Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (88 page)

My latest information is that Linda Kasabian moved from New Hampshire and is now living under an assumed name in the Pacific Southwest with her husband and three children. A friend of Linda’s when she lived in Milford, New Hampshire, told a reporter that Linda “led a normal life. She drove her kids to school, participated in the PTA, that sort of thing.” Barbara Hoyt, whom I was happy to help get into nursing school, is now a registered nurse in the Northwest. Barbara is divorced and living with her daughter in a townhouse she just purchased. She leads a very active life “camping, fishing, painting, and playing volleyball.”

Contrary to other reports, Dianne Lake never became a corporate executive or vice-president of a bank. She worked as a bank teller for years, and describes herself today as a “happily married, well adjusted and committed Christian living with my husband and three children in the western part of the United States.” Kitty Lutesinger is divorced and raising her two children in California. Steve Grogan is not, as has been reported, working as a house painter in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Someone very close to him informed me that his occupation (undisclosed) takes him to various states and “he is doing exceptionally well, better than anyone could have anticipated.”

Mary Brunner, the first female member of the Family, who was an assistant librarian at the University of California at Berkeley when she joined Manson, served six and one-half years for her participation in the Western Surplus Store robbery in Hawthorne, California. She is presently living in the Midwest under an assumed name, is single, and is doing clerical work.

Catherine Share served five years for her conviction in the Hawthorne robbery. She now lives in a Southwest state with her second husband and a twenty-three-year-old son who is a senior in college. After divorcing Manson Family associate Kenneth Como in 1981, she says she completely separated herself from the Family. Like Dianne Lake, she says she is “happily married, and a Christian very active in church affairs.” Share, who was born in Paris to a Hungarian violinist father and German-Jewish refugee mother, both of whom were members of the anti-Nazi underground French resistance during the Second World War, describes her life today as so clean she hasn’t “gotten a traffic ticket in ten years.” And like Patricia Krenwinkel and other former Family members, she is deeply concerned about the many young people today who look up to Manson and want to follow him. Because of this, she is in the process of working on a book (
She Was a Gypsy Woman
) with a Texas-based writer which will “tell the truth” to these youths about “who Charles Manson really is.”

During the penalty phase of the Tate-LaBianca trial, Share had testified that the motive for the murders was not Helter Skelter—which I had tied firmly to Manson—but the so-called copycat motive, which had nothing to do with Manson. In a conversation with her in early April of 1994, she acknowledged to me what I had already known (of the text): that her testimony was untruthful. She said the copycat motive story (as well, of course, as her testimony that Linda Kasabian, not Manson, had been behind the murders) was a fabrication to save Manson from the gas chamber, and that she had testified to it under his explicit direction.

Catherine Gillies is divorced and living on welfare with her four children near Death Valley. She is very proud of the fact that her twin teenage daughters are both honor students. No one seems to know what became of Stephanie Schram. Nancy Pitman married Michael Monfort, a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a group Manson allegedly had a loose, arms-length relationship with in the mid-’70s. She served one year for her accessory-after-the-fact conviction in the murder of Lauren Willett, a homicide Monfort pled guilty to. Pitman divorced Monfort in 1990. She is now single, employed, and living with her four children in the Pacific Northwest. Her main concern these days, she says, “is to protect my children” from any harm brought about by her having once belonged to the Manson Family.

Little Paul Watkins, the intelligent and articulate youth who provided me with the missing link for Manson’s motive of Helter Skelter, died in 1990 from leukemia. Paul and his second wife, Martha, had two girls and lived in Tecopa, a small desert town at the southernmost edge of Death Valley. Paul was the founder and first president of the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce and the unofficial mayor of Tecopa. He and his wife mined rocks in the area and sold them in their Tecopa jewelry store. Paul also lectured extensively on the psychology of cults and the pernicious effects of substance abuse. His book,
My Life with Charles Manson
, was published in 1979.

