Free Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars by Edward George, Dary Matera

daughter he met inside a cardroom in Dean Martin’s wild and woolly red-light hometown, Steubenville, Ohio. For a while, he was happy again. His wife became pregnant with Charlie junior (who has no doubt long since changed his name), and Manson was content to play the young husband role. Financial problems and the limited opportunities available to a man with his education and background caused him to turn back to crime. An auto theft arrest sent him to his first adult prison, Terminal Island in San Pedro, California. His son was born while he was on the inside. Mrs. Manson dutifully visited—for about a year. Then, without so much as a Dear John, she left him for another man. He never saw either her or the child again.
    “I went back to being bitter and hating everyone,” he told Emmons. “I had been bitter when my mom turned me over to the court when I was twelve. I hated her when she refused to let me stay with her after my first escape.… The bitterness I had learned at Plainfield never left me. And though I don’t blame her or feel bitter toward her now, my wife had the full brunt of my hate then.… Until my wife left me, I was filled with honest thoughts for our future together.… The letdown I experienced when I realized I had lost her was the turning point in my life. I figured, screw all that honest-John bullshit. I’m a thief, and I don’t know anything else.”
    Manson was released in September 1958 and set out to be a big-time Hollywood pimp, a profession he thought was at the top of the bad guy food chain. He ran a few girls with moderate success, fathered another son—this one he never even saw—took a fall for passing a bad check, took a bigger fall bringing prostitutes across state lines, hid out in Mexico, was shipped back to the United States, and was slapped with a new, ten-year sentence. He served seven, bouncing between McNeil and Terminal Islands in Washington and California.
    With these critical pieces of the puzzle correctly in place, a picture emerges that better explains how Manson emerged as a 1960s guru. He merely had to look within himself to gain the insights needed to further alienate youthful recruits from their distracted parents. To this day, dysfunctional, loveless parents remain a constant theme with Manson.
    Prison, combined with his diminutive adult stature (five three, 135 pounds), shaped Manson’s well-known half-crazy mental attitude, along with his bizarre posturing. An unintimidating man who lacked physical prowess, he learned early on that in a grown-up prison, he desperately needed a psychological shield to ward off predatory inmates. He compensated for his shortcomings by enveloping himself in an aura of creepy evilness, spiced by a quick, sarcastic wit. Later, he added the body contortions and sudden jerky movements that would one day mesmerize the media. This gave him an air of unpredictability that scared bigger cons away. As every inmate knows, a “psycho” can go off without warning, inflict serious injuries, and/or force sudden confrontations that end with both participants being dumped into the dreaded isolation “hole.” Thus, the crazier Manson acted, the safer he became.
    Flush with success, Manson refined his new persona by practicing and perfecting a series of verbal outbursts and veiled threats, polishing the act until it was almost surrealistic.
    Prior to Manson’s 1967 release from Terminal Island, a counselor noted that “he has developed a casual glibness with words and certain techniques for dealing with people.” They hadn’t seen anything yet. Actually, Manson’s oratory and self-preservation skills were probably obvious even then. The difference was that he was a nobody, just another dirtbag con going nowhere. At the most, his antics may have merely amused his guards, doctors, and administrators.
    After leaving Terminal Island, Manson traveled to San Francisco and fell into the famous Haight-Ashbury flower children set. To Charlie,