Charles Denton “Tex” Watson…The Man Behind The Monster Part Three

I know, I know!

Where the Heck have you been, MsBurb?!
We’re waiting and waiting and no Part Three!!!

Stop yelling people! I can hear ya all the way over here in Calgary!

You see, I think it’s like this…

The subject of Tex has been a very complicated one for me…and I’m not even sure why, really.

I think, of all of The Manson Family kids, this young man seems to be the epitome of a disastrous Life, utterly wasted, his actions in only two short years completely decimated his victims and his own Life, like some kind of bloody tsunami, which stormed out as fast as it stormed in, leaving chaos, confusion, sorrow and utter disappointment that we North Americans could give birth to such a monster.

And because of this, my emotions surrounding this man, have hindered my ability to talk about him.

As a middle-aged woman myself now, I just have this unquenchable thirst to walk up to Tex and slap him on the face and punch him in the gut and scream,

“What the Good Goddamn Were You Thinking, Man?!!! How could you have all this evil and rage in you? How could you stray so far from your up-bringing?! Kids do stupid stuff Tex but you, Holy Shit, you take the cake!!!”

He was raised well, he had almost straight As in High School, he was a letterman athlete, his parents gave him cars and money, none of his actions in those two years jibe completely with his actions before those two years.

Have Tex's psychologists suffered from the same quandary of the Charles Before vs. the Tex After, I wonder?

Were they as perplexed with this man as I am?

I can’t seem to get beyond my urge to slap him silly and view him from any kind of objective stance; hence the silence from old MsBurb…

But finally, I guess, the emotions have died down enough for me to continue this foray into the Impossible Realm of "Tex" Watson, where if there was anyone who has ever done the "Devil's Business", it has got to be this fellow, right here. In Part Three, I'm doing a wee bit of detail house-cleaning, by covering dangling issues not covered in Two.

Part Four will deal with his extensive responses to various interviews he has given over the years. So bare with me while I sweep and gather, the devastating trail this Man/Monster seems to leave...

1) Dr. Walter continues on in his summation of this aforementioned psychoanalytic interview that Tex shows "organic brain disease"; and although he does not elucidate on its origin, one can surmize the damage was directly due to these last two years of drug abuse in Los Angeles...

But was it?

There may have been cognitive/motor skill problems with Tex from birth but as such, we will never know.

My guess on this is there may well have been birth defects from the outset, as his central nervous system seems far more damaged that the other killers I have researched to date, who had similar drug abuse patterns for a similar amount of time.

Not having any Before and After statistics or EEGs to go by, to compare, makes this an impossible question to answer.

2) Dr. Walter states that Tex was "not psychotic before California" but that blanket statement in no way eliminates the possibility of some neurological defect that Tex could have been suffering from since birth. Again, my guess is that there was some dysfunction but that the rampant drug abuse put that dysfunction over the top.

3) At this point in 1971, two years after the killings, Dr. Walter does reiterate that Tex is now suffering from "wide-spread central nervous system damage" and sites the drug abuse as the central cause.

This fact alone, in my layman's opinion, points to every reason NOT to allow parole for this man. CNS damage almost never repairs itself. Yes, there are CNS drugs out on the market that, with some forms of brain damage, can create new pathways through the brain to by-pass the damaged areas, as in the case of Petit Mal and Grand Mal, but when the damage is wide-spread, even in today's technological, pharmaceutical realm, such damage most often never is repaired and will often grow worse with age.

CNS damage can also increase one's ability toward rage actuation, as the damaged subject can become frustrated with his impaired cognitive and/or motor skills, resulting in a very stressed existence for the CNS damaged person.

As such, it is highly unlikely that Tex would be a stable person on the outside without at least a half-way house transition and probable lifetime mood-levelling and neuro-transmitter drugs to maintain/repair the behavioural/cognitive/motor skills, so any under-lying rage actuation, due to the everyday stressors of Life, could be quelled before he hurt himself or others.

At the age he is now, I really doubt that without a constant multi-faceted monitoring environment, Tex would be a volatile man on the outside even today.

4) As of this interview, Dr. Walter stated that "Watson has a large amount of suppressed hostility and anger" and classifies him as a "walking time bomb".

Now granted, 38 years have passed since this examination but because we have no clear idea how much, or if any, psychoanalysis/drug treatment Tex has received in those years, it is very difficult to assess if Tex has shed this repressed anger enough to no longer be a danger to himself or to society ever again.

Again, in my opinion, whatever improvements have been made in Tex's neurological and/or psychological dysfunctions, this man would still be considered a danger on the outside if he wasn't under constant monitoring for the rest of his life.

There, of course, is the matter of him getting up to speed, after being away from the real world for 40 years. Just the everyday tasks of banking, communication, job readiness, etc. at his age would be a phenomenal under-taking regardless of how much or any improvement he may have made to his psyche/behaviour on the inside.

I imagine even Tex knows this now, and has probably resigned himself to his limitations and his environmental circumstances.

With seven cold-blooded murders and a conspiracy charge to his name, I doubt that Tex will be released into society ever again.

And if there is at least one of The Manson Family killers who deserves life behind bars, I imagine even Tex himself would raise his hand to that proposition.

For whatever reason the damage was done; he knows it and so do we. Some acts of wanton depravity are sometimes just too horrendous to surmount.

The Man Behind The Monster will continue...