It would not be until six weeks after the concert, six weeks after their son’s death, that the first person tangentially related to Altamont paid a visit to Meredith Hunter’s family. Chip Monck wandered the streets of Berkeley, stopping bystanders and asking if they knew where Meredith Hunter had lived. Monck, who had had to install the three-foot-high stage designed for the Sears Point site at Altamont, understood why the Stones had immediately departed for England after the concert without a word to the media or anyone else. It would hardly be safe, he thought, for the band to walk the streets of San Francisco after such a calamity. But another part of him wondered if the lack of response to the death of one of their fans was itself part of the show.
Was Hunter’s unplanned and unanticipated death now incorporated into the Stones’ ongoing PR campaign? Was the death of an eighteen-year-old, hardly more than a boy, at their concert the best possible proof of the Stones’ own vaunted fierceness? The scheduled press conference had been canceled, and the Stones seemed to be adopting a policy of silence regarding the concert. Monck was troubled, more than anything, by the idea of the empty bed at Altha Anderson’s home. Even if the Rolling Stones were not personally culpable for Hunter’s death, Monck wondered, shouldn’t someone have the decency to call his mother and offer their condolences? And what did it say about people who could have, and chose not to?
He stopped by the neighborhood police station to ask if they knew where he might find Meredith Hunter’s mother. Monck had stabbed no one on that day in Altamont, nor had he hired the people who had, but he felt a nagging sense of responsibility and dismay over the absconding of all other parties. Monck believed someone ought to express their condolences to Hunter’s mother for the loss of her son. If the Rolling Stones, and the concert’s promoters, were not going to do it, then he would.
The first time he visited Anderson, she threw her tea in his face. The second time, she refused to let him in. The third time he came back, she said, “Oh, it’s you again,” and let him in. Monck told her, “I thought somebody should say how terribly sorry I am, and I’m sure they are as well, at the death of your son.” Anderson calmed down some and offered Monck tea. “Not in my face again, thank you,” he wryly responded. The visit was short, but Monck had communicated his message. What else could you say to someone whose son had been murdered?
* * *
The sheriff’s department had received their first call about a stabbing at Altamont at 6:25 p.m., but the crowding at the site meant that it took ten minutes for the first police cars to arrive at the scene. Seven officers canvassed the site, taking notes and measurements, making drawings and pacing off the distances between the stage and the tents and trailers backstage. They jotted down a name, presumably gleaned from the victim’s girlfriend—“Murdock Hunter.”
Among the first witnesses they encountered were speedway owner Dick Carter and police science student Frank Leonetti, who had administered first aid to Hunter. (“Also present were a variety of Hippie types,” the deputies’ notes read.) Carter and Leonetti told the police that some Hells Angels had stabbed a man near the stage. According to Leonetti, the victim had pulled a gun, and the Angels had rushed him to subdue him. During the fracas, the victim had been fatally stabbed.
The police tracked down the ’65 Mustang Meredith Hunter had driven to the show, still parked on the freeway about one hundred yards west of the San Joaquin County line, and commenced to move it away from the concert site. The two-door beige convertible was towed just before seven o’clock to a garage in nearby Livermore, where its contents were sorted and detailed: a tape deck, six tape cartridges, one black glove, one pair of sunglasses, and one metal comb.
Witnesses had led the police to believe that Hunter’s body had already been taken away, presumably via helicopter. But in fact, Meredith Hunter’s body was still at the speedway, abandoned and forgotten by the authorities. It would be more than an hour before the police learned that no one had taken away Meredith Hunter’s mortal remains. A representative of the coroner’s office accepted his body at 10 p.m., and a sheriff’s department ambulance took Hunter’s corpse away, bringing it to the Callaghan Mortuary in Livermore.
The police had been aware from the very outset of their investigation that the culprit they were seeking was likely a member or associate of the Hells Angels, with whom they had had numerous run-ins in recent months. The search had rapidly focused on the death’s-head insignia on the jacket of the Angels. The death’s-head led Alameda County sheriff’s sergeant Robert J. Donovan to the Hells Angels, and the relatively small insignia on the stabber’s jacket indicated that the Angel in question likely belonged to the San Francisco chapter.
