Chapter 23

Murder

By early summer of 1969, Manson and his Family had reached the point of no return. It was apparent that neither Wilson nor Melcher was going to come through on any of their proposed business deals, and Manson, at first depressed with the situation, quickly became angry. His anger was directed not only at the men who had rejected him, but at the symbols which represented their culture: the establishment, Hollywood, fame and money.

Manson’s paranoia had been growing steadily over the last few months. He was certain that something was about to happen. In preparation for a possible outbreak of Helter Skelter, the Family, under his direction, began to assemble a caché of arms for use in their future struggles. While in residence at the house in Canoga Park, the Family became heavily involved in a number of illegal ventures, including auto theft and drug dealing. A small car theft ring operated out of the house, and, when the Family moved to Spahn Ranch, it followed. Family members and many of the bikers who stayed at the ranch regularly stole vehicles, stripped and then sold them. At Manson’s directive, dune buggies were particularly prized, for use in the desert during Helter Skelter.¹

Straight Satan biker Danny De Carlo helped the Family assemble an impressive collection of arms. He set up a special gun room at Spahn Ranch, appropriately enough in the former Undertaker’s Parlor, where he slept to guard this caché of weapons. It included a 303 British Enfield, a .22 caliber rifle, a .30 caliber carbine, a .20 gauge shotgun, a .12 gauge riot gun, an M-1 carbine and a submachine gun. Manson himself had a long, sharp sword which was kept here, along with a number of buck knives, which were sharpened down both sides of their blade, creating a double edge. Finally, there was a .22 caliber revolver, called a Buntline special, modeled after a pair of guns which Ned Buntline made for Wyatt Earp. The gun had a long barrel, wooden grips, and its chamber held nine bullets. Sometime in June, Manson went to a Jack Frost Surplus Store in Santa Monica and purchased several hundred feet of white nylon, three ply rope.²

Manson’s philosophy, already violent, took a more immediate, dramatic turn in the middle of July, 1969. He predicted to several people that soon members of the establishment would be slaughtered in their Bel Air mansions, their bodies scattered across the front lawns, with messages written in blood on the walls of their houses. To Danny De Carlo, Manson declared that the “pigs ought to have their throats cut and be hung up by their feet.”³ Talk of violence was spurred by his impatience. He had been talking about Helter Skelter, making his plans, buying supplies, waiting for the crisis to erupt, but, so far, nothing had happened. The blacks in Los Angeles had not risen up against the white establishment. One day, Manson took Paul Watkins aside and announced, “Helter Skelter is ready to happen … it’s gotta happen soon. All the piggies are gonna get their jolt of where it’s really at. We have to stock supplies at the desert and be ready to boogie.… I’ll tell ya, blackie never did anything without whitey showin’ him how.… Helter Skelter is coming down. But it looks like we’re gonna have to show blackie how to do it.”⁴ To ranch hand Juan Flynn, Manson complained: “The only way I’m going to show them niggers how to do it is to go down and kill a bunch of those motherfucking pigs.”⁵

Family member Leslie Van Houten later recalled: “Manson had started changing his talking about surviving the Helter Skelter war and that perhaps we would have to do something to instigate it, because it wasn’t coming along as quickly as he had anticipated. I didn’t know, specifically, when it would be starting.”⁶

“Being around Charlie during that time,” remembers Van Houten, “was like playing a game of Scrabble. He never labeled anything as exactly like it was. He’d say, ‘The question is in the answer,’ and ‘No sense makes sense’—things that would make your mind stop functioning. Then it wasn’t a matter of questioning when things began to get bad. We’d stopped questioning months before.”⁷

For some time, Manson had been instructing his followers on ways to slip into the mansions of the wealthy in the dead of night, using credit cards to trip the door locks. Sometimes, they would steal jewelry or money; other times, dressed in black clothing, Family members would simply wander through the house, perhaps rearranging an item of furniture here or there to startle the owners when they awoke. They referred to these nightly forays as “creepy-crawling.”⁸

