Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  In interviewing Hatami, I hadn’t mentioned Manson’s name. Not until the interview was almost over did Hatami realize that the man he had spoken to that day might have been the man accused of plotting Sharon’s murder.

  Melcher to Altobelli to Hatami. If I hadn’t suspected that Melcher was withholding something, it was possible that we might never have placed Manson inside the gate of 10050 Cielo Drive.

  A similar chain, which had begun with my discovery of a short notation in the Inyo County files, led me to the missing piece in the motive for both the Tate and LaBianca murders.

  Finally, nearly three months after first requesting it, I obtained the tape Inyo County Deputy Sheriff Don Ward had made with the two miners, Paul Crockett and Brooks Poston.

  Ward had interviewed the pair on October 3, 1969, at Independence. This was a week before the Barker raid, and nearly a month and a half before LAPD learned of the Manson Family’s possible involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Ward’s interview had nothing to do with those murders, only the activities of the “hippie types” who were now living in Golar Wash.

  Crockett, a weather-worn miner in his mid-forties, had been prospecting in the Death Valley area in the spring of 1969 when he came across Manson’s advance party at Barker Ranch. At this time it consisted of only two persons, a young runaway named Juanita Wildebush and Brooks Poston, a slender, rather docile eighteen-year-old who had been with the Family since June 1968. Nights, Crockett would visit the pair, and the talk would invariably turn to one subject, Charlie. “And I couldn’t believe what they were saying,” Crockett observed. “I mean, it was so utterly ridiculous.” It became obvious to Crockett that these people believed this Charlie to be the second coming of Christ. It was just as obvious that they feared him. And so Crockett, who was no stranger to mysticism, did something perhaps a little odd but at least psychologically effective. He told them that, just like Charlie, he too had powers. And “I planted them with the idea that I had the power to keep Charlie from coming back up there.”

  Other Family members—including Paul Watkins, Tex Watson, Brenda McCann, and Bruce Davis—would occasionally show up at Barker with messages and supplies, and it didn’t take long for the word to get back to Manson.

  Initially he scoffed at the idea. But each time he tried to go to Barker something happened: the truck broke down, Spahn Ranch was raided, and so on. Meanwhile Juanita eloped with Bob Berry, Crockett’s partner, and Crockett succeeded in “unconverting” several of Manson’s most important male followers: Poston; Paul Watkins, who often acted as Manson’s second in command; and, somewhat later, Juan Flynn, a tall, strapping Panamanian cowboy who had worked at Spahn.

  When Crockett first met young Poston, he was “a zombie.” The phrase was Poston’s own. He said that he had wanted to leave the Family many times, but “Manson had a vise grip on my mind, and I couldn’t break the grip. I didn’t know how to leave…”

  Crockett discovered that Manson had “programmed all his people to the extent that they’re just like him. He has put all kinds of things in their heads. I didn’t believe it could be done, but he has done it and I seen it working.” Crockett began “deprogramming” Poston. He put him to work in his various mining ventures, built up his body, got him to thinking of other things than Manson.

  When Manson finally reached Barker, in September 1969, Crockett, meeting him for the first time, found him “a very clever man—he borders on genius.” Then Manson told him “some of the weirdest stories. I thought it was all make-believe, to start with.” Before long, Crockett was not only convinced that Manson was insane, he was sure “he would think no more of killing one of us than he would of stepping on a flower; in fact, he’d rather do that than step on a flower.”

  Deciding that his own life expectancy was directly proportionate to his usefulness to Manson, Crockett made himself very useful, volunteering his truck to haul in supplies, and so forth. He and the former Mansonites now living with him in a small cabin near Barker also began taking precautions.

  Among the weird tales Manson had told Crockett: That the black man “was getting ready to blow the whole thing open…Charlie has set up the whole thing, it’s kind of like a storybook…He says Helter Skelter is coming down.”