Eyewitness testimony put the onus on the Hells Angels for the attack on Meredith Hunter. Numerous accounts pointed to a man wearing an Angels jacket, but given the sartorial similarities between the bikers at Altamont, and the lack of cooperation forthcoming from the members of the Hells Angels, it was a challenge for the police to determine who had been responsible for stabbing Hunter.
The sheriffs also worked to track down evidence that had been assembled by the journalists and filmmakers covering the story. Word trickled out of a firsthand account acquired by Rolling Stone with an eyewitness who called himself Paul Cox for their forthcoming Altamont issue, and of film footage that might have captured the fatal encounter between Hunter and the bikers. Rolling Stone editor John Burks told the police that he had thrown away Cox’s phone number immediately after he had called him, setting back their efforts to track the witness down.
They also reached out to the Maysles brothers, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they did not produce any footage they might have of Hunter’s killing. David Maysles agreed to fly out to California to cooperate with the investigation, with Stones manager Ronnie Schneider joining him for the trip. The two men smoked a joint in their first-class seats (a flight attendant threatened them with arrest if they did not immediately stub it out), and used the six-hour flight to hash out a deal. The Maysles brothers agreed to make a feature film out of their Altamont material.
After a meeting with David Maysles at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, the police screened the raw footage at Francis Ford Coppola’s nascent film studio American Zoetrope on Folsom Street in San Francisco. (Coppola’s American Zoetrope partner, and future Star Wars filmmaker, George Lucas had been one of the cinematographers at Altamont.) The Hells Angels visible in the footage may have been familiar figures to the authorities, but the counterculture as a whole was not. A note scribbled in one of the police reports read, “Marty Balin—who is he?” The officers were similarly puzzled by a sign spotted at the concert site that read FREE SUNSHINE ACID. The ways of the hippies were foreign to the uniformed men investigating the goings-on at their bacchanal.
The police visited San Francisco Hells Angels president Bob Roberts at his clubhouse. Even in Roberts’s telling, the Angels were far from blameless. Hunter had, he said, attempted to climb onto the stage, where eight or ten Angels were congregated. One of the bikers had pushed Hunter down, soon followed by a second Angel. Fighting back, Hunter took a swing at one of the bikers. He pulled a gun and waved it around, and approximately six Hells Angels, joined by three other onlookers, pounced on him.
Roberts told the police that he had no idea who had stabbed Meredith Hunter, but that Hunter was “very militant,” and that “he kept pulling up the waist of his pants and acting tough.” The implication was that a drug-addled black man had acted out at a concert under the Angels’ watch, had forgotten his proper place, and had to be subdued in response. (The irony of a Hells Angel calling out a concertgoer for being stoned was likely lost on Roberts.) The police also heard that the San Francisco Angels had taken possession of Meredith Hunter’s gun. After claiming that he had no knowledge of its whereabouts, Roberts eventually turned over the .22 he had taken with him from the concert.
The parallels between Altamont and the Ashbury Street assault from September wer
e eerie. An encounter between a group of armed, belligerent Hells Angels and African-Americans; an unexpected ratcheting-up of the encounter into extreme, and potentially excessive, force; and a belief that race drove the Angels’ violent response. No one had died outside 715 Ashbury, but the Hells Angels had demonstrated a profound indifference to the personal well-being of African-Americans. The Ashbury incident appeared to have been set off by the Angels’ anger at the black people occupying the hallowed space outside their clubhouse. Could white resentment and territoriality have accounted for the calamitous encounter at Altamont?
Tips came in about bikers from Vallejo to Venice who had been bragging about being present at Altamont. Soon, the police had put together a list of the Hells Angels present at Altamont, which included representatives from the Oakland and Los Angeles chapters. They had thirteen names, but even that was not much to go on. Where, exactly, could they, for example, find an Oakland Angel named Rat?
