Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover

by Jeff Guinn

  Bugliosi rested the prosecution’s case on February 1. The defense began by calling Pat’s parents and Leslie’s mother. All three said they loved their daughters and were bewildered by what they had apparently done. A parade of Family members took the stand—Squeaky, Sandy, Gypsy, Ruth Ann, and Clem. Their testimony rambled—Charlie breathed on a dead bird and brought it back to life, he petted rattlesnakes, people didn’t understand how death wasn’t anything to take seriously. But besides the prattling, there were serious charges. According to Gypsy, Gary Hinman was killed by Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, and Leslie Van Houten, and Linda masterminded the Cielo and Waverly Drive murders because she was in love with Bobby Beausoleil and wanted to commit copycat crimes so he would be set free. Charlie had nothing at all to do with it. During the days that Family members testified, word spread that Tex Watson had been ruled competent to stand trial. His murder case would come to court as soon as the penalty phase trial of Charlie, Susan, Pat, and Leslie concluded.

  Susan Atkins took the stand on February 9. She immediately testified that she participated in the Cielo and Waverly murders. She also killed Gary Hinman, she insisted. Then Susan offered grisly details about slaughtering Sharon Tate. Charlie, she insisted, had nothing to do with the August 9 murders because he was back at Spahn Ranch, sleeping.

  Judge Older took pity on the jury and ended their sequestration. They went home on February 16 for the first time in more than eight months, and returned to court the next day to hear testimony by Pat Krenwinkel. Pat supported Susan’s account that Linda Kasabian plotted the copycat murders, and told jurors about stabbing Abigail Folger and mutilating Leno LaBianca. Leslie followed Pat to the stand, but was vague about whether it had been she or Mary Brunner who was involved in killing Gary Hinman. She claimed that she couldn’t remember Charlie ordering any murders. Leslie agreed that somewhere, sometime she might have mentioned something about Charlie going into the LaBianca house, but when the prosecutor pressed her, she shouted, “Mr. Bugliosi, you are an evil man!” With Linda Kasabian now set up as the real criminal mastermind, the defense recalled her to the stand. But Linda calmly held her ground during aggressive questioning. She strongly denied everything Gypsy, Susan, Pat, and Leslie had claimed.

  Three Family members were the final defense witnesses. Cathy Gillies said Charlie had nothing to do with any murders, there had never been any discussion of a race war, and the Tate-LaBianca murders were copycat killings to free Bobby Beausoleil. She was only sorry that on the night the LaBiancas died, she couldn’t go along and participate because there wasn’t enough room in the car. Mary Brunner testified that the police told her she’d be charged with Gary Hinman’s murder if she didn’t implicate Charlie. Nancy Pitman swore that Charlie never left the ranch on the night of the LaBianca murders. She was dismissed from the stand on March 16 and the defense rested. Charlie never testified on his own behalf—he’d said what he wanted to in his hour-long harangue back in January. Nor did he want to distract jurors’ attention from the confessions by Susan, Pat, and Leslie.

  In the penalty phase of the trial, during final arguments the prosecution made a statement, the defense followed, the prosecution had a second turn and the defense went last. It took Vincent Bugliosi just ten minutes to present the first of his two closing arguments. If the Tate-LaBianca slayings didn’t merit the death penalty for all four perpetrators, he told the jury, then no murders ever would: “These defendants are human monsters, human mutations.”

  Irving Kanarek conceded that “Mr. Manson is not all good,” but “Mr. Manson is innocent of these matters that are before us.” For three days, Kanarek rambled: Charlie was only on trial so somebody (he didn’t specify Bugliosi, but his intent was clear) in the District Attorney’s Office “can have a gold star.” Susan, Pat, and Leslie all said Charlie wasn’t involved in the murders, and they also claimed they weren’t sorry for slaughtering seven people. If they were lying about Charlie not ordering them to kill, why wouldn’t they lie some more and say that they were sorry for their victims, in case the jury might take pity on them and not sentence them to death? And about those five people who died at Cielo, Kanarek assured the jury, if at least some of them hadn’t been “engaged in a narcotic episode of some type, these events would not have taken place.” When Kanarek finally concluded, Daye Shinn argued that Susan Atkins was still young, just twenty-two. No matter what she had done, she might still be rehabilitated if she wasn’t sentenced to death. Maxwell Keith suggested that jurors consider “the roll call of the living dead,” the Family members whose lives “have been so damaged.” As for his client, “I am not asking you to forgive her. . . . She deserves to live. What she did was not done by the real Leslie.” Paul Fitzgerald noted that his twenty-three-year-old client, Pat, had so far lived “approximately 200,000 hours.” The two nights of murder totaled perhaps three hours. “Is she to be judged solely on what occurred during three of 200,000 hours?”

