Helter Skelter

OCTOBER 15–31, 1969

The physical distance between Parker Center, headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Hall of Justice, which houses the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, is four blocks. That distance can be traversed in the time it takes to dial a telephone.

But it isn’t always that easy. Though LAPD and LASO cooperate on investigations that involve both jurisdictions, there exists between them a certain amount of jealousy.

One of the LaBianca detectives would later admit that he and his fellow officers should have checked with LASO homicide detectives in mid-August to see if they had any similar murders. But it wasn’t until October 15, after most of their other leads had evaporated, that they did so.

When they did, they learned of the Hinman murder. And, unlike Sergeant Buckles of the Tate team, they found the similarities striking enough to merit further investigation.

There had been some recent developments in the Hinman case, Sergeants Whiteley and Guenther told them. Less than a week before, Inyo County officers had raided isolated Barker Ranch, located in an extremely rugged, almost inaccessible area south of Death Valley National Monument. The raid, based on charges ranging from grand theft to arson, had netted twenty-four members of a hippie cult known as the “Manson Family.” Many of these same people—including their leader, Charles Manson, a thirty-four-year-old ex-con with a long and checkered criminal history—had also been arrested in an earlier raid conducted by LASO, which had occurred on August 16, at Spahn’s Movie Ranch in Chatsworth.

During the Barker raid, which took place over a three-day period, two young girls had appeared out of the bushes near a road some miles from the ranch, asking the officers for protection. They claimed they had been attempting to flee the “Family” and were afraid for their lives. One was named Stephanie Schram, the other Kitty Lutesinger.

Whiteley and Guenther had been looking for Kitty Lutesinger ever since learning that she was a girl friend of Bobby Beausoleil, the suspect in the Hinman murder. Informed of her arrest, they drove 225 miles to Independence, the Inyo County seat, to question her.

Kitty, a freckled, frightened seventeen-year-old, was five months pregnant with Beausoleil’s child. Though she had lived with the Family, she apparently was not trusted by them. When Beausoleil disappeared from Spahn Ranch in early August, no one would tell her where he had gone. Only after several weeks did she learn that he had been arrested, and, much later, that he had been charged with the murder of Gary Hinman.

Questioned about the murder, Kitty said she had heard that Manson had sent Beausoleil and a girl named Susan Atkins to Hinman’s home to get money from him. A fight had ensued, and Hinman had been killed. Kitty couldn’t recall who told her this, just that it was the talk at the ranch. She did recall, however, another conversation in which Susan Atkins told her and several other girls that she had been in a fight with a man who had pulled her hair, and that she had stabbed him three or four times in the legs.

Susan Atkins had been arrested in the Barker raid and booked under the name “Sadie Mae Glutz.” She was still in custody. On October 13, the day after they talked to Kitty, Sergeants Whiteley and Guenther questioned her.

She told them that she and Bobby Beausoleil were sent to Gary Hinman’s house to get some money he had supposedly inherited. When he wouldn’t give it to them, Beausoleil pulled out a knife and slashed Hinman’s face. For two days and two nights the pair had taken turns sleeping, so Hinman wouldn’t escape. Then, on their last evening at the residence, while she was in the kitchen, she had heard Gary say, “Don’t, Bobby!” Hinman then staggered into the kitchen bleeding from a chest wound.

Even after this, Hinman didn’t die. After wiping the house of prints (not effectively, since both a palm print and a fingerprint belonging to Beausoleil were found), they were going out the front door when they heard Hinman moaning. Beausoleil went back in, and she heard Gary cry out, “Oh, no, Bobby, please don’t!” She also heard “a sound like gurgling as when people are dying.”

Beausoleil then hot-wired Hinman’s 1965 Volkswagen bus and they drove back to Spahn Ranch.

Whiteley and Guenther asked Susan if she would repeat her statement on tape. She declined. She was transported to the San Dimas sheriff’s station, where she was booked for suspicion of murder.

Susan Atkins’ statement—unlike that of Kitty Lutesinger—did not implicate Manson in the Hinman murder. Nor, contrary to what Kitty had said, did Susan admit to having stabbed anyone. Whiteley and Guenther strongly suspected she was telling only what she thought they already knew.

Nor were the two LaBianca detectives very impressed. Hinman had been close to the Manson Family; several of its members—including Beausoleil, Atkins, even Manson himself—had lived with him at various times in the past. In short, there was a link. But there was no evidence that Manson or any of his followers knew the LaBiancas or the people at 10050 Cielo Drive.

Still, it was a lead, and they proceeded to check it out. Kitty had been released into the custody of her parents, who had a local address, and they interviewed her there. From LASO, Inyo County officials, Manson’s parole officer, and others, they began assembling names, descriptions, and fingerprints of persons known to belong to or associate with the Family. Kitty had mentioned that while the Family was still living at Spahn, Manson had tried to enlist a motorcycle gang, the Straight Satans, as his personal bodyguard. With the exception of one biker named Danny, the group had laughed at Manson. Danny had stuck around for several months.

On learning that the motorcycle gang hung out in Venice, California, the LaBianca detectives asked Venice PD if they could locate a Straight Satan named Danny.

Something in Kitty Lutesinger’s statement puzzled Whiteley and Guenther. At first they thought it was just a discrepancy. But then they got to wondering. According to Kitty, Susan Atkins had admitted stabbing a man three or four times in the legs.

Gary Hinman hadn’t been stabbed in the legs.

But Voytek Frykowski had.

Although rebuffed once before, on October 20 the sheriff’s deputies again contacted the Tate detectives at LAPD, telling them what they had learned.

It is possible to measure the Tate detectives’ interest with some exactness. Not until October 31, eleven days later, did they interview Kitty Lutesinger.

NOVEMBER 1–12, 1969

November was a month for confessions. Which, initially, no one believed.

After being booked for the Hinman murder, Susan Denise Atkins, aka[15] Sadie Mae Glutz, was moved to Sybil Brand Institute, the women’s house of detention in Los Angeles. On November 1, after completing orientation, she was assigned to Dormitory 8000, and given a bunk opposite one Ronnie Howard. Miss Howard, a buxom former call girl who over her thirty-some years had been known by more than a dozen and a half aliases, was at present awaiting trial on a charge of forging a prescription.

On the same day Susan moved into Dormitory 8000, one Virginia Graham did also. Miss Graham, herself an ex–call girl with a sizable number of aka’s, had been picked up for violating her parole. Although they hadn’t seen each other for five years, Ronnie and Virginia had not only been friends and business associates in the past, going out on “calls” together, but Ronnie had married Virginia’s ex-husband.

As their work assignments, Susan Atkins and Virginia Graham were given jobs as “runners,” carrying messages for the prison authorities. In the slow periods when there wasn’t much work, they would sit on stools in “control,” the message center, and talk.

At night, after lights-out, Ronnie Howard and Susan talked also.

Susan loved to talk. And Ronnie and Virginia proved rapt listeners.

On November 2, 1969, one Steve Zabriske appeared at the Portland, Oregon, Police Department and told Detective Sergeant Ritchard that a “Charlie” and a “Clem” had committed both the Tate and LaBianca murders.

He had heard this, the nineteen-year-old Zabriske said, from Ed Bailey and Vern Plumlee, two hippie types from California whom he had met in Portland. Zabriske also told Ritchard that Charlie and Clem were at present in custody in Los Angeles on another charge, grand theft auto.

Bailey had told him something else, Zabriske said: that he had personally seen Charlie shoot a man in the head with a .45 caliber automatic. This had occurred in Death Valley.

Sergeant Ritchard asked Zabriske if he could prove any of this. Zabriske admitted he couldn’t. However, his brother-in-law, Michael Lloyd Carter, had also been present during the conversations, and would back him up if Sergeant Ritchard wanted to talk to him.

Sergeant Ritchard didn’t. Since Zabriske “did not have last names nor did he have anything concrete to establish that he was telling the truth,” Sergeant Ritchard, according to the official report, “did not place any credence on this interview and did not notify the Los Angeles Police Department…”

The girls in Dormitory 8000 called Sadie Mae Glutz—as Susan Atkins insisted on being known—“Crazy Sadie.” It wasn’t just that ridiculous name. She was much too happy, considering where she was. She would laugh and sing at inappropriate times. Without warning, she would stop whatever she happened to be doing and start go-go dancing. She did her exercises sans underpants. She bragged that she had done everything sexual that could be done, and on more than one occasion propositioned other inmates.

Virginia Graham thought she was sort of a “little girl lost,” putting on a big act so no one would know how frightened she really was.

One day while they were sitting in the message center, Virginia asked her, “What are you in for?”

“First degree murder,” Susan matter-of-factly replied.

Virginia couldn’t believe it; Susan looked so young.

In this particular conversation, which apparently took place on November 3, Susan said little about the murder itself, only that she felt a co-defendant, a boy who was being held in the County Jail, had squealed on her. In questioning Susan, Whiteley and Guenther hadn’t told her that it was Kitty Lutesinger who had implicated her, and she presumed the snitch was Bobby Beausoleil.

The next day Susan told Virginia that the man she was accused of killing was named Gary Hinman. She said that she, Bobby, and another girl were involved. The other girl hadn’t been charged with the murder, she said, though she had been in Sybil Brand not too long ago on another charge; right now she was out on bail and had gone to Wisconsin to get her baby.[16]

Virginia asked her, “Well, did you do it?”

Susan looked at her and smiled and said, “Sure.” Just like that.

Only the police had it wrong, she said. They had her holding the man while the boy stabbed him, which was silly, because she couldn’t hold a big man like that. It was the other way round; the boy held him and she had stabbed him, four or five times.

What stunned Virginia, she would later say, was that Susan described it “just like it was a perfectly natural thing to do every day of the week.”

Susan’s conversations were not limited to murder. Subjects ranged from psychic phenomena to her experiences as a topless dancer in San Francisco. It was while there, she told Virginia, that she met “a man, this Charlie.” He was the strongest man alive. He had been in prison but had never been broken. Susan said she followed his orders without question—they all did, all the kids who lived with him. He was their father, their leader, their love.

It was Charlie, she said, who had given her the name Sadie Mae Glutz.

Virginia remarked that she didn’t consider that much of a favor.

Charlie was going to lead them to the desert, Susan said. There was a hole in Death Valley, only Charlie knew where it was, but deep down inside, in the center of the earth, there was a whole civilization. And Charlie was going to take the “family,” the chosen few, and they were going to go to this bottomless pit and live there.

Charlie, Susan confided to Virginia, was Jesus Christ.

Susan, Virginia decided, was nuts.

On the night of Wednesday, November 5, a young man who might have been able to provide a solution to the Tate-LaBianca homicides ceased to exist.

