Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime.
Speaker 3: Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind of a Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas, and we're.
Speaker 3: Joined today by doctor Jeffrey Smaalden, author of that Beast,
was not me one forensic psychologist in five decades of
conversations with killers. Doctor Smalldon, thank you for joining.
Speaker 5: Us, Thank you for having me to be there.
Speaker 3: Start by telling us a little bit about yourself in
this fascinating career that you've built.
Speaker 5: I'm retired now after about a quarter century in private
practice as a forensic psychologist. During that twenty five years,
my practice was based in Columbus, Ohio, where I live,
but I consulted on about three hundred death penalty cases
originating in more than fifty five counties throughout Ohio, and
worked on some death penalty cases in other states and
federal court as well. I also was frequently the court
appointed expert actually probably close to fifteen hundred times in
matters pertaining to child custody, so my entire practice wasn't criminal.
Also consulted on civil cases a lot of competency to
stand trial and criminal responsibility aka sanity cases. One of
the things that I tried to emphasize in my book,
and I thought was one of the most interesting aspects
of my journey was the strange path that I took
to become a forensic psychologist as a young man. That
thought had never crossed my mind.
Speaker 2: One thing I struggle with Jeff is the term forensic
psychologist for the civilians here, which is tens of thousands
of us here on Mind over Murder. What the heck
is a forensic psychologist?
Speaker 5: I'm glad you asked that actually, Bill, because that question
comes up frequently when I meet people and tell them
that I had a career as a forensic psychologist. Immediately
that word opens up the file and their brain that
contains pathology pictures and no crime scene analysis. And that's
not what I did at all. Most of my and
I'm going to talk about the criminal part of my practice.
Most of what I did was evaluate suspects after they
had been arrested. I wasn't a profiler. I wasn't the
person trying to identify the as yet unidentified a suspect
and a violent crime. Typically, defense attorneys, since they were
the ones who had a client needing to be evaluated,
were the ones who would contact me following the defendant's arrest.
In a death penalty case, they would ask me to
evaluate their client with an eye toward whether there were
any issues that they should be thinking about in terms
of a mental health defense a trial. Is there anything
that points toward a not guilty by reason of insanity defense?
For example, are there any issues relevant to the competency
to stand trial question? And I'm still speaking specifically about
death penalty case. Assume that there's a strong likelihood our
client will be found guilty of these crimes he's been
charged with. If he is, that'll mean we'll go to
a sentencing hearing. And what information about his background and
so on can you find that might be found relevant
by members of a jury when they need to make
the decision about whether this person should die or be
allowed to live the rest of his life in prison.
Speaker 2: When you're expressing opinions like that in a death penalty case, Jeff,
are you one of the experts who's sworn in and
do you have to testify about what your findings would
be or are you off behind the scenes expert.
Speaker 5: No, I would be a testifying expert if the case
went to trial, and a lot of death penalty cases
never do they get plat out before trial. If they
go to trial, I would be I think I can
only remember two death powty cases where I appeared as
an expert witness during the guilt innocence phase of the trial,
the first phase. Typically my role would be in the
second phase, typically referred to as the sentencing or mitigation phase,
and at that point I would be a live witness,
appearing before the jury to share my findings.
Speaker 3: As you mentioned, you took a very interesting route to
get where you are. A lot of that information is
told in your buck That beast was not me and
that title, which is great. I really love it. It's
a quote from Charles Manson. Why don't we start this
conversation down the serial killer path by having you tell
us about your relationship with Charles Manson?
Speaker 5: My relationship so to speak. Yeah, I was in my
early twenties, a senior in high school, the generally rule
following son of an FBI agent, and I developed a
fascination with the Manson case, which had meant nothing to
me at all in August of nineteen sixty nine when
it occurred, I was a sophomore in high school. I
didn't pay attention to the case at all. But when
I was in England in nineteen seventy three, hitchhiking around
before my fall semester of my junior year abroad in Cambridge,
I read a book about that case that I just
thought was incredibly interesting. It was Ed Sanders' book The Family.
