This is "Giselle", an Eviliz reader. Notice a resemblance to somebody?
Saturday, October 12, 2013
Thursday, October 10, 2013
1754 Waller Street at Stanyan : The BEL Aquarian Temple
Here is a link to Robert Ackerly aka Christopher Wheat (That's right, wheat) aka Bobby BEL and his daughter Amy in the Haight Ashbury this year, talking about the BEL's time there from 1966-1967. Robert is a founding member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (aka BEL, "The Tribe" or "The Church"), who gave a lot of money to the Diggers' free kitchens and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. He has a website here and also runs Youtube Channel "Bobby BEL." At one time he had a show on NoCal community television called "Santa Cruzin'." The camera man is identified as "Brother Fleet," who has been around "since the beginning."1:40: When I got to the Haight I didn't know anybody. I knew this one guy and we were going to go to Canada, but I didn't go." Canada, you say?
2:16: "I'd known him from before at the Steiner Street house. He had this crash pad. We were selling acid on the streets." Sellin' acid!
2:40 "I met these girls who had a hash connection and pretty soon it just began to blossom." Sellin' acid AND hash!5:00 ("Rojo" or "Mojo" and (inaudible)"Dale" or "Gale") brought 500 pounds of weed in this Pink Cadillac right in the first days."
5:30 "We had three hundred pounds of pot right there in that garage." Sellin' acid, hash, AND weed!
8:00 "Pam's connection had this DMT." Sellin' acid, hash, weed AND DMT!
8:20 "Fat Bobby was a gay dude the Joker met in Pasadena." The Joker? Was he also a Gypsy?
9:00 "(Steve) stole the DMT connection, and took it to Laguna Beach where he blew up his house. Instant Karma." (Footnote: In hippie, "instant karma" is a catch all that means something akin to "fugettaboutit.")
Some highlights from clip 2:
1:05 "Johnny Griggs came up here when Orange Sunshine first came out...and, uh, made some phonecalls you know, and started setting up a distribution system...Elliot Miller (aka The Joker) is another brother from Anaheim that nobody knows about, and he had a whole network."
2:00:Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker were in there because these girls knew 'em. And so, uh,
they made this movie called "The Trip" or something (He means Revolution) with Today and all that. I was supposed to be in it, but I forgot about it. Spaced out."5:40 "Diana made us these robes. Our Haight Street robes, like a monk. You know the robe, I used to take her around on Halloween when they were little kids with my shotgun and my Afghani...ha ha ha...That's right...Amy and Andrew grew up in Hawaii." Say what? You used to wear a religious robe around the Haight? Huh.
8:00: "It first started getting weird when they did a casket on Haight Street, and buried the hippies. The hippies are dead: that means it's come to an end, you can't label us." We will call ourselves slippies, instead!
8:40: So, a lot of people started coming into the Haight that were pretty much criminals."
9:45: "Hells Angels had cops in town that worked for the police."
14:30. "So we took off, and we had some friends up in Potter's Valley...and that was the end of The Haight." FYI, people, Potter's Valley is just a hop, skip and jump from Ukiah and Booneville. The core members of the BEL were there when The Family was, too. And weren't "The Witches" dealing acid to the local kids?
Patty can only say ooEEoo so many times: so many coincidences. So many parallels. So many connections. The elder hipsters say it all the time: "What started out as a good thing went bad." They are not lying. But they are not telling the whole truth, either. The murders were horrifically shameful, especially given everyone's initial intentions. No one wanted to admit that anything they might have done personally helped to set the wheels in motion that crushed five (no, make that six. No, make that eight. No make that nine) innocent people. No one could admit to having met or having known anyone else. It was too risky, scary and shameful to do so, and it may still be, who knows?
In 1969, Charles Manson became the focus of a magnifying glass that we (all of us) used to bore a hole right through him. He was and still is the repository for a hell of a lot of guilt, and shame, and fear. Charles Manson is absolutely not a serial killer, but Patty truly believes that he was probably a "hippie mafia" middleman and enforcer. It's an important distinction, no?
And because Patty loves you, here is your lagniappe regarding the 2009 arrest of Brenice Lee Smith:
2:10: “so now that the story’s coming out, the Senate investigating is over right now uh… because of the last case two years ago… we can tell our stories and they can’t do anything to us, and all that kinda stuff.”