At 7:35 P.M. officers from Venice PD, responding to a telephone call, arrived at 28 Clubhouse Avenue, a house near the beach rented by a Mark Ross. They found a youth—approximate age twenty-two, nickname “Zero,” true name unknown—lying on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. Deceased was still warm to the touch. There was blood on the pillow and what appeared to be an entrance wound in the right temple. Next to the body was a leather gun case and an eight-shot .22 caliber Iver & Johnson revolver. According to the other persons present—a man and three girls—Zero had killed himself while playing Russian roulette.

The stories of the witnesses—who identified themselves as Bruce Davis, Linda Baldwin, Sue Bartell, and Catherine Gillies, and who said they had been staying at the house while Ross was away—tallied perfectly. Linda Baldwin stated that she had been lying on the right side of the mattress, Zero on the left side, when Zero noticed the leather case in a stand next to the bed and remarked, “Oh, here’s a gun.” He removed the gun from the case, Miss Baldwin said, commenting, “There’s only one bullet in it.” Holding the gun in his right hand, he had then spun the cylinder, placed the muzzle against his right temple, and pulled the trigger.

The others, in various parts of the house, had heard what sounded like a firecracker popping, they said. When they entered the bedroom, Miss Baldwin told them, “Zero shot himself, just like in the movies.” Bruce Davis admitted he picked up the gun. They had then called the police.

The officers were unaware that all those present were members of the Manson Family, who had been living at the Venice residence since their release following the Barker Ranch raid. Since when questioned separately all told essentially the same story, the police accepted the Russian roulette explanation and listed the cause of death as suicide.

They had several very good reasons to suspect that explanation, although apparently no one did.

When officer Jerrome Boen later dusted the gun for latents, he found no prints. Nor were there prints on the leather gun case.

And when they examined the revolver, they found that Zero had really been bucking the odds. The gun contained seven live rounds and one spent shell. It had been fully loaded, with no empty chambers.

A number of Family members, including Manson himself, were still in jail in Independence. On November 6, LaBianca detectives Patchett and Sartuchi, accompanied by Lieutenant Burdick of SID, went there to interview them.

Patchett asked Manson if he knew anything about either the Tate or LaBianca homicides. Manson replied, “No,” and that was that.

Patchett was so unimpressed with Manson that he didn’t even bother to write up a report on the interview. Of the nine Family members the detectives talked to, only one rated a memorandum. About 1:30 that afternoon Lieutenant Burdick interviewed a girl who had been booked under the name Leslie Sankston. “During this conversation,” Burdick noted, “I inquired of Miss Sankston if she was aware that Sadie [Susan Atkins] was reportedly involved in the Gary Hinman homicide. She replied that she was. I inquired if she was aware of the Tate and LaBianca homicides. She indicated that she was aware of the Tate homicide but seemed unfamiliar with the LaBianca homicide. I asked her if she had any knowledge of persons in her group who might possibly be involved in either the Tate or LaBianca homicides. She indicated that there were some ‘things’ that caused her to believe someone from her group might be involved in the Tate homicide. I asked her to elaborate on the ‘things’ [but] she declined to indicate what she meant and stated that she wanted to think about it overnight, and that she was perplexed and didn’t know what to do. She did indicate she might tell me the following day.”

However, when Burdick again questioned her the next morning, “she stated she had decided she did not want to say anymore about the subject and the conversation was terminated.”

Though the interviews yielded nothing, the LaBianca detectives did pick up one possible lead. Before leaving Independence, Patchett asked to see Manson’s personal effects. Going through the clothing Manson had been wearing when arrested, Patchett noticed that he used leather thongs both as laces in his moccasins and in the stitching of his trousers. Patchett took a sample thong from each back to Los Angeles for comparison with the thong used to tie Leno LaBianca’s hands.

A leather thong is a leather thong, SID in effect told him; though the thongs were similar, there was no way to tell whether they had come from the same piece of leather.

LAPD and LASO have no monopoly on jealousy. To a certain extent it exists between almost all law-enforcement agencies, and even within some.

The Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department is a single room, 318, on the third floor of Parker Center. Although it is a large room, rectangular in shape, there are no partitions, only two long tables, all the detectives working at either one or the other. The distance between the Tate and LaBianca detectives was only a few feet.

But there are psychological as well as physical distances and, as noted, while the Tate detectives were largely the “old guard,” the LaBianca detectives were for the most part the “young upstarts.” Also, there was apparently some residual bitterness stemming from the fact that several of the latter, rather than the former, had been assigned to L.A.’s last big publicity case, Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In short, there was a certain amount of jealousy involved. And a certain lack of communication.

As a result, none of the LaBianca detectives walked those few feet to tell the Tate detectives that they were following a lead which might connect the two homicides. No one informed Lieutenant Helder, who was in charge of the Tate investigation, that they had gone to Independence and interviewed one Charles Manson, who was believed involved in a strikingly similar murder, or that while there one of his followers, a girl who went by the name of Leslie Sankston, had admitted that someone in their group might be involved in the Tate homicides.

The LaBianca detectives continued to go it on their own.

Had Leslie Sankston—true name Leslie Van Houten—yielded to that impulse to talk, she could have told the detectives a great deal about the Tate murders, but even more about the LaBianca slayings.

But by this time Susan Atkins was already doing enough talking for both of them.

On Thursday, November 6, at about 4:45 P.M., Susan had walked over to Virginia Graham’s bed and sat down. They had finished work for the day, and Susan/Sadie was in a talkative mood. She began rapping about the LSD trips she had taken, karma, good and bad vibrations, and the Hinman murder. Virginia cautioned her that she shouldn’t be talking so much; she knew a man who had been convicted just on what he told a cellmate.

Susan replied, “Oh, I know. I haven’t talked about it to anyone else. You know, I can look at you and there’s something about you, I know I can tell things to you.” Also, she wasn’t worried about the police. They weren’t all that good. “You know, there’s a case right now, they are so far off the track they don’t even know what’s happening.”

Virginia asked, “What are you talking about?”

“That one on Benedict Canyon.”

“Benedict Canyon? You don’t mean Sharon Tate?”

“Yeah.” With this Susan seemed to get very excited. The words came out in a rush. “You know who did it, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re looking at her.”

Virginia gasped, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Susan just smiled and said, “Huh-uh.”[17]

Later Virginia Graham would be unable to remember exactly how long they had talked—she would estimate it as being between thirty-five minutes and an hour, maybe longer. She would also admit confusion as to whether some details were discussed that afternoon or in subsequent conversations, and the order in which some topics came up.

But the content she remembered. That, she would later say, she would never forget as long as she lived.

She asked the big question first: Why, Sadie, why? Because, Susan replied, we “wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice.” But why the Tate house? Susan’s answer was chilling in its simplicity: “It is isolated.” The place had been picked at random. They had known the owner, Terry Melcher,[18] Doris Day’s son, from about a year back, but they didn’t know who would be there, and it didn’t matter; one person or ten, they had gone there prepared to do everybody in.

“In other words,” Virginia asked, “you didn’t know Jay Sebring or any of the other people?”

“No,” Susan replied.

“Do you mind me asking questions? I mean, I’m curious.” Susan didn’t mind. She told Virginia that she had kind brown eyes, and if you look through a person’s eyes you can see the soul.

Virginia told Susan she wanted to know exactly how it had come down. “I’m dying of curiosity,” she added.

Susan obliged. Before leaving the ranch, Charlie had given them instructions. They had worn dark clothing. They also brought along a change of clothes in the car. They drove up to the gate, then drove back down to the bottom of the hill, parked the car, and walked back up.

Virginia interrupted, “Then it wasn’t just you?”

“Oh, no,” Susan told her. “There were four of us.” In addition to herself, there were two other girls and a man.

When they reached the gate, Susan continued, “he” cut the telephone wires. Virginia again interrupted to ask whether he wasn’t worried he’d cut the electrical wires, extinguishing the lights and alerting the people that something was wrong. Susan replied, “Oh, no, he knew just what to do.” Virginia got the impression, less from her words than from the way she said them, that the man had been there before.

Susan didn’t mention how they got past the gate. She said they had killed the boy first. When Virginia asked why, Susan replied that he had seen them. “And he had to shoot him. He was shot four times.”

At this point Virginia became somewhat confused. Later she would state, “I think she told me—I’m not positive—I think she said that this Charles shot him.” Earlier Virginia had got the impression that although Charlie had instructed them what to do, he hadn’t come along. But now it appeared he had.

What Virginia didn’t know was that there were two men named Charles in the Family: Charles Manson and Charles “Tex” Watson. The complications this simple misunderstanding would later cause would be immense.

On entering the house—Susan didn’t say how they got in—they saw a man on the couch in the living room, and a girl, whom Susan identified as “Ann Folger,” sitting in a chair reading a book. She didn’t look up.

Virginia asked her how she knew their names. “We didn’t,” Susan replied, “not until the next day.”

At some point the group apparently split up, Susan going on to the bedroom, while the others stayed in the living room.

“Sharon was sitting up in bed. Jay was sitting on the edge of the bed talking to Sharon.”

“Oh, really?” Virginia asked. “What did she have on?”

“She had on a bikini bra and panties.”

“You’re kidding. And she was pregnant?”

“Yeah. And they looked up, and were they surprised!”

“Wow! Wasn’t there some kind of a big hassle?”

“No, they were too surprised and they knew we meant business.”

Susan skipped on. It was as if she was “tripping out,” jumping abruptly from one subject to another. Suddenly they were in the living room and Sharon and Jay were strung up with nooses around their necks so if they tried to move they would choke. Virginia asked why they’d put a hood over Sebring’s head. “We didn’t put any hood over his head,” Susan corrected her. “That’s what the papers said, Sadie.” “Well, there wasn’t any hood,” Susan reiterated, getting quite insistent about it.

Then the other man [Frykowski] broke and ran for the door. “He was full of blood,” Susan said, and she stabbed him three or four times. “He was bleeding and he ran to the front part,” out the door and onto the lawn, “and would you believe that he was there hollering ‘Help, help, somebody please help me,’ and nobody came?”

Bluntly, without elaboration, “Then we finished him off.”

Virginia wasn’t asking any questions now. What had begun as a little girl’s fairy tale had become a horror-filled nightmare.

There was no mention of what had happened to Abigail Folger or Jay Sebring, only that “Sharon was the last to die.” On saying this, Susan laughed.

Susan said that she had held Sharon’s arms behind her, and that Sharon looked at her and was crying and begging, “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby. I want to have my baby.”

Susan said she looked Sharon straight in the eye and said, “Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”

Then Susan said, “In a few minutes I killed her and she was dead.”

After killing Sharon, Susan noticed there was blood on her hand. She tasted it. “Wow, what a trip!” she told Virginia. “I thought ‘To taste death, and yet give life.’” Had she ever tasted blood? she asked Virginia. “It’s warm and sticky and nice.”

Virginia managed to ask a question. Hadn’t it bothered her to kill Sharon Tate, with her pregnant?

