by Jeff Guinn
At daybreak on Saturday, everyone on the ranch was awakened by the din of hovering helicopters and bullhorns blaring orders to come out of the buildings with their hands up. The raid extended for hours—it took that long to locate the dozens of vehicles stashed in remote sections of the ranch. The Family members had constructed elaborate hiding places in brush and gullies. Finally all the cars were logged and impounded, including Johnny Swartz’s 1959 Ford, and all the Family members were in custody but one. The county cops still hadn’t bagged Charlie, who they believed was the ringleader. They kept searching until someone finally spotted him hiding under one of the movie set buildings. When they dragged him out, Charlie was informed that he and the others were under arrest for auto theft. His captors couldn’t understand why the scruffy little man looked so relieved. They hauled their prisoners, twenty-six in all, off to jail. It had been a good morning’s work.
At around the same time on Saturday, staff at the LAPD Firearms and Explosives Unit used the broken pieces of handle to identify the specific make of gun used in the Tate murders. It was a Hi Standard .22 Longhorn, nicknamed the Buntline Special. It was a significant step in the Tate investigation—now detectives could query gun shop owners to see who might have purchased that model, or if one of these guns had been pawned or sold or found somewhere in the aftermath of August 9.
Stumped for fresh information—beyond discovering the model of the gun used at Cielo, the LAPD had made very little progress—L.A. newspapers filled pages with speculation. On August 16 the Times revealed that an informant had tipped police to three possible suspects in the Tate murders. This was true; over the next several weeks investigators frantically followed up on the vaguest possible leads. None of these marginal suspects panned out. Having been cleared of any involvement himself, Roman Polanski announced a $25,000 reward for anyone whose information led to the capture and conviction of the Tate murderers. Because of the impressive amount, and because it was so widely reported that the money had been put up by some of Hollywood’s best-known stars, news of the reward encouraged even more dead-end tips to the police.
On Sunday, August 17, the Times local news section led with a retrospective: “Anatomy of a Mass Murder in Hollywood.” Far less prominent was a one-column article, “LaBianca Couple, Victims of Slayer, Given Final Rites.” An even smaller story informed readers that “Police Raid Ranch, Arrest 26 Suspects in Auto Theft Ring.” Unwittingly, the Times had the seven victims and their killers together on the same page.
On Monday, all the charges against Charlie and his followers were dropped and they were set free. The date on the county warrant had never been changed from August 13 to August 16, making it illegal. Most of the cars recovered during the raid were stolen, but there was no way to prove which of the prisoners were guilty in which instances. The Family was allowed to return to Spahn with the exception of the children, including Linda’s daughter, Tanya. Because county welfare officials were concerned about living conditions at the ranch, the children remained in foster care.
Out in New Mexico, Linda Kasabian was frantic to get her toddler back, and just as desperate not to fall back into Charlie’s clutches. Bob wasn’t any help; no matter how much she explained to him about the Tate murders, he still thought they could just drive back to L.A. and retrieve Tanya from the Family as if she were at some baby-sitter’s. Linda got Joe Sage, a Zen monk in Taos, to call Charlie on her behalf. She told Joe everything and he was very calm about it. He phoned the ranch and asked Charlie if Linda’s story about murders was true, and Charlie told him that Linda was a flipped-out chick who got too weird and ran away. Linda was afraid to talk to Charlie, but she did get on the phone with Pat, who berated her for opening her big mouth. Then another of the Family women—Linda thought it was Squeaky—told her that the county had Tanya in foster care. Linda could go bother them now. Linda contacted the county and had to go through a lot of bureaucratic hoops before Tanya was restored to her. But Linda didn’t say anything to the authorities about the Cielo or Waverly Drive slayings, because, if she did, at the very least she would be considered an accessory.
