Young Marilyn Manson

Marilyn Manson, then known by his given name, Brian Warner, first came to prominence as a teenager in his home town of Canton, Ohio. When his high school, Glen Oaks, launched a radio station, Warner, who had previously worked on the school newspaper, was invited to host the lunch-time show, 'What's Happening, Canton?' "I knew Brian from church youth groups," recalls high school contemporary Tracy Ebert. "He was incredibly po-faced but essentially harmless. Given the choice, you probably wouldn't have wanted to listen to him but, at that time, I don't think anyone found him especially objectionable. Nobody wanted to punch him or anything." Ensconced in his basement studio, Brian spent his lunch-hours warning his fellow students against the consequences of glue sniffing or skate-boarding down the corridors. "He had all of these catch-phrases," remembers Tracy fondly. "He'd always say, 'You know folks, that's not a rule someone's just made up to annoy you - if you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense!' It got that most of the kids could anticipate what he was going to say and finish his sentences for him. They'd shout back at him or throw things at the speakers. He wasn't exactly hated at that point, though. I think most of us kind of liked him, really. That was before Michelle Studmeyer got involved and ruined everything. She was his Yoko."

Michelle's initial contribution to the radio show, a semi-improvised horoscope, was abandoned after three weeks. "It was full of right-on stuff about self-empowerment," recalls Tracy. "Like, 'Leo, today you conquer your inhibitions' or 'Sagittarius, how can you expect to be loved when you refuse to love yourself?' It was actually kind of creepy and hateful." The slot was cancelled after pressure from the school's Aquarians who had noticed that premonitions for their sign were invariably baleful. "Every day it was, like, 'Aquarius, why do you keep ignoring the voice of your conscience?' Everyone else was beautiful but Aquarians had to take a long, hard look at themselves." Responding to complaints, Michelle apologised for an "unintentional bias" tearfully acknowledging that "someone has hurt me very badly". This was assumed to be a reference to (Aquarian) ex-boyfriend Terry Hibbert, who cheerfully admitted responsibility for breaking Michelle's heart, adding in mitigation that "she's a fruitcake". The daily horoscope was jettisoned, but Michelle lingered.

Surviving tapes of the show provide an emphatic, if indistinct, record of Michelle's escalating influence on proceedings. Her initial interventions are hesitant: "Do you mind if I add something here, Brian?" she asks on an early recording as Brian, somewhat awkwardly, alludes to the short skirts favoured by prominent female clique. "Shelley Robson's a lovely girl and, personally, I think it's terribly sad that she feels she has to flaunt herself." Weeks later, she interrupts an admonishment against rowdy behaviour in the male toilets to fume, "When Mike Fischer sticks someone's head down a toilet, it reflects badly on the entire school community." After a crackling pause, Brian adds, "Well, Mike Fischer can consider himself named and shamed," the first use of the phrase with which Marilyn Manson is still primarily associated in Canton. Over the course of one surviving episode, he uses it on twenty seven separate occasions. "I'm afraid some characters will never learn," he starts with sombre relish, the falteringly pedantic delivery of earlier shows replaced by a grim self-assurance, "so they'll just have to be named and shamed." He then proceeds through a list of scofflaws and details of their offences - ranging from reckless skate-boarding to subjecting his grand-mother to prank phone calls - while Michelle eggs him on in the background, her voice occasionally rising to a squawk of indignation

