Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (5 page)

As soon as Charlie arrived, two immediate actions were required. He should visit his mother at the prison in Moundsville, and he had to start school. Neither experience went well.

•  •  •

Everything about the six-acre West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville was intended to intimidate. Dominating the south part of town,
the prison was designed to resemble a Gothic castle, not a shining symbol of hope like Camelot but instead a brooding hulk ruled by some cruel, domineering black knight. Its outer stone walls were four feet thick, twenty-four feet high, and topped with barbed wire and turrets manned by armed guards. Entry past the walls to the inner buildings was permitted only through heavy barred doors; standing outside, one could easily imagine the screams of victims being tortured in subterranean dungeons, which was in fact close to the truth. Prisoners judged guilty of serious infractions were taken away to dark, dank punishment rooms, stripped naked, and bent over a low platform called the Kicking Jenny with their feet and hands tied to rings on the floor. Then a hulking guard tore apart their bare backs with a water-soaked leather whip until his arms grew too tired or his victim seemed near death.

Even prisoners who avoided these bloody episodes suffered on a daily basis. In 1939, when Luther and Kathleen arrived to serve their sentences, the prison population of 2,700 was more than three times its intended or “rated” capacity of about 870. Male inmates were jammed three at a time into tiny five-foot-by-seven-foot cells. At least in terms of sleeping space, women had it better. They were housed on the third floor of the administration building.

The prison was strictly segregated. Blacks and whites observed each other from mandated distances. In several places hallway floors had white and black painted lines, indicating where each race was expected to walk. Segregation was even enforced in the cramped dining hall, though cockroaches routinely found their way into the food without regard to race. Everyone ate what was given to them, bugs and all. They needed their strength for work detail, so they chewed and swallowed even while rats skittered across the dining hall tables.

West Virginia officials wanted their prison to be self-sustaining, and even during the Depression the state penitentiary in Moundsville turned a profit. Male inmates were hired out to area businesses and farmers for as little as 16 cents an hour. There were no regulations to be observed by
these employers regarding the care of their rented labor. The prisoners were fed what their outside bosses wanted to give them, or not fed at all. If their work wasn’t satisfactory, reports back to prison officials and sessions on the Kicking Jenny encouraged the prisoners to do better.

Women were assigned to an in-house sewing factory where they attached collars and cuffs to coarse prison garb fashioned by male inmates in another part of the prison. A few especially unlucky female prisoners were placed on custodial duty; they spent long days mopping floors frequently puddled with sweat, vomit, urine, and blood.

Other work details turned out license plates, blankets, belts, and over a hundred more products that were sold to the public by the state. A nearby two-hundred-acre farm known as Camp Fairchance utilized convict labor to plant, tend, and harvest produce. The best vegetables were sold in local markets. Anything unsalable to the general public was sent to the prison kitchen. Male or female, all able-bodied inmates were required to work nine hours each weekday and a half day on Saturday.

Overwork, beatings, poor food, and all-around unsanitary conditions took their toll on the prison population. Outbreaks of tuberculosis regularly killed dozens of inmates. Those deaths were incidental; it was the prison’s scheduled deaths that entranced the local population. Anyone receiving the death penalty in a West Virginia court was transported to Moundsville for execution. The condemned were hanged on a gallows near the prison’s North Wagon Gate. Each hanging was organized as entertainment. Tickets were printed by the prison and distributed to the public. Demand far exceeded supply, so even though the prison didn’t charge admission to executions, once distributed the tickets were routinely scalped or swapped for liquor or other goods.

Luther and Kathleen Maddox were in no danger from the hangman. Their respective ten- and five-year sentences didn’t commend them to prison officials as potentially dangerous new inmates. They were just two more convicted felons to be crammed into the general population. According to records, Luther was initially sent to work in the prison paint plant. His sister wasn’t as lucky. Kathleen drew a custodial assignment, but she made no complaint. Because of the overcrowded conditions, prisoners who worked hard and followed the rules were often released before
serving their entire sentences. Such paroles never came early. Even with perfect behavior, the Maddoxes could expect to remain in Moundsville for years. But even one fewer day in that filthy, frightening place must have seemed worth striving for.

