SUBJECT: SUSAN ATKINS

A meeting was held today in Mr. Younger’s office, commencing at 10:20 A.M. and concluding at 11 A.M. Present at the meeting were Mr. Younger, Paul Caruso, Richard Caballero, Aaron Stovitz and Vincent Bugliosi.

Discussion was had as to whether or not immunity should be given to Susan Atkins in exchange for her testimony at the Grand Jury hearing and subsequent trial. It was decided that she would not be given immunity.

Mr. Caballero made it known that at this moment his client may not testify at the trial due to her fear of the physical presence of Charles Manson and the other participants in the Sharon Tate murders.

Discussion was held concerning the value of Susan Atkins’ testimony. Agreement was reached upon the following points:

1. That Susan Atkins’ information has been vital to law enforcement.

2. In view of her past cooperation and in the event that she testifies truthfully at the Grand Jury, the prosecution will not seek the death penalty against her in any of the three cases that are now known to the police; namely, the Hinman murder, the Sharon Tate murders, and the LaBianca murders.

3. The extent to which the District Attorney’s Office will assist Defense Counsel in an attempt to seek less than a first degree murder, life sentence, will depend upon the extent to which Susan Atkins continues to cooperate.

4. That in the event that Susan Atkins does not testify at the trial or that the prosecution does not use her as a witness at the trial, the prosecution will not use her testimony, given at the Grand Jury, against her.

C aballero had made an excellent deal, as far as his client was concerned. If she testified truthfully before the grand jury, we could not seek the death penalty against her in the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca cases; nor could we use her grand jury testimony against her or any of her co-defendants when they were brought to trial. As Caballero later put it, “She gave up nothing and got everything in return.”

For our part, I felt we got very much the short end. Susan Atkins would tell her story at the grand jury. We’d get an indictment. And that would be all we would have, a scrap of paper. For Caballero was convinced she would never testify at the trial. He was worried that even now she might suddenly change her mind.

We had no choice but to rush the case to the grand jury, which was meeting the following day.

O ur case was getting a little stronger. The previous day Sergeant Sam McLarty of the Mobile Police Department had taken Patricia Krenwinkel’s prints. On receiving the exemplar from Mobile, Sergeant Frank Marz of LAPD “made” one print. The print of the little finger on Krenwinkel’s left hand matched a latent print officer Boen had lifted from the frame on the left French door inside Sharon Tate’s bedroom. This was the blood-splattered door that led outside to the pool.

We now had a second piece of physical evidence linking still another of the suspects to the crime scene.

But we didn’t have either suspect. Like Watson, Krenwinkel intended to fight extradition. She would be held fourteen days without bond. If extradition papers were not there before the fifteenth day, she would be released.

C aballero drove me to his office in Beverly Hills. By the time we arrived, about 5:30 P.M., Susan Atkins was already there, having been taken out of Sybil Brand on the basis of another court order, requested by Aaron. Caballero had suggested that Susan would be much more apt to speak freely with me in the relaxed atmosphere of his office than at Sybil Brand, and Miller Leavy, Aaron, and I had agreed.

Although she had opened up to both Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard, my interview with Susan Atkins on the Tate-LaBianca murders was the first she had had with any law-enforcement officer. It would also be the last.

Twenty-one years old, five feet five, 120 pounds, long brown hair, brown eyes, a not unattractive face, but with a distant, far-off look, similar to the expressions of Sandy and Squeaky but even more pronounced.

Although this was the first time I had seen Susan Atkins, I already knew quite a bit about her. Born in San Gabriel, California, she had grown up in San Jose. Her mother had died of cancer while Susan was still in her teens, and, after numerous quarrels with her father, she’d dropped out of high school and drifted to San Francisco. Hustler, topless dancer, kept woman, gun moll—she’d been all these things even before meeting Charles Manson. I had a certain amount of pity for her. I tried my best to understand her. But I couldn’t summon up very much compassion, not after having seen the photographs of what had been done to the Tate victims.

After Caballero introduced us, I informed her of her constitutional rights and obtained permission to interview her.

A male and female deputy sheriff sat just outside the open door of Caballero’s office, watching Susan’s every move. Caballero remained for most of the interview, leaving only to take a few phone calls. I had Susan tell me the whole story, from the time she first met Manson in Haight-Ashbury in 1967 to the present. Periodically I’d halt her narrative to ask questions.

“Were you, Tex, or any of the others under the influence of LSD or any other drug on the night of the Tate murders?”

