Restless Souls

by Alisa Statman

  Wondering who dared the intrusion, I wiped the moisture from the window to find the postman. He waved an envelope with the green sticker of certified mail. Good news never came when a signature was required. Probably a creditor looking for money I didn’t have. I opened the door with a self-defeating smile, until I noticed the return address. He instantly became the enemy. I’d only signed a P before pulling back the pen. Was it too late to stop? Could I slam the door and act as if he didn’t exist? I contemplated my next move. His eyebrows rose as if to say, “Sometime today, lady.”

  My gaze turned to a glaring punch.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Listen, I just deliver it. You going to sign or what?”

  Hesitantly, I put the pen back to the paper while each letter quickened my heart until it felt as if a tribe of conga players had gathered in my chest.

  Nightly, since Mom had passed away, came my ritual prayer that this day would never come. Despite my persistence, destiny had arrived, but I wasn’t ready and probably never would be.

  There was no reason to open the letter from the Board of Prison Terms. It didn’t matter which of Sharon’s killers had the upcoming parole hearing; they were collectively and individually petrifying. I tossed it aside, hoping that by some miracle it would disappear.

  Twelve hours later, and a lot of contemplative denial, the letter spied on me from the counter. With the kids in bed, the house was again peaceful. I ripped open the envelope. “Notice of Parole Hearing: The named prisoner will appear before the Board of Prison Terms for a hearing on January 20, 1993. Atkins, Susan, Murder First (seven Counts).”

  A little more than a month away.

  All day I had walked an emotional tightrope. At last, I fell off. I closed myself in the family room, where I cried, ranted, kicked furniture, and threw everything unbreakable within my reach. Panic, anger, sadness, determination, back to panic, the turmoil rebounded off the walls.

  The door creaked open. It was Dad. “Everything all right in here?”

  I threw the notification. “Why do we have to go through this shit?”

  “I don’t know, baby, it’s just the cards we’ve been dealt. All I do know is that I can’t go again.”

  “Why me? Why did Mom have to ask me? I’m not strong enough to do this, Dad.”

  “Then don’t go, Sugar. Your mama would understand. I don’t like seeing you like this, and I know she wouldn’t either. It’s not worth it. Let them walk, someone will kill them and then this will all be over.” He closed the door, leaving me alone with my demons.

  Mom and Sharon’s lifetimes spanned the confining walls. Mom’s achievements in victims’ rights filled one. Another wall captured Sharon at various stages of her life: a toddler taking her first steps, the high school prom queen, stills from her movies, and pregnant with a baby she’d expected to nurture into adulthood. I eluded their reach by turning to the bookcase.

  Perched on its two-decade seat, Helter Skelter upstaged the others with its ominous, red letters beckoning my attention. Written by the prosecutor, the core of the book held the motive and details of Sharon’s murder. Before tonight, there had never been a reason to pick it up. I wiped dust from its binding and took it from its tomb. It felt as heavy as the gloomy weight upon my shoulders. Inside the front cover there was an inscription.

  To Paul Tate

  There’s nothing I can say to express all my outrage over what happened to your lovely and exquisite Sharon. You have my very deepest and heartfelt condolences.

  I have to believe that if there is any ultimate justice in the universe, Sharon’s killers will pay for what they did much, much more than they already have, and you, Sharon, and Doris, with the rest of your family, will be reunited in heaven.

  Paul, I have the greatest respect for you and the moral strength you displayed in not bringing about immediate justice in the courtroom, for which no one would have blamed you if you did.

  My warmest and best personal wishes in all the years ahead to a wonderful human being.

  Respectfully, Vince Bugliosi

  What ultimate justice would there be if Sharon’s killers roamed free? All of them claimed to be rehabilitated. Was this possible? At the time they received their death sentences, only four other women in California had had this penalty imposed on them, none as young as Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten. Even so, their jury was unable to find one mitigating circumstance to support even a remote possibility of rehabilitation, urging their consciences to opt for the death penalty. Those twelve jurors had spent more than nine months, eight hours a day, watching these killers, observing their every idiosyncrasy while listening to testimony. The wisdom of that jury’s decision should be upheld to the fullest that our laws currently allow, life imprisonment. How parole ever became an option is beyond reason.

