by Johnny Satan
Q: But you did fire a shot that missed Hinman?
A: Struggling with Gary Hinman for the gun, it went off in the kitchen. [The bullet] went through the sink. That was the only time it was fired. I knew so little about operating this gun that after it went off and not knowing that it was a semi-automatic, I cocked the gun which jammed it. I didn’t know that it wouldn’t fire again without removing the clip and shell.
Q: Did Gary Hinman bleed to death?
A: No, no, no. Nobody was killing him until the last minute.
Q: I think that’s at odds with the coroner’s report. The prosecution at your trial charged there was torture involved.
A: There had been some suggestion that I tortured him, a theory used by the district attorney to justify a 1st degree conviction, a felony murder. District attorney, Burton Katz, with a red Cadillac pitted against a paunchy Jewish public defender [Leon Salter].
Q: You’re saying that you attacked Hinman with the knife after a struggle over the gun.
A: Right. And I sewed up his ear too, by the way, with dental floss.
Q: That was mighty white of you.
A: Oh, stop being sarcastic. We had a helluva fight. I wasn’t going to let him get the gun.
Q: When did you decide to kill Hinman? And why?
A: Gary Hinman would not have died if he had not told me that he was going to blow the whistle as soon as I was gone.
Q: Blow the whistle to whom?
A: He told me that he was going to the police (and tell them) that I had come and assaulted him to get money from him. I had my back against the wall. He said, “I’m going to tell the police what you did to me.” Up until that point I had assumed that everything was square between us. This guy is a drug dealer. He’s playing the game. And if you’re going to dance, you’ve got to pay the fiddler. You burn somebody, that’s the way it is. You expect somebody to knock on your door to collect. I figured we were straight. He had signed over the pink slips of his two cars to me. They were pieces of junk but they were worth between them, perhaps one thousand dollars. I figured that I’d give these cars to the motorcycle club, hoping they would accept them in return for their $1000, and get myself out of my bind with them. The only reason that I stayed over was so that I wouldn’t be seen driving his beat-up VW van during the daylight.
Q: Did you ever call the Spahn Ranch during this period?
A: Yes. I did and talked to a guy named Bruce. I said, “Come over and pick up a car.” He did. He came over and picked up the car.
Q: Was this after you had killed Hinman?
A: No. At the time that Bruce Davis was coming over to pick up the car everything between Gary and I was straight. Bruce came to the house and stayed just long enough to pick up the car. He didn’t even come inside. He picked up the car keys and somebody who was with him—it was more than likely Elda who was tight with Bruce—drove the car back that he came in. That was Bruce Davis’ only involvement. He had no idea what was going on.
Q: Where is he now?
A: He’s in Folsom Prison.
Q: For the murder of Hinman...
A: Yeah and they tied him up with the Shorty Shea thing. [Stuntman Shorty Shea who lived at the Spahn Ranch prior to his death/murder].
Q: How did Gary Hinman die?
A: Stabbed in the heart twice. He died immediately. He had signed over both pink slips to me and I figured that we were square. One car had already been picked up, and I was going to drive the other. So I stayed over and the next evening he tells me, “I’m sending you to prison for assault,” or whatever. I thought, well, here goes my life. My freedom is my life. The slash on his face is pretty bad. I didn’t really know what to do. Hinman would have a scar on his face now for the rest of his life. He was a lot more upstanding than me. He’s a homeowner and so forth, a college student. I’m at a loss trying to resolve this situation, where we can go from there and not get in each other’s way. And it was a stupid decision. I should have taken my chances with whatever he was going to do.
Q: Did Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner simply stand around and watch you kill Hinman
A: Well, no one wanted to kill him. They had just come along for the ride.
Q: What did the girls do?