One of Manson’s apparent targets that July was the house of John and Michelle Phillips on Bel Air Road in Beverly Hills. Earlier, Phillips had expressed disinterest in meeting or assisting Manson. Certain members of the Family are believed to have at least been acquaintances of Cass Eliott, one of the two women in Phillips’ The Mamas and The Papas, and Manson himself—friends with Melcher and Jakobson—was aware that Phillips, too, had rejected him. Michelle Phillips recalls: “One night John and I were in bed. He had become very paranoid recently, and begun to sleep with a gun beneath his pillow, which really angered me. In the middle of the night, he heard something, and got up to investigate. I remember telling him to go back to sleep, but he grabbed the gun and went off. When he came back a few minutes later, he told me that in the garage he had seen a number of people dressed in black, walking like penguins. He was pretty heavily involved with drugs at the time, and I thought he was imagining the whole thing. ‘Go back to bed, John,’ I told him, and he eventually settled down. Only later did we suspect that Manson had sent his followers out to our house.”⁹

Such activities were possible as members of the Family increasingly came to trust Manson, losing their individuality as the group melded together to form a collective conscience. “When it came time to play Helter Skelter,” write Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, “life in the Family had become a game with no borders on fantasy and reality, an extended ‘trip’ that kept up long after any chemical effects had worn off.”¹⁰

By the beginning of the summer of 1969, the Family was deeply involved in criminal activities. Through a source in Santa Monica, they fenced stolen vehicles and other smaller goods. But they seem to have made most of their money from illegal drug activities, which were widespread.

Perhaps the biggest participant was Tex Watson. Before joining the Family the previous summer, Watson had regularly dealt drugs as co-owner of his wig shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. Significantly, for someone who would claim to be completely under Manson’s influence and unable to escape when the time for murder came, Watson divided his time between Spahn Ranch and his drug-dealing girlfriend. He had actually left the Manson Family during late 1968 for several months, and made his own choice to return in March, 1969. And, although he would later insist that it was his drug use with Manson which had led to the murders, Watson—even away from the Family—continued to be heavily involved with the selling and using of illegal drugs.¹¹

“It was strange,” Watson would later admit, “but even though I truly believed that Charlie knew everything, I could sometimes ignore what he said, even disobey him.” He detailed, for example, his secret stash of speed, which he kept hidden from Manson and shared with fellow members Bruce Davis and Susan Atkins. “I was willing to kill for Manson,” he said, “but I wasn’t willing to give up my speed.”¹² This admission of selective control hardly supports Watson’s view of himself as a mindless zombie who belonged body and soul to Manson.

Watson remained in control enough to be trusted with organizing the Family’s drug orders. They were involved not only in dealing marijuana, but also apparently LSD, hashish, coke and mescaline.¹³ One of their prominent drug contacts was black dealer Bernard Crowe, known as Lottsa Poppa. Manson mistakenly believed that he was a member of the Black Panthers organization.

On the evening of June 30, 1969, Watson, accompanied by his girlfriend Rosina, went to Bernard Crowe’s house in an effort to swindle him out of both drugs and money. Crowe gave Watson $2,400 to make a marijuana purchase; he later claimed that the deal involved a total of $20,000, and that the money he gave to Watson that night was only an initial payment.¹⁴ Watson took the money, excused himself, and, with Rosina sitting in the living room with Crowe, dashed out the rear of the house and fled back to Spahn Ranch. How and why Watson ever thought he could get away with such a piece of obvious thievery is not known. Within a few hours, Crowe had cornered a terrified Rosina, who finally rang Spahn Ranch, pleading for Watson to come back and settle up. Finally, Manson himself got on the telephone and told Crowe that he would be on his way in a few minutes.