Soon after Charlie arrived in McMechen, Uncle Bill took him to Moundsville. Perhaps he cautioned the little boy about what he would see, the terrifying penitentiary itself as well as Kathleen in prisoner’s coveralls. But more likely he warned the five-year-old about behaving properly. No sniveling when he saw his mother. Real boys didn’t do that.

If the sight of the forbidding outer walls and heavily guarded entrance doors didn’t completely unsettle Charlie, the visit with Kathleen surely did. Ushered inside the main entrance and down a hall to the left by Uncle Bill and uniformed prison staff, Charlie was pushed onto a hard wooden slat seat in front of a thick glass panel. On the other side was Kathleen.
Whatever love she tried to communicate to him was verbal; until the day she was set free, it is unlikely that Kathleen was allowed to touch, let alone hug, her child.

If Charlie managed not to cry or show any other unmanly emotion that day at the prison, he more than made up for it when the Thomases enrolled him in school.

•  •  •

More than seventy years later,
longtime McMechen residents still shudder when they recollect their experiences in Mrs. Varner’s first grade class. Richard Hawkey puts it bluntly: “She scared the shit out of me,” and Hawkey’s mother became the school principal. Virginia Brautigan, who as an adult worked for the McMechen schools, says that long after her retirement Mrs. Varner remained legendary among administrators for “how awful she was to her students.” Nobody seems to recall the woman’s first name. The lady did not encourage familiarity.

Everyone agrees that Mrs. Varner ran her class like a Parris Island Marine sergeant browbeating quaking recruits into submission. First graders marched rather than walked into her class, and when the dismissal bell rang the children came to attention and left the room only when their teacher permitted it. Desks were arranged in four rows, and Mrs. Varner assigned seating not alphabetically but by whoever pleased her the
most and least. Her pets, invariably girls, were in the first row, with the special favorite assigned the front seat closest to her. That child could do no wrong. Then the desks were filled in according to Mrs. Varner’s judgmental whim—most promising toward the front, somewhat promising in the middle rows, least promising in the fourth row, and the last seat in the back row reserved for whatever unlucky first grader struck her as a lost cause, thereby becoming a frequent target of her devastating scorn. Spanking was permitted by school rules, but Mrs. Varner had no need to resort to that. She eviscerated students with words; again, her exact classroom vocabulary isn’t precisely recalled, only that she instinctively knew how to discover and verbally exploit children’s greatest insecurities.

After Charlie turned five in November 1939, the Thomases brought him to the elementary school. They felt relieved to get him out of the house. Charlie was sent to Mrs. Varner’s room. She looked at the tiny waif, probably factored in whatever gossip she’d heard about his jailbird mother and uncle, and passed the Varnerian equivalent of the death sentence. Charlie was directed to the last seat in the fourth row. Whatever boy was previously sitting there must have been thrilled by the reprieve. During Charlie’s first day, Mrs. Varner took many opportunities to point out his defects. His mother’s imprisonment may have been mentioned, along with dire predictions about Charlie’s own hopeless future. Witness memories aren’t specific, but they all remember the aftermath perfectly. At the end of his long, terrible day Charlie ran home crying, and Uncle Bill witnessed this unacceptable display.

In those days, parents rarely questioned teachers’ treatment of children. The assumption was that whatever the teacher did, the student deserved. Even Mrs. Varner went unchallenged. Further, McMechen boys did not cry. They stoically accepted whatever punishment was doled out, even if it was unfair—it helped prepare them for life as adult working-class men. At best Bill Thomas had no patience for whiners, and here was this boy living in his house who fled home from school acting like a weepy little girl. Uncle Bill could have reminded himself that Charlie wasn’t his son. But he took great pride in being a self-made man who’d taken whatever life dished out and still succeeded. It required guts and resilience to rise in the railroad from fireman to engineer. Maybe his
mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences, but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.

The next morning Bill rummaged in his daughter’s closet and picked out one of Jo Ann’s dresses. He ordered Charlie to put it on. Since Jo Ann was three years older and normal-sized and Charlie small, the frock certainly sagged off him. Then Uncle Bill marched the five-year-old back to Mrs. Varner’s classroom. Charlie had to wear Jo Ann’s baggy dress all day; as Bill intended, he never forgot it. Later in life, Charlie exaggerated or lied outright about almost everything in his troubled childhood, trying to make bad experiences sound even worse. But he told the truth about being forced by his uncle to wear a dress to school. No embellishment was necessary.

