CHARLES MANSON IS DEAD, BUT LIVES ON

It seems as though Quentin Tarantino's new film has rekindled a surge of interest in the last summer of the 1960's. This included of course, the time of the Tate/LaBianca murders, which, along with the incident at Altamont just a few months later, were the counterpoint to that great experiment of peace and music, the Woodstock Festival.

The following trio of articles show the different aspects of the Manson Chronicles. First, the article by Ed Sanders, who as a journalist spent time with the Manson Family and wrote the book, "The Family" in 1971 examines why this subject is forever fascinating to the public. The next article relives the time right after the murders, when Hollywood, and many of its local musicians and celebrities headed for safety in a grip of fear, believing they may be next on the hit list. Lastly is an article that examines series of unsolved murders after the Manson killings that are suspected of being suspicious as having the taint of the Manson Family on them.

Why Pop Culture Still Can’t Get Enough of Charles Manson
As Quentin Tarantino’s new film revisits Los Angeles at the end of the ’60s, a man who was there — and literally wrote the book on Manson — argues that we never really left.
By Ed Sanders | July 24, 2019

The Manson case had a touch of evil to it — in fact, more than a touch; it was, in many minds, a post-apocalyptic deluge. It exposed how defenseless the folk-rock stars, the movie stars, the producer stars, the drug stars, the limo driver stars and thousands of would-be and wannabe stars were in their pretend fortresses up in the hills of Los Angeles and Malibu.

No one had guards packing pistols or rifles in the summer of 1969. It was as if the whole Los Angeles scene were being protected by the hippies at Hog Farm commune, who provided security at Woodstock consisting of what their leader called “seltzer bottles and cream pies.”

Then, around midnight on Aug. 8, Abigail Folger was lounging in a Cielo Drive guest room in Benedict Canyon, reading a book, when a knife-wielding Susan Atkins walked into her bedroom unannounced. Folger, an heir to the Folgers coffee fortune and a guest of the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, waved hello.

It was ultimate vulnerability.

The ultra-brutal killings that followed stunned the world, prompting headlines about Hippies and Weirdos and Ritual Murder. Along with Folger and Tate, who was married to the director Roman Polanski, the victims that night included Folger’s boyfriend, the Polish writer Wojtek Frykowski; Tate’s friend, the hair-stylist-to-the-stars Jay Sebring; and a young man named Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate’s caretaker.

The next night, in another part of town, the owner of a supermarket chain, Leno LaBianca, and his wife, Rosemary, were killed in a similarly barbaric fashion, with the words “Healter Skelter,” misspelled by one of the killers, written in blood on the LaBiancas’ refrigerator.

Things changed quickly in Los Angeles after that.

As I first began to investigate the case for my 1971 book, “The Family,” the allure of the Tate-LaBianca murders seemed obvious: It had famous rock ’n’ roll stars like Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who briefly housed the so-called Manson family; it had the appeal of the Wild West; it had the bass drum of the 1960s, with its sexual liberation, its love of the outdoors, its ferocity and its open use of drugs. It had the hunger for stardom and renown; it had religions of all kinds; it had warfare and hometown slaughter; and it had it all in a huge panorama of sex, drugs and violent transgression.

But now, I ask myself: What is the big deal about the Manson family? After 50 years, surely the obsession has died down?

It has not. As the bountiful media attention around Quentin Tarantino’s new film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” attests, the obsession is alive and well. And that film is only the latest in a long line of pop culture products from the past half-century to be inspired by the crime, including movies, TV series, a stop-motion animation film and too many documentaries, books, articles and musical tributes to count. At least one prestigious university offers a semester-long seminar on the murders.

As the novelist Graham Greene noted in “The Third Man,” “One’s file, you know, is never quite complete, a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all of the participants are dead.” And as Tarantino knows, Hollywood dotes on self-revealing and self-obsessed stories about itself.

We may be stuck with Charlie Manson for a while.

The End of the ’60s
The Manson case had ripped aside the veils of Hollywood and inflamed the world’s interest, and as a fairly well known musician and writer of the counterculture at the time, I was interested, too, if at first for different reasons. For years after my book was published, I had so much Manson family lore in the front of my brain that my personal calendar was based on what the Manson group had done on that particular day in 1967, ’68 or ’69.

