Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (53 page)

Inyo County dropped the arson charges against Charlie after Los Angeles indicted him for murder. Bugliosi was nervous enough about his case to call Inyo County DA Frank Fowles and ask that the arson charges be refiled. If Manson was set free in L.A., Bugliosi wanted him behind bars somewhere.

The gag order continued for everyone associated with the case, but on February 6 the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “Theory Links Beatle Album to Murders.” Unidentified “investigators” told the reporter that
“Manson himself” considered the Beatles to be prophets, and that songs from their
White Album
, including “Helter Skelter,” formed the basis of the Tate-LaBianca murders, which “Manson hoped police would believe . . . were committed by Negroes [and] that a black rebellion would follow which only he and his Family would survive.” That same day, another
Times
story declared, “Jailed Manson Exerts Strange Hold on Family” and predicted Charlie planned to use “cooperating attorneys” to control trial tactics and testimony. It was a double public relations coup for the prosecution.

But Charlie believed that he was manipulating the media as well. On February 6,
he granted an extended interview to David Felton and David Dalton, two reporters from
Rolling Stone
, which had established itself as the leading publication of the counterculture. Charlie broke out the same sermons he’d delivered so often to his followers: Everyone is God and the Devil at the same time. All human beings are part of each other, and individual human life has no real value. Children are pure until their parents ruin them. Blacks are about to overthrow whites, and it was foretold by the Beatles and the Bible. He cited current events—the Chicago 7 were about to be found guilty because the judge “saw in those guys what he wanted to see.” (Charlie was partially right; two weeks later five of the seven defendants were found not guilty of conspiracy but guilty of incitement; two were found not guilty of either charge.) Charlie promised he wouldn’t be silent at his trial, and conceded that “I’m probably one of the most dangerous men in the world if I want to be.” He invited the writers to visit the Family at Spahn and to ask his followers anything that they liked. They did. Dalton and Felton didn’t find a band of loving, simple souls there. The Family members were now calculating potential profit from book deals and TV specials. They told the
Rolling Stone
writers that they no longer would give away good stories for free, and also complained that by now the Beatles must surely have heard about Charlie’s arrest. Why hadn’t the band rushed to his rescue? They asked the writers to “tell them to call. Give them our number.”

Bugliosi decided to reinterview Gregg Jakobson. Jakobson became the first non-Family member to talk at length about Charlie’s belief in Helter Skelter, giving Bugliosi a potential witness if Stovitz ageed to present
that motive to the jury. Then Bugliosi talked to Terry Melcher again. Melcher mentioned hearing from Rudi Altobelli that Manson once came to Cielo looking for him. This was critical information that would prove Manson had knowledge of the Cielo grounds beyond the electronic gate when he and Dennis Wilson had driven Melcher home. Altobelli was out of the country on business, but Bugliosi intended to speak with him the moment he returned to L.A.

Melcher was now petrified of Charlie and the Family, particularly of the members who weren’t in jail. He hired a bodyguard and kept a shotgun handy. To Melcher, the scariest thing was that he couldn’t pick any potential Family assassins out of a crowd: “[They] looked like every kid at every Grateful Dead or Byrds concert.”

The Family women, led by Squeaky, bombarded Pat Krenwinkel in Alabama with messages to accept extradition. She agreed, and was arraigned in L.A. on February 24. She requested representation by Paul Fitzgerald, who was acceptable to Charlie. Fitzgerald resigned from the Public Defender’s Office to focus full-time on his new client.
The complexity of the case fascinated him.

Altobelli corroborated Melcher’s story when he got back to Los Angeles. Yes, Manson had come onto the Cielo grounds and knocked on the guesthouse door to talk to him. Tate, Folger, Frykowski, and Sebring were all in the main house at the time. Tate had certainly seen Charlie; she asked Altobelli about the “creepy-looking guy” on their flight to Rome the next day. Oh, and there was somebody else at Cielo that night who probably talked to Charlie—Shahrokh Hatami, her personal photographer. Altobelli thought Bugliosi ought to talk to Hatami. And, of course, Altobelli would prefer not to testify at the upcoming trial if at all possible. Bugliosi said he couldn’t make any promises, and based on the potential importance of his testimony Altobelli should expect to be called to the stand.

