Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (86 page)

Near the conclusion of his book, Manson writes: “There are days when I get caught up in being the most notorious convict of all time. In that frame of mind I get off on all the publicity, and I’m pleased when some fool writes and offers to ‘off some pigs’ for me. I’ve had girls come to visit me with their babies in their arms and say, ‘Charlie, I’d do anything in the world for you. I’m raising my baby in your image.’ Those letters and visits used to delight me, but that’s my individual sickness. What sickness is it that keeps sending me kids and followers? It’s your world out there that does it. I don’t solicit my mail or ask anyone to come and visit me. Yet the mail continues to arrive and your pretty little flowers of innocence keep showing up at the gate.”

From these relatively benign words, Manson abruptly changes, and after saying he doesn’t think he’ll ever be released, closes his book in vintage fashion with these ominously ambiguous words: “My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own. So…know that only a body is in prison. At my will, I walk your streets and am right out there among you.”

Life behind bars hasn’t dashed Manson’s desire to be a recording star. From his cell in Vacaville in 1982, Manson recorded his second album, titled
Charlie Manson’s Good Time Gospel Hour
. Manson sings ballads he composed about his life and that of his pals on San Quentin’s Death Row. The sounds of nearby television and flushing toilets can be heard in the background. Manson’s first album, called
LIE
(the photo on the jacket is the one of him on the December 19, 1969, cover of
Life
magazine), was taped, portentously, on August 9, 1968, exactly one year before the Tate murders. With several of the Manson Family girls providing choral backup, Manson sings his own compositions. Both albums have gone through several bootleg editions and are considered such rare collectibles that one alternative music store owner told me if he ever got his hands on either one, “I wouldn’t sell them. They’re too valuable.”

Remarkably, there are some who heap scalding criticism on those in the music industry who never gave Manson a chance when he got out of prison in 1967. If he had been given a real opportunity, they add, most likely the murders would never have taken place. While this is possibly true, that type of “but for” causation could be used to argue that if someone had bought Hitler’s paintings in Vienna in 1912 perhaps we wouldn’t have had the Second World War.

Being behind bars also hasn’t inhibited Manson from reaching America’s vast television audience. The media (NBC’s
Today Show
, CNN, BBC, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, the ABC Special in March of 1994, etc.) have sought him out, enabling him to verbally spew his venom. In a 1988 interview with Geraldo Rivera, he said: “I’m going to chop up some more of you mother-fuckers. I’m going to kill as many of you as I can. I’m going to pile you up to the sky. I figure about fifty million of you. I might be able to save my trees and my air and my water and my wildlife.” When Rivera later said, “There’s nine dead people out there” (referring to Manson’s nine murder convictions), Manson answered, “There’s a lot more than nine, son, a whole lot, and there’s going to be a whole lot more.” When Rivera asked if he told the women in his Family to kill, he responded, “I don’t deal with women I got to tell what to do. They
know
what to do.” He told Rivera: “I make laws. I’m the lawmaker. I’m the one that lays down the track.”

I
n the twenty-five years since the murders, no event thrust the Manson Family back into the news once again as much as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme’s attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975. After Manson was transferred from San Quentin back to Folsom in October of 1974, Squeaky and Sandra Good moved to Sacramento (fifteen miles to the west) to be as close to him as possible.
*
Squeaky, Sandra, and a part-time nurse they had recruited into the Family named Susan Murphy, rented a run-down attic apartment in an old, downtown boardinghouse just a few blocks from the state capitol. On the sunny and crisp morning of September 5, 1975, President Ford was walking through a park in front of the capitol to meet Governor Jerry Brown.

