Restless Souls

by Alisa Statman

  October 5, 1970, was a particularly bad day.

  When Vince Bugliosi finished his direct examination of Sgt. Whiteley, Manson raised his hand. “May I examine him, Your Honor?”

  “No, you may not,” the judge said.

  “Are you going to use this courtroom to kill me? Do you want me dead? The minute I see that you are going to kill me, you know what I’m going to do?”

  Older looked at him curiously. “What are you going to do?”

  Manson smiled. “You know, you’ve studied your books. Do you know who you are talking to?”

  “If you don’t stop, Mr. Manson, and I order you to stop now, I will have to have you removed as I did the other day,” Older threatened.

  “I will have you removed if you don’t stop. I have a little system of my own,” Manson challenged.

  “Fine. Let’s move on. Mr. Bugliosi, call your next witness.”

  “Do you think I’m kidding?” Manson’s voice boomed. In a rage of adrenaline and with a sharpened pencil, he leaped across the defense table toward the judge. A deputy tackled Manson before he hit his destination. As six deputies carried him out, he screamed at Older, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!”

  The female defendants joined in. “You’re just a woman,” they chanted in unison. “You are just a woman, that is all.”

  “Remove the defendants!” Older barked over them.

  Exciting as the outburst was, the cliff-hanger of the proceedings was just around the corner.

  The end of the trial neared. Closing arguments were scheduled for Monday, November 30, 1970. Instead, the courtroom occupants impatiently waited for Leslie Van Houten’s attorney, Ron Hughes, to arrive.

  At ten o’clock police knocked on Hughes’s front door. No one answered.

  By the end of the day, the only thing the police discovered was that Hughes had gone camping in the Sespe Hot Springs the weekend before. Beyond that, it was anybody’s guess, and everyone had the same one: the Manson Family had killed him.

  Judge Older assigned Maxwell Keith as co-counsel for Van Houten, which delayed the proceedings until December 21.

  The morning the trial resumed, Leslie Van Houten stood to announce, “I had nothing to do with Ronald Hughes’s disappearance, Judge Older. I’m beginning to wonder what you did with him.”

  “Miss Van Houten, sit down, or you will be removed.”

  “You stand up!” Van Houten retorted. “Hey! Look at me when I’m talking to you. I’ll take care of you, you’ll see!”

  “Remove the defendant.”

  A deputy grabbed her arm. “Get off of me, you fucking bitch!” Van Houten yelled, then punched her.

  “Where’s the justice now!” Atkins joined in by taking a swing at another deputy. “Who are you on judgment day?”

  Judge Older banged his gavel. “Remove that defendant!”

  Manson leaned back on his chair, singing, “The old gray mare ain’t what she used to be. She’s a judge now.”

  Older remained placid. “Mr. Manson, you are now disrupting this trial.”

  “That old black magic that you keep so well,” Manson sang.

  “I order you once again to stop this, sir.”

  “You have been ordering me forever,” Manson stated. “All my life you have ordered me. You charge me with murder, and you say I have rights, and you hold up the rights in front of me, but you give me none.”

  “Mr. Manson, this will be your last warning. Mr. Bugliosi, let’s proceed.”

  “You are going ahead, but are you going ahead to look at yourselves?” Manson turned toward the jurors. “Look at all of you. Where are you going? You’re going to destruction, that’s where you’re going. You will end up being judged. It’s your judgment day, not mine. I’ve already judged me.”

  With an outstretched arm, Krenwinkel yelled, “Hail Caesar!”

  “That’s it! Remove all the defendants. It is perfectly clear that this was a calculated performance by the four of them to interrupt the proceedings, and they will not be brought back into this courtroom again during the remainder of the guilt phase of the trial. Let’s proceed, Mr. Bugliosi.”

