On the surface, Patti Tate seemed an uncomplicated person. If asked, everyone she knew would have said the same thing about her: sweet, naïve, and unconditionally loving.
Yet my mother was a complicated woman; below the surface, she was a restless soul who felt unworthy of any of those positive affirmations. In clinical circles, they told her she had survivor’s guilt. From my perspective, she was just a little closer to heaven than the rest of us; stuck in a world that had bombarded her with negativity, and in turn, she continually searched for assurance, that somewhere, somehow, love could conquer all.
I’m always astounded when I hear the blame game from criminals who use their tough childhoods as an excuse for their actions. My mom is proof that adverse conditions don’t ever need to lead to violence.
She once played a game called Scruples; a game that questions morals. One question haunted her: Would you rip the wing off a butterfly for a million dollars? Her instantaneous answer was no. The question haunted her not because she ever faltered in her response, but because some playing the game with her debated the integrity of her answer. Those who doubted my mother that night did not know her; for question and answer are the essence of who she truly was.
The few times that I saw her raging angry (aside from when she caught me sneaking out one night) were always rooted in injustice or cruelty to another; no matter how minimal those two actions were, they were intolerable. Even if I pinched my brother during a fight, she’d verbally lash out at me, “You don’t ever have the right to hurt another being.”
While I was in high school, none of my friends called her Ms. Tate or Patti; she was Mama to all of us. She listened to our opinions, and she respected them as if we were adults with something important to contribute to the world.
She was the mama we all went to with our boyfriend problems, and who regarded them as the monumental loves we all thought they were.
Over the weekends, everyone camped out at my house where my mom helped us decide what outfits to wear to the parties, then drove us to those parties, and trusted us to stay even if she saw someone with a beer. And when we did find trouble, she was the one who bailed us out of tight corners, followed by stern lectures while we sulked on the couch.
She was the mama who taught us to say “I love you” at every opportunity. Most important, she was the mama who raised us to be the free spirit she was.
Long before John Edward and Sylvia Browne made it vogue, Holy Cross Cemetery had been a familiar place where I would always go to get a reassuring hug from the other side. There, the headstone of Sharon’s grave had been altered twice since she passed, once for Nana, then again for Mama. Below Sharon and Nana’s epitaphs is Mama’s: OUR MOTHER, OUR INSPIRATION.
Rather than a depository of remains, I like to think of the thrice-used burial plot as a playful gathering of souls.
At Mama’s graveside service, we placed her angel urn next to Nana’s at the foot of Sharon’s casket and released her to them. Then we released butterflies in celebration of her new existence. A life where I’m confident she is as equally excited by being reunited with Nana and Aunt Sharon as she was by being my mother.
My youth gives me confidence that I will have many more love-filled relationships, but I doubt any will surpass the bond that my mother and I shared.
I’ve immortalized my mom with the reverence due angels such as the ones left behind in her bedroom. But I’m entitled. After all, she is my mother.
I pressed the video remote to let the Larry King Show play out. “Patti, you were a child when Sharon was killed. Do you still think about her?” King asked.
“All the time; and it hurts just as bad today as it did then.”
“We’ve run out of time,” King said, “but we obviously haven’t heard the last of this case.”
Nine years from the initial broadcast of that show, King’s assessment of Van Houten’s case blossomed and snared like a well-fed bougainvillea. Following her June 2000 parole denial, Van Houten filed a state appeal that accused the parole board of basing their decision solely on her commitment offense.
In order to deny parole under California statute, the board must present clear and convincing evidence that a prisoner would pose an unreasonable risk of danger to public safety. If the Superior Court found the board negligent of upholding the law, Van Houten would be entitled to a new hearing and possibly a release date.
The Superior Court set a hearing for May 23, 2002.
