Los Angeles, California 90069. 4 page

Q. “So Bobby told him he was a ‘pig’?”

A. “Right. You see, the fight against society was the number one element in this—”

Q. (skeptically) “Yeah. We’ll get into his philosophy and all that bullshit later…”

They never did.

DeCarlo went on. Before leaving the house, they wrote on the wall “‘white piggy’ or ‘whitey’ or ‘kill the piggies,’ something along that line.” Beausoleil also dipped his hand in Hinman’s blood and, using his palm, made a paw print on the wall; the plan was “to push the blame onto the Black Panthers,” who used the paw print as their symbol. Then they hot-wired Hinman’s Volkswagen microbus and his Fiat station wagon and drove both back to Spahn Ranch, where Beausoleil bragged about his exploits to DeCarlo.

Later, apparently fearful that the palm print might be identifiable, Beausoleil returned to the Hinman residence and attempted, unsuccessfully, to wipe it off the wall. This was several days after Hinman’s death, and Beausoleil later told DeCarlo that he “could hear the maggots eating away on Gary.”[22]

As killers, they had been decidedly amateurish. Not only was the palm print identifiable, so was a latent fingerprint Beausoleil had left in the kitchen. They kept Hinman’s Volkswagen and his Fiat at the ranch for several days, where a number of people saw them.[23]Hinman had played bagpipes, a decidedly uncommon musical instrument. Beausoleil and the girls took his set back to Spahn Ranch, where for a time they remained on a shelf in the kitchen; DeCarlo for one had tried to play them. And Beausoleil did not discard the knife but continued to carry it with him; it was in the tire well when he was arrested on August 6, driving Hinman’s Fiat.

DeCarlo drew a picture of the knife Beausoleil claimed he had used to stab Hinman. It was a pencil-thin, miniature bowie, with an eagle on the handle and a Mexican inscription. It tallied perfectly with the knife recovered from the Fiat. DeCarlo also sketched the 9 mm. Radom, which as yet hadn’t been recovered.

The detectives asked him what other hand guns he had seen at Spahn.

A. “Well, there was a .22 Buntline. When they did that Black Panther, I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to clean it. I didn’t want to be nowhere around it.”

DeCarlo claimed he didn’t know whose gun it was, but he said, “Charlie always used to carry it in a holster on the front of him. It was more or less always with him.”

Sometime “around July, maybe June,” the gun “just popped up.” When was the last time he saw it? “I know I didn’t see it for at least a week before the raid.”

The Spahn Ranch raid had taken place on August 16. A week earlier would be August 9, the date of the Tate homicides.

Q. “Did you ever ask Charlie, ‘Where’s your gun?’”

A. “He said, ‘I just gave it away.’ He liked it, so I figured it was maybe just stashed.”

The detectives had DeCarlo draw the Buntline. It was nearly identical with the photo of the Hi Standard Longhorn model sent out in the LAPD flyer. Later DeCarlo was shown the flyer and asked, “Does this look like the gun you mentioned?”

A. “It sure does.”

Q. “What’s the difference between that gun and the gun that you saw?”

A. “No difference at all. Only the rear sight blade was different. It didn’t have any.”

The detectives had DeCarlo run down what he knew about the murder of the Black Panther. Springer had first mentioned the killing to them when they interviewed him. In the interim they had done some checking and had come up with a slight problem: no such murder had ever been reported.

According to DeCarlo, after Tex burned the guy for $2,500 on a grass deal, the Panther had called Charlie at Spahn Ranch, threatening that if he didn’t make good he and his brothers were going to wipe out the whole ranch. That same night Charlie and a guy named T. J. went to the Panther’s place, in North Hollywood. Charlie had a plan.

He put the .22 Buntline in his belt in back. On a signal T. J. was to yank out the gun, step out from behind Charlie, and plug the Panther. Nail him right there. Only T. J. had chickened out, and Manson had to do the shooting himself. Friends of the black, who were present when the shooting occurred, had later dumped the body in Griffith Park, Danny said.

Danny had seen the $2,500 and had been present the next morning when Manson criticized T. J. for backing down. DeCarlo described T. J. as “a really nice guy; his front was trying to be one of Charlie’s boys, but he didn’t have it inside.” T. J. had gone along with Manson on everything up to this, but he told him, “I don’t want to have nothing to do with snuffing people.” A day or two later he “fled in the wind.”