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Sexy Sadie's Sick-Ass Art!
Susan Atkins might have passed away back in 2009, but "art" from the remnants of her diseased mind continue to fill murder auction websites. This is a woman who claimed to be a born-again Christian, and tried year after year to get out of prison on the basis that she was remorseful, sorry, and down right repentant for her sins! Ok, if that was the case, I sure would like to know what was going through her pickle-shaped head at the moment she made this:
I guess she had fond memories of leaving a bloody footprint at the Tate house the night her, and her pals decided to slaughter a bunch of innocent people, including a VERY-pregnant woman! Her footprints in blood must of been such an inspiration for this piece! This little work of art says this at the bottom:
"Anyone you know who would like to receive these monthly (something) from me, have them write to The Dove's Nest, P.O. Box 1326, San Juan Capistrano, Ca 92692-1326." I couldn't read what the description said after the word "monthly."
Why, doesn't the widower Whitehouse (her husband) live in San Juan Capistrano, California? Were they profiting off of her notoriety? I just don't know! I do know she used to send out monthly "Christian" newsletters from her cell, which she called "The Dove's Nest." In my opinion, this is one of the sickest things I have ever seen. No wonder she never was released. By the way, I saw this at murderauction.com. Here is the link:
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
An Interview with Paul Crockett
This interview is from the September/October 1975 issue of Psychic magazine. A huge thank you to Ole JC for the tip!
Monday, October 7, 2013
Mine owner spent time with Charles Manson
Emmett Harder and his wife, Ruth, on their 61st anniversary.
BY MARK MUCKENFUSS
September 20, 2013; 05:34 PM
Sometimes when you go looking for gold, you find it.
I was tracking down information the other day on the Amargosa Mine, also known as the Salt Springs Mine, which is between Baker and Shoshone, just off the road to Death Valley.
I’ve written about the mine in the past. Gold was discovered on the spot in 1849 by members of an early Mormon expedition. It was one of the first, if not the first, non-native gold strikes in Southern California.
I ran across information from 1993 that said Emmett Harder was the current owner. He lived in Devore. Twenty years later, he’s still in Devore and still owns the mine.
But that’s not what this column is about.
This column is about the fact that notorious killer Charles Manson is back in the news. A new biography on Manson by Jeff Guinn recently hit the shelves.
What does that have to do with Harder?
Well, after a lengthy discussion about his lifelong love of prospecting, his sporadic work at the Salt Springs Mine and his fascination with stories of lost rich deposits of gold, Harder mentioned that he also owns a mine in the Panamint Mountains near Death Valley.
The mine is near Barker Ranch, where the Manson Family lived just before and during the infamous Tate and LaBianca murders. Mansion was captured at the ranch, hiding in a small closet.
Harder, 81, said he spent time with Manson and his followers. News stories and other writings over the years bear out his account.
A Life magazine story that ran during the time of the Manson trial featured photos from the ranch.
“One of the pictures is my partner in the gold mine, standing with Charlie,” Harder said. “I’m standing right beside them but I didn’t get in the picture, unfortunately.”
He said he also was just out of the frame in a photo showing some of the young women in Manson’s group making breakfast in the ranch house.
“They were making hotcakes and we were dipping them in syrup,” he said.
At the same time, Manson was in an argument with a man named Carl Rona.
“Charlie took offense when Carl said, ‘You hippies,’” Harder recalled. “Charlie said, ‘By God, we’re not hippies. We’ve escaped from Haight Ashbury and we came down here to get away from the troubles of the world.’”
At one point, Harder said, he brought Manson to San Bernardino.
“I brought Charlie and (Charles “Tex”) Watson and a bunch of the people down from the mine with me,” he said. “They had dinner here at my house. Charlie played the guitar for my wife.”
Harder said he was close to some of the women in the group. One in particular came from a San Bernardino family he knew. Catherine “Cappy” Gilles was the granddaughter of Billy Meyers. The Meyers family owned a ranch adjacent to Barker Ranch and Gilles’ mention of the ranch is reportedly what initially drew Manson to the desert.
Gilles, Harden said, had run away from home at 14.
“I was concerned with her being with these hippies,” he said. “I tried to get her to reunite with her family.”
