Unfortunate Son

When Charles Manson showed up in Lordsburg in a stolen convertible Triumph in December 1959, he wasn’t the bearded cult leader the world later knew. Just 25 years old, he had already spent half of his life in prison and had only been out for a couple of years, despite begging parole offers in California not to release him, when he tried to set up shop in Lordsburg with two underage prostitutes, Leona Rae Musser, who went by the name Candy Stevens, and Elizabeth Olga Johns.

Charles Manson was always drawn to the desert. It’s no surprise he would find a place like Lordsburg appealing, beyond the reach of the law yet rich with commerce.

According to the book “Helter Skelter” by Vincent Bugliosi, Manson was eventually arrested for “having transported two women from Needles, Calif. to Lordsburg, N.M., for immoral purposes.” He spent at least a night in jail in the basement of the Hidalgo County Courthouse in Lordsburg, and then was sent back to California to face charges. 

The Timeline

A decade before the infamous Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles, Manson was answering to charges that he forged a signature on a check he had stolen out of a mailbox. While being questioned in September 1959, police say Manson swallowed the check to destroy the evidence. He was sentenced to a decade in prison, until a teenage girl named Candy Stevens lied to the judge by telling him she was pregnant with Manson’s child and planned to marry him. The judge took pity on them and suspended the sentence, giving him probation instead.

A couple of months later Stevens did get pregnant. The pair allegedly got married so she wouldn’t be forced to testify against him. 

Meanwhile, Manson fled to the desert to escape the heat, and Lordsburg looked like a good place to cool off. Located off Interstate 10 halfway between El Paso and Tucson, thousands of cars and semi-trucks passed through town every day and a percentage of them stopped and stayed the night.

By December, he had been arrested two more times, according to Bugliosi’s book, once for grand theft auto and the other for using stolen credit cards. The charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence, or more likely because federal prosecutors were already building a harsher case against him.

“The close call didn’t faze him,” writes Jeff Guinn in “Manson: The Life and Times.” “He continued pimping out Leona and whatever other girls he could attract to his stable. Even though everything in his criminal past indicated otherwise, Charles always believed that he was never going to get caught again.”

His plan in those days, according to numerous books, was to create a harem of prostitutes he could order to commit petty crimes for him. Stevens was barely over 18 at the time, but the other girl was still underage. Both, according to the books, were more than willing to break the law for their leader.

According to local legend, Manson and his small “family” set up shop either east or west of town, at one of two known illegal bordellos operating out of truck-stop motels, but no one alive seems to remember which. Jim Redford, a retired Silver City architect and historian who grew up in Lordsburg, said that “Dorothy’s 8-0” was the biggest and most famous of the bordellos in town, but the Shady Grove Truck Stop and Motel, just outside of town near the Arizona state line, was a close second. 

Like a lot of things in Manson’s life, the details are murky. He made a lot of scattered court appearances around the west in the months before and after his time in Lordsburg, but most of the records, including “Helter Skelter,” agree that he spent most of December 1959 growing his prostitution ring in Lordsburg before his arrest and extradition and eventual 10-year sentence.

December 1959 is also when Candy Stevens got pregnant.

Sometime at the end of December 1959, Manson was arrested in Lordsburg before he was extradited to California.

Journalist Tom O’Neill spent 20 years researching Manson and his connection to the CIA’s mind-control experiments in the 1960s. His book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” has become a best-seller, and he’s a podcast regular, including a massively popular appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in April 2020.

He knows, more than probably anyone alive, about the Manson murders and Manson’s life prior to the crimes, including what he might have accomplished in Lordsburg.

“Sounds correct to me,” O’Neill told me recently. “I compiled a quick timeline for what I’ve been able to document of Manson’s stay and arrest in Lordsburg. As you’ll see, some of my info is taken directly from Manson’s court records.”

O’Neill’s dates match up, proving Manson spent the latter part of December 1959 in Lordsburg.

All sources say Charlie and Candy parted ways in Lordsburg as he entered the 1960s incarcerated once again. Then they saw each other only once, while he was awaiting trial. 

“I turned 21 years old in the L.A. County Jail,” Manson told Diane Sawyer in 1993 in the famous 60 Minutes interview. “I wasn’t out but a hot second. I’ve been in jail all my life.”

