Q: How did Mrs. Lunt react?
A: She started cursing at us. “Get the fuck outta here! This is a nice neighborhood!” Then Samson raised the rifle under her chin and fired once. Her hair blew up into the air.
Q: What was Ms. Kovac doing?
A: By then, half the building had called the cops and one was just arriving. He got out of the car with his pistol drawn, and Frodo ran to him screaming, “Murder! Murder!”
Q: Sergeant Steve Robey?
A: Yes. That’s who it was.
Q: How did he react to Ms. Kovac?
A: He looked Frodo over and held out his other arm. He was saying, “It’s okay, honey, I got ya” when she swung the bayonet and nearly decapitated him.
From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.
SIX KILLED IN U.N. SLAYFEST
Giant Assailant Nearly Shrugs Off Four U.N. Cops
Giggling Girl Accomplices Covered in Blood
From the New York Post, November 20, 1978.
By the following Wednesday morning, the attacks at the U.N. had been digested and excreted by the media, and the alleged assailants were already famous for their cheerful disregard for the seriousness of their situation.
They’d been caught literally red-handed. There were bloody finger- and footprints all over the scene, not to mention enormous handwriting exemplars on the walls. They’d been seen by two dozen witnesses. The police had seized Violet Wensinger’s bent bayonet, Libby Kovacs’s Buck knife and claw hammer, and Sam Englert’s .30-06 semi-automatic rifle. There was a sawed-off shotgun in the truck.
I remember tucking the New York Times under my arm in the elevator on the way to my office and thinking a few public defenders were about to have a bad Thanksgiving.
Then Robert Morgenthau called me into his office.
“Did you hear about this U.N. thing?”
I told him I had. “Those kids are in big trouble,” I added.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re in trouble with us. It’s your case.”
That made no sense. “Isn’t one of the victims the deputy ambassador? Wouldn’t that be a federal case?”
“There’s some ambiguity there, it seems. The State Department wants us to take it. Something about how they’d prefer this to seem like a problem with dirty old New York instead of the whole country. Plus if you blow it, they get another shot with federal charges.”
“What’s to blow? They’d have to be crazy not to plea out.”
“Funny you should say that,” Morgenthau said, handing me the first of ten thousand files we’d gather on the case.
From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.
Charlie didn’t read books all the way through, but he sure had a knack for finding the one or two things he could use from them, just like he did with people. One of his favorites was Illusions, by the same guy who wrote the one about the seagull. What Charlie took from it was that we create the world around us, and I’m not responsible for the world you’re creating around you.
“Life is an illusion, death is an illusion, money is an illusion. We make it all up to test ourselves, and if you’re bent out of shape by someone else’s illusion, you better check your own,” he told us once.
Rikers Island was no illusion, and Charlie’s absence from the visiting room was no illusion either. I was scared to death, and I had two things to hold onto: Frodo and a line from Illusions that went, “Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they’ll call you crazy.” So that’s why I laughed as much as I did for the cameras. That’s why I stared. That’s why I sang stupid songs. That’s why I held up my bloody hands in their cuffs and licked them.
I thought if everyone thought I was crazy, it meant I was really being brave.
From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.
Doubleday, 1981.
CHARLIE’S DEMONS
Slay Cult Girls Sing “You Light Up My Life” at Arraignment
Kovacs Claims Mysterious Man Will Save Them
From the New York Post, November 22, 1978.
Samuel Paul Englert, AKA Sam Englert, AKA Samson, wasn’t a docile prisoner. His long descent from his cocktail of drugs back to reality made him scream, shudder, and sweat so much that corrections officers had a hard time containing him. When they brought him to the mental health unit, he put his hands behind his head as though relaxing, just to show how he’d broken the cuffs hours ago.
Englert’s father, the pastor of the largest televised Sunday service in South Carolina, sent an attorney on a chartered jet within an hour of his son’s arrest. My interview with Sam at Rikers was four words.
