Helter Skelter

by Vincent Bugliosi

Taking the stand on direct examination by the defense, Tex played the part of Manson’s abject slave. He admitted shooting or stabbing six of the Tate-LaBianca victims, but denied stabbing Sharon Tate. And everything which showed either premeditation or deliberation he put on Manson or the girls. My cross-examination so shook Tex that he often forgot he was supposed to be playing the idiot. By the time I’d finished, it was obvious to the jury that he was in complete command of his mental faculties and probably always had been. I also got him to admit that he had stabbed Sharon Tate too; that he didn’t think of the victims as people but as “just blobs” that he had told Dr. Joel Fort that the people at the Tate residence “were running around like chickens with their heads cut off,” and that when he said this he had smiled; and I tore to shreds his story that he was simply an unthinking zombie programmed by Charles Manson, as well as cast considerable doubt on his claim that he now felt remorse for what he had done.

Despite the problems presented by Judge Alexander, on October 12, 1971, the jury found Watson guilty of seven counts of first degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. That I had effectively destroyed the testimony of the defense psychiatrists on cross-examination was borne out by the fact that on October 19 it took the jury only two and a half hours to decide that Watson was sane. And on October 21, after remaining out only six hours, they returned with a verdict of death. The trial had lasted two and a half months and cost a quarter of a million dollars. It also added another forty volumes, 5,916 pages, to the mini-library on the Tate-LaBianca murders. Although Judge Alexander thanked the jury for the conscientious job they had done, he remarked, on the day he sentenced Watson, “If I had tried this case without a jury, I possibly would have arrived at a different verdict.”

Judge James Kolts, commenting that “Grogan was too stupid and too hopped up on drugs to decide anything on his own,” and declaring that it was really Manson “who decided who lived or died,” reduced the sentence to life imprisonment.

During voir dire in his trial, Manson, angered by the judge’s refusal to let him represent himself, told the Court: “I enter a plea of guilty. I chopped off Shorty’s head.” The judge refused to accept the plea, and the next day Manson withdrew it. During another angry outburst, Manson turned to the press and said, “I’ve told my people to start killing you.”

The robbers came out shooting. In the ten-minute gun battle that followed, the van was riddled with over fifty bullets, and some twenty bullets crashed into the black-and-whites. Surprisingly, no one was killed, though three of the suspects received slight wounds. All six robbers were Manson Family members. Apprehended were Mary Brunner, twenty-seven, first member of the Family; Catherine Share, aka Gypsy, twenty-nine, and Dennis Rice, thirty-two, both recently freed after serving ninety-day sentences for their part in the attempted silencing of Barbara Hoyt; Lawrence Bailey, aka Larry Jones, twenty-three, who was present the night the Tate killers left Spahn; and escaped convict Kenneth Como, thirty-three. Another Family member, Charles Lovett, nineteen, got away during the gun fight but was subsequently apprehended.

Although never made public before this, according to a Family member who was privy to the planning of the Hawthorne robbery, the real plan was as follows: Using the stolen weapons, the Family was going to hijack a 747 and kill one passenger every hour until Manson and all the other imprisoned Family members were released.

In the early-morning hours of October 20, 1971, Kenneth Como hack-sawed his way through the bars of his thirteenth-floor cell, climbed down to the eighth floor on a rope made of bed sheets, kicked in a window in the courtroom of Department 104 (where just a few months earlier I’d prosecuted Manson and his three female co-defendants), then left the building by way of the stairs. Sandra Good picked up Como in the Family van. Though Sandy later smashed up the van and was arrested, Como managed to elude capture for seven hours. Also arrested—but subsequently released, there being no positive proof that they had aided and abetted the escape—were Squeaky, Brenda, Kitty, and two other Family members.

Manson had wanted to speak to me, he said, because he wanted me to know “I don’t have no hard feelings.” He told me that I had done “a fantastic, remarkable job” in convicting him, and he said, “You gave me a fair trial, like you promised.” He was not bitter about the result, however, because to him “prison has always been my home; I didn’t want to leave it the last time and you’re only sending me back there.” There were regular meals, not great, but better than the garbage at Spahn Ranch. And since you don’t have to work if you don’t want to, he’d have plenty of time to play his guitar. “That may be, Charlie, but you don’t have any women there,” I said. “I don’t need broads,” he replied. “Every woman I ever had, she asked me to make love to her. I never asked them. I can do without them.” There was plenty of sex in prison, he said.

Though careful never to do so in open court, in our private conversations Manson often referred to blacks as “niggers.” He claimed he didn’t dislike them. “I don’t hate anyone,” he said, “but I know they hate me.”