A: They didn’t know what to do. He [Gary] was closer to them than he was to me. Susan Atkins seemed to think, “Oh, what fun, how interesting.” Mary Brunner was just scared to death. Mary Brunner just faded into the woodwork. She was a librarian. Susan Atkins is now a Jesus freak in jail. She gave five different testimonies and in one of them, she claimed that she killed Hinman [laughs].
Q: Who actually wrote Political Piggy on the wall in Hinman’s blood?
A: I didn’t, but I had it written. Well, it was my idea to do it. Susan Atkins was on that wall. The whole thing was to take the heat off the trail. Gary Hinman was into his revolutionary communism. His living room was a library of Communist literature. I figured I’d make it look like one of his cohorts, you know.
Q: Make it look like a Black Panther killing?
A: I wasn’t thinking about blacks necessarily.
Q: That was Manson’s trip.
A: It’s never really been his trip. I mean, he’s from the South. West Virginia. Since he’s been in [prison] he gets along with blacks better than anybody.
Q: When you returned to the Spahn Ranch and returned the jammed gun to Bruce Davis, did you tell him that you had killed Gary Hinman?
A: I didn’t talk to anybody about it. But Susan Atkins has a motor mouth. She was the one, not me, that Danny DeCarlo had the conversation with. The district attorney and Danny DeCarlo were drinking buddies and that is how he [DeCarlo] got the two felony charges and a federal gun charge dropped in return for his testimony.
Q: If Hinman died immediately as you say, why did Susan Atkins run back inside the house and suffocate him?
A: It was death gasps. He was dead but there are spasms that people go through. What do they call it? Death rattle. I mean it’s a normal thing that happens. She ran back into the house and laid a pillow over his face to muffle the sound. There was no suffocating. He was dead.
Q: Was this the first time that you had ever killed somebody?
A: The first and only time. I’m not ordinarily violence-prone. I’ve been in some situations here in prison where I’ve had to stand up for myself, but I’ve never had any preoccupation with violence.
Q: Were you frightened after you killed Hinman?
A: It’s hard to say. You go through a lot of things. guilt. Anxiety over getting busted.
Q: Were you surprised that it took a week before you were caught?
A: No. I thought the body would be discovered later than it was because the cars were gone and, by all appearances, Hinman was gone too. The heat of the summer and decomposure attracted flies and some attention.
The body was found five days later.
Q: And when you were caught driving his car, you had some of his blood on you. True?
A: No. Well, in a matter of speaking. I wasn’t wearing the clothes I was wearing then. There were a couple of spots and they [forensic] couldn’t even tell if it was animal blood. It was probably not Gary Hinman’s blood.
Q: Whose blood could it have been?
A: More than likely it was my own. I have a tendency to cut myself. I work with my hands a lot.
Q: In the light of the murder you had committed only a week before, it doesn’t appear that you were taking precautions against getting caught. Driving a dead man’s car, for instance.
A: I’m not sure that I was trying so desperately to prevent my apprehension. I was kind of devastated by what I had done. I drove the car off on the pretense of ditching it somewhere. I picked up some hitchhikers and took them to where they were going and just continued north. In retrospect, it was definitely a stupid move.
A: No. I don’t begrudge anything that happened. Gary Hinman was as stupid as me. If he was going to something like that [report Beausoleil], he should never have told m
e. It was done and finished. he had a thin cut on his cheek. It would have healed and he would have had a thin line to show for it. Well, he burned somebody. He sold some drugs that would have killed people.
Q: What was your biggest mistake that night, and at your trials?
A: My biggest mistake was simply in killing Gary Hinman. I told the judge that I didn’t feel any remorse because I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. That’s the only reason I told him that. As far as I’m concerned that man [Judge John Shea] is a helluva lot more diabolical than Charlie Manson ever was. But the thing is, I’ve felt a great deal of remorse within me. I think I wanted to pay for Gary Hinman’s death. I think I owed Gary that. I’ve worshipped life my whole life. What’s heartbreaking to me more than anything else is that killing Gary Hinman has negated all of my creative efforts. The world doesn’t concentrate on anything other than that one mistake I made in my life. And it was a big mistake. You can’t give life back.
