Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Overriding all doubts was one fact: she had fallen in love with Charles Manson.

  Linda had been at Spahn Ranch a little over a month when, on the afternoon of Friday, August 8, 1969, Manson told the Family: “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”

  Had Linda stopped there, supplying that single piece of testimony and nothing else, she would have been a valuable witness. But Linda had a great deal more to tell.

  That Friday evening, about an hour after dinner, seven or eight members of the Family were standing on the boardwalk in front of the saloon when Manson came out and, calling Tex, Sadie, Katie, and Linda aside, told each to get a change of clothing and a knife. He also told Linda to get her driver’s license. Linda, I later learned, was the only Family member with a valid license, excepting Mary Brunner, who had been arrested that afternoon. This was, I concluded, probably one of the reasons why Manson had picked Linda to accompany the others, each of whom, unlike her, had been with him a year or more.

  Linda couldn’t find her own knife (Sadie had it), but she obtained one from Larry Jones. The handle was broken and had been replaced with tape. Brenda found Linda’s license and gave it to her just about the time Manson told Linda, “Go with Tex and do whatever Tex tells you to do.”

  According to Linda, in addition to Tex, Katie, and herself, Brenda McCann and Larry Jones were present when Manson gave this order.

  Brenda remained hard core and refused to cooperate with law enforcement. Larry Jones, t/n Lawrence Bailey, was a scrawny little ranch hand who was always trying to ingratiate himself with the Family. However, Jones had what Manson considered negroid features and, according to Linda, Charlie was always putting him down, referring to him as “the drippings from a white man’s dick.” Since Jones had been present when Manson instructed the Tate killers, he could be a very important witness—providing independent corroboration of Linda Kasabian’s testimony—and I asked LAPD to bring him in. They were unable to find him. I then gave the assignment to the DA’s Bureau of Investigation, who located Jones, but he wouldn’t give us the time of day.

  Linda said that after Manson instructed her to go with Tex, the group piled into ranch hand Johnny Swartz’ old Ford.

  I asked Linda what each was wearing. She wasn’t absolutely sure, but she thought Sadie had on a dark-blue T-shirt and dungarees, that Katie’s attire was similar, and that Tex was wearing a black velour turtleneck and dark dungarees.

  When shown the clothing the TV crew had found, Linda identified six of the seven items, failing to recall only the white T-shirt. The logical assumption was that she hadn’t seen it because it had been worn under one of the other shirts.

  What about footwear? I asked. The girls, she believed, were all barefoot. She thought, but couldn’t be sure, that Tex had on cowboy boots.

  A number of bloody footprints had been found at the Tate murder scene. After eliminating those belonging to LAPD personnel, two remained unidentified: a boot-heel print and the print of a bare foot—thus supporting Linda’s recollections. Again, as with Susan Atkins, I badly needed independent corroboration of Linda’s testimony.

  I then asked Linda the same question I’d asked Susan—had any of them been on drugs that night?—and received the same reply: no.

  As Tex started to drive off, Manson said, “Hold it,” or “Wait.” He then leaned in the window on the passenger side and said, “Leave a sign. You girls know what to write. Something witchy.”

  Tex handed Linda three knives and a gun, telling her to wrap them in a rag and put them on the floor. If stopped by the police, Tex said, she was to throw them out.

  Linda positively identified the .22 caliber Longhorn revolver. Only at this time, she said, the grip had been intact and the barrel unbent.

  According to Linda, Tex did not tell them their destination, or what they were going to do; however, she presumed they were going on another creepy-crawly mission. Tex did say that he had been to the house and knew the layout.

  As we drove up Cielo Drive in the sheriff’s van, Linda showed me where Tex had turned, in front of the gate at 10050, then parked, next to the telephone pole. He had then taken a pair of large, red-handled wire cutters from the back seat and shinnied up the pole. From where she was sitting, Linda couldn’t see Tex cutting the wires, but she saw and heard the wires fall.

