Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (52 page)

Even as Angelenos ingested her colorful account with their morning eggs and coffee, Susan took a seven-hour ride around the streets of Bel Air. She enjoyed the outing more than the investigators with her; Susan was unable to remember where Linda’s toss-out spots might have been. Her excuse in a note to a former Sybil Brand cell mate was, “It was such a beautiful day my memory vanished.” Susan liked sending regulation-approved letters and also “kites,” illegal notes passed among Sybil Brand inmates. She sent one to Ronnie Howard, declaring that she was not mad at Ronnie for snitching, only hurt: “Yes, I wanted the world to know M[anson]. It sure looks like they do now. . . . I know now it has all been perfect. Those people died not out of hate or anything ugly. I am not going to defend our beliefs. I am just telling you the way it is.”

Susan didn’t realize one way it was. Ronnie gave the note to her lawyer, who sent it on to Bugliosi. Under California law, any jail letters or
messages containing incriminating messages could be used against the sender; unlike Susan’s grand jury testimony, the contents of her notes could still be presented as evidence if she renounced her deal with the prosecutors.

Bugliosi continued accumulating evidence, sometimes through dogged research and sometimes from sheer luck. Examining LAPD evidence bins from the ongoing LaBianca investigations, he found references to Al Springer’s interview and a letter mailed to Charlie while he was in jail in Independence. The letter was signed “Harold.” Bugliosi remembered Susan referring to a party at “Harold’s” next door to the LaBianca home on Waverly Drive. Harold’s letter included an address and two phone numbers. Bugliosi asked the LaBianca detectives to find him.

Having read Susan’s first-person account in the Sunday newspaper, on Monday
a local TV crew set out to look for the items discarded after the Tate murders. Almost immediately they found bloody clothes in an embankment off Benedict Canyon Road. The police had searched for weeks, but the TV crew made the discovery within ten minutes. The LAPD labs matched blood on the clothing to the Cielo victims, and also a long hair stuck on one of the garments as Susan Atkins’s.

On Tuesday,
Bernard Weiss decided to bug the Van Nuys cops about the gun his son Steven found back in September. The Susan Atkins story in the
Times
referred to a .22 used for the Tate murders—were the police sure that Steven’s gun wasn’t the one they were looking for? The officer at Van Nuys referred Bernard to the Homicide Division at Parker Center. He called there and explained how the gun his son found had a broken grip just like the one they thought came from Cielo. Bernard was informed that “we can’t check out every citizen report on every gun we find.” His next call was to a neighbor who worked for a local TV station. The station called Parker Center, and late that night the .22 Buntline was finally retrieved from Van Nuys. Tests on recovered slugs from the murder site proved that it was the gun used in the Cielo killings. When some of the shell casings found at Spahn Ranch matched the .22 Buntline, the murder weapon was solidly linked to the Family.

•  •  •

Charlie used his jail time to formulate a plan for his trial. His strategy was twofold. First, he wanted to defend himself, which would give him
a chance to deliver long speeches and otherwise grandstand in a memorable manner. This was his big chance, his world stage. Second, he did not want lawyers representing Susan, Pat, or Leslie to separate their clients’ cases from his. After doing that, their first move would inevitably be to have the women examined by psychiatrists, who might very well testify that they’d been brainwashed by Charlie to the point that they were not responsible for their actions. Charlie’s last-ditch defense would be that the murders were committed without his knowledge by perpetrators who were mentally competent and carrying out their own wishes rather than Charlie’s orders. He needed to maintain absolute control over the three of them to make sure that, if the time came, they’d plead guilty and exonerate him. Susan had squealed and had a lawyer acting in her best interest and not Charlie’s, but Charlie felt certain that once he had a chance to meet with her, he’d talk Susan back into the fold no matter what her lawyer wanted. From what he’d read in the
Times
, Susan still worshipped him. Pat remained locked up in Alabama; at Charlie’s behest, Squeaky deluged her with letters urging her to allow extradition to L.A., where Charlie’s influence was stronger. Linda Kasabian would be more of a problem. In a failed attempt to have her released on bail, Linda’s lawyers claimed that she went with the killers on the nights of August 9 and 10 only because she was afraid Charlie would kill her daughter if she didn’t. Clearly, that would be her defense at trial.

