THE MANSON MURDERS: MY-LAI OF THE COUNTER CULTURE
Pitts, Jesse R.
Ed Sanders, veteran of the disbanded rock band The Fugs—hence aristocrat of the counter culture which had for popes Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles, for king and queen in exile Timothy Leary...
...In the better cases it is a return to the antinomianism of Anne Hutchinson...
...This was the period when there were frequent riots in the black ghettos of major cities...
...His followers could use their leader as a way of integrating themselves, but Manson could not use his followers as effectively for his own relief...
...This was "Helter Skelter," as Manson interpreted the Beatle song of that title, indulging in the exegesis of the Beatles so fashionable in 1968-69...
...With young men, Manson had another technique which seems to have been effective, at least in "blowing their minds...
...If Manson had been able to play the Hollywood game and had agreed to turn THE MANSON MURDERS on the charm in Hollywood fashion, he might have made a successful career in show business...
...Indeed, one of the first things that Charles (Tex) Watson, the leader of the murder team, said when he entered the Tate house was: "Where is the money...
...He was older than the average hippie, although at first most of the girls he met thought he was in his middle or late twenties...
...The first important movie she had made, with David Niven and Deborah Kerr, was Eye of the Devil, "the story of a hooded religious sect which worshipped the devil and committed sacrificial murJESSE R. PITTS ders...
...What he learned there before 1958 was the art of the pimp...
...He merely said that he and his band were what Jesus and his apostles must have been all about—young, sensual, carefree, loving, sharing—before Establishment scribes got hold of the story...
...Under these conditions continued increases in the homicide rate must be expected...
...Perhaps Manson had reasons to believe that a large sum in cash was likely to be at the house as the result of a payment or to finance the delivery of an important shipment of drugs...
...It was not usually a planned, cynical exploitation...
...Of those for whom there is some biographical information it can be said that they came mostly from petty-bourgeois backgrounds with a smattering of Hollywood children and some upper-middle-class girls such as Cathy Meyers, granddaughter of the owners of the Meyers ranch in Death Valley where the Family took refuge for a few days in September 1969, before settling at the nearby Barker ranch...
...His followers did the same for him, calling him The Soul, or Jesus...
...rationality means the acceptance of uncertainty, the search for truth, but never the certainty of salvation or truth...
...The outside world proved too complex...
...Manson used to say he was the "King of Fuck," and apparently he was...
...THE MANSON MURDERS you live by my permission...
...They believed he could make miracles, levitate trucks over obstacles 344 in the road...
...It was different, grown up...
...He became a great Beatle fan and, in his first attempt to prepare himself for a legitimate career in the straight world, he learned to play the guitar and practiced singing extensively...
...Patricia Krenwinkel struck a carving fork in his belly about seven times and left it twanging in one final stroke...
...The basic problem is that the burdens placed upon the isolated nuclear family by the meritocracy are probably excessive...
...I know that three days before they were killed, twenty-five people were invited to that house to a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who'd given bad dope...
...In 1960 he was finally given a ten-year sentence, largely thanks to the ef forts of an insurance investigator whose daughter had been "turned out" by Manson...
...Finally his phone was tapped...
...There was also the constant filming of activities, orgies, perhaps even murders...
...Besides reading the book (Ed Sanders, The Family [New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1971]), I have interviewed the author, who was kind enough to give me some details not included in his book...
...Until the bloody summer of 1969 there does not seem to have been much coercion about joining or not joining the Family...
...Why should Manson's parole officer send him back to jail because some girl claims she has been raped...
...One can enjoy the scene and yet be no more responsible for it than an actor.' 6 Films can also be a source of blackmail...
...Leno LaBianca was no ordinary Italian American produce dealer...
...And so the police, as well as Sharon Tate's father, gave great importance to running down drug leads...
...The pornography of violence has the same relationship toward a thoughtful and courageous assertion of one's rights that voyeurism has toward sexual potency...
...They had given up their ego (a typical counter culture theme which usually meant "be unselfish...
...Some have real rape and murder...
...Markovitch was a great party organizer and an amateur cameraman of insufficient discretion...
...They visited the Spahn ranch, and Manson tried to attach them to his retinue by providing them with the free sexual services of his girls...
...It should be read as a document in which one can find a source for hypotheses concerning charismatic movements and the type of submission Manson was able to exace from the cohort of teen-age girls in his "family...
...To those who believe that rational calculations of the likelihood of punishment are irrelevant to crimes of passion, I can only give as a rebuttal the experience of the mental hospitals...
