Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (43 page)

It was the same expression, except that in place of the word for defecation Manson now substituted “Helter Skelter.”

Another link had been made, this time to the bloody words on the refrigerator door at the LaBianca residence.

Though this was the first time Manson used the phrase, it was not to be the last.

Watkins: “And he started rapping about this Beatle album and Helter Skelter and all these meanings that I didn’t get out of it…and he builds this picture up and he called it Helter Skelter, and what it meant was the Negroes were going to come down and rip the cities all apart.”

After this, Watkins said, “We started listening to the Beatles’ album constantly…”

Death Valley is very cold in the winter, so Manson found a two-story house at 20910 Gresham Street in Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley, not too far from Spahn Ranch. In January 1969, Watkins said, “we all moved into the Gresham Street house to get ready for Helter Skelter. So we could watch it coming down and see all of the things going on in the city. He [Charlie] called the Gresham Street house ‘The Yellow Submarine’ from the Beatles’ movie. It was like a submarine in that when you were in it you weren’t allowed to go out. You could only peek out of the windows. We started designing dune buggies and motorcycles and we were going to buy twenty-five Harley sportsters…and we mapped escape routes to the desert…supply caches…we had all these different things going.

“I watched him building this big picture up,” Paul noted. “He would do it very slowly, very carefully. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

“Before Helter Skelter came along,” Watkins said with a sigh of wistful nostalgia, “all Charlie cared about was orgies.”

B
efore Jakobson and I had ever discussed the Beatles, I asked him: “Did Charlie ever talk to you about a black-white revolution?”

A.
“Yeah, that was Helter Skelter, and he believed it was going to happen in the near future, almost immediately.”

 

Q.
“What did he say about this black-white revolution? How would it come about and what would it accomplish?”

 

A.
“It would begin with the black man going into white people’s homes and ripping off the white people, physically destroying them, until there was open revolution in the streets, until they finally won and took over. Then black man would assume white man’s karma. He would then be the establishment.”

 

Watkins: “He used to explain how it would be so simple to start out. A couple of black people—some of the spades from Watts—would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district…up in the rich piggy district…and just really wipe some people out, just cutting bodies up and smearing blood and writing things on the wall in blood…all kinds of super-atrocious crimes that would really make the white man mad…”

Poston said very much the same thing before I ever talked to Watkins, but with the addition of one very important detail: “He [Manson] said a group of real blacks would come out of the ghettos and do an atrocious crime in the richer sections of Los Angeles and other cities. They would do an atrocious murder with stabbing, killing, cutting bodies to pieces, smearing blood on the walls, writing ‘pigs’ on the walls…in the victims’ own blood.”

This was tremendously powerful evidence—linking Manson not only with the Tate murders, where
PIG
had been printed in Sharon Tate’s blood on the front door of the residence, but also with the LaBianca murders, where
DEATH TO PIGS
had been printed in Leno LaBianca’s blood on the living-room wall—and I questioned Poston in depth as to Manson’s exact words, where the conversation had occurred, when, and who else was present. I then questioned everyone Poston mentioned who was willing to cooperate.

Ordinarily, I try to avoid repetitious testimony in a trial, knowing it can antagonize the jury. However, Manson’s Helter Skelter motive was so bizarre that I knew if it was expounded by only one witness no juror would ever believe it.

The conversation had occurred in February 1969, at the Gresham Street house, Poston said.

We now had evidence that six months before the Tate-LaBianca murders Charles Manson was telling the Family exactly how the murders would occur, complete even to writing “pigs” in the victims’ own blood.

We now had also linked Manson with every one of the bloody words found at both the Tate and LaBianca residences.

B
ut this would only be the beginning, Manson told Watkins. These murders would cause mass paranoia among the whites: “Out of their fear they would go into the ghetto and just start shooting black people like crazy.” But all they would kill would be “the ones that were with whitey in the first place.”

The “true black race”—whom Manson identified at various times as the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers—“wouldn’t even be affected by it.” They would be in hiding, waiting, he said.

After the slaughter, the Black Muslims would “come out and appeal to the whites, saying, ‘Look what you have done to my people.’ And this would split whitey down the middle,” Watkins said, “between the hippie-liberals and all the uptight conservatives…” And it would be like the War between the States, brother against brother, white killing white. Then, after the whites had mostly killed off each other, “the Black Muslims would come out of hiding and wipe them
all
out.”

All except Charlie and the Family, who would have taken refuge in the bottomless pit in Death Valley.

The karma would then have turned. “Blackie would be on top.” And he would begin to “clean up the mess, just like he always has done…He will clean up the mess that the white man made, and build the world back up a little bit, build the cities back up. But then he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t handle it.”

According to Manson, Watkins said, the black man had a problem. He could only do what the white man had taught him to do. He wouldn’t be able to run the world without whitey showing him how.

Watkins: “Blackie then would come to Charlie and say, you know, ‘I did my thing. I killed them all and, you know, I am tired of killing now. It is all over.’

“And then Charlie would scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick cotton and go be a good nigger, and we would live happily ever after…” The Family, now grown to 144,000, as predicted in the Bible—a pure, white master race—would emerge from the bottomless pit. And “It would be our world then. There would be no one else, except for us and the black servants.”

And, according to the gospel of Charlie—as he related it to his disciple Paul Watkins—he, Charles Willis Manson, the fifth angel, JC, would then rule that world.

