Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (57 page)

During a courtroom break, Charlie told Bugliosi not to take Sandy and her knife seriously: “If I had all the power and control that you say I have, I could simply [tell a Family member] ‘Go get Bugliosi,’ and that would be it.”

Charlie and the Family were right to dread Barbara Hoyt on the witness stand. Recovered from her LSD overdose in Hawaii, Barbara testified about all she’d seen and heard, particularly Susan’s bragging concerning the Tate murders. Bugliosi also took the opportunity to use Barbara’s behavior as a Family member to exemplify Charlie’s dominance of his followers.
In particular, the prosecutor asked about the way in which Charlie ordered Barbara to gratify Juan Flynn.
Barbara’s sexual vocabulary failed her. She finally stammered that Charlie made her give Flynn “that oral whatchamacallit.” During cross-examination, Kanarek demanded to know why she had obeyed. This time, Barbara found the exact words: “I was afraid not to.”

On Saturday, September 26, a brush fire roared through the Simi Hills and burned much of Spahn Ranch. Three horses died in the blaze, and the western movie set was destroyed. As the flames rose as high as sixty feet, the Family women danced and sang, “Helter Skelter is coming down.”

Juan Flynn followed Barbara Hoyt to the witness stand.
He glared at Charlie as he offered damaging testimony about Charlie admitting the Tate murders to him, Susan bragging about getting “some fucking pigs,” and seeing Charlie, Susan, Tex, Linda, Leslie, Pat, and Clem drive off in Johnny Swartz’s Ford on the night of the LaBianca murders. On cross-examination, Kanarek accused Flynn of making everything up in hopes that media coverage would help him get bit parts in western movies. “You recognize,” Kanarek said, “that there is lots of publicity in this case against Mr. Manson, right?” Flynn replied, “It is the type of publicity that I wouldn’t want, you big catfish.” Instead of admonishing the witness for calling Kanarek names, Judge Older grinned and adjourned the morning session.

Evidence was mounting against the defendants and Charlie knew it. He couldn’t prevent Flynn from testifying, but he could at least interrupt.
For that day and several more that followed, as Flynn testified, all four defendants periodically chanted and gestured. At one point, Charlie stood and sang, “The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be, she is a judge now,” and the girls chorused, “You are just a woman, that is all.” On Friday, October 2, Charlie turned to the court spectators and said, “Look at yourselves. You’re going to destruction. . . . It’s your judgment day, not mine.” The three women chorused, “It’s your judgment day,” and Older had them all taken out of the courtroom. After they were gone, Older permitted the prosecution to play a tape of Flynn being interviewed by an Inyo County officer. The jury heard the Spahn ranch hand say, “[Charlie]
grabbed me by the hair like that, and he put a knife by my throat, and then he says, ‘Don’t you know I’m the one who is doing all the killings?’ ”

On Monday, October 5, Detective Paul Whiteley of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office took the stand. His testimony was brief, and the defense attorneys declined cross-examination.
But before Whiteley could step down, Charlie asked Older, “May I examine him?” When Older refused, Charlie said, “You are going to use this courtroom to kill me. I’m going to fight for my life one way or another. You should let me do it with words.” Older threatened to have Charlie removed. Charlie snarled, “I will have you removed,” and then added, “I have a little system of my own.” Older ignored him and instructed Bugliosi to call his next witness. Manson screamed, “Do you think I’m kidding?” He grabbed a sharpened pencil and leaped over the counsel table in the direction of Older. The bailiffs were on him before he could go any further. As they dragged Charlie off to the adjacent isolation room, Charlie yelled to Older, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” Susan, Pat, and Leslie stood and chanted; Older had them removed, too.

Older banned the defendants from court for several days. Charlie listened while locked in the mouse house. The three women were confined to a jury room with speakers so that they, too, could listen to testimony. Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard testified about what Susan had told and written to them. Gregg Jakobson took the stand and recounted Charlie’s interpretations of Beatles songs and Revelation. Shahrokh Hatami and Rudi Altobelli placed Charlie at Cielo on March 23, 1969.

Older allowed Charlie and the women to return to the courtroom on the day that Terry Melcher testified. When Melcher saw Charlie, he begged Bugliosi to let him testify in some other room. Melcher was able to take the stand and withstand Charlie’s steady glare only after taking a tranquilizer. When he finished testifying, Charlie smiled at him.

