Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby brekin » Thu Sep 11, 2014 3:20 pm

justdrew » Thu Sep 11, 2014 2:13 am wrote:ya know, I kinda find it creepy that someone would find that pic creepy. I mean, wtf :shrug:

if you really want to find something creepy, I recommend his calypso album...



it takes a lickin' and keeps on tic'in

probably my favorite song from...


You are confusing Robert Mitchum with Dean Martin.
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Bride of Manson

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Nov 20, 2014 5:04 pm

IanEye » Wed Nov 20, 2013 6:09 pm wrote:.

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gonna get a hip hop haircut
hey now now
hey now now
gonna get a hip hop haircut


Charles Manson, perhaps the most infamous convicted killer of all time, is 79 years old and still locked up in California's Corcoran State Prison, where he walks with a cane and sports chipped prison dentures.
Star is a 25-year-old brunette who's been loyally visiting Manson in jail since she was 19 years old and maintains several websites devoted to defending Manson and his pro-Earth environmental causes.
And according to an astonishingly in-depth new profile by Rolling Stone contributing editor Erik Hedegaard in our new issue that was nearly two years in the making, the pair could be heading down the aisle.

Sort of.

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The Bride Of Manson: At 80, Charles Manson To Marry 26-Year-Old

Airdate: 11/18/2014

Charles Manson, who just turned 80, will exchange vows behind bars with a 26-year-old woman.

Afton Elaine Burton is her name, but she goes by Star. She's so obsessed with the convicted killer, she moved to the town of Corcoran, California, to be near her beloved's prison.

Star said in a video, "Why is that whenever anyone thinks of the name Charles Manson, they think of somebody that is crazy?"

INSIDE EDITION caught up with Star's mother, Melissa Burton, of Bunker Hill, Illinois. She will not be attending the wedding.

Melissa said, “She's not a freak at all."

INSIDE EDITION asked, "Will any family members be attending the wedding?"

"No," replied Melissa.

Star professed her devotion to Manson in a taped interview with Associated Press reporter Scott Smith.

Smith asked, "You love him I suppose, right?"

"Yeah. Of course," replied Star.

Smith told INSIDE EDITION, "She's obviously a believer who thinks Charles Manson is wrongly convicted."

There's proof that wedding bells will ring for the monster behind the murder of actress Sharon Tate and six other people in 1969. There is a marriage license number, an application date, the groom's name and the bride's name appear on the application.

Here's what we know about the Manson prison nuptials. They're allowed ten guests, none of them inmates, and no conjugal visits allowed.

One of those 10 guests will be Jason Freeman, a martial arts cage fighter who is Charles Manson’s grandson. He runs a charity called Frontline Warriors.

Freeman told INSIDE EDITION’s Les Trent, "She seems extremely sweet. It'll be my first day to meet my grandfather and my grandmother, even though she is 12 years younger than me."

See More of Freeman's Interview with INSIDE EDITION

Trent asked, "Do you understand that the families of the victims are outraged that your grandfather is being permitted to get married?"

"Everybody's got an opinion. I got mine, they got theirs. Just got to move forward," said Freeman.

Bride-to-be Star Burton was once Employee of the Month at McDonald’s. A far cry from an image of Star, in which she's got a cross on her forehead apparently in solidarity with Manson’s notorious swastika.

Her mother said, "We love her with all of our hearts. She is my daughter."
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Ich bin Charlie.

Postby IanEye » Thu Jan 08, 2015 12:10 pm

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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Mon Mar 16, 2015 3:06 pm

‘Then It All Came Down’: Truman Capote Interviews Bobby Beausoleil. San Quentin, 1973.

https://capote.wordpress.com/2011/05/14 ... ntin-1973/

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Scene: A cell in a maximum-security cell block at San Quen­tin prison in California. The cell is furnished with a single cot, and its permanent occupant, Robert Beausoleil, and his visitor are required to sit on it in rather cramped positions. The cell is neat, uncluttered; a well-waxed guitar stands in one corner. But it is late on a winter afternoon, and in the air lingers a chill, even a hint of mist, as though fog from San Francisco Bay had infiltrated the prison itself.

Despite the chill, Beausoleil is shirtless, wearing only a pair of prison-issue denim trousers, and it is clear that he is satisfied with his appearance, his body particularly, which is lithe, feline, in well-toned shape considering that he has been incarcerated more than a decade. His chest and arms are a panorama of tattooed emblems: feisty dragons, coiled chrysanthemums, uncoiled serpents. He is thought by some to be exceptionally good-looking; he is, but in a rather hustlerish camp-macho style. Not surprisingly, he worked as an actor as a child and appeared in several Hollywood films; later, as a very young man, he was for a while the protege of Kenneth Anger, the experimental film-maker (Scorpio Rising) and au­thor (Hollywood Babylon); indeed, Anger cast him in the title role of Lucifer Rising, an unfinished film.

Robert Beausoleil, who is now thirty-one, is the real mys­tery figure of the Charles Manson cult; more to the point­and it’s a point that has never been clearly brought forth in accounts of that tribe-he is the key to the mystery of the homicidal escapades of the so-called Manson family, notably the Sharon Tate-Lo Bianca murders.

It all began with the murder of Gary Hinman, a middle-aged professional musician who had befriended various members of the Manson brethren and who, unfortunately for him, lived alone in a small isolated house in Topanga Can­yon, Los Angeles County. Hinman had been tied up and tortured for several days (among other indignities, one of his ears had been severed) before his throat had been mercifully and lastingly slashed. When Hinman’s body, bloated and abuzz with August flies, was discovered, police found bloody graffiti on the walls of his modest house (“Death to Pigs!”)­graffiti similar to the sort soon to be found in the households of Miss Tate and Mr, and Mrs. Lo Bianco.

However, just a few days prior to the Tate-Lo Bianco slayings, Robert Beausoleil, caught driving a car that had been the property of the victim, was under arrest and in jail, accused of having murdered the helpless Mr. Hinman. It was then that Manson and his chums, in the hopes of freeing Beausoleil, conceived the notion of committing a series of homicides similar to the Hinman affair; if Beausoleil was still incarcerated at the time of these killings, then how could he be guilty of the Hinman atrocity? Or so the Manson brood reasoned. That is to say, it was out of devotion to “Bobby” Beausoleil that Tex Watson and those cutthroat young ladies, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Hooten, sallied forth on their satanic errands.

RB: Strange. Beausoleil. That’s French. My name is French. It means Beautiful Sun. Fuck. Nobody sees much sun inside this resort. Listen to the foghorns. Like train whistles. Moan, moan. And they’re worse in the summer. Maybe it must be there’s more fog in summer than in winter. Weather. Fuck it, I’m not going anywhere. But just listen. Moan, moan. So what’ve you been up to today?

TC: Just around. Had a little talk with Sirhan.

RB (laughs): Sirhan B. Sirhan. I knew him when they had me up on the Row. He’s a sick guy. He don’t belong here. He ought to be in Atascadero. Want some gum? Yeah, well, you seem to know your way around here pretty good. I was watching you out on the yard. I was surprised the warden lets you walk around the yard by yourself. Somebody might cut you.

TC: Why?

RB: For the hell of it. But you’ve been here a lot, huh? Some of the guys were telling me.

TC: Maybe half a dozen times on different research projects.

RB: There’s just one thing here I’ve never seen. But I’d like to see that little apple-green room. When they railroaded me on that Hinman deal and I got the death sentence, well, they had me up on the Row a good spell. Right up to when the court abolished the death penalty. So I used to wonder about the little green room.

TC: Actually, it’s more like three rooms.

RB: I thought it was a little round room with a sort of glass sealed igloo hut set in the center. With windows in the igloo so the witnesses standing outside can see the guys choking to death on that peach perfume.

Tc: Yes, that’s the gas-chamber room. But when the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a “holding” room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this “holding” room, two, in case it’s a double execution. They’re ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execu­tion in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards. But the interesting thing I discovered was that there’s a third room in this little suite. It’s behind a closed door right next to the “holding” cell. I just opened the door and walked in and none of the guards that were with me tried to stop me. And it was the most haunting room I’ve ever seen. Because you know what’s in it? All the left­overs, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the “holding” cells. Books. Bibles and Western paperbacks and Erle Stanley Gardner, James Bond. Old brown newspapers. Some of them twenty years old. Unfinished crossword puzzles. Unfinished letters. Sweet­heart snapshots. Dim, crumbling little Kodak children. Pa­thetic.

RB : You ever seen a guy gassed?

TC: Once. But he made it look like a lark. He was happy to go, he wanted to get it over with; he sat down in that chair like he was going to the dentist to have his teeth cleaned. But in Kansas, I saw two men hanged.

RB: Perry Smith? And what’s his name-Dick Hickock? Well, once they hit the end of the rope, I guess they don’t feel anything.

TC: So we’re told. But after the drop, they go on living-fifteen, twenty minutes. Struggling. Gasping for breath, the body still battling for life. I couldn’t help it, I vomited. ns: Maybe you’re not so cool, huh? You seem cool. So, did Sirhan beef about being kept in Special Security?

RB: Sort of. He’s lonesome. He wants to mix with the other prisoners, join the general population.

RB: He don’t know what’s good for him. Outside, some­body’d snuff him for sure.

TC: Why?

RB: For the same reason he snuffed Kennedy. Recognition. Half the people who snuff people, that’s what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.

TC: That’s not why you killed Gary Hinman.

RB: (Silence)

TC: That was because you and Manson wanted Hinman to give you money and his car, and when he wouldn’t-well …

RB: (Silence)

TC: I was thinking. I know Sirhan, and I knew Robert Ken­nedy. I knew Lee Harvey Oswald, and I knew Jack Kennedy. The odds against that-one person knowing all four of those men-must be astounding.

RB: Oswald? You knew Oswald? Really?

