Howard was shocked. Here was a woman casually crowing about the biggest unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. On November 17, she made a hushed call from a pay phone to the Hollywood station of the LAPD, telling a detective that she knew who was responsible for the Tate–LaBianca murders.
That night, the LAPD sent two detectives to interview Howard at Sybil Brand. She convinced them easily of the veracity of her claims. Fearing for her safety, detectives had her moved to an isolated unit. The next morning, more detectives interviewed her, and that same day they brought their information to the district attorney, Evelle Younger. He assigned Aaron Stovitz and Vincent Bugliosi to prosecute the case. The Tate–LaBianca murders had been solved.
“Strong Client Control”
On the evening of November 19, Bugliosi attended a hastily convened meeting at the district attorney’s office. In attendance were his immediate superior, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Busch; Aaron Stovitz, also from the DA’s office; and, from the LAPD, Lieutenant Paul LePage and Sergeant Mike McGann, of the LaBianca and Tate investigative teams, respectively.
With the consent of the DA’s office, the LAPD wanted to cut a deal with Susan Atkins: she’d share what she knew about the murders in exchange for immunity. Bugliosi thought this was a grave error. Atkins, he reminded his colleagues, had described personally stabbing Sharon Tate to death and tasting her blood. She’d admitted stabbing other victims at the Tate house. She’d participated in the murder of Gary Hinman. And that was only what they’d heard so far—who knows what else she’d done? “We don’t give that gal anything!” he claimed to have said.
But the LAPD was adamant. For months, they’d been under enormous pressure to solve the case. The press had derided them constantly for their failure. Now they could announce their success with a splashy press conference and rush the case to a grand jury. Bugliosi countered that they were getting ahead of themselves. They didn’t have a case yet, only a solid lead.
The group reached a compromise: instead of total immunity, Atkins would be offered a second-degree-murder plea, sparing her the death penalty while ensuring she wouldn’t walk free. But, as Bugliosi acknowledged in Helter Skelter, they didn’t work out “the precise terms” of this offer. One of the most pressing concerns went unaddressed: Would Atkins have to testify at the trial—before the public, and Manson himself—or only for the grand jury?
However Bugliosi claimed to have felt about Atkins, the district attorney’s office was desperate to secure her cooperation; without it, they weren’t sure they could indict Manson and the other killers. A lot depended on her reliability and consistency. What if she changed her story, which, so far, they’d only heard from her cellmate? And even more was riding on her defense attorney—if he didn’t like the deal, he could prove to be a major obstacle. Rather than risk that, the DA’s office decided they’d do better to replace him with someone guaranteed to play by their rules—and someone who could make sure Atkins said the right thing at the right time.
Atkins’s attorney was Gerald Condon, a lawyer in private practice who’d been legally appointed by a judge to represent her in the Hinman murder. Normally, the court would’ve assigned her someone from the public defender’s office, but they couldn’t do that here—Beausoleil, her accomplice in the Hinman killing, was already represented by a public defender, and in such cases the court had to avoid a potential conflict of interest. So Condon it was.
Condon was appointed on November 12. Two weeks later, on November 26, he was out.
What happened? In the LASO archives, I found a seven-page memo that gave me a good lead. In an entry for November 20—the day after the DA’s office and the LAPD had agreed to attempt a deal with Atkins—the document notes a never-before-reported meeting between LASO officers, the LAPD, and “Mr. Compton and Mr. Stovitz of the DA’s office.” The men discussed the fact that “the Atkins woman would be in court on 11-26-69 for the Superior Court arraignment, at which time it was stated that there would be a change of her counsel and Mr. Caballero would be designated as her counsel” (emphasis added). There’s no mention of Condon’s or Atkins’s consent to this change. And it was presented as a fait accompli. This meeting came six days before the hearing in question—and yet all parties involved were already certain of the outcome. How?
