Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders Read online

  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were now convinced that the Tate and LaBianca cases had been “solved.”* Susan Atkins had told Ronnie Howard details—the unpublished words written at the LaBianca residence, the lost knife at Tate—which only one of the killers could know.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…”

  DeCarlo 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.

  Clem 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.

  Probably 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.

  They 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

  The Investigation—Phase Two

  “No sense makes sense.”

  CHARLES MANSON

  NOVEMBER 18, 1969

  By now the reader knows a great deal more about the Tate-LaBianca murders than I did on the day I was assigned that case. In fact, since large portions of the foregoing story have not been made public before this, the reader is an insider in a sense highly unusual in a murder case. And, in a way, I’m a newcomer, an intruder. The sudden switch from an unseen background narrator to a very personal account is bound to be a surprise. The best way to soften it, I suspect, would be to introduce myself; then, when we’ve got that out of the way, we’ll resume the narrative together. This digression, though unfortunately necessary, will be as brief as possible.

  A conventional biographical sketch before the Manson trial would probably have read more or less as follows: Vincent T. Bugliosi, age thirty-five, Deputy District Attorney, Los Angeles, California. Born Hibbing, Minnesota. Graduate Hollywood High School. Attended the University of Miami on a tennis scholarship, B.A. and B.B.A. degrees. Deciding on the practice of law, attended UCLA, LL.B. degree, president graduating class 1964. Joined the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office same year. Has tried a number of highly publicized murder cases—Floyd-Milton, Perveler-Cromwell, etc.—obtaining convictions in all. Has tried 104 felony jury trials, losing only one. In addition to his duties as deputy DA, Bugliosi is a professor of criminal law at Beverly School of Law, Los Angeles. Served as technical consultant and edited the scripts of two pilot films for Jack Webb’s TV series “The D.A.” Series star Robert Conrad patterned his part after the young prosecutor. Married. Two children.