  When shown the wire cutters found at Barker Ranch, Linda said they “looked like” the pair used that night. Since the wire cutters had been found in Manson’s personal dune buggy, her identification linked them not just to the Family but to Manson himself. I was especially pleased at this evidence, unaware that link would soon be severed, literally.

  When Tex returned to the car, they drove to a spot near the bottom of the hill and parked. The four then took the weapons and extra clothing and stealthily walked back up to the gate. Tex also had some white rope, which was draped over his shoulder.

  As Linda and I got out of the sheriff’s van and approached the gate at 10050 Cielo Drive, two large dogs belonging to Rudi Altobelli began barking furiously at us. Linda suddenly began sobbing. “What are you crying about, Linda?” I asked.

  Pointing to the dogs, she said, “Why couldn’t they have been here that night?”

  Linda pointed to the spot, to the right of the gate, where they had climbed the embankment and scaled the fence. As they were descending the other side, a pair of headlights suddenly appeared in the driveway. “Lay down and be quiet,” Tex ordered. He then jumped up and ran to the automobile, which had stopped near the gate-control mechanism. Linda heard a man’s voice saying, “Please don’t hurt me! I won’t say anything!” She then saw Tex put the gun in the open window on the driver’s side and heard four shots. She also saw the man slump over in the seat.

  (Something here puzzled me, and still does. In addition to the gunshot wounds, Steven Parent had a defensive stab wound that ran from the palm across the wrist of his left hand. It severed the tendons as well as the band of his wristwatch. Obviously, Parent had raised his left hand, the hand closest to the open window, in an effort to protect himself, the force of the blow being sufficient to hurl his watch into the back seat. It therefore appeared that Tex must have approached the car with a knife in one hand, a gun in the other, and that he first slashed at Parent, then shot him. Yet neither Susan nor Linda saw Tex with a knife at this point, nor did either recall the stabbing.)

  Linda saw Tex reach in the car and turn off the lights and ignition. He then pushed the car some distance up the driveway, telling the others to follow him.

  The shooting put her in a state of shock, Linda said. “My mind went blank. I was aware of my body, walking toward the house.”

  As we went up the driveway, I asked Linda which lights had been on that night. She pointed to the bug light on the side of the garage, also the Christmas-tree lights along the fence. Little details, yet important if the defense contended Linda was fabricating her story from what she had read in the papers, since neither these, nor numerous other details I collected, had appeared in the press.

  As we approached the residence, I noticed that Linda was shivering and her arms were covered with goose bumps. Though it wasn’t cold that day, Linda was now nine months pregnant, and I slipped off my coat and put it over her shoulders. The shivering continued, however, all the time we were on the premises, and often, in pointing out something, she would begin crying. There was no question in my mind that the tears were real and that she was deeply affected by what had happened in this place. I couldn’t help contrasting Linda with Susan.

  When they reached the house, Linda said, Tex sent her around the back to look for an unlocked window or door. She reported that everything was locked, though she hadn’t actually checked. (This explained why they ignored the open nursery window.) Tex then slit a screen on one of the front windows with a knife. Though the actual screen had since been replaced, Linda pointed to the correct window. She also said the slash was horizontal, as it had been. Tex then told her to go back and wait by th
e car in the driveway.

  Linda did as she was told. Perhaps a minute or two later Katie came back and asked Linda for her knife (this was the knife with the taped handle) and told her, “Listen for sounds.”

  A few minutes later Linda heard “horrifying sounds” coming from the house. A man moaned, “No, no, no,” then screamed very loudly. The scream, which seemed continuous, was punctuated with other voices, male and female, begging and pleading for their lives.

  Wanting “to stop what was happening,” Linda said, “I started running toward the house.” As she reached the walk, “there was a man, a tall man, just coming out of the door, staggering, and he had blood all over his face, and he was standing by a post, and we looked into each other’s eyes for a minute, I don’t know however long, and I said, ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’ And then he just fell into the bushes.

  “And then Sadie came running out of the house, and I said, ‘Sadie, please make it stop! People are coming!’ Which wasn’t true, but I wanted to make it stop. And she said, ‘It’s too late.’”

