Today and tomorrow mark the 51st anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca murders. In some ways it still seems like only yesterday, due in large part because of its galvanizing effect on one of the bloodier pages in history. There are many cases of true crime that have shocked the world, but the deeds the Charles Manson set his followers out to commit have all the elements of stabbing our lawful society in the heart.
This long piece from LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE recounts the tragedy in the words of the people who were there. It stands as a testament of the evil that can be perpetrated on our fellow human beings and should never be forgotten.
In This Epic 2009 Oral History, People Close to the Case Recall the Manson Murders
Charles Manson sent members of his “Family” on one of the bloodiest killing sprees in L.A. history. Those involved in the murders and their aftermath speak out
By Steve Oney | July 1, 2009 | lamag.com
As the 40th anniversary of the Manson murders approached in 2009, this magazine spent months tracking down and interviewing many of the major players from the case.
Our epic oral history of the crimes, which clocks in at nearly 14,000 words, includes testimony from family members of the deceased, members of Manson’s “family”, cops, lawyers, movie producers, and celebrity friends of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, and the other victims.
Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, detective Danny Galindo, and other voices from 1969 have since passed away (as has Charles Manson), but their memories of the case live on. —Chris Nichols
Rugged and eerily beautiful, the property at the High Western end of the San Fernando valley, where the killers launched their bloody attacks, now stands empty and unmarked. The old Spahn movie ranch burned down in the 1970s, and the land remains undeveloped. Gone, too, is the Benedict Canyon house where the first night of slaughter occurred. Those who look for 10050 Cielo Drive—and many do—look in vain. It was demolished in the 1990s, and the Mediterranean villa that replaced it bears a different address. The hillside residence at 3301 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz, where the madness continued on the second night, is intact, but it also has a new street number. As for Barker Ranch, the desert hideaway to which the murderers fled, it burned this spring.
Still, the events that transpired at these places have left an indelible scar on Los Angeles’s psyche. The murders, so bizarre, so arbitrary, could have happened only here. For 40 years the city has been haunted by the names of the victims, usually run together as Tate-LaBianca. It is important, though, to remember them as individuals. On the first night: actress Sharon Tate, 26, who had starred in Valley of the Dolls and was married to director Roman Polanski; hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; Voytek Frykowski, 32, an old friend of Polanski’s from Poland; and Abigail Folger, 25, Frykowski’s sweetheart and heiress to the coffee fortune. Steven Parent, an 18-year-old delivery boy, simply happened to be there. On the second night: Leno LaBianca, 44, president of Gateway Markets, a small grocery store chain, and his wife, Rosemary, 38, who ran the clothing shop Boutique Carriage.
Polanski and Tate in London. On the first of two nights of carnage, Manson's followers beat, shot, or stabbed to death five people, including the actress, who was pregnant.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
There is also, of course, another name, one that will likely outlast those of the dead. Charles Manson. There had been mass murderers before, and there have been since, but Manson is an enduring symbol of unfathomable evil. He transformed seemingly peaceful hippies—sons and daughters of the middle class—into heartless killers. Then he set them loose in Los Angeles’s most privileged neighborhoods.
Even after all this time, mention of Manson frightens many who lived through the months of terror. Attempts to solicit information conclude, as often as not, with slammed-down phones. The senseless and intimate nature of the violation—men and women butchered in their own homes—is still too upsetting. Yet those who would talk (and many ultimately did) give voice to one of the most horrific events in Los Angeles history. The Manson case matters not only because of the magnitude of the crime but because it revealed the violent, predatory side of the 1960s. When Winifred Chapman, who kept house at Cielo, discovered the bodies just after 8 a.m. on August 9, 1969, any hope that the counterculture would be immune was shattered. The 1960s ended by degrees, but it was here that the ending began.
