by Greg King
Amidst the frenzied reactions of both the media and the Hollywood community, investigators at 10050 Cielo Drive concluded their work. Earlier, someone had taken bedsheets from the linen closet in the hallway leading to the bedrooms and finally covered the bloody bodies, preventing the circling helicopters from capturing the grim scene on the lawn. By two o’clock that afternoon, in the 94 degree Los Angeles heat, Coroner Thomas Noguchi and his assistant were wandering from body to body, checking their conditions. Paper bags were placed over their hands and the rope between Sharon and Jay was cut.69 Finally, one by one, stretchers were unloaded from the white medical examiners’ vans and wheeled across the front lawn. Sharon’s body was carefully lifted from the bloody floor and placed in a bag on the stretcher, covered with a sheet and wheeled from her house for the last time, before being driven down to the medical examiner’s office in Los Angeles.
As night fell over Los Angeles, everyone was on edge. “In the great houses of Bel Air,” one reporter later wrote, “terror sends people flying to their telephones when a branch falls from a tree outside.”70 Benedict Canyon was strangely silent; the cars filled with reporters and the morbidly curious, which had clogged the twisting length of Cielo earlier that afternoon, had disappeared now, replaced with the peaceful sound of crickets, the rustle of leaves in the breeze. A lone policeman paced uneasily before the gate at 10050 Cielo Drive, standing guard over the empty, blood-stained house. Just after nine, a neighbor across the canyon happened to look out her window. No one had bothered to turn off the automatic timers which controlled the exterior lights at 10050 Cielo Drive. “As if a belated celebration were taking place, all the brightly colored Christmas lights that surround the entire property of the Tate-Polanski home suddenly came alive and began to twinkle their merry colors.”71
Chapter 31
The Second Night
The only television set at Spahn Ranch was located in George Spahn’s trailer. Family members eagerly crowded around to watch the news the following morning, excited by what had taken place, and at all of the press coverage the crimes were generating. Everyone at the ranch knew what had happened. To one of the bikers at the ranch, Danny De Carlo, Family member Steve Grogan bragged, “We got five piggies.”1
“I have no explanation for how hardened I had become in only a few hours,” Susan Atkins later admitted. “As I watched the TV reporters, I even laughed as they described the details of the horror.”2 Charles Watson took immense pleasure in telling Dianne Lake how much “fun” he had had the previous night.3 Only Patricia Krenwinkel seemed bothered by the murders. “I was very dead inside, very empty, very frightened,” she later recalled.4 Talking to Leslie Van Houten, she again expressed surprise at how young the victims had been. It had “seemed wrong, and not right,” she said.5
Van Houten, however, regretted that she had not been able to go the night before. “I felt that what we were doing was a mission that needed to be done,” she declared. “I felt that if they went again, that I wanted to go. I wanted to go and be a good soldier and surrender myself for what I believed in.”6
That afternoon and evening, Manson seemed on edge. After leading the Family in song and smoking some pot, he suddenly announced, “Last night was too messy. This time I’m going to show you how to do it.” He told Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Kasabian to get a change of clothing and their knives.7 “Charlie definitely had me go the second night,” Krenwinkel recounts. “At that point, I felt so dead inside it didn’t really matter.”8 On her way to the car, Atkins turned to ranch hand Juan Flynn and bragged, “We’re going to get them fucking pigs.”9
This time, he also took Steve Grogan and Leslie Van Houten. “I didn’t walk right up and say, ‘May I go,’” Van Houten remembers. “But I think everything in my face said that.”10 She recalled that Manson “came up to me,” asking if she “believed enough” to “go with them.” “I made it very clear,” she admits, “I wanted to go.”11 “I knew that people would die,” Van Houten later declared. “I knew that there would be killing.”12
This time Kasabian drove the killers. At first, no one in the car spoke. “I was completely numb from the night before,” Krenwinkel later recalled.13 They appeared to be headed nowhere in particular, Manson occasionally directing Kasabian to stop as he considered conducting murders at various houses. “Manson,” Van Houten remembers, “was very agitated, and Kasabian was very nervous and upset, and he was yelling at her a lot.”14
Once, Manson had her pull up at a church, saying he wanted to go inside and kill the priest on the altar. But, finding the door locked, he soon returned, having accomplished nothing. At a traffic light, he intended to kill the driver of the car next to them, but the signal suddenly changed. Suddenly, Kasabian recalled, his directions became very precise. He ordered her to take lefts and rights, until the car finally reached Waverly Drive, skirting the crest of a hillside in the fashionable Los Feliz section of Los Angeles near Griffith Park.