It is not known if Manson was aware of the deception beforehand. He took Family associate Thomas Walleman, known as T.J. the Terrible, with him; Bobby Beausoleil has also claimed that Bruce Davis accompanied the pair.¹⁵ Manson drove ranch hand Johnny Shwartz’s yellow and white 1959 Ford; on the front seat lay the .22 caliber Buntline Special. Once at the apartment, Manson got into a heated exchange with Crowe, claiming he had not been responsible for Watson’s action. After this went on for several minutes, Crowe was joined by several friends. Manson pulled out the gun and offered it to Crowe, telling him that he could shoot him. Crowe replied that he was not interested in hurting Manson, just Watson. Manson, according to the witnesses, did a kind of ritualistic dance around the apartment and grabbed the gun, aiming it at Crowe and pulling the trigger. The chamber was empty, and nothing happened. Crowe looked relieved, but Manson, with a smile on his face, pulled the trigger a second time, and the gun went off, the bullet fired almost directly into Crowe’s stomach. He fell over onto the floor, silent. Manson bent down and kissed his feet, then picked up the gun and calmly walked out of the apartment.

Back at Spahn Ranch, Manson told Watson and Danny De Carlo about the shooting. Manson believed he had killed Crowe; but Bernard Crowe was only wounded, and was taken to the hospital for emergency surgery—a fact which, if known, might have prevented the bloodshed in the coming months. Instead, Manson’s paranoia increased dramatically. There were witnesses to the shooting, and Manson feared a Black Panther backlash against the Family.

In the next few days, Manson ordered guard posts set up around Spahn Ranch, and had regular dune buggy patrols of the fire roads leading to the back ranch house where most of the Family stayed. Sometime earlier that summer, several members of the Family had stolen a green telescope from Terry Melcher’s Malibu beach house; now, they used the spyglass to scan the hills surrounding Spahn Ranch, fearing that the Black Panthers were going to attack.¹⁶ Manson became fanatical about the start of Helter Skelter, waiting for a chance to move his Family out to Death Valley. But they still needed money.

Manson got some cash when Linda Kasabian joined his Family on 4 July. Kasabian, twenty, had spent several years wandering from commune to commune; in the process, she married twice, the second time to a fellow hippy Robert Kasabian with whom she had a daughter, sixteen-month-old Tanya. Within a day, Kasabian, having stolen some $5,000 from a friend of her husband, had duly turned over the cash, along with her own wallet and driver’s license. The money helped, but Manson needed more. It was now that the Family’s associations with musician Gary Hinman became deadly.

Hinman, a thirty-two-year-old former musician and friend of Bobby Beausoleil, had always been helpful to Family members, giving them money when he could and allowing them to stay at his house. Hinman also apparently was involved in the manufacture of mescaline and LSD, work he carried out in a small, make-shift laboratory in the basement of his hillside cottage in Topanga Canyon.¹⁷

There are several versions of what led to the eventual confrontation between Hinman and Manson. On the surface, it was a conflict over money, with Manson expecting the musician to apparently hand over the cash which the Family wanted. According to several sources, however, someone in the Family had purchased 1,000 tabs of acid from Hinman, for distribution to Danny De Carlo and his Straight Satan motorcycle gang; a day later, members of the gang claimed that the acid was bad, and complained to Manson that Hinman had deliberately swindled them.¹⁸

On 25 July, Manson dispatched Beausoleil, Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins to Hinman’s Topanga Canyon house. At first, Hinman welcomed them. Then, after they demanded the pink slips to his cars as well as his money, he told them to get out. Beausoleil, Brunner and Atkins threatened and pleaded with him for several hours before Beausoleil pulled out a nine millimeter Radon pistol which Bruce Davis had purchased a few weeks earlier. After waving the pistol in the air for a few minutes, Beausoleil hit Hinman in the face, and the musician spit out a mouthful of blood and a piece of chipped tooth. A struggle ensued, during which time Hinman eventually got the gun away from Beausoleil and turned it on the three. Unbelievably, he then did something which was to cost him his life: Hinman handed the gun back to Beausoleil, saying that he did not believe in violence. After asking them to leave, he wandered off into the living room. Uncertain what to do, Beausoleil called Manson at Spahn Ranch.¹⁹

