The Manson Women and Me

At some point I stopped talking about Pat and Leslie to my friends. I stopped because no matter who these friends were, no matter how progressive politically or committed to social justice, no matter whether they were men or women, no matter how generally sympathetic to people caught up in the criminal justice system, most were unable to locate that sympathy for Leslie or Pat. Their names, almost as much as Charles Manson’s, still conjure both the terror and the anger that gripped the country at the time.

As I got to know the women better, the harsh opinions toward them made me feel increasingly protective. It wasn’t as though I’d forgotten the murders; it was that I knew the women to be more than the murders they’d committed. I knew and trusted their remorse and their concern for their victims. I knew and trusted their concern about society’s problems in general and their empathy for people, especially women and children, who have a hard time of it. I knew and trusted their renunciation of all that was Manson and the beliefs they held when they were under his sway.

But avoiding the topic among my friends didn’t avoid the problem. Outside of my social circle, I continued to be surprised by the vehemence of the hostility toward them. A few years ago I was in a writing workshop where, as in most such groups, the woman who led the group routinely insisted that we create a tolerant, nurturing atmosphere for each other so that our creativity could flourish. One day I wrote a paragraph about Leslie, describing the nature of her interactions with fellow inmates and the families of her fellow inmates. I tried to capture her sunny disposition and how it seemed infectious; I described the way people brightened when she talked to them. While I was reading the piece to the group, Lorna frowned. When I stopped reading, she shook her head and said, “I don’t understand.”

That bad? I thought. The prose seemed straightforward.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t understand. Could you be more specific about what you don’t understand?”

“I don’t understand why,” she said, shrugging her shoulders to illustrate her confusion, “with all of the worthy causes in the world and all of the worthy people in the world you would select this woman to write about.”

First I was surprised and then I was angry, but in between the surprise and the anger was amusement. “It’s my turn to be perplexed,” I said with what I intended as a sarcastic smile on my face. “Lorna, I’m wondering about that creating a safe, nurturing environment thing?”

“I guess there’s a limit to my tolerance,” she said, ignoring my smile and looking at me with a most un-amused look on her face.

Of course the right answer, or at least one of them, was: I wasn’t writing about Leslie to advocate, I was writing about her to understand—to understand her, to understand human nature. She only needed to be worthy of exploration, not advocacy. But that was all beside the point. Lorna was not interested in any portrayal of Leslie as a multi-dimensional person; she was only interested in judgment. Eventually, I did advocate for Leslie’s release, so Lorna had apparently seen the writing on the wall.

The next day she called to apologize. “I’m sorry but I couldn’t help myself. I guess my feelings are still pretty intense about those murders. Those feelings override everything else.”

The more I thought about it, though, the more her reaction gave me pause. She had echoed the sentiments expressed by many of my friends. I recoiled at her attempt at censorship, but it also increased my awareness of the prejudice I was up against in writing about the women. And I couldn’t help wondering about myself. If one of the other participants in the group brought in a sympathetic portrayal of someone like Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the social worker now serving a life term for being responsible for the murder and rape of hundreds of Tutsi women, could I stomach any attempt to depict her as anything but despicable? I doubted it. Unlike Leslie, she denied her participation, but what if she, too, was assuming responsibility and expressing genuine remorse? Would I feel the way Lorna did? I think so because every time I think of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, when I think of the way she engineered some of the most depraved actions on the face of the earth (forcing a boy to rape his own mother, for example), I feel such intense hatred it scares me.

A few years ago, the film director John Waters, who’s been friends with Leslie for many decades, wrote Role Models (2010), a book about people who have inspired him. It is an eclectic collection—ten profiles that include, among others, Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, and Leslie Van Houten. In his chapter on Leslie, he praised her hard work, her tenacity, her patience, and her willingness to assume responsibility for her part in the murders. He also wrote that he respected that she resisted the temptation to adopt religious fanaticism, a route that would provide her instant forgiveness. “She has managed to live through bad times without despair and inspire others to do the same.”

When Waters appeared on HBO’s Real Time to promote the book, Bill Maher asked him about Leslie. Waters, while acknowledging how horrendous the murders were, talked about how much he respects and is inspired by her, adding that she had paid her dues and that it was time for her to be released. And then Maher asked a version of what Lorna had asked me in the writing group. I can’t remember the exact words and I can’t find the clip on the Internet, but his point: this woman is not worthy of your attention.