When I first started looking into the family, I thought they might be innocent, and might have even been framed. I pondered whether some scheme were afoot to blame a hippie tribe with psychedelic dune buggies for some killings that others had committed.

I soon learned otherwise.

In my weekly column, written during the 1970 trial for The Los Angeles Free Press, I tried at first to write about Manson and the other defendants as human beings, not cult demons. I was also concerned with whether Manson and his followers were being judged by a jury of their peers.

In addition, I was against the death penalty, and the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, although a good Los Angeles liberal, was very adroit at putting on a trial that could lead to a death sentence.

If Manson got death, I wrote in one of my columns at the time, then what about William Calley and the perpetrators of the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War?

Because of my countercultural bona fides — among other things, I was a member of the rock band the Fugs, and the Free Press was the country’s premier underground newspaper — I was accepted by remnants of the Manson family. Before and during the trial, they invited me out several times to their home base on the Spahn Movie Ranch, at the edge of the San Fernando Valley, where several key scenes in Tarantino’s movie take place. After a garbage run dinner, they asked me to lead their communal singing in which they specialized in Manson’s songs. They handed me a guitar, but I turned down the offer.

A few weeks before the trial, which was scheduled for June 15, I had gone camping with members of the Manson family, along with a documentary filmmaker, out in the vastness of the mountains above Death Valley, 50 miles from the nearest phone. I slept in a van with a key — and not yet arrested — member of the group.

Even though I often dressed more like a Manson family member than like Bugliosi, I nevertheless had an assignment from Esquire and a book contract from a major publisher, so I had access to the prosecution and homicide investigators. When I called one of the prosecutors, Burton Katz, he was dumbfounded to learn that I had slept in that van beside the guy he believed had cut off the head of Shorty Shea, a former stuntman working on Spahn Ranch who had disappeared several weeks after the Tate-LaBianca murders. (When investigators finally located Shea’s body, over a decade later, his head was attached.)

That’s when I began to get the shivers about the Manson group.

I had also begun learning about a plot to free Manson.

The young man in the van, I found out, had during our trip asked a member of the film crew, “What would you say would happen if one night 75 heads were cut off?” From what was being tossed about, it was obvious an escape attempt for Manson was being planned.

Members of the Manson family said that he had maps of the Los Angeles sewer system. They said there was a set of parallel dry tunnels running all the way from downtown to the edge of the desert, which you could barrel through on motorcycles to freedom. They had talked to the filmmaker about chopping off heads as a distraction to aid the escape.

I told them I didn’t care about their plans. I wanted them to think that an escape meant nothing to me so they wouldn’t become suspicious.

I had never snitched in my life. In my youth, I had been counseled by friends never to catch the eye of a police officer and to be very wary in their company. Later, as someone whose face had been on the cover of Life magazine as a leader of the so-called “other culture,” I was doubly suspicious of the police. In writing and researching the book, however, I began to feel sympathy and respect for a number of police officers whose work I began to understand and appreciate.

So I decided to go to the authorities. I contacted a CBS reporter who was covering the trial and told him what I knew. Together we made arrangements to tip off the police.

The weekend before the trial began, I learned that Manson had been moved to a super secure cell at the Hall of Justice, the same place he was to be tried. The cell had previously held Sirhan Sirhan, the man prosecuted for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. 

Fear Swept the Poolsides
There was great fear of Manson and his disciples, at least in Los Angeles during the trial, among those associated with movies and the music business. One need look no further for the origins of our abiding fixation: Many of the culture’s prominent voices from the past 50 years were shaped by that fear, their worldviews and obsessions forged in it. (In a recent interview with Esquire, Tarantino, who grew up in Los Angeles and was 6-years-old at the time, called 1969 “the year that formed me.”)

I saw that fear at work firsthand. Whenever my band played Los Angeles in the 1960s, we stayed at Sandy Koufax’s Tropicana Motel, located on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Cienega. There was a banana tree by the pool and hibiscus bushes with large red flowers. And there was always a party. During the summer of 1970, while I attended the Tate-LaBianca trial, I stayed with my wife, Miriam, and ­5-year-old daughter, Deirdre, at the Tropicana.

Others in the music business were also staying at the Tropicana that summer, including Kris Kristofferson, the 5th Dimension and Janis Joplin, who was cutting her final album, “Pearl.” In the afternoons, the tables by the pool would fill up with visiting friends, including Phil Ochs, the writer John Carpenter and the singer Rita Coolidge.

