by Jeff Guinn
The bailiffs did their best to make sequestration as easy as possible for the jury. They took them out for group dinners at interesting restaurants, and on weekends arranged bus trips to places like Knott’s Berry Farm. By the end of the trial’s fourth month, bailiff O. P. Skupen believed that the Manson jury was one of the best he’d ever monitored. Despite all Charlie’s antics and all the gruesome testimony they’d heard, none of them seemed shaken. They exhibited exceptional common sense and that, Skupen thought, was bad news for Charlie and the girls. No matter how much was made of them in the newspapers and on TV, Charlie’s shenanigans just weren’t working. Charlie might act cooler than hell on the way to and from the courtroom, he might brag in the isolation room that everything was going the way he wanted, but at some level the guy had to know that these jurors weren’t buying his act.
Tex Watson, awaiting his own murder trial, stopped eating and acted crazy enough to be sent to Atascadero State Hospital for psychiatric testing. When Charlie heard the news, he asked to talk to Bugliosi. He told the prosecutor that if he could have just half an hour with Tex, he’d get him straightened out. Bugliosi laughed and said, “I can’t afford to take that chance. If you cured him, then everyone would believe you were Jesus Christ.”
The final witnesses for the prosecution were Dianne Lake and two psychiatrists who had examined her. Three hundred and twenty People’s Exhibits, including photos of the Tate and LaBianca murder scenes, were formally entered into evidence so that the jury could study them during deliberations. Then at 4:27 P.M. on Monday, November 16, the prosecution rested its case. The trial had lasted twenty-two weeks. At least another two or three months loomed ahead. Judge Older thought everyone involved deserved a short break before the defense took its turn. He recessed court until Thursday morning. In the interim, Charlie met with Susan, Pat, and Leslie, and told them what he wanted them to do.
On November 19, the defense attorneys made rote motions for the judge to dismiss all counts against their clients. It never hurt to try—the request was traditional. After the judge rejected the motions, Paul Fitzgerald told Older, “The defense rests.” As soon as he did, Pat, Susan, and Leslie jumped to their feet and demanded the opportunity to testify. Fitzgerald, Daye Shinn, and Ronald Hughes all asked to approach the bench, where they whispered to Older that they didn’t want their clients testifying to the jury—all three would undoubtedly swear that they were guilty of the Tate-LaBianca murders, but Charlie was completely innocent. Bugliosi realized what was happening and joined the three defense attorneys in their protest. The prosecutor was in danger again of being outmaneuvered by Charlie, who’d saved this surprise for last.
Older, aware that any decision he made might form the grounds for an appeal by Kanarek, finally ruled that the three women could testify after he’d removed the jury. Afterward, whatever admissible statements they made could be added to the trial record. Their own attorneys, and Bugliosi if he wished, didn’t even have to question them. Susan, Pat, and Leslie could say whatever they wanted. That was fine with the lawyers, but the women insisted it was unacceptable. They wanted the jury to hear directly what they had to say. When Older said no, they refused to take the stand.
Charlie said he’d be glad to get up there and testify, jury or no jury.
It was his grand opportunity. The jury wasn’t present, but Charlie had an audience of the courtroom spectators and, most importantly, the media. Charlie never attended law school, but he knew all about the end stages of a murder trial in California. First would come the jury’s verdict of guilt or innocence, and at this point there seemed to be no question which way they’d vote. After that would come the penalty phase, with the jurors deciding whether to go along with Bugliosi’s request for the gas chamber or else mandate life imprisonment. But the real drama was the initial verdict, innocent or guilty, and the only thing that might supersede it would be a bravura performance on the witness stand by Charlie. He knew just how to do it. Charlie told Judge Older that he didn’t want to be questioned by his attorney, Irving Kanarek. The defense attorney would stay seated and silent at the counsel table because his client didn’t want to be interrupted. Charlie Manson was about to deliver a statement.
