Los Angeles, California 90069. 2 page

Though the interviews yielded nothing, the LaBianca detectives did pick up one possible lead. Before leaving Independence, Patchett asked to see Manson’s personal effects. Going through the clothing Manson had been wearing when arrested, Patchett noticed that he used leather thongs both as laces in his moccasins and in the stitching of his trousers. Patchett took a sample thong from each back to Los Angeles for comparison with the thong used to tie Leno LaBianca’s hands.

A leather thong is a leather thong, SID in effect told him; though the thongs were similar, there was no way to tell whether they had come from the same piece of leather.

LAPD and LASO have no monopoly on jealousy. To a certain extent it exists between almost all law-enforcement agencies, and even within some.

The Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department is a single room, 318, on the third floor of Parker Center. Although it is a large room, rectangular in shape, there are no partitions, only two long tables, all the detectives working at either one or the other. The distance between the Tate and LaBianca detectives was only a few feet.

But there are psychological as well as physical distances and, as noted, while the Tate detectives were largely the “old guard,” the LaBianca detectives were for the most part the “young upstarts.” Also, there was apparently some residual bitterness stemming from the fact that several of the latter, rather than the former, had been assigned to L.A.’s last big publicity case, Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In short, there was a certain amount of jealousy involved. And a certain lack of communication.

As a result, none of the LaBianca detectives walked those few feet to tell the Tate detectives that they were following a lead which might connect the two homicides. No one informed Lieutenant Helder, who was in charge of the Tate investigation, that they had gone to Independence and interviewed one Charles Manson, who was believed involved in a strikingly similar murder, or that while there one of his followers, a girl who went by the name of Leslie Sankston, had admitted that someone in their group might be involved in the Tate homicides.

The LaBianca detectives continued to go it on their own.

H ad Leslie Sankston—true name Leslie Van Houten—yielded to that impulse to talk, she could have told the detectives a great deal about the Tate murders, but even more about the LaBianca slayings.

But by this time Susan Atkins was already doing enough talking for both of them.

O n Thursday, November 6, at about 4:45 P.M., Susan had walked over to Virginia Graham’s bed and sat down. They had finished work for the day, and Susan/Sadie was in a talkative mood. She began rapping about the LSD trips she had taken, karma, good and bad vibrations, and the Hinman murder. Virginia cautioned her that she shouldn’t be talking so much; she knew a man who had been convicted just on what he told a cellmate.

Susan replied, “Oh, I know. I haven’t talked about it to anyone else. You know, I can look at you and there’s something about you, I know I can tell things to you.” Also, she wasn’t worried about the police. They weren’t all that good. “You know, there’s a case right now, they are so far off the track they don’t even know what’s happening.”

Virginia asked, “What are you talking about?”

“That one on Benedict Canyon.”

“Benedict Canyon? You don’t mean Sharon Tate?”

“Yeah.” With this Susan seemed to get very excited. The words came out in a rush. “You know who did it, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re looking at her.”

Virginia gasped, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Susan just smiled and said, “Huh-uh.”[17]

L ater Virginia Graham would be unable to remember exactly how long they had talked—she would estimate it as being between thirty-five minutes and an hour, maybe longer. She would also admit confusion as to whether some details were discussed that afternoon or in subsequent conversations, and the order in which some topics came up.

But the content she remembered. That, she would later say, she would never forget as long as she lived.

She asked the big question first: Why, Sadie, why? Because, Susan replied, we “wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice.” But why the Tate house? Susan’s answer was chilling in its simplicity: “It is isolated.” The place had been picked at random. They had known the owner, Terry Melcher,[18]Doris Day’s son, from about a year back, but they didn’t know who would be there, and it didn’t matter; one person or ten, they had gone there prepared to do everybody in.

“In other words,” Virginia asked, “you didn’t know Jay Sebring or any of the other people?”

“No,” Susan replied.

“Do you mind me asking questions? I mean, I’m curious.” Susan didn’t mind. She told Virginia that she had kind brown eyes, and if you look through a person’s eyes you can see the soul.

Virginia told Susan she wanted to know exactly how it had come down. “I’m dying of curiosity,” she added.

Susan obliged. Before leaving the ranch, Charlie had given them instructions. They had worn dark clothing. They also brought along a change of clothes in the car. They drove up to the gate, then drove back down to the bottom of the hill, parked the car, and walked back up.

Virginia interrupted, “Then it wasn’t just you?”

“Oh, no,” Susan told her. “There were four of us.” In addition to herself, there were two other girls and a man.

When they reached the gate, Susan continued, “he” cut the telephone wires. Virginia again interrupted to ask whether he wasn’t worried he’d cut the electrical wires, extinguishing the lights and alerting the people that something was wrong. Susan replied, “Oh, no, he knew just what to do.” Virginia got the impression, less from her words than from the way she said them, that the man had been there before.

Susan didn’t mention how they got past the gate. She said they had killed the boy first. When Virginia asked why, Susan replied that he had seen them. “And he had to shoot him. He was shot four times.”

At this point Virginia became somewhat confused. Later she would state, “I think she told me—I’m not positive—I think she said that this Charles shot him.” Earlier Virginia had got the impression that although Charlie had instructed them what to do, he hadn’t come along. But now it appeared he had.

What Virginia didn’t know was that there were two men named Charles in the Family: Charles Manson and Charles “Tex” Watson. The complications this simple misunderstanding would later cause would be immense.

O n entering the house—Susan didn’t say how they got in—they saw a man on the couch in the living room, and a girl, whom Susan identified as “Ann Folger,” sitting in a chair reading a book. She didn’t look up.

Virginia asked her how she knew their names. “We didn’t,” Susan replied, “not until the next day.”

At some point the group apparently split up, Susan going on to the bedroom, while the others stayed in the living room.

“Sharon was sitting up in bed. Jay was sitting on the edge of the bed talking to Sharon.”

“Oh, really?” Virginia asked. “What did she have on?”

“She had on a bikini bra and panties.”

“You’re kidding. And she was pregnant?”

“Yeah. And they looked up, and were they surprised!”

“Wow! Wasn’t there some kind of a big hassle?”

“No, they were too surprised and they knew we meant business.”

Susan skipped on. It was as if she was “tripping out,” jumping abruptly from one subject to another. Suddenly they were in the living room and Sharon and Jay were strung up with nooses around their necks so if they tried to move they would choke. Virginia asked why they’d put a hood over Sebring’s head. “We didn’t put any hood over his head,” Susan corrected her. “That’s what the papers said, Sadie.” “Well, there wasn’t any hood,” Susan reiterated, getting quite insistent about it.

Then the other man [Frykowski] broke and ran for the door. “He was full of blood,” Susan said, and she stabbed him three or four times. “He was bleeding and he ran to the front part,” out the door and onto the lawn, “and would you believe that he was there hollering ‘Help, help, somebody please help me,’ and nobody came?”

Bluntly, without elaboration, “Then we finished him off.”

Virginia wasn’t asking any questions now. What had begun as a little girl’s fairy tale had become a horror-filled nightmare.

There was no mention of what had happened to Abigail Folger or Jay Sebring, only that “Sharon was the last to die.” On saying this, Susan laughed.

Susan said that she had held Sharon’s arms behind her, and that Sharon looked at her and was crying and begging, “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby. I want to have my baby.”

Susan said she looked Sharon straight in the eye and said, “Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”

Then Susan said, “In a few minutes I killed her and she was dead.”

After killing Sharon, Susan noticed there was blood on her hand. She tasted it. “Wow, what a trip!” she told Virginia. “I thought ‘To taste death, and yet give life.’” Had she ever tasted blood? she asked Virginia. “It’s warm and sticky and nice.”

Virginia managed to ask a question. Hadn’t it bothered her to kill Sharon Tate, with her pregnant?

Susan looked at Virginia quizzically and said, “Well, I thought you understood. I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her.”

Virginia replied, “Oh, yeah, I do understand.”

She had wanted to cut out the baby, Susan said, but there hadn’t been time. They wanted to take out the eyes of the people, and squash them against the walls, and cut off their fingers. “We were going to mutilate them, but we didn’t have a chance to.”

Virginia asked her how she felt after the murders. Susan replied, “I felt so elated; tired, but at peace with myself. I knew this was just the beginning of helter skelter. Now the world would listen.”

Virginia didn’t understand what she meant by “helter skelter,” and Susan tried to explain it to her. However, she talked so quickly and with such obvious excitement that Virginia had trouble following. As Virginia understood it, there was this group, these chosen people, that Charlie had brought together, and they were elected, this new society, to go out, all over the country and all over the world, to pick out people at random and execute them, to release them from this earth. “You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people,” Susan explained.

F our or five times while Susan was talking, Virginia had to caution her to keep her voice down, that someone might hear. Susan smiled and said she wasn’t worried about that. She was very good at playing crazy.

After they’d left the Tate residence, Susan continued, she discovered that she had lost her knife. She thought maybe the dog had got it. “You know how dogs are sometimes.” They had thought about going back to look for it but had decided against it. She had also left her hand print on a desk. “It dawned on me afterwards,” Susan said, “but my spirit was so strong that obviously it didn’t even show up, or they would have had me by now.”

As Virginia understood it, after leaving the Tate residence, they had apparently changed clothes in the car. Then they had driven some distance, stopping at a place where there was a fountain or water outside, to wash their hands. Susan said a man came outside and wanted to know what they were doing. He started to holler at them. “And,” Susan asked, “guess who he was?”

“I don’t know,” Virginia replied.

“It was the sheriff of Beverly Hills!”

Virginia said she didn’t think Beverly Hills had a sheriff.

“Well,” Susan said petulantly, “the sheriff or mayor or something.”

The man had started to reach into the car to grab the keys, and “Charlie turned on the key. Boy, we made it. We laughed all the way,” Susan said, adding, “If he had only known!”

For a moment Susan remained silent. Then, with her little girl’s smile, she asked, “You know the other two the next night?”

Virginia flashed on the grocery store owner and his wife, the LaBiancas. “Yeah,” she said, “was that you?”

Susan winked and said, “What do you think?”

“But that’s part of the plan,” she continued. “And there’s more—”

But Virginia had heard enough for one day. She excused herself to go take a shower.

V irginia would later recall thinking, She’s got to be kidding! She’s making all this up. This is just too wild, too fantastic!

But then she remembered what Susan was in for—first degree murder.

Virginia decided not to say anything to anyone. It was just too incredible. She also decided, if possible, to avoid Susan.

The following day, however, Virginia walked over to Ronnie Howard’s bed to tell her something. Susan, who was lying on her own bed, interrupted: “Virginia, Virginia, remember that beautiful cat I was telling you about? I want you to dig on his name. Now listen, his name is Manson—Man’s Son! ” She repeated it several times to make sure Virginia understood. She said it in a tone of childlike wonder.

S he just couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. It was just too much. The first time she and Ronnie Howard were alone together, Virginia Graham told her what Susan Atkins had said. “Hey, what do you do?” she asked Ronnie. “If this is true—My God, this is terrible. I wish she hadn’t told me.”

Ronnie thought Sadie was “making it all up. She could have gotten it out of the papers.”

The only way to know for sure, they decided, would be for Virginia to question her further, to see if she could learn something that only one of the killers would know.

Virginia had an idea how she could do this without arousing Susan’s suspicions. Though she hadn’t mentioned it to Susan Atkins, Virginia Graham had more than a passing interest in the Tate homicides. She had known Jay Sebring. A girl friend, who was working as a manicurist for Sebring, had introduced them at the Luau some years ago, shortly after Sebring opened his shop on Fairfax. It was a casual thing—he was neither client nor friend, just someone you’d nod and say “Hi” to at a party or in a restaurant. It was an odd coincidence, Susan copping out to her. But there was another coincidence even odder. Virginia had been to 10050 Cielo Drive. Back in 1962 she and her then husband and another girl had been looking for a quiet place, away from things, and had learned 10050 Cielo Drive was up for lease. There had been no one there to show them around, so they had just looked in the windows of the main house. She could remember little about it, only that it looked like a red barn, but the next day at lunch she told Susan about having been there and asked if the interior was still decorated in gold and white. It was just a guess. Susan replied, “Huh-uh,” but didn’t elaborate. Virginia then told her about knowing Sebring, but Susan didn’t appear very interested. This time Susan wasn’t as talkative, but Virginia persisted, picking up miscellaneous bits and pieces of information.

