Near the conclusion of his book, Manson writes: “There are days when I get caught up in being the most notorious convict of all time. In that frame of mind I get off on all the publicity, and I’m pleased when some fool writes and offers to ‘off some pigs’ for me. I’ve had girls come to visit me with their babies in their arms and say, ‘Charlie, I’d do anything in the world for you. I’m raising my baby in your image.’ Those letters and visits used to delight me, but that’s my individual sickness. What sickness is it that keeps sending me kids and followers? It’s your world out there that does it. I don’t solicit my mail or ask anyone to come and visit me. Yet the mail continues to arrive and your pretty little flowers of innocence keep showing up at the gate.”
From these relatively benign words, Manson abruptly changes, and after saying he doesn’t think he’ll ever be released, closes his book in vintage fashion with these ominously ambiguous words: “My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So…know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.”
Life behind bars hasn’t dashed Manson’s desire to be a recording star. From his cell in Vacaville in 1982, Manson recorded his second album, titled Charlie Manson’s Good Time Gospel Hour. Manson sings ballads he composed about his life and that of his pals on San Quentin’s Death Row. The sounds of nearby television and flushing toilets can be heard in the background. Manson’s first album, called LIE (the photo on the jacket is the one of him on the December 19, 1969, cover of Life magazine), was taped, portentously, on August 9, 1968, exactly one year before the Tate murders. With several of the Manson Family girls providing choral backup, Manson sings his own compositions. Both albums have gone through several bootleg editions and are considered such rare collectibles that one alternative music store owner told me if he ever got his hands on either one, “I wouldn’t sell them. They’re too valuable.”
Remarkably, there are some who heap scalding criticism on those in the music industry who never gave Manson a chance when he got out of prison in 1967. If he had been given a real opportunity, they add, most likely the murders would never have taken place. While this is possibly true, that type of “but for” causation could be used to argue that if someone had bought Hitler’s paintings in Vienna in 1912 perhaps we wouldn’t have had the Second World War.
Being behind bars also hasn’t inhibited Manson from reaching America’s vast television audience. The media (NBC’s Today Show, CNN, BBC, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, the ABC Special in March of 1994, etc.) have sought him out, enabling him to verbally spew his venom. In a 1988 interview with Geraldo Rivera, he said: “I’m going to chop up some more of you mother-fuckers. I’m going to kill as many of you as I can. I’m going to pile you up to the sky. I figure about fifty million of you. I might be able to save my trees and my air and my water and my wildlife.” When Rivera later said, “There’s nine dead people out there” (referring to Manson’s nine murder convictions), Manson answered, “There’s a lot more than nine, son, a whole lot, and there’s going to be a whole lot more.” When Rivera asked if he told the women in his Family to kill, he responded, “I don’t deal with women I got to tell what to do. They know what to do.” He told Rivera: “I make laws. I’m the lawmaker. I’m the one that lays down the track.”
In the twenty-five years since the murders, no event thrust the Manson Family back into the news once again as much as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975. After Manson was transferred from San Quentin back to Folsom in October of 1974, Squeaky and Sandra Good moved to Sacramento (fifteen miles to the west) to be as close to him as possible.[98] Squeaky, Sandra, and a part-time nurse they had recruited into the Family named Susan Murphy, rented a run-down attic apartment in an old, downtown boardinghouse just a few blocks from the state capitol. On the sunny and crisp morning of September 5, 1975, President Ford was walking through a park in front of the capitol to meet Governor Jerry Brown.
Not only wasn’t Squeaky on the Secret Service’s list of dangerous people in town to watch—particularly remarkable when weeks earlier she and Sandra had issued a communiqué to the media in Sacramento that “if Nixon’s reality wearing a new face [i.e., Ford] continues to run this country against the law, your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca homes and My Lai put together”[99]—but the President’s men inexplicably paid no attention to an elfish woman nearby attired in a bright red robe and matching turban. As Ford stopped at a magnolia tree to shake hands with a cluster of smiling supporters, Squeaky materialized out of the group, grabbed a gun from under her robe and pointed it at Ford, just two feet away. Instantly, Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf seized Squeaky’s gun arm and threw her to the ground. In apparent anger, Squeaky cried out, “It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.” The reason it didn’t go off will probably never be known beyond all doubt. To be sure, Squeaky’s .45 caliber Army Colt pistol, though loaded with four bullets, had no bullet in the chamber ready to be fired. To fire the gun, Squeaky would have first had to pull the slide back on top of the gun to raise a cartridge from the magazine into the firing chamber, which she hadn’t done. Had Squeaky mistakenly thought that squeezing the trigger (Buendorf and another witness reported hearing a metallic clicking sound, which could have been the hammer striking the rear of the firing pin) would be enough to fire the weapon? Because of the belief that Squeaky knew how to operate guns (on the documentary Manson she is seen operating the bolt of a rifle), many people, including some in law enforcement, are convinced she had no intention of hurting Ford. Nevertheless, prosecutor Dwayne Keyes, now a Superior Court judge in Fresno, told me he is “absolutely positive she had every intent to kill the President,” a state of mind the prosecution had to prove to secure a conviction.
In any event, Squeaky was now competing for the limelight, at least for a while, with her God, Charlie, making the September 15, 1975, covers of Newsweek and Time magazines. At her federal trial she was so obstreperous the judge had her removed from the courtroom for most of the proceedings, but not before she told him that one of the issues at the trial “was as clear as the piano in the front window of your home,” an accurate reference. During jury deliberations after a three-week trial in which Squeaky did not testify, “a lot of people,” juror Robert Convoy recalled, “believed that with no cartridge in the chamber, the gun wasn’t a weapon.” Ultimately, however, the jury found Squeaky guilty of attempting to assassinate Ford (prior to 1965, presidential assassination was only a state, not a federal, crime), the first female in American history so charged and convicted. Squeaky was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Was Manson behind the attempt? My instincts from the beginning were that he was not. Though Manson always spoke as if he had no fear of death, telling his followers that death wasn’t the end of life, “just another high,” even beautiful (“Living is what scares me. Dying is easy,” he’d also say, as well as implying he had been resurrected), I saw firsthand how hard he in fact fought for his life during his nine and one-half month trial. Having his death sentence removed just three years earlier, it made no sense to me that he would risk a new sentence of death against someone as remote to him and his interests as Ford. Prosecutor Keyes also believes that Manson was not involved, and his office found no evidence implicating him. Squeaky, the Little Orphan Annie-looking matriarch of the Family during Manson’s forced exile, was probably trying to impress Manson by her act. She had to know that successful or not in killing Ford, such a spectacular, grandly anti-societal act would be sure to please him.
98
Though Squeaky and Sandra were not allowed to visit or even correspond with Manson, a prison spokesman at the time said that the two of them would come to the prison about once a month “to inquire about how Manson was doing.” A friend of Squeaky and Sandra told
99
The Manson Family’s hatred of former President Nixon stems, of course, from Nixon’s headline-capturing declaration during the trial that he believed Manson to be guilty. In author Ed Sander’s best-selling book,