Several of the killers were familiar with the area. For nearly a year, Watson had lived just two miles away, ironically only a half-block from the daughter of his soon-to-be latest victim.15 Kasabian herself recognized the house where they stopped, a big, Tudor-style mansion where she had formerly been to a party. Manson had also been to the house on several occasions, and met the owner, Harold True.16 But Manson said they were going to the house next door, a smaller Spanish-style home perched at the top of a long driveway.
The house belonged to forty-four-year-old Gateway Markets owner Leno LaBianca and his thirty-eight-year-old second wife Rosemary. Leno, the son of Italian immigrants, had taken the reins of the successful Gateways Market chain on the death of his father when he was twenty-six, built on his hard work, and enjoyed the financial rewards which accompanied that expansion. He owned a suing of racehorses and indulged his passion for gambling.
He had married twice: his first wife, Alice Skolfield, bore him three children, daughters Cory and Louise, and son Anthony. They divorced in 1957. “Leno was one in a million,” Alice remembers. “We went our separate ways amicably, and never fell out of love with each other. We found as we matured that we wanted different things from life and never alienated the children toward one another. I wanted a career and Leno wanted someone more like his mother.”17
Two years later, Leno met Rosemary Struthers. A dark beauty, she was believed to have been born in Mexico of American parents. Following their premature deaths, Rosemary was placed in an Arizona orphanage, from which she was eventually adopted by a California family. In the late 1940s, she met Frank Struthers, and the pair soon married. By the time of their eventual divorce in 1958, Rosemary had given birth to two children, a daughter, Suzan who was conceived in an extra-marital affair, and a son, Frank Struthers, Jr. Leno LaBianca first met Rosemary Struthers while she was working as a hostess at the Los Feliz Inn. They soon married, and, in November of 1968, moved into Oak Terrace, a Spanish-style house at 3301 Waverly Drive. It was the house in which Leno himself had been raised, and he purchased it from his mother Corina. Here, he lived with Rosemary and her two children. Leno’s first wife, Alice, later remembered Rosemary as “an attractive woman, more sophisticated than I had ever been.”18
That second weekend of August, 1969, the LaBiancas had gone to Lake Isabella with Rosemary’s children for a quick holiday. To avoid the Sunday traffic, they left Lake Isabella at nine that Saturday night, taking Rosemary’s twenty-one-year-old daughter Suzan with them; fifteen-year-old Frank decided to return the following day, and remained at the lake with friends. It was a long drive; behind his green, 1968 Thunderbird, Leno pulled a speedboat on a trailer, which further slowed them.
They arrived back in Los Angeles around one that morning. Leno drove the Thunderbird across town, dropping Suzan off at her apartment on Greenwood, before heading to the corner of Hillwood and Franklin, where John Fokianos ran a news stand. Leno greeted the news vendor, and purchased a copy of Saturday’s Los Angeles Times as well as a racing form. Rosemary,
Fokianos later recalled, seemed unnerved by the Tate murders. After a few minutes, Leno eased the Thunderbird back onto the street and drove through the Los Feliz district to the house at the top of Waverly Drive. Because it was so late, Leno left the speedboat on its trailer, still attached to the Thunderbird.
Rosemary LaBianca had good reason to be nervous. Strange things had been taking place at Oak Terrace. A few weeks earlier, she had complained to a friend that someone must have been inside the residence, as their dogs had been found wandering round outside when they had been left locked in the house.19
The LaBiancas’ arrived at Oak Terrace around one-thirty early that Sunday morning. Leno changed into pajamas and remained in the living room, reading the newspaper and drinking a can of Apple Beer, while Rosemary retired to their bedroom to unpack. A half hour later, Kasabian pulled to a stop before the long, curving driveway leading to Harold True’s house at 3267 Waverly Drive.
Manson and Watson walked up the driveway to the True house, then hopped the low wall separating its grounds from the LaBianca residence. On the east side of Oak Terrace, a French door opened to a small terrace; when Manson turned the door handle, it opened. He and Watson entered the dining room; through an open archway to the left was the living room. As they crept in, they saw Leno. He had fallen asleep sitting on the L-shaped sofa facing the fireplace, his newspaper folded in his lap. Suddenly, he stirred.
