The Unabomber’s Manifesto

I’ve read quite a few true crime books this year. It’s an interesting field, but I’m wary of including too much of it here. All the books I’ve discussed here have had satanism or cult connections. This week I’m going a bit further afield and looking at the Unabomber’s manifesto. The Unabomber was not a Satanist nor an occultist, and though not my usual fare, I imagine most of my readers will have at least mild interest in this extraordinarily intelligent, yet completely delusional, mass murderer.

Industrial Society and Its Future – FC (Ted Kaczynski)

For those of you who don’t know, Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard educated Math professor who left his job lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley, to live a life of seclusion in a cabin in the woods. While he was there, he decided that technology was the root of nearly all human unhappiness and that by killing a bunch of influential scientists, he would kickstart a revolution that would destroy all technology and end human suffering. In 1995, after spending almost 2 decades terrorising America, he sent a manifesto to the Washington Post and told them he’d stop bombing innocent people if they printed it. It was actually the wording in the manifesto that led to his arrest. His brother recognised familiar phrases in it and told the FBI.

The above paragraph probably makes this dude seem absolutely crazy, but a lot of his ideas are frighteningly prescient. We all know that technology is undoubtedly fucking people up. Ted came up with this stuff in the 70s, so he wasn’t even thinking of social media and smartphones, but he specifically foretold how advancing technology would gain a stronger and stronger hold on how people would think and act. We’ve gotten to a point now where technology has such a hold on every aspect of our lives that the idea of getting rid of it seems completely impossible.

I think that’s the thing that makes Ted crazy. His goals were noble but utterly ridiculous. He may have been a mathematical genius, a skillful craftsman and a philosopher, but he had no self awareness. He thought a hairy weirdo living in a bush was going to stop people from using electricity.

The other problem is that technology is also pretty useful. I’d love to see people spending less time looking at their screens, but I also think that cancer treatments for sick children are neat. Kaczynski was a “survival of the fittest” kind of a guy. I suppose that kind of belief is easier to accept if you’re a little frigid with no friends or family.

Reading this manifesto reminded me of 2 books. One of these was Kiss Maerth’s The Beginning Was the End. Like the manifesto, that book describes humanity falling from grace. For Ted the fall began with the industrial revolution. For Oscar it was when monkeys started to eat each others’ brains. The effect has been similar. Humanity’s accomplishments are unhealthily great, and both authors want a return to a more natural state. The other book this reminded me of was Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Kaczynski is more optimistic about the future of humanity as he believes in a hope for salvation, but that hope now seems so misplaced that his manifesto felt a lot like reading Ligotti’s thoughts on how humanity is cursed and doomed by its own intelligence. These would be 3 good books to read together if you wanted to have a really bad time.

The actual manifesto is pretty boring. It’s thorough, but quite repetitive. A sparksnotes version would probably be sufficient. I can’t be sure, but I feel like his ideas might have been influential on whoever wrote the Matrix.

Kaczynski killed himself a couple of years ago. I’m sure that living is prison is shit, but you can’t help but wonder if his decision to commit suicide was affected by seeing his prophecies coming to pass. It was a sad end to a sad life. He was a psychopathic murderer, but he clearly had severe mental health problems, and there’s stories that he was a victim of an evil science experiment when he was a teenager.

It’s a pity he murdered innocent people, otherwise I’d think he was pretty cool.

Narcosatanists: Across the Border by Gary Provost

Adolfo Constanzo was a drug dealer and occultist. He and his gang sacrificed humans in bizarre rituals. I had read about him online before, but he never really pops up in any of the books I read about occult murders. There’s a book by Edward Humes called Buried Secrets that came out in 1991 that seems to be a considered the definitive book on the topic, but I had a copy of Gary Provost’s Across the Border, so I went with that.

This is a really horrible story. Constanzo and his gang became known as the “Narcosatanists”, but they weren’t really Satanists. They were practicing a nasty form of Palo Mayombe, an African form of spirituality that came to the USA through Cuba, that involved sacrificing human beings and putting their remains into magical cauldrons. Apparently they had been doing this to rival drug dealers for a while, but things got messy after they kidnapped an American student. (They wanted a victim with a big brain.) They killed at least 20 people. It’s unclear how many of these victims were murdered for the sake of ritual and how many were drug hits. Apparently members of Constanzo’s crew used to drive around without any fear of being caught because they believed their boss had put an invisibility spell on them.

