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26 A doctor and a parole officer remember Manson During the year that Manson and his ‘family’ lived in or near San Francisco, they regularly vis- ited the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinie which was Sounded by Dr. David Smith. Dr. Smith's views are based not on a patient-doctor relationship with Manson, but on his personal observations. Charlie's group was unlike any other commune Ive known, They called themselves a family, but most family communes ure monogamous sexually. The members pair off and don’t in- discriminately change partners. A new girl in Charlic’s family would bring with her a cer- tain middle-class morality. The first thing that Charlie did was to sce that all this was torn down, The major way he broke through was sex, Charlie's girls were expected to have sex with any men around, anytime. If they had hangups ubout it, then they should feel guilty. That way he was uble to eliminate the con- trols that normally govern our lives. Sex, not drugs, was the common denominator, The violence was not the kind of sociopath- ic “escape” violence we see in the Haight but a psychotic, Rasputin-type violence. If you be- lieve God is on your side, anything is justified. The communal thing is very spiritual. Belief in magic, astrology, cosmic consciousness —that explains everything. One of the char- acteristics is to have a spiritual leader and, vi- olence asicte, Charlie Manson as a spiritual leader is probably more typical than we care to believe. Charlie appealed to too many peo- ple to say that just a few nuts were attracted to him. He would probably be diagnosed as a schizophrenic, but ambulatory schizophrenics were very much looked up to in Haight-Ash- bury because they could hallucinate—without drugs. If we're going to pin a psychiatric label on Charlie's girls, then we'd have to say there are hundreds of thousands of kids in this country who are also mentally disturbed. « # DR. ROGER SMITH Manson's parole offiecr, after his release from prison in 1967, was Dr. Roger Smith, a research criminologist who had launched the drug treat- ment program at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clin- ic, He speaks of Manson here out of his ex- tensive unofficial contact with him. Charlie was the most hostile parolee I've ever come across, He was totally up front about it. He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole. He was headed back to the joint [prison] and there was no way out of it, In another era, | think Charlie would have been back in prison in short or- der. But now the patterns have changed, You have a very transient, mobile delinquent pop- ulation, and many of them end up in scenes like this. They pick up the rhetoric and sort of blend in and exploit and manipulate the scene. I think that’s where Charlie fit in, In a sense | think Charlie was really sort of shaken by it all—by the fact that people were friendly, open and willing to do things with him. The first night he was in the Haight, the chicks were willing to go to bed with him, They didn’t care whether he had just gotten out of the joint, That was a real shocker for him. Drugs give you something but they also take, In the case of Charlie, he redefined what real- ity was. He began to drift farther and farther away. He certainly wasn’t operating on any- thing vaguely related to reality, He did become more articulate, began to develop a distinctive kind of philosophy, He no longer scemed an- gry or hostile, only more intense. They talk about the hypnotic kind of state he was able to produce. Always in the back of my mind [ felt he was a con man. Charlie's rap was always a little bit too heavy, a liule bit too polished, Tenderness toward girls? Not a damn bit. I never sensed he had any real warmth toward the girls. They were his possessions. There are a lot of Charlies running around, believe me. He's just one of several hundred thousand people who are released from pris- on after a shattering, soul-rending experience, not prepared for anything except to go back on the streets and do more of the same—but bigger. You get them back in the community and there's no place for them to stay. | couldn't get Charlie into a halfway house because the only one was too small, 1 couldn't get him training because somehow he didn't meet the State requirements. The only place he was accepted was Haight-Ashbury, and doesn’t that say a hell of a lot about the system. He collected CONTINUED lastically and, after three years, dropped out. But his old college sweetheart, airline steward- ess Terry Flynn, reveals far more about the value judgments of Texas girls than about any emotional trauma he may have endured. "He treated me like a queen and he shaved three times a day —there was never a hint of § o'clock shadow -but he became too possessive.” When she saw him in Los Angeles last De- cember after un unexpected flight to Califor- nia “IE just couldn't believe his long hair. But he still opened car doors for me.” > Maine-born Linda Darleen Kasabian, 20, grew to “sweet and pretty” adolescence in her divorced mother’s white clapboard house in Milford, NH. She quit school as a sopho- more to marry a local boy but was divorced a year later. Last July she was in Los Angeles with another husband, Bob Kasabian, and her baby daughter Tanya: a voung friend who had inherited some money was going to take them on a trip to South America. Gypsy, oldest of the girls in Charlie’s family, spotted her in a Topanga Canyon restaurant and took her to the ranch, She came back the next day and then only to steal $5,000 in $100 bills from the friend's camper truck, When the boy followed her to the ranch to protest, Charlie “showed me this big knife and said, “Maybe | should kill you just to show you there's no such thing as dying,” and | felt fear and split.” Linda did a lot of cooking for the family: she is now five months pregnant, and crochets. > Brunette and busty Susan Atkins, 21, had “a very disorganized relationship with her family in San Jose.” worked as a topless dancer and fell in with Charlie in San Francisco. Charlie renamed her **Sadie Mae Glutz.” Susan is the girl who spilled the story of the Tate murders to a cellmate while being held m the Santa Monica jail on charges of having helped one Bob Beausoleil kill Musician Gary Hinman for Chartic. Susan told the grand jury that Char- lie was a “beautiful guy. > Brown-haired Patricia Krenwinkel, 22, is the daughter of a hard-working Los Angeles in- surance agent and lived in a cream-colored stucco house near Loyola University. She was chubby and shy but “quite a litthe daddy's girl” and devoted to stamp collecting. Her father left wife and daughter when she was in her teens, however, and Patty began to go with “guys who hung out at Bob's Big Boy Drive- In at Canoga Park.” Patty's mother took her to Fort Lauderdale, She had a halt vear of col- lege in Mobile, Ala., came back to Los An- geles, got a job in an insurance agency—and then, suddenly, ceased being ordinary. She abandoned her car in a Manhattan Beach parking lot in September 1967, quit her job without picking up her paycheck and went off with Charlie Manson. Charlie changed her name to Katie. Her job at the ranch was the “garbage run.” picking through refuse cans behind nearby stores to salvage food for the family. The pickings, one witness recalls, could