Susan looked at Virginia quizzically and said, “Well, I thought you understood. I loved her, and in order for me to kill her I was killing part of myself when I killed her.”

Virginia replied, “Oh, yeah, I do understand.”

She had wanted to cut out the baby, Susan said, but there hadn’t been time. They wanted to take out the eyes of the people, and squash them against the walls, and cut off their fingers. “We were going to mutilate them, but we didn’t have a chance to.”

Virginia asked her how she felt after the murders. Susan replied, “I felt so elated; tired, but at peace with myself. I knew this was just the beginning of helter skelter. Now the world would listen.”

Virginia didn’t understand what she meant by “helter skelter,” and Susan tried to explain it to her. However, she talked so quickly and with such obvious excitement that Virginia had trouble following. As Virginia understood it, there was this group, these chosen people, that Charlie had brought together, and they were elected, this new society, to go out, all over the country and all over the world, to pick out people at random and execute them, to release them from this earth. “You have to have a real love in your heart to do this for people,” Susan explained.

Four or five times while Susan was talking, Virginia had to caution her to keep her voice down, that someone might hear. Susan smiled and said she wasn’t worried about that. She was very good at playing crazy.

After they’d left the Tate residence, Susan continued, she discovered that she had lost her knife. She thought maybe the dog had got it. “You know how dogs are sometimes.” They had thought about going back to look for it but had decided against it. She had also left her hand print on a desk. “It dawned on me afterwards,” Susan said, “but my spirit was so strong that obviously it didn’t even show up, or they would have had me by now.”

As Virginia understood it, after leaving the Tate residence, they had apparently changed clothes in the car. Then they had driven some distance, stopping at a place where there was a fountain or water outside, to wash their hands. Susan said a man came outside and wanted to know what they were doing. He started to holler at them. “And,” Susan asked, “guess who he was?”

“I don’t know,” Virginia replied.

“It was the sheriff of Beverly Hills!”

Virginia said she didn’t think Beverly Hills had a sheriff.

“Well,” Susan said petulantly, “the sheriff or mayor or something.”

The man had started to reach into the car to grab the keys, and “Charlie turned on the key. Boy, we made it. We laughed all the way,” Susan said, adding, “If he had only known!”

For a moment Susan remained silent. Then, with her little girl’s smile, she asked, “You know the other two the next night?”

Virginia flashed on the grocery store owner and his wife, the LaBiancas. “Yeah,” she said, “was that you?”

Susan winked and said, “What do you think?”

“But that’s part of the plan,” she continued. “And there’s more—”

But Virginia had heard enough for one day. She excused herself to go take a shower.

Virginia would later recall thinking, She’s got to be kidding! She’s making all this up. This is just too wild, too fantastic!

But then she remembered what Susan was in for—first degree murder.

Virginia decided not to say anything to anyone. It was just too incredible. She also decided, if possible, to avoid Susan.

The following day, however, Virginia walked over to Ronnie Howard’s bed to tell her something. Susan, who was lying on her own bed, interrupted: “Virginia, Virginia, remember that beautiful cat I was telling you about? I want you to dig on his name. Now listen, his name is Manson—Man’s Son!” She repeated it several times to make sure Virginia understood. She said it in a tone of childlike wonder.

She just couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. It was just too much. The first time she and Ronnie Howard were alone together, Virginia Graham told her what Susan Atkins had said. “Hey, what do you do?” she asked Ronnie. “If this is true—My God, this is terrible. I wish she hadn’t told me.”

Ronnie thought Sadie was “making it all up. She could have gotten it out of the papers.”

The only way to know for sure, they decided, would be for Virginia to question her further, to see if she could learn something that only one of the killers would know.

Virginia had an idea how she could do this without arousing Susan’s suspicions. Though she hadn’t mentioned it to Susan Atkins, Virginia Graham had more than a passing interest in the Tate homicides. She had known Jay Sebring. A girl friend, who was working as a manicurist for Sebring, had introduced them at the Luau some years ago, shortly after Sebring opened his shop on Fairfax. It was a casual thing—he was neither client nor friend, just someone you’d nod and say “Hi” to at a party or in a restaurant. It was an odd coincidence, Susan copping out to her. But there was another coincidence even odder. Virginia had been to 10050 Cielo Drive. Back in 1962 she and her then husband and another girl had been looking for a quiet place, away from things, and had learned 10050 Cielo Drive was up for lease. There had been no one there to show them around, so they had just looked in the windows of the main house. She could remember little about it, only that it looked like a red barn, but the next day at lunch she told Susan about having been there and asked if the interior was still decorated in gold and white. It was just a guess. Susan replied, “Huh-uh,” but didn’t elaborate. Virginia then told her about knowing Sebring, but Susan didn’t appear very interested. This time Susan wasn’t as talkative, but Virginia persisted, picking up miscellaneous bits and pieces of information.

They’d met Terry Melcher through Dennis Wilson, one of the Beach Boys rock group. They—Charlie, Susan, and the others—had lived with Dennis for a time. Virginia got the idea they were hostile toward Melcher, that he was too interested in money. Virginia also learned that the Tate murders had taken place between midnight and one in the morning; that “Charlie is love, pure love”; and that when you stab someone “it feels good when the knife goes in.”

She also learned that besides the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders, “there’s more—and more before…There’s also three people out in the desert…”

Bits and pieces. Susan had said nothing that would establish whether she was or wasn’t telling the truth.

That afternoon Susan walked over and sat down on Virginia’s bed. Virginia had been leafing through a movie magazine. Susan saw it and began talking. The story she related, Virginia would say much later, was even more bizarre than what Susan had already told her. It was so incredible that Virginia didn’t even mention it to Ronnie Howard. No one would believe it, she decided. For Susan Atkins, in one spurt of non-stop talking, gave her a “death list” of persons who would be murdered next. All were celebrities. She then, according to Virginia, described in gruesome detail exactly how Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Tom Jones, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra would die.

On Monday, November 10, Susan Atkins had a visitor at Sybil Brand, Sue Bartell, who told her about the death of Zero. After Sue left, Susan told Ronnie Howard. Whether she embellished it or not is unknown. According to Susan, one of the girls had been holding Zero’s hand when he died. When the gun went off, “he climaxed all over himself.”

Susan didn’t seem disturbed to hear of Zero’s death. On the contrary, it excited her. “Imagine how beautiful to be there when it happened!” she told Ronnie.

On Wednesday, November 12, Susan Atkins was taken to court for a preliminary hearing on the Hinman murder. While there, she heard Sergeant Whiteley testify that it was Kitty Lutesinger—not Bobby Beausoleil—who had implicated her. On being returned to jail, Susan told Virginia that the prosecution had a surprise witness; but she wasn’t worried about her testimony: “Her life’s not worth anything.”

That same day Virginia Graham received some bad news. She was being transferred to Corona Women’s Prison, to serve out the rest of her sentence. She was to leave that afternoon. While she was packing, Ronnie came up to her and asked, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Virginia replied. “Ronnie, if you want to take it from here—”

“I’ve been talking to that girl every night,” Ronnie said. “Boy, she’s really weird. She could have, you know.”

Virginia had forgotten to ask Susan about the word “pig,” which the papers had said was printed in blood on the door of the Tate residence. She suggested that Ronnie question her about this, and anything else she could think of that might indicate whether she was telling the truth.

In the meantime, they decided not to mention it to anyone else.

That same day the LaBianca detectives received a call from Venice PD. Were they still interested in talking to one of the Straight Satans? If so, they were questioning one, a guy named Al Springer, on another charge.

The LaBianca detectives had Springer brought over to Parker Center, where they interviewed him on tape. What he told them was so unexpected they had trouble believing it. For Springer said that on August 11 or 12—two or three days after the Tate homicides—Charlie Manson had bragged to him about killing people, adding, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.”

NOVEMBER 12–16, 1969

LaBianca detectives Nielsen, Gutierrez, and Patchett interviewed Springer on tape, in one of the interrogation cubicles of LAPD Homicide. Springer was twenty-six, five feet nine, weighed 130 pounds, and, except for his dusty, ragged “colors,” as bikers’ jackets are known, was surprisingly neat for a member of an “outlaw” motorcycle band.

Springer, it turned out, prided himself on his cleanliness. Which was one of the reasons he personally hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with Manson and his girls, he said. But Danny DeCarlo, the club treasurer of the Straight Satans, had got mixed up with them and had missed meetings, so around August 11 or 12, he, Springer, had gone to Spahn Ranch to persuade Danny to come back. “…and there was flies all over the place and they were just like animals up there, I couldn’t believe it, you know. You see, I’m really clean, really. Some of the guys get pretty nasty, but I myself, I like to keep things clean.

“Well, in comes this Charlie…He wanted Danny up there because Danny had his colors on his back, and all these drunkards, they come up there and start harassing the girls and messing with the guys and Danny walks out with his Straight Satan colors on, and nobody messes with Charlie, see.

“So I tried to get Danny to come back, and Charlie is standing there, and Charlie says, he says, ‘Now wait a minute, maybe I can give you a better thing than you’ve got already.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘Move up here, you can have all the girls you want, all the girls,’ he says, ‘are all yours, at your disposal, anything.’ And he’s a brainwashing type guy. So I said, ‘Well, how do you survive, how do you support these twenty, thirty fucking broads, man?’ And he says, ‘I got them all hoofing for me.’ He said, ‘I go out at night and I do my thing.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s your thing, man; run your trip down.’ He figured me being a motorcycle rider and all, I’d accept anything including murder.

“So he starts getting in my ear and says how he goes up and he lives with the rich people, and he calls the police ‘pigs’ and what not, he knocks on the door, they’ll open the door, and he’ll just drive in with his cutlass and start cutting them up, see.”

Q. “This is what he told you?”

A. “This is what he told me verbally, right to my face.”

Q. “You’re kidding, is that what you really heard?”

A. “Yeah. I said, ‘When’s the last time you did it?’ He says, ‘Well, we knocked off five of them,’ he says, ‘just the other night.’”

Q. “So he told you that—Charlie stated that he knocked over five people?”

A. “Right. Charlie and Tex.”

Springer couldn’t recall the exact word Manson used: it wasn’t “people”; it might have been “pigs” or “rich pigs.”

The LaBianca detectives were so startled they had Springer run through it a second time, and a third.

A. “I think you’ve got your man right here, I really do.”

Q. “I’m pretty sure we have, but in this day and age of feeding people their rights, if we’re going to make a decent case on him, we can’t do it with his statement.”

Exactly when had Manson told him this? Well, it was the first time he went to Spahn, and that was either August 11 or 12—he couldn’t remember which. But he sure remembered the scene. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I’ve never been to a nudist colony or I’ve never seen real idiots on the loose…” Everywhere he looked there were naked girls. Maybe a dozen and a half were of age, eighteen or over, but about an equal number weren’t. The young ones were hiding in the bushes. Charlie had told him he could have his pick. He’d also offered to buy him a dune buggy and a new motorcycle if he would stay.

