Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Squeaky—t/n Lynette Fromme—had been with Manson more than a year at that time, having been one of the first girls to join him. She was thin, red-headed, covered with freckles. Though nineteen, she looked much younger. DeCarlo told the detectives, “She had George in the palm of her hand. She cleaned for him, cooked for him, balanced his checkbook, made love with him.”

  Q. (unbelievingly) “She did?! That old son of a gun!”

  A. “Yeah…Charlie’s trip was to get George so he had so much faith in Squeaky that come time for George to go off into the happy hunting ground he’d turn the ranch over to Squeaky. That was their thing. Charlie’d always tell her what to tell George…and she’d report back to Charlie anything anyone else told him.”

  Squeaky maintained that she was George’s eyes. According to DeCarlo, they saw only what Charlie Manson wanted them to see.

  Possibly because he suspected, possibly because his own children on their occasional visits strongly resisted the idea, George never did get around to willing the property to Squeaky. Which, the detectives surmised, was probably why he was still alive out at Spahn Ranch.

  George Spahn had frustrated one of Charlie’s plans. Danny DeCarlo had played along with, then failed to come through on another—Manson’s scheme to get the motorcycle gangs to join him in “terrorizing society,” as DeCarlo put it. Danny had met Manson in March 1969, just after separating from his wife. He had gone to Spahn to repair some bikes, and had stayed; “I had a ball,” he later admitted. Manson’s girls had been taught that having babies and caring for men were their sole purpose in life. DeCarlo liked being cared for, and the girls, at least at first, appeared very affectionate toward “Donkey Dan,”* a nickname they had bestowed upon him because of certain physical endowments.

  There were problems. Charlie was against drinking; Danny liked nothing better than to swill beer and lie in the sun—later he testified that while at Spahn he was smashed “probably 90 percent of the time.” And, with the exception of a couple of “special sweeties,” DeCarlo eventually tired of most of the girls: “They would always try preaching to me. It was always the same shit Charlie preached to them.”

  With the August 15 visit of the Straight Satans, Manson must have realized that he would never succeed in getting the bikers to join him. After that, Danny was ignored, left out of Family conferences, while the girls denied him their favors. Though he went to Barker Ranch with the group, he stayed only three days. He split, DeCarlo said, because he had begun to believe all the “murder talk” he had heard, and because he had strong suspicions that unless he left he might be next. “After that,” he said, “I started watching my back.”

  When the LaBianca detectives had talked to DeCarlo the previous Thursday, he’d promised to try to locate Manson’s sword. He turned it over to Sergeant Gutierrez, who booked it as the personal property of “Manson, Charles M.,” probable crime “187 PC”—murder.

  The sword had accumulated a history. A few weeks after Danny moved to Spahn, the president of the Straight Satans, George Knoll, aka “86 George,” had visited him. Manson had admired George’s sword and had conned him out of it by promising to pay a twenty-dollar traffic ticket George owed. According to Danny, the sword became one of Charlie’s favorite weapons; he had a metal scabbard built for it, next to the steering wheel of his personal dune buggy. When the Straight Satans came to get Danny the night of August 15, they spotted the sword and reclaimed it. On learning that it was “dirty,” i.e., had been used in a crime, they had broken it in half. It was in two pieces when DeCarlo handed it over to Gutierrez.

  Over-all length, 20 inches; blade length, 15 inches. The width of its razor-sharp blade, the tip of which had been honed on both sides, was 1 inch.

  This was the sword, according to DeCarlo, that Manson had used to slice Gary Hinman’s ear.

  From DeCarlo the detectives now learned that, in addition to Bobby Beausoleil and Susan Atkins, three others had been involved in the murder of Hinman: Manson, Mary Brunner, and Bruce Davis. DeCarlo’s primary source was Beausoleil, who, on returning to Spahn after the murder, had bragged to DeCarlo about what he had done. Or, as Danny put it, “He came back with a big head the next day, you know, just like he got him a cherry.”