* * *
It would take over a month to track down Paul Cox, who came in for questioning on January 15. He saw the Smith & Wesson .22 that had been handed over by Bob Roberts, and confirmed that it looked similar to Hunter’s gun. It also matched the description he had given John Burks for the Rolling Stone interview.
They asked Cox to tell them what he had seen, and his story confirmed the account Rolling Stone was set to publish, with the Angels instigating the fight and stabbing Hunter before he pulled out his gun. Cox was not entirely sure, but he believed there might have been two men responsible for Hunter’s stabbing. He had spotted a man with a high forehead, his straight hair combed back, and thought he might have taken part in the assault.
Cox’s description of Hunter’s assailant eventually led the Alameda County sheriffs to Alan Passaro. Passaro was already in Vacaville prison, serving two to ten years on charges of grand theft, vehicle theft, and possession of marijuana with intent to sell. Four days after the concert, Passaro had been pulled over in a car in San Jose with two other Angels, Danny Montoya and Ron Segely (who had also been involved in the Ashbury Street attack). The police found burglary tools in their car, and arrested the three men on charges of burglary and armed robbery. Passaro also had a knife sheath attached to his belt, and a knife that matched the sheath in the backseat of the car. There were what appeared to be traces of blood on the blade and handle. Was it possible that the Hells Angel who had stabbed Meredith Hunter was brazen enough to be driving the streets of San Jose with the very same knife, having failed to even give it a thorough scrubbing?
Passaro agreed to waive his right to an attorney, and immediately sought to deflect the police’s line of questioning. He had been at Altamont, and had been down in front, near the stage, with his fellow Angel Segely. In truth, Passaro told them, he remembered little of what had occurred at Altamont. He had smoked copious amounts of marijuana that day, and much of it was a haze. At first, Passaro denied that he had a knife with him at Altamont, but later in the conversation (perhaps after being reminded that he had been arrested with a knife in his possession), he acknowledged that he did. It had been a long-bladed hunting knife he regularly carried with him, and he said he had pricked his finger with it earlier in the day while cutting some meat. (Passaro also admitted to carrying a .25 caliber automatic under his jacket, which would go mostly unmentioned in the months to come.)
Alameda County sheriff’s lieutenant James Chisholm believed a test would confirm the traces on the blade as blood. Moreover, if the blade was removed, there might be more blood congealed under the hilt. The signs pointed to Passaro’s weapon having been used recently, likely in the assault on Hunter. Traces of blood were also found on the barrel of Hunter’s gun, just in front of the forcing cone. There was not enough, however, to determine the blood type or make any kind of definitive statement about its origins. Circumstantially, though, the presence of the blood indicated that the gun was still close to either Hunter or his assailant when Hunter was stabbed.
Witnesses were brought in to see if Alan Passaro could be conclusively identified as the Hells Angel they had seen stabbing Meredith Hunter at Altamont. Patti Bredehoft selected Passaro’s picture from a selection of potential assailants, but said she was unsure if he was the man she had seen. She insisted that she had not actually seen her boyfriend’s stabbing. She did, however, identify Hunter’s gun, noting that the .22 before her was the same one she had seen him bring to Altamont. Others’ recollections were more vivid, with Paul Cox and others picking out Passaro’s picture from the spread of mug shots.
In mid-March, Passaro consented to take part in a lineup. Both Patti Bredehoft and a second witness, Denice Bell, were unable to identify him conclusively as Meredith Hunter’s attacker. Paul Cox, however, spotted him immediately. On March 24, Alan Passaro was arrested and charged with the murder of Meredith Hunter.
* * *
The arrest of Alan Passaro had marked an end to the police investigation, but it did not provide satisfactory answers to the deeper questions of how and why the fatal encounter between Meredith Hunter and the Hells Angels had taken place.
