by Jeff Guinn
Tex Watson didn’t last long at his parents’ house. Soon after arriving he shut himself in his room, screaming for his parents to go away whenever they knocked on the door to ask if he was all right. When he emerged a few days later, he asked them for money and left. Tex flew to Mexico and bummed around for a bit before ending up back in California. He kept thinking about Charlie, wondering if maybe the guy was right after all and Helter Skelter was about to come down.
The Weathermen launched their Days of Rage assault on Chicago’s upper-class Gold Coast businesses and residences on October 8. The evening began with speeches but escalated into vandalizing stores and cars. Six Weathermen were shot, twenty-eight policemen were injured, and there were sixty-eight arrests. Two days later it happened again, this time with thirty-six policemen and 123 protesters injured. For a change, a portion of a major American city was being torn apart by whites, not blacks. Undeterred by injuries and arrests, the Weathermen vowed further violent acts of anarchy. Mark Rudd later wrote, “We were by now a classic cult, true believers, surrounded by a hostile world that we rejected and that rejected us in return.” The same manifesto could have been adopted by Charlie and the Family out in Death Valley, especially since the Weathermen celebrated internally with group sex and acid sessions.
The Weathermen at least hid from their perceived oppressors in apartments with running water and electricity, access to restaurants and grocery stores. The Family still combed the inhospitable desert looking for a bottomless pit, and were always sun-broiled and often hungry as they did. Charlie, stunned by Tex’s desertion and determined that there would be no more, constantly warned everyone about the dire consequences of trying to leave him. With Tex gone, slow-witted Clem became Charlie’s enforcer, brandishing a shotgun and obviously hopeful of a chance to prove to his beloved leader that he would enthusiastically kill on command. But despite all Charlie could do, there was dissension in his ranks. Squeaky and Sandy would have informed on anyone who complained in their hearing, but by now the once unified Family was broken into cliques. Younger, newer members steered clear of veterans. Bruce Davis, Squeaky, and Sandy had Charlie’s ear to the exclusion of almost everyone else. There were elements of mistrust, especially since Susan kept bragging about being in a fight with a man who pulled her hair. She said that she had to stab him in the legs to make him let go. Because Susan always exaggerated, those who hadn’t been in on any murders couldn’t be certain how much of what she claimed was true.
Kitty Lutesinger was especially horrified by Susan’s boasts. After Bobby Beausoleil’s arrest, Family leaders explained to Lutesinger that he’d been jailed on minor robbery charges. Lutesinger had only recently learned that the father of her unborn child was about to go on trial for murder. She was five months pregnant and miserable in the Death Valley heat. Charlie didn’t physically abuse her, but lately she’d looked on as he battered Stephanie Schram around—whenever Charlie felt frustrated he always seemed to beat up women, and now he was frustrated all of the time. Lutesinger and Schram commiserated. They hated the desert and wanted to leave. On the night of October 9, they saw their chance. Charlie had left for L.A. to try to scrape up more money. Food was running low again. While he was gone, the perimeter guards weren’t quite as vigilant. The girls were able to sneak past them, but the blackness of the desert night soon confounded their sense of direction. Lutesinger and Schram stumbled about in the dark with no idea which way to start walking toward Ballarat. They panicked, and with good reason—when their disappearance was discovered at daybreak, Charlie’s armed guards, led by crazy Clem, would come looking for them. But they inadvertently circled the ranch rather than getting away from it. There was little chance they could elude Family pursuers for very long.
Officers of the California Highway Patrol, the National Park Service, and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office planned to raid the Barker and Myers ranches around 4 A.M. on October 10. They had a hard time just maneuvering into position—much of Goler Wash was impassable even with four-wheel-drive. As they crept slowly forward, they stumbled on two men asleep on the ground with a shotgun lying between them. Clem and a new Family recruit were supposedly on guard; they became the raid’s first arrests. The lawmen nabbed another lookout, then proceeded to the main Barker shacks and arrested Leslie, Pat, Gypsy, Susan, Squeaky, and another Family member called Little Patty. They went on from there to Myers Ranch and added Sandy, Ruth Ann, Nancy Pitman, and one more female to their haul. All ten women gave aliases; it would be time-consuming to establish their real names. The lawmen also found two babies, Susan’s toddler, Ze Zo Ze, and Sandy’s month-old Ivan. Ranger Powell’s wife had come along to serve as a matron for any female prisoners, and she took charge of the babies.