A second, less ambiguous document turned up in the files of LAPD lieutenant Paul LePage. It was a three-page summary of his investigative work on the LaBianca murders. A section on Susan Atkins’s court appearances described the same November 20 meeting in more detail: “It was decided that because of the gravity of the case and the importance of Atkins’s information and cooperation, that her attorney be the type who had ‘strong client control.’ Deputy District Attorney Fitts made several inquiries and it was decided that Condon might not have the necessary control.”
So, behind Atkins’s and Condon’s backs, Fitts “recommended Dick Caballero as an attorney who had good client control and would properly represent his client.” Fitts got in touch with Judge Mario Clinco, who was overseeing the case, “and arrangements were made for Caballero to be appointed as Atkins’s attorney of record at her felony arraignment. This was accomplished.”
“This was accomplished”—yes, it was, with no small contribution from Fitts, the same DA who’d inserted himself in the Beausoleil trial.
According to the minutes of Atkins’s November 26 arraignment, the judge assigned Caballero to the case right then and there. No mention was made of Condon’s removal—or how or why it occurred. The full transcript of the hearing has vanished from the archives of the Los Angeles Superior Court. The court’s spokesperson told me that a thorough search of the archive produced no results.
I called Condon to ask him about his removal from the case. He confirmed that he’d been replaced against his wishes—and his client’s—and that Judge Clinco had never given him a reason.
“Whatever was going through Clinco’s mind, I don’t know,” Condon told me. “Atkins did ask that I stay on.” He remembered being “temporarily distressed” by Clinco’s action, but he never complained to the court about it. Once the news came that Atkins was involved in the Tate–LaBianca murders, his wife told him she’d leave him if he tried to represent her again.
That was that. The LAPD and the district attorney’s office had quietly decided that their star witness needed a certain lawyer. Whether she or her attorney wanted it or not, they “accomplished” it.
“Improper and Unethical”
In addition to his much vaunted “client control,” the replacement lawyer, Richard Caballero, had another quality that endeared him to the DA’s office: he’d worked there himself for eight years. As a prosecutor, Caballero had won five death-penalty convictions, and he was still close with his former colleagues. Bugliosi, Compton, and the others could trust him. Now all he had to do was get Atkins to take the deal. She didn’t have to stay under his thumb forever, just long enough to make it through the grand jury and bring on the indictments they needed.
We’ll never know exactly what Caballero promised Atkins, or how he laid out the terms of the deal: unlike most agreements of this nature, hers was never formalized in writing, never marked by her signature. Whatever he said, it was enough to satisfy the higher-ups at the LAPD and the DA’s office. On December 1, they were finally ready to tell the public: they’d solved the case of the century.
That was the day Police Chief Edward Davis got his big press conference: sturdy podium, cameras rolling, hundreds of stunned and eager reporters jostling for space. Reading from prepared remarks, Davis doled out the details sparingly. He didn’t even provide Manson’s name, announcing that “legal restrictions prohibit the revelation of further information at this time.” Pressed for more information about the suspects, he said only that they were part of a “roving band of hippies” that called itself “The Family” and were led by a man they called “Jesus.”
Davis had to be judicious, or at least appear to be. A thorough a
ccount of the murders could taint the jury pool. The next day, however, an endless trough of specifics came flooding out, provided by two unassailable, on-the-record sources: Atkins’s new attorney, Richard Caballero, and his law partner, Paul Caruso.
Acting as no less than a bullhorn for the DA’s office, Caballero and Caruso—the latter a well-known mob lawyer and a longtime friend of Los Angeles DA Evelle Younger—outlined what would become, in essence, the prosecution’s case for murder against the Manson Family.
Standing on the steps of the Santa Monica Courthouse, Caballero told gathered reporters that Atkins was a follower of Charles Manson, and that she’d been “at the scene of the Tate slayings, the Hinman murder, and the killings of the LaBiancas.” Atkins was under Manson’s “hypnotic spell,” but she had “nothing to do with the murders”—seemingly his only effort at exonerating her amid the onslaught of grim particulars. He added that Manson called himself “both God and the Devil,” and that the police had told him “that Atkins and the others were directed by Manson to go to both the Hinman house and the Tate house.” Atkins would “tell her complete story” to the grand jury later that week.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi claimed that he’d come across Caballero’s comments in the evening paper, and that was the only way his office learned that Atkins had accepted their deal. He never even tried to explain why it wasn’t in writing or why Caballero wouldn’t have alerted him more formally.