  “Helter Skelter is what he calls the Negro revolt,” Poston explained. “He says the Negroes are going to revolt and kill all the white men except the ones that are hiding in the desert…” Long before this Manson had told Poston, “When Helter Skelter comes down, the cities are going to be mass hysteria and the cops—the piggies, he calls them—won’t know what to do, and the beast will fall and the black man will take over…that the battle of Armageddon will be at hand.”

  Poston told Deputy Ward, “One of Charlie’s basic creeds is that all that girls are for is to fuck. And that’s all they’re for. And there is no crime, there is no sin, everything is all right, that it’s all just a game, like the game of a little kid, only it’s a grown-up game, and that God’s getting ready to pull down the curtain on this game and start it over again with his chosen people…”

  His chosen people were the Family, Charlie said. He would lead them to the desert, where they would multiply until they numbered 144,000. He got this, Poston said, “from reading things into the Bible, from Revelations.”*

  Also in Revelation, as well as in Hopi Indian legends, there was mention of a “bottomless pit,” Poston said. The entrance to this pit, according to Charlie, was “a cave that he says is underneath Death Valley that leads down to a sea of gold that the Indians know about.” Charlie claimed that “every tuned-in tribe of people that’s ever lived have escaped the destruction of their race by going underground, literally, and they’re all living in a golden city where there’s a river that runs through it of milk and honey, and a tree that bears twelve kinds of fruit, a different fruit each month, or something like that, and you don’t need to bring candles nor any flashlights down there. He says it will be all lit up because…the walls will glow and it won’t be cold and it won’t be too hot. There will be warm springs and fresh water, and people are already down there waiting for him.”

  Both Atkins and Jakobson had already told me about Charlie’s “bottomless pit.” The Family loved to hear Charlie sermonize about this hidden “land of milk and honey.” They not only believed, they were so convinced that such a place existed that they spent days searching for the hole in the ground which would lead them to the underground paradise.

  There was also a kind of desperation in the search, because it was here, underground in the bottomless pit, that they intended to hide and wait out Helter Skelter.

  It was obvious to both Crockett and Poston that Manson believed Helter Skelter was imminent. And there were the preparations. Manson had arrived at Barker Ranch in September 1969 with about eight others, all heavily armed. More Family members arrived the following week, driving stolen dune buggies and other vehicles. They began setting up lookout posts and fortifications, hiding caches of guns, gasoline, and supplies.

  (It did not occur to Crockett and Poston—since neither was aware of the Family’s involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders—that Manson might be fearful of something other than blacks.)

  Manson hadn’t given up on Poston, but Crockett’s “deprogramming” had been very effective. Manson was even more upset about Paul Watkins’ leaving him, since Watkins, a good-looking youth with a way with women, had been Manson’s chief procurer of young girls.

  Crockett, Poston, and Watkins had begun sleeping with their shotguns within reach. On at least three occasions Charlie, Clem, and/or the girls tried to creepy-crawl the cabin. Each time the trio had been lucky and had heard something, aborting the plan. Then one night Juan Flynn arrived “to shoot some bull,” and admitted Manson had suggested he kill Crockett. Crockett persuaded Juan—who was far too independent to ever join the Family—that he should leave the area.

  Crockett, accustomed to living as free and unencumbered as a mountain goat, was a mite
stubborn. He felt he had as much right to be in Death Valley as Manson did. But he was also a realist. With Flynn gone and Watkins in town getting supplies, he and Poston were vastly outnumbered. Figuring “my usefulness to Charlie had already vanished and that he would, if he considered it necessary, liquidate me immediately, if not sooner,” Crockett had Poston fill the canteens and pack some grub. Under cover of night they fled the area on foot, walking over twenty rugged miles to Warmsprings, then catching a ride to Independence, where they told Deputy Sheriff Ward about Charles Manson and his Family.

  After hearing the tape, I arranged through Frank Fowles for Crockett and Poston to come to Los Angeles.

