by Greg King
Chapter 34
The Trials
Vincent Bugliosi, the Deputy District Attorney assigned to co-prosecute the Tate-LaBianca defendants along with Aaron Stovitz, was only thirty-five when he received this most important of cases.
Over the next two years, he was to demonstrate again and again the wisdom of the choice. Building upon the work of the LAPD, he sought out information with a passion and devoted long hours trying to tie down a motive for the crimes. More importantly, he managed to convey the incredible sense of what had taken place, and also to convince a jury of the guilt of not only those who had killed for Manson but of the complicity of Charles Manson himself.
“It was very difficult,” Bugliosi recalls, “because in no sense was this an ordinary murder case. I had to convince the jury that even though Manson hadn’t been present when Sharon Tate was killed, the crime had his fingerprints all over it.”1
Throughout the course of the trial, Bugliosi was assisted by a team of equally dedicated and talented men. Aaron Stovitz, who was to have argued the case with Bugliosi, left mid-way through the trial. Replacing Stovitz was a pair of young, driven Deputy District Attorneys, Donald Musich and Stephen Kay. It would be Stephen Kay who continued his deep association with the killers and the victims’ families long after his duty ceased.
Finding a jury pool which had not been unduly exposed to the massive press coverage surrounding the crimes proved to be an ordeal. On 14 July, 1970, however, seven men and five women were sworn. They included a retired sheriff’s deputy; a state employee; a former drama critic; an electrician; and a telephone repairman. The majority were over the age of forty, and married. As their foreman, they selected Herman C. Tubick, who held the ironic position of funeral director in Whittier, California. For the duration of the trial, they were sequestered at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
On Friday July 24, 1970—two weeks short of the first anniversary of Sharon’s death—the Tate-LaBianca trial opened in Department 104 in the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles. Presiding over the trial was Judge William Older. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, Older had a distinguished military record, having been a member of the Flying Tigers and a fighter pilot in World War II.2
Thirty-eight days of jury selection and pre-trial motions had already taken place. Charles Manson had desperately tried to convince the court that he should be allowed to represent himself in propria persona, but Judge Older would not allow this potential miscarriage of justice. Instead, Manson was represented by Irving Kanarek. “If I can’t defend myself,” Manson told Judge Older in chambers, “I want whoever gives you the worst time. He gives you the worst time. I want him.”3
Kanarek was renowned for his obfuscation, lethargy and obstruction in court. The Prosecution was stunned; Bugliosi and Stovitz pleaded with their office to intervene. Eventually, Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger appealed to the California State Supreme Court to order Judge Older to hold a competency hearing for Kanarek. The motion was dismissed, but is clearly indicative of the strong feeling roused by Kanarek’s presence in the court.4
Susan Atkins was represented by Daye Shinn; Patricia Krenwinkel by Paul Fitzgerald; and Leslie Van Houten first by Ronald Hughes and later by Maxwell Keith. Charles “Tex” Watson, still fighting extradition in Texas, would be tried at a later date.