  Vince collected his papers in the quieted arena and moved to the podium. It was so quiet, in fact, that the prosecutor startled everyone when he loudly declared, “It was your client, Mr. Kanarek, who ordered the commission of these horrible murders! These men and women who followed him were not suffering from any diminished mental capacity. They suffered from a diminished heart, and a diminished soul. . . . There is a penetrating spotlight on those two dark nights of murder. Charlie Manson knows that a violent death and brutal murder is the ultimate wrong, or he wouldn’t be fighting for his life now. Charles Manson is on trial because he is a cold-blooded, diabolical murderer. As sure as I’m standing here, as sure as night follows day, these defendants are guilty.”

  Two days later, Vince closed his notebook and his final summation with a last thought. “Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Woytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Leno LaBianca, and Rosemary LaBianca are not here in this courtroom now, but from their graves, they cry out for justice.”

  SUITCASES FILLED THE trunk of the car for a long weekend at Mammoth Mountain. On our way out the door, the phone rang.

  “Leave it, P.J.,” Doris said.

  I hesitated. “The jury might be in.”

  “It’s our anniversary. They’re going to make their decision whether we’re there or not. Vince has the number at the cabin.”

  I stubbornly went to answer the phone, and my equally stubborn wife headed for the car. “Let’s go, Patti,” she said.

  “What about Dad?”

  “Just get in the car.”

  A minute later, I was back at the car. “They’ve reached a verdict.”

  “I don’t care, we’ve planned this trip for months,” she complained. “We’ll find out the verdicts on the news.”

  “You take the girls and go. I’ll meet you up there tonight.” I paused, suddenly confused. “Where’s Debbie?”

  “Where’s Debbie?” She laughed hostilely. “That’s just it, you don’t have a clue what’s going on with your family. You’ve completely tossed us aside for that trial. I’ll bet you didn’t even remember yesterday was Sharon’s birthday.”

  “The hell I didn’t. Who do you think put the flowers on her headstone? Oh, wait, I forgot, you’ve never seen her headstone!”

  She smacked me. “Stop it!”

  “When are you going to wake up? That trial is because they killed Sharon. She’s not off doing a movie somewhere; she’s never coming home. And I’m going to make damned sure those sons of bitches never go home to their parents, either. Now I’m going down to that courthouse to see that commitment through.”

  We both got into our cars and went our separate ways.

  DEFENDANTS AND PROSECUTORS enter a trial equally confident that they will win the game. The ensuing weeks of strategic testimony is a pressure cooker of emotions for anyone with a personal stake in the outcome. The moments before a verdict is read are riveting seconds of saturated tension masked by the calm of the poker-faced lawyers, jurors, and defendants.

  The unpredictability of the reactions to the verdict by the accused or the victim keeps the bailiffs and deputies alert to confrontation. Considering the track record of the Manson trial, they anticipated the worst.

  A dozen deputies lined the railing that separated the defendants from the spectators. I sat, quietly focused on the killers’ glib entrance; however, their nonchalance contradicted the apprehension of their wandering glances. Once they were seated, Older said, “The clerk will read the verdicts.”

  “We the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Charles Manson, guilty of the crime of murder of Abigail Folger, a human being, in violation of section 187, Penal Code of California, a felony as charged in Count 1 of the Indictment, and we further find it to be murder in the first degree.”

  In all, there we
re twenty-eight verdicts read, one for each victim and one for each murderer. All guilty, all murder in the first degree.

  With the final verdict handed down, Manson was the first to break the silence. He looked to the jury. “You’re all guilty.” Then to Older. “We are still not allowed to put on a defense?”

  The judge ignored Manson. He banged his gavel. “Court is adjourned.”

  Manson fought against the restraining deputies. “You won’t outlive that, old man!”

  The girls lost their trial-long, happy-go-lucky conduct. “Your whole system is a game,” Van Houten seethed. “You blind, stupid people, your children will turn against you!”

  The deputies pushed the killers toward the lockup. Atkins broke free, darting toward the gallery. “Better lock your doors and watch your own kids!” she managed, before deputies wrestled her to the ground.

  As quickly as the uproar began, it ended with the doors closing behind the prisoners, and the end of a more trusting era.

  9

  LIFE GOES ON. OR DOES IT?

