Inside the Mind of Manson: Part 3

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Is Limited Atonement Biblical? w/Dr. James White (Part 4)

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March 21st, 1967. Charlie had both dreaded and dreamed of this day.

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The day was finally here. This would mean that he would have to leave his familiar surroundings of the institution he had called home for the past six years.

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Charlie walked down the long dark corridor of McNeil Island Penitentiary to freedom. I tried, he thought.

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I asked to stay. In front of him, the heavy metal doors loomed. The doors slowly creaked open and Charles Manson stepped out into the humid air of the 1967

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Summer of Love and made his way down to San Francisco. It was in this environment of cultural revolution that Charlie started his family.

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All right, welcome back ladies and gentlemen to our first ever cultish true crime series.

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This is the continuation of our series. We are, this is our third episode into this whole journey into the mind of Manson.

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We are focusing in on really the formulation of Charlie and Charles Manson's, as known as the

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Manson family, the environment, the Summer of Love, and all that took place from 1967 to 1969.

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So much took place within two years. We're going to try and get that in two episodes.

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We're going to try. So as always, Andrew, do we give you a name for the, or do we give you a true crime name?

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You're super sleuth, but I thought we gave you, did we give you a special name? That really, that is totally a true crime name.

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Yeah, we'll keep that. Yeah, we'll keep it. Super sleuth. You're one of the detectives on call, figuring out all the different mysteries and intricacies of this crime that has fascinated, really is part of American culture.

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It's wild. I was just thinking about this. It's captivated. Captivated. In the era of Manson, he would like to hold people captive.

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Yeah. And here we are, 2020 in the craziest year that I've known pretty much.

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We've got, we've got pandemics, we've got murder hornets and all the racial tension. There's so many similarities, especially what we're going to kind of delve into.

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Right. So as always, we have Dr. Robin Hall. Hi. With you.

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And we actually gave you a name. We call you the Mine Hunter. Yes, I love that. I will wear that with pride. Yes. It's almost like a fighter name, like Robin, Mine Hunter Hall.

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Yep. Yes. So as we discussed before, you have, your doctorate is in clinical psychology.

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Your primary focus is really trauma. That's right. Yes. And you have a huge interest and fascination, just as a whole, almost a recreational, but it's a fascination too, with true crime.

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And a lot of people do. Yeah. And so just real quickly, I mean, you talked about this when it comes just to true crime in general, because this is our first time delving into it.

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There's tons of podcasts out there. Right. What's your fascination about it yourself? And why do you think true crime really is almost a culture in and of itself?

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Let's talk about that just real quickly, and then we'll jump into this environment of Manson. Well, I think you're absolutely right.

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And I think my fascination with it is probably akin to most people's fascination with it, just the total depravity of human nature.

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It's like a train wreck that you can't really pull your eyes from. And I love the psychology behind it, figuring out what drives people, what motivates people to participate and act in the ways that they do.

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And when you get individuals like Manson, who were so good at understanding the psychology of others and manipulating that psychology, for somebody like me, it's just utterly fascinating.

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And then the fallout of that, I think we see a lot of God's common grace, and we don't recognize that.

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And then when we look at somebody like Manson, you really do see the juxtaposition of, this is

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God restraining people, and this is what it looks like when he doesn't. For me, that's really the fascination that I have with true crime.

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And we were talking earlier, Jesus being convicted, tried and convicted as guilty is really the ultimate true crime story.

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So for people, even though non -believing people wouldn't identify their fascination as looking at total depravity or use those words, but really we're all drawn to it for that reason.

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I think we see ourselves in it, and it's fascinating. I've even asked myself the question, oh my goodness, what would it take for me to get there?

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Not that I imagine myself as Manson, but it is, it's like a train wreck. You can't really put your eyes from it.

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Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And so, yeah, I would definitely agree. I think that one of the things too is that when you look at just the fascination,

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I think that people were creating, I would say, from a Christian standpoint, obviously, that's how

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I view it with our podcast is based on, that's the only really way you can give a true accounting for making sense of the world, that it's only through understanding a total depravity or the fact that we live in a sinful and fallen world where you can give an accounting where true crime makes sense.

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So when you look at someone like whether it's Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, or almost even, because I was thinking about this the other day too, that with cultists, which primarily deal with cults, they're celebrity leaders like Jim Jones, David Koresh, kind of these celebrity names, and even true crime kind of has celebrities too, like Ted Bundy.

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What are some other popular names too? John Wayne Gacy. Oh my gosh,

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I'm going to - Jeffrey Dahmer. Oh yeah. Jeffrey Dahmer, the Whitechapel Killer, whose name is going to completely escape me at the moment.

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They're really famous people. When you think of horrific crimes, there are certain images, faces that pop to mind.

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And that's really interesting from a psychological standpoint because you hear narcissism and what drives that is this, really at the bottom of this kind of grandiose sense of self is an ego, to use a secular psychology term, that's just not there.

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So you've got somebody like Charles Manson who grew up in a situation where he was unwanted by really everybody in his blood family.

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So he decided to go out and create his own and to make himself the leader to feel important. And you see a lot of comment like BTK, Dennis Rader, the

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BTK killer, buying torture kill. He wanted credit for what he did after he was caught.

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And it really was his arrogance that got him caught. He was talking with one of the detectives.

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They were communicating with him through the newspaper. And the lead detective on the case convinced him that he could send in a floppy disk drive and they would have no way of tracing it back to who it was, which was of course inaccurate.

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And that's how he was caught. So as soon as he was caught and they started interrogating him, he really didn't falter at all. He immediately confessed and he wanted credit for everything he had done.

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And you see that a lot with serial killers. They want credit for their crimes.

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And if you tie that back into ego, if you've got somebody that really underneath all that superficial arrogance believes that they're worthless, they don't understand they're made in the image of God, truly, why wouldn't they?

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They want to be famous. They want to be loved. They want to be adored. And even if that's going to be through this really infamous way, it doesn't matter.

