Restless Souls

by Alisa Statman

  Watson jabs at Woytek with the gun.

  Groggy, he barely focuses on the three strangers. “What time is it?”

  Watson kicks him in the head before quietly stating, “Shut up. One more word and I’ll kill you.”

  Pain ringing in his ears, Woytek didn’t hear the warning. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the Devil, here to do the Devil’s work,” Watson hissed. Pointing to the hallway he tells Atkins, “There’s two bedrooms down there, go see if anyone else is here.”

  Atkins first finds Gibbie, who looks over her book and smiles. After all, she is a guest and unalarmed at this odd voyeur. Atkins returns her smile, adding a wave for good measure before she moves on to Sharon’s room.

  Jay sits on the edge of the bed, his back to the door, his body blocking Sharon’s eye-line. Atkins slips back into the shadowed hall unnoticed.

  Watson used a bath towel to bind Woytek’s hands at his back before shoving him belly up on the couch.

  “There’s three more back there,” Atkins thumbs toward the hall.

  Watson rolls his eyes. “Bring ’em out. Katie, go with her.”

  Armed with knives, they split at the bedrooms, Krenwinkel to Gibbie’s, Atkins to Sharon’s.

  Atkins burst into the room, moving straight for her strongest adversary. She clenches the crown of Jay’s hair and puts the knife to his throat before Sharon even has a chance to register the invasion. “Get up.”

  Jay slides off the bed while straining to see who is behind him. “Are you kidding? What’s going on?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Sharon shies against the headboard.

  “You too,” Atkins shouts.

  Sharon edges out of the bed. “Can I just put on my robe?”

  “You aren’t gonna need it,” Atkins said.

  The three pause at the bedroom door. Ahead of them, Krenwinkel pulls Gibbie down the hall. She clutches the hem of her nightgown, and looks back at them, not quite frightened, but confused. Atkins pushes Jay forward then puts Sharon between them, the knife held to her stomach. “Move!” she orders.

  In the living room, Watson sucker-punches Jay in the eye then whips him onto the chair closest to the hall.

  Sharon hesitates at the archway. The easy familiarity of home has vanished. Her senses are heightened. The intruder’s body odor is nauseating while her eyes are drawn to Watson’s bloodied hands. She scans Woytek for injuries, searches his eyes for an answer to the festering storm.

  With a scowl, Watson hurls her into the living room. Thrown off balance she falls to her knees.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you, she’s pregnant. Be careful, dammit,” Jay warns.

  Watson bucks the gun against Jay’s head. “Shut up or you’re a dead man!”

  Woytek shakes his head slightly, cautioning Jay.

  Taking the rope he’d brought, Watson loops it twice around Jay’s neck. The other end is thrown over the ceiling beam for leverage. Snatching Sharon, he loops the connecting rope around her neck.

  Jay leaps from the chair. “I said to be more careful.”

  Watson rips the gun from his belt. “And I told you to shut up!” A discharged bullet mutes his words. Jay, shot in the chest, crumples to the floor. Watson dives on his back. He stabs him at least five times.

  Sharon loses count. “Oh my God, what are you doing? Stop it! Stop it!”

  Watson thrusts the bloody knife at her. “Shut up or you’re next!”

  A cry hangs in her throat. Silent tears tumble down her cheeks. In spite of the heat, her skin crawls with a chill.

  Gibbie, trained to deal with gang members, knows to get to the crux of the situation before more violence erupts. “What do you want, why are you here?”

  “We want all of your money,” Watson demands.

  “I have some in the bedroom,” Gibbie offers.

  Watson sends Atkins with her to retrieve the money.

  Jay moans. His hands creep to his chest.

  Sharon pleads with Watson, “Please help him, I think he’s dying.”

  “You want me to help him?”

  She nods.

  He nudges Jay with his foot. “Hey there, buddy, you okay?” When Jay’s eyes fluttered open, Watson makes a sweeping kick, cracking Jay’s nose. “Is that better?” he asks Sharon.

  Remembering the threat, she jerks with a wince, but doesn’t make a sound.

  Atkins and Gibbie return with her wallet. It contains seventy-two dollars. “That’s it? Bunch of rich motherfuckers and that’s all you’ve got!” Watson rants.

