Jury selection for Bobby Beausoleil’s trial started quietly and with little fanfare on November 13. Because the detectives had yet to connect him to the Manson Family’s activities, his trial was assigned to a Superior Court judge in Long Beach, about twenty-five miles from the main criminal courthouse in downtown LA, where his codefendants would be tried later.
Both sides had agreed that Bobby would not face the death penalty, but rather a maximum life sentence and a chance for parole.
Represented by a deputy public defender, Bobby made it through five days of trial—through closing arguments and jury instructions—before the proceedings screeched to an unanticipated halt.
The prosecutor asked for a private meeting in the judge’s chambers to request permission to re-open his case based on some late-breaking evidence: LAPD detectives had just learned that Sadie had been talking to her cellmate Ronnie Howard about the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders. The judge granted the motion, but kept Bobby and the jury in the dark, saying only that the trial was being continued for a week.
The detectives had learned new information from Straight Satans bikers Allan Springer and Danny DeCarlo as well. While the Family was still at Spahn Ranch, DeCarlo said, Charlie told him they knew a guy named Gary who had twenty thousand dollars, and they were going to try to “get it off of him.”
DeCarlo said Bobby also told him how the whole weekend with Gary Hinman went down: After Bobby called Charlie to alert him that Gary wasn’t cooperating, Charlie came over and cut up the man’s ear. Sadie and Mary were there too.
Then Bobby called Charlie a second time. “You better take care of him,” Charlie said. “You’re going to have to kill him, that’s all there is to it.” So that’s what Bobby did, DeCarlo said, stabbing Hinman with the knife he wore in a leather sheath on his belt.
After the Spahn raid charges were dropped, DeCarlo said, he’d gone out to the desert with Tex and Bruce. But after only four days there, he’d decided he was done with the Family for good and returned to LA.
Based on what DeCarlo told detectives, he became a key witness, not only in Bobby’s trial, but in the Tate-LaBianca case as well.
When Bobby’s trial resumed on November 24, the prosecution reopened its case and called several new witnesses, including DeCarlo. However, the testimony wasn’t enough to win a conviction.
After deliberating a little more than a day, the jury foreman announced that the panel had reached an impasse: eight in favor of conviction, four for acquittal.
The judge declared a mistrial after questioning the jury. Determining that the jury didn’t believe DeCarlo, the DA’s office blamed the loss on the prosecutor’s failure to properly prep him to testify. Next time, they vowed, would be different.
In the meantime, the dominoes against the Manson Family continued to fall.
That same week, Leslie Van Houten, who had been transferred from the Inyo County jail in Independence to Sybil Brand in LA, gave up a few more details.
To get these Family members to talk, investigators had to claim they had more incriminating evidence than they actually did—although some detectives used their legal ability to gain leverage over witnesses more than others. Some investigators lied, while others threatened a death sentence or the permanent loss of female witnesses’ children if they didn’t testify.
Leslie clearly didn’t want to incriminate any of her fellow Family members. But once she learned about the death of Zero, whom she hadn’t seen since the Barker raid, and also that Sadie had been talking up a storm, she became upset—or disarmed—enough to disclose names of the two girls who had gone with Sadie to the Tate house.
It took until November 30 for the LAPD to realize it had a fingerprint on file that matched the latent print found on the Tate house’s front door, six inches above and to the left of the knob. This was a huge discovery for the prosecution team—its first piece of physical evidence in the case linking the Family to the murders.
The latent print was a match with Tex Watson’s right ring finger print, collected during his arrest back in April. He’d since been released from the Independence jail as Charles Montgomery, and had flown back to be with his family in Copeland, Texas.
After determining Tex’s true identity, they called the authorities in Tex’s hometown, linked the alias to his cousin, Collin County sheriff Tom Montgomery, and notified him that they were looking at Charles Watson for murder.
The Tate-LaBianca prosecution team still didn’t have enough evidence to prove its case in court. But by the morning of December 1, Vincent Bugliosi decided they had just enough to issue warrants to arrest Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel, Linda Kasabian, and Charles “Tex” Watson for first-degree murder.