“No.”

“What about the next night, the night the LaBiancas were killed?”

“No. Neither night.”

There was something mysterious about her. She would talk rapidly for a few minutes, then pause, head slightly cocked to the side, as if sensing voices no one else could.

“You know,” she confided, “Charlie is looking at us right now and he can hear everything we are saying.”

“Charlie is up in Independence, Sadie.”

She smiled, secure in the knowledge that she was right and I, an outsider, an unbeliever, was wrong.

Looking at her, I thought to myself, This is the star witness for the prosecution? I’m going to build my case upon the testimony of this very, very strange girl?

She was crazy. I had no doubt about it. Probably not legally insane, but crazy nonetheless.

As on the tape, she admitted stabbing Frykowski but denied stabbing Sharon Tate. I’d conducted hundreds of interviews; you get a sort of visceral reaction when someone is lying. I felt that she had stabbed Sharon but didn’t want to admit it to me.

I had to interview over a dozen witnesses that same night: Winifred Chapman, the first police officers to arrive at Cielo and Waverly, Granado and the fingerprint men, Lomax from Hi Standard, Coroner Noguchi and Deputy Medical Examiner Katsuyama, DeCarlo, Melcher, Jakobson. Each presented special problems. Winifred Chapman was petulant, querulous: she wouldn’t testify to seeing any bodies, or any blood, or…Coroner Noguchi was a rambler: he had to be carefully prepared so he would stick to the subject. Danny DeCarlo hadn’t been believable in the Beausoleil trial: I had to make sure the grand jury believed him. It was necessary not only to extract from very disparate witnesses, many of them experts in their individual fields, exactly what was relevant, but to bring these pieces together into a solid, convincing case.

Seven murder victims, multiple defendants: a case like this was not only probably unprecedented, it required weeks of preparation. Because of Chief Davis’ rush to break the news, we’d had only days.

It was 2 A.M. before I finished. I still had to convert my notes to interrogation. It was 3:30 before I finished. I was up at 6 A.M. In three hours we had to take the Tate and LaBianca cases before the Los Angeles County grand jury.

DECEMBER 5, 1969

“Sorry. No comment.” Although grand jury proceedings are by law secret—neither the DA’s Office, the witnesses, nor the jurors being allowed to discuss the evidence—this didn’t keep the reporters from trying. There must have been a hundred newsmen in the narrow hallway outside the grand jury chambers; some were atop tables, so it looked as if they were stacked to the ceiling.

In Los Angeles the grand jury consists of twenty-three persons, picked by lot from a list of names submitted by each Superior Court judge. Of that number twenty-one were present, two-thirds of whom would have to concur to return an indictment. The proceedings themselves are usually brief. The prosecution presents just enough of its case to get an indictment and no more. Though in this instance the testimony would extend over two days, the “star witness for the prosecution” would tell her story in less than one.

Attorney Richard Caballero was the first witness, testifying that he had informed his client of her rights. Caballero then left the chambers. Not only are witnesses not allowed to have their attorneys present, each witness testifies outside the hearing of the other witnesses.

THE SERGEANT AT ARMS “Susan Atkins.”

The jurors, seven men and fourteen women, looked at her with obvious curiosity.

Aaron informed Susan of her rights, among which was her right not to incriminate herself. She waived them. I then took over the questioning, establishing that she knew Charles Manson and taking her back to the day they first met. It was over two years ago. She was living in a house on Lyon Street in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, with a number of other young people, most of whom were into drugs.

A. “…and I was sitting in the living room and a man walked in and he had a guitar with him and all of a sudden he was surrounded by a group of girls.” The man sat down and began to play, “and the song that caught my attention most was ‘The Shadow of Your Smile,’ and he sounded like an angel.”

Q. “You are referring to Charles Manson?”

A. “Yes. And when he was through singing, I wanted to get some attention from him, and I asked him if I could play his guitar…and he handed me the guitar and I thought, ‘I can’t play this,’ and then he looked at me and said, ‘You can play that if you want to.’

“Now he had never heard me say ‘I can’t play this,’ I only thought it. So when he told me I could play it, it blew my mind, because he was inside my head, and I knew at that time that he was something that I had been looking for…and I went down and kissed his feet.”

A day or two later Manson returned to the house and asked her to go for a walk. “And we walked a couple blocks to another house and he told me he wanted to make love with me.

“Well, I acknowledged the fact that I wanted to make love with him, and he told me to take off my clothes, so I uninhibitedly took off my clothes, and there happened to be a full-length mirror in the room, and he told me to go over and look at myself in the mirror.