And then in nineteen seventy four, which by my senior
year in college was seventy four seventy five, I read
Helter Skelter, Her the best selling true crime book of
all time about Manson case by one of the prosecutors
in the case. And as I say in my book,
and I think this suggests something a little bit pathological
about myself. I read. I read that book in a
single sitting from about three. I started at three in
the afternoon, kept drinking coffee all night, finished it late
morning the next day. And I was just so fascinated
by it. And one of the things that fascinated me
the most was that a lot of these young people
who had followed Manson and acted at his behest sounded
like they came from backgrounds not that much different from
my own middle class and I couldn't figure it out
that they would be willing to kill for this career
criminal with a fourth or fifth grade education. And one
day in class my professor I was taking a class
in abnormal psychology, and my professor mentioned that he had
read Helder Skelter. So I thought, I need to talk
with him about this book that I'm so fascinated by.
So I stayed after class that day and I raised
this issue with him about these young people who had
followed him, who came often from middle class backgrounds, and
I said, I wonder if it's a little more complicated
than you would get the sense it is from the
media portrayals of these people. And he said, have you
ever thought of writing them? And I said no, never,
not once. The thought of writing members of the Manson
family had never crossed my mind. And he said it
might be interesting to hear what they sound like on paper.
So I eventually did that, and that was the start
of my correspondence with Manson. Lynette's Squeaky Fromey, who later
earned her own brand of infamy in September of nineteen
seventy five by attempting to assassinate then President Ford and
a number of other members of the Manson family. But
getting back to your question, Kristen, I was apparently the
only person who hadn't received the memory caption, don't try
to bullshit Charles Manson, And so I did try to
bullshit Charles Manson in what way? I remember sitting down
to write him my first letter. I knew where he was,
I'm in fulsome prison, and basically I just wanted to
write a letter that he would respond to. So, yeah,
I was twenty one years old. I was willing to
be manipulative, and I told him that my main interest
was in his music and his lyrics, because I knew
he was a frustrated musician. And he went back and said,
this is so much shit. Don't bother me with this stuff,
music and poetry for what It doesn't mean anything. Basically,
if you're prepared to be real with me, write me
back if so, or if not, stop bothering me. And
so I was a little taken aback because I didn't
really want to make Charles Manson angry with me. This
was nineteen seventy five, six years after the murders, and
so I wrote him back a more honest letter, and
I told him I was a senior in college. I'd
read Helder Skelter, another book about his case and so on.
I was interested in it, and I think the hook
maybe I told him that I was at least open
to the possibility that the authors of these books about
the case hadn't gotten everything right. So he wrote me back.
What I later learned for Manson was quite a thoughtful,
contemplative letter. And write at the beginning of this letter,
he said, take all you've ever heard about the family
and think about it as backwards our side of the
family was never told that beast was not me, but
it's what everyone needs me to be, so they make
me up to be a reflection of society's fears and lies.
And then the letter went on and on and ended
in a poetic go and start a garden wherever you walk, Jeff,
you are the new world. If you do these things,
there'll be no need to communicate with me anymore at
all and anyway. So that letter I always regard as
the first proper letter I received from Manson, and really
the start of a correspondence that then spanned a period
of about two years.
Speaker 2: How many letters back and forth do you think?
Speaker 5: Hard to say? I mean, there were quite a few postcards,
quite a few letters. I would say. Manson probably wrote
me fifteen or twenty times. Hm.
Speaker 2: Wow. So he wasn't interested in cutting off the communication
when he said, go forth and do these worthwhile things.
He was willing to have a conversation with you on
an ongoing basis.
Speaker 5: It would appear he seemed willing, though I certainly don't
want to leave the impression that Manson seemed eager to
have Jeff Smolden as a correspondent. He never gave that impression,
but he at least seemed open to hearing from me
until he didn't. At one point during the correspondence when
I did something that, for reasons I didn't understand at
the time at all, made him extremely angry, and at
that point I thought the correspondence was over, but then
he reached out to continue it.
Speaker 3: How would you characterize Charles Manson? It does sound like
your correspondence with him, from what I read of it
was all over the place. Some days you said he
was very contemplative, but I can't imagine that being his
normal everyday state. So if you had to be English
teachers going to ask you to throw some adjectives out there,
how would you characterize Charles Manson? G.
Speaker 5: Kristen, You don't. You're not willing to accept it. Contemplative
is Charles Manson in default setting?
