Charlie Manson:
The lunatic they followed
(Part 3)
This is the third installment about this lunatic
who brought about eight murders in California. I suggest that you really should
read the previous two articles first before you read this one so that you will
have a better concept of what motivated Manson and his followers to murder
people. Part 1 was published on October 11, and Part 2 was
published on October 15.
The investigation and the
prosecution
More than 40 investigators were
assigned to the Tate murders and the slayings of Leno LaBianca and his wife. The two cases were
not well investigated by the police, principally due to rivalries between the
Tate team who were investigating the four murders in the Tate residence and the
La Bianca team who were investigating the two murders in the LaBianca
residence. The Tate team was not open to
suggestions that the two cases were connected. As a result of this, prosecutor
Bugliosi himself played a significant and active role in gathering the evidence
needed to convict.
On October 20, 1969, Sheriff’s detectives handling the Hinman case (murdered by members of the Manson Family) informed the investigating police that they have learned of a girl who might have information about a roving band of hippies who may be involved in the slayings. On October 31, the girl was interviewed and she told them about Charles M. Manson being the leader of the cult implicated in slayings. It was the first mention of Manson being involved in any murders.
On November 12, the police
in suburban Venice reported a suspected burglar in jail who might have more
information on the suspects. The informant was interviewed the same day and
provided the name of another possible informant. That same day, a third informant was located
and he told the police of overhearing talk that some members of a musical band
might be implicated in the slayings. On November 18, Beverly Hills
police reported a woman suspect in another case as having disclosed
conversations with Susan Atkins, a member of the cult who was a cellmate of the
woman at that time. On the 26, the former cellmate related to the police
investigators the girl’s story about Manson and his followers. The informant’s
cellmate was Susan Atkins who had participated in the murders in both
residences and was the person who also stabbed the pregnant actress, Tate to
death. Atkins was questioned by the police and she revealed the details of the
slayings both in the Tate residence and the LaBianca residence. Atkins told the police that Sharon Tate was the last to die after being
knifed by Tex Watson while she was holding Sharon Tate on the floor. Atkins
said later that she tasted Tate's blood and found it to be “warm and
sticky.” She took some of Tate's blood and used it to scrawl, on the
porch wall, “PIG.”
She also said that Manson,
had expressed his displeasure with the attack at the Tate residence. Too
messy, he thought. He decided to accompany the next Helter Skelter
mission, which he scheduled for that very night. In addition to the four
Family members from the previous night's mission, Manson was joined by Clem
Tufts and Leslie Van Houten. Manson ordered Linda Kasabian to cruise the
neighborhoods of Los Angeles, in search for potential victims, before settling
on the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van
Houten were the killers chosen by Manson. As they left the car, Manson
told them: “Don't let them know you are going to kill them.”
On December 1, 1969, acting on the
information from these sources, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced
warrants for the arrest of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in the Tate case. Also the suspects' involvement in the LaBianca
murders was noted. Manson and Atkins, already were in custody, however they were
not mentioned with respect to the connection between the LaBianca case. Van
Houten, was also among those arrested near Death Valley.
Watson and Krenwinkel, too, were already under arrest,
authorities in McKinney, Texas, and Mobile,
Alabama, having picked them up on notice from LAPD. The police in Los Angeles
had a problem trying to extradite Watson however since the sheriff in the town
where Watson was being held was uncooperative as he was related in some degree
to Watson.
It wasn’t long after when physical evidence such as
Krenwinkel's and Watson's fingerprints were collected by the LAPD at the
Tate residence. On September 1, the distinctive .22-caliber Hi
Standard Buntline Special revolver Watson when he shot Parent,
Sebring,
and Frykowski had been found and given to the
police by Steven Weiss, a 10-year-old who lived near the Tate residence. In
mid-December, when the Los Angeles
Times published a crime account based on information Susan
Atkins had given her attorney, Weiss' father made several phone calls which
finally prompted the stupid investigators in the LAPD to locate the gun in its
evidence file and connect it with the murders via ballistics tests. Acting on
that same newspaper account, a local ABC television crew quickly located and
recovered the bloody clothing discarded by the Tate killers. The knives
discarded en route from the Tate residence were never recovered, despite a
search by some of the same crewmen and, months later still, by the LAPD,
A knife found behind the cushion of a chair in the Tate
living room was apparently that of Susan Atkins, who lost her knife in the
course of the attack.
