Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover

by Jeff Guinn

  • • •

  Susan Atkins, who had still not been officially interrogated by the Tate-LaBianca investigators, was given a court-appointed attorney named Richard Caballero. Having studied the evidence already accumulated against her, Caballero advised his new client that her only hope of avoiding California’s death penalty was to cooperate with the police. He told Susan that Charlie was “a force working in your life that is stronger than you are.”

  • • •

  Members of the Tate and LaBianca teams began interviewing L.A.-area residents who’d been mentioned by Susan to Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham. Gregg Jakobson was cooperative. He told about his interest in Charlie’s music and the Family’s lifestyle, and how he tried unsuccessfully to interest his friend Terry Melcher into either recording Charlie or else financing a movie about the Family. But Charlie couldn’t have intended to have Melcher killed on the night of the Cielo murders, Jakobson pointed out, because he knew by then that Melcher had moved. Jakobson tried to tell about Charlie’s weird beliefs, but the officer interrogating him wasn’t interested in any of that. He just wanted to hear about Charlie’s grudge against Melcher. As an afterthought, he asked Jakobson if he knew a guy named Charles Montgomery, probably nicknamed Tex. Jakobson said that he did, but Tex’s last name was Watson, not Montgomery. The LAPD ran checks on Charles Watson and found that he’d been arrested for drugs in Van Nuys back in April. Fingerprints taken then matched one found on the front door at Cielo. It took only a few more hours of digging to learn that Watson was from a small town in Collin County, Texas, not too far from Dallas. Investigators called the sheriff there—Tom Montgomery, Tex’s cousin. He thrilled the L.A. cops by saying that Tex was living at home, and that he’d pick him up right away.

  Tex had hooked up with an old girlfriend. When they returned from an afternoon drive, Tex’s father was waiting. He asked his son if he knew anything about a murder back in California. Tex said that he didn’t, and he, his father, and Tex’s uncle Maurice drove to the county jail in McKinney. Sheriff Tom Montgomery sheepishly told Tex that he had to take him into custody, but the misunderstanding would surely be cleared up soon: “We know for sure you didn’t commit no murder.” Word of Tex’s arrest spread quickly throughout the small community, but nobody who knew Tex there believed he’d killed anybody. He was such a sweet guy.

  • • •

  Gregg Jakobson was willing to assist LAPD investigators. Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher weren’t. Dennis rightly feared the wrath of the other Beach Boys. They hadn’t liked Charlie Manson to begin with, and now, thanks to Dennis they would soon be linked with some crazy guru and his killer cult, hardly the best association for a band whose trademark song subjects were sun and fun. To Dennis, whose self-esteem was always shaky, the Beach Boys and his place in the band were the most important things in the world. So when the police came to question him, Dennis downplayed his relationship with Charlie. Yes, the guy and his people stayed with Wilson for a little while. So what? Lots of people did—he’d been living in a big house at the time. Sure, he’d had Charlie audition for Brother Records. That’s what you did when you had a label, try out just about every would-be music star you came across to see if any of them really had some talent. Charlie didn’t, and that was that.

  Melcher stonewalled, too. Columbia wouldn’t be pleased to have its boy wonder producer publicly associated with long-haired mass murderers. Melcher knew that he couldn’t completely avoid the Manson taint, but he could at least try to limit it. Where Wilson avoided specifics, Melcher lied. He claimed that he’d only met Manson a couple of times, really just out at Spahn Ranch where he went to listen to the guy’s music at the insistence of Gregg Jakobson. He hadn’t been impressed, though out of pity he did hand over the cash he had in his pocket because those people on the ranch, especially the little kids, looked so raggedy and starved. That Manson apparently thought he’d broken his word about a recording contract was news to him, Melcher insisted. He didn’t understand why Manson would have gone to his former residence on Cielo seeking revenge, if that was what had happened in the Tate murder case. When the investigators said they’d heard that Melcher liked to mess around with the Family women, he showed them pictures of some of his recent girlfriends, including spectacular Candy Bergen. He asked, “When I’ve got beauties like these to get in bed with, why would I want to screw any of Manson’s clap-ridden, unwashed dogs?” The cops might not have believed him, but the unwritten rule of L.A. law enforcement apparently prevailed—celebrities got passes where regular people wouldn’t. Melcher was taken at his word. The investigative team did get one bit of new, useful information from Melcher. He conceded that one time Dennis Wilson had given him a ride home to Cielo, and Charlie Manson rode along in the backseat, strumming his guitar. But Dennis dropped him at the gate, Melcher emphasized. Charlie didn’t come onto the grounds, let alone inside the house. Still, to the investigators it was confirmation that Charlie Manson had been to Cielo at least once. He knew where the place was.

