Original subtitles

♪ People say I'm no good

- Through the ages, philosophers and theologians

have debated the nature of evil.

Is it a physical force?

Can it be measured, understood, predicted, or altered?

Is evil a cause and effect or is it

simply the absence of good?

On this broadcast, we come face to face

with a man that many say inspired

and committed the crime of the century.

His name is Charles Manson.

- Benwood-McMechen sits right along the Ohio River.

It's one of those places where you were

a coal miner, a railroad worker or a steel worker

and everybody seemed to get along real well.

It was one of those situations

where you didn't lock your house.

There was a lotta camaraderie there and it was very cordial.

- McMechan, West Virginia.

It's one the many little mill and mining towns

that cling to hills along the Ohio River.

- McMechen was a small, small town.

Everybody knew everybody, everybody's mother knew you.

Charles, he was a first grader

and he came to live with his grandmother.

- Most people here don't remember Charles Manson,

but this was the closest thing he had

to a hometown when he was growing up.

He lived with an aunt and uncle in this house.

School records in McMechen show

Manson was an average student

in the second, third, and fourth grades.

- This area of Benwood-McMechen was quite unique.

There was five grocery stores

and there were four churches

and 32 bars.

But it was a nice town to grow up in.

You got a milk man delivered your milk

and the grocery store delivered your groceries.

But it was a,

it was a good community.

In no way did it reflect

the

outcome of a person like Charles Manson.

Of course, we didn't know then who he was

nor did we know what he would become.

- I'd have to say

when a child is treated the way he was, you're doomed.

I don't think you stand much of a chance.

I mean, he could've gone a different way.

I don't know, I guess the cards didn't fall that way.

But he wasn't what I would call a bad person.

He was a person who might have tried to be better.

But it was hard.

They went to church here at the Nazarene Church

here in McMechen, which is a small church.

And I was friends with his aunt and uncle and grandmother.

His uncle's name was Bill, his aunt was Glenna,

and they all worked for the B&O,

which was a very good job to have.

It was really the highest paid in the city.

They were nice people, they really were,

A lot of very talented musically

and Mrs. Maddox, that's Charles' grandmother,

who was just a wonderful, wonderful woman.

I mean, I can't imagine anyone who didn't really love her.

She was such a sweet, good person, yeah.

- My grandma was a mountain girl

from Kentucky, up in the mountains,

and she never did drink or smoke or cuss or lie.

She used to cook for the Salvation Army

and she was a human being.

A good one.

- She lived her faith

and she kinda led people to her way of thinking,

which was a good way of thinking, but I don't know

if Charles' mother wanted to adhere to that.

She seemed to love a good time,

a little bit of partying, and there was,

there was mention of that from time to time.

- The Nazarene Church had several

edicts for his young people.

They included: you had to go to church every Sunday,

you had to obey your parents,

no going to the movies, no sinful dancing.

And above all, you could not become over familiar

with members of the opposite sex.

There was a lot of rebellion,

as there always has been with young people

growing up under fundamentalist church rules,

but Charlie's mother Kathleen was really the exception

in that she would actually dare to put up her hair,

sneak into a short dress that might leave her arms bare,

which was just a carnal act, and go out to dance.

But Ashland was too small.

If you tried to dance or if you even

smiled at a boy, mama would hear about it.

So, she would sneak across the river

to try to get away from her mother

and just have what she considered innocent fun, dancing.

Once she came back home pregnant, she was pretty much

held up as an example to the other kids.

"See? You don't follow the rules,

"this is gonna happen to you."

Charles Manson was not, as he likes to claim,

an illegitimate baby who was known as No Name

because there was some doubt as to who was his father.

It was always known that his biological father

was a man named Colonel Scott.

Not a military man, an older man, a married man

who'd pretty much seduced Charlie's

teenage mother at a dance hall.

We don't know much about William Manson,

but he was somebody that apparently

had also met Kathleen at the dance halls.

He married her and he went into the marriage well aware

that his wife was pregnant with another man's child.

Ultimately, he was named Charles Milles Manson in honor of

his deceased grandfather, Charles Milles Maddox.

For Manson, as a child, he was never living

in any one place for too long.