“Why don’t they like Negroes?” A. “I don’t know. They just don’t.” Q. “They have a natural hate for the Negro?” A. “They have a natural hate but they would also like to use the Negro as a whole to begin some kind of militant thing…They are really good at picking out angry people.”

An apparently important influence on Manson, in both precept and example, was a dead man: Adolf Hitler. Manson looked up to Hitler and spoke of him often. He told his followers that “Hitler had the best answer to everything” and that he was “a tuned-in guy who leveled the karma of the Jews.” Manson saw himself as no less a historical figure, a leader who would not only reverse the karma of the blacks but level all but his own Aryan race—his all-white, all-American Family. 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. Both were racists; yet there is some evidence that both also believed they carried the blood of the very people they despised. Many historians believe that Hitler was secretly obsessed with the fear that he had a Jewish ancestor. If Manson’s prison records are correct, he may have believed his father was black. Both surrounded themselves with bootlicking slaves; both sought out the weaknesses of others, and used them; both programmed their followers through repetition, repeating the same phrases over and over; both realized and exploited the psychological impact of fear. Both had a favorite epithet for those they hated: Hitler’s was “Schweinehund,” Manson’s was “pigs.” Both had eyes which their followers described as “hypnotic” beyond that, however, both had a presence, a charisma, and a tremendous amount of personal persuasive power. Generals went to Hitler intent on convincing him that his military plans were insane; they left true believers. Dean Moorehouse went to S...

I do believe that if Manson had had the opportunity, he would have become another Hitler. I can’t conceive of his stopping short of murdering huge masses of people.

Some mysteries remain. One is the exact number of murders committed by members of the Manson Family. Manson bragged to Juan Flynn that he had committed thirty-five murders.

There is now evidence, however, that even if this wasn’t true then, the total to date may be very close to, and may even exceed, Manson’s estimate. In November 1969, Susan Atkins told Ronnie Howard, “There are eleven murders that they will never solve.”

At about 3:30 A.M. on December 30, 1968, seventeen-year-old Marina Habe, daughter of writer Hans Habe, was abducted outside the West Hollywood home of her mother as she was returning home from a date. Her body was found on New Year’s Day, off Mulholland near Bowmont Drive. Cause of death: multiple stab wounds in the neck and chest. It has been rumored, but never confirmed, that the victim was acquainted with one or more members of the Family.

On the night of May 27, 1969, Darwin Orell Scott was hacked to death in his Ashland, Kentucky, apartment. The killing was so savage that the victim, who was stabbed nineteen times, was pinned to the floor with a butcher knife. Sixty-four-year-old Darwin Scott was the brother of Colonel Scott, the man alleged to be Charles Manson’s father.

Though it is known that a number of female Family members were involved in the “cleanup” operation that followed Shea’s murder, none has ever been tried as an accessory after the fact. Some are still on the streets today.

Manson’s arrest on October 12, 1969, did not stop the murders.

About a week after the story of Manson’s involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders broke in the press, Los Angeles Times reporter Jerry Cohen was contacted by a man who claimed he had been present when Zero was shot. Only Zero hadn’t been playing Russian roulette; he had been murdered. The man was about twenty-five, five feet eight, blond, of slight build. He refused to give Cohen his name. He was, he admitted, “scared to death.” Six or eight persons had been in the Venice pad that night, smoking hash. “It was one of the chicks that killed Zero,” he told Cohen. But he wouldn’t say which one, only that recently, at another Manson Family gathering, she had sat staring at him for three hours, all the while fingering her knife.

In questioning him, Cohen established that he had become involved with the Family after the Tate-LaBianca murders. He had never met Manson, he said, but he had heard from other Family members that there had been “many more murders than the police know of” and that “the Family is a whole lot larger than you think.”

On November 16, 1969, the body of a young girl was found dumped over an embankment at Mulholland and Bowmont Drive near Laurel Canyon, in almost the same spot where Marina Habe’s body was found. A brunette in her late teens, five feet nine, 115 pounds, she had been stabbed 157 times in the chest and throat.

