Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  It was a test. It was also, by inference, evidence that Susan Atkins would do anything Charles Manson asked her to do.

  As with the others, I questioned Watkins about Manson’s programming techniques. He told me something very interesting, which apparently the other Family members didn’t know. He said that when Manson passed out the LSD, he always took a smaller dose than the others. Though Manson never told him why he did so, Paul presumed that during the “trip” Manson wanted to retain control over his own mental faculties. It is said that LSD is a mind-altering drug which tends to make the person ingesting it a little more vulnerable and susceptible to the influence of third parties. Manson used LSD “trips,” Paul said, to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.

  As Manson’s second in command, Watkins had enjoyed Charlie’s confidence more than most of the others. I asked him if Manson had ever mentioned Scientology or The Process. Watkins had never heard of The Process, but Manson had told him that while he was in prison he had studied Scientology, becoming a “theta,” which Manson defined as being “clear.” Watkins said that in the summer of 1968 he and Charlie had dropped into a Church of Scientology in downtown Los Angeles, and Manson asked the receptionist, “What do you do after ‘clear’?” When she was unable to tell him anything he hadn’t already done, Manson walked out.

  One aspect of Manson’s philosophy especially puzzled me: his strange attitude toward fear. He not only preached that fear was beautiful, he often told the Family that they should live in a constant state of fear. What did he mean by that? I asked Paul.

  To Charlie fear was the same thing as awareness, Watkins said. The more fear you have, the more awareness, hence the more love. When you’re really afraid, you come to “Now.” And when you are at Now, you are totally conscious.

  Manson claimed that children were more aware than adults, because they were naturally afraid. But animals were even more aware than people, he said, because they always lived at Now. The coyote was the most aware creature there was, Manson maintained, because he was completely paranoid. Being frightened of everything, he missed nothing.

  Charlie was always “selling fear,” Watkins continued. He wanted people to be afraid, and the more afraid the better. Using this same logic, “Charlie said that death was beautiful, because people feared death.”

  I would learn, from talking to other Family members, that Manson would seek out each individual’s greatest fear—not so the person could confront and eliminate it, but so he could re-emphasize it. It was like a magic button, which he could push at will to control that person.

  “Whatever you do,” Watkins advised me, as had both Crockett and Poston, “don’t ever let Charlie know you are afraid of him.” One day at Spahn, without warning or provocation, Manson had jumped on Watkins and started strangling him. At first Paul resisted, but then, gasping for breath, he suddenly gave up, stopped resisting. “It was really weird,” Watkins said. “The instant I stopped fearing him, his hands flew off my throat and he jumped back as if he’d been attacked by an unseen force.”

  “Then it’s like the barking dog,” I commented. “If you show fear, it will attack; if you don’t it won’t?”

  “Exactly. Fear turns Charlie on.”

  Paul Watkins was inherently more independent than Brooks Poston, much less the follower type. Yet he too had remained with the Family for a long period. Other than the girls, was there some reason why he stayed?

  “I thought Charlie was Christ,” he told me, not blinking an eye.

  Both Watkins and Poston had severed the umbilical linking them to Manson. But both admitted to me that they still weren’t completely free of him, that even now they would sometimes lapse back into a state where they could feel Manson’s vibrations.

  It was Paul Watkins who finally supplied the missing link in Manson’s motive for the murders. Yet, if I hadn’t talked to Jakobson and Poston, I might have missed its importance, for it was from all three, Gregg, Brooks, and Paul, that I obtained the keys to understanding (1) Charles Manson’s unique interpretation of the Book of Revelation, and (2) his decidedly curious and complex attitude toward the English musical group the Beatles.

  Several persons had told me Manson was fond of quoting from the Bible, particularly the ninth chapter of Revelation. Once Charlie had handed Jakobson a Bible, already open to the chapter, and, while he read it, supplied his own interpretation of the verses. With only one exception, which will be noted, what Gregg told me tallied with what I later heard from Poston and Watkins.

  The “four angels” were the Beatles, whom Manson considered “leaders, spokesmen, prophets,” according to Gregg. The line “And he opened the bottomless pit…And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power…” was still another reference to the English group, Gregg said. Locusts—Beatles—one and the same. “Their faces were as the faces of men,” yet “they had hair as the hair of women.” An obvious reference to the long-haired musicians. Out of the mouths of the four angels “issued fire and brimstone.” Gregg: “This referred to the spoken words, the lyrics of the Beatles’ songs, the power that came out of their mouths.”

  Their “breastplates of fire,” Poston added, were their electric guitars. Their shapes “like unto horses prepared unto battle” were the dune buggies. The “horsemen who numbered two hundred thousand thousand,” and who would roam the earth spreading destruction, were the motorcyclists.

  “And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.” I wondered about that seal on the forehead. How did Manson interpret that? I asked Jakobson.

  “It was all subjective,” Gregg replied. “He said there would be a mark on people.” Charlie had never told him exactly what the mark would be, only that he, Charlie, “would be able to tell, he would know,” and that “the mark would designate whether they were with him or against him.” With Charlie, it was either one or the other, Gregg said; “there was no middle road.”

