I was a weird kid, fascinated by cults and Charles Manson. How could these people just blindly follow a man, and do his bidding and killing?

Nikki Meredith went to high school with Catherine Share "Gypsy" who was later a Manson family member. She also went to high school with the deputy district attorney in LA, who worked under the lead prosecutor for the Manson trial. She is an award winning journalist who has researched the Manson family beyond anything I could imagine.

Meeting with Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel led to a 20 year relationship of interviews as Meredith delved in the psychology behind the murders and if the women were reformed.

There's heavy medical language that DOES get a little boring, but this is a story that has been told for many, many years and will continue to be told.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

The history of Charles Manson and the pure evil and terror that followed in the Tate-LaBianca murder’s that altered the peaceful social fabric of the U.S. in August 1969. The knowledge that innocent people were slaughtered without a reason or motive; horrified the nation. Nikki Meredith revisited the Manson crime in her book: “Monsters, Morality and Murder: The Manson Women and Me”. Meredith articulated on the reasons these crimes occurred, and the impact of evil related to the Holocaust and other criminal acts. Other matters researched and explored were authors relationships with convicted Manson family murderesses Patricia Krenwinkel (1947-) and Leslie Van Houten (1949-) both women are currently serving time at the Frontera California Women’s Prison.

A detailed update on the lives of the Manson killers were included, and interviews with affiliated friends and families. The family of Sharon Tate has campaigned tirelessly through victim rights/awareness and extensive letter writing campaigns that the killers remain behind bars and not eligible for parole. The author included detailed prison visits and conversations with Krenwinkel and Van Houten, Susan Atkins (1948-2009) and Charles “Tex” Watson (1945-) that began in 1995, and covered a period of over two decades. Meredith’s best writing covered the Barker Ranch (with a photograph) located in the “sinister” rugged canyon terrain of the Panamint Mountains. The author attended high school with Manson recruiter Catherine “Gypsy” Share and Los Angeles deputy district attorney Stephen Kaye, and used these connections throughout her book to (seemingly) verify her connections to the Manson case.

The author provided a researched exploration of 1960’s encounter groups, the cultural “Be In” at Golden Gate Park, Timothy Leary, and exhaustive criminology reports of various cases including the case of Tashfeen Malik, who, with her husband slaughtered 14 of his co-workers in San Bernardino, Ca. (2015). The Manson family criminal actions were frequently compared to the horror of the Holocaust, as the author signified her connection to the Manson family through her own Jewish heritage. Manson revealed his hatred for the Jews when he carved a swastika on his forehead while in prison.
In 1956, the author traveled throughout Europe on a family vacation, her long stories about her routine ordinary life would have been better told in shorter sentences, paragraphs or segments—instead, stories from her personal life and interests were too lengthy as the author continually refocused the storyline on herself and any possible connection linking herself to the Manson case and followers. Excellent photos included. 3* GOOD. **With thanks and appreciation to the CITADEL PRESS BOOKS via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

This book focuses primarily on Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, members of the notorious Manson family imprisoned since the 1970s involving the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders in LA. While author Nikki Meredith also interviewed former Manson member Tex Watson in prison, she established a twenty-year relationship visiting Van Houten and Krenwinkel at the Frontera prison where they both are inmates. When the author initially broached interviewing these women, she also reached out to fellow former Manson family member Susan Atkins, also an inmate at Frontera. Although Atkins initially seemed open to it, she ultimately denied access claiming it would interfere with another media project she was involved with. In hindsight, Nikki Meredith was relieved of the abandoned Atkins interview opportunity; she sensed an inherit evil about Atkins that she did not find in Van Houten and Krenwinkel. Atkins died in prison in 2009 from brain cancer.

