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The Full Story on Charles Manson
Murder!
Quiet and secluded is just what the young movie star wanted. The canyons
above Beverly Hills were far enough away from the noisy glitz of
Hollywood to afford some privacy and space. Sharon Tate loved this place
on Cielo Drive. To her it meant romance - romance with the man of her
dreams and the father of her child, director Roman Polanski.
It was cooler up there too, which was especially refreshing on that hot
muggy Saturday night, the 9th of August 1969. The beautiful young woman
kept herself company with her attractive and sophisticated friends:
Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress and her boyfriend Voytek Frykowski,
and an internationally known hair stylist Jay Sebring.
Sharon was eight months pregnant and very lonely for her husband who was
away in Europe working on a film. Impromptu gatherings like this one on
a weekend night were not at all unusual.
The house was deliberately secluded but not completely insecure.
Approximately 100 feet from the house was a locked gate and on the
property was a guesthouse inhabited by an able-bodied young caretaker.
That night the Kotts, Sharon’s nearest neighbors who lived about 100
yards away, thought they heard a few gunshots coming from the direction
of Sharon’s property sometime between 12:30 and 1 A.M. But since they
heard nothing else, they went to bed.
Around the same time, Tim Ireland who was supervising a camp-out less
than a mile away heard a chilling scream: "Oh, God, no, please don’t!
Oh, God, no, don’t, don’t…"
He drove around the area, but found nothing unusual.
Nearby Emmett Steele’s dogs went into a barking frenzy somewhere
between 2 and 3 A.M. He got out of bed and looked around, but found
nothing amiss and went back to bed.
Robert Bullington, a member of a private security patrol hired by some
of the wealthy property owners, thought he heard several gunshots a
little after 4 A.M. and called his headquarters. Headquarters, in turn,
called Los Angeles Police Department, known as LAPD, to report the
disturbance. The LAPD officer said: "I hope we don’t have a murder; we
just had a woman-screaming call in that area."
Winifred Chapman, Sharon Tate’s housekeeper, got to the main gate of
the house a little after 8 A.M. She noticed what looked like a fallen
telephone wire hanging over the gate. She pushed the gate control
mechanism and it swung open. As she walked up to the house, she saw an
unfamiliar white Rambler parked in the driveway.
When she got to the house, she took the housekey from its hiding place
and unlocked the back door. Once inside the kitchen, she picked up the
telephone and confirmed that it was a telephone wire that had fallen,
completely knocking out all phone service. As she made her way toward
the living room, she noticed that the front door was open and that there
were splashes of red everywhere. Looking out the front door, she saw a
couple of pools of blood and what appeared to be a body on the lawn.
She shrieked and ran back through the house and down the driveway,
passing close enough to the Rambler to see that there was yet another
body inside the car. She ran over to the Kotts and banged on the door,
but they were not home, so she ran to the next house and did the same
thing, screaming hysterically.
LAPD Officer Jerry DeRosa arrived first. He walked up to the Rambler and
found a young man slumped toward the passenger side, drenched in blood.
At this point, Officer William Whisenhunt joined DeRosa. The two
officers, with guns drawn searched the other automobiles and the garage,
while a third officer Robert Burbridge caught up with them.
There on the beautifully manicured lawn with its magnificent panorama of
Los Angeles lay two bodies. One was a white man that appeared to be in
his thirties. Someone had battered in his head and face, while savagely
puncturing the rest of his body with dozens of wounds.
The other body was that of a young woman with long brown hair lying in a
full-length nightgown with multiple stab wounds.
The three officers cautiously approached the house. No telling what or
who may be waiting in there for them. It would have been foolhardy for
all of them to enter through the front door. However, as they went near
the front door, they saw that one of the front window screens had been
removed. Whisenhunt found an open window on the side of the house where
he and Burbridge made their entry.
Once the other two officers were inside, DeRosa approached the front
door. On the lower half of the door, he saw scrawled in blood the word
"PIG." In the hallway they found two large steamer trunks, a pair of
horned rimmed glasses and pieces of a broken gun grip.
Then when they reached the couch, they were in for a real shock. A young
blond woman, very pregnant, was lying on the floor, smeared all over
with blood, a rope around her neck that extended over a rafter in the
ceiling. The other end of the rope was around the neck of a man lying
nearby, also drenched in blood.
As they looked through the rest of the house they heard a man’s voice
and the sound of a dog. It was William Garretson the caretaker. The
officers handcuffed him and put him under arrest.
Later that Saturday night, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and Susan
Struthers, Rosemary s 21-year-old daughter, drove back from vacation
trailering their boat. They dropped off Susan at her apartment and
drove home to 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz area of L.A. They
stopped to pick up a newspaper between 1 and 2 A.M.
It wasn t until the next day that anybody came to the house to see them.
Frank Struthers, Rosemary s son by a previous marriage, got a ride
home. Around 8:30 P.M., as he carried his camping equipment up the
driveway, he noticed things that worried him. First the speedboat was
still in the driveway. It was very unlike his stepfather not to put the
boat in the garage. Then Frank noticed that all the window shades were
down -- something his parents never did.
He knocked on the door, but got no answer, so he went to a pay phone and
called, but again with no response. He finally got in touch with his
sister, who came with her boyfriend to their parents’ house.
Frank and the boyfriend found the back door open. They left Susan in the
kitchen until they had a chance to look around. When the two young men
walked into the living room, they saw Leno in his pajamas, lying with a
pillow over his head and a cord around his neck. Something was sticking
out from his stomach
They rushed out of the house, dragging Susan with them and called the
police at the neighbors’ house.
Soon an ambulance and police cars arrived. Leno was found with a
blood-drenched pillowcase over his head and the cord of a large lamp
tied tightly around his neck. His hands had been tied behind him with a
leather thong. A carving fork protruded from his stomach and the word
"WAR" had been carved in his flesh.
In the master bedroom, they found his wife Rosemary lying on the floor,
her nightgown up over her head. She too had a pillowcase over her head
and a lamp cord tied tightly around her neck.
In three places in the house, there was writing which appeared to be in
the victims’ blood: on the living room wall, "DEATH TO PIGS;" on
another wall in the living room, the single word "RISE;" and in the
refrigerator door, "HEALTHER SKELTER," misspelled.
The Slaughtered
Eventually, all of the victims of the massacre at Sharon Tate’s home
were identified. The young man in the car was a teenager named Steve
Parent who had come to visit Garretson, the caretaker. The two victims
found outside the house were Abigail Folger and her lover, Voytek
Frykowski. In the living room joined by rope were Sharon Tate and Jay
Sebring.
