The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  One day, Mr. Whitehouse and I were leaving the visiting room at the same time. Our timing was bad. The security door behind us locked as did the gate in front of us, trapping us together for about twenty minutes while the guards did a count and performed various other security checks. Since there were only two of us there with nothing else to do, I seized the opportunity to get some information. I asked him how he’d met Susan. He told me that after he’d read Helter Skelter about ten years before, he started writing to her. (I couldn’t imagine what part of Susan’s story enticed him. Surely not her dialogue with the dying Sharon Tate. I didn’t ask. He was wearing what appeared to be religious medals around his neck, so maybe that was the source of her allure.)

  “Do you attend Harvard Law School?” I asked, pointing to the front of his gray sweatshirt that had that emblazoned on the chest. It seemed so improbable that I expected he would tell me it had been a gift from a relative or friend.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m going there now.” My next assumption was that it had to be a different Harvard Law School—a knockoff perhaps? Harvard Law School of Anaheim? “Oh,” I said, “and where is that located?” He looked puzzled, the kind of puzzled one looks when someone you think is of average intelligence turns out to be dim-witted.

  “Cambridge,” he said. I must have looked confused and evidently it showed. “You know, in Massachusetts.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course. How did you happen to get interested in the law?” I expected that he’d answer something about Susan’s legal situation.

  “I was a biochemist,” he said, “and one day decided, just for the hell of it, to take the law school admission test.”

  (He was knocking over each of my assumptions, one by one, like so many dominoes. If ever there was an example of the journalist’s warning—to assume makes an ass out of you and me—this dialogue was it. My assumptions, however, were making a total ass out of me alone. He was fine.)

  Mr. Whitehouse told me that he’d scored so well on the LSAT he decided to apply to Harvard. (I couldn’t help myself. The next day I called Harvard Law School to verify. Yes, he indeed was in his second year.)

  “What kind of law do you plan to practice?” I asked.

  “Patent law,” he answered.

  A subtle version of my next question—how in the hell are you going to help Susan get out of prison with patent law?—was forming in my head when he said, “You know, one of the reasons I don’t like coming here is that people in the visiting room constantly ask me legal questions.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling, “I guess it’s not surprising that people in prison have legal questions.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said stiffly, “but I get tired of telling them that A, I don’t know very much about criminal law and B, I’m not familiar with California law, because I go to school in Massachusetts.” He didn’t bother hiding the exasperation in his voice.

  I was so very tempted to suggest that perhaps he should rethink his choice of sweatshirts when visiting his wife. I did not.

  chapter twenty-three

  AN ABIDING FRIEND TO FAMILIES OF VICTIMS

  October 1996

  Courtrooms divide much the way weddings do—family and friends of the accused on one side, family and friends of the victim on the other. Since I was there to observe the prosecutor, Stephen Kay, I sat on the victim side, in the row behind the victim’s parents.

  Whenever I saw Steve in those days the word (or, rather, non-word) “erectitude” came to mind—someone even taller and straighter than the word “rectitude” conveys. Not quite the farmer in American Gothic, but if I were looking for a guy to help me portray the deacon of a Presbyterian church in Iowa in the 1950s, I’d pick Steve. If I’d been on the jury that day, I would have trusted his honesty.

  The victim was Linda Sobek, a twenty-seven-year-old model and former Oakland Raider cheerleader; the accused was Charles Rathbun, a thirty-nine-year-old freelance Hollywood photographer being tried for the brutal sexual assault and murder of Sobek during a photo shoot in November 1995 on a dry lakebed near Palmdale, California.

  Mr. and Mrs. Sobek sat calmly as the judge dispensed with what is generally known as housekeeping. I was struck, as I always am at trials like these, at the coexistence of a dramatic brutal murder and the inevitable backdrop of the quotidian details of everyday life. No matter that the issue at hand is a violent death, meals must be arranged, parking laws must be enforced, pleasantries are still exchanged. Life does go on.

  After the housekeeping came the horror. The session opened with a dramatic reenactment of the prosecution’s version of the murder. (Rathbun claimed that the victim died in an accident and that he panicked and left the body in the desert because he didn’t think anyone would believe his version. In fact, no one did, at least no one who counted.)

  Steve had arranged for a young woman with long blond hair—a staff member from the district attorney’s office—to play the part of the victim; the medical examiner played the part of the accused. The young woman arranged herself facedown in the area of the floor right in front of the jury. The medical examiner grabbed her long hair, yanked her head back to expose the creamy skin on her throat, and then simulated choking her. It was horribly realistic and dreadful to witness and clearly an unbearable moment for Linda’s mother, who was now hunched over, her head buried in her arms, her shoulders heaving as she wept.

  Of course I thought of the Tate family and what they had endured: photos of their daughter’s butchered body; Susan Atkins’s account of Sharon begging for her life and the life of her unborn child. As a parent, how do you bear it? The sounds? The sights? The ones that are captured by the camera? The ones that are captured in your head?

