The car that approached their house about 1 A.M. on August 10, 1969, was crowded with young killers. The four who had burst into the Tate estate were now joined by Leslie Van Houten—and by Charles Manson.
Manson was not at that time the bearded figure of evil who later became familiar to millions of Americans. He was clean-shaven, small and wiry. He slipped out of the car, holding a gun, and disappeared into the darkness toward the La Bianca house. Less than thirty minutes later he was back. “They’re ready,” he said.
“What happened?”
“A husband and wife are in there. I tied them up and told them, ‘Don’t worry. We don’t intend to hurt you.’”
Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkle and Leslie Van Houten left the car and walked quietly toward the La Bianca house, where a frightened businessman and his wife had been promised that no one would hurt them.
At 11 A.M. the next day, I was performing the autopsy on Sharon Tate, while two of my associates autopsied the other victims. I studied the sixteen stab wounds in Tate’s body with special care because I had been told by police that the knives employed in the orgy of murder had been taken away by the killers so that they could not be connected to the crime. But the murderers didn’t know that an accurate description of those knives could be created by forensic science.
By techniques of wound analysis, forensic scientists can discover not only the measurements of a knife but its precise shape. Further, we can tell whether it is single- or double-edged, whether its tip is pointed or curved and whether its blade is grooved like a hunting knife.
I first measured the entrance of one of the wounds in Tate’s body, which gave me the width and breadth of the blade. Then I looked for bruises on the surface of the skin at the point of entry. Such bruises would indicate that the handle of the knife had struck the body when the victim was stabbed, which meant that the entire blade had entered the wound. Therefore, in those wounds with bruises on the surface, I could discover the actual length of the knife by the depth of the wound.
The next step was to squeeze barium-sulfate paste into each wound until it filled the crevice. Then I made X-ray photographs of them, which, in conjunction with a close examination of the wounds, would enable me to tell police not only the exact dimensions of the knife that had killed Sharon Tate, but the interesting added information that it was double-edged, with a pointed tip.
Later, in court, that forensic evidence would prove to be important, because the murder weapon was never found. Linda Kasabian, who turned state’s evidence, described it from memory, recalling that the length of the blade was between five and a half and six and a half inches. My autopsy showed that the knife was five inches long. She also testified that the width was about one inch; my report stated from one to one and a half inches. The thickness also matched. And then came the clincher. Kasabian testified that the knife had been sharpened on both sides and had a pointed tip, the exact knife I had described.
In sum, the weapon that had killed Sharon Tate and a second knife used in the murders, which was identified by the same process, were established to the satisfaction of the jury, even though the killers thought they had disposed of them.
During my autopsy, I also discovered that bones had been struck by some of the knife thrusts into the bodies of the victims. At the trial, Kasabian testified that Patricia Krenwinkle had told her at the time of the murders that her hand ached from her knife striking bones. Thus another autopsy finding substantiated the verbal evidence of the state’s witness.
But all that was in the future. On the morning of August 11, still completely mystified by the killings, I again noted the abrasion on Tate’s cheek and pondered the enigma of the semihanging. At that moment an aide approached me, interrupting the autopsy. “Dr. Noguchi, a telephone call from Homicide. They say it’s urgent.”
“Urgent?”
I picked up the telephone and discovered that what I had feared earlier had come true. The killers had struck again—and once more there were symbols of a ritual murder.
Leno La Bianca was found lying on his back between a couch and a chair, dead from twenty-six stab wounds. But he too had been symbolically hanged, with a bloody pillowcase used as a hood over his head. A cord knotted around his throat was attached to a large, heavy lamp, and his hands were tied behind his back with a leather thong. An ivory-handled carving fork had also been used to stab him, and it was left protruding from his stomach.
His wife, Rosemary La Bianca, lay on the bedroom floor in a short pink nightgown and a blue dress with white stripes. The nightgown and the dress had been shoved up over her head by her killers. Stab wounds punctured her back and buttocks. She too was hooded in a pillowcase, and she had been “hanged” with a wire attached to a lamp.
