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

  According to Poston: “When Charlie was listening to it, he heard in the background noise, in and around the machine-gun fire and the oinking of pigs, a man’s voice saying ‘Rise.’” Listening to the recording again, I also heard it, twice repeated: the first time almost a whisper, the second a long-drawn out scream.* This was potent evidence. Through both Jakobson and Poston, I’d now linked Manson, irrevocably, with the word “rise” printed in blood at the LaBianca residence.

  In “Revolution 1” the Beatles had finally decided to commit themselves to the revolution. In “Revolution 9” they were telling the black man that now was the time to rise and start it all. According to Charlie.

  Manson found many other messages in this song (including the words “Block that Nixon”), but as far as his philosophy of Helter Skelter was concerned, these were the most important.

  Charles Manson was already talking about an imminent black-white war when Gregg Jakobson first met him, in the spring of 1968. There was an underground expression current at the time, “the shit is coming down,” variously interpreted as meaning the day of judgment was at hand or all hell was breaking loose, and Charlie often used it in reference to the coming racial conflict. But he wasn’t rabid about it, Gregg said; it was just one of many subjects they discussed.

  “When I first met Charlie [in June 1968], he really didn’t have any of this Helter Skelter stuff going,” Paul Watkins told me. “He talked a little bit about the ‘shit coming down,’ but just barely…He said when the shit comes down the black man will be on one side and the white will be on the other, and that’s all he said about it.”

  Then, that December, Capitol issued the Beatles’ White Album, one of the songs of which was “Helter Skelter.” The final stanza went: “Look out helter skelter helter skelter helter skelter/Look out [background scream] helter skelter/She’s coming down fast/Yes she is/Yes she is.”

  Manson apparently first heard the White Album in Los Angeles, while on a trip there from Barker Ranch, where most of the Family remained. When Manson returned to Death Valley on December 31, 1968, he told the group, according to Poston, “Are you hep to what the Beatles are saying? Helter Skelter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is.”

  It was the same expression, except that in place of the word for defecation Manson now substituted “Helter Skelter.”

  Another link had been made, this time to the bloody words on the refrigerator door at the LaBianca residence.

  Though this was the first time Manson used the phrase, it was not to be the last.

  Watkins: “And he started rapping about this Beatle album and Helter Skelter and all these meanings that I didn’t get out of it…and he builds this picture up and he called it Helter Skelter, and what it meant was the Negroes were going to come down and rip the cities all apart.”

  After this, Watkins said, “We started listening to the Beatles’ album constantly…”

  Death Valley is very cold in the winter, so Manson found a two-story house at 20910 Gresham Street in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley, not too far from Spahn Ranch. In January 1969, Watkins said, “we all moved into the Gresham Street house to get ready for Helter Skelter. So we could watch it coming down and see all of the things going on in the city. He [Charlie] called the Gresham Street house ‘The Yellow Submarine’ from the Beatles’ movie. It was like a submarine in that when you were in it you weren’t allowed to go out. You could only peek out of the windows. We started designing dune buggies and motorcycles and we were going to buy twenty-five Harley sportsters…and we mapped escape routes to the desert…supply caches…we had all these different things going.

  “I watched him building this big picture up,” Paul noted. “He would do it very slowly, very carefully. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

  “Before Helter Skelter came along,” Watkins said with a sigh of wistful nostalgia, “all Charlie cared about was orgies.”

  Before Jakobson and I had ever discussed the Beatles, I asked him: “Did Charlie ever talk to you about a black-white revolution?”

  A. “Yeah, that was Helter Skelter, and he believed it was going to happen in the near future, almost immediately.”

  Q. “What did he say about this black-white revolution? How would it come about and what would it accomplish?”

  A. “It would begin with the black man going into white people’s homes and ripping off the white people, physically destroying them, until there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and took over. Then black man would assume white man’s karma. He would then be the establishment.”

  Watkins: “He used to explain how it would be so simple to start out. A couple of black people—some of the spades from Watts—would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district…up in the rich piggy district…and just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing blood and writing things on the wall in blood…all kinds of super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad…”

  Poston said very much the same thing before I ever talked to Watkins, but with the addition of one very important detail: “He [Manson] said a group of real blacks would come out of the ghettos and do an atrocious crime in the richer sections of Los Angeles and other cities. They would do an atrocious murder with stabbing, killing, cutting bodies to pieces, smearing blood on the walls, writing ‘pigs’ on the walls…in the victims’ own blood.”

  This was tremendously powerful evidence—linking Manson not only with the Tate murders, where PIG had been printed in Sharon Tate’s blood on the front door of the residence, but also with the LaBianca murders, where DEATH TO PIGS had been printed in Leno LaBianca’s blood on the living-room wall—and I questioned Poston in depth as to Manson’s exact words, where the conversation had occurred, when, and who else was present. I then questioned everyone Poston mentioned who was willing to cooperate.

  Ordinarily, I try to avoid repetitious testimony in a trial, knowing it can antagonize the jury. However, Manson’s Helter Skelter motive was so bizarre that I knew if it was expounded by only one witness no juror would ever believe it.