Leslie changed her lawyer when he defied Charlie’s wishes and asked that she be examined by a psychiatrist. There would be many more attorney changes before Charlie felt certain he had a unified team. Meanwhile, he demanded the right to defend himself, and Judge Keene reluctantly said he’d consider it. Warning Charlie that he was making “a sad and tragic mistake,” on Christmas Eve Keene agreed to allow it.

Bugliosi paid close attention to Charlie’s maneuverings and guessed that he was setting up Tex Watson to take the fall, especially if Watson’s lawyer back in Texas succeeded in blocking extradition. Bugliosi surmised that Charlie would at some point have the women claim the murders were all Tex’s idea, and that they followed his orders on the nights of the Tate and LaBianca slayings, not Charlie’s.

On December 26,
Rudolf Weber told Bugliosi about the people he’d found washing themselves off with his lawn hose around 1
A.M
. on August
9. He could provide only general descriptions and couldn’t pick out Tex, Susan, Pat, or Linda from a large batch of photos, but he did provide the license number of their car: GYY 435. Bugliosi checked, and the number matched the plate on Johnny Swartz’s Ford. The deputy DA went to see Swartz, who had quit at Spahn and gone to work on another ranch. Swartz told Bugliosi that Manson once threatened to kill him after they had an argument, and also that after Shorty Shea disappeared Charlie claimed to have helped Shea get a job interview in San Francisco. But that couldn’t be true, Swartz said, because after Shorty went missing he saw Danny DeCarlo and a male Family member each toting one of Shorty’s prized .45s, and Shorty would never have left those guns behind.

Sixteen-year-old
Dianne Lake hadn’t had much to say during her post-arrest interview in Independence. But on December 30 she opened up to investigators there. According to Lake, Tex told her that he’d killed Sharon Tate, and that he’d done it on orders from Charlie. She’d seen Leslie Van Houten burn a purse and some rope at Spahn about a week before the August 16 L.A. County raid. Dianne said Leslie told her about stabbing someone who was already dead, and how after committing murders at a house in Los Feliz, a word was written on the refrigerator door there in blood. Leslie mentioned raiding the refrigerator and taking a carton of chocolate milk. Lake also recalled someone having a small bag of coins. Leno LaBianca had had a coin collection.

Afterward county officials weren’t sure what to do with Lake. She was a minor whose parents had gladly sent her off with Charlie Manson, so the authorities didn’t want to send her back to them. They eventually consigned her to a mental institution, where she would be treated for emotional problems until Stovitz and Bugliosi needed her to testify in court.

Charlie enjoyed his newfound fame, but it wasn’t enough. He still wanted to be a rock star, and thought he knew how to do it. There were tapes of him performing his songs; the Family had some, and there were also the recordings made at Brian Wilson’s home studio. Charlie thought that Dennis Wilson had those. All Wilson had to do was turn over those tapes to the Family, and then they’d have a fine selection to release as vinyl albums. People would rush to buy them—who wouldn’t want to
own a Charlie Manson album? Besides putting Charlie at the top of the charts, the record sales would also bring in money to pay his legal expenses. Charlie wanted representation other than public defenders. And, of course, the albums would be put out without kowtowing to some corporate record label. Phil Kaufman would know how to get an album pressed and distributed.

But there was a stumbling block. When Charlie phoned Dennis collect from jail, a guy answering Dennis’s phone refused to accept the charges, even when Charlie screamed, “You’re going to be fucking sorry.” So Charlie sent Squeaky to track down Dennis. She found him at Gregg Jakobson’s. Angry because someone had been disrespectful to Charlie when he called collect, Squeaky told Wilson to hand over the tapes or else be killed. He replied that the tapes had already been turned over to the district attorney. That left Squeaky with the tapes Charlie had made with Gregg Jakobson at the cramped studio in Van Nuys. She took those to Phil Kaufman and explained what Charlie wanted him to do. Charlie got on the phone to plead with Kaufman, “You’ve got to get my music out.”

