Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  You always have been perfect.’”

  Q. “What happened next?”

  A. “He asked me if I had ever made love with my father. I looked at him and kind of giggled and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Have you ever thought about making love with your father?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

  And he told me, ‘All right, when you are making love…picture in your mind that I am your father.’ And I did, I did so, and it was a very beautiful experience.”

  Susan said that before she met Manson she felt she was “lacking something.” But then “I gave myself to him, and in return for that he gave me back to myself. He gave me the faith in myself to be able to know that I am a woman.”

  A week or so later, she, Manson, Mary Brunner, Ella Jo Bailey, Lynette Fromme, and Patricia Krenwinkel, together with three or four boys whose names she couldn’t remember, left San Francisco in an old school bus from which they had removed most of the seats, furnishing it with brightly colored rugs and pillows. For the next year and a half they roamed—north to Mendocino, Oregon, Washington; south to Big Sur, Los Angeles, Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico; and, eventually, back to L.A., living first in various residences in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, Venice, and then, finally, Spahn Ranch. En route others joined them, a few staying permanently, most only temporarily. According to Susan, they went through changes, and learned to love. The girls made love with each of the boys, and with each other. But Charlie was complete love. Although he did not have sex with her often—only six times in the more than two years they were together—“he would give himself completely.”

  Q. “Were you very much in love with him, Susan?”

  A. “I was in love with the reflection and the reflection I speak of is Charlie Manson’s.”

  Q. “Was there any limit to what you would do for him?”

  A. “No.”

  I was laying the foundation for the very heart of my case against Manson, that Susan and the others would do anything for him, up to and including murder at his command.

  Q. “What was it about Charlie that caused you girls to be in love with him and to do what he wanted you to do?”

  A. “Charlie is the only man I have ever met…on the face of this earth…that is a complete man. He will not take back-talk from a woman.

  He will not let a woman talk him into doing anything. He is a man.”

  Charlie had given her the name Sadie Mae Glutz because “in order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past. The easiest way to do this, to change identity, is by doing so with a name.”

  According to Susan, Charlie himself went under a variety of names, calling himself the Devil, Satan, Soul.

  Q. “Did Mr. Manson ever call himself Jesus?”

  A. “He personally never called himself Jesus.”

  Q. “Did you ever call him Jesus?” From my questioning the night before, I anticipated that Susan would be evasive about this, and she was.

  A. “He represented a Jesus Christ–like person to me.”

  Q. “Do you think Charlie is an evil person?”

  A. “In your standards of evil, looking at him through your eyes, I would say yes. Looking at him through my eyes, he is as good as he is evil, he is as evil as he is good. You could not judge the man.”

  Although Susan didn’t state that she believed Manson was Christ, the implication was there. Though I was at this time far from understanding it myself, it was important that I give the jury some explanation, however partial, for Manson’s control over his followers. Incredible as all this was to the predominantly upper-middle-class, upper-middle-aged grand jurors, it was nothing compared to what they would hear when she described those two nights of murder.

  I worked up to them gradually, having her describe Spahn Ranch and the life there, and asking her how they survived. People gave them things, Susan said. Also, they panhandled. And “the supermarkets all over Los Angeles throw away perfectly good food every day, fresh vegetables and sometimes cartons of eggs, packages of cheese that are stamped to a certain date, but the food is still good, and us girls used to go out and do ‘garbage runs.’”

  DeCarlo had told me of one such garbage run, when, to the astonishment of supermarket employees, the girls had driven up in Dennis Wilson’s Rolls-Royce.

  They also stole—credit cards, other things.

  Q. “Did Charlie ask you to steal?”

  A. “No, I took it upon myself. I was—we’d get programmed to do things.”

  Q. “Programmed by Charlie?”

  A. “By Charlie, but it’s hard for me to explain it so that you can see the way—the way I see. The words that would come from Charlie’s mouth would not come from inside him, [they] would come from what I call the Infinite.”

  And sometimes, at night, they “creepy-crawled.”