Manson didn’t mind
being in jail while waiting for his trial. He needed this time to formulate how
he was going to defend himself. He decided that it would be in his best
interests if he defended himself at trial. It would give him a chance to
deliver his speeches about what his goal was in society as it would be the only
time he would be on a world stage. However he could have done that even with a
lawyer representing him because at the closing of the defense’s evidence, he
would be asked if he wished to make an unsworn statement in which the
prosecutor couldn’t cross examine him.
He could also argue at the summation of his defence that
the murders were committed by the other defendants without his authority or
knowledge. Of course, he would need the cooperation of the other defendants to
go along with that scheme. Considering how gullible those silly women were, that
would be easy to do as you will see later in this article.
The trial began on June 15, 1970. The prosecution's
main witness was Kasabian, who, along with Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, had
been charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy. Since Kasabian, by all accounts,
had not participated in the killings, she was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony that
detailed the nights of the crimes. Originally, a deal had been made with Susan Atkins
in which the prosecution agreed not to seek the death penalty against her in
exchange for her grand jury testimony on which the indictments were secured. However
once Atkins repudiated that testimony, the deal was withdrawn and the offer was
then given to Kasabian. Because Van Houten had only participated in the
LaBianca killings, she was only charged with two counts of murder and one of
conspiracy.
Originally, Judge William Keene had finally reluctantly
granted Manson permission to act as his
own attorney. However Manson's conduct, including violations of a gag order
and submission of outlandish and nonsensical pretrial
motionss caused the judge to
reverse his decision so his original permission was withdrawn before the
trial's start. Manson then filed an
affidavit of prejudice against Keene, who was replaced by Judge Charles H.
Older
Ronald Hughes was a
young lawyer with an extensive knowledge of 1960s counterculture but he failed the bar exam three times before passing and he had no trial
experience. Despite that, he was the state-appointed attorney for the defendants,
Charlie Manson and Leslie Van Houten (several other attorneys were appointed
and then dismissed during the trial). Hughes had suggested to Manson that he
should obtain a different attorney for himself. Irving Kanarek then agreed to
defend Manson.
Hughes meanwhile agreed
to defend Leslie Van Houten, because he felt that he could defend her more
effectively than defending Manson. As
attorney for Van Houten, Hughes tried to separate the interests of his client
from those of Charles Manson. His defence of Van Houten was that she was acting
under the influence of Manson who was controlling her actions. This was a move that angered Manson and may have cost
Hughes his life because the actions of Hughes infuriated Manson and
other Manson Family members who were not charged with the murders. The last thing Manson said to Hughes was, 'I don't want
to see you in the courtroom again.”
On December 2, Judge Older ordered the trial to proceed and appointed a new attorney, Maxwell Keith, for Van Houten. The women angrily demanded the firing of all their lawyers, and asked to reopen the defense. Judge Older denied the request. By week's end, Hughes had been missing for two weeks. When the court reconvened, Manson and the women created a disturbance suggesting that Judge Older “did away with Ronald Hughes,” which resulted in them being removed again from the courtroom.
Vince Bugliosi who was the lead prosecutor in the case
figured that Manson would expect Tex Watson to take the fall since the State of
California had been unsuccessful in extraditing Watson to California from
Texas. He also figured that the female defendants might finger Watson as the
prime mover of the killings since they adored Manson and didn’t have the same
adoration towards Watson.
The prosecutor didn’t have to worry because later,
another Family member—sixteen-year-old Dianne Lake began to talk a few months
after she and the other Family members were swept up in the raid. She testified
that Tex told her that he had killed Sharon Tate on the direct orders of
Manson. Admittedly, that is hearsay evidence but it was accepted and it was the
linchpin that nailed the lid on Manson’s rhetorical coffin. Further she said
that Leslie Van Houten had told her that she stabbed someone who was already
dead at a house in Los Feliz. That was where the LaBianca couple lived and was
murdered. She said that Leslie told her
about raiding the refrigerator and taking a carton of chocolate milk from the
fridge and writing the word, “PIG” on the door of the fridge with the blood of
one of the LaBianca victims. It just
goes to show you that if you are part of a group of people who committed a
crime, you should never discuss it with anyone who was not party to the crime
what you did during the crime.
Can you believe it? Manson demanded that the judge
release him immediately because his incarceration while waiting for the trial
to end deprived him of spiritual, mental and physical liberty in an unconstitutional
manner that was not in harmony with Man’s and God’s law. H told the judge that
if the charges were dropped against him, it would save everybody a lot of
trouble. The judge must have smiled when
he heard all that gibberish because he then replied as he waved at the others
in the courtroom “Disappoint all these people? Never, Mister Manson.”
