Helter Skelter

by Vincent Bugliosi

As much as possible, I tried to avoid embarrassing LAPD. It wasn’t always possible.

Hilarious statement. LAPD screwed up many times.

A social worker, Byron Galloway, saw the young girl sprawled on a curb near the Salvation Army headquarters.

Very angrily, Older told Kanarek: “You seem to have some sort of physical infirmity or mental disability that causes you to interrupt and disrupt testimony.

On Saturday, September 26, 1970, an era came to an end. A raging fire swept Southern California. Whipped by eighty-mile-an-hour

winds, a wall of flame as high as sixty feet charred over 100,000 acres. Burned in the inferno was all of Spahn’s Movie Ranch.

To the amusement of the clerk, I had to call my wife to come down and pay the fine. Later the deputy DAs in the office put up a buck each for a “Bugliosi Defense Fund” and reimbursed her.

With my citation, we now had a perfect score: every attorney involved in the trial had been either cited for contempt or threatened with it.

Q. “Do you respect our courts of law, Mr. Altobelli?” A. “I think more than you, Mr. Kanarek.”

It was a decidedly curious situation. Although Manson had vowed to kill me, he still asked to see me periodically—to rap.

The issue is whether or not the prosecution has met its legal burden of proving the guilt of the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.*

Charlie had tried to explode his bombshell, but the attorneys for the girls had managed to defuse it, at least temporarily. Standing up against Manson for the first time, Ronald Hughes observed: “I refuse to take part in any proceeding where I am forced to push a client out the window.”

Manson the nobody. Manson the martyr. Manson the teacher. Manson the prophet. He became all these, and more, the metamorphosis often occurring in midsentence, his face a light show of shifting emotions until it was not one face but a kaleidoscope of different faces, each real, but only for the moment.

He rambled, he digressed, he repeated himself, but there was something hypnotic about the whole performance. In his own strange way he was trying to weave a spell, not unlike the ones he had cast over his impressionable followers.

On the fifth day the jury sent a note to the bailiff, requesting NoDoz for themselves and sleeping pills for Mr. Kanarek.

Cutting telephone wires, instructing Linda to listen for sounds, hosing blood off their bodies, disposing of their clothing and weapons, wiping prints—“their conduct clearly and unequivocally shows that on both nights they knew exactly what they were doing, that they intended to kill, they did kill, and they did everything possible to avoid detection.

“They were not suffering, ladies and gentlemen, from any diminished mental capacity. They were suffering from a diminished heart, a diminished soul.”

KANAREK “May I be sworn?” THE COURT “Mr. Kanarek, I wouldn’t believe you if you were.”

Twelve individuals, from completely different backgrounds, had been locked up together longer than any jury in history.

The jury had deliberated for forty-two hours and forty minutes, over a nine-day period, a remarkably short time for such a long and complicated trial. The reading of the verdicts took thirty-eight minutes.

Ironically, there appeared in the same issue an article entitled “Paul McCartney on the Beatles Breakup.” That there had been irreconcilable troubles within the group became apparent, McCartney said, while they were making the White Album.

After the sentencing, I didn’t anticipate ever seeing Charles Manson again. But I’d see him twice more, the last time under very peculiar circumstances.

Before he killed him, Charles “Tex” Watson told Voytek Frykowski: “I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business.”

There were both surface and substantive parallels between Hitler and Manson. Both were vegetarians; both were little men; both suffered deep wounds in their youth, the psychological scars

at least contributing to, if not causing, their deep hatred for society; both suffered the stigma of illegitimacy, in Manson’s case because he himself was a bastard, in Hitler’s because his father was. Both were vagrant wanderers; both were frustrated, and rejected, artists; both liked animals more than people; both were deeply engrossed in the occult; both had others commit their murders for them.

there was always a pattern behind it: them versus us. Dr. Hochman testified: “I think that historically the easiest way to program someone into murdering is to convince them that they are alien, that they are them and we are us, and that they are different from us.” Krauts. Japs. Gooks. Pigs.

I believe Charles Manson is unique. He is certainly one of the most fascinating criminals in American history, and it appears unlikely that there will ever be another mass murderer quite like him. But it does not take a prophet to see at least some of the potentials of his madness in the world today.

In the twenty-five years since the murders, no event thrust the Manson Family back into the news once again as much as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975.

I’m presently writing a book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. My read on the case? Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone.

Referring in 1994 to what would become his great book Reclaiming History. I am not surprised it took him until 2007 to complete it. The level of research and detail is staggering.

Curt Gentry, the co-author of this book, went on to write J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Published in 1991, it is the definitive biography of Hoover, and in my opinion and that of many others, a literary tour de force.

In the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the atrocities which Charles Manson ordered and masterminded occurred, mass murder, as never before, has almost become a staple in our society. Disgruntled or demented killers flip out, go into a former place of employment, fast-food establishment, law firm, etc., and murder five to ten people or more.

And mass shootings have only become more common since 1994.