by Jeff Guinn
As Noguchi finally concluded the autopsies at the Hall of Justice, an L.A. friend of Tex Watson contacted Tex at Spahn to say he’d gotten a call from Elizabeth Watson, Tex’s mother. Mrs. Watson was concerned that she hadn’t heard from her son in six months—could the friend at least reassure her that he was all right? Tex told Charlie about his friend’s message. Members of the Family usually didn’t have any contact with their relatives unless Charlie gave permission. Charlie was distracted by concerns about overlooked fingerprints and other potential clues; he snapped that Tex ought to call his mother back.
Tex, paranoid from all the hard drugs he’d been ingesting and the knowledge that in two nights he’d killed seven people, convinced himself that his mother must have been contacted by the FBI. Maybe they’d found his fingerprints at Cielo or Waverly Drive. He didn’t call his mother back, but he told Charlie that he had, and that Mrs. Watson had said the FBI came by the house looking for Tex. Charlie was stunned. He’d already been obsessed with potential attacks by the Black Panthers and arrest by the LAPD. Now the FBI was on his heels. If he had planned any more copycat killings in L.A., this latest news changed his mind. Charlie told everyone to refocus on preparing to move to Barker Ranch in Death Valley. They’d get their things and some money together and as soon as possible get out to the desert, where they’d find the bottomless pit and be safe from pursuit.
• • •
Rudi Altobelli was informed of the murders and flew back to L.A., arriving Sunday evening. He had no desire to visit the murder scene, so he asked his friends Terry Melcher and Candy Bergen if he could stay with them at their beach house. But Altobelli was concerned that as soon as the police were finished combing the hilltop house for clues it would be overrun by scavengers seeking grisly souvenirs. He called Gregg Jakobson and asked if he would move into Cielo for a while. Jakobson did, but the place spooked him too much and he stayed for only a few days.
Roman Polanski returned to L.A. on Sunday night, too. He made a brief statement to the press that cautioned the public not to pay attention to sensational rumors in the media, then secluded himself in an apartment on the Paramount studio complex. The LAPD asked him to take a lie detector test about the Cielo murders. He cooperated and was eliminated as a potential suspect.
• • •
Around 8:30 P.M. on Sunday, Frank Struthers arrived home at Waverly Drive. He was dropped off on the street and began walking up the long driveway, where he saw that his stepfather, Leno, had left the speedboat instead of putting it in the garage as usual. That bothered the boy, and so did the fact that all the window shades were pulled down. He knocked on the back door instead of walking inside; there was no response. Really worried now, Frank walked to a nearby pay phone and called his older sister, Suzanne, who came to meet Frank with her boyfriend, Joe Dorgan. The three of them went back to the house on Waverly and went in through the back door. Suzanne stayed in the kitchen while Joe and Frank went through the dining room and into the living room, where they saw Leno’s body on the floor. There was something sticking up from his stomach. They went back to the kitchen and told Suzanne that things were okay but they needed to leave the house right away. Suzanne knew something was wrong; besides the looks on their faces, she’d noticed some words written on the refrigerator door, apparently with red paint.
Neighbors helped Joe, Suzanne, and Frank call the police. Officers arrived shortly after 10:30. Entering the house, they saw Leno in the living room and found Rosemary in the bedroom. The state of the bodies was sickening. They’d been stabbed innumerable times, and the fork in Leno’s belly and the word “WAR” carved on his abdomen added to the nauseating tableau. The officers noted “Death to Pigs” and “Rise” scrawled on the walls in blood, and “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator door. They called for an ambulance and detectives.
Danny Galindo was still at the LAPD’s Parker Center main headquarters, typing reports about the preliminary Cielo murder investigation. He got a call from a reporter friend, informing him that “they got another one of those bloody [murders] just like the one you’re working on.” The reporter told Galindo that this one was even more sickening. One of the victims had a knife jammed in the side of his throat. Galindo had barely hung up when his phone rang again. This time a supervisor ordered him out to Waverly Drive. When he got there Galindo was struck by the similarities between the murders there and at Cielo. The LAPD didn’t want anyone talking to the press, but the media had picked up on the Waverly murders by listening to police band radio and a pack of reporters clustered in the street. They shouted questions at Galindo, asking if these murders were related to the five earlier ones. Galindo said to a TV reporter, “I think it’s more of a copycat case.” The odds were against the same sadistic killers striking two straight nights in neighborhoods that were so widely separate geographically and socially. Galindo’s immediate instinct, one shared by LAPD superiors and fellow officers, was that some sick son of a bitch had read about the Tate murders in the paper and couldn’t resist mimicking them.
