Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (40 page)

I asked Hatami, “What tone of voice did you use?” He illustrated, speaking loudly and angrily. Roman was away, Hatami said, and he felt protective of Sharon. “I wasn’t happy that he was coming on the property, and looking at people he doesn’t know.”

How did the man react? He appeared upset, Hatami said; he turned and walked away without saying “excuse me” or anything.

Just before this, however, Sharon came to the door and said, “Who is it, Hatami?” Hatami told her that a man was looking for someone.

Showing Hatami a diagram of the house and grounds, I had him point to the spots where each was standing. Sharon was on the porch, the man on the walk not more than six to eight feet away, with no obstruction between them. There could be no question that Charles Manson saw Sharon Tate, and she him. Sharon had undoubtedly looked right into the eyes of the man who would order her death. We now had, for the first time, evidence that prior to the murders Manson had seen one of his victims.

Hatami had remained on the walk, Sharon on the porch, while the man went down the path toward the guest house. According to Hatami, he came back up the path in “a minute or two, no more,” and left the premises without saying anything.

It was not as abrasive an incident as I was looking for, but, together with Melcher’s rejection and Altobelli’s subtle putdown, Hatami’s “take the back alley” was more than sufficient cause for Manson to have strong feelings against 10050 Cielo Drive. Too, not only were these people obviously establishment, they were establishment in the very fields—entertainment, recording, motion pictures—in which Manson had tried to make it and failed.

There was one discrepancy: the time. Hatami was positive the incident had occurred during the afternoon. Altobelli, however, was equally insistent that it was between eight and nine in the evening when Manson appeared on the guest house porch. While it was possible one or the other was confused, the most logical explanation was that Manson had gone to the guest house that afternoon, found no one there (Altobelli was out most of the afternoon, making arrangements for his trip), then returned that evening. This was supported by Hatami’s statement that Manson had come back up the path after “a minute or two, no more,” which hardly left time for his conversation with Altobelli.

I had Hatami look at photographs of a dozen or so men. He picked out one, saying it looked like the man, though he couldn’t be absolutely sure. It was a photograph of Charles Manson.

In interviewing Hatami, I hadn’t mentioned Manson’s name. Not until the interview was almost over did Hatami realize that the man he had spoken to that day might have been the man accused of plotting Sharon’s murder.

Melcher to Altobelli to Hatami. If I hadn’t suspected that Melcher was withholding something, it was possible that we might never have placed Manson inside the gate of 10050 Cielo Drive.

A similar chain, which had begun with my discovery of a short notation in the Inyo County files, led me to the missing piece in the motive for both the Tate and LaBianca murders.

F
inally, nearly three months after first requesting it, I obtained the tape Inyo County Deputy Sheriff Don Ward had made with the two miners, Paul Crockett and Brooks Poston.

Ward had interviewed the pair on October 3, 1969, at Independence. This was a week before the Barker raid, and nearly a month and a half before LAPD learned of the Manson Family’s possible involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Ward’s interview had nothing to do with those murders, only the activities of the “hippie types” who were now living in Golar Wash.

Crockett, a weather-worn miner in his mid-forties, had been prospecting in the Death Valley area in the spring of 1969 when he came across Manson’s advance party at Barker Ranch. At this time it consisted of only two persons, a young runaway named Juanita Wildebush and Brooks Poston, a slender, rather docile eighteen-year-old who had been with the Family since June 1968. Nights, Crockett would visit the pair, and the talk would invariably turn to one subject, Charlie. “And I couldn’t believe what they were saying,” Crockett observed. “I mean, it was so utterly ridiculous.” It became obvious to Crockett that these people believed this Charlie to be the second coming of Christ. It was just as obvious that they feared him. And so Crockett, who was no stranger to mysticism, did something perhaps a little odd but at least psychologically effective. He told them that, just like Charlie, he too had powers. And “I planted them with the idea that I had the power to keep Charlie from coming back up there.”

Other Family members—including Paul Watkins, Tex Watson, Brenda McCann, and Bruce Davis—would occasionally show up at Barker with messages and supplies, and it didn’t take long for the word to get back to Manson.

