Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you: you haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me…but I am only what lives inside each and every one of you.

  “My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system…I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.

  “I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second-hand clothes…I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha! I’m already dead, have been all my life. I’ve spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built.

  “Sometimes I think about giving it back to you; sometimes I think about just jumping on you and letting you shoot me…If I could, I would jerk this microphone off and beat your brains out with it, because that is what you deserve, that is what you deserve…

  “If I could get angry at you, I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it…

  “These children, everything they done, they done for the love of their brother…

  “If I showed them that I would do anything for my brother—including giving my life for my brother on the battlefield—and then they pick up their banner, and they go off and do what they do, that is not my responsibility. I don’t tell people what to do…

  “These children [indicating the female defendants] were finding themselves. What they did, if they did whatever they did, is up to them. They will have to explain that to you…

  “It’s all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hellhole that you can think of, and you drag him and put him in a courtroom.

  “You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago…”

  Older asked Manson if he had anything further to say.

  MANSON “I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed.

  “I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.”

  Some called him Christ, Manson said. In prison his name was a number. Some now want a sadistic fiend, and so they see him as that. So be it. Guilty. Not guilty. They are only words. “You can do anything you want with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love…If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself.”

  Telling Manson, “You seem to be getting far afield,” Older asked him to stick to the issues.

  MANSON “The issues?…Mr. Bugliosi is a hard-driving prosecutor, polished education, a master of words, semantics. He is a genius. He has got everything that every lawyer would want to have except one thing: a case. He doesn’t have a case. Were I allowed to defend myself, I could have proven this to you…

  “The evidence in this case is a gun. There was a gun that laid around the ranch. It belonged to everybody. Anybody could have picked that gun up and done anything they wanted to do with it. I don’t deny having that gun. That gun has been in my possession many times.

  “Like the rope was there.” Sure he’d bought the rope, Manson admitted, 150 feet of it, “because you need rope on a ranch.”

  The clothes? “It is really convenient that Mr. Baggot found those clothes. I imagine he got a little taste of money for that.”

  The bloodstains? “Well, they are not exactly bloodstains. They are benzidine reaction.”

  The leather thong? “How many people have ever worn moccasins with leather thongs?”

  The photos of the seven bodies, 169 stab wounds? “They put the hideous bodies on display and they imply: If he gets out, see what will happen to you.”

  Helter Skelter? “It means confusion, literally. It doesn’t mean any war with anyone. It doesn’t mean that some people are going to kill other people…Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast. If you can’t see the confusion coming down around you fast, you can call it what you wish.”

  Conspiracy? “Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? Is that a conspiracy?

  “The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music…

  “It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says ‘Rise,’ it says ‘Kill.’

  “Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

  About the witnesses. “For example, Danny DeCarlo. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike…But actually all I ever did with Danny DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect him back at himself. If he said he did not like the black man, I would say ‘O.K.’ So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and say ‘Charlie thinks like I do.’

  “But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.

  “I don’t think like you people. You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone…”

  Linda Kasabian. She only testified against him because she saw him as her father and she never liked her father. “So she gets on the stand and she says when she looked in that man’s eyes that was dying, she knew that it was my fault. She knew it was my fault because she couldn’t face death. And if she can’t face death, that is not my fault. I can face death. I have all the time. In the penitentiary you live with it, with constant fear of death, because it is a violent world in there, and you have to be on your toes constantly.”

  Dianne Lake. She wanted attention. She would make trouble, cause accidents to get it. She wanted a father to punish her. “So as any father would do, I conditioned her mind with pain to keep her from burning the ranch down.”

  Yes, he was a father to the young girls and boys in the Family. But a father only in the sense that he taught them “not to be weak and not to lean on me.” Paul Watkins wanted a father. “I told him: ‘To be a man, boy, you have to stand up and be your own father.’ So he goes off to the desert and finds a father image in Paul Crockett.”

  Yes, he put a knife to Juan Flynn’s throat. Yes, he told him he felt responsible for all of these killings. “I do feel some responsibility. I feel a responsibility for the pollution. I feel a responsibility for the whole thing.”

  He didn’t deny that he had told Brooks Poston to get a knife and go kill the sheriff of Shoshone. “I don’t know the sheriff of Shoshone. I am not saying that I didn’t say it, but if I said it, at the time I may have thought it was a good idea.

  “To be honest with you, I don’t recall ever saying ‘Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.’ Or I don’t recall saying ‘Get a knife and go kill the sheriff.’

  “In fact, it makes me mad when someone kills snakes or dogs or cats or horses. I don’t even like to eat meat—that is how much I am against killing…

  “I haven’t got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to see any wrong…I have always said: Do what your love tells you, and I do what my love tells me…Is it my fault that your children do what you do?