  In 1971 Alvin Lee composed my life formula: “I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do. So I leave it up to you.”

  I had hit so many crossroads that there were none left to take. At each preceding one, I’d chosen the trail that I assumed would eclipse the past. Bar none, I found myself in a vortex that plunked me right into yesterday’s tar pit, where I squirmed and tugged for release from the swallowing black goo.

  I collapsed in Mom’s favorite recliner, drained, defeated, and out of options; cornered into taking a leap of faith that the driving force of the past was the only way to advance.

  I knew little of Sharon’s murder, even less about Susan Atkins.

  Mom had sat in this very chair and challenged a reporter who believed Atkins was rehabilitated. “Honey, the tears are fake,” she told him. “Atkins says she feels, but she doesn’t. I have not heard this woman say, ‘I am truly sorry for what I did.’ And if you can get those words out of her, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

  “You’re on,” the reporter took the bait. “I have an interview with her next week. I’ll send you the results—have your checkbook ready.”

  A month later, a video arrived from Australia’s 60 Minutes with a short note: “I lost.”

  The journalist had put up a good fight. “Could you say you’re sorry to Mrs. Tate?” he asked Atkins.

  “I don’t know that Mrs. Tate could ever forgive me. My hope is that someday she will,” Atkins replied.

  With a hundred dollars at stake the reporter pressed, “Could you get out the words and say you’re sorry to Sharon Tate’s parents for what you did to them?”

  Atkins took a beat. An almost imperceptible smile creased, “You ask hard questions.” She paused again. “There are no words to describe what I feel—‘I’m sorry,’ ‘please forgive me’—those words are so overused and inadequate for what I feel.”

  No doubt those sentiments would have been a good place to start. We all needed one. Mine was for another day. I turned out the Christmas tree lights and went to bed.

  PART OF MY spirit died when I read the details of Sharon, Jay, Woytek, Gibbie’s, and young Steve Parent’s murder. I cloaked my activities from Dad. It was pointless for both of us to languish in a regression to 1969.

  A thief in the night, I spent the greater part of a week snooping through Dad’s army footlockers in the garage. His 1969 investigation was meticulous, but upon its completion, he stored it in a jumbled index, where it would remain buried in his footlockers. The dim fluorescent buzzed overhead as I scavenged and pulled the appropriate files: Tate Progress Reports, Coroner, Witness Statements, Crime Scene, Grand Jury, and Media. I stowed the materials needed for study in my closet; three boxes all told, including Atkins’s parole hearing transcripts, and Helter Skelter.

  On a day when the kids were in school and Dad was on a plane to visit relatives in Texas, I settled into Mom’s easy chair with Bugliosi’s book and began my odyssey. The itinerary was straightforward, nonstop to perdition.

  I gazed at the doorway and relived the moment that clung to me like nurtured creeping ivy, with leaves that webbed around until they smothered me. Sometimes I managed to rip a vine free
for breath. Other times, it was an unbreakable mesh that showed my mother wilting like a dying tulip as she says, “Sharon’s been murdered.”

  My first cigarette in more than a year rattled within my fingers’ clasp. I lazily blew the smoke from my lungs, luxuriating in the rewarding light-headedness that coaxed me to open the book.

  I knew only the faintest detail of my sister’s murder: she died from sixteen stab wounds. The rest fell on deaf ears that diligently blocked the intricacies of that mayhem. I ignored every book ever written about the topic. When the news reports elaborated on specifics, I changed the channel. If anyone talked about it in my presence, I left the room.

  What I did adhere to was Mom’s belief that each of Sharon’s killers were responsible for their actions; therefore Manson’s philosophy, how he formed the Family, or conjecture of brainwashing was irrelevant and hardly worth investigating. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Joe Friday said.