It was true turnabout. Charlie Manson, aka Jesus Christ, trying to tempt a Straight Satan.

That Springer resisted the temptation may have been due in part to his knowledge that other members of his gang had been there on previous occasions: “Everybody got sick of catching the clap…the ranch was just out of hand…”

During Springer’s first visit, Manson had demonstrated his prowess with knives, in particular a long sword. Springer had seen Charlie throw it maybe fifty feet, sticking it, say, eight times out of ten. This was the sword, Springer said, that Charlie used when he “put the chop” to people.

“Did you ever get a corpse with his ear cut off?” Springer abruptly asked. Apparently one of the detectives nodded, as Springer said, “Yeah, there’s your man.” Charlie had told him about cutting some guy’s ear off. If Danny would come in, he could tell them about it. The only problem was, “Danny’s scared of these creeps, they’ve tried to kill him already.”

Springer had also mentioned a Tex and a Clem. The detectives asked him to describe them.

Clem was a certified idiot, Springer said: he was an escapee from Camarillo, a state mental hospital. Whatever Charlie said, Clem would parrot it. As far as he could tell, “Charlie and Tex are the ones that had the brains out there.” Unlike Clem, Tex didn’t say much; he “kept his mouth shut, real tight. He was real clean-cut. His hair was a little long, but he was—just like a college student.” Tex seemed to spend most of his time working on dune buggies.

Charlie had a thing about dune buggies. He wanted to fix them with a switch on the dash that would turn the taillights off. Then, when the CHP (California Highway Patrol) pulled them over to cite them, there would be two guys armed with shotguns in the back, and as the CHPs came up alongside, “Pow, blow them up.”

Q. “Why did he say he wanted to do that?”

A. “Ah, he wants to build up a thing where he can be leader of the world. He’s crazy.”

Q. “Does he have a name for his group?”

A. “The Family.”

Back to that sword, could Springer describe it? Yeah, it was a cutlass, a real pirate’s sword. Up until a few months ago, Springer said, it had belonged to the ex-president of the Straight Satans, but then it had disappeared, and he guessed one of the members had given it to Charlie.

He had heard, from Danny, that the sword had been used when they had killed a guy “called Henland, I believe it was.” This was the guy who had his ear cut off.

What did he know about the “Henland” killing? they asked. According to Danny, a guy named “Bausley” and one or two other guys had killed him, Springer said. Danny had told him that “almost beyond a reasonable doubt he could prove that Bousley or Bausley or whatever killed this guy and evidently Charlie was in on it or something. Well, anyway, somebody cut his ear.” Clem had also told him, Springer, “how they had cut some fucking idiot’s ear off and wrote on the wall and put the Panther’s hand or paw up there to blame the Panthers. Everything they did, they blamed on the niggers, see. They hate niggers because they had killed a nigger prior to that.”

Five. Plus “Henland” (Hinman). Plus “a nigger.” Total thus far: seven. The detectives were keeping track.

Had he seen any other weapons while at Spahn? Yeah, Charlie had shown him a whole gunrack full, the first time he went up there. There were shotguns, deer rifles, .45 caliber hand guns, “and I heard talk of and was told by Danny that they had a .22 Buntline long barrel, a nine-round. This came from Danny, and he knows guns. And this is what was supposed to have killed that, ah, Black Panther.”

Charlie had told him about it. As Al remembered it, Tex had burned this black guy in a deal for a whole bunch of grass. When Charlie refused to give back the guy’s money, the black had threatened to get all his Panther brothers up to Spahn Ranch and wipe out the place. “So Charlie pulls out a gun, somebody else was going to do it, but Charlie pulls out a gun and he points it at the guy, and he goes click, click, click, click and the gun didn’t go off, four or five times, and the guy stood up and he said, ‘Ha, you coming here with an empty gun on me,’ and Charlie says click, bam, in the heart area somewhere, and he told me this personally right to my face and that was what the Buntline was used on, the long-barrel job.”

After the murder, which had occurred somewhere in Hollywood, the Panther’s buddies “took the carcass off supposedly to some park, Griffith Park or one of them…This is all hearsay, but it is hearsay right from Charlie.”

A. “Now, did anybody have their refrigerator wrote on?”

There was a sudden silence, then one of the LaBianca detectives asked, “Why does this come up?”

A. “’Cause he told me something about writing something on the refrigerator.”

Q. “Who said he wrote it on the refrigerator?”

A. “Charlie did. Charlie said they wrote something on the fucking refrigerator in blood.”

Q. “What did he say he wrote?”

A. “Something about pigs or niggers or something like that.”

If Springer was telling the truth, and if Manson wasn’t just bragging to impress him, then it meant that Manson was probably also involved in the LaBianca murders. Bringing the total thus far to nine.

But the LaBianca detectives had good reason to doubt this statement, for, contrary to the press reports, DEATH TO PIGS hadn’t been printed in blood on the refrigerator door; the phrase had actually been printed on the living-room wall, as had the word RISE. What had been printed on the refrigerator door was HEALTER SKELTER.

While Springer was being questioned, one of the LaBianca detectives left the room. When he returned a few minutes later, another man was with him.

Q. “Here’s another partner, Mike McGann, Al. Let me shove this table down here. He just came in, so you might want to bring him up on what we’ve talked about.”

McGann was one of the Tate detectives. The LaBianca detectives had finally decided to walk those few feet, and share what they had learned. By this time the temptation to say “Hey, look what we found” must have been irresistible.

They had Springer run through it again. McGann listened, unimpressed. Springer then began talking about still another murder, that of a cowboy named “Shorty,” whom he had met when he first visited the ranch. How and what had he heard about Shorty’s death? one of the detectives asked. “I heard about that from Danny.” Danny heard, from the girls, that Shorty “got to know too much and hear too much and got worried too much” and “so they just cut his arms and his legs and his head off…” Danny had felt very badly about this, because he had liked Shorty.

Ten. If.

Q. (to McGann) “Anything you want to get in on this?”

Q. “Yeah, I want to ask about why they killed this colored—the Panther supposedly. When did this take place, do you know?”

Springer wasn’t sure, but he thought it was about a week before he went up to the ranch. Danny could probably tell them about that.

Q. “Did you connect up the five people that Charlie said that he killed in early August with any particular crime?”

A. “Right, the Tate crime.”

Q. “You put that together?”

A. “Right.”

They began zeroing in. Anybody else present when Charlie supposedly confessed those five murders to you? No. Was Tate ever specifically mentioned? No. Did you see anyone at the ranch who wore glasses? No. Ever see Manson with a gun? No, only a knife: “he’s a knife freak.” Were the cutlass and the other knives you saw sharpened on both sides? He thought so but wasn’t sure; Danny had mentioned Charlie sending them out someplace to be sharpened. Ever see any rope up there? Yeah, they used all kinds of rope. Do you know there’s a $25,000 reward on the Tate murders? Yeah, and “I sure could use it.”

Springer had been to Spahn Ranch three times, his second visit occurring the day after his first. He’d lost his hat riding out and had gone back to look for it, but then his bike had broken down and he’d had to stay overnight to repair it. Again Charlie, Tex, and Clem had worked on him to join them. His third and last visit had taken place on the night of Friday, August 15. The detectives were able to establish the date because it was the night before the sheriff’s raid on Spahn Ranch. Also, the Straight Satans held their club meetings on Friday, and they had discussed getting Danny away from Charlie. “A lot of the guys in the club were going to go up there and beat his ass, teach him a lesson not to brainwash our members…” Eight or nine of them did go to Spahn that night, “but it didn’t happen that way.”

Charlie had conned some of them. The girls had lured others into the bushes. And when they started breaking up things, Charlie told them that he had guns trained on them from the rooftops. Springer had one of his brothers check the gunrack that Charlie had shown him on his first visit. A couple of rifles were missing. After a time they’d left, in a cloud of exhaust fumes and threats, leaving one of their more sober members, Robert Reinhard, to bring Danny back the following day. But the next morning “the police were all over the place,” arresting not only Charlie and the others but also DeCarlo and Reinhard.

All had been released a few days later and, according to Danny, Shorty had been killed not long after this.

Fearing he would be next, Danny had taken his truck and split to Venice. Late one night Clem and Bruce Davis, another of Charlie’s boys, had snuck up on the truck. They had succeeded in prying open the door when Danny heard them and grabbed his .45. Danny felt sure, Springer said, that they had come “to off him.” And he was scared now, not only for himself but because his little boy was living with him. Springer thought Danny was frightened enough to talk to them. Talking to the Venice detectives would be no problem, since “he’s known them most of his life,” but getting him to come down to Parker Center was something else. Springer, however, promised he’d try to get Danny to come in voluntarily, if possible the next day.

Springer didn’t have a phone. The detectives asked if there was somewhere they could call “without putting any heat on you? Is there some gal you see quite a bit of?”

A. “Just my wife and kids.”

The clean, neat, monogamous Springer didn’t conform to their stereotype of a biker. As one of the detectives remarked, “You’re going to give the motorcycle gang a whole new image in the world.”

Although Al Springer appeared to be telling the truth, the detectives were not greatly impressed with his story. He was an outsider, not a member of the Family, yet the very first time he goes to Spahn Ranch, Manson confesses to him that he’s committed at least nine murders. It just didn’t make sense. It appeared far more likely that Springer was just regurgitating what Danny DeCarlo, who had been close to Manson, had told him. It was also possible that Manson, to impress the cyclists, had bragged about committing murders in which he wasn’t even involved.

McGann, of the Tate team, was so unimpressed that later he wouldn’t even be able to recall having heard of Springer, much less talking to him.

Although the interview had been taped, the LaBianca detectives had only one portion transcribed, and that not the section on their case, but the part, less than a page in length, with Manson’s alleged confession, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.” The LaBianca detectives then filed the tape and that single page in their “tubs,” as police case files are known. With other developments in the case, they apparently forgot them.

Yet the Springer interview of November 12, 1969, was in a sense an important turning point. Three months after the Tate-LaBianca homicides, LAPD was finally seriously considering the possibility that the two crimes were not, as had long been believed, unrelated. And the focus of at least the LaBianca investigation was now on a single group of suspects, Charlie Manson and his Family. It appears almost certain that had the LaBianca detectives continued to pursue the Lutesinger-Springer-DeCarlo lead they would eventually—even if uninformed of Susan Atkins’ confessions—have found the killers of Steven Parent, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Sharon Tate, and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca.

In the meantime, two people—one at Sybil Brand, the other at Corona—were each, independent of the other, trying to tell someone what they knew about the killings. And having no luck.

There is some confusion as to exactly when Susan Atkins first discussed the Tate-LaBianca murders with Ronnie Howard. Whatever the date, there was a similarity in the way it came about, Susan first admitting her participation in the murder of Hinman, then, in her little-girl manner, attempting to surprise Ronnie with other, more startling revelations.