TC: I met him in Moscow just after he defected. One night I was having dinner with a friend, an Italian newspaper cor­respondent, and when he came by to pick me up he asked me if I’d mind going with him first to talk to a young American defector, one Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was staying at the Metropole, an old Czarist hotel just off Kremlin Square. The Metropole has a big gloomy loRB y full of shadows and dead palm trees. And there he was, sitting in the dark under a dead palm tree. Thin and pale, thin-lipped, starved-looking. He was wearing chinos and tennis shoes and a lumberjack shirt. And right away he was angry-he was grinding his teeth, and his eyes were jumping every which way. He was boiling over about everything: the American ambassador; the Russians-he was mad at them because they wouldn’t let him stay in Moscow. We talked to him for about half an hour, and my Italian friend didn’t think the guy was worth filing a story about. Just another paranoid hysteric; the Moscow woods were rampant with those. I never thought about him again, not until many years later. Not until after the assassina­tion when I saw his picture flashed on television.

RB: Does that make you the only one that knew both of them, Oswald and Kennedy?

TC: No. There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew Kennedy, and she met Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you some­thing else almost as curious. About some of those people your friends murdered.

RB: (Silence)

TC: I knew them. At least, out of the five people killed in the Tate house that night, I knew four of them. I’d met Sharon Tate at the Cannes Film Festival. Jay Sebring cut my hair a couple of times. I’d had lunch once in San Francisco with Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Frykowski. In other words, I’d known them independently of each other. And yet one night there they were, all gathered together in the same house waiting for your friends to arrive. Quite a coincidence.

RB (lights a cigarette; smiles): Know what I’d say? I’d say you’re not such a lucky guy to know. Shit. Listen to that. Moan, moan. I’m cold. You cold?

TC: Why don’t you put on your shirt?

RB: (Silence)

TC: It’s odd about tattoos. I’ve talked to several hundred men convicted of homicide-multiple homicide, in most cases. The only common denominate- I could find among them was tattoos. A good eighty percent of them were heavily tattooed. Richard Speck. York and Latham. Smith and Hickock.

RB: I’ll put on my sweater.

TC: If you weren’t here, if you could be anywhere you wanted to be, doing anything you wanted to do, where would you be and what would you be doing?

RB: Tripping. Out on my Honda chugging along the Coast road, the fast curves, the waves and the water, plenty of sun. Out of San Fran, headed Mendocino way, riding through the redwoods. I’d be making love. I’d be on the beach by a bonfire making love. I’d be making music and balling and sucking some great Acapulco weed and watching the sun go down. Throw some driftwood on the fire. Good gash, good hash, just tripping right along.

TC: You can get hash in here.

RB: And everything else. Any kind of dope-for a price. There are dudes in here on everything but roller skates.

TC: Is that what your life was like before you were arrested? Just tripping? Didn’t you ever have a job?

RB: Once in a while. I played guitar in a couple of bars.

TC: I understand you were quite a cocks man. The ruler of a virtual seraglio. How many children have you fathered?

RB: (Silence-but shrugs, grins, smokes)

TC: I’m surprised you have a guitar. Some prisons don’t allow it because the strings can be detached and used as weapons. A garrote. How long have you been playing?

RB: Oh, since I was a kid. I was one of those Hollywood kids. I was in a couple of movies. But my folks were against it. They’re real straight people. Anyway, I never cared about the acting part. I just wanted to write music and play it and sing.

TC: But what about the film you made with Kenneth Anger-Lucifer Rising?

RB: Yeah.

TC: How did you get along with Anger?

RB: Okay.

TC: Then why does Kenneth Anger wear a picture locket on a chain around his neck? On one side of the locket there is a picture of you; on the other there is an image of a frog with an inscription: “Bobby Beausoleil changed into a frog by Kenneth Anger.” A voodoo amulet, so to say. A curse he put on you because you’re supposed to have ripped him off. Left in the middle of the night with his car-and a few other things.

RB: (narrowed eyes): Did he tell you that?

TC: No, I’ve never met him. But I was told it by a number of other people.

RB (reaches for guitar, tunes it, strums it, sings): “This is my song, this is my song, this is my dark song, my dark song …” Everybody always wants to know how I got together with Manson. It was through our music. He plays some, too. One night I was driving around with a bunch of my ladies. Well, we came to this old roadhouse, beer place, with a lot of cars outside. So we went inside, and there was Charlie with some of his ladies. We all got to talking, played some together; the next day Charlie came to see me in my van, and we all, his people and my people, ended up camping out together. Brothers and sisters. A family.

TC: Did you see Manson as a leader? Did you feel influenced by him right away?

RB: Hell, no. He had his people, I had mine. If anybody was influenced, it was him. By me.

TC: Yes, he was attracted to you. Infatuated. Or so he says. You seem to have had that effect on a lot of people, men and women.

RB: Whatever happens, happens. It’s all good.

TC: Do you consider killing innocent people a good thing?

RB: Who said they were innocent?

TC: Well, we’ll return to that. But for now: What is your own sense of morality? How do you differentiate between good and bad?

RB: Good and bad? It’s all good. If it happens, it’s got to be good. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. It’s just the way life flows. Moves together. I move with it. I don’t question it.

TC: In other words, you don’t question the act of murder. You consider it “good” because it “happens.” Justifiable.

RB: I have my own justice. I live by my own law, you know. I don’t respect the laws of this society. Because society doesn’t respect its own laws. I make my own laws and live by them. I have my own sense of justice.

TC: And what is your sense of justice?

RB: I believe that what goes around comes around. What goes up comes down. That’s how life flows, and I flow with it.

TC: You’re not making much sense-at least to me. And I don’t think you’re stupid. Let’s try again. In your opinion, it’s all right that Manson sent Tex Watson and those girls into that house to slaughter total strangers, innocent people­

RB: I said: Who says they were innocent? They burned peo­ple on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.

TC: The truth is, the Lo Biancos and Sharon Tate and her friends were killed to protect you. Their deaths were directly linked to the Gary Hinman murder.

RB: I hear you. I hear where you’re coming from.

TC: Those were all imitations of the Hinman murder-to prove that you couldn’t have killed Hinman. And thereby get you out of jail.

RB: To get me out of jail. (He nods, smiles, sighs-compli­mented) None of that came out at any of the trials. The girls got on the stand and tried to really tell how it all came down, but nobody would listen. People couldn’t believe anything except what the media said. The media had them pro­grammed to believe it all happened because we were out to start a race war. That it was mean niggers going around hurting all these good white folk. Only-it was like you say. The media, they called us a “family.” And it was the only true thing they said. We were a family. We were mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son. If a member of our family was in jeopardy, we didn’t abandon that person. And so for the love of a brother, a brother who was in jail on a murder rap, all those killings came down.

TC: And you don’t regret that?

RB: No. If my brothers and sisters did it, then it’s good. Everything in life is good. It all flows. It’s all good. It’s all music.

TC: When you were up on Death Row, if you’d been forced to flow down to the gas chamber and whiff the peaches, would you have given that your stamp of approval?

RB: If that’s how it came down. Everything that happens is good.

TC: War. Starving children. Pain. Cruelty. Blindness. Prisons. Desperation. Indifference. All good?

RB: What’s that look you’re giving me?

TC: Nothing. I was noticing how your face changes. One moment, with just the slightest shift of angle, you look so boyish, entirely innocent, a charmer. And then-well, one can see you as a sort of Forty-second Street Lucifer. Have you ever seen Night Must Fall? An old movie with Robert Mont­gomery? No? Well, it’s about an impish, innocent-looking de­lightful young man who travels about the English country­side charming old ladies, then cutting off their heads and carrying the heads around with him in leather hat-boxes.

RB: So what’s that got to do with me?

TC: I was thinking-if it was ever remade, if someone Amer­icanized it, turned the Montgomery character into a young drifter with hazel eyes and a smoky voice, you’d be very good in the part.

RB: Are you trying to say I’m a psychopath? I’m not a nut. If I have to use violence, I’ll use it, but I don’t believe in killing.

TC: Then I must be deaf. Am I mistaken, or didn’t you just tell me that it didn’t matter what atrocity one person com­mitted against another, it was good, all good?

RB: (Silence)

TC: Tell me, Bobby, how do you view yourself?

RB: As a convict.

TC: But beyond that.

RB: As a man. A white man. And everything a white man stands for.

TC: Yes, one of the guards told me you were the ringleader of the Aryan Brotherhood.

RB (hostile): What do you know about the Brotherhood?

TC: That it’s composed of a bunch of hard-nosed white guys. That it’s a somewhat fascist-minded fraternity. That it started in California, and has spread throughout the American prison system, north, south, east, and west. That the prison authori­ties consider it a dangerous, troublemaking cult.

RB : A man has to defend himself. We’re outnumbered. You got no idea how rough it is. We’re all more scared of each other than we are of the pigs in here. You got to be on your toes every second if you don’t want a shiv in your back. The blacks and Chicanos, they got their own gangs. The Indians, too; or I should say the “Native Americans”-that’s how these redskins call themselves: what a laugh! Yes sir, rough. With all the racial tensions, politics, dope, gambling, and sex. The blacks really go for the young white kids. They like to shove those big black dicks up those tight white asses.

TC: Have you ever thought what you would do with your life if and when you were paroled out of here?

RB: That’s a tunnel I don’t see no end to. They’ll never let Charlie go.

TC: I hope you’re right, and I think you are. But it’s very likely that you’ll be paroled some day. Perhaps sooner than you imagine. Then what?

RB (strums guitar): I’d like to record some of my music. Get it played on the air.

TC: That was Perry Smith’s dream. And Charlie Manson’s, too. Maybe you fellows have more in common than mere tattoos.

RB: Just between us, Charlie doesn’t have a whole lot of talent. (Strumming chords) “This is my song, my dark song, my dark song.” I got my first guitar when I was eleven; I found it in my grandma’s attic and taught myself to play it, and I’ve been nuts about music ever since. My grandma was a sweet woman, and her attic was my favorite place. I liked to lie up there and listen to the rain. Or hide up there when my dad came looking for me with his belt. Shit. You hear that? Moan, moan. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

TC: Listen to me, Bobby. And answer carefully. Suppose, when you get out of here, somebody came to you-let’s say Charlie-and asked you to commit an act of violence, kill a man, would you do it?

RB (after lighting another cigarette, after smoking it half through): I might. It depends. I never meant to … to … hurt Gary Hinman. But one thing happened. And another. And then it all came down.

TC: And it was all good.

