Claire V. Watkins

speaker

479 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Claire V. Watkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Best Of: Life in the Mojave Desert / Director of ‘The Uprising’ · 12 Sep 2026 podcast

fable this allegory about how like the countercultural impulse was dangerous and

could only lead to, you know, murder and mayhem.

And um it scared a lot of people off of the kind of thing that the the hippies were up to and it gave their enemies a lot of um ammunition.

Yeah, he was out in Death Valley.

So that's kinda where the mythic like presence of the desert in our family, it was almost as if like the desert saved him from being involved.

And and Manson was the one who first sent him out to the desert to

To find a hole for them to wait out Helter Skelter in.

Well, the way my mom told it it was because he was very good looking and he was young.

He was um young enough to enroll.

He enrolled in Pacific Palisades High School, briefly.

to meet women.

Um, it sounds like in my dad's book he writes about and it's a tricky thing 'cause it's a co written book.

I don't know how much of this is actually him and he's not around for me to ask, you know, but he writes about it as being just like a wonderful time for a kid who's like come of age in a really violent, repressive, like nineteen fifties, abusive, scary house.

When he wanted to leave the family, at first Manson said, Okay, that's fine.

Then he changed his mind and they were

in like a power struggle for a while.

And they were out in Death Valley at the ranches and

Eventually there was a night that he describes in his book where he opened the door of the cabin where he was staying with a couple other people who had also defected from the group and Manson was like squatting there with a knife between his teeth and so he thought he would be killed and he walked that night across Death Valley, basically, um, probably around like fifty miles or so.

But he f fled for his life and then um went to the police, went to the Inyo County sheriffs and um I think he was

Trying his his best to get safe.

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