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Okay. No, that's really good. So let's just jump into the story of Manson. We've got a good foundation and this is definitely so much to unpack here.

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So the first thing that fascinated me, I want to get your take on this. And Andrew, you can give me your take too, is that I was thinking about this.

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So Charlie spent a good amount of time prior to 1967, just being in prison. Really in a sense that you talk about cults, how they isolate people from the outside world.

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Charlie experienced that at expense of, he experienced that at expense of the state. So imagine right now, it's 2020.

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We had so many crazy things right now. So imagine you go to prison. So you just get a year sentence and it's 2019, say

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June, you get a six and a half month sentence or not six and a half months.

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Let's just say you get out around this time, a year sentence. And so you get out around this time and you're here and all of a sudden you see people wearing face masks everywhere.

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There's riots going back and forth. Things are on fire. There's things in the news about murder hornets and just up and people.

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And you're thinking, what happened? But just real quickly, but going back to Charles Manson, if you listen, you guys haven't listened to the first two episodes, we talked a lot about his upbringing and what happened during his prison.

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So what do you think the aspect of just being in prison for a long extended amount of time, being in prison and all of a sudden being thrown out of prison when he wanted to stay there, but then going into an environment like 1967, the summer of love of this real time, a culture revolution, because all these different things were going back and forth.

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How do you think that affected the psyche of Manson, just the isolation for the extended period of time, given all the troubles that he had prior to that?

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Right. So I think isolation away from the culture is one thing, but he wasn't isolated within the context of prison.

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And Andrew, you and I were talking about this. He didn't want to be paroled.

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He actually asked the parole board to let him remain in prison. And I think people want to believe that that's because deep down he had this empathetic understanding of the true monster that he was.

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And if he wasn't released, then maybe he wouldn't go on to become this monster.

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But I think in truth, what was really going on is that he had become very, very good at manipulating the people around him.

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He knew the environment he was in. He knew the people that he was working with, the other inmates, the clinical staff, prison staff.

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And he flourished there. I mean, by all accounts, that's why he was paroled. He was the model inmate, model prisoner, and he had made progress, quote unquote.

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So why would you want to leave an environment that you understand so well? It's really quite scary if you think about leaving this very familiar place that he's kind of got all of his ducks in a row and he doesn't have to work so hard because he knows the psychology of the people there, the way the system works.

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And now he's coming into this brand new world. And outside of newspapers, he wouldn't really have known what was going on.

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So I think it's important too that just like now, we've got this huge cultural revolution going on in 2020.

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There was this huge cultural revolution going on in the 60s. We were moving away from family -driven households.

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You know, people were preaching, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, which was new, you know, essentially.

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And we're going to talk a little bit later about Dennis Wilson and the Beach Boys and kind of, you know, his connection with Manson and the, you know, internal evolution he was going through and why that really made

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Manson what he was preaching so interesting to Dennis. But for Charlie, any environment that he would have come into was going to be new, right?

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So in the same way that he learned to be adaptive in prison, he saw this revolution occurring and he capitalized on it.

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That's it right there. Like imagine coming out of prison, you're there for six years, right? And the society that you had been formed to was a society that's changing so fast.

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So once he gets out, he goes, well, where do I want to go? Do I want to go to, let's say,

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I'm just gonna use Texas as an example where everyone's super conservative, the opposite of how he is and how he grew up, or am

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I going to go to Haight -Ashbury where people are accepting these thoughts and this type of culture that I've kind of already been living for this time?

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I'm the master. The master's going to go to Haight -Ashbury now and I'm going to go ahead and, you know, create my domain there.

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So a couple of things too, just, we mentioned the summer of love. There are a couple of things culturally that kind of really formulated the hotbed of that environment.

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It was, like I said, we were talking about the song, are you going, it's the song, the infamous song, A Ballad of San Francisco.

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Are you going to San Francisco? The infamous ballad. And I'm not going to try and say the lyrics. I'm not going to try and say it because I'm neither a lyricist nor a singer, but that was just an example.

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You had really influential artists around that time. I watched a documentary, it's really good, called Charles Manson Music from an

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Unsound Mind. It's on free on Amazon Prime. It's really good. So there you go, Amazon, you got a plug right there.

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Check out the documentary. It's really, really intriguing, but you had people not only like Dennis Wilson from the Beats Boys, but you had people like Neil Young, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, like the really infamous, some of the most infamous people in music history, some of the biggest influencers.

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It was all this time around the Summer of Love. I think one of the real pinpoints that was a couple of years prior when

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John F. Kennedy was assassinated, because that was kind of one of the turning points where people really did not trust their government as far as the official story goes.

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That's a whole nother episode in and of itself, but that was a real pinpoint where not only that affected the culture, but also affected how people felt about the

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Vietnam War. And so you had the Vietnam War going on, you had the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which is one of the pinnacle turning points, because prior to that, the

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American culture really kind of had this very Tinseltown, Saturday evening post,

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Norm Rockwell sort of feel to it, and this was the glass, what we call the glass ceiling being shattered as far as the

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JFK assassination. And then obviously in the middle of this period from 1967, 1969, you had the assassination too of Martin Luther King Jr.

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So you had that. And so you had all these different things going on, but I think the pinnacle point of the Summer of Love started primarily when

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JFK was assassinated. And then you had all this point where people were trying to delve and find meaning. And so go ahead with it.

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You really have this innocence lost kind of concept, right? So you move out of the home where mom stays home and raises kids, dad goes to work.

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We don't, as a culture, need to abide by that structure. The nuclear family.

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Yeah, the nuclear family, right? So JFK is assassinated.

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The Vietnam, people start really questioning what business we have in Vietnam. So that trust, that kind of, that inherent trust people were giving to their leadership and their government wasn't there anymore.

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They felt like they couldn't trust what they were being told. And you see this really just running away from those traditional, what really are biblical views of the structure of the family and culture towards anything else.

