The Last Charles Manson Tapes by Dylan Howard

Author:Dylan Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Last Charles Manson Tapes
ISBN: 9781510755086
Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
Published: 2018-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I knew a guy that used to work in the stockyards and he used to kill cows all day long with a big sledgehammer, and then go home at night and eat dinner with his children and eat the meat that he slaughtered. Then he would go to church and read the Bible, and he would say, ‘That is not killing.’ And I look at him and I say, ‘That doesn’t make any sense, what are you talking about?’”

—CHARLES MANSON, COURT STATEMENT, NOVEMBER 19, 1970

According to Charlie, Helter Skelter was closer than ever.

The Family was instructed to focus on its preparations. The mechanics—heck, anyone who could tighten a lug nut or help lift an engine block—were converting any vehicles they could into dune buggies, the better to negotiate the rough terrain at Barker Ranch.

Family members had been doing so all along, but now there was an intensity to their work. When Barbara Hoyt first joined the Family in the spring of 1969, she had been enthused about their automotive work, even against the backdrop of an impending race war.

“They were building dune buggies with fur seats and gun mounts,” Hoyt would later say. “They were making clothes out of hides. It was like they were all pioneers. I thought, ‘Wow! This is fun. It’s like camping.’”

The activities remained the same, but the mood changed after the Tate/ LaBianca murders. Manson knew he needed to go to Barker Ranch, deeper into the desert, to avoid the worst of the anticipated uprisings. And that meant he had to spur Family members to work harder than they ever had.

“We never had newspapers at the Spahn Ranch, but Charlie got an LA Times with headlines about the Tate/LaBianca killings,” Catherine Share later shared.

“He held it up and said, ‘It’s started.’ He said we had to get out of town, because it was now dangerous. We were up day and night putting food into barrels and getting our last clothes together, the leather outfits we’d been working on. We had three dune buggies with roll bars and machine gun mounts. It was apocalyptic.

“No one spoke of any alternative.”

Despite Manson’s prohibition against eating meat, the Family did use furs and hides, both for its cars and its clothing. Since they would not kill animals, they had to buy or steal their skins.

They didn’t give much thought to the inconsistency. They probably thought that animals were blameless, unlike people. But the reasons did not matter. Manson was, after all, their infallible leader. He also, of course, was insane.

Even so, he was still functioning—and at a high and dangerous level. He had warped the minds of Family members so thoroughly that they would prepare for carnage without thought of their former actual families or loved ones. He had instilled in them his messianic fervor.

“[W]e’d learn to live off the land,” Share recalled. “We’d live in the desert and come in on dune buggies and rescue the orphaned white babies. We’d be the saviors.

“I believed that the cities were going to burn.

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