“I didn’t want to do it, so he took me by my hand and stood me in front of the mirror, and I turned away and he said, ‘Go ahead and look at yourself. There is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect. You always have been perfect.’”

Q. “What happened next?”

A. “He asked me if I had ever made love with my father. I looked at him and kind of giggled and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Have you ever thought about making love with your father?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

And he told me, ‘All right, when you are making love…picture in your mind that I am your father.’ And I did, I did so, and it was a very beautiful experience.”

Susan said that before she met Manson she felt she was “lacking something.” But then “I gave myself to him, and in return for that he gave me back to myself. He gave me the faith in myself to be able to know that I am a woman.”

A week or so later, she, Manson, Mary Brunner, Ella Jo Bailey, Lynette Fromme, and Patricia Krenwinkel, together with three or four boys whose names she couldn’t remember, left San Francisco in an old school bus from which they had removed most of the seats, furnishing it with brightly colored rugs and pillows. For the next year and a half they roamed—north to Mendocino, Oregon, Washington; south to Big Sur, Los Angeles, Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico; and, eventually, back to L.A., living first in various residences in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, Venice, and then, finally, Spahn Ranch. En route others joined them, a few staying permanently, most only temporarily. According to Susan, they went through changes, and learned to love. The girls made love with each of the boys, and with each other. But Charlie was complete love. Although he did not have sex with her often—only six times in the more than two years they were together—“he would give himself completely.”

Q. “Were you very much in love with him, Susan?”

A. “I was in love with the reflection and the reflection I speak of is Charlie Manson’s.”

Q. “Was there any limit to what you would do for him?”

A. “No.”

I was laying the foundation for the very heart of my case against Manson, that Susan and the others would do anything for him, up to and including murder at his command.

Q. “What was it about Charlie that caused you girls to be in love with him and to do what he wanted you to do?”

A. “Charlie is the only man I have ever met…on the face of this earth…that is a complete man. He will not take back-talk from a woman. He will not let a woman talk him into doing anything. He is a man.”

Charlie had given her the name Sadie Mae Glutz because “in order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past. The easiest way to do this, to change identity, is by doing so with a name.”

According to Susan, Charlie himself went under a variety of names, calling himself the Devil, Satan, Soul.

Q. “Did Mr. Manson ever call himself Jesus?”

A. “He personally never called himself Jesus.”

Q. “Did you ever call him Jesus?” From my questioning the night before, I anticipated that Susan would be evasive about this, and she was.

A. “He represented a Jesus Christ–like person to me.”

Q. “Do you think Charlie is an evil person?”

A. “In your standards of evil, looking at him through your eyes, I would say yes. Looking at him through my eyes, he is as good as he is evil, he is as evil as he is good. You could not judge the man.”

Although Susan didn’t state that she believed Manson was Christ, the implication was there. Though I was at this time far from understanding it myself, it was important that I give the jury some explanation, however partial, for Manson’s control over his followers. Incredible as all this was to the predominantly upper-middle-class, upper-middle-aged grand jurors, it was nothing compared to what they would hear when she described those two nights of murder.

I worked up to them gradually, having her describe Spahn Ranch and the life there, and asking her how they survived. People gave them things, Susan said. Also, they panhandled. And “the supermarkets all over Los Angeles throw away perfectly good food every day, fresh vegetables and sometimes cartons of eggs, packages of cheese that are stamped to a certain date, but the food is still good, and us girls used to go out and do ‘garbage runs.’”

DeCarlo had told me of one such garbage run, when, to the astonishment of supermarket employees, the girls had driven up in Dennis Wilson’s Rolls-Royce.

They also stole—credit cards, other things.

Q. “Did Charlie ask you to steal?”

A. “No, I took it upon myself. I was—we’d get programmed to do things.”

Q. “Programmed by Charlie?”

A. “By Charlie, but it’s hard for me to explain it so that you can see the way—the way I see. The words that would come from Charlie’s mouth would not come from inside him, [they] would come from what I call the Infinite.”

And sometimes, at night, they “creepy-crawled.”

Q. “Explain to these members of the jury what you mean by that.”

A. “Moving in silence so that nobody sees us or hears us…Wearing very dark clothing…”

Q. “Entering residences at night?”

A. “Yes.”

They would pick a house at random, anywhere in Los Angeles, slip in while the occupants were asleep, creep and crawl around the rooms silently, maybe move things so when the people awakened they wouldn’t be in the same places they had been when they went to bed. Everyone carried a knife. Susan said she did it “because everybody else in the Family was doing it” and she wanted that experience.