Shahrokh Hatami remembered that one time at Cielo he gave someone directions back to the guesthouse. The guy was short, and he bugged the photographer because he acted so smug. While Hatami was rather sharply sending him back to the guesthouse, Sharon Tate came out to see who was there. For a moment, she and the uninvited intruder were no
more than a few feet apart. Hatami drew a diagram of the main house, guesthouse, and grounds, marking where everyone stood. Bugliosi was ecstatic. Now he not only had witnesses placing Charlie inside the Cielo gate, he could prove to a jury that Charlie had personally seen at least one of the victims at the main house.

Inyo County sent Bugliosi the tape of Deputy Sheriff Don Ward interviewing Paul Crockett and Brooks Poston about Charlie and the Family. Bugliosi listened to them talking about Helter Skelter and the bottomless pit, and arranged to talk to them himself in Los Angeles. He didn’t find Crockett to be a good potential witness. The old prospector assured Bugliosi that Manson could never be convicted since “he doesn’t do anything anybody could pin on him.” Brooks Poston was much more helpful. The teenager told how Charlie would bend new followers to his will, using persuasion and drugs. He had a lot to say about Charlie using the Bible and Beatles songs to predict Helter Skelter. He also suggested that Bugliosi talk to Little Paul Watkins, whom Charlie used to get girls for the Family.

Watkins was Bugliosi’s best find yet. He’d been a longtime Family member and one of Charlie’s most trusted lieutenants. He described Charlie setting up orgies for outsiders he wanted to impress, and described Charlie’s fascination with fear and death. Based on what he’d learned from Watkins, Poston, and Jakobson, Bugliosi now believed that his plan to sell a jury on Helter Skelter as the murder motive was correct. Watkins in particular talked at length about Charlie’s belief that after a massive race war he’d rule the world. A weak point in presenting Helter Skelter to a jury would have been explaining why Charlie personally thought he’d profit from instigating it. Now Bugliosi had the reason.

Squeaky Fromme and other members of the Family regularly came to Sybil Brand and badgered Susan Atkins about meeting with Charlie, firing her attorney, and recanting her grand jury testimony. Susan wavered. She told Caballero that she was certain she wouldn’t testify against Charlie and the others when they were brought to trial. Meanwhile, she wanted a meeting with Charlie. Stovitz and Bugliosi were sure that when she did, Charlie would reexert his control over her and she’d back out of her deal with the prosecution.
They contacted Linda Kasabian’s lawyers
and offered to request immunity for her in return for full cooperation. The lawyers agreed, and on February 28 she met with Bugliosi. Nearly nine months pregnant, Linda seemed quiet and honest. He liked her much more than Susan. Linda went out with investigators to Cielo and described the gruesome events in explicit detail, breaking into tears at times.

Susan had her meeting with Charlie on March 5. She wrote later that
she had to choose between two terrible options. Susan believed that if she cooperated with the prosecution, Charlie would have her killed, and also her son. If she did as Charlie demanded and backed out of the agreement to cooperate, the prosecutors would undoubtedly seek the death penalty against her. She was more frightened of Charlie than of the gas chamber, so the next day she fired Richard Caballero, who had urged her cooperation with prosecutors, and replaced him with Daye Shinn, one of the lawyers who had hoped to represent Charlie.

Media coverage of Susan’s meeting with Charlie—one report described their “jail reunion” as “joyous”—was overshadowed by
reports of a terrible explosion in Greenwich Village, New York. A ten-room town house was destroyed. Investigators discovered that it was being used by the Weathermen as a primitive bomb factory. Three of their members died in the blast, which was caused by bungled bomb construction. Based on evidence gathered at the scene and the testimony of survivors, it was learned that the group had intended to set off explosions at a dance for military personnel at Fort Dix in New Jersey with the intention of killing everyone there—giving America, in Mark Rudd’s recollection, “a taste of what it had been dishing out daily in Southeast Asia.” That plan had failed, but domestic terrorist bombings around the nation continued to escalate. The government estimated there was now an average of forty per week. Almost all of the explosives were homemade, and many were built according to instructions in
The Blaster’s Handbook
, a build-a-bomb primer published by the Explosives Department of the du Pont Corporation and readily available to anyone.

