“I got a hat. I put my hat on. I walk out into the desert as far out as I can go. And I sit down. I don’t say, do you want to come with me? I don’t say go away. I don’t say anything.

“And I say, you can’t be with me. I’M WITH ME. And they say ‘we just want to be around you. We just want to hear your music.’”
– Charles Manson

CAMP MEEKER, Calif., Jan. 5 – In a small tree-shrouded cabin located high in the hills above the meandering Russian River, 38-year-old Carol McChesney cuddles her infant daughter and speaks adoringly of Charles Manson.

“Charlie is a genius born to show us how to survive this mess – to show how it’s done. And when he gets out, he’ll show the whole country,” said McChesney, who also calls herself Jewel Mansonn.

“He is the source of light and you naturally want to be close to him to feel warm – to feel the light. If you love Jesus Christ,” she added, “you love Charles Manson.”

Another devoted Manson disciple, who prefers to call himself a “friend of Charlie” rather than a family member, said he lived with Manson before the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. He believes in Manson’s innocence and calls him a “modern-day prophet” who is as “persecuted and misunderstood as Jesus Christ or Martin Luther King.”

“I would trust my life to Charlie Manson,” he added.

Despite these accolades, Manson denies his attraction as a charismatic leader – or even the existence of a following. The idea, in fact, exasperates him. In a letter to the Marin Independent Journal, in which he takes note of his poor spelling ability, Manson writes:

“Conterry to what others want to think – I’ve never had a following and my philosophy, my system of opinions, for the most part, change each day to fit whatever thought chamber I may be in.

“I’ve no back up or supporters. I’ve a few friends, most of witch are in prison. There are not then and are not now Manson women. I’m not there leader or teller. I don’t want no one believing in me.”

People come to him and want to be with him, Manson says: “And it only causes me trouble. I just end up back in the penitentiary.”

But whether Manson likes it or not, his attraction has not weakened over time.

Officials at San Quentin Prison, where he is serving a life sentence, say as many as a dozen letters a month arrive for him from strangers around the country requesting autographs, even suggesting intimate meetings.

Manson continues to attract new disciples while retaining strong ties with original family members.

As devout as ever is Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme, who is serving time in a West Virginia federal prison for the 1975 attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. She hasn’t seen Manson face to face in more than a decade, but she still does much of his correspondence. He sends her rough drafts of letters, she corrects his spelling, types them up and sends them off.

“He’s new and on the edge of now. He doesn’t lie. He never killed anyone, he was wronged – but the explanation is too cumbersome,” Fromme, 38, said in a telephone interview from prison. “I want to be with him. I want to be with Manson.”

Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, a prosecutor in Manson’s 1970 murder trial, believes the media has been partly responsible for “keeping Manson alive.”

“Every time he’s up for parole I get calls from all over the world – New Zealand, Japan – asking about him, asking how he’s doing. He’s still front-page news.”

But the fascination with Manson goes deeper than media hype, Kay said.

“He’s a very dynamic personality, not unlike Jim Jones or other cult leaders. He can be very convincing to a person who needs someone to believe in. You see this kind of need a lot among religious fanatics – the true believer type,” Kay said.

San Francisco writer Curt Gentry, who did extensive background research on Manson and his “family” members before co-authoring the book “Helter Skelter,” said he can’t explain Manson’s attraction.

“I still don’t understand what it is. He can change his face so amazingly and there are so many facets of his personality. He seems able to be whatever a person wants or needs him to be,” Gentry said. “Manson seems able to sense what that individual need is, then manipulate that need. He gives them what they are lacking.”

It’s unnerving, Gentry said, how Manson is able to “cast his spell” over people he has never met.

“Once I met this girl in a bar who said she was a member of the family. She was playing with a knife and really into Charlie’s rap … you know, his love talk mixed up with hippie scientology. She really had Charlie down. I checked her out. She never had any personal contact with him. It was very scary. I got the feeling the thing might be contagious.”

Carol McChesney said she first met Manson in Los Angeles after he was jailed in connection with the Tate-LaBianca murders.

A blonde woman with intense eyes and a drawn face, she describes him as “the most kindest person I have ever met. He got me on the right road.”

McChesney calls herself a “former religious fanatic.” She is married and the mother of two children. They reside in Camp Meeker. She visits Manson at San Quentin – about 50 miles from her home – at least twice a month and regularly writes him.

“So many people understand that what he is saying is from God,” McChesney says. “He tells us the way to live on earth is to ‘be what you are and to find peace with it.’ He speaks in terms of brotherly love. Charlie wants us to stop cutting the trees and that we got to stop polluting the earth.”

She adds: “It’s not wrong to follow Charlie Manson.”

How many Manson followers live along the Russian River is unknown. Sheriff’s deputies based in Guerneville say they are aware of a group of Manson people in the area, but they have no idea how many or exactly where they reside.

By TERESA ALLEN