His mother moved too much for that.

For the first four and a half years of his life,

Charlie mostly lived in a series of homes and apartments

stretching from Cincinnati in Ohio all the way

to McMechen with Ashland, Kentucky in between.

And when his Uncle Bill and Aunt Glenna

lived in Charleston, West Virginia,

sometimes Charlie and his mother would live with them.

So, it was pretty much a move around

life for the little boy.

The constant in it, besides his mother,

was his grandmother, who would always be nearby.

- Most of us work hard to provide our homes

with every possible comfort for our children.

We safeguard their health, we strive to put before them

good examples of moral living, of manners and deportment.

- Charlie's grandmother believed that

if she did not bring her children up in the right way,

they were not only going to hell, but she would, too,

because she would've let down the Lord.

Particularly because her husband had died,

she was worried about her two youngest children,

Luther and Kathleen, who she believed were growing up

without a father's influence and therefore had tendencies.

The last game is over, the last movie out.

The American citizen has a final alterative to home.

In another currently flourishing institution. The night club.

- During the first few years of Charlie's life,

even when Kathleen was still married,

she began going out with her brother Luther and his friends

and she was not behaving in the way that

a mother with a child was supposed to behave.

Her marriage to William Manson didn't

last that long, about two and a half years.

He left her and cited that Kathleen was unfaithful,

she was gone most of the time,

and he made very clear in the divorce decree

that there had been no issue from their marriage,

meaning that he said in court Charlie was not his child.

That meant he didn't have to pay child support.

When you were a boy,

did you love your mother?

- I didn't know what that was.

- When Charlie was about four and a half years old,

Kathleen and her brother Luther got a little bit wilder.

The night came when Kathleen and Luther's girlfriend, Julia,

decided to go out on the town a little bit.

The ladies go out to a club and there they meet a gentleman

and decided this guy had money and they wanted some of it.

They went to a phone and called up Luther.

Luther told them, "Get the guy in his car

"and drive to this filling station on the edge of town.

"I will be waiting there."

Luther shows up, he has in his possession

a ketchup bottle filled with salt,

which he tries to stick in the guy's back and say,

"This is a gun, I've got you covered. .

"Give me your money."

And the guy said, "It's a bottle, it's not a gun."

At which point, Luther walloped him over the head with it

and they grabbed the guy's wallet,

found they'd made about 20 bucks in the deal,

and drove off in his stolen car.

The local papers think it's the funniest thing

they've ever had to write about

and they start writing about the Ketchup Bottle Bandits.

Because Luther assaulted the man,

hit him over the head with a ketchup bottle,

he gets 10 years in the Moundsville State Prison.

Kathleen got five years.

And they are sent off to one of the most

draconian prisons in the entire United States.

And there's little four and a half year old Charlie.

What's to become of him?

♪ Come all you West Virginia gals ♪

♪ And listen to the noise

♪ Don't you court these West Virginia boys ♪

♪ If you do, your fortune will be ♪

♪ Cornbread and bacon, you will see ♪

♪ Cornbread and bacon

- We know that Charlie is not quite five years old

when his mother went to prison and the decision

had to be made: where is he gonna live?

And because the jail in Moundsville was so close to McMechen

where his uncle and aunt and their daughter, Joanne, lived,

the decision was made that Charlie would

live permanently in McMechen during

the five years of his mother's prison term

and they could see where he went from there.

Almost as soon as Charlie is there,

and he's had some explanation from his grandmother,

"Mama made a mistake, she's gonna be living in a place

"for a few years but you're gonna see her all the time,"

Uncle Bill, a stern disciplinarian

who believed that little boys, even if they're

just four or four and a half, do not cry,

they do not whimper, they are tough,

took the child to Moundsville.

- It's been said that if Charles Manson

has any roots at all, they are in the penal system--

- Well, one of my first recollections

is walking in Moundsville State Prison

in West Virginia, big gray stone place.

And I come to visit my mom, she was

doin' time there for strong arm robbery.

- The prison in Moundsville

is one of the most intimidating places possible.

It looks like some old medieval castle.

The walls were between 8 to 12 feet thick.

It was meant to be intimidating.