He’s remained in touch with some of the women over the years, including Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who was imprisoned for an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in 1975.
“I saw them in a whole different light,” Harder said. “These girls were all misfits of one kind or another and they were all trapped by Charlie.”
To Harder, Manson seemed inconsequential.
“He wasn’t an impressive fellow for us but he certainly impressed (the women in the Family) in a horrible way.”
Reach Mark Muckenfuss at 951-368-9595 or mmuckenfuss@pe.com
Mark Muckenfuss
Original story HERE
Thank you, Max Frost!
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Getting The Fear: Manson, Me, And The Summer Of Hate
BY MARK DERY
"Getting the Fear," Manson called it—embracing the dry-mouthed jitters of sheer terror, riding that moment when your heart is thudding so hard it feels like something trapped inside your ribcage, trying to get out.
The golden road to expanded consciousness, Charlie told his flock in the summer of '69, led straight through "the infinite plain of fear unto infinity." What did he mean, exactly? The faithful wanted to know. "Well, I go into Malibu and I pick a rich house. I don't steal, I walk into the house and the fear hits you like waves. It's almost like walking on waves of fear."
A nice turn of phrase, and an apt one, given Manson's vision of himself as a con-man messiah—an L. Ron Hubbard for the Love Generation—and the setting: California, where the American Dream skids to a halt at the continent's edge and surfers bob, existentially becalmed, waiting for the Perfect Wave.
Stroll brazenly into the brightly lit homes of the wealthy, Manson instructed "Squeaky" Fromme and "Sadie Mae" Atkins and the rest of the Family; the "rich piggies" would be too petrified to resist. "Do the unexpected. No sense makes sense. You won't get caught if you don't got thought in your head." It's the easiest thing in the world, he explained, to jimmy open one of those flimsy summer doors using, say, a credit card; to slit a screen with a knife and let yourself in.
As always, the girls took Charlie's teachings to heart. Dressed in black, wearing homemade capes, they pried open windows in Malibu dream homes and "creepy crawled" through the rooms, as they called it, stoned immaculate on all that piggy fear, scooping up jewelry and furs. Then, they'd leave.
In the small hours of August 9, 1969, two of the girls, along with Tex Watson, creepy crawled into 10050 Cielo Drive. Everyone had a knife; for good measure, Watson came armed with a .22-caliber "Longhorn" pistol as well. Swaddled in the chaparral of Benedict Canyon, hidden away in a cul-de-sac, the Tate-Polanski mansion was remote from the city's hum, despite its panoramic view of Beverly Hills. "Being secluded, it was also vulnerable," note Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry in their heavy breathing account of the Manson murders, Helter Skelter. It was one of those hot California nights when the air thrums with silence. "You could almost hear the sound of the ice rattling in cocktail shakers in homes way down the canyon," one of the killers recalled.
What happened next is part of the tabloid catechism that Americans of a certain age know by heart.
In August 1969, I was nine and living in San Diego's South Bay, in the suburbs of Chula Vista. I have no idea if I heard horror stories about the Manson murders from my third-grade classmates—whisper-down-the-lane retellings of their parents' veiled references to events in the headlines. There's a chance I saw coverage of the killings on the nightly news, albeit a slim one, since my parents' news diet was limited to our hometown paper. But the December, 1969 Time magazine cover ("The Love and Terror Cult: The Man Who Was Their Leader…The Charge of Multiple Murder…The Dark Edge of Hippie Life") strikes sympathetic vibrations: who could forget Manson in mugshot black and white, giving the camera his best witchy stare with those off-kilter eyes, the left slightly higher than the right for maximum psycho-killer effect?
Growing up in Southern California, I knew the isolation of the cul-de-sac houses out on suburbia's asteroid belt, where the night air was thick with the cloying smell of sage and wild fennel and the darkness echoed with the hiss of automatic sprinklers, stuttering across lawns. A man might scream, might run into his front yard and scream, as Wojtek Frykowski did that night on Cielo Drive, Oh, God, no, please don't! Oh, God, no don't, don't, don't…,and get nothing but echoes for an answer. ("Would you believe that he was screaming ‘Help, help,' and nobody came?" Sadie Mae wondered aloud to a fellow inmate at the L.A. county jail for women.) I knew the mass-produced alienation of suburbia, where you could live your life in a tract home fit for a battery hen, your sixth of an acre flush against your neighbors', yet never exchange much more than a nod of recognition as you pulled into your driveway and they out of theirs.