Speaker 2: He had plenty of time to think deep thoughts, that's
for sure.
Speaker 5: Well, you're absolutely correct about that, I might say, now,
he was all over the map. Occasionally I would catch
him in what seemed like a relatively contemplative mood. Other
times he was just consumed by paranoia and his own
sense of persecution and aggrievement. There were a couple of
laments that appeared over and over again in his letters.
He apparently didn't understand the conspiracy aspects of the law,
and he repeatedly said, I'm in here serving time for
your world sins because you've made me into this epic
pariah that has no relationship with who I really am,
and I committed no crime. He said that over and
over again. I committed no crime, by which I always
assumed he meant, I'm not the one who committed these murders,
therefore I shouldn't have been found guilty of them. And
he denied, of course, that it was his direction that
caused these people to go out and commit these horrible murders.
So that was one of his repeated themes. Another one,
and it was illustrated in a fascinating way. Can I
tell a little story here? Sure about this interesting juncture?
In my correspondence with him, I said he had a
fourth or fifth grade education, and he repeatedly said, I
can't write. I feel like these words are running out
the end of my pencil, and I can't control them.
I can't express myself to you in writing. He was
very frustrated with his inability to communicate, and he kept
saying that he was convinced I was a woman writing
under a man's name because my handwriting was too neat.
He didn't speaking neat handwriting with men, and so he
kept saying, I believe you're a woman writing under a
man's name. And I said, no, I'm not. I'm a
senior in college and I'm beginning graduate school in the fall.
But he kept lamenting his own limitations as a writer.
And then he began with escalating intensity, saying, send me pictures.
Stop writing these words are frustrating me. Send me pictures.
And I thought, okay. I had sent Squeaky and her
roommate Sandy Good, another devoted Manson follower. I had sent
them a picture of me because they had explicitly asked
for one, and I made sure I chose a picture
that looked nothing like me. I had the intrusive thoughts
of these women coming to the Midwest and seeking me out,
so I didn't want him to identify me when I
walked out of my apartment in Valpariso, Indiana. But Manson
never said send me a picture of you. He just said,
send me pictures.
Speaker 2: He wasn't specific about what he wanted photographs of.
Speaker 5: He wasn't and I was too dim to figure it out.
Looking back, he wanted a picture of me, and that's
why I mentioned the fact that he kept saying, you're
a woman writing after a man's name. He wanted a
picture to confirm my identity. Who are you? What do
you look like? And I didn't get it. I didn't
pick up on that. I just thought he wanted pictures.
So I started thinking, well, what kind of picture might
Charles Manson like? And I knew that one of his
themes was society is evil and we need to go
to the desert and so on. And so I was
reading an article in the Nation Geographic one day about
the search for the world's oldest people, and there was
a picture in there this, I think from South America somewhere,
a shepherd sitting on a wooden stool playing a wooden flute,
with a dog laying on the floor next to him,
a pastoral kind of scene. And I thought it was
a totally benign choice on my part. I sent this
picture to him. I didn't even put a post it
note on it saying hope you like this, Charlie or
anything like that. I just put the picture in an
envelope and sent it. And then about three or four
days later I got the first and last air mail
letter I've ever received from a maximum security prison. It
may have been the only stamp that Manson had available
to him at the time, but I saw that red
airmail stamp that thought, oh, there's some kind of urgent
message in this envelope, and in fact there was. He
just railed at me. He was absolutely few, said I
never realized what a fake and a phony you are,
and called my mother all kinds of names, and went
on and on. By the third page, he was slashing
across the page with his pencil. You could tell he
was in a white hot fury. And at the end
of the letter he said, I didn't like my picture,
I don't like your letters. Don't write me. And I thought, okay.
I thought that was the end of it. And then
two days later I got another letter from him, coming
as close to apologizing for something as I think Charles
Manson ever comes. He said, I might have been wrong
to get so angry at you, and to assume that
that you were trying to aggravate me. I've had a
hard life and it's your job. That's how he put it,
It's your job to understand I've been a hard life.
And then, in one of the late twentieth centuries great understatements,
I'm sure, he said, I'm not really an easy person
to get along with.
Speaker 2: Kidding we'd heard that, Charley, you.
