Helter Skelter

type='note'>[91] To the point where, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, Manson receives more mail than any other inmate in the history of the U.S. prison system, an alarming amount of it from young people who tell him they want to join his Family; where Manson T-shirts are selling well today around the country; where there have been several plays about him, even an opera, The Manson Family, that premiered at New York City’s Lincoln Center in July of 1990—as well as a CD soundtrack of the opera released in 1992; where the multi-platinum rock band Guns N’ Roses sing a Manson composition, “Look at Your Game, Girl,” in their latest album; where, believe it or not, avant-garde typographers in California produced a new typeface called Manson in which for $95 art directors, per Time magazine, “can set their serial-killer Zeitgeist essays in Manson Regular, Manson Alternate or Manson Bold” (all renamed Mason after criticism); where “Free Manson” graffiti soils the landscape of Britain’s largest cities, and according to the BBC’s William Scanlan Murphy, Manson interest in Britain is approaching mini-mania proportions;[92] where the television adaptation of this book about the case was, when it aired in 1976, the most watched television movie in the history of the medium and, like no other film of a murder case ever, has continued to be shown, year after year without fail, in the United States and many other countries of the world; where a March 1994 ABC television special on the case produced the highest-ever ratings for a network magazine show debut. Again, why is this so?

After the Tate-LaBianca murders, there was a killer in Los Angeles called “The Trashbag Killer,” so named because he picked up drifters and hitchhikers, murdered and dismembered them, then put them in trash bags. He pled guilty to twenty-one murders. Yet, I don’t remember this murderer’s name. And I would wager that if you were to ask one hundred people in Los Angeles you’d be hard-pressed to find one person who did. This is not that uncommon. At the time of a mass murder, and when the suspected killer is apprehended and tried, there’s always considerable publicity. As a general rule, however, within a short time thereafter the murders and the identity of the perpetrator tend to fade from the public’s consciousness. But not so with the Manson case. In fact, next to Jack the Ripper, whose identity still hasn’t been conclusively established, Manson is probably the most famous and notorious mass murderer ever. So what is it?

A view that’s enjoyed some currency is that the murders represent a watershed moment in the evolving social structure of our society. This view holds that the Manson case was the “end of innocence” (the ’60s mantra of love, peace, and sharing) in our country, and sounded the death knell for hippies and all they symbolically represented. In Joan Didion’s memoir of the era, The White Album, she writes: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969…and in a sense this is true.” Even now, in 1994, ABC’s Diane Sawyer endorses this notion when she says the Manson murders “brought an end to the decade of love,” and “something changed in the heart of America” with the murders.

Others feel, less extravagantly, that the murders were emblematic of the counterculture flower gone to seed. As Time magazine said in 1989 on the twentieth anniversary of the murders, the three female killers were “any family’s daughters, caught up in the wave of drugs, sex and revolutionary blather that had swept up a generation of young people.”

Or, some thought for a time after the murders, perhaps Manson and his disciples represented a ten-or twenty-year extrapolation of the direction in which the counterculture movement was going. And so forth.

All of these hypotheses seem to be devoid of supporting empirical evidence. For instance, although the Manson murders may have hastened its descent, the Age of Aquarius, of which Woodstock (one week after the Manson carnage) was at once its finest hour and last gasp, was already in decline. As the decade of dissent and raw excess approached its denouement, the movement’s mecca, Haight-Ashbury, was in ruins, and America had begun its retreat from the war in Vietnam—the political raison d’etre fueling the movement. Moreover, Manson and the madness he wrought did not reflect the soul of the late ’60s, when admittedly the anti-establishment movement had reached a feverish crescendo. That movement indeed wanted a new social order, but largely one brought about by peaceful means. Manson advocated violence, murder, to change the status quo. As pointed out in the body of this book, though Manson was a hero to some, according to surveys at the time a majority of young people whom the media labeled “hippies” disavowed Manson, stating that what he espoused, i.e., violence, was antithetical to their beliefs.[93]

And we certainly know, from the unerring rearview mirror of twenty-five years later, that Manson and these murders did not represent a foreboding extension of the direction in which the anti-establishment movement was going.