Q: Hello, I’m—
A: Lawyer’s coming.
Elizabeth Mary Kovacs, AKA Libby Kovacs, AKA Frodo, was the most annoying prisoner ever contained in Rikers Island, which is saying something. She sang songs endlessly, mostly “We Are Family” and “Love Will Keep Us Together.” She sometimes stopped in the middle of whatever she was doing to show off a few disco moves, her shackles and handcuffs jangling. She flirted with the guards whatever their gender. She made lewd gestures and comments. She could make a continuous shrieking noise that seemed to come from a set of bottomless lungs. She sometimes spoke in tongues and gave four different names at her booking, including “Mary Magdalene” and “Eva Braun.”
We later discovered this was Charlie’s coaching: the best way to confound the authorities was to appear crazy. When I tried to interview her, she was in rare form.
Q: Hello, Libby. I’m Vince Cozzi from the DA’s office. This is Detective Kirchner.
A: Crack the case yet? I think those kids you arrested might be dangerous.
Q: You’re from Maine, aren’t you? Near Portland?
A: I’m from everywhere. I’m from inside you.
Q: But mostly from Maine, right? The reason I’m asking—
A: The rain in Maine stays plainly in the brain.
Q: —is that we can contact your family if you’d like.
A: Wonderful. Dad would be pleased I’ve gotten better at hand jobs than when I was six.
Q: Libby, if you’re the victim of a crime, we can have that looked into for you. But right now, you’re the perpetrator of one and we both know you aren’t crazy. An insanity plea is very difficult to prove, and if your lawyer suggests one, I’d caution you to reconsider. The best thing you can do now is help Detective Kirchner and me to understand what happened in your own words.
A: Frap frap. Meowly derg.
Q: What is that?
A: Those are my own words.
Q: This isn’t a game, Ms. Kovacs.
A: It will be when Charlie gets here.
Violet June Wensinger, AKA Violet Beauregard, AKA Aphrodite, was quieter than Libby but by no means silent. She sang in ragged harmony with her co-defendant, though she rarely finished a whole song. The expression in her mugshot is so dead that many of the guards later said she was the creepiest of the bunch, shut off from the world.
Q: Ms. Wensinger, I’m Vince Cozzi. This is Detective Kirchner. We’re here to talk to you about the other night.
A: My lawyer hasn’t come yet.
Q: Well, you don’t have to talk to us, but it would—
A: I hope he brings me something to drink.
Q: You want something to drink? We can get you something. There’s a machine outside. What’s your favorite?
To this day, I’m not sure why I used that word, a child’s word. Maybe there was something child-like about her. Maybe I was only hoping.
A: My favorite? You’re asking me what my favorite is?
Q: Yeah, what do you want?
A: I killed a person and you’re going to buy me my favorite?
That’s how I accidentally won the trust of our star witness.
F
rom Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.
I’d seen Charlie do magical things, not just recovering from that bullet. He could soothe pigeons in his hands and jump out of the way of traffic just in time. He could look into anyone’s heart, I thought, and he once stooped beside a blind beggar on the corner, held the man’s face in his hands, and said, “Brother, you can see again.” The man walked away without his cane.
I imagined Charlie drifting across the East River to Rikers like all those illustrations of Jesus after the resurrection in my children’s Bible. His hands would be open at his sides, and there’d be a serene expression on his face. The bars would peel back like shriveling weeds and the stone would crumble to dust.
None of that happened. One day passed and then another, and Charlie didn’t come for us. John Lennon was still alive and so was Andy Warhol, and nobody was strutting in the streets. Nothing was different. That’s what scared me the most: killing six people didn’t knock the whole Earth off its axis.
From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.
Doubleday, 1981.
It had to be frustrating for Charles Manson to be free while his followers became more famous than he was, their faces on TV and their words—his on loan to them—in the papers. A true revolutionary, the Che Guevara of the dance floor, might have declared himself with something big, a dramatic show of his deadly fervor. His natural cowardice and his ex-con’s skill for lying low won out in the end, and he sent Cookie Puss and Ziggy to do it instead.