I. TATE
MICHAEL McGANN, Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective. Seventy-three years old, he is retired. I arrived at the Tate property at 1:45 or 1:50 on the afternoon of August 9. There was a large gate that protected the driveway. There was a car parked in the middle of the driveway, and there was a body in the car. That was Steven Parent. He was slumped over to the side on the front seat. He’d been shot. As I approached the house I noticed that the word “PIG” was written in what appeared to be blood on the front door. Then I went inside. Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were lying on the living room floor, both with multiple stab wounds. A rope was tied around Sharon’s neck and draped over a rafter. The other end of the same rope was affixed to Jay Sebring’s neck. They were probably about four feet apart. Sharon was in a bikini-style nightie. She was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and I could tell she had been stabbed 15-plus times. Sebring had been stabbed and beaten over the head. There was blood everywhere. I went through the house and down a long hallway leading out to the back door where the pool was, and I went out into the lawn and found Abigail Folger. She was in a nightgown, and she’d been stabbed numerous times. Her gown was soaked in blood. Then a little bit farther on was Voytek Frykowski. He had numerous head wounds, like he’d been hit with some kind of object. He also had many stab wounds and had been shot several times. He was fully clothed, and he was covered in blood. In the space of ten minutes I saw all five bodies. I’d worked homicide for five years and seen a lot of violence. This was the worst.
Using the blood of their victims, Manson Family members scrawled the words “PIG” on a door at the home of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate and “Death to Pigs” on the living room wall at the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY MICHAEL MCGANN
DANNY GALINDO, Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective. He is 88 and retired. When I arrived, there was a perimeter all the way around to keep the media out. They had their own camp and so much equipment. It was a circus. Reporters were cluttering the entry to Cielo Drive all the way to the street below.
McGANN The whole crime scene was grotesque, totally weird. Steven Parent, the kid in the car—that made no sense at all. He obviously had nothing to do with the people in the house. But there was some promising evidence, and we tried to collect it immediately. We collected broken pieces of a pistol grip. We found a knife. I collected some phone wire. The killers had cut the line into the house, so I saved the piece they’d cut. We had our people from SID [Scientific Investigation Division] collecting blood. We collected fingerprints. Before we got there, the uniform officers had made an arrest. There was a single-story guest house in the back, and William Garretson was hiding in there.
WILLIAM GARRETSON, caretaker at Cielo Drive. At 59, he is a big-rig truck driver. They were more or less convinced that they had the person who committed the murders: me. They took me across the lawn, and I saw three bodies—Abigail and her boyfriend and then Steve Parent. It wasn’t pleasant. Steve was an acquaintance of mine. Unfortunately, he’d come to visit me the night before to sell a radio. He left, and this happened. They arrested and fingerprinted me. They had me as the prime suspect, and they began playing head games—good cop/bad cop. I escaped death, and now I was going to be tried for something I didn’t do.
GALINDO As the investigators gathered the evidence, I took charge of it. Among the items for gathering and preserving were a goodly amount of narcotics. Some pot was recovered from Jay Sebring’s vehicle. There was a book printed in Chinese depicting many forms of sexual satisfaction in very explicit terms.
McGANN The deputy coroner took charge of the bodies. He took their liver temperatures to try to determine the time of death. He put the remains in plastic bags. As I recall, we removed Sharon and Sebring’s bodies first. Then we went to Abigail and Voytek. Steven Parent was the last body removed.
A body under a white sheet on a lawn at 10050 Cielo Drive
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY MICHAEL MCGANN
McGANN The next day, which was Sunday, we started the autopsies. The L.A. County coroner’s office was in the basement of the old Hall of Justice. It was like a dungeon—an awful place to be, like Frankenstein’s lab. But when you have a homicide, you always go to your autopsies. So I was there as Tom Noguchi did Sharon’s autopsy, then her baby’s. I had a temporary partner, Jess Buckles. As I was observing the autopsies, he got a call from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They had a case in Malibu in which Gary Hinman, a musician, had been murdered. A guy named Bobby Beausoleil had been picked up for the crime. There were similarities between their case and the Tate killings. It was a vicious murder, and the words “POLITICAL PIGGY” had been written on the wall in blood. The sheriff’s detectives told Buckles about this, but Buckles didn’t see any connection. When I asked him what that was all about, he said, “It was nothing.” That was a screwup, a major screwup. Let me tell you, we would have solved the case in a month if I’d known about this.
II. LABIANCA
GALINDO The second night after the Tate fiasco, I was at the homicide division of Parker Center downtown typing reports. I got a phone call. It was a reporter from the police beat, and he said, “Danny, listen to this. You’re gonna get a call right now. They got another one of those bloody ones just like the one you’re working on. And there’s a knife stuck in the throat of the victim.” I hung up, and the phone immediately rings. It was the inspector. So I drove to Los Feliz. When I walked in, Leno LaBianca’s body was lying on the floor in front of the couch on the left side, and it was sitting in a huge pool of blood. The couch was full of blood. They bled him dry. I noticed that his head was covered with a pillow slip all the way down over his chest, and I’m thinking about the knife that’s supposed to be stuck in his throat. I couldn’t see it. Somebody on the premises—an ambulance crewman or another policeman—had seen something and leaked it.
