Word: manson
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...California, the home of Sirhan Sirhan, the Zodiac Killer, Juan Corona, Altamont, People's Park, the Donner Party, the San Andreas Fault, and Richard Nixon, thus begat another symbol of doom and yet another disciple of destruction, this one the most feared of all, coyote-man Charles Manson. For if Manson was given to referring to himself as a coyote who heard and knew all, whose senses were sharp enough to catch any stirrings of life outside his void, then those he surrounded himself with were the rabbits, plump and innocent, waiting for the kill...
This is the backdrop before which Ed Sanders spins his tale of Manson and his band of slave-women, beginning from Manson's last prison term in the mid-Sixties, stretching to his final capture hiding crouched in a cabinet ("Hi," he said to policemen when found, "I'm Charlie Manson."), and including a detailed account of the numerous influences which supposedly turned him on the road to demon-killer...
...Magazine of the Arts, author of The Shards of God: A Novel of the Yippies, and general all-around good guy, should wax so incredibly moralistic in this book is indication enough that it bears close scrutiny. Sanders spent over a year and a half researching the Manson family--as he says, "I wrote down literally everything I heard or saw related to the so-called Manson family...I became a data addict...Day and night I roamed Los Angeles gathering data...Naturally my path crossed many others whose activities were not directly involved in family life and death...
Witness: Bernard Crowe became involved with Manson and the family through some dope dealings. Manson reportedly shot him, but if Sanders' book is any guide, he was shot, says Sanders, on the morning of July 1, 1969, and was supposedly released from the hospital on June 17, 1969. The police, according to Sanders, never asked him how he happened to get shot in the first place. The facts in the case are hopelessly garbled and really need not be included in an investigative work. The shooting sheds little light on either Manson's development or the Tate-LaBianca crimes...
...that...killing that pig with a fork...fork power!" but that of course is somewhere else, standing only as a peculiar monument to the way in 'which any action in America becomes relevant to whomever thinks fastest and yells, "First dibsies." That was the strange thing about Manson, he seemed to fit just about everybody's purpose, to satisfy just about everybody's fantasies, and that is probably why he now has the best possible facilities in his prison cell, and why he'll probably die a rich...