The Search for the Motive 5 page

Manson also threatened Wilson himself, but Dennis did not learn of this until an interview I conducted with both Wilson and Jakobson. According to Jakobson, not long after Dennis refused Manson’s request, Charlie handed Gregg a .44 caliber bullet and told him, “Tell Dennis there are more where this came from.” Knowing how the other threat had upset Dennis, Gregg hadn’t mentioned it to him.

This incident had occurred in late August or early September of 1969. Jakobson was startled by the change in Manson. “The electricity was almost pouring out of him. His hair was on end. His eyes were wild. The only thing I can compare it to…is that he was just like an animal in a cage.”

It was possible there was still another threat, but this is strictly conjecture. In going through the Spahn Ranch phone bills, I found that on September 22, 1969, someone called Dennis Wilson’s private number from the pay phone at Spahn and that the following day Wilson had the phone disconnected.

Looking back on his involvement with the Family, Dennis told me: “I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I got off only losing my money.”

F rom rock star to motorcycle rider to ex–call girl, the witnesses in this case all had one thing in common: they were afraid for their lives. They needed only to pick up a newspaper or turn on TV to see that many of the Family members were still roaming the streets; that Steve Grogan, aka Clem, was out on bail, while the Inyo County grand theft charges against Bruce Davis had been dismissed for lack of evidence. Neither Grogan, Davis, nor any of the others suspected of beheading Shorty Shea had been charged with that murder, there being as yet no physical proof that Shea was dead.

P erhaps in her cell at Sybil Brand, Susan Atkins recalled the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “Sexy Sadie”:

“Sexy Sadie what have you done

You made a fool of everyone…

Sexy Sadie you broke the rules

You laid it out for all to see…

Sexy Sadie you’ll get yours yet

However big you think you are…”

Or perhaps it was simply that the numerous messages Manson was sending, by other Family members, were getting to her.

Susan called in Caballero and told him that under no circumstances would she testify at the trial. And she demanded to see Charlie.

Caballero told Aaron and me that it looked as if we’d lost our star witness.

We contacted Gary Fleischman, Linda Kasabian’s attorney, and told him we were ready to talk.

F rom the start Fleischman, dedicated to the welfare of his client, had wanted nothing less than complete immunity for Linda Kasabian. Not until after I had talked to Linda myself did I learn that she had been willing to talk to us immunity or not, and that only Fleischman had kept her from doing so. I also learned that she had decided to return to California voluntarily, against the advice of Fleischman, who had wanted her to fight extradition.

After a number of discussions, our office agreed to petition the Superior Court for immunity, after she had testified. In return it was agreed: (1) that Linda Kasabian would give us a full and complete statement of her involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders; (2) that Linda Kasabian would testify truthfully at all trial proceedings against all defendants; and (3) that in the event Linda Kasabian did not testify truthfully, or that she refused to testify, for whatever reason, she would be prosecuted fully, but that any statement that she gave the prosecution would not be used against her.

The agreement was signed by Younger, Leavy, Busch, Stovitz, and myself on February 26, 1970.

Two days later I interviewed Linda Kasabian. It was the first time she had discussed the Tate-LaBianca murders with anyone connected with law enforcement.

As noted, given a choice between Susan and Linda, I’d preferred Linda, sight unseen: she hadn’t killed anyone and therefore would be far more acceptable to a jury than the bloodthirsty Susan. Now, talking to her in Captain Carpenter’s office at Sybil Brand, I was especially pleased that things had turned out as they had.

Small, with long light-brown hair, Linda bore a distinct resemblance to the actress Mia Farrow. As I got to know her, I found Linda a quiet girl, docile, easily led, yet she communicated an inner sureness, almost a fatalism, that made her seem much older than her twenty years. The product of a broken home, she herself had had two unsuccessful marriages, the last of which, to a young hippie, Robert Kasabian, had broken up just before she went to Spahn Ranch. She had one child, a girl named Tanya, age two, and was now eight months pregnant with another, conceived, she thought, the last time she and her husband were together. She had remained with the Family less than a month and a half—“I was like a little blind girl in the forest, and I took the first path that came to me.” Only now, talking about what had happened, did she feel she was emerging from the darkness, she said.

