Manson had flouted the law and bragged about it to LAPD officers as he had his followers train rifles on them—something else, incidentally, not reported in Helter Skelter.
Manson’s cavalier, taunting behavior continued. Elsewhere in the warrant, the LAPD’s Ted Leigh said he had found three loaded ammunition clips for a carbine that “fell from a dune buggy while on the highway” sometime on or around July 29. Leigh soon heard from Manson himself, who said the ammunition was his and that he would stop by and pick it up.
So Manson, a paroled ex-con with a known history of violence, had simply called up the cops and asked them if he could come collect the ammunition he’d lost? And he’d done this a little more than a week before the Tate–LaBianca murders. Manson, the warrant noted, had been “mentioned in prior memos,” which fit with Guillory’s insistence that police knew how dangerous he was.
Whether that awareness was the result of surveillance was an open question. The warrant explained that LASO deputies had cultivated an informant at the ranch, someone who “has seen guns in practically every building on the property. The informant was also threatened by Charles Manson.” And there was extensive reconnaissance by the same Officer Leigh, who “flew over the Spahn Movie Ranch approximately August 1, 1969, and… observed a 1969 Volkswagen laying [sic] in a ditch.” How often did the LAPD use planes to investigate car theft? Why were they flying over the ranch, which was out of their jurisdiction?
Manson was prepared to match their vigilance. Per the warrant, someone in the Family had bragged that “we have a guard at each road in [to the ranch] with a rifle and a telephone so if anyone comes in, we’ll know they’re coming.” Another memo quoted Manson telling a fire inspector, “Don’t try to play the ‘man,’ because the next time you try it, you’ll find yourself hanging from a tree, upside down, dead.”
And two days before the murders, an informant told an LAPD sergeant that Manson was on his way back from San Francisco with a young runaway girl and “a large amount of narcotics.” The memo was partly correct. Manson had been in northern California then with a young runaway, but he’d been in Big Sur, not San Francisco. Who knows if Manson had that “large amount of narcotics,” or if they played a role in the bloodshed to come. In any case, the document shook me—it suggested that authorities had tracked Manson with plenty of diligence, and with the help of an informant, in the days before the murders. They had a reliable sense of his comings and goings from the ranch mere hours before he dispatched his killers to the Tate house. And yet, somehow, it took them months to pin the murders on him.
Given the abundance of evidence, it came as no surprise that the raid had been authorized. Manson was practically begging for the strong arm of justice to come swooping in. When it did, the police got more than they bargained for. I found a one-page arrest report for Manson dated August 16, the day of the raid. In addition to the stolen cars and weapons, the arresting officer wrote that Manson had four stolen credit cards in his possession that day: they “fell out of his shirt pocket” when he was taken into custody. This had never been reported before.
In summary: Manson, the known federal parolee, walked away from an arrest that caught him with stolen cars and credit cards, an arsenal of weapons, and underage runaways. And meanwhile, two of the LASO’s best homicide detectives failed to realize that the biggest raid in California history was going down at the very same ranch that their murder suspect had called.
Hundreds of Man-hours and Zero Indictments
Bugliosi, you may recall, had chalked up the failure to a simple mistake—the search warrant was “misdated.” But now that I had it in my hands, I saw no evidence of any misdating. The warrant was clearly dated August 13, 1969. According to the California penal code, a warrant is good for ten days after its date. The raid was completely legal on August 16, a fact I verified with many police and attorneys.
Was there another potential explanation? Ed Sanders went a bit further in The Family—in addition to the “misdated” warrant, he wrote that the Family was let go because of insufficient evidence.
To figure it out, I talked to Bill Gleason, the sergeant who’d written the search warrant and spent two weeks organizing the raid. We spoke often. I always found him quick to smile and patient with my questions, even when I implied that he’d been negligent.
Gleason was still furious at Bugliosi and Sanders for impugning his reputation with their talk of “misdating.” They’d led millions of readers to assume that a clerical slipup had invalidated the hundreds of man-hours that went into the raid.
