Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (33 page)

Susan then threw the towel back into the living room; she didn’t look to see where it landed. (It fell on Sebring’s face, hence the “hood” referred to in the press.)

Sadie, Tex, and Katie then picked up the bundles of spare clothing they’d hidden in the bushes. They left by the gate, Tex pushing the button, and hurried down the hill. “When we got to the car, Linda Kasabian started the car, and Tex ran up to her and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get over on the passenger side. Don’t do anything until I tell you to do it.’ Then we drove off.”

They changed clothing in the car, all except Linda, who, not having been in the house, had no blood on her. As they were driving away, Susan realized she had lost her knife, but Tex was against going back.

They drove somewhere along “Benedict Canyon, Mulholland Drive, I don’t know [which street]…until we came to what looked like an embankment going down like a cliff with a mountain on one side and a cliff on the other.” They pulled off and stopped, and “Linda threw all the bloody clothes over the side of the hill…” The weapons, the knives and gun, were tossed out at “three or four different places, I don’t remember how many.”

Susan then described, as she had to Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard, how after they’d pulled off onto a side street and used a garden hose to wash off the blood, a man and a woman rushed out of the house and threatened to report them to the police. “And Tex looked at him and said, ‘Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you were home. We were just walking around and wanted a drink of water. We didn’t mean to wake you up or disturb you.’ And the man looked down the street and said, ‘Is that your car?’ And Tex said, ‘No, I told you we were just walking.’ The man said, ‘I know that is your car. You better get in and get going.’”

They got in the car, and the man, apparently having decided to detain them, reached in to get the keys. Tex quickly started the car, however, and drove off fast.

After stopping at a service station on Sunset Boulevard, where they took turns going to the bathroom to check for “any other blood spots,” they drove back to Spahn Ranch, arriving there, Susan guessed, about 2
A.M
.

When they pulled up in front of the boardwalk of the old movie set, Charles Manson was waiting for them. He walked over to the car, leaned inside, and asked, “What are you doing home so early?”

A
ccording to Susan, Tex told Manson “basically just what we had done. That it all happened perfectly. There was a lot of—it happened very fast—a lot of panic, and he described it, ‘Boy, it sure was helter skelter.’”

While at the service station, Susan had noticed blood on the door handles and steering wheel. She now went into the ranch kitchen and got a rag and a sponge and wiped it off.

Q.
“How was Charles Manson acting when you arrived back at Spahn

 

Ranch?”

A.
“Charles Manson changes from second to second. He can be anybody he wants to be. He can put on any face he wants to put on at any given moment.”

 

Patricia “was very silent.” Tex was “nervous like he had just been through a traumatic experience.”

Q.
“How did you feel about what you had just done?”

 

A.
“I almost passed out. I felt as though I had killed myself. I felt dead.
I feel dead now.”

 

After she’d finished cleaning the car, Susan and the others had gone to bed. She thought she had made love to someone, maybe Clem, but then again maybe she had imagined it.

The noon recess was called.

T
hroughout her testimony Susan had referred to the victims by name. After the recess I established that she hadn’t known their names that night, nor had she ever seen any of them before. “…when I first saw them, my reaction was, ‘Wow, they sure are beautiful people.’”

Susan first learned their identities the day after the murders, while watching the news on TV in the trailer next to George Spahn’s house. Tex, Katie, and Clem were also there, and maybe Linda, though Susan wasn’t sure.

Q.
“As you were watching the television news coverage, did anyone say anything?”

 

Someone—Susan thought the words came from her own mouth, but she wasn’t positive—said either, “The Soul sure did pick a lulu,” or “The Soul sure did a good job.” She did remember saying that what had happened had “served its purpose.” Which was? I asked.

A.
“To instill fear into the establishment.”

 

I asked Susan if any other members of the Family knew they had committed the Tate murders.

A.
“The Family was so much together that nothing ever had to be said.
We all just knew what each other would do or had done.”

 

We came now to the second night, the evening of August 9 and the early-morning hours of August 10.

That evening Manson again told Susan to get an extra set of clothing. “I looked at him and I knew what he wanted me to do, and I gave a sort of sigh and went and did what he asked me to do.”

Q.
“Did he say what you were going to go out and do that night?” I asked.

 

A.
“He said we were going to go out and do the same thing we did the last night…only two different houses…”

 

It was the same car and the same cast—Susan, Katie, Linda, and Tex—with three additions: Charlie, Clem, and Leslie. Susan didn’t notice any knives, only a gun, which Charlie had.

They stopped in front of a house, “somewhere in Pasadena, I believe,” Charlie got out, and the others drove around the block, then came back and picked him up. “He said he saw pictures of children through the window and he didn’t want to do that house.” In the future, however, Manson explained, they might have to kill the children also.

