Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Charlie, Susan confided to Virginia, was Jesus Christ.

  Susan, Virginia decided, was nuts.

  On the night of Wednesday, November 5, a young man who might have been able to provide a solution to the Tate-LaBianca homicides ceased to exist.

  At 7:35 P.M. officers from Venice PD, responding to a telephone call, arrived at 28 Clubhouse Avenue, a house near the beach rented by a Mark Ross. They found a youth—approximate age twenty-two, nickname “Zero,” true name unknown—lying on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. Deceased was still warm to the touch. There was blood on the pillow and what appeared to be an entrance wound in the right temple. Next to the body was a leather gun case and an eight-shot .22 caliber Iver & Johnson revolver. According to the other persons present—a man and three girls—Zero had killed himself while playing Russian roulette.

  The stories of the witnesses—who identified themselves as Bruce Davis, Linda Baldwin, Sue Bartell, and Catherine Gillies, and who said they had been staying at the house while Ross was away—tallied perfectly. Linda Baldwin stated that she had been lying on the right side of the mattress, Zero on the left side, when Zero noticed the leather case in a stand next to the bed and remarked, “Oh, here’s a gun.” He removed the gun from the case, Miss Baldwin said, commenting, “There’s only one bullet in it.” Holding the gun in his right hand, he had then spun the cylinder, placed the muzzle against his right temple, and pulled the trigger.

  The others, in various parts of the house, had heard what sounded like a firecracker popping, they said. When they entered the bedroom, Miss Baldwin told them, “Zero shot himself, just like in the movies.” Bruce Davis admitted he picked up the gun. They had then called the police.

  The officers were unaware that all those present were members of the Manson Family, who had been living at the Venice residence since their release following the Barker Ranch raid. Since when questioned separately all told essentially the same story, the police accepted the Russian roulette explanation and listed the cause of death as suicide.

  They had several very good reasons to suspect that explanation, although apparently no one did.

  When officer Jerrome Boen later dusted the gun for latents, he found no prints. Nor were there prints on the leather gun case.

  And when they examined the revolver, they found that Zero had really been bucking the odds. The gun contained seven live rounds and one spent shell. It had been fully loaded, with no empty chambers.

  A number of Family members, including Manson himself, were still in jail in Independence. On November 6, LaBianca detectives Patchett and Sartuchi, accompanied by Lieutenant Burdick of SID, went there to interview them.

  Patchett asked Manson if he knew anything about either the Tate or LaBianca homicides. Manson replied, “No,” and that was that.

  Patchett was so unimpressed with Manson that he didn’t even bother to write up a report on the interview. Of the nine Family members the detectives talked to, only one rated a memorandum. About 1:30 that afternoon Lieutenant Burdick interviewed a girl who had been booked under the name Leslie Sankston. “During this conversation,” Burdick noted, “I inquired of Miss Sankston if she was aware that Sadie [Susan Atkins] was reportedly involved in the Gary Hinman homicide. She replied that she was. I inquired if she was aware of the Tate and LaBianca homicides. She indicated that she was aware of the Tate homicide but seemed unfamiliar with the LaBianca homicide. I asked her if she had any knowledge of persons in her group who might possibly be involved in either the Tate or LaBianca homicides. She indicated that there were some ‘things’ that caused her to believe someone from her group might be involved in the Tate homicide. I asked her to elaborate on the ‘things’ [but] she declined to indicate what she meant and stated that she wanted to think about it overnight, and that she was perplexed and didn’t know what to do. She did indicate she might tell me the following day.”

  However, when Burdick again questioned her the next morning, “she stated she had decided she did not want to say anymore about the subject and the conversation was terminated.”

  Though the interviews yielded nothing, the LaBianca detectives did pick up one possible lead. Before leaving Independence, Patchett asked to see Manson’s personal effects. Going through the clothing Manson had been wearing when arrested, Patchett noticed that he used leather thongs both as laces in his moccasins and in the stitching of his trousers. Patchett took a sample thong from each back to Los Angeles for comparison with the thong used to tie Leno LaBianca’s hands.

  A leather thong is a leather thong, SID in effect told him; though the thongs were similar, there was no way to tell whether they had come from the same piece of leather.

  LAPD and LASO have no monopoly on jealousy. To a certain extent it exists between almost all law-enforcement agencies, and even within some.

  The Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department is a single room, 318, on the third floor of Parker Center. Although it is a large room, rectangular in shape, there are no partitions, only two long tables, all the detectives working at either one or the other. The distance between the Tate and LaBianca detectives was only a few feet.

  But there are psychological as well as physical distances and, as noted, while the Tate detectives were largely the “old guard,” the LaBianca detectives were for the most part the “young upstarts.” Also, there was apparently some residual bitterness stemming from the fact that several of the latter, rather than the former, had been assigned to L.A.’s last big publicity case, Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In short, there was a certain amount of jealousy involved. And a certain lack of communication.

