Charles Manson's Creepy Crawl

by Jeffrey Melnick

  The Helter Skelter scenario opened up an impressive array of questions about American political, social, and cultural life in the moment. Of course Vincent Bugliosi was stitching together the explanatory power of Helter Skelter not to endorse Charles Manson’s worldview, but to contribute to a picture of a criminal who had no grip on reality. Just as Terry Melcher and Gregg Jakobson’s testimony about Manson’s musical ability would ultimately support a characterization of him as unable to understand the difference between his social interactions with music-industry figures and his actual talent and prospects, so too did the information provided by Jakobson, Linda Kasabian, and others about Manson’s phantasmagorical Helter Skelter script paint the defendant as woefully unable to “read” the world around him. When Manson told the court “I don’t read or write real good and I’ve stayed like a little kid,” he likely thought he was mobilizing sympathy for his case. But it was just this inability to “read” that Bugliosi would use as evidence that Manson was not able to make his way as a rational actor in the complex world of making meaning.21

  Bugliosi’s story of racial strife discredited not only Manson and the Family, but also the increasingly radical action of the Black Panthers and other insurgent groups. Manson himself had only a tenuous grasp on what a Black Panther was; he did not seem to know who Huey Newton was.22 But much more important than the cult leader’s understanding of the racial landscape was how the prosecutor used this opportunity to tar the entire counterculture. I have already noted that Bobby Beausoleil has argued that Bugliosi’s analysis of the case seems to have been a blatant attempt to undercut the political and cultural achievements of the counterculture. Beausoleil was not alone in this belief and was joined by a variety of commentators from late in 1969 through the early 1970s.

  As early as 1971 radio personality Mae Brussell was promoting the notion that Manson was a “patsy” for powerful forces looking to blunt the impact of the countercultural insurgency of the 1960s. In our time Brussell would likely be defined (and marginalized) as a conspiracy theorist. Her fondness for magical, meaningful coincidences makes it hard to credit much of what she says. Brussell makes quite a bit, for instance, out of a claim that Lawrence Schiller, the person most responsible for circulating Susan Atkins’s claim that Manson had controlled the minds and actions of his followers, was the same Lawrence Schiller who got Jack Ruby to say that he was acting alone in killing Lee Harvey Oswald. Brussell’s real smoking gun in her Manson case, though, is LSD: If Manson was using the drug as his chemical agent of control, she suggests, it is important to ask where the LSD came from. Here Brussell is tapping into a broader argument that many have made about the journey of LSD from government labs to city streets and college campuses. The notion that the government was organized enough to place the drug directly in Manson’s hands, trusting that this would sow chaos in the counterculture is hard to credit.23 But Brussell’s larger point (not hard to credit given what we later came to know about MK-ULTRA, the CIA’ s human subject program) is that the American government did investigate using LSD as a tool of mind control beginning in the 1950s. In Brussell’s terrifying vision, LSD is simply the weapon. The object was to exploit Manson’s own anti-Black racism to target the Black Panthers and other radical African American groups.

  Bugliosi, of course, had no interest in promoting such a wide-lens political vision: he was representing the state, after all. With contributions from Linda Kasabian (“a real flower child” as Vincent Bugliosi’s prosecutorial teammate Aaron Stovitz, violating a gag order, told Rolling Stone)24 and others at the Family’s trial, the state was able to introduce this focus on potential racialized violence as the product of a sick mind living in a sick society. The Watts riots, incited by police violence against a Black motorist, were only a few years in the past and government surveillance and persecution of Black Panthers and other Black radicals and activists was intensifying; a shootout at UCLA in January of 1969 between two Black Power groups, which had been very much stage-managed by the FBI (and which led to the deaths of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins) was certainly present in the minds of the many people circling around the Manson trial who were concerned about racial violence in Los Angeles. And the arrest of Manson and his followers in early December jostled on the front page of countless newspapers with headlines about the police assassination of two Chicago Black Panthers, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. (Here’s how the Madison, Wisconsin, Times titled the two stories: “Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Killed By Police” and “Leader of Hippie Cult Emerges as Key Slaying Figure.”)25

