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

  But that was about all we found. Our search appeared to have yielded little, if anything, of evidentiary value. However, I was anxious to go through the items picked up in the raids.

  On the way back to Independence we stopped in Lone Pine. While I was nursing a beer with the officers, Sartuchi remarked that he and Patchett had interviewed Manson in Independence some weeks earlier, questioning him about the Tate as well as the LaBianca murders. The following day when I called Lieutenant Helder, I mentioned this, thinking he probably had a report on the interview. Helder was amazed; he had no idea anyone from LAPD had ever talked to Manson. This was my first indication that the Tate and LaBianca detectives hadn’t exactly been working hand in glove.

  Helder did have some news. It wasn’t good. Sergeant Lee had run a ballistics comparison on the .22 caliber bullets we’d found at Spahn: all were negative to those recovered at 10050 Cielo Drive.

  I wasn’t about to give up that easily. I still wanted a much more thorough search of Spahn Ranch.

  We stayed at the Winnedumah again that night. Up early the next morning, I walked to the courthouse. I’d forgotten what fresh air smelled like. That trees, grass, have scents. In L.A. there are no smells, just smog. A couple of blocks from the courthouse I saw two young girls, one carrying a baby. It was a wild guess but I asked, “Are you Sandy and Squeaky?” They admitted they were. I identified myself and said that I would like to talk to them in the District Attorney’s office at 1 P.M. They said they would come if I would buy them some candy. I said I would.

  In the DA’s office, Fowles opened his files and gave me everything he had on the Manson Family. Sartuchi set to work photocopying.

  In going through the documents, I spotted a reference to Crockett and Poston: “Inyo County Deputy Sheriff Don Ward talked to the two miners in Shoshone and has their entire conversation recorded.” I wanted to interview the pair, but it would save time if I heard the tape first, so I asked McGann to contact Ward and get it for me.

  There was also an October 2, 1969, California Highway Patrol report in which it was stated: “Deputy Dennis Cox has F.I.R. card on suspect Charles Montgomery, 23 years of age (dob 12-2-45).” Field Interrogation Reports are three-by-five cards that are made whenever a person is stopped and questioned. I wanted to see that card. We still knew very little about Tex, who hadn’t been arrested in either the Spahn or Barker raids.

  After going through the large stack of documents, I started on the evidence seized in the October 10–12 raid. I had Granado test the knives for blood: negative. The wire cutters were large and heavy. It would have been difficult to shinny up a telephone pole with them; still, maybe they were the only pair available. I gave them to the officers so SID could make comparison cuts on the Tate telephone wires. Boots, but no discernible heel mark; I put them aside for SID. I checked the labels on all the clothing, noting that a number of the women’s garments, though now filthy, came from expensive shops. I had them taken to L.A. for analysis. I also wanted Winifred Chapman and Suzanne Struthers to look at them, to see if any of the items might have been the property of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, or Rosemary LaBianca.

  Squeaky and Sandy kept the appointment. I’d done a little checking before talking to them. Though the information was sketchy, I knew that both had been born in Southern California, and had come from fairly well-to-do families. Squeaky’s parents lived in Santa Monica; her father was an aeronautical engineer. Sandy’s parents had divorced and remarried; her father was a San Diego stockbroker. According to DeCarlo, when Sandy joined the Family, sometime early in 1968, she had some $6,000 in stocks, which she sold, giving the money to Manson. She and her baby were now on welfare. Both girls had started college, then dropped out, Squeaky attending El Camino Junior College in Torrance, Sandy the University of Oregon and San Francisco State. Squeaky had been one of the earliest members of the Family, I later learned, casting her lot with Manson just months after he got out of prison in 1967.

  They were the first Family members I had talked to, other than DeCarlo, who was a fringe member at best, and I was immediately struck by their expressions. They seemed to radiate inner contentment. I’d seen others like this—true believers, religious fanatics—yet I was both shocked and impressed. Nothing seemed to faze them. They smiled almost continuously, no matter what was said. For them all the questions had been answered. There was no need to search any more, because they had found the truth. And their truth was “Charlie is love.”

