Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the latter 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy, he was convicted of the murders themselves.
Manson is associated with “Helter Skelter,” the term he took from the Beatles song of that name and construed as an apocalyptic race war the murders were putatively intended to precipitate. This connection with rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an emblem of insanity, violence, and the macabre. Ultimately, the term was used as the title of the book that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.
At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially. Artists including Guns N’ Roses and Marilyn Manson have covered his songs in the decades since.
Manson’s death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state’s death penalty in 1972. California’s eventual reestablishment of capital punishment did not affect Manson, who is an inmate at Corcoran State Prison.
Childhood
First known as “no name Maddox,” Manson was born to unmarried, 16-year-old Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, in Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period after her son’s birth Kathleen Maddox was married to a laborer named William Manson, whose last name the boy was given. Charles Manson’s biological father appears to have been a “Colonel Scott”, against whom Maddox filed a bastardy suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, the boy never really knew him.
According to Manson, his mother, allegedly a heavy drinker, once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia. Upon his mother’s 1942 parole, Manson was retrieved by his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms. He would one day characterize her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole childhood joy.
In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, in Terre Haute, Indiana. After 10 months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.
First offenses
By burgling a grocery store, Manson obtained cash that enabled him to rent a room. A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy’s uncle.
Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age 13, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise. After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951.
In Utah, having burgled gas stations all along the way, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Despite four years of schooling and an average IQ of 109 (later tested at 121), he was illiterate. “He was, the caseworker concluded, aggressively antisocial.”
First imprisonment
Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing at Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution to which he had been transferred the previous October on a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Manson “took a razor blade and held it against another boy’s throat while he sodomized him.” He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered “dangerous.” In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.
After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married a hospital waitress named Rosalie Jean Willis. By his own account, he found genuine, if short-lived, marital happiness with her, and he was able to support their marriage via smalltime jobs and auto theft.
Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle interstate; after a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years’ probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California.
Rosalie gave birth to their son, Charles Manson Jr., while Manson was in prison. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from his wife and mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles; but in March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson tried to escape by stealing a car. He was subsequently given five years probation, and his parole was denied.
Second imprisonment
Manson received five years parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a 16-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. Pleading guilty in September 1959 to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, he received a 10-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman with an arrest record for prostitution made a “tearful plea” before the court that she and Manson were “deeply in love… and would marry if Charlie were freed.” The woman, whose name was Leona and who, as a prostitute, had used the name Candy Stevens, did, in fact, marry Manson before the years end, possibly so testimony against him would not be required of her.
After Manson took Leona and another girl from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution before the year’s end, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued; an April 1960 indictment for violation of the Mann Act followed. Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June, when one of the women was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his ten-year sentence.
In July 1961, after a year spent unsuccessfully appealing the revocation of his probation, Manson was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island. Although the Mann Act charge had been dropped, the attempt to cash the Treasury check was still a federal offense. His September 1961 annual review noted he had a “tremendous drive to call attention to himself,” an observation echoed in September 1964. In the interval, in 1963, Leona was granted a divorce, in the pursuit of which she alleged that she and Manson had had a son, Charles Luther.
In June 1966, Manson was sent, for the second time in his life, to Terminal Island, in preparation for early release. By March 21, 1967, his release day, he had spent more than half of his 32 years in prisons and other institutions. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested, unsuccessfully, that he be permitted to stay, a fact mentioned in a 1981 television interview with Tom Snyder.
Rise of the Family
On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in Berkeley. In prison, he had been taught to play steel guitar by 1930s bank robber Alvin Karpis; now, living mostly by panhandling, he soon got to know Mary Brunner, a twenty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate working as an assistant librarian at UC Berkeley. After moving in with her, according to a second-hand account, he overcame her resistance to his bringing other women in to live with them; before long, they were sharing Brunner’s residence with eighteen other women.
Manson also established himself as a guru in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967’s “Summer of Love”, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.
Before the summer was out, Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. Hitting the road, they roamed as far north as Washington State, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice western parts of the city and county.
In an alternative account, which does not mention the eighteen girls at Brunners place, Manson, apparently accompanied by Brunner, acquired Family members during some months of travels that were undertaken, in part, in a Volkswagen van; it was November when the school bus set out from San Francisco with the enlarged group.
Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.