A .22 caliber gun had shot Steve Parent, Jay Sebring and Voytek
Frykowski. Of the five victims, all but Steve Parent had been stabbed
repeatedly. Sebring had been hit in the face and Frykowski had been
repeatedly hit on the head with a blunt object.
The stab wounds suggested that only one knife had been used for the
wounds. The nature of the wounds indicated that something like a bayonet
was the weapon. A strange knife, a Buck brand clasp-type pocketknife
that the housekeeper could not identify was found very close to Sharon
Tate’s body.
Sharon Tate had been a beauty all of her life. Even as a child she had
won beauty contests. But her ambition was not to be a model but a movie
actress. Finally in 1963 at the age of 22 she found a sponsor in
Producer Martin Ransohoff. With Ransohoff’s help, she landed parts in
the series Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction, and the movies
The Americanization of Emily and The Sandpiper.
In 1965, she got her chance at her first feature role in the Eye of the
Devil with David Niven and Deborah Kerr. In this movie she played the
part of a country girl with special magical powers. While in London in
the summer of 1966 for the filming of the movie, she met Roman Polanski,
who had just made his mark as a director of the movie Repulsion with
Catherine Deneuve and Cul de Sac, which had won many European film
awards.
Polanski put Sharon as the lead in his campy film The Fearless Vampire
Killers. During this period she became Polanski s lover. This
relationship lasted quite a long time and shortly after the filming of
Rosemary’s Baby, he and Sharon married. In 1969, they rented the house
on Cielo Drive from Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son and moved in
mid-February.
Sharon’s career never skyrocketed the way Polanski’s did even with
her role of Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls. A good part of the reason
her career was going nowhere is that she never had an opportunity to
show off whatever acting skills she had. All the roles she had were ones
in which all she had to do was look pretty. Her career took a backseat
when she became pregnant. The baby and her husband became the center of
her life.
She was a unique lady according to most everyone who knew her. In spite
of her beauty and remarkable figure, she was a very down-to-earth woman
with none of the phoniness normally associated with starlets. She was
very sweet and a bit on the naïve side. Everyone seemed to like Sharon
even in a jealous, bitchy town like Hollywood.
Sharon’s life was ended by five stab wounds in her chest and back,
which penetrated her heart, lungs and liver and caused massive internal
hemorrhaging. The remaining eleven wounds simply added insult to her
savaged body.
Her little boy, Paul Richard Polanski, died with her.
Abigail Folger, Sharon’s friend was twenty-five years old when she
died. As heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, she had led a very
comfortable life. She made her debut in San Francisco in 1961. She
graduated from Radcliffe. Like many wealthy girls, she looked for
something meaningful to do with her time and became very involved in
social work.
In 1968, she met her lover Voytek Frykowski who introduced her to Sharon
and Roman Polanski. She became an investor in Jay Sebring’s men’s
toiletries and hair styling business.
Her social work in the ghettos of Los Angeles was beginning to get to
her.
She started to feel that her contribution was futile in combatting the
enormous problems of ignorance and poverty. She told her friends that
she couldn’t get away from her work at the end of the day. "The
suffering gets under your skin," she said.
Her relationship with Frykowski was also a source of concern to her. The
two of them had become much too dependent upon drugs. Both the
frustrations of her social work and her problems with Voytek were the
subject of her almost daily conversations with a psychiatrist. She had
just about built up enough strength to break off her love affair and try
to get her life back on track when twenty-eight stab wounds intervened.
Voytek Frykowski was thirty-two when he died. He had been a long- time
friend of Roman’s from Poland. He was, according to Polanski, "a man
of little talent but immense charm." Always a playboy, he had no visible
means of support, essentially living off Abigail’s money. While he
told people he was a writer, there was no evidence that he was anything
but a very charming, extroverted and entertaining "druggie."
However dissipated his life was or charming his personality, it came to
an abrupt end with two gunshot wounds, thirteen blows to the head and
fifty-one stab wounds.
Jay Sebring was quite the opposite career-wise from Frykowski. He was
the top men’s hairstylist in the U.S. and was a major force in the
development of a market for men’s hair products and toiletries. His
customers included Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, George Peppard, Paul
Newman and Steve McQueen. His new company, Sebring International would
franchise men’s hair styling shops and his line of hair products.
He was known as a ladies man and dated many different women. One of
those women had at one time been Sharon Tate, who broke off her
relationship with Sebring when she became involved with Polanski.
There was another, darker side to Sebring’s exuberant sex life. He
would tie up his girlfriends and occasionally whip them before they had
sex. In spite of his flashy, successful outward life, there was reason
to suspect that the real Jay Sebring was lonley and insecure.
A gunshot wound and seven stab wounds liberated him from his
insecurities.
Aside from Sharon Tate’s baby, the youngest victim was 18-year-old
Steven Earl Parent who lived with his father, mother and siblings in El
Monte. At around 11:45 P.M. Saturday night,
Parent had come onto the estate to visit William Garretson, the
caretaker who was living in the guesthouse. Parent’s hobby was hi-fi
equipment and he wanted to show Garretson a radio he brought with him.
Garretson wasn’t interested and Parent left the guesthouse around
12:15 A.M.
The young man had just graduated from high school in June and worked
several jobs so that he could go to college in the fall.
Instead he got four bullets from a .22 caliber revolver.
Leno LaBianca was a respectable businessman. His father was the founder
of State Wholesale Grocery Company and Leno went into the family
business right out of college. He was a man who was well liked and did
not appear to have any enemies. People described him as a quiet,
conservative person
He died from the multiple stab wounds, twenty- six in all.
Rosemary LaBianca was an attractive 38-year- old woman of Mexican
origin. She had been orphaned as a child and later adopted when she was
twelve. She had worked as a carhop and a waitress. She met her first
husband in the 1940’s and had two children. After they were divorced
in 1958,she met Leno when she was a waitress at the Los Feliz Inn.
Rosemary had become a very successful businesswoman. Not only did she
run the profitable Boutique Carriage, but also her prudent investments
in securities and commodities left her with an estate of $2.6 million.
Not bad for someone who started life with no advantages and spent most
of her career as a waitress and carhop.
She had been stabbed forty-one times, six of which were enough to have
caused her death.
On two consecutive nights, seven innocent adults and one unborn child
lost their lives in what seemed to be a senseless, motiveless crime.
However one feels about the lifestyles of the wealthy and glamorous, it
is hard to imagine any social good coming from these vicious murders.