The “insufficient evidence” excuse, Gleason told me, was closer to the mark. The problem was that none of the evidence—stolen vehicles, guns—could be linked to any of the suspects, most especially Manson himself. It was all scattered around the ranch. What seemed, in the warrant, like an airtight case turned into more of a fishing expedition.
“It’s pretty hard when you got twenty-seven adults there to prove who actually stole a car,” Gleason told me. They’d tried to dust one of the vehicles for fingerprints, but it had been sitting out in the dirt for so long that they got nothing.
“The warrant specified Manson’s body to be searched for car keys and small parts, because he was said to be the leader,” Gleason said.
“But do you sleep with your car keys?” I asked, thinking it was ridiculous to expect to find them on Manson’s person at the crack of dawn.
“No,” Gleason said, laughing. “At six a.m. we didn’t know what they were going to be doing.”
What about the stolen credit cards? They were found on Manson’s person, having fallen out of his shirt pocket. Couldn’t they have prosecuted Manson for those?
“Yeah, we could,” Gleason said. “But we didn’t know he was going to have credit cards when we were doing the search warrant. It was the DA’s call, and if he says we’re not going to prosecute him there’s not a whole lot I can do.”
Robert Schirn, the DA who’d signed the warrant for the raid and then dismissed the charges a few days later, was still working at the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, so I set up an interview with him. Surrounded by plaques and awards, Schirn greeted me with a warm hello and told me to take a seat opposite his desk. Like Gleason, he said that it was hard to bring charges in a case where the thefts couldn’t be linked to anyone. But what about the credit cards?
“It’s been so many years,” Schirn replied. “I don’t know if I was told about the credit cards. If they’re in a report, I assume I would have been shown the report—and I would have been able to determine that there were in fact some stolen credit cards attributable to him.” Maybe Manson was never caught attempting to use the cards. He couldn’t recall.
“So you just don’t remember what went into the decision?” I asked.
“I really don’t.”
He looked a little sheepish, and the silence lasted a beat too long. “All I did was just fill out the card and went on to my next case.”
My inner skeptic had trouble taking Gleason and Schirn at face value. But let’s say they were right, that the colossal raid of the Spahn Ranch had failed to yield any arrests worthy of prosecution, and that it was only a freak coincidence that it brought them so close to the group responsible for so many murders. Even if you believe that, LASO isn’t free and clear. Because a week after their botched raid, the sheriff’s deputies arrested Manson again, on totally different charges. And again, he was allowed to go free.
On August 24, the owner of a property adjacent to the Spahn Ranch alerted LASO sheriffs that someone was trespassing. Deputies drove out to find Manson and a seventeen-year-old girl, Stephanie Schram, in an abandoned cabin, where they’d just had sex. On a bedside table were several joints. And the LASO brought in Manson once more, this time on a felony pot possession charge and for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
As with the raid, published accounts of this incident are thin at best. Bugliosi kept it out of Helter Skelter altogether, and Ed Sand
ers makes only passing mention of it in The Family, writing that Manson and Schram were released because there was no pot in the cigarettes, only tobacco.
However, according to an arrest report I found in the LASO files, the joints did contain pot—and on August 26 the sheriffs released Manson anyway, instead charging Schram with felony possession, even though she was a minor with no criminal record. No reason was given for the decision.
The day after Manson’s release on August 26, a judge signed another warrant, this time for Manson’s arrest, on the strength of his having been found with drugs and a juvenile. This time, LASO detectives never even bothered going to arrest him, something else none of the forty-plus LASO officers I interviewed could explain to me, and something again left out of Helter Skelter. Manson stayed at the Spahn Ranch until he moved to Death Valley around September 10.
The DA’s order rejecting the pot charges against Manson was signed by Monte Fligsten, the deputy district attorney of Van Nuys. Incredibly enough, like Schirn, Fligsten was still working in the DA’s office. When I called him, though, I found him much warier than Schirn had been. I gave him a quick rundown of the files I’d found: Manson, Schram, marijuana, delinquency of a minor… ring any bells?
