Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (66 page)

Fitzgerald said the defense had rested. But the three female defendants now shouted that they wanted to testify.

Calling counsel into chambers, Judge Older demanded to know exactly what was going on.

There had been a split between the defense attorneys and their clients, Fitzgerald said. The girls wanted to testify; their attorneys opposed this, and wanted to rest their case.

Only after an hour of intense discussion did the real reason for the split come out, in an off-record admission by Fitzgerald:

Sadie, Katie, and Leslie wanted to take the stand and testify that they had planned and committed the murders—and that Manson was not involved!

Charlie had tried to explode his bombshell, but the attorneys for the girls had managed to defuse it, at least temporarily. Standing up against Manson for the first time, Ronald Hughes observed: “I refuse to take part in any proceeding where I am forced to push a client out the window.”

The legal problems thus created were immense, but basically they came down to the question of which took precedence: the right to effective counsel or the right to testify. Worried that whichever course Older took might be reversible error on appeal, I suggested he take the matter to the State Supreme Court for a decision. Older, however, decided that even though the attorneys had rested, and had advised their clients not to take the stand, the right to testify “supersedes any and all other rights.” The girls would be permitted to take the stand.

Older asked Manson if he also wished to testify. “No,” he replied, then, after a moment’s hesitation, added, “That is, not at this time anyway.”

On returning to open court, Kanarek made a motion to sever Manson so he could be tried separately.

Charlie was now attempting to abandon ship, while letting the girls sink. After denying the motion, Older had the jury brought in and Susan Atkins took the stand and was sworn. Daye Shinn, however, refused to question her, stating that if he asked the questions she’d prepared, they would incriminate her.
*

This created a whole new problem. Returning to chambers, Older remarked: “It is becoming perfectly clear that this entire maneuver by the defense is simply one…to wreck the trial…I do not intend to permit this to happen.”

Still in chambers, and outside the presence of the jury, Susan Atkins told Judge Older that she wanted to testify to “the way it happened. The way I
saw
it happen.”

T
HE
C
OURT
“You are subjecting yourself to the extreme risk of convicting yourself out of your own mouth, do you understand that?”

A
TKINS
“I understand that.” She added that if she was convicted, “let them convict me on the truth. I do not wish to be convicted on a pack of lies taken out of context and just scattered every which way. Because, Mr. Bugliosi, your foundation is just crumbling. I have watched it crumble. You have been a sly, sneaky fox.”

B
UGLIOSI
“Why do you want to put it back together for me, Sadie, if it is crumbling? You should be happy. You can go back to Barker Ranch if it is crumbling. Why do you want to take the stand to help me?”

Shinn said he would ask to be relieved as counsel if Older ordered him to question his client. Fitzgerald replied similarly, adding, “As far as I am concerned, it would be sort of aiding and abetting a suicide.”

The matter was unresolved when court recessed for the day.

T
he following day Manson surprised everyone by saying that he too wanted to testify. In fact, he wanted to go on the stand before the others. Because of possible
Aranda
problems, however, it was decided that Manson should first testify outside the presence of the jury.

Manson was sworn. Rather than have Kanarek question him, he requested and received permission to make a statement.

He spoke for over an hour. He began almost apologetically, at first speaking so low that the spectators in the crowded courtroom had to lean forward to hear. But after a few minutes the voice changed, grew stronger, more animated, and, as I’d already discovered in my conversations with him, when this happened his face seemed to change too. Manson the nobody. Manson the martyr. Manson the teacher. Manson the prophet. He became all these, and more, the metamorphosis often occurring in midsentence, his face a light show of shifting emotions until it was not one face but a kaleidoscope of different faces, each real, but only for the moment.

He rambled, he digressed, he repeated himself, but there
was
something hypnotic about the whole performance. In his own strange way he was trying to weave a spell, not unlike the ones he had cast over his impressionable followers.

M
ANSON
“There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified…

“I never went to school, so I never growed up to read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, and I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand…

“You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad, and even killers, your children are.
You
made your children what they are…

“
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.

“Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked out, that did not want to go to Juvenile Hall. So I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this: that in love there is no wrong…

“I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters is good if they do it with a good thought…

“I was working at cleaning up my house, something that Nixon should have been doing. He should have been on the side of the road, picking up his children, but he wasn’t. He was in the White House, sending them off to war…

“I don’t understand you, but I don’t try. I don’t try to judge nobody. I know that the only person I can judge is me…But I know this: that in your hearts and your own souls, you are as much responsible for the Vietnam war as I am for killing these people…

“I can’t judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

“I can’t dislike you, but I will say this to you: you haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me…but I am only what lives inside each and every one of you.

“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system…I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.