  As an unequivocal friend to the families of victims, Steve Kay is a man who thinks solely in terms of good and evil, black and white. He is not interested in psychological causes, except as they relate to constructing a motive by which to convict the accused. And that day, observing Linda Sobek’s mother’s most palpable pain, watching the simulated murder and imagining the photos of Linda Sobek’s body parts, I was grateful for the Steve Kays of our criminal justice system. Linda Sobek’s family depended on his advocacy, and I have to believe it provided comfort. Rathbun, the man Steve Kay called a “human monster,” needed to answer for the torture, the terrible pain he had caused. During the adjudication of the crime, there was no room for putting him, his needs, or his history into a human context. “Monster” isn’t a term I would use, but I could certainly understand why the Sobek family might agree with Steve’s use of it.

  (Note: Rathbun was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.)

  chapter twenty-four

  THE AGONY OF MOTHERS

  1996

  As I sat watching Mrs. Sobek struggle to control her sobbing, I thought about the agony suffered by Doris Tate as well as the pain of mothers of murdered children I’d interviewed over the years. One mother in particular had taught me about the enduring nature of that category of grief. I spent time with the mother of a ten-year-old little girl who was kidnapped and murdered by a man who worked as a janitor in her church. I interviewed her several years after the fact, and she was still trying to claim a scrap of a normal life for herself. She told me that in the first few years after the murder, she compulsively talked about her daughter and the crime, repeating over and over and over again the details to her friends and family. And when she had exhausted them, when the people who loved her said they couldn’t listen anymore, she took her case to strangers, showing her daughter’s photos to people she met on buses, in parks, in bars.

  She eventually found her way to a therapist; actually, the therapist found her. After reading an article in the local newspaper in which the mother expressed her anguish and talked about the difficulty of moving on, the therapist called her and offered to provide her with therapy free of charge for as long as she needed it. (I am overwhelmed with hope for humanity whenever I think about that
therapist. I believe she saved that woman’s life.) When the mother told the therapist that her family and friends had warned that her obsessive talking about her daughter wasn’t helping, the therapist said that though the retelling was hard on the listener, it could, in fact, help the talker—one person’s spinning of wheels is another person’s healing process. People respond to tragedy in as many ways as there are people, she said.

  It’s impossible to overstate the pain suffered by parents who have lost a child to violence. For most parents in that situation, the need to bear witness to that pain is so compelling and, according to the experts, such a necessary part of the healing process that it’s shocking that it took the Tate-LaBianca murders to shake the system into creating a place for it in criminal proceedings.

  In the first years after her daughter was murdered, Doris Tate’s way was to suffer in silence. Her way was not to obsessively retell the story of the murder. She did not show strangers photos of her daughter or recount anecdotes from her daughter’s life. She did not roam shopping malls in hopes of buttonholing sympathetic listeners. Her pain was locked away and so was she. In the years after the murders, she virtually checked out of her life. Her two remaining daughters—Patti and Debra—not only lost a big sister, they lost a mother.

  What I know about this I learned from her daughter, Patti Tate, who I interviewed four years before she died; it was a meeting Steve Kay helped arrange. At the time she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She was wearing a scarf because she had lost her hair to chemotherapy, but even without the blond tresses I had seen in photos, her resemblance to Sharon was unmistakable. She had the same luminous blue eyes, peachy complexion, and sweet, open face—a face, however, that clouded over when she talked about her memories of the painful years after Sharon’s murder.

  She said that she and her younger sister Debra were in desperate need of a mother’s strength and support at a time when her mother was unable to give it. “Murders have a ripple effect on a family,” she said. “It’s not one loss.” She likened it to a stone dropped in a lake. “The ripples keep going and going and going.”

  As we sat talking in her den, her son, a boy about eleven with the same blue eyes and peachy complexion, brought her a glass of water so she could take a mound of pills she had in a small glass bowl. How hard this illness must be for you, I thought. Her boy was about the same age she was when her own mother suffered a kind of death that made her unavailable emotionally for years.

  Doris Tate did return to the land of the living, a return Patti credited to Steve Kay. In 1982 he called her with a proposal. A group called Friends of Leslie had presented parole officials with nine hundred signatures urging Leslie’s release. He pleaded with Doris Tate to get involved. And get involved she did. With the help of the National Enquirer, which printed coupons for people to sign and send, she collected 352,000 signatures opposing parole for not only Leslie but for all of the Tate-LaBianca killers.

  This kicked off Doris Tate’s decade-long involvement in all manner of victims’ rights. She joined the Los Angeles chapter of Parents of Murdered Children, a group that worked on Proposition 8, the 1982 Victims’ Rights Bill, which allowed families of victims to address the judge and/or the jury during the penalty phase of trials and at the parole hearings of their victimizers. Doris Tate became the first Californian to take advantage of the provision when she spoke at the parole hearings of Susan Atkins and then Tex Watson. (At that point, she was not allowed to speak at Leslie’s parole hearing because Leslie wasn’t involved in the murder of Sharon Tate. Tate’s other daughter, Debra, recently got around that restriction by getting herself appointed a spokesperson for the LaBianca relatives.)