  “How much do you want?” Woytek asks.

  “We want thousands,” Watson bellows.

  “We just need more time,” Sharon said. “We can get you as much money as you need. In the morning, you can take me to the bank. I swear I’ll get you whatever you want just please don’t hurt anyone else.”

  Watson paces. His anger intensifies with each step. Flipping off the lights, he turns with a vehement finality. “Forget it. It’s over. You’re all going to die!”

  Woytek wrenches free of his restraint and lunges at Atkins. Striking her from behind, he tries to wrestle the weapon from her hands. She blindly flails behind her with the knife; one, two, three times she strikes Woytek in the legs. He screeches, falling to his hands when his legs give out. She seizes on his moment of weakness by driving the knife throughout his back, buttocks, and legs. She’s a leech on his back while he crawls toward the front door. With a burst of energy, he throws her to the ground.

  Watson watches the fight with amusement until he sees that Woytek is about to make it outside where his screams might reach help. Raising the gun, he fires a round into Woytek’s left leg. A second blasts into his left rib, collapsing the lung. Doggedly, Woytek staggers to the threshold of the porch. The gun jams. Watson hurdles the couch; first tackling Woytek, then clubbing him over the head with so many forceful blows that the gun handle splinters around them. Woytek slumps to the floor.

  Gibbie struggles against Krenwinkel, overpowering the murderess. Watson stalks across the room to take over. Slashing at her with the knife, he cuts the left side of her face, exposing her cheekbone. Another strike lacerates her jaw. The next plunges through her abdomen, stopping only when the blade hits her spinal column. She passes out.

  Choking up blood, Jay steals Watson’s attention. Watson kicks him in the head, then uses the knife across his back. The six-inch blade penetrates his lungs and heart. Jay wraps his arms about his head; his body shudders with gasping breaths.

  Three feet away, on the couch, Atkins restrains Sharon’s tangle for survival and clamps a hand over her mouth, forcing her to witness silently the murder of her friends.

  Atkins catches sight of Woytek hobbling out the front door. “Tex, he’s getting away!”

  Woytek hangs on to a post on the front porch. “Somebody, please help me, oh God, help me!”

  Watson races to silence him, his strikes as sure and swift as the needle of a sewing machine.

  Like an apparition, Linda Kasabian appears from the shaded lawn. “Oh God, Tex! Why?” Ignored by him, she looks through the front door. “Sadie, make it stop, there’re people coming!”

  “It’s too late!”

  Woytek reaches out to Kasabian, his voice weakening. “Help me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she turns her back on him and runs.

  Woytek tries to grab Watson’s wielding knife, but both sides of the blade are honed, enabling it to slice through his hands like softened butter. Blinded by the blood flowing down his forehead, Woytek tumbles off the porch and through the hedges. He lands on the grass, with Watson on top of him, never missing a beat with the knife. Woytek’s shouts blasts his ears. “No! Don’t, oh God, please don’t.”

  Inside, Gibbie regains consciousness. With her survival instincts intact, she runs down the hall, headed straight for Sharon’s bedroom door. Before she reaches the poolside, Krenwinkel body-slams her into the shutters of the door. Gibbie ya
nks a clump of Krenwinkel’s hair, pulling until her assailant loses her footing. With a second’s upper hand, she pitches herself outside where her shrieks bounce back at her from the hillside. She’s only taken a few steps before Krenwinkel tackles her.

  Hearing the screams, Watson runs across the lawn to silence her. Like a cornered, weary child in a game of tag, Gibbie submits. “I give up, take me.”

  Watson’s knife punches through Gibbie, along her right breast, down her sternum, over her belly, and into pelvic bone, continuing long after the life has passed from her. Satiated, he looks up and spots the distant lights of the guesthouse. Realizing his oversight, he sends Krenwinkel to make sure the house is empty.

  Walking in the opposite direction, Watson crosses the front lawn until he finds Woytek straining like a kitten fresh from the womb, blindly seeking asylum. Watson stomps on his back, flattening him. He thrashes at him with the knife. So caught up in his assault that he doesn’t notice when Woytek succumbs to death, continuing to propel the knife through the body over twenty more times. His arms tired, Watson prolongs the attack by kicking him all around his torso and head. When he’s finished, Woytek lay in a heap, unrecognizable as the man he’d been a half hour ago.

