Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Shinn admitted that he was.

  THE COURT “It appears to me, Mr. Shinn, that you are not paying the slightest attention to the publicity order, and you haven’t been for some time. I have felt, in my own mind, for a long, long time, that the leak—and there is a leak—is you.”

  Maxwell Keith very reluctantly called his client, Leslie Van Houten, to the stand. After taking her through her background, Keith asked to approach the bench. He told Older that his client was going to involve herself in the Hinman murder. He had discussed this with her for “hours and hours” but to no avail.

  Once she began reciting her tale, the transparency of her fictions became obvious. According to Leslie, Mary Brunner was never at the Hinman residence, while both Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil left before the actual killing took place. It was Sadie, she said, who killed Gary.

  Though implicating herself in the Hinman murder, at least by her presence, Leslie did try to provide some mitigating circumstances for her involvement in the LaBianca murders. She claimed she knew nothing about the Tate murders and that when she went along the next night she had no idea where they were going or what they were going to do. The murder of Rosemary LaBianca was made to seem almost like self-defense. Only after Rosemary swung at her with the lamp did she “take one of the knives and Patricia had a knife, and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady.”

  Q. “Up to that time, did you have any intention of hurting anybody?”

  A. “No.”

  Q. “Did you stab her after she appeared to be dead, Les?”

  A. “I don’t know if it was before or after she was dead, but I stabbed her…I don’t know if she was dead. She was lying there on the floor.”

  Q. “Had you stabbed her at all before you saw her lying on the floor?”

  A. “I don’t remember.”

  Leslie’s forgetting such things was almost as improbable as her claim that she hadn’t mentioned the murders to Manson until they were in the desert.

  Very carefully, Keith tried to establish that Leslie had remorse for her acts.

  Q. “Leslie, do you feel sorrow or shame or a sense of guilt for having participated in the death of Mrs. LaBianca?”

  A. [Pause]

  Q. “Let me go one by one. Do you feel sorrowful about it; sorry; unhappy?”

  You could almost feel the chill in the courtroom when Leslie answered: “Sorry is only a five-letter word. It can’t bring back anything.”

  Q. “I am trying, Leslie, to discover how you feel about it.”

  A. “What can I feel? It has happened. She is gone.”

  Q. “Do you wish that it hadn’t happened?”

  A. “I never wish anything to be done over another way. That is a foolish thought. It never will happen that way. You can’t undo something that is done.”

  Q. “Do you feel as if you wanted to cry for what happened?”

  A. “Cry? For her death? If I cry for death, it is for death itself. She is not the only person who has died.”

  Q. “Do you think about it from time to time?”

  A. “Only when I am in the courtroom.”

  Through most of the trial Leslie Van Houten had maintained her innocent-little-girl act. She’d dropped it now, the jury seeing for the first time how cold and unfeeling she really was.

  Another aspect of her real nature surfaced when Kanarek examined her. Angry and impatient at some of his questions, she snapped back hostile, sarcastic replies. With each spurt of venom, you could see the jurors drawing back, looking at her as if anew. Whatever sympathy she may have generated earlier was gone now. Even McBride no longer met her eyes.

  Leslie Van Houten had been found guilty of two homicides. I felt she deserved the death penalty for her very willing participation in those acts. But I didn’t want the jury to vote death on the basis of a crime she didn’t even commit. I told her attorney, Maxwell Keith, that I was willing to stipulate that Leslie was not at the Hinman residence. “I mean, the jury is apt to think she was, and hold it against your client, and I don’t think that is right.”

  Also, during cross-examination I asked: “Did you tell anyone—prior to your testimony on the witness stand—that it was you who was along with Sadie and Bobby Beausoleil at Gary Hinman’s house?”