I followed the news headlines with interest because I wasn’t sure if anyone would petition to keep Van Houten in prison. Aside from my brother and sister, my immediate family on the Tate side has all passed. There is my Aunt Debra. Though she is my mother’s sister, she is a far-removed aunt. Never close with Mama, often at battle with her, I knew Debra less than I knew Aunt Sharon. And because we were such strangers to each other, I had no way of knowing if she cared enough to fight to keep Aunt Sharon’s killers in prison. What little I knew about her firsthand was that she’d taken my grandfather’s ashes and, to date, had not given him a proper burial. Under those circumstances I wasn’t sure if she was the one to carry on my grandmother and mother’s work.
Like a majority of the public, I lacked the facts of Van Houten’s case; therefore, she easily swayed me with her humbleness. I was not alone. In 1969 Van Houten just as easily swayed detective Mike McGann when he interrogated her at the Inyo County jail. Van Houten toyed with McGann. Coy and shrewd, mixed with nervous laughter, Van Houten gave up little information on her or her crime partners. Instead, she steered McGann’s attention to her alibi for the Gary Hinman, Cielo, and Waverly Drive murders. “For about three weeks I was laid up because of a knee injury. And I didn’t go to the doctor, so for about three weeks, I was just sort of out of it.”
“When was that?” McGann asked.
“End of summer. About the end of July, beginning of August. So for about four weeks I was out. I’d get up to go to the restroom and black out. I had to stay in bed because I couldn’t walk, so I didn’t know too much about what was going on.”
“Leslie, tell me what you heard about the Tate murders up there.”
“Not much.”
“Here’s the thing. Five people were killed up there. I know three for sure that went up. I think I know the forth, but I don’t know the fifth—are your parents still alive?”
“Um, I couldn’t tell you,” Van Houten said.
“You don’t have any feelings for them at all?”
“Oh, I love them but—”
“Would you want to see these people, for no reason at all, to go up there and kill your parents or brothers or sisters? Do you think that’s right?”
“No.”
“I don’t either,” McGann said, “but that’s exactly what happened. And you know exactly who was there and what went down. I need to get at what you know, what you heard. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Well, I heard that Sharon Tate was murdered by four other people, and I heard PIG was written on the front door, just like they did at Hinman’s—just like ole Sadie Mae did before. Um, I heard that the Folger girl was stabbed like eighty-seven times.”
McGann interrupted. “Kind of vicious, huh?”
“I’ll say. Yeah. Overdoing it a little. Anyway, that’s about all I know.”
Interpretations vary. Vincent Bugliosi included part of the Van Houten interrogation in his book Helter Skelter. It included asides such as laughs, sarcasm, shock, and anger, and he riddled her quotes with exclamation points. I interpreted this vast fluctuation as maniacal emotion. When I heard the tape, I formed a quite different opinion of Van Houten. She remained calmly equivocal throughout the interrogation. She did often giggle, but it was the nervous laugh of one about to be charged with murder.
Clearly Van Houten was a sane individual who wasn’t worried about the end of the world because her last question to McGann was, “So, what’s this grand jury immunity deal?”
The show Both Sides aired an hour befo
re Court TV began the live coverage of Van Houten’s next parole hearing. I watched, not only to familiarize myself with the details of Van Houten’s participation, but also to learn the details of the LaBianca murders. Additionally, I wanted to ensure that someone was indeed representing the victims. A picture within picture popped up on the screen that showed the parole hearing room. My confidence was raised by the appearance of the LaBianca family members, coupled with Van Houten’s shackled entrance. The restraints seemed a sure signal from the board that, until proven otherwise, she remained a threat to society.
Midsentence of one of the Court TV reporters, Board Commissioner Sharon Lawin silenced them by starting the hearing with a statement of facts concerning the murders of the LaBiancas, then asked, “Miss Van Houten, are you responsible for the deaths of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca?”
“Yes,” Van Houten eagerly replied.
“Now, your case covers a longer period of time than August 10, 1969, in terms of your involvement and what led up to this particular action. The night before, multiple murders were committed by your crime partners and others. Now, you didn’t participate in that, but as I read the records, you wanted to or felt left out. Would that be an accurate reflection?”