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The idealization of it doesn't matter, free love, freedom with your body, experimentation with drugs.

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And a lot of drugs, really psychedelic drugs. And we'll talk about that a lot today because it was a huge part of what

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Manson used to manipulate his followers. But I think that the point is, is this innocence lost.

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And Manson never had that innocence, right? So he knew that world. And I think that's why hate

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Ashbery really appealed to him, like what you were saying, Andrew. So why would I go to Texas when

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I could go to kind of the epicenter of this revolution that as far as I'm concerned as Manson, I'm already living in.

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Exactly. Yeah. And so one of the things that always fascinated me too, so in hate Ashbery, when he is there,

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I, one of the things that Charlie did is that, you know, as much time as he spent in prison, he wasn't, he didn't, he didn't just, he got, he got very familiar with his environment.

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His, his strength was manipulating people, but it's almost, if you think about, there's my, one of my favorite books,

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Sun Tzu, the art of war, when it talks about knowing your enemy, knowing the battlefield. So one of the things he did when

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Charlie, cause he said he got out of prison and he worked his way down to San Francisco is that he spent a good amount of time just walking around and just observing his environment.

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The whole place was a hotbed of colds. I watched one or two documentaries on the summer of love.

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And just the footage you see, you see like Hari Krishnas, you see all sorts of people that look like some sort of Celtic Druid on one corner.

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You see a bunch of scantily clad hippies on one corner trying to propagate this.

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So you just see all these different religious groups and you have all these different people trying to say, hey, our way is the truth, kind of do this sort of thing.

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Almost in a way, kind of, it would almost mean maybe what the Apostle Paul did when he walked into a place like Ephesus, where you have this whole broad variety of paganism.

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So, but here it is, Charlie, he's going around and just observing, looking around, seeing what makes people tick.

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And so one of the things that he really became aware of was

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LSD, which is interesting enough. Cause I mean, we talked about current environment and things going on today when it comes, especially now in 2020 and current events with racial tensions.

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But one of the big things that really has taken a huge resurgence is the interest in psychedelics.

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And from a spirit, we've talked a couple of times when it goes to the UFO phenomena, but it's also, I think just culturally, it's making a huge comeback as far as doing that, and especially, you know, you work in clinical psychology.

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So that's one of the things that Charlie got familiar with and understood the power of LSD. This is a huge part of the culture in the seventies.

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But talk to us real quickly, just about, so people understand from a psychological standpoint, what these psychedelics do to the person.

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Why would that be appealing to someone like Charles Manson, knowing his love and ability to manipulate? Cause that's where his strength was.

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Absolutely. So LSD, lysergic acid diethyl thalamide is what the abbreviation stands for.

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So it's a, it's a psychedelic drug. It's a hallucinogenic drug. And actually, you know, just to touch on what you were saying,

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Jerry, we're using it in research right now to treat post -traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and the research actually has some very interesting results.

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There's some promising results. And I think the results are promising for the same reason we're going to talk about right now.

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Why Charlie thought, you know, saw what they could be used for and then use them. So one of the things that happens when you are under the influence of a psychedelic drug is you become extremely suggestible.

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So your environment is manipulated by essentially the poison because that's what you're taking is poison.

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It's what causes the hallucinations that you can have visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, tactile hallucinations.

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So, you know, feeling things on your skin. You could even have gustatory hallucinations so you can smell things that aren't there.

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So when you're in that state, you become extremely suggestible. So somebody who's already really good at manipulating people who aren't under the influence is going to see a substance like this and what it does in terms of making people vulnerable.

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And, oh yeah, I mean, this is magic, you know? So, and as we talk a little bit more about what

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Charles, Charlie Manson's like specific ideas were, you know, his whole helter skelter and really what his, you know, quote unquote, theology was, you'll see that it would probably take being under the influence of a psychedelic to believe some of that stuff.

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So he experimented himself, but also we'll see too when he used psychedelics like LSD with his followers, a lot of the time he wasn't ingesting the substance.

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He was just doling it out. You dished it out, making sure they take it. Which happens a lot of times in the world of cults where usually the leader will propagate an ideology to which he will, which he'll tell the followers to do one thing, but then they don't follow through with it.

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Right. Right. So like Osama bin Laden, for example, he would tell his followers, you need to blow yourselves up, commit jihad, and you'll go and have 72 virgins.

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But why didn't he lead the charge on that? He had everyone else do it for him, even though it was this wonderful and glorious thing.

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But that's just one extreme example, but you always see that all the time where it's always, you do as I say, not as I do.

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There's something I think that's really important before we move on. It's like, what was the spiritual climate of people then?

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Right. So I like the term that you use when you're referring to LSD. You said the term magic. All right. So here's

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Walter Martin. This is a quote in regards to the countercultural movement, the sexual revolution. He says, referring to the people of the countercultural movement, he says, they're tired of everything having to be examined by the empirical method and of all the truth and validity being placed in one category.

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They're looking for something outside for reality, and they are revolting against that system. There's a rebellion, secondly, against materialism.

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In an affluent society, which has given us so much, the young people of our day have turned to drugs and they have turned to alcohol and they have turned to sex and they have turned to rebellion in multiple forms.

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For what reason? Because they are turning off the affluency of society, which has so much, so little concern for many.

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What are they going to turn to? Some kind of reality to fill the vacuum of the soul? And Satan stands ready to supply that reality.

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That's the spiritual climate of the time during the sexual revolution. So, and just to kind of expand on that, if you are under the influence of a drug that causes the walls to breathe, you've got marble tiling, swimming, you become very open to the suggestions of somebody that might be more magical, magically oriented.

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So it's less difficult for you to believe that, and we'll talk about this again in detail, but Manson believed that during helter skelter, they were going to travel to the center of the earth.

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That's where they were going to hide out until everything was over. That becomes a lot more believable when the walls are breathing around you, right?

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So it was just a really a perfect kind of mechanism for him to use to suggest some of this more fantastical stuff.