  Q. “Explain to these members of the jury what you mean by that.”

  A. “Moving in silence so that nobody sees us or hears us…Wearing very dark clothing…”

  Q. “Entering residences at night?”

  A. “Yes.”

  They would pick a house at random, anywhere in Los Angeles, slip in while the occupants were asleep, creep and crawl around the rooms silently, maybe move things so when the people awakened they wouldn’t be in the same places they had been when they went to bed. Everyone carried a knife. Susan said she did it “because everybody else in the Family was doing it” and she wanted that experience.

  These creepy-crawling expeditions were, I felt sure the jury would surmise, dress rehearsals for murder.

  Q. “Did you call your group by any name, Susan?”

  A. “Among ourselves we called ourselves the Family.” It was, Susan said, “a family like no other family.”

  I thought I heard a juror mutter, “Thank God!”

  Q. “Susan, were you living at Spahn Ranch on the date of August the eighth, 1969?”

  A. “Yes.”

  Q. “Susan, on that date did Charlie Manson instruct you and some other members of the Family to do anything?”

  A. “I never recall getting any actual instructions from Charlie other than getting a change of clothing and a knife and was told to do exactly what Tex told me to do.”

  Q. “Did Charlie indicate to you the type of clothing you should take?”

  A. “He told me…wear dark clothes.”

  Susan ID’d photos of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian, as well as a photo of the old Ford in which the four of them left the ranch. Charlie waved to them as they drove off. Susan didn’t notice the time, but it was night. There was a pair of wire cutters in the back seat, also a rope. She, Katie, and Linda each had a knife; Tex had a gun and, she believed, a knife too. Not until they were en route did Tex tell them, to quote Susan, that they “were going to a house up on the hill that used to belong to Terry Melcher, and the only reason why we were going to that house was because Tex knew the outline of the house.”

  Q. “Did Tex tell you why you four were going to Terry Melcher’s former residence?”

  Matter-of-factly, with no emotion whatsoever, Susan replied, “To get all of their money and to kill whoever was there.”

  Q. “It didn’t make any difference who was there, you were told to kill them; is that correct?”

  A. “Yes.”

  They got lost on the way. However, Tex finally recognized the turnoff and they drove to the top of the hill. Tex got out, climbed the telephone pole, and, using the wire cutters, severed the wires. (LAPD still hadn’t got back to me regarding the test cuts made by the pair found at Barker.) When Tex returned to the car, they drove back down the hill, parked at the bottom, then, bringing along their extra clothing, walked back up. They didn’t enter the grounds through the gate “because we thought there might be an alarm system or electricity.” To the right of the gate was a steep, brushy incline. The fence wasn’t as high here. Susan threw over her clothing bundle, then went over herself, her knife in her teeth. The others followed.

 
They were stowing their clothing in the bushes when Susan saw the headlights of a car. It was coming up the driveway in the direction of the gate. “Tex told us girls to lie down and be still and not make a sound. He went out of sight…I heard him say ‘Halt.’” Susan also heard another voice, male, say “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” “And I heard a gunshot and I heard another gunshot and another one and another one.” Four shots, then Tex returned and told them to come on. When they got to the car, Tex reached inside and turned off the lights; then they pushed the car away from the gate, back up the driveway.

  I showed Susan a photo of the Rambler. “It looked similar to it, yes.” I then showed her the police photograph of Steven Parent inside the vehicle.

  A. “That is the thing I saw in the car.”

  There were audible gasps from the jurors.

  Q. “When you say ‘thing,’ you are referring to a human being?”

  A. “Yes, human being.”

  The jurors had looked at the heart of Susan Atkins and seen ice.

  They went on down the driveway, past the garage, to the house. Using a scale diagram I’d had prepared, Susan indicated their approach to the dining-room window. “Tex opened the window, crawled inside, and the next thing I knew he was at the front door.”

