If the CIA wanted a presence in the Los Angeles DA’s office, Younger didn’t strike me as someone who’d put his foot down. Nor did his second in command, Lynn “Buck” Compton, who’d been an LAPD detective before getting his law degree and joining the DA’s office. Compton was the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And he’d been a World War II hero—his exploits with the parachute infantry regiment, the Easy Company, were chronicled in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.
I found a letter that Compton wrote to Herrmann on March 14, 1969, five months before the Tate–LaBianca murders, thanking him for “obtaining good advance intelligence… on subversives and militants.” The two had served together on the LAPD in the fifties, so I wasn’t surprised that they knew each other. I was surprised that Compton had written a note that all but proved that he and Herrmann were operating beyond their remit for the State of California. Neither man had any business gathering “advance intelligence” on “subversives and militants”—or on anyone else, for that matter. The DA’s office was supposed to prosecute crimes, not prevent them. And Herrmann, in his strenuous correction to the London Observer article, had stressed that his role was “nonoperational.”
Coda: Front-Page News
I read about CHAOS and COINTELPRO until I must’ve sounded, to all my friends, like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, someone who might go off on a long-winded tangent about the threats of the deep state. But the fact that the CIA has become an all-purpose scapegoat—the preeminent symbol of global power run amok—doesn’t change the fact that its abuses of power in the 1960s were legitimate and myriad. If anything, these abuses were so gross that they’ve lent authority to any and every claim against federal intelligence agencies: if the CIA and the FBI are capable of killing American citizens in cold blood, often in elaborate schemes, what aren’t they capable of?
There had been a day in the summer of ’69 when the major elements from my reporting collided on a single page of the Los Angeles Times. An August 12 article about the DA’s argument in the UCLA Panther murder trial (“Panther Killings Result of Power Play, Jury Told”) ran next to a piece on the LAPD’s theory that the LaBianca killers were imitating the people who’d murdered the Tate victims the night before (“Police See ‘Copycat Killer’ in Slaying of Los Feliz Couple”). The irony was that both of these stories were wrong. The LaBianca murders weren’t the work of a “copycat killer,” and the police should’ve known by then; the real “power play” at UCLA was perpetrated by the FBI. I was tantalized by the juxtaposition of the two items: by how much of the “news” in them was flawed when it was first reported, and by how much of it might be flawed still.
Manson’s race-war motive dovetailed almost too perfectly with the goals of these federal agencies and the DA’s office. In programs like CHAOS and COINTELPRO—and in people like Reeve Whitson, William Herrmann, and Buck Compton—I saw the potential for a major turn in my reporting, even as I tried to accept that so much of what they did would always be untraceable.
Still, if nefarious plots from the CIA and FBI had eventually exploded into public view, I thought I should at least try to see where my hunches led me. What I wanted to answer was this: How did a body like the Los Angeles DA’s office exert its political force? If it wanted to be of service to a higher agency, like the FBI or the CIA, would that be easily accomplished, or was I veering too much into the realm of the paranoiac?
I didn’t have to look very far to see how the DA’s office wielded its power. One glaring example came at the start of the Manson trial, when, without anyone being the wiser, the DA’s office conspired to make sure that its narrative for the Tate–LaBianca murders was the only one that anyone ever heard.
8
The Lawyer Swap
“My Hands Were Tied”
When it came to prosecuting the Manson Family, the Los Angeles DA’s office left nothing to chance. I’d already seen that Vincent Bugliosi had no problem getting his witnesses to lie on the stand, and that Deputy DA Buck Compton gathered intelligence on “subversives and militants.” What I found next was evidence of more pervasive, top-down interference by the DA’s office, which took extraordinary measures to control, and likely in part to fabricate, the story of the Manson murders.
The first signs of misconduct came during the trial of Bobby Beausoleil. He was accused of murdering Gary Hinman, the musician who’d been found stabbed to death just days before the Tate–LaBianca murders.