The body was that of Ronald Hughes. Yet the rest of the autopsy report added little to the newspaper accounts. It noted: “The decedent was observed face down in a pool of water with the head and shoulder wedged under a large rock.” One arm was almost completely severed at the shoulder, and there were large open areas in the chest and back. Other than this, “no outward evidence of violence was noted” while “no evidence of foul play [was] indicated by the X-rays.” All this was qualified more than a little by the fact that the body was badly decomposed. As for the report’s primary findings, there were none: “Nature of death: Undetermined. Cause of death: Undetermined.” The report did note that the stomach contained some evidence of “medication residue.” But its exact composition—drugs, poison, whatever—was, like the nature and cause of death, left undetermined. Completely dissatisfied with the report, I requested that our office conduct an investigation into the death of Hughes. The request was denied, it being decided that since there was no evidence of foul play, such an investigation was unnecessary.

Off camera, and unrecorded, Sandy made a number of other admissions to Merrick. She told him, in the presence of one other witness, that to date the Family had killed “thirty-five to forty people.” And that “Hughes was the first of the retaliation murders.”

Those who did join him were not, as noted, the typical girl or boy next door. Charles Manson was not a Pied Piper who suddenly appeared on the basketball court at Texas State, handed Charles Watson a tab of LSD, then led him into a life of crime. Watson had quit college with only a year to go, gone to California, immersed himself in the selling as well as the using of drugs, before he ever met Charles Manson. Not just Watson but nearly every other member of the Family had dropped out before meeting Manson. Nearly all had within them a deep-seated hostility toward society and everything it stood for which pre-existed their meeting Manson. Those who chose to go with him did so, Dr. Joel Hochman testified, for reasons “which lie within the individuals themselves.” In short, there was a need, and Manson seemed to fulfill it. But it was a double process of selection. For Manson decided who stayed. Obviously he did not want anyone who he felt would challenge his authority, cause dissension in the group, or question his dogma. They chose, and Manson chose, and the result was the Family. Those who gravitated to Spahn Ranch and stayed did so because basically they thought and felt alike. This was his raw material.

Drugs were another of his tools. As brought out in the psychiatric testimony during the trials, LSD was not a causal agent but a catalyst. Manson used it very effectively, to make his followers more suggestible, to implant ideas, to extract “agreements.” As Paul Watkins told me, Charlie always took a smaller dose of LSD than the others, so he would remain in command.

He used repetition. By constantly preaching and lecturing to his subjects on an almost daily basis, he gradually and systematically erased many of their inhibitions. As Manson himself once remarked in court: “You can convince anybody of anything if you just push it at them all of the time. They may not believe it 100 percent, but they will still draw opinions from it, especially if they have no other information to draw their opinions from.”

He used sex. Realizing that most people have sexual hangups, he taught, by both precept and example, that in sex there is no wrong, thereby eradicating both their inhibitions and their guilt. But there was more than sex. There was also love, a great deal of love. To overlook this would be to miss one of the strongest bonds that existed among them. The love grew out of their sharing, their communal problems and pleasures, their relationship with Charlie. They were a real family in almost every sense of that word, a sociological unit complete to brothers, sisters, substitute mothers, linked by the domination of an all-knowing, all-powerful patriarch. Cooking, washing dishes, cleaning, sewing—all the chores they had hated at home they now did willingly, because they pleased Charlie.

He taught his followers a completely amoral philosophy, which provided complete justification for their acts. If everything is right, then nothing can be wrong. If nothing is real, and all of life is a game, then there need be no regret.

He used religion. Not only did he find support for much of his philosophy in the Bible, he often implied that he was the Second Coming of Christ. He had his twelve apostles, several times over; not one but two Judases, Sadie and Linda; his retreat to the desert, Barker Ranch; and his trial, in the Hall of Justice. He also used music, in part because he was a frustrated musician but also because he must have known it was the one thing that could get through to more young people than any other.

He used his own superior intelligence. He was not only older than his followers, he was brighter, more articulate and savvy, far more clever and insidious. With his prison background, his ever adaptable line of con, plus a pimp’s knowledge of how to manipulate others, he had little trouble convincing his naïve, impressionable followers that it was not they but society which was sick. This too was exactly what they wanted to hear.

Whatever it is, I believe Manson has full knowledge of the formula he used. And it worries me that we do not. For the frightening legacy of the Manson case is that it could happen again. 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.

happy. Both Barbara Hoyt and Dianne Lake returned to and graduated from high school, with apparently few if any permanent scars from their time with Manson. Barbara is now studying to be a nurse. Stephanie Schram has her own dog-grooming shop. Paul Watkins and Brooks Poston formed their own combo and appear at various clubs in the Inyo County area. Their songs were good enough to be used as background music in the Robert Hendrickson documentary film on Manson.

