Charles Manson Now (20 page)

I came across the crime scene photos from the Sharon Tate murders in full color, hung like art. It was like looking at a most terrible train wreck, yet I couldn’t look away. This event had somehow brought me to the spot in which I was standing. Throughout my stay in Hollywood I had started hearing my inner voice ask, “What the hell are you doing?” Standing here, staring at the young mother, stabbed about her swollen belly and tied from the neck by a rope, that question echoed in my head louder than ever before. I felt as though I were seriously invading someone’s privacy; no one deserved to be seen butchered like this. I couldn’t help but question what becoming a voyeur to this bloodbath said about me. I was overwhelmed by the thought that whoever did this deserved at least equitable retribution. The idea that Charlie was somehow behind all of this had been ingrained in my mind since childhood. I turned away from the images with this thought: How could you carry the blame for such a horrendous act, whether you were responsible or not?

I rushed out of the Tate murder scene and right into a room dedicated to Charles Manson. The space was filled with a ton of photos, newspaper clippings, odds and ends including a Manson-autographed baseball, and a few of Charlie’s paintings. The paintings were a lot larger than the ones Manson had sent me, but I could immediately recognize his technique. Among the quintessential Manson paintings was a piece that depicts a detailed, glow-in-the-dark, underwater scene: a colorful collection of amoebas set starkly against a background of black lines scrawled on white canvas, markings that seemed to stem from careful calibration at the same time invoking a feeling for the artist’s compulsion. Some of the sea creatures were detailed
down to the cellular level; round, asymmetrical shapes composed of clustered, conjoined circles, each filled with tiny dotted nuclei.

I remember seeing, as I passed through the few remaining rooms, some artwork GG Allin had made with his own blood and hair and some kitchen cabinet doors from which some other rock star (I can’t remember whom) hung himself. This completed my tour.

JD met me at the exit, eager to see my reaction. “What did you think?” he asked, as I struggled to find the words to express my astonishment. “That’s pretty fucked up,” was all I could manage in reply. JD smiled and laughed; I did too. I ended up spending a couple of hours talking with JD and Cathee, who both struck me as wonderful people. JD and I share a deep love and fascination for the bizarre. The three of us chatted about the people that visit the Museum and their various impressions of the treasures inside. “Our favorite reaction,” Cathee explained, “is something we like to call ‘the falling down ovation.’“ Apparently quite a few Museum guests are unable to resist the urge to pass out as well as I was. I was interested to learn how a museum dedicated to death and destruction could originate from such lovely, lively people. I discovered that JD’s interest in death stems from his childhood, during which his healthy curiosity about what happens when we die was discouraged and labeled “weird.” As a result, he wanted to create a place where death could be explored as a fact of life, where people could learn, ask questions, and confront their worst fears without feeling the taboo. While the images displayed inside the Museum are graphic and unsettling at best, Cathee and JD insisted that just because death isn’t pretty doesn’t mean it’s disrespectful to display it. The couple regards the exhibits and
collections as part public service, part artistic expression.

I told Cathee and JD about my relationship to Manson and filled them in on the visits I planned to make throughout the rest of my trip. Through their collecting, they both knew Stanton LaVey, Matthew Roberts, and William Harding. When it comes to circles centered on true crime and serial killers, it truly is a small world. As I prepared to leave, JD told me he had something else to show me. “You’ll love this,” he laughed. He ducked back into the Museum and returned with a living, conjoined, two-headed turtle. I had never seen a live conjoined animal, and, to me, the turtle was a living miracle, the sight of which totally made my day.

The following afternoon, I met up with William Harding at his home. He was in the process ofmoving, and most ofhis collection had already been meticulously packed into crates and boxes. The sheer volume of stuff struck me immediately. William pointed to a large pile of oversized envelopes, artwork, and God knows what else. “That stuff just came in these last couple of weeks,” he shrugged. “I just haven’t had time to go through it yet.” I learned that William is almost constantly sorting and organizing. It goes without saying that the inmates he’s befriended throughout the world’s prison systems have quite a bit of time and enthusiasm to create things for appreciative prison art connoisseurs.