Rosemary LaBianca’s body was in the bedroom. She had fallen over the far side of the bed. There was a pillowcase over her head, too, and around her neck was an electric cord connected to a bed lamp that had toppled over—not, in my opinion, by a struggle but by Mrs. LaBianca pulling herself into a cavity between the wall and the bed. That’s where she died. She was on the floor, partially disrobed, and she had a lot of puncture wounds—turned out there were 40-odd wounds. She bled inwardly. She drowned in her own blood.
On one wall in the living room, written in blood, it said “Death to Pigs.” On another wall, also written in blood, was the word “RISE.” Scraped into Leno’s stomach with a fork—a bifurcated fork—was the word “WAR.” The fork was stuck in his stomach. The word had been written while he was still alive, because he’d bled through the letters. In the kitchen, the words “HEALTER SKELTER”—with helter misspelled—were written in blood on the refrigerator.
When the coroner took the pillow slip off Leno’s head, there was that knife plunged into his throat that the reporter had told me about.
The press knew far more than the police wanted it to, but it didn’t know everything. No one except the investigators and the killers was aware that “Healter Skelter” had been written on the LaBianca refrigerator.
That night I was interviewed by a television reporter. He pointedly asked me, “Do you think this case is connected to the other one?” He meant Tate. I told him, “I think it’s more of a copycat case.” I introduced that expression, and I’ve lived with it forever. It was a helluva mistake on my part, because it wasn’t until much later that things would begin to fall into place.
III. TERROR
On August 11 the police released William Garretson, who had passed a lie detector test. Garretson hadn’t heard anything, says lawyer Barry Tarlow, who represented him. “The killers had no idea he was in the guest house.” With seven people dead and the lone suspect cleared, fear consumed Los Angeles. A Beverly Hills sporting goods store sold 200 firearms in two days. The price of guard dogs rose from $500 to $1,500.
WARREN BEATTY, actor and director. He helped fund a $25,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the Tate killers. He is 72. This hit the movie community very deeply. On a 10-point scale it disturbed me at around a 27. Jay Sebring, Sharon, Abigail, and Voytek were friends of mine. It was something that happened, and no one knew why. Everybody was trying to come up with a reason. The collective response to these killings was what you might expect if a small nuclear device had gone off.
MARTIN RANSOHOFF, producer. Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski fell in love on the set of The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), which was produced by Ransohoff, directed by Polanski, and starred Tate. He is 82. It was hideous. It was a terrifying experience for everyone who lived here.
McGANN People in Hollywood were petrified. They didn’t know what was going on. Everybody we talked to on the street was just afraid. They’d ask, “Are you making progress?”
News coverage was frenzied, much of it riddled with innuendo and inaccuracies. No one stumbled worse than Time. On August 22 it reported: “Theories of sex, drug and witchcraft cults spread quickly in Hollywood, fed by the fact that Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world’s more offbeat crowds.… Polanski, who was in London at the time of the murders, is noted for his macabre movies.” The magazine also claimed: “Sharon’s body was found nude…Sebring had been sexually mutilated…[and Frykowski’s] trousers were down around his ankles.”
BEATTY In their rush to assess what had happened, some of the mainstream press brought the nature of Roman Polanski’s movies into the nature of the crime and held the movies responsible. Roman was a total innocent. Neither his life nor his movies had anything to do with this. But because he’d made Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby he was made to seem responsible.
ANTHONY DiMARIA, Jay Sebring’s nephew. Forty-three years old, he is an actor. The media were reaching and speculating. There were some really salacious things written about my uncle, Sharon, and Voytek. The press was practically butchering these people even as they were fresh in their graves.
IV. THE INVESTIGATIONS
McGANN My initial thought was the drug angle. Sharon didn’t use drugs. Abigail had done a little experimentation but not much. Jay Sebring smoked pot, but everybody in Los Angeles did at that point. Voytek, however, was involved in narcotics. He was a buddy of a Pan American airlines pilot. We thought the Pan Am pilot was flying in dope. In our first report, which I wrote over Labor Day weekend, I proposed several theories. One had a group going to the Cielo house to rob the occupants of drugs. They didn’t intend to kill them, but they were seen either entering or leaving the residence by Steven Parent. They killed him, then they had to kill the others. Another theory was that a dope deal went bad, and a fight ensued. My report went to the chief of detectives, the chief of police, and my captain. On Tuesday we all got together and determined we had to eliminate each of these theories.