  A. “I told Patricia about it.”

  Q. “Actually it was Mary Brunner who was inside the residence, not you, isn’t that correct?”

  A. “That is what you say.”

  Although I was attempting to exonerate Leslie of any complicity in the Gary Hinman murder, I did the opposite when it came to the murder of Rosemary LaBianca. By the time I’d finished my cross-examination on this, Leslie had admitted that Rosemary might still have been alive when she stabbed her; and that she not only stabbed her in the buttocks and possibly the neck, but “I could have done a couple on the back.” (As I’d later remind the jury, many of the back wounds were not post-mortem, while one, which severed Rosemary LaBianca’s spine, would have been in and of itself fatal.)

  As with Sadie and Katie, I emphasized the improbabilities in her copycat tale. For example, though she had testified that she was “hopelessly in love” with Bobby Beausoleil, and became aware that these murders had been committed in an attempt to free him, I brought out that she hadn’t even offered to testify in either of his trials, when her story, had it been true, could have resulted in his release.

  At this point I decided to go on a fishing expedition. Though I had no definite knowledge that this was so, I strongly suspected that Leslie had told her first attorney, Marvin Part, the true story of these murders. I did know that Part had recorded her story and, though I never heard the tape, I recalled Part almost begging the judge to listen to it.

  BUGLIOSI “Isn’t it true, Leslie, that before the trial started you told someone that Charles Manson ordered these murders?”

  A. “I had a court-appointed attorney, Marvin Part, who was insistent on the fact that I was—”

  Keith interrupted her, objecting that we were getting into the area of privileged communications. I noted to Judge Older that Leslie herself had mentioned Part by name and that she had the right to waive the privilege. Kanarek also objected, well aware of what I was hoping to bring out.

  VAN HOUTEN “Mr. Kanarek, will you shut up so I can answer his question?…I had a court-appointed attorney by the name of Marvin Part. He had a lot of different thoughts, which were all his own, on how to get me off. He said he was going to make some tape recordings, and he told me the gist of what he wanted me to say. And I said it.”

  Q. “What did you tell Mr. Part?”

  A. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

  I asked her if she told Part that Manson had ordered these murders.

  A. “Sure I told him that.”

  Did she tell Part that Manson was along the second night, and that when they stopped on Waverly Drive, Manson got out and entered the LaBianca house?

  After a number of evasive replies, Leslie angrily answered: “Sure I told him that!”

  THE COURT “We will take our recess at this time—”

  VAN HOUTEN “Mr. Bugliosi, you are an evil man!”

  Each of the Family witnesses denied that Manson hated blacks. But in the light of what I’d recently learned, several put it in a very curious way. When Fitzgerald asked Squeaky: “Did he love the black man or did he hate him?” she had replied: “He loved them. He is his father—the black man is Charlie’s father.” Gypsy had testified: “First of all, Charlie spent nearly all of his life in jail. So he got to know the black people very, very well. In fact, I mean, they were like his father, you know.” Leslie had said something very similar, adding: “If Charlie hated black people he would hate himself.”

  During a recess I asked Manson, “Charlie, was your father black?”

  “What?” He seemed startled by the question, yet whether because it was such a crazy idea or because I’d found out something he didn’t want known I couldn’t tell. There was n
othing evasive about his eventual response, however; he emphatically denied it.

  He seemed to be telling the truth. Yet I wondered. I still do.

  The next witness was no stranger to the stand. Brought back from New Hampshire at the request of Irving Kanarek, Linda Kasabian was again sworn. Fitzgerald, Keith, and Shinn had opposed calling her; Kanarek should have listened to their advice, as Linda again came over so well that I didn’t even cross-examine her. None of her previous testimony was shaken in the slightest.

  Linda, her husband, and their two children were living together on a small farm in New Hampshire. The footloose Bob Kasabian had turned out to be a pillar of strength, and I was pleased to hear that their marriage now seemed to be working.

  Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch, age twenty, who’d once told Danny DeCarlo she couldn’t wait to get her first pig, repeated the now familiar refrain: “Charlie was no leader.” But “the rattlesnakes liked him, he could play with them” and “he could change old men into young men.”

  Adding a few more fictional touches to the copycat motive, Ouisch claimed that Bobby Beausoleil was the father of Linda Kasabian’s second child.