  Tell me about this love, I asked them. Do you mean this in the male-female sense? Yes, that too, they answered, but that was only a part. More all-encompassing? Yes, but “Love is love; you can’t define it.”

  Did Charlie teach you this? I asked, genuinely curious. Charlie did not need to teach them, they said. Charlie only turned them around so they could look at themselves and see the love within. Did they believe that Charlie was Jesus Christ? They only smiled enigmatically, as if sharing a secret no one else could possibly understand.

  Although Squeaky was twenty-one and Sandy twenty-five, there was a little-girl quality to them, as if they hadn’t aged but had been retarded at a certain stage in their childhood. Little girls, playing little-girl games. Including murder? I wondered.

  Is your love for Charlie, say, different from your love for George Spahn? I asked Squeaky. No, love is love, Squeaky said; it’s all the same. But she’d hesitated just a moment before answering, giving the impression that though these were the words she was supposed to say, there was heresy in them, in denying that Charlie was special. Perhaps to overcome this, she told me about her relationship with George Spahn. She was in love with George, Squeaky said; if he asked her to marry him, she would. George was, she went on, a beautiful person inside. He was also, she added, in an obvious attempt to shock me, very good in bed. She was quite graphic.

  “I’m not that interested in your sex life, Squeaky,” I told her. “But I am very, very interested in what you know about the Tate, LaBianca, Hinman, and other murders.”

  Neither expression changed in the slightest. The smiles remained. They knew nothing about any crimes. All they knew about was love.

  I talked to them for a long time, asking specific questions now, but still getting pat answers. On asking where they were on a certain date, for example, they’d reply, “There is no such thing as time.” The answers were both non-responsive and a guard. I wanted to get past that guard, to learn what they really felt. I couldn’t.

  I sensed something else. Each was, in her own way, a pretty girl. But there was a sameness about them that was much stronger than their individuality. I’d notice it again later that afternoon, in talking to other female members of the Family. Same expressions, same patterned responses, same tone of voice, same lack of distinct personality. The realization came with a shock: they reminded me less of human beings than Barbie dolls.

  Looking at Sandy’s almost beatific smile, I remembered something that Frank Fowles had told me, and a chill ran up and down my spine.

  While she was still in jail in Independence, Sandy had been overheard talking to one of the other girls in the Family. Sandy had told her, “I’ve finally reached the point where I can kill my parents.”

  Leslie, Ouisch, Snake, Brenda, Gypsy—Frank Fowles arranged to have them brought over from the jail, where they were still being held on charges stemming from the Barker raid. Like Squeaky and Sandy, they accepted my “bribe,” candy and gum, and told me nothing of importance. Their answers were as if rehearsed; often they gave identical responses.

  If we were to get any of them to talk, I knew, we would have to separate them. There was a cohesion, a kind of cement, that held them together. A part of it was undoubtedly their strange—and to me still puzzling—relationship with Charles Manson. Part was their shared experiences, the world known as the Family. But I couldn’t help wondering if another of the ingredients wasn’t fear: fear of what the others would say if they talked, fear of what the others would do.

  The only
way we could find out would be to keep them apart, and owing to the smallness of the jail, it couldn’t be done in Independence.

  Besides Manson, there was only one male Family member still in custody: Clem Tufts, t/n Steve Grogan. Jack Gardiner, Fowles’ investigator, gave me the eighteen-year-old Grogan’s rap sheet:

  3-23-66, Possession dangerous drugs, 6 mos. probation; 4-27-66, Shoplifting, Cont’d on probation; 6-23-66, Disturbing the peace, Cont’d on probation; 9-27-66, Probation dismissed; 6-5-67, Possession marijuana, Counseled & released; 8-12-67, Shoplifting, Bail forfeiture, 1-22-68; Loitering, Closed after investigation; 4-5-69, Grand theft money & Prowling, Released insuff. evidence; 5-20-69, Grand theft auto, Released insuff. evidence; 6-11-69, Child molesting & Indecent exposure…

  Grogan had been observed exposing himself to several children, ages four to five years. “The kids wanted me to,” he explained to arresting officers, who had caught him in the act. “I violated the law, the thing fell out of my pants and the parents got excited,” he later told a court-appointed psychiatrist. After interviewing Grogan, the psychiatrist ruled against committing him to Camarillo State Hospital, because “the minor is much too aggressive to remain in a setting which does not provide containment facilities.”

