When the trial resumed after the Thanksgiving break, everyone had taken his place in court but Leslie Van Houten’s attorney, Ronald Hughes. Both sides had rested, but the jury instructions had yet to be finalized and closing arguments were still to come.
Because Hughes had been previously scolded for showing up late to court, no one seemed too concerned by his absence, other than annoyance at the delay. But as Older quizzed the other defense attorneys, none of them knew where he was. Paul Fitzgerald said Hughes had sounded fine when they’d last talked over the holiday.
Hughes was a thirty-five-year-old, 250-pound balding single man with a long, scruffy beard. He’d only just passed the bar—on his fourth try—in June 1969, right before the trial began. An odd bird who had known the Manson Family before the trial, he slept on the floor of a friend’s garage, where he proudly hung his bar certificate on the wall. He often spent weekends camping at the Sespe Hot Springs near the mountain community of Ojai, in Ventura County.
The next day, they learned that Hughes had, in fact, driven up to the hot springs on the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend with two teenagers, James Forsher and Lauren Elder, in Elder’s Volkswagen.
When police questioned the teens, they said it had started to rain so they decided to come back to LA, but Hughes wanted to stay until Sunday. There was such a downpour that their vehicle got caught in some mud, forcing them to leave it there and hike their way to safety.
Ventura County sheriff’s deputies had to wait two days for the bad weather to pass before they could safely search the area by helicopter. During that time, some in LA’s legal community speculated that Hughes had purposely gone into hiding to sabotage the trial. But Bugliosi knew that wasn’t true as soon as he read the news story describing the law degree hanging in Hughes’s messy garage.
On December 2, after the court received a number of reported Hughes sightings—in Mexico, in Reno, and on the freeway somewhere—the judge wanted to get the trial moving so he offered Leslie another attorney. But she declined.
When Lauren Elder’s Volkswagen was finally found, investigators retrieved some of Hughes’s court transcripts. However, other paperwork, including a psych report on his client, was suspiciously missing.
Also on December 2, after evading capture for nearly a year, Bruce Davis turned himself in to authorities.
As reporters surrounded him on a street corner and peppered him with questions about why he’d come back and what he hoped to accomplish, he laughed nervously as he stood with an “X” carved into his forehead.
“It’s time,” he said. “We’re just going to say what’s true.”
“Have any deals been made, and if so what are they?” a reporter asked.
“Well, some people were supposed to be cut loose,” Bruce said.
“Who?”
“Mary Brunner, for one,” he replied.
“You know that you’ll be facing murder charges?”
Bruce laughed again. “Is that all?”
“You do know that?”
“They’re putting murder charges on everybody,” he said.
“Are you guilty of murder?” a reporter asked.
“Are you guilty of murder?”
In the end, the reporters failed to get a straight answer about his motives.
“You’ll just have to watch,” he said.
The next day, Judge Older ignored Van Houten’s—and Manson’s— objections and appointed attorney Maxwell Keith to represent her.
Older also denied Keith’s motion to sever his client from the trial as well as a joint defense motion for a mistrial. Instead, the judge delayed closing arguments to give Keith more time to prepare his statement.
Vincent Bugliosi led off with the People’s closing argument on December 21, with the codefendants absent from the courtroom. Older said he wouldn’t stand for any more disruptions, so he condemned the codefendants to their adjoining cells for the remainder of the trial’s guilt phase.
After recounting the testimony of his eighty-four witnesses, Bugliosi concluded his three-day argument a week later. As he slowly read aloud the names of all seven victims, he said they “are not here in this courtroom, but from their graves they cry out for justice, and justice can only be done by coming back to this courtroom with a verdict of guilty.”
Paul Fitzgerald began the defense’s closing arguments by noting that even Linda Kasabian, the state’s most important witness, admitted that she was unaware of any conspiracy to murder anyone.
“Linda Kasabian said eleven times that there was no conspiracy,” he said. “How can you join a conspiracy and not know what it is?”
He pointed out that she said she’d seen only one of the seven victims being murdered—Steve Parent—and that was by Tex Watson, who wasn’t even on trial yet.
“How can you convict these defendants?” Fitzgerald asked. “We don’t know who killed who.”
