Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (7 page)

Nancy and the Thomases suffered a real fright in mid-December 1947 when Jo Ann was also diagnosed with tuberculosis; she caught the disease while caring for her uncle. The sixteen-year-old was hospitalized, but her case was mild enough for her to be allowed to come home for Christmas. When Charlie arrived from Gibault, Jo Ann was confined to her bedroom. Charlie stayed with the Thomases and Luther was with Nancy.
On Christmas Eve, everyone prepared for church with the exception of Jo Ann, who was too weak to go. She stayed in her room on the second floor and listened to the bustle as everyone got ready to leave. Then, to her dismay, Charlie stayed behind—she had no idea why her parents allowed it. But as soon as the door slammed behind her departing family, Jo Ann heard her cousin turn on the shower in the downstairs bathroom. Charlie wasn’t interested in showering, she believed; Jo Ann remembered Charlie’s fascination with guns, and guessed that the running water was meant to mask any noise her cousin might make opening a cabinet and stealing his Uncle Bill’s handgun. Jo Ann didn’t call down to ask Charlie what he was up to, or to warn him away from the weapon that she felt certain he was filching. Instead she lay quietly because she was afraid he might rush upstairs and hurt her if she tried to interfere. The shower ran the whole time that her other relatives were at church. When they returned, Glenna and Nancy went up to Jo Ann’s room to see how she was feeling. They also wondered why the shower was running. Jo Ann told them to ask Charles, adding that she thought he’d stolen her father’s gun and didn’t try to prevent it because she was afraid of him. They confronted the boy; he had the gun. Well, that was Charles all over, Jo Ann thought. He’d been invited to McMechen for the holiday as a treat, and still he stole from his hosts. He felt that anything he wanted ought to be his no matter what.

Charlie returned to Gibault, but ran away about ten months later.
He once again fled to Indianapolis, but this time he didn’t go to his mother. Instead, demonstrating precocious criminal skills, he broke into a few small stores at night and rifled cash registers for enough change and small bills to rent a room. Nobody knows where Charlie stayed, but it could hardly have been anywhere reputable; no honest landlord would have rented to a tiny thirteen-year-old who looked even younger. Charlie soon pushed his burglary luck too far and was caught attempting another store
break-in. That made Charlie’s immediate future the responsibility of the courts rather than of his long-suffering mother. A sympathetic judge noted Charlie’s time at Gibault, erroneously assumed that the boy was Catholic, and sent him to Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska, a program founded by Father Edward J. Flanagan. Boys Town was the most famous juvenile facility in America, thanks in great part to the hit film of that title starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. Charlie wasn’t there long enough to see whether Boys Town deserved its reputation as the best place in the country for troubled youngsters to adopt more positive attitudes and lifestyles. Four days after he arrived at Boys Town, he and another student named Blackie Nielson stole a car and drove to Peoria, Illinois, where Blackie had an uncle who made his living as a thief. On the way, the boys somehow got their hands on a gun and committed two armed robberies, one of a grocery store and the other at a casino—the latter must have had lax or nonexistent security. This was a marked escalation in Charlie’s criminal career. It was a big step up from trying to steal his Uncle Bill’s gun to using a weapon in a holdup. Charlie was still just thirteen.

In Peoria, Charlie and Blackie worked for the latter’s uncle as apprentice thieves much like Dickens’s fictional Oliver Twist and Artful Dodger. But in real life Charlie had more in common with his mother, Kathleen, and Uncle Luther—he could never avoid capture long. After just two weeks of quasi-adult thievery he was back in custody; police nabbed him in an after-dark attempt to rob a Peoria business. The subsequent investigation linked Charlie to his two armed robberies, and this time there was no sympathetic judge to sentence him to Boys Town. Instead, Charlie was packed off to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield, the type of institution commonly known as a “reform school.” As with Gibault, student inmates there attended academic classes and took courses to learn employable trades.
Unlike Gibault, boys at the facility in Plainfield weren’t modestly rebellious and considered in need of relatively gentle correction. Ranging in age from ten to twenty-one, some Boys School inmates were there on a general charge of “incorrigibility,” but many others among the four-hundred-plus juvenile population were in Plainfield for crimes like armed robbery and manslaughter. Accordingly, the Boys School was a sternly regimented place. Some staffers were devoted to disciplining rather than
encouraging. Boys could receive whatever amount of physical correction adult staffers deemed appropriate. This ran a torturous gamut from simple whippings with paddles to duck walking (staggering painfully about with hands clasping ankles) and table bending (arching backward with shoulder blades barely touching the surface of a table; just holding that position for a few moments ensured that a boy could not walk normally for hours afterward). Even youngsters who behaved suffered physically on a regular basis. When they weren’t in class—and classes were often canceled because teachers quit—students were frequently farmed out as field hands to local farmers who paid 50 cents an hour for the help. (The boys were allowed to keep 30 cents.) When staffers weren’t paying close attention on school grounds during the day or in dormitories at night, bigger, older inmates had ample opportunity to physically and sexually brutalize smaller boys. For undersized boys like Charlie, the ultimate goal at Plain-field was not to reform, but to survive.