He spoke for over an hour, beginning with a self-pitying description of his horrific childhood: “I never went to school, so I never growed up to read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid.” Charlie declared that far from leading his followers into acts of evil, he formed the Family from social outcasts “that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked out.” According to Charlie, “You made your children what they are . . . these children that come at you with their knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them.”
In fact, Charlie said, “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. . . . I am only what lives inside of each and every one of you.” Yes, they could sentence him to death, but “you want to kill me? Ha. I’m already dead, have been all my life.” Charlie admitted that he felt resentful: “Sometimes I think about giving it back to you. . . . If I could, I would jerk this microphone off and beat your brains out with it, because that is what you deserve. . . . If I could get angry at you, I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it.”
Charlie wasn’t giving up his ultimate plan of the women incriminating themselves and exonerating him. He wanted to make a memorable statement in Older’s court, but he didn’t want to die choking on gas chamber fumes. So he next insisted that he wasn’t responsible for whatever the women might have done at Cielo and Waverly Drive: “These children were finding themselves. What they did, if they did whatever they did, is up to them. They will have to explain that to you.”
As for Charlie himself, he was being unfairly picked on. “It’s all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hell hole that you can think of, and you drag him and you put him in a courtroom. You expect to break me? Impossible. You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago.”
Judge Older asked if Charlie was finished. He wasn’t.
“I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed,” Charlie said. “I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.”
Older instructed Charlie to stick to the issues.
Charlie admitted he’d had the .22 Buntline at Spahn Ranch, but “it belonged to everybody.” People like Linda Kasabian, Dianne Lake, and Little Paul Watkins came to him, not vice versa. He didn’t remember telling anyone, “Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.” As for Helter Skelter, “Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down fast . . . it is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says, ‘Rise,’ it says, ‘kill.’ Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”
He roared into the finish, his voice louder, his tiny body rising up from the chair on the witness stand: “What about your children? You say there are just a few? There are many, many more, coming in the same direction. They are running in the streets, and they are coming right at you.”
Bugliosi asked Charlie a few questions. Older asked Charlie if he now wanted to testify before the jury. He felt no need to put on a second show, and told Older, “I have already relieved all the pressure I had.” Satisfied with his performance, believing it to be memorable, Charlie said to the three women, “You don’t have to testify now.” Bugliosi caught the qualifier—Charlie wasn’t excusing the girls from their confessions, just delaying them until the penalty phase of the trial, if, as seemed likely, there was one. This was Charlie’s moment, and he had no intention of sharing it.
Judge Older recessed the trial for ten days so the prosecution and defense could prepare
their final arguments.
On Monday, November 30, the trial reconvened. Ronald Hughes, Leslie Van Houten’s lawyer, wasn’t there. Hughes’s lack of courtroom experience had been evident throughout the trial, and, to make things worse, he was clumsy and constantly tripped over Leslie’s feet when standing to make objections. After Hughes remained missing for several days Judge Older appointed well-respected attorney Maxwell Keith to replace him. Keith needed time to prepare, so Older recessed. Though the judge and attorneys met daily, the trial did not recommence until December 21. Older told the jurors they had to resign themselves to being sequestered over the Christmas holidays.
In the interim, a massive search for Hughes ensued. When the trial originally recessed for ten days on November 19, Hughes told the other defense attorneys that he was going camping at Sespe Hot Springs north of Los Angeles. Even search teams augmented by helicopters failed to locate him. The efforts ended in mid-December. Everyone accepted by then that Hughes was dead. Even after the lawyer’s decomposing body was discovered six weeks later where he apparently drowned in a flooded stream, Bugliosi believed that he might have been murdered by the Family on Charlie’s orders. Shortly after Hughes disappeared, Bruce Davis and Nancy Pitman had turned themselves in to police, Davis on Hinman and Shea murder charges and Pitman on a forgery charge. It seemed a little too pat for Bugliosi—perhaps they were trying to deflect any new investigation that would link them to Hughes’s death. Pitman was held for only a few days before being released. On December 17, Davis, along with Charlie and Clem, was arraigned for the murder of Shorty Shea.