The press asked other official personnel on the scene for comments, and a few offered bits of information off the record. It was soon common knowledge among the media that there were more words written in blood at this second murder site, “Death to Pigs” and “Rise.” But somehow no outsiders learned about “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator door.
On Monday morning, August 11, L.A. residents picked up their morning papers and read that there had been a second set of unusual killings: “A Los Feliz couple were found slain Sunday night under bizarre circumstances that police said may connect the crime with the weird ritual murder of actress Sharon Tate and four others in Benedict Canyon.” News coverage emphasized that the same kind of words were left written in blood at both murder scenes.
Just as the LAPD had concluded that the Cielo murders were related to drugs, now they quickly surmised that there was a clear motive for the LaBianca slayings, too. Leno owed considerable money—estimates ranged as high as almost a quarter-million dollars—on racetrack bets. A former business partner tipped police that Leno might have also fallen afoul of the Mafia. These leads turned out to be dead ends, but they took time to run down.
From the outset, the Tate and LaBianca cases were hampered by the unwillingness of the investigative teams to share information. The Tate detectives were older, seasoned homicide veterans who believed there was no substitute for field experience. The LaBianca team was comprised of younger detectives who liked to employ the latest technological tools. They often operated out of the same long squad room, but never effectively cooperated. LAPD administration was unconcerned—after all, the cases really had nothing to do with each other, at least in terms of who had done the killing. Copycat? Maybe. Same perpetrator or perpetrators? No.
Fear was widespread in Los Angeles on Monday. The Cielo butchery sent waves of panic through the city’s wealthy enclaves. Even electronic fences weren’t enough to keep people safe. Before Sharon Tate’s murder, Beverly Hills sporting goods stores sold only a few handguns a day. In the two days since her death, one store sold two hundred. Guard dogs were previously for sale for $200; now the price jumped to $1,500. But for people of more modest means, the LaBianca murders were far more terrifying than the gory events at Cielo. It was more titillating than frightening for the general public to learn that a movie star had died under terrible circumstances. But Leno LaBianca and his wife were small business owners, regular people, and if mysterious, maybe insane killers had stalked and slaughtered them, then nobody was safe. Throughout the city, everyone hung on every news report.
Charlie Manson wanted the murders to result in citywide panic, and in the strictest sense he got his wish. But it wasn’t the racially incendiary panic that he wanted. Charlie read the articles about the Tate and LaBianca slayings, and not one made any mention of the Black Panthers as potential perpetrators. He couldn’t understand why—they’d left those words in blood, and Bobby Beausoleil had mimicked the tradema
rk Panther paw print on Gary Hinman’s wall. Race-related tension in L.A. continued to run high. What was the matter with the cops, with the media? How could they miss something so obvious?
But it was Charlie who had missed the obvious. In other major American cities—New York, Chicago, Washington—in 1969 blacks and whites mixed freely, too often combustively, as part of daily life on subways, in stores, on street corners. But L.A. was unique—its freeways and sprawl effectively divided one race from another. Watts might erupt in flames, but a car of armed black militants on Cielo or Waverly Drive would have been called in immediately to police. Charlie remembered Black Panthers haranguing white passersby for contributions in Berkeley and San Francisco. Most white people living in Bel Air or Los Feliz had probably never seen a Black Panther. For all Charlie’s scheming to instigate Helter Skelter, the LAPD and the media never considered that the Tate or LaBianca murders might be race-related. In that critical sense, his plot had failed.
Yet Charlie still used the press coverage to emphasize to the Family that, with his leadership, they had done a great, important thing. He usually banned newspapers from Spahn, but now he brandished the city dailies with their massive, alarmist headlines and proclaimed to his followers, “It’s started.” Perhaps not yet the Helter Skelter prophesied by the Beatles and the Bible, but still this was the genesis of widespread violence. They had to get out of town fast, because this was the Apocalypse. No one questioned Charlie when he emphasized that people would soon be coming for them at Spahn.