For a long time I dismissed these attitudes as parochial and small-minded, but the question I had asked myself about the Rwandan social worker continued to bother me. It became increasingly clear that I was not immune to these feelings, and it wasn’t limited to the Rwandan social worker. Karla Faye Tucker, a young woman who was convicted in 1984 for the brutal murder of two people, was another one. I knew very little about the circumstances of the murders until George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, refused to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment. When the state eventually killed her in 1998, she was the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1984, and the first in Texas since 1863.

When I read about Bush’s coldhearted refusal to consider mercy, I was angry, but then I’d been angry at Bush since he’d unseated Ann Richards, a woman I greatly admired, for the governorship of Texas. When I read a detailed account of the grisly murders, my rage transferred from George W. to Karla Faye herself. She’d found Jesus in prison and after that, people from all over the world rallied to the cause of saving her life. Supporters included the United Nations Commissioner on Summary and Arbitrary Executions; the World Council of Churches; Pope John Paul II; Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi; the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; conservative pundit Tucker Carlson; televangelist Pat Robertson; and even Ron Carlson, the brother of Karla Faye’s murder victim Deborah Thornton. When the pleas reached fever pitch, I read Crossed Over, an account of the friendship between Karla Faye and novelist Beverly Lowry. After reading Crossed Over, my anger then targeted Beverly Lowry as well. I didn’t understand. (When you could pick anyone to defend, why pick her? Sound familiar?)

She pled for Karla Faye’s life on the basis that she was under the influence of drugs at the time of the murders, she would not have committed the murders otherwise, and that she was now a reformed person.

But Lowry’s pleas left me cold. No matter how sympathetic her portrayal of Karla Faye, I simply could not get around the brutal, graphic details of what she had done. Yes, she’d had a difficult childhood and yes, she had a spiritual awakening and yes, she expressed profound remorse. No doubt, she had an appealing, fresh-faced girlishness about her, but look at the crime: There was a motorcycle that Karla Faye’s boyfriend Danny Garrett wanted and that the victim, Jerry Dean, owned. There were drugs, there was partying, and one thing led to another. Karla’s boyfriend bludgeoned Dean with a hammer. The blows caused his head to become unhinged from his neck and his breathing passages to fill with fluid. He began making a “gurgling” sound that Karla Faye didn’t like, so she grabbed a pickax and smashed it into him.

The blows stopped the noise but didn’t completely kill him, so Karla’s boyfriend, who’d taken time out from murdering to load motorcycle parts into his truck, re-entered the room, dealt the final blow, and then went back to his task. Meanwhile, Karla Faye noticed a woman hiding under bed covers. Deborah Thornton was there because she’d had the great misfortune of meeting the first victim, Jerry Dean, at a party earlier that afternoon. Karla Faye went after her with the pickax, eventually embedding it in Deborah’s heart. She told friends and later testified in court that she experienced intense multiple orgasms with each blow of the pickax. (Could there be a more perfect example of the blood lust killing that Chris Browning referred to in his book about Battalion 101?)

Upon reading the description of Karla Faye’s murders, I couldn’t help thinking about Bugliosi’s characterizations of Pat and Leslie in 1970 as human monsters. But I also felt that their total lack of feelings, empathy or otherwise, put them in a more elevated category, mutation-wise, than the state of a woman bragging about multiple orgasms as she plunged a pickax into Deborah Thornton’s heart. Part of this weird mechanism I’m trying to understand is that I could always find a way that Pat and Leslie, as bad as they’d been, were not as bad as whoever I was thinking about when these issues came up. Your murderer is much worse than mine.

I noted with dismay that I derived a measure of satisfaction from the anger I felt toward Karla Faye. It seemed very much like the anger I’d heard others express toward Pat and Leslie or that I’d seen on Lorna’s face in that writers’ workshop. I didn’t understand what function these intense negative feelings served. I only knew that they seemed important, almost necessary. Necessary for what?

There was no way for me to absorb the savagery of the Tate-LaBianca murders without blaming someone. I needed someone other than Leslie and Pat to be the repository of these feelings. It helped me live with the material and it protected my feelings for the two women. At any given time it was necessary for me to have one or more persons whom I blamed, disliked, distrusted.

Manson holds permanent first place but, irrationally, he’s inadequate to the task. The world continues to be fascinated by him, but he holds no interest for me. He knew intuitively how to manipulate young people—I suppose you could say he had a gift—but he also learned some tricks of the trade in prison. If it hadn’t been for certain external factors converging, what I’ve described unoriginally as a perfect storm, he wouldn’t have been as effective. Psychopaths are a dime a dozen. Kids who grow up being loved and who are socialized with humane values and end up committing senseless murders are much less common.

