RB: Whatever happens, happens. It’s all good.
TC: Do you consider killing innocent people a good thing?
RB: Who said they were innocent?
TC: Well, we’ll return to that. But for now: What is your own sense of morality? How do you differentiate between good and bad?
RB: Good and bad? It’s all good. If it happens, it’s got to be good. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. It’s just the way life flows. Moves together. I move with it. I don’t question it.
TC: In other words, you don’t question the act of murder. You consider it “good” because it “happens.” Justifiable.
RB: I have my own justice. I live by my own law, you know. I don’t respect the laws of this society. Because society doesn’t respect its own laws. I make my own laws and live by them. I have my own sense of justice.
TC: And what is your sense of justice?
RB: I believe that what goes around comes around. What goes up comes down. That’s how life flows, and I flow with it.
TC: You’re not making much sense—at least to me. And I don’t think you’re stupid. Let’s try again. In your opinion, it’s all right that Manson sent Tex Watson and those girls into that house to slaughter total strangers, innocent people—
RB: I said: Who says they were innocent? They burned people on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.
TC: The truth is, the LaBiancas and Sharon Tate and her friends were killed to protect you. Their deaths were directly linked to the Gary Hinman murder.
RB: I hear you. I hear where you’re coming from.
TC: Those were all imitations of the Hinman murder—to prove that you couldn’t have killed Hinman. And thereby get you out of jail.
RB: To get me out of jail. (He nods, smiles, sighs—complimented) None of that came out at any of the trials. The girls got on the stand and tried to really tell how it all came down, but nobody would listen. People couldn’t believe anything except what the media said. The media had them programmed to believe it all happened because we were out to start a race war.
That it was mean niggers going around hurting all these good white folk. Only—it was like you say. The media, they called us a “family.” And it was the only true thing they said. We were a family. We were mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son. If a member of our family was in jeopardy, we didn’t abandon that person. And so for the love of a brother, a brother who was in jail on a murder rap, all those killings came down.
TC: And you don’t regret that?
RB: No. If my brothers and sisters did it, then it’s good. Everything in life is good. It all flows. It’s all good. It’s all music.
TC: When you were up on Death Row, if you’d been forced to flow down to the gas chamber and whiff the peaches, would you have given that your stamp of approval?
RB: If that’s how it came down. Everything that happens is good.
TC: War. Starving children. Pain. Cruelty. Blindness. Prisons. Desperation. Indifference. All good?
RB: What’s that look you’re giving me?
TC: Nothing. I was noticing how your face changes. One moment, with just the slightest shift of angle, you look so boyish, entirely innocent, a charmer. And then—well, one can see you as a sort of Forty-second Street Lucifer. Have you ever seen Night Must Fall? An old movie with Robert Montgomery? No? Well, it’s about an impish, innocent-looking delightful young man who travels about the English countryside charming old ladies, then cutting off their heads and carrying the heads around with him in leather hat-boxes.
RB: So what’s that got to do with me?
TC: I was thinking—if it was ever remade, if someone Americanized it, turned the Montgomery character into a young drifter with hazel eyes and a smoky voice, you’d be very good in the part.
RB: Are you trying to say I’m a psychopath? I’m not a nut. If I have to use violence, I’ll use it, but I don’t believe in killing.
TC: Then I must be deaf. Am I mistaken, or didn’t you just tell me that it didn’t matter what atrocity one person committed against another, it was good, all good?
RB: (Silence)
TC: Tell me, Bobby, how do you view yourself?
RB: As a convict.
TC: But beyond that.
RB: As a man. A white man. And everything a white man stands for.
TC: Yes, one of the guards told me you were the ringleader of the Aryan Brotherhood.
RB (hostile): What do you know about the Brotherhood?
TC: That it’s composed of a bunch of hard-nosed white guys. That it’s a somewhat fascist-minded fraternity. That it started in California, and has spread throughout the American prison system, north, south, east and west. That the prison authorities consider it a dangerous, troublemaking cult.
RB: A man has to defend himself. We’re outnumbered. You got no idea how rough it is. We’re all more scared of each other than we are of the pigs in here. You got to be on your toes every second if you don’t want a shiv in your back. The blacks and Chicanos, they got their own gangs. The Indians, too; or I should say the “Native Americans”—that’s how these redskins call themselves: what a laugh! Yessir, rough. With all the racial tensions, politics, dope, gambling and sex. The blacks really go for the young white kids. They like to shove those big black dicks up those tight white asses.
TC: Have you ever thought what you would do with your life if and when you were paroled out of here?
RB: That’s a tunnel I don’t see no end to. They’ll never let Charlie go.
TC: I hope you’re right, and I think you are. But it’s very likely that you’ll be paroled some day. Perhaps sooner than you imagine. Then what?
RB (strums guitar): I’d like to record some of my music. Get it played on the air.
TC: That was Perry Smith’s dream. And Charlie Manson’s, too. Maybe you fellows have more in common than mere tattoos.
RB: Just between us, Charlie doesn’t have a whole lot of talent. (Strumming chords) “This is my song, my dark song, my dark song.” I got my first guitar when I was eleven; I found it in my grandma’s attic and taught myself to play it, and I’ve been nuts about music ever since. My grandma was a sweet woman, and her attic was my favorite place. I liked to lie up there and listen to the rain. Or hide up there when my dad came looking for me with his belt. Shit. You hear that? Moan, moan. It’s enough to drive you crazy.
TC: Listen to me, Bobby. And answer carefully. Suppose, when you get out of here, somebody came to you—let’s say Charlie—and asked you to commit an act of violence, kill a man, would you do it?
RB (after lighting another cigarette, after smoking it half through): I might. It depends. I never meant to … to … hurt Gary Hinman. But one thing happened. And another. And then it all came down.
TC: And it was all good.
RB: It was all good.
HANDCARVED COFFINS A NONFICTION ACCOUNT OF AN AMERICAN CRIME (1979)
March, 1975.
A town in a small Western state. A focus for the many large farms and cattle-raising ranches surrounding it, the town, with a population of less than ten thousand, supports twelve churches and two restaurants. A movie house, though it has not shown a movie in ten years, still stands stark and cheerless on Main Street. There once was a hotel, too; but that also has been closed, and nowadays the only place a traveler can find shelter is the Prairie Motel.
The motel is clean, the rooms are well heated; that’s about all you can say for it. A man named Jake Pepper has been living there for almost five years. He is fifty-eight, a widower with four grown sons. He is five-foot-ten, in top condition, and looks fifteen years younger than his age. He has a handsome-homely face with periwinkle-blue eyes and a thin mouth that twitches into quirky shapes that are sometimes smiles and sometimes not.
The secret of his boyish appearance is not his lanky trimness, not his chunky ripe-apple cheeks, nor his naughty mysterious grins; it’s because of his hair that looks like somebody’s kid brother: dark blond, clipped short, and so afflicted with cowlicks that he cannot really comb it; he sort of wets it down.
Jake Pepper is a detective employed by the State Bureau of Investigation. We had first met each other through a close mutual friend, another detective in a different state. In 1972 he wrote a letter saying he was working on a murder case, something that he thought might interest me.
I telephoned him and we talked for three hours. I was very interested in what he had to tell me, but he became alarmed when I suggested that I travel out there and survey the situation myself; he said that would be premature and might endanger his investigation, but he promised to keep me informed. For the next three years we exchanged telephone calls every few months. The case, developing along lines intricate as a rat’s maze, seemed to have reached an impasse. Finally I said: Just let me come there and look around.
And so it was that I found myself one cold March night
