Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (39 page)

Pin changed the subject by proudly displaying the scars from his latest stabbing. He’s been shanked at Pelican Bay State Prison for reasons he didn’t explain—adding to his already untouchable record. The attack was his ticket to Corcoran, where he was locked down in the Protective Housing Unit right next to his old pal Charlie. Pin’s smile melted when the conversation turned to Julian Ramirez, his old San Quentin death row lover from twenty years back. Ramirez had died of stomach cancer that spring, and Roger took it hard. I marveled how this big, brutal felon could hold a torch for someone like that for so long. Deep inside, Pin was a lover, not a killer. Years before, he’d written Julian one of the most beautiful love letters I’d ever read. As I mouthed the words, my heart went out to both of them. Love can indeed be strange.

After a few hours, Charlie skittered over and sat down with us. Pin made an excuse to leave so we could hash out our problems. The “hashing” consisted of me listening to Charlie ramble. He hit the old targets, the “injustice system,” the environment, his devoted followers, and my fear, which he said was in me and not his problem. “You’re paranoid, man,” he concluded. I tried to direct him to my agenda, with little success.

“Did you know your father, Colonel Scott?” I asked, wanting to confirm his mother’s account.

“You’re my father,” he fenced. “You raised me.”

“Would you like to write a chapter for the book? You can say whatever you want.”

“We need to save the redwood trees.…”

“Can I print some of your letters? We’ll clean them up for you.”

“Clean up the air and water first, then I’ll…”

As I listened to his familiar rap, a chill washed over my body. I was absentmindedly observing the comings and goings of other cons, tuning Manson out while searching for familiar faces. One profile suddenly rang an eerie bell. I couldn’t put a name on him at first, then it came—Juan Corona. I’d spent my life with murderers, rapists, child molesters, and their ilk, but this guy Corona was the only one who always gave me the creeps. I turned and shielded my profile, not wanting him to spot me and come by for a friendly chat. A bald Charles Manson was enough excitement for one day.

I drifted back into the relentless rantings of the little cue ball, confident that I’d missed nothing during my trip down dead-migrant-worker lane. Charlie had shifted to something moderately interesting.

“Remember, Ed, I killed no one. The girls had all the intelligence and they knew what they were doing.” After clarifying that for the millionth time, he started pushing his own agenda. “I’ve never snitched on anybody. Remember that.” The statement caught me off guard until I realized that Charlie was worried about the book. He really didn’t care about anything I said about him as long as I didn’t say he was a snitch. His world was the prisons, and to snitch in prison is to die. I couldn’t understand what he was so worried about. He had done everything else in his life, but as far as I could tell, he had never seriously snitched.

Later that afternoon, I returned the favor and sat down at Charlie’s table. The hippie eyed me suspiciously. It was obvious he resented my taking his precious time. Pin said the guy was living with Sandra Good in Hanford, and had helped her set up the Manson Web site on the Internet. I shot him a hard look, wondering if he was part of the crew that had dumped the witches’ brew on my porch.

I took some photos with Charlie and Pin for old times’ sake, and then we bid our farewells. I’d basically accomplished nothing, but nonetheless, it had been worth the trip just to see Charlie’s shiny pate.

On August 31, I tried it again. The same gang was in the visiting room, Charlie, Pin, and the hippie. Charlie was in a foul mood and apparently had been for a while. He’d thrown a major tantrum a few days earlier because the guards wouldn’t allow him to have an embroidered shirt Sandra Good sent. Ignoring his dark disposition, I dived right in, opening our conversation by asking if I could use Squeaky’s old, unpublished
Rolling Stone
article in the book. He ignored me and danced around.

“Who’s ‘Green? I wondered, trying to match a face with one of his nicknames.

“Irish.”

“Like Susan Murphy?”

“No. Like Greenland and Greenfield, Indiana, where I did some time.”

“Don’t put that crazy act on me,” I snapped. “I’ve seen it too many times.”

“And you’ll see it some more!”

“I’m sure. Where’s Richard Rubacher?”

“Somewhere along the coast. I sent him all my letters and he wrote to them [
Stern?
]. I guess he just made some money and retired.” Charlie shot me a cold, sinister smile that made me wonder if Rubacher had shared the spoils as promised.

