It’s too often forgotten that the Family had taken another life by then. Gary Hinman, thirty-four, lived in a secluded house in Topanga Canyon, a hippie community about fifteen miles south of the Spahn Ranch. A soft-spoken Buddhist and music teacher, Hinman had treated Manson and his followers with a dignity that few afforded them. He hosted members of the Family for long stays in his home, and he was generous when they needed food or money.
In July 1969, the increasingly agitated Manson was convinced that Hinman had just come into an inheritance of some twenty thousand dollars. Seeing green, he ordered three of his followers—Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins, the last of whom would later participate in the Tate–LaBianca murders—to seize Hinman’s money by any means necessary.
The three showed up at Hinman’s on July 25. Manson was wrong, he said, there was no inheritance, but they refused to take him at his word. They tied him up and ransacked the place, but there was no cash to be found. Manson decided to see for himself, coming over with Bruce Davis, another Family member. But even Manson couldn’t extract anything from Hinman. Finally, incensed, Manson drew a saber from a sheath on his belt and cut Hinman’s ear in half. He and Davis left the house, but he told Beausoleil and the girls to stay until they found the money.
For two days, they battered and tortured Hinman, who insisted he had no inheritance. (They also sewed up his severed ear using dental floss.) By day three, Manson had had enough—he wanted Hinman dead. Over the phone, he ordered his followers to take care of it. Beausoleil tied Hinman up and stabbed him at least four times. As Hinman incanted a Buddhist prayer, Atkins and Brunner took turns holding a pillow over his face until he stopped breathing. Just as Manson would do in the Tate–LaBianca murders, he told his followers to leave signs implicating the Black Panthers. They dipped a rag in Hinman’s blood and smeared the words “political piggy” on the living room wall, surrounding it with bloody paw prints.
Some of Hinman’s friends grew concerned. On July 31, not having heard from him in six days, they drove over to check on him. They found his body and called the cops.
Charles Guenther and Paul Whiteley, homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, went to investigate. They spent five days searching the crime scene for evidence and conducting interviews. Although no one had seen or spoken to Hinman in the days before his body was discovered, it seemed that a woman had been in his house answering the phone during his captivity. At one point, when a friend of Hinman stopped by, she’d even answered his front door, holding a candle and explaining in a flimsy British accent that Hinman had gone to Colorado to see his parents.
The detectives issued an all-points bulletin for two vehicles missing from Hinman’s driveway: a Fiat station wagon and a VW microbus. Seven days after the body was discovered, the Fiat turned up on the side of a highway in San Luis Obispo, 189 miles north of L.A. Inside was Bobby Beausoleil, fast asleep. A state trooper took him into custody, and Guenther and Whiteley hurried to question him.
Beausoleil had concocted a story that blamed the Black Panthers for the murder, but he kept muddling the details. First he said that he hadn’t known Hinman at all; he’d bought the Fiat from a Black Panther a few days earlier. When the police told him they’d found the murder weapon in the Fiat’s tire well, he half-confessed: sure, he’d been in Hinman’s home, but he hadn’t killed the man. He and two women, neither of whom he would identify, had arrived at the house to find Hinman bloodied and beaten, complaining that a group of Black Panthers had robbed him. They’d stayed and nursed Hinman back to health. As a sign of gratitude, Hinman gave them the Fiat. The murder, Beausoleil speculated, must have occurred after he and the girls left the house—maybe the Panthers had returned seeking more money. So why was the knife in his car? He couldn’t explain. Nor could he say why he’d suddenly changed his story.
Guenther and Whiteley were confident they’d found their man. They charged Beausoleil with first-degree murder and booked him into the Los Angeles County jail on August 7. But they knew he had at least one accomplice: the girl who answered the phone and front door during Hinman’s captivity.
The next day, according to Bugliosi’s narrative, Manson decided it was time to kick off Helter Skelter, his all-out race war. He ordered the Tate–LaBianca murders, making sure, again, that his followers left signs at the crime scenes implicating the Black Panthers.