The sociological implications and legacy, then, of the murders may be no more than that they constituted a reaffirmation of the verity that whenever people surrender their minds and souls to a dictatorial cult figure, there comes a point for the followers when it is too late to turn back, and (as with the masses following the despots of history) whatever direction he goes in, he takes them with him. With the Reverend Moon, for example, it is a life of sleeping on floors and eating mush while he buys more yachts and mansions. With the Reverend Jim Jones and David Koresh, it was suicide. With Manson, murder.

In searching for a more prosaic explanation for the seemingly timeless resonance of the case, observers have pointed to the fact that Manson and his minions may have murdered as many as thirty-five people, and already had plans to murder celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Steve McQueen, and Tom Jones. But apart from the planned celebrity killings, murders by other mass murderers numbering in the twenties and one in the thirties (John Wayne Gacy, thirty-three) have been confirmed. Others have spoken of the brutality of the murders. But though few, there have been murders even more brutal. Still others have pointed to the prominence of the victims—but they weren’t that prominent.

Although all of these elements have undoubtedly contributed to the durability of the case, I believe the main reason for the continuing fascination with it at such a late date is that the Manson murder case is almost assuredly the most bizarre mass murder case in the recorded annals of crime. And for whatever reason, people are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre. If these murders had never happened, and someone wrote a novel with the same set of facts and circumstances, most people would put it down after a few pages; because as I understand it, to be good fiction it has to be somewhat believable, and this story is just too far out.

There is another compelling reason for the continuing fascination with the case. The very name “Manson” has become a metaphor for evil, catapulting him to near mythological proportions. Charles Manson has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity; and again, there is a side to human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil. On a lesser scale, why are there so many popular books and crime shows on television dealing with murder—evil’s ultimate act? (Across the water, one recalls George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Decline of the English Murder,” in which he speaks of the pleasure he and his countrymen receive from reading about a sensational murder in the comfort of their drawing rooms.) Since we place so much value on human life, why do we glorify, in a perverse sort of way, the extinguishment of life? The answer to that question, whatever it is, is at least a partial answer to why people continue to be fascinated by Hitler, Jack the Ripper—Manson.

As with evil, fright also has its allure. The quality of a horror movie, we know, is generally considered to be directly proportionate to the extent to which it terrifies. Manson, of course, delivers on the fright meter like perhaps no one else; his Hitlerian stare fixed upon us from places as diverse as the television screen and the covers of magazines, to the underground albums of his music and his wax frame at Madame Tussaud’s in London. “People worry about this man the way they worry about cancer and earthquakes,” a reporter wrote in 1979. “Just recently”—he quotes a California state prison official—“a New York woman phoned to say she had a dream that Manson made a break and started going after Jews. She wanted to make sure there’s no chance he can escape.” Los Angeles Times columnist Howard Rosenberg calls Manson “America’s preeminent bogeyman.” Not only were the murders he ordered the type one doesn’t even see in horror movies, but Manson, like no other mass murderer of this century, has added a shivering new dimension to the fright quotient—his diabolical and singular talent for getting others, without asking any questions, to kill complete strangers for him at his command. Dr. David Abrahamsen, a noted psychiatrist who has studied the history of violence in America, says he has never heard of any parallel for such a phenomenon. With other prominent mass murderers—from Charles Starkweather, David Berkowitz, Henry Lee Lucas, Charles Whitman, and Richard Speck to Ted Bundy; from Juan Corona, Dean Corll, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez to Jeffrey Dahmer—without exception they committed the murders by themselves or participated with others in the act. The fright generated by these heavyweights of homicide’s rogue gallery, then, was always finite. Because of Manson’s ability to control others and get them to vent his spleen on society for him, the probability of death has always been exponential, and