The Tate-LaBianca murders were committed by members of the Manson Family one week before the Woodstock Festival. Although these two events occurred at opposite ends of the country, mass communication brought the reality of these two perverse celebrations as close as next door. Certainly the stupid violence at the Altamont Raceway a few months later did nothing to quell the idea that young America had no sense at all. The subsequent arrests, trials and convictions of the Manson Family further discredited the propriety of youth’s alternative lifestyle: drugs, free love, long hair, racial harmony and radical politics—these could all be superficially tolerated by Nixon’s Silent (frightened) Majority. But a series of violent murders committed to ignite a race war was too bizarre to accept. Once the images of the killers were broadcast over television and displayed in newspapers and magazines, the children of World War II were no longer presumed naïve.
Mass murderers had heretofore been either one-man operations or the domain of organized crime. In the first two decades following the resolution of World War II, the image of the “lone nut” was engraved on America’s consciousness.
Sharpshooter and Bible-thumper Howard Unruh picked up his 9mm Luger on September 6, 1949 and twelve minutes later, thirteen family members, friends and total strangers lay dead in Camden, New Jersey. Unruh’s motive was blind retaliation for the theft of a fence that he used to keep out the rest of the world.
Droopy-eyed Billy Cook kidnapped the five-member Carl Moser family on New Year’s Eve 1950, killing each of them while in route to Joplin, Missouri. A salesman named Robert Dewey was killed by the same yung man.
Walking death machine Melvin Rees began a spree of murders and rapes in Maryland in 1957. By the time he was caught—four years later—he had destroyed nine people, mostly female children.
During this same time period, Harvey Glatman raped and murdered three Los Angeles women. He was executed for his crimes.
Charles Starkweather slaughtered eleven people out of a sense of boredom and frustration.
In Chicago in 1966, Richard Speck murdered eight nurses while a ninth hid under the bed.
Marine Corps graduate Charles Joseph Whitman killed his mother and father and the next day climbed the tower at the University of Texas in Austin and shot forty-six people, sixteen of whom died.
All of these people were men under the age of thirty-five, all were loners and social misfits, and all channeled their antisocial proclivities in violent ways. Unlike these men, Charles Manson had his own loosely-knit gang of highly motivated disciples to act out his violent impulses for him. For reinforcement he used isolation, drugs, religion, and a unique interpretation of Beatles songs, just as those in power in the United States used the isolation inherent in the vastness of the country, the drugged effects of television, religion and the mass media to program its citizenry.
While it would be historically inaccurate to claim that the Manson Family brought an end to the counterculture, it is true that the Family contaminated every area of society with which it made contact. Nothing so emphasized the magnitude of this contamination as the publication of a book in November 1974.
Helter Skelter was the most frightening book ever written in the genre of what came to be called “true crime.” Former Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi’s story of the Manson murders began with a page that simply said: “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you.” That admonition was not hyperbole. It was the truth. With co-author Curt Gentry, Bugliosi drove the reader screaming around corners and down stairwells with his foot through the floorboards. Even the more philosophical sections brought the totality of the dread moaning down over the reader’s ears. This effect was enhanced by the suggestions that some of the killers were still on the loose and that when those who had been apprehended were released from prison they would leave the streets slippery with blood.
For his midnight missions, Manson chose people in their late teens and early twenties. Although Manson and his disciples were politically reversed from the protestors in Chicago at the previous year’s Democratic National Convention, they did share a sense of community, long hair, no particular aversion to illegal drugs and a disregard for the sexual mores of the Silent Majority. While Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin denied the Chicago demonstrators had any kind of leadership, Manson was the unquestioned head of his group. Whereas the Yippies were not autocratic and had goals that often contradicted one another, as the sole leader of his Family, Manson’s goals were quite clear. And so with images of bare-chested boys torching flags pulsating in the collective consciousness, America was undone by nightly news viewings of the nomadic tribe that seemed to speak of affluence in disarray. While the news reports of the kill-cult were book-ended with body counts from Vietnam, whatever instincts toward cohesiveness for which Americans yearned were fractured by the very informational access which united them in their divisive fear. To the television screen, bare feet and long hair all looked the same.
In December 1969, the same month the arrests of the Manson Family were made public, the Rolling Stones declared a free concert to be held near San Francisco. Twenty-four hours before it was scheduled to begin, Altamont Raceway, which comfortably accommodated 6,500 people, was announced as the site. 300,000 people whose idea of freedom was not having to pay for anything showed up to hear the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills and Nash, and the headliners: The Rolling Stones. Security for the concert was provided by the Hells Angels in exchange for $500 worth of beer. That the Rolling Stones had the slightest concern for the safety of their fans is doubtful. That they were even concerned for themselves is measured by the fact that they were guarded by a group of drunken violence freaks. “Brothers and sisters, please!” singer Mick Jagger pleads in the film of the concert, Gimme Shelter. It did no good for audience member Meredith Hunter, He was beaten and stabbed to death right on camera. The media soaked up the story and squeezed it out all over the world. So as the 1960s came to an end, young America appeared badly out of even its own control.
Into this whirlwind strolled buckskinned Charles Manson and his loyal salivating sycophants, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie van Houten and Charles Watson. In addition to the nightly television coverage, several national magazines publicized the story with enthusiasm. Tuesday’s Child, Rolling Stone, Life and even Ladies Home Journal ran feature stories. Susan Atkins had no more than finished testifying to the grand jury when Lawrence Schiller published a dollar paperback called The Killing of Sharon Tate. The trial was scarcely over when Fugs member Ed Sanders released a book called The Family, which, after Schiller’s book, read like The Great Gatsby. Robert Hendrickson completed a documentary called Manson, but by the time it was released, hippie was dead, Yippie was underground, and most of the “longhaired freaky people” had either joined the KKK or else gone on to make a difference on Wall Street.
“The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you.”
Bugliosi did not limit himself to the story of the murders and his crucial role in getting the convictions. He went much deeper into the abyss. For one thing, the seven Tate-LaBianca victims were not the only people killed by the Family. Gary Hinman, Donald Shea and John Haught were all slain before the trial began. Bugliosi strongly suggested and today still believes the Family murdered van Houten’s attorney Ronald Hughes. Bugliosi offered a mix of evidence and speculation that the Manson clan killed ten other people between October 1968 and November 1972, for a total of twenty-one. “Are there more?” Bugliosi asked. “We tend to think that there probably are, because these people liked to kill.”
President Gerald Ford was stumbling amidst the San Francisco public one autumn day in 1975 when a young redhead stepped through the curious crowd of well-wishers and aimed her gun at the President of the United States. The weapon jammed and as the Secret Service tackled the young woman, she screamed, “It wasn’t loaded!”
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, proud dues-paying member of the dwindling Manson Family, was sent to prison. For the second time within a month, Ford had nearly been assassinated, the nation was spared the horror of a Nelson Rockefeller Presidency, and the Family was back in the news. Squeaky appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.
The following year, Helter Skelter was released as a two-night television movie, a PG version of which later became available on home video. Despite having none of the flair of the book and in Steve Railsback the worst characterization of Manson short of the wax figure at Madame Tousaud’s, the shows were at the time the most-viewed programs in television history. Susan Atkins and Charles Watson converted to Christianity and wrote books about it. Manson appeared on several TV shows and even gave an interview to Geraldo Rivera, wherein the latter’s ego was finally matched. A collection of Manson’s writings was published. The Family’s record albums are collectors’ items.
The true allure of the Manson lore may be as simple and profound as something the late Paul Watkins wrote in his own autobiography. Manson’s former second-in-command and chief procurer stated: “Charlie did more than give hitchhikers and hippies a bad name. He manifested and expressed not only the mechanism of his own twisted psyche, but the latent evils existing within our own society.”
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He had been acquainted with a man named Donald DeFreeze, and had suggested that DeFreeze take the name Cinque. He had helped lay plans that resulted in the kidnapping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of ransomed.
—Stephen King, The Stand
Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun and bought it.
—Warren Zevon, “Roland the Thompson Gunner”
Two of the more imaginative writers of the 1970s used the Patty Hearst story to add verisimilitude to their own stories, in the process creating myths about the young woman’s perils. It is easy to see why. Her abduction and subsequent conversion to the Symbionese Liberation Army required a myth for the story to make sense, the surest sign that there are things going on that people didn’t understand. Just as some people find it helpful to create filler to link scenarios because of a lack of useful information, so do creative people use myths to make sense of a reality that is—for the moment—otherwise inexplicable.
For two years she commanded very serious media attention and abruptly the story was gone. Little has been written of her since her pardon by President Jimmy Carter. Her 1982 autobiography, Every Secret Thing, sold few copies and the Paul Schrader movie based on the book did little at the box office. Today she is scarcely recalled except as a nostalgia item or as a hostess on the Travel Channel. Yet prior to her capture, Patricia Hearst, daughter of publishing magnate Randolph A. Hearst, was granted media shine surpassed in intensity only by the O.J. Simpson affair. But where the Simpson defense raised issues of racism, Hearst’s attorneys suggested the more complex issues of coercion, intimidation and conditioning. The jurors—not to mention much of the general public—scoffed at the notion that the young rich girl had been brainwashed or even succumbed to coercion, which the Merriam Webster Dictionary of Law defines as “The use of express or implied threats of violence or reprisal or other intimidating behavior that puts a person in immediate fear of the consequences in order to compel that person to act against his will.” So important is the concept of coercion in the American legal system that it may actually be a defense in a legal proceeding if the jury accepts the defendant’s behavior as the result of duress. As one looks at the facts of the kidnapping, it is quite possible to conclude that the jury accepted Hearst’s defense, but was sufficiently predisposed against her to give the defense adequate weight. It is also possible to conclude that the notion of conditioning is unacceptable to most Americans. And it is even possible that Hearst’s version of events was a lie and that the jury was too intelligent to believe it. A final explanation is that the entire business with Charles Manson had so frightened people about “politically” motivated cults that the SLA was damned from the outset.
