In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi claims an aversion to “the stereotyped image of the prosecutor” as “a right-wing, law-and-order type intent on winning convictions at any cost.” But that’s exactly how he came across. In file photographs he’s often haloed in microphones, his solemn pronouncements helping the world make sense of the senseless. Journalists lauded his “even-toned arguments.”
With his opening statement, Bugliosi, no less colorful a character than Manson, made what was already a sensational case even more so. The motive he presented for the murders was spellbindingly bizarre. In Bugliosi’s telling, it crossed racism with apocalyptic, biblical rhetoric, all of it set to a melody by the Beatles—“the English musical recording group,” as he primly referred to them:
Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.
Nothing like this had ever been heard in a courtroom. People kill one another for all kinds of reasons, but they’re usually personal, not metaphysical. Seldom had threads like these—racism, rock music, the end times—been woven together in a single, lethal philosophy. When Paul Watkins, a former Family member, took the stand to elaborate on Helter Skelter, the details were even more jarring. Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.
As insane and illogical as it sounded, Bugliosi explained, Manson’s followers subscribed to his prophecy of Armageddon as if it’d been delivered from the Holy Mount. They were willing to kill for him to make it a reality.
But none of this explained why Manson had chosen the Tate and LaBianca homes as his targets. Manson had known the former tenant at the Tate house, Terry Melcher, a record producer and the son of Doris Day. Melcher had flirted with the idea of recording Manson, who had dreams of rock stardom, but he decided against it. Sometime in the spring before the murders, Manson had gone looking for Melcher at the house, hoping to change his mind, but a friend of the new tenants told him that Melcher had moved out. Manson didn’t like the guy’s brusque attitude. Consequently, the house on Cielo Drive came to represent the “establishment” that had rejected him. When he ordered the killings, he wanted to “instill fear in Terry Melcher,” Susan Atkins had said, sending a clear signal to the stars and executives who’d snubbed him. As for the LaBianca house: Manson had once stayed in the place next door. That house was no longer occupied, but it was no matter. The neighbors, Manson decided, would suffice as targets, because they, too, no matter who they were, symbolized the establishment he sought to overthrow with Helter Skelter.
The trial was the longest and most expensive in U.S. history at the time. It wasn’t as straightforward as it might seem, because Manson himself hadn’t actually murdered anyone. He hadn’t set foot in the Tate home at all, and though he’d entered the LaBianca home, he left before his followers killed the couple. That meant Manson could be convicted of first-degree murder only through a charge of conspiracy. According to the legal principle of vicarious liability, any conspirator was also guilty of the crimes committed by his coconspirators. In other words, if the prosecution could prove that Manson had ordered the killings, he would be guilty of murder, even having not laid a finger on any of the victims. Bugliosi had to show that Manson had a unique ability to control his followers’ thoughts and actions—that they would do whatever he asked, even kill complete strangers.
It would have been a complicated case even had things proceeded smoothly. But the Family did all they could to throw sand in the gears. On the very first day of the trial, Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs. The women skipped down the courtroom hallways, three abreast, holding hands, singing nursery rhymes that Manson had written. They laughed at the photographers who jostled to get their pictures. During the trial, if Manson took umbrage at something, they took umbrage, too, mimicking his profanity, his expressions, his outbursts.
The judge, Charles Older, would often threaten to remove Manson. On one occasion, Manson returned the reproach: “I will have you removed if you don’t stop. I have a little system of my own… Do you think I’m kidding?” Grabbing a sharp pencil, he sprang over the defense table, flinging himself toward Older. A bailiff intervened and tackled him, and the girls jumped to their feet, too, chanting unintelligible verses in Latin. As he was dragged from the courtroom, Manson remained defiant, shouting, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” It was a glimpse of the raw pugilism that ran beneath Manson’s philosopher-guru facade. The judge began to carry a .38 revolver under his robes.
