When Charlie got back in the car, Susan says, "he said he saw pictures of children through the window and he didn't want to kill anyone because of the children. He said, `You realize that if you have to take the life of a child, it would only be to save the children of the future ..
"Somewhere in the same neighborhood we stopped at one house and we stayed in the car. Charlie stayed in the car. We just watched ... about two, three minutes.
"We drove on and then we just continued driving around and I fell asleep. I was thoroughly exhausted, and when I woke up we were in front of another house and I seemed to recognize the house - not the house, but the particular area." Susan had been to that area "about a year previously ... I was there with about fifteen people." The house she recognized was next door to the house in front of where they parked. There had been a party there, she recalls. "We had all took an LSD trip together," she, Charlie, about fifteen others. "And the reason why I couldn't see the house was I was sitting in the back seat, like I said there is no seat to the car and I was slumped down because I was sleeping, and when I looked up, I just woke up from a dream and I dreamed that Charlie had gone into a house with Tex and killed the people."
Linda says she drove through a "modern, expensive area" but Charlie gave instructions to drive on because "the homes were too close together ... We came to a church. There were lots of trees. Charlie was going to go in and find a minister, or a priest or whoever was there ... but all the doors were locked." Then he drove for awhile, to Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, before instructing her again to get behind the wheel. For awhile they had driven up a dirt road, Linda recalls, stopping at another house before driving back through the city down Sunset Boulevard. Linda says she followed a white sports car through a residential area. They went up and down many dark streets. Finally Charlie told her to park.
Susan, in the back, saw Charlie get out of the car. He went in the house and was there a long time. She said, "After a while, then Charlie came back and he said, `Tex, Katie -' and he looked at me and he could see that I didn't want to go into the house. Then Charlie turned away from Susan and said, `Leslie - go into the house.' He said something to the effect that last night Tex let the people know they were going to be killed, which caused panic, and Charlie said that he reassured the people with smiles in a very quiet manner that they were not to be harmed - just that they were not to be harmed.
"He said he had the people already tied up." Then, Susan remembers, "Charlie said `paint a picture more gruesome than anybody has ever seen.' And so Tex and Leslie got out of the car." Susan says Charlie told them they wouldn't wait, and to hitchhike back to the ranch.
Susan stayed in the car with Linda, Clem, and Charlie. She says, "Charlie also had a wallet he supposedly got from the house. When he got back in the car - after he sent Leslie, Tex, and Katie into the house - he said it was the woman's identification.
"We drove off," Susan says. "We drove around and Charlie said we were going in the opposite direction than we came from. We drove in a predominantly colored area. I don't know the area, but this is what I gathered, seeing Negroes ...
"Charlie gave Linda the woman's wallet and told her to put it into the bathroom in the gas station, and leave it there hoping that somebody would find it and use the credit cards, and thus be identified with the murder. Linda said she did it - I didn't see her leave it but she didn't come back with it either. Then we drove around for a long time and I went back to sleep. It wasn't like I was asleep, it was like I was drugged. I felt very heavily drugged. I was not on drugs at the time ... I just felt like that I had been shot with morphine, or something, or fell asleep ... or passed out."
Linda, wide awake, stared at passing headlights until there were no more approaching and everything was dark. They were at the beach, and Charlie was asking them whether they knew anyone around there. Linda says they replied "No," but Charlie turned to her, she says, and said, "`What about the man that you and Sandy met? Isn't he a piggie?' And I said `Yes, he's an actor.' And then he further questioned me, and he asked me if the man would let me in. And I said, `Yes.' He asked me if the man would let my friends in, Sadie and Clem. And I said, `Yes.' He said, 'OK. I want you to kill him,' and he gave me a small pocket knife. And at this point I said, `Charlie, I am not you, I am not you. I cannot kill anybody.' I don't know what took place then at that moment, but I was very much afraid."