  It’s hard for me sometimes to accept the fact that people choose to believe that I absolutely cannot change. That I was something at nineteen, and what I am at thirty-three is irrelevant because the life of the one they loved ended when I was nineteen. And though I understand it, it’s very difficult because life goes on. And I go on.

  —LESLIE VAN HOUTEN

  Patti

  Countless times throughout my childhood, I’d heard Dad’s cautionary advice: “Never assume. It will bite you in the ass every time.”

  Like many kids, I ignored my parents’ advice. I assumed that the guilty verdict and death sentence of Sharon’s killers would press a magic button that’d cause them to disappear as quickly as Sharon had. I assumed the close of the trial was the light at the end of the dank and gloomy tunnel that held me hostage to a night of intangible evil.

  A year later, I was still massaging my wounded rear end as the Manson Family and their heinous crimes continued to gain infamy—as the media’s ever-evolving fascination with them fed the steady diets of the inquisitive.

  The group’s cases filled the dockets of the Los Angeles courts for years after the main trial’s conclusion.

  California extradited Charles Watson from Texas and convicted him with a death sentence for the Cielo and Waverly Drive murders.

  In separate trials, Manson, Bruce Davis, and Steve Grogan were each found guilty for killing Spahn’s ranch hand Donald O’Shea.

  Gary Hinman’s parents received justice for their son’s murder when a jury convicted Beausoleil, Davis, Manson, and Atkins.

  Toward the end of 1971, after an intense gun battle, the LAPD apprehended Manson followers in the midst of a weapons shop robbery. The shootout made the six o’clock news. I nervously watched the screen as the police wrestled the crew into custody; positive that the killers were closing in because the event took place just ten minutes from our house.

  The trial for the armed robbers began as the Superior Court reviewed Atkins, Manson, Van Houten, and Krenwinkel’s appeals to overturn their convictions. In the end, only Van Houten received a new trial due to defense attorney Ronald Hughes’s untimely disappearance. The jury in her succeeding trial reached the same guilty verdict.

  The sheriffs eventually recovered Hughes’s body near the Sespe Hot Springs, but they failed to find enough evidence to warrant an arrest for murder.

  Coinciding with the trials, publishing houses turned out books on Manson and the murders faster than soap opera scripts were written. Over the next few years, Sharon’s case remained a top seller for the tabloid papers and movie magazines. Television shows referenced the murders, news programs ran special commentaries, and Manson, a feature-length film, was released nationwide.

  The aftermath of the trial extinguished the optimistic light of escaping the tunnel. For the time being, I was still a prisoner of August 1969, where Sharon and Manson’s faces were hauntingly intertwined, in a clash of love and hatred.

  Although the fall of 1971 promised to be an exciting time as I entered my first year of high school, it proved instead to be a continuum of sleepless nights, hazy days, and insecurity; all deliberately hidden behind a smile and a lighthearted disposition that I rehearsed each morning on the walk to school.

  I made every effort to avoid sympathetic gazes or questions about my well-being as they only triggered memories of Sharon’s murder. I eventually made friends. I kept my grades at a C average, hung out at the beach after school, went to football games on Friday nights, and even made the ballot for homecoming princess; no one could have guessed that I was falling apart, harboring an intimate fear that blended neatly with my depression.

  For a short period, I tried finding late-night reassurance by nestling beneath the down blanket of Mom’s bed. Protected by her warmth, three door locks, bars on the windows, and a loaded gun in her armoire, it seemed a safer bet. We lay awake night after night, side by side, silently watching the walls shimmer from the Moon’s reflection off the rippling swimming pool. Some nights the Santa Ana winds whistled through the trees; other times, they howled as if to instill in me even more fear of the obscure elements of this world.

  Slowly, I withdrew from the nightly safeguard of my mother’s bed because it ultimately became a troubling reminder of why I needed the security of her arms in the first place. Back in my own room, the radio’s steadfast signal kept me company through the long nights, reaffirming that life could triumph through the witching hours.