"It was classic case of folie a deux," recalls Tracy. "Without Michelle's encouragement, Brian would have just bumbled on endearingly. Unfortunately, he became a monster. I actually tried to warn him, but he named and shamed me. Honestly, he was hated. Kids would be pounding on the door of the studio, looking to lynch him - the police were called more than once - but he kept right on talking." Matters came to a head over the course of a momentous week in April, 1986. On the Sunday morning, Michelle, an avidly proselytising vegetarian, woke up to find her front porch spattered with what police later identified as animal viscera. "It was like Altamont," she wailed the next day on a show dominated by the attack. Tuesday's show was similarly themed, though Brian briefly digressed to name and shame a school caretaker Michelle had spotted leafing through top-shelf magazines in a 7-11 ("and what I want to know, Brian, is how I'm supposed to feel if I see Eric looking at me"). Glen Oaks principal, Michael Stone, later conceded that, had it not been for the "meat incident" he would have taken them both off the air immediately. Instead he demanded that they broadcast an unequivocal retraction and, for future shows, specifically forbade any combination of the words 'name' and 'shame' in the same sentence. His half-hearted intervention came too late: on Wednesday, making his way home, possibly still brooding over the mortification of having to deliver an on-air apology, Brian was seized by two men and bundled into the boot of a car.

"An elderly woman witnessed the abduction from her apartment window and called the police immediately," recalls Lawrence Stokes of the Canton Police Department. "Unfortunately, she struggled to provide a description of either of the men or their vehicle." Over the course of the next week, seventeen individuals including Terry Hibbert, Eric Ross, the pornography browsing caretaker, and, intriguingly, Michelle's father, Roger Studmeyer, were questioned in relation to Brian's disappearance. Speculation about Mr Studmeyer's involvement intensified when officers emerged from a routine search of his house with firearms, a computer and eight large boxes. "When a child goes missing you have to pursue every lead," explains Stokes. "We had it on pretty good authority that Roger Studmeyer wasn't especially thrilled about Brian's interest in his daughter.We also had to examine the possibility that Brian might have been involved in the desecration of the Studmeyer porch." Studmeyer, a high school counsellor, was sufficiently concerned by gossip associating him with Brian's abduction to write to the Canton Repository categorically denying any involvement. Tellingly, though, asked by a Repository reporter to provide an assessment of Brian's character, he replied with a terse "no comment".

Officers working on the case were almost unanimously of the opinion that Brian's disappearance was linked to his relationship with Michelle. "I went through Brian's journals," says Stokes, "and it was evident that he was besotted with her. It might be overstating things to say that he was stalking her but he was certainly more aware of what she was doing than she probably appreciated." Most pertinently, Brian knew that she had secretly resumed her 'friendship' with Terry Hibbert. "He was beside himself." say Stokes who remains convinced that Brian was responsible for the attack on the Studmeyer porch. "On Saturday afternoon, he actually disguised himself in a trench-coat and a fedora and followed Michelle and Terry around the state fair - it's in his journal - when they went onto the Love Train, he was sitting in the carriage behind them. It's like something out of Hitchcock. Hours later, after he's had time to mull things over, her porch is covered in entrails. I'm sorry: this isn't fiction and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when a guy wakes up next to a corpse with a smoking gun in his hand, there's no twist in the tale - he's the killer." *

On the second Sunday after Brian's abduction, his parents' church hosted a vigil at which friends could pray for his safe return. "It was surprisingly well attended," says Tracy Ebert. "When something bad happens to someone, no-one likes to acknowledge the fact that they couldn't stand him. If anything, I think everyone over-compensated: it was an exercise in hypocrisy, really, but it was nice for his parents." Only Michelle deviated from the spirit of the occasion, appearing arm in arm with Terry Hibbert. "It was incredibly tactless," remembers Tracy. "I mean, Michelle ticked all the boxes - she lit a candle, she stared at Brian's picture, she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief - but she might as well have brought a monkey with her. Terry Hibbert just didn't know how to conduct himself. He still doesn't, to tell you the truth. Remember, this is someone who once threw eggs at a wedding party. He exchanged high fives with his buddies, he cracked jokes. He actually caressed Michelle's ass while she was trying to talk to Brian's mother. It was excruciating."

