by Ray Black
They were soon on the move again, back to Topanga Canyon. In a canary-yellow building that Manson called the Yellow Submarine, he finessed his vision and began to call the impending apocalypse ‘Helter Skelter’ after a track on the White Album. The Family would be safe while the killing was going on, he said; they would go into hiding in ‘the bottomless pit’, a secret city beneath Death Valley.
He decided that they should write an album of songs that would send coded messages out, triggering the turmoil he had predicted. They invited Terry Melcher to come to the house to hear the songs. Melcher failed to turn up and Manson was furious.
In March 1969, Manson paid a visit to a house at 10050 Cielo Drive. He thought Melcher lived there, but the record producer had actually moved out and since February it had been leased by film director Roman Polanski and his pregnant young wife, the actress Sharon Tate. Manson was told that Melcher had decamped.
A few months later, on the night of August 9, Manson unleashed Helter Skelter. He had come to the conclusion that he would have to show the blacks the way and ordered Family members Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Linda Kasabian to go to Cielo Drive and ‘totally destroy everyone in it as gruesome as you can.’
Arriving at the quiet, secluded house, they cut the phone lines and climbed into the grounds. A car’s headlights approached and Watson instructed the girls to hide in some bushes. Pulling out a gun, he shot dead the car’s driver. It was eighteen-year-old Stephen Parent, who had been visiting William Garretson, a caretaker living in the nearby guest-house on the property. Watson then cut a hole in a screen at an open window and told Kasabian to wait at the gate. He and the two other girls climbed in through the window.
Wojciech Frykowski, a friend of Polanski, was wakened from sleep on the couch in the living room. ‘I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business,’ Watson chillingly told him. The other occupants of the house were rounded up: Tate, Jay Sebring, America’s top men’s hair stylist and twenty-five-year-old Abigail Folger, an heiress to a coffee fortune.
Watson tied Tate’s and Sebring’s necks together and threw the other end of the rope over a beam so that they would choke if they tried to escape. Folger went to get her purse and they took the seventy dollars she had in it. Watson then stabbed Folger a number of times. Frykowski had freed his hands from the towel they had used to tie him up and tried to escape but Watson hit him on the head a number of times with his gun and then shot him twice. At this point, Kasabian appeared, trying to bring a halt to proceedings, saying that someone was coming.
Folger ran to the pool area where Krenwinkel stabbed her repeatedly along with Watson. Frykowski, trying to crawl across the lawn, was also stabbed by Watson. He was found later to have fifty-one stab wounds. Meanwhile, in the house, Sharon Tate was pleading for her life and that of her unborn baby. Atkins told her she did not care about her or her baby and she and Watson stabbed her sixteen times.
Manson had asked them to leave a sign when they left. So Atkins grabbed a towel and wrote the word ‘pig’ on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood.
The following night it was the turn of Leno LaBianca, a supermarket executive, and his wife Rosemary. This time Manson went himself, ‘to show them how to do it’.
They broke in and woke the sleeping couple, covering their heads with pillow cases. Manson left at this point and instructed Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten to go into the house and kill the couple. Watson began stabbing Leno with a chrome-plated bayonet, but in the bedroom Rosemary was putting up a fight. Watson stabbed her, however, and she fell. Returning to the living room, he carved ‘war’ on Leno’s stomach. In the bedroom, Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary with a kitchen knife and Watson ordered Van Houten to stab her, too. Rosemary LaBianca received a total of forty-one stab wounds.
Krenwinkel wrote ‘Rise’ and ‘Death to pigs’ on the walls and misspelled ‘Healther Skelter’ on the refrigerator door, using the couple’s blood. She stabbed Leno’s corpse a further fourteen times, leaving a carving fork sticking out of his stomach. She stuck a steak knife in his neck.