According to Ronnie, one evening Susan came over, sat down on her bed, and started rapping about her experiences. Susan said that she had “dropped acid” (taken LSD) many times, in fact she had done everything there was to do; there was nothing left; she’d reached a stage where nothing shocked her any more.

Ronnie replied that there wasn’t much that would shock her, either. Since age seventeen, when she’d been sent to a federal penitentiary for two years for extortion, Ronnie had seen quite a lot.

“I bet I could tell you something that would really blow your mind,” Susan said.

“I don’t think so,” Ronnie responded.

“You remember the Tate deal?”

“Yes.”

“I was there. We did it.”

“Really, anyone can say that.”

“No, I’ll tell you.” And tell her Susan Atkins did.

Susan would flash from one thought to another with such rapidity that Ronnie was often left confused. Too, Ronnie’s recollection of details—especially names, dates, places—was not as good as Virginia’s. Later she would be unsure, for example, exactly how many persons were involved: at one time she thought Susan said five—herself, two other girls, Charlie, and a guy who stayed in the car; another time it was four, with no mention of the man in the car. She knew a girl named Katie was involved in a murder, but which murder—Hinman, Tate, or LaBianca—Ronnie wasn’t sure. But she also recalled details Susan either hadn’t told Virginia or Virginia had forgotten. Charlie had a gun; the girls all had knives. Charlie had cut the telephone wires, shot the boy in the car, then awakened the man on the couch (Frykowski), who looked up to see a gun pointing in his face.

Sharon Tate’s plea and Susan’s brutal response were nearly identical in both Ronnie’s and Virginia’s accounts. However, the description of how Sharon died differed somewhat. As Ronnie understood it, two other people held Sharon while, to quote Susan, “I proceeded to stab her.”

“It felt so good the first time I stabbed her, and when she screamed at me it did something to me, sent a rush through me, and I stabbed her again.”

Ronnie asked where. Susan replied in the chest, not the stomach.

“How many times?”

“I don’t remember. I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.”

Ronnie knew a little bit about the subject, having once stabbed her ex-husband. “Did it feel sort of like a pillow?”

“Yeah,” Susan replied, pleased that Ronnie understood. “It was just like going into nothing, going into air.” But the killing itself was something else. “It’s like a sexual release,” Susan told her. “Especially when you see the blood spurting out. It’s better than a climax.”

Remembering Virginia’s question, Ronnie asked Susan about the word “pig.” Susan said that she printed the word on the door, after first dipping a towel in Sharon Tate’s blood.

At one point in the conversation Susan asked, “Don’t you remember that guy that was found with the fork in his stomach? We wrote ‘arise’ and ‘death to pigs’ and ‘helter skelter’ in blood.”

“Was that you and your same friends?” Ronnie asked.

“No, just three this time.”

“All girls?”

“No, two girls and Charlie. Linda wasn’t in on this one.”

Susan rapped on about a variety of subjects: Manson (he was both Jesus Christ and the Devil); helter skelter (Ronnie admittedly didn’t understand it but thought it meant “you have to be killed to live”); sex (“the whole world is like one big intercourse—everything is in and out—smoking, eating, stabbing”); how she would play crazy to fool the psychiatrists (“All you have to do is act normal,” Ronnie advised her); children (Charlie had helped deliver her baby, whom she had named Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz; within a couple of months after his birth she had begun fellating him); bikers (with the motorcycle gangs on their side, they “would really throw some fear into the world”); and murder. Susan loved to talk about murder. “More you do it, the better you like it.” Just the mention of it seemed to excite her. Laughingly, she told Ronnie about some man whose head “we cut off,” either out in the desert or in one of the canyons.

She also told Ronnie, “There are eleven murders that they will never solve.” And there were going to be more, many more. Although Charlie was in jail “in Indio,” most of the Family was still free.

As Susan talked, Ronnie Howard realized that there were still some things that could shock her. One was that this little girl, who was twenty-one but often seemed much younger, probably had committed all these murders. Another was Susan’s assertion that this was only the beginning, that more murders would follow.

Ronnie Howard would later state: “I’d never informed on anyone in the past, but this one thing I could not go along with. I kept thinking that if I didn’t say anything these people would probably be set free. They were going to pick other houses, just at random. I just couldn’t see all those innocent people being killed. It could have been my house next time or yours or anyone’s.”

Ronnie decided she “just had to tell the police.”

It would seem that if one were in jail, talking to a policeman would be relatively easy. Ronnie Howard discovered otherwise.

The dates, again, are vague, but, according to Ronnie, she told +Sergeant Broom,[19] one of the female deputies at Sybil Brand, that she knew who had committed the Tate and LaBianca murders; that the person who told her had been involved and was now in custody; but that the other killers were on the loose and unless they were apprehended soon there would be more murders. Ronnie wanted permission to call LAPD.

Sergeant Broom said she would pass the request to her superior, +Lieutenant Johns.

After waiting three days and hearing nothing, Ronnie asked Seargeant Broom about the request. Lieutenant Johns didn’t think there was anything to the story, the sergeant told her. By this time the lieutenant had probably forgotten all about it, Sergeant Broom said, adding, “Why don’t you do the same thing, Ronnie?”

By now, according to Ronnie, she was literally begging. People were going to die unless she warned the police in time. Could you call for me? Ronnie asked. Please!

It was against the rules for a guard to make a call for an inmate, Sergeant Broom informed her.

On Thursday, November 13, biker Danny DeCarlo came down to Parker Center, where he was interviewed by the LaBianca detectives. It was not a long interview, and it was not taped. Although DeCarlo had a great deal of information about the activities of Manson and his group, having lived with them for more than five months, at no time had Charlie admitted to him that he was involved in either the Tate or the LaBianca murders.

This made the officers even more skeptical about Springer’s tale, and it was probably at this point that they decided to write him off as a reliable source. When Springer came back the following week, he was given some photos to identify but was asked few questions.

Arrangements were made to interview DeCarlo on tape, and at length, on Monday, November 17. He was to come in about 8:30 in the morning.

Ronnie Howard kept after Sergeant Broom, who finally mentioned the subject to Lieutenant Johns a second time. The lieutenant suggested that she ask Ronnie for some details.

Sergeant Broom did, and Ronnie—still without identifying the people involved—told her a little of what she had learned. The killers knew Terry Melcher. They had shot the boy, Steven Parent, first, four times, because he saw them. Sharon Tate had been the last to die. The word “pig” had been written in her blood. They were going to cut out Sharon’s baby, but didn’t. Again she stressed that more killings were planned.

Sergeant Broom apparently misunderstood Ronnie, for she told Lieutenant Johns that they had cut out the baby. And Lieutenant Johns knew this wasn’t true.

Your informant is lying, Sergeant Broom informed Ronnie, and told her why.

Ronnie, now almost hysterical, told Sergeant Broom that she had misunderstood what she’d said. Could she talk to Lieutenant Johns herself?

But Sergeant Broom decided that she had already bothered the lieutenant enough. As far as she was concerned, she informed Ronnie, the matter was closed.

There was an irony here, although Ronnie Howard was unaware of it, and wouldn’t have appreciated it had she known: Sergeant Broom dated one of the Tate detectives. But apparently they had other, more important things to talk about.

Virginia Graham was having her own troubles with bureaucracy. Although, unlike Ronnie Howard, she was not yet completely convinced that Susan Atkins was telling the truth, the possibility that there might be more murders worried her too. On November 14, two days after her transfer to Corona, she decided she had to tell someone what she had heard. There was one person at the prison she knew and trusted, Dr. Vera Dreiser, a staff psychologist.

In order for an inmate to talk to a staff member at Corona, it is necessary to fill out a “blue slip,” or request form. Virginia made one out, writing on it, “Dr. Dreiser, it is very important that I speak with you.”

The form was returned with a notation stating that Miss Graham should fill out another blue slip, to see Dr. Owens, administrator of the unit to which she was assigned. But Virginia didn’t want to speak to Dr. Owens. Again she requested a personal interview with Dr. Dreiser.

The request was granted. But not until December. And by then the whole world knew what Virginia Graham had wanted to tell Dr. Dreiser.

NOVEMBER 17, 1969

Danny DeCarlo was due at LAPD Homicide at 8:30 that Monday morning. He didn’t show. The detectives called his home first, getting no answer, then his mother’s number. No, she hadn’t seen Danny, and she was a little worried. Danny was supposed to leave his son with her, so she could baby-sit while he went down to LAPD, but hadn’t even called.

It was possible DeCarlo had skipped. He had been very frightened when the detectives talked to him the previous Thursday.

There was another possibility, one that they didn’t want to think about.

That same day Ronnie Howard had a court appearance in Santa Monica, on the forgery charge. When inmates of Sybil Brand are due in court, they are first transported to the men’s jail on Bouchet Street, where a bus picks them up and delivers them to the assigned departments. Before the arrival of the bus, there are usually a few minutes during which each girl is permitted to make one call from a pay phone.

Ronnie saw her chance and got in line. However, time began running out and there were still two girls ahead of her. She paid each fifty cents to let her call first.

Ronnie called the Beverly Hills Police Department and asked to speak to a homicide detective. When one came on the line, she gave him her name and booking number, and told him she knew who had committed the Tate and LaBianca murders. The officer said those cases were being handled by the Hollywood Division of LAPD, and suggested she call there.

Ronnie then called Hollywood PD, giving a second homicide officer the same information. He wanted to send someone over immediately, but she told him she would be in court the rest of the day.

She hung up, however, before the officer could ask which court she would be in.

All day in court Ronnie Howard had the feeling that she was being watched. She was sure that two men, sitting in the back of the courtroom, were homicide detectives, and expected at any minute they would arrange to speak to her. But they never did. When court adjourned, she was taken by bus back to Sybil Brand, Dormitory 8000, and Susan Atkins.

Shortly before 5 P.M., Danny DeCarlo arrived at LAPD Homicide. He had been on his way downtown earlier when he noticed he was low on gas and had pulled into a service station. On leaving, he had made an illegal turn, had been spotted by a black-and-white, and, after the officers checked and found he had some outstanding traffic tickets, had been hauled in. It had taken all day to secure his release.

Unlike Al Springer, Danny DeCarlo looked, talked, and acted like a biker. He was short, five feet four, weighed 130 pounds, had a handlebar mustache, tattoos on both arms, and burn scars on one arm and both legs from motorcycle pile-ups. Wary, frequently glancing back over his shoulder as if expecting to find someone there, he spoke in a colorful jargon that the interviewing officers—Nielsen, Gutierrez, and McGann—unconsciously adopted. Now twenty-five, he had been born in Toronto, then given U.S. citizenship after serving four years in the Coast Guard, his job: weapons expert. Currently he was in business with his father, selling firearms. When it came to the guns at Spahn Ranch, the detectives couldn’t have found a better source. When he wasn’t getting drunk and chasing girls—which he admitted occupied most of his time—he looked after the weapons. He not only cleaned and repaired them, he slept in the gunroom where they were kept. When a weapon was taken out, Danny knew about it.

