The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  At the party in San Francisco, Leslie got stoned with Bobby. They flirted, they danced, and later had sex. She assumed she was going to be his girlfriend but he already had one: Gypsy. No problem, explained Bobby. He was adept at parceling out his favors to more than one woman at a time.

  Gypsy and Bobby, who were living in a bread truck with RANDY’S TRAVELING CIRCUS painted on the side, invited Leslie to hit the road with them. She agreed and they headed south along the coast. “It was our version of the Merry Pranksters,” she recalled. “We’d drive along the coast tripping out and picking up people as we went. Gypsy kept telling all of us about this wonderful commune near Los Angeles where people were present in the moment, where they lived for the day, not the past or the future.”

  At one point when Leslie was describing her experiences in the Haight, we noticed a young woman standing nearby trying to get her attention above the din in the visiting room. She was young, maybe early thirties, and though she had a broad smile, there was something timid and almost fearful about her.

  “Leslie, I’m so sorry to interrupt but I wanted you to meet my husband.” A slim young man who looked even more timid than his wife stepped forward, and Leslie extended her hand to shake his. She introduced me to the couple, we exchanged comments about the weather—it was hot and humid—and Leslie and the woman talked about an inmate they both liked who had recently been released. And then the couple moved along.

  Once again, I was struck by Leslie’s warmth. She gave this small interaction her all. It was easy to see why so many people at the prison sought her out and why she had so many long-term friends on the outside.

  “Where were we?” she asked. I reminded her that we’d been talking about Catherine Share. “Oh, yeah.” She told me that she didn’t know until years later that Gypsy was scouting girls, pretty girls or girls who had cars or cash or their parents’ credit cards. “Gypsy called me in prison in the early nineties to apologize for recruiting me. That was the word she used. ‘Recruit.’ She said that was her assignment from Manson. I was stunned. I had no idea that it was that well planned.”

  I told Leslie that Catherine and I had been in the same high school sorority at Hollywood High.

  “Was she pushy then?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied. “Actually I thought of her as quiet, reserved.”

  “She’s one of the pushiest people I’ve ever known.”

  The commune Gypsy was talking to Leslie about, the commune near Los Angeles where she said people lived for the moment, not the past or the future, was at Spahn Ranch, the destination for Randy’s Traveling Circus truck.

  chapter thirty-five

  “EENIE, MEENIE, MINEY, MO”

  1954–1960

  I lived fourteen years before I heard the verb “to Jew.” The first time I heard it was from one of the older girls in my social club when she was talking about her father’s purchase of a car, as in “He Jewed the guy down on the price.” I was familiar with the concept: my father’s mother and sister used to take my mother along on shopping trips because they were convinced her Jewishness would enable them to get better deals. My mother joked about it—it was one of many anecdotes in her repertoire of marrying into an Irish Catholic family. So when I first heard this girl use the expression, I felt I had permission to not be offended. I wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to know the rules of the road. Later I would understand that it was one thing for my mother to talk about her family’s provincial attitudes and quite another for someone outside the tribe to do so.

  The longer I was in the Gammas, the more aware I was of ethnic and racial slurs. One of the other older girls (it was always the older girls), for example, had a penchant for doing riffs in a fake Yiddish accent: “Oy vey,” usually followed by a crack about Jewish frugality or big noses. Slurs against Asians were not uncommon, either, and African Americans were not left out of this, though the latter didn’t come up much because there were only two or three in the entire school and they were only there to attend special classes for the deaf.

  When I started noticing these remarks, I thought my father had been prescient that day at the airport. How did he know that’s what the club was like? Did he have inside information? I realized later that the club members weren’t any more anti-Semitic or racist than other kids in the school or, for that matter, society at large in the 1950s. This was the language they heard at home.

  There was, however, a particularly gut-churning incident for me, primarily because it involved one of the girls I really liked, a popular, effervescent senior, who, early on, had taken me under her wing. A bunch of us were riding in her car to a basketball game at University High School. Her method for deciding who would be assigned to the backseat, who in the front, was to employ the “eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a n—ger by the toe.”

  When I was very young, my mother had used this children’s counting rhyme as an opportunity to teach me about the maltreatment of African Americans. She didn’t just say don’t ever use the n-word, she talked about the history of slavery and how, to that day, there was no equality for Negroes. (Decades later I Googled the rhyme and discovered that it might not have had anything to do with slavery.) She said the word was hurtful and that she couldn’t think of another word in the English language that was as horrible and I was never, ever, under any circumstances, to use it and if I ever heard anyone else use that word, I had to speak up and tell them it was wrong. As a little girl, I took this responsibility seriously. If any other kids used that word, and it was usually in the context of eenie, meenie, I would deliver my version of my mother’s lecture.

  But now the stakes were too high. This girl liked me and her status in the club enhanced my status, or at least that’s what I believed. There wasn’t any part of me that was even tempted to correct her. When she recited “eenie meenie,” my mother told me to choose “the very best one,” and when this girl’s finger landed on me, she laughed, squeezed my hand, and said, “Good, now you can sit in front with me.” It’s hard now to remember which was more acute: my excitement over her public anointment of me, my disappointment in her for using the n-word, or my distress at my cowardice for not correcting her.