“WAR” had been carved on the woman’s abdomen. On the walls of the living room were written in blood “DEATH TO PIGS” and “RISE.” And in the kitchen, on the refrigerator door, were the words “HELTER SKELTER.”
The connections between the Tate and La Bianca murders were unmistakable to me—and to the press as well, as soon as the details were known. Their headlines trumpeted that relationship and plunged all of suburban Los Angeles into panic. Sales of guns for home defense quadrupled, guard dogs were purchased, and human bodyguards were hired, as residents feared there were killers on the loose who were slaughtering not only show-business figures but ordinary people as well.
However, the Los Angeles Police Department did not believe there was any connection at all between the two crimes. Inspector K. J. McCauley told the press, “I don’t see any connection between this murder and the other. They’re too widely removed. I just don’t see any tie-up.”
And a sergeant told reporters, “There is a similarity, but whether it’s the same suspect or a copycat we just don’t know.”
There were valid reasons for the LAPD disbelief in a connection:
1. There was no apparent link between the two sets of victims, who were completely different from each other, one from the glamorous movie world, the other from business.
2. Robbery had occurred in the La Bianca case (Rosemary’s wallet with cash and credit cards) but not in the Tate case.
3. Police detectives were hot on the trail of suspected drug dealers in the Tate case, while the La Biancas used no drugs at all.
The La Bianca killings were different in many crucial ways from the Tate murders. But to me the symbolic hangings and the words scrawled in blood at the scene of both crimes seemed to provide a significant, if puzzling, connection. The word “PIG” at the Tate house might have been written by a black drug dealer, as the LAPD believed. But at the La Biancas’ the killers had also scrawled “RISE” and “HELTER SKELTER.” What did those words have to do with drugs? Rather, they seemed to suggest the hand of a terrorist or revolutionary group.
For advice, I turned to Dr. Frederick Hacker, the psychiatrist who had recently testified in my defense before the Civil Service Commission, and who was one of the world’s leading authority on terrorism, its roots and its rites. He had published many articles and books on the subject and had been employed as a consultant in the terrorism field by both government and private sectors. It occurred to me that an expert such as Dr. Hacker, from his vast experience with terrorist groups, might discover an insight into these strange and violent murders.
I called Dr. Hacker to my office and told him it appeared that there was a common thread to the Tate and La Bianca killings. He was immediately fascinated, and I said I would give him copies of all the evidence and documentation I had, from the autopsy reports to the investigators’ findings at the scenes of both murders. At my request, he readily agreed to volunteer as a consultant on these cases as a public service.
In our conversation we touched on several facts that seemed significant—in particular, the use of a wire cutter to snip the telephone lines to the Tate house, which indicated planning and that the victims weren’t killed in a spontaneous frenzy. The rope over the beam and the towel on S
ebring’s head also intrigued Hacker, as did the word “PIG” on the door.
Ten days later he filed his report, and it was a stunner. Dr. Hacker, from his distinctive experience, saw a possible connection between the two crimes much more sinister than anyone could have imagined. These are some excerpts from his report:
It must be assumed that the [actual perpetrator’s] helpers … were in a state of mind compatible with planning and at least a limited amount of anticipation of difficulties and premeditation (see cutting of wires, complicated rope arrangement, … keeping the victims controlled while the slaying went on, etc.) …
The bizarre features of the multiple crime certainly suggest severe psychopathology of the killers … (the possibility that an interested party might have hired impulsively sadistic killers cannot be excluded).
It is conceivable that the personality of the actual killer was quite different from those of his helpers and that … one party … carried out the preparations and precautionary measures while the other party or parties actually perpetrated the crimes… .