On the first day of the trial, Manson walked into the court room with an X carved into his forehead. His followers who remained free passed around a statement, in which Manson declared:
“I am not allowed to be a man in your society. I am considered inadequate and incompetent [sic] to speak or defend myself in your court. You have created the monster. I am not of you, from you, nor do I condone your unjust attitude toward things, animals and people that you won’t try to understand. I haved [sic] Xed myself from your world. I stand in the opposite to what you do and what you have done in the past. You have never given me the constitution you speak of. The words you have used to trick the people are not mine. I do not accept what you call justice. The lie you live in is falling and I am not a part of it. You use the word God to make money.… I know what I have done. Your courtroom is man’s game. Love is my judge.… No man or lawyer is speaking for me. I speak for myself. I am not allowed to speak with words so I have spoken with the mark I will be wearing on my forehead.”5
In a grey business suit, Vincent Bugliosi rose and addressed the twelve jurors. “What kind of diabolical, satanic mind would contemplate or conceive of these mass murders?” he asked the jury. “What kind of mind would want to have seven human beings brutally murdered? We expect the evidence at this trial to answer that question and show that defendant Charles Manson owned that diabolical mind.… The evidence at this trial will show defendant Manson to be a vagrant wanderer, a frustrated singer and guitarist, a pseudo-philosopher, but most of all, the evidence will show him to be a killer who cleverly masqueraded behind the common image of a hippy, that of being peace loving. The evidence will show Manson to be a megalomaniac who coupled his insatiable thirst for power with an intense obsession for violent death.”6
Bugliosi went on to admit, “There was more than one motive” for the crimes, but he concentrated his energies on trying to explain the intricacies of the Helter Skelter theory. “Besides the motives of Manson’s passion for violent death and his extreme anti-establishment state of mind, the evidence at this trial will show that there was further motive which was almost as bizarre as the murders themselves. Very briefly, the evidence will show Manson’s fanatical obsession with Helter Skelter, a term he got from the English musical recording group, The Beatles. Manson was an avid follower of The Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs. In fact, Manson told his followers that he found complete support for his philosophies in the words sung by The Beatles in their songs. To Manson, Helter Skelter, the title of one of The Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to escape from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9, the last book of the New Testament from which Manson told others he found further support for his philosophies. The evidence will show that although Manson hated black people, he also hated the white establishment, whom he called ‘Pigs.’ The evidence will show that one of Manson’s principal motives for the Tate-LaBianca murders was to ignite Helter Skelter, in other words, start the black-white revolution by making it look like the black people had murdered the five Tate victims and Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca, thereby causing the white community to turn against the black man and ultimately lead to a civil war between blacks and whites, a war Manson foresaw the black man winning. Manson envisioned that black people, once they destroyed the white race and assumed the reins of power, would be unable to handle the reins because of inexperience and would have to turn over the reins to those white people who had escaped from Helter Skelter, that is, turn over the reins to Manson and his followers.” He ended by warning that, although at times the trial would almost certainly prove to be both a physical and emotional ordeal, he trusted that the jurors would have no problem finding the defendants guilty.7 Following the defense opening statements, Bugliosi called the first witness to the stand: Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Tate.
Since his daughter’s murder, Paul Tate had left his career in military intelligence and devoted himself to a personal search for her killers. He let his army crew cut grow long, grew a beard and submerged himself in the anti-establishment world from which he thought his daughter’s killers had come. He had regularly spent long nights wandering through the Haight-Ashbury District and along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in search of clues.
Tate’s presence at the trial greatly worried not only members of the Manson Family and the defendants but courtroom security as well. He was, after all, a trained military man, capable, if he wished, o
f exacting his own vengeance against those accused of Sharon’s death. Prior to being allowed in the courtroom, Paul Tate was subjected to a thorough body search in the event that he had come to the Hall of Justice armed with more than just his testimony.
Manson himself later said: “They whisper so I can hear it, ‘Sharon Tate’s father is in court!’ And then they go over and shake him down to see if he has a gun, and they’re just putting that idea into his head. He has a nice face. I saw him the first day in court. He doesn’t want to kill me. They’re putting that into his head. You know, they say things like, ‘We wouldn’t want you to shoot the defendant.’ And every day I see him in court, his face gets a little harder, and one day he’s gonna do it.”8
