Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (6 page)

Kathleen was more sensible. No record exists of her committing any prison infractions. She kept quiet, did her assigned work, and in late 1942 was paroled after serving three years of her five-year sentence. She told her family that all she wanted now was a quiet life with her son. They couldn’t live with Nancy in Ashland because mother and daughter were not on good terms. Kathleen thought that if she moved back with Nancy she would once again be under her mother’s thumb. The Thomases wanted Charlie gone, not the child staying and Kathleen moving in, too. So she and Charlie struck out on their own.

Not surprisingly,
Charlie had only bad memories of his childhood years in McMechen. In the late 1970s he told an interviewer that all he remembered about life with the Thomases was being ordered to “do this (or) don’t do that.” The experience formed the basis for his adult philosophy that it was better for children to be separated from their parents: “The child is born free (and) he should develop without restrictions.”

At the time, though, Charlie was thrilled to be back with Kathleen. He referred to the first weeks that he was reunited with his mother as the happiest days of his life. But that soon changed.

K
athleen initially was hired as a barmaid in McMechen. She wasn’t shunned because she’d just been released from prison.
Lots of paroled inmates looked for work in the little towns around Moundsville, and there were always prospective employers willing to give them a chance at a fresh start. But Kathleen didn’t stay in the area long. She may have been unsettled by proximity to the penitentiary where Luther was still incarcerated. Within weeks, she and eight-year-old Charlie moved to Charleston.

Van Watson hired Kathleen as a clerk at his grocery store, Van’s Never Closed Market. Watson felt sorry for his new employee and her small son. They didn’t appear to have any friends, so he sometimes invited them to dinner with his family. It was the kind of low-key job and understanding boss that Kathleen needed to readjust to normal society, but Charlie immediately began causing problems. He was enrolled in a local elementary school but seldom stayed in class. Kathleen had to be at work; she couldn’t walk him to school and then stand guard outside his room to make certain he didn’t sneak away. Charlie compounded his mother’s frustration by showing up at the grocery during the days that he played hooky, asking for candy and often buying some with pennies he apparently cadged from store customers.
One of the first things Kathleen noticed when she reunited with her son was that he tried to manipulate everyone, especially women. She realized that his interest in people was dictated by what they might be able to do for him. When he wanted to be, no one was more charming or persuasive than little Charlie.

Kathleen had other problems besides concern for her son. Dancing and drinking still appealed to her. After working all day she wanted to
have some fun. It was hard finding someone responsible to keep Charlie when she went out as she did most nights. Kathleen was still only twenty-four. The lure of nightlife often overwhelmed her maternal instincts.
Charlie ended up stashed with a series of questionable baby-sitters. Kathleen felt guilty about it, but she left him anyway.

Carousing wasn’t Kathleen’s only activity on these bar-hopping nights. She was on the hunt for a husband. Hard knocks had diminished her teenage belief in true love and living happily ever after, but Kathleen still yearned to be married to some man who would provide her and Charlie with a decent home and security. Even after three years of languishing in prison, her outgoing personality still attracted men. Shortly after immersing herself in Charleston bars, Kathleen believed she’d found someone.
Though Van Watson couldn’t remember the fellow’s name, he later recalled agreeing when Kathleen asked him to drive her and her fiancé to North Carolina where they would be married. On the trip, Watson learned that Kathleen’s intended was from New York. They didn’t say why they wanted to be married in North Carolina, or why Charlie wasn’t brought along. A few days later Kathleen, still single, came back to work. She didn’t explain what happened and Watson didn’t ask.

In this emotionally bleak time,
Kathleen fell back into another bad habit. She was arrested by state police on charges of grand larceny; no details remain other than that the charges were dropped, and that authorities suspected Kathleen of committing these crimes under the aliases Kathleen Veron and Kathleen McTernan. She and Charlie left Charleston and drifted to temporary lodgings in and around Indianapolis. Fueled mostly by Charlie Manson’s statements as an adult, it’s popular belief that during this time Kathleen was a prostitute. Though it’s impossible to be certain, there seem to be no records of her ever being charged with or even arrested for soliciting in Indianapolis or anywhere else. Kathleen was never any good at avoiding police notice. She probably ran through a series of legal but menial jobs, regularly seeking oblivion through drinking and permanent security from a husband. In trying to wean herself from one, she believed she’d found the other.