  • • •

  On Sunday afternoon, November 30, Richard Caballero met with Bugliosi at Parker Center to talk deal on his client’s behalf. Aaron Stovitz had supplied Caballero with copies of Virginia Graham’s and Ronnie Howard’s taped interviews, and made it clear to the defense attorney that prosecutors were ready to seek the death penalty for Susan. Now Bugliosi made an offer—if Susan cooperated, they would consider letting her plead guilty to second degree murder with a penalty of life imprisonment. Caballero took the offer to Susan at Sybil Brand, emphasizing to her that the case against her was strong. If she didn’t make the deal, she’d die in the gas chamber. Susan said she couldn’t make up her mind. Caballero returned to Parker Center and told Bugliosi about Susan’s indecision. He added that he thought she might agree to testify against Charlie to the grand jury, but never in a public courtroom. Charlie’s hold over her was still that strong. And no matter what Susan might eventually promise to the prosecution, her ongoing devotion to Charlie might make her change her mind and recant at any moment. Bugliosi urged Caballero to keep trying. For now he had a case against Susan and Tex Watson in the Cielo murders, but so far they had only Susan’s jailhouse boasts to Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham to implicate Manson, Pat, and Linda. The prosecutors were especially concerned that the defendants might eventually demand joint rather than individual trials. In joint trials, California law mandated that the prosecution couldn’t use as evidence a statement by one defendant that implicated his or her co-defendants. In that case anything Susan had said about the murders could be used only against her, not Charlie or anyone else she claimed participated in the Tate and LaBianca slayings. To be certain of convicting the others, prosecutors needed much more information from Susan that could help build individual cases against all the suspects.

  Though many of his staff begged him not to, on December 1 Chief Davis insisted on holding a 2 P.M. news conference to announce that the LAPD had cracked the Tate and LaBianca murder investigations. For weeks, the department had little progress to report. Now there were suspects that could be publicly identified in both cases and a motive, revenge on Terry Melcher, for Tate. It would be the investigators’ jobs to back up what Davis would announce. But the press conference was almost derailed before the chief met with the media. At 7 A.M. Sheriff Montgomery phoned Aaron Stovitz to warn that if L.A. didn’t deliver an arrest warrant to Collin County within two hours, he would let Tex go. Stovitz and Bugliosi had to scramble to find a judge to sign Tex’s warrant, which reached Collin County minutes ahead of the sheriff’s deadline. It was only the first of innumerable obstacles Texas lawmen and lawyers would impose on the prosecutors’ efforts to have Tex extradited to L.A. for trial. The extradition appeals process would take almost nine months to work through state and district courts.

  While they were at it, Stovitz and Bugliosi also issued arrest warrants for Pat Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian. After a few phone calls to authorities in Alabama, Pat was arrested
just prior to Chief Davis’s press conference. Linda’s whereabouts were still unknown, but at least the warrant would have lawmen around the country looking for her.

  Chief Ed Davis didn’t hold back when he addressed the media. According to the chief, after 8,750 hours of nonstop investigation, the LAPD had solved not only the Tate murder case, but also the slayings of the LaBiancas. Warrants had been issued for three individuals—Tex, Pat, and Linda. Indictments for four or five additional individuals would be sought from the grand jury. Davis never mentioned Susan or Charlie, but he didn’t have to. Sources soon clued in reporters to a “band of murderous nomads” and their leader. Within a day sketchy profiles of Manson began appearing in the papers, and an L.A. Times headline proclaimed, “Grudge Against Doris Day’s Son Linked to Tate Slayings.” The LaBiancas were still second-tier victims of what the article described as an “occultist band.” Reporters found that Richard Caballero, Susan’s attorney, was glad to provide colorful quotes. He explained to them that his client had participated in the murders while under Charlie’s “hypnotic spell,” and that she “said of Manson, ‘We belong to him, not to ourselves.’ ” It was part of Caballero’s strategy to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea if he couldn’t cut a deal for Susan with the prosecutors.

