By Herlaka Rose
The documents below are reproduced verbatim, with the transcriber's own notes in brackets. Manson's spelling, punctuation and abbreviations are unaltered.
Herlaka Rose corresponded with Charles Manson and transcribed his letters for Serial Killer Magazine. Two of those documents are reproduced here: a letter dated December 5, 2007, and an undated postcard. Neither has appeared on this site before.
Once upon a time I thought what I was told, later I became aware that was only in my thoughts. I thought I can't trust what others say. Then I thought I can't trust what I had just thought, then thought I can't trust what I just thought or what I will think. What can u trust and what is trust-from nothing anything is a lot. How down you got to go be and understand before its up [two swastikas drawn]. People who want can't see everything in nothing. P.S. The saint will deal for you-you must realize I've got to much to do. Here is some stuff. We MUST TRUST the knowing in our AIR TREE WATER ANIMALS-ATWA [transcriber's note: Charles always signs his letters with the word EASY]
Soul. You can say this is my hole and I want you out of my hole. I can say this is my feeling and its only my feeling that holds your hate as being anything and you say my hole is the space and your feeling is just the space. My space and feeling makes place and need. I want and say I need. You use my want as I call it need.
Editor's note: these are transcriptions, not scans. The transcriber offered the magazine photographs of the originals at the time and told the editor she could have each page scanned so the magazine would have the proof; this archive has not seen those images and cannot authenticate the documents beyond saying that the transcription is reproduced here exactly as she supplied it. ATWA stands for Air, Trees, Water, Animals, and it is the one part of the letter that is not private language. Manson used it for decades as the name of an environmental position he claimed, and it has been taken up by people outside the prison since. The signature word EASY, noted by the transcriber, appears on a great deal of his surviving correspondence. The two swastikas are drawn in the original where the bracketed note sits; he had a swastika tattooed between his eyebrows, cut into his forehead as an X during the 1970 trial and later reworked. The archive holds ten other articles on Manson and none of them reproduces a letter, so this is the first primary document from him here. What it mainly demonstrates is why the prosecution's account of his hold over other people is hard to square with the paper he left: read cold, the letter is circular and close to unreadable, and the postcard is an argument with someone about a hole. One caution about scale. Manson was convicted in 1971 of seven counts of first degree murder, for the deaths of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno LaBianca and Rosemary LaBianca, on the basis that he ordered them; he killed none of them himself, and his death sentence was commuted to life when California's death penalty was struck down in 1972. He died on November 19, 2017, aged eighty-three. Nothing in these documents refers to any of that. The transcriber also told the editor she held a letter Manson had written to her on the back of pages sent to him by another correspondent, which she described as comparable to the Albert Fish letter. That document is not in this folder and is not reproduced here.