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

  Asked to explain what she meant by this, Linda replied, “He just had something, you know, that could hold you. He was a heavyweight. He was just heavy, period.”

  Fitzgerald also elicited from Linda that she loved Manson; that “I felt he was the Messiah come again.”

  Linda then added one statement which went a long way toward explaining not only why she but also many of the others had so readily accepted Manson. When she first saw him, she said, “I thought…‘This is what I have been looking for,’ and this is what I saw in him.”

  Manson—a mirror which reflected the desires of others.

  Q. “Was it also your impression that other people at the ranch loved

  Charlie?”

  A. “Oh, yes. It seemed that the girls worshiped him, just would die to do anything for him.”

  Helter Skelter, Manson’s attitude toward blacks, his domination of his co-defendants: in each of these areas Fitzgerald’s queries brought out additional information which bolstered Linda’s previous testimony.

  Often his questions backfired, as when he asked Linda: “Do you remember who you slept with on August 8?”

  A. “No.”

  Q. “On the tenth?”

  A. “No, but eventually I slept with all the men.”

  Time and again Linda volunteered information which could have been considered damaging, yet, coming from her, somehow seemed only honest and sincere. She was so open that it caught Fitzgerald off guard.

  Avoiding the word “orgy,” he asked her, regarding the “love scene that took place in the back house…did you enjoy it?”

  Linda frankly answered: “Yeah, I guess I did. I will have to say I did.”

  If possible, at the end of Fitzgerald’s cross-examination Linda Kasabian looked even better than she had at the end of the direct.

  It was Monday, August 3, 1970. I was on my way back to court from lunch, a few minutes before 2 P.M., when I was abruptly surrounded by newsmen. They were all talking at once, and it was a couple of seconds before I made out the words: “Vince, have you heard the news? President Nixon just said that Manson’s guilty!”

  AUGUST 3–19, 1970

  Fitzgerald had a copy of the AP wire. In Denver for a conference of law-enforcement officials, the President, himself an attorney, was quoted as complaining that the press tended “to glorify and make heroes out of those engaged in criminal activities.”

  He continued: “I noted, for example, the coverage of the Charles Manson case…Front page every day in the papers. It usually got a couple of minutes in the evening news. Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders. Yet here is a man who, as far as the coverage is concerned, appeared to be a glamorous figure.”

  Following Nixon’s remarks, presidential press secretary Ron Ziegler said that the President had “failed to use the word ‘alleged’ in referring to the charges.”*

  We discussed the situation in chambers. Fortunately, the bailiffs had brought the jury back from lunch before the story broke. They remained sequestered in a room upstairs, and so, as yet, there was no chance of their having been exposed.

  Kanarek moved for a mistrial. Denied. Ever suspicious that the sequestration was not effective, he asked that the jurors be voir dired to see if any had heard the news. As Aaron put it, “It would be like waving a red flag. If they didn’t know about it before, they certainly will after the voir dire.”

  Older denied the motion “without prejudice,” so it could be renewed at a later time. He also said he would tell the bailiffs to inaugurate unusually stringent security measures. Later that afternoon the windows of the bus used to transport the jury to and from the hotel were coated with Bon Ami to prevent the jurors from seeing the inevitable headlines. There was a TV set in their joint recreation room at the Ambassador; ordinarily they could watch any program they wished, except the news, a bailiff changing the channels. Tonight it would remain dark. Newspapers would also be banned from the courtroom, Older specifically instructing the attorneys to make sure none were on the counsel table, where they might inadvertently be seen by the jury.

  When we returned to court, there was a smug grin on Manson’s face. It remained there all afternoon. It isn’t every criminal who merits the attention of the President of the United States. Charlie had made the big time.

  The jury was brought down, and Atkins’ defense attorney, Daye Shinn, began his cross-examination of Linda.

  Apparently intent on implying that I had coached Linda in her testimony, he asked: “Do you recall what Mr. Bugliosi said to you during your first meeting?”

