The judge repeated his question: did he feel there would be a conflict of interests?
"Are you going to shoot me?" Charlie replied, and repeatedly evaded Keene's inquiries. To another question Manson said:
"I think you may be about the same height as me. You seem taller because you're sitting up higher." Then he asked, "Who makes the rules here? Wait ... Are you going to let them keep Susan locked up?" He smiled, and interrupted again, saying, "All of you can stand up and go someplace."
During a recess, the attorneys were concerned. "What's he doing? Has he gone crazy?"
"I don't know what's the matter with him," said Charles Hollopeter, Manson's newly appointed court attorney.
Charlie muttered irrationally in court and seemed unable to comprehend any of Keene's questions. At one point he threw his glasses along the counsel table to Katie's attorney, saying "You take my glasses and I'll take yours. You look at the judge through mine and I'll look at him through yours, and you'll see him in a different frame than I do." Manson then shook the hand of Hollopeter and announced, "I have no objection" to the appointment of Shinn as Susan's attorney.
Prosecutor Stovitz, who had remained silent during the lengthy byplay, asked the judge for assurance the trial would proceed on March 30. "We want all defendants tried at the same time," he said. "We don't want any musical chairs played."
Hollopeter jumped up and told the judge it was "entirely possible for Manson's case to be severed, and I want the district attorney on notice that I'm not standing by silently to let him run the case."
As the hearing ended and Charlie was being led from the courtroom, he looked up at Judge Keene and said, "I'll tell you this - I've got three hundred gallons of gasoline up in Inyo County."
It was clear the prosecution's current case against Charlie would be destroyed by Susan's refusal to testify at the trial. But a few days later, Linda and her attorneys met with the prosecutors. The next Sunday she accompanied detectives to the house on Cielo Drive and was in a state of near-hysterics when they left. Then, with representatives from the district attorney's office, she retraced the route she said was taken to the LaBianca home. Her version of the murders, they felt, corroborated the testimony of Susan, even though Linda had remained outside the Tate house.
She could testify that Manson instructed her to dispose of the credit cards he had taken from Mrs. LaBianca, in hopes they would be found, used, and the suspicion diverted. Her lawyer said, "If I agreed to let her testify it would only be on the basis that it would be to her benefit to do so."
The arrangement was made for Linda's immunity, while Charlie unsuccessfully continued his efforts to represent himself. "I don't comprehend that one can represent anyone else," he said. "A man, if he is a man, can only represent himself."
The judge promptly denied the verbal request on that basis, and Manson offered a typed motion specifically requesting that Ronald Hughes be appointed as his attorney, for the sole purpose of "regaining my en pro per status" to act on his own behalf.
Thirty-five-year-old Hughes had passed the Bar examination shortly before, though he had not tried a single case. He had appeared in the courtroom with spectators during most of the pretrial hearings and visited Charlie in jail. He stood up in the courtroom and came forward at Keene's request, when asked if he would be ready for the March 30th trial date. Hughes, a big untidy man with a bushy beard, failed to answer Keene directly. He said he felt he would be "forced to answer directly," and "forced to go along" with the request for continuance.
Keene said, "Mr. Hughes, you're not being forced into anything. I simply want to know if you are going to be ready to go to trial?"
Hughes said he was not. He paced back and forth behind the defense table. "I feel Mr. Manson has been forced all along by you into various positions that are untenable." The lawyer continued to pace nervously while accusing Keene of violating Charlie's constitutional rights on several occasions. He said he also planned to initiate a petition to reinstate Manson's right to act as his own attorney.
At one point, Keene ordered Hughes to "stand still right there so that I can answer you." Keene granted the change of attorneys, and as soon as Hughes was approved, he immediately motioned for withdrawal of the psychiatric examination request made by Manson's earlier court-appointed attorney.