Not only is this book about the Manson women, but about the author herself, and some connections she has to people involved in the Manson/LaBianca orbit. She was high school friends with a girl named Catherine Share who later became Manson family member and recruiter "Gypsy". She also was high school friends with Stephen Kay, who became deputy district attorney in LA, working directly under lead Manson prosecutor Victor Bugliosi during that trial. She also has the experience of her brother having spent a short time in prison, and leading a rehabilitated, meaningful and successful life afterwards. Finally, Meredith has been a magazine writer, NPR reporter, award-winning Bay Area journalist, family therapist and probation officer. It is with this varied professional and personal background that she delves into the psyche of these Manson women.

The parts about the book I found most interesting were the author's meetings and conversations with Van Houten and Krenwinkel in prison. She also had the opportunity to interview a couple of their parents. Throughout the book, she tries to come to conclusions as to whether they are rehabilitated, how they really feel about what they did, and to figure out how they became brainwashed by Manson. Interspersed throughout the book she cites various psychological studies regarding people who murder and how they can become immune to feeling anything about it. Although I read a least half of these accounts, I admit I tired of the medical jargon and began to page through these sections. I was more interested in the one-on-one experiences the author had with the Manson women.

Ultimately, the author's opinion (and that of the parole board) is that Leslie Van Houten should be paroled after her almost 50 years in prison. However, Governor Jerry Brown once again declined her parole in January 2018, although this had still been undecided at the time of this book's writing.

There's not a lot of new information on the Manson family (or Manson Women) contained in this book and for some reason the author has rambled on, jumping from decade to decade without much rhyme or reason. It's the 90s, then it's 2001 and then it's 1940 something and I am left wondering why I need to know that the author was having dreams about Hitler unless that somehow fits in with the ties they want to show that the Tate/ Labianca murders had something to do with being Jewish. I'm also not entirely clear on what the authors brother having been in jail has to do with anything. Maybe I dozed off. Sorry, there's nothing to see here.

3.5 stars

It is evident that a lot of time and research went into creating this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed parts of it. I haven’t read Helter Skelter, and I only have minimal knowledge about the Manson Family, so I went into this book a little blind. The author does a good job of covering the facts needed for this book, and I think she succeeded at making some insights into Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel’s involvement. I don’t know if it was her goal to spark sympathy for these women in the reader, but she did to an extent – it is hard to believe that they continue to be incarcerated after all these years, given their success and improvements in prison. But at the same time, I can see past Meredith’s glowing reviews of these women and understand the position of those opposed to their parole.

Other reviews have said that the book lacks focus and sort of meanders through the topics, and I would have to agree. Many of the chapters left me asking ‘so what?’ as the purpose was unclear, and topics bounced around so frequently due to the short chapters that it was sometimes hard to see the connections between the tidbits of information being provided. The writing was also a bit repetitious at times, with the same facts being relayed several times (for example, almost every time Meredith referred to Debra Tate, she would mention that it was Sharon Tate’s youngest sister). My biggest problem with this book, however, is the connections that Meredith tried to draw between the Manson women and her own life. I found myself skimming over these chapters, trying to get back to the information on the Manson women. The connections she tried to make just did not work, and in my opinion they distracted from what she had researched and put together. This book could have been much stronger without the random tangents where she tried to bring the focus to her and her experiences, because quite frankly I didn’t care about her high school experience or her college boyfriend.

I did enjoy this book and the information it provided, but it could have been better.

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book to read and review.

This review has been posted on my Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2304906681) and a shortened review will be posted on Litsy (@candority).

This book was lacking in focus. While the author. Nikki Meredith, is probably a perfectly nice and well intentioned person, this book was not so much about the Manson women as much as about her. She relates a lot of personal information about herself that are unrelated to the “subject” of this work.

This book is severely lacking focus: Although it is marketed as being a current portrait of Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, it is in fact a memoir of Nikki Meredith that contains parts in which she talks to the aforementioned women and some of their relatives. I guess that Meredith's basic question was how these women were able to commit such heinous crimes, but instead of taking a journalistic or research-based approach, she chooses to a) radically relate all incidents to her own life and b) superficially compare them to other, completely unrelated atrocities. Unsurprisingly, this turns the whole book into a hot mess in which we learn a lot about Meredith and almost nothing about Van Houten and Krenwinkel.