Sheriff Montgomery disclosed the warrant to Tex’s uncle, a sheriff’s deputy at the jail, who then called Tex’s father. Convinced that Tex couldn’t have killed anyone, his father and uncle picked him up at his apartment and drove him to the McKinney jail, where he turned twenty-four the next day.
When Tex had needed an attorney to represent him after he was arrested for stealing typewriters as a fraternity prank, his family had hired Roland Boyd, who got the charges dropped. Now, four years later, they hired Boyd’s firm again to defend Tex against a far more serious set of accusations.
Boyd immediately filed paperwork fighting the request to extradite Tex to LA, arguing that he couldn’t get a fair trial in California due to the unprecedented level of publicity about the case.
For a while, it worked.
The same day that Tex was arrested, Katie was driving to her aunt’s house in Mobile when the cops pulled her over and arrested her too.
After taking her fingerprints during the booking process, the local police sent them to the LAPD, where investigators found a match: Katie’s left little finger fit with the latent print discovered on the door in Sharon Tate’s bedroom that led to the pool.
Bingo. A second key piece of physical evidence.
But Katie wouldn’t agree to come back to LA to face trial either— until February 1970, when she not only stopped fighting extradition but asked to be returned to California. She’d finally succumbed to the pleas in Lynette’s letters, urging her to participate in the Family’s “united” defense.
Linda Kasabian was the only one of the three suspects to surrender voluntarily.
Three days after she’d taken off for New Mexico, the LASD had detained her daughter Tonya during the raid at Spahn Ranch and placed her into foster care. Linda was eventually able to get the child back through the courts.
Reunited, mother and daughter hitchhiked across the country to see Linda’s father in Florida, then headed north to stay with her mother and stepfather in New Hampshire.
After learning a murder warrant was out for her arrest, Linda surrendered to the state police at her mother’s house in Milford, a town of 6,600 people, on December 2.
As she was leaving the house with the officers, Linda turned to her mother and said, “All I ever wanted was what you’ve got—a husband, love, a home and children.”
However, her mood changed abruptly once she got to court. “I don’t care if the whole world comes down, I’m not talking,” Linda told police after pleading guilty to being a fugitive from justice.
Turned over to authorities from LA, she was flown west the next day and booked into Sybil Brand.
As Sadie’s jailhouse stories were filtering into the LAPD and LASD, her lawyer, Richard Caballero, was trying to get her a deal with the DA’s office.
Although her allegiance to Charlie kept her from jumping at the chance to cooperate, she eventually agreed to tell her story on a two-hour tape, which Caballero shared with Bugliosi and a team of detectives on December 3. In one key statement to her lawyers, Sadie said Charlie sent the group to the house on Cielo Drive because the former home of producer Terry Melcher “represented a symbol of rejection for him.”
The next day, on the eve of grand jury proceedings, Sadie and her attorney had a lengthy discussion with the prosecution team in the office of the DA himself. Caballero asked for immunity in return for Sadie’s cooperation in helping to solve the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders, but said he was unsure if she would testify “for fear of the physical presence of Charles Manson” and his codefendants.
The prosecutors acknowledged that Sadie’s cooperation thus far had been vital to the case. As long as they determined that she’d testified truthfully, they said, they wouldn’t use the information that she’d provided against her, nor would they seek the death penalty. Whether they sentenced her on lesser charges would depend on how cooperative she continued to be in the future. But they could not—and would not—grant her immunity.
Sadie accepted the deal and agreed to testify before the grand jury.
While Sadie had bragged to her cellmates that she’d fatally stabbed Sharon Tate, she told the grand jury that she couldn’t bring herself to do anything but hold the pregnant woman while Tex did the deed. She said she’d wanted to cut out Sharon’s baby but couldn’t do that either.
The Cielo Drive house had been chosen as the target, she said, because Tex had been there before and knew the outline of the property. And when they got back to the ranch, Charlie wanted to know why they were done so soon.
But she still didn’t incriminate Charlie in the murders, saying he had simply given her a knife and some dark clothing to wear, and instructed her to follow Tex’s orders. Still characterizing Charlie as some sort of deity, she said the words out of his mouth came from “the Infinite.”