  Not using the n-word was a rule, but the overarching imperative was that you speak up when you hear bigotry. Throughout my childhood, my mother had been vigilant about this. One situation that stands out happened when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. She was one of the leaders of my Campfire Girl troop—a circumstance I was not thrilled about from the outset. This was the era of Ozzie and Harriet, and my mother was no waspy Harriet.

  The kids in my class were all, as far as I knew, churchgoing Christians whose parents had Eisenhower bumper stickers on their wood-paneled station wagons. My parents were atheists who voted for Adlai Stevenson. None of the other mothers worked. They made lunches for their kids and were home to serve them milk and cookies after school. I made my own lunches and was a latchkey kid.

  The worst for me, though, was my parents’ art. Hanging in our dining room was a print of Paul Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women that featured bare-breasted women. Every friend who came to the house was shocked by that picture, so when my mother offered to hold the annual Campfire Girl party at our house, I begged her either to withdraw the offer or to take the picture down. She said she would not take the picture down but she would withdraw her offer out of deference to my prudish sensibilities. That was a solution to the immediate problem, but worse than my embarrassment about the bare breasts was my fear that my parents’ taste in art suggested that they were perverted freaks.

  The annual event that year was to be a mother-daughter sing-along. The theme: Italian crooners. My mother, who was in charge of entertainment, passed out the lyrics to Dean Martin’s That’s Amore and When You’re Smiling along with a couple of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra songs. Because of her involvement I was nervous about the event, but I relaxed as soon as it got under way. Everyone seemed to be having a good time—the mothers and the daugh
ters.

  At the end of the evening, after most of the guests had left, there was a group of mother-daughter teams in the living room cleaning up. One mother held up a record jacket with a photo of Dean Martin and said, laughing, “Look at him, he’s as dark as a wetback.” Holding my breath and praying that my mother hadn’t heard her, I inched my way toward the kitchen.

  No such luck. She whipped her head around to face the woman. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that,” my mother said.

  “Didn’t mean what?”

  “The word you used for Mexicans.”

  The woman made a brushing-away gesture. “Don’t be silly. I was kidding. Anyway,” she said, looking around, “there aren’t any Mexicans in this room, are there?”

  “That really isn’t the point,” my mother said. “At least it’s not the only point.” And then she turned to the few remaining girls and said, “Part of being a Campfire Girl is being a good citizen. I know Mrs. G. didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, but you need to know that it’s not right to talk about people that way.”

  It was very quiet for what seemed like forever. I know time stood still for me. In those few seconds or minutes, I decided I would have to drop out of school. Move to a different district. Maybe, even, to a different city. I couldn’t imagine facing any of these kids or their mothers again.

  Finally, the woman whose house it was started jabbering nervously about how late it was and why didn’t everyone leave the rest of the cleanup to her? She and her daughter would finish in the morning. As I recall, everyone promptly left.

  To this day, I don’t know what I think about what my mother did. Was it appropriate to turn a kids’ sing-a-long into a teaching moment at the expense of that mother and that mother’s child, to say nothing of the humiliation suffered by my mother’s daughter? Many years later, I asked my mother why she didn’t speak to the woman privately. She didn’t miss a beat. “Because it was my responsibility as an adult to let the other girls know it wasn’t acceptable. If people say or do something despicable, you’re just as bad if you don’t publicly challenge them.”

  So, in high school, from the moment I declined to challenge the use of the “n” word, I realized my membership in the club was problematic. It’s hard to say, however, how soon that realization overshadowed my happiness at being accepted. Perhaps it seems trivial to discuss my problems with a high school sorority in the context of the circumstances that worked together to cause two young women to become murderers, but I’m interested in looking at parallel pressures even if those pressures were small by comparison.

  The path to Manson started out as small, innocuous steps. I know that I coped with the disparity between the values with which I was raised, the ones my father underlined for me that day at the Santa Monica Airport, and the modus operandi of the club by creating, if not exactly a false self, then a falseish self. For the first two years of high school, when I was around the Gammas, especially the older girls, I kept both my opinions and my Jewish origins to myself.

  And it wasn’t only my uneasiness over the ethnic and racial slurs that posed a problem. I wasn’t crazy about pledging. Pledging is supposed to be uncomfortable, but the older girls in the club took it a step or two beyond discomfort. The group persona of Gamma Rho may have been wholesome, but some of the older girls had a decidedly dark side, some might say sadistic, and their sadism had free rein during Hell Night. I had a large, weeping cold sore on my lip that one older girl rubbed hot peppers into. For years after that, I dreamed about the menacing gleam in her eyes as she did it.

