by Jeff Guinn
The media covered every aspect of the jury selection process so exhaustively that Judge Older moved the proceedings into his private chambers. Individual examinations still took so long that Older added forty-five minutes to each court day. In all, 205 people were interviewed before the selection of a twelve-member jury and six alternates was finally completed on July 21. Trial proceedings in the presence of the newly empaneled jury would begin on Friday, July 24.
Stovitz and Bugliosi had a battle plan: Helter Skelter was the motive, and the “vicarious liability” rule of conspiracy would be their main argument for conviction. As Bugliosi explained it in his best-selling account of the trial, “each conspirator is criminally responsible for all the crimes committed by his co-conspirators if [these] crimes were committed to further the object of the conspiracy. This rule applies even if the conspirator was not present at the scene of the crime.” The prosecution would try to convince the jury that Charlie, Susan, Pat, and Leslie attempted to precipitate a race war that would result in their ruling the world by committing seven murders. Charlie, the mastermind of the plot, was as guilty of murder as the three women, even though he wasn’t present during the actual slayings. Susan, Pat, and Leslie were willing participants, not mindless robots. (This theme also combated any potential defense claims that Tex was responsible for organizing the murders.) The two prosecutors had worked hard gathering witnesses and evidence. They were prepared to win a conventional trial.
But Charlie was determined that the trial wouldn’t be conventional. He had the gifted performer’s innate sense of public relations and timing. For months, he’d been famous, which was gratifying, but those months were the preliminaries. The trial would be the main event, his showpiece. There was the very real possibility that it would end with Charlie sentenced to die in the gas chamber. That meant the trial would have to be so memorable that Charlie’s fame would long outlast his life. The right bizarre, well-timed outbursts would ensure that—Charlie could concoct these on a daily basis. He believed that he had control over his four handpicked defense attorneys, but much depended on the three women, who in the past had not been Charlie’s most devoted or reliable followers. Pat and Leslie had both made attempts to leave the Family—Charlie had to track down Pat, and had to talk Leslie out of it. Susan was boastful and impulsive. Now he needed them to carry out his orders unquestioningly. It helped that during jury selection they spent most days beside him in court. Proximity was always crucial in Charlie’s maintaining power over others. Linda Kasabian, Dianne Lake, Stephanie Schram, Kitty Lutesinger, and Barbara Hoyt, all cooperating with the prosecution, had been separated from Charlie long enough to shrug off his influence if not their fear of him. So in the days just before the trial, Charlie had true believers like Sandy and Squeaky constantly visit Susan, Pat, and Leslie in jail, reminding them of the obligation of all Family members to remain loyal to each other and obey Charlie. The three female defendants also shared the knowledge that they were bound to Charlie by guilt—as Leslie Van Houten remembered many years later, on August 9 and 10 “a line was being crossed.” Besides the gas chamber, they had nowhere else to go but Charlie. Just as they’d been his accomplices in murder, now they would be his supporting cast in court.
In the end, who could ever be certain of the response of a jury? It was always possible that jurors would favor Charlie’s antics over the prosecution’s conventional case. Months earlier, Charlie warned the Family that if he were ever arrested, he’d act like “Crazy Charlie.” Now, more than ever, it would be true.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Trial
The prosecutors were determined to control the tone of the trial. To prevent disruptions by Charlie’s followers from the spectator seats, Stovitz served all known Family members with subpoenas as potential witnesses for the prosecution. Under California law, they were barred from the courtroom while other witnesses testified. Bugliosi would make the prosecution’s opening statement, hitting hard with Helter Skelter and, he hoped, winning over the jury before the defense had an opportunity to present its counterarguments. He and Stovitz would build momentum with an opening series of witnesses to establish the basic facts of Tate-LaBianca before calling their star witness to the stand. Linda Kasabian would, Stovitz and Bugliosi believed, sway the most skeptical juror with her eyewitness account of two nights of appalling carnage. Their game plan, based on their considerable professional skill and backed by all the resources of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and the LAPD, was in place and they were ready to implement it.
