Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson Hardcover (51 page)

•  •  •

Richard Caballero believed that Susan was going to recant her testimony sooner rather than later. After she did, the prosecutors couldn’t use anything she’d told them or the grand jury so far, but they’d surely be furious and do everything they could to build a strong case against Susan to send her to the gas chamber. Caballero felt his client’s best defense was that she was completely controlled by Charlie, and before she clammed up, he wanted her story as she’d told it so far to get out to the public beyond his own statements and media leaks. Without telling the prosecutors, he began to quietly explore a deal that would result in a pretrial book presenting Susan as evil mastermind Charlie’s helpless, brainwashed minion.
There were lots of writers and journalists who wanted an exclusive piece of the Manson story, so it didn’t take Caballero long to get something in place.

•  •  •

At Sybil Brand,
Susan began receiving her first visitors, some of the female Family members who were staying at Phil Kaufman’s. They told Susan that they loved her, and mentioned how her son was in the custody of L.A. Family Services. The Family had helped Susan get little Ze Zo Ze back after she’d lost him before, when he and the other Family children were taken by Social Services after the August 16 Spahn Ranch raid. They emphasized to Susan that they could certainly find the little boy again.

•  •  •

On the afternoon of December 9, Charles Milles Manson, address transient, occupation musician, was formally charged in Inyo County court with the murders of seven people and immediately extradited to the ninth floor jail at downtown L.A.’s Hall of Justice. Starting with Chief Davis’s press conference on December 1 and continuing through the grand jury testimony and indictments, public appetite for even a glimpse of Charlie in the flesh reached frenzied heights, thanks to media coverage that emphasized sensationalism over facts. Self-styled insiders tipped reporters that Charlie and the Family practiced black magic and animal sacrifice. On-air and print speculation abounded that Charlie used hypnosis to control the minds of his followers. Rare relevant articles (“Manson Wanted a Racial War, Friends Say” in the December 7 edition of the
Los Angeles Times
) were virtually ignored. December 9 became Charlie’s coming-out party, the first real opportunity for the press and public to get a good glimpse of him. As he was taken from the Inyo County courthouse and placed in a van for transport to L.A., Charlie had a Christ-at-Gethsemane air about him—long hair and beard, simple buckskin clothing, eyes expressive even as he shuffled along amid a surrounding phalanx of policemen. He didn’t look like the evil leader of a killer cult. He didn’t look in any way threatening.

When Charlie arrived at the Hall of Justice, there was a large crowd gathered outside and an even bigger one inside. Hundreds of deputy district attorneys, public defenders, and clerical staffers left their desks in the
building to get a good look at the notorious prisoner. Charlie was brought down a long hall, and before they saw him everyone waiting heard metallic rattling. When Charlie finally came into sight, it was hard to immediately tell what he looked like or what he was wearing because he was encased from head to foot in heavy chains. One deputy DA was reminded of the first appearance of Marley’s Ghost in
A Christmas Carol.
The LAPD was taking no chances that Charlie might escape.

•  •  •

Charlie had reason to despair. He was charged with seven of the most notorious murders in modern American history. One of his followers had ratted him out to the grand jury and others would get ample opportunity to do the same. All the power of the District Attorney’s Office and the LAPD was arrayed against him. But Charlie wasn’t without resources himself. His hold over many of his followers, even those in custody, remained intact. Besides them, he had his own proven ability to turn bad situations to his advantage. If it came down to a battle of wits between him and the investigators, Charlie was not necessarily outmatched. His life was at stake, but as he was brought inside the Hall of Justice and up an elevator to the cells on the ninth floor, he didn’t appear scared or even intimidated. If anything, Charlie seemed to some puzzled onlookers to be enjoying himself.

They were right. For thirty-five years, Charlie Manson yearned to be the center of attention, culminating in his ambition to be bigger than the Beatles. As he was marched into jail in chains, with photographers’ cameras flashing and a crush of onlookers gawking, Charlie could sense that he was finally getting close. He’d wanted this attention all his life, and he was prepared to take full advantage.