  Though it was Crockett who had broken Manson’s hold over Poston, the latter was by far the most articulate. Incidents, dates, places—snap, snap, snap. Crockett, by contrast, was evasive. “I can feel their vibrations. I can’t talk freely to you because they might know what I am saying.”

  Crockett doubted if we could ever convict Manson, because “he does nothing himself. His people do it all for him. He doesn’t do anything anybody could pin on him.” He added that “all the women have been programmed to do exactly as he says, and they all have knives. He’s got those girls so programmed that they don’t even exist. They are a copy of him.”

  Though I was interested in Crockett’s contacts with Manson and the Family, I was hopeful that he could give me something more important.

  Crockett had helped Poston, Watkins, and Flynn break away from Manson. To do this he must have gained some insight into how Manson had gained control over them in the first place. Others had also said that Manson “programmed” his followers. Did he understand how he accomplished this?

  Crockett said he did, but when he tried to articulate it, he became bogged down in a morass of words and definitions, finally saying, “I can’t explain it. It’s all part of the occult.”

  I decided I wouldn’t be able to use Crockett as a witness.

  It was otherwise with Brooks Poston. The tall, gangly youth, with the air of the hayseed about him, was a fund of information about Manson and the Family.

  A highly impressionable seventeen-year-old, Brooks Poston had met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house, and from that moment until he finally broke with Manson more than a year later to follow Crockett, “I believed Charlie was JC.”

  Q. “JC?”

  A. “Yeah, that’s how Charlie always used to refer to Jesus Christ.”

  Q. “Did Manson ever tell you that he was JC, or Jesus Christ?”

  It wasn’t so much stated as implied, Brooks said. Charlie claimed that he had lived before, nearly two thousand years ago, and that he had once died on the cross. (Manson had also told Gregg Jakobson that he had already died once, and that “death is beautiful.”)

  Charlie had a favorite story which he was fond of telling the Family, complete with dramatic gestures and moans of pain. Brooks had heard it often. According to Charlie, while he was living in Haight-Ashbury, he had taken a “magic mushroom” (psilocybin) trip. He was lying on a bed, but it became a cross, and he could feel the nails in his feet and hands and the sword in his side, and when he looked down at the foot of the cross he saw Mary Magdalene (Mary Brunner), and she was crying, and he said, “I’m all right, Mary.” He had been fighting it, but now he gave up, surrendered himself to death, and when he did, he could suddenly see through the eyes of everyone at the same time, and at that moment he became the whole world.

  With such clues, his followers had little trouble guessing his true identity.

  I was curious about something. Up until his arrest in Mendocino County on July 28, 1967,* Charlie had always used his real name, Charles Milles Manson. On that occasion, however, and thereafter, he called himself Charles Willis Manson. Had Manson ever said anything about his name? I asked. Crockett and Poston both told me that they had heard Manson say, very slowly, that his name was “Charles’ Will Is Man’s Son,” meaning that his will was that of the Son of Man.

  Although Susan Atkins had emphasized Charlie’s surname in talking to Virginia Graham, I hadn’t really thought, until now, how powerful that name was. Man Son. It was tailor-made for the Infinite Being role he was now seeking to portray.

  But Charlie carried all this yet a step further, Poston said. Manson claimed that the members of the Family were the original Christians, reincarnated, and that the Romans had returned as the establishment.

  It was now time, Manson told his closest followers, for the Romans to have their turn on the cross.

  Exactly how did Manson “program” someone? I asked Brooks.

  He had various techniques, Poston said. With a girl, it would usually start with sex. Charlie might convince a plain girl that she was beautiful. Or, if she had a father fixation, have her imagine that he was her father. (He’d used both techniques with Susan Atkins.) Or, if he felt she was looking for a leader, he might imply that he was Christ. Manson had a talent for sensing, and capitalizing on, a person’s hangups and/or desires. When a man first joined the group, Charlie would usually take him on an LSD trip, ostensibly “to open his mind.” Then, while he was in a highly suggestible state, he would talk about love, how you had to surrender yourself to it, how only by ceasing to exist as an individual ego could you become one with all things.