Despite the emotional build-up, Paul Tate’s testimony was limited to identifying pictures of his daughter, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Voyteck Frykowski, and confirming that the last time he had seen Sharon alive was when he and his wife had visited 10050 Cielo Drive to watch the moonlanding with their daughter on 20 July. He occasionally cast long, emotionless glances at Manson and the other defendants, but they rarely met his gaze. When he left the witness stand, he did not leave the courtroom, but rather took up a seat in the spectators’ section. He would sit through long portions of the trial off and on for the next several months. On one occasion, while walking through the hallway outside of the courtroom, he was approached by Family member Sandy Good. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “I’m sorry, but we’re not guilty.” Tate ignored her and quickly escaped into a telephone booth.9
Wilfred Parent immediately followed Sharon’s father to the witness stand. “We went to court the first day,” remembers Janet Parent, “when my dad had to testify. When we came off the elevator, the reporters were there. They kept sticking a microphone in my mom’s face, and then my dad’s face, shouting questions at them pushing at us. Finally, my dad hauled off and hit one of the reporters who kept after my mom.”10
Seeing the fracas, Bugliosi slipped through the press mob and hustled the Parents into a small room just off the courtroom. “In the beginning,” Janet Parent recalls, “we didn’t know anything about Steve’s death. We didn’t know how fast he died, how many times he was shot. One paper said one thing, another wrote something else. I remember that once we were alone in that room, my mom turned to Bugliosi in tears and asked, ‘Can you tell me if my son suffered?’ He told us no, that it had had all been over in a few seconds.”11
On the witness stand, Wilfred Parent was asked to identify a photograph of his son. As soon as he picked it up, Parent broke into sobs. He continued to cry as he identified photographs of the family car, telling the court that he had given Steven permission to drive it that fateful Friday night. “I remember sitting in the courtroom,” Janet Parent says, “and looking at Manson and the others. Mostly I remember Susan Atkins, because she just stared at us with this cagey smirk.”12
The highlight of the trial came early, with the testimony of former Manson Family member Linda Kasabian. The only indicted defendant who had not actively participated in the actual murders, Kasabian had the good fortune of obtaining a lawyer who managed to cut her an extraordinary deal: if she testified truthfully at the trial, the District Attorney’s Office would petition the Court for immunity. Although Kasabian began her testimony on 27 July, and the Grant of Immunity was not signed until 10 August, her lawyer had applied for the petition before his client took the stand. There was little doubt, therefore, that Kasabian would testify and, at the end, win her complete freedom.
The prosecution deal did not satisfy everyone. If Kasabian had not actually murdered anyone, she had also not acted to prevent either set of murders. Following the shooting of Steven Parent, she was left alone by the other killers; although undoubtedly in a state of shock, she had ample opportunity to summon help. She later tried to explain that she had feared for the safety of Tanya, her young daughter who was back at Spahn Ranch. Such concerns, however, did not prevent Kasabian from abandoning Tanya to the very Family members she herself had witnessed engaged in murder when she fled California a few weeks after the crimes. It is arguable that, had Kasabian acted, the lives of Sharon and the others at 10050 Cielo drive might have been spared; certainly the LaBiancas would never have fallen victim to the murderous spree of the second night. “That she was totally cleared in return for her testimony,” writes Dr. Clara Livsey, “gives one a glimpse of how doubtful the prosecutors must have been of otherwise getting a conviction for the Defendants Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten.”13
“As a prosecutor,” Bugliosi explained, “I had to do everything within my power to get a conviction against those defendants who were most culpable. Kasabian hadn’t actually killed anyone, and was cut from a different cloth than the rest of Manson and his followers. It’s difficult in retrospect to say if we could have won without her testimony, but at the time, I wanted to make sure that those jurors heard her voice as she described the Tate murders. It was certainly the most powerful evidence we had at the trial.”14
Kasabian took stand on Monday, 27 July. A line had formed for curious spectators eager to hear her first-hand account of the murders. As soon as Kasabian raised her right hand to swear her oath, Kanarek was on his feet. “Object, Your Honor, on the grounds this witness is not competent and she is insane!”
“Wait a minute, Your Honor!” Bugliosi shouted, while jumping to his feet. “Move to strike that and I ask the court to find him in contempt of court for gross misconduct. This is unbelievable on his part.”15
Fitzgerald argued on behalf of the Defense “that Linda Kasabian, due to prolonged extensive illegal use of LSD is a person of unsound mind, is mentally ill, is insane, is unable to differentiate between truth and falsity, right or wrong, good or bad, fantasy and reality, and is incapable of expressing herself concerning the matter so as to be understood.”16
After much discussion, Judge Older over-ruled Kanarek’s objection, and allowed Kasabian to testify. Those who had crowded into the courtroom to hear the graphic details of the murders were not disappointed. Over the next few days, Kasabian told all that she knew and had seen. Paul Tate sat silently as she recalled hearing screams and moans coming from the house. “There were no words,” she sobbed, “it was beyond words, it was just screams.”17 She described watching as Watson and Atkins chased Voyteck Frykowski across the lawn; and saw Krenwinkel chasing Abigail Folger as the heiress ran for her life toward the freedom on the other side of the split-rail fence.