On her own since sixteen, Linda had wandered from the east coast to the west, “looking for God.” In her quest she had lived in communes and crash pads, taken drugs, had sex with almost anyone who showed an interest. She described all this with a candor that at times shocked me, yet which, I knew, would be a plus on the witness stand.

From the first interview I believed her story, and I felt that a jury would also. There were no pauses in her answers, no evasions, no attempts to make herself appear something she was not. She was brutally frank. When a witness takes the stand and tells the truth, even though it is injurious to his own image, you know he can’t be impeached. I knew that if Linda testified truthfully about those two nights of murder, it would be immaterial whether she had been promiscuous, taken dope, stolen. The question was, could the defense attack her credibility regarding the events of those two nights? And I knew the answer from our very first interview: they wouldn’t be able to do so, because she was so obviously telling the truth.

I talked to her from 1 to 4:30 P.M. on the twenty-eighth. It was the first of many long interviews, a half dozen of them lasting six to nine hours, all of which took place at Sybil Brand, her attorney usually the only other person present. At the end of each interview I’d tell her that if, back in her cell, anything occurred to her which we hadn’t discussed, to “jot it down.” A number of these notes became letters to me, running to a dozen or more pages. All of which, together with my interview notes, became available to the defense under discovery.

The more times a witness tells his story, the more opportunities there are for discrepancies and contradictions, which the opposing side can then use for impeachment purposes. While some attorneys try to hold interviews and pre-trial statements to a minimum so as to avoid such problems, my attitude is the exact opposite. If a witness is lying, I want to know it before he ever takes the stand. In the more than fifty hours I spent interviewing Linda Kasabian, I found her, like any witness, unsure in some details, confused about others, but never once did I catch her even attempting to lie. Moreover, when she was unsure, she admitted it.

Though she added many details, Linda Kasabian’s story of those two nights was basically the same as Susan Atkins’. There were only a few surprises. But they were big ones.

Prior to my talking to Linda, we had assumed that she had probably witnessed only one murder, the shooting of Steven Parent. We now learned that she had also seen Katie chasing Abigail Folger across the lawn with an upraised knife and Tex stabbing Voytek Frykowski to death.

She also told me that on the night the LaBiancas were killed, Manson had attempted to commit three other murders.

PART 5

“Don’t You Know Who You’re Crucifying?”

“For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect…Wherefore, if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth…”

MATTHEW 24:24, 26

“Just before we got busted in the desert, there was twelve of us apostles and Charlie.”

Family member

RUTH ANN MOOREHOUSE

“I may have implied on several occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.”

CHARLES MANSON

MARCH 1970

On March 3, accompanied by attorney Gary Fleischman and some dozen LAPD and LASO officers, I took Linda Kasabian out of Sybil Brand. For Linda it was a trip back in time, to an almost unbelievable night nearly seven months ago.

Our first stop was 10050 Cielo Drive.

I n late June of 1969, Bob Kasabian had called Linda at her mother’s home in New Hampshire, suggesting a reconciliation. Kasabian was living in a trailer in Topanga Canyon with a friend, Charles Melton. Melton, who had recently inherited $20,000, and had already given away more than half, planned to drive to the tip of South America, buy a boat, and sail around the world. He’d invited Linda and Bob, as well as another couple, to come along.

Linda, together with her daughter, Tanya, flew to Los Angeles, but the reconciliation was unsuccessful.

On July 4, 1969, Catherine Share, aka Gypsy, visited Melton, whom she had met through Paul Watkins. Gypsy told Linda about “this beautiful man named Charlie,” the Family, and how life at Spahn was all love, beauty, and peace. To Linda it was “as if the answer to an unspoken prayer.”[53]That same day Linda and Tanya moved to Spahn. Though she didn’t meet Manson that day, she did meet most of the other members of the Family, and they talked of little else. It was obvious to her that “they worshiped him.”

