But Joe's health had been failing. "Finally, I believed I was dying," after frequent collapses - "or I would have died if some of the girls hadn't arranged for me to get to Bishop," he said.
Later, he was to say, "My tuberculosis has cleared somewhat. But I feel I am `Scorpion' and I am insane because Charlie had controlled the most basic things about my character. I am still crazy - I don't have the past I'd had when I was in San Francisco. There is nothing behind me but a sneaking knowledge that I have played the role of a minor hero in a super issue of Mad comics."
A few nights after Charlie's meeting with Boyd Taylor, he camped with two girls near the ridge of the racetrack. In the morning, he said, he stood up and a "big coyote came across the flat and up to me. He stopped just in front of me and was looking at me dead ahead with no fear. He kept it up for maybe half a minute, and a few times he kept looking back over in the direction he had come. And then I was looking out that way and I saw some rangers. They were coming across the desert floor. The big coyote was warning me!"
He packed up his gear into the dune buggy and drove off behind the ridges.
The Highway Patrol officer entered the wash, accompanied by a park ranger. They were looking for a Toyota involved in the burning of some park equipment. The officer, James Pursell, reports that on September 29th they arrived at the Barker ranch, probably shortly after noon. Pursell drove up and two girls met them midway between the car and the house. He recalls they were dressed in "clothing obviously much larger than they were, sloppy, dirty, baggy clothing, pants, shirts, and hats ... they were not too communicative and said they were just out traveling through the desert more or less." However, they did say that old Buck lived "down the wash a ways."
Pursell followed the wash until they found the miner, "perhaps a mile, maybe a half mile from the ranch." After talking to old Buck the patrolman "felt it wise to return with him to Barker ranch and have a little more detailed talk . . . Buck was driving a military pickup truck," Pursell said. "In the back was a load of miscellaneous automotive parts, new. Batteries, the acid for the batteries, tune-up equipment or parts, headlamps, a new tire and wheels, Volkswagen. Also he had a movie camera. We asked where these items came from and why he had them, and he said he was taking them from Rock Falls in Goler Wash up to Barker Ranch for another individual. I believe he simply stated, `an individual named Charlie.' I asked why he would be doing this if it were not his, and he said he felt his life might depend on his doing what Charlie advised him to do.
"We went to one of the out buildings at the ranch," Pursell recalls, "and all of us had lengthy discussions about what was going on in the area. We received some rather unbelievable information. There apparently was a large group of people that could be described as hippie-type. They had a number of dune buggies, a red Toyota. They were engaged in more or less war games, like Rommel of the Desert Rat Patrol at night ..
Soon after, Pursell and the deputies entered the Barker ranch region to make arrests on charges of auto theft and arson. Deputies found stolen cars in camouflaged hideaways, not far from where Pursell met a dozen young women, some nude, sprawled on the rocks, sunning themselves. They were not embarrassed, Pursell notes, but said they were "taking the sun, getting away from the smog for awhile."
Sometime later, near nightfall, Pursell approached the ranch and opened the kitchen door. He stood there for several moments, his pistol in hand, peering into the dark. There was a single candle burning in the room, and Pursell made out "about a dozen" people sitting around a wooden plank table, just starting on an evening meal of sugared Rice Puffs, caramel popcorn and chocolate candy bars.
He ordered them out with their hands above their heads, "the male suspects one at a time backwards, and the three females to come out together." He then entered the cabin, took the candle, and began searching the rooms. He found another suspect standing in the bedroom. Then, in the bathroom, pausing at what appeared to be a dirty mop hanging out of a tiny cupboard beneath the wash stand, Pursell bent down and opened the door.
"Hello," Manson said to him.
The cupboard, Pursell says, was "perhaps three feet high, twelve to eighteen inches deep, perhaps eighteen or twenty inches wide." He was amazed at how Manson had crumpled himself into the small hole, knees bunched up beneath his chin. He ordered Manson out of the cupboard and waited. "It took him a little while to unwind."