Charlie then told her, Linda says, "As soon as he opens the door, slit his throat' . . . I said, `Charlie, I'm not you, I can't kill anybody.' He had the knife in his hand and started telling how to kill him. 'As soon as he opens the door, slit his throat.' He told Clem to shoot him."
Linda had met the man before, she says, while hitchhiking with another girl, and the man had taken them to an apartment building in Venice. There she had showered, had something to eat and had sex with the man.
As Charlie directed them to Venice, Linda says, "he started to tell me how to go about it, killing him, and I remember I had the knife in my hand, and I asked him, `With this?' And he said, `Yes' and he showed me how to do it." It was a kind of digging motion. And as they neared Venice, Linda recalls, "Charlie said, As soon as you enter the house, as soon as you see the man, slit his throat right away.' Again he told Clem to shoot him. He then said if anything went wrong, you know, just hang it up, don't do it, and hitchhike back to the ranch."
In Venice, Linda says that at first they couldn't find the apartment building. They drove around many streets, finally parked, and she and Charlie went on foot in search of the location. Linda recalls that as they walked through the dark streets she told Charlie she was pregnant and that Charlie kept talking to her and "sort of made me forget about everything ... he just made me feel good." They continued their walk while Clem stayed in the car trying to rouse Susan. It was on this walk, Linda says, that they met a policeman and Charlie had a "very friendly conversation" with him, trying to find the building where the actor lived.
When they finally found the building, Susan and Clem joined Linda, while Charlie returned to the car. Linda went inside the building with Clem and Susan, although she knew she would not lead them to the actor's apartment. She says, "I knocked on the door, which I knew wasn't the door, and a man said, `Who is it?' And I said, `Linda.' And he sort of opened the door and peeked around the corner, and I just said, `Oh, excuse me, wrong door,' and that was it."'
Afterwards, Linda says, they smoked some pot down on the beach, and Clem buried the gun he had in the sand. Then the three thumbed rides back towards Chatsworth. It was the same night, Linda says, that she began to make secret plans to leave the Family.
The house that Tex, Leslie and Katie had entered earlier that night, as Susan remembered from the rear of the car, was on a hill in the Los Feliz area.
The property belonged to Leno LaBianca, wealthy owner of a supermarket chain. He and his wife, Rosemary, had been married "about eight to ten years," says Roxie Lucarelli, a Los Angeles policeman and personal friend of the LaBiancas. "I have known Leno about forty-five years plus and Rosemary about ten years ..." Leno LaBianca had lived in the area since he was a boy, and the two had been in their new home there "a matter of months ... We attended a Christmas party at his former home," Lucarelli says.
When he arrived at the LaBianca home that night, other police officers were there and he recognized Detective Danny Galindo, from L.A. Homicide. It was about one o'clock in the morning, Galindo says. He'd been able to determine that the LaBiancas arrived home after dropping their daughter off and buying a newspaper. He couldn't tell exactly when the two returned. However, he could establish that the LaBiancas had died sometime before 10:30 p.m.
Later, recounting what actually occurred in the house, Susan says: "Katie told me that they took the woman into the bedroom and put her on the bed, and left Tex in the living room with the man and that her and Leslie stayed with the woman, and reassured that woman as Charlie had told them to do ... that everything was going to be all right and that everyth
ing was good, and they wouldn't be hurt and everything was going to be all right, and Katie told me this herself. She said, `I wasn't talking to that woman, I was talking to myself."'
After they had entered the house, Katie found the man and woman sitting on a couch. "The man's hands were tied," Katie says. "And we just looked at him, we looked, you know, it was like there was no thought. We just looked at him."
Leslie remembers that "the woman looked up and said, `We will give you anything."'
"The woman started talking," Katie says, "started saying something about, oh, something about `We won't call the police, we won't call the police,' you know, something like that." Katie says she and Leslie then took the woman into a bedroom, where, as Leslie recalls, the woman again was saying she wouldn't call the police.