  I asked her: “You would do anything to help Charles Manson and these three female defendants, wouldn’t you, Ouisch?”

  When she evaded a direct reply, I asked: “You would even murder for them, wouldn’t you?”

  A. “I could not take a life.”

  Q. “All right, let’s talk about that, Ouisch. Do you know a girl by the name of Barbara Hoyt?”

  On the advice of her attorney, Ouisch refused to answer any questions about the Hoyt murder attempt. By law, when a witness refuses to be cross-examined, that witness’s entire testimony can be stricken. This was done in Ouisch’s case.

  Easily the weirdest of all the witnesses was Steve Grogan, aka Clem, age nineteen. He spoke of the “engrams” on his brain; answered questions about his father by talking about his mother; and claimed that the real leader of the Family was not Manson but Pooh Bear, Mary Brunner’s child by Manson.

  Kanarek complained, at the bench, that Older was smiling at Grogan’s replies. Older responded: “I find nothing whatsoever funny about this witness, I can assure you…Why you would want to call him is beyond my comprehension, but that is up to you…No jury will ever believe this witness, I promise you that.”

  The youth who beheaded Shorty Shea appeared to be a complete idiot. He grinned incessantly, made funny faces, and played with his beard even more than Manson. Yet it was more than partly role playing, as several of his very careful replies indicated.

  Clem recalled accompanying Linda, Leslie, Sadie, Tex, and Katie one night in a car; he claimed that Linda had given them all LSD first; and he insisted that Manson was not along. But he was very careful not to say that this was the night of the LaBianca murders, to avoid implicating himself.

  Many of his responses were almost exact quotations from Manson. For example, when I asked him, “When did you join the Family, Clem?” he replied, “When I was born of white skin.”

  I also asked him, since it had been brought out on the direct examination, about his arrest in the Barker raid. What had he been charged with? I inquired.

  A. “I was arrested on a breach of promise.”

  Q “Breach of promise? Some girl you made a promise to, Clem, or what?”

  A. “It was a promise to return a truck on a certain date.”

  Q. “Oh, I get it. Sometimes that is called ‘grand theft auto,’ too, isn’t it, Clem?”

  The defense called their next witness: Vincent T. Bugliosi. At the bench Fitzgerald admitted that this was an unusual situation: “On the other hand, in this case Mr. Bugliosi has been an investigator as well as a prosecutor.”

  Daye Shinn questioned me about my interview with Susan Atkins and her testimony before the grand jury. Why did I feel Susan hadn’t told the grand jury the whole truth? he asked. I enumerated the reasons, noting, among other things, my belief that she had stabbed Sharon Tate.

  Q. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

  A. “She admitted it on the witness stand, Mr. Shinn, for one thing.

  Also, she told Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham that she stabbed Sharon Tate.”

  Shinn was trying to reinstate the “deal” in which the DA’s Office agreed not to seek the death penalty against Susan if she testified truthfully. As Older told him at the bench: “Susan Atkins took the stand in this case under oath and testified that she was lying at the grand jury. If there’d been any agreement, that in itself would have been enough to negate it.”

  Keith asked me if I had either heard the tape Leslie made with Part or discussed its contents with him. I replied that I had not. Kanarek’s cross-examination went so far afield that Judge Older finally terminated it.

  Others who took the stand in succeeding days included Aaron Stovitz; Evelle Younger, former Los Angeles District Attorney and now California State Attorney General; attorneys Paul Caruso and Richard Caballero; and promoter Lawrence Schiller. Every aspect of the December 4, 1969, agreement; the taping of Atkins’ account; the selling of her story; her grand jury testimony; and her firing of Caballero the day after her meeting with Manson was discussed. Shinn’s most strenuous cross-examination of the entire trial took place when he had Schiller on the stand: Shinn wanted to know exactly how much Susan’s story had earned and in which bank accounts every penny was. Shinn was to receive Susan’s share for representing her.

