The DA’s office was successful in obtaining indictments consolidating the Hinman and Shea murders into one case, but it failed in the attempt to jointly prosecute Charles Manson, Bruce Davis, and Steve “Clem” Grogan as codefendants in one trial. After Davis was able to get his trial severed from the others, each man was tried independently.
Grogan’s first trial for Shorty’s murder ended in mistrial in late August 1970—before the jury even began its deliberations.
Judge Joseph Call, who had been on the bench for more than thirty years, had been receiving death threats, as had Grogan’s attorney. As the pressure escalated, Judge Call got more spooked during a meeting with Grogan and the lawyers in chambers when the defendant abruptly kneeled in front of him, smiled innocently, and touched his knee.
Call’s face went pale at the inappropriate gesture. “Steve doesn’t mean anything by it,” he said, hopefully.
“It’s okay, Joe,” Grogan said gently, again testing propriety by using the judge’s first name. “I know you’re just trying to be fair. You’ll do the right thing.”
Prosecutor Burton Katz sensed that the judge was trying to convince himself that the gesture was not an implicit threat of violence. But considering the testimony that the seemingly harmless Grogan had taken a machete to Shorty’s head and chopped him into nine pieces, Call was understandably anxious about the defendant’s conduct in chambers.
Tensions escalated further when a group of Family members robbed the Western Surplus Store, a gun shop in Hawthorne, in late August. In a scheme to break Charlie out of jail, the group planned to use the stolen weapons to hijack a 747 airplane and kill hostages, one at a time, until Manson was released.
But they never made it that far. While they were grabbing up 141 guns in the store, an employee triggered a silent alarm. The group ran outside with the weapons and jumped in a white van.
After the police showed up, a long shootout ensued, with more than fifty rounds of ammunition exchanged, wounding Family members Gypsy and Mary Brunner, whose immunity deal had left her free to keep testifying as a prosecution witness. The police found a bloody bra in the Family’s van, which had apparently been shot off Gypsy’s body during the firestorm.
Back in the courtroom, Judge Call ordered a mistrial on the grounds that the jury had been highly prejudiced by inflammatory questions and prosecutorial error. Call then declined to preside over the second trial.
Charles “Tex” Watson lost his extradition fight in September 1970 after a Texas judge ruled that he didn’t see any evidence preventing Watson from receiving a fair trial in California.
Although many news articles had identified Tex as the actual killer in the Tate-LaBianca murders, the judge said the sensational publicity surrounding the case was not due to an irresponsible media, but rather that “sensational events involving weird personalities cannot be accurately presented in prosaic terms.” So he ordered Watson to be sent back to California to await trial.
Within a short time of Watson’s arrival at the LA county jail, he began to lose weight and refused to eat many foods, claiming they made him sick. He spat up or wouldn’t eat meat, fried chicken, anything oily, sweet, fatty, or white, including potatoes and bread.
Although Watson claimed he hadn’t done any hard drugs since leaving the Family in the desert, he suggested his dietary problems could be a delayed result of repeatedly eating belladonna root at the ranch. He also said they could be a vestige of consuming a mostly vegetarian diet with the Family.
Whatever the cause, he fell into a catatonic state, unable to talk, move, or take care of his bodily functions, and had to be tube fed. Declared incompetent and unable to stand trial, he was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for emergency treatment on October 30, where he recovered over the next several months. After doctors there determined that he had no mental disorders, he was sent back to the LA county jail.
In May 1971, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to all charges, meaning that at the time of the crimes he was mentally incapable of premeditation or forming intent or malice and could not differentiate between right and wrong.
Meanwhile, his odd behaviors and avoidance of many foods resumed. His weight fell to 112 pounds, 48 pounds lighter than his healthiest weight as an athlete.
Several of the doctors who examined him concluded that the effects of his previously heavy and prolonged daily use of psychedelics and hallucinogens had taken their toll, causing classic symptoms of organic brain disease, even eighteen months after he’d stopped using them.
One doctor diagnosed him with a condition known as “ folie à deux,” meaning that Manson’s dominant personality had taken over his, fusing with Watson’s weaker personality to carry out the stronger, dangerous, and delusional ideology.