We went to Washington, D.C., interviewing people, and then all the way across Massachusetts. We flew to New York. We were eliminating suspects. Finally we told my boss that we needed to go to Jamaica. The Pan Am pilot spent a lot of time there. So we flew to Kingston, where we eliminated the pilot. We were back at square one.
Leno LaBianca was a heavy gambler. Initially detectives explored the possibility that loan sharks had ordered the murders. Then they looked into LaBianca’s brief service on the board of a bank allegedly backed by mob money. They got nowhere. But they noted in one report: “Investigation revealed that the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album, No. SWBO 101, has songs titled ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ and ‘Blackbird.’ The words in the song ‘Blackbird’ frequently say ‘Arise, arise,’ which might be the meaning of ‘Rise’ near the front door.”
We had all the help from LAPD that we needed. Organized Crime did interviews for us. Intelligence did interviews for us. SID did interviews for us. There were hundreds of them. We were frustrated.
V. MISSED OPPORTUNITY
At 6 a.m. on August 16, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies descended on the 200-acre Spahn movie ranch in Chatsworth and arrested 27 people. For 40 years shoot-’em-ups like The Lone Ranger had been filmed there, though by the mid-’60s, the blind and aging owner, George Spahn, was making his living from city folks who drove up Topanga Canyon Boulevard to ride horses.
JUAN FLYNN, Spahn ranch hand. Sixty-five years old, he is retired after a career as a miner and heavy-equipment operator. I came back from serving in the infantry in Vietnam and in 1968 went to work at Spahn Ranch for $2.50 a week. I loved the place. It had the most beautiful trails. It had horses, ponies, and a goat. There were red foxes, red-tailed hawks, and peregrine falcons. Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls, and Jerry Garcia came to ride there. And there were beautiful girls. For $1.50 an hour you could climb mountain trails and look out over the San Fernando Valley. I was Mr. Spahn’s right-hand man. I cleaned 16 stalls a day and handled the horses. It was a joy. Then Charles Manson and his people came and trashed the place.
Some members and hangers-on of the Manson Family at the Spahn Ranch: (back row, from left) Danny DeCarlo, Jennifer Gentry, Catherine Gillies, Mary Theresa Brunner, Charles Lovett, and Catherine Share; (front row, from left) Sandra Good, Ruth Ann Moorehouse, and Lynette Fromme.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY
BILL GLEASON, Los Angeles County deputy sheriff assigned to probe auto thefts. He is 77 and retired. Charles Manson and some of his group just showed up at the Spahn Ranch and started living in the movie sets. Most of the buildings were false fronts, but they made them into rooms. I thought they were just a bunch of hippies, but we started getting reports that members of the Straight Satans, a motorcycle gang from Venice, were going to the ranch on weekends and partying. The word was that they were trading drugs for sex with the women there. Some of the women were runaway juveniles who provided Manson with cash and credit cards stolen from their homes. We also had reports that members of the group were shooting a machine gun. The Manson people were also stealing and building dune buggies and driving them onto adjoining properties, creating a nuisance. A couple of nights before the raid, we hiked into the ranch and found a stolen, brand-new 1969 Ford and a stolen Volkswagen. That was the main basis for our search warrant—to recover these vehicles and try to identify who stole them.
I really didn’t pay much attention to Manson. We’d already taken most of the adults out, and everyone was saying, “Where’s Charlie?” He was hiding under one of the buildings. The deputies had to go in and forcibly remove him. I arrested them one week after the Tate murders, but none of them said anything. Everybody just sat there.
Because Gleason couldn’t determine which member of Manson’s group stole the vehicles, the district attorney did not file charges. Within two weeks Manson and most of his followers had departed for a hideout in Death Valley.
Barker Ranch was just another place out in the desert. It had been nice at one time. It’s stone and stucco, and there’s a fence around it. It sits up on a hill, and you can look down into Death Valley. But by 1969, it was abandoned and pretty run-down. A grandmother of one of the girls in Manson’s group owned the adjoining property, Myers Ranch. The girl told Manson, “There’s this place where we might be able to stay.” That’s why Manson settled there.