Bizzarely, the LAPD did not link the Tate and LaBianca murders. They thought the Tate case was probably the result of a drug deal gone wrong and they even ignored connections with a group of hippies led by ‘a guy named Charlie’. Neither did they link them with the murder of Gary Hinman, whom, with the help of other Family members, Bobby Beausoleil had murdered a few weeks previously.
It was not until the end of August that the team investigating the LaBianca case enquired about similar crimes. They learned of the Hinman killing and how the words ‘Political piggy’ had been written on the wall in the victim’s blood. If LAPD had paid attention to LA sheriff’s office detectives, they would have learned that Beausoleil, known to have been hanging out with Manson’s group, had been arrested.
Finally, it began to be clear that the two cases were connected and it was decided to investigate the similarities with the Hinman case. The investigation led straight back to the Family and Charles Manson.
In October, the desert ranches were raided and a couple of dozen people, including Manson, were arrested. Meanwhile, Susan Atkins confessed to detectives that she had been involved in the Hinman killing and she also told the women with whom she shared a cell in prison what had been going on.
Warrants were issued for Watson, Krenwinkel and Kasabian in the Tate case and they were noted as suspects in the LaBianca case. Soon, after Kasabian had handed herself in to police, they were all under arrest. Kasabian had not taken part in the actual killings and was granted immunity in exchange for testifying against the others.
The girls tried to twist their stories to take all the blame themselves and spare Charlie, but, on January 25, 1971, Manson, Krenwinkel and Atkins were found guilty of all seven charges of murder and Leslie Van Houten was found guilty of two counts of murder. Watson was found guilty on all seven counts later in the year. They were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life after the US Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972.
But at least they had been stopped before their mayhem was able to spread further. Susan Atkins told her cellmates that other celebrities on their list included Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Tom Jones.
She told them she had planned to carve the words ‘helter skelter’ on Elizabeth Taylor’s face with a red-hot knife. Then she would gouge her eyes out. Richard Burton was to be castrated and his penis and Taylor’s eyes were to be put in a bottle and mailed to Eddie Fisher, Taylor’s ex-husband. Sinatra was to be skinned alive while his own music played; the Family would then make purses from his skin and sell them. Tom Jones would have his throat slit, but only after having sex with Atkins.
As a bizarre footnote to the story, a Family member, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975.
Edmund Emil Kemper III: The Co-ed Killer
Edmund Emil Kemper III had always been a little odd, but had been behaving increasingly strangely since the break-up of his parents’ marriage. At the age of nine, he had buried the family cat alive in the back garden of his house in Burbank, California. He had then dug it up, decapitated it and mounted its head on a stick. He dreamt of murdering people and would cut up his sister’s dolls and engage in strange sex games with them. His behaviour was not helped by his mother locking him in the basement at night for eight months, fearing that he would molest his sisters.
In 1963, aged fifteen, his mother was finding it impossible to control him, and after he had run away from his father’s house, he was sent to live with his father’s parents on their remote Californian farm at North Fork, high in California’s Sierra Mountains. Life there was very boring for Kemper. He was away from school and isolated from his normal life. One day there was an argument when his grandmother insisted that he stay home and do housework instead of going into the fields to work with his grandfather. He picked
up a rifle to go outside and shoot something but when she told him not to shoot any birds he turned round and fired a bullet into her head before shooting her in the back. He heard his grandfather arrive and killed him with a single shot as he got out of his car. Kemper said to police interviewing him: ‘I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.’
He was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and detained in Atascadero State Mental Hospital for the criminally insane.
In 1969, aged twenty-one, standing six feet nine inches tall and weighing 300 pounds, he was released into the care of his mother, Clarnell. The doctors considered Clarnell to be at the root of most of Kemper’s problems and warned him not to go back to her, but he did. Needless to say, life with her was no better than it had been before. They argued violently and she would blame him because she could not get any dates. Indeed, she seemed to get on better with the students at the University of Santa Cruz where she worked as a secretary than she did with her own son. He eventually moved out, to Alameda near San Francisco, sharing a rented flat with a friend. Most of his time was spent cruising around the California highways, picking up young, female hitch-hikers.