Dr. Ira Frank, of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, said Watson’s mood seemed flat at times, and his thinking and speech were “often slowed, vague, concrete and at times illogical. Reality was freely mixed with material derived from his hallucinations and psychedelic experiences, which at times appeared delusional. Memory, concentration and judgment seemed impaired and concepts seemed difficult to grasp. . . . He seemed unable to comprehend the complexity and the enormity of his present situation.”
Based on Watson’s description of the murders, Dr. Frank concluded that his actions were mechanical, stemming from a “drug-induced psychotic state,” and rendered him dissociated from emotion and “without rational motive.” Frank thought it “extremely unlikely” that Watson would be dangerous again, saying his condition resulted from a “unique combination of drugs, Manson and the family.” Resolving his mental issues would require a long hospitalization.
By July, Watson still weighed only 114 pounds. He complained that other inmates were harassing and choking him, and that he still couldn’t eat jailhouse food.
The court granted the defense permission for two psychiatrists to interview Watson after administering sodium pentothal or sodium amytal, more commonly known as truth serums. He was also examined by a series of clinicians to evaluate his brain functioning and legal competency to stand trial in light of his insanity claim.
The psychiatrists’ conclusions ran the gamut. Several said he was legally insane during the crimes and still had not regained his sanity. Others said he was insane then but was sane now and able to face trial, and although Watson’s behavior was not “normal,” he had always known that it was wrong to kill. At the other end of the spectrum, one doctor said Watson was legally sane before and he was faking his symptoms now for “personal gain.”
All of this only delayed the inevitable outcome for Tex Watson, the man who had stabbed, shot, and brutally mutilated seven innocent victims at the Tate and LaBianca homes.
After the guilt phase of his trial began on August 2, prison staff had to inject him with Thorazine, a tranquilizer used to calm difficult-tocontrol prisoners, after he tried to harm himself by sticking his hands into the workings of the cell gate, and ramming his head and body against the wall. But on October 12, a jury of six men and six women found him guilty nonetheless.
A subsequent “sanity” phase began next, during which a sampling of his psychiatric evaluations was presented to the jury. The panel found him to be legally sane at the time of the murders.
During a short penalty trial, the same jury deliberated for only five hours before voting on October 21 to send him to the gas chamber.
The DA never charged Watson in the Shorty Shea murder because he was already serving a death sentence for the seven others.
On October 23, 1971, Kenneth Como, one of the crew who stole guns from the surplus store to break Manson out of jail, was arraigned on felony charges for his sixth jailbreak in seventeen years.
He’d sawed his way out of his cell on the thirteenth floor of the Hall of Justice, dropped down the side of the building by using a rope made from strips of mattress cover, then kicked through an eighth-floor window to walk out unnoticed.
After waiting for him in a van below, Sandy Good sideswiped a car on their way to a safe house. Como was hiding in a shed behind the house when authorities captured him six hours later and returned him to jail.
Good, who was arrested for aiding and abetting Como’s escape, was arraigned at the same time. In typical Family style, Como shouted at the judge in Good’s defense: “You should give her a medal for performing a community service!”
Steve Grogan’s second trial proceeded quickly in a new judge’s courtroom, that of Judge James Kolts.
A successful prosecution of a “no-body” case is rare, but this time the jury believed the testimony presented by witnesses who recounted the claims by Grogan and others that they had fatally stabbed, decapitated, dismembered, and buried Shorty somewhere at Spahn Ranch.
The jury deliberated only eight hours before convicting the twenty-year-old of murder. Grogan showed no emotion as the clerk read the verdict, though he smiled a little as the jurors were polled individually.
A week later, on November 8, the same jury of eight men and four women deliberated twice as long before voting to send him to death row.
Manson’s trial for the murders of Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman had been under way in another courtroom at the same time as Grogan’s.
On November 2, after forty-three hours over nine days of deliberations, the jury found Manson guilty of murdering both men, as well as conspiracy to rob and murder Hinman.
After the clerk read the verdict, Manson smiled as if on cue, then began to shout at reporters and people in the gallery. “You’re from the United States of cowards! You’re afraid to face me. All you have is muscle. You don’t have any mind.”