...If they were willing to die for Manson, they were also willing to kill for him...
...Fame-porn" sometimes gets out of hand, leads to blackmail and death...
...She bought him a red Cadillac, which he returned because he did not like the color...
...Since there are no leaders, everyone did his own thing, and he could not be accountable for what the other Family members did...
...The pornography of violence is also evidenced in the satanical cults that seemed to flourish in the late 1960s in California...
...This was part of the panoply of gestures, such as mutual kissing of feet, the exchange of submission that made up the Aesopian language of the Family...
...A famous 1 The family members have been rather contradictory in their statements...
...They must have felt guilty over the Family of flower children, and tried to expiate their remorse by admiration and doing him favors...
...Now the counter culture's turn toward violence unleashed a man who could not tell the difference between reality and fantasy...
...Although many of these runaways were from broken or destructive homes, there were others for whom running away was merely a hip lark...
...Then why not let them go the day after the murder of passion has been committed...
...This neutralized capacity to blackmail can be their substitute for solidarity...
...A network of Youth Centers, directed by hip mentalhealth specialists who often get their money from the Community Funds, is able to provide crash pads away from the Spahn ranches...
...Jay Sebring (ne Kummer in Detroit) was apparently a big-time drug dealer as well as a fashionable hair stylist...
...his remark about Stephanie Schram being the product of 2,000 years of breeding shows it well...
...4 Manson's specialty was car theft...
...Tex left a knife in the throat of Leno LaBianca...
...The hippie culture had oriented him to paths where his psychotic imaginings were accepted and did not lead to aberrant behavior...
...Effective cures for the social problem of the runaway are not easily conjured out of the liberal conscience...
...He became the sole judge of what was right and wrong.4 Nothing was shameful in what he ordained...
...One may suppose that encouraging the girls tocommit "incest" with him was a transposition ofhis own wish to commit incest with his mother...
...Ambivalence was a constant theme of Manson's fantasies and behavior, as well as in the Family...
...In the '60s he became fascinated with subliminal advertising, and he tried it once he had secured a position on the prison radio staff...
...The Family was in principle vegetarian and would supply itself—even in the days when money was floating about—by "garbage runs" to the supermarkets, where they would pick up food discarded because it was spotted or not fresh enough...
...When new members joined, Manson would change their names...
...The counter culture, in its desperate search for love and salvation, makes its crucial mistake in believing that revelation is the sole road to truth...
...Yet Bernardine Dohrn's analysis comes closer to the truth of the Tate-LaBianca murders than she even suspected...
...Manson was not indifferent to status, no more than a bluenose is to sex...
...In accord with the counter culture's solipsistic notion that the sole reference or reward of action is the pleasure of the actor, no one is responsible for or to anyone...
...There was always room for the Manson Family, with its young and uninhibited girls...
...There was no fear of starvation, for the youth society took care of its own...
...Yet at the same time that theywere committing it, they were not...
...The weight of the mass media and of much of the intellectual establishment is toward a weakening of the mechanisms of social control, rather than toward their strengthening...
...Filming was a status symbol, and a way of denying the reality of what one is filming or acting...
...While the civil war was raging, Manson and his followers would take shelter in the Hole in Death Valley, a combination of Hopi lore and long-standing rumors about underground caves full of everything that Nature had denied to the desert...
...The prison had been a simple structure in which to orient himself...
...It is unlikely that he meant by that the $70 Abigail Folger carried in her purse...
...Manson had some musical talent and he was given some breaks...
...The Godfather's description of "Jack Woltz"), syndicate connections, and wild parties that wind up with someone dead or in a psychotic state...
...With an average population of about 25, probably close to a 100 people must have gone through the Family in the nearly two-and-a-half years of its existence...
...The motive most widely diffused by the mass media for the Sharon Tate murders is that the intended victim was Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day and producer of her CBS show, who had supposedly reneged on a promise to make Manson into a rock star...
...Murder, when commanded by the master, and murder by knife—which is probably among the most difficult—became easy for some...
...It is unlikely that the Mafia would use such "cooky" executioners...
...In the millennarian world of the Hole, women would be subject to strong men...
...8 Prisons are seen as schools of crime, dehumanizing, etc...
...How did that happen...
...The LaBianca murders helped further to confuse the police efforts...
...Manson was very proud of Stephanie, whom he had picked up on his return from the Esalen Institute the weekend before the Tate-LaBianca murders...
...He had also been on the board of the "ill-fated Hollywood National Bank...