  The conversation had occurred in February 1969, at the Gresham Street house, Poston said.

  We now had evidence that six months before the Tate-LaBianca murders Charles Manson was telling the Family exactly how the murders would occur, complete even to writing “pigs” in the victims’ own blood.

  We now had also linked Manson with every one of the bloody words found at both the Tate and LaBianca residences.

  But this would only be the beginning, Manson told Watkins. These murders would cause mass paranoia among the whites: “Out of their fear they would go into the ghetto and just start shooting black people like crazy.” But all they would kill would be “the ones that were with whitey in the first place.”

  The “true black race”—whom Manson identified at various times as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers—“wouldn’t even be affected by it.” They would be in hiding, waiting, he said.

  After the slaughter, the Black Muslims would “come out and appeal to the whites, saying, ‘Look what you have done to my people.’ And this would split whitey down the middle,” Watkins said, “between the hippie-liberals and all the uptight conservatives…” And it would be like the War between the States, brother against brother, white killing white. Then, after the whites had mostly killed off each other, “the Black Muslims would come out of hiding and wipe them all out.”

  All except Charlie and the Family, who would have taken refuge in the bottomless pit in Death Valley.

  The karma would then have turned. “Blackie would be on top.” And he would begin to “clean up the mess, just like he always has done…He will clean up the mess that the white man made, and build the world back up a little bit, build the cities back up. But then he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t handle it.”

  According to Manson, Watkins said, the black man had a problem. He could only do what the white man
had taught him to do. He wouldn’t be able to run the world without whitey showing him how.

  Watkins: “Blackie then would come to Charlie and say, you know, ‘I did my thing. I killed them all and, you know, I am tired of killing now. It is all over.’

  “And then Charlie would scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick cotton and go be a good nigger, and we would live happily ever after…” The Family, now grown to 144,000, as predicted in the Bible—a pure, white master race—would emerge from the bottomless pit. And “It would be our world then. There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants.”

  And, according to the gospel of Charlie—as he related it to his disciple Paul Watkins—he, Charles Willis Manson, the fifth angel, JC, would then rule that world.

  Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, and Gregg Jakobson had not only defined Manson’s motive, Helter Skelter, Watkins had supplied that missing link. In his sick, twisted, disordered mind, Charles Manson believed that he would be the ultimate beneficiary of the black-white war and the murders which triggered it.

  One day at the Gresham Street house, while they were on an acid trip, Manson had reiterated to Watkins and the others that blackie had no smarts, “that the only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him or shown him” and “so someone is going to have to show him how to do it.”

  I asked Watkins: “How to do what?”

  A. “How to bring down Helter Skelter. How to do all these things.”

  Watkins: “Charlie said the only reason it hadn’t come down already was because whitey was feeding his young daughters to the black man in Haight-Ashbury, and he said that if his music came out, and all of the beautiful people—‘love’ he called it—left Haight-Ashbury, blackie would turn to Bel Air to get his rocks off.”

  Blackie had been temporarily “pacified” by the young white girls, Manson claimed. But when he took away the pacifier—when his album came out and all the young loves followed Pied Piper Charlie to the desert—blackie would need another means of getting his frustrations out and he would then turn to the establishment.

  But Terry Melcher didn’t come through. The album wasn’t made. Sometime in late February of 1969 Manson sent Brooks and Juanita to Barker Ranch. The rest of the Family moved back to Spahn and began preparing for Helter Skelter. “Now there was an actual physical effort to get things together, so they could move to the desert,” Gregg said. Jakobson, who visited the ranch during this period, was startled at the change in Manson. Previously he had preached oneness of the Family, complete in itself, self-sufficient; now he was cultivating outsiders, the motorcycle gangs. Before this he had been anti-materialistic; now he was accumulating vehicles, guns, money. “It struck me that all this contradicted what Charlie had done and talked to me about before,” Gregg said, explaining that this was the beginning of his disenchantment and eventual break with Manson.

  The newly materialistic Manson came up with some wild moneymaking schemes. For example, someone suggested that the girls in the Family could earn $300 to $500 a week apiece working as topless dancers. Manson liked the idea—with ten broads pulling in $3,000 a week and upward he could buy jeeps, dune buggies, even machine guns—and he sent Bobby Beausoleil and Bill Vance to the Girard Agency on the Sunset Strip to negotiate the deal.

  There was only one problem. With all his powers, Manson was unable to transform molehills into mountains. With the exception of Sadie and a few others, Charlie’s girls simply did not have impressive busts. For some reason Manson seemed to attract mostly flat-chested girls.

  While at the Gresham Street house, Manson had told Watkins that the atrocious murders would occur that summer. It was almost summer now and the blacks were showing no signs of rising up to fulfill their karma. One day in late May or early June of 1969, Manson took Watkins aside, down near the old trailer at Spahn, and confided: “The only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him.” He then added, “I’m going to have to show him how to do it.”

  According to Watkins: “I got some weird pictures from that.” A few days later Watkins took off for Barker, fearful that if he stuck around he would see those weird pictures materialize into nihilistic reality.