Van Houten nodded. “I found out the next day what had happened [at Cielo] and leading up to that point, Manson spoke a lot about sacrificing ourselves to the beginning of the Helter Skelter war. My loyalty and need to please him made me want to go the second night. Also, I kept very close to Patricia Krenwinkel. So when I realized that she had gone [the night before] it was important that I also go.”
“Did you know beforehand that you were going to commit murder?”
“Yes. I knew at the ranch before we left.”
“When you arrived at the LaBiancas’. Who went in first?”
“Manson, maybe Tex. I’m not sure.”
“Did you stay in the car?”
“Yes.”
“When Manson came out, what did he say?”
“He looked in the car window and told Pat Krenwinkel and I to get out. He said to make sure that everyone did something and he asked that the people not be frightened.”
“When you went inside, where were Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca?”
“They were on the sofa, tied up.”
“And then what happened?” Lawin asked.
“Tex told Pat and I to take Mrs. LaBianca into the bedroom, but first, Pat and I went to the kitchen and she got some knives, but I don’t remember if she handed me one or not because I used both hands to hold Mrs. LaBianca down in the bedroom.”
“Where was Tex Watson at that point?”
“He was in the living room killing Mr. LaBianca. I heard sounds of him dying, the gurgling sounds of him dying, and Mrs. LaBianca heard them, too, and started to struggle while calling out for her husband. Pat tried to stab her with a knife, but it bent. I couldn’t hold Mrs. LaBianca down, so I called for Tex and told him that we couldn’t kill her. When Tex came in, Pat left the bedroom, and I stood at the threshold and stared out into the hallway. I stayed there until Tex turned me around and said, ‘Do something.’ When I looked in, Mrs. LaBianca was lying on the floor dead. I stabbed her in the lower torso approximately fourteen to sixteen times. After that, I told Pat that I had touched the lamp, so I began wiping off fingerprints in the bedroom. And I wiped off fingerprints in there for as long as I could.”
“At some point, you went looking for a change of clothes?” Lawin asked.
“Yes. I had no blood on me, but Tex had showered in the bathroom and needed the pants that I had worn. So I went through her closet and found a pair of shorts to change into.”
“Anything else to tell us about the commitment offense?”
“I’m deeply ashamed of it. Living with the acts of that night is difficult. I take them very seriously, not just the murders in the house, but what was in me that made me so available to someone like Manson. One of the hardest things I have to deal with in contributing to murder is that there is no restitution. There’s no making it right. My heart aches with words, but there don’t seem to be any that can really convey living with the amount of pain caused.”
Lawin studied her briefly. “You said a moment ago that you contributed to murder. Now, did you murder Mrs. LaBianca or contribute to her death?”
“I feel I contributed to her death,” Van Houten said, and then added, “It’s difficult to answer that because the autopsy reports have shown that it was Tex that wielded the fatal wounds, but I contributed. I attempted to hold her down for Pat, and I called Tex because we couldn’t kill her. Morally, I feel as though I did.”
“And are you certain that she was dead when you stabbed her?”
“I felt she was. I didn’t think in terms of absolutes at the time.”
At the first commercial break, I pulled out the death photos that I had evaded for nearly ten years. I still couldn’t bear to look at Sharon’s, so I shuffled through them until I found the pictures taken at the LaBianca house. I tried to review them clinically in order to compare Van Houten’s G-rated rendition to actuality, yet my pulse quickened. Mr. LaBianca lay wedged between a chair and sofa. A bloodied pillowcase covered the harrowed look that likely remained on his face; stab wounds covered his body. The killers had ripped open his blood-soaked pajama top so they could gouge WAR into the flesh. They left a fork embedded in his abdomen, a knife traversing his throat.
Mrs. LaBianca lay on the bedroom floor also with a bloodied pillowcase cinched around her head by a lamp cord—presumably the reason Van Houten “touched” the lamp. Her buttocks and back were exposed because the killers had yanked her gown up around her shoulders. Deep stab wounds riddled her backside. Van Houten admits this is where she reluctantly stabbed Rosemary, yet the photographs of these wounds clearly indicate they were not inflicted by an unwilling hand.