The Canton Police Department, meanwhile, had been inundated with reported sightings of Brian. "It goes with the territory," says Lawrence Stokes. "Any cop will tell you that there's direct correlation between one person going missing and a dozen nuts popping up to tell you they've seen him. For whatever reason, the Warner abduction attracted an inordinate level of interest. Of course, you have to follow every lead." Stokes was particularly irritated by the persistent calls of a local woman, Barbara Wallace, who claimed that Brian had appeared to her in dreams. "She was a crackpot, but we had to indulge her because she'd managed to insinuate herself with Brian's parents. Whenever we went to the Warner house, she'd be there with her sketch-pad and dream journal." At Wallace's prompting, officers returned to the Studmeyer house and partially excavated the basement. Roger Studmeyer, dismayed by the renewed speculation, suffered a mild heart attack while remonstrating with a Repository photographer who had followed him to work. Happily, his ordeal by suspicion was soon to end. The next day, three weeks to the day after his abduction, Brian re-appeared.

John and Shelley Palmer, walking their mastiff, Tess, in the woodland that skirts the northern periphery of Canton, were surprised by a the appearance of a face peering at them from the undergrowth. "What a fright he gave us!" remembers Shelley. "I can't really explain it, but there was something unnatural about his appearance. Normally, Tess was the most placid of dogs, but she didn't know what to do with herself. First she growled, then she whimpered and finally she just turned tail." The Palmers, who recognised Brian from photographs in the Repository, alerted nearby park rangers who spent the better part of an hour trying to coax him into the open. "He threw sticks at them, he bit them.... He was pretty much feral," says Shelley who watched the pursuit from a safe distance. "Eventually, they dragged him out of a tree and bundled him into a net."

Malnourished and completely shaved, Brian was otherwise physically unharmed. The only blemish on his body was the letter 'M' tattooed onto his left shoulder blade. The psychological damage, however, was immediately evident. "He couldn't speak," recalls Stokes, "and, what's more, he didn't seem to understand what we were saying to him." For the next six months, he underwent extensive therapy in Madison House, a Maryland institution that specialises in the care of traumatised children. "After a month or so, he started talking again," says Stokes, "but we never got anything out him. I wouldn't say he was unco-operative, but I always got the impression that he remembered more than he was letting on." Brian, recovering steadily, spent the latter part of his stay in Madison House helping in the kitchen and working on a mural that remains on the wall of the facility's east wing. He might have been remembered as a model patient were it not for the occasions on which he was observed slyly goading some of the younger children on his ward. "He was pleasant enough when there were adults in the vicinity," says Stokes, "if anything a bit too pleasant - but, for whatever reason the staff were wary of leaving him alone with the other kids." This trait, inconceivable to any of Brian's lunch-time listeners, might have accounted for the discharge the senior Warners and his frequent visitors from the Canon Police Department all considered premature.

"Brian once asked me to a Laurel and Hardy movie," says Tracy Ebert. "It was a year or so before he went missing. Marilyn Manson fans might find it hard to believe, but he was crazy about them. He used to go to conventions all over the state with his grandfather. I turned up with my friend Karen Shaw and he was there with all of these old guys in these little red hats, you know, fezes. Karen was beside herself, she was like, 'Oh, God, Brian Warner's a Shriner.' She could hardly stand for laughing. I mean, I was laughing, too. I couldn't help myself. They all started singing this goofy song and Brian looked as if he wanted the ground to swallow him up. We had to leave: it was terrible. If I close my eyes, I can still see him, looking sadly after us. That's the way I remember Brian. I don't know what happened to him, but he changed. After he got back, I used to see him flapping through the mall in his black coat and these enormous boots. I'd say 'hi' to him, but he'd just look through me. It was strange. I don't think he was snubbing me, exactly. I honestly don't think he even knew who I was."

* Tracy Ebert insists that Stokes is mistaken. "A lot of people know who dumped meat on Michelle's porch. I'm not saying anymore but I can assure you, it certainly wasn't Brian Warner."

 

 

A young Marilyn Manson

 

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