During the summer of 1943, Kathleen determined to get her life in order. In less than a year she’d been released from jail, engaged but not
married, arrested again but not convicted, and had been an erratic guardian of her child. Charlie was about to turn nine, and he was increasingly incorrigible. Kathleen couldn’t effectively correct the boy’s bad habits without first admitting and dealing with her own. Above all, she was increasingly dependent on alcohol. Kathleen began attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
At one she met Lewis, a twenty-seven-year-old who said he was trying hard to get straightened out, too. Lewis had a lot to overcome. His mother died when he was five, and his father spent several years in the same Moundsville prison where Kathleen and her brother, Luther, later served time. Lewis was just out of the Army; the fact that he was released from service during wartime indicates that he was something less than a model soldier. Currently, he was working in the property department of a circus.

It was hardly a pedigree to recommend Lewis as a source of long-term security, but it was enough for Kathleen. At the least, male day-to-day influence might help get Charlie under control. She married Lewis in August 1943. The wedding took place in St. Clairsville, Ohio, about a dozen miles across the Ohio River from McMechen. That meant the Thomases and Nancy were probably invited; as part of her new life, Kathleen wanted reconciliation with the rest of her family. She no longer expected fantasy romance or perfect happiness. It would be enough to be married and live something like a normal life. But because of her new husband as well as her son, Kathleen didn’t get one.

Neither Kathleen nor Lewis became long-term members of Alcoholics Anonymous. She got her drinking under control and he didn’t.
From the first days of their marriage, Lewis caused Kathleen as many problems as Charlie did. Besides drinking too much and too often, her husband couldn’t hang on to a job, which meant Kathleen had to keep working. Despite whatever he might have claimed before the wedding, afterward Lewis had no interest in helping raise her son. He had no patience with Charlie and thought that it was Kathleen’s job to make the boy behave. He constantly criticized them both.

Kathleen understood that, once again, she’d made a bad choice in men, but at least in one way Lewis was different. Unlike Colonel Scott, William Manson, James Robey, and her unidentified fiancé from New
York, he wanted to stay with her. Being wanted long term by someone was a new experience for Kathleen; perhaps that was all women could expect from men. She decided to stick it out and make marriage with Lewis work.

But that left the problem of what to do with Charlie. His behavior kept getting worse. Now he was stealing things, small items from stores and anything of value he could get his hands on at home. Whenever she caught and confronted Charlie, he never apologized. Instead, he insisted that someone else was to blame, usually her, sometimes Lewis. She didn’t give him enough, so he had to take things. Lewis was always yelling at him even when Charlie hadn’t done anything, so he might as well do something wrong since he was going to be accused anyway. Charlie kept cutting school—every truant officer in Charleston probably knew his name—and neither threats nor bribes made any difference.

Kathleen’s concern about her son was so great that she approached her mother for help. The two women had not been on good terms since Kathleen went to prison in 1939, but now Nancy was willing to set aside their differences for Charlie’s benefit. Nancy talked to Charlie, undoubtedly invoking the Bible and its admonition to children to honor and obey their parents. Charlie wasn’t rude to her—even in his worst moods he was reasonably pleasant to his grandmother. But afterward he didn’t improve at all.

Kathleen surely felt guilty. She knew that her own aberrant behavior had been a terrible influence on Charlie. But even though she’d finally changed her ways, Charlie continued to lie, steal, and skip class. Every so often he’d lose control and scream, and then even though he was just a kid, barely five feet tall and maybe sixty or sixty-five pounds,
he still scared Kathleen with his crazy eyes. Between Lewis and Charlie
she felt sometimes like she was going insane. Probably nothing could change Lewis. He was grown and permanently set in his ways. But Charlie was young. Something might still be done—just not by her. Where her son was concerned, Kathleen had run out of energy and ideas.