While Hughes began the defense preparation, Charlie formulated the plan as to how his defense would be conducted. Later, he told Reese, "When I go in that courtroom, I'll have all my followers behind me. The jury will be sitting there and when it's time for my opening statement I'll go `OM,' humming OM, and all those people behind me will pick it up, `OM,' and it'll fill the room and then all the kids out on the street will rise, rise!"
During the time Charlie met with Hughes, he consulted with other attorneys as well. One lawyer said, "He knows how to get to the streets, he believes he can get great support from the kids and people on the street. It's like he's asking for a revolution."
Charlie told Reese, "There's an underground river that runs from Death Valley to New York." Reese says, "Charlie says he can get to Death Valley from County Jail. There's a hole - he has to get into it backwards and he can then go straight to Death Valley where he's got those three hundred gallons of gasoline. He can get there through this hole without being seen at all.
"He says he knows he has the grapevine, like the garbage man. `You don't even see the garbage man,' Charlie says. Like the prisoners, he knows all kinds of ins and outs and he claims he has direct `tap lines to the street.' That's where his supporters are. It's in those people, like the garbage man, like the hippies, and what he calls the people in ditches - the garbage people, that he feels he can muster support - and they will be Charlie's chorus ..."
But the problems Manson had with his attorneys, which would soon include Ronald Hughes, were that his pursuits could not be achieved in a court of law. "There could be no meeting ground," Reese explains. An ordinary attorney was part of the Establishment. This whole thing - it's Charlie versus the Establishment. It's been going that way for years. This is the finale. This is Charlie's last curtain."
Bobby Beausoleil's second trial began in Keene's courtroom. Marie O'Brien, granted immunity, testified that she and Susan went with Bobby to get money from Hinman, and that during the time they were there Bobby fatally stabbed him.
After the prosecution rested its case, Bobby took the stand. He had not testified in the first trial which resulted in a hung jury. His version matched events already offered the jury, with the exception of who killed Hinman. Manson killed Hinman, Bobby now asserted, after returning to the house with Bruce Davis.
While Bobby's trial was concluding, the grand jury in judge Dell's court returned three indictments on one count of murder each, naming Manson, Susan, and Bruce Davis - the only one not in custody at the time - as conspirators in Hinman's death.
Then Bobby's jury began deliberations about the same time Manson and Susan were arraigned on the murder. Both appeared unconcerned - bored with the proceedings that could lead them all into California's gas chamber.
Back in his cell, Charlie shrugged off the pressures of what was becoming a legal boxing-in, and on his visit with Reese, he returned to "more personal" issues. He said, "You know, my life really started when I was thirty-three years old - when I got out of prison and in with some hippies, and picked up the father image, I got a family ... I had someone to protect, people looking up to me. I had everything - I don't blame anyone . . ." He stopped and put his hand against the glass. "My mother," he said wearily, "she was a runaway when she was fifteen years old, and then she got pregnant by a guy and he was only seventeen." He paused for several moments and just stared at the back of his hand. Then he said, "Now all the newspapers and all the magazines they call her a whore, a prostitute, but that's not true. She was what the flower children were, and I was born from love. How can I blame my mother? That's pointless. What would happen is she would just blame her mother and then her mother would blame
her own mother ... People have to blame everybody for themselves. It's a reflection and I don't blame anybody. The truth is what counts. It always comes out."
But what, one wondered, would be Charlie's truth?
On Friday, April 14th, Judge Keene disqualified himself as trial judge. Although he had failed to respond earlier to an affidavit of prejudice by Manson, Keene was obligated to accept the challenge when filed by Hughes as attorney for Manson. Keene said, "It doesn't matter who hears this case, just as long as it's tried."
Objecting to all proceedings and motions for trial delay, Charlie insisted he wanted to go to trial in three days. During the hearing, he slumped with an intense frown.
Judge Dell asked Hughes how soon he would be ready for trial, and Charlie answered with a grunt, "1984."
Then Manson quickly attempted to dismiss Hughes and reinstate his right to represent himself. Dell ruled as quickly in denial. "While Mr. Manson acted as his own attorney," the judge said, "he did such an abominable, dilatory job that he established conclusively his inability to represent himself."