Every type of prisoner was in Moundsville.

You had the people like Luther and Kathleen

who were there because they were too dumb

to carry out any kind of decent crime

all the way up to the worst kinds of criminals,

multiple murderers, rapists.

The major attraction of the prison were the hangings.

There was standing room only for the hangings.

It was a bleak, horrible place

and not just for the inmates

but for family who would wanna go visit them

because they'd sorta be forced

into narrow little viewing rooms.

When you saw your relative who was an inmate,

you didn't sit across the table,

you could never touch anyone.

There was a thick glass partition

and you had to sit on one side and not move

and the prisoner was on the other side.

So, it was a horrible experience for everyone

and it was meant to be.

There's his mother on the other side of the glass.

He can't touch her, she can't hug him,

and for the entire sentence,

she is never allowed to touch her son.

And Charlie screams and he acts girly and like a sissy

and Uncle Bill is disgusted and drags him off.

But, on a regular basis, never wanting

to go because the place was so awful,

little Charlie Manson would be

taken to see his mother in that prison.

And every time, he had a terrible reaction.

He never got used to it, but then, who would?

- Are there happy memories?

- I don't have that.

- Or sad memories, though, growing up?

- I don't have all that.

- You do have it.

You have an experience, you're an individual,

one human being, with experiences.

- When you leave, go get a big rock

and set it on a table. - Yeah.

- I'm that rock on the table.

- Meaning what? - I don't have

all those things. - But you do have

all those things. - No, no.

You do and you think that I do because you think that

my mind is like your mind, but it isn't.

- I don't think he was evil at the beginning.

I didn't see any signs that Charles would've

turned into the kind of person he ended up.

You know, it's strange what can change your life

because he did have a hard life

as a child

and she wasn't a good mother

and it never got better.

It was never gonna get better.

- Uncle Bill drank too much

and he was very short tempered.

And Charlie was a very disagreeable child.

Wherever he lived, he woulda been a problem

because he whined most of the time, he complained.

He would just fib incessantly about everything.

And the first grade teacher whose class Charlie ended up in

was known as a really mean woman.

Even her own colleagues, the other teachers,

thought she was really rough on the kids.

- I would never want one of my children to be in her class.

I mean, the way she ran her class

was the way you would run a prison.

In her class, you were placed with

what she deemed your intelligence.

So, she would place people together, the dumb-dumbs

and the smart kids and the ones in the middle,

and Charles was placed in the back of the room.

You know, this was so crazy for first graders

because I vision a teacher like I had

who just showed they loved us and this was so crazy.

Didn't anybody ever check on these people?

- On the first day of school,

he came home sobbing saying the teacher

had said such mean things to him.

And very likely, she did.

I talked to other people at McMechen

who had been in her classes and they all agreed

that she was one of those nasty teachers

who couldn't stand little boys in particular.

- And I can understand why he went home crying

because it was really horrible for him.

And

I just think he wasn't given much of a chance.

- Uncle Bill was horrified,

but not that the teacher had been harsh with Charlie.

In those days, it was always assumed

if the teacher got mad at a child, the child deserved it.

What Uncle Bill couldn't stand

was that this five year old boy cried

and acted like a sissy, he acted like a girl.

And Joanne can remember her father coming into her room

and rustling among her clothes and coming out with a dress.

Charlie Manson told all kinds of lies about his childhood.

This story he didn't need to make up or embellish.

This is the one that was bad enough.

Yes, he was sent to school in a dress

as a five year old by his uncle.

All fathers in McMechen were rough on their sons.

Bill wasn't Charlie's father but he

took his responsibility for him very seriously.

Forever after that, Charlie did

just the worst things you could imagine.

And it was almost as though he liked getting in trouble.

The second time I sat down with Joanne to talk,

she said that when Charles was in second grade,

there was a boy in his class he didn't like.

And one day at recess, all the girls

went over as a gang and beat up the boy.

And when they were brought into the principal's office,

they said they did it because

Charles Manson had asked them to.

And Charles said,

"I never touched that boy.

"Those girls were just doing what they wanted to do.

"They oughta be in trouble, not me."

- The Nazarene Church

believes strongly in prayer.