"I remember I came out of the room," Leslie says, "and I ran to a kitchen and I opened a drawer, and I grabbed out a whole bunch of utensils out of the drawer ..."
In the bedroom, while she looked in the closet, Leslie says, "the woman picked up a great big table and she picked it up and it looked like she was going to throw it. And I looked through the corner of my eye and I saw a lamp coming down, so I blocked it I got it away from her, and we fought for a few seconds and I got her on the bed and ripped the pillowcase off the pillow and I put it on her head ..."
Katie returned to the bedroom. "I had a knife in my hand and I remember Leslie picked up the knife," she says. "Like Leslie, I guess, put a pillowcase on her head, and then she [LaBianca] started. She kept saying something about the police - `Just leave!' - or something like that -" and then, Katie says, "the woman heard her husband being killed and started to scream, `What are you doing to my husband?"'
"I asked her to lay still," Leslie recalls. "Then she got at the lamp shade again and I took one of the knives and Katie had a knife, and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady."
Susan says Katie told her they "then stabbed the woman with a fork she got from the kitchen ... Leslie was helping Katie hold the woman down because the woman was fighting all the way up until she was dead.
"And [later] I looked at Katie," Susan recalls, "and I'm not sure in my own mind whether Katie said this or I said this - that is what the woman would carry with her infinitely, `What are you doing to my husband?'
"Katie said after that they went out by the living room and wrote things on the front door . . . `DEATH TO ALL PIGS.' I'm not sure whether she said they wrote in blood on the refrigerator door or on the front door. I think she said they wrote 'HELTER-SKELTER' in blood. In the corner of the living room somewhere they wrote 'ARISE' in blood ... Then, she said, they all took showers after they killed the two people, and changed their clothes inside the house.
"Katie said she went into the living room with a fork. She brought the fork from the kitchen. She looked at the man's stomach and she had the fork in her hand, and she put the fork in the man's stomach and watched it wobble back and forth ... fascinated by it. `WAR' was carved on the man's chest.
"She said when they came out of the shower and on the way to the kitchen, the dog came in and wagged her tail in front of them and Katie bent over and petted the dog and was kind of surprised the dog wasn't afraid of her, and the dog followed them into the kitchen. They were hungry and decided they wanted something to eat ... They ate something ... they got food from the refrigerator.
"Katie said the bodies would probably be found, on her own assumption, just from the type of people that they were and the neighborhood, they probably had grown children, usually they would probably come over for - like Sunday dinner, or Sunday afternoon, or sometime during the weekend the children would be over and would find the bodies.
"They had changed their clothes in the house, and on the way back to the ranch they dumped the old clothing in a garbage can."
Detective Galindo says, "As I entered the living room I observed the body of Leno LaBianca, laying in an east-west direction beside the couch and just a little bit angled with his left leg underneath the massive coffee table."
There was a fork protruding out of his stomach, "sticking just above his navel, approximately two inches, and just to the left of the midline ..." The detective observed "some rather angry scars on his stomach area and what appears to be either `W--A-R' or `X-X-A-R," carved into the skin. LaBianca's hands were tied behind his back with a leather thong, "like the leather shoelaces, tied around the wrists." His head was covered and there was an electrical cord around his neck.
Dr. David Katsuyama, Forensic Medicine, examined the bodies. When the pillowcase was removed from Mr. LaBianca's head, Katsuyama recalls, "there was a knife still found in the neck. The knife was present in the neck and the pillowcase was pulled loosely over it ... the knife was a kitchen knife or steak knife ...
"There were four or five stab wounds," he says, "some rather irregular, and there are four in the anterior portion of the abdomen and there was one in the mid-back ... One of the stab wounds of the neck had caused severance of the right carotid artery, which is one of the main vessels that feeds the structures of the head. The stab wounds into the abdomen had perforated parts of the bowel, the colon and the portions of the tissue that hold the bowel to the abdomen."
