Edward George - Charles Manson: Conversations with a Killer: Mansons Life Behind Bars

My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system . I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you and I look how incompetent you all are, and then I say to myself, you want to kill me? Ha, Im already dead! Have been all my life!

CHARLES MANSON , FROM HIS TRIAL TESTIMONY , 1970

WHEN I WAS A SMALL BOY , the highlight of the week was a Sunday-afternoon walk with my father. We lived in the geographical center of San Francisco near a hill that people called Mount Olympus. The name was not a tribute to the mythological home of the gods. It was a politically incorrect joke on the local milkman. The guy had a bad leg and was known as Old Limpy. He dragged that leg up the hill so many times everyone began referring to it as Mount Olympus.

My dad and I used to spend many wonderful hours hiking the winding road to the top. There was a magnificent statue set high on a pedestal overlooking the city and the Pacific Ocean. The statue held a torch high over her head in one hand, and a sword ready to strike in the other. It was a riveting piece of art that never failed to captivate me, no matter how many times I saw it.

Do you know what it means? my father asked.

No, Dad, what?

Its the statue of light. She carries the torch of truth over her head. The sword is there to protect the torch from those who want to put it out.

Six years later, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father was called into the service. He and other soldiers set up a lookout post on Mount Olympus, scanning the coast for enemy ships and submarines. I was ten then, and used to go up there with him. We spent long hours together looking into the ocean on the night watch. The whole city was blacked out, and the view was glorious. When I couldnt keep my eyes open anymore, Id curl up at the foot of the statue, braced from the whistling wind, and fall asleep. Those were the best of times.

My father was eventually transferred to the battle front overseas and never returned home. No, he didnt die, but he might as well have, as far as a young boy was concerned. He met another woman in a foreign land, divorced my mother, remarried, and moved away. I was devastated.

For years afterward, for decades, I returned to that hill, remembered my father, and fed a pain that wouldnt go away. When I came home from college a grown man, my car mysteriously headed for the old statue. I married and became a father myself, six times over, and still kept coming back. Finally, I arrived one foggy day to find the statue gone. It stunned me, depressing me further, but did nothing to stop my lemming-like treks. Year after year I came, staring up at the empty pedestal, trying to heal a wound that would never stop hurting.