These creepy-crawling expeditions were, I felt sure the jury would surmise, dress rehearsals for murder.

Q. “Did you call your group by any name, Susan?”

A. “Among ourselves we called ourselves the Family.” It was, Susan said, “a family like no other family.”

I thought I heard a juror mutter, “Thank God!”

Q. “Susan, were you living at Spahn Ranch on the date of August the eighth, 1969?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Susan, on that date did Charlie Manson instruct you and some other members of the Family to do anything?”

A. “I never recall getting any actual instructions from Charlie other than getting a change of clothing and a knife and was told to do exactly what Tex told me to do.”

Q. “Did Charlie indicate to you the type of clothing you should take?”

A. “He told me…wear dark clothes.”

Susan ID’d photos of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian, as well as a photo of the old Ford in which the four of them left the ranch. Charlie waved to them as they drove off. Susan didn’t notice the time, but it was night. There was a pair of wire cutters in the back seat, also a rope. She, Katie, and Linda each had a knife; Tex had a gun and, she believed, a knife too. Not until they were en route did Tex tell them, to quote Susan, that they “were going to a house up on the hill that used to belong to Terry Melcher, and the only reason why we were going to that house was because Tex knew the outline of the house.”

Q. “Did Tex tell you why you four were going to Terry Melcher’s former residence?”

Matter-of-factly, with no emotion whatsoever, Susan replied, “To get all of their money and to kill whoever was there.”

Q. “It didn’t make any difference who was there, you were told to kill them; is that correct?”

A. “Yes.”

They got lost on the way. However, Tex finally recognized the turnoff and they drove to the top of the hill. Tex got out, climbed the telephone pole, and, using the wire cutters, severed the wires. (LAPD still hadn’t got back to me regarding the test cuts made by the pair found at Barker.) When Tex returned to the car, they drove back down the hill, parked at the bottom, then, bringing along their extra clothing, walked back up. They didn’t enter the grounds through the gate “because we thought there might be an alarm system or electricity.” To the right of the gate was a steep, brushy incline. The fence wasn’t as high here. Susan threw over her clothing bundle, then went over herself, her knife in her teeth. The others followed.

They were stowing their clothing in the bushes when Susan saw the headlights of a car. It was coming up the driveway in the direction of the gate. “Tex told us girls to lie down and be still and not make a sound. He went out of sight…I heard him say ‘Halt.’” Susan also heard another voice, male, say “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” “And I heard a gunshot and I heard another gunshot and another one and another one.” Four shots, then Tex returned and told them to come on. When they got to the car, Tex reached inside and turned off the lights; then they pushed the car away from the gate, back up the driveway.

I showed Susan a photo of the Rambler. “It looked similar to it, yes.” I then showed her the police photograph of Steven Parent inside the vehicle.

A. “That is the thing I saw in the car.”

There were audible gasps from the jurors.

Q. “When you say ‘thing,’ you are referring to a human being?”

A. “Yes, human being.”

The jurors had looked at the heart of Susan Atkins and seen ice.

T hey went on down the driveway, past the garage, to the house. Using a scale diagram I’d had prepared, Susan indicated their approach to the dining-room window. “Tex opened the window, crawled inside, and the next thing I knew he was at the front door.”

Q. “Did all of you girls enter at that time?”

A. “Only two of us entered, one stayed outside.”

Q. “Who stayed outside?”

A. “Linda Kasabian.”

Susan and Katie joined Tex. There was a man lying on the couch (Susan ID’d a photo of Voytek Frykowski). “The man stretched his arms and woke up. I guess he thought some of his friends were coming from somewhere. He said, ‘What time is it?’…Tex jumped in front of him and held a gun in his face and said, ‘Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.’ Frykowski said something like ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’”

Q. “What did Tex say to that, if anything?”

A. “He said, ‘I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business…’”

Tex then told Susan to check for other people. In the first bedroom she saw a woman reading a book. (Susan ID’d a photo of Abigail Folger.) “She looked at me and smiled and I looked at her and smiled.” She went on. A man and a woman were in the next bedroom. The man, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, had his back to Susan. The woman, who was pregnant, was lying on the bed. (Susan ID’d photos of Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate.) The pair were talking and neither saw her. Returning to the living room, she reported to Tex that there were three more people.