  Charlie felt less confident after the four defense attorneys’ initial summations. Before court convened on the morning of March 23, he called over to Bugliosi, “If I get the death penalty, there is going to be a lot of bloodletting, because I am not going to take it.” Informed of the threat, Judge Older immediately sequestered the jury again since it was the kind of public outburst that was bound to make the papers.

  Bugliosi opened his last statement to the jury by suggesting that Susan, Pat, and Linda had lied when they attempted to exonerate Charlie, and “the fact that they were willing . . . just proves all the more Manson’s domination over them.” The copycat motive was nonsense; the seven murders were committed to precipitate Helter Skelter. Charlie deserved to die, but so did the three women. Their attorneys stressed their youth, but Leslie was twenty-one, Susan twenty-two, and Pat twenty-three, “adults by any standard, and completely responsible for their acts.” No one forced them to go with Tex and murder innocent people: “All they had to do was not do it.” The jury was about to hear the defense attorneys make final pleas for mercy for their clients—was mercy extended to the seven victims? Bugliosi closed by rewording his previous declaration: “If the death penalty is to mean anything in the state of California other than two empty words, this is the proper case.”

  When the defense attorneys took their final turns, Kanarek read chapters of the New Testament to the jurors, and noted, “We are not suggesting that Mr. Manson is the deity or Christ-like or anything like that, but how can we know?” Shinn said that Susan Atkins had initially trusted prosecutors and attempted to cooperate, but they betrayed her. Keith told the jury that, in many respects, he agreed with Bugliosi. Charlie dominated the three women defendants and ordered the Cielo and Waverly Drive murders. The concept of copycat killings was nonsense. The penalty phase testimony of his client, Leslie, and of Susan and Pat just offered more proof that Charlie still controlled them. But Keith didn’t think any of the four deserved the gas chamber. Charlie was crazy, and he’d “infected [the girls] with his madness.” Fitzgerald described to the jurors how horribly the condemned died in the gas chamber.

  Judge Older sent the jury off to deliberate on Friday, March 26. They announced on Monday afternoon that they had reached agreement. It was so fast that there was little doubt what they’d decided.

  Charlie knew that his plan hadn’t worked. He let bailiff Skupen bring him to the counsel table, and stood there with Susan, Pat, and Leslie as the court clerk prepared to announce their fates. Then Charlie lost his nerve. He was always ready, even eager, to insist that human life was insignificant, but this time the life involved was his own. Just as the clerk began to read the verdicts, Charlie leaped up and shrieked, “You people have no authority over me! Half of you in here ain’t as good as I am!” Older ordered the bailiffs to take Charlie back to the mouse house. He had to be dragged there, but once the door slammed shut behind him he stood motionless. Skupen was locked inside with Charlie; on the speaker, they heard the judge demanding that the courtroom come to order. Charlie asked fo
r a cigarette. Skupen handed him one, saying, “Damn it, Charlie, I wanted to see that.” Charlie mumbled, “Well, I didn’t.” Then the clerk announced that the jury sentenced all four defendants to death. Susan, Pat, and Leslie shouted at the jurors, warning them to lock their doors and watch out for their own kids. Outside, asked by a TV reporter for her reaction, Sandy hissed, “Death? That’s what you’re all going to get.” But inside the mouse house Charlie had nothing to say. He smoked and stared into space until the courtroom was cleared. Then Skupen took Charlie by the arm and led him back to his ninth floor cell, where he awaited eventual transfer to San Quentin’s Death Row.