That day the California State Supreme Court announced that it had voted 6–1 to abolish the death penalty in the state of California. The opinion was based on Article I, Section 6, of the State Constitution, which forbids “cruel or unusual punishment.”* The sentences of the 107 persons awaiting execution in California were automatically reduced to life imprisonment. Manson, in Los Angeles as a defense witness in the Bruce Davis trial, grinned broadly on hearing the news. In California a person sentenced to life imprisonment is eligible to apply for parole in seven years.

“It would be dangerous to put a guy like Manson into the main population, because in the eyes of other inmates he didn’t commit first-class crimes. He was convicted of killing a pregnant woman, and that sort of thing doesn’t allow him to rank very high in the prison social structure. It’s like being a child molester. Guys like that are going to do hard time wherever they are.” Too, like Sirhan Sirhan, convicted slayer of Senator Robert Kennedy, his notoriety is his own worst enemy. For as long as he remains in prison, Manson will be looking over his shoulder, aware that any con hoping to make a reputation need only put a shiv in his back.

The man who used and championed fear did not participate. According to the Chronicle story: “Mass murderer Charles Manson is among the inmates in 4–A, although prison spokesmen say he is not involved in this demonstration. Manson has been threatened by other inmates in the past, and authorities say he seldom ventures out of his cell for fear of being attacked.”

As a general rule, however, within a short time thereafter the murders and the identity of the perpetrator tend to fade from the public’s consciousness. But not so with the Manson case. In fact, next to Jack the Ripper, whose identity still hasn’t been conclusively established, Manson is probably the most famous and notorious mass murderer ever. So what is it?

If Manson has continued to fascinate mainstream America, he has also done so with its fanatical elements. Today, almost every disaffected and morally twisted group in America, from Satanists to neo-Nazi skinheads, has embraced Manson and the poisons of his virulent philosophy. He has become their spiritual icon, the high priest of anti-establishment hatred.

Until her death from cancer in July of 1992, Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, attended most of the parole hearings for Manson and his killers, and was successful in mobilizing national support in the form of 352,000 letters to the parole board to keep Manson and the others behind bars for life. “I live with her [Sharon’s] screams and her begging for the life of her baby,” she often said. In the late ’70s, Mrs. Tate co-founded the Los Angeles chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a group providing mental, emotional, and other support to its members. Just before her death, Mrs. Tate, who was the United States’ representative at an International Victims’ Rights Conference in Stockholm in June of 1990, formed the Sacramento-based Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau. The bureau promotes, among other things, the enactment of legislation for the rights of crime victims. Since her mother’s passing, Patti Tate, who was eleven years old when her twenty-six-year-old sister was slain, and who bears a striking resemblance to Sharon, has been faithfully and effectively carrying on all of her mother’s important work. Speaking of her sister, a misty-eyed Patti says: “She was so sweet and such a gentle soul. I idolized her and there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for her.”

Near the conclusion of his book, Manson writes: “There are days when I get caught up in being the most notorious convict of all time. In that frame of mind I get off on all the publicity, and I’m pleased when some fool writes and offers to ‘off some pigs’ for me. I’ve had girls come to visit me with their babies in their arms and say, ‘Charlie, I’d do anything in the world for you. I’m raising my baby in your image.’ Those letters and visits used to delight me, but that’s my individual sickness. What sickness is it that keeps sending me kids and followers? It’s your world out there that does it. I don’t solicit my mail or ask anyone to come and visit me. Yet the mail continues to arrive and your pretty little flowers of innocence keep showing up at the gate.” From these relatively benign words, Manson abruptly changes, and after saying he doesn’t think he’ll ever be released, closes his book in vintage fashion with these ominously ambiguous words: “My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So…know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.”

Remarkably, there are some who heap scalding criticism on those in the music industry who never gave Manson a chance when he got out of prison in 1967. If he had been given a real opportunity, they add, most likely the murders would never have taken place. While this is possibly true, that type of “but for” causation could be used to argue that if someone had bought Hitler’s paintings in Vienna in 1912 perhaps we wouldn’t have had the Second World War.

Being behind bars also hasn’t inhibited Manson from reaching America’s vast television audience. The media (NBC’s Today Show, CNN, BBC, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, the ABC Special in March of 1994, etc.) have sought him out, enabling him to verbally spew his venom. In a 1988 interview with Geraldo Rivera, he said: “I’m going to chop up some more of you mother-fuckers. I’m going to kill as many of you as I can. I’m going to pile you up to the sky. I figure about fifty million of you. I might be able to save my trees and my air and my water and my wildlife.” When Rivera later said, “There’s nine dead people out there” (referring to Manson’s nine murder convictions), Manson answered, “There’s a lot more than nine, son, a whole lot, and there’s going to be a whole lot more.” When Rivera asked if he told the women in his Family to kill, he responded, “I don’t deal with women I got to tell what to do. They know what to do.” He told Rivera: “I make laws. I’m the lawmaker. I’m the one that lays down the track.”