...The more the order went against their pre-Manson conscience the more worthy they became by obeying it, thereby testifying to their complete trust in and surrender to the leader...
...Another suggestion, derived from examining the police procedures in the Manson case, is that the Supreme Court of each state should create a special Lie Detector Commission under its direct control, and that the prosecuting -attorney may ask the court to make the lie detector test mandatory for suspects in crimes of violence, such as homicide, rape, child abuse...
...Today the climate is once more against violence, and if Manson had escaped arrest the Family might now be touring the country playing Jesus Christ Super-Star...
...Since the age of 13 in various institutions, he entered prison at 16...
...For some girls the experience of the Family must have been therapeutic, perhaps helping more girls than it led to murder...
...He called her "the product of two thousand years of breeding...
...There is little doubt that at this very minute some runaways are being victimized by Manson types, perhaps minus the murders...
...These are the nine murders with which the Family has been formally charged...
...In some ways it strengthens the sense of identity...
...Love-hate, murder and feet-kissing, or preoccupation that the victims should not leave this earth with panic on their minds (LaBianca murders), love and beating up, are all symptoms of an egoincapable of lasting integration...
...Hollywood is a place with an abundance of money, a maximum of ambition, a minimum of security, and little or no sense of social obligation or noblesse oblige...
...The blacks would overthrow the white Establishment so thoroughly hated by Manson, and, afterwards, would turn over their power to him...
...They usually limit themselves to animal sacrifices, but some apparently have made human sacrifices...
...The children grow without any other adult reference than their two parents, which creates a great deal of dependency and vulnerability in the parentchild relationship...
...7 Manson had a "hang up" on skinny redheads whoreminded him of his mother...
...Manson would thus ask these girls vicariously to commit with him the crime of "incest," which, for middle-class girls, is the worst crime imaginable...
...Did the killers have a "contract" on LaBianca...
...The counter culture becomes, from late summer 1967 onward, more politicized and violence prone...
...For in the summer of 1969 Manson thought the time had come for the final apocalypse, of which he and the Beatles were the annunciators...
...l This last police hypothesis found greater support when the facts of the case were brought out in court...
...The aborted revolution of May 1968 in France, the Columbia University sit-ins, the Cleveland shoot-out in July, the Chicago Democratic Convention—all gave many people in the movement the belief that the revolution, sparked by the blacks and the students, was close at hand...
...They intended to issue a whole album of his songs...
...His mother was arrested for robbery when he was about nine years old...
...Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970): "Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they atedinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach...
...His band of worshippers screened him from any effective confrontation with reality...
...After they had given away Wilson's clothes, his collection of gold records, his agent managed to get the Family out of the house...
...Thus Manson at his trial could deny any responsibility for the Tate murders...
...He was unable to join the world of entertainment, yet was unable to leave it...
...From the Wilson estate the Family moved to the Spahn Ranch, an old movie set ranch on the outskirts of Los Angeles...
...To the teeny-bopper Manson offered two experiences normally connected with adult life: sex and violence...
...Yet evocative of a totally different type of milieu than the Tate murders...
...The three of them joined the Manson bus in the summer of 1967...
...In the Beatle records he imagined special messages for himself alone...
...Melcher had lived in the house on 10050 Cielo Drive until the beginning of 1969, and Manson did not know he had moved...
...He owned four supermarkets and also properties in California and Nevada, plus nine thoroughbred racehorses one of which had achieved national fame...
...The Supreme Courts would see to it that the professional standards (effectiveness, confidentiality) of the lie detector machinery would be improved and safeguarded...
...Then they ate what they found in the refrigerator and drank some chocolate milk...
...The motorcycle gangs become a focus of massmedia thrills...
...Many of the runaways girls may have had fixations on their fathers that were close to the surface of their consciousness (often a more common reason for running away than parental "cruelty") . When Manson would give them his psychiatric diagnosis that they had a sexual hang-up on their father, it was likely on one level or another to be true (what else is new...
...Psychopathic murders have always existed, and Hollywood is bound to have more than its share of hushed-up homicides, pedophiliac producers (of...
...She was arrested, released on probation, and eventually wound up sharing a pad on Haight-Ashbury with some girls...
...They tried to get Rudy Altobelli, owner of the house on 10050 Cielo Drive, and landlord of Terry Melcher, to take on Manson as a client...
...In 1967 Manson seemed to have convinced two convict friends—one a firstrate forger who made various items for the Family—to turn over their guns to him, which he dropped into the sea from the Golden Gate Bridge...
