A Fragile Its Stuart Whiteley
Wethinkof Charles Manson and his ‘family/responsible for the Sharon Tate and Bianca murders, as a fearful extreme of abnormality and fantasy which resulted in meaningless tragedy.
Yet how many ‘normal’ people could become overwhelmed by their fantasies given an emotional and environmental setting in which deviant behaviour could flourish unchecked ? Was Manson really uniquely evil or did he just have unusual scope to express hisderanged philosophy ?
The saga of Charles Manson and ‘the family’ is a horror-comic story come to life. The book by Ed Sanders, a novelist, poet and bookshop-owner, is a terrifying statement of the events leading up to and following the Sharon Tate murders in the summer of 1969. So awful are the scenes described, not only relating to the murders but also in depicting the sordid, violent and disordered background’to life in California at that time that one can hardly recommend the book to anyone to be read purely out of interest or for enjoyment.
The events took place and had to be documented and this is all that Sanders attempts to do. He makes no pretence of calling this a definitive study of the affair but some analysis of the baldly stated facts would have leavened the horror. Initially the book goes at a frenetic pace leaping from weird scene to weirder happening in the wake of Manson and his tribe of teenage female followers. The author keeps up a slick patter of odd asides and hippy jargon, the very weirdest events being followed by the onomatopoeic warning note: lOo-ee-ooManson, in penal institutions from the age of 13 to 21, had only an eighteen-month period of freedom before being sentenced to ten years’ detention on a smallish fraud charge.
He passed much of the time in prison reading and learning about alternative ways of life through witchcraft, hypnosis, Satanism, Scientology and the like and seems to have survived the incarceration because of a certain, not unlikable, Puckish quality in his personality.
For instance, we are told how he would broadcast hypnotic suggestions over the prison radio system to his fellow cons dutifully sleeping with their earphones on the bed-head. He suggested they applaud his performance in the talent competition at the prison concert, and he not only won but got a standing ovation!
Leaving prison in 1967 at the chronological age of 32 Manson arrived in San Francisco at the peak of the hippy flower-power era and the mood of unreality and fantasy was a perfect fit for his immature personality.
Described as a ‘glib, grubby little man with a guitar, scrounging for young girls using mysticism and guru babble?a time-honoured tactic on the Haight’?Charlie was in his element. He found it easy to relate to young teenage girls, mostly runaways from wealthy middle-class homes and experiencing LSD, marijuana and free love for the first time.
Soon he had a permanent following of young people, mostly girls, and some of these followers were to stay with him throughout the events to come. The girls were often not very attractive physically and indeed when they were despatched once to earn a ‘quick buck’ as topless waitresses they failed in the task because apart from a certain skinnyness?constitutional or due to malnutrition?some were hardly pubescent and as yet had no top to bargain with! When the San Francisco scene soured, however, with the influx of pimps and pushers and other criminal agencies Manson and his group of twentyfive or so pulled out and indeed warned off other would-be seekers for the truth from what San Francisco had now become. All was still love.
The next significant step was when, after a period of roaming the coastal strip in a school bus, the family moved in on the Spahn Ranch, a disused movie lot. It was as if the make-believe setting of the Western ranch strengthened the group in their fantasies of a different world. Manson talked of an uprising of the blacks from which all who survived would flee? Helter-Skelter?to the desert. He picked up an Indian myth of a hidden city beneath the crust of the earth to be entered through a secret hole and expeditions went out to search for the hole, map the escape routes and build dumps of food, gasoline and motor spares ready for the day.
Contacts with the real world became increasingly savage. Houses were broken into just for the thrill of ‘creepy-crawling’ through an inhabited house without detection. Sorties went out to raid supermarket garbage dumps for food or to steal cars for the desert battalion. Dope-dealing was a source of income and in an argument over a fraudulent deal Manson shot a Negro?although he did not kill him as he thought he had done and was next to meet the man face to face in gaol!
It was after another argument over a dope fraud that some of the family tortured and finally killed Gary Hinman, a lapsed ‘family’ member.
Manson was increasingly suspicious, even paranoid now, about people who came to look at the ranch. He feared a Black Power invasion and took to walking about with a sword threatening and slashing out at anyone who displeased him.
A week later Manson sent a group of one man and three girls out to a house in fashionable Los Angeles where a former associate of the ‘family’ had lived but since Manson called at the house some days previously it is inferred that he knew that this person was no longer there. It was to be a ‘creepy-crawl’ with murder as an added feature and the result was the senseless and cruel slaughter of three men and two women? one was the pregnant Sharon Tate.
Sanders gives three possible motives for the killing ?a reprisal for a fraudulent dope deal, something to do with pornographic movies or a paid assassination for business or personal reasons. Another possibility advanced was that it was intended to deflect attention from the previous murder committed. Although one of those killed could have had associations with one of these motives, none of the reasons given hold much strength, especially as the first victim was a youth just leaving the residence after visiting the caretaker.