Provost’s book came out just months after Constanzo died, and it seems likely that more details about the crimes have come out since then. I expected this book to present a sensationalized version of the story, but I don’t think that it does. I noticed that Provost never even mentioned the fact that some of Constanzo’s victims were raped before they were murdered. This may not be an exhaustive account, but its not bullshitty either. There’s a section on other Satanic crimes that’s probably unnecessary given the fact that Constanzo and his crew were not actually Satanists, but Across the Border is relatively short, and the crimes and characters described within are fascinating. It certainly wasn’t a boring book. If I ever get my hands on a copy of Hume’s Buried Secrets, I’ll probably give that a go too.

The Son of Sam a Satanic Assassin? Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil

The Ultimate Evil: An Investigation into America’s Most Dangerous Satanic Cult – Maury Terry

David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, was a lunatic who shot and killed a bunch of innocent people. When he was arrested, he admitted to all of the killings. After the arrest, a reporter named Maury Terry started researching the murders and became convinced that David Berkowitz was actually involved with a Satanic cult and that he did not commit the murders alone.

While on his killing spree, the killer (at least one of them) sent letters to the police and the press referring to himself as “the son of Sam”. Berkowitz later claimed that Sam was an ancient demon that had possessed his neighbour’s dog. The neighbour’s name was Sam Carr. Terry became convinced that Sam Carr’s actual sons had been Berkowitz’s accomplices.

I’m no expert on this case, but that idea doesn’t seem absolutely unfeasible to me. Berkowitz was well known to the Carr family, and both sons died unnatural deaths shortly after Berkowitz was arrested. Some people who know lots about the case also believe that Berkowitz did not act alone, and it seems impossible to prove that the Carr brothers were not involved.

I knew that the claims in The Ultimate Evil were controversial before I read it, and I went in assuming that most of it was complete bullshit. I knew that there was a Netlix documentary series about it, and I thought that this series was going to be an exposé on how Terry’s ideas were all nonsense. There’s some stuff in the book (Terry’s decoding of the Son of Sam letters and the Roy Radin stuff) that seemed like utter nonsense as I was reading them, but some of it was actually quite convincing. When I watched the Netflix documentary, I expected it to provide refutations of these ideas, but it doesn’t.

Berkowitz started off claiming he acted alone, but he changed his story after spending a bit of time in prison. To this day he claims that he had accomplices. He doesn’t seem like a particularly reliable person though. He clearly enjoys attention, and the Satanic cult claims were probably the most efficient source of attention for an incarcerated murderer in the early 1980s. Both the book and the Netflix documentary series make it seem like Berkowitz was merely telling Terry exactly what he wanted to hear. This muddies the water, but it doesn’t actually discredit all of Terry’s evidence.

Much of what Terry says is clearly conjecture, but I don’t think the idea that Berkowitz had accomplices should be immediately disregarded. Those Carr brothers were definitely weirdoes. Both were scientologists, and one supposedly had a thing for murdering animals.

The Netflix documentary alludes to the fact that this book fed into the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and it features clips of Maury Terry being interviewed alongside my old friend Phil Phillips. I wanted to be able to write-off Terry’s theory about the role of Satanism in the murders, but if you look at the letters, the killer(s) clearly had some interest in occultism. I don’t buy any of the “large, organised network of powerful Satanists” nonsense or any of the crap about the links between the Son of Sam and Charles Manson, but Berkowitz did seem to have some connections to occultism. Nevertheless, Terry’s efforts to bring attention to his work by jumping on the Satanic Panic bandwagon seem to have backfired. There’s a couple of parts where he mistakes Iron Maiden lyrics written on walls for Satanic prayers. When he’s trying to decode the letters he does the old “reading it backwards” trick, and at one point he even references James Blish’s Black Easter. So much of this book is dumb that he interesting parts seemed pretty uninteresting.

One of the main reasons I wanted to read this book was because I had read it contained information on the elusive Four Pi cult, an evil group of weirdos led by “The Great Chingon” that I previously came across in Ed Sanders’ The Family and Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising. The only information in here that Terry adds is that the group split up at the end of the 60s because some members were too horny. Rereading the passage in question, I realised that Terry’s source was actually Peter Haining’s The Anatomy of Witchcraft, a book which David Berkowitz annotated and sent to the Ward County Sheriff’s Department when they were investigating John Carr’s death. (Needless to say, I have already started reading that book for a future post!)