The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring 1968, when, by some accounts, Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he had no such intent, Manson began kissing Wilson’s feet.
Inside the house, Wilson discovered 12 strangers, mostly girls. Over the next few months, as their number doubled, the Family members who had made themselves part of Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard household cost him approximately $100,000. This included a large medical bill for treatment of their gonorrhea and $21,000 for the accidental destruction of an uninsured car of his which they borrowed. Wilson would sing and talk with Manson, whose girls were servants to them both.
Wilson paid for studio time to record songs written and performed by Manson, and he introduced Manson to acquaintances of his with roles in the entertainment business. These included Gregg Jakobson, Terry Melcher, and Rudi Altobelli, the last of whom owned a house he would soon rent to actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Jakobson, who was impressed by “the whole Charlie Manson package” of artist/lifestylist/philosopher, also paid to record Manson material.
In the quasi-autobiographical Manson in His Own Words, the account is that Manson first met Wilson at a friend’s San Francisco house where he, Manson, had gone to obtain marijuana. The Beach Boy supposedly gave Manson his Sunset Boulevard address and invited him to stop by when he would be in Los Angeles.
Spahn Ranch
By August 1968, when Wilson had his manager clear the Family members from his house, Manson had established a base for the group at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, not far from Topanga Canyon. The evictees joined the rest of the Family there.
Located in (or near) Chatsworth, the ranch had once been a location for the shooting of Western films; then, with its old movie sets run down, it was primarily doing business in horseback rides. While Family members did helpful work around the place, Manson kept the nearly-blind, octogenarian owner, George Spahn, on his side by having Lynette Fromme act as Spahn’s eyes and, along with other girls, service Spahn sexually. For a tiny squeal she would emit when Spahn would pinch her thigh, Fromme, one of the early Family members who had boarded the school bus, acquired the nickname “Squeaky.”
The Family was soon joined at Spahn Ranch by Charles Watson, who had met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house. A small-town Texan who had quit college and moved to California, Watson had given a lift to Wilson, who had been hitchhiking because his cars had been wrecked. Watson’s drawl earned him a nickname from George Spahn: “Tex”.
Helter Skelter
In the first days of November 1968, Manson established the Family at alternative headquarters in Death Valley’s environs, where they occupied two unused or little-used ranches, Myers and Barker. The former, to which the group had initially headed, was owned by the grandmother of a new girl in the Family. The latter was owned by an elderly, local woman to whom Manson presented himself and a male Family member as musicians in need of a place congenial to their work. When the woman agreed to let them stay there if they’d fix up things, Manson honored her with one of the Beach Boys’ gold records, several of which he’d been given by Dennis Wilson.
While back at Spahn Ranch, no later than December, Manson and Watson visited a Topanga Canyon acquaintance who played them the Beatles’ White Album, then recently released. Despite having been 29 years old and imprisoned when The Beatles first came to America in 1964, Manson was obsessed with the group. At McNeil, he had told fellow inmates, including Alvin Karpis, that he could surpass the group in fame; to the Family, he spoke of the group as “the soul” and “part of ‘the hole in the infinite.’”
For some time, too, Manson had been saying that racial tension between blacks and whites was growing and that blacks would soon rise up in rebellion in America’s cities. He had emphasized Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, which had taken place on April 4, 1968. On a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve at Myers Ranch, the Family members, gathered outside around a large fire, listened as Manson explained that the social turmoil he had been predicting had also been predicted by The Beatles. The White Album songs, he declared, told it all, although in code. In fact, he maintained (or would soon maintain), the album was directed at the Family itself, an elect group that was being instructed to preserve the worthy from the impending disaster.
In early January 1969, the Family escaped the desert’s cold and positioned itself to monitor L.A.’s supposed tension by moving to a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park, not far from the Spahn Ranch. Because this locale would allow the group to remain “submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world,” Manson called it the Yellow Submarine, another Beatles reference. There, Family members prepared for the impending apocalypse, which, around the campfire, Manson had termed “Helter Skelter,” after the song of that name.