Q: Did it ever occur to you to turn state’s evidence or offer your hunch on who committed the Tate-La Bianca murders in exchange for having the Hinman charge dropped?
A: Yes. But there’s no future...
Q: For a snitch?
A: Not to me. I wouldn’t be able to.
Q: Do you still get letters from Family members?
A: I’ve gotten a few from Squeaky. Squeaky and Sandra Good are trying to hold together the illusion of this Manson Family thing. They’re into this fanatical religion hype.
Q: What do they ask you to do?
A: They just preach. I don’t know why. I can’t relate to that.
Q: Do you have any letters from Manson?
A: Oh, heavens yes.
Q: When was the last time you heard from him?
A: Probably about eight years ago.
Q: Have you heard from your old girlfriend Kitty Leutsinger who testified against you when she was pregnant with your child?
A: Not for many, many years. The last time I heard she was living with a junkie in Santa Cruz.
Q: How old is your child?
A: A girl. She’s eleven now and lives with her grandparents. Kitty’s.
Q: Who was killed first? When did the murder sprees begin?
A: Gary Hinman was killed before anybody was killed. Before that nobody had any real plans of killing anybody, but when it happened...
Q: It became contagious?
A: Yeah, sort of.
Q: You’re saying then that the Hinman murder was almost a catalyst for mass killing?
A: I think it did have some kind of triggering effect. Yes.
Q: As a consequence, the people in the Tate and La Bianca homes were killed. Did you have any notice that they were going to be killed?
A: No, nothing at all. When it happened, I knew who had done it. I was fairly certain.
Q: What made you so certain? Because you knew that the Tate house used to be Terry Melcher’s? Did they think they would find Terry Melcher?
A: Yeah, I would assume. Yeah. That’s what I’ve heard.
Q: And the style of the murders was a grotesque exaggeration of the way you killed Gary Hinman. More blood writing on the wall, the way you did it. It has been said that the Tate-La Bianca murders were done to try to spring you from jail. An attempt to prove that they were all connected by the consistent motif of blood. Hence, if you were in jail during the Tate-La Biancas and they were done by the same person who killed Hinman, their crazy logic was that the police would have to release you.
A: I do believe there was something to that, yes, because of the way the murders were made to look. They [Tate-La Biancas] were a few days after I was arrested. That was the 9th [August 9th 1969]. I don’t think that whoever’s idea it was to commit these murders would have been able to get the participation of those involved unless there had been this noble concept.
Q: Meaning freeing Bobby from jail?
A: Gary Hinman had his own personal relationship with the so-called Manson Family and perhaps they interpreted the thing that I had defended them from him, as well as myself.
Q: Did that enter your mind when you killed him, that he could squeal on the Family?
A: It’s not that I did that, but whether they thought I had intended that. You’ve got to understand that these people were totally without some kind of scruples. they had to have some kind of reason to justify it in their own minds, even if the justification was twisted and bizarre.
Q: Why would your incarceration be such a threat or loss to them?
A: I believe that it led to a situation in which Charlie and the others, who had made similar commitments to each other, were forced into a situation of acting upon their commitment. I don’t think it was because of Charlie Manson’s fondness for me, necessarily. I think that this was a justification—something that would give the whole episode a more noble cause than just going out to kill some people. This was 1969. “Kill your parents”—Jerry Rubin and all of that. There was a lot of doomsday talk around at that time when everybody was pretty well frustrated and not knowing what to do and still having some romantic vision of revolution. What the exact motives were I can’t really say. It wasn’t a plot by Beatles’ records and it was not the “I was hypnotized” concept of Susan Atkins. I think it falls back to a basic commitment that Charlie made with people. The striking out was very senseless. I’ve seen it a lot in here, where people are so desperate that they really don’t know who to strike out at. It was more that sort of thing than something that was sat down and plotted out.
