Making Female Missionary Cult Serial Killers
When the movie Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS* was released in 1975, it reminded us of our belief that women did not kill or torture—unless they were Nazis. This infamous exploitation movie was set in a Nazi slave labor camp (actually shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes). Ilsa (played by Dyanne Thorne) is the female camp commandant, a deranged sex maniac and SS mad scientist. She enjoys forcing male prisoners to have sex with her, castrating those who fail to satisfy her. She also conducts medical experiments designed to test whether women can withstand more pain than men, which, of course, involves lots of graphic footage of the torture of buxom, naked women. This genre was not new. It was firmly rooted in a torrent of men’s pulp adventure magazines from the 1950s and 1960s with titles like Argosy, Stag, Man’s Action, True Adventure, which sometimes ran stories with sexy evil torturous Nazi females who demanded sexual satisfaction from their male sex slaves, whose lives depended upon their performance.
A year after Ilsa, Italian film director Lina Wertmüller followed on the same theme in Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebellezze), with Shirley Stoler (who played Martha Beck in The Honeymoon Killers) portraying a female SS camp commandant who demands sexual service from inmate Giancarlo Giannini, in a sequence that the website IMDb claims, “Remains one of the most harrowing and fascinating scenes ever filmed.”213
One can debate endlessly the meaning of the mostly male sexual fascination with beautiful blonde Nazi killer bitches, but its roots are indisputably founded in historical events—recent ones at that—unfolding in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.
STATE SERIAL MURDER IN THE THIRD REICH
By now we realize that serial killers are neither exclusively male nor are they exclusively driven by sexual impulses. They include profit and power killers and Mafia contract killers and although it would have been argued a decade ago that the definition of a serial killer did not include military and genocidal killers, it especially includes them—and particularly those of the Third Reich. In fact, the Third Reich practiced state serial killing—serial mass murder. Probably the first state in history to do so in the way it did.
In the twelve years that it existed, Nazi Germany murdered approximately twelve million people—that includes the Jews, who made up nearly half of those victims. We are not talking here about people killed by aerial bombing, in sieges, by starvation or deprivation by occupied populations at home, or in urban battle crossfire. What we are talking about is one-on-one collective acts of murder—teams of killers firing single gunshots from small arms into the backs of victims’ heads; hangings; beatings; injections of phenol into the heart; stompings; burning people alive; killing by medical experimentation and through so-called “sport” killing, and other individual acts of brutality. Toward the end the Nazis picked up the pace with mass killing in gas chambers, but those never really worked very well and broke down often. But still, they worked well enough to kill three million victims. But most of the remaining nine million were murdered person-to-person by thousands of serial killers who killed day after day, victim by victim, shot by shot, until they could kill no more.
For the longest time, we believed in the Nazis’ defense that they were “only following orders.” We did not forgive it, but we believed in it as an explanation, and that is one of the reasons that we have until recently excluded Nazi war criminals from the category of serial killer. We presumed they were not doing what they did by choice and that their victims were selected for them, the act of killing ordered at the pain of dire punishment if refused. Recent scholarship has completely put that notion to rest. We now know that direct participation in killing was mostly an optional and voluntary choice and no German trooper was punished for refusing to shoot unarmed men, women, and children. If they refused, and some did, they were not shot themselves, they were not sent to a concentration camp, nor were they even sent to the Eastern Front. At worse, they were teased by their fellow troopers for being “weak” and perhaps passed over for promotion.
Some would categorize Nazi perpetrators as missionary type serial killers who are politically, morally, religiously, or ideologically motivated to murder particular types of victims, who they feel deserve to be eliminated from society. But in many cases they did not commit these crimes because they were fanatical Nazis. Historian Christopher Browning studied a mobile killing unit that hunted down and killed thousands of men, women, and children in eastern Polish country villages, shooting them into mass graves one by one. Browning discovered that the killers were mostly reserve police officers approaching middle-age, from the rank and file, of which only 25 percent belonged to the Nazi Party.214 This unit did not consist of indoctrinated, elite, black-uniformed SS troops, security police units, specialized Einsatzgruppen killing commandos, or even vigilante Nazi fanatics; they were ordinary Hamburg traffic cops on temporary assignment in the Polish countryside behind German lines. Thus Browning called his book on the subject Ordinary Men.
What we are beginning to understand is that the Nazis were able to induce a kind of temporary state of psychopathy in its citizenry, where ordinary, sane, “normal” people were made capable for brief periods of committing serial murder. Brief periods, because with time many began to have mental breakdowns, resorted to alcohol abuse, had nightmares, and even committed suicide, and developed what has been recently termed “perpetration-induced traumatic stress”—a type of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by perpetrators of atrocities.215 Thus the Nazis introduced the gas chambers in the winter of 1941–1942, not for more efficient killing necessarily, but for a less traumatic experience for the perpetrators. Gas was seen as a “humane” way to kill victims, reducing the psychological toll on the killers, who were murdering by the hundreds of thousands in the East.
While we have come close to understanding how the Third Reich made ordinary men into serial killers, we have yet little information on the “ordinary” women involved in the killing. And they did indeed exist in Nazi Germany, to some degree authentically reflected by the pulp fictional Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.
The fictional Ilsa is inspired by a combination of two actual notorious blonde/redhead Nazi serial-killing women, both initially products of the state: Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and Irma Grese, the “Beast of Belsen.” Both these women were accused of taking personal pleasure in the sadistic torture and mutilation of concentration camp inmates beyond their call of duty. They were more than just state-nurtured serial killers: They were freelancing, opportunistic murderers who excelled in killing because they personally found pleasure in it. As such, they would have been, and to some degree were, condemned by the Nazis, too. Yet, very much like female serial killer accomplices described in the previous chapter, it is doubtful whether Ilse Koch or Irma Grese would have committed the atrocities they did if they were not introduced and prepared for it by the state.
Ilse Koch—the Bitch of Buchenwald
Ilse Koch was a 41-year-old, red-haired, green-eyed, buxomly woman when she was put on trial in 1947 for crimes committed in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where some 50,000 inmates had died. Interestingly enough, Ilse was tried three times for different crimes in Buchenwald—by the Nazis in 1943, by the Americans in 1947, and again by the new West German government in 1950.
The charges laid against her in her trial by the Americans, the most famous of the three trials, were monstrously spectacular. It was alleged that Ilsa, who was the camp commandant’s wife, would assemble newly arriving inmates and order that they remove their shirts. Ilse would then walk the ranks of the prisoners selecting those with tattoos she liked. She would then have them killed, skinned, and have household artifacts made from the tattooed skin like lamp shades, photo album covers, handbags, and gloves. Her house at the concentration camp was alleged to have light switches made from human thumb bones and furniture and decoration made from body parts and shrunken heads. It was alleged that she had murdered approximately forty inmates for this purpose.216
It was all incredibly creepy stuff and would ten years later inspire a real serial killer back in the U.S. In 1957, Ed Gein, after reading too many men’s pulp true adventure magazines, adopted Koch’s reported decorating style and furnished his own lonely Wisconsin farmhouse in the same way, using the body parts of women he killed or dug up from graves.217
That would make Ilse Koch a very unique serial killer. She was a hedonist lust type—a rare species among women, the only one known in modern times—a female killing to harvest body parts through some kind of compulsive sexual deviance. The closest thing to Ilse on the historical record is Elizabeth Báthory, some four centuries earlier.
There were other charges leveled against Ilse. Any male prisoner who dared to cast his eyes in her direction was beaten to death for impudence and “sexual harassment.” She had crews of inmates worked to death building her personal riding stables on the grounds of the camp. She wandered around the camp reporting prisoners for real or imagined infractions, resulting in their deaths by beating, which she enjoyed watching. There was a distinctly sexual edge to the charges. Ilse was described as a “nymphomaniac,” although her sexual indiscretions were confined to other SS staff at the camp and not inmates. But the accusations that she collected human skin and had had a tattooed skin lamp shade made, distinguished her from the other thirty defendants from Buchenwald standing trial with her. The crimes were so depraved that they became a symbol of Nazis genocidal madness at its most evil and extreme. Newspapers and magazines reproduced photographs of leatherlike patches of tattooed skin, one with a pair of clearly discernible nipples, shrunken heads, and other artifacts, including lampshades, allegedly made of human skin and found in Buchenwald when U.S. troops liberated the camp in 1945. There was newsreel footage of it in movie theaters.
Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947, but a year later American occupational authorities suddenly commuted her sentence to four years’ imprisonment, to the shock of the public worldwide. Having served a year, she had three years remaining on her sentence when public pressure resulted in her being tried again by West German authorities, who then sentenced her to life. Today, Ilse Koch has a legion of defenders—not all of whom are neo-Nazis or Holocaust deniers. Yes, you guessed it—some are feminists who portray Ilse as a victim of male inmates, who slandered Ilse Koch for her “trangression of gender stereotypes.”218
I’m not joking!
Background
Ilse Koch was born Ilse Kohler Schnitzel, September 22, 1906, in Dresden. After graduating high school, she was employed in a bookstore and later worked as a secretary. She joined the Nazi Party relatively early—in May 1932. This placed her in a doubly exclusive category—joining before the seizure of power by Hitler in January 1933 and being one of a small minority of females who were members of the party. Only 7.8 percent of the Nazi Party at that time consisted of females.219 The Nazis did not anticipate any role for women in the Third Reich other than that of wife and mother of Aryan soldiers. Women in the German workplace outside of traditional female jobs like schoolteacher, nurse, shop clerk, or secretary were encouraged to return home and start a racially pure family.
Ilse was employed as a secretary in the Nazi Party. As a trusted party member, she was eventually assigned to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1936. It is important to note that first-generation concentration camps in Germany like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were not “death camps” per se. Unlike the second generation of “annihilation camps”—places like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, built in Poland, the only purpose of which was to kill the many arriving deportees as fast as possible, mostly Jews and Gypsies—first-generation concentration camps in Germany generally kept inmates alive in confinement for long periods of time. They were, indeed, brutal, and inmates were routinely shot, worked, and beaten to death, experimented upon, or killed just to make space. Nonetheless, the primary purpose of these camps was to confine political opponents. Fifty-six thousand victims died in Buchenwald in the ninety-three months it was in operation between its founding in 1937 and its liberation by the Allies in April 1945.220 Some 240,000 prisoners passed through the camp, and although some were killed later in other camps, many, probably most, survived: That’s a concentration camp. At the three annihilation camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, a total of 1.5 million were murdered in twenty-one months and only a few dozen are known to have survived, a big difference in the homicidal environment between the categories of camp. Ilse’s assignment to the Sachsenhausen camp in 1936 was akin to being assigned to an extremely brutal prison but not necessarily part of a killing function of the “Final Solution,” which did not get officially underway until the late autumn of 1941.221
While working as a secretary in the office at Sachsenhausen, Ilse met Karl Otto Koch, the camp commandant. They were married in an SS pagan marriage ceremony and had two children. In 1937, Koch was transferred to the newly opened Buchenwald camp and he and Ilse moved into a new house inside the camp. It was in this house that American troops were said to have found the gruesome human-skin souvenirs.
The Feminist Defense of Ilse Koch
Ilse Koch was never an official functionary of the camp. She was the commandant’s wife. While that gave her a tremendous degree of authority, it was entirely unofficial. Here, according to one German historian, Alexandra Przyrembel, was the first key to the vehemence with which Ilse was prosecuted after the war and the sexually depraved nature of the crimes she was accused of. According to this historian’s feminist perspective, Ilse was prosecuted because she defied traditional gender roles and offended the male inmates’ patriarchal sensibilities by doing so. Przyrembel argues that Ilse as a woman impacted on the “male society of inmates.” She states:
…Ilse Koch appeared—in the perception of inmates—to have penetrated the domain of power reserved for the male members of the SS or at most certain Kapos (inmates who supervised inmate labor). This interaction between the (apparent) confirmation and transgression of gender stereotypes is, in my opinion, the root of the ‘Ilse Koch phenomenon’ after 1945.222
It appears that when it comes to women murderers, radical feminism has no bounds in its assertion that female serial killers are essentially a social construct of the oppressive and conspiring male patriarchy—even a patriarchy confined to a concentration camp. For radical feminism, Ilse Koch is as much a victim of the patriarchy as Aileen Wuornos.
