Around 9:00 p.m. that Friday night, Charlie pulled Linda off the front porch and tracked down Katie in the kids’ trailer, then told them and Sadie to each grab a Buck knife and some dark clothing.
As they were getting ready to go, Tex snorted some speed that he kept hidden in a Gerber baby food jar under the porch. Sadie had some too.
Tex’s drug use had been escalating since he’d joined the Family more than a year earlier. Along with the LSD and cocaine he’d been using, he’d taken up chewing wild belladonna root, a natural hallucinogenic that grew on the ranch. He’d also been sniffing speed every day for the past month to help fuel the long hours that he and Bruce were putting in to retrofit the dune buggies with VW engines so they could travel the desert’s sandy terrain more quickly and easily.
Although only Tex and Sadie were high that night, all four of the twentysomethings felt the lingering effects of their consistent and long-term use of hallucinogens, which perpetuated a sense of non-reality.
They were all wearing the same black outfits they’d worn in recent months during “creepy crawlers,” when they crept into rich people’s homes at night to move things around and scare them. Upset the balance of the mainstream and the establishment. Maybe steal some clothes, credit cards, traveler’s checks, or audio taping equipment, which helped keep the Family fed and clothed. Another of Charlie’s directives, the exercises also helped eliminate their fears and inhibitions.
But this night was different. According to Tex, Charlie took him aside and told him to take the girls to kill people on Cielo Drive, a narrow road that wound through the secluded, woodsy neighborhood of Benedict Canyon on the west side of Los Angeles.
“Go up to the house where Terry Melcher used to live. Kill them, cut them up, pull out their eyes and hang them on the mirrors,” Charlie said, his dark, hypnotic eyes flashing. “As gruesome as you can.”
Charlie had met Melcher, a music producer and the son of actress Doris Day, in the summer of 1968 when Charlie, Tex, and some of the girls were living at the luxurious beach home of Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in the Pacific Palisades.
Charlie, strumming his guitar in the back seat of Dennis’s car, had accompanied the drummer as he drove Melcher back to his house on Cielo Drive from the Palisades one night. Charlie felt that Melcher had promised to record and produce an album of his music, and he was angry that Melcher had reneged on the deal.
Charlie made sure to equip Tex with the right tools for the grisly job: his favorite gun, the long-barreled .22-caliber Buntline that he’d used to shoot Lotsapoppa in Hollywood a week earlier; a Buck knife; some rope; and a pair of bolt cutters to cut the phone wires.
Gather all the people in one room, Charlie told Tex, then kill them. Make sure to leave no witnesses behind. Then, after hitting the first house, go to every house on the street to kill those people too. Bring back as much money as you can find, and don’t come back with less than six hundred dollars.
Like the other Family members, Tex was willing to do whatever he needed to do to win Charlie’s approval. He also knew he owed Charlie for cleaning up his mess with Lotsapoppa.
Waiting with Linda outside the Rock City Café for further instructions, Sadie tucked her black capri pants into her boots and told Danny DeCarlo, a member of the Straight Satans biker club who had been staying at the ranch for the past few months, that they were going out on a caper.
Charlie told the girls to pile into the same yellow Ford sedan that Bruce had used to drive the other group to Gary Hinman’s a couple of weeks earlier.
“I want you to go somewhere. Get in the car. Do whatever Tex says,” he said. Then, sticking his head in the window, he gave them one last directive: “Leave a sign. You girls know what I mean, something witchy. Let them know you were there.”
Ranch hand Juan Flynn came up to the car just before they drove away. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“We’re going to go kill some mother-f***ing pigs,” replied Sadie, who thrived on being outrageous.
Tex got lost as they were driving to Benedict Canyon, listening to Charlie’s voice in his head.
Kill them. Cut them up. Hang them up on the mirrors.
Charlie had preached that they had to kill themselves to be free. A difficult concept to accept, it’s partly why he gave them new names—to kill off their egos so they could lose themselves and be one with the group. So it wouldn’t be hard to kill others. After all, he said, love was nothingness. Love was death. Death was love.
It all made sense when you were on acid, and Charlie only gave them “awareness drugs,” not downers. He didn’t even like his people drinking alcohol.
Charlie had talked to Tex during his morning chores for some time—an exercise Charlie called “computing”—to reinforce his philosophy and ensure that Tex was capable of the duties he and the others would need to carry out in the future. Now that it was time to do the real thing, Tex was ready.
Knowing, perhaps, that the drugs would help make the violent acts seem unreal, Tex later claimed he’d consciously loaded himself up on speed to face up to the task that night, to numb his morals and inhibitions, and to silence the scriptures that he’d been taught in the Methodist church growing up.
Tex pulled up to the driveway at 10050 Cielo Drive and stopped near a telephone pole. Like Charlie, he had been to the house when Melcher had lived there, so Tex already knew the layout.
Charlie knew Melcher had relocated to Malibu, and he rightly assumed that other rich and beautiful people had moved into the house. For the Family’s purposes, it didn’t really matter who they were.
Climbing on the hood of the Ford, Tex shimmied up the tall, thick wooden pole.
Cut the wires.
Tex snipped several of the thick black cords, unsure if they were electricity wires or phone lines, then moved the car down the street. As the cords fell, they got hung up on the wooden fence below.