Then Charlie came into the courtroom and effortlessly took the play away from them. Sometime before bailiffs came to fetch him from his ninth floor cell, Charlie used something sharp to gouge a bloody X into his forehead just above and between his eyebrows. Outside the courtroom, a supporter passed out copies of a lengthy printed statement from Charlie. The poorly spelled but cleverly constructed message read in part, “You have created the monster. I am not of you, from you . . . I haved Xed myself from your world. No man or lawyer is speaking for me. I speak for myself. I am not allowed to speak with words so I have spoken with the mark I will be wearing on my forehead.” There was nothing the prosecutors could do: Charlie hadn’t violated any courtroom procedures.
Bugliosi had been placed on the prosecution team by District Attorney Younger because of his dynamic courtroom presence; now he did his best to return the jury’s focus from Charlie’s gory forehead to the case itself. He’d barely begun acknowledging to the jury that he was sure they already knew what this trial was about when Irving Kanarek popped up from the defense table to object: “He is now making an opening statement for us.” Judge Older overruled, and over the next two hours a pattern emerged. Bugliosi would manage a few more sentences, Kanarek would object and Older would overrule—it happened nine times in all before the young prosecutor finally finished describing Helter Skelter, “a black-white civil war” that Manson and his fellow defendants hoped to precipitate with “these seven incredible murders [that] were perhaps the most bizarre, savage, nightmarish murders in the recorded annals of crime.” The moment Bugliosi concluded, Kanarek demanded that Older declare a mistrial. The judge declined.
At the end of the first day, one of the three county deputies serving as trial bailiffs reported that Charlie offered him $100,000 to be allowed to escape. The other bailiffs said that Susan, Pat, and Leslie all promised sex in return for being set free. They did this openly, in full view and hearing of others. The bailiffs believed that there was something programmed about it, and they were right. Every day before court was in session, the four defendants and their lawyers were allowed to meet in a room beside the main courtroom. It was where unruly defendants could be placed at the judge’s discretion during the trial. The room was equipped with a table and speakers to pipe in court proceedings. Charlie called it the “mouse house,” and used it each morning as a private spot in which to give the three women their instructions for the day. Charlie would tell Susan, Pat, and Leslie what they were to do, and show them the hand signals he would make to them when it was time to do it—when Charlie touched his nose or tugged his earlobe, they were to rub their forefingers across pursed lips to make a “blah-blah-blah” sound during testimony from prosecution witnesses, or stand and turn their backs on the judge, or giggle in unison whenever Charlie wanted to mock court proceedings. The three women slavishly obeyed, honoring Charlie to the point of cutting Xs into their own foreheads. The female Family members outside the courtroom did the same, permanently burning the mark into their flesh with a soldering iron so they wouldn’t have to keep on cutting themselves every few days.
In each morning meeting, if any of the four defense attorneys objected to Charlie’s instructions about what to do in court, such dissent was met with sharp reminders that Charlie knew exactly where they lived. Fitzgerald was always the most likely to protest. He thought the case could be won by conventional methods—if Charlie would just let him, he could convince the ju
ry that the prosecution’s Helter Skelter theme was ludicrous. Then early in the trial, Fitzgerald went home one night to find Squeaky in his bed offering a stark choice: have fun with her and promise to cooperate with Charlie, or else find other, less friendly Family members waiting for him next time. Later, the women defendants would recall that they were never alone with their lawyers without Charlie present, too. He monitored every word spoken between them.
Barred from the courtroom and concerned for their leader and friends on trial, the Family members at Spahn Ranch had to worry about their own safety. No sooner had the trial begun than they were subjected to a series of night attacks. People would drive onto the ranch after dark, follow a narrow road to hills just above the movie set buildings where Charlie’s followers slept, and shoot down at them. No one was hit, but if the attacks continued it was only a matter of time before Family members were wounded or killed. The Family at Spahn didn’t have guns anymore—their caches of weapons had been confiscated during the Barker Ranch raid. They didn’t believe that the county or city police would protect them, so instead of reporting the assaults, they relied on self-defense. They fashioned slingshots, bought sacks of metal ball bearings, and hid behind rocks on the side of the hill road. The next night that a car filled with attackers came, the Family used the slingshots to fire ball bearings through windshields and windows, shattering glass and spraying shards on the cars’ occupants. The attacks stopped, but Family members continued standing guard at night.
