One morning in March 1995, my father and I were having coffee at the kitchen table when somehow the conversation deviated to my brother Marshall. As always, I had questions.
“He was tall for his age,” my father said, gazing at the memory of his estranged son, as if he was standing beside us in the kitchen. “At school they always wanted him for the football team. His hair was red, deep red like your grandmother’s, and his eyes …” my father paused, searching for the right comparison. “Copper. His eyes were copper-coloured and he’d tan so well in the summer he looked as if he’d been dipped in wood stain.”
Another memory still tickled. “A 15-year-old kid tried to dominate him once, bragging about being 15, and Marsh stood up, towered above him and said in a manly voice, ‘Well, I’m 12.’” My father’s smile slowly sank as a thought passed behind his eyes. “When he was 17,” he continued, “Marshall won a scholarship to Harvard off the back of a short story he wrote, and he declined it! Can you imagine?” My father went quiet for a moment, the blade of that wasted opportunity still sharp. “He was such a gifted writer.”
My father was of a generation that upheld the notion that if an establishment such as Harvard University came knocking, it was your duty to answer. Not to do so was an unforgivable waste of opportunity.
Perhaps Marshall didn’t want that particular opportunity at that particular time in his life, I suggested. Perhaps it was simply bad timing. I felt my words fail the moment they left my mouth.
His voice soured: “Then he became a hippy.”
I was well versed on the family accounts surrounding Marshall’s life choices. The last time my father had seen his son was 22 years earlier. Marshall had been a homeless hippy who had hitchhiked from California to Texas in need of money.
I knew my father found it all hard to talk about. His hand trembled as he lifted his mug.
My father was 54 when I was born, and I loved him beyond measure. He had a warm American voice, and was witty and full of character. At four years old, when I asked why I had a belly button, he replied that it was for dips when eating crudites. Chocolate digestives were wedged in apple tree branches for my sister and me to pick. Hoisted on to his shoulders, we would reach for them in the belief that cookies really did grow on trees.
However, as I became an adult, I became more aware of the life he’d lived before I was born, and I wanted to know more. How could my father leave one of his children behind, allow him to disappear into a void? Was it my father’s choice or Marshall’s? How did my brother become linked to the Charles Manson cult, so infamous it rocked the foundations of American society? Years of research and discussions with family members have brought me closer to the answers.
My brother’s story begins miles away from sunny California, love-ins and communal living, in middle-class 1950s Michigan and the emotional chaos of Marshall’s mother, my father’s first wife, Sally. After years of a gradual descent into psychosis, Sally was hospitalised in 1954, receiving electroshock therapy and medication. A year after admission, Sally was deemed fit enough to return home for a weekend. The moment my father went out to do the grocery shopping, she lay on the bed filled with enough sleeping pills to kill a horse, drifting so far into oblivion that her son’s pleas for her to wake up failed to reach her. Marshall was 11 years old.
After this devastating upheaval, my father, with the help of my grandmother, sought structure for his teenage son, finding the solution with the Marine Corps. An ex-US marine and war veteran himself, my father knew the kind of discipline the marines could inculcate. Marshall was subsequently enrolled at the prestigious Howe school, a private military academy in Indiana, and a photograph was taken to immortalise that first day. Looking closely at that image, it’s clear Marshall isn’t keen. Aged 13, not yet two years since his mother took her own life, my brother stands rigid in his service uniform next to the Howe school gate, head slightly lowered, flinging the photographer a glowering stare. It is an anger my father’s lens doesn’t hide.
Marshall’s time at Howe didn’t last long. After a year, my father’s job relocated them to the Netherlands where my father met his second wife. By this time, Marshall was 15 and his behaviour was becoming a problem. Unable to self-regulate, my brother became volatile, opinionated, oppositional. Modern psychology tells us that suppressed trauma will find an escape route, behaviour the most common outlet. In 1959, however, my father’s emotional awareness was far less acute. Marshall was sent away again, this time to a boarding school in Switzerland. By 1962, at just 18 years old and a fully fledged marine, my brother found himself stationed in Vietnam where his days were fraught with danger. During one of those harrowing moments, an explosion changed his life for ever. The blast resulted in burn scarring on the side of his head and severely damaged the hearing in his right ear. The psychological scars would linger far longer.