They stopped in front of another house, but saw some people nearby so remained in the car and after a few minutes drove off. At some point Susan fell asleep, she said. When she awakened, they were in a familiar neighborhood, near a house where, about a year before, she, Charlie, and about fifteen others had gone to an LSD party. The house had been occupied by a “Harold.” She couldn’t recall his last name.

Charlie got out, only he didn’t walk up the driveway of this particular house but the one next door. Susan went back to sleep. She woke up when Charlie returned. “He said, ‘Tex, Katie, Leslie, go into the house. I have the people tied up. They are very calm.’

“He said something to the effect that last night Tex let the people know they were going to be killed, which caused panic, and Charlie said that he reassured the people with smiles in a very quiet manner that they were not to be harmed…And so Tex, Leslie, and Katie got out of the car.”

Susan ID’d photographs of Tex, Leslie, and Katie. Also of the LaBianca residence, the long driveway, and the house next door.

I asked Susan what else Charlie told the trio. She replied that she “thought,” but it may be “my imagination that tells me this,” that “Charlie instructed them to go in and kill them.” She did recall him saying that they were “to paint a picture more gruesome than anybody had ever seen.” He’d also told them that after they were done they were to hitchhike back to the ranch.

When Charlie returned to the car, he had a woman’s wallet with him. Then they drove around “in a predominantly colored area.”

Q.
“What happened next?”

 

Susan said they stopped at a gas station. Then “Charlie gave Linda Kasabian the woman’s wallet and told her to put it in the bathroom in the gas station and leave it there, hoping that somebody would find it and use the credit cards and thus be identified with the murder…”

I wondered about that wallet. To date, none of Rosemary LaBianca’s credit cards had been used.

After leaving the station, Susan said, she went back to sleep. “It was like I was drugged” though “I was not on drugs at the time.” When she woke up, they were back at the ranch.

(At this time we were unaware that Susan Atkins had made some significant omissions in her grand jury testimony—including three other attempts at murder that night. Had we known of them, we probably would have asked for an indictment of Clem. As it was, however, all we had against him was Susan’s statement that he had been in the car. And we still had a slim hope that his brother, whom we’d contacted at the Highway Patrol Academy, might persuade him to cooperate with us.)

Susan had not entered the LaBianca residence. However, the next morning Katie told her what had happened inside.

A.
“She told me that when they got in the house they took the woman in the bedroom and put her on the bed and left Tex in the living room with the man…And then Katie said the woman heard her husband being killed and started to scream, ‘What are you doing to my husband?’ And Katie said that she then proceeded to stab the woman…”

 

Q.
“Did she say what Leslie was doing while—”

 

A.
“Leslie was helping Katie hold the woman down because the woman was fighting all the way up until she died…” Later Katie told Susan that the last words the woman spoke—“What are you doing to my husband?”—would be the thought she would carry with her into infinity.

 

Afterwards, Katie told Susan, they wrote “‘Death to all pigs’ on the refrigerator door or on the front door, and I think she said they wrote ‘helter skelter’ and ‘arise.’”

Then Katie walked into the living room from the kitchen with a fork in her hand, and “she looked at the man’s stomach and she had the fork in her hand and she put the fork in the man’s stomach and watched it wobble back and forth. She said she was fascinated by it.”

Susan also said that it was “Katie, I believe,” who carved the word “war” on the man’s stomach.

The three then took a shower and, since they were hungry, they went to the kitchen and fixed themselves something to eat.

A
ccording to Susan, Katie also told her that they presumed the couple had children and that they would probably find the bodies when they came over for Sunday dinner later that day.

After leaving the residence, “they dumped the old clothing in a garbage can a few blocks, maybe a mile, away from the house.” Then they hitchhiked back to Spahn Ranch, arriving about dawn.

I had only a few more questions for Susan Atkins.

Q.
“Susan, did Charlie oftentimes use the word ‘pig’ or ‘pigs’?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“How about ‘helter skelter’?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“Did he use the words ‘pigs’ and ‘helter skelter’ very, very frequently?”

 

A.
“Well, Charlie talks a lot…In some of the songs he wrote, ‘helter skelter’ was in them and he’d talk about helter skelter. We all talked about helter skelter.”

 

Q.
“You say ‘we’; are you speaking of the Family?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“What did the word ‘pig’ or ‘pigs’ mean to you and your Family?”

 

A.
“‘Pig’ was a word used to describe the establishment. But you must understand that all words had no meanings to us and that ‘helter skelter’ was explained to me.”

 

Q.
“By whom?”

 

A.
“Charlie. I don’t even like to say Charlie—I’d like to say the words came from his mouth—that helter skelter was to be the last war on the face of the earth. It would be all the wars that have ever been fought built one on top of the other, something that no man could conceive of in his imagination. You can’t conceive of what it would be like to see every man judge himself and then take it out on every other man all over the face of the earth.”