Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (19 page)

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.

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.

T
hat 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.

A
ll 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.

S
hortly 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,”
*
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.”
*
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.”
*

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.
†
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.