Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [41]
To survive in prison, Manson became shifty, cunning and manipulative. This set him in good stead when he was released in 1967. He soon discovered that he could use the manipulative powers he had learnt in jail on the long-haired flower children that inhabited Southern California. With his hypnotic stare, his Bohemian lifestyle and the strange meaningless phrases he babbled, he was the perfect hippy guru. His contempt for authority and convention made him a focus of the counter-culture and he soon developed a penchant for the middle-class girls who had dropped out of mainstream society according to the fashion of the times.
Manson travelled with an entourage of hangers-on, known as the Family. They comprised young women – who were all his lovers – and docile males who would do anything he told them to. They numbered as many as thirty at one time.
One typical recruit was Patricia Krenwinkel. She was a former Girl Scout from a normal middle-class family. Her expensive education earned her a good job at a big insurance company in Los Angeles. She met Manson on Manhattan Beach when she was 21 and abandoned everything for him. She ditched her car and walked out of her job without even bothering to pick up her last paycheque. She moved in with the Family on the Spahn Ranch, a collection of broken-down shacks in the dusty east corner of the Simi Valley where they hung out.
Leslie Van Houten was just 19 when she had dropped out of school. She lived on the streets on a perpetual acid trip until she met Manson. Twenty-year-old Linda Kasabian left her husband and two children and stole $5,000 from a friend to join the Family. She too began to see her seamy life through a constant haze of LSD.
Susan Atkins was a 2l-year-old topless dancer and bar-room hustler. A practising devil worshipper, she became Manson’s closest aide. But, like the others, she had to share his sexual favours. Manson quenched his insatiable sexual appetite with his female followers, one or two at a time – or even with all of them together. He knew the power of sex and drugs. When, for a short while in the 1950s, he had been a pimp, he had fallen in love with his main girl, who had dumped him. Then he had picked up two girls – Mary and Darlene – and had slept with them on a rota basis. Soon he had them in his thrall. With the girls in the Family, he used LSD and orgies to control them. He would choreograph his sexual activities with his followers, artistically positioning their naked bodies. He also promised each girl a baby in return for their devotion, while Susan used the situation to plant her Satanist ideas into their receptive minds.
One of the few men in the commune was 23-year-old former high-school football star from Farmersville, Texas, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson. He had once been an honours student, but in Manson’s hands he had become a mindless automaton.
Surrounded by these compliant sycophants, the drug-addled Manson began to enjoy huge delusions, fuelled by Susan Atkins’ studies of Satanism. She convinced him that his own name, Manson, was significant. Manson, or Man-son, meant Son of Man, or Christ, in her twisted logic. He was also the devil, Susan Atkins said.
The lyrics of the Beatles’ songs were also dragged into Manson’s growing delusions. He was blissfully unaware that a helter skelter was a harmless British funfair ride and interpreted the track ‘Helter Skelter’ on the Beatles’ White Album as heralding the beginning of what he saw as an inevitable race war. The blacks would be wiped out, along with the pigs – the police, authority figures, the rich and the famous, and what Manson called ‘movie people’.
Manson fancied himself as something of a popstar himself and took one of his feeble compositions to successful West Coast musician Gary Hinman. Manson also learned that Hinman had recently inherited $20,000. He sent Susan Atkins and Bob Beausoleil – another