Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath

After her visit with Charlie one Sunday, Star and I drive around desolate Corcoran, stop at Kings Drive-In for a milkshake, then head over to the big community park, the only verdant expanse in the area, and find a bench to sit on. “I do not give one fuck whatsoever about 1969, personally,” she says along the way. She starts thinking about Susan Atkins. “That bitch was fucking crazy. She was a crazy fucking whore. ‘Oh, Charlie, I did this for you.’ She didn’t know what she was doing. That girl was just a piece of shit, a whore, and just plain fucking crazy psycho.” She says this with such vehemence that I’m a little taken aback. I hadn’t thought her capable of it, which just goes to show you.

It’s cold on the bench, and she wraps her arms around herself.

Then she bobs her head and comes out with a little bit of a shocker, “a scoop,” she calls it. “I’ll tell you straight up, Charlie and I are going to get married,” she says. “When that will be, we don’t know. But I take it very seriously. Charlie is my husband. Charlie told me to tell you this. We haven’t told anybody about that.”

It’s one thing to be here, doing what she’s doing, visiting Charlie, buying him his quarterly goody box, getting him apple-cider vinegar for his fungus feet and going to target practice. In a way, I can see all of that. I’ve felt his hand on my skin, listened to him speak, seen him say more with his body than with his words. I know. But marrying the guy? Are you going to take his name?

“Yeah,” she says. “My parents like Charlie. We were just talking and they said, ‘If Charlie gets out, you guys can come stay here. You could stay in the basement for a while, and you could maybe build your own little house down by the creek.'”

Will there be conjugal visits?

“No, California lifers no longer get them,” she says. “If we did, we’d be married by now. You know, that’s the only thing I want. I just want to be alone. I don’t want to be always in that visiting room with people staring at me. But that’s the only time I get to see him, in that room, with people staring. It’s hard. But things change, you know. And who knows what could happen?”

Another day, another call from Charlie.

“Star, Star, baby on the floor,” he says. “We started all over with this one. The other ones know it all now. I don’t need to say anything. They’re moving in colors.”

The others being Squeaky and Sandy?

“Yeah.”

This doesn’t sound good, him viewing Star as some kind of project, a baby on the floor that he’s starting all over with, teaching her from the ground up. It sounds like he has plans for her. And historically, his plans have never turned out well.

What about the marriage?

He snorts. “Oh, that,” he says. “That’s a bunch of garbage. You know that, man. That’s trash. We’re just playing that for public consumption.”

It’s not exactly a surprise to hear him say this. I’ve spoken to Manson a lot, and I know this is the kind of thing he does. And Star, too, I see, which is more of a surprise. But even that makes sense, once you understand that she’s Charlie’s baby on the floor, not Charlie’s wife-to-be, but another one of his children, just like Squeaky and Sandy once were, with her just now taking her first little baby steps, him holding her hand and showing the way. At least, that’s my perception of how it is. But we all know how perceptions are.

“I’ve always been pretty truthful with myself, as much as I can be under the circumstances,” Manson says later. “But I’ll never tell on nobody, not even me, man, so that’s why I ain’t never told nobody what really happened back then. I can’t tell you right now. It wouldn’t work if I did tell you, because it would change by morning. Everything is constantly changing, man. The mind is a universal thing. Charles Manson and Beethoven,” he says before hanging up for the night. “It’s just one little thought.”

This story is from the December 5th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.