By February, Manson’s vision was complete. The Family would create an album whose songs, as subtle as those of The Beatles, would trigger the predicted chaos. Ghastly murders of whites by blacks would be met with retaliation, and a split between racist and non-racist whites would yield whites’ self-annihilation. Blacks’ triumph, as it were, would merely precede their being ruled by the Family, which would ride out the conflict in “the bottomless pit” a secret city beneath Death Valley. At the Canoga Park house, while Family members worked on vehicles and pored over maps to prepare for their desert escape, they also worked on songs for their world-changing album. When they were told Terry Melcher was to come to the house to hear the material, the girls prepared a meal and cleaned the place; but Melcher never arrived.
Encounter with Tate
On March 23, 1969, Manson entered, uninvited, upon 10050 Cielo Drive, which he had known as the residence of Terry Melcher. This was Rudi Altobelli’s property, where Melcher was no longer the tenant; as of that February, the tenants were Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.
Manson was met by Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and Tate friend, who was there to photograph Tate in advance of her departure for Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted. When Manson told Hatami he was looking for someone whose name Hatami did not recognize, Hatami informed him the place was the Polanski residence. Hatami advised him to try “the back alley,” by which he meant the path to the guest house, beyond the main house. Concerned over the stranger on the property, Hatami was now down on the front walk, to confront Manson. When Tate appeared behind Hatami, in the house’s front door, and asked who was calling, Hatami said a man was looking for someone. Hatami and Tate maintained their positions while Manson, without a word, went back to the guest house, returned a minute or two later, and left.
That evening, Manson returned to the property and again went back to the guest house, where, presuming to enter the enclosed porch, he spoke with Rudi Altobelli, who was just coming out of the shower. Although Manson asked for Melcher, Altobelli felt Manson had come looking for him, as is consistent with prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s later discovery that Manson had apparently been to the place on earlier occasions since Melcher’s departure from it.
Speaking through the inner screen door, Altobelli told Manson that Melcher had moved to Malibu; he lied that he did not know Melcher’s new address. In response to a question from Manson, Altobelli said he himself was in the entertainment business, although, having met Manson the previous year, at Dennis Wilson’s home, he was sure Manson already knew that. At Wilson’s, Altobelli had complimented Manson lukewarmly on some of his musical recordings that Wilson had been playing.
When Altobelli informed Manson he was going out of the country the next day, Manson said he’d like to speak with him upon his return; Altobelli lied that he would be gone for more than a year. In response to a direct question from Altobelli, Manson explained that he had been directed to the guest house by the persons in the main house; Altobelli expressed the wish that Manson not disturb his tenants.
Manson left. As Altobelli flew with Tate to Rome the next day, Tate asked him whether “that creepy-looking guy” had gone back to the guest house the day before.
Family crimes
Crowe shooting
On May 18, 1969, Terry Melcher visited Spahn Ranch to hear Manson and the girls sing. Melcher arranged a subsequent visit, not long thereafter, on which he brought a friend who possessed a mobile recording unit; but he himself did not record the group.
By June, Manson was telling the Family they might have to show blacks how to start “Helter Skelter”. When Manson tasked Watson with obtaining money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black drug dealer named Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe. Crowe responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered on July 1, 1969, by shooting Crowe at his Hollywood apartment.
Manson’s mistaken belief that he had killed Crowe was seemingly confirmed by a news report of the discovery of the dumped body of a Black Panther in Los Angeles. Although Crowe was not a member of the Black Panthers, Manson, concluding he had been, expected retaliation from the group. He turned Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards. “If we’d needed any more proof that Helter Skelter was coming down very soon, this was it,” Tex Watson would later write, “lackie was trying to get at the chosen ones.”
Hinman murder
On July 25, 1969, Manson sent sometime Family member Bobby Beausoleil along with Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins to the house of acquaintance Gary Hinman, to persuade him to turn over money Manson thought Hinman had inherited. The three held the uncooperative Hinman hostage for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. After that, Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death, ostensibly on Mansons instruction. Before leaving the Topanga Canyon residence, Beausoleil, or one of the girls, used Hinmans blood to write “Political piggy” on the wall and to draw a panther paw, a Black Panther symbol.
In magazine interviews of 1981 and 1998-99, Beausoleil would say he went to Hinmans to recover money paid to Hinman for drugs that had supposedly been bad; he added that Brunner and Atkins, unaware of his intent, went along idly, merely to visit Hinman. On the other hand, Atkins, in her 1977 autobiography, wrote that Manson directly told Beausoleil, Brunner, and her to go to Hinmans and get the supposed inheritance $21,000. She said Manson had told her privately, two days earlier, that, if she wanted to “do something important,” she could kill Hinman and get his money. When Beausoleil was arrested on August 6, 1969, after he had been caught driving Hinman’s car, police found the murder weapon in the tire well.
