others, such as Rudi Altobelli, the owner of 10050 Cielo Drive, who had been both Terry Melcher’s and Sharon Tate’s landlord.
I was surprised at the wide variety of people Manson knew. Charlie was a chameleon, Gregg said; he often professed that “he had a thousand faces and that he used them all—he told me that he had a mask for everyone.”
Including the jury? I wondered, realizing that if Manson put on the mask of the peace-loving hippie at the trial, I’d be able to use Gregg’s remark to unmask him.
I asked Gregg why Manson felt it necessary to don masks.
A. “So he could deal with everyone on their own level, from the ranch hand at Spahn, to the girls on the Sunset Strip, to me.”
I was curious as to whether Manson had a “real” face. Gregg thought he had. Underneath it all he had very firm beliefs. “It was rare to find a man who believed in his convictions as strongly as Charlie did—who couldn’t be swayed.”
What were the sources of Manson’s beliefs? I asked.
Charlie rarely, if ever, gave anyone else credit for his philosophy, Gregg replied. But it was obvious that Charlie was not above borrowing.
Had Manson ever mentioned Scientology or The Process?
The Process, also known as the Church of the Final Judgement, was a very strange cult. Led by one Robert DeGrimston, t/n Robert Moore—who, like Manson, was an ex-Scientologist—its members worshiped both Satan and Christ. I’d only begun to look into the group, acting on the basis of a newspaper story which indicated Manson might have been influenced by them.
However, Jakobson said Manson had never mentioned either Scientology or The Process. Gregg himself had never heard of the latter group.
Did Charlie ever quote anyone? I asked Gregg.
Yes, he replied, “the Beatles and the Bible.” Manson would quote, verbatim, whole lyrics from the Beatles’ songs, finding in them a multitude of hidden meanings. As for the Bible, he most often quoted Revelation 9. But in both cases he usually used the quotations as support for his own views.
Though I was very interested in this odd coupling, and would later question Gregg in depth about it, I wanted to know more about Manson’s personal beliefs and attitudes.
Q. “What did Manson say, if anything, about right and wrong?”
A. “He believed you could do no wrong, no bad. Everything was good.
Whatever you do is what you are supposed to do; you are following your own karma.”
The philosophical mosaic began taking shape. The man I was seeking to convict had no moral boundaries. It was not that he was immoral, but totally amoral. And such a person is always dangerous.
Q. “Did he say it was wrong to kill a human being?”
A. “He said it was not.”
Q. “What was Manson’s philosophy re death?”
A. “There was no death, to Charlie’s way of thinking. Death was only a change. The soul or spirit can’t die…That’s what we used to argue all the time, the objective and the subjective and the marriage of the two. He believed it was all in the head, all subjective. He said that death was fear that was born in man’s head and can be taken out of man’s head, and then it would no longer exist…
“Death to Charlie,” Gregg added, “was no more important than eating an ice cream cone.”
Yet once, in the desert, Jakobson had run over a tarantula, and Manson had angrily berated him for it. He had denounced others for killing rattlesnakes, picking flowers, even stepping on a blade of grass. To Manson it was not wrong to kill a human being, but it was wrong to kill an animal or plant. Yet he also said that nothing was wrong, everything that happened was right.
That Manson’s philosophy was riddled with such contradiction apparently bothered his followers little if at all. Manson said that each person should be independent, but the whole Family was dependent on him. He said that he couldn’t tell anyone else what to do, that they should “do what your love tells you,” but he also told them, “I am your love,” and his wants became theirs.
I asked Gregg about Manson’s attitude toward women. I was especially interested in this because of the female defendants.
Women had only two purposes in life, Charlie would say: to serve men and to give birth to children. But he didn’t permit the girls in the Family to raise their own children. If they did, Charlie claimed, they would give them their own hangups. Charlie believed that if he could eliminate the bonds created by parents, schools, churches, society, he could develop “a strong white race.” Like Nietzsche, whom Manson claimed to have read, Charlie “believed in a master race.”
“According to Charlie,” Gregg continued, “women were only as good as their men. They were only a reflection of their men, all the way back to daddy. A woman was an accumulation of all the men she had been close to.”
Then why were there so many women in the Family? I asked; there were at least five girls to every man.
It was only through the women, Gregg said, that Charlie could attract the men. Men represented power, strength. But he needed the women to lure the men into the Family.
As with others I interviewed, I asked Gregg for examples of Manson’s domination. Gregg gave me one of the best I’d yet found: he said he had had dinner with the Family on three occasions; each time Manson sat alone on the top of a large rock, the other members of the Family sitting on the ground in a circle around him.
Q. “Did Tex Watson ever get up on the rock?”
A. “No, of course not.”
Q. “Did anyone else in the Family get up there?”
A. “Only Charlie.”
I needed many, many more examples like this, so that when I offered all of them at the trial, the jury would be led to the irresistible conclusion that Manson had such a hold over his followers, and specifically his co- defendants, that never in a million years would they have committed these murders without his guidance, directions, and orders.
I asked Gregg about Charlie’s ambitions. “Charlie wanted to be a successful recording artist,” Gregg said. “Not so much as a means to making money as to get his word out to the public. He needed people to live with him, to make love, to liberate the white race.”
What was Manson’s attitude toward blacks?
Gregg replied that Charlie “believed there were different levels when it came to race, and the white man occupied a higher level than the black.” This was why Charlie was so strongly opposed to black-white sex; “you would be interfering with the path of evolution, you would be mixing up nervous systems, less evolved with more evolved.”
According to Jakobson, “Charlie believed that the black man’s sole purpose on earth was to serve the white man. He was to serve the white man’s needs.” But blackie had been on the bottom too long, Charlie said. It was now his turn to take over the reins of power. This was what Helter Skelter, the black-white revolution, was all about.
Gregg and I would talk about this on more than a half dozen separate occasions. What before had been only fragments, bits and pieces, now began slipping into place.
The picture that eventually emerged, however, was so incredibly bizarre as to be almost beyond belief.
There is a special feeling you develop over years of interviewing people. When someone is lying or not telling everything he knows, you can often sense it.
On reinterviewing Terry Melcher, I became convinced that he was withholding something. There wasn’t time for pussyfooting. I told Terry I wanted to talk to him again, only this time he should have his attorney, Chet Lappen, present. When we met in Lappen’s office on the seventeenth, I put it to him bluntly: “You’re not leveling with me, Terry. You’re keeping something back. Whatever it is, eventually it will come out. It would be far better if you told me about it now rather than have the defense surprise us with it on cross-examination.”
Terry wavered for a few minutes, then decided to tell me.