I actually read the revised edition of The Ultimate Evil. It has a little bit extra on Roy Radin’s death and a few other things. Both editions of this book are extremely long, extremely detailed and ultimately extremely boring. The Netflix documentary is a much clearer way to understand Terry’s ideas. There’s really no need for anyone to slog through this unenjoyable mess (that does, admittedly, make a few good points.)

More Books about Charles Manson

I read Ed Sander’s The Family a few weeks ago, and it reignited my interest in the Manson Family. Charles Manson and his followers were horrible people, and I have little sympathy for them, but there is something fascinating about how they lived and what they did. Here’s another 3 books about them.

Helter Skelter – Vincent Bugliosi

I have understood the story behind Helter Skelter for most of my life. A few months ago, I read Ed Sander’s The Family, and I learned a lot about Charles Manson and the Tate-La Bianca murders. Sanders does mention the Helter Skelter stuff in there, but his book is not limited to the crimes and their motives. When I posted about The Family, a friend recommended that I read Chaos by Tom O’Neill. I put a hold on the audiobook version from my local library and waited 6 weeks. After listening to the first 20 minutes, I paused it and started reading Helter Skelter.

Chaos reveals O Neill’s findings after 20 years of researching the Manson case. The first thing it claims is point out that the “official” story as presented in Helter Skelter is based on lies and that O’Neill can prove this claim. Knowing this going in, it was a bit hard to swallow some of the stuff in Helter Skelter. Charles Manson and his followers were clearly a danger to society, and I don’t think anyone really believes that they were innocent, but the story that Bugliosi puts together to get them convicted does seem a bit sketchy. Manson was a dangerous, paranoid, psychotic criminal, but the race-war as foretold by the Beatles and subsequent escape to the Hollow Earth story actually seems a bit too cohesive for Charlie. It seems much more likely that the murders were drugs or revenge related.

As a book, I found Helter Skelter a bit tedious. I had read The Family just a few weeks before and was familiar with the story, and Helter Skelter’s focus is mostly on the court case. It’s an important book in Manson history, but it’s clearly not entirely accurate.

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties – Tom O’Neill

**Back Bay Books – 2020 (First published 2019)**

Chaos is a very captivating read. Its main claim is that the narrative in Helter Skelter is inaccurate. O’Neill shows that the relationship between the Family and the Polanski household was far less tenuous than Bugliosi wanted it to appear. Apparently Bugliosi told O’Neill that the cops found a video at the murder scene of Roman Polanski being cuckholded. It is suggested that the Polanskis and their friends were involved in more naughtiness than has previously been reported.

This seems perfectly believable to me. It refutes the Helter Skelter story, but it does not exonerate anyone.

O’Neill’s research takes some shocking turns, and pretty soon he is linking the Manson murders with the MK-ULTRA and the JFK assassination. That probably makes it sound crazy, but it’s terrifyingly convincing. O’Neill’s research does not reach any tidy conclusions, but the evidence he provides convinced me that there was a lot more to the Manson story than was told in Helter Skelter. I don’t want to summarize the book or O’Neill’s findings, but he convinced me that the CIA were involved in some way. I strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in the Manson family or government deception read this book. I knew that American government agencies got up to some shady stuff, but I wasn’t aware of the reach of programs like COINTELPRO and Operation Chaos. The FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King telling him to kill himself? What the fuck?

The Manson File – Nikolas Schreck

The other book that was recommended to me after finishing The Family was lil’ Niky Schreck’s The Manson File. A new, almost 1000 page edition of this book was published recently, but I was only able to get my hands on the 200 page, first edition from 1988. This was quite different to the other books on Manson I have read. It’s a collection of documents by and about Charles Manson that attempt to make him out as a misunderstood, outlaw rebel and all-round cool guy.

I have to be honest here. I am biased against Mr. Schreck. Provocation is pretty cool, but this guy has been known to cross the line into edge-lord territory. He appeared on white-power talk shows in the 80s. That was a long time ago, and based on his current bandmates, I doubt he is the most racist guy in the world, but when the queen of england died last year, he posted about how much he supports the monarchy. YUCK.