“…Kill Them in a More Decent Way.”
But it is not as simple as all that. The Nazi hierarchy had actually already criminalized Ilse and her commandant husband during the war. SS commandant Karl Koch was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 on charges of financial corruption and the murder of two inmates to cover up his crimes. He was tried by an SS tribunal and sentenced to death. He was executed, ironically, in the Buchenwald concentration camp, by the SS in April 1945, just days before the camp’s liberation.
Ilse was arrested two years before the war ended by the SS in August 1943, and also charged with corruption, but acquitted in her trial. (Although, as she complained to her American captors later, not before her sizable cash deposits were confiscated by the Third Reich in a type of forfeiture of criminal enterprise gains. The amount seized from her was 12,000 Reichsmarks—about $30,000 in today’s buying power.)
It was during this internal 1943 SS investigation that allegations were first made that Ilse Koch made human lamp shades. This was an offense under the Nazi code of conduct, which insisted that killing be conducted with decorum or “decency.” Even the taking of photographs was a serious offense, despite the fact that thousands of perpetrators snapped pictures of themselves committing atrocities. SS men were tried and imprisoned if they were caught taking photographs of atrocities or if they killed Jews without orders or killed them for depraved personal motives.223 During one SS court-martial, an SS private testified that the SS defendant had killed children by holding them off the ground by the hair and shooting them. He testified, “After a while, I just could not watch this anymore and I told him to stop. What I meant was he should not lift the children up by the hair, he should kill them in a more decent way.”224
The SS defendants ended up on trial because they were passing around photographs of the atrocities like trading cards while on leave in Germany. (Some sent photographs to their wives, girlfriends, and mothers.) SS Chief Himmler was very vocal on the issue of killing with decorum. When he addressed a gathering of his senior SS killers, he said, “Most of you know what it is like to see a hundred corpses laid out in a line, or five hundred or a thousand. To have stood fast through this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have stayed decent, has made us hard.”225
In other words, when the tattoo skin artifacts were supposedly found in her former house at Buchenwald in 1945, Ilse had not been living in it for two years and had been thoroughly investigated for it back in 1943. If, indeed, she had such fetishized trophies in her home, the SS investigators would have confiscated and destroyed them, and Ilse would have been severely punished for the offense—especially since she was not even a member of the SS but a civilian wife of an SS offender.
The Tattooed Skin Collection
Despite holding the center-stage in allegations that she had murdered and “skinned” inmates for their tattoos for decorative purposes in her 1947 trial by a U.S. Military Tribunal, Ilse Koch was not specifically charged with those offenses. Ilse, like the other defendants, was indicted with participating in a “common design” to subject the inmates of Buchenwald to “killings, tortures, starvation, beatings, and other indignities.” Any association as perpetrator with the camp was sufficient for her conviction without a specific case necessarily proven.
But the specimens of tattooed skin were not a propaganda invention. They existed—and were indeed found in 1945, along with shrunken heads, perhaps at the house where Ilse once lived or perhaps in the camp pathology department. In fact, such samples were indeed being collected, but with official SS sanction! The culprit was an SS doctor, Erich Wagner, who had been writing a thesis on the link between criminality and the desire to be tattooed. Wagner photographed numerous inmates with tattoos and apparently—either upon their deaths or after ordering their deaths—detached pieces of their skin bearing the tattoos, and cured and saved them, not as decoration, but as academic specimens. According to historian Przyrembel, Ilse Koch did not attend the photographing and might not have even been aware of the existence of the tattoo project.226
A photograph of a lamp shade—allegedly made of human skin and placed next to shrunken heads and samples of preserved tattooed skin—was entered into evidence at her trial, but the actual lamp shade itself apparently was misplaced. While forensic analysis definitively identified the skin samples as human, no test reports on the lamp shade were entered into evidence.
Dr. Sitte, a Ph.D. in physics and a former inmate, was one of the star witnesses against Ilse Koch. He had been confined in Buchenwald from September 1939 until the liberation in April 1945. He stated that he had worked in the camp’s pathology department and that tattooed skin was stripped from the bodies of dead prisoners and “was often used to create lamp shades, knife cases, and similar items for the SS.” Sitte told the court that it was “common knowledge” that tattooed prisoners were taken away after Ilse Koch had selected their tattoos and they would be murdered and skinned for her.
But under cross-examination, Sitte admitted that he had never himself personally seen any of the lamp shades allegedly made of human skin and that he had no personal knowledge of any prisoner who had been reported by Ilse Koch and was then killed so that his tattooed skin could be made into a lamp shade. He also admitted that the lamp shade that was on the display table in the photograph was not the lamp shade made from human skin that he was referring to, allegedly delivered to Koch. Later, in a 1948 letter to the New York Times after Ilse Koch’s sentence had been commuted, Sitte further admitted that:
I began to work in that pathology department only after the Koch era (Koch had been arrested for embezzlement and corruption) and by this time the SS leaders had abandoned their custom of displaying objects adorned with the tanned skin of tattooed prisoners.227
In his letter Sitte concluded, “This was not evidence against Ilse Koch, but against the SS officers in the camp, who killed prisoners for their tattooings.”
But Sitte pleaded nevertheless against the reduction of Ilse Koch’s sentence: “Is justice to the victims of Ilse Koch and her kind so much less important than technical justice to this pack of murderers?”
What was the “technical justice” at issue here? The U.S. Military Governor of Germany, General Lucius D. Clay, explained his decision to commute Koch’s sentence. He stated that Koch “could not be proved guilty of the serious war crimes that had been initially cited against her by the evidence presented at her trial. Among the specific charges was that she had used tattooed human skin for lamp shades and other household articles.”228 The problem, according to Clay, was that U.S. Military Tribunal procedures allowed not only for hearsay evidence to be entered, but also for written affidavits without the defense being given opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses.
In 1976 Lucius Clay recalled:
We tried Ilse Koch…She was sentenced to life imprisonment, and I commuted it to three years. [She had already served one year.] And our press really didn’t like that. She had been destroyed by the fact that an enterprising reporter who first went into her house had given her the beautiful name, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” and he had found some white lampshades in there, which he wrote up as being made out of human flesh.
Well, it turned out actually that it was goat flesh. But at the trial it was still human flesh. It was almost impossible for her to have gotten a fair trial.229
None of this in any way mitigates Nazi atrocities nor the specific charge that inmates were murdered for the collection of their tattooed skins. Holocaust deniers make a big deal out of Clay’s assertion that the lamp shade turned out to be made of goat skin. (And that it was never determined in a test for the U.S. National Archives—where Ilse’s photo albums are today stored—from what “animal” the suede covering the albums was made.) But there was never any doubt that some mad scientist at Buchenwald had collected those human tattoo skin specimens and shrunken heads. The inmates were unaware of the purpose. They assumed they were acts of personal depravity and laid them squarely on the doorstep of Ilse Koch, whom they despised.
While this may clear Ilse from those specific charges, it does not exonerate her as a member of the Nazi party, a corrupt commandant’s wife living on the grounds of a concentration camp, and committing other offenses. The other charges against her—that she exploited inmate labor for her own purposes, that she vindictively reported prisoners, resulting in their punishment and sometimes executions; and that she had inmates, who dared to glance at her punished or murdered for their “impudence” toward a German woman—are entirely plausible and very likely. They are, in fact, the very source of the inmates’ hatred for her—not her gender role transgressions. The senior SS staff had inmates working as servants, cooks, housekeepers, and gardeners at their homes. The SS wives set the degree of discipline for these slave domestics.
To the end, Ilse raged against an imagined “Jewish conspiracy” that she claimed was behind her charges. Ilse was an old-time Nazi Party member and one can easily imagine her attitude toward Jews and communists and other “enemies of the state” confined in her husband’s camp. She deserved the life sentence she got, but her actual crimes made her more typical of other offenders, many of whom found their sentences commuted in the 1950s.
The public outcry over the commutation of the Bitch of Buchenwald’s sentence to a mere four years, with one already served, led to Ilse Koch being tried a second time, this time by the newly reconstituted West German judiciary. The trial was very political. The cream of German establishment opposition to Hitler had been confined in Buchenwald and camps like it. The entire echelon of the huge Social Democratic Party and the German Communist Party had been thrown into concentration camps from 1933 to 1937. Many survived by forming powerful and rival underground resistance groups inside the camps. These groups remained unified and politically active after the war. They emerged in post-war Germany, determined to make up for the lost twelve years during which they had been outlawed and brutalized by the Nazi state. There was no way that a high-profile example of Nazi depravity like Ilse Koch was going to escape punishment. These powerful German camp survivor associations relentlessly lobbied and protested for a second trial of Ilse Koch. And in the end they got their wish.
“Lamp Shade Ilse,” as she was dubbed in the press, was retried in Bavaria in December 1950. In 1952, she was sentenced to life imprisonment after it was proven that she had “contributed” to the specific death of one inmate. The issue of collecting tattooed skin samples was not as central in her last trial. She vehemently appealed her sentence, claiming to be innocent of all the charges, but in 1967 she gave up and committed suicide at the age of 61 by hanging herself in her cell.
Ilse was an evil and awful human being and got the end she deserved. But as far as the extraordinary charges of using human skin as household decoration for which she became so notorious, Ilse Koch might have actually been innocent. The accusations are reminiscent of the myths around Elizabeth Báthory—of her bathing in victims’ blood. But as the classic John Ford western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance declares, when there is a choice between printing the truth or the legend, the legend always wins out. As repulsive as historian Przyrembel’s feminist argument might be—that Ilse Koch was railroaded on those specific charges because she offended patriarchal sensibilities of the camp inmates—it is a charge one cannot completely dismiss as easily as one wishes. In one way or another, how we perceive and define female serial killers is often defined by social constructs and politics, including those of gender stereotyping.
Irma Grese—the Beast of Belsen
In real life, Irma Grese, nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen,” is the more authentic inspiration for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS than the camp housewife Ilse Koch. Grese was young, blonde, and beautiful, and she was part of the concentration camp system, employed as a female SS-Aufseherin—“supervisor” or matron. These were not members of the SS—females were not allowed to join—but paid female employees of the SS, auxiliary workers. She was only 22 years old when she was executed by the British occupational authorities for a series of brutal murders she committed while working in the concentration camp system.
In many ways, Irma Grese is easier to explain. She was born into a family of four siblings on October 27, 1923, to Alfred and Berte Grese, farm workers in Mecklenburg in northern Germany. Very little if nothing is known of her childhood. Her mother committed suicide in 1936 when Irma was 13 years old. Her father, Alfred, vehemently hated the Nazis but wisely kept his opinion to himself. (Some sources claim he joined the Nazi Party in 1937.)
Irma was 10 years old when the Nazis took power in Germany. She was educated in the Nazi school system, which ensured that she was indoctrinated at an early age in racial theory, which espoused the superiority of the German Aryans and the immanent threat from the “subhuman” Jews and “the Judeo-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy.” Irma was raised on colorful Dr. Seusslike children’s books with titles like “The Jew Is a Poisonous Mushroom” or “The Jew Is a Fox,” heavily illustrated with lurid color drawings of beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed German children chasing stereotypically ugly, dark-skinned, hook-nosed Jewish children out of the school and out of town.
Irma was not a popular girl in school and was apparently bullied. She led a lonely existence typical of a serial killer’s childhood. Her sister, attempting to defend Irma against the accusations leveled at her, testified that Irma was cowardly and would run away when threatened, and therefore was incapable of committing violent acts. Of course, we know better. If she ran away she might have stored enormous reserves of rage until she had an opportunity for “payback” as a camp guard over helpless inmates.
Irma was obsessed with her activities in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls [Maidens])—the Nazi version of the Girl Scouts. Perhaps this is where she found acceptance, having been rejected by her schoolmates. Consequently, her already low marks at school suffered even more. She quit school in 1938 at the age of 15. She worked as a nurse’s aide in the SS sanatorium Hohenlychen for two years and unsuccessfully tried to find an apprenticeship as a nurse.
