Charles Manson had been in and out of correctional institutions since he was thirteen. From early 1956 until late 1958 he was imprisoned for car theft at the Federal Correctional Institution a t Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. At Terminal Island there was a lot of what might be called "pimp talk"-about the devices to be used in controlling a bevy of prostitutes. Charlie listened avidly. A friend who knew him then writes: "We’d rap a lot about whores, especially how to control them. We talked about Main Old Ladies-a pimp’s number-one girl who controlled all the others; stables-more than one girl working for you; and we talked about how to turn chicks out." Later Susan Atkins would serve as Charlie’s Main Old Lady until she angered him by bringing strange men home.

When Manson got out of prison, he dealt in women rather than stolen cars. In late 1959 Manson hooked up with another man, forming something called 3-Star Enterprises, Night Club, Radio and TV promotions. The reality of 3-Star Enterprises seems to be that Manson was selling girls out of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. On April 27, 1960, an indictment was handed down charging Manson with Transportation of Women in Interstate Commerce for Purposes of Prostitution. The Federal pimp charges were later dropped, but on June 23,1960, Manson was sentenced to serve ten years at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in the state of Washington for violation of parole.

For most of the 1960’s Manson sat in jail. Through the tumult of the various liberation movements outside in America, through riots, through assassinations, the beginning of Vietnam, peace rallies, sexual liberation, rock and roll, The Beatles For Sale, the Beach Boys, napalm, Hare Krishna, and the growing refusal of women to be victimized-a movement of which he had little awareness-through all this sat Manson monitoring reality through magazines and hearsay conversation. It was while counting the days at McNeil Island that Manson began studying magic, warlockry, hypnotism, astral projection, Masonic lore, scientology, ego games, subliminal motivation, music and perhaps Rosicrucianism.

On March 21, 1967, after serving six years and nine months of punishment, Manson walked out of jail with $35 and a suitcase full of "clothes." He was thirty-two years old.

Within seventy-two hours of his release, Manson descended upon Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. There are hundreds of anecdotes floating around about Manson in the Haight-a lot of which are glorified. The reality was that he was a glib grubby little man with a guitar scrounging for young girls, using mysticism and guru babble, a time-honored tactic in the Haight.

In the early months following his release, he made definite attempts to locate his mother, Kathleen. He secured permission from his Federal parole officer to travel out of state several times. Once he went north to Washington in search of her. Another time, east to West Virginia.-Then he returned to girl-chasing in the West.

On the Haight, Manson encountered the entire collection of subcultural currents that had been building up in the United States during the previous decade. Acid music. Dope. Sexual freedom. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Peace rallies. Provos. Guerrilla theatre. Communes. Long hair. The concept of the underground superstar. Astrology. The occult. Underground newspapers. Crash pads. Day-Glo art.

One almost had to live there to understand the frenzy that engulfed the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the Spring and Summer of 1967. The word was out all over America to come to San Francisco for love and flowers. California was flooded with what The New York Times labeled hippies. It was a noble experiment. It was the politics of Free. The Diggers served free food in Panhandle Park each day. The Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic gave free medical care. There were outdoor free concerts held all the time in the park. People lived and loved in the streets and parks. It was Free. There were no rules. But there was a weakness: from the standpoint of vulnerability the flower movement was like a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.

The Haight attracted vicious criminals who grew long hair. Bikers tried to take over the LSD market with crude sadistic tactics. Bad dope was sold by acne-faced methedrine punks. Satanists and satanist-rapist death freaks flooded the whirling crash pads. People began getting ripped off in the parks. There was racial trouble. Puke was sold as salvation. Ugliness was.

The Vietnam war lay like a curse upon America. In March of 1968, Calley and friends creepy-crawled a village called Mylai. In April, 1968, a drifting racist hick, probably under contract, snuffed Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. On June 4, 1968, Roman and Sharon Polanski and friends dined with Robert Kennedy at a beach house in Malibu. After dinner, Senator Kennedy was driven to the Ambassador Hotel where he was shot.

It was Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, including the wonderful Neal Cassady, who popularized in 1964-65 the concept of the traveling school bus, painted and decorated artistically, full of decorous wanderers.

It was they who experimented in group acid trips and, more importantly, group mystical experiences under LSD. They were into film making during wandering. Kesey’s group, however, was essentially good.

Manson carried this onward, making it evil, slowly changing the colors, the red tempera becoming dog blood, the acid test turning to psychedelic satanism, the filming of happiness turning to the filming of hapless murder of female Caucasians on the beaches of Southern California. But it was a slow change. Such weirdo warping takes months and years to put together.