  A few months later in the course of a lengthy interview, Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner asked former Beatle John Lennon what he thought of Charlie Manson and the whole tragic Helter Skelter business. Lennon replied that Manson was “barmy” (crazy) for reading any kind of message into the song, adding that he personally had never even paid attention to its lyrics because they didn’t matter. So far as the Beatles were concerned, Lennon said, Helter Skelter was only noise.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Wrong Man in the Right Place at the Right Time

  On April 19, 1971, Judge Charles Older formally sentenced Charlie, Susan, Pat, and Leslie to die in the gas chamber. Had he considered it appropriate, the judge could have reduced any or all of their sentences to life in prison, but Older stated that he could find no mitigating circumstances: “I must agree with the prosecutor that if this is not the proper case for the death penalty, what would be?” Charlie’s voice shook as he meekly told Older, “I accept this court as my father. . . . I accept my father’s judgment,” but Charlie realized like everyone else that his execution wasn’t imminent. Appeals on behalf of him and the women would take at least two years, possibly as many as five, and there were more trials to come. Charlie, Susan, and Bruce Davis faced charges for their roles in the Hinman slaying, and Charlie, Bruce, and Clem for their participation in Shea’s.

  They weren’t the only Family members in the dock. Three days before Older passed sentence on Charlie and the three women, in another court Squeaky, Gypsy, Clem, Dennis Rice, and Ruth Ann pleaded no contest to deliberately overdosing Barbara Hoyt with LSD. They were each given ninety days in the county jail. Ruth Ann never appeared for sentencing. The other four served their time and were released.

  Charlie was sent temporarily to private confinement in San Quentin until he was needed in L.A. for the Hinman and Shea trials. Susan pleaded guilty to Hinman’s murder and was transferred to the California Institution for Women forty miles east of L.A. She joined Leslie and Pat, who had arrived ahead of her, and were placed in special cells isolated from the rest of the prison community. Susan believed that Leslie and Pat resented her for the boasts to Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard that led the LAPD to Charlie and the Family; she wrote later that after she arrived at the prison they were unfriendly toward her. Leslie and Pat recall that they held no grudges; they were just too emotionally exhausted from the drawn-out trial to greet Susan with any enthusiasm. And anyway, they were all going to the gas chamber, so what good was resentment? Together, the three women watched television, bummed cigarettes from guards, and waited to be executed.

  In June, Charlie threw a tantrum when it was ruled he would be tried for the Hinman and Shea murders separately from the other defendants. He tore a button from his shirt, hurled it at presiding Judge Raymond Choate, and screamed, “Have you ever seen anyone who doesn’t belong to a woman?” When court proceedings commenced in July, Squeaky, Sandy, and some of the other women remaining in the Family took up their old positions on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. Charlie engaged in courtroom histrionics, first attempting to plead guilty and bragging that he chopped off an unspecified victim’s head, then the next day withdrawing the guilty plea. It seemed as though Charlie’s Hinman-Shea trial would be a mirror image of Tate-LaBianca, but this time his followers were determined not to let their leader’s fate be decided by a jury. The Weathermen had freed Timothy Leary. The Family would do the same for Charlie.

  While Charlie was held in San Quentin pending his L.A. trial for the Hinman-Shea murders, he made a deal with members of the Aryan Brotherhood to protect him from other prisoners in return for Family women providing sex for AB members on the outside. A clue that the partnership involved more than protection and sex came when Charlie insisted that San Quentin inmate and AB leader Kenneth Como be subpoenaed to testify on his behalf in Hinman-Shea. Como was transferred to L.A. in July so he could testify; he escaped from jail there and was hidden by the Family, who now had a wily career criminal to help plot their next move.

  Como and the Family believed that if they accumulated enough guns, they could hijack a jet at the Los Angeles airport and kill a passenger an hour until Charlie and every other imprisoned Family member was released. They accepted that at least a few people would have to be shot before their demands were met. Getting the weapons and acquiring getaway money was necessary. They went after the money first. On August 13, they stole $2,600 from a beer distributorship in the L.A. suburbs. Eight days later, Como, Gypsy, Mary Brunner, Dennis Rice, and two others held up a Western Surplus Store in Hawthorne, holding a clerk and two customers at gunpoint and loading about 140 rifles, shotguns, and handguns into a getaway van. But a silent alarm was triggered, and the LAPD surrounded the store before the thieves could escape. All six were caught. With Sandy’s help, Como briefly escaped again, but he was recaptured within hours. Eventually the media-dubbed “Hawthorne Four”—Gypsy, Mary, Como, and Rice—received stiff prison sentences ranging from ten years to life. Sometime during the planning of the foiled rescue attempt, Como and Gypsy fell in love. The judge denied Como’s request that they be married before they were transported to their respective prisons. Mary and Gypsy were sent to the California Institution for Women and housed with Susan, Pat, and Leslie. The five women got along reasonably well—Susan felt that Gypsy and Mary were friendlier to her than Pat and Leslie had been.