Based on Van Houten’s interview with King, and her testimony at the parole hearing, honest, nice, sad, and remorseful are all adjectives I could use to describe this woman. If Van Houten is a culmination of those adjectives now, how important is it to remember that she stayed in the LaBianca house long after her victims were dead? That even as the blood still seeped from Leno and Rosemary, Van Houten and her crime partners showered, ransacked closets, raided the refrigerator, and—as indicated by the blood-matted fur—played with the LaBiancas’ dogs? I think the apex of that question lay in Dr. McDaniel, the psychiatrist who most recently examined Van Houten: “Miss Van Houten possesses a degree of personal charm that is very convincing. The obvious question is whether this represents true emotional change and a restructuring of her personality, or of someone who is so smooth in their manipulations that they are barely perceptible.”
The doctor’s supposition was reason enough for the board to deny Van Houten parole for another two years.
In the aftermath of the six-hour hearing, I kicked around the parallel course of Van Houten and Sharon’s early lives. Both were homecoming princesses and popular with their friends. Both made high grades. Both experimented with drugs. How they ended up on such diverse paths is a mystery that psychologists should be given carte blanche to solve.
Nana and Mama tangled with forgiveness of Sharon’s killers until they were hog-tied. I, too, have irresolvable issues on the subject. Essentially, parole equals forgiveness. Forgiveness comes once a prisoner fully acknowledges what they did. Furthermore, forgiveness comes once they’ve made restitution to their victim. Since it is impossible for a killer to make restitution to their victim, I believe that murder is unforgivable. Consequently, no matter how rehabilitated they are, they should remain imprisoned for the rest of their lives.
In the wake of every parole hearing Nana attended, press members asked her how much longer she would continue her opposition. She would say, “Until the day I die, and then some.”
Of course, things have changed at the parole hearings since Nana’s time. Steve Kay retired; members of the LaBianca and Sebring families have stepped forward t
o voice their opposition to the murderers’ release; and Proposition 9 now allows the board to give prisoners up to a fifteen-year denial. To date, the parole board has not released any of the Manson Family killers, although, in a plea bargain of sorts, Steven Grogan received parole after revealing to the state where they could find the long-lost remains of Shorty O’Shea. Grogan has been living carefree in Northern California, under an assumed name ever since. But it’s hard to forget that while he never entered the house that night, he waited in the getaway car. Atkins and Kasabian were charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit murder, which, in the eyes of the law holds the same consequence as murder. It remains unclear as to why Grogan was overlooked. But there is no statute of limitations for murder. Every day that the District Attorney’s office remains blind to their oversight, Grogan should count his undeserved blessings.
The Parole Board did give us a scare in 2010 when they granted Manson killer Bruce Davis a date for release. Thankfully, saner minds prevailed, and Governor Schwarzenegger invoked his authority to reverse the board’s decision.
The year Nana passed away, the California Department of Corrections removed Charles “Tex” Watson from his homey environment at the Men’s Colony. These days he resides at Mule Creek State Prison, divorced from his wife and disrobed from his ministerial duties. Apparently, he’s doing an outstanding job as one of the prison janitors.
Time has come full circle since Nana began her fight to keep Sharon’s killers in prison. At the time, due to overcrowded prisons, the parole board was granting a high number of releases. Nana and the multitude of other victims’ advocates became the guardian angels of the state as they worked tirelessly to keep the violent offenders behind bars. They did their job right, but California didn’t, as the state continually neglected to build more prisons to house its offenders.
Now, nearly thirty years later, due to the same overcrowding issues, the U.S. Supreme Court has mandated that California release 40,000 prisoners over the next two years. It wasn’t the answer then and it’s not the answer now. But on November 16, 2011, Watson saw the mandate as a crack in the prison door and his best chance of getting a release date. During his five-hour parole hearing, Watson read a statement regarding his suitability and then refused to answer any questions from the board members. Because the board measures an inmate’s suitability based in part on that inmate’s response to their questions, it was a bad call by Watson and the crack in the door snapped shut on him with a denial that will keep him in prison for a minimum of five years more and quite possibly forever.
Restless Souls Page 38