Things were no more orderly outside the courtroom, where, at the corner of Temple and Grand, members of the Family gathered each morning to hold sidewalk vigils. Barefoot and belligerent, they sat in wide circles, singing songs in praise of their leader. The women suckled newborns. The men laughed and ran their fingers through their long, unwashed hair. All had followed Manson’s lead and cut Xs into their foreheads, distributing typewritten statements explaining that the self-mutilation symbolized their “X-ing” themselves “out of society.”
Bugliosi called the defendants “bloodthirsty robots”—a grandiloquent phrase, but an apt one. It captured the unsettling duality of the killers: at once animal and artificial, divorced from emotion and yet capable of executing the most intimate, visceral form of murder imaginable. Tex Watson would later hymn the detached, automated ecstasy of stabbing: “Over and over, again and again, my arm like a machine, at one with the blade.” Susan Atkins told a cellmate that plunging the knife into Tate’s pregnant belly was “like a sexual release. Especially when you see the blood spurting out. It’s better than a climax.” And behind them was Manson, who lived for sex even as he described himself as “the mechanical boy.”
“A Stage of Nothing”
After seven grueling months, the first phase of the trial drew to a close, and the jury, after ten days of deliberation, arrived at unanimous guilty verdicts. Now, in the second phase, the prosecution had to present an argument for putting the defendants to death. Their case, and the defense’s counterarguments, led to some of the most unnerving testimony yet, including a kind of symposium on LSD—not as a recreational drug, but as an agent of mind control. This death-penalty phase of the trial entertained some of the same questions that engrossed and vexed me for the next two decades. Had Manson really “brainwashed” people? If so, how? And if one person was truly under the psychological control of another, then who was responsible for that person’s actions?
For the first time, the three convicted women—Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten—took the witness stand. One by one, they explained their roles in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their utter lack of remorse. The families of the victims looked on in stunned silence as the women described their loved ones’ final moments in clinical detail. To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love—it freed that person from the confines of their physical being.
Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She shrugged. “I didn’t
know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.”
Patricia Krenwinkel said she’d felt nothing when she stabbed Abigail Folger twenty-eight times. “What is there to describe? It was just there, and it’s like it was right.” Why would she kill a woman she didn’t even know? “Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought and the thought came to be.”
“‘Sorry’ is only a five-letter word,” Leslie Van Houten told the courtroom. “It can’t bring back anything.” She’d helped stab Rosemary LaBianca forty-one times. “What can I feel?” Van Houten said. “It has happened. She is gone.”
As unrepentant as the women were, Bugliosi had his work cut out for him when it came to securing the death penalty. His reasoning relied on a seeming contradiction. He’d argued during the first phase of the trial that the women were “brainwashed zombies,” totally in Manson’s thrall. Now he had to prove the opposite: that they were as complicit as Manson was. Although they were “automatons,” Bugliosi said, “slavishly obedient to Manson’s every command,” the women still had, “deep down inside themselves,” such “bloodlust” that they deserved the death penalty.
The defense argued that the women were merely pawns. Manson had used an almost technologically precise combination of drugs, hypnotism, and coercion to transform these formerly nonviolent people into frenzied, psychopathic killers. At that point, scientists in the United States had been studying LSD for only a little more than a decade—it was far from a known quantity. Manson, the defense said, had used the drug to ply his impressionable followers, accessing the innermost chambers of their minds and molding them to his designs.
Former members of the Family have often recounted Manson’s systematic “brainwashing” methods, beginning with the seduction of new recruits by “bombarding” them with love, sex, and drugs. On the witness stand, Paul Watkins outlined the near weekly orgies that Manson orchestrated at the Spahn Ranch. The leader would hand out drugs, personally deciding everyone’s dosages. And then, as Bugliosi writes in Helter Skelter,
Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes… Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”
If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote. “Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.”