It was in Sacramento that Manson seems to have bought an old yellow school bus large enough to hold his growing youth pack.

On October 16, 1967, at the Stewart E. Miller Standard Chevron station in Sacramento, they outfitted the school bus with a $39 battery and two sets of 825/20 tires costing $216.20.

They removed the seats from the back of the bus to create an area in which to live. On top of the bus they built a large rectangular storage compartment. Inside the bus, as time oozed by, they emplaced an icebox, a stereo set, a floating coffee table suspended by wires, and pillows aplenty. Gradually the walls became painted with Early Acid-American Day-Glo whirlings of color. God’s-eyes, peacock feathers and musical instruments gave the dopemobile cheer. At first, the bus remained school yellow in color, but the police began to stop them for violation of laws governing school buses. At a beach somewhere they acquired a quantity of black spray paint and some bikers sprayed the bus, even the windows, black. They meant to paint the bus with the name "Hollywood Productions" in white letters, but a French girl did the painting and she spelled the name as she pronounced it, "Holywood Productions."

Then the family hit the road. They took a swing up into the Mojave Desert, then back to Los Angeles on November 26, 1967. They passed through Arizona and New Mexico and arrived in El Paso, Texas, on December 6, 1967. They backtracked into New Mexico for about a week then went into the deep South, into Mississippi and Alabama. Patricia Krenwinkel visited her mother in Mobile, Alabama, on December 14, 1967. The black flower bus drove back to Los Angeles, arriving about December 19, 1967.

In December of 1967 The Beatles released their album Magical Mystery Tour and the next month their corresponding movie. The Beatles to the rescue. This seems to be the first Beatles album from which Manson drew philosophical guidance. The whole black bus trip came to be called the Magical Mystery Tour. They were into such a trip of mystic transformation that the family evidently believed that there was an archetypal core personality in each human that could be discovered through acid-zap, mind-moil, role-playing, bunch-punching, magic, blasting-the-past and commune-ism. This was the Magical Mystery Tour.

For most of early 1968 the family stayed in the Los Angeles area. Around May 6, 1968, the black bus drove for the first time to the scroungy, dilapidated Spahn Movie Ranch in

Chatsworth, California, where the family would live off and on until their final flight to the desert. They spent only four days at the Spahn Ranch during their first visit, returned to the ranch in late July, 1968, for a three-month stay, then headed north to Death Valley. They returned to the Spahn Ranch around April, 1969, and remained there for about five months of brigandry and murder. It was reportedly red-haired eager Squeaky Fromme who persuaded George Spahn to allow the family to settle en masse at the Spahn Ranch. Squeaky was assigned a permanent position in Spahn’s saddle-filled house. To this day, Spahn is eager to have the family ladies around him. And, according to numerous interviews with observers, he had no hesitance, say once a week or so, to get after it with girls sixty-five years younger than he.

The Spahn Movie Ranch is Grade B Western movie turf from the 1940’s. The ghosts of Tim Holt and the Durango Kid yodel in the mountain crags. The Western set, where movies were made, was located just off Santa Susana Pass Road. It was a ramshackle collection of buildings in a straight row. A boardwalk extended the length of the set. Sleazy awnings held up by crooked posts ran the length of the mock-up cowboy main street. There was a mock-up restaurant called the Rock City Cafe; a jailhouse with wooden-barred cell; the Long Horn Saloon complete with mirrors and room-length bar and jukebox; a carriage house full of old carriages; an undertaking parlor and several other buildings, including George Spahn’s small house which lay perpendicular to the right of the movie set. All these were built in the manner of a Kansas town of early America. Painted movie props often were strewn about, leaning against the haystack or corral. It was fantasyland.

Manson began to encourage members of various motorcycle clubs to hang out with the family. The two gangs closest to the family were motorcycle groups with the initials S.S., the Satan Slaves and the Straight Satans. He wanted the bikers to join in his group to supply a needed military wing.

Manson used his girls to entice the motorcycle riders to hang around the family. He would order a girl to strip and get down on her knees. Forthwith the zippers zipped and the mini skirt hit the ground. One person interviewed remembered, "The motorcycle gangs would come out there and he would tell a girl, ‘Take your clothes off,’ and she would take her clothes off and he would just give the girl to any of the motorcycle guys there that wanted her." The bikers, many attired in the grease-suffused leathers with Hitlerian medallions, some with I-o-v-e tattooed on one set of knuckles and h-a-t-e on the other, provided freedom-training for some of the girls who were afraid of them. One, called Gypsy, supposedly at first was extremely hesitant to have affairs with the Satans but grew to grok it.