And there was Sunday school for the young people

and the pastor taught the class and Charles came.

- By God and they get saved by the flame.

Thank you, Jesus--

- Charlie Manson is a sponge.

There is nothing unique about Manson,

any of his philosophies, any of the things he preaches.

What he would do is he would cherry pick lines

that would help him appear to have a philosophy

and it starts with the Bible

that he learns in the Church of the Nazarene.

Manson was taken from the beginning by the teachings

that he heard every day based on the Bible

that women were subservient to men,

that the wife is ruled by the husband.

Yes, Jesus was born of a virgin.

Yes, the devil is here every day in our lives.

And most of all, you better believe the Book of Revelation.

He's hearing this every Sunday, over and over again.

And Charles Manson will never be well educated,

he's never gonna be able to read very well,

but there is a gift that Charlie Manson has from childhood.

He has an incredible memory.

The Bible, song lyrics, everything.

And as an adult, he will be able to quote,

particularly from the Book of Revelation,

and they're word for word perfect.

- I understand when he quotes the Bible

where that's coming from.

That's coming from grandma.

I think that's where he gets that.

And he can do it.

- The Bible, the Bible, the Bible

is being pounded into this child's head

and as an adult, he can cherry pick the best phrases,

remember them, and at the appropriate time,

present them almost as his own thoughts.

Young Charlie Manson in McMechen

is remembered mostly for horrible behavior,

but there was always this other part

of Charlie that people would remark on.

His Aunt and Uncle had a beat up

old upright piano in their home

and from the time Charlie is seven, eight years old,

he sits at the piano and tries to pick out tunes on it.

Much more so than the other young kids in McMechen,

he was already picking up on

what passed for the popular music of the day.

- Where did Charlie Manson come from?

What are your earliest memories?

- I come from the heart of Bing Crosby,

Frank Sinatra. - Those were the people that

you listened to as a child? - Yeah.

- He didn't have a wonderful singing voice

but he had a reasonably pleasant one.

He would have to be physically dragged to church on Sundays

but when hymns were sung, he'd brighten up

and he'd try his best to sing.

- He wasn't attentive, I can tell ya he wasn't attentive

in Sunday school, his mind wandered,

I mean, he just wasn't, but he still came.

And Glenna and Bill Thomas were very musical

and Mrs. Maddox, Charles' grandmother,

she also had a great singing voice.

They were all very musical.

- One of Charlie's stated ambitions early

was he wanted to be a singer just like Frankie Lane.

And because he did have, apparently,

some musical and vocal talent,

people thought, "Hm, that might happen."

The one job nobody at Moundsville Prison wanted

was to be assigned to the janitorial staff.

There's vomit, there's blood,

there's urine all over the floors.

The janitors were constantly having to clean up.

Kathleen was so determined she wanted to get outta prison

that she did everything she was asked to do

and did them so well, she's paroled

three years into her five year sentence.

And yet, this isn't any kind of fairy tale.

When she gets out of prison, she stays briefly in McMechen.

She's got her little boy back, but there's still

the influence of her mother who she thinks is

just gonna grind her down like she did the first time.

And let's remember: this is now just a 19 to 20 year old.

She still wants to go out and enjoy herself.

And so, they move to other little towns in the area

and Kathleen gets a job as a clerk in a grocery store.

Doesn't make much money, but it's a job.

She's trying to be a good mom,

she's sending her son to school,

except he won't go to school.

She can take him there, walk him to class,

but then she has to go work

and the minute she does, he disappears.

The truant officers are showing up at her door.

"Your son ran away from school again."

Sometimes, to her amazement, he'll show up at

her grocery store while she's working, during the day,

and he will be begging customers for handouts.

It's a sad, sad situation.

- School records in McMechen

show Manson was an average student

in the second, third, and fourth grades.

Then he went to live again with his mother.

In this neighborhood in Indianapolis,

he had his first brush with the law

for stealing a bicycle and then a car.

- Kathleen decides she has to do something.

And so, she takes a very difficult step.

Kathleen had read about the Gibault School for Boys.

This was an open campus,

there weren't prison walls or anything.

You know, it was stricter, but it would be

something where Charlie would have to behave.