On December 18, Squeaky, Ruth Ann, Gypsy, Clem, and Dennis Rice were indicted for conspiracy to prevent Barbara Hoyt’s testimony in the Tate-LaBianca trial. The judge released Squeaky, Gypsy, and Rice on bail (Clem remained in custody in Inyo County on an illegal weapon possession charge), and nine-months-pregnant Ruth Ann on her own recognizance.
On December 21, Older called the court to order. No sooner had he done so than Leslie stood and berated him for appointing Keith to replace Hughes. She told the judge that she had nothing to do with her original attorney’s disappearance, and wondered if Older might be behind it. Charlie yelled at Older, too, and the judge ordered all four defendants removed. Bugliosi then began his closing arguments. The defense attorneys would follow, and then the prosecutor would make a final statement before the jury retired to consider its verdict.
Bugliosi began with a series of charts, summarizing the evidence presented and saving any emotional appeal for his final statement. It took him a while—since July 24, the prosecution had introduced hundreds of items. Bugliosi was still summing up evidence when Older permitted the defendants to return to court. The three women immediately began talking loudly and Older ordered them removed again. On her way out, Susan grabbed some notes out of Bugliosi’s hand and tore them in half. Bugliosi snatched them back and snarled, “You little bitch.” The judge prohibited all four defendants from returning to the courtroom until the jury announced its verdict. If Susan thought losing some of his notes would faze Bugliosi, she was mistaken. He’d memorized most of his remarks just in case. He told the jury that the Family was “a closely knit bunch of robots,” and Charlie was “the dictatorial master of a tribe of bootlicking slaves.”
On December 28 Bugliosi declared, “The people of the state of California are entitled to a guilty verdict,” and stepped aside for final arguments by each of the four defense attorneys. Paul Fitzgerald, speaking on behalf of Pat Krenwinkel, tried to turn Bugliosi’s words to his client’s advantage, telling the jury that “mindless robots cannot be guilty of first degree murder” because that charge involved premeditation. Yes, one of Pat’s fingerprints was apparently inside the Cielo house, but Fitzgerald suggested that perhaps she’d been there “as an invited guest or a friend.”
Daye Shinn, Susan Atkins’s attorney, attacked the character of the witnesses for the prosecution. Would members of the jury, he wondered, invite Virginia Graham to their homes for Christmas?
It took Shinn less than ninety minutes to complete his closing statement. Irving Kanarek took a week. He expounded on every facet of the trial, once again boring even Charlie, listening in the mouse house adjacent to the courtroom. The mouse house wasn’t entirely soundproofed. At one point the jury could hear Charlie shouting, “You’re just making things worse!” On the fifth day of Kanarek’s argument, the jury sent a note to Older requesting NoDoz. The gist of Kanarek’s statement was that Tex Watson was really the mastermind behind the murders. Charlie was just an innocent bystander.
Maxwell Keith, representing Leslie Van Houten, spoke last. He was new to the trial, but his arguments were the best of any of the defense attorneys. He began with a sarcastic reference to Linda Van Houten, underscoring that Leslie was at a real disadvantage due to her attorney’s lack of familiarity with the case. Like Fitzgerald, he reminded jurors of Bugliosi’s own words—if Leslie was a “mindless robot,” how could she in any sense have committed premeditated murder at Waverly Drive? But he also made a key point about Leslie’s limited role in the slaying of Rosemary LaBianca: “Nobody in the world can be guilty of murder . . . [by stabbing] somebody after they are already dead. I’m sure that desecrating somebody that is dead is a crime in this state, but she is not charged with that.”
Bugliosi’s final summation took two days. He responded to the closing arguments by the four defense attorneys, and conceded he had referred to Susan, Pat, and Leslie as “robots.” But that didn’t mean that they should be acquitted for the murders: “They were not suffering, ladies and gentlemen, from any diminished mental capacity. They were suffering from a diminished heart, a diminished soul.” He concluded with what the media afterward described as the roll call of the dead. “Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca, are not here with us now in this courtroom, but from their graves they cry out for justice. Justice can only be served by coming back to this courtroom with a verdict of guilty.”