  After everyone else went to bed, I routinely crept through the house, inspecting the door and window locks. Then I headed into the kitchen to confirm that all the knives were safely concealed in the drawers.

  In bed and watchful till dawn, I regularly checked the phone for a dial tone and peeked through the curtains to ensure it was the breeze rustling the bushes at my window and nothing more.

  During those lonesome hours, it didn’t matter how hard I tried to direct my thoughts toward the golden memories of Sharon. The instant my eyes closed, nightmarish images fired at me, obliterating any fleeting brightness I’d managed to create.

  I’d dream of row upon row of ghoulish corpses lining the walls of a morgue. Or delight in seeing Jay’s car in our driveway, until a look through the tinted windows revealed a flaming body, melting into the driver’s seat. I’d see Sharon off in the distance, angelically floating toward me in a white minidress. As she’d draw nearer, webs of blood would spore across the fabric, dying it crimson. And then there was Winnie Chapman pounding on our window as Mom and I ate breakfast, my mother completely apathetic to her voice, shrieking, “Mrs. Tate! You’ve got to help! They’re dying! They’re bleeding all over the place!”

  Within the nightmare, I awakened in a bathtub brimming with blood.

  The killers manifested wickedly in those horrific dreams.

  Watson, dressed in black, with a starkly white skull, an elongated jaw, and protruding razor-sharp teeth, would tower over me. A black cowboy hat resting atop his skinless head. Like a Texas gentleman, he’d tip the hat forward just before striking. Susan Atkins would materialize with long black hair that cloaked her head like the hood worn by the shadow of death, her face shrouded with the exception of two fiery, pinpoint eyes.

  Stirred by Sharon’s screams piercing my consciousness, I’d awaken with drowning eyes, unable to focus as I crossed back to reality. Curled up from the gnawing ache of terror commingling with sorrow and guilt, I’d plead for God to reverse time’s hand. Convinced that if I’d stayed with Sharon I could have saved her—or at least perished with her; it seemed a better alternative to surviving.

  By the time I’d secretly reached into my mother’s medicine cabinet for her bottle of Valium, I was desperate to relinquish the predators who vengefully cornered my sanity.

  I held out until midnight before slipping the pill between my lips. Although I was nervous and curious about what would come, I had barely lingered on the mystery before my body tingled from the d
issolved remedy coursing through my system.

  The narcotic warmly caressed me as I rode its wave higher and higher, enjoying the calm, yet afraid to fully release the hold on my domain. I forced my eyes to rest, and recalled a line from the movie Roman was making based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth: The innocent sleep. Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care. The death of each day’s life. My hands unclenched, my pulse slowed its hammer, and then I slept without demons.

  The dream was strikingly bright with colors blooming through brushed edges. As if the long-awaited response to my prayers was at hand. I find myself in the Cielo living room. Sharon and I sit at the piano, the keys of which hold the imprint of the artists whose fingers had pulsated across the ivory in the past. John Lennon, Jim Morrison, John Phillips, Neil Young, and a host of others whose music had permeated my sister’s home. Sharon takes my hand and repeatedly guides me through the five simplistic notes to John Phillips’s song Safe in My Garden. We pause, and then she says, “There’s nothing to fear from the past. In time, it will bring you freedom, but for now, I want you to let it go.”

  My eyebrows furrow. “No!”

  Her fingertips smooth the creases on my forehead. “You must. When you’re ready to look back, I’ll be waiting.” Her hand reaches to close my eyelids.

  When they reopened, my bedroom was shining with the light of another day. I lay there motionless, reveling in the sentimentality of the night’s passing, eager to return to the medicine chest for another trip.

  In the years to come I experimented with every drug I could get my hands on, searching for the halcyon’s wings to lift me above the stormy horizon of my mind and into obliterating clouds, until yesterday would become an indistinct notion.

  THE STEAMING WATER from the showerhead cascaded over my body in the chill of February’s eighteenth morning. It was a new year, and I felt like a new person with the residual of the previous night’s drug, MDA, still massaging my brain into placidity.