Helter Skelter

by Vincent Bugliosi

  On Monday, November 10, Susan Atkins had a visitor at Sybil Brand, Sue Bartell, who told her about the death of Zero. After Sue left, Susan told Ronnie Howard. Whether she embellished it or not is unknown. According to Susan, one of the girls had been holding Zero’s hand when he died. When the gun went off, “he climaxed all over himself.”

  Susan didn’t seem disturbed to hear of Zero’s death. On the contrary, it excited her. “Imagine how beautiful to be there when it happened!” she told Ronnie.

  On Wednesday, November 12, Susan Atkins was taken to court for a preliminary hearing on the Hinman murder. While there, she heard Sergeant Whiteley testify that it was Kitty Lutesinger—not Bobby Beausoleil—who had implicated her. On being returned to jail, Susan told Virginia that the prosecution had a surprise witness; but she wasn’t worried about her testimony: “Her life’s not worth anything.”

  That same day Virginia Graham received some bad news. She was being transferred to Corona Women’s Prison, to serve out the rest of her sentence. She was to leave that afternoon. While she was packing, Ronnie came up to her and asked, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Virginia replied. “Ronnie, if you want to take it from here—”

  “I’ve been talking to that girl every night,” Ronnie said. “Boy, she’s really weird. She could have, you know.”

  Virginia had forgotten to ask Susan about the word “pig,” which the papers had said was printed in blood on the door of the Tate residence. She suggested that Ronnie question her about this, and anything else she could think of that might indicate whether she was telling the truth.

  In the meantime, they decided not to mention it to anyone else.

  That same day the LaBianca detectives received a call from Venice PD. Were they still interested in talking to one of the Straight Satans? If so, they were questioning one, a guy named Al Springer, on another charge.

  The LaBianca detectives had Springer brought over to Parker Center, where they interviewed him on tape. What he told them was so unexpected they had trouble believing it. For Springer said that on August 11 or 12—two or three days after the Tate homicides—Charlie Manson had bragged to him about killing people, adding, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.”

  NOVEMBER 12–16, 1969

  LaBianca detectives Nielsen, Gutierrez, and Patchett interviewed Springer on tape, in one of the interrogation cubicles of LAPD Homicide. Springer was twenty-six, five feet nine, weighed 130 pounds, and, except for his dusty, ragged “colors,” as bikers’ jackets are known, was surprisingly neat for a member of an “outlaw” motorcycle band.

  Springer, it turned out, prided himself on his cleanliness. Which was one of the reasons he personally hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with Manson and his girls, he said. But Danny DeCarlo, the club treasurer of the Straight Satans, had got mixed up with them and had missed meetings, so around August 11 or 12, he, Springer, had gone to Spahn Ranch to persuade Danny to come back. “…and there was flies all over the place and they were just like animals up there, I couldn’t believe it, you know. You see, I’m really clean, really. Some of the guys get pretty nasty, but I myself, I like to keep things clean.

  “Well, in comes this Charlie…He wanted Danny up there because Danny had his colors on his back, and all these drunkards, they come up there and start harassing the girls and messing with the guys and Danny walks out with his Straight Satan colors on, and nobody messes with Charlie, see.

  “So I tried to get Danny to come back, and Charlie is standing there, and Charlie says, he says, ‘Now wait a minute, maybe I can give you a better thing than you’ve got already.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘Move up here, you can have all the girls you want, all the girls,’ he says, ‘are all yours, at your disposal, anything.’ And he’s a brainwashing type guy. So I said, ‘Well, how do you survive, how do you support these twenty, thirty fucking broads, man?’ And he says, ‘I got them all hoofing for me.’ He said, ‘I go out at night and I do my thing.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s your thing, man; run your trip down.’ He figured me being a motorcycle rider and all, I’d accept anything including murder.

  “So he starts getting in my ear and says how he goes up and he lives with the rich people, and he calls the police ‘pigs’ and what not, he knocks on the door, they’ll open the door, and he’ll just drive in with his cutlass and start cutting them up, see.”