He also knew a great deal about Spahn’s Movie Ranch, which was located in Chatsworth, not more than twenty miles from downtown Beverly Hills, yet, seemingly, a world away. Once William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Johnny Mack Brown, and Wallace Beery had made movies here; it was said that Howard Hughes had come to Spahn, to oversee personally the filming of portions of The Outlaw; and the rolling hills behind the main buildings provided settings for Duel in the Sun. Now, except for an occasional Marlboro commercial or a “Bonanza” episode, the main business was renting horses to weekend riders. The movies sets—Longhorn Saloon, Rock City Cafe, Undertaking Parlor, Jail—which fronted on Santa Susana Pass Road, were old now, run down, as was George Spahn, the eighty-one-year-old, near blind owner of the ranch. For years Ruby Pearl, a onetime circus bareback rider turned horse wrangler, had run the riding stable part of the business for George: getting hay, hiring and firing cowboys, making sure they looked after the horses and stable and kept their hands off the too young girls who came for riding lessons. Almost sightless, George depended on Ruby, but at the end of the day she went home to a husband and another life.

Over the years George had sired ten children, each of whom he had named after a favorite horse. He could recall in detail the namesakes but was less clear about the kids. All lived elsewhere, and only a few visited him with any regularity. When the Manson Family arrived, in August 1968, George was living alone in a filthy trailer, feeling old, lonely, and neglected.

This was long before Danny DeCarlo became involved with the Family, but he had often heard the tale from those who were there.

Manson, who originally asked Spahn’s permission to stay for a few days, but neglected to mention that there were twenty-five to thirty people with him, assigned Squeaky to look after George.

Squeaky—t/n Lynette Fromme—had been with Manson more than a year at that time, having been one of the first girls to join him. She was thin, red-headed, covered with freckles. Though nineteen, she looked much younger. DeCarlo told the detectives, “She had George in the palm of her hand. She cleaned for him, cooked for him, balanced his checkbook, made love with him.”

Q. (unbelievingly) “She did?! That old son of a gun!”

A. “Yeah…Charlie’s trip was to get George so he had so much faith in Squeaky that come time for George to go off into the happy hunting ground he’d turn the ranch over to Squeaky. That was their thing. Charlie’d always tell her what to tell George…and she’d report back to Charlie anything anyone else told him.”

Squeaky maintained that she was George’s eyes. According to DeCarlo, they saw only what Charlie Manson wanted them to see.

Possibly because he suspected, possibly because his own children on their occasional visits strongly resisted the idea, George never did get around to willing the property to Squeaky. Which, the detectives surmised, was probably why he was still alive out at Spahn Ranch.

George Spahn had frustrated one of Charlie’s plans. Danny DeCarlo had played along with, then failed to come through on another—Manson’s scheme to get the motorcycle gangs to join him in “terrorizing society,” as DeCarlo put it. Danny had met Manson in March 1969, just after separating from his wife. He had gone to Spahn to repair some bikes, and had stayed; “I had a ball,” he later admitted. Manson’s girls had been taught that having babies and caring for men were their sole purpose in life. DeCarlo liked being cared for, and the girls, at least at first, appeared very affectionate toward “Donkey Dan,”[20] a nickname they had bestowed upon him because of certain physical endowments.

There were problems. Charlie was against drinking; Danny liked nothing better than to swill beer and lie in the sun—later he testified that while at Spahn he was smashed “probably 90 percent of the time.” And, with the exception of a couple of “special sweeties,” DeCarlo eventually tired of most of the girls: “They would always try preaching to me. It was always the same shit Charlie preached to them.”

With the August 15 visit of the Straight Satans, Manson must have realized that he would never succeed in getting the bikers to join him. After that, Danny was ignored, left out of Family conferences, while the girls denied him their favors. Though he went to Barker Ranch with the group, he stayed only three days. He split, DeCarlo said, because he had begun to believe all the “murder talk” he had heard, and because he had strong suspicions that unless he left he might be next. “After that,” he said, “I started watching my back.”

When the LaBianca detectives had talked to DeCarlo the previous Thursday, he’d promised to try to locate Manson’s sword. He turned it over to Sergeant Gutierrez, who booked it as the personal property of “Manson, Charles M.,” probable crime “187 PC”—murder.

The sword had accumulated a history. A few weeks after Danny moved to Spahn, the president of the Straight Satans, George Knoll, aka “86 George,” had visited him. Manson had admired George’s sword and had conned him out of it by promising to pay a twenty-dollar traffic ticket George owed. According to Danny, the sword became one of Charlie’s favorite weapons; he had a metal scabbard built for it, next to the steering wheel of his personal dune buggy. When the Straight Satans came to get Danny the night of August 15, they spotted the sword and reclaimed it. On learning that it was “dirty,” i.e., had been used in a crime, they had broken it in half. It was in two pieces when DeCarlo handed it over to Gutierrez.

Over-all length, 20 inches; blade length, 15 inches. The width of its razor-sharp blade, the tip of which had been honed on both sides, was 1 inch.

This was the sword, according to DeCarlo, that Manson had used to slice Gary Hinman’s ear.

From DeCarlo the detectives now learned that, in addition to Bobby Beausoleil and Susan Atkins, three others had been involved in the murder of Hinman: Manson, Mary Brunner, and Bruce Davis. DeCarlo’s primary source was Beausoleil, who, on returning to Spahn after the murder, had bragged to DeCarlo about what he had done. Or, as Danny put it, “He came back with a big head the next day, you know, just like he got him a cherry.”

The story, as DeCarlo claimed Beausoleil had related it to him, went as follows. Mary Brunner, Susan Atkins, and Bobby Beausoleil had dropped in on Hinman, “bullshitting about old times and everything like that.” Bobby then asked Gary for all his money, saying they needed it. When Gary said he didn’t have any money, Bobby pulled out a gun—a 9 mm. Polish Radom automatic—and started pistol-whipping him. In the scuffle the gun went off, the bullet hitting no one but ricocheting through the kitchen. (LASO found a 9 mm. slug lodged under the kitchen sink.)

Beausoleil then called Manson at Spahn Ranch and told him, “You’d better get up here, Charlie. Gary ain’t cooperating.”[21] A short time later Manson and Bruce Davis arrived at the Hinman residence. Puzzled and hurt, Gary pleaded with Charlie, asking him to take the others and leave; he didn’t want any trouble; he couldn’t understand why they were doing this to him; they had always been friends. According to DeCarlo, “Charlie didn’t say anything. He just hit him with the sword. Whack. Cut part of his ear off or all of it. [Hinman’s left ear had been split in half.]

“So Gary went down, and was really going through some changes about losing his ear…” Manson gave him a choice: sign over everything he had, or die. Manson and Davis then left.

Though Beausoleil did obtain the “pink slips” (California automobile ownership papers) on two of Hinman’s vehicles, Gary continued to insist he had no money. When more pistol-whipping failed to convince him, Bobby again called Manson at Spahn, telling him, “We ain’t going to get nothing out of him. He ain’t going to give up nothing. And we can’t just leave. He’s got his ear hacked off and he’ll go to the police.” Manson replied, “Well, you know what to do.” And Beausoleil did it.

“Bobby said he went up to Gary again. Took the knife and stuck him with it. He said he had to do it three or four times…[Hinman] was really bleeding, and he was gasping for air, and Bobby said he knelt down next to him and said, ‘Gary, you know what? You got no reason to be on earth any more. You’re a pig and society don’t need you, so this is the best way for you to go, and you should thank me for putting you out of your misery.’ Then [Hinman] made noises in his throat, his last gasping breath, and wow, away he went.”

Q. “So Bobby told him he was a ‘pig’?”

A. “Right. You see, the fight against society was the number one element in this—”

Q. (skeptically) “Yeah. We’ll get into his philosophy and all that bullshit later…”

They never did.

DeCarlo went on. Before leaving the house, they wrote on the wall “‘white piggy’ or ‘whitey’ or ‘kill the piggies,’ something along that line.” Beausoleil also dipped his hand in Hinman’s blood and, using his palm, made a paw print on the wall; the plan was “to push the blame onto the Black Panthers,” who used the paw print as their symbol. Then they hot-wired Hinman’s Volkswagen microbus and his Fiat station wagon and drove both back to Spahn Ranch, where Beausoleil bragged about his exploits to DeCarlo.

Later, apparently fearful that the palm print might be identifiable, Beausoleil returned to the Hinman residence and attempted, unsuccessfully, to wipe it off the wall. This was several days after Hinman’s death, and Beausoleil later told DeCarlo that he “could hear the maggots eating away on Gary.”[22]

As killers, they had been decidedly amateurish. Not only was the palm print identifiable, so was a latent fingerprint Beausoleil had left in the kitchen. They kept Hinman’s Volkswagen and his Fiat at the ranch for several days, where a number of people saw them.[23] Hinman had played bagpipes, a decidedly uncommon musical instrument. Beausoleil and the girls took his set back to Spahn Ranch, where for a time they remained on a shelf in the kitchen; DeCarlo for one had tried to play them. And Beausoleil did not discard the knife but continued to carry it with him; it was in the tire well when he was arrested on August 6, driving Hinman’s Fiat.

DeCarlo drew a picture of the knife Beausoleil claimed he had used to stab Hinman. It was a pencil-thin, miniature bowie, with an eagle on the handle and a Mexican inscription. It tallied perfectly with the knife recovered from the Fiat. DeCarlo also sketched the 9 mm. Radom, which as yet hadn’t been recovered.

The detectives asked him what other hand guns he had seen at Spahn.

A. “Well, there was a .22 Buntline. When they did that Black Panther, I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to clean it. I didn’t want to be nowhere around it.”

DeCarlo claimed he didn’t know whose gun it was, but he said, “Charlie always used to carry it in a holster on the front of him. It was more or less always with him.”

Sometime “around July, maybe June,” the gun “just popped up.” When was the last time he saw it? “I know I didn’t see it for at least a week before the raid.”

The Spahn Ranch raid had taken place on August 16. A week earlier would be August 9, the date of the Tate homicides.

Q. “Did you ever ask Charlie, ‘Where’s your gun?’”

A. “He said, ‘I just gave it away.’ He liked it, so I figured it was maybe just stashed.”

The detectives had DeCarlo draw the Buntline. It was nearly identical with the photo of the Hi Standard Longhorn model sent out in the LAPD flyer. Later DeCarlo was shown the flyer and asked, “Does this look like the gun you mentioned?”