RB: It was all good.
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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Wed Oct 07, 2015 3:52 am

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http://www.constantinereport.com/cia-dr ... tate-died/


Two days before Cass Elliot died in London, the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to recommend the first article of impeachment against President Nixon for obstruction of justice. The second article of impeachment, abuse of power, and third, contempt of Congress, were passed on July 29, 1974, the day that Cass suffered a fatal coronary (Four years later, Who drummer Keith Moon would die from barbiturate overdose in the same flat.)

The executive branch took a fatal blow on July 16, 1973, when Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield sabotaged his boss by revealing in open Congressional testimony the existence of secret White House tapes. Butterfield, a veteran Air Force reconnaissance pilot who flew in Vietnam, had been in charge of tactical charts for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara under President Johnson. In 1969, he gave up his commission to accept the post of security advisor to the Oval Office, offered by his old UCLA classmate H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff. In the mid-‘60s, Butterfield had worked in the Pentagon under Knight of Malta Alexander Haig, whose advisor Bob Woodward left the DoD and took a job at the Washington Post six months before the Watergate scandal broke. By revealing the existence of the tapes, Butterfield, with an assist from the CIA, brought down the nation’s chief executive.

CHAOS entered a hyper-operational phase coincident with Nixon’s election to office.

The late Mae Brussell, a mercurial encyclopedia of political research in Carmel, California, reached some startling conclusions in an unpublished manuscript entitled “Operation CHAOS”:

By August, 1967, Special Operations Group went after the youth. By July, 1968, Operation CHAOS, identical to Chilean “Chaos,” went after the “restless youth.” …
Mid-summer of 1969, one month before the Manson Family massacres, Operation CHAOS went into tight security [mode]. . . . They had perfected enough LSD to cause every violent act or symptom associated with the violence in Los Angeles or at Altamont.
It was identical to giving poison candy at Halloween. LSD was the moving force, the cause for the Sharon Tate-La Bianca slaughters. It was fed at the Spahn Ranch for a steady diet.
July, 1968, explicit orders went out to proceed, accompanied with instructions to neutralize segments of our society, including those restless youth. By 1969, the SSS, Special Services Staff of the FBI, combined with the Justice Department and with CIA’s Operation CHAOS.
August, 1969 was the Sharon Tate-La Bianca slaughter. What Manson called home was a relic of Hollywood’s past. The Spahn Ranch was the backdrop for movies made by Tom Mix, William S. Hart and John Mack Brown. Parts of Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw were shot there. But the ranch had one more claim to historical significance. Next to George Spahn’s property stretched the Krupp Ranch, owned by one of the wealthiest families in Nazi Germany, a ranking sponsor of Hitler’s aggression and its accompanying atrocities.1
The Krupp Ranch has since been transformed into a blooming commercial Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes purchased some 500 acres of Krupp-owned land in Nevada after his move to Las Vegas.2

Manson, the aspiring neo-Nazi rock artist and his family of tripping satyrs, socialized with celebrity recording artists, especially Cass Elliot’s entourage, off the Sunset Strip in Laurel Canyon. He lived for a year with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, who would drown in twelve feet of water in 1983.

Bobby Beausoleil, convicted for the torture-murder of Gary Hinman, was a devotee of Manson. The rock group Love, founded by Beausoleil’s musical companion Arthur Lee (of the signature multi-colored glasses), was not a band of laughing survivors. Since the Tate-LaBianca murders, a curse has dogged their heels. Guitarist Bryan MacLean and bass-player Ken Forssi are dead. Tjay Cantrelli, born John Barberis, a sax player and flutist, is also presumed dead, at least this is the most probable conjecture. Johnny Echols has disappeared and is also thought to be deceased. Michael Stuart, drummer, changed his name to conceal his identity and his whereabouts are unknown.

Arthur Lee, convicted in 1995 to 12 years at the Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, for firing a handgun into the air, is fiercely reluctant to discuss the group’s past, and so are survivors of Love’s many incarnations. But the prison sentence is unreasonably harsh — considering that a fan visiting Lee at his home on Mulholland Drive confessed to firing the pistol himself, and that the fan suffered such remorse over the conviction that he was stricken with a bipolar disorder and had to be hospitalized. William Cenego, the fan, points out that the forensic test for gun-powder residue on Lee’s hand was negative.

“I think Arthur had an incredibly unfair trial,” Cenego laments. “It’s almost not accurate to describe it as a trial.”3

The death of Dennis Wilson was questioned by Mae Brussell in her weekly Worldwatcher’s International broadcast on KAZU-FM, Monterey, California, on January 16, 1984:

There’s [an] article in the San Francisco Chronicle . . . that said: “Dennis Wilson was responsible for one of the group’s darkest secrets: ‘Me and Charlie, we started the Family.’” He said he’d founded the Manson Family. He made a record with Charles Manson. On the 20/20 album, Dennis Wilson is credited. . . .
Bill Oster was the fellow who allegedly owned the yacht where he drowned. [Oster:] “He appeared to be clowning [Wilson] when he dove into 12 feet of water. He did not surface after the dive. He poked his hand above and waved. I saw the body slip. I thought he was clowning. I knew he had to come up for air.”
The Los Angeles Herald said that “his wife called at the boat at 4:30.” That would be the exact time he was going under. A woman answered and she was “kind of rude.” She said: “We’ve got some trouble here” and slammed down the phone. That would be the exact time that he was bubbling and waving and nobody jumped in for him. And at 5:30, one hour later, according to another account, he was picked up.
Two days before the drowning, Wilson had signed into St. John’s Hospital to “be clean of alcohol and drugs.” A man and a woman visited him. Wilson became agitated and signed out of the unit. He was taken immediately to the boat.
Medical examiners found a gash on the drummer’s forehead:
The coroner said [the gash] “didn’t contribute” to his death. He died as a result of “drowning.” … He has a hit on the head and drowns in 12 feet of water.
Wilson’s friends check him out and supplied him with alcohol, and he has a hit on the head and drowns in 12 feet of water. He was buried at sea. This assures that there will be no autopsy after that bang on the head. He’s fed to the sharks … that’s the old Grenada trip they’re using. … And there’s no way now to ever know what caused that bang on his head, or how deep it was. …
In Sharon Tate’s home there were video movies of military VIPs. I know there were, but who was on those tapes? They belonged to the LAPD. Would Dennis Wilson know who was on those tapes? He was close to that scene.
Ed Sanders notes that Manson met Abigail Folger, the wealthy coffee heiress found dead among the carnage on Cielo Drive, at the home of Mama Cass Elliot.4
“Gibby,” Maury Terry, author of The Ultimate Evil, discovered in his investigation of satanic cult connections to the Manson family, “had more money than she knew what to do with. She was into finding herself and new directions, and she was always investing in things.” Abigail Folger (daughter of Peter Folger, president of the coffee company, and Ines “Pui” Meija, the youngest offspring of Salvadoran Consul General Encarnacion Mejia and his wife Gertrude), doled out cash to Manson on occasion. Then stopped. “Manson turned against her when she refused to lay out any more bucks for him.”

When Manson lived in San Francisco, Folger loaned $10,000 to the Straight Theater at Haight and Cole Streets. Manson then lived on Cole Street, on the same block as the Process Church of the final Judgment. On September 21, 1967, the Magick Powerhouse of Oz performed at the Straight in celebration of the “Equinox of the Gods.”

The Manson family’s Bobby Beausoleil was the lead guitarist at this august function.

Folger also funded Timothy Leary, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and the Process Church in the establishment of the “Himalayan Academy,” not far from the Esalen Institute.

The Leary lab was chock-a-block with pricey brain-scanning gear, oscilloscopes and advanced bio-electronic hardware. Manson was a hanger-on at the Himalayan Foundation. In fact, he first encountered the Process there, joined the openly Satanic sect, according to Terry, “and later convened with the group in Mill Valley and at a dwelling in San Anselmo occupied by a well-known personage aligned with the LSD scene. Both cities are in the Bay area.”5

Folger, a financier of the covert lab utilized by the CIA’s Timothy Leary, knew another regular of Mama Cass’s entourage: Bill Mentzer, currently serving a life term for the murder of fledgling Hollywood producer Roy Radin, a partner in The Cotton Club. He never lived to see the movie produced by Robert Evans, a partner with the deceased in the film and a friend of Henry Kissinger.6

“I’m used to being around skuzzy people,” Cass Elliot told her future husband Donald von Wiederman on the day they met. “You know, guys with long, stringy hair and zits from not eating right, guys with needle marks on their arms, guys who rip me off every time I turn my back.”7

The nucleus of this pathological parade was Cass, nee Ellen Naomi Cohen, born in 1941 and raised in Washington, D.C., a German baronness by marriage. Her second husband, ‘60s paparazzi journalist von Weidenman, was a German nobleman, heir to a Bavarian baron — also, after his short-lived marriage to Cass, an irrepressibly manic, multifarious Penthouse staff writer, gay porn producer (former publisher of The Advocate), Los Angeles advertising magnate for a spell, artist and novelist.

Cass was the most polished vocalist in the Mamas and The Papas, sometimes described as America’s first hippies. The quartet formed in New York City in 1963 around songwriter John Phillips. Holly Michelle Gillian Phillips, born in Long Beach, California on June 4, 1945, gave up a modeling career to sing with the group and married him in 1962. The Journeymen, as they were initially known, also included Scott McKenzie, who would join the surviving Mamas and Papas in 1985.

Cass moved with the group from the East Coast to Los Angeles in 1964, and they signed with Lou Alder’s Dunhill label. The Mamas and Papas split up in 1968. Michelle Phillips set out on a successful acting career, appearing in Dillinger and Valentino. She was a regular on Knots Landing. Michelle married actor Dennis Hopper for eight days in 1970. John Phillips and Dennis Doherty, the Papas, also went solo with mixed success. Cass Elliot, however, after a rocky start in Las Vegas, launched a highly successful career. She produced seven albums and several singles before her death.

