Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  During one of the noon recesses Manson asked to see me. I’d turned down several earlier requests, with the comment that I’d talk to him when he took the stand, but this time I decided to see what he wanted.

  I was glad I did, as it was one of the most informative conversations we had—Manson telling me exactly how he felt about his three female co-defendants.

  Manson wanted to clear up a couple of wrong impressions. One was Fitzgerald’s reference to him as a “right-wing hippie.” Though I personally thought the description had some validity, Manson felt otherwise. He’d never thought of himself as a hippie, he said. “Hippies don’t like the establishment so they back off and form their own establishment. They’re no better than the others.”

  He also didn’t want me to think that Sadie, Katie, and Leslie were the best he could do. “I’ve screwed girls that would make these three look like boys,” he said.

  For some reason it was important to Manson that I believe this, and he re-emphasized it, adding, “I’m a very selfish guy. I don’t give a fuck for these girls. I’m only out for myself.”

  “Have you ever told them that, Charlie?” I asked.

  “Sure. Ask them.”

  “Then why would they do what they’re doing for you? Why would they be willing to follow you anywhere—even to the gas chamber at San Quentin?”

  “Because I tell them the truth,” Manson replied. “Other guys bullshit them and say ‘I love you and only you’ and all that baloney. I’m honest with them. I tell them I’m the most selfish guy in the world. And I am.”

  Yet he was always saying that he would die for his brother, I reminded him. Wasn’t that a contradiction?

  “No, because that’s selfish too,” he responded. “He’s not going to die for me unless I’m willing to die for him.”

  I had the strong feeling that Manson was leveling with me. Sadie, Katie, and Leslie were willing to murder, even give their own lives, for Charlie. And Charlie personally couldn’t have cared less about them.

  Though he wasn’t even present when the witnesses testified, Maxwell Keith, arguing for Leslie Van Houten, delivered the best of the four defense arguments. He also did what no other defense attorney had dared do during the entire trial. He put the hat on Charles Manson—albeit with a ten-foot pole.

  “The record discloses over and over again that all of these girls at the ranch believed Manson was God, really believed it.

  “The record discloses that the girls obeyed his commands without any conscious questioning at all.

  “If you believe the prosecution theory that these female defendants and Mr. Watson were extensions of Mr. Manson—his additional arms and legs as it were—if you believe that they were mindless robots, they cannot be guilty of premeditated murder.” To commit first degree murder, Keith argued, you must have malice aforethought and you must think and plan. “And these people did not have minds to make up…Each of the minds of these girls and Mr. Watson were totally controlled by someone else.”

  As for Leslie herself, Keith argued that even if she did all the things the prosecution contended, she still had committed no crime.

  “At best, if you want to believe Dianne Lake, the evidence shows that she was there.

  “At best, it shows that she did something after the commission of these homicides that wasn’t very nice.

  “And at best, it showed that she wiped some fingerprints off after the commission of these homicides, which does not make her an aider and abetter.

  “As repugnant as you may feel this is, nobody in the world can be guilty of murder or conspiracy to commit murder who stabs somebody after they are already dead. I’m sure that desecrating somebody that is dead is a crime in this state, but she is not charged with that.”

  This case, Keith concluded, must be decided on the basis of the evidence, and “on the basis of the evidence, ladies and gentlemen, I say to you: You must acquit Leslie Van Houten.”

  I began my final summation (closing argument) on January 13.

  In my opinion, final summation is very often the most important part of the trial, since it’s the final word to the jury. Again, several hundred hours had gone into the preparation. I began by meeting head on each of the defense contentions. In this way I hoped to dispose of any questions or lingering doubts that otherwise might distract the jury during the last phase of my argument during which I summarize, as affirmatively as I can, the highlights and strengths of my case.