Yet over the years, the perpetrators of these crimes and their
persistent followers have tried to suggest that these killings were
necessary and desirable.
This author hopes that nobody finishing this story will agree.
Suspicion
In his very thorough book on the case, Helter Skelter, Prosecutor
Vincent Bugliosi heaps a great deal of fault upon the homicide
detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department. One of the examples he
provides is LAPD’s slowness to connect the Tate murders with the
LaBianca murders the following night and with the murder of Gary Hinman
a few days earlier. Some of this fault on the part of LAPD apparently
stemmed from its lack of cooperation with the Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Office.
LAPD was approached shortly after the Tate-LaBianca murders by 2 LA
Sheriff’s Office detectives who told them of the July 31 murder of
music teacher Gary Hinman. On the wall of the dead man’s living room
was written in his own blood "POLITICAL PIGGY," which seemed very
similar to the words written at the both the Tate and the LaBianca
crimes scenes. Also, Hinman had been stabbed to death as had victims at
the Tate and LaBianca homes.
Amazingly enough, the LAPD detectives refused to examine any connection
between the deaths of Hinman and the people at the Tate house.
Furthermore, the LaBianca murders were squarely in the territory of the
LA Sheriff’s Office and LAPD had no interest.
Had the LAPD detectives bothered to listen to the LA Sheriff’s Office
detectives, they would have heard that the Sheriff’s Office had
arrested a Bobby Beausoleil for the Hinman murder who was living with a
bunch of hippies led by Charles Manson. But, LAPD had already decided
that the Tate murders were a result of a drug deal gone bad and didn’t
want to hear about any hippies.
On the other hand, LAPD had in custody one William Garretson, the
caretaker on the Tate estate who claimed that he slept through the
entire bloody ordeal. The case against the frightened young man never
materialized after he passed a polygraph test.
Officials essentially discounted robbery as a motive for the crimes,
even though Rosemary LaBianca s wallet and wristwatch were missing. In
the two homes of these affluent victims there were many items of value,
which had not been touched by the killers. Small amounts of cash lying
around the Tate home were still in evidence and the purses and wallets
of the Tate victims were intact.
LAPD did investigate three alleged dope dealers that had once crashed a
party at the Polanski’s, but one by one the men were cleared of any
involvement.
Likewise, Roman Polanski was interviewed for hours by the police and
agreed to a polygraph examination. On August 15, he returned for the
first time since the murders to the house on Cielo Drive, accompanied by
psychic Peter Hurkos.
Polanski had been devastated by the loss of his wife and son and was
enraged at the media circus that he walked into when he got back to the
States. He lashed out at the newspapers for suggesting that he and his
wife were Satanists, indulging in sex and drug orgies. "Sharon," he
said, "was so sweet and so lovely that I didn’t believe that people
like that existed…She was beautiful without phoniness. She was
fantastic. She loved me and the last few years I spent with her were the
only time of true happiness in my life…"
He worried to the police that perhaps he was the target not Sharon. "It
could be some kind of jealousy or plot or something. It couldn’t be
Sharon directly." Polanski did not believe that drugs were a motive for
the crimes. His wife, although she had experimented with LSD before they
met, was not a big drug user. "I can tell you without question," he told
the police. "She took no drugs at all, except for pot, and not too much
of that. And during her pregnancy there was no question, she was so in
love with her pregnancy she would do nothing. I’d pour a glass of wine
and she wouldn’t touch it."
One month after the murders, Polanski, along with other contributors
such as Peter Sellers, Yul Brynner and Warren Beatty, put an ad in the
LA area newspapers for a reward:
REWARD
$25,0000
Roman Polanski and friends of the Polanski family offer to pay a $25,000
reward to the person or persons who furnish information leading to the
arrest and conviction of the murderer or murderers of Sharon Tate, her
unborn child, and the other four victims.
It seemed like it was open season on theories. Everybody had a theory.
The Mafia did it, the Polish secret police, etc. Sharon’s father,
Colonel Paul Tate, a former Army intelligence officer, launched his own
private investigation. Letting his hair grow long and growing a beard,
he started to frequent the hippie joints, the drug markets, hoping that
he would get some tidbit of information that would lead to the murderers
of his beloved daughter and grandson.
On September 1, 1969, 10-year-old Steven Weiss found a gun on his lawn
in Sherman Oaks. He carefully took the .22 caliber Hi Standard Longhorn
revolver to his father, who immediately called LAPD. The gun was dirty
and rusty and had a broken gun grip.
A couple of weeks earlier, the LAPD forensics experts determined that
the .22 caliber revolver with the broken grip used on the Tate victims
was none other than a Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver which
was relatively unique and rare. Amazingly enough, two weeks later, an
identical gun with a broken grip is turned in to LAPD, tagged, filed
away and completely forgotten.
A couple of days later, LAPD sent out flyers to all personnel describing
the murder gun and attaching a photo of the revolver. The flyer was also
sent out to other law enforcement agencies around the country and
Canada, while all the time, the gun sat in the Property Section of the
Van Nuys division.
Three months after the murders, which had been separately pursued by
LAPD and the LA Sheriff’s Office, neither group had made any progress.
However, the detectives working for the Sheriff’s Office were younger
and more aggressive than their LAPD counterparts and came to the
conclusion that the Tate and LaBianca cases were definitely connected.
They had several suspects, one of which was Charles Manson.
Finally in mid-October, LAPD began to talk to the Sheriff’s Office and
decided to investigate similarities between the murder of Gary Hinman
and the Tate-LaBianca crimes. The investigation lead to the Spahn Ranch,
which was the home of a hippie group that called itself the Manson
Family.
The Spahn Ranch was in the mountains near Chatsworth. In the 1920’s it
had been the site for old cowboy movies. Author John Gilmore in his book
The Garbage People describes the isolated old movie set:
The façade of the main street, a cluster of rundown movie buildings,
had become a ghost town with its Longhorn Saloon, the Rock City Café,
some stables, weathered props and old trailers. Millions of moviegoers
once viewed this old "Wild West" setting, but the dust had settled.
Rusted car parts littered the grounds and few visitors passed by…
Bobby Beausoleil, the man charged with the murder of Gary Hinman, had
lived at the Spahn Ranch with the Manson Family.
His girlfriend, 17-year-old Kitty Lutesinger, told police that Manson
sent Bobby and a girl named Susan Atkins to Hinman’s house to get
money from him. When Hinman wouldn’t give them the money, they killed
him. Lutesinger also recalled that Susan Atkins mentioned a fight with a
man who she stabbed in the legs several times.