Whether or not I was aware of the Manson murders, the spreading stain of fear was seeping, in August 1969, under the locked doors of everyone's consciousness. Rumors crackled through Hollywood's bush telegraph, talk of ritual slayings, of corpses in black hoods, of Sharon Tate's baby ripped from her womb, of sexual mutilation, of one of the Beautiful Peoples' sadomasochistic orgies interrupted by the arrival of some uninvited Garbage People, as Charlie called his Family. Like Santa Ana winds whipping wildfires through arroyos, the media fanned fears to near-hysteria. "TV programs were interrupted for updates," write Bugliosi and Gentry. "To the millions of Angelenos who commuted to work via the freeways their car radios seemed to broadcast little else."
Locksmiths reported two-week backlogs; a Beverly Hills sporting goods store that had sold three or four firearms a day before the murders sold 200 within two days after them.
I wouldn't know. I wasn't there, in the sense that none of us, at age nine, can truly be said to be anywhere outside our cranial vaults. But I do know that the Manson murders are among my only recovered memories, from the ‘60s, of the world outside home and head. I know, too, that the hair on my forearms always prickles when I read the passage in "The White Album" where Didion freeze-frames a floating world where everything was in flux, held up by a kind of existential surface tension, in her encounter with the stranger in her hallway.
It was a time, she writes, when she "knew where the sheets and towels were kept" but didn't "always know who was sleeping in every bed." (Is that why Sharon Tate's houseguest, Abigail Folger, looked up from her book to smile bemusedly at the stranger passing her bedroom—Manson killer Sadie Mae, who smiled back? Because people came and went, talking of Charlton Heston's Michelangelo, and who knew who was sleeping in what bed?) Didion had "a sharp apprehension," in those days, "of what it was like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have a knife." People she didn't know would bluff their way into her house. Some just invited themselves in, without knocking; there they were, in her entrance hall.
I recall asking one such stranger what he wanted. We looked at each other for what seemed a long time, and then he saw my husband on the stair landing. "Chicken Delight," he said finally, but we had ordered no Chicken Delight, nor was he carrying any. I took the license number on his panel truck. … I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.
That feeling—a premonitory sense of victimhood, of one day ending up a chalk outline, your last minutes narrated in the jargon of wound ballistics and spatter patterns—is part of the post-traumatic legacy of anyone who lived in or near L.A. during the Summer of Hate.
Of course it takes more than out-of-focus childhood memories to explain why I worry, most nights, that I forgot to lock a door or latch a window, a fear that tickles me until I double-check every lock and latch—a ritual that might seem obsessive-compulsive but is, in truth, an atheist's way of crossing himself. Or why I sometimes find myself awake in the night, holding my breath, listening, listening as if my life depended on it. Or why, when I come home to an empty house, I've been known to pull the big, Norman Bates Signature Model chef's knife from the knife block in the kitchen and creep from room to room, flinging open closet doors, peering under beds. I scan the beds and bureaus, not wanting to miss the telling detail, anything out of place. "Someone is coming in our house while we're away," one of the Manson Family victims, Rosemary LaBianca, had said. "Things have been gone through and the dogs are outside the house when they should be inside."
The story I tell myself about my vulnerability, how fragile our jerry-built bulwarks against the random and the senseless really are—little more than lucky charms, if you think about it—is a gothic fiction with many authors: Manson, yes, but Didion no less, and Bugliosi's 1974 account of the killings, and the 1976 made-for-TV movie Helter Skelter. Then, too, the isolation and alienation of the California suburbs played no small part in scripting my bad dreams, the worst of which always involve strangers who know how easy it is, on a hot summer night, to slit a screen and slip noiselessly in. (We had one of those silly sliding screens for a patio door, a rickety, unconvincing thing, just like the ones that yielded obligingly to Charlie.)
But it may have been In Cold Blood, all the more mythic for being true, that tripped the alarm in my unconscious. Unimaginably awful in its tawdry details, the slaughter of the Clutter family sewed the fear of home invasion in the American imagination. "The door was unlocked," one of the killers, Perry Smith, told investigators. "A side door. It took us into Mr. Clutter's office. Then we waited in the dark. Listening. But the only sound was the wind."