For reasons never disclosed by Bugliosi, the DA’s office tried Beausoleil separately from the rest of the Family. As I suggested earlier, it made sense to try all three of the murder cases together—Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca. Law enforcement had connected the crimes. Uniting them under a single trial would’ve made it easier to convict Manson of conspiracy, since he’d helped torture Hinman and had ordered all three sets of slaughters.
And yet they kept the cases separate. I thought I knew why. If they’d thrown Hinman in with Tate–LaBianca, the resulting testimony would have revealed that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office (LASO) knew as early as August 10 that the Manson Family was responsible for all the murders. Remember, LASO detectives Charlie Guenther and Paul Whiteley broke the Tate case when a recorded phone call from one of Hinman’s murderers, Beausoleil, clued them in to a link with the Tate murders. The only way to hide this early break was to try the Hinman murder case separately.
Beausoleil went to trial on November 12, 1969. The prosecutor was Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, who confirmed to me that the case had been tried separately under very suspicious circumstances. He had orders, he said, to keep Charles Manson and the Family out of the trial. That meant that scoring a conviction against Beausoleil would be an uphill battle—since, after all, without Manson’s instructions, he may never have murdered Hinman.
Still, Ross felt he had no choice but to obey. “My hands were tied,” he told me. When we first spoke, in 2000, he’d recently retired after thirty years in the DA’s office, and the case sounded fresh in his mind. He remembered “the orders from on high: don’t mention the name of Manson or these other people.”
Ross later learned that his superiors at the DA’s office, and his own investigating detectives, Guenther and Whiteley, had withheld all evidence related to the Manson Family from him to keep their secret. “I was pissed when I learned later that they had other evidence,” Ross said. “I [was] closed out of the thing. I really don’t know why they did that.”
He could still recall the day the case first landed on his desk, in early September 1969. He was just back from a vacation. The horrors of the Tate–LaBianca murders, then only a month old, still dominated the news. The killers remained at large, and no one even knew who they were. Ross was struck by reports that they’d left the bloody word “Pig” in conspicuous areas of both the Tate and LaBianca homes. His Hinman murder scene featured such writing, too. He took one look at the case and immediately connected it to the unsolved Tate–LaBianca murders. “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to,” he said.
He called in Guenther and Whiteley to ask them about it. “And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, it’s not related. No, [we] can’t find any connection between the two.’” He still sounded bruised when he added, “Now I think they were lying through their teeth.”
Guenther denied the allegation to me, but I found it believable, given what he’d told me about his investigation. And if it’s true, it shows that by September 1969, he and Whiteley were conspiring to hide what they’d learned about the Manson Family’s role in the murders.
Since Ross wasn’t allowed to link Beausoleil to the Family, his case was mostly circumstantial and, by his own admission, weak. After just two days of testimony, the trial was more or less wrapped up. Beausoleil’s defense attorney, Leon Salter, didn’t call a single witness. When the defense rested, Ross’s superiors feared they might lose the trial; they needed more evidence. At the last minu
te, they decided to take a gamble.
Just before the attorneys delivered their closing arguments, David Fitts—the head deputy DA of Santa Monica, and Ross’s supervisor—went into a closed meeting with the judge, who emerged ten minutes later to announce that the trial would be delayed for five days to accommodate a new witness for the prosecution: Danny DeCarlo, the Straight Satans bike-gang member who’d moved to the Spahn Ranch that spring of 1969.
The judge’s action here was unprecedented, or close to it. For one thing, the two lawyers who’d just rested their cases, Ross and Salter, had no say in it. Plus, as a matter of course, trials are almost never reopened after the defense has rested; it risks prejudicing the jury.