Still screaming, Manson refused to walk out of the courtroom on his own, so the bailiffs had to carry him.
When the penalty phase began the next day, Manson was immediately removed to the same type of holding cell where he’d spent most of his trials.
He was allowed back into the courtroom, but continued to cause problems as he called out to Leslie Van Houten, who was about to testify in his defense.
“Leslie, this is not my defense,” he said. “They got nothing to do with me out there.”
Still under his powerful influence, she told Manson’s lawyer that she’d changed her mind. “Mr. Kanarek, I’ve decided I don’t want to testify,” she said, citing her right under the Fifth Amendment.
Although Manson faced the death penalty on all three counts, he ended up with a life sentence in this case, which even the DA’s office has since admitted was weak.
Nevertheless, he was sent back to death row at San Quentin on December 13, 1971.
Even before the Hawthorne gun store shooting, the DA had obtained an indictment against Mary Brunner for Gary Hinman’s murder in light of her disruptive behavior at Bobby Beausoleil’s trial. But the prosecutors didn’t press forward to trial, presumably because they still needed her to testify in other proceedings.
Mary had gone on to testify truthfully for the prosecution during the penalty phase of the Tate-LaBianca trial, acknowledging that Susan Atkins told many different versions of how Hinman was murdered. But she lied on the stand again during Manson’s trial for the Hinman-Shea murders, saying she wasn’t there for Hinman’s murder, nor had she seen Atkins hold a gun on him. She then abruptly stopped testifying and refused to answer any more questions, citing the Fifth Amendment.
After that, the DA’s office decided to try Mary for murder and four counts of perjury, arguing that she’d lost her immunity deal by lying and refusing to cooperate.
But the murder charge didn’t stick. During a hearing in March 1972, Judge George Dell supported the defense’s claim that Mary had been offered immunity seven times since December 1969, and ruled that the offer still stood.
Mary had given enough testimony for Bobby Beausoleil to be sentenced to death, the judge said, and for Manson to be convicted as well. The People have gotten “virtually everything they bargained for,” and Mary had “delivered to the People everything they had a right to expect.”
“It is rather obvious that friends of Mr. Manson and hers contacted her and she changed her story,” Dell said, though in light of her false testimony, he conceded that she should stand trial for perjury.
Her commitment to the Family still deeply ingrained, Mary admitted that she still loved Charlie and Bobby.
“Did you love Bruce Davis?” her attorney asked.
“We were all the same, man,” she replied.
“In other words, you loved everybody, right?”
“The whole Family.”
“And you still love everybody, is that correct?”
“That’s right.”
It took several years, but Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel realized on the same day in March 1973 that they’d finally broken free of the Family.
Still in the isolation unit at Corona, they and Susan Atkins were joined by Mary Brunner and Catherine “Gypsy” Share, who had been convicted of armed robbery at the surplus store.
Talking the same old Manson jargon, Mary and Gypsy told the three women that Charlie had lost them in a card game to another Family member.
“You now belong to Kenneth Como, we’re all going to escape, and we have the blades to do it,” they said, explaining that they had smuggled in hacksaw blades by hiding them in their private areas.
Van Houten and Krenwinkel independently had the same reaction. They were finished with Manson, the Family, and the subjugation that had put them in prison.
“No, I’m not,” Krenwinkel said, realizing that she now had the emotional distance and fortitude to leave the Family for good. “I’m not going with you. You do whatever you want to do. I’m done.”
Van Houten echoed that sentiment as well. “I’ve changed,” she said.
After several years in isolation, Van Houten was finally feeling the guilt of what she’d done and had decided to find a way to live with what she’d become. And that mind-set didn’t include bowing to Charlie Manson any longer.
It took Atkins another year or so before she felt that Manson had left her brain and that he could no longer control her thoughts.
Mary Brunner was sentenced to life, but was released in July 1978, after serving only five years and four months of her sentence. With her immunity deal still in place, she’d gotten off completely for the murder of Gary Hinman. Catherine Share was discharged in April 1977.
Once Mary was paroled, she changed her name, dropped out of public view, and went to live in the Midwest. Meanwhile, Michael Brunner, her son with Manson, was raised by her parents in Wisconsin, thinking for years that his mother was his older sister.