The lawmen searched the ranch premises, and discovered supplies of weapons, gasoline, and a little food. There were eleven vehicles; eight proved to be stolen. None of the prisoners acted guilty or even particularly abashed. A few of the women urinated on the ground in front of their captors. Mrs. Powell carried the infants down to where the lawmen’s trucks were parked. The adult prisoners were handcuffed and driven off to Independence, where they were booked on charges of theft, arson, and receiving stolen property.
Some of the lawmen stayed behind to inventory everything on both ranches. It was almost nightfall before they were done. As they drove away, two young women emerged from clumps of brush and begged to be taken with them. They identified themselves as Kitty Lutesinger and Stephanie Schram. The girls admitted that they’d been part of the Family, but swore that they’d gotten disgusted and run away. Now they were afraid for their lives, and they wanted protection. Lutesinger and Schram were taken into protective custody, and rode with the officers back to Independence. There they were kept separate from the prisoners, and their families were contacted. Lutesinger’s mother told her that Los Angeles County detectives were trying to find her to ask about Bobby Beausoleil and somebody that he was supposed to have murdered. The Inyo cops agreed to contact their Los Angeles County counterparts in the morning. Lutesinger was willing to cooperate. She just wanted to go home.
Someone on one of the ranches got away and called Charlie at Spahn Ranch to tell him what happened. Charlie could have run, leaving everyone to their fate, but they’d gotten out of trouble after raids before, notably the one in August at Spahn. Surely they could do it again. Charlie spent the 11th trolling L.A. contacts for money, then drove back to Barker, where he gathered the Family members remaining at large—Bruce Davis, Dianne Lake, Zero (John Philip Haught), and a few others. The cops had made their raid; now while they sorted through evidence, Charlie would stay at Barker while he thought about what to do. It was a poor decision; Charlie should have realized that the law would keep an eye on the place waiting to see who might show up. But just like the rest of the Family, Charlie was worn out from weeks of tension and physical hardship in the desert. He was not at his most alert.
In Independence, the lawmen gathered to review the October 10 raid. They’d recovered considerable property and taken a good number of prisoners, but none of them was the group’s leader, the guy named Charlie who was supposed to be Jesus. It seemed smart to hit Barker Ranch again. Even if nobody was there, there was still some impounded material to be retrieved. They decided to return to Barker on the afternoon of the 12th.
Pursell, Powell, and another officer crept close to Barker just before dusk and saw several men emerge from one of the nearby washes and enter the main house. As soon as Pursell saw that Inyo County deputy Ward had a backup unit in place, he asked Powell to cover the front of the building while he burst in through the back door with his Smith & Wesson drawn. Seven people sat around a kitchen table, and Pursell ordered them outside with their hands raised. Dianne Lake, Bruce Davis, Zero, and the others obeyed.
Night fell fast in the desert. It was pitch black by the time the prisoners were all handcuffed and placed in the back of a battered truck for transport back to Independence. Pursell decided to take a last
look around inside. It was too dark to see much, but there was a lit candle in a glass mug on the table. Pursell carried the candle into a tiny bathroom, passing it along the walls and down around the shower and sink. There was a closed cabinet beneath the sink, and it seemed to Pursell that in the flickering candlelight he saw a few strands of long hair hanging limply in the crack of the closed door. It was a tiny cabinet in a cramped space. It seemed impossible that anyone could squeeze inside there, but Pursell kept the candle near it and watched as the door was pushed open and a tiny figure began unfolding arms and legs out into the room. Pursell snapped, “If you make one false move, I’ll blow your head off,” and the diminutive man who emerged to stand before him replied “Hi,” in what struck the officer as a very friendly voice: “He was as polite as he could be.” Nonplussed by the man’s appearance of complete calm, Pursell asked, “What’s your name,” and his prisoner replied, “Charlie Manson.” Telling the tale many years later, Pursell recalled, “I’ve had a lot of people, including a judge, ask, ‘Why didn’t you just shoot him?’ But I always answer, ‘How can you shoot a guy whose first word to you is, ‘Hi’?” Though the other Family members captured that night and two days earlier were dressed in rags, Charlie wore relatively clean buckskins laced together with leather thongs.