On December 9, he sent Judy Moore and Christina Duffy to rent a U-Haul with a stolen credit card at Flatbush. Cookie Puss’s main qualification for the job was she could drive a stick shift, albeit poorly. Bill DeJardins, the rental clerk, winced as they lurched away with the grinding of gears. He recalled she was driving barefoot.
Their next stop was Dyno Fuel Oil where they bought five fifty-gallon drums of kerosene. Thuan Ngoc, sworn in as an American eighteen months earlier, wasn’t sure if it was suspicious for two girls to be buying so much, and he was skeptical of their story that they were stocking up for winter. He balked briefly, but then Ziggy told him (honestly) their boyfriend would be very upset if they didn’t come home with it. He made the sale.
Somewhere in an alley, Manson and his followers covered the panels of the truck with black house paint and wrote their magic words on the sides: DO IT TO IT, NIGHT FEVA, BURN THE MUTHA DOWN. They drew stars and moons on it, too, for luck.
At 11:24, the truck slowed to a stop in front of Studio 54. There was still a crowd waiting to get in even with the cold, and Steve Rubell was choosing his second wave of guests for the night.
When he saw the truck, he shouted, “If that thing isn’t full of bare asses, get it the fuck out of here!”
Cookie Puss jumped out of the passenger door, grinning and waving like a celebrity. She had a bottle of vodka in her hand.
From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.
When we saw two of Manson’s chicks get out all dressed in black, everybody was like, “These assholes again?”
They all saw the bottle but I saw the rag in the top, and when she flipped open the old Army Zippo, I knew shit was going down. I grabbed the girl I was trying to get into the club and faced her toward the wall with my back to the truck, and there was this big warm wave that rolled over all of us. People started screaming.
She doesn’t tell the story, but the girl was one I’d met at Dunkin Donuts named Madonna Ciccone.
Interview with Xavier “X-Man” Martinez. From “White Supremacists Can’t Dance: The Mediocre Music of Manson,” by Leslie Van Houten. Rolling Stone, December 1997.
DISCO INFERNO
Studio 54 Seared By Fire, 65 to Hospital with Burns
Two Assailants Dead; Possible Connection to U.N. Slay
From the New York Post, December 10, 1978.
Charles Manson didn’t expect there to be survivors of his truck bomb attack on Studio 54, and there might not have been if he’d remembered a key ingredient lost somewhere in his street explosives lore: fertilizer. Without it, the truck burst into flame and blew apart, but the only victims standing close enough to be swallowed wholly by the flames were Judy Moore and Christina Duffy.
Witnesses said they didn’t even run. NYPD found Duffy’s distinctive dental bridge from an ice skating accident in what was left of her blackened skull.
The many wounded were taken to Presbyterian, and the ones who could talk told detectives only a first name: Charlie. It was Steve Rubell, seated on a gurney without hair or eyebrows, who grabbed a uniformed officer by the collar and said, “His last name is Manson. It’s Charles Mother Fuckin’ Manson.”
From Night Fever: The Story of Charles Manson’s Assault on the World, by Vincenzo Cozzi (with Curt Gentry). W.W. Norton, 1980.
They did their best to keep us from talking to each other at Rikers, but Frodo got a message to me through a line of other prisoners. It came in a crossword puzzle from the paper, and it said, “Have faith in you and the things we do,” which was one of Charlie’s ways of telling us to keep our mouths shut when shit hit the fan, especially around cops. I’d been doing just that, no matter how nice Cozzi was to me.
It was a relief to hear from someone. After days and days, how many I couldn’t tell, and nobody had come to visit me. No Charlie, no Cookie Puss, no Ziggy. I had to learn why from a newspaper.