  The court decided otherwise, sending him to Camarillo for a ninety-day observation period. He remained a grand total of two days, then walked away, aided, I would later learn, by one of the girls from the Family.

  His escape had occurred on July 19, 1969. He was back at Spahn in time for the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders. He was arrested in the August 16 Spahn raid, but was released two days later, in time to behead Shorty Shea.

  Currently, as a result of the Barker raid, he was charged with grand theft auto and possession of an illegal weapon, i.e., the sawed-off shotgun. I asked Fowles the present status of the case.

  He said that, at the instigation of Grogan’s attorney, he had been examined by two psychiatrists, who had decided that he was “presently insane.”

  I told Fowles I hoped he would request a jury trial and fight the insanity plea. If I brought Clem to trial in Los Angeles, charged with participating in the Tate murders, I didn’t want the defense introducing evidence that a court in Inyo County had already found him insane. Frank agreed to go along with this.

  At the moment our case against Grogan was so thin as to be nonexistent. There was no proof that Donald “Shorty” Shea was even dead; to date, no body had been found. As for the Tate murders, all we had was DeCarlo’s statement that Clem had told him, “We got five piggies.”

  There was no way we could use that statement in court if there was a joint trial. In 1965 the California Supreme Court ruled, in the case of People vs. Aranda, that the prosecution cannot introduce into evidence a statement made by one defendant which implicates a co-defendant.

  Since Aranda would have a bearing on all the trials involving the Manson Family members, a simplified explanation is in order. For example, if there were a joint trial, with more than one defendant, we couldn’t use Susan Atkins’ statement to Ronnie Howard, “We did it,” the plural being inadmissible because it implicated co-defendants. We could, however, use her statement, “I stabbed Sharon Tate.” It is possible to “sanitize” some statements so they don’t violate Aranda. Susan Atkins’ admission to Whiteley and Guenther, “I went to Gary’s house with Bobby Beausoleil” could be edited to “I went to Gary’s house,” although a good defense attorney can fight, and—depending on the prosecutor and judge—sometimes win the exclusion of even that. But when it came to the pronoun “we,” there was no way we could get around it.

  Therefore, Manson’s statement to Springer, “We knocked off five of them just the other night,” was useless. As was Clem’s remark to DeCarlo, “We got five piggies.”

  Manson and Grogan could have made such confessions on nationwide TV and, if there was a joint trial, we could never use their remarks against them.

  So we had virtually nothing on Clem.

  In going through Grogan’s file, I noticed that one of his brothers had made application for the California Highway Patrol; I made note of this, thinking maybe his brother could influence Clem to cooperate with us. DeCarlo had described Grogan in two words: “He’s nuts.” In his police photograph—big, wide grin, chipped front tooth, moronic stare—he did look idiotic. I asked Fowles for copies of the recent psychiatric reports.

  Asked, “Why do you hate your father?” Grogan replied, “I’m my father and I don’t hate myself.” He denied the use of drugs. “I have my own bennies, adrenalin. It’s called fear.” He claimed that “love is everything,” but, according to one psychiatrist, “he also revealed that he could not accept the philosophy of interracial brotherhood. Quotes supposedly from the Bible with sexual correlation were given in defense of his attitude.”

  Other quotes from Clem: “I’m dying a little every day. My ego is dying and knows he’s dying and struggles hard. When you’re free of ego you’re free of everything…Whatever you say is right for yourself…Whoever you think I am, that’s who I am.”

  The philosophy of Clem? Or Charles Manson? I’d heard the same thoughts, in several instances even identical words, from the girls.

  If the psychiatrists had examined one of Manson’s followers and, on the basis of such responses, found him insane, what of his leader?