  But the defense attorney still hoped for a deal. After Davis’s press conference, he asked Stovitz for permission to bring Susan to Caballero’s office. Away from Sybil Brand, he suggested, she might be more amenable to talking. Caballero would make a tape of whatever Susan told him. If her case went to trial, he would play it for psychiatrists. If a deal was struck, he’d let the prosecutors hear the tape before they went to the grand jury. Stovitz agreed to the plan.

  Reports of the Davis press conference went out all over the country. Reaction among those who knew Charlie Manson was mixed. Phil Kaufman, who had shared prison time with him, was convinced that Charlie and his followers couldn’t possibly have committed the Tate and LaBianca murders. He knew that they were weird, but he didn’t think they were killers. But Charlie’s cousin Jo Ann recalls that when she heard the news back in West Virginia, she was “very sad and horrified, but not surprised. Once you really got to know Charles, anything awful that he did was no surprise.”

  • • •

  Stovitz and Bugliosi hadn’t wanted Chief Davis to hold the press conference, but their investigation benefited in its immediate aftermath. On December 2, Linda Kasabian voluntarily surrendered to police in Concord, New Hampshire. She said that she had been at Cielo on the night of the Tate murders, but had not participated in them. Linda also said that she would cooperate with any effort to extradite her to California.

  At the urging of her mother, who finally believed the horrific stories told by her seventeen-year-old daughter, Barbara Hoyt came in to talk to the police. She told them about hearing Shorty’s screams on the night that he was butchered, and overhearing Susan bragging about her role in the Tate murders. The investigators felt there was plenty more to explore with her, and Hoyt promised to be available as needed.

  Mary Brunner contacted police in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and made a deal through them with Los Angeles County to cooperate in exchange for immunity in the Hinman case. Besides offering testimony about Hinman’s murder, Mary was adamant that Tex Watson told her about Charlie and some of the others murdering Shorty Shea. She told police that afterward Shorty’s car was left somewhere in Canoga Park. The LAPD initiated a search for it.

  • • •

  Richard Caballero brought the Susan Atkins tape to Parker Center on the evening of December 3 and played it for Bugliosi and members of the Tate and LaBianca teams. Because they were amenable to negotiating a deal, for two hours Caballero allowed them to listen to Susan name the participants and describe, often in gory detail, the murders. Susan was clear that, although he didn’t go along himself, Charlie ordered the Cielo killings. The four who went that night were herself, Tex, Pat, and Linda. The next night Charlie went into the house on Waverly Drive, and afterward sent Tex, Pat, and Leslie inside with orders to kill the LaBiancas. Susan didn’t witness these murders—she was sent on by Charlie with Clem and Linda—but Pat and Leslie told her about them later. Susan also stated that “the reason Charlie picked [Cielo] was to instill fear into Terry Melcher because Terry had given us his word on a few things and never came through with them.”

  There were two significant differences in Susan’s taped testimony and her boasts to Virginia and Ronnie at Sybil Brand. Now, instead of presenting herself as a gleeful slaughterer, Susan claimed that she stabbed Voytek Frykowski only in self-defense, and that rather than butchering Sharon Tate, she held the heavily pregnant actress while Tex stabbed her. But the investigators still heard enough to assure Caballero that his client would be offered a deal.

  • • •

  Another defense attorney had the same goal for his new client. Los Angeles lawyer Gary Fleischman represented Linda Kasabian, who arrived in L.A. late on the 3rd and was booked into Sybil Brand. Stovitz briefly met with her and her lawyer there, and left with the impression that Linda was willing to cooperate but Fleischman wouldn’t allow it until she was offered immunity in return for her testimony. Stovitz and Bugliosi decided not to offer anything for the time being. They would concentrate on cutting a deal with Caballero and Susan. If for some reason that didn’t work out, Kasabian might be a satisfactory alternative.