When I reached Salter on the phone, he was still incensed by the choice. “For the judge to discuss the case without the opposing attorney being present is just unheard of,” he told me. “There was just something rotten about it… I never reported it to [the] state bar, which I’ll always regret.” In the trial transcript, Salter made his objections plain. “It is shocking,” he told the judge, “that when you are in the middle of a trial, where this young man can end up with a life imprisonment, that the District Attorney… has the audacity to talk about this case without my being present.”
You might think that Ross wouldn’t have minded the intervention so much—Fitts was his boss, after all, and they were both angling for Beausoleil’s conviction. But Ross bristled at having been excluded, too. In his thirty years as a DA, he told me, he’d never been left out of a meeting about his own witness lineup.
Ross felt he had no choice but to put DeCarlo on the stand. “That was the first time in my whole career where I was actually ordered to use a witness,” Ross said. The decision came from the highest levels of the DA’s office. Fitts was taking orders from someone. “My best estimate,” Ross said, “would be Buck Compton.”
Ross thought DeCarlo lacked credibility. The biker, already a convicted felon, had decided to testify only because he was facing new charges for marijuana possession and having stolen a motorcycle engine. He was, to use Ross’s word, a snitch, and it was impossible to say if he was telling the truth or not. “DeCarlo was simply amoral,” Ross said. “He could have said whatever he wanted to say.” And getting something useful out of DeCarlo on the stand would be no mean feat, because Ross still wasn’t allowed to introduce anything about Manson or the Family, even though his new witness was a known associate of theirs.
Once he was sworn in, DeCarlo relayed the story of the Hinman stabbing. He claimed he was telling it exactly as he’d heard it from Beausoleil himself. He even included the parts where a man named Charlie, who lived at the Spahn Ranch, cut Hinman’s ear off with “a long sword,” and later ordered Beausoleil to kill Hinman, telling him, “You know what to do.” But he never gave Charlie’s full name.
Then came Salter’s cross-examination.
“This person Charlie that you referred to in your testimony,” he said to DeCarlo. “Were you aware of this person Charlie’s full name?”
“Charles Manson,” DeCarlo said. It was the first time the name had been uttered in the whole trial—on the last day of testimony.
That was November 24. Outside the courtroom, police and district attorneys were finally making headway on the Tate–LaBianca crimes. Like Ross, Salter knew enough to suspect a link. The prosecution’s sudden addition of DeCarlo only encouraged those suspicions. Salter knew that police had questioned DeCarlo about the Tate murders, and he intended to let the jury know it, too.
Manuel Gutierrez, an LAPD officer who’d been the first to hear DeCarlo’s story, took the stand to lend the biker some credibility. Salter tried to get the information out of him. “Sir,” he asked, “you were investigating the Tate murder case at that time, were you not?”
Ross objected; the court sustained.
“Your Honor, may I be heard on this?” Salter said. At the bench, out of earshot from the jury, Salter argued that the jurors should know that DeCarlo was connected to the unsolved Tate murders. “I think we can prove [Gutierrez] was interviewing [DeCarlo] with regard to the Tate murder case,” he said. “If it was a small case, fine, but he is investigating a case in which there has been so much publicity, and they are rather anxious, I imagine, to find out who did it.”
But the judge allowed no further questions on the topic, and that was the last anyone heard of a potential connection to the Tate murders.
Ironically, the addition of DeCarlo did nothing to help the prosecution. The jurors didn’t trust him any more than Ross did. The trial ended in a hung jury. Thanks to Ross’s candor, it is clear that the lack of evidence could be blamed squarely on the higher-ups in the DA’s office: they needed to cover up Guenther and Whiteley’s early knowledge of the Manson Family as the Tate–LaBianca murderers.
“Warm and Sticky and Nice”
As they tailored the Hinman trial to suit the needs of the state, Buck Compton and Vincent Bugliosi were also behind the scenes of the Tate–LaBianca case. The DA’s office knew it needed a momentous conviction, a sense of justice befitting the crime of the century. And Bugliosi, who aspired to power and celebrity, saw how much he could gain from some good publicity here. His office needed to control the narrative from the start, whether they had the evidence to back it up or not.