Tate murders
Two days after Beausoleil’s arrest, Manson told Family members at Spahn Ranch, “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”
On the night of August 8, Manson directed Watson to take Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel one of the hitchhikers allegedly picked up by Dennis Wilson to “that house where Melcher used to live” and “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can.” He told the girls to do as Watson would instruct them.
When the four arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who had previously been to the house on Manson’s orders, climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into August 9, 1969.
Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm, they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Telling the girls to lie in the bushes, Watson stepped out, gave a command to halt, and shot to death the approaching driver, 18-year-old Steven Parent. After cutting the screen of an open window of the main house, Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate. He removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.
Slaughter
As Watson whispered to Atkins, Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; Watson kicked him in the head. When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, Watson replied, “Im the devil, and Im here to do the devils business.”
On Watsons direction, Atkins found the house’s three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel’s help, brought them to the living room. The three were Tate, eight and a half months pregnant; her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; and Frykowskis lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. Polanski, Tate’s husband, was in London, at work on a film project.
Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with rope he’d brought and slung up over a beam. Sebring’s protest his second of rough treatment of Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, out of which she gave the intruders $70, Watson stabbed Sebring seven times.
Frykowski, whose hands had been bound with a towel, freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him. As Frykowski fought his way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson, who joined in against him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times (breaking the gun’s right grip in the process), stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice. Around this time, Kasabian, drawn up from the driveway by “horrifying sounds”, arrived outside the door and, in a vain effort to halt the massacre, told Atkins falsely that someone was coming.
Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area. Folger was pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed and finally, tackled her. She was dispatched by Watson; her two assailants had stabbed her twenty-eight times. As Frykowski struggled across the lawn, Watson ended his life with a final stabbing; the victim had been stabbed a total of fifty-one times during the assault.
Back in the house, Atkins, Watson, or both killed Tate, who was stabbed sixteen times. Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby; she cried, “Mother… mother…” until she was dead.
Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the girls to “leave a sign something witchy”. Using the towel that had bound Frykowskis hands, Atkins wrote “pig” on the houses front door, in Tate’s blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.
In initial confessions to cellmates of hers at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins would say she killed Tate. In later statements to her attorney, Vincent Bugliosi and before a grand jury, Atkins indicated Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson. In his 1978 autobiography, Watson himself said that he stabbed Tate and that Atkins did not. Since he was aware that prosecutor Bugliosi and the jury that had tried the other Tate-LaBianca defendants were convinced Atkins had stabbed Tate, he falsely testified that he did not stab her.
LaBianca murders
The next night, six Family members the four from the Tate murders as well as Leslie Van Houten and Steve “Clem” Grogan rode out at Mansons instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, “to show [them] how to do it.” After a few hours ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them, Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive, home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner. Located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, the LaBianca home was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.
According to Atkins and Kasabian, Manson returned, after disappearing up the driveway, to say he had tied up the house’s occupants; he then sent Watson up with Krenwinkel and Van Houten. In his autobiography, Watson would state that, having gone up alone, Manson returned to take him up to the house with him: when Manson had pointed out a sleeping man through a window, they entered through the unlocked back door. Watson added that, at trial, he “went along with” the women’s account, which he figured made him “look that much less responsible.”
Rousing the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint, as Watson tells it, Manson had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary LaBianca was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Mansons instructions to cover the couples heads with pillowcases, which he bound in place with lamp cords. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instructions that the couple be killed.
Killings
Before leaving Spahn Ranch, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night’s weapons. Now, sending the girls from the kitchen to the bedroom, to which Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet, the first thrust going into the man’s throat.
Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew Watson there to discover Mrs. LaBianca keeping the girls at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. Subduing her with several stabs of the bayonet, Watson returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, who was stabbed twelve times with the bayonet. After Watson had finished, he carved “WAR” on the man’s exposed abdomen, as he would state in his autobiography. Atkins, who did not enter the LaBianca house, told a grand jury she believed Krenwinkel had carved the word. In a ghost-written newspaper account based on a statement she had made earlier to her attorney, she said Watson carved it.