Tex Watson, in his 1978 memoir Will You Die for Me?, tells a similar story. “There was a room in the back of the ranch house totally lined with mattresses,” he wrote, essentially set aside for sex. “As we had any inhibitions we still weren’t dead, we were still playing back what our parents had programmed into us.”
Having made them feel freed and wanted, Manson would isolate his followers from the world beyond the ranch, giving them daily tasks to support the commune and forbidding them from communicating with their families or friends. His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars. Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”
Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions—often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks—during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan.
Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her way out the door when Charlie said, ‘Never mind.’” Manson excelled, Watkins said, at “locating deep-seated hang-ups.” He “took up residence in people’s heads,” leaving them with “no point of reference, nothing to relate back to, no right, no wrong—no roots.” They lived in a “new reality” summoned by LSD, which left them “melt-twisted and free of pretension in timeless spirals of movement.”
Ironically, as his followers became more and more robotic, Manson taught them that people in the straight world “were like computers,” the Family’s Brooks Poston wrote. Their worldviews were simply a matter of society’s programming, and any program could be expunged. On the stand, Susan Atkins described Sharon Tate as an “IBM machine—words came out of her mouth but they didn’t make any sense to me.”
For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”
Bugliosi had to use a little prosecutorial hocus-pocus to tell stories like these. He argued that the Manson women had been psychologically compromised, but he didn’t assert that Manson had actually created his killers. Despite Manson’s talk about “reprogramming,” there was no template for one person’s ever having done such a thing to another. Instead, Bugliosi purported that Manson’s followers must have had some preexisting homicidal impulse buried in their subconsciouses. Manson had learned to recognize and exploit that impulse, but even so, each woman was responsible for her actions. Then as now, this position fascinated and perplexed me: it posited a form of brainwashing in which the brainwashed were still, to some degree, “themselves.”
When it came time to decide on the death penalty, though, the defense called a series of psychiatric experts who disagreed. Manson had brainwashed his followers, they said, and those followers couldn’t be culpable for the murders. LSD had given him a portal to the most labile parts of the subconscious. The scientists explained how acid could break down and reconstruct someone’s personality—how a sober “guide,” intended to lead someone peacefully through the many hours of an acid trip, could abuse the role, inserting violent ideals and beliefs into their minds. With repetition and reinforcement, these beliefs took root and flourished even when the followers were sober. Throw in other coercive techniques like sensory deprivation and hypnosis—both of which Manson embraced—and it was possible to rewrite someone’s moral code such that she acknowledged no such thing as right or wrong.
Dr. Joel Fort, a research psychiatrist who’d opened the nation’s first LSD treatment center, was one of the defense witnesses. He believed that Manson had used LSD to produce “a new pattern of behavior for the girls,” resulting in “a totally neutral system which saw death or killing in a completely different way than a normal person sees it,” free of “social concern, compassion, [and] moral values.”
In one of the most remarkable exchanges in the trial, Manson’s attorney, Irving Kanarek, asked Dr. Fort if “a school for crime” could exist, peopled with social rejects and fueled by LSD: “Let us say with your knowledge of LSD, you have a school for crime, and then you take them here and you program them to go out and commit a murder here, there, everywhere… Are you telling us that this can be done, that you ca
n capture the human mind by such a school for crime?”
“I am indeed telling you that,” Fort said. And he’d never seen anything like it. He compared it to a government’s ability, through the nebulous powers of patriotism, to condition soldiers to kill on its behalf.
What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case. It’s the one that still keeps me up at night. And while all this back-and-forth about LSD is provocative, it feels like an insufficient explanation.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi grapples with this unfathomable riddle: How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year? Bugliosi conceded that he still didn’t have the answer. “All these factors contributed to Manson’s control over others,” he writes,
but when you add them all up, do they equal murder without remorse? Maybe, but I tend to think there is something more, some missing link that enabled him to so rape and bastardize the minds of his killers that they would go against the most ingrained of all commandments, Thou shalt not kill, and willingly, even eagerly, murder at his command.
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 4