The tiny bathroom sink cabinet where Manson tried to hide at Barker Ranch. When a lawman ordered him out, he opened the door and politely said, “Hi.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY VERNON MERITT III/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES
VI. CAPTURED
JAMES PURSELL, California Highway Patrol officer. In 1969, he was assigned to Death Valley. Seventy-three years old, he is retired. Manson and his “Family” pioneered a road into the Death Valley National Monument. They were driving up in there, and the National Park Service didn’t want that. The park service took an earthmoving machine to the western edge of the valley to remove Manson’s tracks. They left it up there to block the road. That pissed Charlie off. He and his group set fire to the machine.
The park service discovered the burned earthmover in early September. On the 29th, Pursell, accompanied by Ranger Dick Powell, visited Barker Ranch.
We drove down Goler Wash. About halfway we met an old army truck coming uphill. The driver was a miner named Paul Crockett. The passenger was a teenager named Brooks Poston. They indicated that some odd things were going on. They said the leader of this group staying at the ranch would put on a robe and preach. They said there were a large number of females there and that they had orgies and used drugs. They said the group had a fleet of dune buggies and that during the night they traveled the valleys up there as if they were re-creating the days of Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
So we backtracked. I went to the right, Dick to the left. He ran into a group of females. Some were nude. I saw what looked to be a camp. When I inquired as to who these gals were and what they were doing, Lynette Fromme, who was the spokesperson and was buck naked, said, “We’re a Girl Scout troop from the Bay Area. Would you and the ranger like to be our scoutmasters?” We saw a couple of vehicles. One was a rail dune buggy, the other a Toyota Land Cruiser. Each had a gun scabbard holding a rifle. We got the VIN numbers. The vehicles came back stolen.
On October 10 authorities raided the Barker and Myers ranches, taking ten women and three men into custody. Among those arrested were Susan Atkins (aka Sadie Mae Glutz), Patricia Krenwinkel (aka Katie), Leslie Van Houten (aka Leslie Sankston), Lynette Fromme (aka Squeaky), Catherine Share (aka Gypsy), Sandra Good (aka Sandy), and Steve Grogan (aka Clem). Officers discovered more dune buggies and evidence tying the group to the burning of the park service earthmover.
We piled all the stuff in a wash so we wouldn’t forget to pick it up on the way out—which is exactly what we did. On October 12 Powell and I and another ranger went back to get it. On the way in, we saw a Chevrolet truck loaded with 55-gallon drums of gasoline. We figured more people were there, so we called for backup. I sat on a knoll overlooking Barker Ranch while the rangers went to the other side. It was beginning to get dusk, so I decided we’d better make a move. I went to the back door and shoved it open. There was a group of people. I announced who I was and ordered them to put their hands on their heads. I ordered them out. Then I entered the house. It was totally dark. On the table was a candle in a glass mug.
With the mug in one hand and my Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum in the other, I went into a tiny bathroom. No one was there. But as I lowered my candle to a little cabinet beneath the sink, I saw long hair hanging out of the door. All of a sudden fingers began wiggling and the door began to open and this figure emerged. I said, “If you make one false move, I’ll blow your head off.” So this figure slowly uncoils himself and in a very friendly voice says, “Hi.” I asked who he was, and he identified himself as Charles Manson. He was as polite as he could be. Over the years I’ve had a lot of people, including a judge, ask, “Why didn’t you just shoot him?” But I always answer, “How can you shoot a guy whose first word to you is ‘Hi’?”
We rode down Goler Wash in a pickup. The girls we arrested began whispering and giggling. Charlie just stared at the backs of their heads the way a parent does with unruly kids. The girls felt it. They turned around and all of a sudden were silent.
Charlie told us that his group was out there looking for a place to hide because there was an impending race war. He told us that the blacks were going to win. He told us that because we were number one, cops, and number two, white, we should stop right there, let them loose, and flee for our lives. That, of course, didn’t happen.