On the same day that the Greenwich Village town house exploded,
LIE
was released. Phil Kaufman knew enough about the music business to realize that he had to start off small. His plan was to place the first few
hundred albums in local L.A. head shops that catered to counterculture customers, and then, when those were snapped up, proving there was wider demand, get
LIE
into chain record stores where it could sell in greater numbers. But when Kaufman took the LP around to the small shops, no one wanted to stock it. It was one thing for head shop owners to find Charlie fascinating, but another to seemingly endorse murder by offering his record for sale. Kaufman did his best but soon realized that there was no market, underground or otherwise, for a Charlie Manson album.

Kaufman realized that, but Charlie didn’t. He found it impossible to believe that the world wasn’t clamoring to hear his music. Clearly, Phil Kaufman was lying when he said no store would stock them; he must be selling them, claiming that he hadn’t, and pocketing the profits instead of turning the money over to Charlie to pay his legal costs. Charlie sent some of the Family to Kaufman’s house to demand the cash from record sales. When Kaufman told them there was no money to give them, they threatened him and demanded that he give them any unsold
LIE
albums instead. Kaufman refused. When they came back a second time brandishing knives, he held them at bay with a shotgun. On a third visit, the Family members surrounded his house and chanted, “Give us the music.” Instead, Kaufman emerged from the house waving a .357 Magnum and chased them down the street. He decided that the Family wasn’t harmless after all, and that Charlie probably did order some of his followers to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders. Kaufman still hoped to sell the albums and recoup his investment, but attorneys representing Voytek Frykowski’s son got a court order garnishing any album proceeds for the boy.
Kaufman was left with a garageful of vinyl LPs and the realization that for a long time the duplicitous son of a bitch had hid his murderous side from Kaufman.

On March 10, Daye Shinn announced that
Susan Atkins would recant her grand jury testimony and claim that, under pressure from the prosecution, she’d made up everything. Stovitz and Bugliosi told reporters that they’d expected that ever since Susan was allowed to meet with Manson, and that they still had enough evidence to successfully prosecute her along with Charlie, Pat, Leslie, and Tex, whenever he was finally extradited
from Texas to California. The prosecutors met with DA Younger, and it was agreed that they’d seek the death penalty for all the defendants.

Charlie got what he wanted with Susan, but lost another legal skirmish. Judge Keene, who previously agreed to let Charlie serve as his own attorney, reversed the decision on the grounds that since his original decision he’d determined that Charlie was incapable of competent self-defense. Charlie screamed, “There’s no love in this court,” and Gypsy and Sandy Good, seated in the spectator section, leaped to their feet to shout insults at Keene. He jailed them for five days and appointed Charles Hollopeter, who had one of the city’s most successful practices, as Charlie’s attorney. Hollopeter immediately asked that Charlie be examined by a psychiatrist. That enraged Charlie, who demanded that Keene at least allow him the defense lawyer of his choice. When the judge agreed, Charlie selected thirty-five-year-old Ronald Hughes, a stout, shambling attorney who had never tried a criminal case. He’d worked himself into Charlie’s good graces by handling the legal paperwork necessary to transfer the rights for Charlie’s songs to Phil Kaufman as part of getting the album release. Charlie clearly intended for Hughes to be a figurehead—there was no way Charlie would allow anyone else to orchestrate his defense. Given his lack of trial experience, Hughes was someone the prosecutors didn’t mind facing in a courtroom.

Any pleasure Stovitz and Bugliosi took from Charlie’s choice of attorney was short-lived. Within days, he jettisoned Hughes for Irving Kanarek, who was notorious for his outrageous tactics. (Hughes was shifted over to defend Leslie Van Houten.) Somehow Charlie had learned about Kanarek, who routinely confounded judges and prosecutors and put juries to sleep by extending trials with drawn-out questioning of witnesses and frequent objections that seemed like filibusters.
His apparent intent was to provoke some prosecutorial or judicial misstep that would allow him to win on appeal. Kanarek bragged that unlike all the ambulance chasers who’d begged Charlie for the high-profile job, Charlie came to him. Kanarek’s was exactly the kind of defense approach that would cause Stovitz and Bugliosi the most trouble. Their plan to present Helter Skelter as a motive was a delicate, complicated strategy under the best of circumstances. With Kanarek jumping in to stall and obfuscate at every
opportunity, their chances of holding a jury’s attention over the course of a lengthy trial were greatly reduced. Hiring Kanarek was a masterstroke on Charlie’s part.