P
aul Watkins, Brooks Poston, and Gregg Jakobson had not only defined Manson’s motive, Helter Skelter, Watkins had supplied that missing link. In his sick, twisted, disordered mind, Charles Manson believed that
he
would be the ultimate beneficiary of the black-white war and the murders which triggered it.

One day at the Gresham Street house, while they were on an acid trip, Manson had reiterated to Watkins and the others that blackie had no smarts, “that the only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him or shown him” and “so someone is going to have to show him how to do it.”

I asked Watkins: “How to do what?”

A.
“How to bring down Helter Skelter. How to do all these things.”

 

Watkins: “Charlie said the only reason it hadn’t come down already was because whitey was feeding his young daughters to the black man in Haight-Ashbury, and he said that if his music came out, and all of the beautiful people—‘love’ he called it—left Haight-Ashbury, blackie would turn to Bel Air to get his rocks off.”

Blackie had been temporarily “pacified” by the young white girls, Manson claimed. But when he took away the pacifier—when his album came out and all the young loves followed Pied Piper Charlie to the desert—blackie would need another means of getting his frustrations out and he would then turn to the establishment.

But Terry Melcher didn’t come through. The album wasn’t made. Sometime in late February of 1969 Manson sent Brooks and Juanita to Barker Ranch. The rest of the Family moved back to Spahn and began preparing for Helter Skelter. “Now there was an actual physical effort to get things together, so they could move to the desert,” Gregg said. Jakobson, who visited the ranch during this period, was startled at the change in Manson. Previously he had preached oneness of the Family, complete in itself, self-sufficient; now he was cultivating outsiders, the motorcycle gangs. Before this he had been anti-materialistic; now he was accumulating vehicles, guns, money. “It struck me that all this contradicted what Charlie had done and talked to me about before,” Gregg said, explaining that this was the beginning of his disenchantment and eventual break with Manson.

The newly materialistic Manson came up with some wild moneymaking schemes. For example, someone suggested that the girls in the Family could earn $300 to $500 a week apiece working as topless dancers. Manson liked the idea—with ten broads pulling in $3,000 a week and upward he could buy jeeps, dune buggies, even machine guns—and he sent Bobby Beausoleil and Bill Vance to the Girard Agency on the Sunset Strip to negotiate the deal.

There was only one problem. With all his powers, Manson was unable to transform molehills into mountains. With the exception of Sadie and a few others, Charlie’s girls simply did not have impressive busts. For some reason Manson seemed to attract mostly flat-chested girls.

W
hile at the Gresham Street house, Manson had told Watkins that the atrocious murders would occur that summer. It was almost summer now and the blacks were showing no signs of rising up to fulfill their karma. One day in late May or early June of 1969, Manson took Watkins aside, down near the old trailer at Spahn, and confided: “The only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him.” He then added, “
I’m
going to have to show him how to do it.”

According to Watkins: “I got some weird pictures from that.” A few days later Watkins took off for Barker, fearful that if he stuck around he would see those weird pictures materialize into nihilistic reality.

It was September of 1969 before Manson himself returned to Barker Ranch, to find that Watkins and Poston had defected. Though Manson told Watkins about “cutting Shorty into nine pieces,” he made no mention whatsoever of the Tate-LaBianca murders. In discussing Helter Skelter with Watkins, however, Manson said, without explanation, “I had to show blackie how to do it.”

L
APD had interviewed Gregg Jakobson in late November of 1969. When he attempted to tell them about Manson’s far-out philosophy, one of the detectives replied, “Ah, Charlie’s a madman; we’re not interested in all that.” The following month two detectives went to Shoshone and talked to Crockett and Poston; LAPD also contacted Watkins. All three were asked what they knew about the Tate-LaBianca murders. And all three said they didn’t know anything, which, in their minds, was true, none having previously made the connection between Manson and these murders. After the interview with Poston and Crockett, one of the detectives remarked, “Looks like we made a trip for nothing.”

Initially, I found it difficult to believe that none of the four even suspected that Manson might be behind the Tate-LaBianca murders. There were, I discovered, several probable reasons for this. When Manson had told Jakobson how Helter Skelter would start, he had said nothing about writing words in blood. He had told this to both Watkins and Poston, even telling Poston about the word “pigs,” but there were no newspapers at Barker Ranch, and its location was such that there was no radio reception. Though they had heard about the murders on their infrequent supply trips into Independence and Shoshone, both stated they hadn’t picked up many details.

The main reason, however, was simply a fluke. Though the press did report that there was bloody writing at the LaBianca residence, LAPD had succeeded in keeping one fact secret: that two of the words were
HEALTER SKELTER
.

Had this been publicized, undoubtedly Jakobson, Watkins, Poston, and numerous others would have connected the LaBianca murders—and probably the Tate murders also, because of their proximity in time—with Manson’s insane plan. And it seems a safe assumption that at least one would have communicated his suspicions to the police.

It was one of those odd happenstances, for which no one was at fault, the repercussions of which no one could foresee, but it appears possible that had this happened, the killers might have been apprehended days, rather than months, after the murders, and Donald “Shorty” Shea, and possibly others, might still be alive.

T
hough I was now convinced we had the motive, other leads failed to pan out.

None of the employees of the Standard station in Sylmar or the Jack Frost store in Santa Monica could identify anyone in our “Family album.” As for the LaBianca credit cards, all appeared to be accounted for, while Suzanne Struthers was unable to determine if a brown purse was missing from her mother’s personal effects. The problem was that Rosemary had several brown purses.