Returning to the bedroom, where Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary LaBianca with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen, Watson heeding Mansons instruction to make sure each of the girls played a part told Van Houten to stab her too. She did, on the exposed buttocks and elsewhere. At trial, Van Houten would claim, uncertainly, that Rosemary LaBianca was dead by the time she stabbed her. Evidence showed that many of Mrs. LaBianca’s forty-one stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem.
While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Healter [sic] Skelter” on the refrigerator door, all in blood. She gave Leno LaBianca fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach; she also planted a steak knife in his throat.
Hoping for a double crime, Manson had gone on to direct Kasabian to drive to the Venice home of an actor acquaintance of hers, another “piggy.” Depositing the second trio of Family members at the man’s apartment building, he drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home. Kasabian thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. As the group abandoned the murder plan and left, Susan Atkins defecated in the stairwell.
Justice system
Investigation
On August 10, 1969 while the Tate autopsies were under way and the LaBianca bodies were yet to be discovered detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction in the Hinman case, informed LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate case of the bloody writing at the Hinman house. They even mentioned that the Hinman suspect, Beausoleil, was associated with a group of hippies led by “a guy named Charlie.” The Tate team, thinking the Tate murders a consequence of a drug transaction, ignored the information.
Steven Parent, the shooting victim in the Tate driveway, was determined to have been an acquaintance of William Garretson, a young man hired by Rudi Altobelli to take care of the property while Altobelli himself was away. As the killers arrived, Parent had been leaving Cielo Drive, after a visit to Garretson. Held briefly as a Tate suspect, Garretson, who lived in the guest house and told police he had neither seen nor heard anything on the murder night, was released on August 11, 1969, after undergoing a polygraph examination that indicated he had not been involved in the crimes. Interviewed decades later, he would state he had, in fact, witnessed a portion of the murders, as the examination suggested.
On August 12, 1969, the LAPD told the press it had ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca homicides. On August 16, the sheriffs office raided Spahn Ranch and arrested Manson and 25 others, as “suspects in a major auto theft ring” that had been stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies. Weapons were seized, but because the warrant had been misdated the group was released a few days later.
By the end of August, when virtually all leads had gone nowhere, a report by the LaBianca detectives, generally younger than the Tate team, noted a possible connection between the bloody writings at the LaBianca house and “the singing group the Beatles most recent album.”
Breakthrough
In mid-October, the LaBianca team, still working separately from the Tate team, checked with the sheriffs office about possible similar crimes and learned of the Hinman case. They also learned that the Hinman detectives had spoken with Beausoleils girlfriend, Kitty Lutesinger, who had been arrested a few days earlier with members of “the Manson Family.”
The arrests had taken place at the desert ranches, to which the Family had moved and whence, unknown to authorities, its members had been searching Death Valley for a hole in the ground access to the Bottomless Pit. A joint force of National Park rangers and officers from the California Highway Patrol and the Inyo County Sheriffs Office federal, state, and county personnel had raided both the Myers and Barker ranches after following clues unwittingly left when Family members burned an earthmover owned by Death Valley National Monument. The raiders had found stolen dune buggies and other vehicles and had arrested two dozen persons, including Manson. A Highway Patrol officer found Manson hiding in a cabinet beneath Barker’s bathroom sink.
A month after they, too, had spoken with Lutesinger, the LaBianca detectives made contact with members of a motorcycle gang she’d told them Manson had tried to enlist as his bodyguards while the Family was at Spahn Ranch. While the gang members were providing information that suggested a link between Manson and the murders, a dormitory mate of Susan Atkins succeeded in informing LAPD of the Familys involvement in the crimes. One of those arrested at Barker, Atkins had been booked for the Hinman murder after shed confirmed to the sheriffs detectives that shed been involved in it, as Lutesinger had said. Transferred to Sybil Brand Institute, a detention center in Los Angeles, she had begun talking to bunkmates Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham, to whom she gave accounts of the events in which she had been involved.
Apprehension
On December 1, 1969, acting on the information from these sources, LAPD announced warrants for the arrest of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in the Tate case; the suspects’ involvement in the LaBianca murders was noted. Manson and Atkins, already in custody, were not mentioned; the connection between the LaBianca case and Van Houten, who was also among those arrested near Death Valley, had not yet been recognized.