  It was September of 1969 before Manson himself returned to Barker Ranch, to find that Watkins and Poston had defected. Though Manson told Watkins about “cutting Shorty into nine pieces,” he made no mention whatsoever of the Tate-LaBianca murders. In discussing Helter Skelter with Watkins, however, Manson said, without explanation, “I had to show blackie how to do it.”

  LAPD had interviewed Gregg Jakobson in late November of 1969. When he attempted to tell them about Manson’s far-out philosophy, one of the detectives replied, “Ah, Charlie’s a madman; we’re not interested in all that.” The following month two detectives went to Shoshone and talked to Crockett and Poston; LAPD also contacted Watkins. All three were asked what they knew about the Tate-LaBianca murders. And all three said they didn’t know anything, which, in their minds, was true, none having previously made the connection between Manson and these murders. After the interview with Poston and Crockett, one of the detectives remarked, “Looks like we made a trip for nothing.”

  Initially, I found it difficult to believe that none of the four even suspected that Manson might be behind the Tate-LaBianca murders. There were, I discovered, several probable reasons for this. When Manson had told Jakobson how Helter Skelter would start, he had said nothing about writing words in blood. He had told this to both Watkins and Poston, even telling Poston about the word “pigs,” but there were no newspapers at Barker Ranch, and its location was such that there was no radio reception. Though they had heard about the murders on their infrequent supply trips into Independence and Shoshone, both stated they hadn’t picked up many details.

  The main reason, however, was simply a fluke. Though the press did report that there was bloody writing at the LaBianca residence, LAPD had succeeded in keeping one fact secret: that two of the words were HEALTER SKELTER.

  Had this been publicized, undoubtedly Jakobson, Watkins, Poston, and numerous others would have connected the LaBianca murders—and probably the Tate murders also, because of their proximity in time—with Manson’s insane plan. And it seems a safe assumption that at least one would have communicated his suspicions to the police.

  It was one of those odd happenstances, for which no one was at fault, the repercussions of which no one could foresee, but it appears possible that had this happened, the killers might have been apprehended days, rather than months, after the murders, and Donald “Shorty” Shea, and possibly others, might still be alive.

  Though I was now convinced we had the motive, other leads failed to pan out.

  None of the employees of the Standard station in Sylmar or the Jack Frost store in Santa Monica could identify anyone in our “Family album.” As for the LaBianca credit cards, all appeared to be accounted for, while Suzanne Struthers was unable to determine if a brown purse was missing from her mother’s personal effects. The problem was that Rosemary had several brown purses.

  By the time LAPD requested the Spahn Ranch phone records, most of the billings for May and July 1969 had been “lost or destroyed.” All the numbers for the other months—April to October 1969—were identified and, though we obtained some minor background information on the activities of the Family, we were unable to find any link between the killers and the victims. Nor did any appear in the phone records of the Tate and LaBianca residences.

  Exposure to rain and sunlight over a prolonged period of time breaks down human blood components. Many of the spots on the clothing the TV crew had found gave a positive benzidine reaction, indicating blood, but Granado was unable to determine whether it was animal or human. However, Granado did find human blood, type B, on the white T-shirt (Parent, Folger, and Frykowski were type B), and human blood, “possible type O,” on the dark velour turtleneck (Tate and Sebring were type O). He did not test for subtypes.

  He al
so removed some human hair from the clothing, which he determined had belonged to a woman, and which did not match that of the two female victims.

  I called Captain Carpenter at Sybil Brand and requested a sample of Susan Atkins’ hair. On February 17, Deputy Sheriff Helen Tabbe took Susan to the jail beauty shop for a wash and set. Afterwards she removed the hair from Susan’s brush and comb. Later a sample of Patricia Krenwinkel’s hair was similarly obtained. Granado eliminated the Krenwinkel sample but, although he wasn’t able to state positively that they were the same, he found the Atkins sample “very, very similar” to that taken from the clothing, concluding it was “very likely” the hair belonged to Susan Atkins.*

  Some white animal hairs were also found on the clothing. Winifred Chapman said they looked like the hair from Sharon’s dog. Since the dog had died shortly after Sharon’s death, no comparison could be made. I intended to introduce the hair into evidence anyway, and let Mrs. Chapman state what she had told me.

  On February 11, Kitty Lutesinger had given birth to Bobby Beausoleil’s child. Even before this, she was an unwilling witness, and the little information I got from her came hard. Later she would return to the Family, leave it, go back. Unsure of what she might say on the stand, I eventually decided against calling her as a witness.

  I made the same decision in relation to biker Al Springer, though for different reasons. Most of his testimony would be repetitive of DeCarlo’s. Also, his most damning testimony—Manson’s statement, “We got five of them the other night”—was inadmissible because of Aranda. I did interview Springer, several times, and one remark Manson made to him, re the murders, gave me a glimpse into Manson’s possible defense strategy. In discussing the many criminal activities of the Family, Manson had told Springer: “No matter what happens, the girls will take the rap for it.”