Anyone might wonder: How could the police fail to connect Hinman’s murder to the Tate–LaBianca killings, given their macabre similarities? It’s a good question—and the official answer, even when I first read it in Helter Skelter, stretched credulity. Part of the problem was a simple matter of jurisdiction. The Hinman murder occurred outside the city limits of Los Angeles, so it was an L.A. County Sheriff’s (LASO) case; the Tate–LaBianca murders were handled by the LAPD. The two police forces didn’t talk as much as you might expect. In fact, as Bugliosi tells it, it was their failure to communicate that led them to overlook Manson in the first place.
By August 10, the day after the LaBiancas had been murdered, Guenther and Whiteley had connected Hinman’s murder to Manson. They knew Bobby Beausoleil had spent time at the Spahn Ranch, living with a strange group under the control of an ex-con named Charlie. And, according to Bugliosi, the two detectives did the right thing: they rushed to the county morgue, where autopsies of the Cielo Drive murder victims were under way, and they reported their suspicions to the LAPD. A sergeant named Jess Buckles heard them out. Wasn’t it curious, they said, that both the Hinman and Tate murders involved brutal stabbings, plus some iteration of the word “Pig” smeared in the victims’ blood near their bodies? They explained that their suspect, Beausoleil, had been living out at a disused movie ranch with a band of hippies led by a guy who claimed to be Jesus Christ.
Their theory fell on deaf ears. Sergeant Buckles didn’t see the connection—especially not if hippies were involved. He told the LASO detectives that they were barking up the wrong tree; the LAPD was already pretty sure that the Tate murders were a drug deal gone awry.
And so, Bugliosi argued, the LASO lead withered on the vine, and shoddy police work kept the Manson Family at large for months longer than they otherwise would’ve been. They weren’t taken into custody until a pair of raids nabbed them on October 10 and 12. Even then, their arrest was for stolen vehicles: the police wouldn’t connect them to Tate–LaBianca for more than another month. While they were at large, Manson and the Family may have killed dozens more people, Bugliosi speculated.
In the official narrative, Manson had a lot of sheer dumb luck. Not only did he evade these early suspicions against him—he also survived, ostensibly on a technicality, the largest police raid in the history of California.
On August 16, 1969, LASO descended on the Spahn Ranch en masse. Just past six in the morning, as the sun was creeping up and most everyone was still asleep, more than one hundred officers swarmed the property, led by the organization’s elite SWAT team. Armed with handguns, AR-15 rifles, and tear gas, they were assisted by two helicopters, numerous ATVs, and a fleet of some thirty-five squad cars. Surrounding the ranch’s two hundred acres, they descended from five prearranged outposts with a show of force the likes of which no one in LASO had ever seen before. They arrested everyone in the Family—twenty-seven adults and seven juveniles. They confiscated seven stolen cars and a vast cache of weapons, including an automatic pistol and a submachine gun. One officer praised the raid’s military precision, telling me, “It was the most flawlessly executed operation I’d ever been involved in.”
The raid had nothing to do with the murders. In the preceding weeks, deputies had been keeping the ranch under close surveillance, perhaps even sending undercover agents to investigate. They suspected that Manson was running an auto-theft ring out of Spahn, stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies.
It would seem like a coup, wouldn’t it? Even if they had no knowledge of the murders, sheriffs had just picked up Manson and ever
yone involved with him on suspicion of crimes that were damning in their own right. Had the Family been formally charged, they would’ve been sitting in jail already when the cops realized they were behind the killings.
But the Family wasn’t charged. Despite the preponderance of evidence—the cars, the guns, the numerous sightings of Manson and his followers with stolen vehicles—the entire group was released three days after the raid, no questions asked. Bugliosi explained it in Helter Skelter: “They had been arrested on a misdated warrant.”
His book downplayed the size of the raid; you’d never know it was the biggest in the history of Los Angeles law enforcement at that time. He also took it as a given that Guenther and Whiteley, seasoned and widely respected detectives, would back away from a lead to the most prominent unsolved murder case in California history. It seemed to me that they wouldn’t do that unless they were told to.
I wanted to get the story straight from Guenther and Whiteley. What they told me was, at the very least, the story of an agonizing series of coincidences and near misses, a comedy of errors that had never been given a proper airing. At most, it was the germ of an extensive cover-up by LASO, which moved to conceal either its own ineptitude or something more sinister: the hand of a higher authority, warning that pursuing Manson would come with steep consequences.