“I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second-hand clothes…I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill
me?
Ha! I’m already dead, have been all my life. I’ve spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built.

“Sometimes I think about giving it back to you; sometimes I think about just jumping on you and letting you shoot me…If I could, I would jerk this microphone off and beat your brains out with it, because that is what you deserve, that is what you deserve…

“If I could get angry at you, I would try to kill every one of you. If that’s guilt, I accept it…

“These children, everything they done, they done for the love of their brother…

“If I showed them that I would do anything for my brother—including giving my life for my brother on the battlefield—and then they pick up their banner, and they go off and do what they do, that is not my responsibility. I don’t tell people what to do…

“These children [indicating the female defendants] were finding themselves. What they did, if they did whatever they did, is up to them. They will have to explain that to you…

“It’s all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hellhole that you can think of, and you drag him and put him in a courtroom.

“
You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago…
”

Older asked Manson if he had anything further to say.

M
ANSON
“I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed.

“I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.”

Some called him Christ, Manson said. In prison his name was a number. Some now want a sadistic fiend, and so they see him as that. So be it. Guilty. Not guilty. They are only words. “You can do anything you want with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love…If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself.”

Telling Manson, “You seem to be getting far afield,” Older asked him to stick to the issues.

M
ANSON
“The issues?…Mr. Bugliosi is a hard-driving prosecutor, polished education, a master of words, semantics. He is a genius. He has got everything that every lawyer would want to have except one thing: a case. He doesn’t have a case. Were I allowed to defend myself, I could have proven this to you…

“The evidence in this case is a gun. There was a gun that laid around the ranch. It belonged to everybody. Anybody could have picked that gun up and done anything they wanted to do with it. I don’t deny having that gun. That gun has been in my possession many times.

“Like the rope was there.” Sure he’d bought the rope, Manson admitted, 150 feet of it, “because you need rope on a ranch.”

The clothes? “It is really convenient that Mr. Baggot found those clothes. I imagine he got a little taste of money for that.”

The bloodstains? “Well, they are not exactly bloodstains. They are benzidine reaction.”

The leather thong? “How many people have ever worn moccasins with leather thongs?”

The photos of the seven bodies, 169 stab wounds? “They put the hideous bodies on display and they imply: If he gets out, see what will happen to you.”

Helter Skelter? “It means confusion, literally. It doesn’t mean any war with anyone. It doesn’t mean that some people are going to kill other people…Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast. If you can’t see the confusion coming down around you fast, you can call it what you wish.”

Conspiracy? “Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? Is that a conspiracy?

“The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music…

“It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says ‘Rise,’ it says ‘Kill.’

“Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

About the witnesses. “For example, Danny DeCarlo. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike…But actually all I ever did with Danny DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect him back at himself. If he said he did not like the black man, I would say ‘O.K.’ So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and say ‘Charlie thinks like I do.’

“But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.

“I don’t think like you people. You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone…”

Linda Kasabian. She only testified against him because she saw him as her father and she never liked her father. “So she gets on the stand and she says when she looked in that man’s eyes that was dying, she knew that it was
my
fault. She knew it was my fault because she couldn’t face death. And if she can’t face death, that is not my fault. I can face death. I have all the time. In the penitentiary you live with it, with constant fear of death, because it is a violent world in there, and you have to be on your toes constantly.”

Dianne Lake. She wanted attention. She would make trouble, cause accidents to get it. She wanted a father to punish her. “So as any father would do, I conditioned her mind with pain to keep her from burning the ranch down.”

Yes, he was a father to the young girls and boys in the Family. But a father only in the sense that he taught them “not to be weak and not to lean on me.” Paul Watkins wanted a father. “I told him: ‘To be a man, boy, you have to stand up and be your own father.’ So he goes off to the desert and finds a father image in Paul Crockett.”

Yes, he put a knife to Juan Flynn’s throat. Yes, he told him he felt responsible for all of these killings. “I do feel some responsibility. I feel a responsibility for the pollution. I feel a responsibility for the whole thing.”

He didn’t deny that he had told Brooks Poston to get a knife and go kill the sheriff of Shoshone. “I don’t know the sheriff of Shoshone. I am not saying that I didn’t say it, but if I said it, at the time I may have thought it was a good idea.

“To be honest with you, I don’t recall ever saying ‘Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.’ Or I don’t recall saying ‘Get a knife and go kill the sheriff.’

“In fact, it makes me mad when someone kills snakes or dogs or cats or horses. I don’t even like to eat meat—that is how much I am against killing…

“I haven’t got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to see any wrong…I have always said: Do what your love tells you, and I do what my love tells me…Is it
my
fault that your children do what
you
do?