  Q. “This is what he told you?”

  A. “This is what he told me verbally, right to my face.”

  Q. “You’re kidding, is that what you really heard?”

  A. “Yeah. I said, ‘When’s the last time you did it?’ He says, ‘Well, we knocked off five of them,’ he says, ‘just the other night.’”

  Q. “So he told you that—Charlie stated that he knocked over five people?”

  A. “Right. Charlie and Tex.”

  Springer couldn’t recall the exact word Manson used: it wasn’t “people”; it might have been “pigs” or “rich pigs.”

  The LaBianca detectives were so startled they had Springer run through it a second time, and a third.

  A. “I think you’ve got your man right here, I really do.”

  Q. “I’m pretty sure we have, but in this day and age of feeding people their rights, if we’re going to make a decent case on him, we can’t do it with his statement.”

  Exactly when had Manson told him this? Well, it was the first time he went to Spahn, and that was either August 11 or 12—he couldn’t remember which. But he sure remembered the scene. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I’ve never been to a nudist colony or I’ve never seen real idiots on the loose…” Everywhere he looked there were naked girls. Maybe a dozen and a half were of age, eighteen or over, but about an equal number weren’t. The young ones were hiding in the bushes. Charlie had told him he could have his pick. He’d also offered to buy him a dune buggy and a new motorcycle if he would stay.

  It was true turnabout. Charlie Manson, aka Jesus Christ, trying to tempt a Straight Satan.

  That Springer resisted the temptation may have been due in part to his knowledge that other members of his gang had been there on previous occasions: “Everybody got sick of catching the clap…the ranch was just out of hand…”

  During Springer’s first visit, Manson had demonstrated his prowess with knives, in particular a long sword. Springer had seen Charlie throw it maybe fifty feet, sticking it, say, eight times out of ten. This was the sword, Springer said, that Charlie used when he “put the chop” to people.

  “Did you ever get a corpse with his ear cut off?” Springer abruptly asked. Apparently one of the detectives nodded, as Springer said, “Yeah, there’s your man.” Charlie had told him about cutting some guy’s ear off. If Danny would come in, he could tell them about it. The only problem was, “Danny’s scared of these creeps, they’ve tried to kill him already.”

  Springer had also mentioned a Tex and a Clem. The detectives asked him to describe them.

  Clem was a certified idiot, Springer said: he was an escapee from Camarillo, a state mental hospital. Whatever Charlie said, Clem would parrot it. As far as he could tell, “Charlie and Tex are the ones that had the brains out there.” Unlike Clem, Tex didn’t say much; he “kept his mouth shut, real tight. He was real clean-cut. His hair was a little long, but he was—just like a college student.” Tex seemed to spend most of his time working on dune buggies.

  Charlie had a thing about dune buggies. He wanted to fix them with a switch on the dash that would turn the taillights off. Then, when the CHP (California Highway Patrol) pulled them over to cite them, there would be two guys armed with shotguns in the back, and as the CHPs came up alongside, “Pow, blow them up.”

  Q. “Why did he say he wanted to do that?”

  A. “Ah, he wants to build up a thing where he can be leader of the world. He’s crazy.”

  Q. “Does he have a name for his group?”

  A. “The Family.”

/>   Back to that sword, could Springer describe it? Yeah, it was a cutlass, a real pirate’s sword. Up until a few months ago, Springer said, it had belonged to the ex-president of the Straight Satans, but then it had disappeared, and he guessed one of the members had given it to Charlie.

  He had heard, from Danny, that the sword had been used when they had killed a guy “called Henland, I believe it was.” This was the guy who had his ear cut off.

  What did he know about the “Henland” killing? they asked. According to Danny, a guy named “Bausley” and one or two other guys had killed him, Springer said. Danny had told him that “almost beyond a reasonable doubt he could prove that Bousley or Bausley or whatever killed this guy and evidently Charlie was in on it or something. Well, anyway, somebody cut his ear.” Clem had also told him, Springer, “how they had cut some fucking idiot’s ear off and wrote on the wall and put the Panther’s hand or paw up there to blame the Panthers. Everything they did, they blamed on the niggers, see. They hate niggers because they had killed a nigger prior to that.”