All the suspects had been handcuffed and loaded into two pickup trucks. In two raids, the deputies made twenty-seven arrests. They had found eight children in a state of malnutrition. Manson, Susan and the other adults were charged with auto theft and arson.
Some of the family were released, including Katie, after brief "checking out," as one deputy said. And "we saw this Susan Atkins was wanted for questioning - one of "possibly three young women" named in warrants issued following Bobby's arrest in August. So she was held at Inyo County, then returned to Los Angeles and arraigned in justice Court on murder charges in the Hinman case. Bobby was waiting in County Jail for his trial to begin in early November.
Katie, with others in Death Valley, was soon picked up again in nearby Lancaster in connection with the Hinman case. The Sheriff telephoned her father in Inglewood. "They were holding my daughter on some sort of suspicion of murder," he says. "I left for Lancaster right away." Upon arrival, he learned she had been questioned only "briefly - something to do with the stabbing of a man that befriended hippies," and he managed to talk deputies into releasing Katie into his custody.
"On our way back down to Inglewood, her reaction was so unemotional," he says. "I don't think we spoke twenty words by the time we had hit the San Diego Freeway." They stopped to eat, and Katie began to talk. "She didn't say anything significant, but just enough of a gesture so that it appeared that all was well again." She spent most of the next two days around the house, and "some of the time visiting friends." Krenwinkel deliberately avoided questioning her. He says, "I'm not the kind to use third-degree ... And I didn't want to preach `You did wrong.' I just felt, I didn't think I could win her back that way."
A week later he got a telephone call at his office. It was Katie. "She told me she'd talked to her mother in Mobile and she wanted to go there, to see her mother. She was entitled to that." He bought his daughter a plane ticket that evening and drove her to the airport. He watched the plane leave, taking Katie to Alabama.
About the same time, Linda had traveled across the country and arrived in Miami with her eighteen-month-old baby girl, and pregnant again. Linda had earlier been able to gain the help of a man who ran a Zen Buddhist retreat in New Mexico. She was able to return to California and arrange with a lawyer to get her daughter out of a foster home, where the baby had been placed after Linda left her at Spahn ranch.
Linda then returned to New Mexico. "Three weeks later," she says, "I was able to get my daughter back." Finally, from New Mexico, Linda hitchhiked with the child to her father's in Miami. She tried to erase the murders from her mind. "I didn't want to remember it anymore," she says. "I just wanted to forget about it ... I couldn't, and I kept reading newspapers and seeing horrible things." She said she once thought of turning herself in, or getting in touch with relatives of the victims. But, she said, "I just couldn't - I was too much afraid, and too much pregnant, and I had the baby with me. So I didn't do it." Her father, Rosaire Drouin, says Linda "showed up in Miami around the first of November." It was the second time in the fifteen years since he had separated from Linda's mother that he saw his daughter again. "I remember the first time she came to Miami," he says. "She stole a lot of things from my apartment, and was buying dope with the money. The only time she ever wrote to me is when she was in California, and only when she needed money. I sent her some."
Drouin, a bartender in Miami, says Linda "was not a bad girl, and she was not a good girl. She was pretty happy. No, I wouldn't say she was depressed or unhappy or anything like that. She was happy as hell. In fact, I kept looking through her luggage to see if she had any
drugs. I wondered if she was high." He recalls her "always talking about the good life out in California, about living in the woods and all that ..." He says both Linda and her baby had sores on their arms. "I guess they got those living in the woods ..."
In Santa Monica Superior Court, Susan had been made a codefendant with Bobby, but would not stand trial with him. She was extremely "talkative and cooperative" with police - she provided details of the efforts to rob Hinman. He had been stabbed and tortured, she said, the "knife was stuck into his heart." Among the girls who had gathered in the "reflection of Manson," it seemed Susan, in particular, had been searching for punishment ... as if even her earliest violations of the law were committed to bring down authority upon herself. Though she'd followed Charlie's orders, her compulsion to confess demonstrated that he had failed to give her the treatment she needed.