Had Meredith Hunter been singled out because of his race? It was hard to say. By no means had they only picked on African-Americans at Altamont, nor did Meredith Hunter’s initial treatment, however egregious and brutal, differ substantially in tone or vigor from that of numerous other victims of the Angels’ abuses that Saturday. And yet Meredith Hunter was the only one of the Angels’ victims to be stabbed, the only one to die at Altamont.
The Angels and their supporters would point to Hunter’s gun as the aggravating factor, and undoubtedly that was true to an extent. But questions remained. Had it been necessary to kill Meredith Hunter in self-defense, or merely expedient? Paul Cox’s eyewitness testimony suggested that the Angels had been the ones to escalate the situation, and the first to strike. Had the Angels truly seen themselves, as they would later argue, as defending Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones from an attempted assassination in that era of murderous assaults on celebrated figures, or was Meredith Hunter’s gun a convenient excuse to lash out even more furiously at the black man the Angels perceived as uniquely and terrifyingly violent?
Assassination was in the air in the late 1960s. And artists had not been immune from the homicidal impulse; Andy Warhol had also been shot in 1968, wounded by a mentally unstable extremist intent on peddling her misandrist manifesto.
Meredith Hunter, though, had never expressed interest in Mick Jagger or the Rolling Stones before Altamont, preferring soul and R&B on the whole to rock. Nor had he been particularly political, articulating little in the way of an ideological point of view. While he had a lengthy juvenile record, he had never shown any inclination for the kind of violent crime of which he was being accused. It seemed unlikely that he would have brought in a gun, as the Angels claimed, with the express purpose of killing Jagger, nor would it have been clear why he might have targeted a British rock star and sex symbol as the source of his ire.
Instead, Hunter had likely brought along his gun in the hope of bluffing his way out of any potential trouble. A .22 would not be the ideal weapon to wield in a moment of true danger, and Hunter had told his sister that the gun was not even loaded.
It had undoubtedly been misguided of Hunter to pull out his gun, even in self-defense. Regardless of who had begun the fight, Hunter’s gun had escalated it. But the Angels had been the ones who had targeted Hunter first, and they had seized on his mistake to end his life. Their intent, likely unpremeditated but no less ferocious for that, was to kill him, and they kicked and punched and stabbed him until they accomplished their mission. The punishment did not in any way match the crime, and the crime—brandishing a weapon—had itself been prompted by their own assault.
Hawkeye believed Hunter’s race was a stroke of good fortune for the security-minded Angels. If Hunter had been white, he would have been one anonymous face in a sea of young white faces as he fled. It had been the color of his skin that allowed the Angels to find a
nd pursue Meredith Hunter, the whiteness of the audience the ideal backdrop for the Angels’ hunt for a lone black man. Meredith Hunter had no rights, Hawkeye would later observe with a laugh. There was no law at Altamont.
Bredehoft, confused and numb with shock, initially told police that she thought it was entirely possible that Hunter had been picked on because he was black—an opinion she would later revise in her comments to the media. She had noticed Angels looking at the couple, and at Ronnie and Judy, all day long, and been spooked by their attention, which boded evil intent. Hunter had been singled out by the Hells Angels as a black man, she believed, and moreover, a black man with a white girlfriend. This last point, at the very least, seemed debatable, given that the Angels beating Hunter had not realized she was associated with him.
It was unlikely that the Hells Angels would have decided, in deliberate fashion, to kill Meredith Hunter. Instead, the day’s cycle of violence would be carried out, in intensely focused fashion, on Hunter himself. Meredith Hunter had made the mistake of attending a concert while black, first attracting the Hells Angels’ attention. Then, perhaps, the presence of his white girlfriend had intensified their focus. Finally, and fatally, Hunter had sought to defend himself with a weapon of his own after being assaulted, thereby justifying, to their minds, their counterattack. A white man with a gun who made the mistake of pulling it on a Hells Angel might very well have been stabbed and beaten to death, as well. The Angels’ racism only went so far as an explanation of their actions. But perhaps the Angels might never have singled out Meredith Hunter in the first place, tempting him to head back to the car for his gun, if he had not been African-American.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 18
