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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom O'Neill
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April 5 - April 22, 2023
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”
Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily.
Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles.
at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.
They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch—
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.
In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,”
Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April.
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number. On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child.
There on Cielo Drive, at the home she called the “Love House,” Tate was optimistic about the future. She believed her child would strengthen her marriage to Polanski, who sometimes demeaned her.
Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said. “Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”
how, Time asked, could “children who had dropped out for the sake of kindness and caring, love and beauty, be enjoined to kill”?
Dr. Lewis Yablonsky, a sociologist who’d written a book called The Hippie Trip, argued that many hippies were “lonely, alienated people”: Even when they act as if they love, they can be totally devoid of true compassion. That is the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly… Many hippies are socially almost dead inside. Some require massive emotions to feel anything at all. They need bizarre, intensive acts to feel alive—sexual acts, acts of violence, nudity, every kind of Dionysian thrill.
Manson went to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where he was caught raping a boy at knifepoint; to a federal reformatory in Virginia, where he racked up similar offenses; and to a reformatory in Ohio, where a run of good behavior earned him an early release in 1954, though caseworkers had taken frequent note of his antisocial behavior and psychic trauma. In less than a year’s time he had a wife, and a baby on the way.
By the time he got out, in 1958, his wife had filed for divorce, and he turned to pimping to make a living. The following May, he was arrested yet again, this time for forging a government check for $37.50. This got him another ten-year sentence, but the judge, moved by the plea of a woman who said she was in love with him and wanted to marry him, suspended the sentence right away, letting him go free.
The FBI was surveilling him, hoping to bust him for violating the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of prostitutes across state lines. They were never able to bring the charge, but when Manson disappeared to Mexico with another prostitute, he was found in violation of his probation, and the ten-year sentence he’d received earlier was brought into effect. The same judge who’d granted him probation now decreed: “If there ever was a man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for probation, he is it.”
When he was released at age thirty-two, he’d spent more than half his life in the care of the state. He preferred life in prison, he said, so much so that he asked if he could simply remain inside. “He has no plans for release,” one report said, “as he says he has nowhere to go.”
the New York Times, striking a dramatic note, claimed that they “lived a life of indolence, free sex, midnight motorcycle races and blind obedience to a mysterious guru inflamed with his power to control their minds and bodies.”
Tuesday’s Child, an L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists, named Manson their “man of the year.” Some didn’t even care if he was behind the murders. Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”
Manson brought a rollicking exhibition of controlled insanity whenever he appeared before the bench. He quarreled with the judge, arguing that he should be allowed to represent himself. The “girls,” for their part, mimicked their leader’s behavior, publicly battling the judge and their court-appointed defense attorneys at every opportunity and refusing to obey even the most fundamental rules of courtroom decorum.
Even in the doodles that he left behind on a courtroom legal pad, psychiatrists saw “a psyche torn asunder by powerful thrusts of aggression, guilt, and hostility.”
The six defendants—Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Steve Grogan, and Linda Kasabian—
Vincent Bugliosi became the public face of the state, and Manson’s de facto foil. Though you’d never know it to look at them, the two were the same age—Manson was actually Bugliosi’s senior by three months.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi claims an aversion to “the stereotyped image of the prosecutor” as “a right-wing, law-and-order type intent on winning convictions at any cost.” But that’s exactly how he came across. In file photographs he’s often haloed in microphones, his solemn pronouncements helping the world make sense of the senseless. Journalists lauded his “even-toned arguments.”
Bugliosi, no less colorful a character than Manson, made what was already a sensational case even more so. The motive he presented for the murders was spellbindingly bizarre. In Bugliosi’s telling, it crossed racism with apocalyptic, biblical rhetoric, all of it set to a melody by the Beatles—“the English musical recording group,” as he primly referred to them: Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white
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When Paul Watkins, a former Family member, took the stand to elaborate on Helter Skelter, the details were even more jarring. Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.
Manson’s followers subscribed to his prophecy of Armageddon as if it’d been delivered from the Holy Mount. They were willing to kill for him to make it a reality.
The trial was the longest and most expensive in U.S. history at the time. It wasn’t as straightforward as it might seem, because Manson himself hadn’t actually murdered anyone.
