Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (22 page)

It looked bad, and the detectives left it at that. Although privately they were inclined to accept DeCarlo’s tale, suspecting, however, that although he probably had not taken part in the murder, he still knew more than he was telling, it gave them some additional leverage to try and get what they wanted.

T
hey wanted two things.

Q.
“Anybody left up at Spahn Ranch that knows you?”

 

A.
“Not that I know of. I don’t know who’s up there. And I don’t want to go up there to find out. I don’t want nothing to do with the place.”

 

Q.
“I want to look around there. But I need a guide.”

 

Danny didn’t volunteer.

They made the other request straight out.

Q.
“Would you be willing to testify?”

 

A.
“
No, sir!
”

 

There were two charges pending against him, they reminded him. On the stolen motorcycle engine, “Maybe we can get it busted down to a lesser charge. Maybe we can go so far as to get it knocked off. As far as the federal thing is concerned, I don’t know how much weight we can push on that. But here again we can try.”

A.
“If you try for me, that’s fine. That’s all I can ask of you.”

 

If it came down to being a witness or going to jail—

DeCarlo hesitated. “Then when
he
gets out of jail—”

Q.
“He isn’t going to get out of jail on no first degree murder beef when you’ve got over five victims involved. If Manson was the guy that was in on the Tate murder. We don’t know that for a fact yet.

 

We’ve got a great deal of information that way.”

A.
“There’s also a reward involved in that.”

 

Q.
“Yes, there is. Quite a bit of a reward. Twenty-five grand. Not to say that one guy is going to get it, but even split that’s a hell of a piece of cash.”

 

A.
“I could send my boy through military school with that.”

 

Q.
“Now, what do you think, would you be willing to testify against this group of people?”

 

A.
“He’s going to be sitting there looking at me, Manson is, isn’t he?”

 

Q.
“If you go to trial and testify, he is. Now, how scared of Manson are you?”

 

A.
“I’m scared shitless. I’m petrified of him. He wouldn’t hesitate for a second. If it takes him ten years, he’d find that little boy of mine and carve him to pieces.”

 

Q.
“You give that motherfucker more credit than he deserves. If you think Manson is some kind of a god that is going to break out of jail and come back and murder everybody that testified against him—”

 

But it was obvious DeCarlo didn’t put that past Manson.

Even if he remained in jail, there were the others.

A.
“What about Clem? Have you got him locked up?”

 

Q.
“Yeah. Clem is sitting in the cooler up in Independence, with Charlie.”

 

A.
“What about Tex and Bruce?”

 

Q.
“They’re both out. Bruce Davis, the last I heard, sometime earlier this month, was in Venice.”

 

A.
“Bruce is down in Venice, huh? I’ll have to watch myself…One of my club brothers said he spotted a couple of the girls down in

 

Venice, too.”

 

The detectives didn’t tell DeCarlo that when Davis was last seen, on November 5, it was in connection with another death, the “suicide” of Zero. By this time LAPD had learned that Zero—aka Christopher Jesus, t/n John Philip Haught—had been arrested in the Barker raid. Earlier, in going through some photographs, DeCarlo had identified “Scotty” and “Zero” as two young boys from Ohio, who had been with the Family for a short time but “didn’t fit in.” One of the detectives had remarked, “Zero’s no longer with us.”

 

A.
“What do you mean he’s ‘no longer with us’?”

 

Q.
“He’s among the dead.”

 

A.
“
Oh, shit, is he?
”

 

Q.
“Yeah, he got a little too high one day and he was playing Russian roulette. He parked a bullet in his head.”

 

While the detectives had apparently bought the story of Zero’s death, as related by Bruce Davis and the others, Danny didn’t, not for a minute.

No, Danny didn’t want to testify.

The detectives left it at that. There was still time for him to change his mind. And, after all, they now had Ronnie Howard. They let Danny go, after making arrangements for him to call in the next day.

One of the detectives commented, after Danny had left but while the tape was still on, “I kind of feel like we’ve done a day’s work.”

The DeCarlo interview had lasted over seven hours. It was now past midnight on Tuesday, November 18, 1969. I was already asleep, unaware that in a few hours, as a result of a meeting between the DA and his staff that morning, I would be handed the job of prosecuting the Tate-LaBianca killers.

By now the reader knows a great deal more about the Tate-LaBianca murders than I did on the day I was assigned that case. In fact, since large portions of the foregoing story have not been made public before this, the reader is an insider in a sense highly unusual in a murder case. And, in a way, I’m a newcomer, an intruder. The sudden switch from an unseen background narrator to a very personal account is bound to be a surprise. The best way to soften it, I suspect, would be to introduce myself; then, when we’ve got that out of the way, we’ll resume the narrative together. This digression, though unfortunately necessary, will be as brief as possible.

A conventional biographical sketch before the Manson trial would probably have read more or less as follows: Vincent T. Bugliosi, age thirty-five, Deputy District Attorney, Los Angeles, California. Born Hibbing, Minnesota. Graduate Hollywood High School. Attended the University of Miami on a tennis scholarship, B.A. and B.B.A. degrees. Deciding on the practice of law, attended UCLA, LL.B. degree, president graduating class 1964. Joined the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office same year. Has tried a number of highly publicized murder cases—Floyd-Milton, Perveler-Cromwell, etc.—obtaining convictions in all. Has tried 104 felony jury trials, losing only one. In addition to his duties as deputy DA, Bugliosi is a professor of criminal law at Beverly School of Law, Los Angeles. Served as technical consultant and edited the scripts of two pilot films for Jack Webb’s TV series “The D.A.” Series star Robert Conrad patterned his part after the young prosecutor. Married. Two children.

