Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover

by Jeff Guinn

  Pat couldn’t find her knife. It wouldn’t do to keep everyone else waiting while she continued looking for it, so she rejoined Charlie, Tex, Susan, and Linda without it.

  Charlie told Tex to take ranch hand Johnny Swartz’s yellow 1959 Ford. Tex fetched the car and the girls piled in. Even though Linda was the only one with a valid driver’s license, Tex stayed behind the wheel. Linda sat with him in front. Susan and Pat were in the back. As the car was about to pull away Charlie called out to Susan, “Do something witchy,” a reference to the words “POLITICAL PIGGY” written in blood at Gary Hinman’s. Despite the talk that day about copycat murders, as Tex drove the old Ford out of the ranch’s front gate the three women didn’t know yet that they were going to kill anyone. They’d been ordered to take their knives, but there was nothing new about that. Since Charlie had first mentioned Helter Skelter, Family members usually went around armed so that they could defend themselves in case of attack.

  Tex didn’t talk as he drove, and so the women whispered to each other about the purpose of this expedition—maybe they were going to creepy-crawl again and steal things. A week earlier, Pat had been sent out with Tex to steal a dune buggy off of a car lot. Some of the other women, not Pat or Susan or Linda, had creepy-crawled and come back with filched items. So it was probably going to be something like that. The women stopped whispering and settled back in their seats, wondering where they were going. Tex hadn’t told them and they didn’t ask.

  • • •

  At about 11:45 P.M., William Garretson was surprised by a knock on his door. Steve Parent had driven up to Cielo, opened the electronic gate by pushing the outside button, and pulled his Rambler onto the long driveway. Parent reminded Garretson about picking him up and showed him the clock radio. Garretson wasn’t really interested in buying it, but he politely allowed Parent to plug it in, set it for the current time, and demonstrate how well the radio worked.

  • • •

  Tex was sure that he knew the best route from Spahn to Cielo, but he took some wrong turns and got lost. They ended up in Beverly Hills and had to take Sunset Boulevard toward Benedict Canyon.

  • • •

  Garretson told Parent that he didn’t want the clock radio, and by way of consolation offered the eighteen-year-old a beer. Parent sipped it and asked if he could use Garretson’s phone. He called a friend who said that he was having trouble setting up a stereo system—could Steve come over and give him a hand? Parent said he would, and chatted with Garretson as he finished his beer. Then he unplugged the clock radio, which indicated the time was 12:15.

  • • •

  Tex guided the Ford up steep Cielo Drive, passing houses scattered at short intervals along the way. Besides its narrow width and tight curves, there was the additional pressure of keeping a wary eye for deer that ventured out to graze after dark. At the very top of the hill Tex stopped in front of the closed electronic gate and told the women to wait. From that vantage point, none of them could actually see the house or the guest cottage behind it. Grabbing the bolt cutters as Charlie had instructed, Tex nimbly climbed a telephone pole and snipped the wires connecting to the main house and guest cottage. Then he backed the car down the hill, a tricky maneuver he managed without a hitch, and led the women back up on foot. Tex tucked the .22 in his pants and slung a coil of three-ply white rope over his shoulder.

  • • •

  Garretson walked Parent out to the Rambler. As they said good night, Altobelli’s Weimaraner began to bark. Garretson told Parent that it was the dog’s “people bark,” meaning that humans were walking around the property. There seemed to be no reason for alarm; maybe somebody was just leaving the main house. Garretson said goodbye and went back inside the guest cottage.

  • • •

  Tex whispered instructions for the women to follow him climbing up over the fence. There was an incline on the right side of the road, so it wasn’t especially difficult. Once they were inside, Tex said in a matter-of-fact tone that they were going into this big house where Terry Melcher had lived, and they were going to kill everybody inside. The women didn’t recoil; they hadn’t expected to kill anyone, but at that point, Pat remembered more than forty years later, “we were little kitty cats who were mentally gone.” Charlie had commanded them to do what Tex said. They would.

  • • •

  Parent got into the Rambler and began slowly moving down the long, curving driveway toward the main gate. It was closed, so he had to stop and roll down his window to push the button that would open it.