  Five. Plus “Henland” (Hinman). Plus “a nigger.” Total thus far: seven. The detectives were keeping track.

  Had he seen any other weapons while at Spahn? Yeah, Charlie had shown him a whole gunrack full, the first time he went up there. There were shotguns, deer rifles, .45 caliber hand guns, “and I heard talk of and was told by Danny that they had a .22 Buntline long barrel, a nine-round. This came from Danny, and he knows guns. And this is what was supposed to have killed that, ah, Black Panther.”

  Charlie had told him about it. As Al remembered it, Tex had burned this black guy in a deal for a whole bunch of grass. When Charlie refused to give back the guy’s money, the black had threatened to get all his Panther brothers up to Spahn Ranch and wipe out the place. “So Charlie pulls out a gun, somebody else was going to do it, but Charlie pulls out a gun and he points it at the guy, and he goes click, click, click, click and the gun didn’t go off, four or five times, and the guy stood up and he said, ‘Ha, you coming here with an empty gun on me,’ and Charlie says click, bam, in the heart area somewhere, and he told me this personally right to my face and that was what the Buntline was used on, the long-barrel job.”

  After the murder, which had occurred somewhere in Hollywood, the Panther’s buddies “took the carcass off supposedly to some park, Griffith Park or one of them…This is all hearsay, but it is hearsay right from Charlie.”

  A. “Now, did anybody have their refrigerator wrote on?”

  There was a sudden silence, then one of the LaBianca detectives asked, “Why does this come up?”

  A. “’Cause he told me something about writing something on the refrigerator.”

  Q. “Who said he wrote it on the refrigerator?”

  A. “Charlie did. Charlie said they wrote something on the fucking refrigerator in blood.”

  Q. “What did he say he wrote?”

  A. “Something about pigs or niggers or something like that.”

  If Springer was telling the truth, and if Manson wasn’t just bragging to impress him, then it meant that Manson was probably also involved in the LaBianca murders. Bringing the total thus far to nine.

  But the LaBianca detectives had good reason to doubt this statement, for, contrary to the press reports, DEATH TO PIGS hadn’t been printed in blood on the refrigerator door; the phrase had actually been printed on the living-room wall, as had the word RISE. What had been printed on the refrigerator door was HEALTER SKELTER.

  While Springer was being questioned, one of the LaBianca detectives left the room. When he returned a few minutes later, another man was with him.

  Q. “Here’s another partner, Mike McGann, Al. Let me shove this table down here. He just came in, so you might want to bring him up on what we’ve talked about.”

  McGann was one of the Tate detectives. The LaBianca detectives had finally decided to walk those few feet, and share what they had learned. By this time the temptation to say “Hey, look what we found” must have been irresistible.

  They had Springer run through it again. McGann listened, unimpressed. Springer then began talking about still another murder, that of a cowboy named “Shorty,” whom he had met when he first visited the ranch. How and what had he heard about Shorty’s death? one of the detectives asked. “I heard about that from Danny.” Danny heard, from the girls, that Shorty “got to know too much and hear too much and got worried too much” and “so they just cut his arms and his legs and his head off…” Danny had felt very badly about this, because he had liked Shorty.

  Ten. If.

  Q. (to McGann) “Anything you want to get in on this?”

  Q. “Yeah, I want to ask about why they killed this colored—the Panther supposedly. When did this take place, do you know?”

  Springer wasn’t sure, but he thought it was about a week before he went up to the ranch. Danny could probably tell them about that.

  Q. “Did you connect up the five people that Charlie said that he killed in early August with any particular crime?”

  A. “Right, the Tate crime.”

  Q. “You put that together?”

  A. “Right.”

  They began zeroing in. Anybody else present when Charlie supposedly confessed those five murders to you? No. Was Tate ever specifically mentioned? No. Did you see anyone at the ranch who wore glasses? No. Ever see Manson with a gun? No, only a knife: “he’s a knife freak.” Were the cutlass and the other knives you saw sharpened on both sides? He thought so but wasn’t sure; Danny had mentioned Charlie sending them out someplace to be sharpened. Ever see any rope up there? Yeah, they used all kinds of rope. Do you know there’s a $25,000 reward on the Tate murders? Yeah, and “I sure could use it.”