The judge refused to permit any additional arguments by Manson or Hughes about self-representation. When Manson continued to interrupt, the judge threatened to have him gagged. He pointed to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling which permitted such an action. Then, in Judge Charles Older's court, the defendants and attorneys were told the trial date would be met. "There's a practical limit as to what the court has to put up with," Older said.
The defendants were returned to their cells, satisfied postponements would be granted. Charlie still believed he'd "outwit" the courts and finally represent himself.
Katie's attorney was set to appeal a denied motion to move the trial, while Leslie was undergoing psychiatric examination. Her lawyer indicated a possible change of plea or an "attempt to prove diminished capacity."
Leslie had seemed despondent after Tex failed to respond to her plea to rejoin the others at the trial.
But even though Tex's uncle was a sheriff, and he had TV in his cell and three meals a day cooked and brought in by his mother - "really special treatment" - Tex was responding to very little.
One friend, Guthrie, says, "I think he just mentally left... He was psychologically facing the realization of going back to California, and facing whatever that was, and being bombarded with this `good Christian boy in Texas, he came to the realization that here he was - put him in a gas chamber and drop a pellet for doing what he'd done, and I think he could not face what he had done or what was facing him. Just mentally died, or a kind of mental suicide, whichever happened ... or else just a good act." Yet his lawyer was to continue the extradition fight for more than eight months.
While Watson was still in Texas, Linda remained sequestered from the others, preparing testimony that would sink Charlie, Tex, and the girls, in exchange for her immunity from prosecution.
Daye Shinn had filed a motion to suppress Susan's grand jury testimony, while Bruce Davis, sought in connection with Hinman's murder, was still at large. And while sheriff's deputies continued their search, the jury in Bobby's trial completed its second full day of deliberation without reaching a verdict. Sequestered that night in a hotel, the panel resumed deliberations Saturday morning, April 18th, and that same day they found Bobby guilty of first degree murder.
Attorney Salter said the jurors "believed Marie [O'Brien] and they didn't believe my client." The attorney insisted Marie was protecting Manson because she was in love with him, and because Charlie was the father of her child. He attributed Bobby's guilty verdict to the "Publicity" he said, "which, since December has created an entirely different situation between this trial and the first trial, and ... an extra witness in this trial - an eyewitness," Marie. Her immunity in the case would continue as long as she sustained cooperation in the future prosecution of Manson, Bruce Davis, Susan and "anyone else involved in Hinman's murder."
Under California law, murder trials are conducted in two stages. The first determines the guilt or innocence, and the second stage is to decide the penalty. Prosecutor Katz, who claimed throughout the trial he would attempt to send Beausoleil to the gas chamber, said the verdict "restores my faith in the jury system."
Three days later, the same jury took less than three hours to return a unanimous death verdict. The first conviction was in, and Bobby would go to the gas chamber.
It became clear to attorney Reese, and to a few others close to Charlie during the long wait to trial, that what they beheld was a rather rarefied example of the "total failure of modern society ... When I'd look at Charlie," Reese says, "I couldn't help seeing all those years of his life, the brutal and callous indifference of institutions, and that he was beaten on and beaten, really having been molded in the worst juvenile hell-holes we have. Then into one prison after the other.
"He never had a chance. As ... Susan never had a chance, none of these garbage-eaters, and by the same token Sharon Tate, and Jay Sebring, and the others never had a chance. I don't know. Maybe none of us have a chance, or if we did we sure blew it somewhere along the line."
Finally, in June, 1970, the Tate-LaBianca trial got under way, with Charlie assuming a position of crucifixion, his girls mimicking him, yelling, "Why don't you just kill us now?"