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Right. So again, people are trying to have this escape to this utopia. They are one, it was the

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San Francisco wasn't enough. They then had to ingest LSD while they're in San Francisco. So one thing,

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Andrew, you mentioned, and in the documentary mentioned this too, and I watched it is Timothy Leary.

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Yeah. You just, you kind of introduced me to him was when you're doing your research. He had his very infamous saying, and just tell me a little about his thoughts and what sort of influence did he have?

23:33

Oh, wow. Okay. So I'll try to make it fairly brief, but Timothy Leary was a

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Harvard psychology professor and he, and I forget who the other person that worked with him.

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I don't have it pulled up right now, but they pioneered the way in LSD research that they were getting, you know, funding through the education system to provide for that.

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And he actually spoke at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and he phrased the famous words, turn on, tune in and drop out.

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And so he spoke to all of these hippies essentially, and he gave that phrase, and I don't mean to be derogatory when

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I say hippies, I'm just, you know, just describing the people of that time. But so what we can see is not only was this counter -cultural movement supplied by like de facto, like resurgence.

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Also we have an education system that was also breathing in to this cultural environment.

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And I mean, if we look at nowadays, it's very similar in regards to critical race theory, intersectionality, you name it, breathing into the culture and also the church nowadays, but, you know, fueling the atmosphere for rebellion.

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But Timothy Leary many times also said he wasn't necessarily trying to create this revolution, but he is one of the main figures.

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Him and Richard Alpert, who is later known as Ram Das, who was a guru. They were really the two main educational proponents to LSD research in the

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United States of America, who also did influence the counter -cultural movement where it's turn on, so listen to what's going on in reality, so tune in and then drop out of it, go do your own thing, go search for this other metaphysical type of knowledge somewhere else.

25:19

Go to your happy place. Yes. And one of the things too, so what you'll notice too, if you listen to that second episode, we spent a good amount of time talking about Charlie's time in prison.

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And as we noticed, there's lots of different influences that he sort of dealt, he kind of grabbed from every little aspect of it.

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And so there is a book that he, this one, I think it was a science fiction book, or just, but also it was like Scientology and all these other different things he would just sort of grab from and put together.

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And so what happened in prison, him sort of grabbing from everything, that also in the inside of prison began to manifest on the outside of prison in hate aspirate, all these different groups, like I said, he's watching all these different gurus, he is trying to say, okay, what works?

26:00

What sticks? What doesn't? How can I kind of grab and put all these things together? Now I have LSD, which everyone's taking anyways,

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I can figure out a way to weaponize, now I can weaponize this to manipulate that. So it's almost sort of like I've got an expansion pack to my manipulation abilities.

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So I love that, yeah. That's the gamer nerd part of me. The frosting to it. So you've got people like Timothy Leary, who by all accounts is this extremely respected -

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Brilliant. I mean, professor of psychology. He is a psychologist, he's part of this psilocybin project in the early 60s.

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So he's not a government official, he's not somebody in authority paid to be touting one way or the other, he's an academic and people put their faith in that.

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He's seen as kind of unbiased authority figure because of that. And I'm reading here,

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Richard Nixon once described Leary as the most dangerous man in America. And he actually, there was, when we get into the

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Manson's trial, the Manson and the girls tried to have their trial declared a mistrial because of what

27:07

Richard Nixon commented about Charlie. I remember hearing about that. Leary sounds like someone who would be on the

27:14

Joe Rogan experience. Oh, for sure. Easily. I'm pretty sure he died before Joe Rogan started doing his podcast, or he probably would be.

27:21

Yeah. Joe Rogan would be like, introduce ladies and gentlemen, the great and powerful, Timothy Leary. In psychology, the whole idea behind using things like a hallucinogen, and again, like I said, we're using this right now in research.

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If I can escape my reality, so if I'm a combat veteran who has post -traumatic stress disorder, my everyday reality is really hellacious.

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The post -traumatic stress is no joke at all. You've got people who are in kind of a chronic state of hyper anxiety.

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And if my reality is that every waking moment, why would I want to stay in it? And so when you introduce something like a psychedelic that allows me in a very real metaphysical way to escape that reality and create my own, especially with a controlled dose, which the people that are researching this aren't just eating paper of LSD in the way that somebody in Haight -Ashbury would have done it.

28:24

In a really controlled environment, it allows me to escape. It allows me to make sense in this other reality, what's going on.

28:33

And so that's the same idea that Manson is using to manipulate his followers. Right.

28:38

So we got the spiritual climate, the cultural climate, and then we have the LSD that Manson has weaponized.

28:44

So with everything going on, one of the things that was very interesting is that during this time that you had roughly about 300 kids a day just arriving in Haight -Ashbury, just trying to find their way.

29:00

And all of them were kind of in that point of really a vulnerable and susceptible. They're trying to find purpose and meaning and things like that.

29:09

And one of the things I mentioned too is that it was, I mean, the Manson family is very popular because of everything that happened.

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But for every person that's named, who knows how many unnamed people in Haight -Ashbury were completely sucked into the world of the cults.

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There were so many different groups. Like I said, there's Hare Krishnas, there's all sorts of different, there's a guru in every corner.

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Those are the guys that have the flowers, right? In the airport? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Like when a society wants to reject materialism, that's where gurus thrive.

29:44

Because if you think about Hinduism and many cults that come off of that, it's all about overcoming the material into a more spiritual sense of reality.

29:51

So let's talk about the formulation of families. So at this time, there's some famous names that now are kind of part of this whole story.

29:59

They delve onto San Francisco and they get in connection with Charlie. So let's talk about a couple of them. People like Susan Atkins.

30:05

Sure. Mary Bruner, people like that. Let's just talk about a couple of those people and just real briefly so people can kind of get an idea of what it was like.

30:12

We don't just name every single person. Sure. But just get an idea of some of the big players, how they get into Manson, what was kind of Manson's role with each particular person.

