Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (50 page)

These were only guesses, Watkins told them, as he was “unsure of the origin of the blaze.”

Three days
before
the fire, Inyo County authorities had heard a rumor that Watkins was going to be killed by the Family.

As far back as November 1969, I’d asked LAPD to infiltrate the Family. I not only wanted to know what they were planning as far as defense strategy was concerned; I told the officers, “It would be tragic if there was another murder which we could have prevented.”

I made this request at least ten times, LAPD finally contending that if they did plant an undercover agent in the Family, he would have to commit crimes, for example, smoke marijuana. For there to be a crime, I noted, there had to be criminal intent; if he was doing it as part of his job, to catch a criminal, it wouldn’t be a crime. When they balked at this, I said he didn’t even have to be a police officer. If they had paid informers in narcotics, bookmaking, even prostitution cases, surely they could manage to come up with one in one of the biggest murder cases of our time. No dice.

Finally I turned to the DA’s Bureau of Investigation, and they found a young man willing to accept the assignment. I admired his determination, but he was clean-cut, with short hair, and looked as straight as they come. As desperate as we were for information, I couldn’t send him into that den of killers; once they stopped laughing, they’d chop him to pieces. Eventually I had to abandon the idea. We remained in the dark as to what the Family was planning to do next.

The words
PIG, DEATH TO PIGS, RISE
, and
HEALTER SKELTER
contain only thirteen different letters. Handwriting experts told me it would be extremely difficult—if not impossible—to match the bloody words found at the Tate and LaBianca residences with printing exemplars obtained from the defendants.

It wasn’t only the small number of letters involved. The words were printed, not written; the letters were oversize; in both cases unusual writing implements had been used, a towel at the Tate residence, probably a rolled-up piece of paper at the LaBiancas; and all but the two words found on the refrigerator door at the latter residence had been printed high up on the walls, the person responsible having to stretch unnaturally high to make them.

As evidence, they appeared worthless.

However, thinking about the problem, I came up with an idea which, if successful, could convert them into very meaningful evidence. It was a gamble. But if it worked, it would be worth it.

We knew who had printed the words. Susan Atkins had testified before the grand jury that she had printed the word
PIG
on the front door of the Tate house, while Susan had told me, when I interviewed her, that Patricia Krenwinkel had admitted printing the words at the LaBiancas. Though Susan’s grand jury testimony and her statements to me were inadmissible because of the deal we had made with her, she had confessed the printing at Tate to Ronnie Howard, so we had her on that. But we had nothing admissible on Krenwinkel.

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that this is limited to verbal utterances, and that a defendant cannot refuse to give physical evidence of himself, like appearing in a lineup, submitting to a breath-analysis test for drunken driving, giving fingerprint and handwriting exemplars, hair samples, and so on. After researching the law, I drew up very explicit instructions for Captain Carpenter at Sybil Brand, stating exactly how to request the printing exemplars of Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten.

Each was to be informed: “(1) You have no constitutional right to refuse; (2) you have no constitutional right to have your attorney present;(3) your constitutional right to remain silent does not include the right to withhold printing exemplars; and (4) if you submit to this process, this can be used as evidence by the prosecution in your case.”

Captain Carpenter assigned Senior Deputy H. L. Mauss to obtain the exemplars. According to my instructions, she informed Susan Atkins of the above, then told her: “The word
PIG
was printed in blood at the Tate residence. We want you to print the word
PIG
.” Susan, without complaint, printed the exemplar as requested.

Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel were brought in individually and given similar instructions concerning their rights. However, each was told,
orally
: “The words
HELTER SKELTER, DEATH TO PIGS
, and
RISE
were printed in blood at the LaBianca residence. We want you to print those words.”

In my memo to Captain Carpenter there was one additional instruction for the deputy: “Do not write any of this for them.” I wanted to see if Krenwinkel misspelled “helter” as “healter” as she had on the refrigerator door.

Leslie Van Houten printed the exemplar.

Patricia Krenwinkel refused.

We’d won the gamble. We could now use her refusal in the trial as circumstantial evidence of her guilt.

As evidence, this was doubly important, since, before this, I’d had absolutely
no
independent evidence corroborating Linda Kasabian’s testimony regarding Patricia Krenwinkel’s involvement in the LaBianca murders. And without corroborating evidence, as a matter of law, Krenwinkel would have been entitled to an acquittal on those charges.