Cass’s beau at the time of her fatal heart attack was “Pic” Dawson, then under investigation by Scotland Yard for international drug smuggling. Dawson was the son of Harrison Pickens Dawson II, scion of an affluent landowning clan in the Bible Belt. Pic’s father was also a respected economist, sent to Germany after WW II to assist in rebuilding the economy. Subsequently, he entered the American Diplomatic Corps and was assigned to the State Department as a foreign service attaché and supervisory commercial officer in Bonn until his retirement in 1970. He died on Christmas Eve, 1985. At the time of his father’s death, Pic, who perished himself a year later from a heroin overdose, was living in London.8

Cass had recently wrapped up two triumphant weeks of sold-out performances at the London Palladium. The coroner’s report was not conclusive. She “probably choked to death,” but there was also “a possibility of heart attack.”

Donald von Wiederman knew Cass as well as anyone alive. He spoke to her by telephone before and after she set off for London. She told him that she was “in love” but didn’t mention Dawson by name. When her death hit the headlines, von Wiederman was immediately skeptical of the forensic report and had reason to suspect foul play:

The phone rings. It’s July, 1974.
“My, my,” says a cheery voice, “how time flies when you’re having sex.” Cass is manic. She’s leaving the next day for London. She’s going to play the Palladium as a solo act, her life-long dream. She tells me that she thinks she’s in love, that her life is finally falling into place. I sense that she is holding something back. I have no idea what it is. …
A week later she calls from London. She is a smash, critically acclaimed, selling out every night. … I ask her about the new man in her life. She tries to change the subject but then tells me that someone told her that Alan Carr, her newly hired manager, had paid her new boyfriend to be with her. She says it uncertainly, telling me she doesn’t really know if it is true.
I think this has to be the ultimate insult, but still she is upbeat. She says she has to go.
The next day she is dead.
The media screams to the world that she choked on a ham sandwich. Not a nice epitaph for someone who gave so much. I don’t believe it for a minute.
There are a lot of seemingly mysterious circumstances surrounding her death. According to the first accounts in the newspapers, no traces of drugs were found in her body, an improbable reality at the very least. The press says her address book is missing. Her jewelry is missing, even the bracelets fused on her wrists for posterity.
The media reports that she was alone when she died. She was never alone, never, unless she was alone with her daughter. Alan Carr claimed he knew nothing, a white lie at best, a malevolent secret at worst. Scotland Yard has to be forced to release the results of the autopsy, and those results are inconclusive, meaningless. In my mind, manipulated. The new and unknown man in her life does not come forward to mourn her.9
In his biography of Cass, Jon Johnson published twelve photocopies from her FBI file, released after an FOIA request. The pages are almost entirely obscured by black ink.

Hoover’s Bureau kept tabs on Cass at the request of Alex Butterfield, who, Johnson notes cryptically, was “obsessed” with her.

“She reportedly has associated with drug addicts,” the FBI report mentions, “and individuals opposed to the President’s Vietnam policy.”

One report marked “urgent” and “confidential” notes that Cass attended a fund-raiser in Hollywood attended by Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal, among other celebrities. The event was hosted by the Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice Committee (EIPJ). The FBI memo gossips that “between dates with Henry Kissinger, Mario Thomas also attended the EIPJ meet with Barry Diller.” Tuesday Weld, Burt Lancaster and Jane Fonda, among others, attended the fund-raiser as well.

Cass had political ambitions. “I think that I would like to be a senator or something in twenty years,” she told Mike Douglas. She attended a variety of Democratic Party functions, participated in a Madison Square Garden rally sponsored by Rose Kennedy. “I saw in the Democratic Convention in Chicago that there were more people interested in what I was interested in than I believed possible. It made me want to work. … There would be room in an organized movement of politics for me to voice myself.”

Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, suspects that Cass was the target of political foul play. “Cass Elliot was a friend,” he says. “I believe she may have been killed. She knew an awful lot about the incredible criminal links between Hollywood and Washington and Las Vegas. … She was also a friend of Sharon Tate’s. On the night Bobby Kennedy was killed, [Cass] had dinner with Sharon and Roman Polanski at the home of film director John Frankenheimer in Malibu Beach.”10

Pathologists in London refused to specify the cause of death at a public hearing. They did, however, mutter fatuously that she may have “choked” to death.

The faux ham sandwich legend began with Dr. Anthony Greenburgh, a Belgravia physician and “doctor to the stars,” who entered the flat (loaned to Cass by British singer Harry Nilsson), and thought, as he told the Daily Express, “she appeared to have been eating a ham sandwich and drinking Coca-Cola while lying down — a very dangerous thing to do. She seemed to have choked on a ham sandwich.”

Dr. Greenburgh’s opinion failed to account for the fact that Cass had not bitten into the sandwich, as Inspector Kenneth Humm noted in his police report.11

But the most-ludicrous-explanation award went to Dr. Keith Simpson, whose autopsy detected a “left-sided heart failure. She plainly had a heart attack.” He claimed, to cries of outrage from the medical community, that a section of Elliot’s heart muscle had actually “turned to fat,” a coronary transmutation he attributed to “stress.”

Johnson’s post-mortem examination of a medical hoax:

The conclusion was termed “improper” by a Vanderbilt University heart specialist immediately after it was made public. “It is true that obesity is related to high blood pressure and stroke, but there’s no correlation with a heart attack,” disputed Dr. George V. Mann. “He’s stating an old-fashioned dogma, a Victorian concept of fatty degeneration that has gone out in modern times. Old time pathologists tend to look at deposits of adipose tissue around the surface of the heart and associate it with a heart attack, but a heart attack is due to limitation of blood supply to the heart muscle with the result that some of the muscle dies.”12
Whatever the underlying cause, the verdict remained unchanged. Officially, Cass died of a massive heart attack at the age of 32.

Why did Dr. Simpson reach into the 19th century and extract this long-discredited theory to explain the death of Mama Cass? He was not a quack or charlatan, despite superficial appearances to the contrary.

Dr. Simpson, who died on July 21, 1985, was among the most respected forensic pathologists in the world. In his lifetime, he was a professor of forensic medicine at the University of London and Oxford. He was co-founder and president of the Association of Forensic Medicine, famed for post-mortems in a number of high profile homicides. In 1963, he was elected to the Royal College of Pathologists. Professor Simpson was the editor of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence, a standard reference work. Forty Years of Murder, his autobiography, was an international best-seller in the late 1970s.

It’s likely that Dr. Simpson performed more autopsies than any other forensic pathologist in the world, yet his analysis of the death of Cass Elliot was so blatantly stupid that less knowledgeable and experienced pathologists denounced it openly as medical flimflam.

How could he be so mistaken?

Because Professor Simpson was not only a celebrated medical pathologist, he was also a political animal, the first forensic pathologist to be recognized by the Home Office, a consultant to corruption-riddled Scotland Yard. He could not have possibly believed his own diagnosis. He lied and was covering for someone … but who? And why?

The death certificate states that Cass Elliot died from “natural causes.” This conclusion is based on the erroneous autopsy report, so it isn’t known whether her death was natural or not. Dr. Simpson covered up the true cause of death with his Victorian cardiac fantasia — and, they say, the cover-up proves the crime. Given the body count around Cass, most of them connected to the Laurel Canyon rock scene — the slaughters, torture-murders, overdoses, disappearances, corpses stuffed into car trunks, etc. (Googling them is an all-day affair) – it has to be considered that Cass was also murdered. Dr. Simpson invented a “natural” cause of death to conceal the true circumstances. The Church Committee hearings revealed, in its discussion of the famed CIA “heart attack gun,” that the CIA has developed a toxin that causes cardiac arrest, delivered via a tiny projectile that melts once the drug istaken into the bloodstream. This is an explanation, however unfeasible, given the circumstances than Dr. Simpson’s fat transmutation hypothesis.

It is reinforced by his implausible claim that there were “no drugs” detected in Elliot’s bloodstream at the time of death. Recall Donald von Wiederman’s skepticism. Cass, he knew, was always high. She took drugs on a daily basis. But Dr. Simpson was in a tight spot. If he even admitted to traces of drugs in her system, he would have had to list and quantify them. Elliot’s blood samples would be subject to peer review. He was forced to deny that there was any trace of drugs in her system. If he included them in his report, there was a risk that the toxin used to kill her would be detected on subsequent analysis. He would be caught out, opening a can of worms with “Homicide” on the label.

But Simpson’s explanation for the death of Mama Cass wasn’t the only disingenuous moment in an otherwise illustrious career. His opinion concerning another mysterious, high-profile death – also with connections to heroin smuggling — was equally ludicrous: the death-by-hanging of Roberto “God’s Banker” Calvi.

Calvi, whose murder has been the subject of numerous investigative reports, was the chairman of Banco Abrosiano. The bank’s largest shareholder was the Vatican. The bank had been overrun by the infamous Propaganda Due, or P2, Masonic Lodge, founded by Nazi collaborator Licio Gelli in 1966. In consultation with the CIA, P2 and Operation Gladio, a NATO secret army, waged a war on socialists by committing acts of terror and blaming them on the left.

Under his tutelage, the bank laundered funds derived largely from the heroin trade. In 1982, after $900 million vanished from the bank, Calvi fled to the UK. in a state of panic. He threatened to tell authorities everything he knew about the money laundering.

Calvi was found hanging by a length of orange rope twisted into a lover’s knot from London’s Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets filled with bricks. Letters of consolation to offshore banks set up by Calvi were signed by Archbishop Marcinkus, the powerful Chicago-born prelate and Vatican insider implicated in the scandal but never interrogated by the authorities.

Calvi’s mentor was Michele Sindona, poisoned by cyanide-laced coffee while sitting out a life term in prison for the 1986 murder of lawyer Giorgio Ambrosoli.

Sindona was a Knight of Malta and crony of Richard Nixon.

Roberto Calvi took to his grave knowledge of payments made by major Italian companies to prominent political parties. Mafia don Francesco “Frankie the Strangler” di Carlo has confessed that on June 16, 1982, two days before the murder, he was assigned the hit. Di Carlo was directed to contact Giuseppe “Pippo” Calo, a Cosa Nostra general.

But by the time de Carlo contacted Calo, “he told me not to worry, that the problem had been taken care of.”13

Di Carlo, among the first Mafia leaders to launder drug proceeds through the establishment banking system, is currently serving 25 years in prison for heroin trafficking.