30:21

Sure. So the five original female family members were Susan, Sadie Mae Atkins, Lynette Squeaky Fromm, Patricia Katie Krenwinkel, Mary Bruner, and Ella Jo Bailey.

30:34

So here, let me pull up my notes on each one of them.

30:42

So we see a really common thread with these girls and I think that's pretty important. Let's see.

30:48

We can talk about Susan Atkins first. Sure. You know, there were a few people that were kind of at the front of the trials.

30:57

So, you know, we associate these, you know, the very famous pictures of the three girls arm in arm walking into the courtroom after Manson, you know, etches on his forehead the other, the girls do the same thing in solidarity with him.

31:12

Man, it's just cultish all the way, right? Yes. It really is. Okay. So let's see.

31:19

So Leslie Van Houten, that's a name that you hear all the time associated with the

31:25

Manson family. So she became associated with the Manson family at 19. She was a high school dropout and a runaway.

31:32

So this is the kind of theme that we're going to see happen here. Patricia Krenwinkel. Well, while you're pulling that up too, like one of the other people that come into the family later on, even though she wasn't directly involved in the murders,

31:44

I skimmed through her book as Diane Lake, and she got into the Manson family when she was at 14 years old and she was.

31:53

And so she got caught up into it and both of her, she wasn't a runaway, but her parents, while you pull it up, her, her parents got involved in the whole hippie movement and taking

32:05

LSD together and saw them kind of go their own way. But they joined, her parents joined this free love commune, which is very interesting because she talks about in her book, how this commune was all about free love and going against society and not being bound by the rules and love the one you're with, even though, you know, that infamous song, even though it came out in 1970, it still was prominent, kind of a commenter in the culture there.

32:30

But so they said you could just basically, you know, sleep around, have sex with whoever you want, because this is the culture rebellion system.

32:37

Don't be told what to do. And however, she got kicked out of the commune because she's 14 years old.

32:43

So because she wasn't legal. Right. So for her, in her mindset, she was saying, and this doesn't make any sense because here this culture is telling me free love, free love, don't listen to what society tells them.

32:55

But then they kick her out based off of a contract that the society tells her, which goes to show if you don't have a ultimate foundation of truth, you end up, that worldview ends up collapsing on itself.

33:07

But so she got kicked out of that group, but was really into LSD, psychedelics, trying to find meaning.

33:12

So she became runaway. Sure enough, she didn't initially fall into Manson, but she got ahold, it was some of these people that we're going to mention that she got into contact with, which is how she joined the family at 14 years old.

33:24

I mean, so it's, what's amazing is Manson identifies these types of women, right.

33:30

And then trains them to identify girls and women that are very, very like themselves.

33:38

Right. So it, I mean, I know you think you see that all the time in, in cults and cult leadership, right?

33:45

It's this delegating of, you know, finding, finding people. So if I can train my followers to identify people that would be good fits for the family, then

33:54

I don't have to go out and do all the work. Right. So Patricia Krenwinkel met

34:01

Manson in 1967, and she left Los Angeles to go to San Francisco with him.

34:07

She went by Katie. She was picked up by Dennis Wilson of the

34:12

Beach Boys. And later was part of turning his house into kind of the flop, the

34:18

Manson family flop house. So we'll talk more about that. Let's see. We've got

34:24

Squeaky Fromm. Her real name was Lynette. If you look, she was played by Dakota Fanning in Once Upon a

34:32

Time in Hollywood. She wasn't a participant in either of the murders, but she was a huge Manson follower and part of at Spawn Ranch, kind of running things at Spawn Ranch.

34:46

So, but we're talking about girls who have no like family structure or they leave their family structure.

34:53

Right. And they essentially adopt Manson or Manson, Manson adopts them as the father figure or as the daughter, this really warped daughter kind of relationship.

35:06

So part of becoming a member of the family was you had to have sex with Manson and you had to have sex with each other.

35:13

So that was this breaking down of any kind of physical barriers that would exist between, and as much as we don't want to believe this, sex is an incredibly manipulative, can be very manipulative.

35:29

Right. So, and as much as we want to believe our culture tells us that it's no big deal and it doesn't matter.

35:35

And it's, there's really no emotional connection to it, especially for women. That is so false. It's so inaccurate.

35:41

It's a spiritual, there's a spiritual connection that happens when someone has sex with You're in their most vulnerable position.

35:47

And so you've got this man who is becoming what they need, right? That father figure that they need.

35:54

And so Andrew and I were talking about this too. One of the things that he did was he identified girls that weren't necessarily traditionally beautiful, right?

36:03

So there was a lot of self -esteem issues there. Women that like himself were looking to belong, right?

36:10

You, you're able to identify those things that you are unhappy within yourself and other people, right?

36:17

Really fast. Yeah. Just real quick, I'm just going to comment on something too.

36:22

And one of the things you'll see parallel with this is that one of the biggest things, one of the biggest things people are aware of right now is this, the horror and reality of sex trafficking.

36:32

And we always talk about human trafficking, but in a weird way, we always think of Charles Manson as far as the murders that took place at Seattle Drive.

36:40

But there's a lot of examples too, of what happens between the trafficker and the people who end up becoming the victim.

36:48

There's a lot of manipulation. There's a lot of drug use you mentioned before. One of the things that happens when someone gets kidnapped, who's going to be a trafficker, they get them hooked on heroin to be dependent on that.

36:59

So, so you see that, but really what you're seeing here, when Charlie is doing all these things, getting them hooked on drugs and telling them that you're, you're wonderful, you're beautiful.

37:10

And Diane Lake talks about that, you know, and again, this is just the reality of, this is a sinful, broken, fallen world as, as just to quote the world's radar, a girl who's 14, there's a lot going on as far as her, as far as her development goes and being caught up in a cult like that.

37:26

And then being told who's a lot of different insecurities and having Manson coming along to try and groom her insecurities and make her dependent on that.