  I saw Charles Manson for the first time that day. He was walking from the jail to the courtroom for arraignment on the Michigan loader arson charge, and was accompanied by five sheriff’s deputies.

  I hadn’t realized how small he was. He was just five feet two. He was thin, of slight build, a shade hunchbacked, wore his brown hair very long, almost to his shoulders, and had a good start on a beard, grown—I’d noticed in comparing the LASO and Inyo mug shots—after his arrest in the Spahn Ranch raid. He wore fringed buckskins, which were not inexpensive. Though handcuffed, his walk was casual, not stiff, as though he was completely at ease.

  I could not believe that this little guy had done all the things it was said he had. He looked anything but a heavyweight. Yet I knew that to underrate him would be the biggest mistake I could make. For if the Atkins and DeCarlo stories were true, he was not only capable of committing murder himself, he also possessed the incredible power to command others to kill for him.

  Manson’s girls had talked a great deal about the Indian concept of karma. It was like a boomerang, they said. Whatever you threw out would, eventually, come back to you. I wondered if Manson himself really believed this and if he sensed that, nearly three and a half months after these hideous murders, his own karma was finally returning. He must. You don’t assign five sheriff’s deputies to an arson suspect. If he didn’t know now, he would soon enough, when the jail grapevine repeated some of the questions we’d been asking.

  Before leaving Independence, I gave Frank Fowles both my home and office numbers. If there were any developments, I wanted to be notified, whatever the hour. Manson had pleaded not guilty to the arson charge, and his bail had been set at $25,000. If anyone attempted to meet it, I wanted to know immediately, so we could move fast on the murder charges. It might mean revealing our case before we were ready to do so, but the alternative was worse. Aware that he was suspected of murder, once free Manson would probably split. And with Manson at large it would be extremely difficult to get anyone to talk.

  NOVEMBER 22–23, 1969

  That weekend I went through LAPD’s files on the Tate-LaBianca murders; the Inyo County files; LASO’s reports on the Spahn Ranch raid and other contacts with the Family; and numerous rap sheets. LAPD had conducted over 450 interviews on Tate alone; although they had netted less than had a ten-cent phone call from an ex-hooker, I had to familiarize myself with what had and hadn’t been done. I was especially interested in seeing if I could find any link between the Tate-LaBianca victims and the Manson clan. Also, I was looking for some clue as to the motive behind the slayings.

  Occasionally writers refer to “motiv
eless crimes.” I’ve never encountered such an animal, and I’m convinced that none such exists. It may be unconventional; it may be apparent only to the killer or killers; it may even be largely unconscious—but every crime is committed for a reason. The problem, especially in this case, was finding it.

  After listening to the seven-hour taped interview with Daniel DeCarlo, I began studying the criminal record of one Manson, Charles M.

  I wanted to get to know the man I would be up against.

  Charles Manson was born “no name Maddox” on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old girl named Kathleen Maddox.*

  Though Manson himself would later state that his mother was a teenage prostitute, other relatives say she was simply “loose.” One remarked, “She ran around a lot, drank, got in trouble.” Whatever the case, she lived with a succession of men. One, a much older man named William Manson, whom she married, was around just long enough to provide a surname for the youth.

  The identity of Charles Manson’s father was something of a mystery. In 1936 Kathleen filed a bastardy suit in Boyd County, Kentucky, against one “Colonel Scott,”* a resident of Ashland, Kentucky. On April 19, 1937, the court awarded her a judgment of $25, plus $5 a month for the support of “Charles Milles Manson.” Though it was an “agreed judgment,” Colonel Scott apparently didn’t honor it, for as late as 1940 Kathleen was attempting to file an attachment on his wages. Most accounts state that Colonel Scott died in 1954; though this has never been officially verified, Manson himself apparently believed it. He also stated on numerous occasions that he never met his father.

  According to her own relatives, Kathleen would leave the child with obliging neighbors for an hour, then disappear for days or weeks. Usually his grandmother or maternal aunt would have to claim him. Most of his early years were spent with one or the other, in West Virginia, Kentucky, or Ohio.