  Taking on each of the defense attorneys in turn, I cited twenty-four misstatements of either the law or the testimony in Fitzgerald’s presentation. As for his suggestion that if Manson ordered these murders he would have sent men rather than women, I asked, “Is Mr. Fitzgerald suggesting that Katie, Sadie, and Leslie were inadequate to do the job? Isn’t Mr. Fitzgerald satisfied with their handiwork?” Fitzgerald had also contended that perhaps Linda planted the bloody clothing a few days before it was found. I reminded the jury that Linda was returned to California on December 2, in custody, and that the clothing was found on December 15. “Apparently Mr. Fitzgerald wants you to believe that one night between these dates Linda snuck out of her room at Sybil Brand, rounded up some clothing, put some blood on them, hitchhiked out to Benedict Canyon Road, threw the clothing over the side of the hill, then hitchhiked back to the jail and snuck back into her room.”

  Fitzgerald had likened the circumstantial evidence in this case to a chain, saying that if one link were missing the chain was broken. I, instead, likened it to a rope, each strand of which is a fact, and “as we add strands we add strength to that rope, until it is strong enough to bind these defendants to justice.”

  Shinn had raised very few points that needed rebutting. Kanarek had raised a great many, and I took them on one by one. A few samples:

  Kanarek had asked why the prosecution didn’t have the defendants try on the seven articles of clothing to see if they fitted. I reversed this, asking why, if they didn’t fit, the defense didn’t illustrate this to the jury.

  As for the absence of Watson’s prints on Parent’s vehicle, I reminded them of Dolan’s testimony that 70 percent of the times LAPD goes to a crime scene no readable prints are found. I also noted that in moving his hand, it was very likely Watson had created an unreadable smudge.

  When I lacked the answer to a question, I frankly admitted it. But usually I offered at least one and often several possibilities. Whom did the glasses belong to? Frankly, we didn’t know. But we did know, from Sadie’s statement to Roseanne Walker, that they did not belong to the killers. Why was there no blood on the Buck knife found in the chair? Kanarek had raised this point. It was a good one. We had no answer. We could speculate, however, that Sadie had lost the knife before she stabbed Voytek and Sharon, possibly while she was in the process of tying up Voytek, and that at some later point she borrowed another knife from Katie or Tex. “Much more important than what knife she used was the fact that she confessed stabbing both of the victims to Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard.”

  The whole thrust of Irving Kanarek’s seven-day argument, I told the jury, was that the prosecution had framed its case against his client, Charles Manson.

  “In other words, ladies and gentlemen,” I observed, “there are seven brutal murders, so the police and the District Attorney got together and said, ‘Let’s prosecute some hippie for these murders, someone whose life style we don’t like. Just about any hippie will do,’ and we just arbitrarily picked on poor Charles Manson.

  “Charles Manson is not a defendant in this trial because he is some long-haired vagabond who made love to young girls and was a virulent dissenter.

  “He is on trial because he is a vicious, diabolical murderer who gave the order that caused seven human beings to end up in the cold earth. That is why he is on trial.”

  I also hit, and hard, Kanarek’s claim that the prosecution was responsible for the excessive length of the trial. The jury had missed both Christmas and New Year’s at home, and I didn’t want them en
tering the jury chambers resenting the prosecution for this.

  “Irving Kanarek, the Toscanini of tedium, is accusing the prosecution of tying up this court for over six months. You folks are the best witnesses. Every single, solitary witness that the prosecution called to the stand was asked brief questions, directly to the point. The witnesses were on that stand day after day after day on cross-examination, not on direct examination.”

  As for Maxwell Keith, he did “everything possible for his client, Leslie Van Houten,” I observed. “He gave his best. Unfortunately for Mr. Keith, he had no facts and no law to support him. Mr. Keith, if you look at his argument very closely, never really disputed that Linda Kasabian and Dianne Lake told the truth. Basically, his position was that even if Leslie did the things Linda and Dianne said she did, she is still not guilty of anything.

  “I wonder if Max would concede that she is at least guilty of trespassing?”

  KEITH “I will.”