The musicians were very anxious that I not bring any of the Manson family to the Tropicana. A few vowed to move out if I did, and I promised I wouldn’t.

A ripple of fear seemed to sweep across the poolside when it appeared that I had breached the edict one afternoon, as two hirsute young men came to visit me. Their names were Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther, and you could almost hear the shudders around the pool, where everyone was certain I had violated the ban against Mansonites.

Frey, whose band the Eagles would sell tens of millions of albums, was not attired in the threads of a star. Souther, who wrote many hit songs during the ensuing decade, was similarly bedecked. Their band, Longbranch Pennywhistle, performed a Fugs cover at their concerts, and the two had come by to invite Miriam and me to a show.

Kris Kristofferson told Miriam at the time that when the two men came poolside, he contemplated diving into the pool and swimming to the other side — the quickest route to safety.

“Live Freaky, die Freaky,” one of the people gathering outside Sharon Tate’s house reportedly said the morning after her murder. What that meant for the hills and valleys of Hollywood was, “From now on it’s lock your doors, close your gates, hire some guards, get some guns.”

Bread and Circuses
Some important people and events fade with time. A few years ago, I gave a talk at a large Midwest university on the subject of 1968, and I spoke about the time Allen Ginsberg chanted a poem by William Blake in a confrontation with military troops during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

After my presentation, I was leaving the auditorium when a young man approached me and asked, “Mr. Sanders — Allen Ginsberg, he was one of the lawyers at the O.J. Simpson trial, right?”

But some events last and last and last.

Ask Tarantino. He has his finger firmly on a key element of human proclivities. His “Once Upon a Time” received a six-minute standing ovation this year at Cannes.

He knows, to paraphrase the ancient Roman poet Juvenal, that the people want bread and circuses. They want sex scandals and shocking violence, the more vicious the better — even today, when such things seem as common as a hamburger stand.

Ed Sanders is a poet, writer and co-founder of the underground rock band the Fugs. For his 1971 book, “The Family,” he embedded himself among several of Charles Manson’s followers.

Correction: July 29, 2019
An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the timing of events of the summer of 1969. The Woodstock music festival took place the week after the Manson family murders, not beforehand.

[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times.]

How the Manson Killings Gripped Los Angeles
By Laura M. Holson | July 5, 2019

A maid called the police at 9 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1969, after finding five dead people in a Beverly Hills home. There was a blond woman on the living room floor, a rope wrapped around her neck and stab wounds in her swollen belly. A bloodied corpse wore a hood; another was behind the wheel of a car. Two more were sprawled on the lawn about 50 feet apart. A neighbor recalled hearing shots around midnight.

The word “pig” was wiped in blood on a white front door.

Charles Manson, an ex-convict turned cult leader, had planned the attack, directing his followers to sneak into a Benedict Canyon home rented by the director Roman Polanski, where they killed his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four guests before dawn.

Americans have long had an insatiable appetite for gruesome crime stories. But this inexplicable act left many in Hollywood panicked that they could be next.

Some celebrities bought handguns to protect themselves. Others installed security cameras or holed up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. For many, the killings exposed the network of hustlers and hangers-on who lurk in the shadows of Los Angeles, barely within grasp of celebrity culture and the desire that fuels it.

“The murders brought into focus several life cycles — disparate but connected — that displayed some of the glamour and intrigue that have long fed the Hollywood script mill,” The New York Times reported.

Adding to the curiosity was the fact that Polanski had directed “Rosemary’s Baby,” the 1968 classic about a satanic cult that tricks a woman into birthing the devil’s child. Tate, for her part, was best known for her role in 1967’s “Valley of the Dolls” as Jennifer North, a beauty with limited acting ability who dies of a drug overdose.

Even today, the murders remain a subject of morbid fascination. In July, the director Quentin Tarantino will release “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” a Technicolor pastiche that explores Los Angeles in 1969 through the fictional friendship of a has-been actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman (Brad Pitt) who live next door to Polanski and Tate.

The married couple were described then as members of a new Hollywood elite — international, stylishly restless and lacking the deep ties to Los Angeles of their more established peers. A Times article published weeks after the murders noted that the couple and their entourage had been said to prefer renting homes instead of buying them. They bounded among London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, where uninhibited sex and drugs were parcel to the hippie California vibe in the 1960s.