Discharged in 1966, Marshall was thrust back into a turbulent America that had little regard for the sacrifices made by young veterans. In a world that seemed to have forgotten them, countless others like him were searching for a sense of purpose. Thus, at the tender age of 23, my brother entered the hippy world of California as a war veteran struggling to find his place as the country grappled with civil rights issues, anti‑war protests and counterculture movements. As traditional values crumbled, it is easy to see why vulnerable individuals would have been susceptible to manipulation by charismatic leaders, particularly sociopathic predators like Charles Manson, who preyed on those who felt marginalised or disconnected from mainstream society. And so it proved for Marshall.
For someone like my brother, who had seen the darker sides of humanity, the 1960s counterculture must have represented not just freedom but a chance to heal. It was a world far removed from the hellscape of Vietnam and the archaic rigidity of military institutions, and Marshall would have been easily swept up in it.
Spahn Ranch was the perfect place for Manson to position himself as a guru. In the middle of nowhere, it was as far from any form of social connection as it could be, isolating the “family” from cultural norms. Yet an internal sense of community prevailed through the language of belonging. At first, it’s likely that Marshall would have responded to small requests, such as attending meetings or participating in group hangouts, perhaps getting friendly with a fringe member who would pull him into the circle. He would have received a warm welcome, hugs, been shown around a sprawling compound, while its elderly owner, George Spahn, sat passive and blind in a rocking chair, a pretty girl on his lap. Communal living would present itself as a consensual family space where children were looked after, all burdens of responsibility vanished. Acid trips would create transcendental experiences.
Marshall needed family, and, for a short while, he must have felt as if he’d found one. Nine months later, however, the sky would fall. The horror of the Manson murders had exposed the workings of a deeply disturbed mind. There’s relief in knowing that my brother was long gone by then. Headstrong and resistant to coercion, Marshall was again on the move, drifting in and out of familial memories until 1973, when Manson and his killers were two years into their life sentences.
The most vivid vignette in the Marshall archive occurred in June that year. It was to be the last encounter my father would have with his son. At 29 years old, my brother stepped out of the shadows to materialise on my parents’ front doorstep in Houston, Texas. The oppressive heat rendered him shirtless under denim dungarees, and barefoot – a striking figure wrapped in a tattered blanket, caught between past and present. Beneath the nest of hair and unkempt beard, familiar copper eyes gleamed, and my father was pleased to see him.
Marshall was warmly welcomed into the home. My father introduced him to my mother, and showed off his new baby daughter. Marshall stayed a few days, and my mother remembers how gentle he was with my sister, helping to feed her, wiping her chin.
“Dad’s a quiet man, isn’t he?” Marshall said to my mother, a plastic spoon of apple sauce held aloft. She nodded. Yes, she agreed that he was. “We Potters are a quiet bunch,” he said as my sister’s little mouth opened for her spoonful.
After a week he announced his departure. My father’s corporate job was a big source of contention. Marshall’s dubious life choices were disapproved of, sparking defensiveness on his part. A bitter argument followed. Two generations clashed at the kitchen table. My father embodied the principled, archaic America built on religious faith, conformity, academic success and stoicism. The lost Harvard opportunity still stung. Marshall, however, came to the table as a member of a damaged generation in search of change and cultural freedom by taking a stand against conservative ideals and middle-class values. I’m told he called my father a “corporate whore”.
“This is my life. This is how I will live it,” my brother asserted, forefinger pressing on the table.
And so, on the way to the bus station, the last time my father would ever be with Marshall, my brother demanded to be dropped off in a layby along the Katy Freeway. The car door slammed shut. As my father drove away, his rear-view mirror caught sight of a painted van pulling over. His son got in. I often think how strange it must be to see your child disappear into a void, spirited away in a dubious-looking vehicle spattered with graffiti.
August 1981. One summer evening, my sister and I were playing in the garden. It had been a warm afternoon and we were still running through the sprinkler as the day waned. The phone rang, my father answered, his demeanour shifting as he pressed his ear to a familiar voice laden with distress and urgency.
“Dad, I’ve done something stupid.”
We heard my father’s tone change between long silences. Then he called for my mother. My sister and I looked at each other. Something was wrong. Someone named Marshall needed help, money for a lawyer.