  A. “Well, he has always stressed for me to tell the truth.”

  Q. “Besides the truth, I’m talking about.”

  As if anything else were important.

  Q. “Did Mr. Bugliosi ever tell you that some of your statements were wrong, or some of your answers were not logical, or did not make sense?”

  A. “No, I told him; he never told me.”

  Q. “The fact that you were pregnant, wasn’t that the reason that you stayed outside [the Tate residence] instead of going inside to participate?”

  A. “Whether I was pregnant or not, I would never have killed anybody.”

  Shinn gave up after only an hour and a half. Linda’s testimony remained unshaken.

  With a heavy, ponderous shuffle, Irving Kanarek approached the witness stand. His demeanor was deceiving. There was no relaxing when Kanarek was cross-examining; at any moment he might blurt out something objectionable. There was also no anticipating him; he’d suddenly skip from one subject to another with no hint of a connecting link. Many of his questions were so complex that even he lost the thought, and had to have the court reporter read them back to him.

  It was excruciatingly tiring listening to him. It was also very important that I do so, since, unlike the two attorneys who preceded him, Kanarek scored points. He brought out, for example, that when Linda returned to California to reclaim Tanya, she told the social worker that she’d left the state on August 6 or 7—which, had this been true, would have been before the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred. If accurate, this meant that Linda had fabricated all of her testimony regarding those murders. And if she had lied to the social worker to get her daughter back, Kanarek implied, she could very well lie to this Court to get her own freedom.

  But mostly he rambled and droned on and on, tiring the spectators as well as the witness. Many of the reporters “wrote off” Kanarek early in the proceedings. Given a choice of defense attorneys, they quoted Fitzgerald, whose questions were better phrased. But it was Kanarek, in the midst of his verbosity, who was scoring.

  He was also beginning to get to Linda. At the end of the day—her sixth on the stand—she looked a little fatigued and her answers were less sharp. No one knew how many days of this lay ahead, since Kanarek, unlike the other attorneys, consistently avoided answering Older’s questions about the estimated length of his cross-examination.

  On my way home that night I was again thankful the jury had been sequestered. You could see the headlines on every newsstand. The car radio had periodic updates. Hughes: “I am guilty of contempt for uttering a dirty word, but Nixon has the contempt of the world to face.” Fitzgerald: “It is very discouraging when the world’s single most important person comes out against you.” The most reported quote was that of Manson, who had passed a statement to the press via one of the defense attorneys. Mimicking Nixon’s remarks, it was unusually short and to the point: “Here’s a man who is accused of murdering hundreds of thousands in Vietnam who is accusing me of being guilty of eight murders.”

  The next day in chambers Kanarek charged the President with conspiracy. “The District Attorney of Los Angeles County is running for attorney general of California. I say it without being able to prove it, that Evelle Younger and the President got together to do this.”

  If this was so, Kanarek said, “he shouldn’t be President of the United States.”

  THE COURT “That will ha
ve to be decided in some other proceeding, Mr. Kanarek. Let’s stay with the issues here…I am satisfied there has been no exposure of any of these jurors to anything the press may have said…I see no reason for taking any further action at this time.”

  Kanarek resumed his cross-examination. On direct, Linda had stated that she had taken some fifty LSD “trips.” Kanarek now asked her to describe what had happened on trip number 23.

  BUGLIOSI “I object to that question as being ridiculous, Your Honor.”

  Though there is no such objection in the rule books, I felt there should be. Apparently Judge Older felt similarly, as he sustained the objection. As well as others when I objected that a question had been repeated “ad nauseam” or was “nonsensical.”

  Just after the noon recess Manson suddenly stood and, turning toward the jury box, held up a copy of the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

  A bailiff grabbed it but not before Manson had shown the jury the huge black headline:

  MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES

  Older had the jury taken out. He then demanded to know which attorney, against his express orders, had brought a newspaper into court. There were several denials but no one confessed.