When police questioned Susan Atkins, who was still in jail, she admitted
that she went with Beausoleil to Hinman’s home to get some money he
had inherited. When he refused, Beausoleil slashed his face. The two of
them kept Hinman prisoner in his home until Beausoleil murdered him a
couple of days later.
At that point there did not seem to be any direct connection between
Beausoleil and the Tate-LaBianca murders, except for some hearsay that
Susan Atkins had stabbed a man in the leg. Gary Hinman had not been
stabbed in the leg, but Voytek Frykowski had.
Confession
While she was awaiting trial for the murder of Gary Hinman, Susan Atkins
was placed in the Sybil Brand Institute, L.A.’s women’s house of
detention. Her bed was next to that of a thirty- one-year-old former
call girl named Ronnie Howard. Another inmate, Virginia Graham, was a
close friend of Ronnie’s. Susan Atkins was a real talker. She had an
almost unbelievable story that Ronnie and Virginia listened to with
absolute amazement.
Atkins acted like a nut case: dancing and singing at the oddest times,
oblivious to the seriousness of the charges against her and bubbling
over with laughter and delight without any apparent reason.
In the course of conversation, Susan told Virginia that she was in for
first degree murder.
"Did you do it?" Virginia wanted to know.
"Sure," Susan answered as though it were the most natural response in
the world. But, the police thought that she only held Hinman while Bob
Beausoleil stabbed him. In reality, Susan said, it was she who stabbed
Hinman while Beausoleil held him.
She also told Virginia that her lover Charlie was Jesus Christ and he
was going to lead her to a hole in the earth in Death Valley where there
was a civilization down there. After hearing that story, Virginia was
convinced that Atkins was completely nuts.
Several days later on November 6, Susan was again in a talky mood and
mentioned the Sharon Tate murder. "You know who did it don’t you?
Virginia said she didn’t.
"Well, you’re looking at her."
Virginia was horrified and asked why she did such a thing.
"Because we wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the
world would have to stand up and take notice."
Atkins went on to explain that they selected the Tate house because it
was isolated. Susan said they knew who the owner was but they didn’t
know or care who would be at the house that night.
Susan explained that there were four of them, three girls and a man, all
of whom had been given their instructions by Charlie. When they got to
the gate, the man cut the telephone wires. Next they shot the teenager
four times because he had seen them.
When they got in the house, Susan said that in the living room there was
a man on the couch and a woman on the chair reading. Then some of
Susan’s group stayed in the living room, while Susan went into the
bedroom where Sharon was sitting on the bed talking to Jay Sebring. They
quickly put nooses over Sharon and Jay’s heads so that if they moved
they would choke.
Frykowski ran for the door. "He was full of blood," she said and claimed
that she had stabbed him three or four times. "He was bleeding and he
ran to the front part, and would you believe that he was there hollering
‘Help, help, somebody please help me,’ and nobody came? Then we
finished him off."
"Sharon was the last to die," Susan said with a laugh as she described
how Sharon was begging her, " Please don’t kill me. Please don’t
kill me. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby.
I want to have my baby."
Susan said she just looked at Sharon straight in the eye and said,
"Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going
to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die and I
don’t feel anything about it…In a few minutes I killed her."
Susan said she saw that there was Sharon’s blood on her hand and she
tasted it. "Wow, what a trip! To taste death, and yet give life."
Flabbergasted, Virginia asked Susan if it didn’t bother her to kill a
pregnant woman.
"I thought you understood. I loved her, and in order for me to kill her
I was killing part of myself when I killed her," Susan explained. She
had wanted to cut out Sharon’s baby but there wasn’t enough time.
She had also wanted to take out all the victims’ eyes and squash them
against the walls and cut off and mutilate all of their fingers, but
they didn’t have the chance.
Susan told Virginia that after they left the Tate house she realized
that she didn’t have her knife with her any more. Not only that, she
had left her palm print on a desk, "but my spirit was so strong that
obviously it didn’t even show up or they would have me by now." The
four of them drove to a place where they were able to wash their hands
and change their clothes.
Susan ended the story with admitting that they killed the LaBianca’s
the next night. "That’s part of the plan," she explained. "And
there’s more."
This tale of murder had Virginia’s head spinning. She told Ronnie
Howard, who didn’t believe the story. "She’s making it all up. She
could have gotten it out of the papers," Ronnie reasoned. Virginia came
up with a way to test Susan about whether she was telling the truth.
Some years earlier when the Tate house had been up for lease, Virginia
had actually been to see the exterior of the house on Cielo drive. When
she saw Susan, she asked her if the house was still decorated in gold
and white. Susan said no.
Virginia also picked up some miscellaneous pieces of information that
tied Charlie and Susan to that house. It used to belong to Terry
Melcher, Doris Day’s son. Charlie and Susan were angry with Melcher
for some reason that was not clear. She babbled something about Melcher
being too interested in money.
Later that day, Susan began to talk again and gave Virginia the list of
celebrity targets that were next on their list: Richard Burton and
Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Tom Jones. It was
important to select victims that would shock the world.
She had planned to carve the words "helter skelter" on Elizabeth
Taylor’s face with a red-hot knife and then gouge her eyes out. Then
she would castrate Richard Burton and put his penis along with Elizabeth
Taylor’s eyes in a bottle and mail it to Eddie Fisher.
Sinatra was to be skinned alive, while he listened to his own music. The
Family would then make purses out of his skin and sell them in hippie
shops. Tom Jones would have his throat slit, but only after being forced
to have sex with Susan Atkins.
People who knew them but were not part of the group reported other
confessions from Manson and Family members about the same time. On
November 12, the L.A. Sheriff’s detectives had a chance to interview
Al Springer who was a member of the motorcycle gang called the Straight
Satans who had been involved with the Manson Family off and on.
The detectives were astonished when Springer told them that a few days
after the Tate murders that Manson had bragged to him about killing
people: "We knocked off five of them just the other night." Springer
stayed clear of Manson after that, but mentioned that Danny DeCarlo,
another member of the motorcycle gang lived at the Spahn Ranch with the
Family.
In the course of the interview Springer asked if anyone had their
refrigerator wrote on? "Charlie said they wrote something on the fucking
refrigerator in blood…Something about pigs or niggers or something
like that."
When the police finally got to Danny DeCarlo, they really got an earful
about Charlie and his Family. Not only did DeCarlo confirm their
culpability in Gary Hinman’s death, but he implicated them in the
death of a 36-year-old ranch hand named Shorty, a nickname for Donald
Shea. He was killed because he’d tell the owner of the Spahn Ranch
what was really happening on his property. "Shorty was going to tell old
man Spahn…and Charlie didn’t like snitches," DeCarlo explained.