Linda, the state's star witness in exchange for total immunity, did not "crack" as Charlie predicted - though on the days she testified, other family members not in custody carried picket signs reading "Judas Day" and "A Snitch in Nine." Nor would the court even accept the defense motion to have a psychiatrist observe Linda, supposedly unable to determine "fact from fantasy" due to her alleged "three hundred trips on LSD ... the acid express." Yet as weeks and months passed, almost one hundred witnesses lent piecemeal support to her version of the crimes, along with such prosecution evidence as a rope, a gun, bullets, shell-casings, bloody clothes, fingerprints and dozens of photos - "a panorama of gore," enlarged and in color. And from the start, the prosecution had made it firmly clear that the death penalty would be sought for Manson, Katie, Susan and Leslie.
Clem [Steve Grogan], sought in connection with the LaBianca murder, was to remain in hiding, as did Bruce Davis.
One member of the family died supposedly "playing Russian roulette with a revolver." And there was the question of Shorty Shea - missing, rumored to have been tortured and then, at Charlie's order, beheaded and buried near the ranch.
One girl in the group, diagnosed by two psychiatrists as in a state of drug-induced schizophrenia, had been committed to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino.
A friend close to Leslie, seeing her in court late in August, observed, "I could hardly believe it was her. And I talked to her for a moment - she remembered me and was very cheerful about everything, but it wasn't the girl I'd known all those years. It was someone else altogether - not Leslie Van Houten. Something's drastically wrong ... This girl on trial now ... She's like a comedienne or mentally unbalanced."
Tex, finally extradited to California, was to lose fifty pounds while "vegetating" in a solitary cell, frightened over his own personal impending doom. He could no longer communicate with others and was unable even to feed himself. All he could manage was a feeble grin. While the others were being tried, he was being force-fed with tubes through the nostrils. Finally, he became so weak that only injections could sustain his life. Described by medical examiners as "catatonic" and "in an acute psychotic state," he was sent to Atascadero State Mental Hospital, where he would either continue to "vegetate" - or recover and stand trial for the murders.
But the "vegetating" part, according to an ex-inmate then at Atascadero, was, like Leslie's "mentally unbalanced" act, a cloak to "get himself declared mentally incompetent - at least at the time of the murders . . . Watson said he had it down pat - go bananas now and eat bananas later. He meant instead of sucking gas. He saw himself getting off scot-free, beating it, in other words, and getting out. He meant out - free. He'd think about name changes, living a different life where he wouldn't
be known. Beating it, in other words ... He once joked about the gun busting when he beat one of them on the head. He said something about his fist being more powerful than the way the gun was made. He said he'd break concrete with his fist ... But he believed in killing, and killing with a knife was the way to do it. Not kicking in heads, though he'd felt a lot of joy in that, too ..
The course of Charlie's conduct in court - including leaping off a table toward the judge, shouting, "In the name of Christian justice someone should cut your head off," threatening to use his three hundred gallons of gasoline "stashed," away, or to escape to his "big hole in the desert," would leave many wondering about the sanity of Manson himself - or of his co-defendants. In a world clearly different from that of the jurors who would sit in judgement on them, the girls would mimic their "master" - repeating meaningless chants over and over, yet professing no meaning to the words - more mumbo jumbo to further establish their "difference."
Still a ninth murder was to be disclosed and more indictments handed down, against Charlie, Bruce Davis and Clem for the torture, beheading and dismemberment of Shorty at the ranch. For almost a year the police and deputies had searched for the body without success, until finally, just before the jury began deliberations on the Tate murders, Chief Deputy District Attorney Joseph Busch decided to prosecute without a corpse. "There is no body recovered in this case, but there is precedent to support a successful prosecution." He said, "We can't excuse murder just because they are clever enough to dispose of the body."
Bruce Davis would make headlines by walking up to the Hall of Justice one day, barefoot, an X on his forehead - copying Manson's symbol of X'ing oneself out of society - with a grin reminiscent of Watson's, and saying, "I've come to get my father out of the tower ... they want to kill bodies, don't they? I'm here if that's what they're after." Many would wonder about the sanity of Davis, whose manner some felt made him seem even crazier than "Crazy Charlie," as they used to call Manson in prison.
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family Page 21