  Springer had been to Spahn Ranch three times, his second visit occurring the day after his first. He’d lost his hat riding out and had gone back to look for it, but then his bike had broken down and he’d had to stay overnight to repair it. Again Charlie, Tex, and Clem had worked on him to join them. His third and last visit had taken place on the night of Friday, August 15. The detectives were able to establish the date because it was the night before the sheriff’s raid on Spahn Ranch. Also, the Straight Satans held their club meetings on Friday, and they had discussed getting Danny away from Charlie. “A lot of the guys in the club were going to go up there and beat his ass, teach him a lesson not to brainwash our members…” Eight or nine of them did go to Spahn that night, “but it didn’t happen that way.”

  Charlie had conned some of them. The girls had lured others into the bushes. And when they started breaking up things, Charlie told them that he had guns trained on them from the rooftops. Springer had one of his brothers check the gunrack that Charlie had shown him on his first visit. A couple of rifles were missing. After a time they’d left, in a cloud of exhaust fumes and threats, leaving one of their more sober members, Robert Reinhard, to bring Danny back the following day. But the next morning “the police were all over the place,” arresting not only Charlie and the others but also DeCarlo and Reinhard.

  All had been released a few days later and, according to Danny, Shorty had been killed not long after this.

  Fearing he would be next, Danny had taken his truck and split to Venice. Late one night Clem and Bruce Davis, another of Charlie’s boys, had snuck up on the truck. They had succeeded in prying open the door when Danny heard them and grabbed his .45. Danny felt sure, Springer said, that they had come “to off him.” And he was scared now, not only for himself but because his little boy was living with him. Springer thought Danny was frightened enough to talk to them. Talking to the Venice detectives would be no problem, since “he’s known them most of his life,” but getting him to come down to Parker Center was something else. Springer, however, promised he’d try to get Danny to come in voluntarily, if possible the next day.

  Springer didn’t have a phone. The detectives asked if there was somewhere they could call “without putting any heat on you? Is there some gal you se
e quite a bit of?”

  A. “Just my wife and kids.”

  The clean, neat, monogamous Springer didn’t conform to their stereotype of a biker. As one of the detectives remarked, “You’re going to give the motorcycle gang a whole new image in the world.”

  Although Al Springer appeared to be telling the truth, the detectives were not greatly impressed with his story. He was an outsider, not a member of the Family, yet the very first time he goes to Spahn Ranch, Manson confesses to him that he’s committed at least nine murders. It just didn’t make sense. It appeared far more likely that Springer was just regurgitating what Danny DeCarlo, who had been close to Manson, had told him. It was also possible that Manson, to impress the cyclists, had bragged about committing murders in which he wasn’t even involved.

  McGann, of the Tate team, was so unimpressed that later he wouldn’t even be able to recall having heard of Springer, much less talking to him.

  Although the interview had been taped, the LaBianca detectives had only one portion transcribed, and that not the section on their case, but the part, less than a page in length, with Manson’s alleged confession, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.” The LaBianca detectives then filed the tape and that single page in their “tubs,” as police case files are known. With other developments in the case, they apparently forgot them.

  Yet the Springer interview of November 12, 1969, was in a sense an important turning point. Three months after the Tate-LaBianca homicides, LAPD was finally seriously considering the possibility that the two crimes were not, as had long been believed, unrelated. And the focus of at least the LaBianca investigation was now on a single group of suspects, Charlie Manson and his Family. It appears almost certain that had the LaBianca detectives continued to pursue the Lutesinger-Springer-DeCarlo lead they would eventually—even if uninformed of Susan Atkins’ confessions—have found the killers of Steven Parent, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Sharon Tate, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca.