Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (76 page)

According to Hochman, in talking to him Leslie professed “a kind of primitive Christianity, love for the world, acceptance of all things. And I asked her, ‘Well, professing that, how can it be you would murder someone?’ She said, ‘Well that was something inside of me too.’”

Maxwell Keith should have stopped right there. Instead, he asked Hochman: “How do you interpret that?”

A.
“I think it’s rather realistic. I think that in reality it
was
something inside of her, despite her chronic denial of the emotional aspects of herself, that a rage was there.”

 

Nor did Keith leave it at that. He now asked: “When you say a rage was there, what do you mean by that?”

A.
“In my opinion it would take a rage, an emotional reaction to kill someone. I think it is unquestionable that that feeling was inside of her.”

 

Q.
“Bearing in mind that she had never seen or heard of Mrs. LaBianca, in your opinion there was some hate in her when this occurred?”

 

A.
“Well, I think it would make it easier for her not to know Mrs.

 

LaBianca…It is hard to kill someone that you have good feelings towards. I don’t think there was anything specific about Mrs.

LaBianca.

“Let me make myself clear: Mrs. LaBianca was an object, a blank screen upon which Leslie projected her feelings, much as a patient projects his feeling on an analyst whom he doesn’t know…feelings towards her mother, her father, toward the establishment…

“I think she was a very angry girl for a long time, a very alienated girl for a long time, and the anger and rage was associated with that.”

Hochman was articulating one of the main points of my final summation: namely, that Leslie, Sadie, Katie, and Tex had a hostility and rage within them that pre-existed Charles Manson. They were different from Linda Kasabian, Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, Juan Flynn, and T. J. When Manson asked them to kill for him, each said no.

Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten said yes.

So there had to be something special about these people that caused them to kill. Some kind of inner flaw. Apart from Charlie.

T
hough he had badly damaged his own case, Keith had tried to put the hat on Manson. Fitzgerald, in his examination of Hochman, did just the opposite. He sought to minimize the importance of Manson’s influence over Leslie. Asking Hochman what Manson’s influence actually was, he received this reply: “His ideas, his presence, the role he played in his relationship to her, served to reinforce a lot of her feelings and attitudes. It served to reinforce and give her a way of continuing her general social alienation, her alienation from the establishment.”

Q.
“So, really, all you are saying is that (A) Manson could possibly have had some influence, and (B), if he did have some influence, it would only contribute to the lowering of her restraints on her impulsiveness, is that correct?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“So any influence Manson had on Leslie Van Houten, in terms of your professional opinion, is tenuous at best, is that correct?”
*

 

A.
“Let me give you another example that may make it clearer…

 

Suppose someone comes in and says, ‘Let’s eat the whole apple pie.’ Obviously your temptation is stimulated by the suggestion, but your final decision on whether or not to eat the whole pie or just one piece comes out of you. So the other person is influential, but is not a final arbiter or decider of that situation…

“Someone can tell you to shoot someone, but your decision to do that comes from inside you.”

Kanarek, when his turn came, picked up the scent. “And so you are telling us then, in layman’s language, that when someone takes a knife and stabs, the decision to do that is a personal decision?”

A.
“In the ultimate analysis it is.”

 

Q.
“It is a personal decision of the person who does the stabbing?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Ironically, Kanarek and I were now on the same side. Both of us were seeking to prove that, even independent of Manson, these girls had murder within them.

M
anson was very impressed by Hochman and at first wanted to be interviewed by him. I was relieved, however, when he later abandoned the idea. I wasn’t greatly worried about Manson conning Hochman. But even if Hochman didn’t buy Manson’s story, Kanarek would make sure he repeated it on the stand. Thus, using Hochman as a conduit, Manson could get almost everything he wanted before the jury, without being subject to my cross-examination.

H
ochman found in all three girls “much evidence in their history of early alienation, of early antisocial or deviant behavior.” Even before joining the Family, Leslie had more emotional problems than the average person. Sadie actively sought to be everything her father warned her not to be. “She thinks now, in retrospect,” Hochman noted, “that even without Charles Manson she would have ended up in jail for manslaughter or assault with a deadly weapon.” Katie first had sex at fifteen. She never saw the boy again, and she suffered tremendous guilt because of the experience. Manson eradicated that guilt. He also, in letting her join the Family, gave her the acceptance she desperately craved.

Of the three, Hochman felt Sadie had a little more remorse than the other two—she often talked of wishing her life were over. Yet he also noted, “One is struck by the absence of a conventional sense of morality or conscience in this girl.” And he testified, “She does not seem to manifest any evidence of discomfort or anxiety about her present circumstances, or her conviction and possible death sentence. On the contrary, she seemed to manifest a remarkable peacefulness and self-acceptance in her present state.”