  For the rest of her life—Doris died of a brain tumor in 1992—she became a powerful influence on the California legislature. When she talked, lawmakers listened because she was able to mobilize thousands of constituents. Steve Kay and Doris Tate were pioneers together: she was the first relative and he was the first prosecutor the state allowed to participate in parole hearings.

  Mrs. Tate subsequently got involved with the Victim Offender Reconciliation and Justice for Homicide Victims groups. The program, which still exists, brings offenders face-to-face with victims of their crimes or with victims of other people’s crimes. The goal is to demonstrate to criminals the human consequences of their actions with the hope that such exposure will deter them from further violence. For victims, the hope is that the opportunity to express their anguish will help with the healing process.

  I never met Doris Tate, but I saw video of her talking to prisoners as part of that program. She was impressive. She had a Barbara Bush no bullshit bearing, but it was softened by a quasi-nurturing demeanor. I say “quasi” because she seemed like someone who would offer a shoulder for you to cry on, but after helping you dry your tears, she might deliver a lecture on how you brought the troubles on yourself. The way she connected with those men was powerful. She got them to take responsibility for the harm they had caused and did so in a way that also exposed their basic humanity. But as the years went by, she focused more and more on punishment and less and less on reconciliation. She amped up her advocacy for capital punishment and her emphasis on stripping prisoners of their rights.

  The current family website, presumably now run by Debra Tate, the youngest sister, refers to these activities as prison reform. Their prison reform, which was the result of a letter writing and phone call campaign, included legislation to rescind overnight family visits for violent offenders. Again, this effort was successful. On the one hand, it’s understandable why the family was enraged that Tex Watson could father four children in prison. On the other, depriving Pat and Leslie of visits with their parents is quite another thing.

  Overnight visits, also known as Extended Family Visits, were originally instituted in California because studies showed that behavior improved in prisons after adopting the practice. (This privilege is a powerful incentive to follow the rules.) These visits also strengthen family bonds, an important factor when and if an inmate is paroled. The practice was suspended for a few years and then reinstated but not for inmates serving time for violent crimes. As of this writing, the Department of Corrections has not stated a clear policy for that population.

  Since I first started visiting Pat and Leslie, victim rights groups have succeeded in stripping prisoners of rights and services, many of which were hard won over the past thirty years and accepted as standard practice in enlightened prison systems. Some of what’s been taken away may seem trivial—Leslie can no longer dye her hair—and some not so trivial, such as individual therapy.

  chapter twenty-five

  HOMECOMING PRINCESS

  December 1997

  The visiting room was crowded and Leslie wanted to smoke, the one addiction she hadn’t yet managed to shake, so we sat outside. (She has since quit.) It was mild but breezy and there were lots of kids buzzing around the picnic tables. If you blurred your eyes a bit, you could imagine that we were in a suburban park. Well, blurred your eyes and held your nose. The breeze, though light, was blowing the smell of cow shit right into our faces and, I feared, cow shit particulates into our noses. I briefly considered taking up smoking myself.

  Every once in a while an inmate would stop to say hello or to introduce Leslie to a visitor. Her reaction was always animated, her eyes eager and bright. There was something poignant about her lively cordiality even under those bleak circumstances. She acknowledged that she had periods of depression, especially in connection to the endless cycle of parole hearings, but clearly her temperament’s set point is one of good spirits.

  When I asked her about her childhood before her parents’ divorce, she described a picture-perfect suburban family: a community-minded, churchgoing mom and dad; well-adjusted, healthy kids living in a comfortable house with a swimming pool. At some point, Leslie’s parents wanted to share their good fortune and adopted two children from Korea. And then, when Leslie was fourteen, the carefully
constructed life crumbled. Her father left the family. There was, of course, another woman.

  Before the divorce, Leslie was active, high-achieving, and socially successful. She’d been a Bluebird, a Campfire Girl, and later a Job’s Daughter. She sang in the church choir. She was a talented seamstress and started designing and sewing her own clothes when she was in junior high school. In high school she was elected Homecoming Princess and student body secretary.

  Once her father left, her mother, who had been a stay-at-home mom, went back to work and could no longer greet her kids when they arrived home from school. One day, instead of her mother greeting her with brownies fresh from the oven, Leslie came home and found her older brother and his friend drying marijuana leaves in the oven. She said she wanted to try it. He said no. “I blackmailed him. I said if he didn’t let me try it, I’d tell Mom he was smoking dope. He relented.

  “From almost the first hit, I was a goner. I loved getting high. I didn’t have a take-it-or-leave-it response. I now know better than anyone the terrible toll drugs can take but as a teenager, fun was my priority.”

  At school, she’d always been part of the college-bound elite, but her newly acquired drug use separated her from the friends with whom she’d grown up. While they governed the student body, rallied at football games, and studied for their SATs, Leslie got stoned. Another factor separating her from her old friends was a boy named Bobby Mackey, who transferred from another schoo1. Bobby, a bit of a bad boy, was just enough of an outlaw to appeal to the newly discovered thrill-seeking part of her. She and Bobby smoked grass, they took LSD, they had sex, and they soon decided that they had outgrown the boring blocks of Monrovia.