37:36

That's just the reality of the, of really the wickedness of who he was and how he manipulate people.

37:42

But ultimately what you're seeing here is what, this is typical cult mentality is this, it's the destructions of one's own personal identity and the replacement of it with something else.

37:53

So when someone's going in and having sex with Charlie and then taking the LSD and getting taught that's warped ideology and having to do everything else, that is really the destruction of the old self and the embracement of the new as Charlie calls it.

38:08

Well, and these new identities where, so like I'm this, my old self that's destructed is this meek, vulnerable little girl who doesn't, doesn't have anybody that cares about them, has no worth.

38:22

And it's being replaced by this image that Charlie's given me, this I'm worthy, right?

38:28

I'm worthy of attention. I'm worthy of affection. I've been chosen specifically, right?

38:34

So we know, and Paul says in Romans, there are none that seek for God, right? But because we all know

38:40

God, because this law is written on our heart, we are aware that something is missing.

38:46

So we create that idol, right? And that's essentially what's happening here. If we put it in biblical terms.

38:52

So what were you going to say, Andrew, earlier? Oh, I was just thinking about the song, Look At Your Game Girl, right?

38:58

Like he, when you're listening to that song, it almost sounds like he's singing about the women, right?

39:04

But what I'm thinking is that he was actually singing about himself. And then when he looked at the women, he looked at people who were a reflection of himself.

39:11

He knew what he longed for. He knew what he wanted. So if he could find someone like that, he can give them everything that he desired.

39:17

But what that is, what he truly desires is to manipulate. So to manipulate somebody without them really even realizing it, of course, hindsight's 20 -20.

39:27

They realize it way later on, but it's actually - Hopefully, hopefully he realizes it. Yeah. Some of them don't like Squeaky Fromme.

39:33

She's still under his spell, but he gets off like that. Right. That's exactly right. That song's about himself.

39:39

It is. Ultimately, he wants to feel important. He wants to feel adored and revered and loved, and he can see that desire in the people that he identifies for the family.

39:51

So when he's even having sex with them, he gets off because he's, this sounds so intense, but he's having sex with himself.

39:57

That's right. Yeah. No, no. I mean, that's such a great way of really characterizing narcissism.

40:03

And Charlie is the ultimate narcissist. So it's a personality disorder that's really, really interesting and unique from all the other personality disorders because it's characterized by this grandiose sense of self, this arrogance, but that's really just a defense mechanism for an extremely tiny self -worth, self -image.

40:28

And we can see stuff in other people way easier than we see it in ourselves, right? Always. So if I know that I've really just,

40:35

I just want to be adored, admired, revered, and I can pick out people that are missing that, feeling good about themselves in that way,

40:44

I can easily manipulate that. Twisted empathy. That's right. So one of the things that we're talking about, this kind of sums up the relationship with a lot of the girls.

40:52

Was there anything significant with any of the particular players you mentioned? You mentioned Susan Atkins, and she is one of the people that was involved in the murders.

41:01

She was. And I mentioned too, Diane Lake, for example, even though she wasn't. She, like I said, she wrote a book kind of giving her own biography at the time of that.

41:10

But were there any of the other people? Oh yeah, Tex Watson. Sure. He was also a big part of it.

41:16

We're talking about the girls of Manson, but Tex got involved and he was a part of the murders at Cielo Drive.

41:23

I mean, he essentially led the murders at Cielo Drive. And you see this in Once Upon a

41:29

Time in Hollywood. We're going to just reference this. It's so well done, a lot. But the girls were essentially told, do what

41:36

Tex says. And Tex was given the explicit orders that everybody in this house is going to die that night.

41:44

Which again, just talking about Charlie's manipulation, how brilliant, really, truly sadistic and brilliant of him to send these people to do his dirty work.

41:55

In his mind, my hands are not bloody here. So Susan Atkins is believed to have been the one that wrote

42:02

Pig on the wall in blood at the Cielo Drive house. She was present for almost all of the murders.

42:10

So not just the Cielo Drive, the Tate murders, but also the LaBianca murders. And then the murder of Gary Hinman, which

42:17

I don't know if we talked about that in the last episode, did we? We briefly mentioned it, but that was back in July, 1969.

42:24

So this is prior to the Tate and LaBianca murders. Right. So he's really the first person they believe was murdered by the family and really death by association.

42:36

So then we have Tate murders, LaBianca murders, and then let's see, there was one more at the end.

42:44

Yeah. Donald Shea. So, and I think his body, both Hinman and Shea's bodies were found at Spahn Ranch or at least on the surrounding property.

42:54

Yeah. And maybe we should talk about Spahn Ranch a little bit. Yeah. We'll talk. Yeah. We'll jump into that in just a second.

43:00

So as far as do we know about Tex Watson, was he also a runaway as well?

43:05

I mean, he seemed, was he kind of one of the 300 people? Do you know how him and Manson met? Of all the things

43:11

I just know, he just, when I was reading the books too, it's all of a sudden, you know, you look at the family and really the involvement there and all of a sudden

43:18

Tex Watson is just kind of there and part of it. Yeah. But so we can talk about that, but like one of the things too, which is an interesting aspect.

43:30

And one of the things that interconnects the whole time from 1967 to 1969, it's just the reality of music.

43:36

Cause we talked about that. He learned, he learned to steal guitar in prison from a notorious gangster, which is still crazy and amazing.

43:45

Yeah. He hears initially, he hears the Beatles in prison cause he's not fully isolated from the outside world.

43:51

No. And so that in a way that prisoners aren't isolated from the outside world, you know, in terms of media now.

43:57

Right. So he's wanting to be famous. That's just the thing he wants.

44:03

And, but in order to almost cause he always, he's dealt with his whole life in many ways since childhood is rejection and being worthless.

44:11

So he's trying to find significance. So, you know, when it comes to an aspiring musician, I'm sorry,

44:17

I'll let you jump in a second here, but I think like one thing is when you're anybody who's ever been, if anyone listens to our podcast,

44:23

I work for a company for six months that, and they listened to our podcast too, that, uh, they're, they're an aspiring musician.