  • • •

  On December 4, Susan Atkins got her deal, an exceptionally generous one. If she testified truthfully to the grand jury, the prosecution would not seek the death penalty against her for the Hinman, Tate, or LaBianca murders. If Susan chose not to testify at the anticipated murder trials, or even if she later recanted all that she’d said, prosecutors could not use her grand jury testimony against her or any co-defendants. Caballero boasted later that his client “gave up nothing and got everything in return.” The defense attorney cleverly expedited the one-sided deal by warning prosecutors that, because of the influence Charlie still had on her, at any moment Susan might decide not to testify to the grand jury. Without that testimony, there would almost surely be no grand jury indictments of Charlie, Tex, and Pat, all of whom might then be released. So Stovitz and Bugliosi gave Caballero everything he demanded for his client and arranged for Susan to go before the grand jury on December 5.

  • • •

  A fingerprint of Pat’s taken by the Mobile, Alabama, Police Department matched a print found inside Sharon Tate’s bedroom at Cielo. Now she and Tex were both placed at that murder scene. But prosecutors still had only Susan’s word that Charlie was the mastermind behind the Tate slayings.

  On the evening of the 4th, Bugliosi met with Susan at Caballero’s office. She told him, “Charlie is looking at us right now and he can hear everything we are saying.” Bugliosi thought she was crazy—“probably not legally insane, but crazy nonetheless.” He and Stovitz were basing their high-profile case on the words of an extremely nutty girl.

  • • •

  At nine the next morning, Aaron Stovitz swore in Susan Atkins before twenty-one members of the grand jury. By law, two-thirds of them had to agree on any indictments. Susan waived her right not to incriminate herself and, coaxed by Stovitz and Bugliosi, told her story yet again. Her testimony lasted all day. Some of the details she provided were so explicit that at one point a recess was declared when a gagging grand juror had to leave the room. By the time the grand jury broke for the weekend, its mostly white, mid-to-upper-middle-class members had heard from Susan not only about the Tate and LaBianca murders, but also about the wonders of Charlie and the power Susan believed was speaking through him: “The words that would come from Charlie’s mouth . . . would come from what I call the Infinite.” The prosecutors were pleased when Susan said that Charlie “programmed [us] to do things.” She even alluded briefly to Helter Skelter, “the last war on the face of the earth.” Stovitz and Bugliosi were confident that they were well on the way to getting the indictments t
hat they wanted.

  • • •

  Over the weekend, press coverage of Susan’s testimony (“Orgy of Murder: Tate Suspect Tells Jury of Slayings”) competed for front page space with news from Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco. Less than four months after the Woodstock festival had celebrated music as a means of bringing people together in an atmosphere of peace and love, on Saturday December 6 a black audience member was stabbed to death by Hells Angels during the performance by the Rolling Stones. It was the dark side yang to the hopeful Woodstock yin, and further proof to a growing number of outraged, conservative Americans that way too many longhairs were not only socially subversive, but also just plain dangerous.

  • • •

  On Monday, the grand jury reconvened and heard testimony from a number of witnesses, including Danny DeCarlo, Gregg Jakobson, and three of the five Family women who’d been transferred from the Inyo County jail to Sybil Brand. Gypsy wouldn’t testify, and the prosecutors didn’t call Leslie because Susan had just named her as one of the LaBianca killers. Ruth Ann, Dianne Lake, and Nancy Pitman all swore they knew nothing about any murders, but it didn’t matter. In the most negative possible way, Susan had wowed the jurors. That afternoon they returned indictments on seven counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder for Charles Manson, Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel. Because she had been involved only on the second night, Leslie Van Houten was indicted on two counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. But Stovitz and Bugliosi were well aware that the indictments were only a first step. Successful prosecution still depended on Susan Atkins, and, based on her adoring descriptions of him to the grand jury, she might bolt back to Charlie at any time. They needed much more.