For years, Paul (who composed, sang, and played the saxophone and flute) and his close friend Brooks Poston (composition, guitar) had a rock band called the “Desert Sun” that played at night spots in the Death Valley area. Brooks, the self-described hayseed from Texas, is now reportedly a member of a non-violent cult in New Orleans, but I have been unable to confirm this.

Dennis Rice served five years for the Hawthorne robbery and an additional two for violating a condition of his parole that he stop associating with members of the Manson Family. Today, he is an ordained minister and president of “Free Indeed” Ministries, Inc. He lives with his second wife in a Southwest state and speaks, he says, “in high schools, jails, and prisons all over America on the power of Jesus Christ to change lives.” He has six children, all of whom, he notes proudly, are “Christians serving God.”

Ruth Moorehouse is living with her husband and three children in a midwestern state. The Panamanian cowboy, Juan Flynn, returned to Panama, where he works on a ranch. In early 1994, Juan returned to the Death Valley area to visit old friends. In the late ’70s I received a call from Canadian law enforcement looking for Danny DeCarlo, who was born in Canada. I have been unable to find out from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa what became of this matter because the Privacy Act in Canada prohibits the release of this information. I have no idea where DeCarlo is today.

I am frequently asked what happened to the “Manson children.” There were eight of them, four belonging to Dennis Rice by his first wife—three boys and a girl. Two of Rice’s boys are now pastors in churches located in a Southwest state. The other boy and the girl also live in the Southwest and are very involved in the activities of their local Christian church.

Little is known of Sandra Good’s son, Sunstone Hawk, except that he went to college on a football scholarship and was a lineman on the team.

Linda Kasabian’s daughter, Tanya, grew up with Linda in New Hampshire.

She now lives in the Pacific Northwest, is married, and recently made Linda a grandmother with her first child.

All I was able to learn about Susan Atkins’ son, Zezozose Zadfrack, was that he was adopted, reportedly by a physician. The court records have been sealed and Atkins herself does not know where her son is.

Valentine Michael (“Pooh Bear”), the son of Manson and Mary Brunner, was raised by Mary’s parents in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Until the third grade he did not know who his father was and believed his mother to be his older sister. In 1993, Michael told a reporter who tracked him down that he had never visited Manson “nor do I have any desire to see him. He’s just some evil person I have nothing to do with.” According to Manson Family researcher Bill Nelson, Michael, now twenty-six, lives with his girlfriend and their three-year-old son in a Rocky Mountain state where he is a salesman for a plumbing supply firm. He recently got his real estate license. Michael is deeply appreciative of the fact that his grandparents raised him, and to this day remains closer to them than to his mother.

As to some of those whose lives brought them into contact with Manson and his Family in a significant way, Doris Day’s son, record producer Terry Melcher, at whose former home the Tate murders took place and whom Manson unsuccessfully sought to have record him and his music, is now primarily in the hotel and real estate business on the West Coast. He continues, however, to be involved in the music world. Since 1985, he has been the producer of the Beach Boys’ recordings. Terry and his wife have become quite active in the civic affairs of the community in which they live.

Gregg Jakobson, who met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s home and was the one who introduced Melcher to Manson, whose philosophy on life he found intellectually stimulating, is, to quote him, “half retired and leading the good life” in the charming oceanside community of Laguna Beach, California. Gregg and his wife, comic Lou Costello’s daughter, divorced and he has not remarried. He is the part-owner of a Chinese restaurant in nearby Newport Beach, buys and sells antiques, and does a little music composition working with local musicians.

Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys at whose home on Sunset Boulevard Manson, without invitation, moved into with his Family in the late spring of 1968, and who told me, when I sought musical tapes he had made of Manson, that he had destroyed them because “the vibrations connected with them don’t belong to this earth,” drowned on December 27, 1983, at Marina del Rey, California, while diving off a dock near a friend’s boat. The coroner’s report provided a possible explanation for the drowning. The alcohol level in Wilson’s blood was .26 percent, nearly three times the legal limit for operating a motor vehicle in the state of California. Traces of cocaine and Valium were also found in his system.
*

George Spahn didn’t much care for the rainy Oregon weather nor the ranch he bought there in 1971, and after a year returned to Los Angeles and moved back with his wife, from whom he had been legally separated. Spahn died in late 1974 at the age of eighty-five. One of Spahn’s daughters told me that Ruby Pearl, the one-time circus bareback rider and horse wrangler who helped Spahn run the ranch, had accompanied Spahn to Oregon. She bought a smaller ranch in Oregon after Spahn reunited with his wife, and is still living there.