  During my cross-examination of these witnesses, I scored a number of significant points. I brought out through Caruso, for example, that during the December 4, 1969, meeting he had stated that Susan Atkins probably wouldn’t testify at the trial “because of her fear of Manson.”

  Kanarek, however, scored one of the biggest points—for the prosecution. In questioning Caballero, Atkins’ former attorney, he asked: “What did [Susan Atkins] tell you about the language written in blood at these three homes?”

  CABALLERO “I told you not to ask me that question, Irving.”

  Apparently convinced that Caballero was hiding something favorable to his client, Kanarek repeated the question.

  Caballero sighed and said: “She told me that Charles Manson had wanted to bring on Helter Skelter and it wasn’t happening fast enough, and the use of the word ‘pig’ was for the purpose of making them think that Negroes were committing these crimes, because the Panthers and people like that are the ones that used the name ‘pig’ to mean the establishment, and that was the whole purpose of it, that Helter Skelter wasn’t happening fast enough, and Charlie was going to bring on the ruination of the world, and this is why all the murders were committed.

  “I asked you not to ask me these questions, Mr. Kanarek.”

  Having failed abysmally in their attempt to sell the copycat motive, the defense now switched to a new tactic. They called a number of psychiatrists to the stand, hoping to establish that LSD had affected the minds of the three female defendants to the extent that they were not responsible for their acts.

  It was not a real defense, but it could be made to seem a mitigating circumstance which, unless thoroughly rebutted, might tip the scales in favor of life imprisonment.

  Their first witness, Dr. Andre Tweed, professed to be an expert on LSD, but almost all of his testimony was contrary to that of acknowledged experts in the field.

  Tweed claimed he knew of one case where a youth while under LSD heard voices which told him to kill his mother and his grandmother, and he did just that. On the basis of this single, unidentified case, Tweed concluded that “people may perform homicidal acts while under the influence of LSD.” It was also his opinion, he said, that LSD probably caused brain damage.

  On cross-examination I brought out that Dr. Tweed had only talked to Patricia Krenwinkel for two hours. He had not read the trial transcripts or interviewed any of her friends or relatives. He had never done any controlled research in the field of LSD, had only lectured once on the subject, and had writte
n no papers on it. When I asked him why he considered himself an expert, he rather loftily replied: “What is an expert but what the beholder thinks he is from his experience? Many people consider me an expert, so I have accustomed myself to assuming that I am.”

  Q. “Do you consider Dr. Thomas Ungerleider of UCLA an expert in

  LSD?”

  A. “Yes, I do.”

  Q. “More than yourself?”

  A. “I am not in a position to judge that. I will leave that to others.”

  Q. “Do you consider Dr. Duke Fisher of UCLA an expert in the field of LSD?”

  A. “Yes.”

  I then brought out that the two men had written a paper entitled “The Problems of LSD in Emotional Disorders,” in which they concluded that “there is no scientific demonstrable evidence of organic brain damage caused by LSD.”

  Tweed now had to admit that was correct, as far as present evidence went.

  On December 24, 1969, Patricia Krenwinkel had been examined by a Mobile, Alabama, psychiatrist, a Dr. Claude Brown. Since Tweed had based his conclusions in part on Brown’s report, I was given a copy of it just prior to my cross-examination.

  It was a bombshell, as my next question to Dr. Tweed indicated:

  Q. “In forming your opinions with respect to Patricia Krenwinkel, did you take into consideration that she told Dr. Brown that on the night of the Tate murders Charles Manson told her to go along with Tex

  Watson?”

  After numerous objections and lengthy conferences at the bench, Dr. Tweed admitted that he had considered this. Still later, Patricia Krenwinkel was recalled to the stand, where, though she denied the truth of the statement, she admitted that she had told Dr. Brown that this was so.

  We now had a perfect score. Manson had called Sadie, Katie, and Leslie to the stand in an attempt to exonerate him. Instead, I had now proven that each of the three had previously told others that Manson was behind these murders.