Q. “Who else got murdered up there? What about Shorty? Do you know anything about that?”

There was a long pause, then: “That was my ace in the hole.”

Q. “How so?”

A. “I was going to save that for the last.”

Q. “Well, might as well clear the thing up now. Has Charlie got something he can smear on you that—”

A. “No, no way at all. Nothing.”

One thing did worry DeCarlo, however. In 1966 he had been convicted of a felony, smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border, a federal charge; he was currently appealing the sentence. He was also under indictment on two other charges: along with Al Springer and several other Straight Satans, he had been charged with selling a stolen motorcycle engine, which was a local charge, and giving false information while purchasing a firearm (using an alias and not disclosing that he had a prior felony conviction), which was federal. Manson was still on parole from a federal pen. “So what if they send me to the same place? I don’t want to feel a shank in my back and find that little son of a bitch behind me.”

Q. “Let me explain something to you, Danny, so you know where you stand. We’re dealing with a guy here who we are pretty sure is responsible for about thirteen murders. Some of which you don’t know about.”

The figure thirteen was just a guess, but DeCarlo surprised them by saying, “I know about—I’m pretty sure he did Tate.”

Q. “O.K., we’ve talked about the Panther, we’ve talked about Gary Hinman, we’re going to talk about Shorty, and you think he did Tate, that’s eight. Now, we’ve got five more. All right? Now, our opinion of Charlie is that he’s got a little mental problem.

“But we’re in no way going to jeopardize you or anyone else if, for no other reason, we don’t want another murder. We’re in business to stop murders. And in this business there’s no sense in solving thirteen murders if somebody else is going to get killed. That just makes fourteen.”

A. “I’m a nasty motorcycle rider.”

Q. “I don’t care what you are personally.”

A. “The police’s general opinion of me is nothing.”

Q. “That’s not my opinion.”

A. “I’m not an outstanding citizen—”

Q. “As I told you the other day, Danny, you level with us, all the way, right down the line, no bullshitting—I’m not going to bullshit you, you’re not going to bullshit me—we level with each other and I’ll go out for you a hundred percent. And I mean it. So that you don’t have to go to the joint.”

Q. (another detective) “We’ve dealt with motorcycle riders before, and with all kinds of people. We’ve gone out on a limb to help them because they’ve helped us. We’ll do our very best to make sure that nobody gets killed, whether he’s a motorcycle rider or the best citizen in the world…

“Now tell us what you know about Shorty.”

E arly that same evening, November 17, 1969, two LAPD homicide officers, Sergeants Mossman and Brown, appeared at Sybil Brand Institute and asked to see one Ronnie Howard.

The interview was brief. They heard enough, however, to realize they were on to something big. Enough, too, to decide it wasn’t the best idea to leave Ronnie Howard in the same dormitory with Susan Atkins. Before leaving Sybil Brand, they arranged to have Ronnie moved to an isolation unit. Then they drove back to Parker Center, anxious to tell the other detectives that they had “cracked the case.”

N ielsen, Gutierrez, and McGann were still questioning DeCarlo about the murder of Shorty. They already knew something about it, even before talking to Springer and DeCarlo, since Sergeants Whiteley and Guenther had begun their own investigation into the “possible homicide” after talking to Kitty Lutesinger.

They knew “Shorty” was Donald Jerome Shea, a thirty-six-year-old male Caucasian who had worked at Spahn Ranch on and off for some fifteen years as a horse wrangler. Like most of the other cowboys who drifted in and out of Spahn’s Movie Ranch, Shorty was just awaiting the day when some producer discovered he had all the potential of a new John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. Whenever the prospect of any acting job materialized, Shorty would quit work and go in search of that ever elusive stardom. Which explained why, when in late August he disappeared from Spahn, no one thought too much about it. At first.

Kitty had also told LASO that Manson, Clem, Bruce, and possibly Tex had been involved in the killing, and that some of the girls in the Family had helped obliterate all traces of the crime. One thing they didn’t know, and now asked Danny, was, “Why did they do it?”

A. “Because Shorty was going to old man Spahn and snitching. And

Charlie didn’t like snitches.”