Tex gave her the rope and told her to tie up the man on the couch. After she’d done this, Tex ordered her to get the others. Susan walked into Abigail Folger’s bedroom, “put a knife in front of her, and said, ‘Get up and go into the living room. Don’t ask any questions. Just do what I say.’” Katie, also armed with a knife, took charge of Folger while Susan got the other two.

None offered any resistance. All had the same expression on their faces, “Shock.”

On entering the living room, Sebring asked Tex, “What are you doing here?” Tex told him to shut up, then ordered the three to lie on their stomachs on the floor in front of the fireplace. “Can’t you see she’s pregnant?” Sebring said. “Let her sit down.”

When Sebring “didn’t follow Tex’s orders…Tex shot him.”

Q. “Did you see Tex shoot Jay Sebring?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “With the gun that he had taken from Spahn Ranch?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “What happened next?”

A. “Jay Sebring fell over in front of the fireplace and Sharon and Abigail screamed.”

Tex ordered them to be quiet. When he asked if they had any money, Abigail said she had some in her purse in the bedroom. Susan went with her to get it. Abigail handed her seventy-two dollars and asked if she wanted her credit cards. Susan said she didn’t. On their return to the living room, Tex told Susan to get a towel and retie Frykowski’s hands; she did, she said, but couldn’t get the knot very tight. Tex then took the rope and tied it first around Sebring’s neck, then the necks of Abigail and Sharon. He threw the end of the rope over the beam in the ceiling and pulled on it, “which made Sharon and Abigail stand up so they wouldn’t be choked to death…” Then, “I forget who said it, but one of the victims said, ‘What are you going to do with us?’ and Tex said, ‘You are all going to die.’ And at that time they began to plead for their lives.”

Q. “What is the next thing that happened?”

A. “Then Tex ordered me to go over and kill Frykowski.”

As she raised her knife, Frykowski, who had managed to free his hands, jumped up and “knocked me down, and I grabbed him as best I could, and then it was a fight for my life as well as him fighting for his life.

“Somehow he got ahold of my hair and pulled it very hard and I was screaming for Tex to help me, or somebody to help me, and Frykowski, he was also screaming.

“Somehow he got behind me, and I had the knife in my right hand and I was—I was—I don’t know where I was at but I was just swinging with the knife, and I remember hitting something four, fives times repeatedly behind me. I didn’t see what it was I was stabbing.”

Q. “But did it appear to be a human being?”

A. “I never stabbed a human being before, but I just know it was going into something.”

Q. “Could it have been Frykowski?”

A. “It could have been Frykowski, it could have been a chair, I don’t know what it was.”

Susan had changed her story. In my interview with her, and on the tape, she had admitted to stabbing Frykowski “three or four times in the leg.” Also, if the story she told Virginia Graham was true, she knew exactly how it felt to stab someone, i.e., Gary Hinman.

Frykowski ran for the front door, “yelling for his life, for somebody to come help him.” Tex got to him and hit him over the head several times with “I believe a gun butt.” Tex later told her that he had broken the gun hitting Frykowski and that it wouldn’t work any more.[38]Apparently Tex had a knife ready, as he began stabbing Frykowski “as best he could because Frykowski was still fighting.” Meanwhile, “Abigail Folger had gotten loose from the rope and was in a fight with Katie, Patricia Krenwinkel…”

THE FOREMAN “We have a grand juror who would like to be excused for just a couple of minutes.”

A recess was taken. There was more than one pale face in the jury box.

W e resumed where Susan had left off. Someone was moaning, she said. Tex ran over to Sebring, “and bent down and viciously stabbed him in the back many times…

“Sharon Tate, I remember seeing her struggling with the rope.” Tex ordered Susan to take care of her. Susan locked her arm around Sharon’s neck, forcing her back onto the couch. She was begging for her life. “I looked at her and said, ‘Woman, I have no mercy for you.’ And I knew that I was talking to myself, not to her…”

Q. “Did Sharon say anything about the baby at that point?”

A. “She said, ‘Please let me go. All I want to do is have my baby.’

“There was a lot of confusion going on…Tex went over to help Katie…I saw Tex stab Abigail Folger and just before he stabbed—maybe an instant before he stabbed her—she looked at him and let her arms go and looked at all of us and said, ‘I give up. Take me.’”

I asked Susan how many times Tex had stabbed Abigail. “Only once,” Susan replied. “She grabbed her middle section of her body and fell to the floor.”