This was not his mother turning him in to the authorities,

as he would always claim it is.

But unfortunately, this is just the first step

in what's gonna be a series of places

Charlie Manson is going to be placed.

He ran away soon after, came home to mom.

"I trust you, you're my mother.

"How can you do this to me?"

To make her feel guilty.

- That always was utmost in my mind, you know,

the fact that he did try to escape there

and his mother would take him right back.

Which had to be so painful.

In my eyes, that's very painful.

I can't imagine it.

And I always felt that just a little bitta help,

a little bitta love mighta made

a big difference in his life.

I really do.

It's cruel.

And I think that was the beginning of the end.

- The things he did, which soon began to

involve first petty theft, then he would

break away and go into armed theft.

He went to a series of different places,

more and more up the ladder, so to speak,

into full time detention.

He was once lucky enough to get sent to Boys Town,

convincing a judge in Indianapolis when he was 12

that, "Hey, I'm a Catholic."

Even though he wasn't.

And he's sent to Boys Town, one of

the most famous places in all of America.

There's movies that are being made about this.

He lasts four days and he and some of the other boys

steal a car belonging to a priest and head out.

As with Kathleen, he's very inept

at trying to elude the law.

He's caught, he goes back.

But nothing was ever Charlie's fault

as far as Manson was concerned.

- He was sent to the Indiana Boys School,

the state reform school.

He wouldn't conform to the rules

and was moved from one dormitory to another.

Manson compiled 28 bad conduct reports in two years.

- He was a, as I described him perhaps 20 years ago,

a chronic discipline problem even at that time.

- How was he regarded by the other boys?

- The other students seemed to regard him

as a boy they liked to mingle with.

Manson seemed to have a lot of stories to tell

that was of interest to the other boys.

- The file on Manson at the reform school

shows he escaped five times.

There are letters there from his aunt and grandmother

in which they write of their love for him

and their hopes that he would do better.

- The consensus was he was self-centered,

generally lazy, cooperated only under pressure,

and had little influence on other people

for either good or bad.

- You have said before

that you needed love and you needed family

and you needed friends and that's the one thing

that every man needs. - No.

You misunderstood, I never said anything like that.

- Do you wanna look back

at that early period of your life and say,

"Boy, something went wrong when I went to foster homes

"and then my mother would take me,

"then I'd go see my grandmother,

"then I'd go back and see my mother"?

Did that shape you, did it make a difference?

- Well see, that doesn't even compute in my world

because there is no wrong.

- Do you need to be loved?

- I am loved. - By whom?

- I am love. - You're, are you loved?

- I am love!

- In the tougher reform schools,

it is absolutely true that Charlie Manson,

one of the smaller, weaker boys is certainly picked on,

he certainly suffers physical indignities

and we can be fairly well assured he is sexually assaulted.

Manson recognizes early on

that it's just human nature to back away

from someone who's an absolute lunatic.

He studies, he thinks, and he perfects the act.

If someone bigger, scarier is approaching him,

he will act so insane, so violently out of control that

even the worst bullies will back off and leave him alone.

He calls it being Crazy Charlie and he will

use this again throughout his adult life.

- We all do what we have to do to survive, right?

It's like a long time ago, back in the '50s

when I was in reform school, I would get in a fight

or I'd get in a argument and I'd be down

in solitary confinement and I'd just go

and I turned everything off a long time ago.

- And yet, from these experiences,

Charles doesn't abhor the terrible things done to him.

Rather, he wants to do them to other boys.

In one instance, he's found sodomizing

another younger boy while holding a piece of

broken glass to his throat, threatening to kill him.

When he would be asked about having been raped

as a child in school, Charlie said,

"So what?

"It's just like if it happens, you wipe it off."

Manson finally ended up in a maximum security

detention facility in Chillicothe.

This was the place that kids were sent

when they were so bad there was no other place

for them to go until they turned 21.

There were kids in there who had committed murder already.

What he did is completely unparalleled

in the rest of his life.

This time, for months, he is the model inmate.

Follows every rule, tries hard in school.

And there's the innate belief that every once in awhile,

there has to be some kid that we've really helped.

Maybe this is a success story.

