Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath

A while later, she sits on a couch talking about a problem she and Gray Wolf are having with a Manson-memorabilia collector named Ben. Every time Manson does something wrong and is sent to solitary, he has to get rid of everything he owns or the state will take it, so he sends the stuff to those who have befriended him, mostly collectors looking for some big future payoff. Currently, Ben has an old pair of Manson’s flip-flops for sale, $5,000. With Manson’s permission, he’s also selling some early Manson recordings, but just today Ben started accusing Star and Gray Wolf of trying to sabotage his sales, as well as with swiping a $4,500 wheelchair he’d sent Charlie. “It’s war!” he wrote on his Facebook page. “This is just the beginning! Your [sic] toast!” Star shakes her head. “He’s freaking out because Charlie stopped calling him. He doesn’t want to let go. And we’re the bad guys. Anyway, that’s the problem we have. People are so weird.”

Charlie gets up in the morning, leaves his gray concrete cell, goes to breakfast, grabs a bag lunch, comes back, naps, eats his lunch, takes another nap, paces back and forth, maybe plays a game of chess, goes to dinner, has to be back in his cell by 8:45 p.m., has no specific time for lights out. “I like my cell,” he says. “It’s like that song I wrote. I called it ‘In My Cell,’ but the Beach Boys changed it to ‘In My Room.'” Manson makes this claim about “In My Room” fairly often, which is kind of ridiculous, since the song came out in 1963, four years before his release on the parole-violation conviction, but obvious fabrications like these never seem to slow him down. “Like all my songs,” he continues, “it’s about my heaven is right here on Earth. See, my best friend is in that cell. I’m in there. I like it.”

Even so, he worries constantly about the prison’s ventilator system and swears the air is killing him. He’s afraid that the guards will put garbage in his shoes, just to mess with him. He says he always has to be on high alert. He has never been held in general population, always in some kind of protective-housing unit, where it’s supposed to be harder for inmates to get at him, especially the fame-seekers. Even so, back in 1984, at a different prison, a guy doused him with paint thinner and set his head on fire. Right now, he has only about 15 other prisoners to contend with, among them Juan Corona, who murdered 25 people in 1971; Dana Ewell, who ordered the murder of his own family in 1992; Phillip Garrido, the rapist who kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard and held her for 18 years; and Mikhail Markhasev, who was convicted of killing Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis. So far, they seem to all get along just fine.

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