DeCarlo had been told what they did to his friend Shorty: "they stuck
him like carving up a Christmas turkey…Bruce (Davis) said they cut him
up in nine pieces. They cut his head off. then they cut his arms off
too, so there was no way they could possibly identify him. They were
laughing about that."
Another Family member named Clem told DeCarlo with a big grin that "we
got five piggies" the day after the Tate murders.
The two detectives shared this information with the detectives at LAPD,
but the latter did nothing with the information. The L.A. Sheriff’s
detectives, on the other hand, now focused their investigation on the
Manson family believing that the hippie cult was somehow tied into both
the Tate and LaBianca murder cases.
At some point in mid-November, Susan Atkins told her story to Ronnie
Howard. Ronnie Howard felt that she had to tell the police about what
Susan had revealed, especially since other people were future targets of
the group. She asked for permission to contact LAPD, but was repeatedly
denied, even though the woman she asked permission was dating one of the
Tate case homicide detectives. Virginia Graham, who had been transferred
to another facility, was running into the same kind of difficulty when
she tried to tell the authorities about Susan.
Finally on November 17, 1969, two LAPD homicide detectives came to Sybil
Brand to interview Ronnie Howard. The message was finally beginning to
penetrate the collective intelligence of the LAPD that they had just
found a gold mine. After they interviewed her, they had her moved for
her safety into an isolation unit.
Charlie
Just who was this Charlie anyway? Both LAPD and the Los Angeles
Sheriff’s Office started to dig through the rubble of his heavily
documented 36 years. As information came in about him, it was no
surprise that he was in trouble. If ever a kid had a miserable start in
life Charles Manson was it.
An illegitimate and unplanned child, he was born in Cincinnati, Ohio,
November 12, 1934 to Kathleen Maddox, a promiscuous sixteen-year- old
who drank too much and got into a lot of trouble. Two years later,
Kathleen filed suit against Colonel Scott of Ashland, KY, for child
support which she was awarded, but never received. Kathleen was briefly
married to William Manson who gave his name to the boy.
Charles Manson in Nuel Emmons’ book Manson in His Own Words describes
the Maddox family:
Kathleen was the youngest of three children from the marriage of Nancy
and Charles Maddox. Her parents loved her and meant well by her, but
they were fanatical in their religious beliefs. Especially Grandma, who
dominated the household. She was stern and unwavering in her
interpretation of God’s Will, and demanded that those within her home
abide by her view of God’s wishes.
My grandfather worked for the B&O Railroad. He worked long hard hours, a
dedicated slave to the company and his bosses…He was not the
disciplinarian Grandma was…If he tried to comfort Mom with a display
of affection, such as a pat on the knee or an arm around her shoulder,
Grandma was quick to insinuate he was vulgar.
For Mom, life was filled with a never-ending list of denials. From
awakening in the morning until going to bed at night it was, "No
Kathleen, that dress is too short. Braid your hair, don’t comb it like
some hussy. Come directly home from school, don’t let me catch you
talking to any boys. No, you can’t go to the school dance, we are
going to church…In 1933, at age fifteen, my mother ran away from home.
Other writers have portrayed Mom as a teenage whore...In her search for
acceptance she may have fallen in love too easily and too often, but a
whore at that time? No!…In later years, because of hard knocks and
tough times, she may have sold her body some…
Charlie never knew his father and never had a real father figure. His
mother was the kind that children are taken away from and placed in
foster homes. Kathleen had a habit of disappearing for day and weeks at
a time, leaving Charlie with his grandmother or his aunt. When Kathleen
and her brother were both sentenced to the penitentiary for armed
robbery, Charlie got sent off to live with his aunt and uncle in
McMechen, West Virginia. The aunt was very religious and strict in stark
contrast to his mother’s permissiveness.
When Kathleen was released from jail, she was not responsible enough to
take care of him, preferring her life of promiscuity and hard drinking
to any kind of normal lifestyle. There was no continuity in his life: he
was always being foisted on someone new; he moved from one dingy rooming
house to another; there were only transitory friendships that he made on
the streets.
Manson tells the story which was circulated within his family: "Mom was
in a café one afternoon with me on her lap. The waitress, a would-be
mother without a child of her own, jokingly told my Mom she’d buy me
from her. Mom replied, ‘A pitcher of beer and he’s yours.’ The
waitress set up the beer, Mom stuck around long enough to finish it off
and left the place without me. Several days later my uncle had to search
the town for the waitress and take me home."
John Gilmore in his insightful book called The Garbage People describes
how Charlie adapted to this life of emptiness and violence:
He kept to himself. Though friendless, his young mind bypassed the
loneliness of his surroundings. He watched, listened, pretended his
imaginative resources knew no limit. And he began to steal, as if to
hold onto something that continually flew away. There was a consistency
and permanency to the habit of stealing and it became easier. With
everything transient, the thefts and goods he carried with him offered a
sense of stability, a kind of reward. An object owned gave identity to
an owner, an identity that had yet to be acknowledged.
When he was nine, he was caught stealing and sent to reform school and
then later when he was twelve, he was caught stealing again and sent to
the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1947. He ran
away less than a year later and tried to return to his mother who
didn’t want him. Living entirely by stealing and burglary, he lived on
his own until he was caught. The court arranged for him to go to Father
Flanagan’s Boys Town.
He didn’t last long at Boys Town. A few days after his arrival,
thirteen-year-old Charlie and another kid committed two armed robberies.
A few more episodes like that landed Charlie in the Indiana School for
Boys for three years. His teachers described him as having trust in no
one and "did good work only for those from whom he figured he could
obtain something."
In 1951, Charlie and two other boys escaped and headed for California
living entirely by burglary and auto theft. They got as far as Utah when
they were caught. This time he was sent to the National Training School
for Boys in Washington, D.C. While he was there they gave him various
tests which established that his IQ was 109, that he was illiterate and
that his aptitude for everything but music was average.
His keepers said this about him: "Manson has become somewhat of an
‘institution politician.’ He does just enough work to get by
on…Restless and moody most of the time, the boy would rather spend his
class time entertaining his friends…It appears that this boy is a very
emotionally upset youth who is definitely in need of some psychiatric
orientation."
That same year, Dr. Block, a psychiatrist examined him, noting "the
marked degree of rejection, instability and psychic trauma." His
illegitimacy, small physical size and lack of parental love caused him
to constantly strive for status with the other boys. "This could add up
to a fairly slick institutionalized youth," Dr. Block concluded, "but
one is left with the feeling that behind all this lies an extremely
sensitive boy who has not yet given up in terms of securing some kind of
love and affection from the world."