  The story, as DeCarlo claimed Beausoleil had related it to him, went as follows. Mary Brunner, Susan Atkins, and Bobby Beausoleil had dropped in on Hinman, “bullshitting about old times and everything like that.” Bobby then asked Gary for all his money, saying they needed it. When Gary said he didn’t have any money, Bobby pulled out a gun—a 9 mm. Polish Radom automatic—and started pistol-whipping him. In the scuffle the gun went off, the bullet hitting no one but ricocheting through the kitchen. (LASO found a 9 mm. slug lodged under the kitchen sink.)

  Beausoleil then called Manson at Spahn Ranch and told him, “You’d better get up here, Charlie. Gary ain’t cooperating.”* A short time later Manson and Bruce Davis arrived at the Hinman residence. Puzzled and hurt, Gary pleaded with Charlie, asking him to take the others and leave; he didn’t want any trouble; he couldn’t understand why they were doing this to him; they had always been friends. According to DeCarlo, “Charlie didn’t say anything. He just hit him with the sword. Whack. Cut part of his ear off or all of it. [Hinman’s left ear had been split in half.]

  “So Gary went down, and was really going through some changes about losing his ear…” Manson gave him a choice: sign over everything he had, or die. Manson and Davis then left.

  Though Beausoleil did obtain the “pink slips” (California automobile ownership papers) on two of Hinman’s vehicles, Gary continued to insist he had no money. When more pistol-whipping failed to convince him, Bobby again called Manson at Spahn, telling him, “We ain’t going to get nothing out of him. He ain’t going to give up nothing. And we can’t just leave. He’s got his ear hacked off and he’ll go to the police.” Manson replied, “Well, you know what to do.” And Beausoleil did it.

  “Bobby said he went up to Gary again. Took the knife and stuck him with it. He said he had to do it three or four times…[Hinman] was really bleeding, and he was gasping for air, and Bobby said he knelt down next to him and said, ‘Gary, you know what? You got no reason to be on earth any more. You’re a pig and society don’t need you, so this is the best way for you to go, and you should thank me for putting you out of your misery.’ Then [Hinman] made noises in his throat, his last gasping breath, and wow, away he went.”

  Q. “So Bobby told him he was a ‘pig’?”

  A. “Right. You see, the fight against society was the number one element in this—”

  Q. (skeptically) “Yeah. We’ll get into his philosophy and all that bullshit later…”

  They never did.

  DeCarlo went on. Before leaving the house, they wrote on the wall “‘white piggy’ or ‘whitey’ or ‘kill the piggies,’ something along that line.” Beausoleil also dipped his hand in Hinman’s blood and, using his palm, made a paw print on the wall; the plan was “to push the blame onto the Black Panthers,” who used the paw print as their symbol. Then they hot-wired Hinman’s Volkswagen microbus and his Fiat station wagon and drove both back to Spahn Ranch, where Beausoleil bragged about his exploits to DeCarlo.

  Later, apparently fearful that the palm print might be identifiable, Beausoleil returned to the Hinman residence and attempted, unsuccessfully, to wipe it off the wall. This was several days after Hinman’s death, and Beausoleil later told DeCarlo that he “could hear the maggots eating away on Gary.”*

  As killers, they had been decidedly amateurish. Not only was the palm print identifiable, so was a latent fingerprint Beausoleil had left in the kitchen. They kept Hinman’s Volkswagen and his Fiat at the ranch for several days, where a number of people saw them.† Hinman had played bagpipes, a decidedly uncommon musical instrument. Beausoleil and the girls took his set back to Spahn Ranch, where for a time they remained on a shelf in the kitchen; DeCarlo for one had tried to play them. And Beausoleil did not discard the kn
ife but continued to carry it with him; it was in the tire well when he was arrested on August 6, driving Hinman’s Fiat.

  DeCarlo drew a picture of the knife Beausoleil claimed he had used to stab Hinman. It was a pencil-thin, miniature bowie, with an eagle on the handle and a Mexican inscription. It tallied perfectly with the knife recovered from the Fiat. DeCarlo also sketched the 9 mm. Radom, which as yet hadn’t been recovered.

  The detectives asked him what other hand guns he had seen at Spahn.

  A. “Well, there was a .22 Buntline. When they did that Black Panther,

  I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to clean it. I didn’t want to be nowhere around it.”

  DeCarlo claimed he didn’t know whose gun it was, but he said, “Charlie always used to carry it in a holster on the front of him. It was more or less always with him.”