Over the next few days, Caballero and Caruso kept talking to the press—and talking, and talking. In case there was lingering ambiguity, they described Manson’s dictatorial methods. They offered a timeline of events for the nights of the murders, including the order of the deaths. They tossed in sordid details, describing the killers’ dress code and noting that, after killing the LaBiancas, they’d helped themselves “to a snack from the icebox.”
It was a four-day fusillade of specificity. Finally, on December 4, the president of the Los Angeles County Bar had had enough. “Bar Chief Scores Atkins Attorney over Tate Comments,” read the Santa Monica Evening Outlook’s front page, quoting him as he accused Caballero and Caruso of “entirely improper and unethical” conduct by “revealing vital facts about the Sharon Tate murder case from the viewpoint of Miss Atkins.”
But the scrutiny didn’t last. Amid the swell of coverage on the murders, no one seemed to mind the lawyers’ leaking. In a passing remark to the Los Angeles Times on the day before Atkins’s grand jury testimony, Caballero more or less admitted that he wasn’t acting in his client’s best interest, saying he was “gambling that her voluntary testimony might save her from the gas chamber”—“gambling” and “might” being the operative words.
Bugliosi and his team had essentially arranged for the defense lawyers to taint the jury on the prosecution’s behalf: everyone in Los Angeles was suddenly an expert on the Manson Family. Meanwhile, on December 4, as they continued their press tour, Caballero and Caruso met with the DAs to finalize their “deal.” Bugliosi described it as “excellent”; it was, in fact, nonexistent. As all the parties present would later admit during the death-penalty phase of the trial, nothing was ever formalized or signed.
The next day, Atkins testified before the grand jury, as promised. The papers reported that Manson, Atkins, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Tex Watson had been indicted on seven counts of murder after only twenty minutes of deliberation.
Soon after, Caballero and Caruso walked away from the case, richer and more famous, with no apparent regrets. A reporter asked Bugliosi if he would have gotten the indictments without Atkins’s cooperation. He answered, “Do the French drink wine?”
The Shape-Shifting Deal
When Bugliosi made his “deal” with Caballero, he knew full well that Atkins was an unstable witness and a murderer. He needed her to get indictments for the other members of the Family, but he also needed a pretext to back away from her after she’d served her purpose. It wouldn’t look good if he could only score convictions by easing up on one of the killers. His reversal would be a lot easier since the deal wasn’t on paper, but even so, he’d have to provide some explanation if and when the prosecution parted ways with her.
Before Bugliosi put Atkins in front of the grand jury, he approved an odd request from her lawyers: to have her removed from jail and brought to their offices in Beverly Hills for a taped interview. In Helter Skelter, calling the arrangement “unusual” but “not unprecedented,” Bugliosi claimed that his team went along with it because they thought Atkins would speak more freely away from her fellow inmates. But it also set up a chain of events that allowed the prosecutor to rid himself of her.
In the comfort of Caballero’s office, Atkins spoke on tape for two and a half hours about her role in the murders. Listening the next day, Bugliosi noticed that she’d changed her story. At first, she’d told her cellmates that she’d stabbed Sharon Tate. Now she claimed that she couldn’t bring herself to do it, and instead held Tate by the arms while Watson stabbed her. That’s what she told the grand jury, too: that she didn’t kill Sharon Tate. But the discrepancy wasn’t a problem for Bugliosi as long as he got his indictments.