  Complaining that she had lost her knife, Susan ran back into the house. Linda remained outside. (Susan had earlier told me, and the grand jury, that Linda had never entered the residence.) Turning, Linda saw a dark-haired woman in a white gown running across the lawn; Katie was pursuing her, an upraised knife in her hand. Somehow, the tall man managed to stagger from the bushes next to the porch onto the lawn, where he had again fallen. Linda saw Tex hit him over the head with something—it could have been a gun but she wasn’t sure—then stab him repeatedly in the back as he lay on the ground.

  (Shown a number of photographs, Linda identified the tall man as Voytek Frykowski, the dark-haired woman as Abigail Folger. Examining the autopsy report on Frykowski, I found that five of his fifty-one stab wounds were to the back.)

  Linda turned and ran down the driveway. For what seemed like maybe five minutes, she hid in the bushes near the gate, then climbed the fence again and ran down Cielo to where they had parked the Ford.

  Q. “Why didn’t you run to one of the houses and call the police?” I asked Linda.

  A. “My first thought was ‘Get help!’ Then my little girl entered my mind—she was back [at the ranch] with Charlie. I didn’t know where I was or how to get out of there.”

  She got in the car and had started the engine when “all of a sudden they were there. They were covered with blood. They looked like zombies. Tex yelled at me to turn off the car and get over. He had a terrible look in his eyes.” Linda slid over to the passenger side. “Then he started in on Sadie and yelled at her for losing her knife.”

  Tex had put the .22 revolver on the seat between them. Linda noticed that the grip was broken, and Tex told her it had smashed when he hit the man over the head. Sadie and Katie complained that their heads hurt because the people had pulled their hair while they were fighting with them. Sadie also said the big man had hit her over the head and that “the girl”—it was unclear whether she meant Sharon or Abigail—had cried for her mother. Katie also complained that her hand hurt, explaining that when she stabbed, she kept hitting bones, and since the knife didn’t have a regular handle, it bruised her hand.

  Q. “How did you feel, Linda?”

  A. “In a state of shock.”

  Q. “What about the others, how did they act?”

  A. “As if it was all a game.”

  Tex, Sadie, and Katie changed their clothing while the car was in motion, Linda holding the wheel for Tex. Linda herself didn’t change, since there was no blood on her. Tex told them he wanted to find a place to hose the blood off, and he turned off Benedict Canyon onto a short street not too far from the Tate residence.

  Linda’s account of the hosing incident paralleled Susan Atkins’ and Rudolf Weber’s. Weber’s house was located 1.8 miles from the Tate premises.

  From there Tex turned onto Benedict Canyon again and drove along through a dark, hilly country area. He stopped the car on a dirt shoulder off the road, and Tex, Sadie, and Katie gave Linda their bloody clothing, which, on Tex’s instructions, she rolled up in one bundle and threw down the slope. Since it was dark, she couldn’t see where it landed.

  After driving off, Tex told Linda to wipe the knives clean of fingerprints, then throw them out the window. She did, the first knife hitting a bush at the side of the road, the second, which she tossed out a few seconds later, striking the curb and bouncing back into the road. Looking back, she saw it lying there. Linda believed she threw the gun out a few minutes later but she wasn’t sure; it was possible that Tex did it.

  After driving for a time, they stopped at a gas station—Linda was unable to recall the street—where Katie and Sadie took turns going into the rest room to wash the rest of the blood off their bodies. Then they drove back to Spahn Ranch.

  Linda did not have a watch but guessed it must have been about 2 A.M. Charles Manson was standing on the boardwalk in the same spot where he had been when they drove off.

  Sadie said she saw some blood on the outside of the car, and Manson had the girls get rags and sponges and wash the car inside and out.

  He then told them to go to the bunkhouse. Brenda and Clem were already there. Manson asked Tex how it had gone. Tex told him that there was a lot of panic, that it was real messy, and that there were bodies lying all over the place, but that everyone was dead.

  Manson asked the four, “Do you have any remorse?” All shook their heads and said, “No.”

