Everyone in the Family knew that Charlie Manson didn’t like ranch hand Donald “Shorty” Shea. For one, Shorty had married a black topless dancer in July, and Charlie didn’t like the races mixing.
When Shorty didn’t get picked up during the sheriff’s raid at Spahn, Charlie’s animus for the guy grew even stronger, because he suspected that Shorty had ratted them out to the law. Taking the cue from their leader, the rest of the Family concurred.
Born in Boston, Shorty was a stocky guy—five feet eleven inches tall and 190 pounds—who had worked at the ranch on and off for fifteen years, taking the occasional role as a stuntman.
He cut an unusual figure at Spahn. When he was in the air force in the mid-1950s, his ankles had been crushed and hips shattered in a parachute jump. In addition, he had a withered arm that was shorter than the other.
But he loved horses, having three of them tattooed on his chest, along with a rose. More recently, he’d added the figure of a woman to his upper left arm with the words “I’ll always love you, Niki.”
Shorty had been married once before, in 1961. He and his first wife moved with their three children to Spahn to train horses, then moved to Boston in 1965, where they divorced.
He returned to LA broke, so broke that he was constantly pawning his prized pearl-handled guns, two .45-caliber Colt Dakota revolvers with 7.5-inch barrels. But he always got them back. He pawned one of them for the last time at the Hollywood Collateral Loan Association on July 25, the other three days later.
The guns weren’t really his to begin with. He’d borrowed them for a bit part in a film shoot in Arizona in 1968, leaving a camera as a deposit and promising to return the pistols. But Shorty told a friend that he’d never give them up. No matter what.
The “Niki” tattoo was inspired by his second wife, Magdalene Velda Fury, a dancer he’d met at the Cab-Inn in Carson, Nevada, where he was the manager. The couple got married in Las Vegas, then came back to LA together.
When Shorty brought his new bride to the ranch to meet George and Pearl, he also introduced her to Tex, Lynette, Gypsy, and Charlie.
Pearl, who had known Shorty since he’d arrived at Spahn fifteen years earlier, noted later that the couple’s visit “made the hippies mad.”
One Saturday night shortly thereafter, Shorty was walking on the boardwalk when a five-inch knife went flying by his head and stuck point-first into the saloon door, missing him by about two feet. Shorty looked around and saw Charlie standing nearby.
When Shorty confronted him, Charlie replied, “I might as well kill you, because your wife’s brothers will do it anyway. Why did you marry a black woman?”
Shorty related the episode to Magdalene as soon as he got home that night. But he had a tempestuous relationship with her too. They’d been married for only six weeks when he left her in the middle of the night after an argument.
He called her the next day to tell her that everyone at the ranch had been arrested in a raid. “I’m going up there to stay and take care of the horses,” he said, telling her to call one of his good friends if she needed to reach him. He also wrote her a letter a few days later, saying he hoped they could reconcile.
In the meantime, Shorty lived at the ranch in his car, a white 1962 Mercury he’d recently acquired from a friend, and kept all his belongings in it: a suitcase, two foot lockers, and a brown gun case.
A couple of days after the raid, Shorty ran into a producer with whom he’d previously bunked at the ranch. “I’m glad you’re here,” Shorty told him. “I think they’re trying to kill me. Someone threw a knife at me. Can you loan me a few dollars?”
Shorty said he might go back to work at the Leslie Salt Mine near San Francisco for a while, but he needed to leave in the next few days or he wouldn’t have the money to get there.
One night, Shorty got drunk and asked Pearl if he could stay at her house; he felt he was in danger and didn’t like being around the weird hippies. She told him she didn’t have room for him, but suggested he find a place to sleep amongst a group of Family members.
Pearl then got into her car and was about to leave when she saw a blue vehicle pull up. Charlie, Tex, Bruce, Clem, and another guy quickly jumped out and spread out along the boardwalk near where she’d left Shorty. Pearl thought it was odd; she’d never seen those guys move so fast. But she didn’t look back; she just kept on driving.
After the charges from the sheriff’s raid were dropped and the Family members were released from jail, five of them—Gypsy, Brenda, Clem, Lynette, and Barbara—were sitting on a rock outside the Longhorn Saloon when they saw Shorty walk around the corner of George’s house, bend over, and peer underneath.
“That Shorty is sneaking around again,” one of them said.
“Yes, but he’ll be taken care of,” Brenda said.
The same night that Shorty talked to Pearl on the boardwalk, Barbara was getting into bed in a building near the creek when she heard a scream. She sat up, thinking she might have imagined it.
But the screeching started up again and kept going. She could tell that the long, agonizing shrieks of pain were coming from the creek, another one of Charlie’s favorite spots to do target practice. She also knew Shorty’s voice, and she was sure it was him. Scared to move, she lay quietly until the screaming stopped.
Magdalene called the ranch about a week after receiving Shorty’s letter and asked to speak to him.
“Shorty went to San Francisco early this morning,” said the woman who answered the main ranch phone in George’s house, a duty that Lynette usually handled.
Magdalene tried calling Shorty’s friend as he’d instructed, but he didn’t know anything about a trip to San Francisco. He’d thought Shorty was still at Spahn.
But after the night Shorty talked to Pearl, none of his friends saw him again, and it took years before they found out what had really happened to him.
The details of how Shorty was murdered were fuzzy for years, because the killers purposely exaggerated the details at Charlie’s direction. But over time, Clem and Bruce gradually revealed some kernels of truth so at least the outline of the story is known. It has since become obvious that Clem minimized what happened to protect everyone but Tex, and although Bruce also downplayed his role for many years, he has recently been more forthcoming, and has incriminated Charlie in the slaying as well.
Clem, Bruce, and Tex were standing on the boardwalk one day when Charlie told them that Shorty had been working to get the Family evicted, so he had to go. Not them.