“One day I may write the full story,” he told the Observer, “but the real killers will never be brought to justice because they are being protected by the Italian state, by members of the P2 Masonic lodge. They have massive power. They are made up of a mixture of politicians, bank presidents, the military, top security and so on. This is a case that they continue to open and close again and again but it will never be resolved.”14 Journalists who have written about P2 have also linked the lodge to not only the Mafia, but the CIA, Knights of Malta, MI5 and a number of neo-Nazi groups.

Two inquests into Calvi’s death were conducted. The first was presided over by London coroner Dr. David Paul in a marathon session lasting 10 hours and 20 minutes. In Mafia: Inside the Dark Heart, A.G.D. Maran writes of Dr. Simpson’s role in the inquest:

[Dr. Paul] kept the jury hearing evidence for nine hours, summed up for an hour and then asked the jury to be quick about their verdict, giving them incorrect instructions about the application of an open verdict. They voted by a majority for suicide, but it was no surprise that the verdict was overturned on appeal and a second inquest ordered. The main witness at the first inquest was the famous forensic pathologist Dr. Keith Simpson. These were the days of eminence-based rather than evidence-based medicine, when a famous medical expert’s opinion would be invariably believed. Simpson said that the death had occurred around 2 a.m. and the cause was asphixia due to hanging. He did not opine as to the probability of either murder or suicide, but from the way that he presented the evidence it seemed that he favored suicide. …
The second inquest lasted two weeks. … What was certain was that it would have been virtually impossible for Calvi himself to have reached that point on the scaffold, carrying 12 pounds of bricks, and to arrange his own hanging. Also, he could have saved himself all the discomfort by staying in Chelsea Cloisters and swallowing the hundreds of barbituate tablets that were in his luggage. …
Much of the evidence for murder rests on the virtual impossibility of his having hanged himself.15
Dr. Keith Simpson was not a good liar. He offered up transparently false and misleading testimony at least twice in his career.

Cass Elliot and Roberto Calvi lived worlds apart but shared two things in common: heroin and premature mortality. Cass’s fiancé Pic Dawson peddled the opiate; Roberto Calvi laundered profits from its distribution. They both died under very peculiar circumstances. The fix was in.

Dr. Simpson misrepresented the cause of death in both cases to draw attention away from sensitive subjects.

Drugs, for instance.

Many books have been written about the Manson murders, and there have been differences of opinion but on one point they all agree: the motive for the slayings involved drugs.

And Cass was at the center of it all. Pic Dawson, heroin addict and drug dealer, was the first suspect in the slaughter at 10050 Cielo Drive.

He sold drugs to Wojciech Frykowski and Jay Sebring, both of whom were murdered by the Manson family. Cass was a close friend of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. She lived across the road from victims Frykowski and Folger, socialized with both of them. She also knew Manson and his entourage.

Vincent Bugliosi has written about the Hollywood connections at length in Helter Skelter. He is also the author of Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John Kennedy — a revisionist account of the sniper fire in Dallas. Before the Manson murders, Bugliosi worked for the D.A.’s office in Los Angeles where he altered evidence to convict Sirhan Sirhan for the Robert Kennedy assassination, orchestrated by the CIA, a clutch of affluent right-wingers with ties to the John Birch Society and an assortment of neo-Nazi groups in Southern California.16

Helter Skelter is a cover-up, no less disingenuous than Dr. Simpson’s fat heart thesis and cooked testimony before the Calvi inquest.

The explanation for Cielo Drive and a litany of related homicides isn’t found in Bugliosi’s book.

Pic Dawson’s father was a State Dept. foreign attaché — a common synonym for CIA officer.

Manson murders blogger Phil Jayhan, among others, has traced multiple CIA connections after reading widely about the case and piecing together the essential leads. Jayhan notes that Jimi Hendrix, on more than one occasion, played live and recorded with the falsely-accused Arthur Lee, lead vocalist of Love, the rock band that has fallen on very hard times since the Manson murders. Love’s Gary Beausoleil was a member of the Manson cult and is serving a life term for Gary Hinman’s murder.

“Almost all of the rock stars of the late 1960s used to live in Laurel Canyon, including the band Love,” Jayhan writes. “Frank Zappa, who promoted the use of LSD through his record Freakout, lived in the Canyon even though he never took LSD himself. Frank Zappa’s father used to work at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds back east… Do you really believe that Jimi Hendrix died while choking on his vomit or Mama Cass Elliot choked on a ham sandwich? The logical explanation here is that the CIA hippies were the suppliers or promoters of the drugs to the rest of the crowd” – including Pic Dawson, who recruited Wojciech Frykowski, Gibby Folger’s paramour, as a front man to introduce the LA rock star scene to a drug called Methylenedioxyamphetamine, MDA for short, synthetic mescaline, a hallucinogenic compound with the street name “the love drug.”

MDA, like LSD, was spun off by the MKUltra mind control experiments, another weapon in the CHAOS bio-chemical arsenal. John Marks, in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a history of MKUltra, reports that professional New York City tennis player Harold Blauer died in 1953 during classified MDA experimentation overseen by the Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence.17 Blauer was completely unaware that he had been used as a guinea pig and for 22 years after his overdose the cause of death was covered up by the state of New York and the CIA.18

“Manson was also associated with Robert DeGrimston of the Process Church,” Jayhan writes. “In fact, they used the same alias, Robert Moor. DeGrimston was associated with Ron Stark, a CIA agent who supplied LSD to almost all of the youth in America during the late 1960s. Another strange unexplained occurrence that happened during the Manson trial is the fact that Steve Kay, who worked on Bugliosi’s prosecution team, used to date Sandra Good, one of the main Manson girls years earlier when they went to school together in San Diego. I think that the ‘Bug’ has a little explaining to do.”19

CIA/Mafia connections were responsible for much of the bloodletting connected to Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, including the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Anyone alive at the time heard of the carnage. But the motive has always been hazy.

During the Manson trial, Susan “Sadie Glutz” Atkins, the killer of Sharon Tate, testified that the motive was two-fold – payback for burning Manson follower Linda Kasabian on a $1,000 MDA deal, and to free Bobby “Cupid” Beausoleil, who recorded with Arthur Lee and sang backup on Zappa’s LP Freakout, from imprisonment by copying the torture-murder of Gary Hinman.20

The first motive for the murders, corroborated by a number of independent witnesses, connects directly to Pic Dawson, Mama Cass’s paramour and Frykowski’s MDA supplier. Per the coroner’s report, Frykowski and Folger both had MDA in their blood when they were killed (0.6 mg and 2.4 mg., respectively). Atkins, in volume 180, page 23,049 of the trial transcripts, recalls that Kasabian told her that she purchased the bad MDA at the Polanski-Tate residence. Dawson was the MDA supplier to this crowd and he frequented the house at the invitation of Frykowski and Folger, who house-sat while Polanski and Tate were off filming in Europe.21

Tex Watson and Linda Kasabian paired up in the months prior to the murders, according to Beausoleil.21 Kasabian scored the MDA from a partner of Dawson’s, Billy Doyle – another of Cass Elliot’s boyfriends (she was engaged to him for a brief period in 1969), and a familiar face at the Polanski household. If Watson and Kasabian sought payback, it was Dawson and Doyle who should have been taken out, not Sharon Tate and her houseguests.

What does Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield and his “obsession” with Cass Elliot have to do with any the above? A year after her apparent heart failure in London, Pentagon whistle-blower L. Fletcher Prouty told NPR’s Daniel Schorr that Butterfield had been” the CIA’s spy in the White House.”22 (The Nixon aide denied it, but Randall B. Woods’ Shadow Warrior: William Egan Colby and the CIA, argues convincingly that he was a CIA mole.)

It was Butterfield who suggested to Nixon at their very first meeting that a tape machine be set up in the Oval Office. Butterfield was also one of Crimes of Patriots author Jonathan Kwitny’s sources on CIA heroin trafficking and money laundering at the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, so it is certain that he was privy to Agency involvement in the drug trade. Mae Brussell has gone so far as to suggest that Butterfield was instrumental in the founding of Nugan Hand.

It was Butterfield who directed the FBI to open a file on Cass Elliott. Her death on the very day that articles of impeachment against Nixon passed in the House is telling. Nixon, according to Alfred W. McCoy, in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, lobbied Congress on behalf of PepsiCo for approval of a bottling plant near the Mekong River in Laos that served as a front for the importation of acetic anhydride — the key precursor in the production of heroin. The Pepsi plant did not produce one bottle of soft drink, but it was Air America’s primary cargo supplier of the opiate for import to the United States and elsewhere. (During this period, Nixon called for an escalation of the war in Laos.) Air America, of course, was a CIA front.

Cass’s fiancé Pic Dawson dealt heroin. He also sold MDA, the CIA mind control drug. The fact that he was the first dealer in Los Angeles to do so links him once again to the agency that had developed the drug as a bio-warfare weapon aimed at America’s “restless youth.”

Thus Butterfield’s “obsession” with Mama Cass Elliot. If anyone “knew where the bones were buried,” it was she. At a time when the CIA was cleaning house – and went so far as to drive Nixon from office, very deftly, without exposing his ties to scandals much deeper than illicit wiretaps, hush money and milk funds, including political assassinations and heroin importation – it was an opportune time for CIA/CHAOS agents to live and let Cass die – especially with Frank Church beginning to stick his big nose where it didn’t belong. Dr. Simpson, the famed forensic expert, delivered his diagnostic quack song-and-dance over her body, a role he would reprise when P2’s Roberto Calvi threatened to blow the whistle on the laundering of heroin profits at Banco Ambrosiano.

Vincent Bugliosi could be counted on to tie up loose ends with a perception management best-seller and movie made for television.