T
hough we’d won that gamble, Krenwinkel herself could just as easily have emerged the winner. Leslie could have refused to make an exemplar also, which would have diluted the force of Katie’s refusal. Or Katie could have made the exemplar, the handwriting experts then failing to match her printing with that found at the LaBiancas.

We were less lucky when it came to putting the Tate-Sebring rope and the wire cutters in Manson’s possession before the murders, evidence I was counting on to provide the necessary corroboration of Linda Kasabian’s testimony as to Manson.

We knew from DeCarlo, who had been present, that Manson had purchased about 200 feet of the white, three-strand nylon rope at the Jack Frost surplus store in Santa Monica in June 1969. However, when Tate detectives finally interviewed Frost—three and a half months after my initial request—he was unable to find a purchase order for the rope. Nor could he definitely state that this was the same rope he had stocked.
*
An attempt to identify the manufacturer, then trace it back to Frost, also failed. Frost usually picked up his stock in odd lots from jobbers or through auctions, rather than directly from the manufacturer.

Just as these were blind alleys, so was one other—literally. According to DeCarlo, Manson had given part of the rope to George Spahn, for use on the ranch. Spahn’s near blindness, however, eliminated him as a witness.

It was then I thought of Ruby Pearl.

For some reason, though the police had visited Spahn Ranch numerous times, none of the officers had interviewed Ruby, George’s ranch manager. I found her a fund of valuable information. Examining the Tate-Sebring rope, she not only said it looked like the rope Manson had, she also supplied numerous examples of Manson’s domination; recalled seeing the .22 Longhorn at the ranch many times; identified the leather thong found at the LaBiancas’ as similar to the ones Manson often wore; and told me that, prior to the arrival of the Family at Spahn, she had never seen any Buck knives there, but that in the summer of 1969 “suddenly it seemed everyone had one.”

While disappointed that we couldn’t obtain documented proof of the rope sale, I was pleased with Ruby. Being an experienced horse wrangler—as well as a tough, gallant lady who showed not the slightest fear of the Family
*
—her testimony would carry weight. There was a fine streak of stubborn authority about her.

Another find was Randy Starr, whom I interviewed the same day as Ruby. A sometime movie stunt man who specialized in fake hangings, Starr said the Tate-Sebring rope was “identical” to a rope he’d once used to help Manson pull a vehicle out of the creek bed. Starr told me, “Manson always kept the rope behind the seat in his dune buggy.”

Even more important was Randy Starr’s positive identification of the .22 Longhorn revolver, for Starr had once owned the gun and had given it to Manson.
†

One question remained unanswered. Why, on the night of the Tate murders, did the killers bring along 43 feet 8 inches of rope? To tie up the victims? Manson accomplished this the next night with a single leather thong. I obtained a glimpse of a possible answer during one of my interviews with DeCarlo. According to Danny, in late July of 1969, Manson had told him that the establishment pigs “ought to have their throats cut and be hung up by their feet.” This would really throw the fear into people, Manson said.

The logical inference, I felt, was that the killers brought along the rope intending to hang their victims. It was only a guess, but I suspected it was correct.

The wire cutters presented their own problems. Linda Kasabian said the pair found in Manson’s dune buggy looked like the pair that had been in the car that night. Fine. Joe Granado of SID used them to test-cut a section of the Tate telephone wire and concluded that the two cuts were the same. Great. But then officer DeWayne Wolfer, considered LAPD’s foremost expert on physical evidence, made some test cuts also, and he concluded that these wire cutters couldn’t have been the ones used.

Not about to give up, I asked Wolfer if the tautness of the wire could have been a factor. Possibly, he said. I then asked Wolfer to accompany telephone company representatives to 10050 Cielo Drive and make another cut, only this time I wanted him to sever the wire while it was strung up and tight, the way it was the night of the murders. Wolfer eventually made the test, but his opinion remained unchanged: the actual cut made on the night of the murders and the test cut did not match.

While it was possible that the cutting edge of the wire cutters could have been damaged subsequent to the Tate murders, Wolfer’s tests literally severed this important link between Manson and the Tate evidence.