So much wild speculation about the Tate murders was sweeping the city that the LAPD felt compelled to issue a four-item “clarification”:
1. Narcotics were found on the [Cielo] premises.
2. None of the bodies had wounds involving the sex organs.
3. The word “PIG” written in blood was found on the premises. The letters were “P-I-G” not “P-I-C.” [“Pic” was rumored to be the name of the killer.]
4. At present, there is no evidence to connect these murders with any others.
The clarification had no effect on the rumors.
• • •
The combination of the Straight Satans’ invasion and the Los Angeles County raid made everyone at Spahn paranoid, Charlie most of all. He still expected the Black Panthers to attack at any moment, and the LAPD and FBI must be lurking, too. Charlie never found fault with himself—his plans were always perfect; his followers and the various Spahn hangers-on weren’t—so he looked around for scapegoats and selected two. Danny DeCarlo was the first. Charlie had expected that using the Family women to win over DeCarlo would result in him recruiting the rest of the Straight Satans as a sort of Family cavalry unit. After what had happened Friday, that clearly wasn’t going to happen, and it must be because of DeCarlo. DeCarlo had been arrested in the county raid, but returned to Spahn with everybody else. At Charlie’s command he was no longer treated as a welcome guest and future member of the Family. Instead, the women rebuffed his advances, and when he tried to pal around with the men they walked away. DeCarlo had spent lots of time hanging around with Charlie; he’d seen him lose his temper and lash out violently. Beginning in late July after Gary Hinman he’d heard all the talk about murders. Now he did his best to stay out of Charlie’s way and, at least for a while, avoided his wrath.
Shorty Shea wasn’t as fortunate.
To some extent, Charlie understood why the Straight Satans had come to the ranch. They’d been stiffed on the July drug deal and they wanted Danny DeCarlo, their club treasurer, returned to their fold. But he brooded about the raid by the Los Angeles County cops. Spahn Ranch was on the periphery of their territory, and they’d already rousted the Family there as recently as April. There was no pressing reason for them to be back so soon unless someone had tipped them off about the stolen cars and dune buggies. When Charlie tried to figure out who might have squealed, he soon settled on an obvious candidate. For months, ranch hand Shorty Shea had been urging George Spahn to evict the Family or even sell the land right out from under them to the developers. Squeaky had overheard Shorty offering to throw the Family out himself and reported it to Charlie. It made sense that Shorty squealed about the stolen vehicles to the county cops so they’d do his dirty work.
Charlie and his followers had walked away from the raid, but it was still a terrible blow to their plans for moving to Death Valley. Most of the dune buggies they’d prepared for use on Barker Ranch were gone, confiscated by the county. The cars they’d been allowed to retain were useless on desert terrain. Now they’d have to go about accumulating a whole new fleet, and that would take too much time—Charlie wanted to get out of L.A. fast before other arms of the law like the LAPD or FBI came for him. Shorty Shea had no right to cause problems for Charlie Manson. Over the last seven weeks, Charlie had already a hand in murderous attacks on nine people. Now it was time for a tenth.
On a night late in August, probably the 25th or 26th, Shorty Shea got into a car with Charlie, Clem, and Bruce Davis. They didn’t drive far, just out to some point on the Spahn property. Around 10 P.M. Family member Barbara Hoyt, sleeping in a trailer on high ground past the movie set, was awakened by the sound of a scream. At first she thought she must have imagined it, but then there were more screams that “kept happening and happening and happening.” Shorty Shea was never seen again. Bruce Davis allegedly told some Family members that he, Clem, and Charlie a
rmed themselves with bayonets purchased from Army surplus, and when they had Shea far enough out on the ranch so that there would be no witnesses, they “carv[ed him] up like a Christmas turkey.” It took awhile for Shea to die, and most of the Family believed that Charlie dismembered his corpse and buried the pieces around the ranch. Afterward Bruce Davis filled some trunks with Shea’s possessions, loaded them in the murdered ranch hand’s automobile, and then he and Gypsy drove the car to Canoga Park and abandoned it.