Anxious though Manson was to please the bikers, not all of them passed the race test. For instance, Joe of the Straight Satans once brought a guy to the ranch who was one-half Indian, a guy named Sammy. Charlie would not allow him to make it with the girls. A person named Mark who was only one-quarter Indian was not allowed commerce with the Aryans at the Spahn Ranch.

It is undeniable that an increasing contact with members of clubs with the hellish names would create great violent "reflections" in Manson. With some of the groups, like Straight Satans and particularly the Satan Slaves, Manson had deep associations during the following year of violence. There had been a year of flowers. But sometime in the Summer or Spring of 1968 a change occurred in the family. With the coming of the bikers, Manson’s treatment of women had undergone a change. When he was collecting his pubescent pack, he had been a gentle guru. On the Spahn Ranch he developed into a five-foot-six misogynist.

In his universe, women had no soul. They were to be the slaves of Man. They even offered food to the dogs before they themselves ate. He used to put girls up against the haystack and see how close to them he could throw the machete.

The girls were required instantly to submit to the men Manson stated to be on the grope list. Anytime, anywhere. The girls supposedly were not allowed to ask for sex but had to wait, though they could smile alluringly if they wanted.

Manson hated women. "I am a mechanical boy,/I am my mother’s boy," went one of his songs.

Manson decreed that only the men could talk to the babies. The women, though they still cared for them, could only speak gibberish to the children. The women were not allowed to discipline the children in any way. After all, the child was the perfect state. Infant sexuality was encouraged. Susan Atkins told a cell mate later that she used to perform fellatio on her own baby son, Zezo. The women in the family were not allowed to ask questions. The word "why" was banned. Only a few knew exactly what the men were doing. The men had almost a separate life.

When Charlie would beat any of the girls, they’d say, well, it was really because they wanted him to do it. Dianne Lake a.k.a. Snake, for instance, then fifteen, was to become a kind of punching bag for Charlie during his anger spasms. But she stayed on. The family claimed she wanted "attention," so she deliberately angered the Devil. The girls would fight among each other, but the rule was when a man told them what to do, they had to do it immediately. The girls would say, "I don’t care or know about you, I’ve got my own love for me." They talked his raps, spoke his language; they’d walk around

singing little ditties about themselves such as "die, Leslie, do die," for that was the essence of the message, to die in the mind in order to live.

But Charlie’s greatest hold on the girls was fear. Threatening to cut off their breasts was one of his favorite snarls.

As Manson’s attitude toward women changed, so did his attitude toward property. All new recruits received the usual Manson lecture series on Helter Skelter: there is no good/no evil, everything belongs to everybody. In 1968, Manson had demonstrated that everything belonged to everybody by giving things away. At one point, a wealthy young lady evidently purchased a number of thoroughbred horses which Charlie gave away for her. At another point, they moved in with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, whose fabulous rock-and-roll wardrobe became community property. And Manson gave away Wilson’s gold records.

But in 1969, Manson reversed his field, stealing rather than giving. After all, he believed, everything belonged to everybody. On the crime front in May and June of 1969, Manson was in full frenzy. He talked about a thousand capers. He wanted to rob an armored car. He wanted to break into a military reservation and steal weapons. They had set up a whole network of crime, enabling them to fence anything or readily to get hold of any psychedelic substance they should require. They had a fence and a dope source in Santa Monica for sale of hot items.

In early Summer of 1969, members of the family stole an NBC-TV station wagon loaded with film equipment. There were tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras, lenses and Nagra recording equipment aboard. Torrid video-porn and perhaps brutality films were shot with the NBC cameras. Manson took an NBC camera with him to Death Valley in September, 1969. With the sound pack the family recorded their song sessions and other activities, including the re-creation, in song form, of some of the murders.

There was one enormous difference at the Spahn Ranch compared to the previous year when the family first showed up. "They talked about killing all the time," recalled a young man who lived at the nearby Steele Ranch. For a long time Charlie had been saying, "There is no good, there is no evil," but now he was saying things like "You can’t kill kill," and "If you’re willing to be killed, you should be willing to kill," and "It’s the pigs’ turn to go up on the cross."

Manson became more and more involved with blending violence into his transactions. He seemed to be eager to see which member of his family would kill. After all, Manson said, "We are all one." Killing someone therefore is just like breaking off a piece of cookie.