  • • •

  Tex heard the car approaching, and hissed to the women that they should jump into the bushes and lie down. He pulled the .22 out of his pants with his right hand and grasped a knife with his left. Parent flinched as Tex emerged from the shadows at his open car window. He blurted, “Please, please don’t hurt me. I’m your friend. I won’t tell.” Tex slashed at him with the knife—Parent was cut across his left arm. Then Tex either ignored or forgot Charlie’s instructions to use the Buntline only as a last resort. He shot the teenager four times at point-blank range. Parent fell dead across the front seat of the car.

  • • •

  A hundred yards away at the next house down the Cielo Drive slope, Mrs. Seymour Kott sat up in bed, awakened by what she thought might be “three or four gunshots.” But she didn’t hear anything more, so she went back to sleep. A private security patrol officer, sitting in his car parked on a street nearby, also thought he heard shots. Since he couldn’t tell specifically which direction they came from—area acoustics were baffling—he called in a report to the West Los Angeles Division of the L.A. Police Department. The officer who took the call commented, “I hope we don’t have a murder,” but didn’t send out anyone to investigate.

  • • •

  Tex thought for a moment about how the flashes from the gunshots reflected off Parent’s glasses, then reached inside the open driver’s side window and shifted the Rambler into neutral. He pushed it a short way back down the driveway and left the car parked there. Tex whispered for the women to come out of the bushes and go with him to the main house. They eased their way down the driveway, and as they negotiated the curve they could see the main house, and the pretty Christmas lights sparkling on the fence outside.

  • • •

  The peculiar acoustics of the canyon swallowed the sound of the gunfire for those inside the main house. Abigail Folger was reading a book in the guest bedroom of the main house. Voytek Frykowski was asleep on the couch in the living room. In the master bedroom, Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring perched on the bed, talking quietly. Folger wore a white nightgown. Tate was in her underwear, which was often her home attire during very hot weather. She had a negligee tossed over her shoulders. Both men were fully clothed.

  Out in the guest cottage Garretson didn’t hear gunfire either. He put on some music, watched TV, and began writing letters. Garretson also tried to make a phone call, but even though Parent had just used the phone, now for some reason the line was dead.

  • • •

  As the four Family members neared the main house, Tex told Linda to go to the back and see if there might be an unlocked door or window. Linda was hesitant, but she walked around the house out of Tex’s sight and stayed there for a few moments. Then she returned and told him that everything was shut tight, which wasn’t true. The freshly painted nursery windows were still cracked open and their screens hadn’t been snapped back in place. But in front of the house, just to the side of the front door, a window into the entry hall was open behind a screen. Tex quietly cut a long horizontal slit in the screen, pulled the screen loose, then pushed up the window. He told Linda to go back down to the gate and keep watch—someone might have heard the shots that killed Steve Parent. Then Tex climbed through the window and motioned for Susan and Pat to follow him.

  Linda crept back down the driveway, passing the Rambler with the teenager’s body in the front seat. Though she later recalled that her mind
had gone blank, she kept a lookout as Tex had ordered.

  Inside the main house, Tex, Susan, and Pat crept down the entry hall into the living room. They saw Voytek Frykowski sleeping on the couch. Tex whispered to Susan to go check the rest of the house to see who else was there. Frykowski, roused by the soft sound of Tex’s voice, muttered, “What time is it,” and then, “Who are you? What do you want?” Tex kicked him in the head, hard, before replying, “I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” Susan had frozen in place when Frykowski spoke. Now Tex sent her on her way with an impatient jerk of his head toward the hallway. Dazed, Frykowski tried to say something else, but Tex hissed, “Another word and you’re dead.”

  Pat remembered she had not brought a knife. While Susan explored and Tex hovered over the dazed Frykowski, Pat went down the driveway to where Linda stood guard. She borrowed Linda’s knife and returned to Tex in the living room.

  Susan walked down the hall and looked through an open door into the guest bedroom. Abigail Folger glanced up from her book and smiled. She wasn’t shocked to see a stranger in the house. Tate and Polanski regularly welcomed all-hours guests. This woman seemed like one more. Susan smiled and gave a little finger wave. Folger waved back and resumed reading. Further down the hall, Susan peered into the main bedroom and saw Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring talking. They apparently were in deep conversation; neither noticed her. Susan made her way back to the living room, passing Folger’s room again, waving to her for a second time. When she rejoined Tex, she quietly told him that there were three other people inside. Tex told her to bring them to him.