VII. SUSAN ATKINS
Pursell and the officers took the prisoners to Independence, the seat of Inyo County. The group was charged with auto theft, possession of stolen property, and arson. Its ringleader was booked as “Manson, Charles M. aka Jesus Christ, God.” During the second week of October, two frightened 17-year-olds emerged from the brush several miles from Barker Ranch. Kitty Lutesinger and Stephanie Schram told Inyo County officers that they were fleeing the Family. Lutesinger was the girlfriend of Bobby Beausoleil, who was being held in connection with the murder of musician Gary Hinman, the crime Jess Buckles had dismissed the day of the Tate autopsies. On learning she was in custody, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies drove to Independence to interview her. She told them that Beausoleil was a member of Charles Manson’s Family and had killed Hinman in a dispute over money. According to Lutesinger, Susan Atkins—one of the girls arrested at Barker Ranch—had participated in the murder. When the deputies interviewed Atkins, she confirmed most of what Lutesinger had said. Atkins was booked on suspicion of murder and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM, Beverly Hills party girl. In 1969, she was jailed for a parole violation after passing a bad check. She is now a 76-year-old grandmother. Susan Atkins slept about five beds up from me. She was always singing. She was happy and joyous. I thought she was just a hippie kid in for possession of marijuana. But when I asked her what she was in for, she said, “187—murder.” She said she was in for killing Gary Hinman. She said the police were too stupid to prove it. A couple of days later, she sat on the side of my cot. She said, “Do you know about those murders up in Benedict Canyon?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Well, you know who did it, don’t you?” I said, “No.” She said, “You’re looking at her.” Which took me aback. But I was curious, and she gave me a blow-by-blow description as to how the crimes were committed.
She told me how they cut the phone wire and shot the young man in the car. She told me how they got onto the property. She told me she went to the bedroom in the rear and that Jay Sebring was sitting on the bed talking to Sharon Tate. She said she got them to come out. They thought it was a robbery. She said they put a rope around their necks and threw it over a beam. That got my attention. I’d been to that house several years before—I knew there were beams in the living room. She told me that Voytek Frykowski ran out on the lawn screaming, “Help, help!” Here she put her hands on her hips and said, “You know, nobody came, and I killed him.” She said Sharon Tate was crying and begging, “Please don’t kill me. I just want to have my baby.” She said, “I looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘Bitch, I don’t care.’ Then I killed her.” She said they were going to pull out the victims’ eyeballs and smash them, but they ran out of time. She said, “We had to love them to kill them.” She said they released these people into the universe. She also told me how wonderful the feeling is when you stab someone and stick the knife in. This was thrilling to her. There was not a shred of sympathy on her part for the victims.
After about an hour, I said I had to take a shower. I couldn’t stand it. Later, as I was walking down the aisle, I saw Ronnie Howard, another inmate. I grabbed her and said, “This dizzy little bitch just told me she killed Sharon Tate. What am I going to do?”
A week or so afterward, I was transferred to the California Institute for Women. I had a terrible dream. I saw Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring covered in blood telling me, “You know what you have to do.” I went and sat outside in the yard and waited for a counselor. I said, “I have to talk to you. I have information regarding who killed Sharon Tate.” A detective came to take my statement.
The five victims at the Tate residence: (from left) Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Roman Polanski’s; Sharon Tate; Steven Parent, a delivery boy who happened by; Jay Sebring, a hairstylist; and Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s girlfriend
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY AP
McGANN Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard broke the case. We got a call from Sybil Brand, and they said that Susan Atkins had been talking to these two inmates. Another detective and I went there, and there was no question about it. Atkins had laid out the whole story. She knew everything—the position of the bodies, the kinds of stab wounds, the way the rope was thrown over the rafters. Atkins was cooperative. I talked to her for hours. We tape-recorded everything. We got what we wanted. She wrapped it all up for us.
The Spahn movie ranch in the West Valley, where Manson and his Famaily lived when they embarked on their raids
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY AP
VIII. THE PROSECUTION
VINCENT BUGLIOSI, deputy district attorney. He is 74 and the author of several books, including Helter Skelter (cowritten with Curt Gentry), the definitive account of the case. I was walking out of court when Aaron Stovitz, who was head of the trial division, grabbed me by the arm and brought me into the office of Miller Leavy, who was above Aaron. Two LAPD detectives were there, and I hear the name “Tate.” They used to call it the Tate-LaBianca case before Manson showed up and upstaged the victims. I said to Aaron, “Are we handling this?” He said, “Yeah.”