“Leave a Sign”
Paul Fitzgerald, the defense attorney, gave me Charlie Guenther’s number. Guenther was the most honest cop he knew; when he’d taken the liberty of telling the retired detective about my research, Guenther had said he might be able to help me.
When I got Guenther on the phone, he already knew what he wanted to tell me—but he refused to say it. I had to come to his house, he said, more than a hundred miles away in Victorville, California. I tried to wrestle a hint out of him. Sounding exasperated, he said it had something to do with Bobby Beausoleil and “maybe a call that had been made.” After a pause, he added, “and the destruction of evidence.”
The very next day, I made the two-hour drive to Victorville. If you’re driving from L.A. to Vegas, it’s just about the last place to fill up your tank before you’re surrounded by the endless vastness of the Mojave Desert. The town is an oasis of man-made lakes and sprawling golf clubs, all catering to the community’s many retirees—among them, Charlie Guenther, who welcomed me into his new condo dressed in a white T-shirt and shorts. I sat on an overstuffed couch beneath a framed painting of a forlorn Jesus in prayer at Gethsemane. Guenther sank into a large recliner, though he was seldom relaxed enough to stay in it for long.
Guenther was famous among true-crime devotees—he’d become something of a staple in the genre, his skilled investigative work having solved a number of notable murders. His better-known cases included the Cotton Club murders and the 1958 killing of the author James Ellroy’s mother. Guenther never solved that crime, but Ellroy still hailed him, in My Dark Places, as one of the best homicide detectives ever to work in L.A. Most everyone who wrote about Guenther noted his penetrating blue eyes, his unruly mop of hair—now gone white—and his stocky build.
Listening to him talk, I could see why Guenther was so highly regarded—but that day he was also nervous, jumpy. He wouldn’t let me tape our conversation, saying that “smart cops” never allow themselves to be recorded. As the words came spilling out of him, I tried to get his every utterance on paper while appearing nonchalant, lest he become even more inhibited.
He remembered going to the Tate autopsies with his partner, Whiteley, to tell the investigators about the similarities between the Hinman murder and the Tate murders. The coroner, Thomas Noguchi, had already reached the same conclusion: they must be connected. “I know Charlie, I know,” Noguchi told him. “Same knife. Same wound. Same blood on the wall.” But the LAPD detectives weren’t nearly as receptive. They were “convinced it had something to do with narcotics,” Guenther said.
I turned the conversation to Bobby Beausoleil. The mere mention of his name launched Guenther out of his recliner: “He lies, and I can’t tell you how I know that.”
Of course he lies, I said. Didn’t all murderers?
“He called the ranch after he was arrested,” Guenther said, pacing in front of me. To his mind, it was this phone call that had initiated the Tate–LaBianca murders. “The sole motive for those murders was to get Bobby out of jail.”
I’d heard this before—the copycat theory of the murders. Bugliosi had discredited it, I reminded him. That name didn’t sit well with him, either.
“Arrogant son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Vince didn’t want anything to do with the Hinman case. Hinman was a nothing case. Vince didn’t want to prosecute it.”
So Guenther didn’t buy into the Helter Skelter motive? He absolutely didn’t, he said, sinking back into his recliner. He thought Bugliosi “made up” the motive to sell books. No one in law enforcement believed it, either, he added. As soon as the Family’s Linda Kasabian flipped and became a prosecution witness, the entire motive for the murders changed. Guenther slouched in his chair, his great paw of a hand rubbing his forehead.
When Beausoleil called the ranch from jail, according to Guenther “he said, ‘Tell Charlie I’ve been arrested for killing Hinman.’” Guenther was sure about this, because there was a recording of Beausoleil’s call. Knowing that he had accomplices in the Hinman murder, police had tapped the phone at the men’s jail and recorded the calls he made. On August 8, the day after he was booked, Beausoleil called the Spahn Ranch and told the person on the other end, allegedly Linda Kasabian, that he’d been arrested for Hinman’s murder. “I need help,” he was heard telling her. “Leave a sign.”