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is "The White Album"'s oracular opening line, written to be quoted. Didion elaborates: "We look…for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five," five being the body count at the Tate-Polanski mansion that night. "We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
In the years just before her mind subsided into the murk of Alzheimer's, my mother, who studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1962, started insisting she'd had a close encounter with the Boston Strangler. He'd killed someone in the very building where she shared an apartment with another girl, she claimed, a fellow art student named Lydia. No, no, he'd knocked on the door one night while she and Lydia waited, unmoving, unbreathing, their ears aching with the sound of him standing just outside the door until, at last, his footsteps creaked down the hall. With each re-telling, the Strangler came a little closer. In her last reworking of the theme before my mother's mind sank into the weed-choked mire of dementia, the Strangler was throttling Lydia with her nylons while my mother hid, mad with terror, under her bed.
Did she build her fever dreams on even a fragment of fact? Did the Strangler strike somewhere nearby, if not in her building? Or was my mother's fearful, coat-clutching insistence that Death had knocked on her door, then passed on, an intimation of mortality, or maybe a premonition of the onrushing darkness of Alzheimer's? Or was it just one of those bottle rockets the mind sends up, a neurochemical farewell to the memories that make us who we are?
For whatever reason, it was a story she needed to tell herself.
We are the unreliable narrators of our lives.
"Getting the Fear," Manson called it—embracing the dry-mouthed jitters of sheer terror, riding that moment when your heart is thudding so hard it feels like something trapped inside your ribcage, trying to get out.
A nice turn of phrase, and an apt one, given Manson's vision of himself as a con-man messiah—an L. Ron Hubbard for the Love Generation—and the setting: California, where the American Dream skids to a halt at the continent's edge and surfers bob, existentially becalmed, waiting for the Perfect Wave.
Stroll brazenly into the brightly lit homes of the wealthy, Manson instructed "Squeaky" Fromme and "Sadie Mae" Atkins and the rest of the Family; the "rich piggies" would be too petrified to resist. "Do the unexpected. No sense makes sense. You won't get caught if you don't got thought in your head." It's the easiest thing in the world, he explained, to jimmy open one of those flimsy summer doors using, say, a credit card; to slit a screen with a knife and let yourself in.
As always, the girls took Charlie's teachings to heart. Dressed in black, wearing homemade capes, they pried open windows in Malibu dream homes and "creepy crawled" through the rooms, as they called it, stoned immaculate on all that piggy fear, scooping up jewelry and furs. Then, they'd leave.
In the small hours of August 9, 1969, two of the girls, along with Tex Watson, creepy crawled into 10050 Cielo Drive. Everyone had a knife; for good measure, Watson came armed with a .22-caliber "Longhorn" pistol as well. Swaddled in the chaparral of Benedict Canyon, hidden away in a cul-de-sac, the Tate-Polanski mansion was remote from the city's hum, despite its panoramic view of Beverly Hills. "Being secluded, it was also vulnerable," note Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry in their heavy breathing account of the Manson murders, Helter Skelter. It was one of those hot California nights when the air thrums with silence. "You could almost hear the sound of the ice rattling in cocktail shakers in homes way down the canyon," one of the killers recalled.
What happened next is part of the tabloid catechism that Americans of a certain age know by heart.
In August 1969, I was nine and living in San Diego's South Bay, in the suburbs of Chula Vista. I have no idea if I heard horror stories about the Manson murders from my third-grade classmates—whisper-down-the-lane retellings of their parents' veiled references to events in the headlines. There's a chance I saw coverage of the killings on the nightly news, albeit a slim one, since my parents' news diet was limited to our hometown paper. But the December, 1969 Time magazine cover ("The Love and Terror Cult: The Man Who Was Their Leader…The Charge of Multiple Murder…The Dark Edge of Hippie Life") strikes sympathetic vibrations: who could forget Manson in mugshot black and white, giving the camera his best witchy stare with those off-kilter eyes, the left slightly higher than the right for maximum psycho-killer effect?