Thus, weeks before Charles Manson was found, Dr. Hacker predicated the existence of a man not even present at the scenes of the crimes, who had sent his “impulsively sadistic killers” to do his murdering. Hacker’s report also went on to say that “the criminals might be looked for among fringe pseudo-religious groups”—a prophetic description of the cult of which Manson was the pseudogod.
Finally, in what I considered to be one of his most brilliant insights, Dr. Hacker said that the criminals might be a group of former associates of the victims who believed themselves “rejected, thwarted, cheated by one or more of the victims and who took revenge in this fashion.”
Manson and his followers were eventually tried for the brutal slayings in Bel-Air and Los Feliz. Vincent Bugliosi, an extremely capable deputy district attorney, and his superior, Aaron Stovitz, head of the trials division, prosecuted the case against them. Bugliosi placed a cot in his office, working around the clock for months to secure their conviction. And the motive he ascribed to Manson was based on the words “Helter Skelter.” In Bugliosi’s statement at the trial,
The evidence will show that one of Manson’s principal motives for these seven savage murders was to ignite Helter Skelter; in other words, start the black-white revolution by making it look as though the black man had murdered these seven Caucasian victims. In his twisted mind he thought this would … ultimately [lead] to a civil war between blacks and whites… . Manson envisioned that black people, once they destroyed the entire white race, would be unable to handle the reins of power because of inexperience and would therefore have to turn over those reins to those white people who had escaped from Helter Skelter—i.e. Charles Manson and his Family.
Dr. Hacker’s theories and my own study of the case have led me to conclude that Manson had a different motive. Why did he choose Sharon Tate’s residence for the orgy of murder? I believe that the pseudogod chose that particular house for a very mortal reason: symbolic revenge for a failed musical career. And after he had turned his worshiping cultists loose on Sharon Tate and her friends, the La Bianca murders were purely random, committed only to throw police off the real “revenge” trail at 10050 Cielo Drive.
Among the reports that crossed my desk as I was investigating the case, I found an odd fact that seemed to corroborate a motive of revenge. August 9, 1969, the date of the Tate massacre, was the exact anniversary of the day, one year before, when Manson made his first and only real step up the ladder as a rock-music singer. On that day he appeared at a studio in Van Nuys and recorded songs on tape, at the behest of a talent scout, Gregg Jakobsen.
Things must have looked bright for Manson that morning. Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys had not only befriended him but had allowed Manson and some of his followers to live in his mansion on Sunset Boulevard and hobnob with movie stars at parties. Even better, Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, had “promised” to produce a record album starring Charles Manson.
Terry Melcher lived at 10050 Cielo Drive.
But after the recording session, Melcher, according to Manson and his followers, reneged on his “promise.” Melcher has always said that it was all a misunderstanding. He made no such commitment. But, whatever happened, Manson’s musical “career” began to collapse right there. A year later, down and out in a dirty commune on a shabby “ranch,” the glory days of Hollywood and fame as a rock singer denied him forever, he decided to strike back at the Hollywood society that had coldly rejected him. And I believe he chose not only a special anniversary day for his revenge, but also a special house: 10050 Cielo Drive, where his “sponsor” and symbol of his betrayal, Terry Melcher, had lived, and where Manson had visited.
At his trial, Tex Watson testified, “Manson told me to take the gun and knife and go up to where Terry Melcher used to live. He said to kill everybody in the house as gruesome as I could.” And by “gruesome,” Watson said, Manson meant that “witchery” should be included. That was why their orgy of killing included the strange “hanging” of Tate and Sebring and the bloody message scrawled on the door.
Thus, neither Manson’s choice of day nor his choice of house was coincidental. The tragic coincidence was that Sharon Tate, lovely and pregnant, and three of her friends were in the house that night. They died with barefoot, lank-haired young girls brutally thrusting knives into their bodies, girls programmed by a “god” who, I believe, was more mortal than they knew. He craved success on earth.