  Max’s response surprised me. He was in effect admitting that Leslie had been in the LaBianca residence.

  Even if Rosemary LaBianca was dead when Leslie stabbed her, I told the jury, she was guilty of first degree murder as both a co-conspirator and an aider and abetter. If a person is present at the scene of a crime, offering moral support, that constitutes aiding and abetting. But Leslie went far beyond this, stabbing, wiping prints, and so forth.

  Also, we had only Leslie’s word for it that Rosemary was dead when she stabbed her. “Only thirteen of Rosemary’s forty-one stab wounds were post-mortem. What about the other twenty-eight?”

  Yes, Tex, Sadie, Katie, and Leslie were robots, zombies, automatons. No question about it. But only in the sense that they were totally subservient and obsequious and servile to Charles Manson. Only in that sense. “This does not mean that they did not want to do what Charles Manson told them to do and weren’t very willing participants in these murders. To the contrary, all the evidence goes the other way. There is no evidence that any of these defendants objected to Charles Manson about these two horrendous nights of murder.

  “Only Linda Kasabian, down in Venice, said: ‘Charlie, I am not you. I can’t kill.’”

  The others not only didn’t complain, I noted, they laughed when the Tate murders were described on TV; Leslie told Dianne that stabbing was fun, that the more she stabbed the more she enjoyed it; while Sadie told Virginia and Ronnie that it was better than a sexual climax.

  “The fact that these three female defendants obeyed Charles Manson and did whatever he told them to do does not immunize them from a conviction of first degree murder. It offers no insulation, no protection whatsoever. If it did, then hired killers or trigger men for the Mafia would have a built-in defense for murder. All they would have to say is: ‘Well, I did what my boss told me to do.’”

  Mr. Keith also “suggested that Watson and the three girls had some type of mental disability which prevented them from deliberating and premeditating, even prevented them from having malice aforethought.” The problem with this, I told the jury, was that the defense never introduced any evidence of insanity or diminished capacity; on the contrary, I reminded the jury, Fitzgerald described the girls as “bright, intuitive, perceptive, well educated,” while the evidence itself showed “these defendants were thinking very, very clearly on these two nights of murder.”

  Cutting telephone wires, instructing Linda to listen for sounds, hosing blood off their bodies, disposing of their clothing and weapons, wiping prints—“their conduct clearly and unequivocally shows that on both nights they knew exactly what they were doing, that they intended to kill, they did kill, and they did everything possible to avoid detection.

  “They were not suffering, ladies and gentlemen, from any diminished mental capacity. They were suffering from a diminished heart, a diminished soul.”

  Still up to his old tricks, Kanarek had constantly interrupted my argument with frivolous objections. Even after another contempt citation and a $100 fine, Kanarek persisted. Calling counsel to the bench, Judge Older stated: “I have come to the regretful conclusion during the course of the trial that Mr. Kanarek appears to be totally without scruples, ethics, and professional responsibility so far as the trial of this lawsuit is concerned, and I want the record to clearly reflect that.”

  KANAREK “May I be sworn?”

  THE COURT “Mr. Kanarek, I wouldn’t believe you if you were.”

  With the defense arguments out of the way, I spent an entire afternoon reviewing the eyewitness testimony of Linda Kasabian. Among the instructions Judge Older was going to give the jury was one regarding the testimony of an accomplice. Both Fitzgerald and Kanarek had read the start of it: “The testimony of an accomplice ought to be viewed with distrust.” They stopped there, however. I read the jury the rest: “This does not mean that you may arbitrarily disregard such testimony, but you should give it the weight to which you find it to be entitled after examining it with care and caution in the light of all the evidence in this case.”

  I then took the evidence of other witnesses, totally independent of Linda Kasabian, and showed how it confirmed or supported her testimony. Linda testified that Watson shot Parent four times. Dr. Noguchi testified that Parent was shot four times. Linda testified that Parent slumped over toward the passenger side. The police photographs show Parent slumped over toward the passenger side. Linda testified that Watson slit the screen horizontally. Officer Whisenhunt testified that the screen was slit horizontally. For the night of the Tate murders alone, I noted forty-five instances where other evidence confirmed Linda’s account.