Q. “Just about the petty bullshit at the ranch?”

A. “That’s right. Shorty was telling old man Spahn that he should put him in charge and he would clean everybody up.” He would, in short order, run off Manson and his Family. Shorty, however, made a fatal mistake: he forgot that little Squeaky was not only George’s eyes, she was also Charlie’s ears.

There were other reasons, which Danny enumerated. Shorty had married a black topless dancer; Charlie “had a thing” about interracial marriages, and blacks. (“Charlie had two enemies,” DeCarlo said, “the police and the niggers, in that order.”) Charlie also suspected that Shorty had helped set up the August 16 raid on Spahn—Shorty had been “offed” about ten days later.[24]And there was the possibility, though this was strictly conjecture on DeCarlo’s part, that Shorty had overheard something about some of the other murders.

Bruce Davis had told him about Shorty’s murder, DeCarlo said. Several of the girls had also mentioned it, as had both Clem and Manson. Danny was unclear as to some of the details—how they had managed to catch Shorty off guard, and where—but as for the mode of death, he was more than graphic. “Like they were going to do Caesar,” they went to the gunroom and picked up a sword and four German bayonets, the latter purchased from an Army surplus store for a buck each and honed to razor sharpness, then, getting Shorty off by himself, they “stuck him like carving up a Christmas turkey…Bruce said they cut him up in nine pieces. They cut his head off. Then they cut his arms off too, so there was no way they could possibly identify him. They were laughing about that.”

After killing him, they covered the body with leaves (DeCarlo guessed, but was not sure, that this had occurred in one of the canyons behind the ranch buildings); some of the girls had helped dispose of Shorty’s bloody clothing, his automobile, and other possessions; then “Clem came back the next day or that night and buried him good.”

Q. (unidentified voice) “Can we break this up for about fifteen minutes, maybe send Danny up to get some coffee? There’s been an accident and they want to talk to you guys.”

Q. “Sure.”

Q. “I’m going to send Danny up to the eighth floor. I want him back down here in fifteen minutes.”

A. “I’ll wait right here.” Danny was not anxious to be seen wandering the halls of LAPD.

Q. “It won’t take more than fifteen minutes. We’ll close the door so nobody will know you’re in here.”

There had been no accident. Mossman and Brown had returned from Sybil Brand. As they related what they had heard, the fifteen minutes stretched to nearly forty-five. Although the Atkins-Howard conversations left many unanswered questions, the detectives were now convinced that the Tate and LaBianca cases had been “solved.”[25]Susan Atkins had told Ronnie Howard details—the unpublished words written at the LaBianca residence, the lost knife at Tate—which only one of the killers could know. Lieutenants Helder (Tate) and LePage (LaBianca) were notified.

When the detectives returned to the interrogation room, they were in a lighthearted mood.

Q. “Now, when we left Shorty, he was in nine pieces and his head and arms were off…”

D eCarlo was not told what they had learned. But he must have sensed a change in the questioning. The matter of Shorty was quickly wrapped up. Tate was now the topic. Exactly why did Danny think Manson was involved?

Well, there were two incidents. Or maybe it was the same incident, Danny was not sure. Anyway, “they went out on one caper and they came back with seventy-five bucks. Tex was in on that. And he fucked up his foot, fucking somebody out of it. I don’t know whether he put his lights out or not, but he got seventy-five bucks.”

There were no calendars at Spahn Ranch, DeCarlo had told them earlier; no one paid much attention to what day it was. The one date everyone at the ranch remembered, however, was August 16, the day of the raid. It was before this.

Q. “How much before?”

A. “Oh, two weeks.”

If DeCarlo’s estimate was correct, this would also be before Tate. What was the other incident?

A. “They went out one night, everybody went but Bruce.”

Q. “Who went?”

A. “Charlie, Tex, and Clem. Them three. O.K., the next morning—”

One of the detectives interrupted. Had he actually seen them leave? No, only the next morning—Another interruption: Did any of the girls go that night?

A. “No, I think—No, I am almost positive it was just them three that went.”

Q. “Well, do you remember, were the rest of the girls there that night?”

A. “See, the girls were scattered all over the place, and there is no possible way that I could have kept track of who was there and who wasn’t there…”

So it was possible the girls could have gone without DeCarlo’s knowing about it. Now, what about the date?

