Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (32 page)

Q.
“It didn’t make any difference who was there, you were told to kill them; is that correct?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

They got lost on the way. However, Tex finally recognized the turnoff and they drove to the top of the hill. Tex got out, climbed the telephone pole, and, using the wire cutters, severed the wires. (LAPD still hadn’t got back to me regarding the test cuts made by the pair found at Barker.) When Tex returned to the car, they drove back down the hill, parked at the bottom, then, bringing along their extra clothing, walked back up. They didn’t enter the grounds through the gate “because we thought there might be an alarm system or electricity.” To the right of the gate was a steep, brushy incline. The fence wasn’t as high here. Susan threw over her clothing bundle, then went over herself, her knife in her teeth. The others followed.

They were stowing their clothing in the bushes when Susan saw the headlights of a car. It was coming up the driveway in the direction of the gate. “Tex told us girls to lie down and be still and not make a sound. He went out of sight…I heard him say ‘Halt.’” Susan also heard another voice, male, say “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” “And I heard a gunshot and I heard another gunshot and another one and another one.” Four shots, then Tex returned and told them to come on. When they got to the car, Tex reached inside and turned off the lights; then they pushed the car away from the gate, back up the driveway.

I showed Susan a photo of the Rambler. “It looked similar to it, yes.” I then showed her the police photograph of Steven Parent inside the vehicle.

A.
“That is the thing I saw in the car.”

 

There were audible gasps from the jurors.

Q.
“When you say ‘thing,’ you are referring to a human being?”

 

A.
“Yes, human being.”

 

The jurors had looked at the heart of Susan Atkins and seen ice.

T
hey went on down the driveway, past the garage, to the house. Using a scale diagram I’d had prepared, Susan indicated their approach to the dining-room window. “Tex opened the window, crawled inside, and the next thing I knew he was at the front door.”

Q.
“Did all of you girls enter at that time?”

 

A.
“Only two of us entered, one stayed outside.”

 

Q.
“Who stayed outside?”

 

A.
“Linda Kasabian.”

 

Susan and Katie joined Tex. There was a man lying on the couch (Susan ID’d a photo of Voytek Frykowski). “The man stretched his arms and woke up. I guess he thought some of his friends were coming from somewhere. He said, ‘What time is it?’…Tex jumped in front of him and held a gun in his face and said, ‘Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.’ Frykowski said something like ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’”

Q.
“What did Tex say to that, if anything?”

 

A.
“He said, ‘I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business…’”

 

Tex then told Susan to check for other people. In the first bedroom she saw a woman reading a book. (Susan ID’d a photo of Abigail Folger.) “She looked at me and smiled and I looked at her and smiled.” She went on. A man and a woman were in the next bedroom. The man, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, had his back to Susan. The woman, who was pregnant, was lying on the bed. (Susan ID’d photos of Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate.) The pair were talking and neither saw her. Returning to the living room, she reported to Tex that there were three more people.

Tex gave her the rope and told her to tie up the man on the couch. After she’d done this, Tex ordered her to get the others. Susan walked into Abigail Folger’s bedroom, “put a knife in front of her, and said, ‘Get up and go into the living room. Don’t ask any questions. Just do what I say.’” Katie, also armed with a knife, took charge of Folger while Susan got the other two.

None offered any resistance. All had the same expression on their faces, “Shock.”

On entering the living room, Sebring asked Tex, “What are you doing here?” Tex told him to shut up, then ordered the three to lie on their stomachs on the floor in front of the fireplace. “Can’t you see she’s pregnant?” Sebring said. “Let her sit down.”

When Sebring “didn’t follow Tex’s orders…Tex shot him.”

Q.
“Did you see Tex shoot Jay Sebring?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“With the gun that he had taken from Spahn Ranch?”

 

A.
“Yes.”

 

Q.
“What happened next?”

 

A.
“Jay Sebring fell over in front of the fireplace and Sharon and

 

Abigail screamed.”

Tex ordered them to be quiet. When he asked if they had any money, Abigail said she had some in her purse in the bedroom. Susan went with her to get it. Abigail handed her seventy-two dollars and asked if she wanted her credit cards. Susan said she didn’t. On their return to the living room, Tex told Susan to get a towel and retie Frykowski’s hands; she did, she said, but couldn’t get the knot very tight. Tex then took the rope and tied it first around Sebring’s neck, then the necks of Abigail and Sharon. He threw the end of the rope over the beam in the ceiling and pulled on it, “which made Sharon and Abigail stand up so they wouldn’t be choked to death…” Then, “I forget who said it, but one of the victims said, ‘What are you going to do with us?’ and Tex said, ‘You are all going to die.’ And at that time they began to plead for their lives.”