Initially he scoffed at the idea. But each time he tried to go to Barker something happened: the truck broke down, Spahn Ranch was raided, and so on. Meanwhile Juanita eloped with Bob Berry, Crockett’s partner, and Crockett succeeded in “unconverting” several of Manson’s most important male followers: Poston; Paul Watkins, who often acted as Manson’s second in command; and, somewhat later, Juan Flynn, a tall, strapping Panamanian cowboy who had worked at Spahn.

When Crockett first met young Poston, he was “a zombie.” The phrase was Poston’s own. He said that he had wanted to leave the Family many times, but “Manson had a vise grip on my mind, and I couldn’t break the grip. I didn’t know how to leave…”

Crockett discovered that Manson had “programmed all his people to the extent that they’re just like him. He has put all kinds of things in their heads. I didn’t believe it could be done, but he has done it and I seen it working.” Crockett began “deprogramming” Poston. He put him to work in his various mining ventures, built up his body, got him to thinking of other things than Manson.

When Manson finally reached Barker, in September 1969, Crockett, meeting him for the first time, found him “a very clever man—he borders on genius.” Then Manson told him “some of the weirdest stories. I thought it was all make-believe, to start with.” Before long, Crockett was not only convinced that Manson was insane, he was sure “he would think no more of killing one of us than he would of stepping on a flower; in fact, he’d rather do that than step on a flower.”

Deciding that his own life expectancy was directly proportionate to his usefulness to Manson, Crockett made himself very useful, volunteering his truck to haul in supplies, and so forth. He and the former Mansonites now living with him in a small cabin near Barker also began taking precautions.

Among the weird tales Manson had told Crockett: That the black man “was getting ready to blow the whole thing open…Charlie has set up the whole thing, it’s kind of like a storybook…He says Helter Skelter is coming down.”

“Helter Skelter is what he calls the Negro revolt,” Poston explained. “He says the Negroes are going to revolt and kill all the white men except the ones that are hiding in the desert…” Long before this Manson had told Poston, “When Helter Skelter comes down, the cities are going to be mass hysteria and the cops—the piggies, he calls them—won’t know what to do, and the beast will fall and the black man will take over…that the battle of Armageddon will be at hand.”

Poston told Deputy Ward, “One of Charlie’s basic creeds is that all that girls are for is to fuck. And that’s all they’re for. And there is no crime, there is no sin, everything is all right, that it’s all just a game, like the game of a little kid, only it’s a grown-up game, and that God’s getting ready to pull down the curtain on this game and start it over again with his chosen people…”

His chosen people were the Family, Charlie said. He would lead them to the desert, where they would multiply until they numbered 144,000. He got this, Poston said, “from reading things into the Bible, from Revelations.”
*

Also in Revelation, as well as in Hopi Indian legends, there was mention of a “bottomless pit,” Poston said. The entrance to this pit, according to Charlie, was “a cave that he says is underneath Death Valley that leads down to a sea of gold that the Indians know about.” Charlie claimed that “every tuned-in tribe of people that’s ever lived have escaped the destruction of their race by going underground, literally, and they’re all living in a golden city where there’s a river that runs through it of milk and honey, and a tree that bears twelve kinds of fruit, a different fruit each month, or something like that, and you don’t need to bring candles nor any flashlights down there. He says it will be all lit up because…the walls will glow and it won’t be cold and it won’t be too hot. There will be warm springs and fresh water, and people are already down there waiting for him.”

Both Atkins and Jakobson had already told me about Charlie’s “bottomless pit.” The Family loved to hear Charlie sermonize about this hidden “land of milk and honey.” They not only believed, they were so convinced that such a place existed that they spent days searching for the hole in the ground which would lead them to the underground paradise.

There was also a kind of desperation in the search, because it was here, underground in the bottomless pit, that they intended to hide and wait out Helter Skelter.

It was obvious to both Crockett and Poston that Manson believed Helter Skelter was imminent. And there were the preparations. Manson had arrived at Barker Ranch in September 1969 with about eight others, all heavily armed. More Family members arrived the following week, driving stolen dune buggies and other vehicles. They began setting up lookout posts and fortifications, hiding caches of guns, gasoline, and supplies.