This one Danny remembered, more or less, because he was rebuilding the engine on his bike and had to go into town to get a bearing. It was “around the ninth, tenth, or eleventh” of August. “And they split that night and they came back the next morning.”

Clem was standing in front of the kitchen, DeCarlo said. Danny walked up to him and asked, “What’d you do last night?” Clem, according to Danny, smiled “that real stupid smile of his.” Danny glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Charlie was standing behind him. He got the impression that Clem had been about to answer but that Charlie had signaled him to be quiet. Clem said something like “Don’t worry about it, we did all right.” At this point Charlie walked off. Before starting after him, Clem put his hand on Danny’s arm and said, “We got five piggies.” There was a great big grin on his face.

C lem told DeCarlo, “We got five piggies.” Manson told Springer, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.” Atkins confessed to Howard that she stabbed Sharon Tate and Voytek Frykowski. Beausoleil confessed to DeCarlo that he had stabbed Hinman. Atkins told Howard that she had done the stabbing. Suddenly the detectives had a surfeit of confessors. So many that they were thoroughly confused as to who was involved in which homicides.

Skipping Hinman, which, after all, was the sheriff’s case, and concentrating on Tate, they had two versions:

(1) DeCarlo felt that Charlie, Clem, and Tex—without the help of any of the girls—had killed Sharon Tate and the others.

(2) Ronnie Howard understood Susan Atkins to say that she, two other girls (the names “Linda” and “Katie” had been mentioned, but whether they were involved in this particular homicide was unclear), plus “Charles,” plus possibly one other man, had gone to 10050 Cielo Drive.

As for the LaBianca murders, all they knew was that there were “two girls and Charlie,” that “Linda wasn’t in on this one,” and that Susan Atkins was somehow involved in that collective “we.”

The detectives decided to try another approach—through the other girls at the ranch. But first they wanted to wrap up a few loose ends. What clothing had the three men been wearing? Dark clothing, DeCarlo replied. Charlie had on a black sweater, Levi’s, moccasins; Tex was dressed similarly, he thought, though he may have been wearing boots, he wasn’t sure; Clem wore Levi’s and moccasins, too, plus an olive-drab field jacket. Had he noticed any blood on their clothes when he saw them the next morning? No, but then he hadn’t been looking for any. Did he have any idea which vehicle they took? Sure, Johnny Swartz’ ’59 Ford; it was the only car working at that time. Any idea where it was now? It had been hauled off during the August 16 raid and, so far as Danny knew, was probably still in the impound garage in Canoga Park. Swartz was one of the ranch hands at Spahn, not a Family member, but he let them borrow his car. Any idea what Tex’s true name was? “Charles” was his first name, Danny said; he’d seen the last name once, on a pink slip, but couldn’t recall it. Was it “Charles Montgomery”? the detectives asked, using a name Kitty Lutesinger had supplied. No, that didn’t sound familiar. What about Clem—does the name “Tufts” ring any bell? No, he’d never heard Clem called that, but, “That boy that was found shot up in Topanga Canyon, the sixteen-year-old kid. Wasn’t his name Tufts?” One of the detectives replied, “I don’t know. That’s the sheriff’s case. We got so many murders now.”

O.K., now about the girls. “How well did you know the broads out there?”

A. “Pretty well, man.” [Laughter]

The detectives began going through the names the girls had used when arrested in the Spahn and Barker raids. And they immediately encountered problems. Not only had they used aliases when booked, they also used them at the ranch. And not a single alias but several, seemingly changing names like clothes, whenever the mood hit them. As a further complication, they even traded aliases.

As if these weren’t problems enough, Danny provided another. He was extremely reluctant to admit that any of the girls might be capable of murder.

The guys were something else. Bobby, Tex, Bruce, Clem, any would kill, DeCarlo felt, if Charlie told him to. (All, it later turned out, had.)

Ella Jo Bailey was eliminated; she’d left Spahn Ranch before the murders. Mary Brunner and Sandra Good were out also; they’d been in jail both nights.