That night Tex took her into a small room and told her “far-out things—nothing was wrong, all was right—things I couldn’t comprehend.” Then “He made love to me, and a strange experience took place—it was like being possessed.” When it was over, Linda’s fingers were clenched so tightly they hurt. Gypsy later told her that what she had experienced was the death of the ego.

After making love, Linda and Tex talked, Linda mentioning Melton’s inheritance. Tex told her that she should steal the money. According to Linda, she told him she couldn’t do that—Melton was a friend, a brother. Tex told her that she could do no wrong and that everything should be shared. The next day Linda went back to the trailer and stole $5,000, which she gave to either Leslie or Tex. She had already turned over all her possessions to the Family, the girls having told her, “What’s yours is ours and what’s ours is yours.”

Linda met Charles Manson for the first time that night. After all she had heard about him, she felt as if she were on trial. He asked why she had come to the ranch. She replied that her husband had rejected her. Manson reached out and felt her legs. “He seemed pleased with them,” Linda recalled. Then he told her she could stay. Before making love to her, he told her that she had a father hangup. Linda was startled by his perception, because she disliked her stepfather. She felt that Manson could see inside her.

Linda Kasabian became a part of the Family—went on garbage runs, had sex with the men, creepy-crawled a house, and listened as Manson lectured about the Beatles, Helter Skelter, and the bottomless pit. Charlie told her that the black man was together but the white man was not. However, he knew a way to unite the white man, he said. It was the only way. But he didn’t tell her what it was.

Nor did she ask. From the first time they met, Manson had stressed, “Never ask why.” When something he said or did puzzled her, she was reminded of this. Also of another of his favorite axioms, “No sense makes sense.”

The whole Family, Linda said, was “paranoid of blackie.” On weekends George Spahn did a brisk business renting horses. Occasionally among the riders there would be blacks. Manson maintained they were Panthers, spying on the Family. He always hid the young girls when they were around. At night everyone was required to wear dark clothing, so as to be less conspicuous, and eventually Manson posted armed guards, who roamed the ranch until dawn.

Gradually Linda became convinced that Charles Manson was Jesus Christ. He never told her this directly, but one day he asked her, “Don’t you know who I am?”

She replied, “No, am I supposed to know something?”

He didn’t answer, just smiled, and playfully twirled her around.

Yet she had doubts. The mothers were not allowed to care for their own children. They separated her and Tanya, Linda explained, because they wanted “to kill the ego that I put in her” and “at first I agreed to it, I thought that it was a good idea that she should become her own person.” Also, several times she saw Manson strike Dianne Lake. Linda had been in many communes—from the American Psychedelic Circus in Boston to Sons of the Earth Mother near Taos—but she’d never seen anything like this, and, forgetting Charlie’s commandment, she did ask Gypsy why. Gypsy told her that Dianne really wanted to be beaten, and Charlie was only obliging her.

Overriding all doubts was one fact: she had fallen in love with Charles Manson.

Linda had been at Spahn Ranch a little over a month when, on the afternoon of Friday, August 8, 1969, Manson told the Family: “Now is the time for Helter Skelter. ”

Had Linda stopped there, supplying that single piece of testimony and nothing else, she would have been a valuable witness. But Linda had a great deal more to tell.

T hat Friday evening, about an hour after dinner, seven or eight members of the Family were standing on the boardwalk in front of the saloon when Manson came out and, calling Tex, Sadie, Katie, and Linda aside, told each to get a change of clothing and a knife. He also told Linda to get her driver’s license. Linda, I later learned, was the only Family member with a valid license, excepting Mary Brunner, who had been arrested that afternoon. This was, I concluded, probably one of the reasons why Manson had picked Linda to accompany the others, each of whom, unlike her, had been with him a year or more.

Linda couldn’t find her own knife (Sadie had it), but she obtained one from Larry Jones. The handle was broken and had been replaced with tape. Brenda found Linda’s license and gave it to her just about the time Manson told Linda, “Go with Tex and do whatever Tex tells you to do.”

A ccording to Linda, in addition to Tex, Katie, and herself, Brenda McCann and Larry Jones were present when Manson gave this order.