“What about Nuel Emmons? You gave him a book [to write],” I queried. It was an important question because Emmons’s well-written book,
Manson in His Own Words,
included the most damning passages I’d ever seen linking Charlie directly to the Tate-LaBianca murders. Though at times Emmons presented the clear-speaking Manson as a reluctant follower who lost control of his minions—the story Charlie always sold me—when it came down to those final nights of mayhem, he portrayed Manson as being firmly in control. Here Emmons quotes Manson quoting himself giving the order to Tex Watson:

“It’s time to get something done for Bobby. The girls are ready to do whatever is necessary. They don’t have a plan or a place picked out, so it looks like it’s going to be pretty much up to you. But I think it would be best to hit some of the rich pigs’ places. Get some bolt cutters or something you can cut a phone wire or gate chain with. You know what else you need, so put it together and get going.… You know the neighborhoods, someplace like where Terry [Melcher] used to live. Just make sure the girls do it like Gary’s house was done. Maybe even take some rope and hang somebody, like a reverse of the Ku Klux Klan thing, that way it will put the heat on the blackies.”

Now I was so much a part of it, I might as well have been in the car with the others, knife and gun in hand. I knew that each suggestion dropped to Tex would be followed as a course of action. Whatever they did, it would be the same as if I had done it with them. For one short moment, I had an urge to overtake the car and bring them back.… I turned away from the trailer … and took a long walk. Maybe sometime during that walk I thought of how wrong it was. Personally, I had never believed any tactics, copycat or otherwise, were going to get Bobby off the hook. Yet … I had shared in the madness. I had a moment or two of regret, but for the most part, bitterness and contempt for a world I didn’t give a shit about allowed me to go along with anything that might come of the night’s activities.… I hadn’t twisted any arms. I wasn’t sitting behind anyone with a gun next to their head, giving directions. Yet, I can’t deny making some of the suggestions that led to the events of that night. Nor can I deny that I was the one person who could have prevented that car from leaving Spahn Ranch. But—so goes the feeling of power when coupled with hatred.

On that evening, I was aware of being totally without conscience.… I can’t put a finger on when I became devoid of caring emotion.… Here I was, waiting for a report of murder to come back to me, not caring who had died or how many victims there were. And the closest I could come to disliking myself was “Charlie, you are your mother’s son—one dirty bogus bastard.” Thinking of my mother quickly altered any softness that may have been creeping into my mind. I saw my mother guiding me through the courtroom door, and heard her speak the words, “Yes your Honor, I want my son, but I just can’t afford to support both of us at this time.” I remembered the argument she had had with her boyfriend a few nights prior to that day in court, and I heard him saying, “I don’t give a shit, I’m leaving. I can’t stand that kid. Get rid of him and we can make it just fine.”

I saw four larger and older guys beating the hell out of me and wrestling me to the floor, and I remember them holding me while one ripped my ass with his big cock and then the others took their turn. I thought of good old Mr. Fields, in charge of all the boys and paid to teach us the responsibility of being honest citizens, lubricating my asshole with tobacco juice and raw silage and then offering me to his favorite pets. My head was straight now. Fuck this world and everyone in it. I’d give them something to open their eyes, and then take our group out into the desert.…

Emmons further detailed how Manson, worried that Tex and the girls had left incriminating evidence at the crime scene, went to the Tate house later that same night and wiped everything down to eliminate fingerprints. The horror Charlie found inside did not appear to disturb him.

“So what about that, Charlie? Was Emmons on the mark?”

“He was a convict who had a body and fender shop on the street [in L.A.]. He fixed up my car and saved me from getting arrested,” Manson explained, dodging the details. “I owed him, so I let him write a book. He called it
Manson in His Own Words,
but it was really Manson in his [Emmons’s] words,” Charlie added with a laugh.

“Was it accurate?” I repeated, having heard that Charlie was angry when the book came out.

“It was no different than all the others. Same bullshit.”

“I’ve written to Emmons twice, and he hasn’t responded,” I mentioned.

“That’s because you’re a cop and he’s a convict. He don’t trust you.”

“I thought he was an author now?”

“Once a con, always a con.”

