The Manson Women and Me

chapter forty-one

Once again, I was late, and once again Pat was chilly, but today there seemed to be an extra iciness. I didn’t want to ask her directly what was wrong—with Pat that didn’t usually work—so I steered the conversation to something I’d been wanting to ask her. I told her I’d noticed in a parole report that one of her jobs at the prison was training women to fight fires (as a lifer, she wasn’t allowed to travel to fight fires herself), and I know she’d received commendations for this work.

“What happened to that job?” I asked.

“I quit,” she said.

“You didn’t like the work?”

“I loved the work and I miss it, but the prison cut way back on the amount of training the women received and after that, I just couldn’t do it anymore. In good conscience, I couldn’t send those women out to front lines of dangerous wild fires without adequate training no matter how much I loved the job.”

She said quitting the job was another manifestation of lessons learned from her relationship with Manson. “When I was with him, I did what I was told. I obeyed. I won’t do that anymore.”

She said she was passionate about the plight of abused women; she placed the relationship she and the other women had with Manson in that category. She said one of the things she felt guilty about was the role she played with the women. As surrogate mother, she may have made it more comfortable for some of them to stay, women who might otherwise have moved on and gotten out of there before their lives were so messed up.

She had opinions about everything and considered it a badge of honor that she challenged what she heard and what she read. (She was a fan of The X-Files, whose motto is “trust no one.”) She accepted nothing as true, she said, before investigating it on her own, reading about it, and turning it over in her own mind. She read whatever she could get her hands on in the prison—Newsweek cover to cover every week and, when she borrowed it from Leslie, the New Yorker. She also loved the Nation, which she saw from time to time. She spent her share of time in the prison law library and was particularly fond of Supreme Court opinions written by Justice William O. Douglas.

An hour into our time together that day, I said that she seemed upset. Had something happened? At first she denied it and then she acknowledged that she’d had a bad week and yes, she was upset, really upset with the psychiatrist who did the evaluation for her last parole hearing. In their session together she’d mentioned an incident that had happened with another inmate, and he used that incident against her in his report.

An inmate who was on washing dishes detail started horsing around and accidentally sprayed Pat with a hose. According to Pat, the woman was horror-stricken when she realized she’d gotten Pat wet, but Pat’s reaction was to laugh it off and walk away. She mentioned it to the shrink only because she wanted him to know that she was now able to shrug off incidents that once would have angered her. But in his report he wrote that it was evidence of Pat’s insensitivity. He believed the inmate was terrified because she had sprayed “the most notorious woman murderer in the country.” In his opinion, Pat’s laughter at the time was a continuation of the insensitivity to others she showed when she murdered Abigail Folger and the LaBiancas.

Pat said his interpretation demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the prison culture: “The woman, who, by the way, is covered with tattoos and is a member of a gang, wasn’t afraid because I’m the most notorious woman murderer in the country, she was afraid because gang members seek violent retribution for something as minor as being sprayed with a hose. I can’t tell you how ridiculous it is for him to say that a woman here is more fearful of me than she is of the Crips and the Bloods.”

Pat’s explanation sounded credible to me, certainly more credible than the psychiatrist’s. (It’s hard for me to get past his use of the word “insensitive” in the context of murder.) But later when I was at McDonald’s writing up my notes, I realized that I had been momentarily bothered by her anger. Not because it signaled that she was dangerous. I didn’t believe that Pat was dangerous. But maybe I do believe that she’s forfeited her right to express anger at anyone . . . ever. It didn’t take long for me to talk myself down from this position. No one can live without expressing anger, especially someone who’s been in prison for as long as she has. Even if you believe that she deserves to be there, the prison/parole system is unimaginably irrational, frustrating, unfair.

I tried to imagine myself in her situation. I spend an hour—given current budgetary constraints, probably less than an hour—with a psychiatrist who doesn’t know me, and based on one incident that I tell him about, he arms the district attorney with ammunition that damages my record of twenty-seven years of hard work and good behavior. How could anyone not be enraged?

Wanting the record to be fair may have nothing to do with parole. I’m pretty sure Pat knows the chances are slim that she will ever get out of prison, but it’s understandable that she would want some recognition for working so hard. Or if not recognition, at least not misrepresentation. What’s called for is a measure of justice, honesty, fairness.

At the same parole hearing, Stephen Kay, who claims to have made a “study” of her but who hasn’t actually talked to her since 1970, told the panel that Pat only sees people as objects: “She has as much regard for you and me as she would a piece of Kleenex she’d blow her nose into.”

I’m sure there are convicted killers about whom what he said is true, but I know it isn’t true of Pat. Unlike Kay, I have spent time with her. But who is going to object to the injustice of saying something undeserved and negative about someone convicted of murder? Kay’s continued depiction of her as dangerous was not only dishonest, it was unwarranted and unnecessary. If the chance that Pat will be paroled is very slim, why not give her credit for what she has accomplished? The only purpose his remarks serve is to whip up the old rage.

I know Pat’s psychological makeup is complicated and contains vast unexplained areas of emotion—I discuss those later—but she is not without compassion. When I tell her about a friend who is dying of cancer, I know her sympathy is real. When I tell her about the work my daughter is doing at a massive refugee camp on the Somali border with Kenya, I know both her interest and her compassion are genuine. When she points out women in the visiting room, women in wheelchairs or with oxygen canisters who have terminal diseases and whose appeals for compassionate release have been turned down, I do not doubt her concern.

One day, she asked me if I’d ever been to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. I said I had. She asked me if it’s as beautiful as it reads in the photographs. I said it is. We talked about the initial controversy surrounding the design, and we both agreed that, contrary to the critics, it’s a perfect tribute. She told me she had friends in high school who were killed in Vietnam and her pain about them is still acute. Tears rimmed her eyes when she talked about them. “I know I’ll never get out of here but if I did, the very first thing I’d do would be to go to the Vietnam Memorial.”

Stephen Kay would no doubt challenge my belief in her authentic compassion, but that’s because his thinking is binary. You are either not a murderer or you are a murderer, and if you are, you deserve to have verbal abuse heaped on you eternally. It is a black-and-white world, and perhaps this outlook is precisely what we need in prosecutors. But perhaps that’s not what we need at parole hearings.