We went upstairs to the master bedroom, where William showed me his most prized possessions: prison IDs, fingerprint charts, corporal artifacts like hair and teeth. William showed me four teeth, two of which had belonged to cannibal killers, preserved in little plastic containers, almost as if they were rare
coins. While he flipped through various boxes, I noticed a lock ofManson’s hair. He showed me an authentic Manson fingerprint chart. “How in the hell did you get this stuff?” I asked. William told me that was something he really couldn’t talk about. I didn’t press him. Instead, I asked him to show me his absolute favorite piece. Without hesitation, he turned to face the wall behind us. “That,” he said, and pointed to a black matted frame surrounding a pentagram necklace Charles Manson had made. It was intricate and original in that it was a true piece of prison craft; Charlie had constructed the satanic symbol out of toilet paper and dental floss. I was starting to feel that my trip had really become rich with satanic undertones.

When I’d met William the day before, I immediately decided that I liked him. He has a lot of contained energy, which creates an aura that’s more hyper than intense, so he comes across as being very alive. He emits a great deal ofconfidence and enthusiasm, yet at the same time he seems comfortably average and unassuming. I sometimes try to predict a person’s nature before we’ve met, based on what I know about him or her. For some reason, my idea of what a person is “supposed” to look or act like is almost always completely wrong. Such was the case with William. The more time we spent talking, the more I realized I couldn’t find any trace of evil about him. He seemed a complete contradiction to his home, a space filled with the most intimate keepsakes of people held responsible for the world’s most heinous crimes.

I asked him how this had started. William explained that his collection had begun as recently as September 2000, when an online search for “Richard Ramirez” yielded fan pages devoted to the “Night Stalker” serial killer’s art. William was “instantly
amazed.” He’d never known art like this was accessible. He said to himself, “I want that.” When I asked William what he found appealing about Ramirez’s art, he told me he was more transfixed by the rarity of the work than by its quality. William searched for Ramirez’s address, wrote to him, and received a letter in reply. Eventually, Ramirez sent William an original drawing. But even then, William’s curiosity didn’t subside. “So I have met him,” he told me. “I still write to him. I’ve talked to his wife a few times. Once, while visiting another inmate on death row, I saw him just by chance. We waved and exchanged smiley faces; he recognized me pretty quick.”

I wanted to understand William’s impressions of the serial killers he’s befriended, how he feels he can possibly relate to them. He told me, “I could have been hit in the head with a baseball bat when I was eleven, or my mom could have gone through a bad divorce, and my stepfather could have raped me, and these things may have made me so mad that I wouldn’t know any way to vent that anger aside from killing people.” William said he is a victim of his circumstances just as all other people, including men like Richard Ramirez, are victims of theirs. William further clarified that both experience and character constitute a man’s circumstances, and that the former, the latter, or both might drive a man to kill. “A lot of these guys have told me, ‘If I could go back, I wouldn’t have done it.’ Others have said, ‘If I got out [of prison], I’d do it again.’“ While some men kill in response to trauma, others inherently crave bloodshed. William explained that some serial killers are in love with torture and murder, and in some cases with the people they crush with their desires. William knew some killers who’d spent their lives isolated and without
friends. In part, their crimes stemmed from the logic that says if they could just abduct a person, they could keep that person long enough for him or her to fall in love with them. “They have this romantic idea of how it’s going to work, then of course it doesn’t, and then they have to kill them.”

In order to routinely communicate with serial killers and collect their art and artifacts, you have to become desensitized to a certain degree. This doesn’t mean, however, that a collector’s friends and family will become desensitized as well. William is used to hearing he will go to Hell for writing to serial killers like Ramirez. People think men like William are sick by association. But William insists there is a point at which his rate and level of understanding hits a plateau: “Do I think it’s going to desensitize me to the point where I really want a feel, or a taste? No, I don’t even eat meat. I have no desire to feel what it’s like to hurt a child, a woman, a man; that’s not what interests me.” It’s the fascinating human connection that appeals to William. He described his first impression of Ramirez: “It was behind glass, there was only a small window actually. I was a little nervous, only because the newness of all of it. He was soft spoken, polite. He seemed very shy and was pretty articulate, actually. Meeting him was very laid back.”