  As a result, none of the LaBianca detectives walked those few feet to tell the Tate detectives that they were following a lead which might connect the two homicides. No one informed Lieutenant Helder, who was in charge of the Tate investigation, that they had gone to Independence and interviewed one Charles Manson, who was believed involved in a strikingly similar murder, or that while there one of his followers, a girl who went by the name of Leslie Sankston, had admitted that someone in their group might be involved in the Tate homicides.

  The LaBianca detectives continued to go it on their own.

  Had Leslie Sankston—true name Leslie Van Houten—yielded to that impulse to talk, she could have told the detectives a great deal about the Tate murders, but even more about the LaBianca slayings.

  But by this time Susan Atkins was already doing enough talking for both of them.

  On Thursday, November 6, at about 4:45 P.M., Susan had walked over to Virginia Graham’s bed and sat down. They had finished work for the day, and Susan/Sadie was in a talkative mood. She began rapping about the LSD trips she had taken, karma, good and bad vibrations, and the Hinman murder. Virginia cautioned her that she shouldn’t be talking so much; she knew a man who had been convicted just on what he told a cellmate.

  Susan replied, “Oh, I know. I haven’t talked about it to anyone else. You know, I can look at you and there’s something about you, I know I can tell things to you.” Also, she wasn’t worried about the police. They weren’t all that good. “You know, there’s a case right now, they are so far off the track they don’t even know what’s happening.”

  Virginia asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “That one on Benedict Canyon.”

  “Benedict Canyon? You don’t mean Sharon Tate?”

  “Yeah.” With this Susan seemed to get very excited. The words came out in a rush. “You know who did it, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re looking at her.”

  Virginia gasped, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  Susan just smiled and said, “Huh-uh.”*

  Later Virginia Graham would be unable to remember exactly how long they had talked—she would estimate it as being between thirty-five minutes and an hour, maybe longer. She would also admit confusion as to whether some details were discussed that afternoon or in
subsequent conversations, and the order in which some topics came up.

  But the content she remembered. That, she would later say, she would never forget as long as she lived.

  She asked the big question first: Why, Sadie, why? Because, Susan replied, we “wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice.” But why the Tate house? Susan’s answer was chilling in its simplicity: “It is isolated.” The place had been picked at random. They had known the owner, Terry Melcher,† Doris Day’s son, from about a year back, but they didn’t know who would be there, and it didn’t matter; one person or ten, they had gone there prepared to do everybody in.

  “In other words,” Virginia asked, “you didn’t know Jay Sebring or any of the other people?”

  “No,” Susan replied.

  “Do you mind me asking questions? I mean, I’m curious.” Susan didn’t mind. She told Virginia that she had kind brown eyes, and if you look through a person’s eyes you can see the soul.

  Virginia told Susan she wanted to know exactly how it had come down. “I’m dying of curiosity,” she added.

  Susan obliged. Before leaving the ranch, Charlie had given them instructions. They had worn dark clothing. They also brought along a change of clothes in the car. They drove up to the gate, then drove back down to the bottom of the hill, parked the car, and walked back up.

  Virginia interrupted, “Then it wasn’t just you?”

  “Oh, no,” Susan told her. “There were four of us.” In addition to herself, there were two other girls and a man.

  When they reached the gate, Susan continued, “he” cut the telephone wires. Virginia again interrupted to ask whether he wasn’t worried he’d cut the electrical wires, extinguishing the lights and alerting the people that something was wrong. Susan replied, “Oh, no, he knew just what to do.” Virginia got the impression, less from her words than from the way she said them, that the man had been there before.

  Susan didn’t mention how they got past the gate. She said they had killed the boy first. When Virginia asked why, Susan replied that he had seen them. “And he had to shoot him. He was shot four times.”

  At this point Virginia became somewhat confused. Later she would state, “I think she told me—I’m not positive—I think she said that this Charles shot him.” Earlier Virginia had got the impression that although Charlie had instructed them what to do, he hadn’t come along. But now it appeared he had.

  What Virginia didn’t know was that there were two men named Charles in the Family: Charles Manson and Charles “Tex” Watson. The complications this simple misunderstanding would later cause would be immense.

  On entering the house—Susan didn’t say how they got in—they saw a man on the couch in the living room, and a girl, whom Susan identified as “Ann Folger,” sitting in a chair reading a book. She didn’t look up.

  Virginia asked her how she knew their names. “We didn’t,” Susan replied, “not until the next day.”

  At some point the group apparently split up, Susan going on to the bedroom, while the others stayed in the living room.

  “Sharon was sitting up in bed. Jay was sitting on the edge of the bed talking to Sharon.”

  “Oh, really?” Virginia asked. “What did she have on?”

  “She had on a bikini bra and panties.”

  “You’re kidding. And she was pregnant?”

  “Yeah. And they looked up, and were they surprised!”

  “Wow! Wasn’t there some kind of a big hassle?”

  “No, they were too surprised and they knew we meant business.”