The next morning, some of the other ranch hands asked Charlie if he’d seen Shorty Shea. Charlie said that he thought Shea had gone to San Francisco: “I told him about a job there.”
• • •
At the end of August, both the Tate and LaBianca investigation teams prepared progress reports for top administration of the LAPD. The Tate squad’s report listed five suspects, William Garretson and four individuals suggested by informants. It noted that all five had been cleared. The Tate team had no explanation yet for the word “PIG” written in blood on the front door at Cielo. The LaBianca team’s report included considerably more details, including speculation on the bloody words “Rise,” “Death to Pigs,” and “Healter Skelter” left at Waverly Drive. Younger and more attuned to rock music than the Tate detectives, the LaBianca investigators noted that the Beatles’ most recent album included the songs “Helter Skelter,” “Blackbird,” and “Piggies,” and lyrics from those songs might in some way be related to the gory words scrawled by the killers. This possible lead wasn’t emphasized in the report, and no further attention was paid to it.
Neither the Tate nor the LaBianca report mentioned that the two events had any possible connection.
By the end of August, stories about the Tate murders continued to appear in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, and widespread interest in them continued. But other violent events forced their way into headlines and news reports, too, particularly the first in a series of bombings of federal buildings and major businesses across the nation by radical protesters. Between August 31 and the end of May 1970, these totaled almost 250, or an average of about one each day. Violence plagued America; the grisly murder of an actress was embedded in the public consciousness, but it was joined by fresher, equally deplorable events. Only in L.A. did the story continue to dominate local news reports. Somewhere in the city particularly foul murderers skulked, perhaps preparing to strike again.
But by the first week in September that was no longer true. Though he was hampered by a shortage of dune buggies, Charlie decided he couldn’t wait any longer. The Family stole a few cars—a red four-wheel-drive Toyota was the prize among them—to partially replace the fleet lost in the county raid. Then Charlie loaded the Family into the vehicles and led his followers into the desert.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Death Valley
Because it involved so many people and loads of supplies, the Family’s relocation to the desert took several trips spread out over the better part of a week. Charlie slightly hedged on his commitment to Death Valley by leaving a few of the women back at Spahn, both to provide him with an L.A. base of operations and to send word if cops showed up looking for him. But he and more than two dozen of his followers moved, too many to fit in the shacks on Barker Ranch. The overflow squatted on adjacent Myers Ranch; Cathy Gillies’s grandmother, who didn’t live on the property, was probably unaware that the temporary visitors she’d allowed to stay awhile in late 1968 were back.
Charlie didn’t allow them to readjust to their new, primitive living conditions. From the moment they arrived, everyone in the Family engaged in frantic efforts to prepare for the attack that Charlie swore to them was coming. He was sometimes vague about who, exactly, was about to descend—sometimes it was still militant blacks bent on wiping out every trace of the white population, but he also mentioned “the law.” The bottom line was that some form of violent assault was imminent, and the Family had to be ready to fight it off. So pits had to be dug to cache weapons and nonperishable food, and bunkers carved into hillsides. It was hot, sweaty work in the unrelenting desert summer heat, but those weren’t the only tasks Charlie assigned. At some point every day, squads of Family members had to trek out into the desert to look for the bottomless pit where Charlie prophesied they would hide until Helter Skelter was finally over and the blacks begged the Family to emerge and rule the world. Charlie kept describing the pit in detail, all about the upper tunnel that led below to a great city, and how the magical city’s atmosphere would allow all of them to evolve into whatever sort of beings that they liked, and the wonderful news that they wouldn’t age while they were down there, so that when they did come back up into the surface world they’d still be young and strong and ready to rule under Charlie’s direction for a very long time.
