by prison doctors stated: “He has above-average intelligence, and the [Rorschach test] drawings seem to point to schizophrenia. This doesn’t mean his entire performance was schizophrenic…Manson is a passive-aggressive personality with paranoid tendencies.”
Manson’s response? “Sure I’m paranoid. I’ve had reason to be ever since I can remember. And now I have to be, just to stay alive. As for schizophrenia, take anybody off the streets and put them in the middle of a prison and you’ll see all kinds of split personalities. I’ve got a thousand faces, so that makes me five hundred schizophrenics. And in my life I’ve played every one of those faces, sometimes because people push me into a role, and sometimes because it’s better being someone else than me.” After spending a short time in the psychiatric ward at Vacaville, Manson was transferred out on the recommendation of a psychiatric report which said he was nothing but “a psychiatric curiosity or oddity.”
Knowing he may well spend the rest of his life in prison, Manson has either boycotted his parole hearings since his first one in 1978 or used them merely as a forum to sermonize or simply have some fun. In 1978 he regaled the parole board with his comments for three hours. “I’m totally unsuitable for that world out there. I don’t fit in at all,” a bearded and shaggy-haired Manson allowed in saying he should not be released from prison. But then Manson, never a model of consistency, added: “I’m mad. I’m indignant. I’m mad to every bone in my body that I have to come back to the penitentiary when I didn’t break no law.” Waving his arms in exclamation and half singing his presentation, Manson said, “I’m not your executioner. I’m not your devil and I’m not your God. I’m Charles Manson.” Reminding the board he had spent most of his life behind bars, he said, “I was born and raised all my life in prison.” He told the board he had been “asked to come to Scotland, Germany, Australia,” but that he wasn’t interested. When asked where he would go if released, he responded, “I’d go to the desert, talk to the animals and live off the land.” The parole board, in denying parole, said that Manson’s crime “eclipses the imagination.” The following year Manson sent word from his cell that he had nothing to tell the board, and gave his unit sergeant several $100 bills from a Monopoly set and a Chance card that said “Advance to Go. Collect $200” to deliver to the board members.
Delighting in talking to reporters covering his parole hearings, he told one, “You’re in prison more than I am. You’ve got more rules to live by than I do. I can sit down and relax. Can you?” Grabbing another reporter’s arm and pressing his mouth close to her ear, he whispered, “Do you know a way out of here? If you get me out, we can go to the desert and I’ll show you things that’ll blow your mind.”
At his parole hearing in 1981, Manson, in a T-shirt with a small skull and crossed bones, repeatedly stood, sat down, paced, and interrupted the hearing, frequently shouting at the board members. He told the board: “I’ve been in solitary for ten years. I ain’t got no mind. It’s gone, man. I don’t understand half the things you’re saying.” Then, “I never really grew up. I went to prison at nine. I don’t read or write too good and I’ve stayed like a little kid. I stopped thinking in 1954.”
In 1986, Manson did not appear at his parole hearing, sending the board, instead, a lengthy written statement. “All of the judgments and the blame that is pushed off on me will be reflected back in the fires of the Holy War that you call crime,” he wrote. “I did invoke a balance for life on Earth. From behind the time locks of courtrooms and from the worlds of darkness, I did let loose devils and demons with the power of scorpions to torment. I did unseal seven seals and seven jars in accord with the judgments placed upon me…You’ve drugged me for years, dragging me up and down prison hallways, laying my head on every chopping block you’ve got, chained me, burnt me, but you cannot defeat me…In the all that was said about me, it was not me saying it, and if you see a false prophet, it is only a reflection of your own judgments.”
That same year he wrote President Ronald Reagan at the White House with this advice: “Keep projecting [to kids] what not to do and you make the thought in their brains of what can and will be done.” Before signing off with “Easy, Charles Manson,” he told Reagan: “I’m the last guy in line but I’ve got all the thoughts for the balance of order and peace with a one-world government if we all are to survive.”