In the early 1980s, ongoing investigations scrutinised anyone who might be linked to Charles Manson, and Marshall was caught in that trawling net. The shadow of the Manson murders loomed large. Victims’ families were still grappling with the aftermath of those horrifying events, and law enforcement was desperate for answers regarding potential connections between Manson associates and contemporary cases of violent crimes taking place in New York. Many individuals linked to Manson or anyone within his organisation were apprehended and scrutinised. To me and my sister, however, none of this made sense. My parents discussed it at length, long after we had gone to bed, and it wasn’t until a few days later that I summoned up the courage to ask my father who Marshall was.
But, after that phone call, all things Marshall fell deathly and irrevocably silent.
It was 11 September 2002, and my husband and I, newly embarked on our teacher training, found ourselves at home in our London studio flat. The television news that evening was centred on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. We watched as representatives from more than 90 countries arrived in New York City, their sombre presence interspersed with haunting footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. The profound sense of vulnerability that had enveloped the world’s greatest superpower struck a chord with me – as though it mirrored a similar vulnerability in my father. This was also the year he would turn 80, and, over the coming months, I felt a sense of urgency to reassess unresolved questions about his past.
Over the years, Marshall had never been far from my mind. Still drifting in and out of our lives, my brother would appear by way of a photograph unearthed in a drawer, or a casual mention in conversation would trigger an anecdote. That evening, the mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg lighting the eternal flame in Battery Park was that trigger. The desire to reconnect, to remember, to unravel the mysteries surrounding my brother’s life launched me on a quest to find him for myself. Apart from asking distant relatives, I didn’t know where to start.
In August 2003, a groundbreaking network called MySpace heralded a new age of online socialising. On the persuasion of a friend, I set up an account. It occurred to me that MySpace might be a way of finding my mysterious lost brother. I still wanted answers; to find out what happened to him after that phone call.
My search yielded many Marshall Potters, none of them mine, and it looked like a dead end. I turned to archive sites until I found one offering access to official documents, national census information and addresses. It claimed to have a Marshall Potter on its records. Embedded in documents and certificates, I finally unearthed my brother. His birth date matched, but there was also an additional date, the other bookend to a life: 14 September 1995. I couldn’t help but think about my father fleshing out that shadowy figure at the kitchen table nine years earlier. There had been a six-month deadline to find him and I was eight years too late.
About a month later, the postman arrived with a document that required my signature. When I held the envelope in my hands, I felt a mixture of dread and anticipation. I was hoping Marshall’s death certificate would provide me with the closure I needed. For a long while I didn’t want to open it. A part of me didn’t want to know the cause of his death. Marshall would have been 51 at the time, and I could only speculate at a heart attack or misadventure. When I finally read it, the certificate told a different story. Date: 14/09/1995. Time: 04:00. Cause of death: gunshot wound to head and brain. No pending investigation, concluded suicide.
For a long time, I found myself at odds with how my father let his only son vanish down the barrel of a gun. Still, he was upset by the news of Marshall’s suicide, enough so that my mother rang to tell me not to discuss it any further. I was frustrated by this stubborn reluctance to talk. Surely, together, we could cauterise this wound; it would be of help to my father, and me, towards a positive understanding. Or perhaps my mother was right to shoo me away. Perhaps the news had weakened a dam restricting the flow of a regret too big to control. It’s no secret that my father’s generation had a removed regard to parenting, the misguided assumption that Marshall, being male, would survive, would “rally round” and “step up”; an ethos that a 1950s military school would, no doubt, brutally uphold with pride. So often I’d think of Marshall, gun poised to his temple, about to launch himself into another world where he’s no longer broken. It still feels strange to mourn someone I’ve never met, yet my DNA tells me I do.
When my father died in 2007, it brought a profound sense of loss, not just of him, but also of Marshall. My father never had the opportunity to make amends, something I’m sure he lamented. I often reflect on my father’s decisions and the societal norms that influenced him. Was my father simply a product of his time? Was Marshall a casualty of his? In the future, will our children, decades from now, look back at our parenting choices and say to us: you got that wrong?
In today’s digital age, rife with toxic influencers preying on our vulnerable children, the relevance of my father and Marshall’s story becomes more acute. At its heart lies the need to communicate with our children, to satiate the craving to belong and be understood. As a parent, I will embrace this responsibility, for I know the implications of inaction are far too great.