A. “It sure does.”

Q. “What’s the difference between that gun and the gun that you saw?”

A. “No difference at all. Only the rear sight blade was different. It didn’t have any.”

The detectives had DeCarlo run down what he knew about the murder of the Black Panther. Springer had first mentioned the killing to them when they interviewed him. In the interim they had done some checking and had come up with a slight problem: no such murder had ever been reported.

According to DeCarlo, after Tex burned the guy for $2,500 on a grass deal, the Panther had called Charlie at Spahn Ranch, threatening that if he didn’t make good he and his brothers were going to wipe out the whole ranch. That same night Charlie and a guy named T. J. went to the Panther’s place, in North Hollywood. Charlie had a plan.

He put the .22 Buntline in his belt in back. On a signal T. J. was to yank out the gun, step out from behind Charlie, and plug the Panther. Nail him right there. Only T. J. had chickened out, and Manson had to do the shooting himself. Friends of the black, who were present when the shooting occurred, had later dumped the body in Griffith Park, Danny said.

Danny had seen the $2,500 and had been present the next morning when Manson criticized T. J. for backing down. DeCarlo described T. J. as “a really nice guy; his front was trying to be one of Charlie’s boys, but he didn’t have it inside.” T. J. had gone along with Manson on everything up to this, but he told him, “I don’t want to have nothing to do with snuffing people.” A day or two later he “fled in the wind.”

Q. “Who else got murdered up there? What about Shorty? Do you know anything about that?”

There was a long pause, then: “That was my ace in the hole.”

Q. “How so?”

A. “I was going to save that for the last.”

Q. “Well, might as well clear the thing up now. Has Charlie got something he can smear on you that—”

A. “No, no way at all. Nothing.”

One thing did worry DeCarlo, however. In 1966 he had been convicted of a felony, smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border, a federal charge; he was currently appealing the sentence. He was also under indictment on two other charges: along with Al Springer and several other Straight Satans, he had been charged with selling a stolen motorcycle engine, which was a local charge, and giving false information while purchasing a firearm (using an alias and not disclosing that he had a prior felony conviction), which was federal. Manson was still on parole from a federal pen. “So what if they send me to the same place? I don’t want to feel a shank in my back and find that little son of a bitch behind me.”

Q. “Let me explain something to you, Danny, so you know where you stand. We’re dealing with a guy here who we are pretty sure is responsible for about thirteen murders. Some of which you don’t know about.”

The figure thirteen was just a guess, but DeCarlo surprised them by saying, “I know about—I’m pretty sure he did Tate.”

Q. “O.K., we’ve talked about the Panther, we’ve talked about Gary Hinman, we’re going to talk about Shorty, and you think he did Tate, that’s eight. Now, we’ve got five more. All right? Now, our opinion of Charlie is that he’s got a little mental problem.

“But we’re in no way going to jeopardize you or anyone else if, for no other reason, we don’t want another murder. We’re in business to stop murders. And in this business there’s no sense in solving thirteen murders if somebody else is going to get killed. That just makes fourteen.”

A. “I’m a nasty motorcycle rider.”

Q. “I don’t care what you are personally.”

A. “The police’s general opinion of me is nothing.”

Q. “That’s not my opinion.”

A. “I’m not an outstanding citizen—”

Q. “As I told you the other day, Danny, you level with us, all the way, right down the line, no bullshitting—I’m not going to bullshit you, you’re not going to bullshit me—we level with each other and I’ll go out for you a hundred percent. And I mean it. So that you don’t have to go to the joint.”

Q. (another detective) “We’ve dealt with motorcycle riders before, and with all kinds of people. We’ve gone out on a limb to help them because they’ve helped us. We’ll do our very best to make sure that nobody gets killed, whether he’s a motorcycle rider or the best citizen in the world…

“Now tell us what you know about Shorty.”

Early that same evening, November 17, 1969, two LAPD homicide officers, Sergeants Mossman and Brown, appeared at Sybil Brand Institute and asked to see one Ronnie Howard.

The interview was brief. They heard enough, however, to realize they were on to something big. Enough, too, to decide it wasn’t the best idea to leave Ronnie Howard in the same dormitory with Susan Atkins. Before leaving Sybil Brand, they arranged to have Ronnie moved to an isolation unit. Then they drove back to Parker Center, anxious to tell the other detectives that they had “cracked the case.”

Nielsen, Gutierrez, and McGann were still questioning DeCarlo about the murder of Shorty. They already knew something about it, even before talking to Springer and DeCarlo, since Sergeants Whiteley and Guenther had begun their own investigation into the “possible homicide” after talking to Kitty Lutesinger.

They knew “Shorty” was Donald Jerome Shea, a thirty-six-year-old male Caucasian who had worked at Spahn Ranch on and off for some fifteen years as a horse wrangler. Like most of the other cowboys who drifted in and out of Spahn’s Movie Ranch, Shorty was just awaiting the day when some producer discovered he had all the potential of a new John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. Whenever the prospect of any acting job materialized, Shorty would quit work and go in search of that ever elusive stardom. Which explained why, when in late August he disappeared from Spahn, no one thought too much about it. At first.

Kitty had also told LASO that Manson, Clem, Bruce, and possibly Tex had been involved in the killing, and that some of the girls in the Family had helped obliterate all traces of the crime. One thing they didn’t know, and now asked Danny, was, “Why did they do it?”

A. “Because Shorty was going to old man Spahn and snitching. And

Charlie didn’t like snitches.”

Q. “Just about the petty bullshit at the ranch?”

A. “That’s right. Shorty was telling old man Spahn that he should put him in charge and he would clean everybody up.” He would, in short order, run off Manson and his Family. Shorty, however, made a fatal mistake: he forgot that little Squeaky was not only George’s eyes, she was also Charlie’s ears.

There were other reasons, which Danny enumerated. Shorty had married a black topless dancer; Charlie “had a thing” about interracial marriages, and blacks. (“Charlie had two enemies,” DeCarlo said, “the police and the niggers, in that order.”) Charlie also suspected that Shorty had helped set up the August 16 raid on Spahn—Shorty had been “offed” about ten days later.[24] And there was the possibility, though this was strictly conjecture on DeCarlo’s part, that Shorty had overheard something about some of the other murders.

Bruce Davis had told him about Shorty’s murder, DeCarlo said. Several of the girls had also mentioned it, as had both Clem and Manson. Danny was unclear as to some of the details—how they had managed to catch Shorty off guard, and where—but as for the mode of death, he was more than graphic. “Like they were going to do Caesar,” they went to the gunroom and picked up a sword and four German bayonets, the latter purchased from an Army surplus store for a buck each and honed to razor sharpness, then, getting Shorty off by himself, they “stuck him like carving up a Christmas turkey…Bruce said they cut him up in nine pieces. They cut his head off. Then they cut his arms off too, so there was no way they could possibly identify him. They were laughing about that.”

After killing him, they covered the body with leaves (DeCarlo guessed, but was not sure, that this had occurred in one of the canyons behind the ranch buildings); some of the girls had helped dispose of Shorty’s bloody clothing, his automobile, and other possessions; then “Clem came back the next day or that night and buried him good.”

Q. (unidentified voice) “Can we break this up for about fifteen minutes, maybe send Danny up to get some coffee? There’s been an accident and they want to talk to you guys.”

Q. “Sure.”

Q. “I’m going to send Danny up to the eighth floor. I want him back down here in fifteen minutes.”

A. “I’ll wait right here.” Danny was not anxious to be seen wandering the halls of LAPD.

Q. “It won’t take more than fifteen minutes. We’ll close the door so nobody will know you’re in here.”

There had been no accident. Mossman and Brown had returned from Sybil Brand. As they related what they had heard, the fifteen minutes stretched to nearly forty-five. Although the Atkins-Howard conversations left many unanswered questions, the detectives were now convinced that the Tate and LaBianca cases had been “solved.”[25] Susan Atkins had told Ronnie Howard details—the unpublished words written at the LaBianca residence, the lost knife at Tate—which only one of the killers could know. Lieutenants Helder (Tate) and LePage (LaBianca) were notified.

When the detectives returned to the interrogation room, they were in a lighthearted mood.

Q. “Now, when we left Shorty, he was in nine pieces and his head and arms were off…”

DeCarlo was not told what they had learned. But he must have sensed a change in the questioning. The matter of Shorty was quickly wrapped up. Tate was now the topic. Exactly why did Danny think Manson was involved?

Well, there were two incidents. Or maybe it was the same incident, Danny was not sure. Anyway, “they went out on one caper and they came back with seventy-five bucks. Tex was in on that. And he fucked up his foot, fucking somebody out of it. I don’t know whether he put his lights out or not, but he got seventy-five bucks.”

There were no calendars at Spahn Ranch, DeCarlo had told them earlier; no one paid much attention to what day it was. The one date everyone at the ranch remembered, however, was August 16, the day of the raid. It was before this.

Q. “How much before?”

A. “Oh, two weeks.”

If DeCarlo’s estimate was correct, this would also be before Tate. What was the other incident?

A. “They went out one night, everybody went but Bruce.”

Q. “Who went?”

A. “Charlie, Tex, and Clem. Them three. O.K., the next morning—”

One of the detectives interrupted. Had he actually seen them leave? No, only the next morning—Another interruption: Did any of the girls go that night?

A. “No, I think—No, I am almost positive it was just them three that went.”

Q. “Well, do you remember, were the rest of the girls there that night?”

A. “See, the girls were scattered all over the place, and there is no possible way that I could have kept track of who was there and who wasn’t there…”

So it was possible the girls could have gone without DeCarlo’s knowing about it. Now, what about the date?

This one Danny remembered, more or less, because he was rebuilding the engine on his bike and had to go into town to get a bearing. It was “around the ninth, tenth, or eleventh” of August. “And they split that night and they came back the next morning.”

Clem was standing in front of the kitchen, DeCarlo said. Danny walked up to him and asked, “What’d you do last night?” Clem, according to Danny, smiled “that real stupid smile of his.” Danny glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Charlie was standing behind him. He got the impression that Clem had been about to answer but that Charlie had signaled him to be quiet. Clem said something like “Don’t worry about it, we did all right.” At this point Charlie walked off. Before starting after him, Clem put his hand on Danny’s arm and said, “We got five piggies.” There was a great big grin on his face.

Clem told DeCarlo, “We got five piggies.” Manson told Springer, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.” Atkins confessed to Howard that she stabbed Sharon Tate and Voytek Frykowski. Beausoleil confessed to DeCarlo that he had stabbed Hinman. Atkins told Howard that she had done the stabbing. Suddenly the detectives had a surfeit of confessors. So many that they were thoroughly confused as to who was involved in which homicides.

Skipping Hinman, which, after all, was the sheriff’s case, and concentrating on Tate, they had two versions:

(1) DeCarlo felt that Charlie, Clem, and Tex—without the help of any of the girls—had killed Sharon Tate and the others.