He was right.
• • •
For months, Los Angeles County lawmen had heard rumors of illegal activities on Spahn Ranch—stolen cars and drug use in particular. The earlier raid in April hadn’t yielded satisfactory results. Now they decided to try again, this time a massive surprise raid incorporating helicopters, officers on horseback to pursue suspects into the ranch hills where cars couldn’t go, and more than a hundred personnel so that every inch of Spahn could be investigated. A court warrant was issued to conduct the raid on Wednesday, August 13, but the raid was inexplicably postponed until Saturday.
Charlie sent Linda Kasabian to visit Bobby Beausoleil in the county jail. The Tate and LaBianca copycat murders apparently wouldn’t be linked to the killing of Gary Hinman, and Charlie had to think of some other way to keep Beausoleil quiet, at least until Charlie and the Family lost themselves out in the wastes of Death Valley. Linda’s message from Charlie was supposed to be brief: “Say nothing. Everything’s all right.” But when she got to the county jail she didn’t have any identification and they wouldn’t let her in.
Charlie was far less concerned about the two Family members in LAPD custody. Mary Brunner and Sandy Good were still being held on charges of using stolen credit cards, but Charlie had no time to waste on raising their bail. Sandy was hugely pregnant now, and at a preliminary hearing that week she was released. She immediately rejoined the Family at Spahn. But the court kept Mary in custody on a new charge of forgery. She would remain in jail until September, when she was released on probation.
In anticipation of the Family’s relocation there, Charlie sent a few members ahead to Death Valley. It seemed like a good idea to get Tex away from Spahn, just in case the FBI showed up there looking for him. Dianne Lake went with him—Stephanie Schram had replaced her as Charlie’s unofficial girlfriend. They had an uneasy time of it as they waited for the rest of the Family to join them. Tex was ambivalent about staying in the group. He thought a lot about calling his parents and asking for airfare home. Dianne, still just fifteen, got picked up by a deputy from Shoshone, who thought she might be a runaway. Dianne eventually convinced them that she was nineteen and they let her go. Tex was questioned by the same deputy when he was caught skinny-dipping in an irrigation ditch. Since he was in a playful mood, Tex gave the lawman his correct age and date of birth, but said his name was Charles Montgomery. The deputy wrote it down.
• • •
Sharon Tate posthumously became one of the most famous actresses of her generation. On Tuesday, August 12, Valley of the Dolls was rereleased nationally, and other films in which she played even bit parts soon followed. All over America, Tate received the ultimate tribute to a star’s drawing power—her name was above the title on theater marquees.
That same day, a visitor dropped by Spahn Ranch. With his short hair and clean hands, Al Springer didn’t resemble the prototypical biker, but he was a loyal member of the Straight Satans all the same. The Satans hadn’t been happy with Charlie and the Family ever since the botched drug deal with Bobby Beausoleil; with one exception, they’d made themselves scarce at Spahn ever since. Danny DeCarlo, the Satans’ club treasurer, was still living on the ranch, having fun with the Family women and helping convert cars into dune buggies. Springer went to Spahn to talk DeCarlo into leaving, and instead found himself the target of a recruiting pitch from Charlie. Charlie envisioned commanding an army of bikers out in the desert, tough outlaws riding bikes or driving dune buggies and fighting off any Family enemies. He told Springer that if he stayed he could have all the girls he wanted. Springer tried to put Charlie off by asking how he managed to support so many women at the same time.
Charlie couldn’t resist bragging. He told Springer that he liked to go out at night with his cutlass, the one that used to belong to the Straight Satans. He knocked on doors in the swankiest neighborhoods and cut up the people who answered. Charlie claimed he’d “knocked off five of them just the other night.” It sounded absurd to Springer, but DeCarlo said it was true, and that there was more—DeCarlo had heard from Tex and Clem about them murdering some guy named Henland and also “a nigger.” Charlie supposedly cut Henland’s ear off with his sword, and he shot the other man with a long-barreled .22.
