To the extremists, mass murderers like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer are no more intriguing than they are to the average citizen. They are merely very sick psychopaths who kill for no reason other than to satisfy their unchecked homicidal urges. Though these killers attract inevitable media attention and interest for a while, they have no followers nor anything to say, and if and when they do talk, not even the extremists listen. The only message these homicidal monsters have to give by their violence is horror. Manson and his murders, on the other hand, are downright hip to the extremists. As misdirected as it was, his violence was political, revolutionary, and therein lies his main appeal to those on the fringes. Also, aware of the flat intellect of most mass killers, the extremists admire and are impressed with Manson’s unquestioned intelligence, the offbeat and sometimes searing nature of his insights, his enigmatic answers and allusions, and a mental deftness that allows him to speak in riddles, always with an underlying message. In short, they are drawn to the mystery of Manson.
While a Mansonesque culture and mystique grow outside his prison walls, Charles Manson, inmate I.D. # B-33920, and now fifty-nine, is incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California, a town of approximately nine thousand people located in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California, sixty miles south of Fresno. Corcoran is built on what was once Tulare Lake, home of the Tachi Indians.
Transferred from San Quentin’s Death Row to Folsom State Prison near Sacramento on October 6, 1972, Manson was sent to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville on March 20, 1974; back to Folsom on October 22, 1974; back to San Quentin on June 7, 1975; and back to Vacaville on May 11, 1976, where he remained until July 17, 1985, his longest stay at one prison. He returned to San Quentin on July 18, 1985, and was sent to his present location, Corcoran, on March 15, 1989.
Tip Kindel, public information officer for the California Department of Corrections, says the reason for all the transfers of Manson is that Manson has been “both a disciplinary and a security problem for the Department.” It would appear that the fame and outlaw reputation Manson acquired far and wide for the Tate-LaBianca murders has had a measurable effect upon how he perceives himself, causing him to act much more belligerently behind bars. Though he was never a model prisoner, I could find no reference in his prison records during his many years of incarceration before the murders of any assaultive behavior by him against prison personnel. But Kindel reports that since Manson’s conviction for the murders, he has physically assaulted prison staff (striking them with his hands, throwing hot coffee or expectorating on them, etc.) six times, the last time in February of 1992, and threatened them on numerous other occasions. Altogether, Manson has been found guilty of fifty-nine “C.D.C. 115s,” California Department of Corrections disciplinary write-ups. For the past year, however, according to an official at Corcoran, Manson “has not been disruptive” and “hasn’t gotten into any trouble.” Prison counselor Ernest Caldren observes that Manson “has a pattern of cycling in his behavior. There are brief periods of cooperation, and then he turns and threatens staff, particularly the inexperienced, with violent behavior.”
In 1972 and 1973, while at Folsom, Manson himself was assaulted on two separate occasions by fellow inmates. And a California state prison official says that throughout the years reports have reached prison personnel that one prison gang or another “had a contract on Charlie.” However, the only known attempt on his life was while Manson was at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. The primary reason for sending Manson there was not because of the psychiatric facilities, as many imagined, but because it is considered to be the best place in the California correctional system to take care of a special prisoner like Manson. Vacaville, for the most part, houses the weaker segment of the prison population: those who, because of their physical or mental disability, are more apt to be victims than predators behind bars. On September 25, 1984, it was Manson’s misfortune to be working in the hobby shop at Vacaville with one Jan Holmstrom, a member of the Hare Krishna religious group serving a life sentence for the 1974 shotgun murder of his father, a Pasadena gynecologist. (In an ironic scene reminiscent of the Manson murders, Holmstrom wrote “baby killer” in blood on a wall of the family home.) Holmstrom doused Manson with paint thinner and then set him on fire, causing second-and third-degree burns to nearly 20 percent of his body, mostly his face, scalp, and hands. Holmstrom, described by prison officials as a “psychiatric case in remission,” said he set Manson ablaze because Manson had objected to his Hare Krishna chants and had threatened him for his religious beliefs. He also claimed, “God told me to kill Manson.”
True “solitary confinement” does not exist in the California prison system today. Inmates still use the popular term, however, to refer to the situation where no other inmate shares their cell with them and they are segregated from the general prison population, mingling only with selected prisoners. Manson has spent the majority of his twenty-three years of incarceration for the Tate, LaBianca, Shea, and Hinman murders in this type of housing.
At Vacaville in August of 1980 Manson was given his first prison job—gardener and maintenance man for the Protestant chapel. “It’s taken me ten years to get a breath of fresh air,” he said. “I’m not about to screw up.” Maintaining a clean disciplinary record for close to two years, in June of 1982 he was placed, per his request, on the “main line,” the general prison population. Manson’s resolve not to screw up lasted (or the lack of it remained undiscovered) until October 29, 1982, when a hacksaw blade, along with marijuana, was found in his cell.[96] A subsequent search of the chapel uncovered four bags of marijuana, one hundred feet of nylon rope, and a mail-order catalog for hot-air balloons. If Manson couldn’t hack his way out of prison, he apparently was thinking of “flying the coop.” In what must be considered a vapid display, prison officials actually asked the state attorney general’s office to file possession of marijuana charges against the man serving nine concurrent life sentences for nine murders, but saner counsel prevailed and no charges were filed.
While at Vacaville, Manson refused to take part in group psychiatric therapy and largely just played word games with psychiatrists during the individual sessions he consented to. One psychiatric evaluation of Manson made by prison doctors stated: “He has above-average intelligence, and the [Rorschach test] drawings seem to point to schizophrenia. This doesn’t mean his entire performance was schizophrenic…Manson is a passive-aggressive personality with paranoid tendencies.”
Manson’s response? “Sure I’m paranoid. I’ve had reason to be ever since I can remember. And now I have to be, just to stay alive. As for schizophrenia, take anybody off the streets and put them in the middle of a prison and you’ll see all kinds of split personalities. I’ve got a thousand faces, so that makes me five hundred schizophrenics. And in my life I’ve played every one of those faces, sometimes because people push me into a role, and sometimes because it’s better being someone else than me.” After spending a short time in the psychiatric ward at Vacaville, Manson was transferred out on the recommendation of a psychiatric report which said he was nothing but “a psychiatric curiosity or oddity.”
96
Also, upon his arrival back at San Quentin from Vacaville in 1985, a four-inch piece of a hacksaw blade was found in his shoe.
How does one reconcile Manson’s apparent interest in escaping with his desire at Terminal Island in 1967 to stay behind bars? Prison had become his home, he told the authorities back then, and he didn’t think he could adjust to the world outside. Even today, I suspect that Manson isn’t miserable or even unhappy behind bars. Having spent forty-two of his fifty-nine years in jails, reformatories, and prisons, he obviously has become totally institutionalized, and therefore most likely isn’t uncomfortable in an incarcerated setting per se. However, after he got out in 1967 he undoubtedly learned to like having a harem of girls (“Up in the Haight, I’m called the gardener. I tend to all the flower children,” he had told Squeaky when they first met) and riding dune buggies up and down the desert more. Further, like never before, Manson now has to look over his shoulder. He knows that any con who wants to make a name for himself can kill him and then