C
harlie’s arrival in chains at the L.A. Hall of Justice increased rather than satisfied public interest in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Previously, most media coverage was limited to speculation and occasional stories noting a lack of progress in the Tate investigation; the LaBiancas were essentially forgotten. There was a lot going on in America and the world, much of it tragic on a larger scale, that was featured on front pages and broadcasts. News of war and racial strife had saturated public consciousness for the last four years, and there seemed to be no end to those stories. The root causes were complex, and people were sick of thinking about them. With Tate-LaBianca, Charlie and the Family offered a simpler horror—a strange man and his followers apparently killed a famous pregnant actress and six other people. In
The White Album
, a collection of essays on the 1960s,
Joan Didion reflected on the murders and concluded, “The paranoia was fulfilled.” Charlie Manson fulfilled the paranoia of disparate social factions, giving everyone what they wanted—a bogeyman, martyr, and even hero.

It was impossible not to notice Charlie; there were stories about him to watch or to read every day. There was an undeniable attraction to it all: What juicy detail might be revealed next?
L.A. was in the midst of a newspaper war; the
Times
and the
Herald Examiner
vied to see which could attract more readers with bloodcurdling Manson stories. The national media couldn’t get enough of Charlie either. The biggest magazines sent platoons of reporters and photographers to McMechen, West Virginia, to write about Charlie’s childhood.
The director of the county’s public housing there had to assign a special room for interviews so residents wouldn’t
be badgered on the streets. But few wanted to talk about Charlie, and those who did helped further his fame by exaggerating the travails of his childhood. It was widely reported that Charlie was the son of an unwed teenaged whore who eventually abandoned him, and that when he wasn’t in reform schools he was mistreated by hardhearted relatives. It took much longer for reporters to find Kathleen in the Northwest, and to protect her daughter, Nancy, she wanted nothing to do with the media. The principal of the McMechen elementary school, intrigued by all she read and heard, decided to pull Charlie’s file from the dusty room where student records were filed. It wasn’t there; in the few days since Charlie’s explosion into celebrity, someone had stolen it. A black market for Manson memorabilia was already blossoming.

To those appalled by student radicals and war protesters, Charlie and the Family were proof that longhairs were not only disruptive but dangerous. It didn’t matter that they were neither students nor protesters. They looked like they could be, and that was enough. For anyone concerned that drugs had the potential to turn normal young people into kill-crazy lunatics, information about the Family’s regular use of LSD confirmed their worst fears. Atheists and agnostics could and did cite Charlie’s garbled, violent interpretation of Revelation as evidence that religious fundamentalists were monsters. Critics of rock ’n’ roll pointed to Charlie’s fixation with the Beatles—see how such music incited disaster? (In his perceptive
Waiting for the Sun
, Barney Hoskyns wrote that Charlie and Altamont “managed to undo the whole notion that rock music was a positive force for change.”)

But Charlie fulfilled the paranoia of the young disenchanted, too. The antiwar protesters and student radicals deeply distrusted the government and considered elected politicians and lawmen the enemy. Charlie’s docile appearance and initially polite requests to represent himself in court, which were turned down, signaled to many disaffected that here was an innocent man being railroaded because he looked and acted different.
The most radical activists took it a step further; the presumed guilt of Charlie and his followers made him admirable. In December, at the last formal meeting of SDS before it broke into irreconcilable factions, Bernardine Dohrn delivered a speech praising them: “Dig it! First they
killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!” The Weathermen’s salute became four fingers held up in the air to signify the fork jammed into Leno LaBianca’s abdomen. To them, Mark Rudd recalls, the Tate-LaBianca murders were “a big fat finger in the face of this country . . . here’s a little of your own medicine, you hypocrites.”

At the jail on the ninth floor of the Hall of Justice, letters addressed to Charlie began pouring in, hundreds a day. Some were diatribes from those who thought him disgusting, others suggested he save his soul through prayer, a good number requested autographs, but to those screening inmate mail the most disturbing came from teenage girls who wanted Charlie’s permission to join the Family. They thought it sounded wonderful, and for that
Charlie had Squeaky, Ruth Ann, and some of his other still at large followers to thank. Charlie wasn’t the only one with a keen sense of public relations.