  Q. “Did all of you girls enter at that time?”

  A. “Only two of us entered, one stayed outside.”

  Q. “Who stayed outside?”

  A. “Linda Kasabian.”

  Susan and Katie joined Tex. There was a man lying on the couch (Susan ID’d a photo of Voytek Frykowski). “The man stretched his arms and woke up. I guess he thought some of his friends were coming from somewhere. He said, ‘What time is it?’…Tex jumped in front of him and held a gun in his face and said, ‘Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.’ Frykowski said something like ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’”

  Q. “What did Tex say to that, if anything?”

  A. “He said, ‘I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business…’”

  Tex then told Susan to check for other people. In the first bedroom she saw a woman reading a book. (Susan ID’d a photo of Abigail Folger.) “She looked at me and smiled and I looked at her and smiled.” She went on. A man and a woman were in the next bedroom. The man, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, had his back to Susan. The woman, who was pregnant, was lying on the bed. (Susan ID’d photos of Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate.) The pair were talking and neither saw her. Returning to the living room, she reported to Tex that there were three more people.

  Tex gave her the rope and told her to tie up the man on the couch. After she’d done this, Tex ordered her to get the others. Susan walked into Abigail Folger’s bedroom, “put a knife in front of her, and said, ‘Get up and go into the living room. Don’t ask any questions. Just do what I say.’” Katie, also armed with a knife, took charge of Folger while Susan got the other two.

  None offered any resistance. All had the same expression on their faces, “Shock.”

  On entering the living room, Sebring asked Tex, “What are you doing here?” Tex told him to shut up, then ordered the three to lie on their stomachs on the floor in front of the fireplace. “Can’t you see she’s pregnant?” Sebring said. “Let her sit down.”

  When Sebring “didn’t follow Tex’s orders…Tex shot him.”

  Q. “Did you see Tex shoot Jay Sebring?”

  A. “Yes.”

  Q. “With the gun that he had taken from Spahn Ranch?”

  A. “Yes.”

  Q. “What happened next?”

  A. “Jay Sebring fell over in front of the fireplace and Sharon and

  Abigail screamed.”

  Tex ordered them to be quiet. When he asked if they had any money, Abigail said she had some in her purse in the bedroom. Susan went with her to get it. Abigail handed her seventy-two dollars and asked if she wanted her credit cards. Susan said she didn’t. On their return to the living room, Tex told Susan to get a towel and retie Frykowski’s hands; she did, she said, but couldn’t get the knot very tight. Tex then took the rope and tied it first around Sebring’s neck, then the necks of Abigail and Sharon. He threw the end of the rope over the beam in the ceiling and pulled on it, “which made Sharon and Abigail stand up so they wouldn’t be choked to death…” Then, “I forget who said it, but one of the victims said, ‘What are you going to do with us?’ and Tex said, ‘You are all going to die.’ And at that time they began to plead for their lives.”

  Q. “What is the next thing that happened?”

  A. “Then Tex ordered me to go over and kill Frykowski.”

  As she raised her knife, Frykowski, who had managed to free his hands, jumped up and “knocked me down, and I grabbed him as best I could, and then it was a fight for my life as well as him fighting for his life.

  “Somehow he got ahold of my hair and pulled it very hard and I was screaming for Tex to help me, or somebody to help me, and Frykowski, he was also screaming.

  “Somehow he got behind me, and I had the knife in my right hand and I was—I was—I don’t know where I was at but I was just swinging with the knife, and I remember hitting something four, fives times repeatedly behind me. I didn’t see what it was I was stabbing.”

  Q. “But did it appear to be a human being?”

  A. “I never stabbed a human being before, but I just know it was going into something.”

  Q. “Could it have been Frykowski?”

  A. “It could have been Frykowski, it could have been a chair, I don’t know what it was.”

  Susan had changed her story. In my interview with her, and on the tape, she had admitted to stabbing Frykowski “three or four times in the leg.” Also, if the story she told Virginia Graham was true, she knew exactly how it felt to stab someone, i.e., Gary Hinman.

