The Manson Women and Me

THE MOTHERS WHO POISONED THEIR BABIES AT JONESTOWN HAUNT HER

July 2012

I was driving home to California from Arizona on Highway 58 through the Mojave Desert. I make this trek every summer after six weeks in the high desert south of Tucson. It was hot—the outside reading on my car thermometer read 115 degrees—and desolate. When I saw the Highway 395 turn-off to Death Valley I started thinking about my trip to Barker Ranch (see chapter 45). At that very moment the NPR program To the Best of My Knowledge came on the radio. The topic: “Why do people join religious cults?” Like so much that’s happened since I started researching this topic, I thought, “Synchrony!” Or maybe it was the primeval ambience of the desert. Or maybe the heat was getting to me.

In any event, the host Jim Fleming was interviewing Diane Benscoter, a former member of the Unification Church. When the focus turned to dangerous cults, Fleming asked why some cult members commit violence. Benscoter said that in 1974 when she was recruited by the Moonies she was an idealistic seventeen-year-old who wanted to make a difference in the world. She was invited to join a peace walk from Omaha to Des Moines.

Two young people accompanied her, and the three attended lectures along the way. There was much talk of the Messiah and making the world a better place—“creating the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.” Her companions told her that God was choosing her to be part of this grand project. They told her it was not necessary to wait for the Second Coming. It had already occurred in 1920 in Korea in the form of Sun Myung Moon, and they were on their way to meet him in Des Moines, Iowa.

With every mile she walked, her excitement built. When they arrived and she met said Messiah, she was a convert. She cut off her hair, started to fast, and committed the rest of her life to Sun Myung Moon. She spent the next five years selling candy and flowers on the street to raise money for him. Her family was not willing to lose her permanently to the Moonies, so her parents hired a deprogrammer. Eventually, it worked.

Part of her deprogramming was to read a book by Robert Jay Lifton about idealistic totalistic communities. Point by point, she realized that the Unification Church qualified: the church manipulated people, both personally and spiritually; the church promoted black-and-white thinking; the church forbade criticism of the leader or the principles of the group; the world was divided into good (everyone in the group) and evil (everyone outside the group). The scales fell from her eyes. She was free from the church’s grip.

Jim Fleming asked her if it was a relief to reach the end of the deprogramming. Did she feel free at that point?

Benscoter replied that she felt free in some ways but that freedom came with a price. It left her feeling extremely empty. She said she didn’t know anything about herself. She didn’t know what she believed in, she didn’t even know what music she actually liked—it had all been fed to her. She didn’t know what to do with her life.

(As I’ve mentioned, Pat and Leslie told me that they, too, had “no self ” when they were with Manson.)

When Benscoter hears about people in cults committing violence, either toward themselves or to others, she understands. The mothers who poisoned their babies with Kool-Aid at Jonestown haunt her. Suicide bombers who kill themselves and innocent people haunt her. She knows that she would have been capable of doing such things when she was a Moonie. “I was so dedicated to my Messiah, it had taken over my thought processes, my rational thought, such that I would have done anything and so I empathize with those people greatly.”

November 10, 2012

After missing each other for weeks Diane Benscoter and I finally talked, and when I got off the phone I felt as though the lock I’d been trying to pick for so long gave way. In an attempt to understand the women’s psyches under Manson’s influence, I had tried every combination of numbers, turned the dial both ways, held up the lock to my ear, listening to the vibrations of the pins, each time clicking impotently. Finally the numbers, the tumblers, the whatevers, slipped into place and something unlocked. Our conversation didn’t supply me with all of the answers, but it gave me a context that made their behavior if not totally understandable, at least not as alien as it had been.

Here is a summary of our conversation:

I told her what I had told so many. I described what Pat and Leslie were like growing up and how they changed when they were with Manson. I told her that the women were not only removed from any civilized idea of right and wrong, they were detached from any sort of feeling for their victims. Not an ounce of empathy for their suffering, not a fraction of an ounce.

She told me that because of her experience as a Moonie, she understands. She repeated what she’d said on the radio. She not only understands, she identifies. She identifies with suicide bombers and with the mothers who poisoned their babies with Kool-Aid at Jonestown. They were all part of totalistic communities as described by Lifton—the book that helped her get free from the church.

“Because you think of the leader as God and God is above the law, you have permission to spurn the laws of society, too. You start believing that the laws that you grew up believing in are wrong because they are man-made. The leader spouts the same stuff over and over, and everyone in the group keeps reinforcing it. There’s no countervailing force. There are no checks and balances. The instructions come from above. You start to feel special. We’re in on the secret. No one else is.”

“But,” I asked, “what accounts for the brutality?”

“In a situation like that there’s a chemical reaction,” she said. “Adrenaline is released . . . you’re euphoric in that moment because you believe that what you’re doing is exactly right. You have what feels like super-human energy.” She likens this state of mind to a mother who is able to gather enough strength to lift a car off her child. “You’re in a bubble of righteousness. Everything else disappears. You’re above the law of physics. There is nothing you can’t or won’t do.”

She said the bubble is impenetrable, so impenetrable that it can override the most basic human instinct, a mother protecting her young. When the Jonestown mothers watched their babies foaming at the mouth from the poison Kool-Aid, it still wasn’t enough to shake them out of it. “You believe the world is evil and now you have the ticket to heaven. You are so special. You have special permission to do anything.”

She talked about how someone’s mind can become so distorted that it makes sense to try to save the world by any means necessary, even if it’s brutal and ugly. In fact, she said, when your brain is working like that, you think it would be wrong if you didn’t participate. “Something happened to my brain when I was in the church. I know my brain changed.”

“But, Diane,” I said, “five years. It took Pat and Leslie five years of being away from Manson and the other cult members to get out of that bubble.”

This did not surprise her. She said it’s precisely because the behavior was so extreme, so brutal, they couldn’t let it in. The brain has a way of protecting itself when someone has done something so horrific. “What they did was so enormous. How could they comprehend that?”

Diane never did anything as extreme as Pat and Leslie when she was in the Unification Church, not even close, but she acted in ways that, for her, were so out of character that she later had difficulty believing accounts of her behavior. “At one point I got a call from my brother telling me that my mother had breast cancer. He asked me to come home and I refused. I felt that what I was doing was more important than being with my mother. Before that it would have been inconceivable for me to turn my back on my mother when she was sick with cancer, so once I made the decision not to go home, I was even more dedicated to the church because I had to justify that decision.”

“In for a dollar, in for a dime?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she replied.

“But,” I said, “it’s one thing to believe that you’re above the law because of divine intervention, but it’s quite another to cause terrible suffering and feel nothing for your victims.”

“Once you’ve crossed the line,” she explained, “you shut down the part of you where empathy resides. Your survival depends on being able to shut it down. The cognitive dissonance between who you were and who you are is so great, you wouldn’t be able to tolerate it otherwise. And it isn’t just empathy that you shut down. It’s your values, it’s everything you believed in. It takes a long time before your original, primary version of what’s right and wrong returns.”