According to Hochman, all three girls denied “any sense of guilt whatever about anything.” And he felt that intellectually they actually believed there is no right or wrong, that morality is a relative thing. “However, I, as a psychiatrist, know that you cannot rationally do away with the feelings that exist on the irrational, unconscious level. You cannot tell yourself that killing is O.K. intellectually when you have grown up all your life feeling that killing is wrong.”

In short, Hochman believed that as human beings the girls felt some guilt deep down inside, even though they consciously suppressed it.

Keith asked Hochman: “In your opinion, Doctor, would Leslie be susceptible or respond to intensive therapy?”

A.
“Possibly.”

 

Q.
“In other words, you don’t feel that she is such a lost soul that she could never be rehabilitated?”

 

A.
“No, I don’t think she is
that
lost a soul, no.”

 

To a psychiatrist, no one is beyond redemption. This is essential, standard testimony. Yet only one of the defense attorneys, Maxwell Keith, asked the question, and then only on redirect.

Earlier I’d brought out that Hochman had only the word of the girls that they were on LSD either night. I now asked him: “Have you ever read a reported case in the literature of LSD of any individual who committed murder while under the influence of LSD?”

A.
“No. Suicide, but not murder.”

 

As I’d later ask the jury, could Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten,
all four
, be exceptions?

A large portion of Hochman’s testimony had dealt with the mental states of the three girls. Susan Atkins was suffering from a diagnosable condition, he said: an early childhood deprivation syndrome which had resulted in a hysterical personality type.

This was not legal insanity as defined by M’Naghten.

Leslie Van Houten was an immature, unusually impulsive person, who tended to act spontaneously without reflection.

Nor was this legal insanity as defined by M’Naghten.

In his report on Krenwinkel, Dr. Claude Brown, the Mobile psychiatrist, had stated that “at the time I saw Miss Krenwinkel, she showed a schizophrenic reaction.” He added, however, that “I do not state with any certainty that this psychosis existed at the time of the alleged murders.”

Schizophrenia
may
be legal insanity as defined by M’Naghten. But Dr. Brown’s opinion was qualified, and when Fitzgerald asked Dr. Hochman if, on the basis of his examination of Krenwinkel, he agreed that she was, or had been, schizophrenic, Hochman replied, “I would say no.”

It remained to bring these points across to the jury, in terms they could easily understand.

On recross-examination I had Hochman define the word “psychotic.” He replied that it meant “a loss of contact with reality.”

I then asked him: “At the present time, Doctor, do you feel any of these three female defendants are psychotic?”

A.
“No.”

 

Q.
“In your opinion, do you feel that any of these three female defendants have ever been psychotic?”

 

A.
“No.”

 

B
UGLIOSI
“May I approach the witness, Your Honor? I want to ask the witness a question privately.”

T
HE
C
OURT
“Yes, you may.”

I had already questioned Dr. Hochman once about this. But I wanted to be absolutely certain of his reply. Once I had received it, I returned to the counsel table and asked him a number of unrelated questions, so the jury wouldn’t know what we had been talking about. I then gradually worked up to the big one.

Q.
“The term ‘insanity,’ Doctor, you are familiar with that term, of course?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“Basically, you define the word ‘insanity’ to be the layman’s synonym for ‘psychotic’?”

 

A.
“I would say that the word ‘insanity’ is used generally to mean

 

‘psychotic.’”

Q.
“Then, from a psychiatric standpoint, I take it that in your opinion none of these three female defendants are presently insane nor have they ever been insane, is that correct?”

 

A.
“That is correct.”

 

As far as the psychiatric testimony was concerned, with Hochman’s reply the ball game was over.

T
he defense called only three more witnesses during the penalty trial, all hard-core Family members. Each was on the stand only a short time, but their testimony, particularly that of the first witness, was as shocking as anything that had gone before.

Catherine Gillies, whose grandmother owned Myers Ranch, parroted the Family line: Charlie never led anyone; there was never any talk of a race war; these murders were committed to free Bobby Beausoleil.

Coldly, matter-of-factly, the twenty-one-year-old girl testified that on the night of the LaBianca murders, “I followed Katie to the car, and I asked if I could go with her. Linda, Leslie, and Sadie were all in the car. And they said that they had plenty of people to do what they were going to do, and that I didn’t need to go.”

On direct examination by Kanarek, Cathy stated: “You know, I am willing to kill for a brother, we all are.”

Q.
“What do you mean by that?”

 

A.
“In other words, to get a brother out of jail, I would kill. I would have killed that night except I did not go…”