44:32

And with that, and always trying to get a recording contract and all, you know, trying to play your gigs, trying to get those connection connections.

44:39

There's a lot of trial and error. You have to go through rejection. Usually that's part of just the process in order to grow, in order to become famous.

44:46

You look at any famous musician, they probably were ridiculed by all the critics and stuff like that, but they pushed forward.

44:52

But I think for Charlie, there are so many underlying aspects. So, well, and part of narcissism, part of what, what really defines narcissism or characterize narcissism is the inability to withstand any kind of rejection or criticism, no tolerance for it whatsoever.

45:09

And that's connected to this underlying sense of absolute, utter worthlessness. Um, I had an experience, um, when

45:17

I was doing my pre -doctoral internship at Arizona state hospital, um, best experience of my life where I, we call it de -masking.

45:25

Um, so it was my first day, first day on, um, the sexually violent predator unit there.

45:31

And, um, I ended up interacting with an individual who I knew nothing about. Um, turns out he was a sadistic serial rapist.

45:39

Uh, his forte was, um, using things like hot candle wax on his sedated or immobile geriatric victims in the nursing home.

45:48

He was working in really nice guy. Um, and it became really evident to me in the therapy session that we were in, um, that he was attempting to switch therapists because he, he thought that, uh, he could manipulate this new female therapist that had just been hired by the institution.

46:05

So I called him out on it, um, in the group. And if he could have killed me with his eyes in that moment, he would have.

46:12

Um, so, cause I embarrassed him. I called him out on his stuff in front of everybody. And here I was this nobody student, um, you know, there to observe and, and, you know,

46:22

I asked him, you know, Mr. So -and -so, isn't it true that you want to leave this 16 year veteran, you know, sex therapist, veteran, um, and go to this newly licensed master's level female therapist because she'll be easy to manipulate.

46:36

And if he could have killed me in that moment, he would have. And so we refer to that as and I inflicted what we call a narcissistic ego wound on this individual.

46:45

Um, they cannot stand criticism. They just don't tolerate it. And that defined the relationship that I had with this individual for the next year.

46:54

Um, and I always watched my back whenever I was on the other words. So in other words, in regards to music, let's just say that Charlie Manson and Simon Cowell would not get along except like, unlike most of the people, you know, on American, I think it was

47:08

American Idol, right? Um, Charlie would have felt nothing about taking out a gun and shooting Simon right there.

47:15

Right. So, so one of the things too, is that you look at this, not just cultural revolution, but a huge part of any, uh, really revolutionary culture is always connected to music.

47:23

So we mentioned there's people like Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa. And so you think about, you think about all the music that took place in the

47:30

Vietnam war, like there's something happening here, right? That's as much as I'm going to sing. But, um, yeah, so you, but you have people like The Doors and you had all these like really famous bands.

47:41

The Beatles. I mean, it's a commentary on what was happening in Vietnam. Even if you look at the involvement of the

47:47

Beatles from when they first started versus you go to like some of their first very like happy songs versus Sergeant Pepper, where it starts to become, you could start to really tell like Lucy in the sky.

47:59

So we're talking about psychedelics, Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds. Like, where do you get that? Happiness is a warm gun.

48:06

Ooh, that's one of my favorite Beatles songs. Oh, I love that song so much. Well, music during this time also changed.

48:14

So prior to the sixties, music was very folky, very storytelling, but narrative, narrative.

48:21

Yeah. During this time, we actually had a shift of music to where it became a way to portray abstract concepts of metaphysical thought and emotion.

48:29

Something that music had never really done prior, at least within the modern history world.

48:35

So it was able now to disconnect from a material narrative sense of music and connect to something, what would, what

48:43

I would say like a movement or something greater than the world. And so people could spiritually connect with music during this time.

48:50

Right. So one of the connections, we're going to interconnect the story of Charlie and Dennis Wilson of the

48:55

Beach Boys. So if you think from the cultural time that the Beach Boys really, really started where it was just like very, it was kind of like a very happy aspect of California life.

49:06

Everyone's gone surfing USA or I wish they could all be California girls. Right.

49:12

So you have this like very happy time, but with what was happening though, is that as the culture was becoming very revolutionary, that they were, the

49:22

Beach Boys are really kind of really struggling with their sound, trying to find their audience because they were still, they still had that mindset of early music from an early era where everyone would all wear the same suits and kind of the same outfit of conformity.

49:36

They were behind the times. Yeah. They were behind the times. So it's almost kind of like, you know, you look at those like washed up eighties bands trying to make a comeback, you know, the hair metal.

49:45

Yeah. Right. So you kind of see that, but, um, well, and so really you were asking too about Tex Watson.

49:53

So, so he, so he, he's a little bit different than some of the other than, than the girls.

49:58

Okay. So he grew up in a family that was intact. He even attended a Methodist church growing up.

50:05

Um, he went to college at the university of North Texas and was a member of a fraternity there.

50:12

Um, so he ended up getting connected to the Manson family through the women. Um, and so exploring the psychology of that,

50:19

I think Tex Watson was more of a Manson understudy. So, you know, we've got the, kind of the narcissism in bloom with him.

50:28

Okay. So he was, I think he was more attracted to being idolized, um, in the same way that Manson was, um, and enjoyed the, the aspects of being the brainwasher and the manipulator, um, and less, even though he was absolutely manipulated by Manson, I think in his mind, he was more like Manson than he was like the girls.

50:50

So there were, I think there's a distinction there that we need, we need to make it. He was very smart. Um, and obviously still very influenced by Manson and one of the only men really to ever be a part of the family.

51:01

Charlie did not want men in the family. Um, he wanted women. So we'll girls, yeah, girls and girls.

51:08

So easier to manipulate. Right. And there's that aspect to that. Charles Manson was a pimp in the past. Right? So he's getting a lot of girls to handle, right?