  Three snubbed filters crowded the ashtray before I dared to open the book. Above the first line of text, I found a penned note from my mother:

  I figured you’d start here. Remember our friend Saint Francis’s guidance: “Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

  I’m right over your shoulder.

  Loving you always, Mother

  I couldn’t help but look. Of course, no one was there. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel as isolated as I weeded through the pages of Helter Skelter searching for and then assembling the puzzle pieces that shaped a repulsive canvas.

  A u g u s t 9, 1 9 6 9

  Sharon’s house on Cielo Drive is stashed in the hillside of Benedict Canyon, above Beverly Hills. Built on a two-acre ledge in the thick of the Santa Monica Mountains, the property overlooks the twinkling lights of the city.

  The only access to the property, short of climbing the steep cliff, is a forty-degree turn off Cielo Drive onto a narrow road that twists its way to the gate of Sharon’s house. At an acre’s distance from the front porch, the closest neighbor couldn’t really be considered next door.

  A tick past midnight, it is quiet inside the house. Everyone has retired to separate rooms.

  The living room occupies one-third of the floor plan. A fireplace and benched hearth spread across the back wall, windows across the front wall. A loft overhead canopies half the room; the other half exposed by a pitched roof encasing two dormer windows. At the base of the rafters, stereo speakers, softly playing music, looked over a piano, and next to the piano, a partner’s desk.

  Beneath the loft’s edge, Woytek Frykowski naps on the sofa.

  A hallway leads to two bedrooms. In the first, Gibbie, already in her nightgown, lays atop the covers of a Victorian bed with a book that doubles as a fan in the heat of the night.

  In the other room, the added weight of the baby makes Sharon even hotter. She’d stripped down to her bra and panties, and then opened the doors leading to the pool. Jay sits on the edge of the bed, talking her down from an earlier squabble with Roman.

  Outside, the temperature dropped a few precious degrees. Beyond the pool, a bounty of shrubbery sequesters the guesthouse. William Garretson lives there. Garretson and his acquaintance, Steven Parent, sit on the front porch sipping beers.

  Beyond the opposite end of the property, a car with extinguished headlights rolls up the lightless road toward the gate. The passengers—Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Linda Kasabian, and Charles Watson—all concentrate on their objective and scout the area for anything that might hamper that mission.

  There are two other houses on the road. When they pass the first one, the gate to Sharon’s house comes into view. Watson parks at the fence. The neighbors don’t hear the hum of the broken muffler even though their bedroom window is close enough that they should hear something.

  Watson looks through the chain-link gate that serves not to hide, but to barricade the unwelcome; whereas a two-story garage and the swollen hillside near the fence obscure the residence and front lawn one hundred yards away. His neck cranes the height of the telephone pole before he jumps six feet to the first rung. At the top, he severs the phone lines and any chance of his victims calling for help.

  The high view reveals the entire property. He waits. His eyes, already adapted to darkness, scan the grounds to see if the disconnected lines alerted anyone to their arrival.

  Floodlights shine from the ancient oak trees. The branches sway and creak from the scurrying animals who found safety above the ground predators. Crickets tweak to one another over the rustling leaves. The wind alternatively flutters and surges through the canyon. Nature’s ensemble shelters the single-story ranch, designed in the rustic fashion of French country homes. The red wood of the outer walls is illuminated here and there by coach lights. The front windows leak the interior’s illumination onto the front lawn, shadowed by the crisscrossed panes.

  Tex watches. Minutes pass. No one steps from the house to investigate the downed connection.

  Back at the car, he shifts the transmission to neutral then pushes the decade-old Ford until it coasts to the bottom of the hill, where he obscurely plants it.

  On their return to the gate, Watson coaches the women. They need to work as one to accomplish their goal.

  At the same time, Garretson says good-bye to Steven at the door. Steven is left alone to cross the grounds to the driveway.