They’d met Terry Melcher through Dennis Wilson, one of the Beach Boys rock group. They—Charlie, Susan, and the others—had lived with Dennis for a time. Virginia got the idea they were hostile toward Melcher, that he was too interested in money. Virginia also learned that the Tate murders had taken place between midnight and one in the morning; that “Charlie is love, pure love”; and that when you stab someone “it feels good when the knife goes in.”

She also learned that besides the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders, “there’s more—and more before…There’s also three people out in the desert…”

B its and pieces. Susan had said nothing that would establish whether she was or wasn’t telling the truth.

That afternoon Susan walked over and sat down on Virginia’s bed. Virginia had been leafing through a movie magazine. Susan saw it and began talking. The story she related, Virginia would say much later, was even more bizarre than what Susan had already told her. It was so incredible that Virginia didn’t even mention it to Ronnie Howard. No one would believe it, she decided. For Susan Atkins, in one spurt of non-stop talking, gave her a “death list” of persons who would be murdered next. All were celebrities. She then, according to Virginia, described in gruesome detail exactly how Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Tom Jones, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra would die.

O n Monday, November 10, Susan Atkins had a visitor at Sybil Brand, Sue Bartell, who told her about the death of Zero. After Sue left, Susan told Ronnie Howard. Whether she embellished it or not is unknown. According to Susan, one of the girls had been holding Zero’s hand when he died. When the gun went off, “he climaxed all over himself.”

Susan didn’t seem disturbed to hear of Zero’s death. On the contrary, it excited her. “Imagine how beautiful to be there when it happened!” she told Ronnie.

O n Wednesday, November 12, Susan Atkins was taken to court for a preliminary hearing on the Hinman murder. While there, she heard Sergeant Whiteley testify that it was Kitty Lutesinger—not Bobby Beausoleil—who had implicated her. On being returned to jail, Susan told Virginia that the prosecution had a surprise witness; but she wasn’t worried about her testimony: “Her life’s not worth anything.”

That same day Virginia Graham received some bad news. She was being transferred to Corona Women’s Prison, to serve out the rest of her sentence. She was to leave that afternoon. While she was packing, Ronnie came up to her and asked, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Virginia replied. “Ronnie, if you want to take it from here—”

“I’ve been talking to that girl every night,” Ronnie said. “Boy, she’s really weird. She could have, you know.”

Virginia had forgotten to ask Susan about the word “pig,” which the papers had said was printed in blood on the door of the Tate residence. She suggested that Ronnie question her about this, and anything else she could think of that might indicate whether she was telling the truth.

In the meantime, they decided not to mention it to anyone else.

T hat same day the LaBianca detectives received a call from Venice PD. Were they still interested in talking to one of the Straight Satans? If so, they were questioning one, a guy named Al Springer, on another charge.

The LaBianca detectives had Springer brought over to Parker Center, where they interviewed him on tape. What he told them was so unexpected they had trouble believing it. For Springer said that on August 11 or 12—two or three days after the Tate homicides—Charlie Manson had bragged to him about killing people, adding, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.”

NOVEMBER 12–16, 1969

LaBianca detectives Nielsen, Gutierrez, and Patchett interviewed Springer on tape, in one of the interrogation cubicles of LAPD Homicide. Springer was twenty-six, five feet nine, weighed 130 pounds, and, except for his dusty, ragged “colors,” as bikers’ jackets are known, was surprisingly neat for a member of an “outlaw” motorcycle band.