51:15

He's going to need someone that he can trust to handle them while he goes and does other things. And Tex Watson was that man.

51:21

Right. And you'll, and you'll see that too, is that he only let people into his inner inner circle or inner click that people, he knew that he could control and manipulate.

51:29

So one of the, one of the people, musicians, he got connected with us. Charlie's trying to find his way. And he, and what

51:35

I'm happening to is that as they're in San Francisco, they realized that the place where you want to really kind of make things happen as far as music goes is

51:43

LA. So he works their way down with the girls and, and they start really building their movement in, in Los Angeles.

51:52

And so while they're there, they end up getting connected with, he ends up trying to formulate and, and he ends up getting connected with the musician named

52:00

Bobby Bosley. And, but one of the things that happens too, is that even though they did some music together, he never let, he told

52:09

Charlie, he's like, I didn't allow you're not in my inner circle because you're too much of an independent thinker. I need too much of an independent artist.

52:15

Right. So we'll probably jump into this next episode because there's so many interesting things about Dennis Wilson. So what we'll do is that I'm going to just kind of tell the story about how they got connected, which

52:26

I read about, I'm like, this is crazy. There's so many different things. We're talking about things in prison.

52:32

I mean, just this, this story in of itself. So again, it's funny because in Once Upon a

52:37

Time in Hollywood, you know, is that, you know, at the very beginning, Brad Pitt's character is at a stoplight and he sees some of the girls conveniently who are coming out of a garbage dump, looking for supplies, which is one of the things that Charlie always had him do, which he also wrote a song called

52:50

Garbage Dump, singing about it. Wasn't the best song. Yeah. But like he tried.

52:56

None of them were that great. Right. But yeah. So when it ends up happening, so you see that scene where Brad Pitt sees all the

53:03

Manson girls walking by. So what he was doing, not only was he having the girls go and try and recruit for his members, but they joined the family, but he is also trying to help them find connections to build his musical career so he could become famous.

53:18

So what ends up happening is that the girls, these there's a couple of girls,

53:24

I don't remember which ones were out. It was just part of the family and they're going around looking for connections, either recruit or connections for Charlie's music career.

53:33

And this guy pulls up in a car, I believe is a convertible right next to them and says, hey, do you want to come to my house for milk and cookies?

53:41

And of course, you would think that he is trying to offer some sort of, you know, favor that would be inappropriate, you know, obviously.

53:50

But so they go to his house expecting that for something more.

53:55

But he literally comes out with a glass of milk and some cookies and a plate of cookies and set the down for the girls.

54:03

I'm sure they're like dumbfounded, like what? He goes, yeah, here you go. And by the way, I got to go to a recording session. Oh, who do you like?

54:10

So who's your recording? Who are you part of the Beach Boys? Right. And so they're like, what? Yeah, I'm Dennis Wilson.

54:16

So that became the point when they went back to Charlie and said, oh, we just met

54:23

Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. I can imagine how ecstatic he must have been.

54:28

Like, this is my big break. You know, you're trying to do, it's kind of like, you know, you're in, you're in Hollywood, you're doing all this movie auditions and stuff like that.

54:35

And all of a sudden you get the, you get an audition for like Rocky or something like that. I'm just trying to, I'm trying to think of a comparison.

54:42

And you're this aspiring actor. Cary Grant walks into the audition room or somebody really famous and you're like, this is it, right?

54:48

If I can make this connection, then this is the only door I need opened. This is basically equivalent to like Simon Cowell. It's like, congratulations.

54:54

You're going to Hollywood. I've been stepping on these people for so long that now I've finally had my chance.

55:00

Right. Gotcha. It really is just fascinating too. And like to bring it back in like God's sovereignty in that, right?

55:08

Like I like God's sovereign over the details we catch and the details we miss, you know?

55:14

And so here, here is this chance meeting, right? And it really sets the stage.

55:20

Like in Charlie's mind, like you said, Jerry, this is it. Like this is, this is, this is my ticket in, right?

55:26

This is how I become like the Beatles. Right. Right. Um, which he wanted desperately to be.

55:31

Right. And just didn't come anywhere close. Um, at least in a, you know, famous way.

55:36

Right. So I think we've covered a good portion of 1967 from 1969 and we're out to Dennis Wilson and have gone at least an hour.

55:46

So we'll go do is we'll try and get the rest of everything up until Cielo drive in the next episode.

55:53

So if you guys like this episode, let us know what you thought. I know this will allow this material is difficult to listen to.

56:00

So I believe we put a recording, uh, just we'll put, we'll put, we put a disclaimer at the beginning of all these, obviously this episode and the other ones, this is a mature content.

56:09

It's difficult where this is a sinful world and we need to talk about it because you don't have appreciation for the light unless you really show darkness in many particular ways.

56:19

So, uh, just like I said, we do appreciate you all listening to this episode. And as always this, this program program cannot continue without your support.

56:27

Uh, we need you to help us help programs like this continue. So, uh, be part of the cultist crew, go to the cultist show .com.

56:34

You can go to the donate tab, please donate one time or monthly and help support us, allow this program to continue.

56:41

There's so much we want to do to engage, uh, the cultural, the culture, the world of the kingdom of the cults.

56:47

Uh, we are only limited and held back by the support and our, it's Andrew and I's goal to do this, uh, full time.

56:54

So we can really expound, not just upon the podcast, but do a whole lot more for you all. So again, go to the cultist show .com,

57:01

go to the donate tab, donate one time or monthly. So all that being said, Robin, thank you for mind hunting with us.

57:08

Dr. Mindhunter. Dr. Mindhunter. It has been my pleasure. And we will talk to you all in the fourth segment of our true crime series.

57:17

We are, we are unraveling the mind of Manson. We're going to talk about Spawn Ranch, what happened there,

57:25

Charlie's relationship with Dennis Wilson and the music and all the connected to what happened at Cielo drive.