(It did not occur to Crockett and Poston—since neither was aware of the Family’s involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders—that Manson might be fearful of something other than blacks.)

Manson hadn’t given up on Poston, but Crockett’s “deprogramming” had been very effective. Manson was even more upset about Paul Watkins’ leaving him, since Watkins, a good-looking youth with a way with women, had been Manson’s chief procurer of young girls.

Crockett, Poston, and Watkins had begun sleeping with their shotguns within reach. On at least three occasions Charlie, Clem, and/or the girls tried to creepy-crawl the cabin. Each time the trio had been lucky and had heard something, aborting the plan. Then one night Juan Flynn arrived “to shoot some bull,” and admitted Manson had suggested he kill Crockett. Crockett persuaded Juan—who was far too independent to ever join the Family—that he should leave the area.

Crockett, accustomed to living as free and unencumbered as a mountain goat, was a mite stubborn. He felt he had as much right to be in Death Valley as Manson did. But he was also a realist. With Flynn gone and Watkins in town getting supplies, he and Poston were vastly outnumbered. Figuring “my usefulness to Charlie had already vanished and that he would, if he considered it necessary, liquidate me immediately, if not sooner,” Crockett had Poston fill the canteens and pack some grub. Under cover of night they fled the area on foot, walking over twenty rugged miles to Warmsprings, then catching a ride to Independence, where they told Deputy Sheriff Ward about Charles Manson and his Family.

A
fter hearing the tape, I arranged through Frank Fowles for Crockett and Poston to come to Los Angeles.

Though it was Crockett who had broken Manson’s hold over Poston, the latter was by far the most articulate. Incidents, dates, places—snap, snap, snap. Crockett, by contrast, was evasive. “I can feel their vibrations. I can’t talk freely to you because they might know what I am saying.”

Crockett doubted if we could ever convict Manson, because “he does nothing himself. His people do it all for him. He doesn’t do anything anybody could pin on him.” He added that “all the women have been programmed to do exactly as he says, and they all have knives. He’s got those girls so programmed that they don’t even exist. They are a copy of him.”

Though I was interested in Crockett’s contacts with Manson and the Family, I was hopeful that he could give me something more important.

Crockett had helped Poston, Watkins, and Flynn break away from Manson. To do this he must have gained some insight into how Manson had gained control over them in the first place. Others had also said that Manson “programmed” his followers. Did he understand how he accomplished this?

Crockett said he did, but when he tried to articulate it, he became bogged down in a morass of words and definitions, finally saying, “I can’t explain it. It’s all part of the occult.”

I decided I wouldn’t be able to use Crockett as a witness.

I
t was otherwise with Brooks Poston. The tall, gangly youth, with the air of the hayseed about him, was a fund of information about Manson and the Family.

A highly impressionable seventeen-year-old, Brooks Poston had met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house, and from that moment until he finally broke with Manson more than a year later to follow Crockett, “I believed Charlie was JC.”

Q.
“JC?”

 

A.
“Yeah, that’s how Charlie always used to refer to Jesus Christ.”

 

Q.
“Did Manson ever tell you that he was JC, or Jesus Christ?”

 

It wasn’t so much stated as implied, Brooks said. Charlie claimed that he had lived before, nearly two thousand years ago, and that he had once died on the cross. (Manson had also told Gregg Jakobson that he had already died once, and that “death is beautiful.”)

Charlie had a favorite story which he was fond of telling the Family, complete with dramatic gestures and moans of pain. Brooks had heard it often. According to Charlie, while he was living in Haight-Ashbury, he had taken a “magic mushroom” (psilocybin) trip. He was lying on a bed, but it became a cross, and he could feel the nails in his feet and hands and the sword in his side, and when he looked down at the foot of the cross he saw Mary Magdalene (Mary Brunner), and she was crying, and he said, “I’m all right, Mary.” He had been fighting it, but now he gave up, surrendered himself to death, and when he did, he could suddenly see through the eyes of everyone at the same time, and at that moment he became the whole world.