Brenda remained hard core and refused to cooperate with law enforcement. Larry Jones, t/n Lawrence Bailey, was a scrawny little ranch hand who was always trying to ingratiate himself with the Family. However, Jones had what Manson considered negroid features and, according to Linda, Charlie was always putting him down, referring to him as “the drippings from a white man’s dick.” Since Jones had been present when Manson instructed the Tate killers, he could be a very important witness—providing independent corroboration of Linda Kasabian’s testimony—and I asked LAPD to bring him in. They were unable to find him. I then gave the assignment to the DA’s Bureau of Investigation, who located Jones, but he wouldn’t give us the time of day.

L inda said that after Manson instructed her to go with Tex, the group piled into ranch hand Johnny Swartz’ old Ford.

I asked Linda what each was wearing. She wasn’t absolutely sure, but she thought Sadie had on a dark-blue T-shirt and dungarees, that Katie’s attire was similar, and that Tex was wearing a black velour turtleneck and dark dungarees.

When shown the clothing the TV crew had found, Linda identified six of the seven items, failing to recall only the white T-shirt. The logical assumption was that she hadn’t seen it because it had been worn under one of the other shirts.

What about footwear? I asked. The girls, she believed, were all barefoot. She thought, but couldn’t be sure, that Tex had on cowboy boots.

A number of bloody footprints had been found at the Tate murder scene. After eliminating those belonging to LAPD personnel, two remained unidentified: a boot-heel print and the print of a bare foot—thus supporting Linda’s recollections. Again, as with Susan Atkins, I badly needed independent corroboration of Linda’s testimony.

I then asked Linda the same question I’d asked Susan—had any of them been on drugs that night?—and received the same reply: no.

As Tex started to drive off, Manson said, “Hold it,” or “Wait.” He then leaned in the window on the passenger side and said, “Leave a sign. You girls know what to write. Something witchy.”

Tex handed Linda three knives and a gun, telling her to wrap them in a rag and put them on the floor. If stopped by the police, Tex said, she was to throw them out.

Linda positively identified the .22 caliber Longhorn revolver. Only at this time, she said, the grip had been intact and the barrel unbent.

According to Linda, Tex did not tell them their destination, or what they were going to do; however, she presumed they were going on another creepy-crawly mission. Tex did say that he had been to the house and knew the layout.

A s we drove up Cielo Drive in the sheriff’s van, Linda showed me where Tex had turned, in front of the gate at 10050, then parked, next to the telephone pole. He had then taken a pair of large, red-handled wire cutters from the back seat and shinnied up the pole. From where she was sitting, Linda couldn’t see Tex cutting the wires, but she saw and heard the wires fall.

When shown the wire cutters found at Barker Ranch, Linda said they “looked like” the pair used that night. Since the wire cutters had been found in Manson’s personal dune buggy, her identification linked them not just to the Family but to Manson himself. I was especially pleased at this evidence, unaware that link would soon be severed, literally.

When Tex returned to the car, they drove to a spot near the bottom of the hill and parked. The four then took the weapons and extra clothing and stealthily walked back up to the gate. Tex also had some white rope, which was draped over his shoulder.

As Linda and I got out of the sheriff’s van and approached the gate at 10050 Cielo Drive, two large dogs belonging to Rudi Altobelli began barking furiously at us. Linda suddenly began sobbing. “What are you crying about, Linda?” I asked.

Pointing to the dogs, she said, “Why couldn’t they have been here that night?”

L inda pointed to the spot, to the right of the gate, where they had climbed the embankment and scaled the fence. As they were descending the other side, a pair of headlights suddenly appeared in the driveway. “Lay down and be quiet,” Tex ordered. He then jumped up and ran to the automobile, which had stopped near the gate-control mechanism. Linda heard a man’s voice saying, “Please don’t hurt me! I won’t say anything!” She then saw Tex put the gun in the open window on the driver’s side and heard four shots. She also saw the man slump over in the seat.