Kemper held down a job at a Green Giant canning factory and, still a virgin, worked out his sex and violence fantasies with pornography and detective magazines. In 1971 he had a motorcycle accident for which he received $15,000 in compensation. He was unable to work and now had time and money on his hands.
In spring 1972 Kemper, after yet another tempestuous argument with his mother, went out looking for a victim on whom he could vent his anger. He quickly picked up two hitch-hikers, Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa, eighteen-year-old students making their way back to Stanford University. He pulled a gun on them and informed them that he was going to rape them. Pulling off onto a side road, he made one girl climb into the boot of the car. He handcuffed the other one and then stabbed and strangled her. Opening the boot, he stabbed the other girl. He then drove the bodies back to the apartment where he decapitated them and cut off their hands.
Returning to his apartment that night, he removed the clothing from the bodies and had sex with them. Next day he buried the heads and bodies in different places in order to make it difficult for them to be identified if discovered. He got rid of the clothes in remote parts of the Santa Cruz mountains. One of the girls’ heads was found the following August, but without the remainder of her body it was impossible to prove how she had died.
In September he struck again. He picked up a fifteen-year-old Asian ballet student, Aiko Koo, and told her she was being kidnapped. When she became hysterical, he pulled his gun out and told her to be quiet. North of Santa Cruz, he smothered her until she lost consciousness and then strangled her and had sex with her dead body. He then visited his mother and chatted with her while the body lay in the car’s boot. Returning to his apartment, he had intercourse again with the corpse and in the morning he cut it up and drove it out into the country where he buried the hands and the torso in different places again. This time, he kept the head in the boot and it was still there when he visited a psychiatrist.
Around this time, in November 1972, Kemper’s records were sealed, meaning that they no longer existed as a blemish on his character. His mother had been fighting for this and he had been examined by two psychiatrists who agreed that he had made good progress. Little did they know what kind of progress he had really been making and it was not long before his murderous instinct forced him to strike again.
He picked up a girl one afternoon and killed her with a single shot from the new gun he had purchased; with his records sealed he could now own a gun. He drove her back to his mother’s house and hid her in the closet of his bedroom. Next morning, when his mother left for work, he dismembered the corpse, removing the bullet from the head in case it was found. He tossed the parts off a cliff into the sea, some of them being found within days. He buried the head in the garden under his mother’s window. ‘She always wanted people to look up to her,’ he later joked.
By now, of course, there was panic and security was heightened everywhere. Papers spoke of the Co-ed Killer and girls were warned to be careful, but he still managed to pick two up on the UCSC campus less than a month later. He had shot them even before he had driven off university property. The guards at the gate failed to spot the bodies slumped inside the car and he drove them to his mother’s where he decapitated them in her driveway while she was in the house. It gave him a thrill to have her so close when he did it. He took the heads into his bedroom and masturbated over them. For a couple of days he drove around with the bodies in the car before disposing of them in the usual way, taking care to remove the bullets.
A few months later, he bought another gun, a .44, but a sheriff noted the name on the record of the sale of the gun and decided to pay Kemper a visit. He asked Kemper for the pistol and said it would be retained by the authorities until a court decided whether it was lawful for him to own a gun. Kemper went to the boot of the car and took the pistol out, handing it to the officer who then left. But Kemper was shaken. He had come very close to being found out. The car, after all, had a bullet hole in it and had been awash with blood very recently. He realised that it was time for the endgame; he would kill his mother and then give himself up.
On April 20, Kemper and his mother had their usual argument and, as usual, she humiliated him. At five next morning, while she slept, he smashed her skull with a claw-hammer and slit her throat. He raped the corpse and cut her head off. He placed it on the mantelpiece and used it as a dartboard. He then called Sally Hallett, a friend of his mother, and invited her to the house for a surprise dinner. When she arrived he clubbed her, strangled her and decapitated her. He then slept in his mother’s bed before going out and driving for miles through a number of states. He stopped in Colorado, called the police and gave himself up. It was over.