Watson and Krenwinkel, too, were already under arrest, authorities in McKinney, Texas and Mobile, Alabama having picked them up on notice from LAPD.[21] Informed that there was a warrant out for her arrest, Kasabian voluntarily surrendered to authorities in Concord, New Hampshire on December 2.
Before long, physical evidence such as Krenwinkel’s and Watson’s fingerprints, which had been collected by LAPD at Cielo Drive, was augmented by evidence recovered by the public. On September 1, 1969, the distinctive .22-caliber Hi Standard “Buntline Special” revolver Watson used on Parent, Sebring, and Frykowski had been found and given to the police by Steven Weiss, a ten-year-old who lived near the Tate residence. In mid-December, when the Los Angeles Times published a crime account based on information Susan Atkins had given her attorney, Weiss’ father made several phone calls which finally prompted LAPD to locate the gun in its evidence file and connect it with the murders via ballistics tests. Acting on that same newspaper account, a local ABC television crew quickly located and recovered the bloody clothing discarded by the Tate killers. The knives discarded en route from the Tate residence were never recovered, despite a search by some of the same crewmen and, months later still, by LAPD. A knife found behind the cushion of a chair in the Tate living room was apparently that of Susan Atkins, who lost her knife in the course of the attack.
Trial
At the trial, which began June 15, 1970, the prosecution’s main witness was Kasabian, who, along with Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, had been charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy. Not having participated in the killings, she was granted immunity in exchange for testimony that detailed the nights of the crimes. Originally, a deal had been made with Atkins in which the prosecution agreed not to seek the death penalty against her in exchange for her grand jury testimony on which the indictments were secured; once Atkins repudiated that testimony, the deal was withdrawn. Because Van Houten had only participated in the LaBianca killings, she was charged with two counts of murder and one of conspiracy.
Originally, Judge William Keene had reluctantly granted Manson permission to act as his own attorney. Because of his conduct, including violations of a gag order and submission of “outlandish” and “nonsensical” pretrial motions, the permission was withdrawn before the start of the trial. Manson filed an affidavit of prejudice against Keene; he was replaced by Judge Charles H. Older. On Friday, July 24, the first day of testimony, Manson appeared in court with an X carved into his forehead and issued a statement that he was “considered inadequate and incompetent to speak or defend [him]self” and had “X’d [him]self from [the establishment's] world.” Over the following weekend, the female defendants duplicated the mark on their own foreheads, as, within another day or so, most Family members did, too.
The prosecution placed the triggering of “Helter Skelter” as the main motive. The crime scenes’ bloody White Album references pig, rise, helter skelter were correlated with testimony about Manson predictions that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of “pigs” on walls in victims blood. Testimony that Manson had said “now is the time for Helter Skelter” was supplemented with Kasabians testimony that, on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson considered discarding Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet on the street of a black neighborhood. Having obtained the wallet in the LaBianca house, he “wanted a black person to pick it up and use the credit cards so that the people, the establishment, would think it was some sort of an organized group that killed these people.” On his direction, Kasabian had hidden it in the women’s rest room of a service station near a black area. “I want to show blackie how to do it,” Manson had said as the Family members had driven along after the departure from the LaBianca house.
Ongoing disruptions
During the trial, Family members loitered near the entrances and corridors of the courthouse. To keep them out of the courtroom itself, the prosecution subpoenaed them as prospective witnesses, who would not be able to enter while others were testifying. When the group established itself in vigil on the sidewalk, each of the “hard-core” members wore a sheathed hunting knife that, being in plain view, was carried legally. Each of them was also identifiable by the X on his or her forehead.
Some Family members attempted to dissuade witnesses from testifying. Prosecution witnesses Paul Watkins and Juan Flynn were both threatened; Watkins was badly burned in a suspicious fire in his van. Former Family member Barbara Hoyt, who had overheard Susan Atkins describing the Tate murders to Family member Ruth Ann Moorehouse, agreed to accompany the latter to Hawaii. There, Moorehouse allegedly gave her a hamburger spiked with several doses of LSD. Found sprawled on a Honolulu curb in a drugged semi-stupor, Hoyt was taken to the hospital, where she did her best to identify herself as a witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. Before the incident, Hoyt had been a reluctant witness; after the attempt to silence her, her reticence disappeared.