And at this facility, there was the honor award

that you have completely overcome

all the terrible things that brought you here.

And it wasn't given out often,

but it was given out to Charles Milles Manson.

Charlie had conned the people

who were certain no kid could ever fool them.

And so, miraculously, there it is,

Charlie Manson has completely turned a new leaf

and he's gonna be a model citizen.

- When he was released,

he went back to McMechen, worked at a few odd jobs,

and a few months later, he was married here

and they moved into a house across the street.

- Well, a lot of people didn't know

Charlie Manson even lived around here.

You know, they, he was virtually friendless.

He was sorta the, the type of person,

was like a school kid who wore

a raincoat to school on a sunny day.

I mean, he just, no one jumped to be around him.

He was very low key.

- He wasn't outgoing, no,

and no one seemed to make an effort to

seek Charles out or introduce themselves.

He was a, a kind of a cocky,

let's start a fight type of guy

and a blowhard and that kind of a person.

I didn't know that side of him.

We enjoyed his company, my cousin Barbara

and I both enjoyed his company and

Charles

might have been a little shy.

And very attractive, had a dimple,

had curly black hair, and he had beautiful eyes.

- 50 years later, people will tell you,

"Well you just know in every town

"there's a good girl who can't resist a bad boy."

- What about your wife?

You were married once, weren't you?

- Yes. - How'd that go?

Why'd you wanna get married?

That's kinda convention, that's kinda normal,

that's kind of in the--

- Got married 'cause I wanted to

get in that pussy, that's why I got--

- Oh yeah? - Married.

- Married for sex

was the reason you got married.

- Yeah, that's what,

I didn't know what was happenin'.

I knew there was somethin' happening

but no one would tell me, so I had to find out.

You know, I didn't have books like you guys,

Playboys and stuff, in them days.

Had to find out for myself.

- Charlie's grandmother throws a lovely party

for them, a reception, after the wedding in her house.

We have pictures.

- Rosalie worked at Warsinsky's Grocery.

I thought she was rather quiet

and kinda reserved, not outgoing so much.

I kept it to myself, but I thought

she was very attractive and

I wouldn't mind having her for a girlfriend.

She was very pleasant, cordial, a very nice person.

I had seen her across the street standin' with Charlie

and that kinda bursted my bubble a little bit

because I thought he was relatively quiet

and if you asked him a question, you didn't expect

to get much more than a yes or no answer.

But he just seemed to come in and sweep Rosalie off her feet

and that's the last I heard of Rosalie at the store.

- The reception was at Glenna's home

and my mother, dad, and I went there for the reception.

It was small but it was a nice time.

But the one thing that I noticed that night:

I have never seen him that happy in my life.

- For married couples, the way you

passed the time of day in the evening

was to sit out on the front stoop

and as your neighbors walked by,

you'd chat and you'd pass the time of day.

And suddenly, there's Charlie Manson trying to do this.

- I first met Charlie Manson,

my first experience, personal experience, was

I was on my way to baseball practice

and the coach's wife asked Charlie to drive us

down to the ball field, so we climbed into

the back seat of his Freddie Flintstone car.

He took us to the game, didn't say a word,

and when we got out, we thanked him

and he just looked straight ahead and continued on.

He said nothing, just drove off.

That was Charlie.

- And it only lasts a few months, then Rosalie's pregnant.

And there's medical bills.

And Charlie gets a second job helpin' out

at a local store but there's still not enough money.

And Charlie starts stealin' cars.

And he subsidizes for a few months, but it's not workin'.

Kathleen, with her husband Lewis,

has moved out to California.

And so, Charlie suggests to Rosalie

they go out there, it'll be better there.

And so, he leaves McMechen with a pregnant child bride

in a car he stole to go to California

where he is sure he will somehow become a huge success.

- See, my old lady, she said,

"Let's steal a car and go to California."

And I said, "Man, I ain't gonna steal no car

"and go to California and go back to jail."

She says, "We won't get caught."

We didn't get caught, just I got caught.

- You had a son by that marriage, didn't you?

- Yeah, I got a kid somewhere.

- You think about him?

- About as much as my father did me.