Taking over, Irving Kanarek stretched out his closing argument for seven days, complaining when the DA’s office interrupted his statement to arraign Manson in another courtroom on the reissued indictment against him in a consolidation of the Hinman and Shea murder cases.
“This is deliberate,” Kanarek said. “Is this Russia or is this the United States?”
Kanarek summed up the proceedings as a political campaign against alternative ideas and lifestyle choices that were antagonistic to the status quo, such as the communal way in which Manson and his friends were living.
“The District Attorney of Los Angeles County, as we have said, is a political office and this is a political trial,” he said. “No matter how we look at it.”
Manson’s attorney spent the better part of a day attacking the credibility of Linda Kasabian, painting her as “the manipulator,” rather than his client, noting that she’d gotten herself granted immunity even after being labeled as an accomplice to the murder of seven people. He also pointed out conspiratorially that Bugliosi kept referring to her intimately by her first name instead of Mrs. Kasabian.
Going through the exhibits one by one, Kanarek pointed out that the prosecution had showed the jury no physical evidence or crime scene photos that tied Manson in any scientific way to the murder scenes or to any criminal wrongdoing. He cited the leather thongs as an example.
“It doesn’t connect Mr. Manson with this any more than any one of us who may have leather on his or her person.”
“Manson is a very small part [of this case]—he is a person who is merely a symbol” of those antagonistic ideas, he said. Hearkening back to six-year-old Charlie’s argument to his aunt and uncle, Kanarek said Manson had the right to share his opinions with others and should not be held accountable if they acted on those opinions.
The case went to the jury at 3:20 p.m. on January 15, 1971. The jury returned ten days later, after a week of deliberations, with the verdict that Bugliosi had requested: guilty on all counts.
About two weeks later, on the eve of the death penalty phase of the trial, a Los Angeles Times reporter managed to track down Charles Manson’s chain-smoking, emphysema-ridden mother, Kathleen, who did her best to paint a sympathetic portrait of her son.
“I still believe that if those jurors would just talk to Charles for fifteen minutes, they could see he’s mentally ill. He needs treatment, has for years,” she said.
Kathleen said she thought the girls in the Family were taken in by Charlie’s personality and the LSD they took, not any special power of hypnosis.
“He always had a way with people,” she said. “Even later, when he was in prison, he was able to get special treatment.”
Kathleen died two years later in Spokane, Washington, married for a third time and leaving behind an eleven-year-old daughter from her second marriage.
To mark the start of the next phase, on January 28, 1971, Manson shaved his head. The girls, of course, all followed his lead.
Before the jury was brought in that morning, attorney Paul Fitzgerald tried to enter a new plea of not guilty by reason of insanity for his client, Patricia Krenwinkel.
Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi argued that by waiting until the second phase of the trial to do so, it was “much too far after the bell has already been rung.” Judge Older agreed, saying Fitzgerald should have done this during the guilt phase.
But Fitzgerald described this as a tactical decision, contending that doing so earlier would have been admitting guilt. At the very least, he said, the court should appoint psychiatrists to determine whether Krenwinkel was sane so the jury could consider that before deciding if she deserved a death sentence.
The judge countered that he saw no grounds for making the public pay to appoint private clinicians. “There is nothing on the record, nothing that the court has seen, that would indicate that any of these defendants has any mental illness, any diminished capacity, any insanity is now present or was present at the time of the crime,” Older said.
That point would be debated—in and out of court—for years to come. Tex Watson would make the same insanity claim during his trial, Leslie Van Houten would argue a “diminished capacity” defense at a retrial, and Charles Manson would subsequently be classified as a mentally ill inmate.
Older rejected the insanity plea as well as Fitzgerald’s argument that the death penalty was unconstitutional, amounting to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. From there, the proceedings moved once again into the realm of the bizarre. Manson asked Older one more time to relieve him of Kanarek so he could represent himself.
“I don’t have any more money,” Manson said. “You see, he has been working seven months now, and I haven’t got any more money to pay him. That is one good reason. Another good reason is that I have personal knowledge of the people involved, and could probably put on a very sensible penalty phase if the judge would let me do this.”