Pursell marched Charlie outside; he was cuffed and placed in the truck bed with the other seven prisoners. They picked up three more Family members on the way to the main road. They were crammed into the same truck bed as the first eight, with Pursell there to guard them. The other lawmen rode in the truck’s cab or in a second truck that they’d left a short distance away from the ranch. The second truck followed closely behind the first, its headlights trained on the prisoners in the truck bed ahead. On the way back to Independence, Pursell thought the female prisoners acted like unruly schoolkids, whispering and giggling to each other. It was annoying and Charlie eventually noticed; he shut them up with a single hard stare. Then he turned to Pursell and companionably informed him that the blacks were about to rise up against the whites, and then there would be a war that the blacks would win. Pursell and the other officers would be primary targets because they were cops and they were white. The smart thing, Charlie suggested, would be for the lawmen to let their prisoners loose and then run for their lives. Pursell declined, and the prisoners were locked up in the Inyo County jail. They seemed to be starving, and bolted down the food that was offered. Charlie griped that it was wrong for National Park officers to participate in law enforcement: “You should be out telling people about the flowers and animals.”
Counting those already in custody from the first raid, the county jail cells overflowed with twenty-seven Family men and women. Frank Fowles, the county district attorney, arrived and the latest batch of Family prisoners was charged with grand theft auto and arson. Charlie was booked as “MANSON, CHARLES M., AKA JESUS CHRIST, GOD.”
• • •
Following their arrests, most of the Family either maintained unwavering loyalty to Charlie or else rediscovered it. He’d warned them that if they ever fell into the hands of the law, they should never reveal any Family information—if they did, the cops would think they were crazy and send them to some place where they’d be zapped with electrical jolts to the brain. The chaotic state of the country reinforced Charlie’s words—in such a crazy time, anything seemed possible and paranoia was plausible. In the cramped cells of the Inyo County jail (the overflow was so pronounced that county lawmen tried unsuccessfully to pass on some of their prisoners to federal custody, since, among other alleged crimes, they’d vandalized the earth mover inside National Park boundaries), Charlie’s hold on most of his followers was stronger than ever. But there were certain exceptions among the very youngest women who’d recently escaped his clutches—Barbara Hoyt, now back with her mother; Stephanie Schram, fed up with mistreatment by Charlie, and Kitty Lutesinger, who’d never felt comfortable with the Family in the first place, and who now learned she was wanted for questioning by the Los Angeles County officers investigating the Hinman murder. Lutesinger felt no residual loyalty to Charlie, or even to Beausoleil. On October 12, while most of the Inyo County, National Park Service, and California Highway Patrol officers were carrying out the second raid on Barker Ranch, Lutesinger met with L.A. County investigators Paul Whiteley and Charles Guenther, who’d raced up to Independence as soon as they learned she was being held in protective custody there. Lutesinger was happy to tell what she knew.
Lutesinger told Whiteley and Guenther that she understood her boyfriend Bobby was sent by Charlie Manson to get money from Gary Hinman. Bobby took two girls with him, Sadie and another one with red hair. Lutesinger didn’t remember her name; everybody in the Family changed their names all the time and she had trouble keeping track of what they called themselves. Anyway, while they were at Hinman’s house they got into a fight with him and Hinman was killed. Lutesinger couldn’t remember who she heard that from, but everybody at Spahn talked about it. Sadie, well, this girl’s real name was Susan, but she went by Sadie most of the time, told Lutesinger and a couple of the other girls later that she was in a big fight with a man who yanked her hair, and that she had to stab him in the legs a few times. So she apparently helped kill Hinman. All Lutesinger could tell the county officers about the redhead was that she was sort of slender.