Guided by Bugliosi’s questions, Brooks Poston and Little Paul Watkins explained to the jury just how seriously the Family prepared for Helter Skelter out in Death Valley. Watkins emphasized the Family’s belief that Charlie was the Second Coming of Christ. Poston admitted that, for a long time, he thought that Charlie was Jesus. Then he testified that Charlie once asked him to kill the sheriff of Shoshone.

The bailiffs did their best to make sequestration as easy as possible for the jury. They took them out for group dinners at interesting restaurants, and on weekends arranged bus trips to places like Knott’s Berry Farm. By the end of the trial’s fourth month, bailiff O. P. Skupen believed that the Manson jury was one of the best he’d ever monitored. Despite all Charlie’s antics and all the gruesome testimony they’d heard, none of them seemed shaken. They exhibited exceptional common sense and that, Skupen thought, was bad news for Charlie and the girls. No matter how much was made of them in the newspapers and on TV, Charlie’s shenanigans just weren’t working. Charlie might act cooler than hell on the way to and from the courtroom, he might brag in the isolation room that everything was going the way he wanted, but at some level the guy had to know that these jurors weren’t buying his act.

Tex Watson, awaiting his own murder trial, stopped eating and acted crazy enough to be sent to Atascadero State Hospital for psychiatric testing.
When Charlie heard the news, he asked to talk to Bugliosi. He told the prosecutor that if he could have just half an hour with Tex, he’d get him straightened out. Bugliosi laughed and said, “I can’t afford to take that chance. If you cured him, then everyone would believe you were Jesus Christ.”

The final witnesses for the prosecution were Dianne Lake and two psychiatrists who had examined her. Three hundred and twenty People’s Exhibits, including photos of the Tate and LaBianca murder scenes, were formally entered into evidence so that the jury could study them during deliberations. Then at 4:27
P.M
. on Monday, November 16, the prosecution rested its case. The trial had lasted twenty-two weeks. At least another two or three months loomed ahead. Judge Older thought everyone involved deserved a short break before the defense took its turn. He recessed court until Thursday morning. In the interim, Charlie met with Susan, Pat, and Leslie, and told them what he wanted them to do.

On November 19, the defense attorneys made rote motions for the judge to dismiss all counts against their clients. It never hurt to try—the request was traditional. After the judge rejected the motions, Paul Fitzgerald told Older, “The defense rests.”
As soon as he did, Pat, Susan, and Leslie jumped to their feet and demanded the opportunity to testify.
Fitzgerald, Daye Shinn, and Ronald Hughes all asked to approach the bench, where they whispered to Older that they didn’t want their clients testifying to the jury—all three would undoubtedly swear that they were guilty of the Tate-LaBianca murders, but Charlie was completely innocent. Bugliosi realized what was happening and joined the three defense attorneys in their protest. The prosecutor was in danger again of being outmaneuvered by Charlie, who’d saved this surprise for last.

Older, aware that any decision he made might form the grounds for an appeal by Kanarek, finally ruled that the three women could testify after he’d removed the jury. Afterward, whatever admissible statements they made could be added to the trial record. Their own attorneys, and Bugliosi if he wished, didn’t even have to question them. Susan, Pat, and Leslie could say whatever they wanted. That was fine with the lawyers, but the women insisted it was unacceptable. They wanted the jury to hear directly what they had to say. When Older said no, they refused to take the stand.

Charlie said he’d be glad to get up there and testify, jury or no jury.

It was his grand opportunity. The jury wasn’t present, but Charlie had an audience of the courtroom spectators and, most importantly, the media. Charlie never attended law school, but he knew all about the end stages of a murder trial in California. First would come the jury’s verdict of guilt or innocence, and at this point there seemed to be no question which way they’d vote. After that would come the penalty phase, with the jurors deciding whether to go along with Bugliosi’s request for the gas chamber or else mandate life imprisonment. But the real drama was the initial verdict, innocent or guilty, and the only thing that might supersede it would be a bravura performance on the witness stand by Charlie. He knew just how to do it. Charlie told Judge Older that he didn’t want to be questioned by his attorney, Irving Kanarek. The defense attorney would stay seated and silent at the counsel table because his client didn’t want to be interrupted. Charlie Manson was about to deliver a
statement.