The very next night Manson led his group out himself?this time all high on acid (LSD) and after a torturous back-and-forth drive through the Los Angeles suburbs pausing at certain houses, considering them for a ‘creepy-crawl’ and then giving them a miss they arrived at the Bianca residence. They had no prior knowledge of this wealthy middle-aged couple it seems and just tied them up and took part in a stabbing holocaust?leaving a knife and fork in one of the bodies?apparently as some distorted allusion to the Beatles’ song, ‘Piggies’. They knew what they were doing and took steps to wipe finger-prints and cover their tracks on leaving.
Next a ranch-hand at the Spahn movie lot was less ritualistically and more systematically disposed of because he had been talking to police about goings-on at the ranch.
The final act was coming up. The family took to wandering and camping farther into the Death Valley desert region because the ranch was becoming too harassed by police on the look-out for the stolen vehicles, drug-trafficking and runaways. Many of the family were now in real fear of Manson and there were one or two escapes or attempts to escape from his clutches. Badly fed and housed they lived in primitive squalor but curiously they kept bringing themselves to the notice of the authorities. They set a forestry vehicle on fire and damaged and plundered buildings and Government property, so that increasing attention was directed on to them. A forestry warden commented?’you could drop the Empire State Building in that desert and it would not be found’?but somehow Charles Manson did not want to be lost.
He similarly had a curious interaction with a former ‘family’ member, Crocket, living and prospecting in the desert. Crocket was leaking increasing information to the police about Manson and Manson repeatedly threatened to kill Crocket, raided his shack, or attempted to disarm him yet he, who had without qualms removed lesser obstacles, didn’t kill Crocket, who continued to pose a danger to him.
The nuisance that the family was making of themselves finally brought a police invasion and about half of the family were arrested on stolen vehicle charges. Manson was away on that day but the next day he returned to the scene and, of course, was picked up in a follow-up sortie. Why return? He could have faded out as others did.
It was only when the family were in their respective gaols on relatively minor charges that any connection with the murders was suspected. One of the girls simply chattered to cell-mates who used the information to secure their own future. The police then began to pressure others connected with the family and similarities between the two slaughter scenes and connections between people associated with the family and with the man already under arrest for the Hinman murder were pointed out to the various police squads pursuing different investigations. The link man who tied up these loose ends was Sgt. Whiteley.
Speculation as to the reasons behind this dreadful rampage is left to the bewildered reader. One thing we know is that former college boy, Tex Watson, the lead knife man in the two massacres, showed a severe drop in I.Q. level on psychological testing suggesting that he was brain damaged due to the drugs he habitually took, particularly a certain leaf containing belladona which he chewed.
There is no suggestion that anyone killed in a druginduced automatism or psychosis and some of the family girls not directly involved in the killings were interviewed by Sanders when respectably back at high school and one whilst grooming customers at a dog beauty parlour! The past was behind them. No madness, satanic power or other mysterious force is revealed.
Manson, for all his paranoid attitudes, is never presented as psychotic. Rather we get the picture of someone who from adolescence was deprived of a normal social learning process and drifts into deviance as a way of life, seeking alternatives to the life-styles and careers others follow and on which he had ‘missed out’.
Imaginative, creative in his way (he very nearly had a folk guitar disc issued and repeatedly tried to gain acceptance as a pop composer and performer), forceful in personality, he is only able to relate comfortably to youngsters who are themselves working through pubertal and adolescent crises.
His repeated clashes with organised society in escalating acts of violence could be explained as demands for acknowledgement of his existence and in this the man Crocket served as a curious go-between. Similarly his insatiable violent and perverted demands for sexual recognition from the girls.
The more Manson drifts from the real world both in his imagination and in his actual physical environment the more established and self-contained the fantasy life becomes. Killing the ‘pigs’ who have what he has not and who, if they continue to exist in actuality, are indisputable evidence that his way of life is a fantasy, can be understood then as a natural sequence of events.
Elements of the same reasoning can commonly be seen in many ‘psychopaths’, infamous or inadequate, and the divide between reality and fantasy becomes a fragile line.
Indeed the frightening thing about the whole Manson story is how close many others in all walks of life were to him in his meanderings, without themselves taking his ultimate fateful step and how near many ‘normal’ people may be to such ‘abnormal’ behaviour, given the emotional and environmental circumstances conducive to the development of alternative or ‘deviant’ behaviour and the reinforcement of followers who seem to readily accept that what the leader proclaims has validity.
The Family by Ed Sanders, published by Rupert Hart-Davis at ?2.50 Four young women members of the Manson ‘family’, their heads shaved, keep a vigil outside the Hall of Justice where Manson’strial is taking place.
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