  Moving toward the front door, Watson has forgotten that Sharon is alive; entering the house, her hysterics serve as a reminder. “Please don’t kill me, please, I want to live, I want to have my baby, please, let me have my baby. Please, I’m begging you, take me with you. After I have my baby you can kill me any way you want. Please, you’ve got to listen to me!”

  Atkins stoops until she’s close enough that Sharon smells her sour breath. “Look bitch, I have no mercy for you. I don’t care if you’re gonna have a baby. Get ready, ’cause you’re going to die and I don’t feel a thing about it.”

  Watson steps inside. “Then why don’t you kill her?”

  Without hesitation, she swings the knife. Sharon flings her arms defensively, wildly, not knowing what she is hitting, and too terrified to feel the pain as the knife gashes her forearms.

  Watson snaps the loose end of the rope looped around Sharon’s neck. The velocity with which he pulls, suspends her, throttling her airway, leaving her defenseless when her fingers rip at the rope. Her widened eyes are her sole form of communication. They beseech, pray, even search for a godsend, but she is alone. Atkins stabs her near her left armpit.

  Watson releases the rope and puts Sharon in a chokehold. She claws at his arms. “Dammit, Sadie, get her hands!”

  Sharon writhes from his grip. As she twists away, his knife shot out a lick just below her rib cage. Her heart batters as she scrambles on her hands and knees, frantically crawling anywhere she can go. She reaches for the end table, grappling for leverage, but her blood-slicked fingers slip across the wood surface. His left hand catches her ankle and tugs her back; the other hand strikes out, tearing at her hamstring. A potted plant falls from the table. She launches it back at Watson. With the minuscule advantage, she scurries in the opposite direction, toward Jay, the rug burning her knees and elbows. Only gaining inches before the entangled noose cinches her airway. Trapped, she curls her body around the baby; her hands wrap behind her head. Watson straddles her, his knife chops across her spine; his weight crushes the baby up toward her lungs. She struggles to hold onto consciousness.

  Atkins crooks Sharon’s right arm in her own and pulls to expose Sharon’s chest. Watson buries the knife into her chest three successive times, puncturing the aorta and the sac around her heart. Blood pours from her chest, and trickles from her nose and mouth. She pulls her knees toward her chest, her breath labored, her final words as low as they are weak. “Mama, help me.”

  Watson and Atkins’s heaving breaths ebb until the air is still.

  “Are they all dead?” Atkins whispers.

  Watson nods as he slumps to the couch, rolling Sharon’s body out of the way.

  Krenwinkel stands at the foyer. “There was no one in the other house.”

  “Are you sure?” Watson asks.

  “Yeah. I looked through the windows, just a couple of dogs in one room.”

  Watson collects his weapons. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They make it to the driveway. “Shit,” Watson stops them, “we forgot to write stuff on the walls. Sadie, go back while we get the car.”

  In the living room, Atkins takes the towel that had bound Woytek’s hands before kneeling by Sharon’s body. The blood continues to seep from her bosom. Atkins’s fingertip swirls over Sharon’s skin like a finger painter. Then she puts her bloodied finger to her lips. Her tongue reaches to taste it. Sitting as if in a trance, her other hand goes to Sharon’s abdomen. The baby is probably alive. Should she cut it out? Wow, what a trip, she thinks, to taste death, and yet give life.

  Watson is back at the front door. “Sadie, hurry up!”

  The idea abandoned, she puts the towel to Sharon’s chest. The thirsty tip soaks until it is maroon. With the towel, she writes PIG across the outside of the front door.

  Atkins caught up with them at the driveway. They recover their unsoiled clothes from the bushes. This time Watson uses the control button to open the gate. As it opens, the three killers escape, disappearing into the night, where they remain undetected for four months.

  I CLOSED BUGLIOSI’S book. Contrary to my expectations, it didn’t have all the answers. It was missing emotion. How did victims feel in their last hour? Any thesaurus bulges with insightful compilations; however, each is an inadequate depiction of what that emotion must be. Perhaps we don’t need to invent an appropriate word because a victim’s instinct for survival overrides emotion. If not, I doubt the human language will ever succeed in finding a suitable phrase; after all, the emotion is caused by the inhuman.