What about Ruth Ann Smack, aka Ruth Ann Huebelhurst? (These were booking names. Her true name was Ruth Ann Moorehouse, and she was known in the Family as “Ouisch.” Danny knew this, but for personal reasons didn’t bother to enlighten the detectives.)

Q. “What do you know about her?”

A. “She used to be one of my favorite sweeties.”

Q. “Do you think she would have the guts to get into a cold-blooded murder?”

Danny hesitated a long time before answering. “You know, that little girl there is so sweet. What really made me sick to my stomach is when she came up one night, when I was up there in the desert, and she said, ‘I can hardly wait to get my first pig.’

“Little seventeen-year-old! I looked on her like she was my daughter, just the sweetest little thing you would ever want to meet in your life. She was so beautiful and so sweet. And Charlie fucked her thinking around so much it turned your guts.”

The date when she told DeCarlo this was determined to be about September 1. If she hadn’t killed by then, she couldn’t have been in on LaBianca or Tate. Eliminate Ruth Ann.

Ever know a Katie? Yeah, but he didn’t know what her real name was. “I never knew anyone by their real name,” DeCarlo said. Katie was an older broad, not a runaway. She was from down around Venice. His description of her was vague, except that she had so much hair on her body that none of the guys wanted to make it with her.

What about a Linda? She was a short broad, Danny said. But she didn’t stay long, maybe only a month or so, and he didn’t know much about her. She’d left by the time they raided Spahn Ranch.

When Sadie went out on “creepy-crawly” missions, did she carry any weapons? one of the detectives asked.

A. “She carried a little knife…They had a bunch of little hunting knives, Buck hunting knives.”

Q. “Buck knives?”

A. “Buck knives, right…”

They now began firing specific questions at DeCarlo. Ever see any credit cards with an Italian name on them? Anybody ever talk about somebody who owned a boat? Ever hear anyone use the name “LaBianca”? Danny gave “No” answers to all.

What about glasses, anybody at Spahn wear them? “None of ’em wore glasses because Charlie wouldn’t let ’em wear glasses.” Mary Brunner had had several pairs; Charlie had broken them.

DeCarlo was shown some two-strand nylon rope. Ever see any rope like this up at Spahn? No, but he had seen some three-strand. Charlie had bought about 200 feet of it at the Jack Frost surplus store in Santa Monica, in June or July.

Was he sure about that? Sure he was sure; he’d been along when Charlie bought it. Later he’d coiled it so it wouldn’t develop snags. It was the same as they used in the Coast Guard, on PT boats; he’d handled it hundreds of times.

Although DeCarlo was unaware of it, the Tate-Sebring rope was also three-strand.

P robably by prearrangement, the detectives began to lean on DeCarlo, adopting a tougher tone.

Q. “Did you ever caper with any of the guys?”

A. “Fuck no. No way at all. Ask any of the girls.”

Q. “Did you have anything to do with Shorty’s death?”

DeCarlo denied it, vehemently. Shorty had been his friend; besides, “I’ve got no balls for putting anybody’s lights out.” But there was just enough hesitation in his reply to indicate he was hiding something. Pressed, DeCarlo told them about Shorty’s guns. Shorty had a matched pair of Colt .45s. He was always hocking, then reclaiming the pistols. In late August or early September—after Shorty had disappeared but supposedly before DeCarlo knew what had happened to him—Bruce Davis had given him Shorty’s pawn tickets on the guns, in repayment for some money he owed DeCarlo. Danny had reclaimed the pistols. Later, learning that Shorty had been killed, he’d sold the guns to a Culver City shop for seventy-five dollars.

Q. “That puts you in a pretty shitty spot, you’re aware of that?”

Danny was. And he got in even deeper when one of the detectives asked him if he knew anything about lime. When arrested, Mary Brunner was carrying a shopping list made up by Manson. “Lime” was one of the items listed. Any idea why Charlie would want some lime?

Danny recalled that Charlie had once asked him what to use “to decompose a body.” He had told him lime worked best, because he had once used it to get rid of a cat that had died under a house.