Speaker 5: Won't get any argument from me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But then in that letter and the reason I tell
this story. In that letter, he sent me a picture
and it looked like it could have come from National
Geographic too. He was a picture of a mule with
its back piled high with I don't know some they
look like bags of mult or something like that. And
then Manson used a pencil to draw a line extending
above the baggage on the mule's back, and then he
drew lines to make it look like a globe. The
whole the theme being I'm carrying the weight of your
whole world on my shoulders, which one of the things
he would say over and over again.
Speaker 2: I wanted to ask you a little bit about the
legitition sticks of this. And this is the second time
we've had this kind of conversation, because we just interviewed
Edna Cowell Martin, who is Ted Bundy's cousin and Jo Yes,
she just came out with this book Dark Tide, and
we had her on the show recently, and never having
written that's double check with Christian. But I've never written
to a person in prison before, certainly not on death Row.
The logistics of the letters back and forth. Were your
letters handwritten and his letters handwritten? You mentioned a pencil
in his example.
Speaker 5: In both cases mostly yes. I remember my first letter
to him, I typed on my little Selectric typewriter, but
most of my letters I think were handwritten. His were
always handwritten. And I'm thinking of John Wayne Gacy whose
letters were almost always typed, but Manson's were almost always handwritten.
The letters I get from Squeaky fromy and Sandy Good,
her roommate, in the months prior to the assassination attempt,
were all handwritten. Of course, they weren't in prison, which
is another.
Speaker 2: That's a whole different story. So how cognizant were either
of you of the fact that, as we understand it,
letters in and out of prison are read by prison authorities.
Our understanding is that, for instance, someone like Manson in
sending Jeff Smaalden in Valparaiso, Indiana, a letter, he would
be showing it to someone who would review it before
it went out. Were you at all aware of any
of those things happening?
Speaker 5: It's an interesting question. I was so young and naive
and ignorant. I don't think I was even thinking of
those things. Manson, who'd spent most of his life in prison,
presumably was. However, and I'm sure you've had this sense
from the work that you guys do. It's amazing how
many criminals, people in jails and prisons, they know that
their phone calls are being monitored, but they say incredibly
incriminating things, And I always think, what are they doing?
Are they not thinking at all about the authorities listening
in on these calls. But as for Manson, he never
said anything incriminating. Quite the opposite. He said I never
did anything wrong. But whether he was thinking in terms
of the authorities screening his letters, I don't know.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
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mindover Murder.
Speaker 3: In talking to Manson and then later to John Wayne
Caasey notably, and many other people who were on Death
row or just in prison. What facets of human behavior,
or human nature or human motivation were you attempting to
understand by interviewing? And I guess maybe befriending isn't the
word that I want. You're not befriending these killers, But
I'm also not sure what VERBT use there, So I
would love to know what verb you would use in
its place. I don't feel like I should say you
were befriending Manson, But tell me what verb you would choose?
And then what were you trying to get out of
these conversations with them?
Speaker 5: I certainly never thought of it in terms of befriending them.
I would say creating a situation that made it possible
for me to engage with them, Okay, at a horizontal level.
Something I always tried to bring was a non judgmental attitude,
which didn't mean that I didn't have any feelings toward
what they had done. The opposite is true. But I
always wanted to communicate a willingness to hear their point
of view and interest in their point of view, and
a genuine curiosity about them as human beings. And this
is true both with these the contacts with Manson, Gacy
and others before I became a forensic psychologist. And it's
also true about my way of relating to the many
way beyond a thousand killers that I dealt with during
my career as a forensic psychologist, for example. And I
think some other people in my field would maybe criticize
me for this. I always introduced myself as Jeff. I
never wanted to create a situation that seemed like I
was talking down to them from a position of authority.
I would introduce myself as Jeff, hand them my business
cards so they could figure out quickly enough that I
had my PhD and so on. They didn't need me
to tell them that. But I wanted to create a
situation where we could communicate on a horizontal level, and
I tried to accomplish that when I was corresponding as well.
Speaker 2: Would they have access to the Internet or other resources
that would allow them to look into who you were.