Charlie’s true believers—Squeaky, Sandy, addled Clem—took him completely at his word. Others liked his descriptions of the pit so much that they didn’t allow themselves to question Charlie’s veracity; Leslie in particular wanted to become an elf with wings. Many, worn down by physical labor and sweltering temperatures, acquiesced because they were too exhausted to question Charlie’s orders. He remained in total command. At night he gathered everyone around campfires, doled out strong hits of acid, and described the world soon to come, a place where they enjoyed every luxury and this tough time in Death Valley was a distant memory. They should be grateful to him, Charlie stressed. He was putting himself at great risk to save them. Sometimes he’d describe in colorful detail how he shot Lotsapoppa; occasionally Charlie also mentioned the killing of Shorty Shea, emphasizing that Shorty had to die because he’d ratted on the Family. The underlying message was that Charlie would kill anyone who betrayed him, Family members included.
It was a hard way to live, but the men in the Family found more to enjoy in it than the women. The men served as armed lookouts, roosting in the shade and avoiding enervating movement in the unrelenting sun. They got the first and largest servings at meals and could relax afterward. The women had to chop wood for the stoves, cook the meals, eat whatever scraps were left by the men, and care for the children—for now there weren’t many, just Susan’s son, Ze Zo Ze (whom she stole back from county foster parents after the Spahn raid), and a baby boy named Ivan recently delivered by Sandy Good. Even if she was worn out to the point of collapse, every female was obligated to uncomplainingly have sex with any male Family member who demanded it. To many of the women, life in a bottomless pit sounded great by comparison.
Seventeen-year-old Ruth Ann Moorehouse was one of the few women remaining constantly upbeat and energetic. Most of the others dreaded the anticipated attacks, but Ruth Ann looked forward to them—to her, it would be part of a great adventure, one she’d missed out on so far because she hadn’t had the chance to kill anyone for Charlie. Ruth Ann confided to Danny DeCarlo that she could hardly wait to get her first pig. That was too much for DeCarlo, who suspected that eventually Charlie would decide to eliminate him the same way that he had Shorty Shea. DeCarlo fled Barker Ranch and holed up with some of his old Straight Satan pals in Venice; because of all the “murder talk” he’d heard at Spahn and in the desert, DeCarlo remained concerned that Charlie might yet send out some of the Family to murder him.
Though DeCarlo ran, another non-Family member stayed around. Hulking Spahn ranch hand Juan Flynn accompanied the Family out into the desert, not to join but because he wanted to find out what had happened to his friend Shorty. It didn’t take Juan long—Charlie bragged about the Shea murder at the campfires. But Juan wasn’t sure what to do with the information; clearly, Charlie Manson was a dangerous man to anger, and if Juan went to the cops and Charlie didn’t get sent away for killing Shorty, then Charlie or his followers were bound to come after Juan. So Juan stayed at Barker, uncertain what to do next.
The murder talk—bits and pieces about Tate and LaBianca, Charlie’s open boasting about killing Lotsapoppa and Shorty Shea—unnerved some of the Family members, too. Barbara Hoyt over
heard Susan Atkins gossiping with Ruth Ann; she paid no attention until Susan mentioned the name “Tate.” Then she eavesdropped with a growing sense of horror as Susan went into great detail for Ruth Ann about Tate being the last to be slaughtered and how, as she died, Tate called for her mother. Despite his own bragging about Lotsapoppa and Shorty Shea, Charlie had cautioned the Tate and LaBianca killers to keep quiet about what they’d done. They only obeyed to a limited extent; even Charlie wasn’t able to resist crowing about those murders to Al Springer, and Tex blabbed to Clem and Danny DeCarlo. Susan could never resist bragging under any circumstances, inevitably exaggerating her own importance. Some of the younger girls like Barbara Hoyt, Stephanie Schram, and Kitty Lutesinger, routinely left out of matters involving Charlie’s inner circle, knew some violent things had happened but weren’t certain who or what they involved. Now, out in the desert, they learned about Tate and LaBianca, and they were frightened enough to think about escape. But it was hard to know where to run—even reaching the nearest Inyo County settlements on foot would take hours, and Los Angeles seemed like a distant planet. Besides, everyone knew that Charlie could find you anywhere.