Q: How accurate are the descriptions of Manson and the Family in Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and Ed Sanders’ The Family?
A: They are both so pathetic because neither one took the proper approach to begin to understand what happened. Everything gets lost in blood and guts, devil worship, all that stuff that never went on. This satanic crap and brainwave master never went on. These things were taken out of light-hearted conversations. There is truth in all these books. There are facts. period.
Q: Where did the writers go wrong?
A: They were never in a situation where they experienced that kind of desperation.
Q: Describe the kind of desperation.
A: The desperation which leads somebody to go out and almost...
Q: Kill?
A: Yeah. Kill crazily. Just throw away their lives and murder people.
Q: What created this so-called desperation?
A: They were a bunch of people with their backs against the wall. This wasn’t mere discontent. This was lunacy. At least in their minds, they were at the end corner of the world. They couldn’t travel any more together without a caravan of law enforcement people behind them. The only place left to go was the desert. They were at the end of the edge of the world and they were scared to death of being pushed off the edge. The desert is death. They wound up in Death Valley trying to live off the bugs.
Q: How do you think Manson has held up over the last decade of virtual solitary confinement?
A: I don’t know if he’s burnt out. From what I’ve heard, the pressures have taken their toll. All this time he’s been in protective custody. Some of these guys kill people for real weird reasons, just to see what it’s like. Some kind of peer pressure or peer prestige. There’s a lot of sickness in prisons. It’s an environment that grows this ugly fear mentality, like a culture dish of bacteria.
Q: Have you changed much being in jail for 11 years? Do you think you’ve learned anything?
A: Oh, I’ve learned a lot: Where do I begin? I’ve got my act together pretty well. I was a lame kid when I came in and when I come out I’m not going to be any lame kid. They don’t have to worry about me being a troublemaker because I’ve got enough talent. Believe me, it’s been hell, but experiences like this temper you. I’ve used it.
(OUI magazine, October 1981)
CHARLES MANSON PAROLE STATEMENT
As anyone in the know knows, throughout the state of California, the country, and the world: the lawyers, courts,
and government of the U.S. lie and cannot be trusted. (California Department of Corrections included.) To keep this so-called Board of Paroles from telling more lies about me, my family, brothers and sisters in soul in truth and of God, I have come to this hearing to make statements to and for the public record to be marked in history.
I have been kept in handcuffs for over sixteen years and kept for the most part in solitary confinement, as the so-called authorities kept changing the names from solitary to “administrative segregation” to “quiet cells” and other cover-ups each time the court ordered elimination of solitary time, or the public began to hear about mistreatment. Their fears and guilts were covered up by distortion, lies, and confusion to mislead and misinform the public for more tax dollars and bigger criminal justice business, actually fed by the misfortunes and blood of children.
I’ve been kept in mental wards, nut wards; I’ve been beaten, drugged, and have lost track of the times I’ve been handcuffed to the bars or left to be killed. Inmates have told me that doctors and other C.D.C. staff have tried to have me killed by telling them lies about me killing pregnant women and eating their unborn babies, or have implied threats to their personal safety along with promises of paroles and other favors. I have witnesses to all I say but no court will touch it because they broke their laws to put me back in prison, and each day they break all the laws by keeping me. They violate every human right in the book, yet they keep preaching to the world as if they had no sins and were all good guys.
So, for years doctors and staff have been falling off me with heart attacks, sicknesses, killing themselves or being murdered, as they did me wrong by trying to use this case to set a new prison system and continue to pick up the paychecks. I see all new cops, new staff. For each inmate sent to kill me, the prison system has lost staff. All of the judgments and the blame that is pushed off on me will be reflected back in the fires of the Holy War that you call crime. It suits your fears not to face the actions you are creating and calling up in your prison crime factories, as your deceit is reflected. And then you are paid for the stories of crime sold to the public in TV and movies.