On August 4, despite precautions taken by the court, Manson flashed the jury a Los Angeles Times front page whose headline was “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares,” a reference to a statement made the previous day when U.S. President Richard Nixon had decried what he saw as the media’s glamorization of Manson. Voir dired by Judge Charles Older, the jurors contended that the headline had not influenced them. The next day, the female defendants stood up and said in unison that, in light of Nixon’s remark, there was no point in going on with the trial. On October 5, denied the court’s permission to question a prosecution witness whom the defense attorneys had declined to cross-examine, Manson leaped over the defense table and attempted to attack the judge. Wrestled to the ground by bailiffs, he was removed from the courtroom with the female defendants, who had subsequently risen and begun chanting in Latin. Thereafter, Older allegedly began wearing a revolver under his robes.
Defense rests
On November 16, the prosecution rested its case. Three days later, after arguing standard dismissal motions, the defense stunned the court by resting as well, without calling a single witness. Shouting their disapproval, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten demanded their right to testify.
In chambers, the women’s lawyers told the judge their clients wanted to testify that they had planned and committed the crimes and that Manson had not been involved. By resting their case, the defense lawyers had tried to stop this; Van Houten’s attorney, Ronald Hughes, vehemently stated that he would not “push a client out the window.” In the prosecutor’s view, it was Manson who was advising the women to testify in this way as a means of saving himself. Speaking about the trial in a 1987 documentary, Krenwinkel said, “The entire proceedings were scripted by Charlie.”
The next day, Manson testified; but lest he violate the California Supreme Court’s decision in People v. Aranda by making statements implicating his co-defendants, the jury was removed from the courtroom. Speaking for more than an hour, Manson said, among other things, that “the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment.” He said, “Why blame it on me? I didnt write the music.” “To be honest with you,” Manson also stated, “I dont recall ever saying ‘Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.’”
As the body of the trial concluded and with the closing arguments impending, attorney Ronald Hughes disappeared during a weekend trip. When Maxwell Keith was appointed to represent Van Houten in Hughes’ absence, a delay of more than two weeks was required to permit Keith to familiarize himself with the voluminous trial transcripts.[120] No sooner had the trial resumed, just before Christmas, than disruptions of the prosecution’s closing argument by the defendants led Older to ban the four defendants from the courtroom for the remainder of the guilt phase. Older said it had become obvious the defendants were acting in collusion with each other and were simply putting on a performance.
Conviction and Penalty phase
On January 25, 1971, guilty verdicts were returned against the four defendants on each of the twenty-seven separate counts against them. Not far into the trial’s penalty phase, the jurors saw, at last, the defense that Manson (in the prosecution’s view) had planned to present. Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten testified the murders had been conceived as “copycat” versions of the Hinman murder, for which Atkins now took credit. The killings, they said, were intended to draw suspicion away from Bobby Beausoleil, by resembling the crime for which he had been jailed. This plan had supposedly been the work of, and carried out under the guidance of, not Manson, but someone allegedly in love with Beausoleil Linda Kasabian. Among the narrative’s weak points was the inability of Atkins to explain why, as she was maintaining, she had written “political piggy” at the Hinman house in the first place.
Midway through the penalty phase, Manson shaved his head and trimmed his beard to a fork; he told the press, “I am the Devil, and the Devil always has a bald head.” In what the prosecution regarded as belated recognition on their part that imitation of Manson only proved his domination, the female defendants refrained from shaving their heads until the jurors retired to weigh the state’s request for the death penalty.
The effort to exonerate Manson via the “copycat” scenario failed; on March 29, 1971, the jury returned verdicts of death against all four defendants on all counts.[106] On April 19, 1971, Judge Older sentenced the four to death.
On the day the verdicts recommending the death penalty were returned, news came that the badly-decomposed body of Ronald Hughes had been found wedged between two boulders in Ventura County. It was rumored, although never proven, that Hughes was murdered by the Family, possibly because he had stood up to Manson and refused to allow Van Houten to take the stand and absolve Manson of the crimes. Though he might have perished in flooding, Family member Sandra Good stated that Hughes was “the first of the retaliation murders.”
Source: Wikipedia