"The impermanence makes for an edginess, an urgency, an unreality — or more precisely, for an almost involuntary detachment from the ongoing concerns which move and occupy most mortals,” Charles Champlin, a Los Angeles Times critic, told The New York Times.

Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, but returned to his parents’ native Poland when he was a toddler. He made a number of films before moving to the United States in 1968, fostering friendships with Polish and French expats in Los Angeles. That year, Polanski married Tate in London after the couple met on the set of a movie he directed in Italy.

“We were always out enjoying ourselves, it was always great fun,” the actor Peter Sellers told The Times then. “If Roman had a premiere in Paris, why we’d all fly over there for it. Or we would have lunch in London and dinner in Copenhagen.”

The celebrity murders were front-page news. “Actress Is Among 5 Slain At Home in Beverly Hills,” read a headline on Page One of The New York Times. The New York Daily News called it a ritualistic slaying of a “sexpot.” Polanski was in London and did not know Manson or the killers, who included Charles Watson and a cadre of Manson’s “girls” who lived with Manson at the Spahn Ranch in Los Angeles County. (They were Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel; a third, Linda Kasabian, said she did not participate in the killings and became the star witness against the others.)

The French Normandy-style home with sweeping ocean views that Polanski had rented was a central character in the murderous affair. Rudolph Altobelli, a Hollywood business agent who represented Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, bought the house in 1963. He rented it to high-profile clients and celebrity friends, including Cary Grant and Terry Melcher, the son of the actress Doris Day. Melcher was a young music producer who testified at Manson’s 1970 trial that he had gone to a music audition for Manson — the cult leader sang and played guitar — but “wasn’t impressed enough to want to make a record.”

Lawyers contended at the time that Manson had commanded his followers to go to the home to kill Melcher after he was spurned. But Melcher had already moved out, and Manson ordered the death of the inhabitants anyway. The next day, members of the cult killed two more people, the grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.

Julian Wasser was a Life photographer at the time and, after hearing about the murder of Tate, he went to the house. There, he told The Guardian in 2014, he met a distraught Polanski and took photographs of the scene for him so they could be shared with a psychic. (Years later, Polanski would flee the United States to avoid a jail sentence for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, and he remains wanted by the American authorities.)

As news of the murders spread from the seaside bungalows in Venice to the hillside estates above Sunset Boulevard, panic set in. The author Joan Didion wrote in “The White Album,” her 1979 book of essays, “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” Even the house in Benedict Canyon didn’t last. It was demolished in 1994.

“Hollywood was afraid because they didn’t know what was going on,” Wasser told The Guardian. “They thought it was a strange cult that was going to kill everybody. It led to security mania, everybody putting in special alarm systems. If you said ‘hi’ to someone in the street, they’d think you were another Manson. Total paranoia.”

Indeed, the murders spawned copycats. In February 1970, Capt. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, an Army medical field officer with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, told the police that three men and a blond woman had entered his house, screamed “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs,” and killed his wife and two young daughters.

Like Tate, his wife was pregnant and was stabbed in the stomach. In 1979, a jury convicted Captain MacDonald of the crime, saying he had been inspired after reading an Esquire magazine article about the Tate murder.

Back in Los Angeles, a string of violent crimes kept the city on edge. In May 1970, the police arrested five men who had stored 250 weapons and charged them with plotting to assassinate a Superior Court judge.

Later that year, the crew and cast for “The Last Picture Show,” a movie starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd about two teenagers growing up in the early 1950s, moved to Archer City, Tex., to begin filming. A Dec. 14 Times article noted that the townspeople didn’t know much about making a movie. But everyone knew Sharon Tate.

R.J. Walsh, who ran a gas station, recalled at the time, “Most of our people have never been out of Texas and they have heard a lot about California — all the trials and the kidnapping and all them Tate murders coming out of there. But one after another people have said to me they never dreamed that people who followed the movie business could be that nice.”

[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times.]

How many more did Manson family kill? LAPD investigating 12 unsolved murders
By Richard Winton | August 8, 2019

The Manson murders mostly are remembered as two events that occurred 50 years ago this month: the killing of actress Sharon Tate and four others in Benedict Canyon and then the butchering of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Feliz.

But cold-case investigators and others long have believed that Charles Manson and his cult followers were responsible for many more deaths.

