Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath

And now, here sits Charlie in jail, where he has sat for so long, saying the same thing he’s said basically since the beginning. He didn’t tell Tex to go kill anyone (“I didn’t direct anyone to do a motherfucking thing”), he’s innocent (“I never killed anyone!”), there was no Family (“Bug made that up!”), he was no leader (“Go for what you know, baby; we’re all free here. I’m nobody’s boss!”), Helter Skelter wasn’t what Bugliosi said it was (“Man, that doesn’t even make insane sense!”), he was wrongly denied the right to act as his own attorney during the trial (“I wanted my rights!”), and the government owes him $50 million “and Hearst Castle, for 45 years of bullshit,” and none of this is important anyway, given what we are doing to our air, our trees, our water, our animals, the saving of which he sometimes puts on display as a good enough reason alone for what happened at the Tates’ and LaBiancas’, regardless of his involvement.

“Look, here’s how that works,” he says. “You take a baby and” – here he says something truly awful about what you could do to that baby, worse beyond anything you could imagine – “and it dies,” and here he says something equally wretched. Then he goes on, “I know what you’re thinking. I can see your brain rattling and running back and forth. But what happens when that baby dies?” He breathes in and he breathes out, he breathes in and he breathes out. “A dog would have done it, kill to take another breath. So, was it wrong to do it to those people?” And it’s at moments like these that you realize prison is the only place for him, and hope to hell he never puts his hand on your skin again.

manson 0Visits with Charlie are always taxing for Star, and she takes it easy driving the two miles from his door back to her own. It used to be she’d make the trip with a tall, gaunt, spooky-looking guy named Gray Wolf, 64, a Manson believer from the Spahn Ranch days who carved an X into his forehead at the same time Star did, but earlier this year he was arrested for attempting to smuggle a cellphone into prison for Charlie, and there went his visitation rights, leaving Charlie’s weekend companionship almost all up to this slight, doily-thin girl.

How she got here is pretty much like how many of the Spahn Ranch girls got to where they were going, too, as a reaction to the world around them and how it made them feel. She grew up on the Mississippi River, near St. Louis, had an early fondness for I Love Lucy, had parents who were deeply religious and disliked all her friends. “They thought I was turning into a hippie,” she says. “I was smoking marijuana, eating mushrooms, not wanting to go to church every Sunday, not wanting to marry a preacher. They are Christian Baptist and wanted me to be a preacher’s wife.” To keep her out of trouble, they would lock her in her room, which is where she spent a good portion of her high school years. And, like Charlie, she found a way to coexist with such solitary confinement. “I’ve never been lonely since those times when I got used to being alone.” Then one day, a friend gave her a sheet of paper with some of Charlie Manson’s words on it about the environment. She’d never heard of Manson, but she liked what he had to say – “Air is God, because without air, we do not exist” – and began writing to him. After their correspondence took off, she put her nose to the grindstone, saved up $2,000 while working in a retirement-home kitchen and in 2007, stuffed all the belongings she could into a backpack and took a train to Corcoran. And soon enough, Charlie nicknamed her Star, just as he had once named Squeaky (Red) and Sandy (Blue).

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