Older noted that this same request had been considered half a dozen times by at least four different judges, including him. “I see no reason to change my mind that you are competent to represent yourself,” the judge said.
When Older suggested that Manson could still assist his attorney in his own defense, Manson pointed out that Kanarek, like the rest of his team, had still yet to put forth a defense.
“The attorneys wouldn’t understand the defense if it was put on in front of them,” Manson said. “. . . We wanted to put on a defense from the minute I was arrested. I knew that nothing could come between us . . . There is no way I can speak through any of these people and there is no way any of these people can speak through me . . . What good is a courtroom if it is only one-sided?”
“Sit down, Mr. Manson.”
“Now, am I supposed to sit here like a dummy? . . . There is no justice here, Older. Dammit man, look at it!”
“All right, I am going to have you removed, Mr. Manson, and you will not be present during the penalty phase of your trial.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. I am already removed from the first day.”
Older tried to sideline Manson by calling on Kanarek to make a motion he’d been trying to make, to no avail.
“He ain’t got no guts. He’s a woman,” Manson said. “You can’t face me in this courtroom. If you let me go in here, I’d tear that little boy apart,” he said, referring to Bugliosi. “You know it too.”
“You already called me a genius, Charlie,” Bugliosi said.
“That will be enough, Mr. Bugliosi, let’s proceed,” Older said.
Kanarek used the break in the drama to try to get one of the female jurors dismissed, alleging that she’d “taken to alcohol” during the sequestration, but Older ignored him, too, and called the prosecution’s first witness, Bernard Crowe, to the stand. Before seeing him in the courthouse that day, Manson had thought he’d killed Crowe in Rosina’s Hollywood apartment.
Manson, however, would not be upstaged. Before Bugliosi could ask Crowe a question, Manson began to strike his attorney at the defense table, hitting him several times in a karate chop to the chest and side as they faced the jury box, which was about twenty feet away.
“I can’t get nothing from this man,” Manson said. “I can’t even communicate with him.”
Older ordered the bailiffs to take Manson out of the courtroom, and at Kanarek’s request, told the jury to disregard the incident.
Bugliosi still had no physical proof that Manson had killed anyone himself, only witnesses who claimed that he’d ordered the killings in a conspiracy. He’d wanted Crowe to have the bullet removed from his gut to show the jury direct physical evidence that Charlie had shot him with the intention to kill.
But when Crowe took the stand he still had the slug in his body. The doctors had advised him that it was too risky to remove, because the lead could leach into his blood stream.
As Crowe recounted the night of Tex’s drug burn for the jury, he described the scene in Rosina’s apartment, when Manson denied having anything to do with Tex’s activities. “Then he backed up a little bit, and he pulled a revolver out of his belt and started pulling the trigger,” he said.
After Manson shot him in the stomach, he added, “I played possum and held my breath” until Manson left, wearing Crowe’s friend Steve’s suede shirt.
On Saturday, March 27, 1971, after the jury had begun its deliberations, two fishermen found Ronald Hughes’s naked body in Alder Creek, eight miles below the Sespe Hot Springs. His head was lodged, face down, under some rocks.
Because his remains were badly decomposed, the medical examiner ruled the cause of death as “undetermined.” Authorities said it looked like a drowning accident, suggesting that he got swept up in the swollen creek and hit his head as he was sent downstream, until his body got caught between the rocks.
Before Hughes’s body was discovered, an anonymous caller to the LAPD had reported that the attorney had been murdered by the Manson Family and buried out near Barker Ranch.
Shortly before he disappeared, Hughes had a run-in with Manson in the courtroom. Pointing directly at Hughes, Manson said, “Attorney, I don’t ever want to see you in this courtroom again.”
“And we never saw him again,” prosecutor Stephen Kay recalled later.
Based on the evidence, Bugliosi suspected that Hughes had been killed to win a mistrial for Manson and his codefendants, to delay the outcome, or to scare the whole defense team.
On Monday, March 29, the jury voted to give the death penalty to Manson, Atkins, Van Houten, and Krenwinkel.
Judge Older sentenced all four defendants to death row. Because the state had only one prison for female inmates at the time, the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Corona, the three women were placed in a special isolation unit there. Manson was sent to San Quentin State Prison on April 22.