In the trial, felony charges were dropped against DeCarlo, an arrangement for testimony against Bobby. But DeCarlo said he was testifying because "a man was killed for no reason at all. That's my motive for being here."
Susan's new obsession to divulge what she knew was not limited to the Hinman case. She was sharing a cell with some young women, and one was Ronnie Howard. "One day," Ronnie says, "Susan told me, `I don't think anything in life shocks me anymore.' And I answered, `Well, few things shock me, either.' Then Susan said, `I bet I could tell you a few things that would shock you ... What if I told you that I was at the Tate house and that I was the one that did it - murdered Sharon Tate?
"I didn't believe her at first," Ronnie says. "It was too fantastic - I couldn't believe an innocent looking girl could be involved in all this. I just thought it all fantasy - until she went into details. Then I asked her, `Who really killed Sharon Tate?' She told me she did. And again I thought it fantasy. So I asked her, `Where did you stab her, in the stomach?' And she said, `No,' she didn't want to hurt the baby, so she stabbed her in the chest. She couldn't remember how many times, she said she just stabbed until Sharon Tate stopped screaming."
Susan "enjoyed telling me," Ronnie recalls. "I didn't have to press her too hard because I was her friend. She loved telling me about it, and loved to brag about it. Still I thought it too fantastic, and that she was talking fantasy, until she told me about leaving her knife behind at the Sharon Tate house. Later I told police, and the police went back and found it."
Susan bragged, Ronnie says, that eleven murders had actually been committed, and that the murders so far "`was just the start of it,' that there were many more murders to come. Susan said even if she never got out, that I should go see Charlie because he would be out anytime." She remembers Susan telling her the "family" had planned a lot of killings.
"They were going to just jump into their bus and go across the country and stop at different houses ..."
At the time, Manson was being held on auto theft charges and Ronnie feared his release. "It was fantastic. Especially when Susan told me how the murders so far was just the start of it." It was so incredible, Ronnie admits, that in jail she couldn't get any authority to listen to her.
"It was the hardest thing I've ever tried to do in my life, to get anyone to listen to me," she says. "I never tried so hard to get a phone call, just a phone call to police. I knew that people here [in jail] had committed the Tate-LaBianca murders, and were going to kill many others. And I said, `Please, let me make a phone call.' But I couldn't - I don't think anyone believed me. I tried to tell the lieutenant, and I went through her deputy. But the lieutenant said I didn't give the deputy any basis to the story, `So why don't I just forget about it.'
"Finally, I was going to court and was allowed to make one phone call, only a few seconds. I called Hollywood Police Department and told my name. I know I tried so hard to reach the police, and if they didn't send anyone out to see me I was just going to forget about the whole thing. But the same day they sent out a couple investigators to see me, and they got after her.
"I was kept over in jail longer, supposedly for my own protection, though I said I knew how to protect myself better outside.
"I had a very hard time in jail," Ronnie admits. "There is a code about informers, and everybody in jail was against me. Everybody I thought was my friend, was my friend no longer. And even when I left jail, Sadie told me, with a smile - but then she always smiled, and I think she would still talk to me if she could - she said, `Ronnie, I have no ill feelings toward you, but it's the rest of the Family.' And she said, `You know, our people are everywhere, in every state. No matter how far you go, you have plastic surgery done or whatever, how many thousands of dollars you have, you're going to die, Ronnie, you're gonna die.' I just smiled back at her and said, `Well, we all have to die sometime."'
Later Susan wrote to Ronnie, "When I first heard you were the informer I wanted to slit your throat." But, she added, "I snapped that I was the real informer, and it was my throat I wanted to cut."
Another cellmate of Susan's, in jail on charges of forging a narcotics prescription, also said Susan bragged to her about the murders - boasting - "many more were going to die." Susan told her, she says, "They felt the stabbings and the brutal cuttings would release the souls of the victims ... the more they stabbed, the more they enjoyed it. They got sexual gratifications from the stabbing." The cellmate told her lawyer, and soon after others who had been jailed with Susan related similar stories.