Springer, it turned out, prided himself on his cleanliness. Which was one of the reasons he personally hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with Manson and his girls, he said. But Danny DeCarlo, the club treasurer of the Straight Satans, had got mixed up with them and had missed meetings, so around August 11 or 12, he, Springer, had gone to Spahn Ranch to persuade Danny to come back. “…and there was flies all over the place and they were just like animals up there, I couldn’t believe it, you know. You see, I’m really clean, really. Some of the guys get pretty nasty, but I myself, I like to keep things clean.

“Well, in comes this Charlie…He wanted Danny up there because Danny had his colors on his back, and all these drunkards, they come up there and start harassing the girls and messing with the guys and Danny walks out with his Straight Satan colors on, and nobody messes with Charlie, see.

“So I tried to get Danny to come back, and Charlie is standing there, and Charlie says, he says, ‘Now wait a minute, maybe I can give you a better thing than you’ve got already.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘Move up here, you can have all the girls you want, all the girls,’ he says, ‘are all yours, at your disposal, anything.’ And he’s a brainwashing type guy. So I said, ‘Well, how do you survive, how do you support these twenty, thirty fucking broads, man?’ And he says, ‘I got them all hoofing for me.’ He said, ‘I go out at night and I do my thing.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s your thing, man; run your trip down.’ He figured me being a motorcycle rider and all, I’d accept anything including murder.

“So he starts getting in my ear and says how he goes up and he lives with the rich people, and he calls the police ‘pigs’ and what not, he knocks on the door, they’ll open the door, and he’ll just drive in with his cutlass and start cutting them up, see.”

Q. “This is what he told you?”

A. “This is what he told me verbally, right to my face.”

Q. “You’re kidding, is that what you really heard?”

A. “Yeah. I said, ‘When’s the last time you did it?’ He says, ‘Well, we knocked off five of them,’ he says, ‘just the other night.’”

Q. “So he told you that—Charlie stated that he knocked over five people?”

A. “Right. Charlie and Tex.”

Springer couldn’t recall the exact word Manson used: it wasn’t “people”; it might have been “pigs” or “rich pigs.”

The LaBianca detectives were so startled they had Springer run through it a second time, and a third.

A. “I think you’ve got your man right here, I really do.”

Q. “I’m pretty sure we have, but in this day and age of feeding people their rights, if we’re going to make a decent case on him, we can’t do it with his statement.”

Exactly when had Manson told him this? Well, it was the first time he went to Spahn, and that was either August 11 or 12—he couldn’t remember which. But he sure remembered the scene. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I’ve never been to a nudist colony or I’ve never seen real idiots on the loose…” Everywhere he looked there were naked girls. Maybe a dozen and a half were of age, eighteen or over, but about an equal number weren’t. The young ones were hiding in the bushes. Charlie had told him he could have his pick. He’d also offered to buy him a dune buggy and a new motorcycle if he would stay.

It was true turnabout. Charlie Manson, aka Jesus Christ, trying to tempt a Straight Satan.

That Springer resisted the temptation may have been due in part to his knowledge that other members of his gang had been there on previous occasions: “Everybody got sick of catching the clap…the ranch was just out of hand…”

During Springer’s first visit, Manson had demonstrated his prowess with knives, in particular a long sword. Springer had seen Charlie throw it maybe fifty feet, sticking it, say, eight times out of ten. This was the sword, Springer said, that Charlie used when he “put the chop” to people.

“Did you ever get a corpse with his ear cut off?” Springer abruptly asked. Apparently one of the detectives nodded, as Springer said, “Yeah, there’s your man.” Charlie had told him about cutting some guy’s ear off. If Danny would come in, he could tell them about it. The only problem was, “Danny’s scared of these creeps, they’ve tried to kill him already.”

Springer had also mentioned a Tex and a Clem. The detectives asked him to describe them.