Nixon himself attempted to scuttle exposure of CHAOS and its role in the Manson case by declaring, in the midst of the trial and on national television, that the cult leader was “guilty.” Nixon was an attorney. He was completely aware that his widely-publicized statement could prejudice the jury, that the charges might well be dismissed as a result of his statement. On August 4, 1979 he was forced to retract:

Nixon Backs off From Calling Manson Guilty

AP
WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 – President Nixon has backed away from an off-the-cuff comment that Charles Manson, the California hippie-cult leader, was guilty, directly or indirectly, of “eight murders without reason.”
While Air Force One circled Washington for nearly a half hour Monday night on a flight from Denver, Nixon drafted a statement that declared, “The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances.”
Hours earlier, Manson’s defense attorneys had asked a Los Angeles judge to declare a mistrial, alleging prejudicial publicity. The court denied the initial motion “without prejudice,” wanting to make certain what Nixon actually said.
Stopping in Denver en route back to the White House from a working holiday in San Clemente, Nixon went before newsmen prior to conferring in the Colorado capital with state law enforcement officials and said of Manson:
“Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. Here is a man, yet, who, as far as the news media coverage was concerned, appeared to be rather a glamorous figure…”
Many reporters who heard Nixon, an attorney, were aware immediately that the chief executive had assumed Manson guilty before completion of his trial. Some thought they saw a quick facial reaction from Atty. Gen. John N. Mitchell, who was standing at the President’s side.
Fellow lawyer Mitchell, however, made no move to suggest that Nixon amend his impromptu remark. …
Tricky Dick’s attempt to undermine the Manson trial didn’t work out, but he needn’t have worried. The many CHAOS ties to Laurel Canyon’s colorful youth — Mama Cass Elliot, the fall of LOVE, the Manson murders, LSD, heroin, MDA, a long list of dead witnesses — never did make headlines, as his own “horror stories” eventually did.

Alex Butterfield could rest easy. Who was to know?

Are WE (the people) clear(ed)?

NOTES

1. Mae Brussell: “Operation CHAOS: The CIAs War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture,” unpublished ms.

2. State Archives Administration of the German Democratic Republic, Brown Book: War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany, East Germany: Verlag Zeit im Bild, 1965, pp. 41-2.

3. Sara Scribner, “Love Hurts,” New Times (Los Angeles weekly), March 11, 1999, pp. 15-21.

4. Brussell.

5. Maury Terry, The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation into America’s Most Dangerous Satanic Cult, New York: Dolphin, 1987, pp. 494-95.

6. Ibid., pp. 495-96.

7. Donald von Wiedenman, “The Baron and The Pop Star” (1975), Hershey Bars & Nylons website.

http://hersheybarsandnylons.com/writing ... _star.html.

8. Eddi Fiegel, Dream a Little Dream of Me: The Life of Cass Elliot Paperback, Chicago Review Press, 2005. Also see the Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1969 for details on the police questioning of Pic Dawson, then a suspect in the Tate-LaBianca murders. For information on Pic’s diplomat father, see the Find A Grave website, Memorial #44383182.

9. Wiederman.

10. Paul Krassner in: Craig Karpel, ‘The Power of Positive Paranoia,” Oui, May 1975, p. 111.

11. “Ham and Wheeze,” January 19, 2007: http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/mamacass.asp

12. Jon Johnson, Make Your Own Kind of Music: A Career Retrospective of Cass Elliot, Hollywood: Music Archives Press, 1987, pp. 71-72.

13. Justin Penrose, “Mafia hitman reveals he was hired to kill God’s banker Roberto Calvi,” The Daily Mirror, May 12, 2012.

14. Tony Thompson, “Mafia boss breaks silence over Roberto Calvi killing,” The Observer, May 12, 2012. Also, Nick Mathiason, “Who Killed Calvi,” ­The Observer, December 6, 2003.

15. A.G.D. Maran, Mafia: Inside the Dark Heart, New York: Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, 2010.

Edward Jay Epstein is an investigative reporter, not an acclaimed medical authority, but had no trouble ruling out “suicide,” which would “require extraordinary activities from a sixty-two year old man, who was over-weight and suffered from vertigo. Despite the darkness, he would have had to find the scaffolding from the walkway along the river, which, since it was nearly submerged, could be seen only by leaning over the parapet wall at a strategic point.” Calvi would then have hoisted himself “over the parapet on the bridge,” descended “twelve feet down a nearly vertical iron ladder to the level of the temporary scaffolding. He then would have to step across the two and one-half feet gap onto the scaffolding’s rusty poles, which were arranged like monkey-bars in a children’s playground, and edge his way about 8 feet along them to tie the rope to the eyelet. …. “ For more, see: Edward Jay Epstein, “The first Calvi Mystery: Was his death suicide or murder”– http://edwardjayepstein.com/question_calvi.htm

16. cf., William Turner and John Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, one of the most exhaustively-investigated, accurate accounts of the assassination.

17. John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, New York: Times Books, 1979, p.72n.

18. “Elizabeth Barrett, Individually and As Administratrix of The estate of Harold Blauer, Deceased, Plaintiff, v. United States of America, Defendant, Third-party Plaintiff-appellee, v. State of New York, Third-party Defendant-appellant, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1988-02-1988.

19. Phil Jayhan, “Re: The Charles Manson Murders: The Real Story,” August 21, 2011.

http://letsrollforums.com/charles-manso ... 5e74bbe94&

20. In Ed Sanders, The Family, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, p. 257-58.

21. Ibid., p. 258.

22. Prouty quoted in “Alexander P. Butterfield,” Spartucus International website:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbutterfield.htm . See Johnson re Butterfield and the FBI.
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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Oct 07, 2015 5:36 pm

I don't know what blows my mind more, that I never read the Copote interview with Beausoleil or what it discusses, which is all new to me. Thank you for posting it.

Never thought much for reading anything about those folk, but that gives me a whole new perspective to ponder.

I think there's far more to Mr. Copote than him being an author.
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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Mon Dec 14, 2015 12:02 pm

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Postby IanEye » Mon Dec 14, 2015 12:26 pm

^^ ah, thanks for this. ^^

I am a big fan of Bullen's group, Scorn.




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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Wed Dec 30, 2015 5:16 pm

"A Case Study of the Charles Manson Group Marriage Commune"*

by David E. Smith, M.D.** and Alan J. Rose***

http://web.archive.org/web/20071127020405/http://charliesfamily.tripod.com/journal.html


I found this article a couple of years ago in my college's library. It was published in 1970 and comes from the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine.(?!)I believe this is the same article that was originally published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs.


Much has been written about communal living in areas outside the United States and in countries such as Israel, where the Kibbutim have flourished. In these instances, communal practices relative to sexual behavior and child rearing have been described in great detail.

America, too, has a long history of communal living, primarily involving religious groups such as the Amish and the Mennonites. Recently, however, through the national media, the dominant culture in the United States has been made aware of a new style of commune which has evolved primarily in America's "hippie subculture." Unfortunately, we know relatively little about this pattern of alternative cooperative living.

These "hippie" communes can be categorized into six general types (Crash Pad Type, Drug and Non-Drug Family Type, Drug and Non-Drug Marriage Type, and Self-Contained Rural Type.

Staff members of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic spent the summer of 1969 studying the health needs of communes in Northern California and Oregon. It was reported that there were over 200 cooperative living groups in the area alone involving several thousand peopkle. However, beyond superficial description, little study has been made of the characteristics of communes despite the rapidly growing number of people involved in this life style.

The purpose of this study is to describe in detail one specific type of commune- the Group Marriage Commune. The common denominators in this type of commune are polygamous sexual practices involving all members of group and cooperative child rearing. Following the preparation of this manuscript, the central figure in this report, Charles Manson, was arrested in connection with the Sharon Tate murders. However, it would be impudent to comment on the murders until Manson's trial has been completed.

The "group marriage" is not new, of course, and has been practiced by various societies throughout history. Middle class white American youth participating in a group marriage is relatively new, however, particularly in that it represents a direct affront to the dominant culture's expressed moral code. This paper then, will present a case study of a particular commune of the group marriage type.

Research Methodology

We gathered our data primarily by participant-observation techniques. Both authors worked with commune dwellers at the Haight-Ashbury clinic, and observed a variety of urban and rural communes. In addition, Rose lived in two types of communes, the crash pas type and the group marriage type, with the latter experience being the primary resource for the study.

This paper is primarily descriptive with little effort being made to quantitate. Participation in the communes at the time of involvement was not associated with academic observation and only after leaving the communal setting was thought given to description.

Structure of the Group Marriage Commune

Most group marriage communes that survive for a long period of time have a "father figure" as the spiritual leader of the group. The group marriage commune under study had a "father figure" (Charles Manson), a 35-year-old white male with a past history of involvement with the law.

The age range of these communal dwellers was about 16 to 34, the core group consisted of approximately 20 people, including 14 women.

Although there were three people with some college education, including one person having a Master's degree, members disapproved of the whole process of formal institutional education in America. They believed that education was a means of conditioning or "brain washing" a young person with the values and mores of the dominant culture. Manson felt that a person should be "open to change" and willing to accept new values, but insisted that once someone has been indoctrinated by society, his value system became rigid.

Approximately 20 members of this commune referred to themselves as a "family," but we have chosen the term "group marriage commune" because of the polygamous sexual relations, but affairs outside the "family" were rarely endorsed. In cases of sexual conflict, Manson made the final judgment as to what constituted acceptable behavior.

In addition, there were many "sympathetic cousins" (a term we chose to represent those people who had been greatly influenced by the group marriage communes and who had adopted some of the beliefs, although not living with the "core group"). The "cousins," however, often visited with the family for extended periods of time, although they were all involved in their own "scenes" in other parts of the state.

Brief Description of the Leader

Manson was thirty-five years of age, and had no college education. He was an extroverted, persuasive individual who served as absolute ruler of the group marriage commune. What he sanctioned was approved by the rest of the group, but what he disapproved was forbidden.

Tales of Manson's sexual prowess were related to all new members. One of the most popular stories concerned his daily activities before the group moved to the ranch, and wjile they were being supported by a "wealthy cousin." One popular story often told was that Manson would get up in the morning, make love, eat breakfast, make love, and go back to sleep. He would wake later, and make love, have lunch, make love, and go back to sleep. Waking up later, he would make love, eat dinner, make love, and go back to sleep- only to wake up in the middle of the night wanting to have intercourse again.

Such stories, although not validated, helped him maintain his leadership role. Charlie had a persuasive mystical philosophy placing great emphasis on the belief that people id not die and that infant consciousness was the ultimate state. However, Charlie's mysticism often became delusional and he on occasion referred to himself as "God" or "God and the Devil." Charlie could probably be diagnosed as an ambulatory schizophrenic.