On December 1 Los Angeles police chief Edward M. Davis called a news conference to announce that the Tate and LaBianca murders had been solved. Three of the alleged killers—Manson, Atkins, and Van Houten—were already in custody in Inyo County. Tex Watson was in custody in Texas and Patricia Krenwinkel in Alabama. Linda Kasabian had disappeared.
BUGLIOSI One of the problems was getting the physical evidence straight. Back in September, a ten-year-old kid, Steven Weiss, found the revolver that had been used in the Tate killings. The murderers had tossed it out the window on Beverly Glen as they were driving away. The boy’s family had turned it in to the Van Nuys division of the LAPD. The police already had the murder weapon, but they didn’t know they had it. They were looking all over the country for it, even in Canada.
McGANN We sent out bulletins, pictures, brochures. Somehow Van Nuys didn’t get the news. This was a screwup.
BUGLIOSI There were two separate investigations—Tate and LaBianca—and they were going off on their own. They weren’t sharing information.
GALINDO My boss, Lieutenant Paul LePage, who ran the LaBianca team, trusted the people he worked with, and they trusted him. Bob Helder, who ran the Tate team, was feisty. This may not sound like much, but during meetings he’d throw his feet up on the captain’s desk. LePage and Helder bumped heads off the bat. When information came in, they didn’t share unless the captain called them in and said, “You guys have to talk.” Vince very quickly recognized the rift between the two units, and he brought them together.
BUGLIOSI This was considered to be a weak case. It was a circumstantial evidence case. The main guy—Manson—had not participated in the murders. People in my office said, “It’s unfortunate that you’ve been assigned to this case. It’s not a strong case.” But you have to understand something about me. When I get on a case, the first thing I determine is if the person is guilty irrespective of whether I form that opinion based on admissible evidence. If I believe the person is guilty, I know that I can find the evidence—not manufacture it, find it. If I think a person is guilty, something comes over me. When I started looking at the police reports and saw the kind of person Manson was, I realized it was only a matter of time before I’d come up with enough evidence.
Danny Galindo: Former LAPD homicide detective
PHOTOGRAPHED BY FRANK OCKENFELS
In 1969, Charles Manson was 34 years old. He’d arrived in California from Ohio in 1955 at the wheel of a stolen Mercury with his pregnant wife at his side. Over the next 12 years he was convicted of everything from transporting stolen vehicles across state lines to forging government checks. He was in and out of the federal prison at Terminal Island. A modestly talented musician, he adored the Beatles and aspired to become a recording star. He was also a Scientologist and would claim that he had achieved the religion’s highest level. He had spent half his life behind bars.
BUGLIOSI Manson’s name at birth was “No Name Maddox.” He didn’t know his father. Maddox was his mother’s maiden name. Manson was the surname of one of the men his mother spent time with. He felt his mother didn’t love him. He felt he’d been dealt a bad hand. He was only five foot two—he was hostile about that. He took to crime early. By 13, he’d committed an armed robbery. At 17, he committed a homosexual rape. He committed a lot of federal crimes, which carry long jail terms.
To Manson there was no such thing as good and bad, no such thing as right and wrong. Everyone was acting out their own karma. You’re doing what you’re supposed to do. He admired Hitler. He said, “Hitler is a tuned-in guy who leveled the karma of the Jews.” Manson is someone without regrets or compunctions.
Looking at his records, I found only three instances in which Manson had been examined by a psychiatrist and then only superficially. If he’d been properly examined, maybe—and I italicize the word—this rage seething in him would have been detected, and he’d never have been set free. He didn’t want to be set free. Prison was where he felt at home. I called the authorities at Terminal Island, the last place he was incarcerated, and they told me, “Manson wanted to stay behind bars.” He felt prison was his home, the only one he’d ever had. He liked it. But in March of 1967, they let him go. If he’d only remained in prison, as many as 35 people might not be in their graves. I say 35 because that’s the number the Manson Family tosses around. They didn’t just commit the Tate and LaBianca murders. They say, “We offed 35 people.”
From Terminal Island, Manson went up to San Francisco. The Haight-Ashbury district was paradise for him. It was free sex, love, drugs, and food, and kids began congregating around him. There was something about him. He was bright and had the rap of a street hustler. The kids liked his music. He sang about ending the war in Vietnam. Because he was older, kids thought they could learn something from him. Before you know it, a group of them were following him around. They formed the Family, got a school bus, and started traveling up and down the West Coast. He began to gain control of these kids.
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