Even in clear-cut circumstances, a criminal trial is a messy, protracted affair—and once the verdict comes in, all the particularities fade from the public mind. In the fifty years since Manson and his followers were convicted, the details have become largely irrelevant. If people recall any aspect of the trial, it’s usually the testimony of Linda Kasabian, the state’s star witness. She’d served as a lookout and a driver for the Family during both nights of murders. Granted immunity, Kasabian was able to describe the crimes and the inner workings of the Family in nauseating detail, clinching the case against Manson. And while many observers weren’t pleased that an accomplice to the murders would walk free, Kasabian took pains to appear more honorable than the others. She showed remorse; she emphasized that she hadn’t participated in any of the violence.
What hardly anyone remembers is that Kasabian wasn’t the first one in the Family to get a deal from the prosecutors. Before her was Susan Atkins, the woman who’d led the police to break the case—and who was eventually convicted along with the other killers, spending the rest of her life in prison before her death in 2009. Before Kasabian flipped, Atkins, an unrepentant killer, was the foundation for the LAPD’s case, and for the prosecution that followed.
To pursue the conviction of Manson, the prosecution first had to bring their charges before a grand jury. They relied strongly on Atkins’s testimony there—it was instrumental in securing the first-degree murder indictments against Manson and five others, including herself. In short, it was her story that made Bugliosi’s famous trial possible.
But I found two memos indicating that Atkins was improperly obtained as a witness. Before she or any other Manson followers had been charged, prosecutors colluded with a Superior Court judge to have her legally appointed defense attorney replaced by a former deputy DA who would do their bidding. Her story, sanctioned and tweaked by the DA’s office and her planted defense attorney, was based on lies. The entire narrative put before that grand jury should be reconsidered.
It started with the end of the Family. About a month after the Tate–LaBianca murders that would bring them to infamy, they fled the Spahn Ranch; Manson believed the police were closing in on them. (He also feared retaliation from the Black Panthers, having mistakenly believed, as discussed in the last chapter, that he’d murdered one—Bernard Crowe, who was neither a Panther nor dead.) He resettled his clan deep in Death Valley, at an adjoining pair of remote, barren ranches called Myers and Barker. There they sustained themselves through petty crimes and an auto-theft ring. It was this last that brought them to the attention of Inyo County law enforcement, who tracked them to their compound and captured them in raids over two nights in mid-October 1
969.
In Independence, California, the group of twenty-some bedraggled hippies sat in the cramped county jail. LASO detectives Guenther and Whiteley drove 225 miles to the dusty desert town to seek out a possible witness in the Hinman murder. You may remember her name: Kitty Lutesinger, Bobby Beausoleil’s girlfriend, the same witness the detectives had seemingly deliberately failed to track down months earlier.
Lutesinger’s parents had called the detectives to say that their daughter was in custody in Independence. When Guenther and Whiteley found her, she told them that Susan Atkins had boasted of torturing and finally killing Hinman with Beausoleil over two nights. The story aligned with what they’d already heard. They asked the Inyo County sheriff to take them to Atkins herself.
Atkins agreed to speak to the detectives without an attorney present. They told her that her fingerprints had been found at the Hinman crime scene and that Beausoleil had already ratted on her—both lies, but they got her talking about the crime. Atkins admitted to having held Hinman while Beausoleil stabbed him, but she claimed she never hurt him. She was booked on a first-degree-murder charge and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, in downtown Los Angeles.
Atkins’s cellmate was a longtime con artist and call girl who went by Ronnie Howard. The two became fast friends. Almost immediately, Atkins was telling Howard and another inmate, Virginia Graham, all about her role in the Tate–LaBianca murders. She had personally stabbed Sharon Tate to death, she bragged, as Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby. After Tate died, Atkins said she’d tasted the dead actress’s blood; it was “warm and sticky and nice.”
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 24
