Twenty years later, the piece isn’t finished, the magazine no longer exists, and I’m still in L.A.
“A Picture Puzzle”
Before I interviewed anyone, I read Helter Skelter. I saw what all the fuss was about: it was a forceful, absorbing book, with disquieting details I’d never heard before. In their infamy, the murders had always seemed to exist in a vacuum. And yet, reading Bugliosi’s account, what had seemed flat and played out was full of intrigue.
I made notes and lists of potential interviews, trying to find an angle that hadn’t been worked over. Toward the beginning of the book, Bugliosi chides anyone who believes that solving murders is easy:
In literature a murder scene is often likened to a picture puzzle. If one is patient and keeps trying, eventually all the pieces will fit into place. Veteran policemen know otherwise… Even after a solution emerges—if one does—there will be leftover pieces, evidence that just doesn’t fit. And some pieces will always be missing.
He was right, and yet I wondered about the “leftover pieces” in this case. In Bugliosi’s telling, there didn’t seem to be too many. His picture puzzle was eerily complete.
That sense of certitude contributed to my feeling that the media had exhausted the murders. The thought of them could exhaust me, too. Bugliosi describes Manson as “a metaphor for evil,” a stand-in for “the dark and malignant side of humanity.” When I summoned Manson in my mind, I saw that evil: the maniacal gleam in his eye, the swastika carved into his forehead. I saw the story we tell ourselves about the end of the sixties. The souring of the hippie dream; the death throes of the counterculture; the lurid, Dionysian undercurrents of Los Angeles, with its confluence of money, sex, and celebrity.
Because we all know that story, it’s hard to discuss the Manson murders in a way that captures their grim power. The bare facts, learned and digested almost by rote, feel evacuated of meaning; the voltage that shot through America has been reduced to a mild jolt, a series of concise Wikipedia entries and popular photographs. In the way that historical events do, it all feels somehow remote, settled.
But it’s critical to let yourself feel that shock, which begins to return as the details accumulate. This isn’t just history. It’s what Bugliosi called, in his opening statement at the trial, “a passion for violent death.” Despite the common conception, the murders are still shrouded in mystery, down to some of their most basic details. There are at least four versions of what happened, each with its own account of who stabbed whom with which knives, who said what, who was standing where. Statements have been exaggerated, recanted, or modified. Autopsy reports don’t always square with trial testimony; the killers have not always agreed on who did the killing. Obsessives continue to litigate the smallest discrepancies in the crime scenes: the handles of weapons, the locations of blood splatters, the coroner’s official times of death. Even if you could settle those scores, you’re still left with the big question—Why did any of this happen at all?
Something to Shock the World
August 8, 1969. The front page of that morning’s Los Angeles Times described an ordinary day in the city. Central Receiving Hospital had failed to save the life of a wounded policeman. The legislature had passed a new budget for schools, and scientists were optimistic that Mars’s south polar cap could be hospitable to alien life. In London, the Beatles had been photographed crossing the street outside their studio, a shot that would become the cover of Abbey Road. Walter Cronkite led the CBS Evening News with a story about the devaluation of the franc.
The space race was in full swing, and Americans were dreaming, sometimes with a touch of trepidation, about the science-fictional future. Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.
Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”
Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.
In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the witch.”
And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.
That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe. None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch—whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows—the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson, who had commanded them to take their trip that night.
The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
The drive to Cielo would’ve taken about forty minutes. It was just after midnight when they arrived. Benedict Canyon was quiet, seemingly worlds away from the hustle and sprawl of Los Angeles. The house, built in 1942, had belonged to a French actress, who’d modeled it on the Norman country estates of her youth. A long, low rambler at the end of a cul-de-sac, invisible from the street, it sat on three acres of bucolic, isolated land. Nestled against a hillside on a bluff, it afforded views of Los Angeles glittering to the east and Bel Air’s fulsome estates unfurling to the west. On a clear day, you could see straight to the Pacific, ten miles out.
Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to jump over an
embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver. Kasabian remained on the outskirts, keeping watch. The other three crept up the hill toward the secluded estate.
At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio. He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!” Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them. It was a rustic home of stone and wood, its clapboard siding often described, in the many newspaper stories soon to follow, as tomato red. Beside the long front porch, a winding flagstone path led past a wishing well with stone doves and squirrels perched on its lip. There was a pool in the back and a modest guesthouse. The yard had low hedges, immense pines, and welcoming beds of daisies and marigolds. A white Dutch door opened into the living room, where a stone fireplace, beamed ceilings, and a loft with a redwood ladder provided a warm ambience.
Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for friends, asked, “What time is it?”
Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.”
Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him. “Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.
In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.
On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas. A film career, she hoped, would get her noticed for something beyond her good looks. There on Cielo Drive, at the home she called the “Love House,” Tate was optimistic about the future. She believed her child would strengthen her marriage to Polanski, who sometimes demeaned her.
Having reported back to Watson, Susan Atkins retied Frykowski’s hands with a piece of nylon rope. She went to bring the others into the living room, returning with Folger at knifepoint, and then with Sebring and Tate. “Come with me,” she’d told them. “Don’t say a word or you’re dead.”
In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s, throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.
Sebring struggled to his feet and protested—couldn’t this man see that Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him twice, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights.
Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”
“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.
Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins, attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground, pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again, with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.
Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her neck, shot out the front door, too. She was halfway across the front lawn, her nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take me.”
Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh, bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole, plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.
Atkins had remained in the house with Tate, who was whimpering, sitting on the floor—still in only lingerie, and still bound by the neck to the dead body of her former lover, Sebring. She was the only one still alive. She was due to give birth to the child, a boy, in two weeks. Watson came back inside and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.
“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.
Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood. It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” S
he soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.” Their work was done.
When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly. “I was gone,” Atkins later recalled. “It was like I was dead. I could not think about anything. It was almost as if I passed out, blacked out… My head was blank. There was nothing in me. It was like I had given it all.”
At 10050 Cielo Drive was a scene of such callous, barbarous devastation that it shook something loose in the national psyche. August 8, 1969, and August 9, 1969, suddenly seemed to describe different realities. Media accounts were quick to infer something more sordid than ordinary homicide, something occult. One paper called the murders a “blood orgy”; others reported “ritualistic slayings” and “overtones of a weird religious rite.” The facts were unavailable or misreported. Maybe drugs were involved, maybe they weren’t; maybe Sebring had been wearing the black hood of a Satanist, maybe he hadn’t. The big picture was one of supernatural ruin. An officer at the scene said the bodies looked like mannequins dipped in red paint. Another said, “It’s like a battlefield up there.” Pools of blood had soaked into the carpets. According to Time magazine, stray bullets were lodged in the ceiling.
In Roman Polanski, whose films were arrantly, even proudly occultist, the public found someone onto whom it could project its fatalism. A popular press account said that, mere minutes before he learned of the murders, Polanski, at a party in London, had been discussing a friend’s death. “Eeny meeny miney mo,” he said, “who will be the next to go?” With that, the phone rang, and he was summoned to hear that his wife and friends had been brutally murdered.
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 2