For a short time, things started to look up for Charlie. His aunt had
agreed to take care of him and his chances for parole were good. Shortly
before the parole hearing, Charlie held a razor blade against another
boy’s throat while he sodomized him. Charlie was transferred to the
Federal Reformatory at Petersburg, Virginia, where he was characterized
as definitely homosexual, dangerous and safe only under supervision.
In September of 1952, he was sent to a more secure institution in
Chillicothe, Ohio. His keepers there saw him as "criminally
sophisticated despite his age and grossly unsuited for retention in an
open reformatory type institution." For some reason, Manson suddenly
changed his attitude. He was more cooperative and genuinely improved
educationally so that he was able to read and understand basic math.
This improvement lead to his parole in May of 1954 at the age of
nineteen.
At first he lived with his aunt and uncle, then his mother for a short
period of time. Early in 1955, he married a waitress who bore him a son,
Charles Manson, Jr. Charlie worked at various low-paying jobs and
augmented his income by stealing cars. One of them he took to Los
Angeles with his then pregnant wife. Inevitably, he was caught again
eventually found his way to the prison at Terminal Island in San Pedro,
California.
His wife had the good sense to divorce him after he spent three years in
jail. In 1958, he was released on parole. This time Manson took up a new
occupation - pimping. He supplemented this income by getting money from
an unattractive wealthy girl in Pasadena. In 1959, Manson was arrested
on two federal charges: stealing a check from a mailbox and attempting
to cash a U.S. Treasury check for $37.50
.This time Manson was lucky, a young woman pretended she was pregnant
and pleaded with the judge to keep him out of jail. The judge believed
the story and had pity on him. While he sentenced Charlie to ten years,
he then immediately placed him on probation. A couple of months later,
he was arrested by LAPD for stealing cars and using stolen credit cards,
but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
Near the end of 1959, Manson conned a young woman out of $700 in savings
to invest in his nonexistent company. To make matters worse, he got her
pregnant and then drugged and raped her roommate. He fled to Texas but
was arrested and put in prison to serve out his ten-year sentence. "If
there ever was a man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for
probation, he is it," the judge said. Eventually at the age of 26 he was
sent to the U.S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington.
His record there described Charlie as having "a tremendous drive to call
attention to himself. Generally he is unable to succeed in positive
acts, therefore he often resorts to negative behavior to satisfy this
drive. In his efforts to "find" himself, Manson peruses different
religious philosophies, e.g. Scientology and Buddhism; however, he never
remains long enough with any given teachings to reap meaningful
benefits."
By 1964, he hadn’t changed much, as least as viewed by prison
officials: "His past pattern of employment instability continues…seems
to have an intense need to call attention to himself…remains
emotionally insecure and tends to involve himself in various fanatical
interests."
Whatever those "fanatical" interests were, they included an obsession
with the Beatles. Manson’s guitar was another obsession. He felt that
with the right opportunities he would be much bigger than the Beatles.
In prison, he became friends with the aging gangster, Alvin Karpis. The
former Public Enemy Number One and sole survivor of the Ma Barker gang
taught Charlie how to play the steel guitar. The prison record noted in
May of 1966 that "he has been spending most of his free time writing
songs, accumulating about 80 or 90 of them during the past year…He
also plays the guitar and drums, and is hopeful that he can secure
employment as a guitar player or as a drummer or singer."
Karpis had some interesting insights into Charlie’s true personality:
"There was something unmistakably unusual about Manson. He was a runt of
sorts, but found his place as an experienced manipulator of others...I
did feel manipulated, and under circumstances where it hadn’t been
necessary."
On March 21, 1967, Charlie was released from prison and given
transportation to San Francisco. He was 32 years old and more than half
of his life had been spent in institutions. He protested his freedom.
"Oh, no, I can’t go outside there…I knew that I couldn’t adjust to
that world, not after all my life had been spent locked up and where my
mind was free. I was content to stay in the penitentiary, just to take
my walks around the yard in the sunshine and to play my guitar…" The
prison officials ignored his protest and unleashed him on the world
again.
Helter Skelter
As poorly prepared for life on the outside as he was, Charlie was able
to blend in with his guitar into the hippie scene in San Francisco. The
high- point of the Haight Ashbury culture was past and the only ones
left were the diehards and the last ones to the party. Charlie was never
impressed by the hippie culture, but he lived off it and it didn’t
expect much from him. He learned about drugs and how he could use them
to influence people.
Charlie started to attract a group of followers, many of whom were very
young women with troubled emotional lives who were rebelling against
their parents and society in general. He battered down their inhibitions
and questioned the validity of their notions of good and evil. For the
most part, Charlie’s followers were weak-willed people who were
naïve, gullible and easy to lead. LSD and amphetamines were additional
tools by which Charlie altered their personalities to his needs.
In spring of 1968, Manson and his followers left San Francisco in an old
school bus and traveled around. Eventually, he and a few of his group
moved in with Gary Hinman, a music teacher with a house on the Canyon
Road. Through Hinman, Charlie met Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Manson and his girls starting hanging around Wilson every chance they
had. Manson tried to leverage the acquaintance with Dennis Wilson but it
didn’t go anywhere. Eventually, Wilson became uncomfortable with
Manson and his girls and told them to split.
About that time, Manson found George Spahn and conned the old man into
letting him and his followers live on the Ranch. Squeaky Fromme, one of
Charlie’s devotees, made sure that the elderly man’s sexual needs
were fully satisfied. The Manson Family survived by a combination of
stealing and scavenging. Much of their food was taken from what the
supermarkets discard each day.
Charlie was still hell-bent to market his music to somebody. Through his
contacts with Dennis Wilson and another man in the music business,
Charlie met Doris Day’s son Terry Melcher. The plan was to interest
Melcher in financing a film with Manson’s music.
At that time, Melcher owned the house on Cielo Drive that was eventually
leased to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. At various times, Manson had
been by the property in a car with Dennis Wilson.
Melcher was asked to listen to Charlie and decide whether or not he
wanted to record them. Melcher went out the first time and listened to
Charlie sing his own compositions and play the guitar. Some of the girls
sang and played tambourines. Melcher went out a second time a week
later, but the music was nothing he was interested in recording. What he
didn’t realize is that Manson had built this recording opportunity
with Melcher into something very real in his mind. When nothing came of
it, Charlie was plenty angry and blamed Melcher for his disappointment.