  Susan went first to the guest bedroom, where she brandished her knife at Folger and ordered her to go into the living room. Pat held her there at knifepoint while Susan went to the main bedroom for Tate and Sebring. She told them, “Come with me. Don’t say a word or you’re dead.” They meekly got up from the bed and walked ahead of her down the hall. When they reached the living room Tate could see Tex and Pat waiting there. She hesitated, and Tex roughly grasped her arm and dragged her forward.

  Frykowski reeled on the couch, still stunned from being kicked in the head. Tex had the three-ply rope, but he told Susan to tie Frykowski’s hands behind him with a towel. She had trouble knotting the thick towel, but did the best that she could. Tex used the rope to tie Sebring’s hands. Sebring complained that Tex was being too rough, and Tex warned him, “One more word and you’re dead.” Frykowski gasped, “He means it.” Tex looped more rope around Sebring’s neck and then flipped the other end up over a beam in the ceiling. Tex then tied the rope around Tate’s neck. Tate began crying, and Tex snarled at her to shut up. Sebring protested, “Can’t you see that she’s pregnant?” and Tex shot him in the abdomen. Sebring collapsed on the living room rug. Tate screamed, then continued sobbing.

  Tex looked around the living room and announced, “I want all the money you’ve got here.” Folger said that she had money in her room. Susan marched her there and Folger removed some bills from her pocketbook. Susan gave Tex the money—it was about $70. Disgusted, Tex said, “You mean that’s all you’ve got?” Tate said that they didn’t have any money in the house, but if they had time they could get some. Tex thought she might be stalling, hopeful that help was somehow on the way. He said, “You know I’m not kidding,” and Tate said that she knew.

  Tex was frustrated. Charlie told him to bring back money; they’d come to this house because rich people lived there, and now Tate was telling him that they didn’t have any. It made Tex furious, and just then Jay Sebring groaned as he lay on the floor. Tex crouched over him and began stabbing him, slamming the knife into Sebring again and again until he finally lay still enough to convince Tex that he was dead. Tate and Folger screamed during the entire assault. When Tex was finally finished and stood up, his knife dripping blood, one of the women asked plaintively, “What are you going to do with us?” although it was obvious. Tex’s reply was blunt: “You’re all going to die.”

  Folger and Tate began begging for their lives. Ever since Tex had kicked him into semiconsciousness, Voytek Frykowski had slumped on the couch. But hearing his death sentence pronounced, he suddenly jerked upright and began tugging his hands free from the towel Susan had clumsily knotted around his wrists. Tex yelled to Susan, “Kill him,” and she tried, but Frykowski got his hands loose and grappled with her, the two of them rolling around on the floor, Frykowski wrapping his hands in Susan’s long hair and Susan blindly stabbing with her knife, sinking the blade mostly into Frykowski’s legs. He screamed as he struggled. At some point Susan lost her knife.

  Out near the gate, Linda heard Frykowski’s screams clearly. Instinctively, she began walking back toward the main house, stopping just outside.

  While Pat held Folger at knifepoint and Tate watched helplessly, Tex tried to help Susan finish off Frykowski. He fired a couple shots into him and battered at his head with the grip of the Buntline. Frykowski still managed to struggle to his feet and stumble out onto the lawn, with Tex in hot pursuit. Frykowski went down and Tex leaped on him, pounding and stabbing until he was still. Just steps away, Linda looked on in horror. She was close enough to the living room to see Susan, and she shouted, “Please make it stop, people are coming,” a lie but the only thing she could think of. Susan said that there was nothing she could do. Linda ran back down the driveway, climbed over the fence, and stopped down the hill where Tex had parked Johnny Swartz’s yellow ’59 Ford.

  Back at the Cielo main house Folger broke away, running out on the lawn, too. Pat raced after her and tackled her. Pat stabbed Folger several times, trying to kill her and unsure of whether she had. Tex, certain that he’d finished off Frykowski, was standing nearby, so Pat called him over and said she wasn’t sure whether or not Folger was dead. Tex said he would make sure; meanwhile, Pat was to go to “the back house”—he pointed in the direction of the guest cottage—and kill whoever was there.