(Something here puzzled me, and still does. In addition to the gunshot wounds, Steven Parent had a defensive stab wound that ran from the palm across the wrist of his left hand. It severed the tendons as well as the band of his wristwatch. Obviously, Parent had raised his left hand, the hand closest to the open window, in an effort to protect himself, the force of the blow being sufficient to hurl his watch into the back seat. It therefore appeared that Tex must have approached the car with a knife in one hand, a gun in the other, and that he first slashed at Parent, then shot him. Yet neither Susan nor Linda saw Tex with a knife at this point, nor did either recall the stabbing.)

Linda saw Tex reach in the car and turn off the lights and ignition. He then pushed the car some distance up the driveway, telling the others to follow him.

The shooting put her in a state of shock, Linda said. “My mind went blank. I was aware of my body, walking toward the house.”

As we went up the driveway, I asked Linda which lights had been on that night. She pointed to the bug light on the side of the garage, also the Christmas-tree lights along the fence. Little details, yet important if the defense contended Linda was fabricating her story from what she had read in the papers, since neither these, nor numerous other details I collected, had appeared in the press.

As we approached the residence, I noticed that Linda was shivering and her arms were covered with goose bumps. Though it wasn’t cold that day, Linda was now nine months pregnant, and I slipped off my coat and put it over her shoulders. The shivering continued, however, all the time we were on the premises, and often, in pointing out something, she would begin crying. There was no question in my mind that the tears were real and that she was deeply affected by what had happened in this place. I couldn’t help contrasting Linda with Susan.

When they reached the house, Linda said, Tex sent her around the back to look for an unlocked window or door. She reported that everything was locked, though she hadn’t actually checked. (This explained why they ignored the open nursery window.) Tex then slit a screen on one of the front windows with a knife. Though the actual screen had since been replaced, Linda pointed to the correct window. She also said the slash was horizontal, as it had been. Tex then told her to go back and wait by the car in the driveway.

Linda did as she was told. Perhaps a minute or two later Katie came back and asked Linda for her knife (this was the knife with the taped handle) and told her, “Listen for sounds.”

A few minutes later Linda heard “horrifying sounds” coming from the house. A man moaned, “No, no, no,” then screamed very loudly. The scream, which seemed continuous, was punctuated with other voices, male and female, begging and pleading for their lives.

Wanting “to stop what was happening,” Linda said, “I started running toward the house.” As she reached the walk, “there was a man, a tall man, just coming out of the door, staggering, and he had blood all over his face, and he was standing by a post, and we looked into each other’s eyes for a minute, I don’t know however long, and I said, ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’ And then he just fell into the bushes.

“And then Sadie came running out of the house, and I said, ‘Sadie, please make it stop! People are coming!’ Which wasn’t true, but I wanted to make it stop. And she said, ‘It’s too late.’”

Complaining that she had lost her knife, Susan ran back into the house. Linda remained outside. (Susan had earlier told me, and the grand jury, that Linda had never entered the residence.) Turning, Linda saw a dark-haired woman in a white gown running across the lawn; Katie was pursuing her, an upraised knife in her hand. Somehow, the tall man managed to stagger from the bushes next to the porch onto the lawn, where he had again fallen. Linda saw Tex hit him over the head with something—it could have been a gun but she wasn’t sure—then stab him repeatedly in the back as he lay on the ground.

(Shown a number of photographs, Linda identified the tall man as Voytek Frykowski, the dark-haired woman as Abigail Folger. Examining the autopsy report on Frykowski, I found that five of his fifty-one stab wounds were to the back.)

Linda turned and ran down the driveway. For what seemed like maybe five minutes, she hid in the bushes near the gate, then climbed the fence again and ran down Cielo to where they had parked the Ford.

Q. “Why didn’t you run to one of the houses and call the police?” I asked Linda.

A. “My first thought was ‘Get help!’ Then my little girl entered my mind—she was back [at the ranch] with Charlie. I didn’t know where I was or how to get out of there.”

