The Los Angeles federal probation office, which was responsible for monitoring Charlie Manson in 1968 and 1969, really had no idea what he was up to as he repeatedly exaggerated his celebrity connections and sugarcoated the truth. The officers also didn’t seem to try to independently confirm his progress reports.
Even Roger Smith noticed that something was awry. After Charlie’s case was transferred to LA, Roger was concerned that his former probationer didn’t seem to have a new officer monitoring him, or if he did, that Charlie wasn’t really on his radar.
“Somebody dropped the ball,” Roger said. “He had to see me every week. I was enough on top of him he didn’t get out of control, but left to his own devices and access to unlimited amounts of acid and control over those girls, it’s absolutely no surprise that he spiraled out of control.”
It seems that Charlie managed to snow the entire LA office about his whereabouts and activities—and the chain of command up to the US Parole Board in Washington DC as well—through a series of misrepresentations, lies, and manipulations.
In July 1968, for example, he told his probation officer that he “thought it best for everyone” if he moved out of Dennis Wilson’s home, when in fact he’d been evicted.
When the officer came to check on Charlie’s “new” digs at Spahn Ranch on October 3, he was satisfied to find Charlie dressed in western clothes and “performing well as a cowboy.” He fooled the officer into thinking that the laid-back rural setting “provided him with enough activity to do something worthwhile, and that he was distant enough from any negative influences,” as Angus McEachen, head of the LA probation office, put it.
A month later, Charlie called the officer to request permission to leave Spahn and relocate to Myers Ranch near Trona in Death Valley, claiming he was bored and that Myers “would be a good change. He was anxious to continue with ranch life as a means of not taking on too much responsibility and thought in that respect it would be simple for him to stay out of trouble,” McEachen wrote.
Charlie never mentioned that the Family had already been out to the desert—driving to the bottom of Goler Wash in a green school bus the girls painted and decorated inside with silks, satins, and tapestries to look like a harem den. As they hiked over to nearby Myers Ranch, which was owned by the grandmother of Family member Catherine “Cappy” Gillies, they spotted Barker Ranch along the way. When it was warm enough, they went nude, one of Charlie’s rules.
Charlie also didn’t disclose that he gave one or more of Dennis Wilson’s gold records to Cappy’s grandmother to persuade her to let him and some friends stay for a while at the Barker cabin, which Charlie had hoped to purchase.
While Charlie told teenage Family member Brooks Poston that they were searching for a city of gold buried under the desert, he told his probation officer that he was gold prospecting and that he’d discovered “a vein of gold bearing ore in one of the mountains at a high altitude.” He said he’d filed a claim on the mine with two other prospectors, but Brooks later told authorities that it was he and a gold prospector, Paul Crockett, who had filed those claims.
Based on such statements, McEachen was conned into feeling optimistic about Charlie’s future. “He is courteous and polite with us, and would like to remain in our district,” he wrote. “There have been no further negative reports about subject and it may be that subject will continue to improve in his conduct.”
Charlie lied about his income as well. Long after Dennis had cut ties with him, he claimed that the Beach Boys were paying him advances on royalties for two songs that would be on their next album—five thousand dollars on one, and another that was under discussion for “a personal settlement.”
By then, Charlie and some of the Family had relocated back to the San Fernando Valley, specifically to a canary yellow house on Gresham Street in Canoga Park that they called “the Yellow Submarine.” But he never mentioned that move either.
Charlie and Family member Paul Watkins were on an acid trip at the Yellow Submarine when Charlie started riffing about the black man: “Blackie” had been suppressed, he said, subjected to cruelty and slavery, and it was time for his karma to change. The militant blacks—groups like the Black Muslims and Black Panthers—were going to rise and kill all the whites.
“A revolution is coming,” Charlie said in what became a Family catchphrase.
The Family needed to prepare for this revolution, he said, by going into the city and saving white children. Better still, they should have a bunch of kids themselves and expand the Family to 144,000 chosen people out in the desert, where they would wait it out for 150 years, living in a bottomless pit.
By then the revolution would be over and Blackie would be done killing. However, the blacks wouldn’t know how to lead, so they would willingly let Charlie take over, quite satisfied to return to being servants like they used to be.
“The only thing Blackie knows is what Whitey has told him or shown him,” Manson said.
As Charlie developed his premise in the coming months, he wove the tapestry of his own LSD-enhanced prophecies with threads from Beatles lyrics from the White Album, Krishna Venta lectures, and references from the book of Revelation—an odd mix of concepts that his Family came to accept without question as Manson mysticism.