That’s probably about how it would read, yet it tells nothing about how I feel toward my profession, which is even more important.

“
The primary duty of a lawyer engaged in public prosecution is not to convict, but to see that justice is done…
”

Those words are from the old Canon of Ethics of the American Bar Association. I’d thought of them often during the five years I’d been a deputy DA. In a very real sense they had become my personal credo. If, in a given case, a conviction is justice, so be it. But if it is not, I want no part of it.

For far too many years the stereotyped image of the prosecutor has been either that of a right-wing, law-and-order type intent on winning convictions at any cost, or a stumbling, bumbling Hamilton Burger, forever trying innocent people, who, fortunately, are saved at the last possible minute by the foxy maneuverings of a Perry Mason.

I’ve never felt the defense attorney has a monopoly on concern for innocence, fairness, and justice. After joining the DA’s office, I tried close to a thousand cases. In a great many I sought and obtained convictions, because I believed the evidence warranted them. In a great many others, in which I felt the evidence was insufficient, I stood up in court and asked for a dismissal of the charges, or requested a reduction in either the charges or the sentence.

The latter cases rarely make headlines. Only infrequently does the public learn of them. Thus the stereotype remains. Far more important, however, is the realization that fairness and justice have prevailed.

Just as I never felt the slightest compunction to conform to this stereotype, so did I rebel against another. Traditionally, the role of the prosecutor has been twofold: to handle the legal aspects of the case; and to present in court the evidence gathered by law-enforcement agencies. I never accepted these limitations. In past cases I always joined in the investigation—going out and interviewing witnesses myself, tracking down and developing new leads, often finding evidence otherwise overlooked. In some cases, this led to the release of a suspect. In others, to a conviction that otherwise might not have been obtained.

For a lawyer to do less than his utmost is, I strongly feel, a betrayal of his client. Though in criminal trials one tends to focus on the defense attorney and his client the accused, the prosecutor is also a lawyer, and he too has a client: the People. And the People are equally entitled to their day in court, to a fair and impartial trial, and to justice.

T
he Tate-LaBianca case was the farthest thing from my mind on the afternoon of November 18, 1969. I’d just completed a long trial and was on my way back to my office in the Hall of Justice when Aaron Stovitz, head of the Trials Division of the District Attorney’s Office and one of the top trial lawyers in an office of 450 deputy district attorneys, grabbed me by the arm and, without a word of explanation, hurried me down the hall into the office of J. Miller Leavy, director of Central Operations.

Leavy was talking to two LAPD lieutenants I’d worked with on previous cases, Bob Helder and Paul LePage. Listening for a minute, I heard the word “Tate.” Turning to Aaron, I asked, “Are
we
going to handle it?”

He nodded affirmatively. My only comment was a low whistle.

H
elder and LePage gave us a sketchy résumé of what Ronnie Howard had said. As a follow-up to Mossman and Brown’s visit the previous night, two other officers had gone to Sybil Brand that morning and talked to Ronnie for a couple of hours. They had obtained considerably more detail, but there were still huge gaps in the story.

To say that the Tate and LaBianca cases had been “solved” at this point would be a gross overstatement. Obviously, in any murder case finding the killer is extremely important. But it’s only a first step. Neither the finding, the arresting, nor the indicting of a defendant has evidentiary value and none are proof of guilt. Once the killer is identified, there remains the difficult (and sometimes insurmountable) problem of connecting him with the crime by strong, admissible evidence, then proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, be it before a judge or a jury.

And as yet we hadn’t even made the first step, much less the second. In talking to Ronnie Howard, Susan Atkins had implicated herself and “Charles,” presumably meaning Charles Manson. But Susan had also said that others were involved, and we lacked their actual identities. This was on Tate. On LaBianca there was virtually no information.

One of the first things I wanted to do, after reviewing the Howard and DeCarlo statements, was to go to Spahn Ranch. Arrangements were made for me to go out the next morning with several of the detectives. I asked Aaron if he wanted to come along, but he couldn’t make it.
*

When I returned home late that afternoon and told my wife, Gail, that Aaron and I had been assigned the Tate case, she shared my excitement. But with reservations. She had been hoping that we could take a vacation. It had been months since I’d taken a full day off. Even when I was at home in the evenings, I was either reading transcripts, researching law, or preparing arguments. Although every day I made sure I spent some time with our two children, Vince, Jr., three, and Wendy, five, when I was on a big case I totally immersed myself in it. I promised Gail I’d try to take a few days off, but I honestly had to admit that it might be a while before I could do so.

At that time we were, fortunately, unaware that I would be living with the Tate-LaBianca cases for almost two years, averaging one hundred hours per week, rarely, if ever, getting to bed before 2
A.M
. seven days per week. And that the few moments Gail, the kids, and I had together would be devoid of privacy, our home transformed into a fortress, a bodyguard not only living with us but accompanying me everywhere I went, following a threat by Charles Manson that he would “kill Bugliosi.”