  Sometime “around July, maybe June,” the gun “just popped up.” When was the last time he saw it? “I know I didn’t see it for at least a week before the raid.”

  The Spahn Ranch raid had taken place on August 16. A week earlier would be August 9, the date of the Tate homicides.

  Q. “Did you ever ask Charlie, ‘Where’s your gun?’”

  A. “He said, ‘I just gave it away.’ He liked it, so I figured it was maybe just stashed.”

  The detectives had DeCarlo draw the Buntline. It was nearly identical with the photo of the Hi Standard Longhorn model sent out in the LAPD flyer. Later DeCarlo was shown the flyer and asked, “Does this look like the gun you mentioned?”

  A. “It sure does.”

  Q. “What’s the difference between that gun and the gun that you saw?”

  A. “No difference at all. Only the rear sight blade was different. It didn’t have any.”

  The detectives had DeCarlo run down what he knew about the murder of the Black Panther. Springer had first mentioned the killing to them when they interviewed him. In the interim they had done some checking and had come up with a slight problem: no such murder had ever been reported.

  According to DeCarlo, after Tex burned the guy for $2,500 on a grass deal, the Panther had called Charlie at Spahn Ranch, threatening that if he didn’t make good he and his brothers were going to wipe out the whole ranch. That same night Charlie and a guy named T. J. went to the Panther’s place, in North Hollywood. Charlie had a plan.

  He put the .22 Buntline in his belt in back. On a signal T. J. was to yank out the gun, step out from behind Charlie, and plug the Panther. Nail him right there. Only T. J. had chickened out, and Manson had to do the shooting himself. Friends of the black, who were present when the shooting occurred, had later dumped the body in Griffith Park, Danny said.

  Danny had seen the $2,500 and had been present the next morning when Manson criticized T. J. for backing down. DeCarlo described T. J. as “a really nice guy; his front was trying to be one of Charlie’s boys, but he didn’t have it inside.” T. J. had gone along with Manson on everything up to this, but he told him, “I don’t want to have nothing to do with snuffing people.” A day or two later he “fled in the wind.”

  Images in this book are not displayed owing to permissive issues.

  Q. “Who else got murdered up there? What about Shorty? Do you know anything about that?”

  There was a long pause, then: “That was my ace in the hole.”

  Q. “How so?”

  A. “I was going to save that for the last.”

  Q. “Well, might as well clear the thing up now. Has Charlie got something he can smear on you that—”

  A. “No, no way at all. Nothing.”

  One thing did worry DeCarlo, however. In 1966 he had been convicted of a felony, smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border, a federal charge; he was currently appealing the sentence. He was also under indictment on two other charges: along with Al Springer and several other Straight Satans, he had been charged with selling a stolen motorcycle engine, which was a local charge, and giving false information while purchasing a firearm (using an alias and not disclosing that he had a prior felony conviction), which was federal. Manson was still on parole from a federal pen. “So what if they send me to the same place? I don’t want to feel a shank in my back and find that little son of a bitch behind me.”

  Q. “Let me explain something to you, Danny, so you know where you stand. We’re dealing with a guy here who we are pretty sure is responsible for about thirteen murders. Some of which you don’t know about.”

  The figure thirteen was just a guess, but DeCarlo surprised them by saying, “I know about—I’m pretty sure he did Tate.”

  Q. “O.K., we’ve talked about the Panther, we’ve talked about Gary Hinman, we’re going to talk about Shorty, and you think he did Tate, that’s eight. Now, we’ve got five more. All right? Now, our opinion of Charlie is that he’s got a little mental problem.

  “But we’re in no way going to jeopardize you or anyone else if, for no other reason, we don’t want another murder. We’re in business to stop murders. And in this business there’s no sense in solving thirteen murders if somebody else is going to get killed. That just makes fourteen.”

  A. “I’m a nasty motorcycle rider.”

  Q. “I don’t care what you are personally.”

  A. “The police’s general opinion of me is nothing.”

  Q. “That’s not my opinion.”

  A. “I’m not an outstanding citizen—”

  Q. “As I told you the other day, Danny, you level with us, all the way, right down the line, no bullshitting—I’m not going to bullshit you, you’re not going to bullshit me—we level with each other and I’ll go out for you a hundred percent. And I mean it. So that you don’t have to go to the joint.”