- Manson's wife had a baby

but before it was born, he was in trouble

with the law again, arrested for

driving a stolen car to California.

- As was his mother, he is one of the most

incompetent criminals that ever stole stuff

in the history of the United States of America.

He steals a car to get to Los Angeles

but instead of ditching the car, he starts

driving around LA, seeing the sights.

These are in the days when cops will mark down

out of state license plates and just run casual checks.

- These observations can give

a definite indication that the vehicle may be stolen,

even before a thorough inspection is made

or the subject's questioned.

- And, of course, the car comes back as stolen.

That starts Charlie's downfall, legally.

He would do these extra things that he didn't have to do

and I have talked to psychologists

who study criminal behavior and they will say to me,

"This is proof that, deep down,

"he always wanted to be in prison, he felt safe there,

"he's subconsciously doing these dumb things

"just so he will get back to where he really feels secure."

♪ Ho ho ho ho get on home

♪ Oh ho ho ho ho get on home

- I got it.

- Tell me, for instance,

what did you guys do for sex?

- Well, there is young boys around

and you can always give 'em a few

packs of cigarettes to do what you want.

- How do you do that after you're locked down?

- Well, you can shower time or

when they have a yard night or something,

there's places around here you can go to, of course.

They call 'em spots, yeah.

Things like that.

It's no problem, old man.

- Charlie Manson's life and the terrible crimes he committed

all happened because he's the wrong man

in the right place at the right time.

And nowhere is this more true than when

he is first sent to prison at Terminal Island.

The last few years before Charles Manson

enters the adult criminal system for the first time,

the philosophy of the American criminal system changes.

- What are prisons for?

When you think about it, there are just a limited

number of things a penal system can be asked to do.

In the first place, it can be asked

to punish those who break the rules.

But most civilized societies have not

been content with the punishment.

They want the punishment to have a purpose.

- You're in prison.

And maybe one of the reasons you are here

is that there was no place for you

in a society demanding skills and education.

California spends more than any other state

on educating and training prisoners.

If you don't have a high school education,

you're encouraged to get one and you can learn a trade.

- Now we have a whole new philosophy.

We've gotta work with these people

so that they won't have to turn to crime,

so they'll have skills that will

let them function in the regular world.

- You in California here are so fortunate

that you don't quite realize that

40-odd other states are far behind you

and that the jails and prisons in most of these states

are filthy and dehumanizing machinery,

that they ruin the people that go into them

and that they harm all the people outside

who think that the machine is doing something constructive

to the individual who is ground up in it.

- So, Charlie goes to prison where, a couple years before,

it woulda been like his mother's experience in Moundsville

where the foot's in the back of your neck

and you will do what you're told or else.

Now we're going to help you grow as a person.

And one of the ways American prisons did this:

Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People

is sweeping the nation. - Hello, everybody.

You know the happiness you get out of life

and, to a large extent, the size of your income

will depend very largely upon your ability

to win friends and influence people.

- Dale Carnegie is a salesman who was brilliant

at putting together the kinda tips he learned on the road

that would help you if you wanted to sell people something,

if you wanted people to like you,

little tricks you could play.

And there's courses you would sign up for

and all the prisoners at Terminal Island in California,

boy, they wanna get in on this.

- Be sincere.

You will just be wasting your time

if you pretend to be interested in other people

in order to get something out of them.

- Sincerity is the best gimmick, remember that.

"Sincerity and honesty," he said,

"It'll trick 'em every time."

I said, "Well, sincere and honesty,

"I never tried that."

- A good smile has

the same effect as a puppy's tail.

When a puppy wags his tail, he says, "I'm glad to see you."

And a smile says the same thing.

- Charlie eats up the Dale Carnegie course.

- Charlie was takin' the course,

Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Very strange.

- And within four small months after signing up

for the Dale Carnegie course, I received a promotion

and 12 months after that, I was promoted to

zone sales manager of the Burroughs Corporation.

- So, I mean, that's probably where he got

a lot of his ideas that he transformed 'em into

his own way of applying what he had learned in that course.

- Now, this is the guy who supposedly can hardly read.

But his retention, when he wants to

remember something, is perfect.

Charlie, in particular, has a couple

special things that resonate with him.