Speaker 5: Not back then? One of the things in my book,
and I tried hard to include regular reminders of this,
because I think it's easy to lose sight of but
I was describing events that occurred fifty years ago, particularly
with respect to the Manson people. These things were happening
in the mid seventies, so the Internet was still long
ways off. Same was true with Gacy in the eighties. No,
that was never an issue. Now it would be more
a question. I would wonder what kinds of access they
had to commute computers and so on.
Speaker 2: You tell a fascinating story about visiting with John Wayne
Gacy on death Row. We want people to read the book, obviously,
but it's a fascinating book and an incredible story. Tell
us a little bit about if visiting is the right word.
With Gacy. I was shocked by how little effort there
was made to protect you as an individual.
Speaker 5: So was I and it's why I include the one
scene with Gacy as the prologue to my book because
it was shocking to me, frankly. But there I was
my second year of graduate school. I had never been
in the same room before with someone who had been
found guilty of one murder, let alone thirty three murders,
so it was still very naive, even though I had
begun graduate work that would eventually lead to my career.
And I just remember I made two different trips to
see Gacy on death Row in Illinois, and I recount
one thing that had happened during the first one. As
I say in my book, when we got to what
the people at the prison referred to as the condemned unit,
that was the phrase they used for death row. I
was about to go into the death row visiting area.
There was a big iron, big steel whatever gait that
I had to go through my last portal to pass
through before I'd reached the room where I was going
to meet with Gacy for the first time. And just
as I was about to walk through the door, the
guard who had accompanied me there said something to the
effect of, I know you understand why mister Gacy is
on our condemned unit, and I know you've come a
long way to visit him. I just want you to
know that should anything go awry while you're with him,
or god forbid, should a hostage situation develop, you'll be
on your own, because prison policy is that we don't
negotiate within me. You understand, Oh my god. And I
remember saying, yeah, well, what else was I going to say?
I wasn't going to bail out At that point, I'd
driven four hundred and fifty miles for this visit, and
so I said yeah, But as I described in more
colorful detail in my book, I lost my concentration for
a minute and forgot to ask if there was a
restroom back there, and ended up having to request mister
Gacy's help to find a restroom, which is something that
no normal person would ever want I have to do.
Speaker 2: Yeesh, there's something so unbelievably creepy about it.
Speaker 5: I was just going to say there were no guards
back in that area at all. I ended up having
to scream to get a guard's attention to take me
to a restroom. And it was a situation that Gacy
loved because it converged exactly with his fantasy of a
yeng young man unable to get help and totally under
Gasey's control. And he loved it. He thought it was
fantastic that I was unable to get anybody to assist
me in finding a restroom.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I'm looking at the picture in the back
of the book of the two of you together. How
could you stand being that close to him? Well, how
could you stand it?
Speaker 5: There's a little story there. The reason I'm smiling and
Gasey's looking mildly perturbed is that right before that picture
was taken by a guard who I think I had
paid five dollars to have two pictures taken. And the
guard appeared with the camera, and so Gasey and I
get up from the table and stood next to one another,
and as the guard was looking through his camera, he said,
j W, why are you taking up so much of
the frame. Gasey was sensitive about his weight at that point,
so he wasn't happy. I thought it was funny. I
don't know, Christen. You asked, like, how did I get
that close to him? I did a number of times.
He asked me to come over to his side of
the table multiple times during my visits with him, so
that we could look over his photo album and so on.
He wanted to show me things, and I remember at
the time thinking I don't really want to do that,
but I also didn't want to communicate to him that
I felt afraid of him. So I did do it
and position myself so in a way so that I
thought I could move quickly if I had to, But
he could very easily. Even though he had handcuffs on
and leg manacles. It would not have been difficult for
him to put those handcuffs over my head and squeeze
my neck with his fore arms had he been so inclined.
And I was frankly too naive at the time to
fully understand the jeopardy I was in. At that point,
Caasey still was holding out in the fantasy that his
appeals might result in some relief for him, at least
where the death penalty was concerned. The reason I included
the detail I did from Jason Moss's book Moss's contacts
with Gasey occurred. This is a young man who wrote
an honors paper based on his attempts to open up
lines of communication with serial killers by posturing as their
quote unquote ideal victim. And he did this with Gasey,
and he ended up visiting Gasey and then writing about
it in a book that was published after Gaysey's execution.