  Garretson goes inside, turns up his stereo, and begins writing letters.

  The engine to Steven’s car turns over as Sadie, Katie, Yanna the Witch, and Tex climb the embankment to the right of the gate.

  Steve turns the wheel of the drifting car to the left. He’s searching for a control button to activate the gate.

  The four killers drop down inside the fence when his headlights shine their way. “Get down and don’t come out till I call for you,” Watson orders the women.

  Steven spots the remote mechanism. He slows near the pole.

  Watson jumps from the bushes with a knife in one hand, a gun in the other, and forty feet of rope coiled over his shoulder like a Wild West cowboy. He levels the revolver until aimed at Steven. “Halt,” Watson orders as he rounds the car to the driver’s window. He lowers his face until he is eye to eye with the teenager.

  Sensing danger, Steven throws the shifter into reverse. The knife slashes through the open window like a rabid dog’s gnashing. Steven’s hands jump off the wheel in defense, his foot slides from the brake. The creeping car veers toward the hillside. Shock motivates his silence when Watson’s first swing of the blade splits the skin of his forearm, the second forceful enough to splice his metal watchband. “Stop hurting me.” Steven pawed at the knife. “I swear I won’t say a word to anyone, just leave me alone.”

  The razor edges cut through the tendons in his hands.

  A bordering guardrail stops the car. Gunfire cracks. A bullet rips into Steven’s arm. His heart thumps with explosive beats. “Oh God, why?” His bladder gives way, but he doesn’t understand; only feels the warmth in the seat of his pants. Another bullet tears into his chest. His hand reaches toward the wound, but never completes the move; a final bullet slams into his cheek and through his skull; knocking him unconscious before his body sags onto the passenger seat.

  Watson’s hands bloodied, his shirt and face splattered, froze in the abrupt silence. He listens intently. Dogs bark throughout the canyon, but he can’t tell from which direction they resonate. His alert eyes splinter the night, sweeping 360 degrees: toward the house, down the private road, then across the canyon, back to the house. The distant dogs settle; first one, then another until the dark hour is once again paralyzed.

  At the end of the driveway apron, the property spreads out before them. Watson separates the group by sending Kasabian around to the back to look for open doors or windows. The other three go through a short gate and onto the front lawn. Ignoring the flagstone path, Watson trails the hedges bordering the front of the house. He checks the first two windows
. Both locked. The third window, to the dining room, is raised a foot.

  Kasabian returns as Watson cuts and removes the screen. He raises the window higher. One leg dangles over the sill. “Go keep watch out by the cars,” he tells Kasabian. “If anyone comes, kill them.”

  “And listen for sounds,” Krenwinkel adds.

  “Shssh,” Watson admonishes the remaining two. He hoists the other leg through the window. “Go wait for me by the front door.”

  Inside, he pauses to take in his surroundings. The floor plan is still fresh in his mind from his days visiting Terry Melcher. From the dining room he sees into the kitchen and the service area beyond it. The unlit rooms indicate they’re vacant; he heads in the opposite direction, toward the lights.

  The center of the living room holds a sitting area made up of two cream-colored brocade armchairs that serve as bookends to a beige velveteen couch facing the fireplace. In front of the couch sits a narrow coffee table, and in front of the table a zebra rug sleeps on the carpet.

  The high back of the sofa conceals Woytek’s slumber from the killer’s viewpoint in the foyer.

  The music plays in Watson’s favor. The open-air loft can be accessed from a wooden ladder about a yard from where he stands. He goes four steps up to peer into the loft. Empty. On the way down, he realizes he’s not alone. He studies Woytek’s lethargic breaths. He lay on his back. His lips separated. Legs crossed at the ankles, one arm rests under his head, the other tucked into his waistband. His chest rises and falls to the beat of vulnerable dormancy.

  Watson backtracks to the front door. When turned, the lock claps. He wheels his look to Woytek. Still asleep. He waves Atkins and Krenwinkel through, hushing their giggles.