That night, Sharon Tate and her friends were killed, and Susan Atkins scrawled the word “Pig” in blood on the front door of the Cielo house, just as she’d done on the wall at Hinman’s. Guenther believed this was the “sign” Beausoleil referred to—Atkins hoped to exonerate Beausoleil, since he was in jail when the Tate–LaBianca murders had taken place. Manson’s followers were, in effect, imitating themselves on a more devastating scale just to free one of their own. After that, they could escape to the desert.
Essentially, the wiretap was the best evidence yet for the copycat theory of the murders, and Guenther had never told anyone about it. He was visibly anxious to get it off his chest after thirty years, sometimes shaking in his seat. But he worried that it would overturn the verdicts against the convicted killers. “I don’t want this reversed after all these years!” he said, pounding his fist on the arm of his chair.
Guenther’s intensity moved me—he seemed on the verge of tears. But I couldn’t figure out why he’d decided to reveal the recordings now, after all these decades. And why to me? Surely other journalists had sniffed around before. I asked if he had a copy of the tape. No such luck. Because the wiretap was illegal, his commanding officer, Captain George Walsh, had ordered him and Whiteley to turn over the recording; Walsh apparently destroyed it, or made sure that someone else did.
But if any of this was going into my Premiere story, Guenther didn’t want to go on the record alone about it. He needed someone else to say it with him, someone who could verify the tape’s authenticity—ideally, someone from the other side of law enforcement. He named Aaron Stovitz, who’d been Bugliosi’s coprosecutor for part of the trial. Stovitz had heard the tape. Guenther was sure of that—the detective had brought it to him before it was destroyed.
“Get Stovitz to say it,” he urged me, tears welling in his eyes again. “Say, Charlie Guenther gave me this reluctantly. Say I owned up after a long conversation and did it reluctantly. Ask him, how can it hurt? Promise me, promise me! I don’t want them all back out on the street, and I’m worried this will do it!”
I promised him. But I still didn’t understand why Walsh had destroyed the tape. Even if it were illegal, it so clearly solved the Tate–LaBianca murders—the day after they occurred, at that. “He said it would eliminate the narcotics angle,” Guenther told me.
That startled me. Why would Walsh, who wasn’t involved in the LAPD investigation, want them to pursue what he now knew was a false lead?
Talking to Guenther reminded me of something in an old issue of Rolling Stone. Aaron Stovitz had given an interview to the magazine in June 1970, right before the trial started. He mentioned exactly the phone call that Guenther had just told me about, though he’d couched it in more uncertain terms. Using the pseudonym “Porfiry,” and speaking in the present tense, Stovitz told Rolling Stone that Bobby Beausoleil “puts a phone call in at the ranch telling them that he was arrested there and telling them he hasn’t said anything”:
Now—this is only a supposition on my part, I don’t have any proof to support it—I suppose he, meaning Manson, said to himself, “How am I going to help my friend Beausoleil out? By showing that the actual murderer of Hinman is still at large. So I know that Melcher used to live in this house on Cielo Drive. ‘Go out there, Watson, with these girls and commit robbery and kill anyone that you see there. Don’t forget to leave’”—and this is very important because in the Hinman case they wrote POLITICAL PIGGY in blood. He said “Don’t forget to leave a sign.”
Given that Guenther had used that exact phrase—“leave a sign”—I was almost sure that none of this was a mere “supposition” on Stovitz’s part. But he’d never divulged how he knew about Beausoleil’s phone call. Would he admit to having heard the tape?
I doubted it. I’d interviewed Stovitz once already, and he was cagey. He’d said he was always convinced that the Tate–LaBianca murders were copycat crimes, but he wouldn’t say why. When I’d asked him why the case wasn’t prosecuted that way, he said it was because Bugliosi called the shots.
And sure enough, when I paid him a second visit, Stovitz was even more aloof. He denied ever having heard the Beausoleil tape. He’d heard “rumors” of it, he conceded, but never from Guenther. He dismissed me with a message: “Tell Charlie Guenther, Mr. Stovitz has a great deal of faith in you but unless you have some notes [it didn’t happen].”
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 15