After she failed to secure the apprenticeship, probably because of her low school grades, Irma was recommended by her boss at Hohenlychen in 1941 for a position in the SS female concentration camp service. She was interviewed, but told that at 17, she was still too young. For a year she ended up employed as a machine operator on a dairy farm.230
When Irma turned 18 in 1942, and became eligible, she successfully entered the SS-Helferinnenkorps, the female volunteer auxiliary service in the SS, which provided a range of services from secretarial to prison and camp custodial in the SS and security police. Irma claims that the German Labor Service, which enforced mandatory employment for all young Germans, arbitrarily assigned her to the job. This is unlikely, as women who were drafted into the service were classified as SS-Kriegshelferinnen (“war auxiliaries”) to differentiate them from the more worthy SS-Helferinnen volunteers.231
Irma began her training as a guard in July 1942 at the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. The ethos of Nazi concentration camp guards was brutal: Pity or mercy were seen as signs of weakness. It was drummed into the trainees’ heads that inmates were enemies of the state and must be treated brutally at all times. In a kind of distillation of psychopathy, guards were not permitted to speak to inmates other than in an official capacity to ensure that inmates remained anonymous subjects for their brutality.
To ensure the unemotional performance of torture and punishment of inmates, usually by whipping with a stick or rod, with twenty-five strokes as the minimum for minor infraction and a thousand as the maximum, punishment was carried out by guards other than those who assigned it or reported the prisoner. This ensured that the guard had no personal or emotional sadistic investment in assigning punishment and that at the same time no guards could escape meting out beatings, even if they did not themselves report prisoners for infractions. Everyone had to participate.
SS guards were required to be uncompromisingly tough and to hate the inmates under their charge. When it rained, guards were prohibited to seek shelter when supervising outdoor work details. They had to show themselves to be as tough and/or tougher than the inmates they supervised.
A female inmate at Ravensbrück recalls the teenage girls arriving for training as guards:
The beginners usually appeared frightened upon first contact with the camp, and it took some time to attain the level of cruelty and debauchery of their seniors. Some of us made a rather grim little game of measuring the time it took for a new Aufseherin to win her stripes. One little Aufseherin, twenty years old, who was at first so ignorant of proper camp “manners” that she said “excuse me” when walking in front of a prisoner, needed exactly four days to adopt the requisite manner, although it was totally new for her.
It would be a reasonable estimate that about half of the guards took visible pleasure in striking and terrorizing their prisoners, especially the weak, ill, and frightened. Others dealt their blows with the coarseness and simplicity of a peasant whipping her donkey, some simply acted for the sake of conformity particularly in front of their colleagues or the SS men. In any case, even the best of them showed no adverse reaction when a prisoner was beaten in their presence.232
No “adverse reaction:” no subjectivization of the victim, no emotion, no empathy, no mercy or feeling—a psychopathic state artificially induced through indoctrination from childhood, hard conditioning, and discipline. But blatant sadistic behavior in concentration camps was paradoxically condemned by the Nazis as “indecent.” Murder was to be committed coldly for noble state reasons, not for personal, depraved satisfaction, and SS men who killed for their own pathological gratification or material gain (as Ilse’s husband, Karl Koch, had) were tried and sentenced to prison terms or executed by SS tribunals.233
On her first visit home, Irma arrived wearing her camp guard uniform and was promptly beaten by her father and told to never return, her sister testified at Irma’s trial.
After a year’s service at Ravensbrück, Irma was sent in March 1943 to what some SS doctors bitterly called “anus mundi”—the “asshole of the world”—a swampy hellhole the size of about forty American city blocks: the Auschwitz-Birkenau megadeath camp. This was a third-generation camp combining a forced labor concentration camp with a huge annihilation facility. Double railway spurs snaked directly into the camp with packed cargo trains backed up along the line attempting to unload thousands of Jewish deportees daily from the most distant towns and cities of occupied Europe—places like Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Yugoslavia. (The Jews of Germany, Poland, Russia, and northern and central Europe had already been mostly murdered—either shot on location or in the second-generation annihilation camps.)
They would be forced off the train on “the ramp” and they would undergo “selection”—those to live sent in one direction and those to die sent in another, toward four huge combination crematoria / gas chambers the size of railway stations. One can see them today in aerial photographs filmed by passing USAF B-17 bombers on the way to targets in the vicinity. One can easily compare the immense size of these killing facilities next to train cars parked nearby on the spur in the photos. Two of the huge underground gas chambers could easily accommodate 1,200–1,500 victims each.
SS doctors on the ramp “selected” the very old, the very young, the weak, sick, or infirm to walk about a five-minute distance from the ramp to the nearest gas chamber. Of course, one did not need a medical degree to tell who was fit for slave labor—anybody could do that. But by their “selection” of who lived or died, the physicians were now actually taking the responsibility unto themselves for the killing, rendering murder into the realm of a medical procedure ordered by a doctor. As Victor Brack, chief of Germany’s “euthanasia” program said, “The syringe belongs in the hand of the physician.”
Those “ordinary” men—the cops who blew out the brains of kids and their screaming mothers one by one—ended up as mental cases. The Nazis discovered they could synthesize psychopathy temporarily, but they couldn’t make it persist: The killers were bothered by what they were doing. So at Auschwitz they medicalized and assembly-lined the procedure. It was no longer murder—no more than a surgeon plunging a razor-sharp instrument inside a patient’s body is murder. It was “racial hygiene,” practiced by professional physicians. They were healing the German race by destroying the Jewish bacillus infecting it. There were always physicians on the ramp, with a second shift of physicians on standby in case the first needed to be relieved.234
Again we see a type of state-induced “artificial psychopathy”—a psuedoscientific medical rationalization for serial killing. One survivor, a scientist himself, stated that the ramp physicians began using a medical term, therapia magna,* as a joke at first but then seriously:
They considered themselves performing Therapia Magna Auschwitzciense. They would even use the initials TM. At first it was mockingly and ironically, but gradually they began to use them simply to mean the gas chambers. So that whenever you see the initials T M, that’s what it means. The phrase was invented by Schumann who fancied himself an academic intellectual among the intelligentsia of Auschwitz doctors.235
The physicians “selected” mostly old and middle-aged men, women, and children under 14 to die. Healthy young men and women and those with needed skills were sent to work, unless the young woman was carrying an infant in her arms, in which case she was selected to die with her child. (Somebody had to carry the infant into the gas chamber.) Occasionally, trusted inmates working on the ramps would discreetly whisper to a young mother to give her child to an elderly relative to carry when approaching the selection. This would save her life, but not that of her infant. Other mothers understated their child’s age, hoping to save them from hard labor, unwittingly condemning their own child to death in the gas chamber.
Those “selected” by the physicians would become walking dead, sent directly from the ramp to the gas chambers. They would be ushered into huge subsurface undressing rooms to prepare for a “shower.” There they would be told to hang their clothing carefully on numbered pegs and reminded to tie their shoes together by the laces so they would not get lost. (It made it easier to sort the victims’ clothing afterward if it was already sized and the shoes paired.) They would be told to hurry along into the shower in the next room before the hot water ran out or before the coffee and breakfast that awaited them grew cold. And off they went.
Once packed into the huge concrete chamber with dummy shower heads, the airtight door would be suddenly slammed shut behind them, the lights turned off, and cyanide gas pellets would be poured by medical orderlies (again medics) from the roof into four vented, metal mesh columns dispersed along the length of the chamber. The cyanide gas was a commercial product that was released from the pellets once exposed to warm air. Called Zyklon-Bl (Cyclone B), it was designed to kill rats in granaries by gas so as not to contaminate the grain or storage facility with pesticides. The SS demanded that the manufacturer produce special batches of the gas without the “irritant” warning odor intended to alert people of its presence. The manufacturer balked, claiming it would endanger the patent they held on Zyklon-Bl if they did that. The SS insisted. Special custom-made batches were delivered without the irritant. The gas was odorless and painless to the victims, killing them through rapid respiratory and cardiac arrest and oxygen depletion in the blood. Victims did not “choke” on the gas, they just dropped dead with seizures. But it was a horrible death, nonetheless, with victims packed tightly among naked, dying strangers in pitch-black dark, clawing on each other in respiratory and cardiac paralysis in ever gradually expanding circles from the mesh columns.
The four crematoria gas chambers were capable of easily killing approximately 10,000 people a day—each. The problem was not killing, but disposing of the bodies. At maximum capacity, the crematoriums combined together could only burn 5,000 bodies every twenty-four hours. But furnaces frequently broke down, forcing corpses to be burned in huge, hellish, smoking, open-air pits at the camp’s perimeter. Bones and ash would be ground to dust and hauled away in dump trucks for disposal in the nearby river. Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.5 million people were killed this way at Auschwitz, mostly Jews, but Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and other “subhumans” as well.
The Auschwitz camp and its satellites were like a small slave kingdom, with the registered inmate population totaling 155,000 at its maximum. These inmates were put to work “processing” the corpses, emptying the gas chambers, extracting gold teeth, and sorting the belongings of the dead to be shipped back to Germany for profit. They also worked in the kitchens, gardens, warehouses, clinics, and artisan shops that supported the enterprise of death or on construction gangs expanding the already huge camp perimeter to accommodate more and more victims to gas and burn, day in and day out, trainload by trainload.
“Sport”
So it was here at Auschwitz that little blonde Irma Grese—the former Nazi Girl Scout and wannabe nurse—at the tender age of 19 was assigned to supervise a camp section with thirty thousand female inmates, those chosen from the ramp to temporarily live a little longer. That is, as long as they did not get sick or collapse, could do the work assigned to them, committed no infraction real or imagined, and were lucky not to have encountered some idle SS man or female SS-Aufseherin like Irma in a bad mood swing looking to “sport” with inmates.
To “sport.” It was a guard’s term, meaning to idly brutalize prisoners for no reason other than to relieve the boredom; technically an offense, but as long as it did not “get out of hand” the authorities looked the other way. Irma’s “sport” was to order women to retrieve something thrown beyond the safety line, which delineated, at the camp perimeters, an area beyond which prisoners were not allowed to venture. Guards were under strict orders to shoot to kill, with no warning shot, any prisoner who stepped beyond this perimeter. On average, Irma was reported sending thirty women a day to die in this manner, until one SS guard refused to shoot a woman ordered out by Irma into the kill zone. He was charged with a violation of camp regulations, but when the SS inquiry discovered the circumstances, he was returned to duty and Irma was transferred from the detail.236 Irma was too much even for the SS.
One surviving inmate recalls that when Irma arrived at Auschwitz she appeared to be “a young girl in my eyes about 18–19, with a round, full face and two long braids.” The inmate was transferred to another section and did not see Ilse for several months. When she saw her again she was stunned by the dramatic transformation. She had “slimmed down, her hair was up in a bun, the uniform immaculate and she had a cap over her head and on her waist was a belt and a pistol.”
With her stunning blonde good looks, the teenage Irma had become the center of attention. Some sources allege she became the lover of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, a handsome, wounded war hero physician who worked on the ramp in an immaculately tailored uniform and conducted horrific medical experiments on dwarfs and child twins in his spare time. One of his experiments consisted of attempting to change eye color by injecting dyes directly into the iris. Mengele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death,” would whistle Schumann tunes as he “selected” on the ramp or scrapped bone marrow samples from screaming children without an anesthetic. Witnesses placed Irma on the ramp when Mengele was there. She brutally beat and kicked people who were attempting to bypass the selection or to switch lines afterward.
An inmate physician stated that Irma had a fixation on women with large breasts and would inevitably whip their breasts to the point that they would become infected. She would always make a point of being present when the physician treated the painful infection, “swaying back and forth with a glassy-eyed look” as the inmate cried in pain.
Irma carried a special lightweight cellophane whip that was particularly painful and cutting that she had custom-made in one of the camp workshops. She kept prisoners standing for hours during roll call, mercilessly beating and stomping any inmate who collapsed. She forced prisoners to kneel for hours, killing anyone who keeled over. She rode around the camp on a bicycle, shooting prisoners with her handgun.