“Who are you? What do you want?” he asked.20
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Manson assured him. “Just relax. Don’t be afraid.”21 Manson took a leather thong from round his neck and handed it to Watson, telling him to tie the man’s hands behind his back, while he himself searched the rest of the house. Manson found Rosemary, attired in a nightgown, in the bedroom. On Manson’s instructions, she grabbed a striped dress and quickly pulled it over her nightgown, before he brought her into the living room. She sat on the sofa next to her husband, while Manson tied her hands behind her back. He then left, whispering to Watson, “Make sure the girls get to do some of it, both of them.”22
Manson returned to the car. According to Kasabian, he explained that he had assured the couple inside that they would not be harmed. Motioning to Krenwinkel and Van Houten, he instructed them to join Watson inside the residence. “Go do what Tex says,” he told them as they climbed from the rear of the car.23 As they headed up the hill, he whispered, “Don’t let them know that you are going to kill them.”24
As soon as the two women reached the house, Manson climbed back into the car and, together with Kasabian, Atkins and Grogan, drove off into the night.
“We went in the house,” recalls Van Houten, “and I would say that was when I first really understood what was happening.”25 There was an eerie stillness. Leno LaBianca, clad in a pair of blue pajamas, sat on the living room sofa, his hands tied behind his back. Beside him, Rosemary gazed at the women, terrified.
After whispering with Watson, Krenwinkel and Van Houten walked over to the sofa. “Pat and I took Mrs. LaBianca into the bedroom,” Van Houten remembers.26 Once in the bedroom, the women stripped the pillows of their cases. Along with Watson, they placed one of the cases over Rosemary’s head. Watson took a massive lamp from the table at the side of the bed, unplugged it, and wrapped the cord round and round Rosemary’s neck and through her mouth. He then returned to the living room with the second pillow case, and did the same to Leno, taking another lamp and wrapping its cord round the terrified man’s neck.
Leaving Rosemary on the bed, Krenwinkel and Van Houten walked into the kitchen. The silence was shattered by the rattle of knives, as the two women rummaged through the drawers for weapons.27 Hearing this, Leno realized what was about to take place. He began to scream, “You’re going to kill us, aren’t you? You’re going to kill us!” Watson pushed him back against the couch and told him to shut up.28
As Leno yelled and struggled, his wife, in the bedroom, joined in his cries for help. Watson told Krenwinkel and Van Houten to go and keep her quiet. He himself turned on the helpless Leno. He stabbed the struggling man repeatedly in the stomach and chest.
“Don’t stab me anymore!” Leno managed to howl. “I’m dead! I’m dead!”
Watson took no notice. He stabbed Leno in the throat so violently that he broke off the blade of the steak knife he was using, leaving it lodged in Leno’s windpipe. “The room began to explode with color and motion,” he later recalled. To finish the job, he grabbed a double-tined carving fork from the kitchen and stabbed Leno in the stomach over and over again, ripping his pajama top open in the process.29
In the bedroom, Rosemary LaBianca, hearing her husband’s screams—“horrible, guttural sounds” in the words of Van Houten—began to struggle with the women.30 “What are you doing to my husband?” she yelled.31
“I remember her screaming for him.…” Van Houten has said. “I remember thinking to myself, how much she loved him, that, that was her thought, her concern for him. You could hear the—you could hear the guttural sounds of him dying. And I tried to hold Mrs. LaBianca down while Pat [Krenwinkel] stabbed her.”32
Krenwinkel plunged her knife deeply into the white pillowcase; it struck Rosemary LaBianca’s collarbone, and bent. Although Krenwinkel tried again, her knife was damaged, and she could not deliver any further blows.