I eventually tracked Emmons down. To the contrary, he turned out to be super friendly. He gave me some photographs of Charlie and the old gang, and even showed me a pair of false teeth that Manson had given him.

“What about that Hare Krishna guy?” I asked Charlie. “What was the deal with that? Why’d he light you up?”

“The dude showed me a photo of his wife with this Hare Krishna guru from India. I said, ‘A light-skinned Negro guru like that must enjoy fucking nice white girls.’ He didn’t like that remark. Then I told him that his guru wasn’t God, that Jesus was, and that he should follow Jesus. He didn’t like that either. A few days later, he came after me with the match [and paint thinner]. I exploded like a bomb.”

That was a switch. I’d never known Charlie to defend the faith before. He must have gotten hold of a Bible and stumbled across Matthew 5, verses 11-12, the part that promises great rewards to anyone who suffers in the name of Jesus. Was Charlie seeing the end in sight due to his advancing age? Was he, like so many people, trying to get his house in order before going to that big isolation cell in the sky? Probably not, but it was a development worth watching.

In keeping with Charlie’s more familiar mind-set, he told me that the karma gods had already taken vengeance for what the Hare Krishna had done. “If you send a scorpion out to stick someone, and they don’t have it coming, the scorpion will spin around and come back at you. After that Hindu burned me and I survived, their leader in India was shot dead and twenty-five hundred of his followers were consumed in a fire. The Hindu’s evil was reflected back.”

Returning to Pin, I found my old pal disquietingly concerned. “Don’t get too close to Manson and his people,” he warned. “You could get hurt.” That caught me off guard. Pin and Manson were tight. He usually defended Charlie. It wasn’t like him to come down on the guy.

“I’ve gotten to know him a lot better this time around,” Pin explained. “I can see how crazy he is. Behind that screwball face is a man you don’t understand. There’s something wrong with him. There’s an evil there beyond your comprehension. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. You’ve never murdered anyone. You don’t know what it takes, and what it does to you afterward.”

That was certainly true. Since Pin was well acquainted with the homicidal beast that can reside inside a person, his warning had to be taken seriously.

“I told Charlie that if anything happened to you or your family, he’d have to deal with me,” Pin added.

That was sure nice of Pin. All the kindness I’d showed him over the years was paying dividends. And Pin’s brave threat was not without risk, as Charlie didn’t take kindly to such talk.

“Let me worry about that in here. You just take care of yourself out there,” Pin said.

I left the prison that evening enveloped in a sense of dread. It wasn’t Charlie’s mood or even anything he said. I was used to all that. It was Pin’s concern that got to me. What did he know that he wasn’t saying? Despite our friendship, the snitch code was deeply ingrained in all prisoners, Pin included, so if anything specific was coming down, Pin would try to handle it himself without giving me the details. It was obvious that he’d done precisely that. Hopefully, Manson got the message. I didn’t relish the thought of having to clean any more voodoo stews off of my porch—much less deal with something decidedly more sinister.

*   *   *

Recently, a movement of militant white supremacists known as “the Order” approached Manson about being their leader. Searching for a resurrected Hitler, they spoke of a grand coronation that glorified Manson’s mystical qualities. The FBI busted some of their members, and their previous guru was burned to death in a shoot-out, leaving them leaderless. They came to Manson searching for a shepherd to recruit “true believers” like Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, or Theodore Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber.

Manson has intensely followed the growth of these burgeoning militias, often sending me articles that he’s come across. With a little updating and fine-tuning, his philosophy would fit in perfectly with theirs. If he’s ever released from prison as a “harmless old man,” I could easily see him uniting these strange groups that fester all over the country and building them into one large, scary army. Just as Adolf Hitler rose from being a misfit and a petty criminal to become the racist dictator of Germany, so these white supremacist groups lust for Manson to become their unifying leader.

We may not have seen the last of him yet.

UPDATE 1998

I
N LATE AUGUST
1997, Charles Manson was transferred from Corcoran State Prison to Pelican Bay State Prison—one of the top maximum security facilities in the United States. Set on a bleak strip of land a few miles from the Oregon border, Pelican Bay is basically a series of isolation cages that house the most violent and incorrigible offenders in the California prison system.