  There was no question now that the jury would have to be voir dired. Each member was brought in separately and questioned by the judge under oath. Of the twelve jurors and six alternates, eleven were aware of the full headline; two saw only the words MANSON GUILTY; four only saw the paper or the name MANSON; and one, Mr. Zamora, didn’t see anything: “I was looking at the clock at the time.”

  Each was also questioned as to his or her reaction. Mrs. McKenzie:

  “Well, my first thought was ‘That’s ridiculous.’” Mr. McBride: “I think if the President declared that, it was pretty stupid of him.” Miss Mesmer: “No one does my thinking for me.” Mr. Daut: “I didn’t vote for Nixon in the first place.”

  After an extensive voir dire, all eighteen stated under oath that they had not been influenced by the headline and that they would consider only the evidence presented to them in court.

  Knowing something about jurors, I was inclined to believe them, for a very simple reason. Jurors consider themselves privileged insiders. Day after day, they are a part of the courtroom drama. They hear the evidence. They, and they alone, determine its importance. They tend, very strongly, to think of themselves as the experts, those outside the courtroom the amateurs. As juror Dawson put it, he’d listened to every bit of the testimony; Nixon hadn’t; “I don’t believe Mr. Nixon knows anything about it.”

  My over-all feeling was that the jurors were annoyed with the President for attempting to usurp their role. It was quite possible that the statement might even have helped Manson, causing them to be even more determined that they, unlike the President, would give him every benefit of the doubt.

  A number of national columnists stated that if Manson was convicted, his conviction would be reversed on appeal because of Nixon’s statement. On the contrary, since it was Manson himself who brought the headline to the attention of the jury, this was “invited error,” which simply means that a defendant cannot benefit from his own wrongdoing.

  One aspect of this did concern me just a little. It was a subtler point. Although the headlines declared that Manson—not the girls—was guilty, it could be argued that as Manson’s co-defendants the guilt “slopped over” onto them. Although I assumed this would be an issue they would raise on appeal, I felt fairly certain it would not constitute “reversible error.” There are errors in every trial, but most do not warrant a reversal by the appellate courts. This might have, had not Older voir dired the jury and obtained their sworn statements that they would not be influenced by the incident.

  Nor did the three female defendants exactly help their case when, the next day, they stood up and said in perfect unison: “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?”

  Older had not given up his search for the culprit. Daye Shinn now admitted that just before court resumed he’d walked over to the file cabinet where the bailiff had placed the confiscated papers and had picked up several and brought them back to the counsel table. He’d intended to read the sports pages, he said, unaware that the front pages were also attached.

  Declaring Shinn in direct contempt of Court, Older ordered him to spend three nights in the County Jail, commencing as soon as court adjourned. We were already past the usual adjournment time. Shinn asked for an hour to move his car and get a toothbrush, but Older denied the motion and Shinn was remanded into custody.

  The next morning Shinn asked for a continuance. Being in a strange bed, and an even stranger place, he hadn’t slept well the night before, and he didn’t feel he could effectively defend his client.

  These were not all of his troubles, Shinn admitted. “I am now having marital problems, Your Honor. My wife thinks I am spending the night with some other woman. She doesn’t read English. Now my dog won’t even talk to me.”

  Declining comment on his domestic woes, Older suggested that Shinn catch a nap during the noon recess. Motion denied.

  Irving Kanarek kept Linda Kasabian on the stand seven days. It was cross-examination in the most literal sense. For example: “Mrs. Kasabian, did you go to Spahn Ranch because you wanted to seek out fresh men, men that you had not had previous relations with?”