Ed Kemper confessed to everything, waiving his right to an attorney. He told them that he had kept hair, teeth and skin of some victims as trophies. He also told them that he had sliced some flesh off two of his victims’ legs and cooked it in a macaroni casserole. When asked what punishment would fit the crimes he had committed, he replied: ‘Death by torture.’
The trial was over very quickly. Psychiatrists testified that he had been sane when committing the murders and he was found guilty of eight counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has proved to be a quiet, well-behaved inmate.
Kenneth Allen McDuff: The Broomstick Killer
Texan Kenneth Allen McDuff has the rare distinction of being the only American ever to have been condemned to death, had his sentence commuted and then sentenced to death again for an entirely different crime.
He was born in Rosebud, a small town in central Texas, in 1946 and was nothing but trouble from the start. His schooldays were a constant battle with authority and he was a relentless bully. As is often the case, though, he was also a coward, backing off if a victim of his bullying stood up to him. His antisocial behaviour was not helped by the fact that his mother Addie, believed her six foot three, 230-pound son could do no wrong, even later in his life when he had done a great deal of wrong.
Dropping out of school at an early age, McDuff worked with his father, pouring concrete. His spare time was spent hell-raising. He drank, fought and womanised, wrecking a succession of cars while he did it. He was often in trouble with the authorities and, aged nineteen, he was sent to prison on fourteen counts of burglary.
In less than a year, he was out, picking up where he had left off. On August 6, 1966, McDuff was cruising in his car with an associate, Roy Dale Green. Driving through a suburb of Fort Worth, they spotted a car parked at a baseball park. Robert Brand, seventeen, his girlfriend Edna Louise Sullivan, sixteen, and Brand’s cousin, Marcus Dunnam, fifteen, were taking a break after giving Louise some driving lessons.
McDuff and Green climbed out of their car and ordered the three teenagers at gunpoint to get out. They locked t
hem in the boots of the two cars. Green drove one, McDuff the other, to a secluded area where, as they begged for mercy, McDuff shot the two boys in the head at point-blank range. Louise was then raped by both men a number of times; they also abused her with a broken broomstick handle. McDuff then slowly strangled her by pressing the broomstick across her throat.
Green was not as ruthless as McDuff and confessed to police the following day. McDuff was arrested and Green testified against him in exchange for a lighter sentence. At his trial, Falls County sheriff Brady Pamplin, a former Texas Ranger, described McDuff as the most remorseless and sadistic killer he had ever met, while Green said that McDuff once boasted to him: ‘Killing a woman’s like killing a chicken. They both squawk.’
McDuff was sentenced to death.
He was lucky though. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court declared execution to be unconstitutional and his sentence was overturned. At the same time, Texan prisons were under fire for the terrible and oppressive conditions in which inmates were being held. Reforms were introduced which meant that few prisoners served out their full term, even killers such as Kenneth McDuff. Consequently, he was given parole in October 1989, having served twenty-three years. This was in spite of the fact that, while incarcerated, he had offered a member of the parole board a bribe of $10,000 and, in spite of his denials, was convicted for it while inside. There are some who believe another bribe got him his release, but, to this day, it has never been proved and McDuff never said.
Three days after he was released, the body of a prostitute, Sarafia Parker, was found near Temple, Texas. It was never proved conclusively that McDuff was the murderer, but it seems too much of a coincidence that his parole officer was located in Temple.
Out of prison, he returned immediately to his old ways. He was picked up by police on a number of occasions – for making terrorist threats when trying to start a fight with some black youths, for drunk driving and for public drunkenness. He also became addicted to crack cocaine. He was supposed to be studying to be a machinist at Texas State University, but spent most of his time hanging out with the dregs of society.