![]() ![]() The only one that seemed more like when I talked to him was the Ronald Reagan Jr. On the TV interviews, for the most part, he acted like a loon. As long as you are respecting him, he’s giving it right back. But I have 12 and a half hours of audio, and he sounds like a normal person. Anyone would be, if they were in prison that long. The funny thing is, if you watch the videos of him, he acts like a nutcase, and he most likely is, in some sense. Louis in 1955 and got a tattoo on his leg at a shop next to a theater across from the bus station.īut Dickerson was careful never to ask about the big thing, the Tate-LaBianca murders: “I never wanted to push him, because he goes into defense mode. ![]() Manson told Dickerson he’d passed through St. How his mother didn’t even know his exact date of birth. In an early letter, he wrote, “We can start by saying you take what I say and think about it apart from everything you know.” Bits of biography came through: How Manson used different middle names when he got busted, so the records would stay separate. Often, Dickerson couldn’t even make out the handwriting, let alone Manson’s logic: “He’d get on one of his little trips and be all over the place.” There’s always been a thin line between mystical experience and madness, and there’s no way to pinpoint his location at any given time. From nothing we are coming into the everything we are.” He wrote that all history and mystery could “fit on the head of a pin and be in the mind of a fly” and urged Dickerson to “Look up at the Milkieway, a billion X a billions X a billion as long as you live you could be just counting the time in between them in light years, and you can see it all now, lights that started 200 million years before you.” A bit later, he wrote, “You don’t realize how little we are and you don’t realize how big we are, how grate and how small. There is, hard as this is to fathom, a capacity for awe in his letters. He also wrote about Martin Luther, who “cut God’s church in ½ because it was wrong and off track and out of line-nevertheless had he the same faith in all god being good and right he would of kept that faith in ONE.” Manson described World War I and World War II as “2 cross’s at war with each other not knowing why.” He referenced Elvis Presley, Guns n’ Roses (who liked his music), Marilyn Manson (who adopted his last name). Manson’s letters are an incoherent tangle of music, cynicism (“Politicians, you just get paper clips and shit from them”), philosophical ramblings about God and survival and air and water and animals, schemes to “git” stuff (like a “life size TV” for phone conversations) and fury over “cheeters” he couldn’t trust. Dickerson had to focus on a personal crisis and wound up moving, so there could be more Manson letters piled up someplace, lost in the gap before his forwarding address kicked in.Īs it is, he has a stack of letters, a binder of artwork and music notation, and more than 12 hours of recorded phone conversations from perhaps the most notorious criminal in U.S. One day, exasperated, he finally picked up and heard: “You have a collect call from the California State penitentiary… You have a collect call from Charles Manson.”Ī voice said, “Ken? Kenny? Yeah, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”įrom there unspooled years of conversation, ending five years before Manson's death this November 19. So he composed a letter, and then he added a sheet of paper with an outline of his hand and “Reach out and touch somebody” written above it. It’s enough to know that he was convicted of ordering the savage murders of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and four other people who were at her home on August 9, 1969-as well as a married couple, the LaBiancas, the next day.ĭickerson was wide open, though, more interested than scared. I thought, I might as well write him.”ĭickerson’s casual shrug makes it seem a natural course of action, but Manson’s name alone causes most people to recoil. “He was a part of history,” Dickerson continues, “regardless if we want him to be or not. “I’m a history nerd,” Dickerson explains now. “I’d seen a few documentaries about him, and then I found out he played music.” Got covered by the Beach Boys won praise from Neil Young. Ken Dickerson was 20, an aspiring musician from House Springs, Missouri. Twelve years ago, Charles Manson was 71, living in the California State Penitentiary-Corcoran, not terribly interested in parole. ![]()
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