(2) Ronnie Howard understood Susan Atkins to say that she, two other girls (the names “Linda” and “Katie” had been mentioned, but whether they were involved in this particular homicide was unclear), plus “Charles,” plus possibly one other man, had gone to 10050 Cielo Drive.

As for the LaBianca murders, all they knew was that there were “two girls and Charlie,” that “Linda wasn’t in on this one,” and that Susan Atkins was somehow involved in that collective “we.”

The detectives decided to try another approach—through the other girls at the ranch. But first they wanted to wrap up a few loose ends. What clothing had the three men been wearing? Dark clothing, DeCarlo replied. Charlie had on a black sweater, Levi’s, moccasins; Tex was dressed similarly, he thought, though he may have been wearing boots, he wasn’t sure; Clem wore Levi’s and moccasins, too, plus an olive-drab field jacket. Had he noticed any blood on their clothes when he saw them the next morning? No, but then he hadn’t been looking for any. Did he have any idea which vehicle they took? Sure, Johnny Swartz’ ’59 Ford; it was the only car working at that time. Any idea where it was now? It had been hauled off during the August 16 raid and, so far as Danny knew, was probably still in the impound garage in Canoga Park. Swartz was one of the ranch hands at Spahn, not a Family member, but he let them borrow his car. Any idea what Tex’s true name was? “Charles” was his first name, Danny said; he’d seen the last name once, on a pink slip, but couldn’t recall it. Was it “Charles Montgomery”? the detectives asked, using a name Kitty Lutesinger had supplied. No, that didn’t sound familiar. What about Clem—does the name “Tufts” ring any bell? No, he’d never heard Clem called that, but, “That boy that was found shot up in Topanga Canyon, the sixteen-year-old kid. Wasn’t his name Tufts?” One of the detectives replied, “I don’t know. That’s the sheriff’s case. We got so many murders now.”

O.K., now about the girls. “How well did you know the broads out there?”

A. “Pretty well, man.” [Laughter]

The detectives began going through the names the girls had used when arrested in the Spahn and Barker raids. And they immediately encountered problems. Not only had they used aliases when booked, they also used them at the ranch. And not a single alias but several, seemingly changing names like clothes, whenever the mood hit them. As a further complication, they even traded aliases.

As if these weren’t problems enough, Danny provided another. He was extremely reluctant to admit that any of the girls might be capable of murder.

The guys were something else. Bobby, Tex, Bruce, Clem, any would kill, DeCarlo felt, if Charlie told him to. (All, it later turned out, had.)

Ella Jo Bailey was eliminated; she’d left Spahn Ranch before the murders. Mary Brunner and Sandra Good were out also; they’d been in jail both nights.

What about Ruth Ann Smack, aka Ruth Ann Huebelhurst? (These were booking names. Her true name was Ruth Ann Moorehouse, and she was known in the Family as “Ouisch.” Danny knew this, but for personal reasons didn’t bother to enlighten the detectives.)

Q. “What do you know about her?”

A. “She used to be one of my favorite sweeties.”

Q. “Do you think she would have the guts to get into a cold-blooded murder?”

Danny hesitated a long time before answering. “You know, that little girl there is so sweet. What really made me sick to my stomach is when she came up one night, when I was up there in the desert, and she said, ‘I can hardly wait to get my first pig.’

“Little seventeen-year-old! I looked on her like she was my daughter, just the sweetest little thing you would ever want to meet in your life. She was so beautiful and so sweet. And Charlie fucked her thinking around so much it turned your guts.”

The date when she told DeCarlo this was determined to be about September 1. If she hadn’t killed by then, she couldn’t have been in on LaBianca or Tate. Eliminate Ruth Ann.

Ever know a Katie? Yeah, but he didn’t know what her real name was. “I never knew anyone by their real name,” DeCarlo said. Katie was an older broad, not a runaway. She was from down around Venice. His description of her was vague, except that she had so much hair on her body that none of the guys wanted to make it with her.

What about a Linda? She was a short broad, Danny said. But she didn’t stay long, maybe only a month or so, and he didn’t know much about her. She’d left by the time they raided Spahn Ranch.

When Sadie went out on “creepy-crawly” missions, did she carry any weapons? one of the detectives asked.

A. “She carried a little knife…They had a bunch of little hunting knives, Buck hunting knives.”

Q. “Buck knives?”

A. “Buck knives, right…”

They now began firing specific questions at DeCarlo. Ever see any credit cards with an Italian name on them? Anybody ever talk about somebody who owned a boat? Ever hear anyone use the name “LaBianca”? Danny gave “No” answers to all.

What about glasses, anybody at Spahn wear them? “None of ’em wore glasses because Charlie wouldn’t let ’em wear glasses.” Mary Brunner had had several pairs; Charlie had broken them.

DeCarlo was shown some two-strand nylon rope. Ever see any rope like this up at Spahn? No, but he had seen some three-strand. Charlie had bought about 200 feet of it at the Jack Frost surplus store in Santa Monica, in June or July.

Was he sure about that? Sure he was sure; he’d been along when Charlie bought it. Later he’d coiled it so it wouldn’t develop snags. It was the same as they used in the Coast Guard, on PT boats; he’d handled it hundreds of times.

Although DeCarlo was unaware of it, the Tate-Sebring rope was also three-strand.

Probably by prearrangement, the detectives began to lean on DeCarlo, adopting a tougher tone.

Q. “Did you ever caper with any of the guys?”

A. “Fuck no. No way at all. Ask any of the girls.”

Q. “Did you have anything to do with Shorty’s death?”

DeCarlo denied it, vehemently. Shorty had been his friend; besides, “I’ve got no balls for putting anybody’s lights out.” But there was just enough hesitation in his reply to indicate he was hiding something. Pressed, DeCarlo told them about Shorty’s guns. Shorty had a matched pair of Colt .45s. He was always hocking, then reclaiming the pistols. In late August or early September—after Shorty had disappeared but supposedly before DeCarlo knew what had happened to him—Bruce Davis had given him Shorty’s pawn tickets on the guns, in repayment for some money he owed DeCarlo. Danny had reclaimed the pistols. Later, learning that Shorty had been killed, he’d sold the guns to a Culver City shop for seventy-five dollars.

Q. “That puts you in a pretty shitty spot, you’re aware of that?”

Danny was. And he got in even deeper when one of the detectives asked him if he knew anything about lime. When arrested, Mary Brunner was carrying a shopping list made up by Manson. “Lime” was one of the items listed. Any idea why Charlie would want some lime?

Danny recalled that Charlie had once asked him what to use “to decompose a body.” He had told him lime worked best, because he had once used it to get rid of a cat that had died under a house.

Q. “Why did you tell him that?”

A. “No particular reason, he was just asking me.”

Q. “What did he ask you?”

A. “Oh, the best way to ah, ah, you know, to get rid of a body real quick.”

Q. “Did you ever think to say, ‘Now what in the fuck makes you ask a question like that, Charlie?’”

A. “No, because he was nuts.”

Q. “When did that conversation take place?”

A. “Right around, ah, right around the time Shorty disappeared.”

It looked bad, and the detectives left it at that. Although privately they were inclined to accept DeCarlo’s tale, suspecting, however, that although he probably had not taken part in the murder, he still knew more than he was telling, it gave them some additional leverage to try and get what they wanted.

They wanted two things.

Q. “Anybody left up at Spahn Ranch that knows you?”

A. “Not that I know of. I don’t know who’s up there. And I don’t want to go up there to find out. I don’t want nothing to do with the place.”

Q. “I want to look around there. But I need a guide.”

Danny didn’t volunteer.

They made the other request straight out.

Q. “Would you be willing to testify?”

A. “No, sir!”

There were two charges pending against him, they reminded him. On the stolen motorcycle engine, “Maybe we can get it busted down to a lesser charge. Maybe we can go so far as to get it knocked off. As far as the federal thing is concerned, I don’t know how much weight we can push on that. But here again we can try.”

A. “If you try for me, that’s fine. That’s all I can ask of you.”

If it came down to being a witness or going to jail—

DeCarlo hesitated. “Then when he gets out of jail—”

Q. “He isn’t going to get out of jail on no first degree murder beef when you’ve got over five victims involved. If Manson was the guy that was in on the Tate murder. We don’t know that for a fact yet.

We’ve got a great deal of information that way.”

A. “There’s also a reward involved in that.”

Q. “Yes, there is. Quite a bit of a reward. Twenty-five grand. Not to say that one guy is going to get it, but even split that’s a hell of a piece of cash.”

A. “I could send my boy through military school with that.”

Q. “Now, what do you think, would you be willing to testify against this group of people?”

A. “He’s going to be sitting there looking at me, Manson is, isn’t he?”

Q. “If you go to trial and testify, he is. Now, how scared of Manson are you?”

A. “I’m scared shitless. I’m petrified of him. He wouldn’t hesitate for a second. If it takes him ten years, he’d find that little boy of mine and carve him to pieces.”

Q. “You give that motherfucker more credit than he deserves. If you think Manson is some kind of a god that is going to break out of jail and come back and murder everybody that testified against him—”

But it was obvious DeCarlo didn’t put that past Manson.

Even if he remained in jail, there were the others.

A. “What about Clem? Have you got him locked up?”

Q. “Yeah. Clem is sitting in the cooler up in Independence, with Charlie.”

A. “What about Tex and Bruce?”

Q. “They’re both out. Bruce Davis, the last I heard, sometime earlier this month, was in Venice.”

A. “Bruce is down in Venice, huh? I’ll have to watch myself…One of my club brothers said he spotted a couple of the girls down in Venice, too.”

The detectives didn’t tell DeCarlo that when Davis was last seen, on November 5, it was in connection with another death, the “suicide” of Zero. By this time LAPD had learned that Zero—aka Christopher Jesus, t/n John Philip Haught—had been arrested in the Barker raid. Earlier, in going through some photographs, DeCarlo had identified “Scotty” and “Zero” as two young boys from Ohio, who had been with the Family for a short time but “didn’t fit in.” One of the detectives had remarked, “Zero’s no longer with us.”

A. “What do you mean he’s ‘no longer with us’?”

Q. “He’s among the dead.”

A. “Oh, shit, is he?”

Q. “Yeah, he got a little too high one day and he was playing Russian roulette. He parked a bullet in his head.”

While the detectives had apparently bought the story of Zero’s death, as related by Bruce Davis and the others, Danny didn’t, not for a minute.

No, Danny didn’t want to testify.

The detectives left it at that. There was still time for him to change his mind. And, after all, they now had Ronnie Howard. They let Danny go, after making arrangements for him to call in the next day.

One of the detectives commented, after Danny had left but while the tape was still on, “I kind of feel like we’ve done a day’s work.”

The DeCarlo interview had lasted over seven hours. It was now past midnight on Tuesday, November 18, 1969. I was already asleep, unaware that in a few hours, as a result of a meeting between the DA and his staff that morning, I would be handed the job of prosecuting the Tate-LaBianca killers.