Mindhunter (16 page)

Eventually, in our analysis, we would begin to break down the components of a crime into such elements as pre- and postoffense behavior. Kemper had mutilated each of his victims, which at first suggested to us a sexual sadist. But the mutilation was all postmortem, or after the victim’s death, rather than while she was alive, thus not inflicting punishment and causing suffering. After listening to Kemper for several hours, it became clear that the dismemberment was more fetishistic than sadistic and had more to do with the possession part of the fantasy.

Equally significant, I thought, was his handling and disposal of the corpses. The early victims had been carefully buried far from his mother’s home. The later ones, including his mother and her friend, had virtually been left out in the open. That, combined with his extensive driving around town with bodies and body parts in the car, seemed to me to be taunting the community he felt had taunted and rejected him.

We ended up doing several lengthy interviews with Kemper over the years, each one informative, each one harrowing in its detail. Here was a man who had coldly butchered intelligent young women in the prime of their lives. Yet I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I liked Ed. He was friendly, open, sensitive, and had a good sense of humor. As much as you can say such a thing in this setting, I enjoyed being around him. I don’t want him out walking the streets, and in his most lucid moments, neither does he. But my personal feelings about him then, which I still hold, do point up an important consideration for anyone dealing with repeat violent offenders. Many of these guys are quite charming, highly articulate, and glib.

How could this man do such a terrible thing? There must be some mistake or some extenuating circumstances.
That’s what you’re going to say to yourself if you talk to some of them; you cannot get the full sense of the enormity of their crimes. And that’s why psychiatrists and judges and parole officers are fooled so often, a subject we’ll get into in more detail later on.

But for now:
if you want to understand the artist, look at his work.
That’s what I always tell my people. You can’t claim to understand or appreciate Picasso without studying his paintings. The successful serial killers plan their work as carefully as a painter plans a canvas. They consider what they do their "art," and they keep refining it as they go along. So part of my evaluation of someone like Ed Kemper comes from meeting him and interacting with him on a personal basis. The rest comes from studying and understanding his work.

The prison visits became a regular practice whenever Bob Ressler or I were on a road school and could get the time and cooperation. Wherever I found myself, I’d find out what prison or penitentiary was nearby and who of interest was "in residence."

Once we’d been doing this for a while, we refined our techniques. Generally, we were tied up four and a half days a week, so I tried to do some of the interviews on evenings and weekends. Evenings could be difficult because most prisons take a head count after dinner and no one is allowed into the cellblock after that. But after a while, you start to understand the prison regimens and adapt to them. I found that an FBI badge could get you into most penitentiaries and a meeting with the warden, so I began showing up unannounced, which often worked out best. The more of these interviews I did, the more confident I began to feel about what I was teaching and telling these veteran cops. I finally felt that my instruction was achieving some reality base, that it wasn’t just recycled war stories from those who had actually been there.

It wasn’t necessarily that the interviewees were providing profound insight into their crimes and psyches. Very few had that, even someone as bright as Kemper. Much of what they told us parroted their trial testimony or self-serving statements they’d made many times before. Everything had to be interpreted through hard work and extensive review on our part. What the interviews were doing, though, was letting us see the way the offender’s mind worked, getting a feel for them, allowing us to start walking in their shoes.

In the early weeks and months of our informal research program, we managed to interview more than half a dozen killers and would-be killers. These included George Wallace’s would-be assassin, Arthur Bremmer (Baltimore Penitentiary), Sarah Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, both of whom had tried to kill President Ford (Alderson, West Virginia), and Fromme’s guru, Charles Manson, at San Quentin, just up the bay from San Francisco and the rotting hulk of Alcatraz.

Everybody in law enforcement was interested in Manson. It had been ten years since the grisly Tate and LaBianca murders in Los Angeles, and Manson remained the most famous and feared convict in the world. The case was regularly taught at Quantico, and while the facts were clear, I didn’t feel we had any real insight into what made this guy tick. I had no idea what we could expect to get from him, but I thought that anyone who had so successfully manipulated others to do his will would be an important subject. Bob Ressler and I met with him in a small conference area off the main cellblock at San Quentin. It had wire-reinforced glass windows on three sides, the kind of room set aside for inmates and their lawyers.

My first impression of Manson was just about diametrically opposite from what I had of Ed Kemper. He had wild, alert eyes and an unsettling, kinetic quality to the way he moved. He was much smaller and slighter than I’d imagined; no more than five two or five three. How did this weak-looking little guy exert such influence over his notorious "family"?

One answer came right away when he climbed onto the back of a chair positioned at the head of the table so he could look down on us as he talked. In the extensive background preparation I’d done for the interview, I’d read that he used to sit on top of a large boulder in the desert sand when he’d addressed his disciples, enhancing his physical stature for his sermons on the mount. He made it clear to us from the outset that despite the celebrated trial and voluminous news coverage, he didn’t understand why he was in jail. After all, he hadn’t killed anyone. Rather, he considered himself a societal scapegoat—the innocent symbol of America’s dark side. The swastika he had carved into his forehead during the trial was faded but still visible. He was still in contact with his women followers in other prisons through cooperative third parties.

In one sense at least, he was very much like Ed Kemper and so many of the other men we talked to in that he had had a terrible childhood and upbringing; if those two terms can be used at all to describe Manson’s background.

Charles Milles Manson was born in Cincinnati in 1934, the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute named Kathleen Maddox. His surname was merely a guess on Kathleen’s part as to which of her lovers was the father. She was in and out of prison, pawning Charlie off on a religious aunt and sadistic uncle who called him a sissy, dressed him in girl’s clothing for his first day of school, and challenged him to "act like a man." By the time he was ten, he was living on the streets, except for his terms in various group homes and reform schools. He lasted four days at Father Flanagan’s Boys Town.