  Later that night, they made me strip down to my underwear. I don’t remember all that they made me do, other than shouting questions at me, and when I got the answers wrong making me do jumping jacks as penance. I do remember the humiliation of standing alone in some girl’s rumpus room with all of the older girls staring at me. I wanted to quit that night but I talked myself out of it—there was a reason they called it Hell Night. I don’t remember how I later rationalized the racial slurs, the riffs in the Yiddish accent, or the use of the n-word. What I do remember is the shame of remaining quiet. The worst part was my cowardice and the feeling that I was betraying my family and my family’s values.

  chapter thirty-six

  MICHELTORENA HILL

  1977–1978

  I’d known Leslie for some time before I discovered that she was released from prison in 1977 and lived a quiet, unobserved life for six months on Micheltorena Hill in the Silver Lake District just a few blocks from where I grew up.

  Here’s how it happened: In 1976 the California Court of Appeals threw out her conviction, ruling that a mistrial should have been declared during the first trial because her attorney, Ronald Hughes, had disappeared during the trial—apparently having drowned on a camping trip. The new attorney, Maxwell Keith, had to take over mid-trial, requiring him to familiarize himself with over eighteen thousand pages of transcript in a very short time. The appellate court ruled that this burden put him at a decided disadvantage.

  The new trial, this time separate from that of her co-defendants, was set for Leslie in 1977. She was transferred from Frontera to Sybil Brand, the downtown women’s jail.

  Stephen Kay was the prosecutor, and he tried Leslie on “conspiracy to murder” charges. The conspiracy involved the accusation that she was in on the planning of the murders at the Tate house on the first night though there was no evidence that she even knew about them. Those charges allowed Steve to expose jury members to the grisly details of those five murders and to show them enlarged color photos of those victims along with the photos of the LaBiancas.

  Leslie’s lawyer, Maxwell Keith, who had represented her during the death penalty phase of the first trial, went for a diminished capacity defense based on her drug use and Manson’s brainwashing. The diminished capacity defense is no longer permissible, but according to California state law at the time, a first-degree murder conviction required that the state of mind of the accused be capable of pre-meditation, deliberation, and harboring malice. Keith argued that Leslie had not been capable of any of those things at the time of the murders.

  Steve’s summation to the jury not only included a rehashing of the horror at the Tate house, but also an admonition to the jury that something other than justice was involved: “When you go in that jury room, society will be watching you.”

  After twenty-five days of deliberation, the trial ended in a hung jury—seven voted for conviction on first-degree murder and five voted for manslaughter. (If she had been convicted of manslaughter she would have been eligible for immediate release for time served.) This gave Leslie hope that there could be a plea bargain. Usually, with a widely split decision, a defendant would be able to plea bargain to second-degree murder. According to Leslie’s mother, Steve was particularly upset that so many jurors had held out for manslaughter and was in no mood to plea bargain. This was the first time in California history that a hung jury in a first-degree murder case led to another trial. I wasn’t following the case then, but given how high its profile, I believe that most likely even a deputy DA not as obsessed as Steve would have insisted on another trial.

  The third trial was scheduled for March 1978 and the court granted Leslie the right to be released on bail. For the next six months, she lived quietly in an apartment on Micheltorena Hill, driving herself to court every day.

  Steve adopted a new strategy. He changed the charge to “felony murder committed in the act of robbery,” a crime for which state of mind was not legally relevant. The felony robbery consisted of the food, clothing, coins, and wallet that had been taken from the LaBianca house. This was a reversal of the strategy Bugliosi had pursued in the first trial. In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi stated that there had been no evidence of robbery and the LaBiancas’ son testified in that trial that nothing was missing except for a few coins and some clothes. The wallet had been taken by Manson when he went into the LaBianca house and tied them up. This was a tactic in his inspired plan to
start a race war. Because he wanted the police to think a black person had stolen it, he had the group drive to a gas station in a black neighborhood and leave the wallet in the bathroom. Only problem: he selected a neighborhood that wasn’t predominantly African American. No race war. Not even a racial skirmish.

  Bugliosi had rejected this approach in the first trial because a robbery motive made the crime seem too pedestrian, but Steve had to settle for a mediocre motive. The judge in the third trial instructed the jury to disregard Leslie’s state of mind at the time of the crime. In spite of that, Maxwell Keith argued to the jury that she could not have understood the nature of the crime because of the cumulative effects of LSD and the intensity of Manson’s power over her. His goal was to win a verdict of voluntary manslaughter—unlawful killing without malice aforethought.

  The jury voted unanimously to convict her on two counts of first-degree felony murder. But it was not all bad news, or so it seemed at the time: Leslie would be forevermore separated legally from Manson, Pat, and Susan; when Superior Court Judge Gordon Ringer sentenced her to seven years to life in prison, the new sentence automatically carried with it the possibility of parole after seven years, which she had already served. Her mother and other allies believed that the judge had been encouraging about the possibility that Leslie could become a beneficiary of that provision.

  There was another reason for optimism: Leslie was no longer what’s called a “death penalty overturn.” Though the death penalty had been reinstated, the crime for which she was convicted was not subject to the death penalty. While this put her in an improved position technically, it is a point routinely missed by parole panels. They assume she’s a death penalty reversal so they approach her with a “you’re lucky to be alive” attitude. “No,” she will say patiently, “I’m not a death penalty reversal,” and she explains why. The educational process is continual because the panels change constantly. (The board is composed of twelve full-time commissioners who are appointed by the governor to staggered three-year terms.)