  Bugliosi’s trial focus on Helter Skelter threw Manson’s supposed obsession with “imminent” race war into the same conceptual bag as bottomless pits in the desert, wild sex orgies, (mis)readings of the Bible and the Beatles, and near-constant use of psychedelic drugs. This was the truth according to Vincent Bugliosi and it was the truth accepted by the jury when it brought back its guilty verdicts early in 1971. In one sense the collective storytelling organized by Bugliosi at the trial and beyond was a useful corrective to other attempts to reduce the murders to a hand-wringing story about why the Laurel Canyon (and Pacific Palisades) elite should have seen this coming and needed to start locking their doors to keep out the countercultural riffraff. Bugliosi swung a much wider gate open with his Helter Skelter proposition; as Bobby Beausoleil, Ed Sanders, and many others have pointed out, this mostly provided entrance to people intent on using the Tate-LaBianca murders as an opportunity to undermine a variety of countercultural aims.

  It took some time for Vincent Bugliosi to organize the Helter Skelter narrative. He was appointed to the case in November of 1969 and Manson was arrested in early December. The trial began in the summer of 1970. The period from late 1969 to mid-1970 was full of competing theories and attempts at mobilizing the crimes and the arrests. Popular explanations ranged from the aforementioned “Grudge Against Doris Day’s Son Linked to Tate Slayings” (in the Los Angeles Times) to various versions of “Scientology Leader Denies Manson ‘Family’ Connection” (it was the Process Church he was connected to, according to the public relations director for the Scientologists), to the commentary by local news commentator Piers Anderton on KNBC-TV, which held that the murders were an “inevitable end-product of the hippie culture”—a predictable outcome for a culture so committed to “doing your own thing” and letting “it all hang out.”26

  Vincent Bugliosi was not the first to reach a wide public with an “inside” account of the Tate-LaBianca murders. By far the most important first contribution to this collective chronicle was the “confession” of Susan Atkins—published in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, December 14 (as well as in many other newspapers in the United States and beyond), and then in book form in January of 1970. The circumstances surrounding Atkins’s narrative of the events of August, 1969 are sketchy—in both major senses of the word. To begin, it is not at all clear what part Atkins (a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz) played in the writing of “Susan Atkins’ Story of 2 Nights of Murder”: while the long article was rooted in information she had provided to the Grand Jury and the District Attorney’s office, it was the brainchild of Lawrence Schiller, who brokered a deal with Atkins’s lawyer to have Jerry Cohen, on leave from his regular job at the Los Angeles Times, ghostwrite the account. Schiller seems to have been in charge of selling the rights to English and German news outlets.27 How the Los Angeles Times came into possession of a copy of the manuscript is a hotly debated point. Suffice to say that mutual accusations flew among Richard Caballero, Atkins’s lawyer, and Schiller. (When David Dalton and David Felton got around to the question of Atkins’s published confession in their June 1970 Rolling Stone cover story on the case, they wrote, soberly, that representatives of the Los Angeles Times told the truth when they insisted no money had changed hands. “[T]he Times people didn’t buy the confession,” according to Dalton and Felton, “they wrote it. Word for word.”)28

  Regardless of the questions surrounding the manuscript’s mysterio
us origins and circulation, it is most noteworthy in retrospect for its silence on the racial apocalypse motive. The primary goal of this work—in addition to providing crime details of compelling voyeuristic value—was to establish that Manson directed all of this violent activity. “Charlie had control over everybody,” Atkins avers: “I never questioned what Charlie said. I just did it.”29 The “Susan Atkins” (well, actually, the Sadie Mae Glutz) presented here is told explicitly by Manson’s deputy-in-charge, Tex Watson, that they are going to Cielo Drive “to instill fear into Terry Melcher because Terry had given his word on a few things and never came through with them. So Charlie wanted to put some fear into him, let him know that what Charlie said was the way it is.” Among other things, the Atkins “confession” raises the interesting possibility that not every member of the Family alleged to have been involved with the Tate-LaBianca murders had the same understanding of why it was necessary to journey to Cielo and Waverly Drives over the two nights in August, 1969. And just to make sure that Atkins had no credibility whatsoever, the “confession” ends with Atkins saying that she needs to stop reflecting on the mayhem—it has exhausted her. Also, according to the accused murderer, her lawyer was coming soon, and bringing with him “a dish of vanilla ice cream”: “Vanilla ice cream really blows my mind.”30