Certainly there are parallels between the Hearst saga and the Manson killings. Both cases involved charismatic leaders and impressionable followers. Both leaders had the stigma (or badge of honor) of being an ex-convict. Both leaders were older than their followers. Both leaders gave their followers new names and new identities. Both leaders used isolation to control their followers. Both men implied that they themselves were something more than human. Both foresaw African Americans leading a revolution. Both viewed the white establishment as the enemy and referred to that enemy as “pigs.” Both forced their associates to undergo rigorous training. Both divided their organizations into military units which ultimately caused the downfall of the leader himself. And both led groups that carried on after the imprisonment or death of their leader.
A cactus grows in the desert because it can grow nowhere else. The seeds of the behavior of the members of the SLA only came to fruition under the conditions provided by their leader.
“You do indeed know me,” Cinque said in his first taped message to Randolph Hearst. “You have always known me. I’m that nigger you have hunted and feared night and day. I’m that nigger you have killed hundreds of my people in a vain hope of finding. I’m that nigger that is no longer just hunted, robbed and murdered. I’m that nigger that hunts you now.”
A jail rat from the age of sixteen, Donald DeFreeze discovered his true self in San Quentin, where he was reborn as the Fifth Prophet: Cinque Mtume. After being transferred to Soledad Prison, Cinque became a trustee. In March 1973, he was babysitting a boiler when he felt the spirit swell up in him. Epiphanized, he leapt a fence and completed his escape. In Berkeley, he connected with friend Russ Little and soon the two men moved in with female radical Pat Soltysik (Zoya). These three formed the original core of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Little’s girlfriend Angela DeAngelis (Celina) soon joined, as did friends Joe Remiro and Willie Wolfe (Cujo).
William Wolfe had been a middle class social success and social worker when he met Cinque as part of a program to educate African-American prisoners. The teacher ended up receiving the education. Cujo was born.
Angela DeAngelis had likewise come from an affluent family. At college In Indiana, she and future husband Gary Atwood became fast friends with Bill and Emily Harris. Radicals were not much tolerated in Indiana, even in the late 1960s, and so the group found their way to Berkeley, as did Nancy Ling Perry (Fahizah), a former Goldwater Republican who transferred from Whittier College. She was impressed with the free love, free speech, cheap drugs and cozy camaraderie of the local radical scene and through her work in prison reform she discovered the SLA.
Camilla Hall (Gabi) also identified with society’s outcasts. The artistically gifted gay young woman met Zoya and soon moved in with her. It was through this relationship that she found acceptance in the guerrilla group.
In late 1973 Russ Little and Joe Remiro were arrested for murdering Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of schools in Oakland and—according to the SLA—the original Uncle Tom. Field Marshall Cinque could not allow his loyal comrades to remain in captivity. An exchange was in order. But what did the SLA possess that they could trade for the release of two convicted murderers?
On Monday, February 4, 1974, three SLA members entered the apartment shared by Steven Weed and Patricia Hearst. The intruders beat Weed unconscious, blindfolded Hearst and brought her to their hideout where they required her to stay in a closet for almost two months, leaving the cramped quarters only for supervised bodily functions and the occasional tub bath.
Cinque knew that to immediately demand an exchange of prisoners was not only futile but self-serving, Instead, through a series of tape recorded communiqués, he insisted that the Hearst Corporation give seventy dollars worth of food to every indigent Californian. The Hearst family made a counter-offer of two million dollars earmarked for a program called People In Need. The ultimate result was a food distribution to a few thousand poor people. Governor Ronald Reagan had someone in his office instruct him to assure Californians that there would be no exchange of prisoners.
During the ongoing food distribution, Patty Hearst was subjected to the constant rhetoric of the nine SLA members who held her fate. Blindfolded for fifty-seven days and nights, she was told over and over that the Establishment, in the person of her father, was responsible for her imprisonment due to his lack of concern for the starving masses in California and even for the safety of his own daughter. All the rich people, all the people who made the rules, Cinque told her, were all just like that. Over and over she was told her Establishment family would sooner let her die than give up any of their precious money.
Was she going to be killed? asked the nineteen-year-old Patty Hearst.
Yes, it might be necessary for her to die. But even if the SLA did not kill her, the authorities surely would. The FBI was conducting house-to-house searches. Once they found the hideout, they would kill all the inhabitants and blame Patty's death on the revolutionaries.