The Manson File has some interesting bits, but a lot of it is Manson’s own writing. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with Manson, and he has a tendency to get lost in his own words. This gets worse without an interviewer to reign him in. The only piece that he wrote in here that I enjoyed was his letter to Ronald Reagan in which he told the former president to end the war on drugs and to invest that money into planting more trees. I am 100% behind this line of thinking. There’s also a letter he wrote in the mid-’70s to the Hollywood Star, a tabloid newspaper, spilling some Hollywood secrets. It’s in this letter that he claims that Jane Fonda had sex with a dog. He also claims that Roman Polanski funded his Hollywood movies with “money from dog and children movies”. One might write this off as slander, but it was written before it came out that Roman Polanski actually anally raped children and made movies of his wife being raped by other men. What a fucking piece of shit. I wish the Family had killed him instead of his wife.

A lot of the book is taken up with awful art, songs and poems by Manson, and there’s a cringey essay describing the similarities and nebulous links between the Family and The Process Church of the Final Judgement. It also features a couple of essays by James N. Mason, a neo-nazi, terrorist and convicted paedophile. In a completely expected turn of events, Mason, one of the worst people in the world, idolizes Charles Manson. The only other noteworthy part of this text is a picture of the contents of a package that Charlie sent to Nick Bougas, a contributor to this book. The package contained a book and a pair of Charlie’s dirty undies. As awful as Charles Manson was, he clearly had some redeeming qualities.

Given the fact that the new edition of The Manson File is 5 times longer, I am sure it’s a very different book. I get the sense that it contains more information on the inconsistences within Helter Skelter, but I won’t be sure until I read it. At this point, I have read more than 1200 pages about Charles Manson in the last 2 weeks, and I will probably wait a while before I seek out the new edition of Schreck’s work.

I’ve definitely spent too much time on Charles Manson recently. The acts he inspired were horrendous, but it’s hard not to find him entertaining. I think part of the appeal is that Charlie was one of the biggest losers to have ever lived. He had a traumatic, loveless childhood. He had no formal education. He was insane. Just as things started looking up for him, he fucked it all up beyond everyone’s expectations, potentially because he had become a test subject for CIA mind control experiments. His life was a an absolute disaster, but he always managed to keep a smile on his face.

What Happened to the Manson Family Snuff Films?

A few weeks ago, I reviewed a book about the history of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. That book describes the very tenuous links between the Process and the Manson Family and notes that these links were initially highlighted in the first edition of Ed Sanders’ The Family. The Process took Sanders to court and had the offending chapter of his book removed in subsequent editions. This is a bit ridiculous as they had interviewed Manson for an issue of their magazine that came out before Sanders’ book. They liked looking for attention, but it seemed to concern them when they actually got it. I had been planning to read Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter for years, but when I heard of Sanders’ book, it seemed far more appealing. While a lot of it wouldn’t hold up in court, it’s not supposed to. Sanders fully acknowledges that many of his sources were less than trustworthy. Part of its value lies in the way it preserves the rumours about the Family from a time when they were still an entity.

The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion

When I was an edgy teenager, I thought Charles Manson was pretty cool. I was 16 when I stenciled his face onto the front of my schoolbag. (LOL. I was an idiot.) All the bands I liked seemed to have songs or t-shirts about him, and I read a bunch of websites about the Family and watched all of Charlie’s interviews on youtube. I knew the basic story of Manson’s life, the Family, the murders and the whole Helter-Skelter thing. There was lots of interesting stuff in Sanders’ book that I didn’t know about already, but the biggest surprise was the claim that the Manson Family may have recorded snuff films.

Apparently the Family made quite a few home movies, some of them pornographic. It doesn’t seem like the footage has ever turned up, but it is known that Charlie’s gang had several cameras, including a TV camera they stole from an NBC station wagon. Far more concerning are the claims of one associate of the Family who claims to have seen three extremely disturbing films featuring Family members. He claims that these films were shown at night and involved animal torture and sacrifice. One of them featured a dog being tortured to death and then people having sex while covered in the dog’s blood. The person who made this claim did not explicitly say that the video was filmed by the Family but that it involved members of the Family. Sanders mentions reports of numerous occult rituals that were reported in that area at the time the Family were living there, and elsewhere in the book, he spends a great deal of time discussing the The Solar Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a bunch of Crowley freaks who were supposedly linked with the Family. Crowley used animal blood during some of his sex magic rituals at the Abbey of Thelema, so it’s not unbelievable that his followers would have done the same. (Apparently the source of his information about the cult activity was Arthur Lyons, author of Satan Wants You.) Another video featured a cat being blown up with fireworks, and the final and most gruesome video was of the corpse of a decapitated woman. Sanders claims that it was suggested to him that the Process may have been behind these appalling acts, but as Gavin Baddeley notes in Lucifer Rising, this doesn’t really make sense. The Process were always dog lovers, and their organization ultimately ended up as an animal shelter.