The Family women didn’t last long at Phil Kaufman’s. Each one thought that she had the best idea of what Charlie wanted them to do, and they argued constantly. Kaufman got sick of it and told them to stop bickering or get out. They straggled back to Spahn Ranch; George Spahn wasn’t initially glad to see them but soon changed his mind. Squeaky took charge and began inviting the media to visit. Local and national publications were soon featuring long articles about the Family’s simple lifestyle; photographs showed them doing chores on the ranch, frolicking in its streams and caves (sexy little Ruth Ann always posed out front), and even going on their garbage runs. People began coming out to Spahn and renting horses because Charlie Manson’s followers were usually the ones who handed you the reins. Family numbers on the ranch had dwindled,
but now there were new recruits. The Family engaged anyone promising in conversation and invited them to their communal meals. The most important new addition was Dennis Rice, who came with his four young children and a valid credit card. Dennis became the Family’s main conduit to Charlie, visiting him in jail and bringing back instructions. Squeaky took most responsibility for visiting the female members in jail, reminding them to keep quiet and do whatever Charlie told them. Gypsy and Nancy Pitman were released in mid-December—from Susan
Atkins’s grand jury testimony it was clear they hadn’t participated in the murders, and there was no proof that they had committed any other crimes. As soon as they were freed, they joined the others at Spahn. All of the women were careful to emphasize to the media that Charlie “is love.” They said they didn’t know anything about any murders, only that following Charlie made them happy—and, they emphasized,
free
. Reporters didn’t see any evidence of robotic, mind-controlled followers at Spahn, and this was reflected in their stories, just as Squeaky and the others intended.

On December 10,
prosecutors caught a major break. A service station attendant in Sylmar found Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet as he cleaned the women’s toilet tank. Her driver’s license and credit cards were still inside—Charlie’s hope that a black person would find and use them hadn’t panned out. The wallet was too saturated to yield fingerprints, but the discovery corroborated Susan Atkins’s grand jury testimony.

San Jose detectives announced their intention to question Charlie and Family members about the August 2 murders of two teenage girls in their jurisdiction. They suspected the slayings were linked to Tate and LaBianca because each girl suffered numerous stab wounds. It was eventually determined that there was no evidence tying Charlie or the Family to the San Jose crime, but it was only the first of many times it would be suspected that Manson Family members committed other murders beyond those already known.

Charlie was arraigned by Judge William B. Keene on December 11. He wore his buckskins, and the
L.A. Times
noted that “he appeared to relish” the crowd that jammed the courtroom to see him. Keene assigned public defender Paul Fitzgerald to represent Charlie, a potential conflict of interest as he was also part of Bobby Beausoleil’s defense team. Fitzgerald felt he had a good chance to get Charlie off; he told reporters afterward that “all the prosecution has are two fingerprints and Vince Bugliosi,” a nod to the assistant DA’s impressive record as a prosecutor. Bugliosi privately agreed, and arranged for Susan Atkins to be taken from Sybil Brand on Sunday the 14th to ride around with investigators and point out where she thought Linda Kasabian had tossed out bloody clothes, knives, and the Buntline .22 after the Tate murders.

The judge may have given the assignment to Paul Fitzgerald, but a large number of L.A. lawyers hoped to persuade Charlie to let them represent him instead. This was the kind of high-profile case where a win virtually guaranteed a lucrative practice.
During the next six weeks Charlie logged 139 visits from attorneys hoping to gain his trust and business. A dizzying lawyer-go-round for Charlie and for Susan, Pat, and Leslie had begun.

Judge Keene also imposed a gag order; no one associated with the case was to discuss evidence with the media. But, as Bugliosi sourly observed, “rumors multiplied like bacteria.” He even heard a rumor that Susan’s lawyer, Richard Caballero, had cut a deal with a European press syndicate to publish her personal story as soon as the grand jury transcript of her testimony was made public. On Sunday, he picked up his morning paper and found that the truth was even worse. The
Los Angeles Times
front page trumpeted, “SUSAN ATKINS’S STORY OF 2 NIGHTS OF MURDER.” With his client’s permission, Caballero and his law partner, working with local journalists,
turned the tapes Caballero had made with Susan into a quickie book that was supposed to be published only in Europe on December 14. But the
L.A. Times
somehow obtained a copy and printed the contents. Now everyone, including Charlie, knew all that Susan claimed.