The Los Angeles Police Department officially has a dozen unsolved homicide cases linked to Manson. And there are additional slayings outside the jurisdiction that some believe to be the work of his “family.” Some of those ties seem more plausible than others, but all have been extensively examined and theorized — as are all things involving Manson.

The supposed suicide of one Manson follower’s boyfriend in England. The drowning of an attorney whom Manson declared during the middle of his trial he never wanted to see again. A young man killed during a game of Russian roulette with family members present. Two young women stabbed to death off Mulholland Drive and a couple of young Scientology followers who met a similar fate.

Manson “repeatedly” said many others were killed, said Cliff Shepard, a former LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division detective who worked some of those cold cases. “We may never know or identify all their victims.”

In all, Manson and his followers were convicted of nine murders — the Tate and LaBianca attacks plus the slayings of musician Gary Hinman and stuntman and ranch hand Donald “Shorty” Shea.

Dan Jenks, an LAPD Robbery-Homicide detective, said the unsolved cases still were under active investigation and that the department would not comment on specifics.

“There is no statute of limitations. We are always developing new techniques. The last 10 years, DNA has come a long way,” Jenks said. “We will stay on them and keep them as active as we can.”

The LAPD repeatedly has declined requests by the Los Angeles Times for information about those cases. But seven years ago, while seeking to obtain audiotapes of a Manson follower that detectives hoped would yield clues, the department formally declared that a dozen unsolved cases might be tied to the family.

The tapes involved conversations between convicted killer Charles “Tex” Watson and his attorney in 1969. The LAPD obtained the tapes after a legal battle, but they appeared to provide few clues. The department, however, refused a Times request to review them, citing ongoing investigations. A judge in 2017 ruled that attorneys for Manson follower Leslie Van Houten could not have the recordings as part of her efforts to gain parole.

“The thing we discovered after reviewing the tapes, there was no new information related to any of the unsolved cases,” Jenks said. The death of Manson in 2017, as well as those of other family members, has made efforts to pursue the cases harder.

Manson prosecutor Stephen Kay said he and his partner, the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, always suspected that the cult had killed others.

“I know that Manson one time told one of his cellmates that he was responsible for 35 murders,” said Kay, who has attended 60 or so parole hearings to keep those he convicted of the Manson slayings in prison. “Whether that is true or not or just jail bragging, I don’t know. We prosecuted him for nine murders, and those were all the murders we had evidence on.”

A suspicious death in London
Just months after the Tate and LaBianca murders, Joel Pugh — the 29-year-old boyfriend of Manson clan member Sandra Good — was found dead in the Talgarth Hotel in London. His wrists and throat had been cut. British authorities listed it as a suicide, saying Pugh had been depressed. No suicide note was left.

Kay and others said Manson hated Pugh. “He had no reason to commit suicide, and Manson was very unhappy that Sandy” was with Pugh, Kay said.

Manson follower Bruce M. Davis, who recently was cleared for parole after nearly 50 years in prison, was in London at the time Pugh died. Kay said that Davis, now 76, was the family member most able to kill. The prospect of his pending release — which still could be blocked by Gov. Gavin Newsom — has energized investigations during the last decade.

Davis was convicted in the killings of Hinman and Shea in 1971 and sentenced to death. When California for a time abolished the death penalty, Davis and other members of the family were given life sentences.

At a parole hearing, Davis said he hadn’t known about the Tate killings until the morning after they happened but had committed the other murders because “I wanted to be Charlie’s favorite guy.”

Deadly game of Russian Roulette
Davis also was a witness to the November 1969 death of John “Zero” Haught in Venice, according to investigators. Authorities concluded that Haught had died accidentally while playing Russian roulette with a revolver, but that finding came under question.

The gun recovered didn’t have any fingerprints on it, The Times’ Jerry Cohen reported in 1969. A young man who held Haight’s head after the shooting told Cohen he entered the room to find a female Manson follower with the gun in her hand. Several Manson followers were inside the home that night, including Davis, The Times reported.

Davis could not be reached for comment, and his attorney did not return messages.

In his book about the Manson family murders , “Helter Skelter,” Bugliosi said he believed that a woman known for years only as Jane Doe 59 was killed because she had witnessed Haught’s killing.

She was stabbed 150 times. A bird-watcher discovered her remains on Mulholland Drive, about six miles from the Benedict Canyon home where Tate and the others were killed.