  Susan never saw her son Ze Zo Ze again. He was adopted and his name was changed.

  Sandy Good was sentenced to six months for her role in Como’s second escape. That left Squeaky to lead what was left of the Family, with the assistance of Sandy after she served her prison time. Previously, the two women had never been particularly close, but now circumstances dictated otherwise. With so many members locked away and access to Charlie limited, it was hard to keep everything organized and everyone loyal. Charlie had no intention of allowing the Family to disintegrate and made this clear to Squeaky and Sandy whenever they were able to communicate with him. To that end, Squeaky began writing a book that she believed would not only remind Family members of their duty to Charlie, but would entice other readers to want to join.

  In August, Tex Watson went on trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders. Vincent Bugliosi was lead prosecutor. Tex entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity; he freely admitted participating in the murders, though he emphasized that he had been ordered to do so by Charlie. After two and a half months that included testimony by Linda Kasabian, Little Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, and a score of psychiatrists, Tex was found guilty and sentenced to death. Steve Grogan—Clem—received the same jury verdict and sentence for the murder of Shorty Shea, but in his case the judge ruled that “Grogan was too stupid” to commit murder on his own and reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. Bruce Davis was sentenced to life for Hinman-Shea, and so, superfluously, was Charlie, who was still scheduled to die in the gas chamber for Tate-LaBianca unless his sentence was overturned on appeal.

  • • •

  News of Charlie and the Family still made headlines, but not as many. He resented his loss of celebrity. In particular Charlie complained that all of his former music business friends had deserted him. In December 1971 he became the 97th prisoner placed in San Quentin’s Death Row. The sheer number of condemned ahead of him in line for the gas chamber meant that Charlie’s stay would be leng
thy.

  His Death Row sojourn got off to a bad start when the other prisoners were infuriated by Charlie’s cavalier attitude toward his mail. Condemned men at San Quentin yearned for mail and seldom got any. After Charlie’s arrival, on any given day the rest of the Death Row population collectively received no more than twenty-five to thirty letters while Charlie routinely scored hundreds. That was grounds for widespread jealousy. What made the inequity even more galling was that Charlie dumped everything in the trash without bothering to look at it. This fostered the kind of deep-seated resentment that could potentially get Charlie shanked. Roger Dale Smith, in the cell next to Charlie’s, called him out and demanded to know why he didn’t read his mail. Charlie admitted that he couldn’t read very well, so he avoided frustration by not trying to read the letters at all. Smith, nicknamed “Pin Cushion” for surviving more than 135 prison stabbings and desperate for something to help while away the Death Row hours, offered to read some of Charlie’s mail to him. The range of messages, mostly the same as Charlie had received while in jail in L.A., stunned Smith—there were death threats, assurances of prayers on his behalf, messages of congratulation for standing up to the Man, requests for autographs, and pleas from young women to be allowed to join the Family. Smith, whose toughness was legendary among his fellow convicts, let the other Death Row denizens know that Charlie now enjoyed his protection. Charlie was left to spend the days quietly strumming his guitar; when an occasional letter interested him, he dictated a response to Smith.

  On February 18, 1972, the California Supreme Court voted 6–1 to abolish the death penalty. At the California Institution for Women, Susan Atkins, Pat Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten greeted the news with cheers. Charlie, temporarily back in L.A. to testify in the Hinman-Shea murder trial of Bruce Davis, grinned. Under California law, their sentences, as well as Tex Watson’s, were automatically reduced to life in prison. They would be eligible for parole in seven years. Tex was transferred to a prison near San Luis Obispo, where he was assigned to work in the psychiatric unit as a clerk. Susan, Leslie, and Pat remained where they were, isolated from the main prisoner population for four more years. But now they were allowed to do needlepoint, plant small gardens, and have mandatory sessions with psychiatrists. It took time for their belief in Charlie to weaken. Occasionally they huddled together and sang some of his songs, including “Home Is Where You’re Happy.”