In the beginning of this journey, I didn’t understand my need for scapegoats. I thought my lack of interest in Susan was primarily due to her identification as born-again. I saw the conversion as lazy, a shortcut for taking responsibility. I think that’s what John Waters meant when he said he admired Leslie for resisting the temptation to adopt “religious fanaticism,” a route that would provide her instant forgiveness.

When Leslie’s mother told me she always urged her to keep her distance from Susan Atkins and Pat Krenwinkel, I think she was using a similar mechanism to cope. (She had needed more than one.) She believed that Leslie was made of different stuff than they were, and she wanted the world to think so, too. But before she died, she told me she was rethinking this attitude as she was rethinking many things. She realized that her commitment to these categories hadn’t helped; it certainly hadn’t helped get Leslie out of prison. “Recently I happened to talk to Susan Atkins and her husband and I quite enjoyed it. She seemed pleasant and he’s so bright.”

As I’ve indicated, when the photos from Abu Ghraib prison surfaced, I was acutely aware of the similarity between me and those people I had accused of being narrow-minded. Despite the consensus of many experts that it was the system that was evil, not the individuals at the bottom who were acting out the pathology of the system, I had a problem with letting those people at the bottom off the hook—in particular, Lynndie England. She’s the one laughing and smiling while those men were so palpably suffering. The government may have treated her as a scapegoat, Philip Zimbardo certainly thought so, but to me her participation was unforgivable. England was convicted on September 26, 2005, of one count of conspiracy, four counts of maltreating detainees, and one count of committing an indecent act. Along with a dishonorable discharge she received a three-year prison sentence. She was paroled on March 1, 2007, after serving 521 days.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that every example I’ve mentioned is a woman, and apparently I’m not alone in this focus. According to researchers Georgie Ann Weatherby, Jamie Blanche, and Rebecca Jones, the public has a particular fascination with cases that involve women, and certainly the media coverage is more sensational when the murderers are women. “When the media (and thus the public) learns of a violent female crime they automatically enter a frenzied state,” they write in “The Value of Life: Female Killers & the Feminine Mystique” (Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice Research & Education Volume 2, Issue 1, 2008). They maintain that this frenzied state leads to distortions. “In order to deal with such a rare occurrence, society’s rules automatically shut down, which causes people to bring forth biased and stereotypical notions about these women.”

I’m convinced that the unforgiving anger expressed toward Pat and Leslie is more intense because they are women. But maybe I’m talking about my own unforgiving anger when it comes to women other than Pat and Leslie.

There are many reasons, I suppose, that the image of a woman murdering in situations other than self-defense is more threatening to me than the image of a murdering man. For one thing, women grow up with the awareness that men can hurt us; we’re practically socialized to believe this. From the local news to mainstream TV series, we’re bombarded with images of men hurting women. We can’t help but be desensitized to it. On some primitive level, perhaps women believe that men’s sexual drive renders them incapable of self-control and capable of atrocious brutality. Much of this is myth, and some of it is perpetuated by men themselves. For the most part, I think this expectation operates on a subconscious level.

There is something particularly chilling about a woman without empathy—much more frightening than a man without empathy. The anger I feel about the women I’ve listed above is qualitatively different from any anger I’ve ever felt toward male murderers. It feels as though it comes from a different part of my brain. The most obvious basis is our original relationship with our mothers.

The part I have the most trouble understanding is how oddly committed I am to my negative feelings about poor Lynndie England. It seems connected to my humanity and not in a good way.

For me, one of the problems with Lynndie is that, because of the photos, her laughter in the face of all of those suffering men is frozen in time. It’s a problem for me but apparently not for Lynndie. She feels no remorse. In 2013, she told NBC news she does not regret her actions. “They [Iraqis] got the better end of the deal. They weren’t innocent. They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.”

As I’ve said, when I think of Mrs. LaBianca I feel a heartbreaking sadness. She not only suffered on her own behalf, she heard her husband being killed in the other room. Does it help that Leslie didn’t experience any pleasure from the killing? What she describes is a state of numbness, of unfeeling. If that’s true, and I believe her (though there are those who don’t), does it make the act more palatable? It doesn’t in any way absolve her of responsibility, she’s the first to say that, but in terms of her humanity, does it make a difference to me that she was an automaton rather than a sadist?

But how can I forget one very important distinction? Lynndie didn’t kill anyone. She may have inflicted horrible psychological, emotional, and spiritual damage, but she did not murder anyone. That makes it all the more puzzling that I cannot find it in my heart to feel forgiveness for her while I feel true compassion for Leslie.