In the revised version of The Family that came out in 2002, Sanders notes that none of this footage has ever been found. Maybe I am wrong, but I don’t think the more innocent Manson Family home movies have shown up either. Do (or did) they exist? Does some weirdo have them? Are they buried in the desert in Death Valley?

The 2002 revised version of the text that omits nearly all mentions of the Process.

I was reading an article on The Reprobate recently that mentioned an advertisement that showed up in Variety Magazine in the 1980s offering hundreds of hours of footage of the Manson Family filmed between 1969 and 1973. This sounded intriguing, but it also included the movie rights to Robert Hendrickson’s 1973 documentary, Manson. The asking price was ridiculously high, and it didn’t seem like anyone took the mysterious seller up on their offer. I also saw mention of a documentary series from 2018 that was called Inside the Manson Cult: The Lost Tapes, but when I researched that, I found that the 100 hours of footage that was sifted through to make the show, “was discovered after British producer Simon Andreae traced the whereabouts of filmmaker Robert Hendrickson, who had been given exclusive access to the Manson cult 50 years ago.” It seems like Hendrickson was probably the seller in the Variety ad, and I doubt very much that his collection of Family footage contained any snuff films.

The difficulty with researching anything to do with the Manson Family is the sheer volume of information and discussion about them online. We’re talking about some of the most infamous crimes ever committed. Also, it turns out that Sanders’ book was the birthplace of the phrase “snuff film”, so that messes up google searches on this specific topic, and that’s rabbit hole that I don’t want to fall into. There was also an exploitation movie produced called Manson Family Movies (1984) that claimed to be found footage of the Tate-La Bianca murders. This film shows up a lot when you go looking for the real stuff. I’m not saying that it hasn’t been addressed countless times, but I didn’t actually see much discussion on the films, real or fake, that Sanders’ mentioned. If anyone has any further thoughts or information on them, I’d love to hear from you. (If you are in possession of the snuff footage, please don’t send it to me.)

Again, I’ve been familiar with the Manson story for most of life, but I’ve long had it categorized in my head as a crime story. I hadn’t really given much thought to the culty aspects of it. The Family was as culty as can be. While it doesn’t seem likely that there were any important links between the Family and the Process, both were certifiable doomsday cults. Like de Grimston, Charles Manson once claimed to be a scientologist and had a Christ/Satan thing going on. I think the big difference was that Robert de Grimston was a huckster and that Manson was violently insane. There’s other stuff in this book about the mysterious (and possibly fake) Four Pi cult, but I’ll do a separate post on them in the future. Also, while we’re (kinda) on the topic of Satanism: Bobby Beausoleil, the Family member who murdered Gary Hinman, starred in a movie with Satanist Anton LaVey, the guy who played Satan in a Roman Polanski movie. Some Family members later claimed that Sharon Tate’s murder was a copycat job to make it look like Hinman’s murderer was still on the loose so that Bobby could get out of jail. Small world. (Edit: Apparently LaVey had nothing to do with Rosemary’s Baby. Sorry. I read it in a book, but apparently that book was wrong.)

When I started the book, I googled Ed Sanders and saw a familiar face. It took me a few days to realise where I had seem him before. He was one of the guys in that video of William F. Buckley interviewing a drunk Jack Kerouac about hippies. I went on to listen to his band, The Fugs. Honestly, I wasn’t impressed by the first few songs I heard, but this one instantly became one of my favourite songs ever. Seriously, it’s genius. Ed Sanders is a pretty cool guy.

I was greatly entertained by this book, and while reading it and researching the Manson Family, I came across quite a few other books that I intend to read. I mentioned above that I used to think that Charles Manson was pretty cool. I actually find him more interesting now than I did back then, but I want to make it very clear that I now understand that he was a tragic, but horrible piece of walking garbage.