Springer had no interest in leaving the Satans for the Family. He was very fastidious and he thought that the shacks on the ranch were filthy and the women were disease-ridden. But he hung around a little longer, listening to Charlie prattle. At some point somebody mentioned writing a word on a refrigerator, something about pigs or niggers, Springer didn’t quite catch what. But Charlie and the others were very clear that they set up these things to call the blame down on the Black Panthers. He had no doubt about that. Springer didn’t exactly blow Charlie off. Hell, DeCarlo said he was scared that if he left, the Family would track him down and kill him. They didn’t like defectors. So Springer was noncommittal, and took word back to the other Satans that DeCarlo didn’t feel like Charlie would let him leave. That pissed them off something fierce; they began planning how they’d go out to Spahn and take their buddy back whether Charlie and his people wanted them to or not.
• • •
Linda Kasabian couldn’t stand it anymore. For two nights she’d been part of a murder spree, and now she believed that the others in the Family were “little robots” totally under Charlie’s evil control. When Charlie told her to go back to the county jail and try again to see Bobby Beausoleil, to get him the word that he still had to keep quiet, Linda made a show of agreeing. She borrowed a car and left Spahn, but instead of driving into L.A. she headed for New Mexico where her estranged husband, Bob, was still living. Besides the danger she faced herself from Charlie if he ever caught her, Linda took an additional risk by leaving her young daughter, Tanya, behind with the Family. She gambled that no matter how angry everyone there might be with her, they all seemed to love and care for children.
When Linda found Bob she told him everything, including all about the Tate murders. He wanted her to return to Spahn with him right away so that they could rescue Tanya, but Linda was convinced that Charlie would kill them if they tried. For the next few days they argued about it.
• • •
The L.A. media inundated viewers and readers with nonstop coverage of the Tate murders. Beyond a few short follow-up articles, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca disappeared. On August 13 readers of the Los Angeles Times learned about the substantial quantity of drugs found at the Cielo murde
r scene (this in direct contradiction to the Times’s original story on August 10, which stated “no narcotics were found”); on the 14th the Times described in detail the funeral service for Sharon Tate, listing the many stars in the overflow crowd who came to mourn her. On the 15th, the Times reported that federal officials now “admitted” they were focusing the Tate inquiries on drugs “and gambling debts,” apparently mixing in by accident a leak from the LaBianca investigation.
The great interest in the L.A. murders was interrupted for four days beginning on August 15. Four hundred thousand people, most of them young and long-haired, gathered on an upstate New York farm for the Woodstock music festival. The crowd and the festival were on a scale unlike any before. The festival celebrated the hippie sense of peace and love as much or more than the music. When Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman tried to interrupt The Who’s set with political rhetoric, the band unceremoniously threw him off the stage. There was a long downpour, and instead of fleeing for cover many of the young people played in the mud. There was some mockery of them by hardshell conservatives: See, these doped-up longhairs don’t have sense enough to get out of the rain. But for much of the country, Woodstock was a soothing reminder that amid the tragic news of murders in Los Angeles and the stalemate in Vietnam, it was still possible for young people to gather and have a good time instead of protesting or rioting. Maybe hippies really were sweet and harmless after all.
On Friday night, August 15, Spahn Ranch became the antithesis of Woodstock peace and love when eight or nine Straight Satans roared in on their motorcycles to rescue Danny DeCarlo and, while they were at it, kick Charlie Manson’s ass. The Satans jumped off their bikes and went looking for Charlie, who they expected would be cowering somewhere. Instead, he walked up to them cooler than hell and greeted them warmly. That threw the bikers off guard. When they threatened to tear the whole ranch apart, Charlie ignored the threat and offered them food and dope. The Family women appeared, acting friendly, and some of the Satans went off with them for fun and games. After a while the bikers gathered back together and remembered why they’d come. DeCarlo was on the ranch somewhere, and they demanded that he be brought to them. That was when Charlie, still sounding pleasant but also firm, mentioned that he had the men in the Family up on the roofs of the movie set. They had guns trained on the Satans and would shoot if Charlie gave the command. Al Springer checked out the rifle racks that Charlie had shown him in one of the shacks. Sure enough, some of the guns were missing. So the Satans blustered awhile and then got on their bikes and rode off, outmaneuvered by the slick-talking little creep they had fully intended to pound into bloody pulp. As a face-saving gesture, they took back the sword that Charlie loved so much, and left behind one of their members; Robert Reinhard was supposed to find DeCarlo in the morning and get him off of Spahn, but he didn’t get the chance.