...It produces a caricature of the nouveau riche, a place where one's status is symbolized by the size of one's "take" and the immunity from social sanctions it can buy...
...Yet we may find, just as in the student movement, that an amazing amount of action is accounted for by fashion rather than by the "heavy" explanations of the social scientist...
...For the girls, to participate in violence was to deny traditional role limitations, a chance to show they cared for their leader...
...It was probably better than being a "groupie" for a secondrate rock band, but sometimes not terribly different in experience...
...From the simple or even "kinky" pornography of sex which is getting to be stale and banal, the focus of audacity becomes the pornography of violence—that is, rage and anger and hatred, but repressed by a great fear of retribution...
...Most of Manson's adult life was spent in prison...
...He could also quote extensively from the Bible...
...In this atmosphere the private underground movies turn to beatings, leather straps, hoods, and chains...
...Running away is not as "in" for middle-class teen-agers as it used to be...
...Self-confidence, even when given back by a Manson, can be the first step toward an integrated self, which then can be a better judge of what is really happening and can leave the cult...
...It means bearing the responsibilities of fallible human justice rather than escaping them in the effusions of universal guilt, which is the mask of universal innocence...
...He had learned in prison of their secret arms caches, and it was because of their "super-awareness" that they would recognize Manson as the leader...
...From the amiable imitator of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, traveling up and down the coast with his followers in a converted school bus—and sometimes getting into trouble with the police for letting them cavort in the nude—Manson had become the leader of a millennarian cult, preaching salvation for those who would join him before the Apocalypse started...
...known, sweaty, beery biker, they did it immediately...
...He went to Hollywood parties, probably was on first-name terms with movie stars who would now rather forget him...
...Liberal opinion is against punishment...
...For us, humanists of the Judeo-Puritan tradition, the Law is first our responsibility to the widest possible human collectivity, rather than to the exclusive community of the saved...
...THE MANSON MURDERS ers among the hippies: Mary Brunner, a University of Wisconsin graduate...
...Again we have the theme of acting for the movie of the mind—while they were committing incest they were forgiven, but on condition of transferring their superego to Manson...
...In his cosmology women were inferior creatures who should obey men—that is, the redempted men who followed Manson...
...and often he would make them take acid at the same time, the drug usually being an effective way to decrease temporarily the organizing and judgmental functions of the ego...
...After trying suicide she had become involved with two boys who stole cars and robbed gas stations...
...The Spahn ranch became a crash pad for runaways...
...Thereby Manson, not on acid, could take over these functions from his followers...
...Manson, who gave his name to the child...
...Nevertheless, during 1968 the counter culture itself became more violent...
...One approach might be to improve the police and make it into a thoroughly professionalized system, but this, of course, is not going to be easy...
...A major reason is their capacity to cure the member of the very estrangement from self and society that led to membership in the first place...
...This psychological trick, perhaps learned in prison, was effective in some cases...
...Some of the fame-porn movies, retailing for as high as $250,000, are bought by rich businessmen who want to impress their guests...
...Universal also employed him as technical adviser on a Jesus film eventually killed by the front office...
...It also gives us a better understanding of the Hollywood climate which produced many of the victims...
...But the biker atmosphere, the tough talk about "offing pigs," the whispers of murder, must have been quite heady to the teen-agers, especially the teen-age girl, whose sexual partners became infused with the virility of violence...
...Could these five murders have been their revenge...
...A sexual party with him was something different from a grope with a teen-age boy...
...Violence was also a hip thing in 1968-69, an act which put the middle-class adolescent above the common crowd...
...With a minimum of discretion, the Family couldhave escaped detection for many months in thewilds of Death Valley...
...In the beginning Manson did not claim to be Jesus...
...Linda Kasabian had been living with her hippie husband on various communes before joining Manson...
...They used to say to other men who might be hassling them for sex orattention: "I don't care or know about you, I've got my own love for me...
...Manson had remained pretty well "together" for about 15 months following his release from prison...
...346 JESSE R. PITTS The therapeutic approach, unless it substitutes the stigma of sick for the stigma of criminal, is read by persons closest in social space to the culprit either as a reward for deviance or as a denial that society really "means it...
...and Susan Atkins, 19yearold daughter of a bankrupt appliance salesman...
...The description Sanders gives of the ride in which Manson was trying to choose his victims on Saturday night, August 9, inclines one to believe the choice of the LaBianca house was made completely at random...
...They too would hitch a ride back to the Spahn ranch, where Manson would be waiting for them...
...As a matter of fact, an increasing number of murderers are placed on probation rather than being sent to jail...
