Charles Manson remains relevant, and rightfully so

His is the first voice we hear. "You think my mind is like your mind, but it isn't." Oh, Charles Manson, why must we hear from you still?

I am reluctant to take on this job, to review a six-part docuseries about a man and the horror he caused, a story I have already read endlessly about, watched endlessly about, heard people talk endlessly about. It feels akin to that time a newsroom manager told me to try for a jailhouse interview with Paul Bernardo. "No," I told him. "There is nothing more we need to hear from that man."

But I am intrigued. Because long before my crime-reporting career ended, before I began researching the effects of the media on trauma survivors, Helter Skelter was one of my all-time favourite true-crime books. How would I react to watching Helter Skelter: An American Myth after all these years, and after so many months of deliberately avoiding the true-crime genre, so entrenched in researching true-crime trauma I currently am.

I tell the PR people hired by Hollywood Suite I will watch one of the six hour-long episodes and let them know.

"You think my mind is like your mind, but it isn't."

As I let Manson's words sink in, I think about all the times we have written off horrible things as anomalies carried out by horrible people, broken robots. That is, after all, why Manson and his cult of hippies continues to intrigue us after all these decades, isn't it? Because they were different from us? Because it had never happened before? Because it will never happen again?

I keep watching.

One of the first people we hear after Manson is former Manson "family member" Dianne Lake. "He was kind of impish and playful. You know, he could be funny," she says, almost incredulously, of the man who would later rape her. Lake was 14 years old when she met Manson. I think of all the girls I've reported on who met their pimps, their traffickers, around that age.

Stephanie Schram was 17.

"He said some things like, 'Oh what's a beautiful girl like you out here so late at night?' And in just a short period of time, he was able to tell me everything I ever wanted to hear: 'I bet your dad doesn't really love you. I bet nobody really takes you seriously.'"

Pimp, I think. He was just like a pimp.

(For anyone unaware, I've done a lot of work around pimps and human trafficking, and recently published a book, All the Bumpy Pebbles, on the topic. I can say with certainty that not only do most pimps operate in the same ways, but their tactics very much overlap with those of cult leaders. What I didn't realize coming into this docuseries, however, was that before he became a murderous cult leader, Charles Manson was a pimp, having learned the art of coercion and control from pimps he met in prison).

I finish the first episode and agree to review the series, with one caveat: My review will be honest. And here we are.

Of all the things I learned from Helter Skelter: An American Myth, the most surprising takeaway was just how relevant it remains. If you care to look for them, the themes of this docuseries are everywhere in today's world: The potential effects of childhood trauma; the power of manipulation; and how bad things can happen when other bad things — in Manson's backdrop: the Vietnam war, violent protests, and race riots across America — are swirling about.

We've long known that Manson's mother was locked up during his childhood. But I had never considered what that must have been like for a little boy, who at four years old was forced to visit a prison described by Manson biographer Jeff Guinn as, "a bleak, horrible place, and not just for the inmates, but for family who would want to visit them."

Indeed, "little Charlie Manson" did not want to visit his mother. He was scared. He would scream and he would cry. But his uncle would make him return to that horrible place over and over again. (The same uncle would later force a five-year-old Manson to wear a dress to school — punishment for acting like a "sissy.")

Perhaps not surprisingly, Manson began acting out. Again and again, he was sent away, first by his guardians, then by the judicial system. He was hazed and he was raped. In nearly every place that he was put, he came into contact with "the worst of the worst," Guinn says. "Charlie Manson's life and the terrible crimes he committed all happen because he's the wrong man in the right place at the right time."

I consider all the sentencing hearings I covered as a reporter, during which defence lawyers shared all the sordid childhood details of these seemingly stone-cold killers: Childhoods without parents, childhoods without mentors, childhoods spent in a pinball game of foster homes and group homes and adults who abused them.

Layer by layer, the myth of this simply evil man is peeled back. No, Charles Manson, your mind was not like ours. But was it once?

And what of his loyal followers?

Linda Deutsch reported on the Manson trial as a young reporter for the Associated Press. She was not much older than Manson's three female co-defendants — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. "And I was looking at them and thinking, there but for the grace of God, what if I had been dragged into some cult like this?"

Journalist Steve Oney had similar sentiments: "He knew how to twist people. He knew how to survive. I think any of us, if we’d been walking down the road in 1969 and had a fight with our parents, could have ended up in the Manson family.”

I don't condone everything shared in the documentary. I don't think they needed to show the bodies, one by one, just as they had been left during that two-night murder spree in the summer of 1969: Sharon Tate; Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent, Leno LaBianca and Rosemary LaBianca, reduced to crime scene photos devoid of humanity. So late in the six-part series did these photos surface (50 minutes and 40 seconds into the fourth episode, for anyone who would like to avoid) that I thought, quite impressed, we might not see them at all. They were shocking, horrifying, and for a brief moment, pulled this docuseries into the sensational realm that so many tellings of this story have played in before. Considering all the lessons of Helter Skelter: An American Myth, I found these photos needless and disappointing.

And I don't agree, at least entirely, with the sentiment shared by author Deborah Herman near the end of the last episode, that there is an enduring fascination in the Manson story "because it is something that was an aberration."

Perhaps that is why we have been fascinated for so long. But it is not why we should be fascinated still. Because now we know better.

Charles Manson was not an aberration, a one-time evil, something to be gawked at and rubber-necked more than five decades later.

There are Charles Mansons all around us. They're pimping out our daughters. They're spreading hateful lies on social media. They're storming the U.S. Capitol.

And so, if we must talk about that murderous man all these decades later, let it be for the lessons of what happened then, a recognition of what is happening now, and a warning of what will happen in the future, should we remain comfortable in the myth that Charles Manson was a boogie man who existed only in the past.

Helter Skelter: An American Myth will premiere in Canada on February 11th at 9 p.m., exclusively on Hollywood Suite. One episode will be released per week and all of them will be available on demand thereafter. You can subscribe to Hollywood Suite through your cable, satellite or IPTV provider or for an extra $4.99/month through Amazon Prime Video. (Just want to tune in for this series? Sign up for the channel through Amazon Prime Video once all the episodes have been aired and binge-watch during a free 30-day trial!).