In a June 5, 1994, letter to me, Watson wrote: “With my deepest remorse, I apologize to the people of the world for my part in making Manson what he has become. To the many victims, my heart is full of sorrow for my actions…. If anyone should have received the death penalty for their crimes, it was me. I believe that God and his grace gave me a second chance, having a different plan for my life…. I have no great ambitions, other than allowing the Lord to use me as a testimony, urging others to Christ.”

“Suddenly,” she writes, “there in my thoughts was a door. It had a handle. I took hold of it, and pulled.” When the door opened, she says, a flood of brilliant light poured over her. In the center was an even brighter light, which she knew was Jesus. “He spoke to me—literally, plainly, in my nine-by-eleven prison cell. ‘Susan, I am really here. I’m coming in your heart to stay. Right now you are being born again…You are now a child of God. You are washed clean and your sins have all been forgiven.’” Atkins goes on to say that that night, for the first time in many years, she “slept soundly, free of nightmares—unafraid and warm.” On the last page of her book, she writes that she believes “the Lord will one day release me from this place [Frontera] and give me a ministry to people of all kinds, but especially those who are as twisted and lost as I was from my earliest teen years.”

She now denies stabbing Sharon Tate, adding, however, that her moral culpability is still the same because she was there and “did nothing to stop it.” When she was asked by a reporter in the mid-’80s if she would be willing to say she was sorry to Sharon Tate’s mother for her involvement in Sharon’s murder, she replied: “There are no words to describe what I feel. ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me,’ those words are so overused and inadequate for what I feel.”

In 1988, while stating her deep remorse for the murders, Krenwinkel nonetheless told her prison psychiatrist that Abigail Folger, the person she murdered on the night of the Tate murders, “could have been something more than she was, a drug abuser.” At her 1993 parole hearing, Krenwinkel, crying and her voice cracking, told the board: “No matter what I do, I cannot change one minute of my life. There’s nothing I can do outside of being dead to pay for this. And I know that’s what you wish, but I cannot take my own life.” In the 1994 ABC special, she said that every day “I wake up and know that I’m a destroyer of the most precious thing, which is life, and living with that is the most difficult thing of all.” But, she adds, “that’s what I deserve—to wake up every morning and know that.” Responding to Manson’s claim he did not order the murders, she said, “Charlie is absolutely lying. There wasn’t one thing done—that was even allowed to be done—without his express permission.” She is very concerned about young people who write her and “seem to think that what we did was all right. There is nothing, nothing that we did that is all right. If there is anything I can say to these children, it’s that he [Manson] is not the man to follow.”

All other family members convicted of Manson-related murders, with the exception of one, are also still behind bars. Bruce Davis, convicted of the murders of Donald “Shorty” Shea and Gary Hinman, is presently at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, California, and Robert Beausoleil, also convicted of the Hinman murder, is at the California Correctional Center at Susanville, California. Only Steven Grogan (“Clem Tufts” in the Family), convicted of Shea’s murder, has been released.

In 1977, Grogan, while at the Deuel Vocational Institution at Tracy, California, asked to see Katz. Determined to prove he had not beheaded Shea, and that Shea had not been cut up into nine pieces, he drew a map for Katz, pinpointing the location of Shea’s body. Subsequently, Sergeant Gleason and his partner found Shea’s remains in one piece at the spot designated by Grogan—the bottom of a steep embankment about a quarter mile down the road from the ranch. On November 18, 1985, Grogan was released from prison, and was discharged from parole on April 13, 1988.

Sandra Good served ten years (five of which, from 1980 to 1985, she spent with Squeaky at Alderson) of her fifteen-year sentence. She now lives in Hanford, California, a town near Manson’s prison at Corcoran. Though she does not have visiting privileges, she is content to be geographically close to Manson, and has become the main spokesperson and cheerleader for him on the outside, telling whoever will listen, including national television audiences, that Manson is innocent of the Tate-LaBianca murders, and would be a “fantastic” person for the country to follow, one who would “give the children back to themselves.”

Barbara Hoyt, whom I was happy to help get into nursing school, is now a registered nurse in the Northwest. Barbara is divorced and living with her daughter in a townhouse she just purchased. She leads a very active life “camping, fishing, painting, and playing volleyball.”