The trial bailiffs reached an understanding with Charlie. In the courtroom it was Judge Older’s responsibility to keep him in line, but the bailiffs didn’t want any trouble out of him when he was in their charge. They had to be with Charlie a lot, coming for him on the ninth floor to bring him down to the courtroom in the morning, sitting with him on the frequent occasions when the judge sent him to the mouse house, and escorting him back to his ninth-floor cell at the end of the day. On his way down the halls to and from the courtroom they had to walk him by photographers lining the walls and snapping pictures. Oden “O.P.” Skupen, a Los Angeles County deputy and veteran court bailiff, had no intention of letting Charlie act up in front of the photographers. He told him, “If you try any crap and embarrass me, I’ll take you into the lockers and I’ll beat the shit out of you.” Charlie knew Skupen meant it. No matter how crazy he acted in the courtroom, Charlie always behaved in the hallway.
The bailiffs also strip-searched Charlie before and after each day’s trial proceedings. It was distasteful for everyone since a body cavity probe was required. Charlie swore that he wouldn’t conceal anything up his rectum and didn’t, but the rules required probing anyway. He smelled awful; prisoners on the ninth floor were allowed just one shower a week. Unless Charlie was going into his courtroom antics, the bailiffs usually found him okay to deal with. He’d spent lots of time in prison and knew how to act when he wasn’t in public. The bailiffs smoked, and Charlie bummed cigarettes from them every chance he got. As long as he behaved, they didn’t mind giving him a few. Privately, they thought it was weird how Charlie was all about controlling the three girls in the courtroom, but outside the court he seemed comfortable being ordered around by the bailiffs. It was like the guy wanted to boss and be bossed, too.
On July 27, Bugliosi called Linda Kasabian to the stand. He had done his best to make certain she seemed presentable to the jury, even vetoing her plan to wear a long dress because “long is for evening.” The witnesses so far—the fathers of Sharon Tate and Steve Parent, Cielo housekeeper Winifred Chapman, William Garretson—were stage setters. If the jury believed Linda, the prosecution would win. Stovitz and Bugliosi arranged for her to be brought to the courtroom from the Sybil Brand jail by an indirect route, but somehow the Family found out and Sandy Good confronted Linda just outside the courtroom. Sandy screamed, “You’ll kill us all, you’ll kill us all,” before Linda was taken inside.
The moment the court clerk began swearing Linda in, Kanarek objected on the grounds that she was insane as a result of heavy drug use. He kept objecting as Bugliosi began his questioning, some fifty objections in all. Each was overruled by Older, but sometimes it took ten minutes or more to talk a single one through, and this prevented the prosecutor from building any momentum. As best he could, Bugliosi guided Linda through a description of why she joined the Family and how all of them fell under Charlie’s control. By her third day of testimony, Charlie was making throat-cutting gestures toward the witness stand, and the total of Kanarek objections topped two hundred. Older finally found Kanarek in contempt of court and sentenced him to a night in jail. The next day, Kanarek made more objections than ever, so many that even Charlie lost patience with him, and asked Older if he was allowed to object to his attorney’s objections. Older said no.
Linda remained composed throughout. She faltered only when describing the murders at Cielo, crying at times. When Bugliosi asked her what Voytek Frykowski screamed as Tex Watson stabbed him, Linda said simply, “There were no words, it was beyond words, it was just screams.”
On July 30, Bugliosi concluded his questioning and turned the witness over to defense for cross-examination. Fitzgerald went first. He attacked Linda’s contention that she followed Charlie’s orders because she was afraid of him. But when Fitzgerald demanded, “What were you afraid of?” Linda replied, “I was just afraid. He was a heavy dude.” The defense attorney tried to shame her by citing all the orgies she admitted to participating in at Spahn Ranch. Linda wasn’t fazed. She testified that she eventually had sex with all the men there, and admitted that she enjoyed it. Fitzgerald was nonplussed and Stovitz and Bugliosi were ecstatic. Surely that kind of honesty would help convince the jury that everything else she claimed was also true. Despite all the histrionics and stalling by the defendants and their attorneys, the prosecutors began to feel that they had the case in hand.