Whiteley and Guenther checked; Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz, was also in custody. They stayed overnight in Independence and the next morning had Susan brought from her cell for interrogation. Bobby Beausoleil would go to trial in mid-November, so they had very little time to collect evidence. The L.A. County lawmen bluntly told Susan that they had a witness implicating her in the murder of Gary Hinman. What did she have to say about that?
Charlie had warned his followers not to divulge any information to police. But Susan assumed the worst—Beausoleil must have ratted on her—and, besides, she couldn’t resist a chance to show off. The story she told to Whiteley and Guenther mostly corroborated Lutesinger’s. She and Beausoleil went to Hinman’s to get money from him. When he didn’t give them what they wanted, Bobby cut Hinman’s face with a knife, and then he and Susan waited two days for him to change his mind. Toward the end of the second day, Susan was in another room when she heard Hinman plead, “Don’t, Bobby,” and then she saw Hinman staggering around from a knife wound to the chest. She and Beausoleil waited until they thought he was dead and then tried to wipe up their fingerprints. As they were leaving they heard Hinman making noises, so Beausoleil went back in and finished him off. Then they took one of Hinman’s cars back to Spahn Ranch. Susan never admitted that she had stabbed Hinman, or claimed that she and Beausoleil were told by Charlie to get money from Hinman. But Whiteley and Guenther still had testimony that would help convict Beausoleil. They asked Susan to repeat her story on tape, but she refused. So she was transported back to Los Angeles County. Based on Lutesinger’s testimony, Squeaky and Pat were taken to L.A. County, too, because they were the only female Family members in custody who had reddish hair. Mary Brunner, the redhead who’d been with Beausoleil and Susan at Hinman’s when he was murdered, was in Wisconsin.
Squeaky and Pat were held for only a day. They denied being present at Hinman’s murder and beyond Lutesinger’s vague physical description of a slender redhead there was no proof that they had been. A guard felt sorry for Pat and helped her contact her parents. She stayed in L.A. for a few days with her father, then went to stay with her mother in Alabama. As soon as she was released, Squeaky rushed back to Independence. She wanted to be nearby if Charlie needed her.
On October 15, marchers jammed America’s streets—fifty thousand in New York, 100,000 in Boston, twenty thousand in Washington; in all, more than one million demonstrators participated in what organizers identified as a National Moratorium against the still undeclared but very real war in Vietnam. President Nixon insisted to his advisors that it was “a nothing,” and made it known to the media that while the marches went on, he
watched a football game. Only a small percentage of the protesters waved North Vietnamese flags and chanted pro–Ho Chi Minh slogans, but they were prominently featured on television coverage, enraging viewers who supported the war. John Ehrlichman, one of the president’s closest advisors, afterward warned Moratorium leader David Hawk, “You’re going to force us to up the ante to the point where we’re handing out death sentences for traffic violations.” Given the tenor of the times, it was hard to know if he was joking.
While most of the nation focused on the Moratorium, Inyo County court officials tried to sort out charges against the Manson Family. As had been the case after the Los Angeles County raid at Spahn Ranch on August 16, it was hard to tie individual Family members to the theft of specific stolen vehicles, and no one among them admitted burning the giant earth mover machine. By the end of the court session, about half of the prisoners were released, including Sandy, Bruce Davis, Cathy Gillies, and Zero. Most of the freed Family members hightailed it back to L.A., staying on Spahn Ranch or in Venice. Sandy, her baby, Ivan, and Squeaky moved into an Independence motel. Sandy and Squeaky hadn’t been particularly close, but now they strongly bonded through their devotion to Charlie.
Charlie remained in custody because Kitty Lutesinger told county officials that she’d seen him behind the wheel of one of the stolen dune buggies. When that couldn’t be proven, he was held on arson charges, though these, too, would soon have to be dismissed if county investigators couldn’t come up with conclusive evidence.