Manson could be convicted of first-degree murder only through a charge of conspiracy. According to the legal principle of vicarious liability, any conspirator was also guilty of the crimes committed by his coconspirators. In other words, if the prosecution could prove that Manson had ordered the killings, he would be guilty of murder, even having not laid a finger on any of the victims.
Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs. The women skipped down the courtroom hallways, three abreast, holding hands, singing nursery rhymes that Manson had written.
During the trial, if Manson took umbrage at something, they took umbrage, too, mimicking his profanity, his expressions, his outbursts.
The judge, Charles Older, would often threaten to remove Manson. On one occasion, Manson returned the reproach: “I will have you removed if you don’t stop. I have a little system of my own… Do you think I’m kidding?” Grabbing a sharp pencil, he sprang over the defense table, flinging himself toward Older. A bailiff intervened and tackl...
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The judge began to carry a .38 revolver under his robes.
After seven grueling months, the first phase of the trial drew to a close, and the jury, after ten days of deliberation, arrived at unanimous guilty verdicts. Now, in the second phase, the prosecution had to present an argument for putting the defendants to death. Their case, and the defense’s counterarguments, led to some of the most unnerving testimony yet, including a kind of symposium on LSD—not as a recreational drug, but as an agent of mind control.
For the first time, the three convicted women—Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten—took the witness stand. One by one, they explained their roles in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their utter lack of remorse. The families of the victims looked on in stunned silence as the women described their loved ones’ final moments in clinical detail. To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love—it freed that person from the confines of their physical being.
“I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.”
limitations of hedonism
As unrepentant as the women were, Bugliosi had his work cut out for him when it came to securing the death penalty. His reasoning relied on a seeming contradiction. He’d argued during the first phase of the trial that the women were “brainwashed zombies,” totally in Manson’s thrall. Now he had to prove the opposite: that they were as complicit as Manson was. Although they were “automatons,” Bugliosi said, “slavishly obedient to Manson’s every command,” the women still had, “deep down inside themselves,” such “bloodlust” that they deserved the death penalty.
The defense argued that the women were merely pawns. Manson had used an almost technologically precise combination of drugs, hypnotism, and coercion to transform these formerly nonviolent people into frenzied, psychopathic killers. At that point, scientists in the United States had been studying LSD for only a little more than a decade—it was far from a known quantity. Manson, the defense said, had used the drug to ply his impressionable followers, accessing the innermost chambers of their minds and molding them to his designs.
Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”
Bugliosi had to use a little prosecutorial hocus-pocus to tell stories like these. He argued that the Manson women had been psychologically compromised, but he didn’t assert that Manson had actually created his killers. Despite Manson’s talk about “reprogramming,” there was no template for one person’s ever having done such a thing to another. Instead, Bugliosi purported that Manson’s followers must have had some preexisting homicidal impulse buried in their subconsciouses. Manson had learned to recognize and exploit that impulse, but even so, each woman was responsible for her actions.
Dr. Joel Fort, a research psychiatrist who’d opened the nation’s first LSD treatment center, was one of the defense witnesses. He believed that Manson had used LSD to produce “a new pattern of behavior for the girls,” resulting in “a totally neutral system which saw death or killing in a completely different way than a normal person sees it,” free of “social concern, compassion, [and] moral values.”
How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?
With an eye on other possible motives, I focused on three questions in my first weeks of reporting. First: Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers? Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities? Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny?
Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, said that her father had hired a security guard. “He was there from sundown to sunrise for months,” she explained. “Mom fed him to death, I think. He was uniformed with a gun and he sat in the kitchen all night. I can remember the whole tone of this city afterward… it defined fear.”
I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”
Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency—he wouldn’t say which—and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until 1972.
in The Family, Ed Sanders had written that it was likely that Mama Cass Elliot knew Manson through her drug connections—
Be that as it may, he had a sharp recall for his time with Manson, and what he told me didn’t vindicate Melcher or Bugliosi in the slightest. It was impossible that he’d moved into the Cielo house in January 1969, for one simple reason: he’d gone to prison then.
I got a copy of his parole record from the state of California. It showed that he entered the prison system on January 2, 1969. So Bugliosi’s timeline was wrong, and Melcher had lied to me.