When I saw the Post with those pictures on the front page of stark white blankets over the only two corpses, I doubled over in my cell and threw up. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that in jail by then, but this time it didn’t seem to stop. It kept going and going until my stomach had nothing more, but even then, it surged like it wanted to come out, too.
To the world today, Cookie Puss was a crazy girl who died with her hand melted into the hand of another crazy girl, but to me, she was an almost miraculous friend, the one who taught me how to be a woman of the 70s instead of the 50s like my mother wanted. She took me to get birth control. She read me her plays, funny ones about people who found their own kind of love. She taught me how to say no to every man but Charlie.
If I’d met her first, I might not even have needed him.
Ziggy I didn’t know as well because she was the quiet observant type. Most people don’t know this, but she had one of those perfect memories; she could tell you the last thirty license plates she’d seen. She saw a lot more than most of us, and sometimes I think she just got all filled up with that pain and had nowhere to put it.
It’s funny the things you can think when there isn’t someone else’s beat in your heart. What I noticed most about those days was Charlie’s silence. When we killed those six people at U.N. Plaza, he said nothing. When John Lennon didn’t end up dead, he said nothing. When Cookie Puss and Ziggy burned, still nothing. For once, he wasn’t everywhere—he was nowhere. He was the Nowhere Man, like all the others who disappear when the rent needs to be paid or a period doesn’t come, as mine hadn’t since my arrest.
An emotion crept back inside me, one whose name I’d forgotten because only Charlie was allowed to feel it. Anger.
When Cozzi came for another of his visits later that night, he looked as though he hadn’t slept in about thirty-six hours. He wasn’t even wearing a tie.
“I won’t waste time with you, Violet. You’re the smartest one of the bunch. Is Charlie’s last name Manson?”
“Yes,” I said. The world should know his name.
“We’re going to find him, Violet,” Cozzi said, switching to a seat closer to mine at the interrogation table. “The difference is whether we find him by our surprise or his. If it’s ours, a lot more people could get killed.”
“If it’s his, it’ll be him?” I asked.
“We don’t want that to happen,” Cozzi said.
&nb
sp; I never knew the Bible as well as Charlie and Samson did; my faith was the Vacation Bible School kind, all songs about Zacchaeus and not keeping your light under a bushel. I did know the story of Judas, though, and Charlie told us once he was the hero of the whole Bible. He was the guy, after all, who made Jesus famous.
I said, “He’s hiding in the walls.”
From Disco Aphrodite: A Manson Girl Speaks Out from Prison, by Violet “Aphrodite” Wensinger.
Doubleday, 1981.
The lease had long lapsed on the so-called Safehouse, and the Family’s solution to this problem was novel, if terrifying. They simply slithered into the walls and maintenance areas like cockroaches, creating secret doors into every apartment where they helped themselves to food and cash (and the occasional nap or lay in a clean bed) with the residents seldom the wiser.
If you were a child in that building from 1978 to 1979 and saw a hairy monster in your closet, there’s a good chance that monster was Charles Manson.
This made the tactical situation difficult for NYPD officers but not impossible. They stormed the building of the Safehouse with their revolvers and shotguns drawn, and in Violet’s old apartment, they found a removable closet panel leading into the darkness. They chased a half dozen barefoot people to ground, ducking under rusted pipes and jumping over heaps of trash. Princess, Velveteen, and Slinky made it as far as the fire escape but no farther.
Officers did a floor-by-floor sweep of the building and might have never found Manson if Officer DePaoli hadn’t seen two sets of four filthy fingertips poking out from the top of the garbage chute. He motioned with the barrel of his gun and two other policemen took up positions at the sides.
“If it was up to me, I’d have crushed that dickhead’s fingers and let him slide down into the goddamned furnace,” DePaoli told me in his pre-trial interview. “But fuck it all, we’re supposed to be the good guys.”
Inside the chute they found a mop of greasy hair. DePaoli grabbed it and the face underneath grinned up at him like a child playing hide and seek.
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