Clem was a certified idiot, Springer said: he was an escapee from Camarillo, a state mental hospital. Whatever Charlie said, Clem would parrot it. As far as he could tell, “Charlie and Tex are the ones that had the brains out there.” Unlike Clem, Tex didn’t say much; he “kept his mouth shut, real tight. He was real clean-cut. His hair was a little long, but he was—just like a college student.” Tex seemed to spend most of his time working on dune buggies.

Charlie had a thing about dune buggies. He wanted to fix them with a switch on the dash that would turn the taillights off. Then, when the CHP (California Highway Patrol) pulled them over to cite them, there would be two guys armed with shotguns in the back, and as the CHPs came up alongside, “Pow, blow them up.”

Q. “Why did he say he wanted to do that?”

A. “Ah, he wants to build up a thing where he can be leader of the world. He’s crazy.”

Q. “Does he have a name for his group?”

A. “The Family.”

Back to that sword, could Springer describe it? Yeah, it was a cutlass, a real pirate’s sword. Up until a few months ago, Springer said, it had belonged to the ex-president of the Straight Satans, but then it had disappeared, and he guessed one of the members had given it to Charlie.

He had heard, from Danny, that the sword had been used when they had killed a guy “called Henland, I believe it was.” This was the guy who had his ear cut off.

What did he know about the “Henland” killing? they asked. According to Danny, a guy named “Bausley” and one or two other guys had killed him, Springer said. Danny had told him that “almost beyond a reasonable doubt he could prove that Bousley or Bausley or whatever killed this guy and evidently Charlie was in on it or something. Well, anyway, somebody cut his ear.” Clem had also told him, Springer, “how they had cut some fucking idiot’s ear off and wrote on the wall and put the Panther’s hand or paw up there to blame the Panthers. Everything they did, they blamed on the niggers, see. They hate niggers because they had killed a nigger prior to that.”

Five. Plus “Henland” (Hinman). Plus “a nigger.” Total thus far: seven. The detectives were keeping track.

Had he seen any other weapons while at Spahn? Yeah, Charlie had shown him a whole gunrack full, the first time he went up there. There were shotguns, deer rifles, .45 caliber hand guns, “and I heard talk of and was told by Danny that they had a .22 Buntline long barrel, a nine-round. This came from Danny, and he knows guns. And this is what was supposed to have killed that, ah, Black Panther.”

Charlie had told him about it. As Al remembered it, Tex had burned this black guy in a deal for a whole bunch of grass. When Charlie refused to give back the guy’s money, the black had threatened to get all his Panther brothers up to Spahn Ranch and wipe out the place. “So Charlie pulls out a gun, somebody else was going to do it, but Charlie pulls out a gun and he points it at the guy, and he goes click, click, click, click and the gun didn’t go off, four or five times, and the guy stood up and he said, ‘Ha, you coming here with an empty gun on me,’ and Charlie says click, bam, in the heart area somewhere, and he told me this personally right to my face and that was what the Buntline was used on, the long-barrel job.”

After the murder, which had occurred somewhere in Hollywood, the Panther’s buddies “took the carcass off supposedly to some park, Griffith Park or one of them…This is all hearsay, but it is hearsay right from Charlie.”

A. “Now, did anybody have their refrigerator wrote on?”

There was a sudden silence, then one of the LaBianca detectives asked, “Why does this come up?”

A. “’Cause he told me something about writing something on the refrigerator.”

Q. “Who said he wrote it on the refrigerator?”

A. “Charlie did. Charlie said they wrote something on the fucking refrigerator in blood.”

Q. “What did he say he wrote?”

A. “Something about pigs or niggers or something like that.”

If Springer was telling the truth, and if Manson wasn’t just bragging to impress him, then it meant that Manson was probably also involved in the LaBianca murders. Bringing the total thus far to nine.

But the LaBianca detectives had good reason to doubt this statement, for, contrary to the press reports, DEATH TO PIGS hadn’t been printed in blood on the refrigerator door; the phrase had actually been printed on the living-room wall, as had the word RISE. What had been printed on the refrigerator door was HEALTER SKELTER.

W hile Springer was being questioned, one of the LaBianca detectives left the room. When he returned a few minutes later, another man was with him.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 853