  “What about your children?” Manson asked angrily, rising slightly in the witness chair as if he were about to spring forward and attack everyone in the courtroom. “You say there are just a few?

  “There are many, many more, coming in the same direction.

  “They are running in the streets—and they are coming right at you!”

  I had only a few questions for Manson, none of which came from the notebooks I’d kept.

  Q. “You say you are already dead, is that right, Charlie?”

  A. “Dead in your mind or dead in my mind?”

&nbs
p; Q. “Define it any way you want to.”

  A. “As any child will tell you, dead is when you are no more. It is just when you are not there. If you weren’t there, you would be dead.”

  Q. “How long have you been dead?” Manson evaded a direct reply.

  Q. “To be precise about it, you think you have been dead for close to 2,000 years, don’t you?”

  A. “Mr. Bugliosi, 2,000 years is relative to the second we live in.”

  Q. “Suffice it to say, Department 104 is a long way from Calvary, isn’t that true?”

  Manson had testified that all he wanted was to take his children and return to the desert. After I reminded him that “the only people who can set you free so that you can go back to the desert are the twelve jurors in this case,” and noting that, though he had testified for over an hour, “the jury in this case never heard a single, solitary word you said,” I posed one final question: “Mr. Manson, are you willing to testify in front of the jury and tell them the same things that you have testified to here in open court today?”

  Kanarek objected. Older sustained the objection, and I concluded my cross.

  To my surprise, Older later asked me why I hadn’t seriously cross-examined Manson. I’d thought the reason was obvious. I had nothing to gain, since the jury wasn’t present. I had lots and lots of questions for Charlie, several notebooks full, if he took the stand in the presence of the jury, but in the meantime I had no intention of giving him a dry run.

  However, when Older asked Manson if he now wished to testify before the jury, Charlie replied, “I have already relieved all the pressure I had.”

  As Manson left the stand and passed the counsel table, I overheard him tell the three girls: “You don’t have to testify now.”

  The big question: what did he mean by “now”? I strongly suspected that Manson hadn’t given up but was only biding his time.

  After the defense had introduced their exhibits, Judge Older recessed court for ten days to give the attorneys time to prepare their jury instructions and arguments.

  This being his first trial, Ron Hughes had never argued before a jury before, or participated in drawing up the instructions which the judge would give the jury just before they began their deliberations. He was obviously looking forward to it, however. He confided to TV newscaster Stan Atkinson that he was convinced he could win an acquittal for Leslie Van Houten.

  He wouldn’t even get the chance to try.

  When court resumed on Monday, November 30, Ronald Hughes was absent.

  Quizzed by Older, none of the other defense attorneys knew where he was. Fitzgerald said that he had last talked to Ron on Thursday or Friday, and that he sounded O.K. at that time. Hughes often spent his weekends camping at Sespe Hot Springs, a rugged terrain some 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles. There had been floods in the area the past weekend. It was possible that Hughes had been stranded there.

  The next day we learned that Hughes had gone to Sespe on Friday with two teen-agers, James Forsher and Lauren Elder, in Miss Elder’s Volkswagen. The pair—who were questioned but not held—said that when it began raining, they had decided to return to L.A., but Hughes had decided to stay over until Sunday. When the two tried to leave, however, their auto became mired down, and they were forced to abandon it and hike out.

  Three other youths had seen Hughes on the morning of the following day, Saturday the twenty-eighth. He was alone at the time and on high ground, well away from the flood area. Chatting with them briefly, he appeared neither ill nor in any danger. Polygraphed, the three were found to have no additional knowledge and they were not held. Since Forsher and Elder had last seen Hughes a day earlier, they apparently were not polygraphed and their story was taken at face value.

  Owing to the continued bad weather, it was two days before the Ventura Sheriff’s Office could get up a helicopter to search the area. In the meantime, rumors abounded. One was to the effect that Hughes had deliberately skipped, either to avoid argument or to sabotage the trial. Knowing Ron, I seriously doubted if this was true. I became convinced it wasn’t when reporters visited the place where Hughes lived.

  He slept on a mattress in a garage behind the home of a friend. According to reporters, the place was a mess—one remarked that he wouldn’t even let his dog sleep there. But on the wall of the garage, neatly framed and carefully hung, was Ronald Hughes’ bar certificate.

  Although there were numerous reports that a man fitting Hughes’ description had been seen in various places—boarding a bus in Reno, driving on the San Bernardino freeway, drinking at a bar in Baja—none checked out. On December 2, Judge Older told Leslie Van Houten that he felt a co-counsel should be brought in to represent her during Hughes’ absence. Leslie said she would refuse any other attorney.

  On December 3, after consulting with Paul Fitzgerald, Older appointed Maxwell Keith co-counsel for Leslie.