Location and Economic Support

The economic level of this commune was low and there was no stable source of income. Money would be brought into the group by new members or througb gifts from the "cousins." Gifts of food, money and clothing, also came from friends and acquaintances of the group, although such presents were rare. At the time of our observation, the group lived on a "ranch" which had as its sole means of support money coming from the rental of horses for riding. The group marriage commune worked on the ranch in return for living quarters,. These living quarters were probably illegal, since the buildings had been condemned, but this was of little concern to the group.

The group usually awoke at about 7:00 a.m. in order to feed the horses and put them out to pasture before the first riders arrived. They finished breakfast and had the horses saddled by 8:00 a.m. Some people stayed near the office in order to act as guides on the trails while some were prepared to saddle more horses. Others cleaned the stalls and prepared the hay and oats so that the barn would be ready when the horses came back. Some lounged or made love most of the day until dinner time. The group usually gathered after dinner and smoked marijuana while singing or talking. Drug use, however, was primarily recreational and had little to do with the central philosophy of the group.

Because they had little money, food procurement was a daily "adventure" (a term used by the group because of the risks involved in getting food). Two or three people would take the ranch truck to the nearby town. Parking behind the grocery store or supermarket they proceeded to rummage through the garbage bins. Meat which had begun to discolor, dented cans of food, open bags of fruit and vegetables, etc., made up the daily meals.

The term "adventure" was used because such forays were illegal; a prevalent rumor had it that the stores sprinkled rat poison or lime over the food in an attempt to discourage such procurement methods. Fourteen to twenty people per day were fed two meals, seven days a week. This commune was not a "vegetarian commune" nor was it involved in Eastern relgion as were some of the communes previously studied. LSD-induced psychedelic philosophy was not a major motivational force.

Attitudes Toward the Children

One of the most significant characteristics of the communes in general is the return to natural, almost primitive techniques of childbirth and child rearing. This commune was no different. Of the 14 females in the "immediate family," two were pregnant at the time of our observation. Both said that Manson was the father, although there was no way to verify the claim, as the sexual relations in the group were polygamous. It should be noted that Manson was held in such high regard by the girls that all of them wanted to carry his child.

One of the pregnant girls gave birth to her son in the group's bus which the family used both as transportation and as a home prior to the ranch location. During the three months of residence in Haight-Ashbury, for example, the group (known then as "Charlie's Girls") used the bus as their primary home.

To relax during childbirth the girl smoked marijuana. The group aided in the delivery; no physician or midwife was present. The above birth in the bus was a breech birth with not natal complications. The child was a fairly healthy youngster, although he did have a few allergies and a yeast infection he caught from his mother. The child did not see a physician until about four months after delivery, when he was treated at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic. In general, commune dwellers reject the concept of both pre-natal care and well-baby care, as well as birth certificates and immunizations.

The mother and the group were against circumcision, but later forced by county health officials to have the operation performed. This occurred after the child was given to foster parents while the mother was being tried for a drug violation (possession of marijuana). It was at this time, also, that the child was given a birth certificate. This latter "injustice" was viewed by the group as the most harmful, as it was felt that this was an example of certification and harassment by society. To have the child numbered and registered with the state by means of a birth certificate is a practice that most commune dwellers reject.

Sexual Practices and Child Rearing

Since the group had extremely permissive sexual attitudes, the members felt no need for conventional marriage relationships which they considered psychologically destructive. The large number of divorces in the larger society and in their own family backgrounds helped them to rationalize or reinforce this attitude.

The group functioned as "one husband and wife." They took communal responsibility for the children, although the mother cared for the infant during the early natal period with breast feeding. The entire group believed that they gave the child more attention and affection than did most families. The child was always the center of attraction and went everywhere with the group. The child was viewed as the one member of the group to most closely emulate and followe, as he alone was "untainted" by society. Charlie used the words of Jesus, "He who is like the small child shall reap the rewards of heaven," as a guide for the group's child rearing philosophy.

On Becoming a Partner in the Group Marriage Commune

Entry into this commune was relatively simple. There were no "entrance requirements" other than the willingness to give up one's social "hangups" and inhibition about sex, sexual partners, material possessions, and power over people. The latter was considered to be the primary motivation of the establishment or dominant culture. Sexual inhibitions were a major concern of the group. The sexual ethic the group attempted to adopt was at odds with the members' own middle-class backgrounds. Most of the group came from middle-class backgrounds and upon becoming a partner in the group marriage, many found it difficult to adjust to the group's attitude toward sex.

Communal marriage was the modus operandi, and conventional one-to-one relationships were not sanctioned. The females in the group had as their major role the duty of gratifying the males. This was done by cooking for them and sleeping with them. Any member of the group could sleep with any other member as long as the partners did not get so involved with each other that they would not (or did not want to) sleep with anyone else.

Manson set himself up as the "initiator of new females" into the commune. He would spend most of their first day making love to them, as he wanted to see if they were just ona "sex trip" (a term used by the group to label someone there only for sexual gratification), or whether they were seriously interested in joining the group. Manson would spend a great deal of time talking with them and finding out, as he put it, "where their heads were at." An unwillingness, for example, to engage in mutual oral-genital conact was cause for immediate expulsion, for Charlie felt that this was one of the most important indications as to whether or not the girl would be willing to give up her sexual inhibitions.

Middle-class standards of sex behavior were rejected by the group. Most of the group had refuted the financial and materialistic orientation of their families with relative ease. The sexual orientation was more difficult. Homosexual activity, though not stigmatized, was minimal. Charlie felt that getting rid of sexual inhibitions would free people of most of their inhibitions and problems.

Divorce From the Group Marriage Commune

Should the group discover that a partner was not ridding himself of inhibitions fast enough, pressure would be applied. This pressure would take various forms. One of the most popular was the refusal of the other group members to have intercourse with that individual. Another approach would be the "long talk" method. This technique would involve two or three partners in the commune approaching the individual in question and asking "Why are you here? What do you want from us? If we asked you to hitch-hike to New York and stay there awhile, would you do it?" If the answer to the last question was yes, and the individual still did not go, he would usually be asked to leave and stay away until he went through sufficient "changes." People usually left "involuntarily" at the insistence of the family or group because the group felt that the individual was 1)just there for sexual reasons (on a sex trip), or 2)failed to conform to the standards of the group as established by Manson.

Discussion and Summary

A descriptive study such as this about a group marriage commune leaves a great many questions unanswered. It is apparent that many of the activities of the group would be labled deviant by America's dominant culture, but deviance itself is a culturally defined attitude and it is more meaningful to describe such behavior as either constructive or destructive.

In health terms, a great deal of the behavior in group marriage commune is destructive. Communicable diseases ranging from upper respiratory problems to gonorrhea are rampant. Hepatitis and food poisoning also occur with great frequency. Drug abuse, however, does not seem to be a major health problem, although the use of illegal drugs by commune members seems to attract a great deal of attention in the popular press.

Relative to psychosocial issues, analysis becomes much more difficult. Childbirth and communal child rearing seem to be handled fairly well as long as the group stays together, but substantial problems develop for both mother and child if they must leave the commune. Little is know of the long term consequences of such communal child rearing.

The final and most interesting questions relate to why this alternative communal life style holds such an attraction for thousands of adolescents and young adults. Why, for example, were these young girls so attracted and captivated by a disturbed person such as Manson? What is happening within the framework of the dominant culture and its monogamous, nuckear family units, that so many youths must feel compelled not simply to rebel but totally reject traditional life styles?

*This research was conducted 15 months prior to the highly publicized "Sharon Tate murder." The authors take no position or have no information relative to the involvement of this commune in this violent crime.

**Assistant Clinical Professor of Toxicology, U.C. Medical Center, San Francisco and Medical Director, Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.

***Research Associate, Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.
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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Sat Jan 02, 2016 5:58 pm

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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Mon Mar 14, 2016 7:16 am

.....on-line watchable version of the amazing time-capsule 1973 Manson documentary co-directed by Laurence Merrick, Sharon Tate's acting teacher ......after all those shitty true-crime re-treads it's truly like "the source" man...

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http://sockshare.net/watch/qvo7pWvl-manson.html

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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Fri Apr 15, 2016 3:58 am

Board recommends parole for Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten; victim's daughter vows to oppose

Matt HamiltonContact Reporter

APRIL 14, 2016, 9:04 PM

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-charles-manson-follower-leslie-van-houten-seeks-parole-for-1969-slaying-20160413-story.html

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A California review board recommended parole Thursday for former Charles Manson “family” member Leslie Van Houten, who was convicted along with other members of the cult in the 1969 killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Van Houten, 66, had been denied parole 19 times by the state parole board since being convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. After the two commissioners on the panel issued their decision at a hearing at the California Institution for Women in Chino, Van Houten said she felt “numb,” according to her attorney, Richard Pfeiffer.

“The opposition to parole has always been the name Manson,” Pfeiffer said. “A lot of people who oppose parole don’t know anything about Leslie’s conduct. Her role was bad. Everyone’s was. But they don’t know what she’s done since then and all of the good she’s done.”

The ruling will be reviewed by the parole board’s legal team. If upheld, it will be forwarded to Gov. Jerry Brown, who could decide to block Van Houten’s release. A spokesman for the governor said Thursday that it would be premature for his office to comment.

Cory LaBianca, who was 21 when her father, a wealthy grocer, and stepmother were slain in their Los Feliz home, said she was disappointed by the parole board’s decision and planned to lobby the governor to reject Van Houten’s release.

“Maybe Leslie Van Houten has been a model prisoner,” Cory LaBianca said. “But you know what? We still suffer our loss. My father will never be paroled. My stepmother will never get her life back. There’s no way I can agree with the ruling today.”

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, whose office argued for Van Houten to remain behind bars, also expressed disapproval in a statement: “We disagree with the board's decision and will evaluate how we plan to proceed.”

Five people in all, including Van Houten, were convicted of the Tate-LaBianca killings, part of a murderous rampage hatched by Manson in an effort to instigate a race war, according to trial testimony.

The youngest of Manson’s followers, Van Houten has been considered the least blameworthy member of the group and has been portrayed by supporters as a misguided teen under the influence of LSD on the night of the slayings.

A former homecoming queen from Monrovia, Van Houten did not join in the Aug. 9, 1969, murders of Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, and four others at the Benedict Canyon home that Tate was renting.