Charlie saw parallels everywhere: Beetles, locusts, and the Beatles were all related. The Bible’s Revelation 9 was a corollary to the Beatles song “Revolution 9.” The biblical breastplates of iron were the Beatles’ electric guitars. There were five angels in the Bible, just like the original Beatles. Now there were just four and Charlie was the fifth, Exterminus or the Destroyer, as in Revelation 9:1: “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.”
He said he was “tuned in” as he repeatedly played the songs “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9,” listening for deep meaning, especially in the eerie echoing line, “number nine, number nine, number nine.”
In February 1969 he moved the Family members at Gresham Street back to Spahn Ranch, and sent Brooks Poston, the young Family member, back to Barker Ranch to keep watch over Charlie’s desert outpost in Death Valley while he prepared the others to join him there later that summer.
When the various contingents of the Family reconvened back at the ranch, Charlie seemed much more intense, especially to those who had not heard his earlier rants at the Yellow Submarine.
As he brought the others up to speed about the coming revolution, he said the Family had to step it up and band together even more in preparation.
Katie’s usual duties were to cook or take care of the children, but Charlie changed it up. One day he told her to dress in dark clothing, go with Tex to an auto showroom, and drive off with some dune buggies. So that’s what she did.
Charlie escalated the psychological push as well: “We had to be one philosophy, one thought. We were one him,” Katie recalled. “And we would be able to survive somehow.”
When Leslie wasn’t high, she kept busy with her tasks and chores. She and the others practiced creeping up on one another, took karate lessons, and learned survivalist techniques like canning food that would last for years in the desert.
To keep the momentum going, they turned the Lone Star Saloon into a nightclub, painted the walls black, and renamed it Helter Skelter, a song off the White Album. They also drew the words on a glass Sparkletts jug inside the club, and wrote slogans on the trailer’s cabinet door: “1 2 3 4 5 6 7, All Good Children Go to Heaven,” a lyric from the Beatles album Abbey Road, and “Helter Skelter Is Coming Down Fast,” a combination of lyrics from that song.
But by June, Charlie was getting restless. He took Paul Watkins aside and said Blackie needed some help starting the revolution.
“I’m going to have to show him how to do it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the LA probation office was still completely unaware of Charlie’s true whereabouts. Although by May he’d been back in LA for several months, he was still reporting that he was living on a ranch near Trona. He also said he’d earned five hundred dollars from Gregg Jakobson “of Beverly Hills” for a music gig and working as a “caretaker and songwriter.” Charlie waited until June—four months after his return to Spahn Ranch—to inform the authorities.
He occasionally asked if he could leave the state for a period of time. Still falsely claiming to be working with the Beach Boys, he was granted permission to play with them in Texas in May and June. Charlie lied again later, saying he didn’t go because the group had gone without him.
Charlie kept the probation office at bay by admitting to the occasional minor offense, presumably to seem honest. After all, no probationer is a perfect angel. For example, he said he was arrested for being drunk in Canoga Park on June 3, and paid a twenty-dollar fine. And two months later, amid the chaos after the Tate-LaBianca murders, he reported simply that he was arrested for auto theft on August 16. He never mentioned the sheriff’s raid at Spahn, only that he’d gotten a thirty-five-dollar traffic ticket.
Angus McEachen, LA’s chief probation officer, finally began to catch on to Charlie’s games after being informed that a colleague from the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had obtained a warrant for Charlie’s arrest. The warrant was based on information that Charlie had purchased two firearms from the Surplus Distributing Company in Van Nuys, using a fake ID: a short-barreled rifle on July 2 and a 9-millimeter Polish Radom handgun on July 14.
Bruce Davis confessed years later that it was he who purchased the 9-millimeter that day, using a fake ID with the name of Jack McMillan. Bruce claimed he bought the gun for target practice, so he “could be like the other guys” at the ranch. That same weapon was used during the three-day torture session that ended in Gary Hinman’s murder two weeks after the purchase.
In September 1969, McEachen faced reality, telling his counterpart in San Francisco that he was skeptical of Charlie’s unverifiable income claims, and that they shouldn’t give him the benefit of the doubt after he’d violated the conditions of his release by buying firearms and consorting with other ex-cons. But by then it was too late. The murders had already occurred and Charlie had fled to the desert.
When Charlie’s probation officer finally went to Spahn to do an in-person check, he reported back that a young woman named Lynn—who described herself as “George’s housekeeper”—said Charlie no longer lived at the ranch.
The gun store employee, who had identified a photo of Manson as the buyer of the illegal firearms, subsequently decided that he’d been wrong, so the ATF had to withdraw its warrant. It’s possible that Charlie was with Bruce that day, and the clerk misremembered who actually bought the weapon, but it’s also possible that the Family threatened the clerk into changing his story.
If Charlie had been picked up sooner for any of his numerous probation violations, Hinman and the eight other victims murdered by the Manson Family might still be alive today.