  One verse spoke of worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze. Manson said that referred to the material worship of the establishment: of automobiles, houses, money.

  Q. “Directing your attention to Verse 15, which reads: ‘And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.’ Did he say what that meant?”

  A. “He said that those were the people who would die in Helter Skelter…one third of mankind…the white race.”

  I now knew I was on the right track.

  Only on one point did Jakobson’s recollection of Manson’s interpretation differ from that of the others. The first verse of Revelation 9 refers to a fifth angel; the chapter ends, however, referring to only four. Originally there were five Beatles, Gregg explained, one of whom, Stuart Sutcliffe, had died in Germany in 1962.

  Poston and Watkins—who, unlike Jakobson, were members of the Family—interpreted this much differently. Verse I reads: “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.”

  To members of the Family the identity of that fifth angel, the ruler of the bottomless pit, was never in doubt. It was Charlie.

  Verse II reads: “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

  The king also had a Latin name, which, though it appears in the Catholic Douay Version, was inadvertently omitted by the translators of the King James version. It was Exterminans.

  Exterminans, t/n Charles Manson.

  As far as Jakobson, Watkins, and Poston knew, Manson placed no special meaning on the last verse of Revelation 9. But I found myself thinking of it often in the months ahead:

  “Neither r
epented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.”

  “The important thing to remember about Revelation 9,” Gregg told me, “is that Charlie believed this was happening now, not in the future. It’s going to begin now and it’s time to choose sides…either that or flee with him to the desert.”

  According to Jakobson, Manson believed “the Beatles were spokesmen. They were speaking to Charlie, through their songs, letting him know from across the ocean that this is what was going to go down. He believed this firmly…He considered their songs prophecy, especially the songs in the so-called White Album…He told me that many, many times.”

  Watkins and Poston also said that Manson and the Family were convinced that the Beatles were speaking to Charlie through their music. For example, in the song “I Will” are the lines: “And when at last I find you/Your song will fill the air/Sing it loud so I can hear you/Make it easy to be near you…” Charlie interpreted this to mean the Beatles wanted him to make an album, Poston and Watkins said. Charlie told them that the Beatles were looking for JC and he was the JC they were looking for. He also told them that the Beatles knew that Christ had returned to earth again and that he was living somewhere in Los Angeles.

  “How in the world did he come up with that?” I asked them.

  In the White Album is a song called “Honey Pie,” a lyric of which reads: “Oh honey pie my position is tragic/Come and show me the magic/Of your Hollywood song.” A later lyric goes: “Oh honey pie you are driving me frantic/Sail across the Atlantic/To be where you belong.”

  Charlie, of course, wanted them to sail across the Atlantic, to join him in Death Valley. While residing in the Gresham Street house (in January and February of 1969, just after the White Album was released), Manson and the girls sent several telegrams, wrote a number of letters, and made at least three telephone calls to England, attempting to reach the Beatles. No luck.

  The line “I’m in love but I’m lazy” from “Honey Pie” meant to Charlie that the Beatles loved JC but were too lazy to go looking for him; also, they’d just gone all the way to India, following a man who they’d finally decided was a false prophet, the Maharishi. They were also calling for JC/Charlie in the first eight lines of the song “Don’t Pass Me By,” in “Yer Blues,” and, in the earlier Magical Mystery Tour album, in “Blue Jay Way.”

  Much of this I would never use at the trial; it was simply too absurd.

  The Beatles’ White Album, Manson told Watkins, Poston, and others, “set up things for the revolution.” His album, which was to follow, would, in Charlie’s words, “blow the cork off the bottle. That would start it.”

  Much of the time at the Gresham Street house, according to Poston, Watkins, and others, was spent composing songs for Charlie’s album. Each was to be a message song, directed to a particular group of people, such as the bikers, outlining the part they’d play in Helter Skelter. Charlie worked hard on these songs; they had to be very subtle, he said, like the Beatles’ own songs, their true meaning hidden beneath the awareness of all but the tuned-in people.

  Manson was counting on Terry Melcher to produce this album. According to numerous Family members (both Melcher and Jakobson denied this), Terry had promised to come and listen to the songs one evening. The girls cleaned the house, baked cookies, rolled joints. Melcher didn’t show. Manson, according to Poston and Watkins, never forgave Terry for this. Melcher’s word was no good, he said angrily on a number of occasions.

  Though the Beatles had made many records, it was the double-disk White Album, which Capitol issued in December 1968, that Manson considered most important. Even the fact that the cover was white—with no other design except the embossed name of the group—held significance for him.

  It was, and remains, a startling album, containing some of the Beatles’ finest music, and some of their strangest. Its thirty songs range from tender love ballads to pop parodies to cacophonies of noise made by taking loops of very diverse tapes and splicing them together. To Charles Manson, however, it was prophecy. At least this is what he convinced his followers.