•  •  •

When Charlie Manson arrived at the Boys School in early 1949, he found himself in an environment where his usual tactics of lying, intimidating, whining, and otherwise manipulating others to get his way were ineffective. For all Charlie’s remarkable criminal record for one so young, he was a beginner compared to lots of others boys in Plainfield. He claimed later that he was almost immediately raped by other students, who sodomized Charlie with the encouragement of a particularly sadistic staff member. If that is an embellishment, it is undoubtedly true that tiny Charlie was forced into sexual acts by stronger boys. Such experiences led him to develop an almost detached view of rape, whether suffered by himself or others. He said sixty years later,
“You know, getting raped, they can just wipe that off . . . I don’t feel that someone got violated and it’s a terrible thing. I just thought clean it off, that’s all that is.”

Charlie couldn’t cut classes as he had back in Charleston, but he still couldn’t read beyond a basic grasp of a few printed words. He may have suffered from some learning disability, but such things weren’t tested or even acknowledged at the Boys School.
Reports from teachers indicate that Charlie “did good work only for those from whom he figured he could obtain something,” and that he “professed no trust in anyone.”

Since he was in constant danger of being beaten and suffering sexual
assault, it was at Plainfield that
Charlie developed a lifelong defense mechanism he later called the “insane game.” In dangerous situations where he could not protect himself in any other way, he would act out to convince potential assailants that he was crazy. Using screeches, grimaces, flapping arms, and other extreme facial expressions and gestures, Charlie could often back off aggressors. It didn’t always work; in Plainfield and later in adult prisons, Charlie sometimes had to submit to stronger inmates who didn’t care whether their prey was crazy or not. In these cases, he did whatever he had to. At the Boys School and afterward, Charlie Manson always survived.

During Charlie’s time at the Boys School, his mother was not often in touch with him and may not have visited her son at all.
Kathleen was still trying to salvage her marriage to Lewis. On several occasions, fed up with his drinking, she left him. Though the length of their separations varied greatly, from only a few days to a later, longer span of several years, Kathleen didn’t find herself able to completely break away. Lewis made it clear that he wanted to remain married; his repeated promises to reform resonated with a woman who desperately wanted some semblance of security in her life, even if that was only an alcoholic husband. Kathleen didn’t stop loving Charlie; instead she hoped that reform school and professionals expert in combating delinquency might yet transform him into a better boy. She no longer believed that she could do it. If and when Charlie was judged ready for release, he needed to rejoin a stable family. For Charlie’s sake as well as her own, Lewis remained Kathleen’s priority.

In October 1949,
Charlie joined six other boys in an escape attempt from Plainfield. It wasn’t his first time; Boys School officials later stated he’d made four previous solo tries. This one made the papers because it was the largest mass escape in school history. While most of the other boys avoided immediate recapture, Charlie was nabbed after less than twelve hours of freedom. He was picked up in Indianapolis by a policeman who caught him trying to break into a gas station.