At many points during her testimony, Kasabian broke into sobs, sometimes continuing barely above a whisper. She was not alone. Several spectators in the courtroom were also crying by the time she had finished. It was a devastating moment for the defense. “Her answers were sincere,” recalled Juror William Zamora, “and to the point. She left no trace of doubt in our minds that she was telling the truth.”18 From that moment on, no matter how many witnesses they called or how many objections were raised, the trial was lost. This fact was not lost on the defendants, nor on the remainder of the Family. Manson was seen to draw a finger slowly across his throat as Linda testified, an apparent threat, while Sandy Good was more explicit, running up to Linda in the hallways and screaming, “You’ll kill us all! You’ll kill us all!”
A number of other witnesses testified, including a very scared Terry Melcher, who still believed that he had been the target of the murders and feared for his life. The press attention was constant, and updates on the latest developments were common features on all three of the network nightly news broadcasts. Entire front pages of the day’s newspapers were filled with headlines screaming the latest sensationalistic revelation.
Much of the trial was devoted to the presentation of the “Helter Skelter” motive. Although certain Family members would dismiss the entire idea as the work of prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, the weight of the evidence demonstrates that Manson and his followers believed at least elements of the idea.
While certain m
embers of the Family may have believed Manson’s frequent talk of a “bottomless pit,” it is unlikely that such delusions fueled the murders. Here, it is important to separate Manson’s fanciful lectures on The Beatles and Biblical prophecy from the very real belief that a race war was likely to erupt. Belief in the latter was visibly and repeatedly demonstrated by the Manson Family: they spent hours converting dune buggies into assault vehicles for the coming conflict; purchased surveyors’ maps of Death Valley in order to plot their escape routes; and practiced both defending themselves and killing others. “Helter Skelter,” Manson’s envisioned race war, was a constant companion in the lives of his Family members. But the less fantastic elements of revenge and an attempt to reassert control over his crumbling Family seem to have had at least an equal part in motivating the crimes. It speaks volumes of Bugliosi’s brilliance that he managed to convince the trial jury that the “Helter Skelter” motive was the correct one.
If the murders of Sharon and the others had stirred up a storm of rumor and controversy, it was nothing compared to the actual, incredible facts of the Manson Family. The apparent utter normalcy of the killers prior to their meeting Manson—high school athletes, choir girls, Sunday school teachers—sent waves of fear through an entire generation of parents already agonizing over the rebellious and seemingly reckless spirit of the youth in America. That these defendants all possessed arrest records, had used illegal drugs and been sexually promiscuous prior to meeting Manson was forgotten. Thus, more than anything else, the trial came to symbolize the violent nature of the hidden 1960s, and the dreadful uncertainty that somewhere out there, lost among the hippies who still wandered the streets, might be more Mansons, waiting to claim the spotlight of murder.
“This will be remembered,” declared Defense Attorney Paul Fitzgerald, “as the first of the acid murders; our changing social structure is making more people turn on and we’re on the brink of a whole new concept of violence … violence perpetrated against society by people who have reached a different plateau of reality through LSD.”19 The most famous of all commentators on the proceedings was undoubtedly the President himself. During a visit to California, Richard Nixon, in remarks to a group of reporters, referred to Manson. “As we look at the situation today,” the President said, “I think the main concerns that I have are the attitudes which are created among many of our young people in which they tend to glorify and make heroes out of those who engage in criminal activities. I noted, for example, the coverage of the Charles Manson case when I was in Los Angeles. Here is a man who is guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason, a man who as far as the public is concerned appeared to be rather a glamorous man.”20