But he doesn't complete the course because he felt like

he had learned what there was for him to learn.

The first is: the best way to avoid

an argument is not to get into one.

- I was walkin' in the yard and there was

this guy playin' a guitar and a cop came by and said,

"Manson, you can't play your guitar here.

"You gotta play your guitar over there."

And Charlie just kept playin' his guitar

and the cop just stopped and said,

"Manson, you ain't never gonna get outta here."

Charlie never missed a beat.

He said, "Outta where, man?"

And just kept goin'.

And that was it, that was my first day with Charles Manson.

- That's the first thing, don't give 'em anything

to tear into, and most importantly,

always let the other fellow think that the idea is his.

- Charlie directed mental traffic.

He wanted to do something and he'd jump ahead to one of

the girls and one of the girls'd say, "I got a good idea."

Charlie had planted a seed.

And off they went, doing his way.

- Manson's incredible powers

that you hear people talk about all the time,

the charisma, the ability not only

to read minds but make people trust him,

straight outta Dale Carnegie's

How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Word for word.

Manson, when he gets outta Terminal Island,

has a new career goal: he's gonna be a world class pimp.

He liked listening to the pimps at Terminal Island,

they gave him advice on how to find the right girls.

The rules are simple: you wanna find young women

who are bent but not broken,

emotionally distraught but not completely unhinged.

The second thing you have to do

is you have to make them depend on you.

You control every aspect of their lives.

The third thing is you keep them from outside influences.

Don't let them talk to family,

don't let them talk to friends.

You must be the only person they have to turn to.

Charlie did not realize that the biggest challenge

is not to recruit girls who will work for you

but to recruit women who would stay working for you.

And he never had a string of women who could

earn enough money to support him the way he wanted.

He had to try to subsidize himself in other ways

that just got him into further legal trouble.

He was a terrible pimp.

And soon ends up in jail again, this time at

McNeil Island up near Seattle in Washington.

In McNeil Island, Manson is once again

together with the worst of the worst.

The trait that continues to distinguish him

from other prisoners is the fact that

he is so honestly interested in music.

In one of the great ironies in American Criminal History,

Alvin Creepy Karpis, one of the real serious killers

from the Bonny and Clyde, Dillinger days,

is also incarcerated in McNeil Island

and he plays steel guitar.

And Charlie sucks up to Creepy Karpis

and gets guitar lessons from him.

Karpis, later, when Manson becomes so infamous,

tells an interviewer, "Boy,

"I didn't know he had that in him."

In McNeil, a couple other critical things

happen in Manson's development as

what we have to call a genius con artist.

There are, obviously, in all these prisons

all sorts of religious outlets made available

to the prisoners with the belief

that God can change you if man can't.

On one of his reports from McNeil Island,

it says that for the first time,

Manson appears to be showing some self awareness

and he credits it to his study of Scientology.

Scientology has managed to sort of pick up a niche

and the prison officials, they may not know

all the details of Scientology but hey,

it's a religion, it's recognized as one,

so it must be good, it's got God in it.

Manson is very interested in the theory in Scientology

that your body is simply a vessel that you're temporarily in

and that greater things are always possible.

You have the opportunity to be this great, glorious being

and you've probably been that before

and it's just a matter of accepting your nature.

He can understand why that would be attractive

and that this would be the kind of psychological tool

he could use to impress particularly

young women with bad self images.

"You may think the situation you're in

"is really awful, but it's not you.

"It's just such a temporary thing

"and I'm gonna teach you how to move beyond it. "

- The seed grows up from the ground.

You go down under the earth to plant somethin'

and you plant these seeds and this garden grows.

It's the same thing with the garden that's in the mind.

- You think you'll ever leave prison?

- Prison?

I got outta jail.

I'm inside of you, man.

I'm inside every one of ya.

Can't you see I'm out, man?

Can't you see I'm out?

Can't you see I'm free?

♪ Every beat of my eye is just for you ♪

♪ And I will love you 'til my life is through ♪

♪ Hence the moment you're awake I just wanna cry ♪

♪ Hence the moment I will pray you don't say goodbye ♪

♪ For I would die

♪ Every beat of my...