Tex then ran outside. Susan released her grip on Sharon but continued to guard her. When Tex returned, he told Susan, “Kill her.” But, according to the story Susan was now telling, “I couldn’t.” Instead, “in order to make a diversion so that Tex couldn’t see that I couldn’t kill her, I grabbed her hand and held her arms, and then I saw Tex stab her in the heart area around the chest.” Sharon then fell from the couch to the floor. (Susan only mentioned Tex stabbing Sharon Tate once. According to the autopsy report, she had been stabbed sixteen times. According to Ronnie Howard, Susan told her, “I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.”)

The next thing she remembered, Susan now testified, was that she, Tex, and Katie were outside, and “I saw Abigail Folger on the front lawn, bent over falling onto the grass…I didn’t see her go outside…and I saw Tex go over and stab her three or four—I don’t know how many times…” (Abigail Folger had twenty-eight stab wounds.) “While he was doing that, Katie and I were looking for Linda, because she wasn’t around…and then Tex walked over to Frykowski and kicked him in the head.” Frykowski was on the front lawn, away from the door. When Tex kicked him, “the body didn’t move very much. I believe it was dead at that time.” (Which was not surprising, since Voytek Frykowski had been shot twice, struck over the head thirteen times with a blunt object, and stabbed fifty-one times.)

Then “Tex told me to go back into the house and write something on the door in one of the victims’ blood…He said, ‘Write something that will shock the world.’ …I had previously been involved in something similar to this [Hinman], where I saw ‘political piggy’ written on the wall, so that stuck very heavily in my mind…” Re-entering the house, she picked up the same towel she had used to tie Frykowski’s hands, and walked over to Sharon Tate. Then she heard sounds.

Q. “What kind of sounds were they?”

A. “Gurgling sounds like blood flowing into the body out of the heart.”

Q. “What did you do then?”

A. “I picked up the towel and turned my head and touched her chest, and at the same time I saw she was pregnant and I knew that there was a living being inside of that body and I wanted to but I didn’t have the courage to go ahead and take it…And I got the towel with Sharon Tate’s blood, walked over to the door, and with the towel I wrote PIG on the door.”

Susan then threw the towel back into the living room; she didn’t look to see where it landed. (It fell on Sebring’s face, hence the “hood” referred to in the press.)

Sadie, Tex, and Katie then picked up the bundles of spare clothing they’d hidden in the bushes. They left by the gate, Tex pushing the button, and hurried down the hill. “When we got to the car, Linda Kasabian started the car, and Tex ran up to her and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get over on the passenger side. Don’t do anything until I tell you to do it.’ Then we drove off.”

They changed clothing in the car, all except Linda, who, not having been in the house, had no blood on her. As they were driving away, Susan realized she had lost her knife, but Tex was against going back.

They drove somewhere along “Benedict Canyon, Mulholland Drive, I don’t know [which street]…until we came to what looked like an embankment going down like a cliff with a mountain on one side and a cliff on the other.” They pulled off and stopped, and “Linda threw all the bloody clothes over the side of the hill…” The weapons, the knives and gun, were tossed out at “three or four different places, I don’t remember how many.”

Susan then described, as she had to Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard, how after they’d pulled off onto a side street and used a garden hose to wash off the blood, a man and a woman rushed out of the house and threatened to report them to the police. “And Tex looked at him and said, ‘Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you were home. We were just walking around and wanted a drink of water. We didn’t mean to wake you up or disturb you.’ And the man looked down the street and said, ‘Is that your car?’ And Tex said, ‘No, I told you we were just walking.’ The man said, ‘I know that is your car. You better get in and get going.’”

They got in the car, and the man, apparently having decided to detain them, reached in to get the keys. Tex quickly started the car, however, and drove off fast.

After stopping at a service station on Sunset Boulevard, where they took turns going to the bathroom to check for “any other blood spots,” they drove back to Spahn Ranch, arriving there, Susan guessed, about 2 A.M.

When they pulled up in front of the boardwalk of the old movie set, Charles Manson was waiting for them. He walked over to the car, leaned inside, and asked, “What are you doing home so early?”

A ccording to Susan, Tex told Manson “basically just what we had done. That it all happened perfectly. There was a lot of—it happened very fast—a lot of panic, and he described it, ‘Boy, it sure was helter skelter.’”

While at the service station, Susan had noticed blood on the door handles and steering wheel. She now went into the ranch kitchen and got a rag and a sponge and wiped it off.