  Unlike Fitzgerald and Shinn, Kanarek examined Linda’s testimony regarding those two nights as if under a microscope. The problem with this, as far as the defense was concerned, was that some of her most damning statements were repeated two, three, even more times. Nor was Kanarek content to score a point and move on. Frequently he dwelt on a subject so long he negated his own argument. For example, Linda had testified that on the night of the Tate murders her mind was clear. She had also testified that after seeing the shooting of Parent she went into a state of shock. Kanarek did not stop at pointing out the seeming contradiction, but asked exactly when her state of shock ended.

  A. “I don’t know when it ended. I don’t know if it ever ended.”

  Q. “Your mind was completely clear, is that right?”

  A. “Yes.”

  Q. “You weren’t under the influence of any drug, is that right?”

  A. “No.”

  Q. “You weren’t under the influence of anything, right?”

  A. “I was under the influence of Charlie.”

  Although Linda remained responsive to the questions, it was obvious that Kanarek was wearing her down.

  On August 7 we lost a juror and a witness.

  Juror Walter Vitzelio was excused because both he and his wife were in ill health. The ex–security guard was replaced, by lot, by one of the alternates, Larry Sheely, a telephone maintenance man.

  That same day I learned that Randy Starr had died at the Veterans Administration Hospital of an “undetermined illness.”

  The former Spahn ranch hand and part-time stunt man had been prepared to identify the Tate-Sebring rope as identical with the one Manson had. Even more important, since Randy had given Manson the .22 caliber revolver, his testimony would have literally placed the gun in Manson’s hand.

  Though I had other witnesses who could testify to these key points, I was admittedly suspicious of Starr’s sudden demise. Learning no autopsy had been performed, I ordered one. Starr, it was determined, had died of natural causes, from an ear infection.

  KANAREK “Mrs. Kasabian, I show you this picture.”

  A. “Oh, God!” Linda turned her face away. It was the color photo of the very pregnant, and very dead, Sharon Tate.

  This was the first time Linda had seen the photograph, and she was so shaken Older called a ten-minute recess.

  There was no evidence whatsoever that Linda Kasabian had been inside the Tate residence or that she had seen Sharon Tate’s body. Aaron and I therefore questioned Kanarek’s showing her the photograph. Fitzgerald argued that it was entirely possible that Mrs. Kasabian had been inside both the Tate and La
Bianca residences and had participated in all of the murders. Older ruled that Kanarek could show her the photo.

  Kanarek then showed Linda the death photo of Voytek Frykowski.

  A. “He is the man that I saw at the door.”

  KANAREK “Mrs. Kasabian, why are you crying right now?”

  A. “Because I can’t believe it. It is just—”

  Q. “You can’t believe what, Mrs. Kasabian?”

  A. “That they could do that.”

  Q. “I see. Not that you could do that, but that they could do that?”

  A. “I know I didn’t do that.”

  Q. “You were in a state of shock, weren’t you?”

  A. “That’s right.”

  Q. “Then how do you know?”

  A. “Because I know. I do not have that kind of thing in me, to do such an animalistic thing.”

  Kanarek showed Linda the death photos of all five of the Tate victims as well as those of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. He even insisted that she handle the leather thong that had bound Leno’s wrists.

  Perhaps Kanarek hoped that he would so unnerve Linda that she would make some damaging admission. Instead, he only succeeded in emphasizing that, in contrast to the other defendants, Linda Kasabian was a sensitive human being capable of being deeply disturbed by the hideousness of these acts.

  Showing Linda the photos was a mistake. And the other defense attorneys soon realized this. Each time Kanarek held up a picture, then asked her to look closely at some minute detail, the jurors winced or squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs. Even Manson protested that Kanarek was acting on his own. And still Kanarek persisted.

  Ronald Hughes approached me in the hall during a recess. “I want to apologize, Vince—”

  “No apology necessary, Ron. It was a ‘heat of the moment’ remark. I’m only sorry that Older found you in contempt.”

  “No, I don’t mean that,” Hughes said. “What I did was a hell of a lot worse. I was the one who suggested that Irving Kanarek become Manson’s attorney.”