She got in the car and had started the engine when “all of a sudden they were there. They were covered with blood. They looked like zombies. Tex yelled at me to turn off the car and get over. He had a terrible look in his eyes.” Linda slid over to the passenger side. “Then he started in on Sadie and yelled at her for losing her knife.”

Tex had put the .22 revolver on the seat between them. Linda noticed that the grip was broken, and Tex told her it had smashed when he hit the man over the head. Sadie and Katie complained that their heads hurt because the people had pulled their hair while they were fighting with them. Sadie also said the big man had hit her over the head and that “the girl”—it was unclear whether she meant Sharon or Abigail—had cried for her mother. Katie also complained that her hand hurt, explaining that when she stabbed, she kept hitting bones, and since the knife didn’t have a regular handle, it bruised her hand.

Q. “How did you feel, Linda?”

A. “In a state of shock.”

Q. “What about the others, how did they act?”

A. “As if it was all a game.”

Tex, Sadie, and Katie changed their clothing while the car was in motion, Linda holding the wheel for Tex. Linda herself didn’t change, since there was no blood on her. Tex told them he wanted to find a place to hose the blood off, and he turned off Benedict Canyon onto a short street not too far from the Tate residence.

Linda’s account of the hosing incident paralleled Susan Atkins’ and Rudolf Weber’s. Weber’s house was located 1.8 miles from the Tate premises.

From there Tex turned onto Benedict Canyon again and drove along through a dark, hilly country area. He stopped the car on a dirt shoulder off the road, and Tex, Sadie, and Katie gave Linda their bloody clothing, which, on Tex’s instructions, she rolled up in one bundle and threw down the slope. Since it was dark, she couldn’t see where it landed.

After driving off, Tex told Linda to wipe the knives clean of fingerprints, then throw them out the window. She did, the first knife hitting a bush at the side of the road, the second, which she tossed out a few seconds later, striking the curb and bouncing back into the road. Looking back, she saw it lying there. Linda believed she threw the gun out a few minutes later but she wasn’t sure; it was possible that Tex did it.

After driving for a time, they stopped at a gas station—Linda was unable to recall the street—where Katie and Sadie took turns going into the rest room to wash the rest of the blood off their bodies. Then they drove back to Spahn Ranch.

Linda did not have a watch but guessed it must have been about 2 A.M. Charles Manson was standing on the boardwalk in the same spot where he had been when they drove off.

Sadie said she saw some blood on the outside of the car, and Manson had the girls get rags and sponges and wash the car inside and out.

He then told them to go to the bunkhouse. Brenda and Clem were already there. Manson asked Tex how it had gone. Tex told him that there was a lot of panic, that it was real messy, and that there were bodies lying all over the place, but that everyone was dead.

Manson asked the four, “Do you have any remorse?” All shook their heads and said, “No.”

Linda did feel remorse, she told me, but she didn’t admit it to Charlie because “I was afraid for my life. I could see in his eyes he knew how I felt. And it was against his way.”

Manson told them, “Go to bed and say nothing to the others.”

Linda slept most of the day. It was almost sundown when Sadie told her to go into the trailer, that the TV news was coming on. Although Linda could not recall seeing Tex, she remembered Sadie, Katie, Barbara Hoyt, and Clem being there.

It was the big news. For the first time Linda heard the names of the victims. She also learned that one, Sharon Tate, had been pregnant. Only a few days earlier Linda had learned that she herself was pregnant.

“As we were watching the news,” Linda said, “in my head I kept saying, ‘Why would they do such a thing?’”

A fter Linda and I left the Tate residence, I asked her to show us the route they had taken. She found the dirt shoulder where they had pulled off to dispose of the clothing, but was unable to find the street where Tex had turned off Benedict Canyon, so I had the sheriff’s deputy who was driving take us directly to Portola. Once on the street, Linda immediately identified 9870, pointing to the hose in front. Number 9870 was Rudolf Weber’s house. She also pointed to the spot where they had parked the car. It was the same spot Weber had indicated. Neither his address, nor even the fact that he had been located, had appeared in the press.

We were back on Benedict looking for the area where Linda had thrown out the knives when one of the deputies said, “We’ve got company.”

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 657