  Susan skipped on. It was as if she was “tripping out,” jumping abruptly from one subject to another. Suddenly they were in the living room and Sharon and Jay were strung up with nooses around their necks so if they tried to move they would choke. Virginia asked why they’d put a hood over Sebring’s head. “We didn’t put any hood over his head,” Susan corrected her. “That’s what the papers said, Sadie.” “Well, there wasn’t any hood,” Susan reiterated, getting quite insistent about it.

  Then the other man [Frykowski] broke and ran for the door. “He was full of blood,” Susan said, and she stabbed him three or four times. “He was bleeding and he ran to the front part,” out the door and onto the lawn, “and would you believe that he was there hollering ‘Help, help, somebody please help me,’ and nobody came?”

  Bluntly, without elaboration, “Then we finished him off.”

  Virginia wasn’t asking any questions now. What had begun as a little girl’s fairy tale had become a horror-filled nightmare.

  There was no mention of what had happened to Abigail Folger or Jay Sebring, only that “Sharon was the last to die.” On saying this, Susan laughed.

  Susan said that she had held Sharon’s arms behind her, and that Sharon looked at her and was crying and begging, “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby. I want to have my baby.”

  Susan said she looked Sharon straight in the eye and said, “Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”

  Then Susan said, “In a few minutes I killed her and she was dead.”

  After killing Sharon, Susan noticed there was blood on her hand. She tasted it. “Wow, what a trip!” she told Virginia. “I thought ‘To taste death, and yet give life.’” Had she ever tasted blood? she asked Virginia. “It’s warm and sticky and nice.”

  Virginia managed to ask a question. Hadn’t it bothered her to kill Sharon Tate, with her pregnant?

  Susan looked at Virginia quizzically and said, “Well, I thought you understood. I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her.”

  Virginia replied, “Oh, yeah, I do understand.”

  She had wanted to cut out the baby, Susan said, but there hadn’t been time. They wanted to take out the eyes of the people, and squash them against the walls, and cut off their fingers. “We were going to mutilate them, but we didn’t have a chance to.”

  Virginia asked her how she felt after the murders. Susan replied, “I felt so elated; tired, but at peace with myself. I knew this was just the beginning of helter skelter. Now the world would listen.”

  Virginia didn’t understand what she meant by “helter skelter,” and Susan tried to explain it to her. However, she talked so quickly and with such obvious excitement that Virginia had trouble following. As Virginia understood it, there was this group, these chosen people, that Charlie had brought together, and they were elected, this new society, to go out, all over the country and all over the world, to pick out people at random and execute them, to release them from this earth. “You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people,” Susan explained.

  Four or five times while Susan was talking, Virginia had to caution her to keep her voice down, that someone might hear. Susan smiled and said she wasn’t worried about that. She was very good at playing crazy.

  After they’d left the Tate residence, Susan continued, she discovered that she had lost her knife. She thought maybe the dog had got it. “You know how dogs are sometimes.” They had thought about going back to look for it but had decided against it. She had also left her hand print on a desk. “It dawned on me afterwards,” Susan said, “but my spirit was so strong that obviously it didn’t even show up, or they would have had me by now.”

  As Virginia understood it, after leaving the Tate residence, they had apparently changed clothes in the car. Then they had driven some distance, stopping at a place where there was a fountain or water outside, to wash their hands. Susan said a man came outside and wanted to know what they were doing. He started to holler at them. “And,” Susan asked, “guess who he was?”

  “I don’t know,” Virginia replied.

  “It was the sheriff of Beverly Hills!”

  Virginia
said she didn’t think Beverly Hills had a sheriff.

  “Well,” Susan said petulantly, “the sheriff or mayor or something.”

  The man had started to reach into the car to grab the keys, and “Charlie turned on the key. Boy, we made it. We laughed all the way,” Susan said, adding, “If he had only known!”

  For a moment Susan remained silent. Then, with her little girl’s smile, she asked, “You know the other two the next night?”

  Virginia flashed on the grocery store owner and his wife, the LaBiancas. “Yeah,” she said, “was that you?”

  Susan winked and said, “What do you think?”

  “But that’s part of the plan,” she continued. “And there’s more—”

  But Virginia had heard enough for one day. She excused herself to go take a shower.

  Virginia would later recall thinking, She’s got to be kidding! She’s making all this up. This is just too wild, too fantastic!

  But then she remembered what Susan was in for—first degree murder.

  Virginia decided not to say anything to anyone. It was just too incredible. She also decided, if possible, to avoid Susan.

  The following day, however, Virginia walked over to Ronnie Howard’s bed to tell her something. Susan, who was lying on her own bed, interrupted: “Virginia, Virginia, remember that beautiful cat I was telling you about? I want you to dig on his name. Now listen, his name is Manson—Man’s Son!” She repeated it several times to make sure Virginia understood. She said it in a tone of childlike wonder.

  She just couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. It was just too much. The first time she and Ronnie Howard were alone together, Virginia Graham told her what Susan Atkins had said. “Hey, what do you do?” she asked Ronnie. “If this is true—My God, this is terrible. I wish she hadn’t told me.”

  Ronnie thought Sadie was “making it all up. She could have gotten it out of the papers.”