Sadie loved to talk. She later told another girl, "It was in their eyes - wide and scared as I told them what I'd done and how it was, and how much I loved doing it. I said it made me come to think about it - to remember it was like licking honey - like licking blood ... I liked to look in the eyes of girls while making love and tell them what it's like to kill with a knife ..."
In mid-November, a full-scale investigation was ordered. Two lieutenants and sixteen policemen were assigned to the case, and a week before Bobby's trial ended, Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi accompanied detectives to Death Valley in search of physical evidence to support circumstantial evidence linking Manson and the others to the murders.
The day before Thanksgiving, the jurors in Bobby's trial deadlocked, and a mistrial was declared. Bobby beamed at first, but the public defender, acting as his counsel, then informed him he would be retried along with Susan.
On November 25, the police transferred eight prisoners from Independence in Inyo County to County Jail in Los Angeles on subpoenas. At this time, murder complaints were filed and fugitive warrants issued for the arrest of Linda, Katie and Tex.
Deputy District Attorney Aaron Stovitz said a grand jury would be impanelled to investigate the murders. At the same time, Susan gave to her newly appointed attorneys, Paul Caruso and Richard Caballero, a lengthy account in which she said she acted under Manson's "hypnotic spell" during the time of the murders. Further, she would waive rights against self-incrimination and give testimony to the grand jury, gambling that her testimony might save her life. Caballero said, "She will tell the jury exactly what happened in the Tate and LaBianca houses."
When Susan's father learned of his daughter's arrest and the claim of her being "hypnotized," he said, "I think she is trying to talk her way out of it. She's sick and she needs help ..." He said Manson's family visited him in San Jose. "I thought they were just a slap-happy bunch of kooks, dumb hippies ... I should have been more firm with Susan, demanded more. I loved her, and still do. She once did some very beautiful things, but that was a long time ago. And now the horror has come. And I know where she's been. Everywhere people died when they were there ..."
Watson reached his hometown in late October, where people observed the "change in Tex." One friend remarked Tex seemed to "have a tornado in his head ..." The elder Watson, who ran the general store, junk shop and gas station, soon learned of the charges against his son - sought on a fugitive warrant. He brought the young Watson to the deputies at McKinney, Texas, "for the detectives from California." Though he did not understand what the charges were all about, he was to scrub the nam
e "Watson" from the storefront as publicity of the crimes soon spread.
And while Tex spent his twenty-fourth birthday in the McKinney jail, his family appointed a former county attorney, William Boyd, who immediately said Tex was unable to decide whether to fight the extradition.
Stuart Guthrie recalls that after Tex's arrest, his brother Mike "went down there in the courtroom and sat ten feet away from Tex - who had known Mike all his life, but didn't seem to know who he was that day ... So I'm of the opinion that Manson could have told Tex to stick his head in a buzz saw and Tex would have done it with a smile on his face, without even knowing what he was doing."
After further meetings with Tex, lawyer Boyd requested psychiatric examinations, saying, "I personally have some serious doubts about this boy's mental state." The lawyer then decided to fight extradition, and detectives who had come for Watson returned to California without the prisoner.
Meanwhile, the house near Mobile, Alabama, where Katie had spent most of her early life, had been staked out by the police. Katie was wearing a big floppy hat, jeans and a baggy checkered shirt when she was arrested on December 1, by a detective named McKellar. While driving in a car with a teenage boy, she pulled the hat down over her face when she saw the police "as though we wouldn't be able to see her," McKellar said. But problems arose over the fugitive warrant and it became clear she would resist extradition to California, the same as Tex.
Soon after Thanksgiving, Linda Kasabian left Miami on a plane to Boston. From there she set out for New Hampshire, to remain about a week in a small industrial town near Concord where her stepfather and mother lived, and where she had spent her childhood. Linda's mother says, "She loves children. She was never, never violent ... There was no hate in her at all. She was searching for something - love, I guess."
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 19