Manson later appeared in court with an X carved into his
forehead. He issued a statement that he was considered inadequate and
incompetent to speak or defend himself against the judge’s rulings and
therefore this was the reason why he had "X'd himself from the
establishment’s world. Over the following weekend, the female defendants
duplicated the mark on their own foreheads, as did most Family members within
another day or so. Manson's X mark on his forehead was eventually replaced by a
swastika
which remains on his forehead to this day.
The prosecution had placed the triggering of ‘Helter
Skelter’ as the main motive. The crime scene's bloody White Album
(put out by the Beatles) references—pig, rise, helter skelter—that were
correlated with testimony about Manson’s predictions that the murders blacks
would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of “pigs”
on walls in victims’ blood. Testimony that Manson had said “now is the time for
Helter Skelter” was supplemented with Kasabian's testimony that, on the night
of the LaBianca murders, when Manson considered discarding Rosemary LaBianca's
wallet on the street of a black neighborhood. Having obtained the wallet in the
LaBianca house, he “wanted a black person to pick it up and use the credit
cards so that the people, the
establishment, would think it was some sort of an organized group
that killed these people.” On his direction, Kasabian had hidden it in the
women's restroom of a service station near a black area. She said, “I want to
show blackie how to do it.” Manson had suggested that to the Family members who
participated in the LaBianca murders after they left the LaBianca house.
During the trial, Family members loitered near the
entrances and corridors of the courthouse. To keep them out of the courtroom
itself, the prosecution subpoenaed them as prospective witnesses, who would not be able to
enter while others were testifying. When the group established itself in vigil
on the sidewalk, some members wore a sheathed hunting knife which when in
plain view, was carried legally. Each of them was also identifiable by the X on
his or her forehead.
Some Family members attempted to dissuade witnesses from
testifying. Prosecution witnesses, Paul Watkins and Juan Flynn were both
threatened. Watkins was badly burned in a suspicious fire in his van. Former
Family member Barbara Hoyt, who had overheard Susan Atkins
describing the Tate murders to Family member Ruth Ann Moorehouse, agreed to
accompany the latter to Hawaii. There, Moorehouse allegedly gave her a
hamburger spiked with several doses of LSD. Found sprawled on a Honolulu
curb in a drugged semi-stupor, Hoyt was taken to the hospital, where she did
her best to identify herself as a witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.
Before the incident, Hoyt had been a reluctant witness; after the attempt to
silence her, her reticence about testifying then disappeared.
On October 5, Manson was denied the court's permission to
question a prosecution witness whom the defense attorneys had declined to cross-examine.
Leaping over the defense table, Manson attempted to attack the judge. Wrestled
to the ground by bailiffs, he was removed from the courtroom along with the
female defendants, who had subsequently risen and begun chanting gibberish in Latin. The judge
thereafter began wearing a revolver under his robes.
Twenty-two weeks into the trial, (November 16)
which included more outbursts and bizarre behavior from Manson and his
co-defendants, the prosecution rested. Lawyers for the defendants
stunned the courtroom by announcing that the defense also rested. Susan Atkins,
Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten
immediately shouted that they wanted to testify.
Manson had managed to get his instructions passed onto the three other
defendants so the three women then told the judge that they wanted to testify
to committing the murders on their own and that Manson had nothing to do with
the crimes. It is beyond my understanding why these three freaks of nature
would want to save the life of their mentor who got them into his mess in the
first place. Hughes objected and stood up against Manson's ploy and stated, “I
refuse to take part in any proceeding where I am forced to push a client out
the window.” After Manson made a statement to the court, he then advised the
women against testifying. Judge Charles Older who had taken over the case
then ordered a ten-day recess to allow the attorneys to prepare for their final
arguments. Hughes later told a reporter that he was confident that he could
secure an acquittal for Van Houten.
In late November
1970, the missing lawyer, Hughes had gone camping near Sespe Hot Springs. He
disappeared, and his decomposed body was discovered four months later. It is
thought that other members of the Family killed him in reprisal for impugning
Manson in court. One member of the Family described his murder as the first of
the retaliation killings.