Then they were blindsided in a way that they could never have anticipated.
Richard Nixon built his political career on the votes of white working-class Americans. He first came to prominence as a fierce anticommunist opposing the Red Menace. He won the tight race for the White House in 1968 by proclaiming himself “the law and order candidate,” a less-than-subtle signal for rioting blacks and student radicals. During the campaign Nixon claimed he had a secret plan to end the fighting in Vietnam, but after gaining the presidency he talked instead of “peace with honor,” an ambiguous term that seemed to question the patriotism of anyone demanding specifics. He and Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced the young antiwar protesters as communist supporters or dupes. Charlie Manson’s trial was a godsend for Nixon, evidence he could cite as proof that young people with long hair were not only immoral (all those orgies) and drug-addled (LSD trips all the time) but dangerous (they killed people, even pregnant women). As a lawyer himself, Nixon was aware that commenting on the trial in progress could be grounds for a mistrial—how could jurors not be swayed by the president’s opinion? But he couldn’t resist.
On August 3, Nixon gave a speech in Denver. He always enjoyed press bashing, and the media had been full of stories about Linda Kasabian’s testimony. Making an observation rather than responding to a question, Nixon declared, “I noted . . . the coverage of the Charles Manson case. Front page every day in the papers. It usually got a couple of minutes in the evening news. Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. Here is a man yet who, as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be a rather glamorous figure, a glamorous figure to the young people whom he had brought into his operations . . . the judge seemed to be the villain.” All this proved, Nixon claimed, that the American press set out “to glorify and make heroes out of those engaged in criminal activities.”
Within moments, Nixon’s remarks flashed across national wire services. The Manson jury’s sequestration prohibited access to newspapers or viewing TV newscasts, so prosecutors felt reasonably certain that the jurors wouldn’t immediately learn what the presi
dent said. Judge Older summoned Stovitz, Bugliosi, and the four defense attorneys to his chambers to discuss the situation. Kanarek immediately demanded a mistrial—surely someone on the jury would hear about it and tell the others. When Older turned him down, Kanarek requested that each juror be questioned to determine if he or she knew what Nixon said. Older refused that request, too. He instructed the bailiffs to be even more vigilant in preventing jurors from reading or watching the news, and ordered the trial resumed.
Kanarek began questioning Linda Kasabian, continuing the next morning. When Linda admitted to taking fifty LSD trips, Kanarek asked her to describe in detail the 23rd. Bugliosi objected that the question was ridiculous, and Older sustained him. The prosecutors hoped that they’d dodged the Nixon bullet, but during the afternoon session, someone—Older blamed defense counsel Daye Shinn—slipped Charlie a copy of the morning’s Los Angeles Times, and he triumphantly brandished the huge headline “MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES,” in front of the jury. Soon afterward Susan, Pat, and Linda stood and asked Older in perfect unison, “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?”
Nixon’s press secretary announced that the media had twisted the president’s remarks. But Charlie got the last word. When he was brought into court on August 5 he waved a handprinted sign that read, “NIXON GUILTY.” The bailiffs yanked it away from him, but they were laughing as they did. They had to hand it to Charlie. Whatever else might be true about this guy, he had a sense of humor.
Irving Kanarek questioned Linda for an entire week. At one point he waved pictures of the slaughtered Cielo victims in front of her. It was obvious to everyone but Kanarek that the jury was as horrified to see them as Linda—he was reinforcing the prosecution’s point that the murders were especially horrible. Charlie yelled at him to stop. When Kanarek finally wound down, Daye Shinn took a turn for the defense and asked Linda if she believed in Santa Claus. At the L-shaped defense table in front of the judge and witness stand, Susan, Leslie, and Pat yawned and made it clear that they were bored. Fitzgerald asked Older if it would be all right to give them some colored pencils and blank paper. The three young women doodled happily while their former friend gave testimony that could cost them their lives.
