Similarly, I find the fascination with serial murders unwholesome. I've never joined any of the online discussions about Charlie, because I can't see any point. He's in jail till he dies, as are his worst accomplices, and there's no mystery about who did the killings. Murder places the perpetrator outside normal society for good.
As a result, when I visited Death Valley I had long forgotten that Manson was arrested at the Barker Ranch a few miles outside the valley entrance. I was only reminded of it when I made a side-trip to Ballarat, an old ghost town in the Panamint Valley that was a mining centre 120 years ago, but is now just a cemetery with a few remnants of crumbling shacks. Its caretaker, one of those characters who end up in places like Panamint because that's where such people end up, pointed to an old pickup truck, and told me it was Charlie Manson's.
It wasn't. Charles 'Tex' Watson, who is still serving life in jail despite a Christian conversion and having started a ministry, owned the truck, a 1935 Dodge. In an online interview with the strangely named Shadoe Steel ( http://www.aboundinglove.org/interview.php,) he describes driving this along Sunset Boulevard in L.A. when he stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker. This turned out to be Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who had trashed all his own cars. Wilson took Watson back to his home, and introduced him to a house-guest. That, of course, was Manson, who was there with a couple of his girlfriends. Tex and the Dodge left with Manson.
What can you tell from an old pickup? Cars may pollute, but they're innocent. This one is rusting, the horeshair burst out of its single bench seat. I wonder if it would even hold together if someone were to tow it back out along the rocky track from Ballarat. But it is there, a mute, quirky witness to the Manson nightmare.
I just broke off writing this to re-read Watson's account of things. His story feels incomplete, or maybe so rehearsed now that nothing but the stupidity and horror of what he did, coupled with his sense of Christian redemption, remains for him. There are, I've read, persistent rumours of other murders the Family committed beyond the Tate and LaBianca slaughters. There were, I assume, moments in that life with Manson that were fun or joyous. And there was the baffling numbness the participants felt, the brutal pointlessness of their crimes, the lifetime of coming to terms (or not) with their actions of 1969. So many ifs, so many small questions.
What did the pickup have to say about it all? Only that Hannah Arendt was so right about the banality of evil. Strip away the adrenaline rush and the headlines, and there is just a confused, deluded, poorly nurtured human mess, either urging others to kill or killing himself - or herself. Much of the grief of the victims' families itself must have rusted by now, even if their anger still remains.
Watson is 61 now, Manson nearly 72. They and a number of the others will either die in jail, or spend only their last few years in freedom, past the point in life where any form of violence seems to have a point. Like the pickup, they are rusting away.
Manson himself still has his demons, it seems. Watson claims to have faced his, as has Susan Atkins, if her published claims (Child of Satan, Child of God, S. Atkins, 1977) are to be believed. But mostly, like all old horrors, the sensational crimes of 1969 are fading into memory, to be reprised as the family members die off, then finally forgotten.
Like, I imagine, that 1935 Dodge.