“I was confused and torn inside,” Van Houten remembered. “I wanted to do what Manson had asked us to do and I was battling with my own sense of I was in something that I was—was not capable of handling. And I didn’t hold her down well and she picked the lamp up and I don’t really know if she even knew she had the lamp. She was struggling for her life.…”33
“Leslie was still trying to hold her,” Krenwinkel remembers, “because she was still struggling, and I went and got Tex [Watson].”34 Van Houten was not strong enough, however, and Rosemary managed to pull away. Watson entered the room to see her, head cloaked in the pillowcase, backed into a corner like a wounded animal, swinging the lamp in her hands blindly before her in a futile effort to keep her killers at bay. Watson ran forward, stabbed her, and she fell. As she lay on the floor, kicking and screaming, he continued to stab.35
Van Houten and Krenwinkel were both attempting to hold her down to the floor. Later, Van Houten claimed that she had left the room. “I stood in the hallway and I looked in to a blank room that was like a den. And I stood there until Tex turned me around and handed me a knife and he said, ‘Do something.’ I went back in the bedroom and Mrs. LaBianca was laying on the floor, on her stomach, and I stabbed her numerous times in the back.”36 Watson later wrote that Van Houten showed “none of the enthusiasm” demonstrated by Krenwinkel.37 Van Houten, as she later admitted both to her own lawyer and on the witness stand during her trial, had no idea if Rosemary LaBianca was alive or dead as she stabbed her repeatedly in the lower back and buttocks. Rosemary’s autopsy would later show that one of the wounds in her lower back had indeed been a fatal one, administered while she was still alive.38 She had, Van Houten later said, “No mercy” for Rosemary LaBianca.39
In the living room, Krenwinkel noticed the double-tined carving fork lying on the floor next to Leno’s body. She picked it up and thrust it into his exposed stomach. Giving it a twang, she watched it wobble back and forth, fascinated.40 As she looked at the body, she thought, or so she later said, “You won’t be sending your son off to war.” Taking one of the knives, she bent down and carved WAR into the exposed flesh of Leno’s stomach.41 The killers left several bloody messages, helped themselves to food from their victims’ refrigerator, and took a shower in their pink-tiled bathroom. Before leaving, Van Houten, worried about prints, spent a considerable amount of time wiping down the rooms in which the murders had taken place.42 The killers left Oak Terrace, walking down the long driveway and turned left, following Waverly Drive down the hillside to an overpass, where they hid in some bushes. At dawn, they hitchhiked back to Spahn Ranch.
Sunday evening, fifteen-year-old Frank Struthers returned with
friends from the weekend at Lake Isabella. As he walked up Waverly Drive, he noticed that his stepfather’s speedboat was still on its trailer, and still attached to the Thunderbird on the street. This was unusual, for Leno generally never left the boat out at night. He also saw that the shades of the house had been drawn, but that the lights inside were on. This, too, was unusual. Rather than enter, he nervously knocked on the door. There was no answer.
He walked to the nearest pay telephone, at a drive-in located at the corner of Hyperion and Rowena, nearly a mile down the hillside. He first called Oak Terrace. The telephone rang and rang. Next, he called the restaurant where his sister Suzan worked; she was not there, but the manager offered to call her apartment, and took the number of the pay phone. Just after nine, she called back. Frank explained that he was worried about entering the house, as no one answered his knocks; everything seemed odd at the house on Waverly Drive. After a quick discussion, she told her brother to remain where he was until she could join him.
Suzan Struthers arrived just after ten, accompanied by her boyfriend, Joe Dorgan. Together with Frank, they drove back up the hill to Oak Terrace. They entered the house by the kitchen door, Dorgan telling Suzan to remain in the kitchen while he and Frank looked through the rest of the house. They got no farther than the living room before they found Leno LaBianca, sprawled on his back, dead. Without bothering to search the rest of the house, the trio ran from the property and immediately called the police.
Soon, the house at Waverly Drive was swarming with detectives. They found Leno LaBianca in the living room, lying on his back beside a couch. A pillowcase had been placed over his head, and the cord from a heavy lamp had been tied round his neck. His hands were bound behind his back with a leather thong. He had been stabbed repeatedly, and the broken blade of a kitchen knife was later found in his throat. The pajama top he wore had been ripped back, and a carving fork rose from his stomach. Carved in large letters across his full belly was the word “WAR”. His wife Rosemary was lying face-down in their bedroom, a pillowcase over her head as well as a lamp cord knotted round her neck. Her dress and nightgown had been pulled up over her back, and she had been stabbed repeatedly, over forty times the autopsy would reveal. Smeared in Leno LaBianca’s blood on the northern wall of the living room were the words “Death to Pigs;” on the southern wall, just to the left of the front door, “Rise” had been written in his blood. On the door of the refrigerator in the kitchen was written a misspelled “Healter Skelter.”