As the family got freakier and freakier, doors began to slam in their faces. They began to hate rich people, the piggies, they called them, of Brentwood and Bel Air and Benedict Canyon. One of Manson’s favorite raps was built around a rural pig slaughter. Those who have been unfortunate enough to have witnessed it will know how a pig is tied up and hung by its hind feet, skinned and then ripped open and innards removed. This is precisely what Manson preached for the so-called "pigs" of Brentwood. And this is probably the purpose for which Watson carried that forty-three-foot piece of rope into the Polanski residence. The origin of the so-called "list" of famous people to be killed may date from these early months of 1969 when violence overwhelmed the Spahn Ranch.

In November of 1968 Apple records released The Beatles’ double album containing among the thirty songs such gems of snuff as Sexie Sadie, Rocky Raccoon, Blackbird, Revolution 9 and Helter-Skelter - all found by Manson to foretell his conquest of the world. Manson felt able to twist and interpret the lyrics as if they were holy writ. Even its all-white cover was symbolic to the family-all white, dig it?

Manson began t o listen to the song Helter-Skelter from the new Beatles’ album with earphones and somehow, as if by a miracle, he began to hear The Beatles whispering to him, urging him to call them in London. The girls tried to place the call but failed. It is unfortunate that Manson evidently did not know that a helter skelter is a slide in an English amusement park.

"Rise! Rise! Rise!" Charlie would scream during the playing of Revolution 9 (which Manson associated with Revelation, Chapter 9 ) . Later they wrote Rise in blood on the LaBiancas’ wall.

Something freaked out Manson in 1969 enough for him to prepare for-the end of Western civilization. Along oozed Helter Skelter.

Manson had a hypnotic rap about how the modern blacks were arming themselves, how he, Manson, had talked to blacks in prison and he had learned of heavy arms caches here and there. He announced that the blacks would rise up, kill a few million whites, take over the reins of government.

Then, the story continues, after forty or fifty years the blacks would turn the government over to Manson when they supposedly found themselves unfit to run the world. Oo-ee-oo.

It was the pig Christian wealthy Americans that were going to get cut. He, Christ, he, Devil, was going to pull off the Second Coming.

Manson added a murderous ingredient to the concept of Helter Skelter-that is, the possibility of a trigger that would set it off. Manson somehow came to believe that the big race war would begin with blacks murdering some white families in their homes.

"The karma is turning," he said, meaning that "to complete the karma of the world" such a collision was inevitable.

Sometime in the Fall of 1968, Manson grew zealous about "The Hole." In Hopi Indian legend there was a myth called Emergence from the Third World wherein there was a reference to a large underground world from which the Hopi nation emerged to dwell on Earth’s surface. Manson believed that there was some geological possibility for the existence of The Hole. He came to believe that there was a city in The Hole with chocolate fountains and food trees and a race of people already living there.

Manson received, on a metaphysical plane, further guarantees of the existence of such a hole in key passages of Revelations. Wasn’t the world hip to references to locusts proceeding from "the bottomless pit"-the puteum abyssi in chapter 9 of the Book of Revelations?

Manson linked the impending Helter Skelter with the concept of The Hole. For inside this mystic Hole in Death Valley, Manson and his family would live and dwell while the blacks and the whites in the cities would fight to a bloody end and then the blacks would take over.

From The City in The Hole, Manson would make forays to sack cities with his hairy locusts of the Abyss. And the blacks, through their "super awareness" -in the words of the family-would know that Charlie was where it was at, and nod him into power.

On a higher level, if higher is any word to be used, Manson taught that the family by bringing the seven holes on the seven planes into alignment would be the ones to squirt through to the other side of the universe. And The Hole was to be the magic paradise-magic, because where else can you find subterranean chocolate fountains?

Dune buggies were the horses of Helter Skelter with those "breastplates of fire," described in The Revelation of St. John the Divine, Chapter 9. And The Beatles, unknown to them, were the "four angels" who would wreak death upon a third part of mankind. And Manson found a scriptural basis for announcing that The Beatles were destined to have a fifth member or "angel"-the angel of the bottomless pit, otherwise known as guess who.

One of Manson’s favorite passages from Revelations 9 was: "Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts"-words he would quote over and over again, preparing his worshipers to kill. And did not the family have "hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions"?

And was not Manson the king of the pit?

"And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon." When they translated the Bible from Latin to English, the translators left out another name in the text similar to Abaddon and Apollyon, a name for the angel of the bottomless pit. The name in Latin is Exterminans.

Exterminans-what a word to sum up Charles Manson.

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