That hot second produced three known children and cost the lives of at least nine people, not to mention instilled a new kind of fear in the human heart.

Writer Marco Margaritof reports Stevens visited her jailed husband back in California before her son, Charles Luther Manson, was born.

“This was a one-time scenario, though,” Margaritof wrote. “The two would never meet again, and Manson would never meet his son.”

Little is known about Charles Luther Manson. He was born exactly nine months after Charles and Candy were in Lordsburg, on Sept. 24, 1960. 

Candy would file for divorce on June 4, 1963, claiming that Manson “has been extremely and repeatedly cruel.”

In a letter to pen pal Michael Channels, Manson wrote in 2002: “Leona Manson [Candy Stevens] had a son Charles Manson Jr. in Denver, Colorado. I wondered about him – She is a tricky bitch I called her Wonderwoman.  We got a blood test and papers but never got married – She just forged the papers and filed divorce and got custody of my son.”

Local Lore

Manson would later take part in the gruesome murders of at least nine people, including the actress Sharon Tate and her unborn baby in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969.

In Lordsburg lore, Manson is not discussed, but he is still an ever-present figure. Growing up, I remember finding a copy of “Helter Skelter” and finding Lordsburg mentioned in the text. It made the murders more personal, knowing I shared the same geography as a killer.

I grew up hearing stories about Manson’s stay, and rumors that he fathered a child in town persist to this day, but no one postulated as a candidate fits the timeline.  

I spent a couple of years reading everything I could to see what grain of truth might lie in the rumors. I searched records in the Lordsburg-Hidalgo County Library for any trace of Manson, and found none. I also searched the local paper, The Lordsburg Liberal which made no reference to Manson in 1959; his name wouldn’t appear in those pages until 1969.

Sixty-five years have passed, so memories have faded, but not completely. 

When Mary Moore, a lifelong resident of Hidalgo County, was an under-classman in high school, she remembers going to the movie theater in Lordsburg around 1959.

“My sister and I went to the movie there,” Moore said, “and when we got out of the theater, this guy pulled up to us and wanted to give us a ride.”

Moore remembers that the man was driving a “strange” dark-colored car and had a hat on. He pulled over aggressively and blocked their path forward.

“My sister was younger than me, and she just jumped into the car,” Moore said. “And I jerked her out of that car and said, ‘no, we don’t want a ride.’”

Not long after, Moore said, the girls spotted the car again, this time in front of their grandmother’s house.

“The man came by and wanted to know where the dump was,” she said. “It seemed like the same car and the same guy with the hat on. He asked, ‘can I take her with me to show me where the dump is?’”

Protective of her little sister, Moore ran the guy off, once again.

“Why would any man want to do that, take a young girl for a ride like that?” Moore asked.

Years later, Moore said, her younger sister came to recognize the now-famous man. “She swears that it was Charles Manson who tried to pick us up.”

Moore looked at a photograph of a 1950s-era dark-colored convertible Triumph and said, “that looks like the car.” She also remembers that he was wearing a town hat.

“My sister was so sure it was him,” Moore said. 

“I remember my brother-in-law Bill Horne talking about meeting Charles Manson,” wrote Jim Morris, who attended elementary and middle school in town. “Bill worked at the Tower Texaco in Lordsburg 1956 to 1964, and he met a lot of celebrities and other famous people while working there.”

Manson’s name became a synonym for evil 10 years after his time in Lordsburg. In a San Quintin interview in 1989, Penny Daniels asks him what he would do if he got out of prison.

“I’d probably play some music. Get my guitar and go back out to the desert,” he says. He might have had Lordsburg in mind.

He died in prison in Bakersfield in 2017. Although nothing is known about her later life, Candy Stevens has almost certainly passed away. 

So has Charles Luther Manson. According to public records, he changed his name to Jay Charles Warner in 1976. He died in 2007 in Colorado. Coincidentally, Manson’s first son, Charlie, Jr., also changed his name to Jay later in life. 

Likewise, Manson’s name is almost gone from Lordsburg now, just whispers in the desert. 

Jason K. Watkins is a writer based in Phoenix. He grew up in Lordsburg. He can be reached at jasonkwatkins.com.