Richard Ramirez was the youngest child born to working class immigrants in El Paso Texas in 1960. Under the influence of a close cousin who murdered his own wife, Ramirez became a high school dropout and drug user. On June 28, 1984, following a routine drug binge, Ramirez broke into the home of seventy-nine-year-old Jennie Vincow and began stabbing her in her sleep. The act of killing aroused Ramirez sexually, and compelled him
to commit acts of necrophilia. The killing kick-started a thirteen-month murder spree, for which Ramirez was eventually arrested, charged, tried, convicted of thirteen murder counts and over thirty other felonies, and sentenced to death. His crimes were so vile they traumatized the world. He tortured people in their homes, raped children, mutilated his victims’ bodies, and even kept parts of the corpses as souvenirs. A self-proclaimed Satanist, Ramirez would scrawl pentagrams on the bodies of his victims and on the palms of his hands while he sat in front of the judge in court. Ramirez is recognized as one of America’s most horrific and prolific serial killers. DNA evidence has recently linked Ramirez to the murder of nine-year-old Mei Leung, who was sexually assaulted and killed in the basement of a residential hotel in 1984. William, who is in his thirties, was just a kid when the Ramirez murders headlined national news. Remembering my childhood impressions of Charles Manson, I asked William what he had thought of Ramirez then. William explained that back then he was mostly interested in teen killers like self-proclaimed Satanists Sean Sellers and Richard Kasso. “As a kid, I never really gave [Ramirez] much thought.”

William draws a distinction between himself and other serial killer “collectors” who develop rapport with inmates only to satisfy a temporary or superficial need. Many people lure prisoners into false friendships in order to obtain information for a book or score a piece of artwork. When they get what they need (which often involves breeching an inmate’s trust), they discontinue the relationship and move on to another project, another prisoner. But William made it clear that he isn’t just collecting commodities; he’s collecting pieces of people. “The
inmates that I write to, they know that I am going to be there. We’ve had arguments - I’ve gotten into some serious verbal altercations - it’s like any other relationship. Another person might stop, but I value the friendships.” William told me that men in jail are still men. “I’m not saying that they should be released. Some of these guys are guilty; they belong right where they are, but I’m not breaking any rules by showing them a little bit of humanity, showing them what they kind of missed out on.” In terms of the money he could make from his acquisitions, it is clear by the piles of pieces that reach his ceilings that William isn’t capitalizing where he could. “It’s certainly not about money; when you see my collection you understand that. I have a hard time parting with things. I’ve never sold a letter.” William said that when he does decide to part with a painting, he’ll price the piece higher than what he knows will sell. “People say, ‘Why don’t you lower the price?’ It’s because I really don’t want to sell it.”

I asked William when and how he got interested in Manson. He told me that, initially, “It was just a crime interest.” William had been writing inmates convicted of murder all over the country, inmates ranging from the well known to the utterly obscure. Because Manson is the most famous American inmate, William’s interest centered on establishing communication with him. Initially, Manson didn’t write back. It took time, years, for William to compose himself effectively on paper. In 2005, he wrote Manson a letter that explained what kind of person he was, what kind of person his wife was, how they’d been wed with a Satanic ceremony. “I sent him a few pictures of the wedding, and I just told him, ‘If you ever want to talk to somebody, you know, a neighbor, go ahead and drop me a line.’“ Manson wrote
back from the hole, and the two exchanged a few letters before Charlie suggested a visit. William credits Manson’s willingness to meet him on his letter writing abilities and his pure intentions. “I mean, I was incarcerated myself, so I know how to write. And, as a matter of fact, I didn’t ask him for anything. I didn’t say, ‘Sign this; I want that.’“

Manson called William in June 2006. Surprisingly, William didn’t know much about Manson’s biography, trial, and conviction before he’d initiated contact. Eager to learn more, he asked Manson which books he should read as part of a crash course. “None of them,” Manson scowled. “They’re all shit.” So William respectfully abandoned the prospect of outside research and decided to let any information about Manson come from Manson himself. “He just became someone I talked to. I didn’t know anything about ATWA, nothing about any of that. All I knew was that the man is highly collectible, and he wanted me to visit.”