Q. “Why did you tell him that?”

A. “No particular reason, he was just asking me.”

Q. “What did he ask you?”

A. “Oh, the best way to ah, ah, you know, to get rid of a body real quick.”

Q. “Did you ever think to say, ‘Now what in the fuck makes you ask a question like that, Charlie?’”

A. “No, because he was nuts.”

Q. “When did that conversation take place?”

A. “Right around, ah, right around the time Shorty disappeared.”

It looked bad, and the detectives left it at that. Although privately they were inclined to accept DeCarlo’s tale, suspecting, however, that although he probably had not taken part in the murder, he still knew more than he was telling, it gave them some additional leverage to try and get what they wanted.

T hey wanted two things.

Q. “Anybody left up at Spahn Ranch that knows you?”

A. “Not that I know of. I don’t know who’s up there. And I don’t want to go up there to find out. I don’t want nothing to do with the place.”

Q. “I want to look around there. But I need a guide.”

Danny didn’t volunteer.

They made the other request straight out.

Q. “Would you be willing to testify?”

A. “No, sir! ”

There were two charges pending against him, they reminded him. On the stolen motorcycle engine, “Maybe we can get it busted down to a lesser charge. Maybe we can go so far as to get it knocked off. As far as the federal thing is concerned, I don’t know how much weight we can push on that. But here again we can try.”

A. “If you try for me, that’s fine. That’s all I can ask of you.”

If it came down to being a witness or going to jail—

DeCarlo hesitated. “Then when he gets out of jail—”

Q. “He isn’t going to get out of jail on no first degree murder beef when you’ve got over five victims involved. If Manson was the guy that was in on the Tate murder. We don’t know that for a fact yet.

We’ve got a great deal of information that way.”

A. “There’s also a reward involved in that.”

Q. “Yes, there is. Quite a bit of a reward. Twenty-five grand. Not to say that one guy is going to get it, but even split that’s a hell of a piece of cash.”

A. “I could send my boy through military school with that.”

Q. “Now, what do you think, would you be willing to testify against this group of people?”

A. “He’s going to be sitting there looking at me, Manson is, isn’t he?”

Q. “If you go to trial and testify, he is. Now, how scared of Manson are you?”

A. “I’m scared shitless. I’m petrified of him. He wouldn’t hesitate for a second. If it takes him ten years, he’d find that little boy of mine and carve him to pieces.”

Q. “You give that motherfucker more credit than he deserves. If you think Manson is some kind of a god that is going to break out of jail and come back and murder everybody that testified against him—”

But it was obvious DeCarlo didn’t put that past Manson.

Even if he remained in jail, there were the others.

A. “What about Clem? Have you got him locked up?”

Q. “Yeah. Clem is sitting in the cooler up in Independence, with Charlie.”

A. “What about Tex and Bruce?”

Q. “They’re both out. Bruce Davis, the last I heard, sometime earlier this month, was in Venice.”

A. “Bruce is down in Venice, huh? I’ll have to watch myself…One of my club brothers said he spotted a couple of the girls down in Venice, too.”

The detectives didn’t tell DeCarlo that when Davis was last seen, on November 5, it was in connection with another death, the “suicide” of Zero. By this time LAPD had learned that Zero—aka Christopher Jesus, t/n John Philip Haught—had been arrested in the Barker raid. Earlier, in going through some photographs, DeCarlo had identified “Scotty” and “Zero” as two young boys from Ohio, who had been with the Family for a short time but “didn’t fit in.” One of the detectives had remarked, “Zero’s no longer with us.”

A. “What do you mean he’s ‘no longer with us’?”

Q. “He’s among the dead.”

A. “Oh, shit, is he? ”

Q. “Yeah, he got a little too high one day and he was playing Russian roulette. He parked a bullet in his head.”

While the detectives had apparently bought the story of Zero’s death, as related by Bruce Davis and the others, Danny didn’t, not for a minute.

No, Danny didn’t want to testify.

The detectives left it at that. There was still time for him to change his mind. And, after all, they now had Ronnie Howard. They let Danny go, after making arrangements for him to call in the next day.

One of the detectives commented, after Danny had left but while the tape was still on, “I kind of feel like we’ve done a day’s work.”

The DeCarlo interview had lasted over seven hours. It was now past midnight on Tuesday, November 18, 1969. I was already asleep, unaware that in a few hours, as a result of a meeting between the DA and his staff that morning, I would be handed the job of prosecuting the Tate-LaBianca killers.

PART 3

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 913