At his last parole hearing on April 21, 1992, Manson, the defiant swastika still very visible on his forehead, responded to the accusation he had ordered the murders by telling the three-man parole board (now called the Board of Prison Terms): “Everyone says that I was the leader of those people, but I was actually the follower of the children…I didn’t break God’s law and I didn’t break man’s law.”
As with each of his prior appearances before the board, he did virtually all the talking. The most routine questions launched him into unstoppable, stream of consciousness lectures that contained references to God, the economy, Rambo, the Queen of England, World Wars I and II, the Pope, J. Edgar Hoover, winos, Vietnam, chess, Christian ethics, General MacArthur, President Truman, Ninja warriors, the San Diego Zoo, J. R. Ewing, gangster Frank Costello, and a myriad of other people and subjects, including the relationship between does and bucks, and dogs and chickens. And, as always, that which he always returns to—the need to stop the destruction of the environment. He told the board they live in a matriarchal world, he in a patriarchal one. “You back up to your women. I don’t back up to my women.” Although the details did not emerge, Manson acknowledged at the hearing that he has been getting $500 for his autograph from people on the outside.[97]
The board, in finding Manson unsuitable for parole, set 1997 for his next hearing, the maximum time (five years) between parole hearings allowed under the California Penal Code.
Until her death from cancer in July of 1992, Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, attended most of the parole hearings for Manson and his killers, and was successful in mobilizing national support in the form of 352,000 letters to the parole board to keep Manson and the others behind bars for life. “I live with her [Sharon’s] screams and her begging for the life of her baby,” she often said. In the late ’70s, Mrs. Tate co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a group providing mental, emotional, and other support to its members. Just before her death, Mrs. Tate, who was the United States’ representative at an International Victims’ Rights Conference in Stockholm in June of 1990, formed the Sacramento-based Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau. The bureau promotes, among other things, the enactment of legislation for the rights of crime victims.
Since her mother’s passing, Patti Tate, who was eleven years old when her twenty-six-year-old sister was slain, and who bears a striking resemblance to Sharon, has been faithfully and effectively carrying on all of her mother’s important work. Speaking of her sister, a misty-eyed Patti says: “She was so sweet and such a gentle soul. I idolized her and there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for her.”
Corcoran is a medium-maximum security institution. Manson is housed in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) in a 6?? ? 12?? cell he shares with another inmate. Called a “prison within a prison,” SHU is the maximum security section at Corcoran. Manson is issued three meals a day by correctional officers. The food is served on trays through a food port located in each cell door. Breakfast is at 6:30 A.M., lunch at noon, and dinner at 5 P.M. No less than ten hours a week he exercises in a nearby walled yard with ten co-inmates of his. Manson has a radio and television set in his cell, but does not have his beloved guitar, the latter not permitted in SHU. Like all inmates in this unit, he does not have a work assignment. Per the California Department of Corrections, the current annual cost to the taxpayers for housing Manson is $20,525.
Manson carries on running correspondence with as many of the people who write to him as he can. He also apparently writes to some who have no desire to be his pen pal, sending four letters to me in the preceding years. In 1986, the book
Near the conclusion of his book, Manson writes: “There are days when I get caught up in being the most notorious convict of all time. In that frame of mind I get off on all the publicity, and I’m pleased when some fool writes and offers to ‘off some pigs’ for me. I’ve had girls come to visit me with their babies in their arms and say, ‘Charlie, I’d do anything in the world for you. I’m raising my baby in your image.’ Those letters and visits used to delight me, but that’s my individual sickness. What sickness is it that keeps sending me kids and followers? It’s your world out there that does it. I don’t solicit my mail or ask anyone to come and visit me. Yet the mail continues to arrive and your pretty little flowers of innocence keep showing up at the gate.”
From these relatively benign words, Manson abruptly changes, and after saying he doesn’t think he’ll ever be released, closes his book in vintage fashion with these ominously ambiguous words: “My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a