In 1979, Ronnie Howard died in a Los Angeles hospital from injuries sustained in a beating by two unknown male assailants. Laurence Merrick, who produced the 1970 Academy Award-nominated documentary
Manson
, was shot to death in 1977 at his Hollywood studio. The police concluded that both murders were unrelated to Manson or his Family.

After she resolved her parole problems, Virginia Graham opened up a health spa at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel in Honolulu with the $12,000 she received as her share from the Polanski reward money. A survivor, Virginia today is the manager of a fine art gallery in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, and just completed a much expanded version of her 1974 book,
The Joy of Hooking,
titled
Look Who Is Sleeping in My Bed: Madames, Mansions, Murder and Manson.
I appreciated what she said about me in her 1974 book, especially in view of Manson’s familiar refrain that I railroaded him. She wrote: “I can’t remember how many times we went down to the District Attorney’s Office to go over my statement with Vincent Bugliosi. I have to say this about Bugliosi. Although I’ve never had much love for authority of any kind, he was absolutely fair, straight and honest. He never once even hinted that I might alter my testimony a little bit to help the state’s case. He was careful to the other extreme, in fact.”

Spahn Ranch was never rebuilt after it was burned to the ground by brush fires that swept the area from Newhall to the sea in September of 1970. The German company that bought the land from George Spahn never developed it into the dude ranch resort for German tourists they had planned. Today, there are no signs that the murderous Manson Family was ever there. All of the ramshackle structures on the ranch are gone and the property, which was eventually sold to the state of California, is deserted, weed-choked land.

The Tate residence went through several owners after Rudi Altobelli, the landlord at the time of the murders. The current owner tore the house down in January of 1994 because he didn’t like “the history of the place,” and is in the process of constructing an enormous $10 million home that will tower over all other homes in the area. The LaBianca home was owned for years by a Filipino couple, the wife reportedly being a friend of Imelda Marcos. They sold it recently to their daughter and son-in-law.

As for the Manson trial participants today, Irving Kanarek, Manson’s lawyer, was ordered to be inactive by the California State Bar on January 29, 1990. He resigned from the bar on October 26, 1990, “with charges pending.” I do not know the basis for the charges (being a privileged matter) nor Kanarek’s present whereabouts.

Paul Fitzgerald, Patricia Krenwinkel’s lawyer, practices law in Beverly Hills and is a prominent member of the criminal defense bar in the Los Angeles area. Fitzgerald, a fine trial lawyer who continues to win more than his share of cases, manages to do so without sacrificing grace and civility in the courtroom, a place inherently inhospitable to both qualities.

Daye Shinn, Susan Atkins’ lawyer, was disbarred by the California State Bar on October 16, 1992, for misappropriating a client’s money.

Maxwell Keith, the urbane lawyer who replaced Ronald Hughes as Leslie Van Houten’s lawyer, is still in the private practice of law in Los Angeles, and this year was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Association.

The cause of Ronald Hughes’ death in the Sespe Hot Springs area of Ventura County remains a mystery to this day. In 1976, a former member of Manson’s Family, understandably wanting to remain anonymous, called me. Without furnishing any additional or supporting information, he stated categorically that Hughes had been murdered by the Manson Family. Lieutenant Greg Husband of the Ventura County Sheriff’s office reports that since it was never determined whether Hughes’ death was the result of an accident, homicide, or suicide, the Hughes case file is still open, though no investigators are presently assigned to the case. It should be remembered that there is no statute of limitations for the crime of murder.