Charles Denton “Tex” Watson…The Man Behind The Monster Part Four – The Interviews, Part A

Not many over the years but what there has been, well, they’ve been truly telling, I must say.

They all were read and absorbed and left for the most part a severe confusion, that Tex, I guess, was as zombie-like and brain-dead as Susan Atkins was to her death.

But, for just one second, in an interview Tex did on his experience with meeting Suzan LaBerge, for one teeny, weenie second, I saw Tex’s eyes flicker and falter when he commented that he has completely accepted responsibility for his “crime”…singular…sanitized description.

It was like seeing an epiphany really, that one of these brutal knife wielders had a moment of self-doubt, a moment of uncertainty, possibly a moment of fear - a truly human emotion - that maybe God has certain expectations of killers after they die, that forgiveness is earned and not just a birth-right.

Tex’s eyes flickered and filtered and I knew, right at that very moment , that what these born-again killers had been proselytizing for decades was even to them, at least to those who had enough soul to accurately assess their situation, not a wholly accepted ideology.

THANK GOD!

…was all I thought. Thank God that there is some humanity visible in at least one of these killers. That they aren’t just the sum total of mindless smiles and crocodile tears; that there possibly is still a soul lying within that polished exterior which shows me that their past, present and future has not and will not be anything but full of bliss and serenity.

In that one moment, at 2:56 into the video, I saw the excruciating pain and the agony that the victims had endured, if only for an instant, but what undoubtedly has been a lifetime’s worth of tortured sleeps and horrifying nightmares, when these killers have been alone, lights out, lying on their hard cots, staring up at the cement ceiling, I knowing now that at least Tex Watson has replayed those nights like a pathetic made-for-TV movie, a constant and unrelenting replay of each blow and each scream, knowing that beyond their now acceptance of God, the harsh reality that God has chosen them to relive those moments over and over until He sees fit to free them from those nights.

Yes, I saw all that in the teeny, weenie flicker of Tex’s eyes.

From Patricia Krenwinkel you get sentence hesitations, where when an emotion is about to over-take her, she prevents it from entering her consciousness by stopping mid sentence to regain her composure, to tell the facts without the feeling, each and every time.

From Leslie, you get embarrassment, as if she’d been caught at the High School prom with her panties down behind the bleachers, that what she had participated in forty years ago was only deserving of that kind of emotion.

From Susan, well, a straight transfer of her God-complex from one guru to another – Charlie as JC to JC Himself – that chick went to her death bed needing to latch onto a male leader figure, as if not succeeding in said, she would dissolve into the nothingness she knew she was.

From Bobby, well, according to ones who have interviewed him in the flesh, his bravado and machismo are protecting him from his past, his love of music sugar-coating his actions and his weakness to be accepted. Sad really, that someone who looked so handsome and had such talent, succumbed to such an immature failing.

Maybe that’s why I have had such a difficult time talking on Tex, as if there was something missing in all that I knew of the boy in the man’s body. It was the God complex that has been getting in the way….

The Man Behind The Monster Will Continue…