Over and over. The programming took hold.
In one of the communiques sent to her parents, Patty is heard to say:
I no longer fear the SLA because they are not the ones who want me to die. The SLA wants to feed the people and assure safety and justice for the two men in San Quentin. I realize now that it's the FBI who wants to murder me.
Ms. Hearst later argued that she was forced to repeat the message and did not truly believe in the content.
It was shortly after the release of this message that Cinque offered to allow Patty to join his organization. With the earlier communiques, the SLA had laid the groundwork for convincing the public their hostage was on the road to conversion. Now Cinque told the heiress she could stay and join, or she could simply go home. Hearst later stated that she believed that if she had chosen to go home, she would have been murdered. And so she told the Field Marshall she wanted to join. In turn, he gave her the name Tania.
On April 15, 1974, something occurred which would become a key determinant in the way the public viewed the criminal justice system. It was on that day that the SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank in the Sunset District of San Francisco at Noriega and 22nd Avenue. The robbery was planned to provide funds to support the SLA's revolution. The robbery was also intended to let the media see Tania in the role of a committed urban guerrilla. While the bandits made off with $10,660, Patty Hearst was caught on tape holding a carbine on bank employees and customers.
Evelle Younger had become California's Attorney General based on his office's successful prosecution of the Manson Family back when he had been the Los Angeles District Attorney. His opinion was ominous: "The moment of truth has long since passed for Patricia Hearst."
The public perception began to be formed.
In May 1974, Patty Hearst was waiting in a van outside Mel's Sporting Goods while Bill and Emily Harris went inside to shop. Bill chose to shoplift and was just leaving the store when an employee wrestled him to the ground. In response, Hearst aimed a submachine gun out the van's window and fired thirty rounds into the air. Emptying that weapon, she then fired three more shots from her own carbine. Asked by authorities to explain why she did this, she thoughtfully replied:
I acted instinctively, because I had been trained and drilled to do just that, to react to a situation without thinking, just as soldiers are trained and rilled to obey an order under fire instinctively, without questioning it. The penalty for failure in combat was death.
In the process of making their escape, the trio stole two cars and kidnapped two people who were released within a few days.
Patty and the Harrises were holed up in an Anaheim hotel when the TV news telecast the first reports: The police found the SLA safe house, fired over 3,500 shots into the building, lobbed in tear gas, and the hideout caught fire. Except for the three frightened folks watching TV in Anaheim, the entire SLA was dead.
Sportswriter Jack Scott contacted the survivors. He told them he wanted to write a sympathetic account of the SLA. Scott, his parents and his wife transported the group east where the fugitives would be somewhat less recognizable. Along with Revolutionary Army member Wendy Yoshimura, they lived in various farm houses in New York and Pennsylvania.
The group made it back to California by February 1975, settling in Sacramento with new friends Mike Bortin, Jim Kilgore, Steven Soliah and Steven's sister Kathy. Their first target was the Guild S&L Association, where they netted $3,700. Next they assaulted the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael. It was there that Emily Harris shot and killed a customer named Myrna Lee Opshal. Becoming more confident, the group turned to setting off car bombs beneath police cars. In September, the group separated. Patty and Wendy move in together in the Outer Mission District and that was exactly where the FBI arrested them, an hour after nabbing the Harrises.
F. Lee Bailey and Al Johnson defended Hearst against charges of armed robbery and aggravated assault. Better than half the people surveyed in California at the time of Patty's arrest believed she had staged her own kidnapping. As Hearst herself would later ask, "How would it appear to the voters if the Ford administration, which had pardoned Richard Nixon, had chosen not to prosecute me?" Bailey and Johnson tried to persuade the jury that their client had been acting under duress, which, they explained, is the wrongful compulsion that induces a person to act against his own will. The jury was not persuaded and found her guilty of the Hibernia robbery. Originally sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, the punishment was later reduced to seven years. She subsequently was given five years probation for pleading "no contest" on the charges stemming from the Mel's Sporting Goods shoot-out. Two appeals on the Hibernia sentence were denied. On May 15, 1978, she began serving time in Pleasanton. Her sentence was commuted by President Carter and she left prison on February 1, 1979.
The key question avoided by the media was one of personal responsibility under efforts of conditioning. Whether or not Hearst was the ultimate variable in a Stanley Milgram experiment, it is interesting to ponder how the public had been prepared for her reemergence. Some argued from the outset that she would go free because of her wealth. Others said her fame and fortune worked against her. After all, would the FBI have devoted eighteen months pursuing a less significant person for committing similar crimes?
Perhaps the ironic aspect of the Hearst saga is that today few people read, write or concern themselves with her plight. And yet the big question remains: When a microcosmic society conspires to alter a person's thinking, what is the responsibility of that individual for their own behavior?