Another facet of Charlie, although not nearly as important to him as his
music, was his philosophy. To a large extent, this "philosophy" was a
con, something he dreamed up to impress his followers, but he probably
believed some of it.
The core of this philosophy was a kind of Armageddon. Charlie preached
that the black man was going to rise up and start killing the whites and
turn the cities in to an inferno of racial revenge. The black man would
win this war, but wouldn’t be able to hang onto the power he seized
because of innate inferiority.
In 1968, Charlie was forecasting racial war when all of a sudden the
Beatles released their White Album, which had the song "Helter Skelter."
The lyrics fit Charlie’s theory to a tee: "Look out helter skelter
helter skelter helter skelter/She’s coming down fast/ Yes she is/Yes
she is." Now, the racial Armageddon had a name. It was Helter Skelter.
Helter Skelter would begin, according to one of Charlie’s devotees,
"with the black man going into white people’s homes and ripping off
the white people, physically destroying them,. A couple of spades from
Watts would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district…and
just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing
blood and writing things on the wall in blood…all kinds of
super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad…until
there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and
took over. Then the black man would assume the white man’s karma. He
would then be the establishment…"
Charlie and the Family would survive this racial holocaust because they
would be hiding in the desert safe from the turmoil of the cities. He
pulled from the Book of Revelations, the concept of a "bottomless pit,"
the entrance of which, according to Charlie, was a cave underneath Death
Valley that led down to a city of gold. This paradise was where Charlie
and his Family were going to wait out this war. Afterwards, when the
black man failed at keeping power, Charlie’s Family, which they
estimated would have multiplied to 144,000 by that time, would then take
over from the black man and rule the cities.
"It will be our world then," Charlie told his followers. "There would be
no one else, except for us and the black servants. He, Charles Willis
Manson, the fifth angel, Jesus Christ, would then rule the world. The
other four angels were the Beatles.
How did this hokey philosophy result in the blood bath at the Tate and
LaBianca houses? Well, Charlie the Prophet had already forecast that the
murders would start in the summer of 1969, but as the summer went on, it
looked as though the "prophet" was wrong. "The only thing blackie knows
is what whitey has told him," he said to one of his followers just
before the murders. "I’m going to have to show him how to do it."
After the LaBianca murder, one of Manson’s girls, Linda Kasabian, was
told to take Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet and credit cards and leave
them in the ladies room of a gas station in an area heavily populated by
blacks. That way, when, theoretically, the credit cards would be used by
some black woman, it would appear that blacks were responsible for the
LaBianca deaths. However, the credit cards were never used or turned in
to the authorities.
Prosecution
Vincent Bugliosi (Associated Press©)
On November 18, 1969, 35-year-old Deputy District Attorney Vincent T.
Bugliosi was assigned the Tate-LaBianca murder cases. Aaron Stovitz,
head of the Trials Division of the District Attorney’s Office, was
assigned as a co-prosecutor, but was later pulled off for another case.
Bugliosi had an unbelievably difficult job ahead of him. Not only did he
need to prove that members of the Manson Family were responsible for the
Tate and LaBianca murders, but he had to prove the Charles Manson
ordered them to do it. While Manson had sent four Family members to the
Cielo Drive massacre, he did not go himself. He did, however, tie up
Rosemary and Leno LaBianca and gave three others instructions to kill
them.
The prosecutor had to establish Charlie’s dominance over the members
of his Family and convince a jury that Charlie had sufficient motive to
want these seven people dead.
At the beginning, he didn’t have much of a case. There was Susan
Atkins’ story as related to Virginia Graham and the stories that Al
Springer and Danny DeCarlo told the police, along with some comments
from other people interviewed about Manson and his followers. It
wasn’t until December 3 that Bugliosi knew for certain who of
Manson’s Family had actually been involved with the murders. Manson
had sent Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and
Linda Kasabian to the Tate residence. Accompanying him to the LaBianca
home was Watson, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. Atkins, Kasabian and
Steve "Clem" Grogan waited in the car.
Atkins’ testimony was deemed vital to the prosecution, but she was not
offered immunity. However, if she cooperated with the prosecution, they
would not seek the death penalty against her in any of the three cases:
Hinman, Tate and LaBianca. The extent to which she cooperated would
affect whether the prosecution would press for first-degree murder, life
sentence, etc.
Things started to look up for the prosecution when a fingerprint of
Patricia Krenwinkel’s was found on a door inside of Sharon Tate’s
bedroom. This physical evidence was added to the .22 caliber bullets
found at the Spahn Ranch (the gun used at the Tate murders was a .22
caliber revolver).
The first order of business for Bugliosi was to get grand jury
indictments against Manson and the individuals involved in the murders.
When Susan Atkins testified to the grand jury, she gave the same
bloodcurdling story to them that she gave to Ronnie Howard and Virginia
Graham. She showed absolutely no sign of guilt or remorse for the
ghastly things she did. The jurors stared at her in disbelief.
Biker Danny DeCarlo testified that he, Manson, Watson and others had
used a .22 caliber Buntline revolver for target practice at the Spahn
Ranch.
He also said that the three-strand nylon rope that was used in the Tate
murders was identical to the rope used at the ranch.
It only took the grand jury twenty minutes to hand down the indictments
Bugliosi sought: Charles Manson, Charles "Tex" Watson, Patricia
Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian, seven counts of murder and
one count of conspiracy to commit murder; Leslie van Houten, two counts
of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.
A few days later, the wallet belonging to Rosemary LaBianca was found in
the ladies restroom at the service station where Linda Kasabian left it.
The wallet had gotten lodged in the toilet tank. This piece of
corroborating evidence was necessary to bolster Susan Atkins’ story in
case she decided to repudiate her testimony when Charlie started to
pressure her.
Another critical piece of evidence was finally "found:" the unusual .22
caliber Hi Standard Longhorn revolver with the broken gun grip which had
been found by Bernard Weiss’ son and turned over to the police three
and a half months earlier. Bernard Weiss after reading about the
indictments in the newspaper called LAPD Homicide to see if the revolver
he had turned in was the murder weapon.
After being passed around to several people, an officer told Weiss "We
don’t keep guns that long. We throw them in the ocean after a while."
Weiss said, "I can’t believe that you’d throw away what could be the
single most important piece of evidence in the Tate case."
"Listen, mister," was the official answer. "We can’t check out every
citizen report on every gun we find."
Weiss called a newscaster, who in turn, called LAPD. The gun was "found"
where it had been "lost" in the Van Nuys police station. After the tests
had been run, there was no doubt that it was the murder weapon. One
thing remained to be done -linking Manson to that particular revolver.