  A quiet, somewhat shy man in his mid-forties, whose conservative clothing and courtroom manner were in sharp contrast to those of Hughes, Keith had an excellent reputation in the legal community. Those who knew him well described him as conscientious, totally ethical, and completely professional, and it was clear from the start that he would be representing his client and not Manson.

  Sensing this, Manson asked to have all the defense attorneys dismissed (“They aren’t our lawyers; they won’t listen to us”) so he and the girls could represent themselves. He also demanded that the case be reopened so they could put on a defense. They had twenty-one witnesses waiting to testify, he said. Both requests were denied.

  Keith had his work laid out for him. Before he could prepare his argument, he had to familiarize himself with 152 volumes of transcript, over 18,000 pages.

  Though Older granted a delay until he could do so, he told all counsel: “We will continue to meet every day at 9 A.M. until further notice.”

  Older obviously wanted to count heads.

  Several days earlier Steve Kay had overheard Manson tell the girls, “Watch Paul; I think he’s up to something.” I made sure Fitzgerald learned of the conversation. One missing attorney was one more than enough.

  Neither the air search nor a subsequent ground search of the Sespe area yielded any trace of Hughes. The abandoned Volkswagen was found, with a batch of court transcripts inside, but other papers Hughes was known to have had, including a secret psychiatric report on Leslie Van Houten, were missing.

  On December 6, Paul Fitzgerald told reporters, “I think Ron is dead.” On December 7, an all-points bulletin was issued for Hughes, LASO admitting, “This is something you do when you have no other leads.” On December 8, Judge Older went to the Ambassador Hotel to inform the jury of the reason for the delay. He also told them: “It appears fairly certain that you will be sequestered over the Christmas holidays.” They took it much better than expected. On December 12, the search for Ronald Hughes was suspended.

  The most persistent rumor was that Hughes had been murdered by the Family. There was, at this time, no evidence of this. But there was more than ample cause for speculation.

  Though once little more than an errand boy for Manson, during the course of the trial Hughes had grown increasingly independent, until the two had finally split over whether there should be a defense—Hughes strongly opposing his client’s taking the stand to absolve Charlie. I also heard from several sources, including Paul Fitzgerald, that Hughes was afraid of Manson. It was possible that he showed this fear, which, in Manson’s case, was like waving a red flag before a bull. Fear turned Charlie on.

  There could have been several reasons for his murder, if it was that. It may have been done to intimidate the other defense attorneys into letting Manson put on a defense during the penalty trial (one was so shaken by Hughes’ disappearance that he went on a bender which ended in his arrest for drunken driving). Equally likely, it could have been a tactic to delay the trial—with the hope that it would result in a mistrial, or set the stage for a reversal on appeal.

  Speculati
on, nothing more. Except for one odd, perhaps unrelated, incident. On December 2, four days after Hughes was last seen alive, fugitives Bruce Davis and Nancy Pitman, aka Brenda McCann, voluntarily surrendered to the police. Two of the Family’s most hard-core members, Pitman had been missing for several weeks after failing to appear for sentencing on a forgery charge, while Davis—who had been involved in both the Hinman and Shea murders, who had picked up the gun with which Zero had “committed suicide” but had somehow left no prints, and who was the chief suspect in the slaying of two young Scientology students*—had evaded capture for over seven months.

  Maybe it was just the proximity in time that linked the two events in my mind: Hughes’ disappearance; Davis’ and Pitman’s surprise surrender. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some way the two incidents might be related.

  On December 18—three days before the Tate-LaBianca trial reconvened—the Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Steve Grogan, aka Clem; Lynette Fromme, aka Squeaky; Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch; Catherine Share, aka Gypsy; and Dennis Rice on charges of conspiracy to prevent and dissuade a witness (Barbara Hoyt) from attending a trial. Three other charges, including conspiracy to commit murder, were dismissed by Judge Choate on a 995 motion by the defense.

  Although we had presumed—as I suspected the involved Family members had also—that an overdose of LSD could be fatal, we learned from medical experts that there was no known case of anyone’s dying from this cause. There were many cases, however, where LSD had resulted in death from misperception of surroundings: for example, a person, convinced he could fly, stepping out the window of a tall building. I thought of Barbara, running through the traffic in downtown Honolulu. That she hadn’t been killed was no fault of the Family. The result, however, was that, despite the best efforts of the LaBianca detectives, the DA’s Office had a very weak case.

  Pending trial, four of the five were released on bail. They immediately returned to the corner outside the Hall of Justice, where they would remain, on and off, during most of the remainder of the trial. Since Ouisch, who had given Barbara the LSD-laden hamburger, was nearly nine months pregnant, Judge Choate released her on her own recognizance. She promptly fled the state.