W
hen I’d accompanied LAPD to Spahn Ranch on November 19, 1969, we’d found a number of .22 caliber bullets and shell casings. Because of the terrific windstorm, and the necessity of following up other leads, our search had been cursory, however, and I’d asked Sergeant Lee to return and conduct a more thorough search. The much repeated request became even more important when, on December 16, 1969, LAPD obtained the .22 caliber Longhorn revolver. Yet it was not until April 15, 1970, that Lee returned to Spahn. Again concentrating on the gully area some two hundred feet behind George Spahn’s residence, Lee found twenty-three more .22 caliber shell casings. Since twenty-two had been found during the first search, this brought the total to forty-five.
*

It was not until after the latter search that Lee ran comparison tests on any of the Spahn shell casings. When he finally did, he concluded that fifteen of the forty-five had been fired from the Tate murder gun.
†

Belatedly, but fortunately in time for the trial, we now had scientific evidence linking the gun to Spahn Ranch.

Only one thing would have made me happier: if Lee had returned and found the rest of the shell casings before the gun was discovered. As it was, the defense could contend that during the four and a half months between the two searches the police and/or prosecution had “planted” this evidence.

For months one item of physical evidence had especially worried me: the pair of eyeglasses found near the trunks in the living room at the Tate murder scene. The natural conclusion was that if they didn’t belong to any of the victims, they must belong to one of the killers. Yet neither Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, nor Kasabian wore glasses.

I anticipated that the defense would lean heavily on this, arguing that since they didn’t belong to any of the defendants, at least one of the killers was still at large. From there it was only a short step to the conclusion that maybe the wrong people were on trial.

This posed an extremely serious problem for the prosecution. That problem, though not the mystery itself, vanished when I talked to Roseanne Walker.

Since Susan Atkins had confessed the murders to both Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard, it occurred to me that she might have made incriminating statements to others, so I asked LAPD to locate any girls Atkins had been particularly close to at Sybil Brand.

One former inmate who agreed to talk to me, though she wasn’t very happy about it, was Roseanne Walker. A pathetic, heavyset black girl who had been sent to Sybil Brand on five drug-related charges, Roseanne had been a sort of walking commissary, selling candy, cigarettes, and makeup to the other inmates. Not until the fifth or sixth time I interviewed her did Roseanne recall a conversation which, though it seemed unimportant to her, I found very significant.

Susan and Roseanne were listening to the radio one day, when the newscaster began talking about a pair of eyeglasses LAPD had found at the Tate murder scene. Amused, Susan remarked, “Wouldn’t it be too much if they arrested the person the glasses belonged to, when the only thing he was guilty of was losing his glasses?”

Roseanne replied that maybe the glasses did belong to the killer.

Susan said, “That ain’t the way it went down.”

Susan’s remark clearly indicated that the glasses did
not
belong to the killers.

O
ther problems remained. One of the biggest concerned Linda Kasabian’s escape from Spahn Ranch.

Linda told me that she decided to flee after the night of the LaBianca murders; however, Manson sent her to the waterfall area later that day (August 11) and she was afraid to leave that night because of the armed guards he had posted.

Early the next morning (August 12) Manson sought her out. She was to put on a “straight” dress, then take a message to Mary Brunner and Sandra Good at Sybil Brand, as well as Bobby Beausoleil at the County Jail. The message: “Say nothing; everything’s all right.” After borrowing a car from Dave Hannum, a new ranch hand at Spahn, Linda went to Sybil Brand, but learned that Brunner and Good were in court; at the County Jail her identification was rejected and she wasn’t allowed to see Beausoleil. When she returned to the ranch and told Manson she had been unsuccessful, he told her to try again the next day.

Linda saw her chance. That night she packed a shoulder bag with some clothing and Tanya’s diapers and pins, and hid it in the parachute room. Early the next morning (August 13) she again borrowed Hannum’s car. On going to get the bag, however, she found Manson and Stephanie Schram sleeping in the room. Deciding to forget the bag, she went to get Tanya, but discovered that the children had been moved to the waterfall area. There was no way she could go there to get Tanya, she said, without having to explain her actions. So she left the ranch without her.

Instead of going to Los Angeles as instructed, Linda began driving to Taos, New Mexico, where her husband was now living. Hannum’s car broke down outside Albuquerque. When she tried to have it repaired, using a credit card Bruce Davis had earlier given her for gas, the gas station owner checked and learned the card was no longer valid. Linda then wrote a letter to Hannum, enclosing the keys, telling him where he could find the car, and apologizing. She then hitchhiked the rest of the way.