But it was obvious to me in reading Moss's book
that he had met Gasey in exactly the same place
where I did. So put it mildly, he had a
different and very harrowing experience with Gacy, and it freaked
me out, frankly when that book came out. I thought,
at the point when he saw Gasey Gasey knew the
gig was up, that his appeals were not going to
result in any relief, and he was going to be
executed in a few months, so he basically had nothing
to lose, whereas he would have had a lot to
lose from attacking me back in eighty six or eighty seven.
Speaker 2: And in the photograph, it's pretty evident that Gasey is
substantially larger than you are, and that I actually think
he might have been able to overpower you. And here's
a guy who has killed at least thirty, mostly young men.
He has a significant amount of physical strength. That vision
you described, a moment ago of him slipping his handcuffs
those manacles around your neck from behind, that's not much
of a stretch to think that he might have had
that capability.
Speaker 5: He absolutely would have had that capability, and he could
I think he could have easily overcome me had he
decided to do that. And I should have been thinking
more about it than I was. Frankly, I was wary,
but not I had that thought of what he could do,
but I put it to the back of my mind.
I just tried hard to compartmentalize it because I thought
if you're thinking all the time where you're sitting next
to him that he could be on the verge of
strangling you. It's going to be very difficult to interact
with him in the kind of familiar, relaxed way you
want to. But yeah, scary situation for sure.
Speaker 3: And I like that you bookended that story with the
very last one that you tell in the book about
meeting with Alva Campbell and how the guard called you
over and said he could strangle you with your necktie.
So maybe you want to take that necktie off. And
you walk yourself through the process and taking off the tie,
and this guy is watching you and he clearly knows
it's exactly what the guard has said to you. And
you pull the tie off and he says, you feel
better now, Doc. It was like, oh my god, with the.
Speaker 5: Whole mile on his face, Yeah, have you made yourself
feel safe now? Doc? He understood what the guard had
told me. Yeah. That's another one of one thing I
hoped in this book that I was a relatable narrator.
Speaker 3: Oh totally.
Speaker 5: I didn't try to gloss over the times where I
wasn't thinking about things I should have been thinking of,
or I made mistakes. I should have known by the
time I had my interactions with Alvit Campbell in the
mid nineteen nineties that it wasn't a good idea to
have a tie on when you met someone like him.
But I had just been in court all afternoon on
a domestic case, had gone directly to the jail, and
just wasn't really thinking about it, And I should have been,
but I wasn't until the guard called my attention to
it and said, if he thought he could get out
of here by strangling you with your he would do
that in a hot second, and not think about it
at all.
Speaker 3: That has to make your blood run cold to hear that.
Speaker 5: It was just a reminder. And Alva Campbell was a
very violent man who had engaged in all kinds of
violent acts before. He was very capable of being violent,
and he was very manipulative, So yeah, he could have
decided it made sense to take that risk.
Speaker 2: My thought was, there's probably no dress code in jail either,
so you didn't really need quite so dressed up like
you would have been for court earlier that day.
Speaker 5: No, typically when I would go to the jail, i'd
have jeans on, not a T shirt, button down shirt
or some sneakers, very casual. But I had come directly
from court that day. It made it an anomalous day
for me because I was already dressed up in my
court uniform.
Speaker 3: Jeff, did you ever reach a point in all of
this correspondence and research where you felt like, Okay, I've
bit off more than I can chew here, Like I'm
emotionally not capable of compartmentalizing and handling all of this.
This is dark and intense subject matter. I guess, for
lack of a better term, how do you keep yourself
healthy when this is the headspace that you were in
all the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know that I always succeeded in keeping
myself healthy. I eventually bailed out of the correspondence with Manson,
eventually bailed out of the one with Gacy years later,
after three years, because I became just exhausted by the
demands of trying to engage them, and it was a
very kind of psychologically and emotionally taxing project to maintain
an ongoing epistolary relationship with these people. I never want
I didn't want to make them really angry, both because
in Manson's case, I knew that he had sympathizers slash
followers outside prison, and I'll tell a little story in
a second. But I didn't know how far his reach
extended and what he might do if I made him
really angry. So that was always part of my thinking.