Q. “How was Charles Manson acting when you arrived back at Spahn Ranch?”

A. “Charles Manson changes from second to second. He can be anybody he wants to be. He can put on any face he wants to put on at any given moment.”

Patricia “was very silent.” Tex was “nervous like he had just been through a traumatic experience.”

Q. “How did you feel about what you had just done?”

A. “I almost passed out. I felt as though I had killed myself. I felt dead. I feel dead now.”

After she’d finished cleaning the car, Susan and the others had gone to bed. She thought she had made love to someone, maybe Clem, but then again maybe she had imagined it.

The noon recess was called.

T hroughout her testimony Susan had referred to the victims by name. After the recess I established that she hadn’t known their names that night, nor had she ever seen any of them before. “…when I first saw them, my reaction was, ‘Wow, they sure are beautiful people.’”

Susan first learned their identities the day after the murders, while watching the news on TV in the trailer next to George Spahn’s house. Tex, Katie, and Clem were also there, and maybe Linda, though Susan wasn’t sure.

Q. “As you were watching the television news coverage, did anyone say anything?”

Someone—Susan thought the words came from her own mouth, but she wasn’t positive—said either, “The Soul sure did pick a lulu,” or “The Soul sure did a good job.” She did remember saying that what had happened had “served its purpose.” Which was? I asked.

A. “To instill fear into the establishment.”

I asked Susan if any other members of the Family knew they had committed the Tate murders.

A. “The Family was so much together that nothing ever had to be said. We all just knew what each other would do or had done.”

We came now to the second night, the evening of August 9 and the early-morning hours of August 10.

That evening Manson again told Susan to get an extra set of clothing. “I looked at him and I knew what he wanted me to do, and I gave a sort of sigh and went and did what he asked me to do.”

Q. “Did he say what you were going to go out and do that night?” I asked.

A. “He said we were going to go out and do the same thing we did the last night…only two different houses…”

It was the same car and the same cast—Susan, Katie, Linda, and Tex—with three additions: Charlie, Clem, and Leslie. Susan didn’t notice any knives, only a gun, which Charlie had.

They stopped in front of a house, “somewhere in Pasadena, I believe,” Charlie got out, and the others drove around the block, then came back and picked him up. “He said he saw pictures of children through the window and he didn’t want to do that house.” In the future, however, Manson explained, they might have to kill the children also.

They stopped in front of another house, but saw some people nearby so remained in the car and after a few minutes drove off. At some point Susan fell asleep, she said. When she awakened, they were in a familiar neighborhood, near a house where, about a year before, she, Charlie, and about fifteen others had gone to an LSD party. The house had been occupied by a “Harold.” She couldn’t recall his last name.

Charlie got out, only he didn’t walk up the driveway of this particular house but the one next door. Susan went back to sleep. She woke up when Charlie returned. “He said, ‘Tex, Katie, Leslie, go into the house. I have the people tied up. They are very calm.’

“He said something to the effect that last night Tex let the people know they were going to be killed, which caused panic, and Charlie said that he reassured the people with smiles in a very quiet manner that they were not to be harmed…And so Tex, Leslie, and Katie got out of the car.”

Susan ID’d photographs of Tex, Leslie, and Katie. Also of the LaBianca residence, the long driveway, and the house next door.

I asked Susan what else Charlie told the trio. She replied that she “thought,” but it may be “my imagination that tells me this,” that “Charlie instructed them to go in and kill them.” She did recall him saying that they were “to paint a picture more gruesome than anybody had ever seen.” He’d also told them that after they were done they were to hitchhike back to the ranch.

When Charlie returned to the car, he had a woman’s wallet with him. Then they drove around “in a predominantly colored area.”

Q. “What happened next?”

Susan said they stopped at a gas station. Then “Charlie gave Linda Kasabian the woman’s wallet and told her to put it in the bathroom in the gas station and leave it there, hoping that somebody would find it and use the credit cards and thus be identified with the murder…”

I wondered about that wallet. To date, none of Rosemary LaBianca’s credit cards had been used.

After leaving the station, Susan said, she went back to sleep. “It was like I was drugged” though “I was not on drugs at the time.” When she woke up, they were back at the ranch.

(At this time we were unaware that Susan Atkins had made some significant omissions in her grand jury testimony—including three other attempts at murder that night. Had we known of them, we probably would have asked for an indictment of Clem. As it was, however, all we had against him was Susan’s statement that he had been in the car. And we still had a slim hope that his brother, whom we’d contacted at the Highway Patrol Academy, might persuade him to cooperate with us.)