• • •
The jurors retired to deliberate on Friday afternoon, January 15, 1971. Ten days later, they sent word to Judge Older that they had reached verdicts, and Older reconvened court. After agreeing with Bugliosi and the four defense attorneys that the penalty phase, if any, would begin in three days, Older instructed the bailiffs to bring Charlie, Susan, Pat, and Leslie into court. As the defendants were led in, Charlie winked at the girls and they giggled and winked back. Then all four listened impassively as they were found guilty on all counts. As the jury filed out, Charlie told them, “You are all guilty.” On his way back to his ninth floor cell, Charlie said to the bailiff escorting him, “What did you expect?” He didn’t appear concerned.
Kathleen Maddox was in Los Angeles when the jury found her son guilty of murder. For more than a year, she’d been horrified by the stories describing what he’d become and what he’d apparently led foolish followers to do. During that time, Kathleen didn’t try to contact Charlie. She was convinced that he was mentally ill—what other explanation could there be for the things that he’d done? Her hope was that instead of going to the gas chamber, Charlie would get some kind of psychiatric help. Kathleen felt certain that was what he needed. She didn’t excuse what he’d done—she cried when she thought about the people who had died.
It also bothered her that so many stories about Charlie claimed that he was the son of an unfit mother, that he’d had a deprived childhood and no one ever loved him. So when she went down to L.A. during the last days of the trial and a Los Angeles Times reporter guessed who she was, Kathleen agreed to talk. On January 26, “Mother Tells Life of Manson as Boy” vied with “Manson Verdict: All Guilty” for front page space. Kathleen did her best to make the reporter understand. She told about how strict her mother, Nancy, was, how she herself had made some mistakes as a girl, all about Colonel Scott being Charlie’s father and her struggle to raise her son right. If anything, Kathleen said, Charlie was a spoile
d little boy who was given anything he wanted instead of having to work for it. But she felt that the resulting story had a lot of mistakes in it, quoting her as saying Charlie was born out of wedlock when he wasn’t—she was married to William Manson by then—and how Charlie loved his baby sister, Nancy, when in fact he’d had a temper tantrum just learning about the adopted child. Kathleen decided that reporters weren’t to be trusted and rushed back home. Over the next months she received letters from famous TV newsmen asking her to come on their shows and tell her story, but she never responded.
Just before the penalty phase of the trial began, Charlie sent word through Sandy and Squeaky to Susan, Pat, and Leslie that they were now to take the stand and swear they’d committed the murders without any orders or suggestions from him. Months earlier, he’d asked all his followers if they would die for him. Now he expected three of them to do it.
Vincent Bugliosi called only two witnesses in penalty phase, a policeman from Oregon who testified that a gun-toting Susan Atkins once said she wanted an opportunity to shoot him, and Lotsapoppa, massive living proof that Charlie was capable of attempting murder as well as ordering it. The Oregon cop’s testimony went smoothly, but Lotsapoppa had just taken the stand when Charlie stood and demanded to question the drug dealer himself. Judge Older told Charlie that he could suggest questions, but Kanarek would have to ask them. Charlie scribbled down several and handed them to Kanarek, who ignored the list and began asking Lotsapoppa questions of his own. Charlie yelled at Kanarek to ask the ones he’d been given, and the lawyer said no. Charlie sprang to Kanarek’s side and punched him hard on the arm; Kanarek yelped in pain. The bailiffs moved forward to grab Charlie, but halted when they saw Judge Older give a subtle shake of his head. The judge apparently enjoyed seeing Irving Kanarek acquire a few bruises. Charlie belted his attorney on the arm several more times before Older finally nodded, and the bailiffs dragged Charlie off to the mouse house.