  Linda did feel remorse, she told me, but she didn’t admit it to Charlie because “I was afraid for my life. I could see in his eyes he knew how I felt. And it was against his way.”

  Manson told them, “Go to bed and say nothing to the others.”

  Linda slept most of the day. It was almost sundown when Sadie told her to go into the trailer, that the TV news was coming on. Although Linda could not recall seeing Tex, she remembered Sadie, Katie, Barbara Hoyt, and Clem being there.

  It was the big news. For the first time Linda heard the names of the victims. She also learned that one, Sharon Tate, had been pregnant. Only a few days earlier Linda had learned that she herself was pregnant.

  “As we were watching the news,” Linda said, “in my head I kept saying, ‘Why would they do such a thing?’”

  After Linda and I left the Tate residence, I asked her to show us the route they had taken. She found the dirt shoulder where they had pulled off to dispose of the clothing, but was unable to find the street where Tex had turned off Benedict Canyon, so I had the sheriff’s deputy who was driving take us directly to Portola. Once on the street, Linda immediately identified 9870, pointing to the hose in front. Number 9870 was Rudolf Weber’s house. She also pointed to the spot where they had parked the car. It was the same spot Weber had indicated. Neither his address, nor even the fact that he had been located, had appeared in the press.

  We were back on Benedict looking for the area where Linda had thrown out the knives when one of the deputies said, “We’ve got company.”

  Looking out the window, we saw we were being followed by a Channel 2 TV unit. Its presence in the area may have been a coincidence, but I doubted it. More likely, someone at the jail or in the courts had alerted the press that we were taking Linda out. At this time only a few people knew that Linda Kasabian would be a witness for the prosecution. I’d hoped to keep this secret as long as possible. I’d also hoped to take Linda to the LaBianca residence and several other sites, but now that would have to wait. Telling Linda to turn her head away so she wouldn’t be recognized, I asked the driver to hightail it back to Sybil Brand.

  Once on the freeway, we tried to outrun the TV unit, but without success. They filmed us all the way. It was like a Mack Sennett comedy, only with the press in pursuit of the fuzz.

  After Linda was back in jail, I asked Sergeant McGann to get some cadets from the Police Academy, or a troop of Boy Scouts, and conduct a search for the knives. From Linda’s testimony, we knew that they had probably been thrown out of th
e car somewhere between the clothing site and the hill where young Steven Weiss had found the gun, an area of less than two miles. We also knew that since Linda had looked back and seen one of the knives lying in the road, there must have been some illumination nearby, which could be another clue.

  The following day, March 4, Gypsy made another visit to Fleischman’s office. She told him, in the presence of his law partner Ronald Goldman, “If Linda testifies, thirty people are going to do something about it.”

  I’d already checked out the security at Sybil Brand. Until her baby was born, Linda was being kept in an isolation cell off the infirmary. She had no contact with the other inmates; deputies brought her meals. After the baby was born, however, she would be reassigned to one of the open dormitories, where she might be threatened, even killed, by Sadie, Katie, or Leslie. I made a note to talk to Captain Carpenter to see if other arrangements could be made.

  Attorney Richard Caballero had been able to postpone the inevitable, but he couldn’t prevent it. The meeting between Susan Atkins and Charles Manson took place in the Los Angeles County Jail on March 5. Caballero, who was present, would later testify: “One of the first things they wanted to know was whether either one had gotten to see Linda Kasabian yet.” Neither having done so, it was decided both should keep trying.

  Manson asked Susan, “Are you afraid of the gas chamber?”

  Susan grinned and replied that she wasn’t.

  With that, Caballero must have realized that he had lost her.

  Susan and Charlie talked for an hour or so more, but Caballero hadn’t the foggiest idea of what they said. “At some point in the conversation they began to talk in sort of a double talk or pig Latin,” and “when they reached that point they lost me.”

  However, the looks they exchanged said it all. It was like a “joyous homecoming.” Sadie Mae Glutz had returned to the irresistible Charles Manson.