Don't get me wrong: It is legitimate question to ask through which lenses we judge our environment or to ponder how such crimes influence our own lives. There is a lot of research about this, especially in the fields of media studies and psychology, none of which is cited in the book. We are getting anecdotes instead: Meredith's brother went to jail, just like Van Houten and Krenwinkel (completely different and unrelated crime of course). The parents of her ex-boyfriend were anti-Semites and despised her for her Jewsih heritage (the victims of the Manson murders were also innocent and hated and killed for no reason). Meredith's ex-boyfriend hit her (violence). Meredith traveled to Germany and Rwanda, where terrible genocides took place.

Which brings us straight to the next issue here: It simply makes no sense to throw all kinds of atrocities in the mix and compare them to the Manson murders: The Holocaust! Rwanda! Abu Ghraib! The Heaven's Gate sect! ISIS! Of course you will gain zero insight that way, because there is no universal formula as to why people behave violently. What causes myriads of historians and political scientists to dissect these events over the course of whole lifetimes is to find out the specific aspects that came into play and how they were interrelated. The commonalities between these crimes are obviously banal, because they are the lowest common denominator. Meredith talks about mirror neurons and the Stanford Prison Experiment as if this was cutting-edge insight and not common knowledge.

The lack of focus also shows in the writing itself, which meanders on and on and gives a myriad of details that are completely irrelevant: Meredith once bought a pair of wooden shoes in Amsterdam for her high school teacher. She went to Mommy and Me swim classes with her daughter. Once she went dress-shopping with her mom and then they had lunch at the Pig'n Whistle a few blocks up Hollywood Boulevard from the Broadway. What is the function of these remarks in the context of this book? They serve no purpose at all.

And there are logical inconsistencies that Meredith herself is even aware of: "None of the above has anything directly to do with Catherine (Share), but in my mind, it's always been connected." Well, good for you, but why are you informing me about it? Regarding the closed-down nuclear reactor close to the prison, she writes: "(...) it was hard to separate my uneasiness about lingering radiation from the horror I always felt whenever I thought about the murders, the murderers and the victims." Seriously? And then, of course, when she visity Manson's Ranch: "The sight of that comet that night in Death Valley struck me as synchronistic, another "sign" connected to the murders. For the life of me now, I can't remember what I thought it was a sign of (...)". I rest my case.

Plus there are some not well thought-out passages: The prison system is a "totalitarian regime" - there is certainly a lot wrong with the prison system, but to use this term for it after writing page after page about the Nazis is a little thoughtless, to say the least. Meredith's father believed that people should pay taxes, which is a "Marxist principle"? Nope. And of course there's confusion about the terms Communist, Marxist and Stalinist - but why are we even dealing with that in a book about, yes, Krenwinkel and Van Houten? Oh, and if you want to meet some soma-types, you have to go to the milk bar in "A Clockwork Orange", psychology discusses somatotypes, or did discuss them, because the concept is outdated. But good to know that Meredith's ex-boyfriend was mesomorphic (WTF).

It should be noted that Meredith was an advocate for Van Houten's release - as I have never met Van Houten and accordingly cannot judge whether she still poses a threat to society, I have no position on this. The way she slams prosecutor Stephen Kay though ignores the main point here: When he speaks out in favor of releasing Van Houten and something happens, who will be blamed? It's strange to read her downright ruinous remarks after all those pages about empathy.

To be fair, Meredith's conversations with Van Houten and Krenwinkel as well as some of their relatives are interesting, but they are buried under ... stuff? This concept just does not work. This could have been so much better!

A lot of research went in this book, that you can tell.
Not sure about the authors personal life, how it connected. Felt a bit disconnected for me in that easy. Overall book was interesting.
Thank you to author, publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.