Whether or not I was aware of the Manson murders, the spreading stain of fear was seeping, in August 1969, under the locked doors of everyone's consciousness. Rumors crackled through Hollywood's bush telegraph, talk of ritual slayings, of corpses in black hoods, of Sharon Tate's baby ripped from her womb, of sexual mutilation, of one of the Beautiful Peoples' sadomasochistic orgies interrupted by the arrival of some uninvited Garbage People, as Charlie called his Family. Like Santa Ana winds whipping wildfires through arroyos, the media fanned fears to near-hysteria. "TV programs were interrupted for updates," write Bugliosi and Gentry. "To the millions of Angelenos who commuted to work via the freeways their car radios seemed to broadcast little else."
Locksmiths reported two-week backlogs; a Beverly Hills sporting goods store that had sold three or four firearms a day before the murders sold 200 within two days after them.
It was reported that Frank Sinatra was in hiding; that Mia Farrow wouldn't attend her friend Sharon's funeral because, a relative explained, "Mia is afraid she will be next"; …that Steve McQueen now kept a weapon under the front seat of his sports car; that Jerry Lewis had installed an alarm system complete with closed circuit TV. Connie Stevens later admitted she had turned her Beverly Hills home into a fortress. "Mainly because of the Sharon Tate murders. That scared the daylights out of everyone."Joan Didion, in her deadpan valedictory for the passing of ‘60s utopianism, "The White Album," contemplates the death aura of the decade's end from the safe remove of the late ‘70s. Using her improbable friendship with Linda Kasabian, "star witness for the prosecution in what was commonly known as the Manson Trial," as a leitmotif, she puts the ‘60s on the couch, diagnosing the social pathologies and cultural neuroses of the era from a series of convulsions whose only common thread, at first glance, is their shared timeline, 1968: the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the nightmare at My Lai, the trial of Huey Newton, the murder of the silent-movie star Ramon Novarro by a couple of hustlers, the ugly mood at a Doors recording session, so thick you could cut it with a knife. (Speaking of which, why didn't Manson take his cues from Doors records? A band dedicated to "anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, about activity that appears to have no meaning," as Jim Morrison put it, would seem to be more in tune with Charlie's acid-casualty theology and his Boschian visions of a world run amok than The Beatles' all-you-need-is-love homilies.) "The jitters were setting in," Didion wrote.
I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive…For many of the people she knew, she says, the ‘60s ended at precisely that moment.
It was a time, she writes, when she "knew where the sheets and towels were kept" but didn't "always know who was sleeping in every bed." (Is that why Sharon Tate's houseguest, Abigail Folger, looked up from her book to smile bemusedly at the stranger passing her bedroom—Manson killer Sadie Mae, who smiled back? Because people came and went, talking of Charlton Heston's Michelangelo, and who knew who was sleeping in what bed?) Didion had "a sharp apprehension," in those days, "of what it was like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have a knife." People she didn't know would bluff their way into her house. Some just invited themselves in, without knocking; there they were, in her entrance hall.
I recall asking one such stranger what he wanted. We looked at each other for what seemed a long time, and then he saw my husband on the stair landing. "Chicken Delight," he said finally, but we had ordered no Chicken Delight, nor was he carrying any. I took the license number on his panel truck. … I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.
That feeling—a premonitory sense of victimhood, of one day ending up a chalk outline, your last minutes narrated in the jargon of wound ballistics and spatter patterns—is part of the post-traumatic legacy of anyone who lived in or near L.A. during the Summer of Hate.
Of course it takes more than out-of-focus childhood memories to explain why I worry, most nights, that I forgot to lock a door or latch a window, a fear that tickles me until I double-check every lock and latch—a ritual that might seem obsessive-compulsive but is, in truth, an atheist's way of crossing himself. Or why I sometimes find myself awake in the night, holding my breath, listening, listening as if my life depended on it. Or why, when I come home to an empty house, I've been known to pull the big, Norman Bates Signature Model chef's knife from the knife block in the kitchen and creep from room to room, flinging open closet doors, peering under beds. I scan the beds and bureaus, not wanting to miss the telling detail, anything out of place. "Someone is coming in our house while we're away," one of the Manson Family victims, Rosemary LaBianca, had said. "Things have been gone through and the dogs are outside the house when they should be inside."