In February 1951,
when he was sixteen, Charlie tried again. He and two other sixteen-year-olds sneaked off the Boys School campus, stole a car, and headed west. They apparently had no specific destination in mind
besides getting as far away from Plainfield as they could. By this time, Charlie was veteran enough at the Boys School to align himself with one of its tougher inmates. Fellow escapee Wiley Senteney was sent to Plainfield for killing a holdup victim. Along with a boy named Oren Rust, Charlie and Wiley eluded capture for almost three days. They broke into a series of gas stations and were finally caught outside Beaver, Utah, in a roadblock set for a different robbery suspect. The juveniles were sent back to Indiana, where they faced Dyer Act charges of driving a stolen vehicle across a state line, a federal crime. Despite Senteney pleading to reporters that he ran from Boys School only because he was so badly beaten by staff there, all three were sentenced to the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C., where they were to remain until they turned twenty-one. Charlie didn’t believe any new place could be as bad as Plainfield.

New arrivals at the National Training School were immediately given aptitude and intelligence tests. Though Charlie was judged illiterate,
his IQ score of 109 was slightly above the national average of 100.
His scores were satisfactory if unremarkable in mechanical aptitude and manual dexterity. The sixteen-year-old said that his favorite school subject was music. Charlie’s case worker’s initial summation was that the boy was aggressively antisocial, at least in part because of “an unfavorable family life, if it can be called family life at all.” It’s unknown whether this assessment was based in any part on input from Kathleen or whether the case worker just took Charlie’s word for everything. But his slacker ways were readily apparent, as were Charlie’s attempts to make it seem like he was trying to fit in when he really wasn’t. After Charlie had been at the school for a month, the caseworker noted, “This boy tries to give the impression that he is trying hard to adjust although he actually is not putting forth any effort in this respect.” Charlie also gave evidence of a desire to be dominant among fellow residents of his dormitory rather than being dominated as he was at Boys School: “I feel in time he will try to be a [big] wheel in the cottage.”

Counting his time at Gibault, Charlie had now been in some form of reform school for more than four straight years, and he’d learned the ropes. Though the National Training School wasn’t as onerous as
Boys School, it still was highly regimented. Charlie much preferred as an alternative the minimum security Natural Bridge Honor Camp in nearby Virginia.
The most promising students from the National Training School were given the privilege of transferring to Natural Bridge, and Charlie was in no way promising. But he already had considerable gifts as a manipulator, and he brought these to bear on Training School psychiatrists. A summer 1951 psychological report stated that Charlie had a terrible sense of inferiority. Though Charlie had in compensation developed the sneaky skills of “a fairly ‘slick’ institutionalized youth,” the report concluded that “one is left with the feeling that behind all this lies an extremely sensitive boy who has not yet given up in terms of securing some kind of love and affection from the world.” By fall, one psychiatrist determined that what Charlie needed to turn his life around was something to give him self-confidence—a transfer to Natural Bridge, for example. The psychiatrist recommended the move and, on October 24, Charlie got his wish.

Soon afterward, Aunt Glenna Thomas visited him at his new school and promised administrators that she and Uncle Bill would give Charlie a home and help him find work if the honor camp would release him. It was a curious offer; the Thomases had been glad to get rid of Charlie eight years earlier when Kathleen was released from prison, and he’d tried to steal a gun from Bill when he was their guest for Christmas 1947. But the boy’s grandmother lived near the Thomases in McMechen now, and Nancy surely lobbied them to help get Charlie out of reform school. Kathleen was still preoccupied with Lewis and not overtly involved in Glenna’s plea for Charlie’s release. Kathleen probably had no idea that Charlie’s transfer at the honor camp was due in part to his convincing Training School psychiatrists that his mother had ignored and never loved him. But Glenna would not have made the overture to honor camp administrators if her sister hadn’t supported it; Kathleen certainly hoped that nearly six years of confinement and tough rules had worked positive changes on her son.

A parole hearing for Charlie was scheduled for February 1952. All he had to do was follow Honor Camp rules and stay out of trouble until then; if he did, his release was practically assured.
But this proved beyond him;
in January Charlie was caught sodomizing another boy while holding a razor blade to his victim’s throat. Consenting homosexual intercourse was forbidden at the camp; forcible rape was considered an offense second only to murder. Charlie not only lost his chance for early release, he was immediately transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia. Now seventeen, Charlie didn’t attempt to make a good impression at the new location. Between his arrival on January 18 and a reformatory reporting period in August he committed “eight serious disciplinary offenses, three involving homosexual acts.” Though Charlie remained small in stature, growing to only about five feet four (some adult prison measurements pegged him at five foot five), he now played the “insane game” well enough to act as predator much more often than victim.