  Frykowski ran for the front door, “yelling for his life, for somebody to come help him.” Tex got to him and hit him over the head several times with “I believe a gun butt.” Tex later told her that he had broken the gun hitting Frykowski and that it wouldn’t work any more.* Apparently Tex had a knife ready, as he began stabbing Frykowski “as best he could because Frykowski was still fighting.” Meanwhile, “Abigail Folger had gotten loose from the rope and was in a fight with Katie, Patricia Krenwinkel…”

  THE FOREMAN “We have a grand juror who would like to be excused for just a couple of minutes.”

  A recess was taken. There was more than one pale face in the jury box.

  We resumed where Susan had left off. Someone was moaning, she said. Tex ran over to Sebring, “and bent down and viciously stabbed him in the back many times…

  “Sharon Tate, I remember seeing her struggling with the rope.” Tex ordered Susan to take care of her. Susan locked her arm around Sharon’s neck, forcing her back onto the couch. She was begging for her life. “I looked at her and said, ‘Woman, I have no mercy for you.’ And I knew that I was talking to myself, not to her…”

  Q. “Did Sharon say anything about the baby at that point?”

  A. “She said, ‘Please let me go. All I want to do is have my baby.’

  “There was a lot of confusion going on…Tex went over to help

  Katie…I saw Tex stab Abigail Folger and just before he stabbed—maybe an instant before he stabbed her—she looked at him and let her arms go and looked at all of us and said, ‘I give up. Take me.’”

  I asked Susan how many times Tex had stabbed Abigail. “Only once,” Susan replied. “She grabbed her middle section of her body and fell to the floor.”

  Tex then ran outside. Susan released her grip on Sharon but continued to guard her. When Tex returned, he told Susan, “Kill her.” But, according to the story Susan was now telling, “I couldn’t.” Instead, “in order to make a diversion so that Tex couldn’t see that I couldn’t kill her, I grabbed her hand and held her arms, and then I saw Tex stab her in the heart area around the chest.” Sharon then fell from the couch to the floor. (Susan o
nly mentioned Tex stabbing Sharon Tate once. According to the autopsy report, she had been stabbed sixteen times. According to Ronnie Howard, Susan told her, “I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.”)

  The next thing she remembered, Susan now testified, was that she, Tex, and Katie were outside, and “I saw Abigail Folger on the front lawn, bent over falling onto the grass…I didn’t see her go outside…and I saw Tex go over and stab her three or four—I don’t know how many times…” (Abigail Folger had twenty-eight stab wounds.) “While he was doing that, Katie and I were looking for Linda, because she wasn’t around…and then Tex walked over to Frykowski and kicked him in the head.” Frykowski was on the front lawn, away from the door. When Tex kicked him, “the body didn’t move very much. I believe it was dead at that time.” (Which was not surprising, since Voytek Frykowski had been shot twice, struck over the head thirteen times with a blunt object, and stabbed fifty-one times.)

  Then “Tex told me to go back into the house and write something on the door in one of the victims’ blood…He said, ‘Write something that will shock the world.’…I had previously been involved in something similar to this [Hinman], where I saw ‘political piggy’ written on the wall, so that stuck very heavily in my mind…” Re-entering the house, she picked up the same towel she had used to tie Frykowski’s hands, and walked over to Sharon Tate. Then she heard sounds.

  Q. “What kind of sounds were they?”

  A. “Gurgling sounds like blood flowing into the body out of the heart.”

  Q. “What did you do then?”

  A. “I picked up the towel and turned my head and touched her chest, and at the same time I saw she was pregnant and I knew that there was a living being inside of that body and I wanted to but I didn’t have the courage to go ahead and take it…And I got the towel with Sharon Tate’s blood, walked over to the door, and with the towel I wrote PIG on the door.”

  Susan then threw the towel back into the living room; she didn’t look to see where it landed. (It fell on Sebring’s face, hence the “hood” referred to in the press.)

  Sadie, Tex, and Katie then picked up the bundles of spare clothing they’d hidden in the bushes. They left by the gate, Tex pushing the button, and hurried down the hill. “When we got to the car, Linda Kasabian started the car, and Tex ran up to her and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get over on the passenger side. Don’t do anything until I tell you to do it.’ Then we drove off.”