  Pat was shaking, equally afraid to follow Tex’s order and to disobey. She compromised by walking down the back alley between the main house and guest cottage until she was out of Tex’s sight. Then she waited for a few moments and returned. She told Tex that she had looked in a window and there was no one in “the back house.” He believed her, so William Garretson lived.

  Tex had stabbed Folger several more times; he wrote later that she was, in fact, alive when he reached her, and that she muttered, “I give up, you’ve got me,” just before he delivered the fatal blow. With Folger and Frykowski dead on the lawn, and Jay Sebring lifeless on the living room floor, only Sharon Tate remained. Susan was guarding her beside the sofa. Tex and Pat returned to the living room and Tate began pleading—not for her own life, but for her unborn child’s. They could take her with them, Tate begged, and kill her after the baby was born. But Charlie hadn’t said anything about postponing murders. He wanted maximum publicity right away. Susan held Tate while Tex stabbed her. Sharon Tate sobbed for her mother as she died.

  When it was over, Tex and Susan and Pat surveyed the scene. Was it sufficiently gruesome? The nylon rope was knotted around Sebring’s and Tate’s necks, looped up over the ceiling beam between them. Out on the lawn, Frykowski’s face was mutilated almost beyond recognition, and Folger’s once white nightgown was saturated with gore. They felt that ought to be enough. Tex thought they’d been careful not to leave fingerprints or any other clues. He took Folger’s $70 and prepared to lead Susan and Pat out of the house. There were other valuables there for the taking—Sebring wore an expensive watch and there was a little cash by the side of Tate’s bed—but in the aftermath of slaughter they wanted to leave. Just before they did, Tex remembered that Charlie told them to write something witchy in blood, something that would appear to be proof that the people who’d killed Gary Hinman were still at large. Tex told Susan to do it. She didn’t want to use her bare hand, so she dipped a towel in Tate’s blood and carefully wrote “PIG” on the outside of the front door.

  Tex, Susan, and Pat we
re all dripping with blood. Their clothes were bloody, and Tex had some on his hands. He got careless on the way out; not feeling like scaling the fence again, he pressed the button to open the gate with his bloody index finger. The three of them walked through the Cielo gate and down the hill to the yellow Ford where Linda waited.

  There had been little conversation in the car as the four drove to Cielo, but on the way back to Spahn everyone talked at once. Susan told Tex that she’d lost her knife back at the house and he shouted angrily at her. Pat complained that her hand ached—while stabbing Folger, her knife frequently struck bone, and the impact hurt her hand. All of them were angry with Linda for fleeing the scene. As he drove down Benedict Canyon Drive, Tex squirmed out of his bloody clothes and into fresh ones while Linda held the wheel. Susan and Pat removed their gory garments, too, and put on the clean clothes they’d left in the car during the murders. Linda rolled all the discarded clothes into a bundle and, on Tex’s order, tossed them out of the car and down the steep slope by the side of the road. A little further along he had her throw out the knives, too, and then the .22 Buntline. Before they tossed it, they noticed that parts of the handle had broken off, undoubtedly when Tex bashed Frykowski with it. But they decided not to go back to Cielo to retrieve the handle fragments and Susan’s knife.

  After a few miles, Tex steered off Benedict Canyon onto Portola Drive, a residential side street. He parked by the curb of a house at 9870 where a hose stretched out into the yard. Tex turned on the water tap and he, Susan, and Pat clustered around the hose, splashing water on their hands and faces to rinse away splatters of blood. It was about 1 A.M. They tried to be quiet, but the running water and their hushed chatter roused Rudolf Weber, who hurried outside to see who was in his yard at such a late hour. Tex explained that they were out walking and wanted a drink, but the parked Ford was right behind him and Weber didn’t believe it. As Weber stalked toward them, Tex, Susan, and Pat jumped back in the car. Weber tried to reach in through the open driver’s side window to rip the key from the ignition, but Tex was too quick. The car sped away, but not before Weber noted its license number—GYY 435.