She’d heard about foster care programs and schools that helped wayward boys. They might have a lot of rules and sternly enforce them, but maybe that was what Charlie needed, a firm hand from people who knew
how to communicate with problem boys like him. Kathleen had no intention of giving up Charlie permanently. But if he lived somewhere else for a while and got the help he needed, she could concentrate on Lewis and try to make him more responsible. If he didn’t have Charlie around aggravating him, maybe he’d drink less. Placing Charlie for a while in a foster home or school might be best for all of them.

In 1947, without first informing twelve-year-old Charlie, who’d begun running away from home for short periods and didn’t need a new excuse to do it again, Kathleen looked around for the right place for him. No appropriate foster care had openings. Then she found an Indiana school that sounded just right.
The Gibault School for Boys was in Terre Haute about seventy-five miles from where Kathleen, Lewis, and Charlie lived in Indianapolis. The school, founded to offer a positive learning environment for male delinquents, was run by Catholic priests. When the Brothers of the Holy Cross replaced secular administrators in 1934, the student body was comprised of thirty-five boys. By the time Kathleen sought a place there for Charlie thirteen years later, there were about 125 students.

To hear Charlie tell of it later in life, his mother shipped him off to a virtual Midwestern gulag, but in fact Gibault was a pleasant, open (no fences or walls) campus. Pupils were accepted from fifth through tenth grade, with shop as well as academic courses available. There were sports teams, and the boys helped out on a 150-acre farm that provided fresh vegetables for students and faculty.

Applicants did not need to be Catholic, but boys accepted at Gibault were required to attend daily religious services as well as regular classes. Besides charging tuition from parents who could afford it (Kathleen would say later that she paid an unspecified amount to Gibault while Charlie was there), the school was financially supported by various Knights of Columbus councils. The priests demanded good behavior from students and enforced rules by paddlings with a yard-long board. School rules restricted this corporal punishment to no more than three swats at a time.
Charlie claimed he was regularly beaten by the priests “with paddles as big as ball bats.” Since his behavior didn’t improve notably after arriving at Gibault in 1947, he undoubtedly did receive innumerable three-smack paddlings.

All new students underwent academic and psychological testing.
Gibault found Charlie’s “attitude toward schooling at best only fair,” and, though there were sometimes short periods when he was “a likable boy,” he mostly demonstrated “a tendency toward moodiness and a persecution complex.” Charlie was unhappy at Gibault; he soon fled to his mother in Indianapolis.
It hurt Kathleen to send him back; then and later he described Gibault as a terrible place where the priests hated him so much that they encouraged him to run away, but she knew Charlie was undoubtedly lying. Even so, he came close to persuading her that he’d learned his lesson and would never cause trouble again. After a few hours Kathleen steeled herself and took him back to Gibault.

In late December 1947 Charlie left Gibault again, this time on an approved pass to spend Christmas in McMechen with the Thomases.
It was Jo Ann’s idea. As much as she didn’t like her cousin, she still thought it would be wrong to leave him at school for the holiday. Kathleen and Lewis stayed away—their current relationship was too tempestuous to inflict on the rest of the family. But besides Uncle Bill and Aunt Glenna and Cousin Jo Ann, there were two other relatives there to greet Charlie. His grandmother Nancy had moved to McMechen, and, having finally been paroled from Moundsville penitentiary, Charlie’s Uncle Luther was there, too. Prison records indicate that sometime in 1944 Luther was stricken with tuberculosis and confined to the dispensary until January 1947. He was then released, too sick to work or even to live on his own.
Instead Luther lived with his mother, and sometimes when he felt especially ill and needed additional care he would stay with the Thomases, where Glenna and Jo Ann could nurse him.

Luther was dying slowly and knew it. Though Nancy was saddened by her only son’s plight, she was grateful that his eternal soul was saved. After so many years of resisting his mother’s religious beliefs, Luther in his last years became a zealous convert to the Nazarene faith. His newfound devotion was such that, lying in his sickbed or propped up in a chair, he studied for the ministry. Only the precarious health that confined him indoors prevented Luther from seeking leadership of his own congregation.
When he died in 1950, Luther’s obituary made no reference to his prison term in Moundsville. He’d succeeded in publicly rehabilitating himself, and he made his mother proud.