On November 17, Manson testified. Lest
Manson's address violate the California Supreme Court's decision in People
v. Aranda by making statements implicating his co-defendants, the jury was
removed from the courtroom. Speaking for more than an hour, Manson said, among
other things, that “the music is telling the youth to rise up against the
establishment.” He also said, "Why blame it on me? I didn't write the
music. To be honest with you, I don't recall ever saying 'Get a knife and a
change of clothes and go do what Tex says.’ I never said that.” Of course he
was lying through his teeth—a common trait among sociopaths.
No sooner had the trial resumed, (just before Christmas)
than disruptions of the prosecution's closing argument by the defendants led Judge
Older to ban the four defendants from the courtroom for the remainder of the guilt phase.
This may be have been because the defendants were acting in collusion with each
other and were simply putting on a performance, which Older said was becoming
obvious and interfered with the process of the court.
The matter went to the jury and Manson and the three
women were found guilty on all counts with respect to the five murders in the
Tate residence and two in the LaBianca residence.
On January 25, 1971, guilty verdicts were
returned by the jury against the four defendants on each of the 27 separate
counts against them. Midway through the penalty phase, Manson shaved his head
and trimmed his beard to a shape like a fork. He told the press, “I am the Devil, and the
Devil always has a bald head.” I thought that strange considering that
previously he had told his followers that he was Jesus Christ. In what the prosecution regarded as belated
recognition on their part that imitation of Manson only proved his domination,
the female defendants refrained from shaving their heads until the jurors
retired to weigh the state's request for the death penalty.
On March 29, 1971, the jury returned verdicts
of death against all four defendants on all counts. On April 19, 1971, Judge
Older sentenced the four of them to death to make it official.
On March 29, 1971, the same day the jury returned death penalty verdicts against all the
defendants on all counts, Hughes' severely decomposed body was discovered by
two fishermen in Ventura County. His body was found wedged
between two boulders in a gorge. Hughes was later positively identified by
dental X-rays. Due to the severe decomposition of his body, the cause
and nature of his death was ruled as “Undetermined”.
Things did not go well for other members of the Manson
Family. On November 8, 1972, the body of 26-year-old Vietnam Marine combat
veteran James L. T. Willett was found by a hiker near Guerneville, California. Months earlier,
he had been forced to dig his own grave, and then was shot and poorly buried;
his body was found with the one hand protruding from the grave and the head and
other hand missing (likely because of scavenging animals). His station wagon
was found outside a house in Stockton where several Manson followers
were living, including Priscilla Cooper, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, (later
imprisoned for attempting to shoot President Ford) and Nancy Pitman. Police
forced their way into the house and arrested several of the people there, along
with Fromme who called the house after they had arrived. The body of James
Willett's 19-year-old wife Lauren ‘Reni’ Chavelle Olmstead Willett was found
buried in the basement. She had been killed by a gunshot to the head, in what
the Family members initially claimed was an accident. It was later suggested
that she was killed out of fear that she would reveal who killed her husband,
as the discovery of his body had become prominent news. The Willetts' infant
daughter was found alive in the house. Michael Monfort pled guilty to murdering
Reni Willett, and Priscilla Cooper, James Craig, and Nancy Pitman pled guilty
as accessories after the fact. Monfort and William Goucher later pled guilty to
the murder of James Willett, and James Craig pled guilty as an accessory after
the fact. The group had been living in the house with the Willetts while
committing various robberies. Shortly after killing Willett, Monfort had used
Willett's identification papers to pose as Willett after being arrested in an
armed robbery of a liquor store. News reports suggested that James Willett was
not involved in the robberies and wanted to move away, and was killed out of
fear that he would talk to police. After leaving the Marines following two
tours in Vietnam, Willett had been an ESL teacher for immigrant
children.
Proceedings to extradite
Watson from his native Texas began after he had resettled a month before his
arrest. This resulted in him being tried separately. The trial commenced in
August 1971 and by October, he, too, had been found guilty on seven counts of
murder and one of conspiracy. Unlike the others, Watson had presented a
psychiatric defense in which prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi made short work of
Watson's insanity claims. Like his co-conspirators, Watson was also sentenced
to death.
In 1976, Leslie Van Houten was granted a new trial on the
grounds that she was denied proper legal representation after Hughes
disappeared before the closing arguments. Van Houten’s retrial in 1977 ended in
a hung jury.
She was then released from jail after posting $200,000 bond and retried in
1978. In her third trial, Van Houten was convicted of the first degree murders of
Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and conspiracy in connection with the four Tate murders. She was sentenced to life in
prison.
The next
article will be about the fate of the five condemned murderers.
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