Not only wasn’t Squeaky on the Secret Service’s list of dangerous people in town to watch—particularly remarkable when weeks earlier she and Sandra had issued a communiqué to the media in Sacramento that “if Nixon’s reality wearing a new face [i.e., Ford] continues to run this country against the law, your homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca homes and My Lai put together”
†
—but the President’s men inexplicably paid no attention to an elfish woman nearby attired in a bright red robe and matching turban. As Ford stopped at a magnolia tree to shake hands with a cluster of smiling supporters, Squeaky materialized out of the group, grabbed a gun from under her robe and pointed it at Ford, just two feet away. Instantly, Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf seized Squeaky’s gun arm and threw her to the ground. In apparent anger, Squeaky cried out, “It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.” The reason it didn’t go off will probably never be known beyond
all
doubt. To be sure, Squeaky’s .45 caliber Army Colt pistol, though loaded with four bullets, had no bullet in the chamber ready to be fired. To fire the gun, Squeaky would have first had to pull the slide back on top of the gun to raise a cartridge from the magazine into the firing chamber, which she hadn’t done. Had Squeaky mistakenly thought that squeezing the trigger (Buendorf and another witness reported hearing a metallic clicking sound, which could have been the hammer striking the rear of the firing pin) would be enough to fire the weapon? Because of the belief that Squeaky knew how to operate guns (on the documentary
Manson
she is seen operating the bolt of a rifle), many people, including some in law enforcement, are convinced she had no intention of hurting Ford. Nevertheless, prosecutor Dwayne Keyes, now a Superior Court judge in Fresno, told me he is “absolutely positive she had every intent to kill the President,” a state of mind the prosecution had to prove to secure a conviction.

In any event, Squeaky was now competing for the limelight, at least for a while, with her God, Charlie, making the September 15, 1975, covers of
Newsweek
and
Time
magazines. At her federal trial she was so obstreperous the judge had her removed from the courtroom for most of the proceedings, but not before she told him that one of the issues at the trial “was as clear as the piano in the front window of your home,” an accurate reference. During jury deliberations after a three-week trial in which Squeaky did not testify, “a lot of people,” juror Robert Convoy recalled, “believed that with no cartridge in the chamber, the gun wasn’t a weapon.” Ultimately, however, the jury found Squeaky guilty of attempting to assassinate Ford (prior to 1965, presidential assassination was only a state, not a federal, crime), the first female in American history so charged and convicted. Squeaky was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Was Manson behind the attempt? My instincts from the beginning were that he was not. Though Manson always spoke as if he had no fear of death, telling his followers that death wasn’t the end of life, “just another high,” even beautiful (“Living is what scares me. Dying is easy,” he’d also say, as well as implying he had been resurrected), I saw firsthand how hard he in fact fought for his life during his nine and one-half month trial. Having his death sentence removed just three years earlier, it made no sense to me that he would risk a new sentence of death against someone as remote to him and his interests as Ford. Prosecutor Keyes also believes that Manson was not involved, and his office found no evidence implicating him. Squeaky, the Little Orphan Annie-looking matriarch of the Family during Manson’s forced exile, was probably trying to impress Manson by her act. She had to know that successful or not in killing Ford, such a spectacular, grandly anti-societal act would be sure to please him.

Searching Squeaky’s apartment pursuant to a warrant after the attempt on Ford, police found a stack of letters, ready to go, from “The International People’s Court of Retribution,” an impressive-sounding organization whose membership, however, was rather limited—Squeaky, Sandra Good, and Susan Murphy. The letters threatened named corporate executives and U.S. government officials with death if they did not forthwith stop polluting the air and water and destroying the environment. A long list of other addressees was nearby. While on bail after her and Murphy’s arrest for conspiring to send threatening communications through the United States mail, Good proceeded to utter, on radio and TV, the same threats, constituting four new federal violations of transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce.

Good represented herself at her trial, was convicted on all five counts (Murphy on only the conspiracy count), and asked that she be sentenced to the maximum of twenty-five years. The judge gave her fifteen. William Shubb, her appointed “advisory counsel” during the trial and now a U.S. Federal District Court judge in Sacramento, says that if she had been agreeable he is certain a plea could have been negotiated wherein her sentence would have been much less severe.

A
ll of Manson’s co-defendants in the Tate-LaBianca murders are, like Manson, still behind bars serving their life sentences.

Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson’s chief lieutenant at the murder scenes and the principal killer of the Tate-LaBianca victims, has renounced Manson and is presently at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He was transferred there in April of 1993 from the California Men’s Colony (CMC) in San Luis Obispo, where he had been incarcerated since September 1972. At CMC in 1975, Watson, through the ministry of Raymond Hoekstra (a legendary prison evangelist known as “Chaplain Ray”), became a born-again Christian. As a student chaplain and associate administrator of the Protestant chapel at CMC, Watson baptized, led Bible-study groups, and preached to the inmate congregation. In 1980, Watson founded Abounding Love Ministries (ALMS), a California nonprofit corporation which he and his Norwegian wife, Kristin, run. The two married in 1979 and have three children. Ordained as a minister in 1983, Watson receives donations to his ministry of approximately $1,500 per month from people on a national mailing list to whom he sends religious cassette tapes and a Christian newsletter.

Watson’s 1978 book,
Will You Die for Me?
, which he wrote with Chaplain Ray, chronicles his life with Manson, the murders, and his ultimate conversion to Christianity. Speaking of Manson, to whom he writes, “I had given myself totally,” he says he served the power of death and destruction “through one diabolical man who wanted to be God.” Believing that Manson “was—perhaps still is—possessed” by the devil, he says Manson’s only interest “had been death, but Jesus promised life.”

A rather startling admission by Watson to his prison psychiatrist was revealed at his last parole hearing in May of 1990. (Watson elected to waive his January 1993 parole hearing, stipulating to his unsuitability for parole.) The psychiatrist wrote that it had only been “during the last three years of one-on-one therapy that [Watson had] begun to truly experience a sense of deep remorse, both for the crime victims and for the families of the crime victims.” When a troubled parole board member asked Watson what, then, had he been feeling the previous eighteen years, Watson responded: “Well, it’s not that I haven’t experienced that before, but there’s been things happening in my life over the last few years that have really brought it home more so.” Watson explained that ever since he became a Christian in 1975 it’s been “great to know that I have been forgiven by God for what I’ve done. But I think sometimes we can hide behind that, and the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to really see myself in a new light in the sense that I’ve opened myself up to really look at the crime through other people’s eyes other than just my own.”

Watson’s belated epiphany was brought about in large part, he informed the board, by a somewhat incongruous relationship with Suzanne LaBerge (formerly Suzanne Struthers), Rosemary LaBianca’s daughter from a relationship before she met Leno. The thrice married and divorced Suzanne, who was twenty-one years old at the time of the murders, began visiting Watson at CMC in 1987. She appeared at the 1990 parole hearing and actually made an impassioned plea for the release of her mother’s killer, telling the board Watson had atoned for his terrible crimes, had overcome his past by turning to Christ, and no longer was a threat to society.

In a June 5, 1994, letter to me, Watson wrote: “With my deepest remorse, I apologize to the people of the world for my part in making Manson what he has become. To the many victims, my heart is full of sorrow for my actions…. If anyone should have received the death penalty for their crimes, it was me. I believe that God and his grace gave me a second chance, having a different plan for my life…. I have no great ambitions, other than allowing the Lord to use me as a testimony, urging others to Christ.”

While at CMC, Watson completed courses in vocational data processing and office machine repair. His current work assignment at Mule Creek is “tier tender,” i.e., keeping clean one of the two tiers in the building where he is housed. A prison spokesperson at Mule Creek advises that since Watson’s incarceration for the Tate-LaBianca murders he has received “one disciplinary infraction, of a minor nature, in 1973. He continues to program without incident.”

Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, like Watson, have each renounced Manson and expressed remorse for the killings. All are still at the California Institution for Women at Frontera. One of only three prisons for women in the state, Frontera has been described by one wag as “a college campus with barbed wire around it.” Each of the three Manson girls lives in a cottage-like housing unit (two inmates to a unit) at the attractive, well-manicured institution. All three girls have been reviewed for parole consideration, and denied, ten times thus far. It is the common consensus that if any of them are ever released, Van Houten will be the first one, primarily because unlike Atkins and Krenwinkel, she was only involved in the LaBianca, not the Tate murders. Additionally, a well-organized group, “Friends of Leslie,” consisting of hundreds of supporters, regularly urge her release to the parole board.