His young adult life was marked by a series of robberies, forgeries, pimpings, assaults, and incarcerations at increasingly tougher institutions. The FBI had investigated him under the Dyer Act for the interstate transport of stolen cars. He was paroled from his latest imprisonment in 1967, just in time for the "Summer of Love." He made his way to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the West Coast magnet for flower power and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Looking primarily for a free ride, Manson quickly became a charismatic guru to the turned-on dropout generation still in their teens and twenties. He played the guitar and spoke in elliptical verities to disillusioned kids. Soon he was living for free, with all the sex and illicit stimulants he wanted. A nomadic "Family" of followers of both sexes gathered around him, sometimes numbering as many as fifty. As one of his services to the community, Charlie would preach his vision of the coming apocalypse and race war, which would leave the Family triumphant and him in control. His text was "Helter Skelter" from the Beatles’
White Album.

On the night of August 9, 1969, four Manson Family members, led by Charles "Tex" Watson, broke into the secluded home of director Roman Polanski and his movie star wife, Sharon Tate, at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills. Polanski was away on business, but Tate and four guests—Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent—were viciously slaughtered in a depraved orgy that included slogans scrawled on the walls and victims’ bodies with their own blood. Sharon Tate was nearly nine months pregnant.

Two days later, at Manson’s apparent instigation, six Family members killed and mutilated businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. Manson himself didn’t participate, but came in the house afterward for the mayhem that followed. The subsequent arrest for prostitution of Susan Atkins, who had participated in both murders, and an arson involving a piece of highway equipment, ultimately led back to the Family and perhaps the most celebrated trials in California history, at least until the O. J. Simpson extravaganza. In two separate proceedings, Manson and several of his followers were sentenced to death for the Tate and LaBianca murders and a number of others traced to them, including the killing and mutilation of Donald "Shorty" Shea, a movie stuntman and Family hanger-on who was suspected of squealing to the police. When the state’s capital-punishment laws were overturned, the sentences were reduced to life imprisonment.

Charlie Manson was not your routine serial killer. In fact, it was in dispute whether he’d actually murdered anyone with his own hands. Yet his bad background was beyond question, and so were the horrors his followers had committed at his instigation and in his name. I wanted to know how someone sets out to become this satanic messiah. We had to sit through hours of cheap philosophizing and ramblings, but as we pressed him for specifics and tried to cut through the bullshit, an image began to emerge.

Charlie hadn’t set out to be the dark guru. His goal was fame and fortune. He wanted to be a drummer and play for a famous rock band like the Beach Boys. He had been forced to live by his wits his entire life and so had become extremely adept at sizing up the people he met and quickly determining what they could do for him. He would have been excellent in my unit assessing an individual’s psychological strengths and weaknesses and strategizing how to get to a killer we were hunting.

When he arrived in San Francisco after his parole, he saw vast hordes of confused, naive, idealistic kids who looked up to him for his life experience and the seeming wisdom he spouted. Many of them, particularly the young girls, had had problems with their fathers and could relate to Charlie’s past, and he was astute enough to be able to pick them out. He became a paternal figure, one who could fill their empty lives with sex and the enlightenment of drugs. You can’t be in the same room with Charlie Manson and not be affected by his eyes—deep and penetrating, wild and hypnotic. He knew what his eyes could do and what effect they could have. He told us he had spent his early life getting the shit beaten out of him, and with his small stature, there was no way he could win a physical confrontation. So he compensated by invoking the force of his personality.

What he preached made perfect sense: pollution is destroying the environment, racial prejudice is ugly and destructive, love is right and hate is wrong. But once he had these lost souls in his sway, he instituted a highly structured delusional system that left him in complete control of their minds and bodies. He used sleep deprivation, sex, food control, and drugs to gain complete dominance, like a prisoner-of-war situation. Everything was black-and-white and only Charlie knew the truth. He’d strum his guitar and repeat his simple mantra over and over again: only Charlie could redeem the sick and rotting society.

The basic dynamics of leadership and group authority that Manson described for us we were to see repeated over the years in subsequent tragedies of similar dimension. The power over and understanding of inadequate people that Manson possessed would be revisited by the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass murder- suicide of his flock in Guyana, then again by David Koresh at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to name but two. And despite the glaring differences among these three men, what links them together is striking. Insight we got from talking to Manson and his followers contributed to our understanding of Koresh and his actions and other cults.

At the heart of it, the issue with Manson wasn’t this messianic vision but simple control. The "helter-skelter" preaching was a way to maintain the mind control. But as Manson came to realize, unless you can exert this control over your flock twenty-four hours a day, you risk losing it. David Koresh realized this and holed up his devotees in a rural fortress where they couldn’t leave or be away from his influence.

After listening to Manson, I believe that he did not plan or intend the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends; that, in fact,
he lost control
of the situation and his followers. The choice of the site and victims was apparently arbitrary. One of the Manson girls had been there and thought there was money around. Tex Watson, the good-looking, all-American honor student from Texas, sought to rise in the hierarchy and rival Charlie for influence and authority. Zoned out like the others on LSD and having bought into the leader’s new tomorrow, Watson was the primary killer and led the mission to the Tate-Polanski house and encouraged the others to the ultimate depravities.

Then, when these inadequate nobodies came back and told Charlie what they had done, that helter-skelter had begun, he couldn’t very well back down and tell them they had taken him too seriously. That would have destroyed his power and authority. So he had to do them one better, as if he had intended the crime and its aftermath, leading them to the LaBianca home to do it again. But significantly, when I asked Manson why he hadn’t gone in and participated in the killings, he explained, as if we were dense, that he was on parole at the time and couldn’t risk his freedom by violating that.