He spoke for over an hour, beginning with a self-pitying description of his horrific childhood: “I never went to school, so I never growed up to read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid.” Charlie declared that far from leading his followers into acts of evil, he
formed the Family from social outcasts “that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked out.” According to Charlie, “You made your children what they are . . . these children that come at you with their knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them.”

In fact, Charlie said, “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. . . . I am only what lives inside of each and every one of you.” Yes, they could sentence him to death, but “you want to kill me? Ha. I’m already dead, have been all my life.” Charlie admitted that he felt resentful: “Sometimes I think about giving it back to you. . . . If I could, I would jerk this microphone off and beat your brains out with it, because that is what you deserve. . . . If I could get angry at you, I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it.”

Charlie wasn’t giving up his ultimate plan of the women incriminating themselves and exonerating him. He wanted to make a memorable statement in Older’s court, but he didn’t want to die choking on gas chamber fumes. So he next insisted that he wasn’t responsible for whatever the women might have done at Cielo and Waverly Drive: “These children were finding themselves. What they did, if they did whatever they did, is up to them. They will have to explain that to you.”

As for Charlie himself, he was being unfairly picked on. “It’s all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hell hole that you can think of, and you drag him and you put him in a courtroom. You expect to break me? Impossible. You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago.”

Judge Older asked if Charlie was finished. He wasn’t.

“I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed,” Charlie said. “I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.”

Older instructed Charlie to stick to the issues.

Charlie admitted he’d had the .22 Buntline at Spahn Ranch, but “it belonged to everybody.” People like Linda Kasabian, Dianne Lake, and
Little Paul Watkins came to him, not vice versa. He didn’t remember telling anyone, “Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.” As for Helter Skelter, “Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down fast . . . it is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says, ‘Rise,’ it says, ‘kill.’ Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

He roared into the finish, his voice louder, his tiny body rising up from the chair on the witness stand: “What about your children? You say there are just a few? There are many, many more, coming in the same direction. They are running in the streets, and they are coming right at you.”

Bugliosi asked Charlie a few questions. Older asked Charlie if he now wanted to testify before the jury. He felt no need to put on a second show, and told Older, “I have already relieved all the pressure I had.” Satisfied with his performance, believing it to be memorable, Charlie said to the three women, “You don’t have to testify now.” Bugliosi caught the qualifier—Charlie wasn’t excusing the girls from their confessions, just delaying them until the penalty phase of the trial, if, as seemed likely, there was one. This was Charlie’s moment, and he had no intention of sharing it.

Judge Older recessed the trial for ten days so the prosecution and defense could prepare their final arguments.

On Monday, November 30, the trial reconvened. Ronald Hughes, Leslie Van Houten’s lawyer, wasn’t there. Hughes’s lack of courtroom experience had been evident throughout the trial, and, to make things worse,
he was clumsy and constantly tripped over Leslie’s feet when standing to make objections. After Hughes remained missing for several days Judge Older appointed well-respected attorney Maxwell Keith to replace him. Keith needed time to prepare, so Older recessed. Though the judge and attorneys met daily, the trial did not recommence until December 21. Older told the jurors they had to resign themselves to being sequestered over the Christmas holidays.

In the interim,
a massive search for Hughes ensued. When the trial originally recessed for ten days on November 19, Hughes told the other defense attorneys that he was going camping at Sespe Hot Springs north
of Los Angeles. Even search teams augmented by helicopters failed to locate him. The efforts ended in mid-December. Everyone accepted by then that Hughes was dead. Even after the lawyer’s decomposing body was discovered six weeks later where he apparently drowned in a flooded stream, Bugliosi believed that he might have been murdered by the Family on Charlie’s orders. Shortly after Hughes disappeared, Bruce Davis and Nancy Pitman had turned themselves in to police, Davis on Hinman and Shea murder charges and Pitman on a forgery charge. It seemed a little too pat for Bugliosi—perhaps they were trying to deflect any new investigation that would link them to Hughes’s death. Pitman was held for only a few days before being released. On December 17, Davis, along with Charlie and Clem, was arraigned for the murder of Shorty Shea.