Around midnight, Manson, accompanied by Bruce Davis, arrived at Hinman’s house. Manson waved his sword in Hinman’s face, threatening him and demanding money, but the musician continually begged to be left alone. Finally, Manson raised the sword and brought it down on the side of Hinman’s head, cutting off part of his ear. After this, Manson and Davis quickly left for the ranch.²⁰ The rest of the Family members, however, remained behind, tying up Hinman and taking turns watching him all night. Susan Atkins later admitted that she walked down the canyon to an all-night store and bought some food, bandages and white dental floss so that they could sew up the wound in the side of Hinman’s head.²¹ While she was gone, Beausoleil and Brunner turned the house upside down, searching for money and the pink slips to Hinman’s cars.

For two days, the trio of Mansonites tormented Hinman, with the girls offering him food while Beausoleil repeatedly beat him. Finally, Hinman signed over his Volkswagon minibus and his Fiat. Beausoleil reported back to Manson at the ranch, who told him to kill Hinman, saying “He knows too much.”²²

Atkins was in the kitchen when she suddenly heard Hinman screaming, “No Bobby!” She saw Hinman stagger into the kitchen, clutching his chest, and Beausoleil followed, holding a knife which he had used to stab him twice.²³ Beausoleil and the women moved Hinman into the living room; he was a Buddhist, and they placed him before his Nichiren Shoshu shrine, handing him his prayer beads. The trio stood over him, watching as Hinman lay on the floor, covered in blood, chanting his prayer until he fell silent.²⁴

With clear heads, and under instructions from no one, the three spent the next few minutes running through the house, wiping it down for prints.²⁵ They covered Hinman’s body with his green bedspread; above him, on the living room wall, they printed the words “Political Piggy” in his blood, drawing a paw which was supposed to point toward the Black Panthers as the culprits. They locked all the doors and climbed out a side window.

As they stood on the deck outside the house, they heard Hinman moaning. Beausoleil went back inside, followed by the women. They took turns holding a pillow over the struggling musician’s face until he again fell silent. They left in Hinman’s VW bus, Manson and Bruce Davis having already taken the Fiat. On their way back to Spahn Ranch, they stopped at the Topanga Kitchen Restaurant for cherry cake and coffee, paid for with a twenty dollar bill Mary Brunner had stolen from Hinman’s wallet.²⁶

A day later, police raided Spahn Ranch. It was not in connection with Gary Hinman’s murder, but with reports that an auto theft ring was operating out of the property. Manson managed to effectively threaten the officers by saying that he had armed troops hidden in the hills above the ranch. But the police left after arresting only Johnny Schwartz, whose 1959 Ford had invalid registration. Manson and his followers remained at the ranch.

On 31 July, worried at not having heard from their friend for several days, Hinman’s friends went round to his house and found his mailbox full of mail. As they wandered round the deck, they noticed hundreds of flies swarming at the windows. When they broke in, they found Hinman’s body, covered with maggots and rapidly decomposing in the heat.²⁷

Manson was away from Spahn Ranch when, on Tuesday, August 5, Bobby Beausoleil left in Hinman’s stolen Fiat, on his way to San Francisco. There was a police bulletin out on the vehicle, and it only took a few hours before a California Highway Patrol car pulled Beausoleil over near San Luis Obispo. Although Beausoleil declared that he had purchased the car the previous week from an unknown black man, the police were suspicious enough to have his fingerprints sent down to Los Angeles for comparison with those found in Hinman’s house. When they matched, Beausoleil was shipped south to Los Angeles, charged in the murder of Gary Hinman. He admitted that he had been in Hinman’s house, and that Gary had told him he had been attacked by some black militants. Beausoleil said he and two unnamed female friends had helped sew up the musician’s face, and that a grateful Hinman had given them the pink slips to his cars.

The police bought none of it. On August 7, Beausoleil arrived in Los Angeles and made his one telephone call, to Spahn Ranch. A few hours later, on the morning of Friday, August 8, 1969, Charles Manson returned to the ranch from a trip north and learned what had happened. In less than twelve hours, he would order his followers to kill everyone at 10050 Cielo Drive.