  As with Jakobson, I queried Poston as to the sources of Manson’s philosophy. Scientology, the Bible, and the Beatles. These three were the only ones he knew.

  A peculiar triumvirate. Yet by now I was beginning to suspect the existence of at least a fourth influence. The old magazines I’d found at Barker, Gregg’s mention that Charlie claimed to have read Nietzsche and that he believed in a master race, plus the emergence of a startling number of disturbing parallels between Manson and the leader of the Third Reich, led me to ask Poston: “Did Manson ever say anything about Hitler?”

  Poston’s reply was short and incredibly chilling.

  A. “He said that Hitler was a tuned-in guy who had leveled the karma of the Jews.”

  I spent most of two days interviewing Crockett and Poston, obtaining much new information, some of it very incriminating. For example, Manson had once suggested Poston take a knife, go into Shoshone, and kill the sheriff. In the first real test of his newly found independence, Poston had refused to even consider the idea.

  Before Crockett and Poston returned to Shoshone, I told them I wanted to talk to Juan Flynn and Paul Watkins. They weren’t sure if Juan would talk to me—that big Panamanian cowboy was an independent cuss—but they thought Paul might. Since he was no longer procuring girls for Charlie, he had some free time on his hands.

  Watkins agreed to the interview, and I arranged for Watkins, Poston, and Crockett to stay in a motel in downtown L.A.

  “Paul, I need a new love.”

  Paul Watkins was describing for me how Manson would send him out to recruit young girls. Watkins admitted that he liked his special role in the Family. The only problem was, after he’d located a likely candidate, Charlie would insist on sleeping with her first.

  Why didn’t Manson pick up the girls himself? I asked.

  “He was too old for most of the girls,” the nineteen-year-old Watkins replied. “He frightened them. Also, I had a good line.” It was also obvious that Watkins was better-looking than Charlie.

  I asked Paul where he found the girls. He might go down to the Sunset Strip, where the teenyboppers hung out. Or drive the highways watching for girls who were hitchhiking. Once Charlie, through the connivance of an older woman who posed as Watkins’ mother, even had him arrange a phony registration at a Los Angeles high school so he could be closer to the action.

  Watkins also described the orgies that took place at the Gresham Street house and at Spahn. For a while there was one about every week. They would always start with drugs—grass, peyote, LSD, whatever was available—Manson rationing them out, deciding how much each person needed. “Everything was done at Charlie’s direction,” Paul said. Charlie might dance around, everyone el
se following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes. Then, when everyone was naked, they’d lie on the floor, “and they’d play the game of taking twelve deep breaths and releasing them and close eyes and then rub against each other” until “eventually all were touching.” Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.” Paul said that the usual objective during the orgies was for all the Family members to achieve a simultaneous orgasm, but they were never successful.

  Manson often staged these events to impress outsiders. If there were guests who he felt could be of some use to him, he’d say to the Family, “Let’s get together and show these people how to make love.” Whatever the reaction, the impression was a lasting one. “It was like the Devil buying your soul,” Watkins said.

  Manson also used these occasions to “eradicate hangups.” If a person indicated reluctance to engage in a certain act, Manson would force that person to commit it. Male-female, female-female, male-male, intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio, sodomy—there could be no inhibitions of any kind. One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched. Manson also “went down on” a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.

  Charlie used sex, Paul said. For example, when it became obvious that DeCarlo was making no effort to persuade his motorcycle gang to join the Family, Manson told the girls to withhold their favors from Danny.

  The fact that Manson directed even the sex lives of his followers was powerful evidence of his domination. I asked Watkins for other examples specifically involving co-defendants. He recalled that once at Spahn Ranch, Charlie told Sadie: “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Sadie got right up and was on her way out the door when Charlie said, “Never mind.”