Galindo states, "Beginning with the remains of Mr. LaBianca, I observed a large amount of blood that had gathered on a cushion seat on the couch beneath which Mr. LaBianca lay. I observed in what should be the den area just north of the living room a crumpled piece of paper that appeared to contain smears of blood.
"In the living room on the wall, on the north wall by the door ... I observed the lettering `R-I-S-E,' and it appeared to be in blood ... On the north wall of the living room, facing north and just left of the archway into the den there was lettering `DEATH TO PIGS,' in rather large reddish letters on the wall, and it appeared that a picture of some sort had been removed from the wall. This appeared written in blood.
"In the den - through the den and into the kitchen, again on the north wall, of the kitchen there was a refrigerator on which on the door the lettering `HELTER-SKELTER,' had been written in blood. `HELTER' across the top right hand door and right underneath the word `SKELTER,' in a combination of capital letters and lower case letters.
"In the bedroom at the southeast corner of the premises," Galindo says, "I observed the body of Mrs. LaBianca ... She was lying on the floor, face down, on the outside of the bed ... She was obviously dead."
Dr. Katsuyama performed the autopsy on Rosemary LaBianca, and attributed death "to multiple stab wounds to the neck, the trunk, causing massive hemorrhage ... There are nine major wounds in the back and on the upper portion of the back and on the lower portion of the back were numerous small superficial, relatively superficial, cutting wounds over the lower portion of the trunk and on the buttocks." One investigating officer says, "it appears as though the back area has been shredded or ripped extensively." Dr. Katsuyama also states finding "wire also wrapped around the extremities, hands tied together and the lower legs tied together, and also wire wrapped around the neck ...
Galindo surveyed the entire residence. "After approximately five or six hours' search it was our determination that a large amount of valuables still remained within the premises, including several diamond rings, two large jars of coins, several coin collections, (and two bags of mint nickels, about $200 worth), many guns and rifles. There didn't appear to have been any ransacking of any sort. Underneath the washbasin - in the bathroom - there was some paper towels that had been water soaked and appeared to have blood ... the only possibility of ransacking would have been the evidence of watermelon rinds in the kitchen," eaten and scattered about.
What dumbfounded the deputies was that nothing of value was taken; many costly appliances, as well as currency and coins, had been left untouched - "as though the killer or killers didn't even recognize the articles as having any mortal use. It seemed their only concern had been to butcher up the people like that. And to see the garbage scattered about the kitchen, the watermelon
rinds slung around ..."
"About a day or two after August 9th," Danny DeCarlo says, he noticed Tex limping around the ranch. "They used to have karate classes up there," he recalls, "and the thing was to kick, you know, with your foot, so he was limping. I said to him, `What happened to your foot?' And he says, `Me and this guy got into it.' And I said, `You hurt your foot?' He says, `Yeah.' I said, `Well, what did you do to him?' He says, `I took his money.' I said, `How much you get?' He said, `Seventy-five dollars.' I figured it was just maybe a bar fight, those were pretty common."
DeCarlo says, "Tex was really quiet. He never said anything except when Charlie wasn't there. Well, then, he jumped up there where the king's throne was. He took over until Charlie got back and then he retreated back like a little mouse, just like the rest of them did."
Then DeCarlo had a brief conversation with Clem. DeCarlo says, "I saw no calendar, no clock, so I can't give exact dates, but I said, `What did you do last night?' And he kind of looked at me and smiled but then he looked over my shoulder and Charlie was standing behind me. And so he kind of looked at Charlie and Charlie looked at Clem just as if to say - not to say anything, and so Charlie more or less said, `Well, so we took care of business,' something along that line. So Charlie turned around and walked away from me, that is, away from my back, see, and then I turned to Clem and Clem looked at me and turned around and walked away and said, `We got five piggies,' and that was what he said. That was the first time I ever heard `five piggies.' I just let it go at that because I never thought nothing of it."
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 17