Beyond the dress incident, except for his cousin Jo Ann no one living recalls much more about Charlie Manson’s first extended stay in McMechen. He attracted very little further notice; instead of running in the streets and nearby fields playing with friends like other little boys, he skulked around the Thomases’ house. Though he survived his time in Mrs. Varner’s class, Charlie remained a poor student in the two and a half years that followed. Reading skills particularly eluded him then and afterward; tested as an adult, he could read at only a rudimentary level. His time in the McMechen elementary school was notable only in that
he consistently attracted the notice of bullies through a combination of his small stature and big mouth. Once Charlie exchanged insults with an older, much larger boy who began slapping him. Jo Ann, saddled with protecting her cousin and determined to live up to the responsibility, jumped between them, and the bigger boy slapped her, too. Feisty Jo Ann bit his finger hard and he ran away howling with pain. Her teacher was bewildered—Jo Ann always behaved well and never got into playground scraps. When she asked the girl what happened, Jo Ann explained how Charlie was being struck by a bigger boy, and so she stepped in to rescue him. But when Charlie was called over and asked to corroborate what Jo Ann had said, he claimed he didn’t know anything about it. He just saw Jo Ann bite somebody. Jo Ann could have gotten in serious trouble, but
the teacher knew that she was truthful and Charlie usually lied, so she believed Jo Ann. Jo Ann decided that Charlie liked to start trouble and then let somebody else get blamed for it.

Another incident cemented Jo Ann’s complete disdain for her cousin. Bill and Glenna went to Charleston for the day, leaving Jo Ann in charge of Charlie, who then was about seven. Besides baby-sitting, the ten-year-old girl was instructed to clean the house. There was no question of Charlie helping. He routinely ignored his chores. Jo Ann was making one of the beds when Charlie wandered into the room, brandishing a razor-sharp sickle he’d brought in from the yard. He deliberately got in Jo Ann’s way as she tried to pull and tuck in the sheets. Jo Ann glared at him and ordered Charlie to go outside. When he said “Make me,” she shoved him out of the room and through the screened back door. Then she latched the door and went back to finish making the bed. Charlie screamed and slashed at the screen with the sickle; Jo Ann was certain that Charlie meant to use the blade on her once he got inside because he looked and sounded so crazy, completely out of control. Bill and Glenna returned just in time. They took in the torn back door screen, Charlie’s furious red face, and Jo Ann’s pale frightened one and demanded to be told what happened. Scared nearly speechless, Jo Ann mumbled, “Ask Charles.” His version was that she started it and he was simply protecting himself. The elder Thomases didn’t believe him, and Charlie got a whipping. “Of course it didn’t make any difference,” Jo Ann remembered seventy years later. “You could whip him all day and he’d still act however he wanted.”

In the two and a half years that he lived with the Thomases, Charlie developed three interests. He became fascinated by knives or anything else that was sharp. He enjoyed handling guns, the only trait the kid exhibited that struck Uncle Bill as normal for a boy. And, above all, he fell in love with music. The Thomases had a piano. Charlie could sit down at it and pick out songs by ear. He would lose himself that way for hours. Charlie also surprised the Thomases with his nice voice. They had to drag him to church on Sundays, but once there he enjoyed singing hymns. Charlie’s musical skills were the best thing about him.

Time passed slowly for Charlie’s mother and uncle in the state prison. Despite cushy work assignments, Luther had it tougher than Kathleen.
His ten-year sentence was twice as long, and his marriage to Julia Vickers fell apart. Even though Luther knew that bad behavior would preclude his early release he kept committing small infractions. He stole some paper and lost his letter-writing privileges. Talking back to his job foreman cost him five days in solitary. After three years at Moundsville, Luther couldn’t stand it anymore. He behaved for a while and was reassigned to the penitentiary garage. On February 21, 1942, he stole a prison truck and escaped. Luther was no better at prison breakouts than he’d been at armed robbery. He was back in custody three days later, and early release for good behavior was no longer an option.