  I concluded: “Ladies and gentlemen, the fingerprint evidence, the firearms evidence, the confessions, and all of the other evidence would convince the world’s leading skeptic that Linda Kasabian was telling the truth.”

  I then cited every single piece of evidence against each of the defendants, starting with the girls and ending with Manson himself. I also noted that there were 238 references in the transcript to Manson’s domination over the daily lives of his Family and his co-defendants. The inference that he must have also been dominating and directing them on the two nights of murder was unmistakable, I pointed out.

  Thinking back over those many months, I remembered how difficult it had been to come up with even a few examples of his domination.

  Helter Skelter. During the trial the evidence of this had come in piece by piece, from the mouths of many witnesses. I assembled those pieces now, in one devastating package. Very forcefully, and I felt convincingly, I proved that Helter Skelter was the motive for these murders, and that that motive belonged to Charles Manson and Charles Manson alone. I argued that when the words “Helter Skelter” were found printed in blood, it was like finding Manson’s fingerprints at the scene.

  We were nearly finished now. Within a few hours the jury would begin its deliberations. I ended my summation on a very powerful note.

  “Charles Manson, ladies and gentlemen, said that he had the power to give life. On the nights of the Tate-LaBianca murders, he thought he had the concomitant right to take human life.

  “He never had the right, but he did it anyway.

  “On the hot summer night of August the eighth, 1969, Charles Manson, the Mephistophelean guru who raped and bastardized the minds of all those who gave themselves so totally to him, sent out from the fires of hell at Spahn Ranch three heartless, bloodthirsty robots and—unfortunately for him—one human being, the little hippie girl Linda Kasabian.

  “The photographs of the victims show how very well Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel carried out their master Charles Manson’s mission of murder…

  “What resulted was perhaps the most inhuman, nightmarish, horror-filled hour of savage murder and human slaughter in the recorded annals of crime. As the helpless, defenseless victims begged and screamed out into the night for their lives, their lifeblood gushed out of their bodies, forming rivers of gore.

  “If they could have, I am sure that Watson, Atkins, and Krenwin
kel would gladly have swum in that river of blood, and with orgasmic ecstasy on their faces. Susan Atkins, the vampira, actually tasted Sharon Tate’s blood…

  “The very next night, Leslie Van Houten joined the group of murderers, and it was poor Leno and Rosemary LaBianca who were brutally butchered to death to satisfy Charles Manson’s homicidal madness…

  “The prosecution put on a monumental amount of evidence against these defendants, much of it scientific, all of it conclusively proving that these defendants committed these murders.

  “Based on the evidence that came from that witness stand, not only isn’t there any reasonable doubt of their guilt, which is our only burden, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever of their guilt…

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the prosecution did its job in gathering and presenting the evidence. The witnesses did their job by taking that witness stand and testifying under oath. Now you are the last link in the chain of justice.

  “I respectfully ask that after your deliberations you come back into this courtroom with the following verdict.” I then read in full the verdict the People wished.

  I came now to the end of my argument, what the newspapers would call the “roll call of the dead.” After each name I paused, so the jurors could recall the person.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I quietly began, “Sharon Tate…Abigail Folger…Voytek Frykowski…Jay Sebring…Steven Parent…Leno LaBianca…Rosemary LaBianca…are not here with us now in this courtroom, but from their graves they cry out for justice. Justice can only be served by coming back to this courtroom with a verdict of guilty.”

  Gathering up my notes, I thanked the jury for the patience and attention they had shown throughout the proceedings. It had been a very, very long trial, I noted, and an immense imposition on their personal and private lives. “You have been an exemplary jury. The plaintiff at this trial is the People of the State of California. I have all the confidence in the world that you will not let them down.”