“Shorty is a snitch,” Charlie said. “We’re going to kill him.”
That same day they asked Shorty to drive Clem, Tex, and Bruce to get some spare car parts. Clem joined Bruce in the back of the car, and Tex rode in front with Shorty. The plan was to wait until Tex gave the signal, then they would all jump Shorty and kill him.
Shorty drove about a quarter mile before Tex told him to pull over toward an embankment. When Shorty refused, Tex took out his knife and Shorty did as he was told.
Clem knew he was supposed to hit Shorty with a pipe wrench, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him to hurt someone else. But he was scared. He always felt as though he was being watched at the ranch. If he didn’t do what Charlie had instructed, Charlie could just as easily order him killed.
The kid kept watching for a car to come along and distract them so he wouldn’t have to do it, but when none came, he finally took the wrench and halfheartedly struck Shorty in the back of the head. Not hard enough to knock him out, the smack only served to surprise Shorty and kick him into survival mode.
Leaving the engine running, Shorty used his stuntman tricks to slide out the passenger side of the car. Tex was already outside, so Clem had to climb from the back into the driver’s seat to stop the car from going over the embankment.
By the time Clem got out, Tex already had hold of Shorty, and together they dragged him down a hill to a ravine.
Bruce stayed in the back seat for several more minutes until Charlie pulled up in another car. “C’mon,” Charlie told him, leading him down the embankment about twenty yards to join the others, where Tex was stabbing Shorty.
“Charlie, why are you doing this?” Shorty asked, knowing he was the leader.
“Here’s why,” Charlie said, knifing Shorty after deeming that he had come to the state of fear-enhanced total awareness that Charlie referred to as “Now.”
As Shorty was slumped over, with his head bent forward, Charlie handed Bruce a machete and pointed at the nape of Shorty’s neck. Bruce touched the machete to Shorty’s skin, but couldn’t bring himself to chop off his head as Charlie was indicating. He’d only come along for the ride; he didn’t want to go against Charlie, but Tex and Clem were both bigger than him.
Still, he recalled later, “I couldn’t do what he wanted me to do.”
When Bruce dropped the machete, Charlie handed him a knife with a long, thick blade, which Bruce used to slice into Shorty’s right shoulder, cutting him from armpit to collarbone.
Years later, Clem said Shorty was already unconscious when he knifed him twice in the chest, and Bruce said he was pretty sure that Shorty was already dead when he sliced his shoulder, as if that lessened the heinousness of their acts of mutilation.
But as Bruce finally admitted, “It wouldn’t have mattered to me if he were dead or alive at the time. I was going to do what I did and I did it.”
Once Shorty was dead, Clem pulled his body over to the side of the ravine and covered it with leaves. After driving back to the ranch, Clem waited until dark to return with a shovel to bury the body deeper in the soil.
Later that night Charlie woke up Gypsy and told her to get into a car with him, Clem, Brenda, and Bruce. They drove Gypsy to the bridge near the railroad tracks, where Shorty’s Mercury was parked halfway into the road. Gypsy followed Charlie’s orders to ditch the car in the Valley, then thumb her way back to the ranch, leaving the Mercury on Gresham Street, near the Yellow Submarine house.
Over the next few days, Bruce’s initial feelings of shock and shame were replaced by a numbness and a foggy state of denial as he “tried to rationalize what [he] had done.”
Seeing an opportunity to instill more fear into the Family, Charlie told Clem, Bruce, and Tex to tell everyone in the group that they’d chopped off Shorty’s head, cut his body into nine pieces, and buried them all over the ranch.
Always the good soldier, Clem did as he was told, exaggerating the savagery and callousness of the killing to Paul Watkins and others. “Charlie told me to cut his head off, so I had this big machete and I chopped his head off and it went, bloop, bloop, bloop and rolled over out of the way,” he boasted, adding that warm blood splattered all over his body. “It was real groovy.”
“Do you feel guilty?” Paul asked.
“Any guilt that I have is something I have to work out with myself,” Clem said.
Bruce backed up the gruesome tale as well. “Charlie stabbed him, then we all took turns,” he told Paul. “Shorty got to Now. [Clem] cut his head off with a machete. We stashed the body under some leaves. It was dark. Clem came back later with some girls. It was at night and the moon was full and the girls buried him. We had to put him out of the way. He knew too much.”
Charlie did his share of talking up the murder too. “Shorty couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” he told gold prospector Paul Crockett at Barker Ranch later that summer. “It’s hard to kill a man that’s brought to Now. I had to cut his head off.”
When Charlie asked biker Danny DeCarlo about the proper chemicals to dispose of a body, DeCarlo explained that lime would preserve it, but lye would dissolve it.
Charlie’s ploy worked. Most everyone—including juries in future murder trials—believed the stories that they had beheaded and dismembered Shorty Shea. In the short-term, the tales also had the intended intimidation effect within the Family, even as Charlie and those involved in the murder tried to cover their tracks.
When Gypsy put on a blue shirt she’d found in the bunkhouse, Charlie confronted her.
“Where did you get that shirt? That’s Shorty’s,” he said, telling her to get rid of it.
“If anyone asks about Shorty, tell them he went to San Francisco,” Bruce told the others.
Bruce didn’t give any explanation to DeCarlo when he gave the biker Shorty’s two pawn tickets for the pearl-handled guns, which DeCarlo redeemed in Hollywood, using the alias Richard A. Smith.
DeCarlo said later that he didn’t know the guns belonged to Shorty until he redeemed the tickets. He kept one of the revolvers and gave the other one to Charlie, who returned it two weeks later. But after learning that Shorty had been killed, DeCarlo dumped the weapons at another pawn shop in Culver City.