Throughout Helter Skelter, Bugliosi inadvertently proved how malleable the Atkins deal was, describing it in different terms at different times. Early in the narrative, he said that all she had to do was testify truthfully to the grand jury and cooperate with authorities; she’d never have to testify against her codefendants at the actual trial. In exchange, the prosecution would consider not asking for the death penalty.
But after the grand jury, the deal changed. Suddenly, she did have to testify against the others. Without her, “we still didn’t have a case,” Bugliosi wrote. Later still, he said that the prosecution was “stuck” with Atkins on the stand because of the deal, bemoaning the fact that he’d made an agreement with a killer.
I tend to think this is all rhetorical hand-wringing—a way of upping the stakes in his book when really he knew that Atkins was never going to take the stand.
Caballero, in fact, was doing everything in his power to lead his client away from testifying. He allowed Atkins to take visits from her former friends in the Family, who came bearing messages from Manson. The lawyer knew full well that, given enough exposure to her former lifestyle, Atkins was likely to return to Manson’s fold and refute her grand jury testimony. It worked. One day, she called Caballero and told him that she refused to testify at the trial. It was her first step toward formally undoing everything—except the indictments, which couldn’t be undone. Bugliosi fretted that he’d lost his “star witness.”
But inwardly, he must have been pleased. Although he omitted it from his book, he was already in negotiations with the attorney of Linda Kasabian, a far more sympathetic witness, to cut a deal and take Atkins’s place at the trial. Of course, had Atkins’s attorneys been independently appointed, they would’ve reminded the prosecution of the terms of her deal, which precluded her testimony at the trial. Now Bugliosi could claim that she’d violated the deal and would lose her security against the death penalty.
Atkins kept unraveling. On March 5, 1970, in the attorney’s room at the Central County Jail, Caballero presided over an hour-long reunion between his client and Manson. He described it as “joyous,” adding that Atkins and Manson “both burst into laughter when their eyes met for the first time in five months.” The meeting was only possible because Judge William Keene had granted Manson the right to represent himself—an allowance that shocked the courtroom. As his own attorney, Manson was entitled to meet with his jailed codefendants on the pretext of interviewing them as possible witnesses in the case against him. Among his first requested interviews was the woman responsible for his indictment: Susan Atkins.
After their meeting, a reporter asked Atkins if Manson had ordered her to “change the story she related to the grand jury.” Atkins responded just as Caballero and the prosecution always knew she would: “Charlie doesn’t give orders. Charli
e doesn’t command”—contradicting the thrust of her grand jury testimony, of course.
The day after the meeting, Atkins fired Caballero and Caruso. She announced that she was recanting her grand jury testimony and formally declined to testify for the state. That same day, Judge Keene revoked Manson’s right to represent himself, arguing that he had filed too many “outlandish” and “nonsensical” motions.
Caballero later testified that, after he was fired, he didn’t check in with the prosecution about the status of Atkins’s deal. But in an interview with the Hollywood Citizen News several weeks after his firing, he made the status of the deal crystal clear: it didn’t exist. “Susan Atkins’ former attorney, Richard Caballero, said that no deal had been made which caused her to testify before the grand jury,” the paper reported.
The “excellent deal” that Bugliosi had written of was no deal at all. Its nonexistence has gone unnoticed all these years. Who cares about the legal vagaries of a confessed killer like Susan Atkins? But without this hoax of a deal—and the lawyer swap that enabled it—Manson and his followers may never have been indicted, and the reigning narrative of Manson as an all-controlling cult leader may never have come out.
Gary Fleischman, Linda Kasabian’s attorney—he now goes by Gary Fields—told me that he was convinced the DA was “instrumental in getting Dick Caballero appointed,” and that Bugliosi never had any intention of keeping his deal with Atkins. “They used [her] to get an indictment,” he said, “and then they dumped her because they couldn’t use her at trial because she was dirty.” The whole thing “smelled to high heaven,” he continued. “Caballero and Caruso got away with fucking murder. They sold her down the river.” It was a stunning assessment from Fields. No one had benefited more from Caballero and Caruso’s dirty dealings than his client.
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 25