It is hard to sort fact from fiction in some of the testimony. One witness testified that Irma was accompanied by a German shepherd—trained by her to bite the breasts of female inmates—which she would unleash on prisoners who fell behind in convoys. But this is unlikely as specially trained dog handlers were in charge of the animals, each paired with its handler. One could not just “borrow” a guard dog.
It was said that Mengele broke up with Irma when he learned that she was having lesbian affairs with other inmates, something strictly prohibited by not only camp regulations but German law as well. Again, the portrayal of the female defendant as somehow sexually depraved is reminiscent of the charges leveled against Ilse Koch. The witnesses against her were mostly female and accusations of Irma’s lesbianism might be reflective of female taboos of the period if we follow historian Przyrembel’s logic.
When Auschwitz was closed down as the Red Army approached in December 1945, Irma accompanied prisoner transfers to Ravensbrück and then to the temporary transit camp of Belsen. By then the Third Reich was collapsing and the camp administration basically ignored the needs of the overcrowded, sick, and starving camp population. When British troops liberated Belsen, they found Irma and other female and male guards surrounded by mountains of emaciated corpses, most dying from deadly typhus. Bulldozers were used to push the tangled piles of corpses into mass graves. Irma was arrested on the spot and put on trial in September 1945 along with forty-four other defendants in one of the earliest war crimes trials after World War Two.
During her trial, the press was mesmerized by the beauty queen looks of the now 21-year-old defendant. She had chosen to remain at Belsen because she had fallen in love with one of the SS men there and now he was in the dock with her. Every day Irma brought a comb with her to carefully set her hair in blonde ringlets during the trial breaks.
In the trial Irma denied some of the specific or more lurid charges, but freely admitted to beating and torturing prisoners because it was the only way she “could keep order.” She denied using a whip at Auschwitz, claiming she “only” beat prisoners with her hands, but admitted that she used a whip at Belsen because the prisoners were in such derelict condition that she would not want to touch them.
Throughout the trial Grese appeared contemptuous of the proceedings. She showed no emotion as the prosecution rolled films of the piles of corpses discovered at Belsen.
Irma Grese was sentenced to death and executed by hanging on December 13, 1945—the youngest woman hanged by the British in the twentieth century.
The Making of State Serial Killers
Irma Grese was not “following orders” when she beat and murdered her victims. She was clearly freelancing—to the point that the SS themselves thought she was excessive and had her transferred from perimeter duty after one too many “sporting” killings of inmates.
Both male and female guards in Nazi concentration camps were conditioned to suppress any empathy they may have had with the inmates, a primary characteristic of psychopathy. They were stripped of the ability to perceive the inmates in any way other than the generic “enemy of the state.” No private communication was allowed between the prisoners and guards. Auschwitz was a murderous kingdom where killing was the norm. How could Irma Grese be anything but what she was in an environment like that with the conditioning she had?*
Nazism was to a great extent a cult, but its ideology seemed to play almost no role in the crimes of Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, nor did “following orders” appear to have much to do with it in the two women’s cases, since they were acting mostly on their own initiative. Historians, sociologists, and psychologists have been struggling to explain how so many “ordinary” people in Germany ended up serially murdering so many victims. We are not talking about the “banality of evil” bureaucrats who killed from behind their desks, never actually seeing their victims, but of the thousands of people who were killing one on one, with blood splashing into their faces—all serial killers.
One of the earliest theories, suggested by Theodor Adorno, was that there was a type of testable “Authoritarian Personality Type” that could be scored on a so-called F-scale. Some of the personality features consisted of:
Some of these characteristics are reminiscent of some of the psychopathology found among serial killers. According to Adorno, fascist cult movements encourage such personalities to express themselves in cruel and violent ways against ideologically targeted out groups.237
This approach has come under severe criticism. Historian Zygmunt Bauman dismissed it, arguing that it was as if saying: “Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.” Bauman rejected Adorno’s authoritarian personality type because it implied that ordinary people did not commit atrocities.238
John Steiner suggested a version of the authoritarian personality type, the so-called “sleeper,” a latently violent personality that is unleashed by circumstance, such as an encounter with the violent subculture of the Nazi movement.239
Ervin Staub accepts Steiner’s idea that people can be latently violent, but believes that the so-called “sleeper” is a very common trait to most people—that all human beings have a primary capacity for violence. There is a little bit of a serial killer in all of us. Staub says, “Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”240
Bauman disagrees. He argues that most people slip into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of the “faulty personality” as a cause behind cruelty. Evil is situational, according to Bauman. Serial killers are made.
There is some evidence for this. Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University conducted an experiment where he set up a mock prison. Using personality tests, he filtered out sadistic personality types among those volunteering as guards. Yet within six days, volunteers who did not test for sadistic traits began to devise rapidly escalating brutal and cruel methods to control and deal with the volunteer prisoners. Zimbardo concluded that the prison situation alone was a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, antisocial behavior.
Zimbardo discovered that a third of the eleven guards emerged as cruel and tough, constantly inventing new ways to torment their prisoners; a middle group tended to be tough but fair and played by the rules, even if they were cruel, but did not exceed that cruelty on their own initiative; and only two guards actually went out of their way not to be cruel or showed acts of kindness to the prisoners.
If brutality and serial killing can be situational, then before we dismiss Ilse Koch and Irma Grese as Nazi bitches, we need to take a closer look into the face of the former Kentucky-born and -bred chicken factory worker and IGA cashier Lynndie Rana England, who, at the age of 21, found herself caught on camera while tormenting and abusing naked prisoners as a reservist in a military police company in Iraq assigned to the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Lynndie never killed anybody, but is that the difference between her and Grese? How far did Lynndie have left to go? How many of us have a serial killer inside ready to be unleashed in the right situation? Is the process of becoming a serial killer much simpler and easier than we suspect?
The Manson Cult Women—Charlie’s Hippie-Killer Girls
Let’s fast-forward from the gloomy, musty, barbed-wired Europe of our grandmothers to where surf Nazis must die—to the sunshine of California twenty-five years later, to Charlie Manson’s apocalypse and the killer girls who followed him into it. It’s a very witchy story in a witchy place at a witchy time—the West Coast in the sixties. It was the Age of Aquarius: sex, drugs, music, freedom, sunshine and ocean and mass graves.
The girls met Manson when they were mostly in their late teens. They were in their early twenties when they descended down from the dark of the night onto upscale homes in Los Angeles, beating, garroting, shooting, and stabbing to death the wealthy occupants, finger-painting slogans in their blood on their white walls and brand-new appliances. One of the victims was an eight-month pregnant starlet, Sharon Tate, the wife of movie director Roman Polanski. Charles Manson, himself, did not kill any of the victims and was not even present at the actual killings. But Manson is the ultimate “Everest” in the tale of these female killers—simply always there.
Today Manson won’t let anybody forget that he has been in prison since 1969 for seven murders—none of which he physically committed. He is right about that. It’s a fact. But as somebody once said about him, “Charlie had a way of taking the truth and making it into a lie.” What Charlie did was he got a whole bunch of young women and a few men to go out and do the killing for him.
Nearly forty years later, we cannot get Charles Manson and the Manson women out of our minds: They are the shadow in every baby boomer’s sweet memory of another time long past. Manson represents in our collective consciousness how the sixties came to die: Manson with a swastika hand-tattooed into his forehead, and his killer girls, chanting and screaming at their trial, “Why don’t you just kill us all now,” each one with an X branded into her forehead with hot hairpins, right between the eyes. And all the raggedy, hippie Manson girls outside, barefoot on the court building lawn, some with their heads shaved, with their own X carved into their foreheads as well. And several years later, the Manson girl, Squeaky, pulling a gun on President Gerald Ford. All the other murders attributed to shadowy Manson followers still unsolved. The nightmare did not stop with Manson’s imprisonment. There was the Geraldo Rivera TV specials with Manson, including one live from prison in 1989, twenty years after the event.
GERALDO: “Mostly the devil in your world, eh, Charlie?”
MANSON: “Okay. I’ll play. I’ll be the devil.”
GERALDO: “You look more guilty than anyone I’ve ever looked in the eye in my whole entire life.”
MANSON: “Really? Oh boy, that mirror is gonna be heavy for you to carry, ain’t it?”
Charlie Manson was, and is, as I write this in the winter of 2007, a clever, mean old snake. But Manson does not, and did not, know what he said from day to day—and that’s the problem. But he said it all beautifully with a mad poet’s flurry. Unfortunately, Manson had a dark, nasty core that burned deep within him. He was an old-time hillbilly who did some real hard time from the age of eight in the American reformatory and prison system of the 1940s…and throughout the 1950s…and for the first six and a half years of the 1960s. Prison was his home. Other than that, Charlie was like most of us. He had his good, sweet days when he saved lives and he had days that were not so sweet—those low, dark times when Charlie raged a deep, black rage and destroyed and killed those he had earlier saved.
Charlie was a spoken hurricane—his poet’s rap powered by a charismatic sincerity rooted in a backwoods tradition of old-time religion, the kind that comes with the zeal of speaking in tongues or snake handling, honed once in the California prison system by cellblock lessons in the techniques of Scientology and fine guitar playing. Charlie had it all and too much.
Manson still inspires a cadre of followers today: “ATWA—air trees water animals” is still the mantra for a third generation of Manson defenders, many born long after the sixties died. Just google “ATWA” for the key into that dark kingdom on the Internet. ATWA is a sort of environmentalist fundamentalism—the Charlieban, the black green vowing holy war on the “piggies” chopping down our forests, pissing into our water, and unjustly imprisoning Manson.
Charlie Manson really was a good poet and lyricist, and a kind of savant philosopher who could have today, in the age of Amazon.com, made a million had he not gone over the edge back then. He would say things like, “Time is a game that’s played with money.” Or “Do the unexpected. No sense makes sense.” But he mixed it with LSD and weed—his psyche already whacked by pools of his own natural body meth—perhaps kryptopyrrole from his piss, when in his head, rotting away all semblance of reason and compassion. The broken Boys Town childhood buried what was left in layers of rage, which would jack-in-the-box out of him in bad times, along with the brilliantly clever turns of phrase and poetry.
With his dark man-boyish looks—all denim and leather and suede and whisky, incense and bullshit, mental crank and Bowie knives—Charlie got laid a lot in the sixties. He called himself the “Gardener,” planting his seed among the flower children, a sex-preacher man in the Age of Aquarius darkened by Altamont. Charlie took Woodstock and dune-buggied it out into Death Valley for us. Both men and women followed Charlie Manson into the abyss, but mostly it was the women who were loyal to the end. They closed up the sixties for us, in that last summer of 1969, finger-painting obscenities in blood on the naïveté of the age. We will never get the sixties back again—it’s an impossibility that the Mansonites had as much to do with as anything.
The Tate Murders: “Have You Ever Tasted Blood? It’s Warm and Sticky and Nice.”
On the night of August 8, 1969, 26-year-old Sharon Tate had everything going for her. A harmless and pretty actress, she had married a tortured and brilliant successful film director—Roman Polanski. Her husband had just bought her a white Rolls Royce in England, and her only problem was that her red Ferrari in L.A. was out for repairs. Sharon was in the final stages of her pregnancy and she and Roman settled in a rented house in Los Angeles—not just any house, but one of those palatial, gated and walled estates with a swimming pool and guesthouse on the hillside of Bel Air. The house had been previously occupied by actress Candice Bergen and record and television producer Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son.
Feeling lonely while Polanski was finishing a script in England, Sharon Tate invited three of her friends to stay over at the house. They, too, were “beautiful people” in what today would be that Paris Hilton way: Abigail Folger, 25, the heiress to a multimillion-dollar coffee empire; Voytek Frykowski, 32, Folger’s lover and a friend of Polanski’s from Poland, and Jay Sebring, 35, a highly successful entertainment industry hairstylist and Tate’s former boyfriend.
They were vapid and wealthy but reasonably decent people. They were settling into their beds for an early night when what would later be described as a crazed, howling, drugged horde of murderous hippies vaulted the walls of the estate and butchered them all.
It was around 12:30 a.m. The doors of the house were locked, but the baby’s nursery had just been painted that day, and the window was left open to air the drying paint. The killers slit the screen in the window and wiggled into the house—“creepy crawling” was the term they used.
According to the summary given by authorities at Manson’s 1992 parole hearing:
Shortly before midnight on August 8, 1969, the prisoner [Manson] informed his crime partners that now is the time for helter skelter. The crime partners were directed to accompany Charles [“Tex”] Watson to carry out the orders given by the prisoner. The crime partners at the time were Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. As the crime partners were in the car getting ready to leave the area, the prisoner informed them, “You girls know what I mean,” something to which he instructed them to leave a sign. Crime partner Watson drove directly to 10050 Cielo Drive, where he stopped the car. Linda Kasabian held three knives and one gun during the trip. Watson then cut the overhead telephone wires at the scene and parked the vehicle.
Crime partners Atkins and Krenwinkel had been in the backseat with Linda Kasabian, the passenger in the right front seat. Watson then carried some rope over the hill and to the outer premises of 10050 Cielo Drive.
The vehicle containing victim Steven Parent approached the gate opening into the street. Watson stopped him at gunpoint and Parent stated, “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” Watson shot Parent five times and turned off the ignition of his car.
All of the crime partners then proceeded to the house where Watson cut a window screen. Linda Kasabian acted as a lookout while another female crime partner entered the residence through an open window and admitted the other crime partners.
Within the residence the prisoner’s crime partners, without provocation, logic, or reason, murdered Abigail Anne Folger by inflicting a total of twenty-eight multiple stab wounds on her body. Victim Voytek, count two, was killed by multiple stab wounds. A gunshot wound to his left back and multiple, forced trauma of a blunt nature to the head. Victim Sharon Tate Polanski was killed with multiple stab wounds. Victim Jay Sebring was killed by multiple stab wounds.
Jay Sebring was actually stabbed seven times and shot once; Voytek Frykowski was shot twice, received thirteen blows to the head, and was stabbed fifty-one times; Sharon Tate was stabbed sixteen times—her unborn child, was of course, dead. Sharon and Sebring were also hung by the neck from a rafter in the house before they were killed. Written in Tate’s blood on the front door of the house was a single word: “Pigs.”
Sharon Tate had been killed by 21-year-old Susan Atkins, nicknamed Sadie Mae Glutz. According to her own testimony, she held Tate in a headlock while the other victims were being stomped and stabbed. Then Sharon’s turn came. She begged Atkins not to kill her. Atkins testified: “She said, ‘Please let me go. All I want to do is have my baby.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Woman, I have no mercy for you.’ And I knew that I was talking to myself, not to her.”
In jail, bragging to a cellmate, Atkins was more effusive, saying that she looked Tate in the eyes and said, “Look, bitch, I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”
Atkins also revealed to her cellmate that she licked Sharon Tate’s blood off her fingers, “Wow, what a trip! I thought, ‘To taste death, and yet give life.’ Have you ever tasted blood? It’s warm and sticky and nice.”
Atkins dipped a towel into Tate’s blood, and wrote “Pigs” on the front door of the house with it. Atkins said she wanted to cut Sharon’s baby out of her womb and bring it back for Charlie, but that there just was not enough time. Atkins explained to her cellmate, “You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people…I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her.”
It would be a long time before the killers were identified. The massacre was a shocking news story, and in the subsequent days, all sorts of rumors of ritual or satanic rites were circulating in Bel Air and the Hollywood Hills. The fact that Polanski had just finished directing Rosemary’s Baby, a movie with a satanic theme, only heightened the speculation.
The LaBianca Murders
The next day, on August 10, at around 10:30 p.m. in Los Feliz, another upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles just east of Hollywood next to Griffith Park, police were called to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, the wealthy owners of a supermarket chain. Rosemary, age 38, was found in her bedroom, stabbed forty-one times in her back and buttocks. A lamp cord was wrapped around her neck and one of the knife blows had severed her spine. Her husband, Leno, age 44, was found downstairs in the living room, stabbed twelve times with a knife and fourteen times with a large serving fork. It was left protruding from his ample stomach. Across his abdomen, the word “War” had been crudely carved into his flesh. In his blood, the words “Death to Pigs” and “Rise” were written on the walls, and on the refrigerator door, “Helter Skelter.”
Again, according to Manson’s parole hearing record:
On August the 10th, 1969, the prisoner drove his crime partners to a location near the residence of victims Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. The prisoner entered the LaBianca home alone at gunpoint and tied up the victims.
He impressed them with the statement that they would not be harmed and that a robbery was taking place. He then returned to the vehicle containing his crime partners and then directed them to enter that residence and kill the occupants. He informed them not to notify the victims that they would be killed.
Crime partners Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, then entered the residence and the prisoner drove away from the scene. The crime partners entered the residence and in a callous manner killed Leno LaBianca by inflicting multiple stab wounds to his neck and abdomen. Rosemary LaBianca was killed by multiple stab wounds, which were inflicted to the neck and trunk [sic].
The crime partners carved the word “war” on Leno LaBianca’s stomach with the use of a carving fork. At both of the above murder scenes, the prisoner’s crime partners used blood of their victims to write the words.
Under case number A-267861, the prisoner was received into the institution on December 13th, 1971, for violation of first-degree murder concurrent with prior term.
The Murder of Gary Hinman
The Tate and LaBianca murders were not the only killings, nor were they the first ones.
[A] pistol, knives, and swords were used in the following crimes, which the prisoner committed with crime partners Beausoleil and Atkins and [Brunner] and Davis. The prisoner directed the crime partners to go to the home of victim Gary Allen Hinman and have him sign over his property. The crime partners followed the prisoner’s directions and on July 26th, 1969, they contacted the prisoner from the Hinman residence. Prisoner and Davis then went to the Hinman home and the prisoner struck Hinman with a sword, severing a part of the right ear and causing a laceration to the left side of his face from his ear to his mouth. The prisoner and Davis then drove away from the crime scene in Hinman’s automobile.
On July 27th, 1969, after suffering three days of torturous treatment, Hinman was killed by a stab wound through the heart, which was inflicted by Beausoleil.
When Hinman was found in the Topanga Canyon home on July 31st, 1969, he had been stabbed through the heart in addition to suffering a stab wound in the chest, a gash on the top of his head, a gash behind the right ear, and a laceration on the left side of his face, which cut his ear and cheek.
The complicity of so many young women in these brutally violent crimes mesmerized the media as did the image of the female Manson followers who were not charged and who loitered, chanting and singing and demonstrating outside the court building.
The Manson killings are an anomaly in the history of serial murder. Except for the murder of a drug dealer in a dispute, for which Manson was never charged, Manson did not physically kill any of the victims nor was he present at the moment of death of any of the murders. Two of the incidents were a type of serial mass murder—the people killed together in the Tate house and the LaBianca house. Some of the killers, while actually committing Manson’s serial murders, themselves personally killed only once, while others did not kill at all but participated as accomplices. The leading presence of a male in charge, Tex Watson, at the killings further clouds the issue. But in the end, three women were convicted of murder along with Manson, and today still sit in prison.
Who Was Charles Manson?
One cannot really begin to tell the women’s stories without telling Charlie’s first. The man the women followed had come from far away and had been kept locked up for decades before he burst on the scene. When Manson said at his trial that he went to jail when he was 8 years old, and got out when he was 32, that was not an exaggerated claim. The last time Manson had been released from prison, in March 1967, he was, in fact, 32 years old, and he had spent by then an accumulated total of seventeen years in various reformatories, jails, and prisons—more than half his life. He was 8 years old the first time he was arrested for theft, and he was 9 when he was confined to a reformatory.
It was not just how much time Manson did, but how and when he did it. Charlie likes to say he had gone to prison the last time on a ten-year sentence for attempting to steal $37.50. And it’s true. He tried to steal a check from a mailbox, and mail theft is a heavy federal offense. But his sentence was suspended. Then he went out and committed more offenses, so the sentence was automatically reinstated and he ended up serving seven years of it. Again—remember the warning: “Charlie has a way of taking the truth and making it into a lie.”
When they locked him up in 1959, Charlie was 24 years old and Eisenhower was President. When he got out in 1967, he was 32 and Kennedy was long dead. What more can one say? Manson had sat out in prison more than half of the sixties and more than half of his own twenties.
But Manson did not waste his time in prison. He learned Scientology techniques. The Church of Scientology looked into it after Charlie made the news. An internal document from the church’s security unit, seized by the FBI during an unrelated investigation and released through the Freedom of Information Act, reads as follows:
(22 June 1970)
Report of interview with Raul Morales, Re: Charles Manson.
According to Raul: Raul arrived in prison on McNeil Island, Washington, in 1962 and became a cellmate of Lafayette Raimer, allegedly a trained Scientology auditor (about Level I in Raul’s estimation) and was introduced to Scientology at that time. Raimer was auditing in prison at that time and in one ten-man cell had managed to gather a group of about seven, all in Scientology. Charles Manson entered later and studied, did TRO, etc., along with his cellmates and received approximately 150 hours of auditing from Raimer. Processes used were CCH’s, Help processes (Who have you helped—Who have you not helped), and other Dichotomy processes (Raul’s terms, such as What can you confront, what would you rather not confront), Havingness (such as What can you have? Look around and find something you can have. Look around and find something you’re not in.) Raimer kept records of his auditing. Manson got super-energetic & flipped out when he’d been audited and would, for a time, talk about nothing but Scientology to the extent that people avoided his company. After a while, however, Manson was screaming to get away from his auditor (in Raul’s opinion, he’d been severely overrun or something). He eventually managed to get put in solitary confinement to get away from his auditor. Eventually prison officials got suspicious of the group’s strange activities and broke up the group. Subsequently, Raul was released from the prison in 1965.
Raimer’s wife was in training here at the L.A. Org in 1965–66; she had disconnected from Raimer. Raul just found out yesterday that another friend, Marvin White, later sent Manson books (after the Scientology group was broken up) on hypnotism and black magic.241
Manson’s story gets wilder: at McNeil Island Penitentiary he also learned how to play the guitar. His teacher was Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, one of the few surviving gangsters of the classic era of Public Enemy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, and Machine Gun Kelly. Karpis had been a member of the murderous Ma Barker Gang and held the record for the longest imprisonment on Alcatraz Island. He had been in prison since 1936, serving a life sentence for bank robbery and kidnapping and had recently been transferred to McNeil Island where he met Manson. Karpis was a bad-boy talented guitar player and taught the eager Manson all he knew.
At 8:15 a.m. on March 21, 1967, Manson was released from Terminal Island Reformatory in Long Beach. One can wax all manner of lyric about what the world was like in 1959 when Charlie went in and what it had become by 1967 when he came out, but enough said.
He claims that he never wanted to be released. That he was content in prison. On his release, Charlie was given thirty-five dollars, exactly two dollars and fifty cents less than the amount for which he had been locked up seven years before. Manson was transported to nearby Los Angeles. He carried a little suitcase with the clothes in which he had been arrested, and rode the bus for three days. He slept on the buses until the drivers kicked him off. Manson said it kept reminding him of being kicked out of prison. Then, because he had some acquaintances in San Francisco, Manson headed north.
Charlie crash-landed in the epicenter of America’s counterculture movement—the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in March 1967 on the eve of the “Summer of Love,” when the hippie movement came into being. This was the time of Flower Power, Make Love Not War, Turn On / Tune In / Drop Out, peace rallies, sit-ins, love-ins, share-ins, guerrilla theater, communes, underground newspapers, Day-Glo posters, Owsley’s acid, and music and music and music. And Charlie hadn’t even smoked a joint yet—he had been strictly a Jack Daniel’s man. The rest of Manson’s history is pure legend, myth, and speculative bullshit.
Flowers and Acid—Manson in the Valley of Thousands of Plump White Rabbits
There are two versions of how Charlie Manson became. One is that he dropped LSD for the first time at a Grateful Dead concert at the Avalon Ballroom, curled up in the middle of the crowded dance floor into a fetal position, and was reborn, “innovating” to the music and drawing applause as he neuro-spun like a dervish acidhead.242
The other version is that a young girl named Nancy Hart, a petty check forger and would-be folk singer, introduced Manson to LSD. She says that she was sleeping in the park under a pile of blankets one spring night, when Manson approached her and asked if he could get in under with her, because “she was giving off this tremendous heat.”243
“Charlie wasn’t a great lover, but he acted out the role of it,” Hart recalled. “And he was a great con artist, perhaps the best I have ever seen or come across in the business. He went around with me and hung paper [passed bad checks] around San Francisco and he’d rap on all the con tricks he’d gathered. What he knew could blow minds…”
“We’d ball and he’d get bored with what we were doing, so he screwed me with a broom handle after he got tired and had me do it with a Coke bottle, both sides, and to myself so, while he jerked off. And he had me rap it all, like relating to him how I was experiencing and what it was that I felt from him—from his nearness, if you can dig it. On acid it was that especially, that no contact thing and his relating what was happening.”
When she gave Charlie his first tab of acid, Hart told him, “You’re already there, you don’t need it, but it’ll help straighten the currents.” After spending several days with Manson, Nancy Hart was arrested and Manson went on his own way.
Manson said, “My awareness after acid of what was going on became that much more enlightened. I was with them, part of them. We were all really a part of one another.”
LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide—acid. It was discovered in Switzerland in 1938, four years after Manson was born. It was of no interest to anybody and was filed away without any further testing. Then, on April 16, 1943, one of its discoverers, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a chemist working at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Basel, accidentally ingested a small amount of the substance. Hofmann later wrote in his notebook:
Last Friday…I had to interrupt my laboratory work in the middle of the afternoon and go home, because I was seized with a feeling of great restlessness and mild dizziness. At home, I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant delirium, which was characterized by extremely excited fantasies. In a semiconscious state, with my eyes closed (I felt the daylight to be unpleasantly dazzling), fantastic visions of extraordinary realness and with an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors assaulted me. After two hours this condition disappeared.244
LSD is classified as an hallucinogen—from the Latin halucinari (to wander mentally) and the Greek genes (to be born). It is also classified as a psychedelic—from the Greek psyche (soul) and delos (visible or evident).
Psychedelic drugs, those that make the “soul visible” can be found in natural substances, and have a long history of religious and mystical use among Mexican and Central American Indians prior to the arrival of Europeans. Peyote cactus buds, when chewed, produced a psychedelic effect. Mescaline is derived from peyote, and is named for the Mescalero Apaches, who first brought it north from Texas and New Mexico. Mescaline has fewer unpleasant side effects than peyote. Psilocybin produces similar psychedelic effects and is found in certain types of mushrooms—so-called “magic mushrooms,” which were also consumed in religious rituals by native Indians (and gobbled down today by new-agers in the northwest).
The effect of these substances is difficult to describe. First, time slows down. A minute feels like ten minutes, but one does not perceive things in slow motion. One’s way of thinking and brain functions are altered. One might see sounds and smell colors and hear smells and touch tastes. One might be able to look at oneself from the outside—make new connections between ideas and gain remarkable insights into oneself, if one is predisposed in that direction.
Among the Indians in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, peyote was used to treat alcoholism and to alleviate postmenopausal depression in women. Guided by Indian shamans, their awareness sensitized by the effects of peyote, many women who felt depressed about the passage of their childbearing capacities, found new meaning and hope in their existence.245 Unlike antidepressants, which chemically simulate a “happiness” that wears off with the drug, psychedelics focus natural thinking processes in a search for a cerebral discovery, which can remain fused in the psyche long after the drug is gone. It is said the drug can reveal a new path in one’s thinking process, which once learned, is not forgotten and is not dependent on further ingestion of the hallucinogenic substance. This is precisely why, during the 1950s and 1960s, LSD was adopted as a possible miracle drug by some psychiatrists.
LSD is about a hundred times more potent than peyote or mescaline. It is a very powerful drug that induces a psychedelic trip some ten hours in duration. Pharmaceutical LSD, only produced by Sandoz, was privately consumed in small, closed circles of psychiatric employees and their friends and relatives throughout most of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was unknown outside these circles.
In the meantime, Harvard instructor Timothy Leary was discovering psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1960. He said, “It was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man. You are never the same after you’ve had that one flash / glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you’ve had the veil drawn.”
Leary then turned to LSD, and in 1963 he began talking about it to the press. By 1965, thanks to Leary, it had become the demon drug and was banned and outlawed. Sandoz stopped making it and a whole army of small underground laboratories began manufacturing it. LSD became instantly popular.
In 1965, at a psychiatric conference on the therapeutic use of psychedelics, the following was reported about LSD and mescaline:
Under skilled treatment procedures, the hallucinogens do seem to produce these effects and one more, which is not often mentioned. That is a marked heightening of the patient’s suggestibility. Put in another way, the judgmental attitude of the patient toward the experience itself is diminished. This can be helpful, for insights are accepted without reservations and seem much more valid than under nondrug condition.246 [My emphasis.]
Charles Manson, a 32-year-old outlaw, who spent seventeen years in jail, was now into LSD, jacked up on Scientology, and musically fathered by Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. It was like North Korea with a nuke. The “Gardener” was loose among the flower children who were desperately looking for themselves during the great Summer of Love—especially the lost young women. And there was Charlie, all bullshit and rage, and now a pocketful of acid.
It is hard to say when Manson transformed himself into his long-haired, shaggy, hippie persona. On July 29, 1967, Manson was arrested on a minor charge of “interfering with a police officer.” It was nearly August of the great, hippie, flower-powered Summer of Love, but Manson’s mugshot that day shows him with his hair styled quite conservatively. It is slightly long and curly on the top and front in that late fifties greaser kind of way, but neatly barbershop-trimmed short around his ears and neck.
Manson was keeping his wits about him. He didn’t buy into any of it. Thirty years later, in 1997, he recalled:
When I got out last time, I knew it was all a bunch of rotten apples. But I didn’t figure I was any better than the worst of them, or any worse than the best. It’s the same fucking thing, it’s just a pile of shit anyway, so why not try to grow some flowers in it? That’s when I got out, and I went through these other things, and then I got trapped up in these kids of the sixties. But I’m not a kid of the sixties; I’m a kid of the forties. Bing Crosby was my hero, not Elvis Presley.247
Charlie Manson began homing in on young, impressionable flower kids emerging alone into a truly brave new world, a world that had never existed before for the young—especially the girls who were double-locked and chained by society’s old values, which discounted both youth and women exponentially. Charlie offered to throw off their chains, and nobody knew better, because there was nothing like the sixties before—not even the twenties. There were no rules—nothing from the past to compare the present to—anything seemed possible.
Charlie once said of those times:
I could see these people on the street—see them with clean eyes, you know. These people on the street were like me—thrown out of life like your paper coffee cups and hamburger sacks and rags and stinking Kotex pads and dirty rubbers. They were the garbage floating around and shit sticking to the sides of your toilet and your drain holes…I took these people that were your garbage that’d been thrown away by society, and I put them to use. I made them put water in cans and make things work in order to keep living on the outside.
Ed Sanders, from the band The Fugs, said that the Summer of Love in the Haight was free and beautiful, “but there was a weakness: from the standpoint of vulnerability the flower movement was like a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.”
When the whole hippie movement in Haight-Ashbury was overrun by speed freaks and bikers and got all nasty and syphilitic by the foggy cold autumn of 1967, Manson moved himself and his followers to warmer climes—down to Los Angeles.
Mary Theresa Brunner—the Manson Family Matriarch
In the spring of 1967, six months before the move, Manson was hanging out in front of the gates of the University of California at Berkeley, panhandling and playing his guitar. There he attached himself to a small poodle and then to the somewhat unattractive, bespectacled redhead walking it—23-year-old Mary Theresa Brunner. Born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on December 17, 1943, to parents John and Evelyn Brunner, Mary was a good Catholic girl, who graduated in history from the University of Wisconsin and had recently moved to California to accept a librarian’s position at the UC Berkeley Library.
Charlie charmed Mary on the spot, and with the hippie campus abandon of that spring of ’67 in her nostrils, Mary thought she’d take a taste. She invited the charismatic street musician to crash on the couch of her apartment. No sex—this was strictly platonic. Then Charlie starting bringing girls to her apartment for sex. And Mary, who by now was smitten, wanted some, too, and brought him into her bed. But Charlie kept on bringing girls home, first one, then two, and eventually there would be eighteen. That’s how the Family got started—with Mary Brunner. It was never called the “Manson Family”—that’s a media thing. They referred to themselves only as “the Family.”
Brunner would become the Family matriarch, nicknamed Maryoch or Mother Mary Manson. She would have a child by Manson, which he delivered himself and named Michael Pooh Hoo. She was one of the women that went to Hinman’s house and at least witnessed, if not participated, in his three-day torture before he was stabbed through the heart.
After Manson was convicted in the Tate-LaBianca murders, the ex-librarian was involved in a dramatic shootout in 1971 at a gun store in Los Angeles on South Hawthorne Boulevard. She and several accomplices had forced the clerks and customers to the floor and had loaded hundreds of powerful weapons into a van. The weapons were to supply a plan to rescue Manson from prison by hijacking a 747 jet, whose passengers would be killed one at a time, every hour, until Manson was released. But instead of fleeing, they began to argue amongst themselves as to whether they should kill all the people inside the store. By then, police responding to a silent alarm surrounded the store and there was a ten-minute gunfight before the robbers surrendered.
Brunner became involved with the Aryan Brotherhood (AB), an ultra-violent white-power convicts’ group. Several other Manson followers also moved on to the Aryan Brotherhood after Manson was sent away, and were close to the core founders of the AB. There developed a sort of Aryan Brotherhood breakaway faction of the Manson Family after 1970.
Brunner testified against the others on the Gary Hinman murder, and after serving some time for the Hawthorne gun store robbery while her parents took care of Pooh Hoo, she was released and subsequently vanished into obscurity in the Midwest to raise Charlie Manson’s son, who must be turning forty soon.
Lynette Alice Fromme—Squeaky
Mary Brunner was joined by a second female recruit, a studious teenage girl from Redondo Beach, the slender, freckle-faced Lynette Alice Fromme, who became known as “Squeaky.” Resembling Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Fromme was 17 when her unusually domineering father kicked her out of the house.
Lyn was born on October 22, 1948, to Helen Fromme and her husband, William, an aeronautic engineer employed in the Los Angeles aircraft industry. She had a younger brother and sister. She was a talented and smart girl, averaging B plus and A minus during most of her academic career. She was an editor of the high school yearbook and an “expert” on the poet Dylan Thomas. But at home her father was rigidly controlling, specifically of her. She would inexplicably be subjected to stringent codes of conduct and made to eat separately from the rest of the family members.
Lyn ran away from home several times, but would return, reconciling with her mother and controlling father. By 1966, she was hitchhiking up and down the California coast, drinking, dropping acid, and having sex, which she found unsatisfactory. In 1967, she returned home and enrolled in El Camino College, signing up for French, theater arts, psychology, and modern dance. Her plan was to keep her grades up and transfer the next year to the University of California. But she had a final break with her crazy father instead. “We argued over some kind of definition from the dictionary, that’s how dumb it was,” she later said. “His way or no way. I said, ‘yes, but,’ and he said, ‘yes but nothing.’”248
Taking nothing but her schoolbooks, Lyn walked out of her home with no place to go. She hitchhiked down to Venice Beach. At Manson’s sentencing hearing, she would testify, “I was in Venice, sitting down on a curb crying, when a man walked up and said, ‘Your father kicked you out of the house, did he?’ And that was Charlie.”
They spoke only for a few minutes. Charlie played the wise, fatherly figure for her, telling her, “The way out of a room is not through the door. Just don’t want out, and you’re free.” Cool, thought Lyn.
Charlie told her he was heading up north back to San Francisco. She could join him if she wanted to. When? Right now, he told her. Lyn was a little incredulous and Manson said, “I can’t make up your mind for you,” and walked off. Lyn had only three more weeks to go on her freshman semester. She said that she grabbed her books and ran to catch up with him.
Lyn joined Manson and Mary Brunner, who had by now quit her job as a librarian, and with her last paycheck financed a trip for the three of them to Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. There they rented a small cabin near the ocean and Charlie began to work his sex magic, breaking down both Mary’s and Lyn’s taboos, eventually taking them both to bed. After the stupid sex Lyn had been having with her clumsy high school lovers, sex with Manson was mind-blowing, she recalled. He led her to discover her clitoris—“a tiny, hard, supersensitive thing,” she said. He was the first lover who had performed oral sex on her.
Manson told the bright 17-year-old, “The fact is that if a man loves, he makes a woman feel like the most beautiful creature in the whole world. And if a woman loves, she can accept and feel all of his love, making one love, in one motion, of all feeling at once.”
Lyn testified on his behalf, “Charlie is our father in that he would—he would point out things to us. I would crawl off in a corner and be reading a book, and he would pass me and tell me what it said in the book…And also he knew our thoughts…He was always happy, always. He would go into the bathroom sometimes to comb his hair, and there would be a whole crowd of people in there watching him because he had so much fun.”
Squeaky did not go out on the 1969 killings, but six years later she tried to make up for it. In September 1975, in Sacramento, armed with a loaded .45 semiautomatic handgun, Squeaky rushed at President Gerald Ford and got within two feet of him, before being subdued by the Secret Service. She was quickly put on trial, and in November, sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate the President.
Squeaky’s life sentence is sort of like Manson’s seven years for the theft of $37.50. Few people believe that Squeaky wanted to actually shoot Ford. In fact, while there were four bullets in the handgun’s magazine, there was no round chambered in the breech—which means that Squeaky could have pulled the trigger as many times as she wanted, but the gun would not fire. She would have to jack back the slide and chamber a round before the weapon would work. Lyn was familiar with weapons, so it is unlikely that she was ignorant of the necessary procedure to properly load the .45. On the other hand, she could have been stressed or drugged out, and just forgot to chamber a round—it can happen. And if she meant no harm, why was the weapon loaded? Many feel, however, that Lynette Fromme should have been convicted of assault at worst. She is still in prison today, almost 60 years old at this writing.
Susan Atkins—Sexy Sadie Mae Glutz
Susan Atkins, who became known as Sexy Sadie Mae Glutz, was 21 at the time of the murders and perhaps the most vicious of all the Family members. After chasing one of the escaping victims across the lawn at Cielo Drive and cutting him down, she then returned to the house to stab to death the eight-and-a-half-months pregnant Sharon Tate.
Susan Atkins was born in San Gabriel, California, on May 7, 1948. She was the middle child and only girl among the three siblings. The family, apparently, had problems with alcohol, and authorities once tried to take the children away. She was a religious girl, sang in the church choir, was a member of the Girl Scouts, and was a good student in primary school.
Susan, however, felt that she was left out of the family, with her parents preferring her brothers: her mother the youngest, her father the eldest. Atkins herself said, “I didn’t like my mother. She tried to get along with me, but I just refused to get along with her. I didn’t like my father either. Didn’t like either one of them. I didn’t like my mother because she was an alcoholic…my father also was an alcoholic, used to beat my mother up.”249
In 1963, when Susan was 15, her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Susan and the church choir sang beneath her dying mother’s bedroom window. About her mother’s death, however, relatives recall, “Susan had an almost indifferent air about it.”
After her mother’s death, Susan began to run wild. A friend of Susan’s stated, “She just didn’t seem to care. Like when her mother died, she didn’t show any real sadness about it. I don’t think Susan cared about anything very much. There was something wrong with her.”
Atkins left home when she was 18—“On the day,” she says. She held a few menial jobs, but mostly she turned to crime. Susan was arrested for car theft and put on probation. She committed a number of petty crimes and frequented the company of armed robbers. In San Francisco, she worked as a topless dancer and lived in a communal house. She also got into Satanism. According to her psychiatric report, read into the record at her sentencing hearing, Atkins, in 1966:
…entered into what she now calls her Satanic period. She became involved with Anton LaVey, the Satanist.* She took a part in a commercial production of a witch’s sabbath,† and recalls the opening night when she took LSD. She was supposed to lie down in a coffin during the act, and lay down in it while hallucinating. She stated that she didn’t want to come out, and consequently the curtain was fifteen minutes late. She stated that she felt alive and everything else in the ugly world was dead. Subsequently, she stayed on her “Satanic trip” for approximately eight months.
One day in the summer of 1967, when Atkins was 19, she met Charlie at a party. Atkins recalled that Manson was singing and playing his guitar and that she was mesmerized by his voice and lyrics:
And when he finished his song, I asked him if I could play his guitar. He just handed it to me without saying anything.
I looked at it and put my hand on it, and I plucked it. I knew only one chord. I thought to myself, “I can’t play this.”
I just thought that to myself, didn’t say it out loud. But he turned around and looked at me, straight in the eye, and he said: “You can play that guitar if you want to.”
I just looked at him, and I immediately knew who he was and what he was there for. In other words, what he was there for was to show me he was inside my head. There was no way I could get away from it.
And, wow, nothing like this ever happened before—and it blew my mind. I was just with him from then on.250
Several days later, Manson returned for Atkins:
He told me he wanted to make love with me. Well, I acknowledged the fact that I wanted to make love with him and he told me to take off my clothes. So I uninhibitedly took off my clothes, and there happened to be a full-length mirror and I turned away and he says, “Go ahead and look at yourself, there is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect. You always have been perfect.” He says…“You were born perfect and everything that has happened to you from the time you were a child all the way up to this moment has happened perfectly. You have made no mistakes. The only mistakes you have made are the mistakes that you thought you made. They were not mistakes…”
He asked me if I ever made love with my father. I looked at him and kind of giggled and I said, “No.” And he said, “Have you ever thought about making love to your father?” I said, “Yes, I thought I would like to make love with my father.” And he told me, he said, “All right, when we are making love imagine in your imagination that I am your father and, in other words, picture in your mind that I am your father.” And I did, I did so, and it was a very beautiful experience.251
Manson was giving little Suzy Atkins a pseudo-Scientologist total mind-and-body fuck.
Susan Atkins became Sexy Sadie Mae Glutz. She had a child by somebody from the Family, which Manson also delivered. The little boy was named Zo Zo Ze Ze Zadfrack (or according to other sources, as if it makes a difference, Zezo Zece Zadfrack).
Before Susan Atkins joined in on the murders at Cielo Drive, she had already participated in the torture and murder of Gary Hinman on July 26, 1969. Thirty-two-year-old Hinman taught music in L.A. and was working on his Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA. He was a member of the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist sect and owned several cars and a Volkswagen camper. Hinman was fairly well known in Topanga Canyon, and hitchhikers and hippies often stayed at his house, as did Manson in 1968. Hinman may or may not have been manufacturing synthetic mescaline.
According to witnesses, on Friday, July 25, Bobby Beausoleil, a new male member of the Family, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins went to Hinman’s house armed with a handgun and knives. They demanded money from him and ownership papers to his cars. Hinman refused, whereupon the trio began to beat him. When they had no success getting what they wanted, they telephoned Manson.
Manson arrived brandishing a sword and demanding that Hinman turn over the cars and money to him. When Hinman refused, Manson struck him with the sword, cleaving his ear in two and cutting a deep wound into his jaw. Hinman quickly handed over the keys to his cars and Manson drove off in one of them, telling the girls to sew Hinman’s wound up, and to continue attempting to extract cash from him.
Atkins and Brunner stitched Hinman’s wound with dental floss and then proceeded to torture him all day Saturday and into Sunday. They would take turns sleeping. On Sunday, Hinman had still failed to relinquish any money. At that point, Beausoleil telephoned Manson again, who allegedly said, “You know what to do,” or “You know what to do. Kill him—he’s no good to us,” or “He knows too much.”
Manson steadfastly denies he gave any instructions to kill Hinman:
It would come from the witness stand that when on the telephone the only thing that ever connected me with Hinman’s murder was Beausoleil called me and asked me what to do and I told him, “You know what to do.” I didn’t tell him like [raising voice], “You know what to do.” I told him, “Man, you’re a man, grow up, juvenile. Don’t ask me what to do. Stand on your own two feet. Be responsible for your own actions. Don’t ask me what to do.”252
Shouting, “Society doesn’t need you—you’re a pig! It’s better this way. I’m your brother,” Beausoleil stabbed Hinman four times. As Hinman bled to death, one of the girls gave him his prayer beads and Hinman chanted, “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo—Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” the chant of his Buddhist sect.
Hinman lost consciousness, but continued to breathe. Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner then took turns holding a pillow over his face until he suffocated. Using his blood, they wrote, “Death to Piggies,” on the wall and attempted to stage the scene to look like some kind of Black Panther hit. They even made a crude cat’s paw print on the wall.* They left with the remainder of Hinman’s vehicles.
Charlie’s Apocalypse
In the days between the Hinman murder and the Tate murders, Manson was north of Los Angeles, driving up the coast in a 1952 Hostess Twinkies bakery truck. A series of witnesses and a traffic citation pinpoint his travels.
Manson was up in Big Sur at the Esalen Institute. Esalen was (and is today) a personal “growth center” and luxury resort for wealthy clients from San Francisco and Los Angeles, offering seminars in all sorts of alternative Eastern and Western philosophies presented by various guest speakers. The subject matter ranged from yoga to satanism. Abigail Folger often stayed at the Esalen Institute.
Manson traveled in high Hollywood movie and music circles. He was a guest for the longest time in Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson’s home, had met producer Phil Kaufman when Kaufman was in prison for a marijuana possession charge, and Kaufman promised to produce Manson’s record, LIES (and did so in 1970 after Manson went on trial). Manson has a whole history of broken deals and screwed-up opportunities with heavy players in the film and music industries. The industry was liberating itself of the old studio mogul dinosaurs, getting closer to the youth in the street. A lot of doors were open for a guy like Manson. (The Beach Boys had actually recorded one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” which appears on their 20/20 album as “Never Learn Not to Love.”)
Manson visited Esalen on numerous occasions, taking seminars himself, using their hot tubs and springs and looking for recruits. This last visit to Esalen, however, did not go well for Manson, according to witness Paul Watson, who testified that Manson had said he went “to Esalen and played his guitar for a bunch of people who were supposed to be the top people there, and they rejected his music. Some people pretended that they were asleep and other people were saying, ‘This is too heavy for me,’ and ‘I’m not ready for that,’ and others were saying, ‘Well, I don’t understand it,’ and some just got up and walked out.”253
Manson rolled back into Los Angeles on Friday morning, August 8, 1969, feeling exposed and rejected after the experience in Esalen and in one dark and heavy mood. Sharon Tate and her friends had just a little over twelve hours left to live.
In the preceding six months, Manson had gone apocalyptic with the Family, purchasing dune buggies and planning to hide out in Death Valley when the race war he predicted between blacks and whites broke out. He was feeding his followers pure hatred and fear. The prosecution would claim Manson called it Helter Skelter, inspired by the Beatles song on the White Album. Maybe.
Or maybe Charlie’s brain just melted with drugs and paranoia and Hollywood bullshit—calls not returned, promised deals vanished into smoke. Manson would say anything that came to him with his moods and drugs and forget the next day, but according to Tex Watson, another trusted male member of the Family, Manson specifically told him that afternoon to go to producer Terry Melcher’s former house at Cielo Drive, and murder anybody he found there as a warning to Melcher. Manson had had some kind of music deal going with Melcher that had gone bad. Manson knew that Melcher no longer lived there and that Sharon Tate occupied the house. He ordered Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel to accompany Tex and do what he told them.
Patricia Krenwinkel—Big Patty
Patricia Krenwinkel was 18 years old when she met Manson. She was a former Presbyterian Sunday school teacher and an avid Bible reader. She was extremely homely—a manly face, excess body hair, and as revealed when she later shaved her head, jug-handle ears. She became known as Big Patty, Katie, or Yellow.
Krenwinkel grew up in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles. Her father, Joe, was an insurance agent and her mother a housewife who was active in church and community programs. She did well in high school and attended one semester of the Jesuit Springfield College in Mobile, Alabama. After her arrest her parents described her as a perfect, normal, happy, clever, studious, pious, well-behaved child who enjoyed her family life, school and church activities, and was never in trouble. “Pat was very enthusiastic about reading the Bible…Never saw her hostile or angry…never saw her fight…never saw her cruel to animals…never saw her physically violent…not a person with a quick temper…If she awakened first in the morning, when she was still in her crib, she was doing little drawings or playing with little things…she would play with them and not create a disturbance. She would not cry for anyone to get her up or to do anything for her…I never had any trouble with her…never disrespectful…was a model child…never in trouble with the police…never received a traffic ticket.”254
Creepy!
At Cielo Drive, the former Sunday school teacher chased Abigail Folger out onto the lawn in front of the house and stabbed her twenty-eight times, as Folger whimpered, “Stop, I am already dead.” The next night at the LaBianca house, she stabbed Rosemary so hard that she severed her spine. She then stuck a serving fork into Leno LaBianca’s stomach and “pinged” it to watch the fork wobble.
She would describe to her prison psychiatrists a much less rosy picture of herself as a child than the one painted by her parents. She said she always felt unwanted and unloved and perceived herself as ugly and hairy (which one might argue she was). Feeling overweight, she crash-dieted when she was 14. She said that she was completely mind-controlled by her parents, internalizing her “bad” repulsive self while maintaining an artificially pious and obedient exterior. The need to suppress her real self made her angry, which she also needed to repress and conceal.
Her parents divorced when Patricia was 13 but they claim, “It did not involve the children. It was a very quiet something—very personal, and it was nothing that the children would have any part in or be hurt by it.” More wishful fantasy.
Krenwinkel met Manson and Mary Brunner through her half-sister, with whom she was sharing an apartment and who was a heroin addict. (Another product of a perfect childhood under their roof that the parents fantasized about. Her sister would later die of an overdose.)
Patricia recalled that when she met Manson he told her that everything would be all right. He liberated her secret self. Manson was the first man to make love to her with the lights on—to her hairy, “bad” self. She said, “I cried that first night with my head in his lap. He was like my dad. It got pure, it was so good…I told him, I’ve got to go wherever you go.” And she did.
Linda Kasabian—Yana the Witch
A new recruit to the Family, Linda Kasabian, was sent to accompany Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel to the Tate murders. Linda had the only valid driver’s license among them. Linda was born on June 21, 1949, in Biddeford, Maine. Her parents divorced and remarried when Linda was still young. She grew up in Milford, New Hampshire.
Kasabian recalled, “My mother and father fought a lot. My first recollection of childhood was sitting on a couch crying…My father finally left the house for good after we had moved to New Hampshire. My mother insisted that he buy me some shoes before he left and he refused. But as he went out he slipped some pennies into my hand.”
She remembers her father driving around to the house to see her later. He always had another woman in the car and Linda instinctively hated her.
“My mother and I grew close…She’d fix up my banana curls and dress me in a pinafore and take me around, showing me off to everybody. My father used to beat her on the behind as she stooped over the washing machine…But my stepfather was worse. His name was Byrd and he had children of his own and he was always telling my mother how much better his kids were. I screamed at my stepfather one day. I said, ‘You hate me, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I hate you all right.’ And I flipped. I just flipped.”
In grade school, Linda was a cheerleader and a star athlete. Then her recollections take a slight twist, almost sounding like Aileen Wuornos’s childhood:
We used to go down to the river and strip. There were boys and girls and we’d all roll in the sand and feed the ducks and have a ball. But there was this kid, Larry, with the big bug eyes. He liked me and I guessed I liked him, too. But we wouldn’t let him come down to the river with us and this made him mad and one day he went to our teacher and then there was trouble. Then one day a girl I knew called me a dirty little river girl. But the boys liked me. Maybe because they thought of me as a river girl.255
When Linda turned 16 she dropped out from high school and got married but soon divorced. After meeting a hippie named Robert Kasabian she married a second time and the couple traveled the country staying at various communes. In March 1968, Linda gave birth to her first child, Tanya. The following year the couple were living in Topanga Canyon with Charles Melton, who was acquainted with some Manson Family members. When her marriage with Robert was disintegrating in 1969, Linda paid a visit to her friends at the Spahn’s Ranch, where the Family was based. After spending a day with Manson, Linda returned to Topanga Canyon, packed her belongings, and after stealing five thousand dollars from Melton, left Robert to join the Family.
When the murders took place, she stood watch outside the house and later testified against the accused in exchange for immunity. After Linda was released, she reconciled with Kasabian and moved to New Hampshire where she had another child.
In a 1971 interview, she claimed to be a Jesus freak, telling the report, “Freedom is a union with that man,” pointing to a picture of Jesus above a mattress that served as her bed.
In 1996, police arrested Linda and one of her daughters during a raid in which a gun and drugs were seized. Linda’s daughter, aka “Lady Dangerous,” was charged with possession of cocaine and sentenced to a year in prison. Linda Kasabian was found in possession of methamphetamine but stayed out of jail after agreeing to attend drug-counseling.256
Before sending them out to Cielo Drive, Manson told the girls to leave a sign at the house: “Something witchy.” With Tex and Atkins snorted-up on speed (without Manson’s knowledge—he despised amphetamines) and Kasabian and Krenwinkel stoned on who-knows-what, they drove in a 1959 Ford through the San Fernando Valley Friday night traffic up the back of the Hollywood Hills. The high hills at night are a magical place. Viewed from the dark and relatively rural heights, the lights of Los Angeles below stretch out forever on both sides to the horizons like a vast, twinkling, electric ocean. After crossing Mulholland Drive on the ridge of the hills, they rolled down the other side along North Beverly Glen Boulevard into Bel Air, turning east into a tangle of hillside streets just before Sunset Boulevard. They parked the car down the hill from the Cielo Drive gate and proceeded on foot, carrying with them a change of clothes, rope, knives, and a gun. They were all wearing black clothes that Charlie had them purchase for “creepy crawling,” where they would practice trespassing across people’s property in the middle of the night without being detected.
Kasabian understood little of what was going on inside the house while she stood guard outside in the bushes. She heard shouts and the sounds of a scuffle. At one point, she saw Voytek Frykowski burst out of the house, screaming, blood streaming from his body. He was chased down by Susan Atkins and Tex, who both stabbed at him with their knives. Frykowski tried to stay on his feet, clutching a garden lamppost, like a wounded animal surrounded by a killing pack. Finally, he crumpled to the lawn with thirteen separate blunt-trauma injuries to his head, two gunshot wounds, and fifty-one stab wounds.
When Kasabian saw Abigail Folger run out of the house, her white see-through nightgown a sticking-wet red, and chased by Krenwinkel wielding a knife and butchering her on the lawn, she had had enough. She left the Cielo Drive property and walked outside to sit in the car. Ten minutes later, she saw Tex, Atkins, and Krenwinkel descending the hill, like zombies, their dark clothes soaking wet and their hands and faces stained with red.
Leslie Van Houten—LuLu with No Nickname
The next night, Charlie, Tex, and Krenwinkel drove out to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Accompanying them was yet another female member of the Family—19-year-old Leslie Van Houten. Another “perfect” child from a Presbyterian family, Leslie was a Bluebird, Campfire Girl, and a member of a girls’ religious group called Job Daughters. She was the youngest of two children. When she was seven, her parents adopted two Korean orphans.
Again, the family is portrayed as religious, an ideal family, but Leslie’s father actually had problems with alcoholism. The marriage was on the rocks. When Leslie was 14, her parents divorced.
Leslie did well in school and was popular. She had been elected Homecoming Queen at her high school. But she led a double life. She began smoking marijuana, still something rare for middle-class kids back then. She became pregnant and had an abortion.
She graduated from business school, but never sought any work afterward. She ended up in San Francisco and hooked up with Bobby Beausoleil, the handsome star of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. Beausoleil was socializing with Manson and was slowly being drawn into the Family. When he finally submitted to Charlie, he brought Leslie Van Houten with him.
Van Houten felt overlooked by Manson, who did not give her a nickname like the other girls. Moreover, he handed her off to be Watson’s woman, which upset her even more. When she heard the girls who had gone to Cielo drive describe the murders they had committed, she decided she wanted to go the next time to prove her devotion to Manson. She got her opportunity the next night.
After Manson went into the house by himself and subdued Rosemary and Leno LeBianca at gunpoint, he departed, leaving them tied-up and at the mercy of Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. After murdering Leno, they tied an electrical cord around Rosemary’s throat. As Watson and Krenwinkel stabbed her, Van Houten held her down with a pillow over her head. She then assisted them in cleaning the house of evidence and writing “witchy” slogans on the walls and refrigerator. She finally earned a nickname—LuLu.
Manson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, and Atkins were tried together and sentenced to death, but the sentences were commuted when the death penalty was temporarily suspended in 1970. One can surf the Internet and find complete transcripts of their parole hearings. Atkins claims to have found Jesus in a big way, while the other women found him in a small way. They are all sorry, boohoo. They are all up for their umpteenth parole hearing in 2006 and 2007. It’s unlikely they will be released.
Manson rages on. For a while, he had his own website, ATWA.com, but it got pulled and a WHOIS search shows it as “locked” but available for sale. What isn’t these days? Now others run it for him under different URLs, linking into archival caches of the former site.
The Method to Charlie’s Madness
Charlie Manson demanded absolute obedience from the people around him. His word was never questioned. At first one might suspect that it was the drugs, especially the LSD that broke down the will of his disciples—but it wasn’t. It was the sex. Dr. David Smith, who worked at the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic and saw the Manson group, said, “A new girl in Charlie’s Family would bring with her a certain middle-class morality. The first thing Charlie did was to see that all this was worn down. That way he was able to eliminate the controls that normally govern our lives.”257 Manson’s girls had become his followers, not despite their middle-class background and education, but because of it.
Manson controlled the men in the Family through the girls. The girls often lured the men to his circle, and afterward it was on Manson’s command whether the girls would have sex with the men or not. Manson also liked young men in his group, to lure other girls, because he knew that as an older man he often scared young girls away.
Nor was Manson above using physical violence with any female that disobeyed him. He was particularly abusive of a 13-year-old girl by the name of Dianne Lake, nicknamed “Snake” for the way she moved when she made love. Her parents had already gone hippie, living on various communes, and had no objections to her joining the Family. Manson was seen beating her with a chair leg once, and with an electric cord another time. (After Manson was sent away to prison, Snake was adopted by a district attorney, returned to school, and today is a vice-president of a bank. I’m not sure how happy an ending that is.)
Manson orchestrated group sex sessions. One witness said, “Everything was done at Charlie’s direction.” He would dance with his followers trailing behind him like a train, stripping off their clothes. Manson would liberally distribute LSD and peyote and the Family would huddle into a group grope, with Charlie giving directions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture, but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”
Manson would use sex to break down people’s “hang-ups.” He sodomized the 13-year-old Lake in front of the group and performed fellatio on a young man to show he had no hang-ups himself.
But there was more to it than that. Sometimes it’s the times. Today, a Charlie Manson running his kind of game might at best get a shrug and a laugh. But the sixties were a very special time—a type of loss of virginity for an entire generation of Leave It to Beaver kids, who found themselves not only dropping acid, smoking pot, and having sex, but also dying in Vietnam, in civil rights actions, and in campus protests, clubbed and killed by their Father Knows Best elders. Unlike the “lost generation” of young men who returned from the First World War and fueled the rebellion of the twenties, the sixties’ kids mostly stayed close to home—their traumas unfolded not on the battlefield, but in their hushed, closed suburban homes, and it encompassed young men and women alike. The hypocrisy of the times was crushing. A figure like Charlie Manson was truly a Christlike savior in their eyes. He was something new. It was no coincidence how many of the women who joined Manson grew up in religious households. The entire ethos of modern California is built on the search for a new spirituality, and Manson was one of its epicenters.
Manson said at his sentencing:
You eat meat with your teeth and you kill things that are better than you are, and in the same respect you say how bad and even killers that your children are. You make your children what they are. I am just a reflection of every one of you…These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.258
That might be the one truth Charlie never turned into a lie.