“I have no recollection,” he said.
“Do you recall investigating Manson at the time of August of ’69?”
“I didn’t participate in any of the Manson issues at all,” he said. I offered to fax him the documents so he could verify his signature. He said he didn’t want to be involved and hung up.
The LASO deputies who’d arrested Manson were flabbergasted when he wasn’t charged at any point after the raid—especially given the effort of the raid itself. It was “a bunch of bullshit.”
The deputies and the DAs had numerous chances to get Manson behind bars, or to keep him there, and they failed.
Even if none of Manson’s charges were prosecutable, they were egregious enough to send the parolee back to prison. Bugliosi said as much in Helter Skelter: “During the first six months of 1969 alone, [Manson] had been charged, among other things, with grand theft auto, narcotics possession, rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There was more than ample reason for a parole revocation.”
If LASO officers did try to get Manson’s parole officer to send him back to prison, I found no written record of such a request in the files. No one I spoke to could even agree on whose job it was to report a federal parole violation. The DAs said it was the detectives’ job. The detectives said it was the DA’s job. And, at the end of the day, everyone said, Wasn’t it the parole officer’s job? “It’s always been a problem,” Bill Gleason told me, “that guys would get arrested and released before the P.O. could place a hold.” Then again, I had it on good authority that it was precisely Bill Gleason’s duty to have told the parole office, and he didn’t.
I felt like I was trapped in the swirling eddies of some forgotten bureaucracy. Maybe Manson was just the beneficiary of a simpler time, when police had fewer forces at their disposal and cruder methods of communication.
Samuel Barrett, who was Manson’s parole officer at the time of the murders, told me he’d never been informed of the August 1969 arrests. If a parolee was involved in a crime at the local level, he said, it was “paramount” for the DA to file the charges. Otherwise, it would be hard to send anyone back to federal prison.
“But sheriffs, the DA,” I said, “they all said it was up to you.”
“They pass the buck,” Barrett said. “It’s all hearsay without filing charges.”
Chasing Kitty Lutesinger
While Bobby Beausoleil was busy torturing Gary Hinman, he left his girlfriend behind at the ranch. Kitty Lutesinger, sixteen, was pregnant with his child, and in his absence, she set off a chain of events that gave the sheriff’s office another chance to nab Manson.
Lutesinger had moved out to the Spahn Ranch to be with Beausoleil, but she’d never been a perfect fit for the Family. Now that she was pregnant, Manson mistrusted her, fearing that she’d compel Beausoleil to leave the group and raise their child. Lutesinger, in turn, was uneasy around Manson. He was always speechifying about the end of the world, fooling around with guns, and heaping abuse on anyone who crossed him. So, with her boyfriend showing no signs of returning anytime soon, Lutesinger ran away from the ranch.
LASO sheriffs found her on July 30 and took her in for questioning, since she was a teen runaway. She told them everything she knew about Manson: that he was an ex-con who’d threatened her life and her relatives’ if she left the Family, that there were drugs and guns stockpiled at the ranch, and that many of the Family were runaway girls. Police sent her home to her parents in the San Fernando Valley. But she’d proven so informative that Bill Gleason drove out there to interview her again eleven days later, in preparation for the big raid. This would’ve been on August 10—just a day after the bodies had been found at Cielo Drive.
I couldn’t find his full report in the LASO files, but Ed Sanders wrote about it in The Family, and he included an eye-opening detail: Lutesinger asked Gleason if the Black Panthers were behind the Tate murders. “I had been programmed to believe it was the Panthers who did it,” she told him.
That remark should have raised a red flag. The timeline is the key. This conversation took place when the bodies at Cielo Drive were barely cold. As Gleason knew, Lutesinger had been away from the Manson Family since August 1, when she fled the ranch. So if she had, in fact, been “programmed to believe” that the Panthers killed Tate, the programming must’ve occurred before the murders, by someone who was responsible for them. Gleason should’ve suspected that Manson, or at least someone at the Spahn Ranch, knew more. (He told me he had no memory of discussing the Tate murders with Lutesinger, and found it unlikely that he had. The murders “had only occurred a few hours before. There probably wouldn’t have been anything much on the news at that time.” In fact, the bodies had been discovered more than twenty-four hours before he interviewed her; they’d dominated the news.)