  Q. (another detective) “We’ve dealt with motorcycle riders before, and with all kinds of people. We’ve gone out on a limb to help them because they’ve helped us. We’ll do our very best to make sure that nobody gets killed, whether he’s a motorcycle rider or the best citizen in the world…

  “Now tell us what you know about Shorty.”

  Early that same evening, November 17, 1969, two LAPD homicide officers, Sergeants Mossman and Brown, appeared at Sybil Brand Institute and asked to see one Ronnie Howard.

  The interview was brief. They heard enough, however, to realize they were on to something big. Enough, too, to decide it wasn’t the best idea to leave Ronnie Howard in the same dormitory with Susan Atkins. Before leaving Sybil Brand, they arranged to have Ronnie moved to an isolation unit. Then they drove back to Parker Center, anxious to tell the other detectives that they had “cracked the case.”

  Nielsen, Gutierrez, and McGann were still questioning DeCarlo about the murder of Shorty. They already knew something about it, even before talking to Springer and DeCarlo, since Sergeants Whiteley and Guenther had begun their own investigation into the “possible homicide” after talking to Kitty Lutesinger.

  They knew “Shorty” was Donald Jerome Shea, a thirty-six-year-old male Caucasian who had worked at Spahn Ranch on and off for some fifteen years as a horse wrangler. Like most of the other cowboys who drifted in and out of Spahn’s Movie Ranch, Shorty was just awaiting the day when some producer discovered he had all the potential of a new John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. Whenever the prospect of any acting job materialized, Shorty would quit work and go in search of that ever elusive stardom. Which explained why, when in late August he disappeared from Spahn, no one thought too much about it. At first.

  Kitty had also told LASO that Manson, Clem, Bruce, and possibly Tex had been involved in the killing, and that some of the girls in the Family had helped obliterate all traces of the crime. One thing they didn’t know, and now asked Danny, was, “Why did they do it?”

  A. “Because Shorty was going to old man Spahn and snitching. And

  Charlie didn’t like snitches.”

  Q. “Just about the petty bullshit at the ranch?”

  A. “That’s right. Shorty was telling old man Spahn that he should put him in charge and h
e would clean everybody up.” He would, in short order, run off Manson and his Family. Shorty, however, made a fatal mistake: he forgot that little Squeaky was not only George’s eyes, she was also Charlie’s ears.

  There were other reasons, which Danny enumerated. Shorty had married a black topless dancer; Charlie “had a thing” about interracial marriages, and blacks. (“Charlie had two enemies,” DeCarlo said, “the police and the niggers, in that order.”) Charlie also suspected that Shorty had helped set up the August 16 raid on Spahn—Shorty had been “offed” about ten days later.* And there was the possibility, though this was strictly conjecture on DeCarlo’s part, that Shorty had overheard something about some of the other murders.

  Bruce Davis had told him about Shorty’s murder, DeCarlo said. Several of the girls had also mentioned it, as had both Clem and Manson. Danny was unclear as to some of the details—how they had managed to catch Shorty off guard, and where—but as for the mode of death, he was more than graphic. “Like they were going to do Caesar,” they went to the gunroom and picked up a sword and four German bayonets, the latter purchased from an Army surplus store for a buck each and honed to razor sharpness, then, getting Shorty off by himself, they “stuck him like carving up a Christmas turkey…Bruce said they cut him up in nine pieces. They cut his head off. Then they cut his arms off too, so there was no way they could possibly identify him. They were laughing about that.”

  After killing him, they covered the body with leaves (DeCarlo guessed, but was not sure, that this had occurred in one of the canyons behind the ranch buildings); some of the girls had helped dispose of Shorty’s bloody clothing, his automobile, and other possessions; then “Clem came back the next day or that night and buried him good.”

  Q. (unidentified voice) “Can we break this up for about fifteen minutes, maybe send Danny up to get some coffee? There’s been an accident and they want to talk to you guys.”

  Q. “Sure.”

  Q. “I’m going to send Danny up to the eighth floor. I want him back down here in fifteen minutes.”