  When Schiller’s book, The Killing of Sharon Tate with the Exclusive Story of the Crime by Susan Atkins (Confessed Participant in the Murder of Sharon Tate) appeared, Sadie Mae Glutz’s confession had been demoted to the back half. The first part of the book, presumably written by journalist Jerry Cohen (Schiller occupied an interesting position in the 1960s and 1970s as something other than an author—he was more of a curator or event-planner of books) was taken up with faux-sociological inquiries into the broader implications of the murder: “Did eight persons die horribly because of the Family’s antecedents in the hippie movement?” The book strikes something of a jeering tone as it outlines the imagined reception of the murders and arrests for the large percentage of observers. The authors nod to “members of the silent majority”—the demographic category identified by President Richard Nixon in a November 1969 speech—who found the “solution to the Tate case” (the arrest of Manson and associates) to be “secretly satisfying.”31 Putting the events in the context of a film genre that would, before long, find much to borrow from the Manson murders, The Killing of Sharon Tate proposed that as “in the horror-film battles” in which, for instance, Frankenstein encountered the Wolf Man, it was a case of the hippies meet the Beautiful People. The middle class watched, relieved, happy to be spectators, as two out-groups fell upon the other.32 Leaving aside the question of how the “Beautiful People” could be construed as any sort of “out-group,” this book promotes a delectable vision of murder as corrective action—a painful but necessary restoration of the social order. Insofar as the book is interested in particular motives for the crimes, its heart seems to be with a blame-the-victim suggestion that the real target may have been “Polish playboy” Voytek Frykowski, who had been running with a much-too-rough crowd of drug dealers.33

  Once Sadie Mae Glutz is introduced as a speaking subject (about midway through the book), it is hard to get past her “confession” that, as I recounted in Part One, she knew that her father “wanted to have an affair” with her.34 After she admits that she “actually did want to have an affair with him” as well, it becomes clear that Sadie Mae Glutz’s role in the book’s moral universe is to shock its readers and remind American families to clean up their own backyards before they spend too much time worrying about murderous hippies.35 The Killing of Sharon Tate has little to say about race relations, outside of Sadie Mae Glutz’s rather offhanded contention that Charlie “reacts to Black people, digs them” because he had spent so much time around them during his prison years.36

  Perhaps the most puzzling early entry in the Manson true-crime sweepstakes was George Bishop’s Witness to Evil (also known as The Trial of Charles Manson), which is remarkably free of any point of view—aside that is, from the sexism and racism dripping off of so many of its pages. Among other memorable turns of phrase, Bishop refers to Sharon Tate’s domestic servant Winifred Chapman as a “sepia Camille” and wonders if it is hard to understand what the defense attorney Daye Shinn—“a natural-born United States citizen of Korean ancestry”—says in court, not only because he speaks “chop-chop English” but also, perhaps, because of the “unfathomable reasoning processes of the Asiatic mind.”37 Bishop’s rhetoric is similarly distasteful with respect to gender politics: we are told that “Miss Bijou Nolan” who had worked with defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald earlier in his career has “one of the finest pair of legs in the history of public defense.”38 Prosecution witness Ronnie Howard was, according to Bishop, “an early thirties brunette in good shape despite considerable mileage.”39 (This might be an appropriate moment for me to note that in the huge welter of nonfiction historical narratives and cultural analyses produced about the Manson Family since 1969—aside from first person accounts by key figures involved in the case—a truly astonishing proportion has been written by men. Except for Joan Didion’s crucial “White Album” essay, Karlene Faith’s underappreciated book on Leslie Van Houten, and Karina Longworth’s multipart podcast, male authors have dominated the arena. Uneasily, I take my place.)