...If the police (aided by some ten private investigators financed by parents or friends of the victims) took nearly four months to break the case, it was largely because there was an abundance of clues that seemed to indicate either a financial motive—a "drug burn"—a "freak out" during a wild "fameporn" party, or the ceremonial of an occult satanical group involving human sacrifice...
...They wrote "Death to Pigs" on a tapestry, "Rise" on the wall, and "Healter Skelter" [sic] on the doors of the refrigerator, all in the blood of their victims...
...Susan Atkins reported thatManson wanted to scare Terry Melcher, but also claimed that Linda Kasabian had been "burnt" for $1000 worth of MDA she had contracted for from the occupants of 10050 Cielo Drive...
...This is the advice that our Puritan fathers have always given us...
...Her husband's latest movie, Rosemary's Baby, where Mia Farrow is impregnated by the devil, had apparently displeased some of the local satanical cults...
...But the most likely explanation the police had was a "drug burn" which, over the years, had become a new and relatively common cause of beatings and executions...
...He was also very much into the cult of the child, a mainstay of the counter culture which deems the child to be an equivalent of the noble savage—human nature uncorrupted by the system...
...Abigail Folger's lover, Voityck Frykowski, was a childhood friend of Roman Polanski, and was also a drug dealer with a corner on the new drug MDA which he imported from Canada...
...Fame-porn and the occult seemed reasonable hypotheses when the police made an inventory of the Tate house on Cielo Drive and found a substantial inventory of pornographic takes (some private and others "outtakes" from legitimate studios) belonging to Roman Polanski...
...After being thrown out of Dennis Wilson's house, it is likely that his dependency upon the Family grew to psychotic proportions, with a background of anger and hatred for those who had rejected him...
...Bonnie and Clyde is an example of the pornography of violence which culminates in M*A*S*H*, Catch 22, Soldier Blue, and Easy Rider...
...Another version is that he knew but wanted to put a scare into Melcher...
...Manson seems to have been obsessed by a need to control others...
...The public has heard only of the TateLaBianca murders, which had seven victims...
...The influence of the satanical cults may have been real...
...Decadent or marginal upper-class participants give the milieu its minimum veneer...
...A millionairess, daughter-in-law of a famous Washington hostess, used him to spend part of her divorce settlement...
...It would not be a panacea, but it would increase the likelihood that those who challenge by their acts of violence the inviolability of the human person—which is after all one of our most important values and a keystone of the democratic system of government—would be punished .9 On a talk show Ed Sanders was asked, "How do you prevent things like Manson...
...Several times Manson stopped the car, went to investigate a possible location, only to drive on...
...Tough antiEstablishment talk became the thing among the teeny-boppers...
...Evocative, is it not...
...Tex scratched the word "war" on Leno LaBianca's stomach...
...The Manson Family was probably -a good example of the teen-age runaways that swamped the hippie movement in 1967-68, just as Manson and his friend Bill Vance, of 5 At the Barker ranch the Family finally was captured in two raids following complaints by localminers and because they had burnt a $30,000 Clark skip-loader that belonged to the Park Rangers...
...After the bus adventure was over, the Family stayed in various places...
...Men (more often teen-age boys) were fewer, one for every four girls or so...
...Sometimes the filming is public, sometimes behind a deceptive one-way mirror...
...All millennarian cults, which insist upon the special quality of the saved, tend to have a high turnover of members...
...Some stayed, most left when the servile condition of the Family became apparent...
...Sanders believes there is strong reason to ascribe six more murders to Manson and his followers, all in the year preceding their arrest in October 1969...
...If you hit the attendant he may hit you back...
...After he had finally decided on the LaBianca house, which was next door to a house where the Manson family had participated in an acid party the year before, he crept up to the unaware couple, tied them up, and returned to the car, giving instruc tions to the team ("Tex" Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houghton...
...This latter reason is also mentioned in Susan Atkins's confession, but it is likely to be either irrelevant or a small part in a complex field of forces...
...At 18, Susan, after the death of her mother, had dropped out of high school and left home...
...Wild...
...Manson would provide the trigger: by com 2 In a speech given at the Flint, Mich., 1969 SDS conference, as reported in Weatherman, Harold Jacobs, ed...
...After beating themarijuana charge he organized on August 27 thebeheading murder of "Shorty" Shea, a regularhand on the Spahn ranch, who had been trying to pressure his boss to get rid of the Family, andwhom Manson suspected of having organized withthe police his arrest on the marijunana charge...
...You will not get out so quickly...
...They were preceded by the murder of Gary Hinman, a UCLA sociology graduate student, and followed by the murder of a Hollywood stunt man named Shorty Shea...
...If the girls were ordered to perform sexual acts with some un ported to be in the hands of ex-convict Bill Vance, a member of the Family who is being tracked downby the FBI...
...Manson let himself be called these names, and he insisted he never told anyone to do something they did not want to do themselves...
...The L.A...
...To people like Terry Melcher or Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who made enormous amounts of money out of cheap art, Manson was their wild fantasy, their remorse...
...Police told me this...
...They did not mean, of course, "do your thing," but rather "Follow the Law, given to us by God, and obey it regardless of the temptations of the flesh, the seduction of the crowd, and the commands of false idols...
...But he doesn't let us step on him...
...also because the murder scene looked like a Sharon Tate movie made real...
...3 In the Hinman murder, which began the series in July 1969, the killers had drawn a panther's paw in blood to mislead the public into believing blacks committed the murder...
...This did not prevent the Beach Boys from issuing one of Manson's songs, after giving it their syrupy treatment (from "Cease to Exist," its title was changed to "Never Learn Not to Love...
...The Family is without literary pretensions: it is taken right off the tapes with a minimum of editing...
...Patricia Krenwinkel, dropout from a small Catholic college in Alabama...
...In initiating intercourse he would ask the girls to imagine that he was their father...
...Growing sexual permissiveness has made some of the old precautions unnecessary and has granted immunity for trespasses whose public discovery had nearly ruined the career of a Robert Mitchum...
...occult society dedicated to observing and aiding the end of the world by stirring up murder, violence and chaos, and dedicated to the proposition that they...
...Meanwhile, the Family girls would say: "He's not our leader, he falls down at our feet...
...It was in his view of women that Manson was most vulnerable from a counter culture standpoint...
...In other cases, probably in most, the member or might-be member must have picked up his pack and taken the first ride out...
...At the apartment which Abigail Folger and Voityck Frykowski had been sharing for more than a year, the police also found a collection of fame-porn...
...Ed Sanders, veteran of the disbanded rock band The Fugs—hence aristocrat of the counter culture which had for popes Allen Ginsberg and the Beatles, for king and queen in exile Timothy Leary and Bernardine Dohrn, for princes of the royal blood Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mark Rudd —has written a book on the Manson family that will help the reader to understand the background of the Manson murders...
...It abandons hippie pacifism, which had taught some troubled youths to reach dignity without the use of force...
...He began recruiting female followThis son was apparently shot to death in a brawlin January 1972...
...Manson was very much against killing animals, even snakes, and he once threatened with death a member of the Family who had shot a rattlesnake...
...rather, these runaways provided some commune boss with an easily seduced and cowed following...
...the Beatles were the four angels of the Apocalypse, to whom would be added Manson as angel of the bottomless pit...
...When four girls in short-short mini skirts did the garbage run, the stock boys were likely to be generous...
...Except in cases of armed-robbery murder heis unlikely to remain in prison for more than twoor three years—not too high a price to pay for a"rep" that will be of great help in street life...
...Teen-agers are often caught between the conflicting desires to be taken seriously, to imitate adults, but to benefit from a moratorium as to the consequences of their action...
...Every time he was released for insufficient evidence, or the complaint was withdrawn, as in the case of the rape charge...
...In the 1960s the spread of the counter culture and the availability of video tape allow underground Hollywood new scope and audacity...
...Most of the Manson followers were young girls aged 14 and above...
...shall survive the gore as the chosen people...
...When there was money in the Family (at times thousands of dollars were floating about) they spent it wantonly, buying all sorts of musical instruments and wrecking or abandoning them...
...He became involved in the occult and scientology, black magic, and derived much inspiration from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land...
...Patients may be psychotic, but they know—in the mist of their delirium—that hitting the doctor is more dangerous than hitting the attendant...
...Allen Ginsberg tries hard to make them allies of the hippies...
...Revelation 9" was a reference to the ninth book of Revelations...
...On the other hand, the society presses a value system in which individual achievement and autonomy are supreme...
...All other men were weak and actually dominated by women, which was against the cosmic order...
...They would spend hours singing, lovemaking, turning on acid, and proselytizing...
...When paroled in 1967, he came to the Berkeley-San Francisco scene with his guitar...
...How did he obtain such power over his followers...
...Sanders believes that the conversion of Manson to violence was largely determined by the influence of the satanical cults, especially one which had recently emigrated from England: "an...
...But the fact is, given our lack of knowledge about effective rehabilitative measures, a certain number of criminals will have to be kept in a custodial system for the safety of the public, and for their own...
...Anyway, the money was not there...
...A close approximation might be the few communes that are into political violence, mostly bombings, perhaps mayhem, and who finance their operations through rip-offs and drug trafficking...
...in the winter of 1968-69 Manson, guided by Beatle mysticism---a search for occult and esoteric meanings in the Beatle songs: "Revelation 9," "Piggie," "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," "Helter Skelter"—developed his own scenario of Apocalypse...
...In the worse cases the individual is left defenseless against the commands of the savior he loves, whether it be Hitler, Stalin, or the Manson of death...
...Kill the Pigs...
...They would hitchhike back when they were finished, while Manson would drop off another team to do murder: the 17-year-old Steve Grogan, also known as "Clem," Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian...
...When he got out in 1958 he tried to organize a stable of girls, and also tried his hand at stealing and forging checks...
...9 Preliminary results of research in a large Midwestern city show the likelihood of a murdererbeing arrested and sent to jail to be one out of three...
...Susan Atkins said it well: "He gave my faith in myself back to me...
...Being versed in the counter culture was no vaccination against Manson's appeal: Diane (Snake) Bluestein had been living on the famous Hog Farm commune with her parents before becoming a devotee who was to stick with Manson even after his arrest and exposure...
...His followers had become trained for instant obedience, ready to commit murder at their master's command...
...What this policy forgets is that the role of punishment is not to rehabilitate the culprit but to reinforce, through symbolization, the strength of the transgressed value in the minds of the still innocent public...
...Afterwards, Manson threatened with death those who might leave, because they knew too much...
...Who was Manson...
...340 JESSE R. PITTS 1 ^'1 anson was born in 1934, apparently the illegitimate son of a 17-year-old girl who later married a Mr...
...He would give them a knife and say: "Go ahead and kill me," gaining the ascendancy over them of not being afraid to put his life on the line...
...In 1969 he was also The Devil ("Let me speak to the Devil," Clem Brogan said when he called the Spahn 342 ranch to warn Manson of the first Barker ranch bust...
...He wanted the Family to have children and discouraged the use of birth control...
...mitting atrocious crimes and laying them at the door of the Black Panthers,3 the Manson Family would trigger a murderous white backlash that would in turn result in a black uprising...
...5 Sandy Good was the daughter of a stockbroker...
...To be logical, then, most murderers—who are "spontaneous" criminals rather than armed robbers or Manson types—should never be placed in prison...
...This demonstrated Manson to be above the contingencies of life, a truly free man...
...More commonly Manson let himself be loved, and the girls wanted to love...
...Prisons have been delegitimated...
...Manson's soul was their soul...
...The second team, after some desultory motions toward locating a Lebanese actor who had picked up Linda Kasabian ten days before, aborted the mission...
...Meanwhile, the first murder team did kill the LaBiancas by knifing them more than 70 times...
...8 Manson was arrested four times, between March 30 and August 23, 1969 (the Tate-LaBianca murders took place on August 9 and 10) on charges varying from rape to auto theft to possession ofmarijuana...
...The biker clubs were the transmission belt of the satanical cults to the Manson Family...
...In November 1967 he recorded for Universal Studios...
...In order to shock, to dare, one has to go well beyond the orgies a la Citizen Kane...
...If the lonely cry out, let us try to reach them first, before monsters are born from their fears...
...convict days, were examples (rather extreme, no doubt) of those psychopathic adults who fattened on this new prey...
...In his book, Sanders merely quotes an interview given by Dennis Hopper to the Los Angeles Free Press: "They had fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality— and they recorded it all on videotape too...
...Kitty Lutesinger and Stephanie Schram were daughters of local ranchers, not culturally upper-middle, but certainly financially welloff...
...There were two teams of killers in the car...
...At the present time most of the Manson movies are reJESSE R. PITTS On a deeper level Manson had a few psychological tricks he used to convert people on the fringe of the movement...
...It is conceivable that the Tate massacre was the result of revenge by an irate wholesaler who had been "burnt" by not getting delivery for his money, or who had received bad merchandise...
...He had abstained from criminality beyond what was accepted by the counter culture as a justified rip-off on the Establishment...
...The famous actors and actresses, the socialites who film one another copulating, fellating, sodomizing, flagellating, exchange the tapes or stills...
...Roger Cor 338 man features Peter Fonda in Wild Angels, a film depicting an orgy in a church...
...Most of the Manson followers were content with the smell of violence rather than the real thing, just as most Communists were quite satisfied with the smell of conspiracy rather than a real one...
...This beating took place two or three days before the Tate murders...
...It would permit the girls to deny that Manson was a "sexist," just as JESSE R. PITTS some lovers of democracy become enmeshed in totalitarian movements and do not see or want to see the contradiction...
...if you hit the doctor you are likely to be labeled "homicidal" (no more passes to the grounds, no more privileges of any sort) and diagnosed as a schizophrenic, paranoid type...
...At 21 he married a 17-year-old who divorced him two years afterwards, after giving birth to a child who would be 16 years old by now...
...and Sanders adds: "If they did, he'd punch them in the face...
...The use of the word Pig was also supposed to be a clue, since the Panthers' rhetoric had heavily emphasized the animal: "We're going to barbecue us some pork...
...THE MANSON MURDERS movie star also supposedly had been present...
...In the 'S0s he was an avid listener to pimps describing their methods for controlling their girls...
...There is an international fame-porn circuit, and L'Affaire Markovitch, named after Alain Delon's second bodyguard to meet violent death, may have involved some of the Fifth Republic's greatest names...
...Joining the Family was actually a way to make the grade in the counter culture...
...Although he •had •these successful "friends," always boosting his talent, very little seems to have come out of their efforts, either because Manson was not hardworking enough or their efforts on his behalf were desultory...
...Their recidivism rate is very low —even though they spend the most time in the schools for crime that prisons are supposed to be...
...Now one videotapes the party...
...The occult connection was suggested by the writing in blood, the towel over the head of Jay Sebring (which in the writers' imagination became a hood), the rope linking Sebring and Sharon Tate...
...Eventually the Family wound up at Dennis Wilson's three-acre estate on Sunset Boulevard, from which the girls would go on garbage runs in Wilson's Rolls-Royce...
...Violence means putting yourself on the line...
...His answer was, "Don't let anybody tell you what to do...
...Manson was also admired as a "now" person, living without thought for the consequences of his actions...
...In a sense they had died so as to be able to be reborn in the Hole after Helter Skelter...
...He had many 'assets for success: a musical talent above average, knowledge of occult and hip books, a sexual staying power well above average, and the fact that he was an ex-convict, "victim of society...
...If Sanders tends to stress Manson's fear of the Panthers and the implicit racism of his doctrine that lets the blacks do the dirty work of the revolution before passing command to him, Susan Atkins, in her published "confession," declares that Manson "dug blacks" because of his long prison experience...
...The failure of the other to kill Manson became a sign of lack of conviction, lack of direction, lack of guts, He would take back the knife and say: "Then, I can kill you"—that is, you belong to me and must obey me, under penalty of death...
...This was the meal in the midst of the corpses that aroused the enthusiasm of Bemardine Dohrn, 2 showing the coolness and detachment of these politically unformed but instinctual militants of the class struggle: a model for University of Chicago or Columbia University Weathermen still hung-up on bourgeois respectability at a time when Bernardine wanted them to start bomb terrorism...
...Sanders does not in his book allude to any participation of the LaBiancas in drug traffic, which would be the only logical link between the Tate and LaBianca murders...
...Manson claims that the true reason for the murders has yetto be told, but he is not talking...
...Sanders reported that Manson may possibly have participated at the Tate house in a beating of a dealer named Billy Doyle, and recorded on video tape...
...At the present time and in view of the laws regarding the admissibility of evidence, the police and the prosecuting attorney are frequently led, in their prosecution of a known criminal, to perjury, the use of stool pigeons, undercover deals with the defense attorney, which in their totality are probably more dangerous to civil rights than the controlled use of the lie detector...
...Meanwhile, what of the night...
...Second, it is the commitment to rationality, universalistic and disciplined...
...I have read a paperback titled The Killing of Sharon Tate, by Lawrence Schiller, which contains a purported confession by Susan Atkins, who was Manson's number one girl...
...About half the "old guard" from the days of flower power remained for the bloodshed of "Helter Skelter...
...Sanders says: "One of Manson's favorite passages from Revelation 9 was: `Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts'—words that he would quote over and over again, preparing his worshippers to kill...
...In 1967 when the Family was living on the bus, they went searchingfor his mother all over the West Coast—in vain...
...One might think that a stronger extended family could prevent runaways...
...A successful show business talent manager," as Sanders describes him, Altobelli declined...
...What is to be done...
Vol. 19 • April 1972 • No. 2