7
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Medical Examiner’s Case No. 70-10463
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Janis Joplin
Barney’s Beanery was a famous late-night restaurant in Hollywood. The menu was modest, the prices were cheap, and the ambience was almost always electric with the presence of celebrated Hollywood stars.
Janis Joplin and band member Ken Pearson were at the bar on the night of October 4, 1970. Joplin was sipping vodka and orange juice. The two of them had just returned from a Hollywood recording studio, where they had listened to tapes which were to be included in Joplin’s new album, “Pearl.”
Shortly after midnight, Pearson drove Joplin to the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood, where the band was staying. Joplin told him she was enthusiastic about the new album. In fact, all evening she had been in a cheerful mood. Pearson didn’t know that one reason for her high spirits was that at four o’clock that afternoon Joplin had been visited by her drug connection. Now the two of them went to their separate rooms. Joplin’s was on the first floor. Less than half an hour later she emerged from her room and reentered the lobby, where she told a clerk she needed change for a five-dollar bill to buy some cigarettes.
The clerk would later tell police that she spoke casually to him and seemed perfectly natural. In fact, it’s not known definitely at what time that night Janis Joplin plunged a needle into her arm, injecting a lethal dose of heroin into her blood. Sometimes there is a delay in the reaction, and it’s medically possible, but unlikely, that she had already injected herself before the visit to the lobby and the informal chat with the clerk. But when the time came, the heroin took savage effect and Joplin crumpled to the floor beside her bed, her body, clad in a nightgown, wedged against a bedside table.
Three weeks earlier a male rock star, Jimi Hendrix, had OD’d in a London apartment. And the deaths of these two stars, one following so closely after the other, stunned their legion of fans. A New York Times writer began his article on Joplin: “God, what a year this is turning out to be… . the king and the queen of the gloriously self-expressive music that came surging out of the late sixties are dead, the victims, directly or indirectly, of the very real physical excesses that were part of the world that surrounded them.”
The “Queen of Rock,” now a drug victim, was born in Port Arthur, Texas, where, she later said, she was a “misfit.” “I read, I painted. I didn’t hate niggers. Man, those people back home hurt me.”
From the first she loved music, collecting
Bessie Smith records and singing at charity functions around town. But she had never sung professionally at all when she received a telephone call from a friend, Travis Rivers, in San Francisco. He had formed a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis Joplin joined the group in Haight-Ashbury, and a legend was born.
From the start her animal vitality dominated her audiences. Foot-stomping, arm-waving, gyrating her hips, she energized her young listeners and sent them into a frenzy. As she told a Reuters reporter later, “I couldn’t believe it, all that rhythm and power. I got stoned just feeling it, like it was the best dope in the world. It was so sensual, so vibrant, loud, crazy. I couldn’t stay still; I had never danced when I sang, but there I was moving and jumping. I couldn’t help myself, so I sang louder and louder. By the end I was wild.”
Somewhere along the way Joplin was introduced to hard drugs and became a user. According to her friends, at the time of her death she was fighting the habit, and had actually stayed off drugs for weeks before beginning the injections again.
What would cause a later controversy was the fact that Joplin had not injected a great amount of heroin into her veins that night. Indeed, at an insurance trial in 1974 related to her death it was stated that the amount of heroin was not overwhelmingly large. Why, then, did Janis Joplin die?
I supervised Janis Joplin’s autopsy, where evidence of multiple old punctures was found in the veins of her arms. When a needle is injected into a vein it causes a minute injury, and after it has healed a tiny, almost microscopic indentation can be observed in the vein. There were many of those—and one fresh puncture which had not healed.
We sent Joplin’s blood to the toxicological laboratory to be tested for drugs, which we believed were almost certainly the cause of her death. And since there was no evidence that anyone had been with her either shortly before or at the time of her death, we also believed that the lethal drugs had been self-injected. But then we received word that no drugs had been found in her room. Thus there arose the possibility of an accomplice in Joplin’s death. And was it the result of an accidental overdose or murder?
The Coroner Series Page 11