Three years ago, the LAPD identified her as 19-year-old Reet Jurvetson from Montreal, using a DNA sample from her sister. She had come to Los Angeles from Canada to join a man she had first met in a Montreal coffee shop.

“She thought he looked like Jim Morrison,” Shepard, the former LAPD detective, said.

She sent a postcard to her mother about getting an apartment in L.A. 16 days before her death.

LAPD detectives asked Manson about Jurvetson before the killer’s death. He denied knowing her.

“It was like talking to a wall,” said LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division Capt. Billy Hayes.

That Manson wouldn’t say much doesn’t surprise his son.

Manson’s son Michael Brunner told The Times recently that “Charlie lived by a code. He was an outlaw. He was not a nice guy. But he lived by a code and he was not gonna be the one that was snitching. And there was a lot of snitching going on. And the people that were snitching, you know, they say snitches get stitches.”

Shepard said much of the speculation about Jurvetson stemmed from a photo of a woman resembling her who was dancing at the family’s Spahn Ranch hangout with Manson follower Steve Dennis “Clem” Grogan. He was paroled in 1985 after being convicted of murder for his role in Shea’s death.

Grogan told detectives a few years ago that the woman was another Manson follower, not the Jane Doe, Shepard said.

Still, the LAPD has not ruled out the Manson cult in her killing.

A violent time
Complicating the effort to solve Jurvetson’s murder is the fact that the period of the late 1960s and ’70s was marked by numerous serial killers roaming California.

Sandi Gibbons, a former City News Service reporter who later served as the spokeswoman for several L.A. County district attorneys, said the area off Mulholland was a popular place for dumping bodies at the time.

On New Year’s Day 1969, the body of 17-year-old Marina Habe — who was kidnapped outside her West Hollywood home — was found less than half a mile from Jurvetson’s remains in a ravine off Mulholland Drive. Habe, the daughter of a Hollywood screenwriter, also had multiple stab wounds to her neck.

Shepard said Manson also was asked about Habe and dismissed any suggestion she was one of his crowd.

LAPD homicide detectives also saw similarities between the vicious knife attack on Jurvetson and the November 1969 killings of James Sharp, 15, of Crestwood, Mo., and Doreen Gaul, 19, from Albany, N.Y. Stabbed and beaten, their bodies were dumped in a downtown Los Angeles alley a week before the discovery of Jurvetson’s remains.

At the time, LAPD Lt. Earl Deemer described the wounds on the pair as being inflicted by a “fanatic.” Each had been stabbed 50 to 60 times. In “Helter Skelter,” Bugliosi wrote that Gaul was rumored to be a former girlfriend of Davis — who, like the dead teenagers, once was a Scientologist.

Davis had lived at the same housing complex as Gaul, but in a police interview in the 1970s he denied knowing her. Years later, another man confessed to killing the pair in a robbery but was never charged. He has since died.

Death of a lawyer
Then there was the death of Ronald Hughes.

The 35-year-old attorney strongly defended Leslie Van Houten during the family’s murder trial, seemingly at the expense of Manson.

“We recessed for the weekend, and Manson — who sat in the corner of the counsel table — pointed to Hughes and said to her attorney: ‘I don’t want to see you in this courtroom again.’ And we never saw him again,” Kay said.

In late November 1970, as the trial neared its end, Hughes disappeared. Four months later, his decomposed body turned up wedged in a rocky creek in Ventura County. Kay said Hughes was last seen swimming in the nearby hot springs right before a flash flood.

In “Helter Skelter” and in later interviews, Bugliosi suggested that Manson directed Hughes’ killing, calling it “the first of the retaliation murders.”

But Charlie Rudd, a retired Ventura County sheriff’s sergeant, told The Times in 2012 that Hughes’ death probably had nothing to do with Manson. Authorities recovered Hughes’ body near Sespe Hot Springs in the Los Padres National Forest, and Rudd said there was little evidence of foul play.

According to Rudd, the creek probably swelled dangerously and Hughes died either because he drowned or because he was battered to death by debris and rocks. “There was nothing else to indicate otherwise, and the medical examiner couldn’t come to a conclusion of anything other than that.”

Was Hughes murdered? Kay said he wasn’t so sure.

“I’m on the fence.”

[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times.]