  That Charlie had renamed Susan Atkins “Sadie Mae Glutz” long before the White Album appeared containing the song “Sexy Sadie” was additional proof to the Family that Manson and the Beatles were mentally attuned.

  Almost every song in the album had a hidden meaning, which Manson interpreted for his followers. To Charlie “Rocky Raccoon” meant “coon” or the black man. While to everyone except Manson and the Family it was obvious that the lyrics of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” had sexual connotations, Charlie interpreted the song to mean that the Beatles were telling blackie to get guns and fight whitey.

  According to Poston and Watkins, the Family played five songs in the White Album more than all the others. They were: “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” “Revolution 1,” “Revolution 9,” and “Helter Skelter.”

  “Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise,” went the lyrics of “Blackbird.” According to Jakobson, “Charlie believed that the moment was now and that the black man was going to arise, overthrow the white man, and take his turn.” According to Watkins, in this song Charlie “figured the Beatles were programming the black people to get it up, get it on, start doing it.”

  On first hearing the song, I’d thought that the LaBianca killers had made a mistake, writing “rise” instead of “arise.” However, Jakobson told me that Charlie said the black man was going to “rise” up against the white man. “‘Rise’ was one of Charlie’s big words,” Gregg said, providing me with the origin of still another of the key words.

  Both the Tate and LaBianca murders had occurred in “the dead of night.” However, if the parallel had special significance to Manson, he never admitted it to anyone I interviewed, nor, if he knew it, did he admit the dictionary meaning of the phrase “helter skelter.” The song “Helter Skelter” begins: “When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide/Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride…” According to Poston, Manson said this was a reference to the Family emerging from the bottomless pit.

  There was a simpler explanation. In England, home of the Beatles, “helter skelter” is another name for a slide in an amusement park.

  If you listen closely, you can hear grunts and oinks in the background of the song “Piggies.”* By “piggies,” Gregg and the others told me, Manson meant anyone who belonged to the establishment.

  Like Manson himself, the song was openly critical of the piggies, noting that what they really needed was a damned good whacking.

  “By that he meant the black man was going to give the piggies, the establishment, a damned good whacking,” Jakobson explained. Charlie really loved that line, both Watkins and Poston said; he was always quoting it.

  I couldn’t listen to the final stanza without visualizing what had happened at 3301 Waverly Drive. It describes piggy couples dining out, in all their starched finery, eating bacon with their forks and knives.

  Rosemary LaBianca: forty-one knife wounds. Leno LaBianca: twelve knife wounds, punctured with a fork seven times, a knife in his throat, a fork in his stomach, and, on the wall, in his own blood, DEATH TO PIGS.

  “There’s a chord at the end of the song ‘Piggies,’” Watkins said. “It goes down and it’s a really weird chord. After the sound of piggies snorting. And in the ‘Revolution 9’ song, there’s that same chord, and after it they have a little pause and snort, snort, snort. But in the pause, there is machine-gun fire.

  “And it’s the same thing with the ‘Helter Skelter’ song,” Paul continued. “They had this really weird chord. And in the ‘Revolution 9’ song there’s the same chord again, with machine guns firing and people dying and screaming and stuff.”

  The White Album contains two songs with the word “revolution” in their titles.

  The printed lyrics of “Revolution 1,” as given on the jacket i
nsert, read: “You say you want a revolution/Well you know/We all want to change the world…/But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out.”

  When you listen to the record itself, however, immediately after “out” you hear the word “in.”

  Manson took this to mean the Beatles, once undecided, now favored the revolution.

  Manson made much of these “hidden lyrics,” which can be found in a number of the Beatles’ songs but are especially prevalent in the White Album. They were, he told his followers, direct communications to him, Charlie/JC.

  Later on the lyrics go: “You say you got a real solution/Well you know/We’d all love to see the plan.”

  The meaning of this was obvious to Manson: Sing out, Charlie, and tell us how we can escape the holocaust.

  Of all the Beatles’ songs, “Revolution 9” is easily the weirdest. Reviewers couldn’t decide whether it was an exciting new direction for rock or an elaborate put-on. One critic said it reminded him of “a bad acid trip.”

  There are no lyrics as such, nor is it music in any conventional sense; rather, it is a montage of noises—whispers, shouts, snatches of dialogue from the BBC, bits of classical music, mortars exploding, babies crying, church hymns, car horns, and football yells—which, together with the oft reiterated refrain “Number 9, Number 9, Number 9,” build to a climax of machine-gun fire and screams, to be followed by the soft and obviously symbolic lullaby “Good Night.”

  Of all the songs in the White Album, Jakobson said, Charlie “spoke mostly of ‘Revolution 9.’” He said “it was the Beatles’ way of telling people what was going to happen; it was their way of making prophecy; it directly paralleled the Bible’s Revelation 9.”

  It was also the battle of Armageddon, the coming black-white revolution portrayed in sound, Manson claimed, and after having listened to it myself, I could easily believe that if ever there were such a conflict, this was probably very much what it would sound like.