Susan had not entered the LaBianca residence. However, the next morning Katie told her what had happened inside.

A. “She told me that when they got in the house they took the woman in the bedroom and put her on the bed and left Tex in the living room with the man…And then Katie said the woman heard her husband being killed and started to scream, ‘What are you doing to my husband?’ And Katie said that she then proceeded to stab the woman…”

Q. “Did she say what Leslie was doing while—”

A. “Leslie was helping Katie hold the woman down because the woman was fighting all the way up until she died…” Later Katie told Susan that the last words the woman spoke—“What are you doing to my husband?”—would be the thought she would carry with her into infinity.

Afterwards, Katie told Susan, they wrote “‘Death to all pigs’ on the refrigerator door or on the front door, and I think she said they wrote ‘helter skelter’ and ‘arise.’”

Then Katie walked into the living room from the kitchen with a fork in her hand, and “she looked at the man’s stomach and she had the fork in her hand and she put the fork in the man’s stomach and watched it wobble back and forth. She said she was fascinated by it.”

Susan also said that it was “Katie, I believe,” who carved the word “war” on the man’s stomach.

The three then took a shower and, since they were hungry, they went to the kitchen and fixed themselves something to eat.

A ccording to Susan, Katie also told her that they presumed the couple had children and that they would probably find the bodies when they came over for Sunday dinner later that day.

After leaving the residence, “they dumped the old clothing in a garbage can a few blocks, maybe a mile, away from the house.” Then they hitchhiked back to Spahn Ranch, arriving about dawn.

I had only a few more questions for Susan Atkins.

Q. “Susan, did Charlie oftentimes use the word ‘pig’ or ‘pigs’?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “How about ‘helter skelter’?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “Did he use the words ‘pigs’ and ‘helter skelter’ very, very frequently?”

A. “Well, Charlie talks a lot…In some of the songs he wrote, ‘helter skelter’ was in them and he’d talk about helter skelter. We all talked about helter skelter.”

Q. “You say ‘we’; are you speaking of the Family?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “What did the word ‘pig’ or ‘pigs’ mean to you and your Family?”

A. “‘Pig’ was a word used to describe the establishment. But you must understand that all words had no meanings to us and that ‘helter skelter’ was explained to me.”

Q. “By whom?”

A. “Charlie. I don’t even like to say Charlie—I’d like to say the words came from his mouth—that helter skelter was to be the last war on the face of the earth. It would be all the wars that have ever been fought built one on top of the other, something that no man could conceive of in his imagination. You can’t conceive of what it would be like to see every man judge himself and then take it out on every other man all over the face of the earth.”

After a few more questions, I brought Susan Atkins’ testimony to an end. As she nonchalantly stepped down from the witness stand, the jurors stared at her in disbelief. Not once had she shown a trace of remorse, sorrow, or guilt.

T here were only four more witnesses that day. After Susan Atkins was taken from the room, Wilfred Parent was brought in to identify his son in a high-school prom picture. After identifying photos of the other Tate victims, Winifred Chapman testified that she had washed the front door of the Tate residence shortly before noon on Friday, August 8. This was important, since it meant that in order to leave a print Charles “Tex” Watson had to have been on the premises sometime after Mrs. Chapman left at four that afternoon.

Aaron questioned Terry Melcher. He described meeting Manson; told of how Manson had been along when Dennis Wilson drove him home to 10050 Cielo Drive one night; and described, very briefly, his two visits to Spahn Ranch, the first to audition Manson, the second to introduce him to Michael Deasy, who had a mobile recording unit and who he felt might be more interested in recording Manson than he was.[39]

According to various Family members, Melcher had made numerous promises to Manson, and hadn’t come through on them. Melcher denied this: the first time he went to Spahn, he had given Manson fifty dollars, all the money he had in his pocket, because “I felt sorry for these people”; but it was for food, not an advance on a recording contract; and he’d made no promises. As for Manson’s talent, he “wasn’t impressed enough to allot the time necessary” to prepare and record him.

I wanted to interview Melcher in depth—I had a feeling that he was withholding something—but, like most of the other grand jury witnesses, he was here for a very limited purpose, and any real digging would have to wait.

Los Angeles Coroner Thomas Noguchi testified to the autopsy findings on the five Tate victims. When he had concluded, the session was adjourned until Monday.

That the proceedings were secret encouraged speculation, which, in some cases, appeared not as conjecture but fact. The headline on the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that afternoon read:

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1026