  Witness to Evil makes it clear that if it has any particular point to make it is to remind readers that it is time to fight back against the forces of anarchy represented by Manson, the Family, and—this is important—Manson’s lawyer Irving Kanarek. The book includes a modicum of parental, straight-culture tsk-tsking: the foreword, after all, is written by Art Linkletter, who connects up the murders and his daughter Diane’s recent death, which was officially ruled a suicide but consistently described by the television personality as the result of a “bad trip.” Bishop himself is fairly desultory about prosecuting his case, noting only that we all ought to figure out what part LSD played in the murders because we “don’t want carloads of people riding around in every city and town” targeting “you or me as random murder victims.”40

  Bishop seems to have been a daily spectator at the trial (hence the “witness” of the title). What remains most valuable about his book is that it makes a good, clear case for what Bugliosi achieved during the many months of the trial. While Manson was the big fish Bugliosi ultimately needed to land, he had plenty else to wrestle with—mostly the demons of disorder also known as the defense team. Two of the defense lawyers were later barred from practicing law in California (for reasons unrelated to the Tate-LaBianca trial); another member of the team, Ronald Hughes, disappeared during a trial recess under very mysterious circumstances and was later found dead. The cheese who stood alone was Paul Fitzgerald—representing Patricia Krenwinkel—who by all accounts did a decent job. Bishop has fun making fun of the defense team, at one point even suggesting that some of their tactics were “so gauche” that it might seem as if one was a used-car salesman and one the manager of a rock band. Punch line? One of them (Shinn) had, according to Bishop, been a used-car salesman in the past; and one (Hughes) had previously managed a rock group known as the United States Government! The team was strengthened after tragedy befell Hughes, and Maxwell Keith was named by the court to replace him. Keith, as newspapers around the country reported, was known as the “Ivy League Hillbilly” for what was described as his combination of “country boy mien and erudite mind.”41

  The king of this crazy court was Irving Kanarek, and George Bishop really wanted his readers to understand that this man represented, on some level, not just Manson, but also those terrifying forces of cultural anarchy that had come to be adjudicated in Judge Older’s courtroom. Accounts of Kanarek’s performance in the courtroom tend to lazily follow Bugliosi’s lead and organize around keywords like the previously mentioned “dilatory” and “obstructionist.” But Kanarek was consciously and consistently anti-authoritarian, and his main target was Vincent Bugliosi. Before the trial
proper even got underway, the prosecutor was seeking relief from what he perceived as Kanarek’s purposeful abuse. Among other things, Bugliosi explained to the judge that the defense attorney was mispronouncing his last name (as BUG-li-o-si instead of Boo-lee-o-si) in order to try to “get to” the prosecuting attorney. After a quick lesson in Italian pronunciation (“You can forget about the ‘G’”), Bugliosi requested that the judge instruct Kanarek “to make an effort.” This pretrial colloquy seems to have made little impression on Kanarek: on day forty-two of the trial Bugliosi stopped the proceedings to complain to the judge about Kanarek putting the “G” back in: “The ‘G’ is silent, sir.”42 (These narcissistic interruptions are fascinating in large part because of how they interfere with the heroic narrative Bugliosi would construct of himself in interviews, documentaries, and above all, in his own book. Helter Skelter would be packaged in 1974 with a subtitle promising that it presented the “true story of the Manson murders,” but in this book by Bishop, as in the reporting by Theo Wilson and others, we get important reminders that the veneration of Vincent Buglioisi has mostly been authored by Vincent Bugliosi.)

  At the trial Irving Kanarek did not seem to have a unified plan of action. More than anything he seemed to be want to upset the workings of the judicial machinery at every turn. His challenges were existential, really. Kanarek’s individual objections and delaying tactics could certainly seem jejeune when read out of context, but his challenges added up to a profound question about what it means to be a speaking subject. Manson himself spoke movingly of having no voice in the proceedings, and Kanarek did all he could to make sure that Bugliosi’s narration would not completely dominate the proceedings. Kanarek also had his moments of compelling rhetoric, as when he insisted to the jury in his closing argument that they must respect Manson’s homegrown spirituality because, after all, a man “can be a church inside his own body.”43