But the following day, Van Houten, then 19, was part of a group that stormed into the LaBiancas’ home. As Charles “Tex” Watson stabbed Leno LaBianca, Van Houten and another woman held down Rosemary LaBianca. After Watson stabbed Rosemary LaBianca with a bayonet, he handed a knife to Van Houten. She testified to stabbing Rosemary in the back at least 14 more times.

The blood of the victims was used to scrawl messages on the walls, as had been done at the Benedict Canyon home.

Van Houten, Manson and three others were convicted and sentenced to death, but after the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, their sentences were commuted to life in prison.

An appellate court overturned Van Houten’s conviction in 1976, and a second trial the following year ended in a hung jury. She was convicted in her third trial in 1978 and sentenced to seven years to life in prison.

Starting in 1979, Van Houten went before the parole board almost regularly. In 1985, board member Rudolph Castro said her crimes “shocked the conscience” and her “willingness to join a marauding group … whose purpose was to commit crimes” warranted keeping her behind bars.

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Charles Manson and other members of his so-called family were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate and six other people during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area during two August nights in 1969. Prosecutors said Manson and his followers were trying to incite a race war that he believed was prophesized in the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter."

In recent years, Van Houten’s attorneys characterized her as a model inmate, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from prison while running self-help groups for incarcerated women.

At a 2002 parole board hearing, Van Houten said she was “deeply ashamed” of what she had done, adding: “I take very seriously not just the murders, but what made me make myself available to someone like Manson.”

See the most-read stories this hour >>
According to comments carried by the Associated Press, she told the board Thursday: “I don't let myself off the hook. I don't find parts in any of this that makes me feel the slightest bit good about myself.”

Near the end of the five-hour hearing, Commissioner Ali Zarrinnam told her: “Your behavior in prison speaks for itself. Forty-six years and not a single serious rule violation.”

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Manson, 81, and others convicted in the killings remain in prison. Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel have been denied parole several times, and Susan Atkins died in 2009.

Last summer, a review board recommended parole for Manson associate Bruce Davis, who was convicted in the 1969 slayings of Gary Hinman and Donald “Shorty” Shea. He was not involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders.

In January, Brown rejected parole for the 73-year-old, stating that “Davis' own actions demonstrate that he had fully bought into the depraved Manson family beliefs.”
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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Fri Jan 06, 2017 7:59 am

Charles Manson Had Over 100 Infractions in Prison Before Recent Hospitalization: ‘Not a Model Prisoner’

http://people.com/crime/charles-manson-had-over-100-infractions-in-prison-before-recent-hospitalization-not-a-model-prisoner/

BY CHRISTINE PELISEK POSTED ON JANUARY 5, 2017 AT 5:21PM EST

Charles Manson, the 82-year-old serial killer serving nine life sentences for the grisly killings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six other people during a two-day spree in 1969, is “not a model prisoner,” says a California prison official.

“He has had over 100 violations since he was incarcerated, which has been a very long time,” Kristina Khokhobashvili, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, tells PEOPLE.

On Sunday, Manson was taken from California’s Corcoran State Prison and transported to a hospital in Bakersfield for gastrointestinal bleeding, the Los Angeles Times reports. The Times reports that Manson is seriously ill.

Manson’s most recent rules violations at Corcoran — where he has been since 1989 — have included getting caught with three contraband mobile phones, failing to provide a urine sample for random drug testing, threatening prison staff, possession of a weapon and assault.

“He was a nasty prisoner,” retired Los Angeles County prosecutor Stephen Kay, who helped convict Manson, tells PEOPLE. “He threw hot coffee on a guard and spit on a guard’s face. He had a saw blade in the sole of a shoe. He was making little dolls, but they were like voodoo dolls of people, and he would stick needles in them hoping to injure the live person the doll was fashioned after. He said his main activity was making those dolls.”

Manson, Kay says, had a particular dislike for female prison guards. “He was especially nasty to the female guards,” he says. “He never had any respect for women. Women were to be used.”

On one occasion in 1982, prison guards searching Manson’s cell at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville found a hacksaw blade, marijuana and LSD, according to the Times. Also discovered were a nylon rope and a catalogue indicating how to purchase a hot-air balloon, objects that made officers believe he might have been planning a prison escape, the paper reports.

Kay says Manson, who was known for his outlandish and violent behavior behind bars, had enemies in prison.

“They were in the model shop and Manson got into a religious argument with a Hare Krishna, and the Hare Krishna poured lighter fluid on him and lit him up,” Kay says about the Vacaville assault.

Kay adds, “He has a lot of scarring on his upper body. I don’t know if he started it but he didn’t finish it. He was in the general prison population, and after that incident they decided they couldn’t have him in general population anymore. He was at risk of being severely injured.”

Manson first came to the public’s attention after he was arrested for the series of gruesome murders that he and his followers committed in 1969. The murders were part of a twisted plot by Manson to start a race war he called “Helter Skelter,” after the Beatles song. Manson and his so-called “family” of followers were convicted in 1971.

He has been denied parole 12 times and has spent time in San Quentin, Vacaville and Corcoran prisons.
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Re: Nikolas Schreck's "The Manson File"

Postby semper occultus » Tue Feb 28, 2017 6:08 am

Notes Towards a Psycho-Historical Context for the Manson Family

http://avalonianaeon.blogspot.co.uk/2009_08_01_archive.html#4357263106212329234

SUNDAY, 16 AUGUST 2009

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With the recent release of the Johnny Depp vehicle Public Enemy coinciding with the general period of the fortieth anniversary of the Manson murders it is interesting to note a point of connection that comes through one of the true-life characters featured in the movie, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis (pictured above). In later years he tutored the young Charlie on the guitar and much else besides. This serves as an interesting doorway into an expanded psycho-historical context in which to place the Family enigma. I offer up these fragments in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s Probes in the hope they may inspire others to expand them further.

Charles Manson is certainly a unique character and a lot of his story carries the tone of the time. It’s fascinating to investigate the occult beliefs circulating in sixties California that may have influenced him. Ed Sanders in The Family and Adam Gorightly in The Shadow Over Santa Susana have pointed towards the Solar Lodge of the OTO, the Process Church of the Final Judgement and a wider climate inspired by the Church of Satan as important factors in the genesis of Helter Skelter. I’ve dealt with some of this in my recent post.

I think there is also a larger American pyschogeographical context that Charlie and the Family can be fruitfully placed in. Firstly, the Karpis connection helps fit Manson into a lineage that stretches back through the gangster era to the Wild West. Charlie’s gangster mentor was a former designated Public Enemy from the Dillinger/Bonnie and Clyde era. A thief and murderer in his own right he joined up with the Ma Barker gang, a group of psycho-killer brothers immortalised by seventies Euro-disco-kitsch champions Boney M under their variant spelling as Ma Baker.


Go on, you know you want to watch it.


As a young girl Ma Barker had seen Jesse James ride by on a horse and was upset to hear of his death. Contrary to the legend she didn’t slaughter for fun and may not have been actively involved in the carnage but here was a family that slayed together. FBI chief J Edgar Hoover wrote in a book called The FBI in Action that “Ma Barker and her sons, and Alvin Karpis and his cronies, constituted the toughest gang of hoodlums the FBI ever has been called upon to eliminate…Looking over the record of these criminals, I was repeatedly impressed by the cruelty of their depredations…murder of a policeman …murder of two policemen ….machine gun murder of an innocent citizen who got in the way during a bank robbery …kidnapping and extortion…train robbery…mail robbery ...the protection of high police officials bought with tainted money…paroles bought.” As well as guitar tutorials, Karpis probably regaled his student with romanticised outlaw-chic stories of on-the-road pillage and slaughter.

During Manson’s apparent hippy phase he remained in contact with all kinds of figures in the general criminal underworld, engaging in a wide range of what could be called conventional criminal activity: car theft, burglary, credit card rackets, as well as drug-dealing. Somewhere in the background lurk Mafia types and the possibility that there may be a contract-killing aspect to the Tate-LaBianca murders. In this sense, Manson was a gangster.




Spahn Ranch from Life magazine

Once the Family moved out from the cities into the wilderness they took on the established outlaw ambiance. They spent significant time on Spahn Ranch, a location that had featured in numerous western B movies. Scenes from the legendary sixties TV series Bonanza and The Lone Ranger had been shot there. A whole Wild West street film set was in place that included a saloon. In this environment the Family lived their drug-filled orgiastic lifestyle. There were real cowboys still working on the ranch and a number of the Family also helped with the horses and general chores. Biker gangs were increasingly in evidence, along with the build up of an arsenal of weapons. In their later wanderings mining cabins and shacks, abandoned ghost villages, and isolated wilderness settlements are everywhere in the Family landscape. There can be little doubt that what could be called the Wild West Factor would have been part of the potent influences that shaped the group mindset.

Taking a look at Death Valley, scene of the final hoedown before Manson’s arrest, it’s redolent of Palestine. It’s a place where it would be easy to become a Bible nut. From the nineteenth century onwards large numbers of weird religious cults with their own take on Revelations went west. Madness, violence and sexuality were often present in varying blends around charismatic leader figures. The End Times were usually near. Charlie and the Family are part of this heritage as well. He fits the warped-out preacher archetype. My personal favourite modern representation of this is Henry Kane in Poltergeist II.

Manson is already a mythic figure. In another fifty years who knows how Hollywood might portray him or characters clearly derived from him? Look at the enormous number of westerns romanticising the lives of dirtbag murderers and the hideous environments they lived out their wretched lives in. These movies were created decades after the events they portrayed. With the gangster era there was no time-lag with the glamorising movies depicting it. Hippy outlaws and love-guru preachers may eventually become even more lionised noir figures than they already are. The psychogeography is well established. They are recognisable figures in archetypal tales set in a dreamtime landscape.

Steve Railsback as Manson in the seventies TV mini-series Helter Skelter. In my opinion the only actor who has ever managed a convincing portrayal. The words are accurately reported and the tale assuredly portrays Manson as a monster but Charlie himself skillfully milked the archetypal outlaw role and generates some power with it. What might a 2070 version of Helter Skelter be like?
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"yesterday I was having dinner with Charles Manson"

Postby IanEye » Mon Mar 27, 2017 1:21 pm

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