Q.
“What is the next thing that happened?”

 

A.
“Then Tex ordered me to go over and kill Frykowski.”

 

As she raised her knife, Frykowski, who had managed to free his hands, jumped up and “knocked me down, and I grabbed him as best I could, and then it was a fight for my life as well as him fighting for his life.

“Somehow he got ahold of my hair and pulled it very hard and I was screaming for Tex to help me, or somebody to help me, and Frykowski, he was also screaming.

“Somehow he got behind me, and I had the knife in my right hand and I was—I was—I don’t know where I was at but I was just swinging with the knife, and I remember hitting something four, fives times repeatedly behind me. I didn’t see what it was I was stabbing.”

Q.
“But did it appear to be a human being?”

 

A.
“I never stabbed a human being before, but I just know it was going into something.”

 

Q.
“Could it have been Frykowski?”

 

A.
“It could have been Frykowski, it could have been a chair, I don’t know what it was.”

 

Susan had changed her story. In my interview with her, and on the tape, she had admitted to stabbing Frykowski “three or four times in the leg.” Also, if the story she told Virginia Graham was true, she knew exactly how it felt to stab someone, i.e., Gary Hinman.

Frykowski ran for the front door, “yelling for his life, for somebody to come help him.” Tex got to him and hit him over the head several times with “I believe a gun butt.” Tex later told her that he had broken the gun hitting Frykowski and that it wouldn’t work any more.
*
Apparently Tex had a knife ready, as he began stabbing Frykowski “as best he could because Frykowski was still fighting.” Meanwhile, “Abigail Folger had gotten loose from the rope and was in a fight with Katie, Patricia Krenwinkel…”

T
HE
F
OREMAN
“We have a grand juror who would like to be excused for just a couple of minutes.”

A recess was taken. There was more than one pale face in the jury box.

W
e resumed where Susan had left off. Someone was moaning, she said. Tex ran over to Sebring, “and bent down and viciously stabbed him in the back many times…

“Sharon Tate, I remember seeing her struggling with the rope.” Tex ordered Susan to take care of her. Susan locked her arm around Sharon’s neck, forcing her back onto the couch. She was begging for her life. “I looked at her and said, ‘Woman, I have no mercy for you.’ And I knew that I was talking to myself, not to her…”

Q.
“Did Sharon say anything about the baby at that point?”

 

A.
“She said, ‘Please let me go. All I want to do is have my baby.’
“There was a lot of confusion going on…Tex went over to help
Katie…I saw Tex stab Abigail Folger and just before he stabbed—maybe an instant before he stabbed her—she looked at him and let her arms go and looked at all of us and said, ‘I give up. Take me.’”

 

I asked Susan how many times Tex had stabbed Abigail. “Only once,” Susan replied. “She grabbed her middle section of her body and fell to the floor.”

Tex then ran outside. Susan released her grip on Sharon but continued to guard her. When Tex returned, he told Susan, “Kill her.” But, according to the story Susan was now telling, “I couldn’t.” Instead, “in order to make a diversion so that Tex couldn’t see that I couldn’t kill her, I grabbed her hand and held her arms, and then I saw Tex stab her in the heart area around the chest.” Sharon then fell from the couch to the floor. (Susan only mentioned Tex stabbing Sharon Tate once. According to the autopsy report, she had been stabbed sixteen times. According to Ronnie Howard, Susan told her, “I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming.”)

The next thing she remembered, Susan now testified, was that she, Tex, and Katie were outside, and “I saw Abigail Folger on the front lawn, bent over falling onto the grass…I didn’t see her go outside…and I saw Tex go over and stab her three or four—I don’t know how many times…” (Abigail Folger had twenty-eight stab wounds.) “While he was doing that, Katie and I were looking for Linda, because she wasn’t around…and then Tex walked over to Frykowski and kicked him in the head.” Frykowski was on the front lawn, away from the door. When Tex kicked him, “the body didn’t move very much. I believe it was dead at that time.” (Which was not surprising, since Voytek Frykowski had been shot twice, struck over the head thirteen times with a blunt object, and stabbed fifty-one times.)

Then “Tex told me to go back into the house and write something on the door in one of the victims’ blood…He said, ‘Write something that will shock the world.’…I had previously been involved in something similar to this [Hinman], where I saw ‘political piggy’ written on the wall, so that stuck very heavily in my mind…” Re-entering the house, she picked up the same towel she had used to tie Frykowski’s hands, and walked over to Sharon Tate. Then she heard sounds.

Q.
“What kind of sounds were they?”

 

A.
“Gurgling sounds like blood flowing into the body out of the heart.”

 

Q.
“What did you do then?”

 

A.
“I picked up the towel and turned my head and touched her chest, and at the same time I saw she was pregnant and I knew that there was a living being inside of that body and I wanted to but I didn’t have the courage to go ahead and take it…And I got the towel with Sharon Tate’s blood, walked over to the door, and with the towel I wrote
PIG
on the door.”