Kaufman still felt certain that Charlie and his goofy crew weren’t guilty, so he agreed to help. He used his own money to have two thousand copies of the record pressed and cardboard sleeves printed. The album was called
LIE
, and its cover was a mean-eyed shot of Charlie that had been a recent
Life
magazine cover. Kaufman had some fun with the credits, listing himself as the producer and using his prisoner number at Terminal Island instead of a last name. Part of the back cover was a reprint of an interview Charlie gave to a local underground paper, much of it about his terrible childhood: “No mother, no father. In and out of orphanages and foster homes. . . . I can’t tell anybody nothing that they don’t already know. But I can sing for them, and I got some music that says what I like to say if I ever had anything to say.” Squeaky also wrote some liner notes: “He is your brother—and we are him. He’s shown us the door to the love within each one of us—and now we are all keys. It’s in you. Pass it on.” Kaufman and Squeaky called a press conference to announce that the album, which included Charlie originals like “Cease to Exist,” “People Say I’m No Good,” and “Don’t Do Anything Illegal,” would be in stores soon.

The LaBianca detectives located Harold True, and Aaron Stovitz interviewed him. He admitted knowing Charlie and the Family; they’d visited him at his rented home on Waverly Drive “four or five” times before True moved in September 1968. Since the LaBiancas didn’t move in next door until November, True hadn’t met them and had no idea whether Manson ever had. But the interview established that Charlie had been on Waverly Drive several times before the LaBianca murders.

Stovitz and Bugliosi worried that their case was coming together much too slowly. If Susan Atkins didn’t renege on their agreement they would have her testimony, but so far the limited physical evidence they had placed only Tex and Pat at the Cielo murder scene, and both of them were not in state custody and resisting extradition. Bugliosi sent a memo to District Attorney Evelle Younger admitting that without Susan’s testimony, they were in trouble. His fear was that Charlie would demand an immediate trial, and he and Stovitz agreed that they would bluff, giving every indication that they were eager to go to trial, too. Charlie was a veteran con man; for the moment, they would try to con him. Whether he fell for it or not, Charlie was happy with the status quo.
There was the cover of
Life
, then a major article in the
New York Times
described the Family as a gang who “lived a life of indolence, free sex, midnight motorcycle races and apparently blind obedience to a mysterious guru.” With the album about to come out, Charlie expected to become a rock star, too. This pretrial period was exciting. Charlie was in no hurry to see it end.

He often amused himself by appearing in court to make unreasonable demands. On January 17, 1970, he demanded his immediate release because incarceration deprived him of “spiritual, mental and physical liberty in an unconstitutional manner not in harmony with man’s or God’s law.” If the charges against him were dropped, Charlie said, it would save everyone a lot of trouble. The judge dryly responded, “Disappoint all these people? Never, Mr. Manson.” Charlie wasn’t disappointed in the least. His bizarre request got him more media coverage. Ten days later he was back in court objecting to “the heinous relationship of the Establishment in [my] indictment.” He refused to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. The judge ruled that not responding was the equivalent of
a not guilty plea. A trial date of February 9 was tentatively set, but the judge noted that the trial was unlikely to begin then. There were still too many legal issues to be resolved, including whether Tex and Pat would be returned to California.

Facing a trial date, Stovitz and Bugliosi discussed the motives for the murders that they would attempt to prove.
They immediately disagreed. Stovitz favored the more conservative approach of robbery. The killers went to Cielo and Waverly Drive to get money for their desert relocation and, possibly, bail for Mary Brunner, the mother of Charlie’s child. Both nights, the robbery victims were killed. Bugliosi said that was ridiculous. Very little had been taken on either night—about $70 from Abigail Folger at Cielo, and Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet, perhaps a bag of coins, and a container of chocolate milk from Waverly Drive. Many valuable items had been left behind at both murder sites. Bugliosi wanted to convince a jury that the killers’ motives, and Charlie’s master plan, was to kick off the black-white race war of Helter Skelter by committing shockingly brutal murders and leaving evidence incriminating the Black Panthers. Stovitz replied that robbery, at least, was a common motive that a jury might understand. The Helter Skelter business was too strange. Besides, how could they prove it? Bugliosi agreed that they needed more evidence to take his preferred approach.

There was a second point of fundamental disagreement between the two prosecutors, though it had nothing to do with trial strategy. Stovitz thought the Tate-LaBianca murder trial was important; there would be considerable public interest and media coverage, but ultimately it would be forgotten. Bugliosi believed otherwise: This Manson case was once in a lifetime; the trial and everyone prominent in it would be remembered.