Even though Lutesinger had cooperated with police, she apparently couldn’t decide where her allegiances were. On August 15, she ran away again, fleeing her parents’ home and returning to the Spahn Ranch.
That same day, Guenther and Whiteley, still searching for accomplices in the Hinman murder—though, for some reason, they never checked the Spahn Ranch—learned that Lutesinger was Beausoleil’s girlfriend and immediately deemed her a person of interest, issuing an all-points bulletin for her arrest. On August 17, the day after their colleagues raided the Spahn Ranch, Guenther and Whiteley visited her parents. I found Whiteley’s interview notes in the LASO files. Lutesinger’s parents confirmed that she was pregnant by their main suspect, that she’d been living at the Spahn Ranch until August 1, and that she’d run away again the night before, though they didn’t know where. Whiteley did note that Manson had personally phoned the Lutesinger home the preceding week, and that Kitty had spoken to him.
In fact, at the very moment of that interview, Kitty Lutesinger was in LASO custody. She’d been picked up with the rest of the Family in the raid.
And here, to my mind, the credibility of the LASO deputies stretches to its breaking point. Guenther and Whiteley had just posted the bulletin for Lutesinger’s arrest. They’d just learned that she’d been living at the Spahn Ranch—along with their primary murder suspect. And yet they didn’t go to the ranch to look for her. They did nothing.
All they had to do was stop by, and they would have learned that everyone from the ranch was in jail at the Malibu station; they could’ve gone there, interviewed Lutesinger, and potentially cracked the Hinman and the Tate–LaBianca murders four months earlier than those crimes were.
Why didn’t they go? For two reasons, Guenther told me. First, he and Whiteley never heard about the August 16 raid, even though their colleagues conducted it, and it was the largest in state history. Bill Gleason backed them up on this. “We were two independent units,” he told me. �
�We really had no reason to contact each other or even knew about the investigations going on.”
Gleason said he “purposely kept everything quiet” about the raid. But he’d also said that a few stray LAPD squad cars had found out about it somehow and came along uninvited. Plus, as Bugliosi reported in Helter Skelter, the raid was on the front page of the local section of the next day’s Los Angeles Times, beside a story about the still unsolved Tate murders.
Guenther’s second reason was that Kitty Lutesinger’s parents told him they’d already been to the ranch to look for her, and they’d been told that she wasn’t there. But did he really expect a runaway’s friends to turn her over to her parents, especially when everyone knew the cops were sniffing around for a murder suspect? He didn’t even attempt an answer; we just sat in silence for a while.
Gleason had organized the raid. It would seem that it was only a matter of time until he realized that Lutesinger, whom he’d interviewed just six days earlier, was sitting in one of his jail cells while homicide detectives sought her out. He’d given me copies of his files on the case—one of them, a timeline of the investigation, had an entry dated August 17, 1969: “Whitely [sic] & Guenther tell Gleason that Lutesinger is wanted for questioning in Hinman murder.”
But Gleason told me that he didn’t even know Lutesinger was arrested during his own raid. She’d been booked under a fake name, because everyone in the Family used aliases. I reminded him that he’d already known that. It was in the search warrant affidavit he wrote before the raid, and Lutesinger herself had told him. Plus, one of the arrest reports in the LASO files said that he’d taken it on himself to learn the true identities of each suspect. He was unmoved. “She was just another face,” he said. “I had a lot of things going on that day. I doubt if I would have recognized her.” Lutesinger was released with the rest of the Family on August 18, and remained with them at the Spahn Ranch until mid-September, when they all moved to Death Valley. No one ever went to the ranch to look for her, despite the all-points bulletin out for her arrest.
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 17