Eventually Randy Starr provided that link. He once owned the revolver
and had given it to Manson.
Another important development occurred when the police were contacted by
the man who owned the place that the Tate killers had used to clean up
right after the murders. The man had remembered the car and the license
plate which was traced to a Spahn Ranch employee who had let Manson and
his girls borrow his car.
Even though it was not necessary for the prosecution to establish the
motive for the crimes, Bugliosi considered motive an important piece of
evidence, especially since Manson was not physically present at the Tate
murders. Bugliosi set out to establish that the primary motive was
Helter Skelter: Manson’s belief that he could start a race war and
personally gain from it. But certainly, there was the connection between
Manson’s anger at Terry Melcher and the crimes committed on his former
property. To further bolster that motive, it was established that two
different people had chased Manson off the property a few months before
the murders.
Rudi Altobelli, the man who bought the Cielo Drive property from
Melcher, was an important man in the entertainment industry. He
represented stars like Katherine Hepburna nd Henry Fonda. Because he
traveled so much, he rented out the property to the Polanski’s and
stayed in the guesthouse when he visited the area.
In March of 1969, Manson went to the house where four of the five
murdered people were staying. Charlie said he was looking for Melcher.
Sharon’s houseguest sent him away in not too friendly terms, but not
before he saw Sharon, who wondered what the "creepy looking guy" wanted.
Then Manson went to the guesthouse and told Rudi Altobelli that the
people in the main house told him to ask at the guesthouse. Altobelli
admonished Manson for bothering his tenants and told him he didn’t
know where Terry Melcher had moved.
Manson knew the layout of the house and he knew who was living in it. It
was quite possible that the "Helter Skelter" crimes were committed at
that particular house because Charlie wanted to pay back the residents
for rejecting him and scare the daylights out of Melcher for not backing
his recording career.
Manson himself became a major player as he appeared frequently in the
courtroom. Bugliosi studied him and described the behavior he witnessed:
Though he had little formal schooling, he was fairly articulate, and
definitely bright. He picked up little nuances, seemed to consider all
of the hidden sides of a question before answering. His moods were
mercurial, his facial expressions chameleon-like. Underneath, however,
there was a strange intensity. You felt it even when he was joking,
which, despite the seriousness of the charges, was often. He frequently
played to the always-packed courtroom, not only to the Family faithful
but to the press and spectators as well. Spotting a pretty girl, he’d
often smile or wink. Usually they appeared more flattered than offended.
The trial officially began in mid-June of 1970. Judge Charles Older
presided. He decided that the jury, once selected, would be locked up
until the end of the trial-"to protect them from harassment and to
prevent their being exposed to trial publicity." Older was given a
bodyguard and his home was provided with protection.
The twelve jurors selected were five women and seven men with a range of
ages spanning25 to 73. While many occupations were represented, one was
a retired deputy sheriff.
In his opening statement, Bugliosi characterized Manson as "vagrant
wanderer, a frustrated singer-guitarist …who would refer to himself as
Jesus Christ…and was a killer who cleverly masqueraded behind the
common image of a hippie that of being peace loving…but was a
megalomaniac who coupled his insatiable thirst for power with an intense
obsession for violent death."
Bugliosi stressed that Manson commanded his followers to commit the
murders, but that "the evidence will show that they were very willing
participants in these mass murders…"
Manson, who first appeared to the jury with a bloody X that he had
carved into his forehead, insisted on defending himself. He was assisted
by an older lawyer named Irving Kanarek who was a legendary for his
attention to detail (much to the frustration of witnesses, judges and
juries) and Ronald Hughes, "the hippie lawyer" who was Leslie Van
Houten’s attorney.
Critical to Manson’s defense was maintaining control of the Family.If
his followers testified against him, he was doomed. He had to set up and
maintain an effective communications network between himself and the
other Family members, particularly those under indictment. He needed the
Family members who were not in jail to communicate his wishes to those
who were.
Just how sinister this communication would be was evidenced by what
happened to Barbara Hoyt. Hoyt was one of the prosecution’s witnesses
who was threatened that if she testified at the trial, she and her
family would be killed. She was then lured to Honolulu by one of
Manson’s girls and given a lethal dose of LSD. Fortunately, she got to
the hospital in time to save her.
Manson was able to exert a lot of control over his girls in the
courtroom. By then Susan Atkins had repudiated her testimony to the
grand jury. They came up with bizarre stories that would implicate
themselves but spare their beloved Charlie.
As the evidence was presented, things were looking bad for Charlie and
the girls. A pattern was developing, according to Bugliosi: "The more
damaging the testimony, the more chance that Manson would create a
disturbance, thereby assuring that he - and not the evidence itself -
would get the day’s headlines. Often these disturbances would result
in Judge Older removing them from the courtroom.
The drama hit a high point when Manson got into an argument with Judge
Older and jumped towards the judge, yelling, "someone should cut your
head off!" Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten stood up and started
chanting in Latin.
When Manson and his girls were removed from the court, a shaken Judge
Older instructed the jury to disregard what they heard and saw, but the
effect was indelible. The jury got a first hand chance to see the real
Charles Manson.
After 22 weeks of trial, the Prosecution rested. It was time for the
defense attorneys to do their part. Judge Older told the lawyers that
were assisting Manson and defending the girls to call their first
witness. The defense responded: "Thank you, Your Honor. The defendants
rest."
The court was stunned. Then the three girls shouted that they wanted to
testify. The judge and everyone else were bewildered. The girls had
decided that they would testify that they planned and committed the
murders themselves and that Charlie had nothing to do with it.
Ronald Hughes, Leslie Van Houten’s "hippie lawyer" objected and stood
up against Manson’s transparent ploy: "I refuse to take part in any
proceeding where I am forced to push a client out the window." A few
days later, Ronald Hughes had disappeared. After the trial was over, his
body was found wedged between two boulders in Ventura County. One of
Manson’s followers later admitted that the Manson Family had murdered
him.
A new lawyer had to be found immediately to take over the defense.
Maxwell Keith was appointed. When the court reconvened, Manson and the
girls created a disturbance suggesting that Judge Older "did away with
Ronald Hughes," which resulted in them being removed again from the
courtroom.
For the most part, the lawyers for the defense put forth a disappointing
presentation. Paul Fitzgerald, Patricia Krenwinkel’s attorney, spent
more time defending Manson than his client. Daye Shinn, Susan Atkins’
lawyer made a brief defense for his clie