  And what do the inhuman feel when they kill? Hatred, revenge, outrage, fury, injustice, dissatisfaction, jealousy, greed? Was the mere action of stabbing a catalyst that propelled them to annihilate?

  In place of a knife, I took a pen and stabbed at the ottoman. One, two, three, four—my eyebrows naturally furrowed by the action. Five, six, seven, my jaw clenched. Eight, nine, ten, the arc of my swings heightened. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, an unidentified anger brewed; the very act enraging. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, I paused to mark the effort it took to kill Sharon. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, adrenaline rushing, I stood in order to stab harder. Continuing on fifty-one more times as in Woytek’s death, I hit at a frenetic pace. Twenty-eight times for Gibbie’s murder, and so on until my arm swung one hundred times. One hundred one, one hundred and two, I dropped the pen.

  A rush of air escaped as I slunk into the chair, kneading my wrist and elbow. I concentrated on what I felt.

  Release.

  During the past eight hours of reading depictions of murder, anger had replaced fear. I was damn good and angry with Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Kasabian, and Van Houten. It was venom that needed to be released, and the experiment served the purpose.

  Limp against the cushions, I felt much like the surrender of a good long cry, exhausted and numb. The exact words Atkins had used: “Tired, but at peace . . . exhausted.”

  It took a tremendous effort to reenact the stabbing, with an innate crescendo of anger building with each swing. A meager depiction of the fury. Still, it gave me the understanding of how personal it is to stab someone. Different from other killing breeds, the stabber has to look into their victim’s dying eyes. They feel the victim’s quivering skin while holding them at bay. The stabber’s hands are one with the weapon; striking until they feel the last breath, their hands and arms soaked with blood by the time they’re finished.

  This is the type of murderess Susan Atkins is.

  In all that I’d read about Atkins, a quote from the book 5 to Die is the most insightful paragraph ever written about this woman. The authors, Jerry LeBlanc and Ivor Davis, interviewed Atkins before the trial when little was known about her.

  “At first, she said Gary Hinman had been cut up in
a fight and she went to his house to nurse him. . . . When it was inferred, falsely, that Bobby Beausoleil had already fingered her, Sadie loosened her tongue and let fly. She hasn’t stopped talking yet, but always, she tells just as much as has to be told, and, it will be seen, in whatever version suits her passing whim. . . . A facial chameleon whose features can shift almost imperceptibly from impatience to engrossment, from unconcern to rapt attention, from irritation to mirth, and from coldness to glowing innocence. If Atkins goes free, it just might be by the recitation of so many divergent, unlikely stories, always within a fabric of truth, that a jury of her peers, if any exist, will have to conclude that either she or they have lost the power to distinguish between fantasy and reality.”

  Between August 1969 and January 1971, Atkins’s version of whether she stabbed Sharon or not, alternated with a seesaw’s pace. Fact or fiction, the most disturbing aspect of her many confessions is that her mind could even formulate the hideous details she provided.

  Before and after her arrest for the murders, Atkins boasted to anyone within earshot that she was the one who’d stabbed Sharon. In his book, Vince Bugliosi quoted Atkins’s confession to a cellmate before her indictment for the murders. “‘Sharon was the last to die.’ On saying this, Susan laughed. ‘I proceeded to stab her. It felt so good the first time I stabbed her, and when she screamed at me, it did something to me, sent a rush through me. . . . It was like going into nothing, going into air. It’s like a sexual release, especially when you see the blood spurting out. It’s better than a climax.’”

  By the time she testified for the grand jury, her account changed. “In order to make a diversion so that Tex couldn’t see that I couldn’t kill her [Sharon], I grabbed her hand, held her arms and then I saw Tex stab her in the heart.”

  During the penalty phase of her trial she reverted back to an earlier version of her statement. “I was still holding Sharon Tate and Tex came back in and said kill her and I killed her. . . . I stabbed her. . . . She fell and I stabbed her again. . . . I don’t know how many times I stabbed her. She sounded like an IBM machine. She kept begging and pleading and pleading and begging, and I got sick of listening to her, so I stabbed her and I just kept stabbing until she stopped screaming.”