The story I tell myself about my vulnerability, how fragile our jerry-built bulwarks against the random and the senseless really are—little more than lucky charms, if you think about it—is a gothic fiction with many authors: Manson, yes, but Didion no less, and Bugliosi's 1974 account of the killings, and the 1976 made-for-TV movie Helter Skelter. Then, too, the isolation and alienation of the California suburbs played no small part in scripting my bad dreams, the worst of which always involve strangers who know how easy it is, on a hot summer night, to slit a screen and slip noiselessly in. (We had one of those silly sliding screens for a patio door, a rickety, unconvincing thing, just like the ones that yielded obligingly to Charlie.)
But it may have been In Cold Blood, all the more mythic for being true, that tripped the alarm in my unconscious. Unimaginably awful in its tawdry details, the slaughter of the Clutter family sewed the fear of home invasion in the American imagination. "The door was unlocked," one of the killers, Perry Smith, told investigators. "A side door. It took us into Mr. Clutter's office. Then we waited in the dark. Listening. But the only sound was the wind."
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is "The White Album"'s oracular opening line, written to be quoted. Didion elaborates: "We look…for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five," five being the body count at the Tate-Polanski mansion that night. "We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
In the years just before her mind subsided into the murk of Alzheimer's, my mother, who studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1962, started insisting she'd had a close encounter with the Boston Strangler. He'd killed someone in the very building where she shared an apartment with another girl, she claimed, a fellow art student named Lydia. No, no, he'd knocked on the door one night while she and Lydia waited, unmoving, unbreathing, their ears aching with the sound of him standing just outside the door until, at last, his footsteps creaked down the hall. With each re-telling, the Strangler came a little closer. In her last reworking of the theme before my mother's mind sank into the weed-choked mire of dementia, the Strangler was throttling Lydia with her nylons while my mother hid, mad with terror, under her bed.
Did she build her fever dreams on even a fragment of fact? Did the Strangler strike somewhere nearby, if not in her building? Or was my mother's fearful, coat-clutching insistence that Death had knocked on her door, then passed on, an intimation of mortality, or maybe a premonition of the onrushing darkness of Alzheimer's? Or was it just one of those bottle rockets the mind sends up, a neurochemical farewell to the memories that make us who we are?
For whatever reason, it was a story she needed to tell herself.
We are the unreliable narrators of our lives.
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Friday, October 4, 2013
Shadowpulp True Crime Radio Hour
Bill Jensen is the host of Shadowpulp True Crime Radio Hour out of Los Angeles. The program's focus is mainly unsolved crimes. It is not solely a Manson orientated show. This last April 23rd Jensen did a show on four of the unsolved murders that have been discussed as possibly committed by Family members as speculation of what murders might be on the Tex Tapes. The four murders were of Doreen Gaul, James Sharp, Marina Habe and the Mulholland Drive Jane Doe.
Jensen's guests were Michelle McNamara who has the website TrueCrimeDiary.com and Scott Michaels of Dearly Departed Tours.
http://www.ustream.tv/new/search?q=Shadow%20Pulp
Michelle McNamara also writes for LA Magazine and has had a couple of recent articles on the Manson Family published online.
http://www.lamag.com/crimeinla/2013/06/28/killer-mystery-is-charles-manson-responsible-for-more-murders
http://www.lamag.com/crimeinla/2013/07/01/why-charles-manson-wont-die
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Tate's Hair Designs
Anywhoo, Patty asked Mom Patty to ask this friend if she knew that Doris and PJ Tate had lived so very close to us "back in the day"? Like, within a mile, maybe. Serious. My mom did not know, nor did Patty until fairly recently. This friend responded that yes, she did know, because she got her hair done at Doris' beauty parlor! She does not remember a lot of details but this is what she wrote:
"Hi again!!! I don't remember the dates. The hairdresser I used worked for Doris Tate. I think I went there for several years. I had many casual conversations with Doris. I knew who she was and that she lived in PV. I believe I met one of the sisters. I also remember a time when Charles Manson or one of his followers were coming up for a parole hearing and talking about the fact that Doris went to make sure they never left prison. She was nice. She wasn't visibly sad. Her business was successful. That's about all I remember. -S"Special Thanks to Alisa Statman for sharing the above photo to jog S' memory. If we are lucky maybe she will remember more.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
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