And yeah, there were times where I became very I
don't know what the right word would be beyond wary, frightened,
felt very vulnerable. I'll tell what happened with Manson's followers,
and I think it's responsive to your question. This is
in mid nineteen seventy five, so this is a long
time ago, almost fifty years. I began corresponding with Squeaky
Fromy and a roommate, Sandy Good, who, as it turned out,
lived in an attic apartment in Sacramento. They weren't in prison,
but they were in regular contact with manson fervent devotees,
and in the months during the spring of nineteen seventy five,
there was an interesting and alarming progression in the rhetoric
contained in their letters. In the very first letter that
I got from SQUEAKYPHROMI and I include a picture of
that envelope in my book. It wasn't what I expected
She was, by most accounts Manson's second in command, his
most favored girl, so to speak. And I had this
idea in my mind, what would the first in command
of somebody like Charles Manson sound like in a letter?
What would it be like to hear her voice in
a letter? And so when I got her first letter
was in this envelope with floral accents, and a stationary
had flowers on them. She drew little flowers and smiley
faces and hearts, and all the talk was of peace
and love and the companionship at spawn ran. At one
point she paused to say, Charlie didn't do it, Jeff,
he is it, And she talked of him as the
only person who knew how to bring about world peace
and so on, and I remember thinking, what, what are
you even talking about? They just sounded like so bizarre
coming from Charles Manson's first in command. But then after
that letter, her roommate Sandy Good took over the correspondence,
and initially her letter sounded the same way, and they
both sounded very intelligent, articulate, And then suddenly things took
a dark turn with Sandy Good. She had been dropping
hints about things they wanted me to do. They were
very upset with people they believe were polluting the environment
and so on, and she kept saying things like, there
are people you can contact to help us, let us
know when you're ready to do that. And I would
just ignore those things and hope that they would go away.
And then one time, this I believe was in May,
I got a letter from Sandy that began with words
that you never want a letter from a member of
the Manson family to say, Jeff, we're moving out of
the realm of words. And I remember thinking, I don't
want to move out of the realm of words. That's
the only realm I want.
Speaker 2: To be right, you're fine with words.
Speaker 5: I'm fine with the realm of words. That's where I
want to stay. But then she went on in that
letter to say to give me specific instructions about calling people.
And up until that point, all the references to any
crimes committed by members of the Manson family had been
oblique and vague. But now she said, I want you
to call these people and tell them Charles Manson demands
that they stop polluting the environment. And if they ask,
who say Charles Manson, Remember Sharon Tate.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, no one's reviewing these letters speaking of.
Speaker 5: I became really alarmed at that point. And then she
followed that up with a sixteen page handwritten letter where
she said, I want you to tell these people that
soon a wave of assassins will sweep through their homes
and splash blood from room to room.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 5: I started talking about people getting their arms chopped off,
and invited me to arrange a group of my friends
who would be willing to go out in the woods
and kill a hunter and then leave a sign on
the trees saying there are hunters hunting hunters. So she
was basically trying to recruit me to actively become involved
in this campaign of eco terrorism. And at that point
I thought, Okay, I'm in way over my head. I
need an exit strategy, and I wasn't sure how to
execute one that would work. And what I did was
I wrote Squeaky and Sandy a letter. This was in
June of nineteen seventy five, and I told them that
I had left the address where I'd been living in
Western New York. It was actually my parents' address, but
they didn't know that my dad, by the way, was
an FBI agent in these letters from Charles Manson and
Squeaky fromy were coming to my father's address. But that's
another whole element of the story. But I wrote this
letter and then I sent it to a good friend
of mine who lived in Wisconsin, and I asked her
to mail my letter from Wisconsin to get a Wisconsin
postmark on it. In my letter, I'd said I'd left
New York, I was hitchhiking around, didn't have a settled address.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very vague about where I am exactly.
Speaker 5: And the next thing I heard was Squeaky had attempted
to assassinate President Ford. But getting back to your original question,
Bill about whether I ever fell or maybe Kristin you
asked it whether I felt like the emotional demands of
continuing with this were too much. That was one such point.
Speaker 2: Join us again next time on Mind Over Murder as
we continue our conversation with doctor Jeffrey Smalden discussing his
book that Beast was not Me one forensic psychologist, five
decades of conversation with killers.
Speaker 3: That is going to do it for this episode of
Mind Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
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