The fence, which was six feet high and twelve feet wide, had a chain-link electric security gate across the driveway that allowed cars to go in and out with the press of a button on either side. Because Tex didn’t know if the fence was armed with an alarm, he led the group up the brush-covered slope at the end of it, where they were able to hop over to the other side.
They moved in the dark like animals. Bodies without minds. Creeping toward the house like predators.
To them, Charlie was who he said he was: Jesus Christ, God, their father, and the Devil himself. He was in their minds. He could see what they were doing and read their thoughts. He was there with them, he was them, and they were him. They were all one. He’d also taught them that they were invisible to the outside world. No one could see them. But they still needed to take precautions.
Don’t leave any witnesses.
Headlights started toward them as they walked up the driveway, past the lawn that spanned the length of the house to their left. The upscale bungalow had a stone façade that was broken up by a series of white-framed windows, and was topped by a dark shingle roof, like a French country house.
A stone walkway led from the driveway to the front door of the main house. It also connected to other short throughways that ran along the façade, back to the pool and patio area off the master bedroom, and on to the red wooden guesthouse at the rear of the property. A separate dirt path started at the driveway a distance from the main house and snaked its way across the lawn, past the pool and patio, in a more direct route to the guesthouse.
“Lie down and be still,” Tex told the girls, who ducked down and hid while he stepped out of the bushes. Tex strode toward the white Rambler Ambassador and approached the driver’s side window with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other.
“Halt!” he said.
The driver, a tall redheaded teenager with glasses, looked up at Tex with fear in his eyes. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said. “I won’t say anything.”
Tex responded quickly. Without feeling. Like a machine programmed to kill. As the boy raised his left arm defensively, Tex slashed at the kid’s palm with the knife, slicing through the band of his wristwatch. Then, without a second thought, he shot the kid four times point blank.
Tex told Linda to go back down to the front gate to keep watch in case anyone came, then he led the others toward the house.
“C’mon,” Tex said.
Cutting the window screen next to the front door, Tex opened the window and crawled into the house to let Sadie and Katie in through the front door, where two blue steamer trunks were sitting in the entryway.
From there, they went into the living room, where a blond man was sleeping on the couch with an American flag draped over him. Tex kicked him in the head.
“What time is it? Who are you?” the man asked, confused. “What do you want?”
“I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Tex said.
Tex tied the man’s hands behind his back with the rope, then told Sadie to bind his wrists with a towel. When the man tried to object, Tex cut him off.
“Don’t move or you’re dead,” he said.
Sadie and Katie, told to go through the house and bring any other occupants into the living room, brought in a young brunette who had been reading in her bedroom.
Next, Sadie went to the master bedroom, where she collected a beautiful, very pregnant blonde in a bikini top and panties sleep-set and a short, handsome brown-haired man, wearing a dress shirt and vertically striped black and white pants.
Tex told the occupants to lie face down on the floor, but the short man refused. “I know karate,” he said.
At five feet six inches and only 122 pounds, he was dwarfed by Tex, who was six feet one inch tall and had an athletic build after playing on the football, basketball, and track teams in high school.
Tex wrapped the length of rope around the short man’s neck, threw one end over the wooden beam above, then started wrapping the other end around the pregnant woman’s neck so they would strangle themselves if they struggled.
“Can’t you see she’s pregnant?” the short man replied, taking a step toward Tex. “Let her sit down.”
Tex responded by shooting the man in the chest. He fell to the floor, where Tex smacked him in the face with the butt of his gun.
“Where’s your money?” Tex barked at the group.
“In a wallet on the desk,” the blond man said.
Katie rifled through the desk, but there was no money in it.
“I only have seventy-two dollars,” the brunette said. “I just went to the bank yesterday.”
Hearing the short man groaning, Tex stabbed him, which sent the women into hysterics.
“What are you going to do with us?” they asked.
“You’re all going to die,” Tex said.
The blond man jumped up from the couch and started toward the front door, erupting into a tangle of arms and legs as he kicked at Sadie, pulled her hair, and fought to get free of the towel binding his wrists.
“Kill him!” Tex shouted.
Sadie stabbed at his legs, but somehow he got loose and went after her hard.
“Tex! Help me!” Sadie yelled. “Do something!”
Tex smashed the butt of his gun into the top of the man’s skull so hard that the wooden grip broke into several pieces and went flying.
Tex didn’t know that the blond man had taken MDA that night, a new party drug that seemed to make him almost superhuman. His girlfriend had taken some too.
Like a wild bull, the blond man kept up the fight, pulling his assailants toward the front door and out onto the porch. In the struggle to wrestle him into submission, Sadie lost her knife.
Tex felt like an animal, making “happiness noises,” as he later described it, while he stabbed the big man on the front porch again and again until finally the man began to succumb.
“Help me, oh God, help me!” he pleaded.
Just then Tex heard a woman’s voice erupt in the yard. “Make it stop!” she cried out.
Looking up, he saw Linda, who had left her post at the gate and was now standing on the path, watching the scene in total disbelief.
“It’s too late!” Sadie retorted.
Meanwhile, the brunette had broken away and run out the back door of the master bedroom into the pool area, and was now running across the lawn.
“Someone is getting away!” Sadie yelled.
When Tex looked over he saw Katie in a wild state, a knife in her raised hand, chasing the brunette until she fell on the lawn, where Katie proceeded to hold her down and repeatedly plunge the knife into the length of her five-feet-five-inch frame.
“Stop! I’m already dead,” the woman said.
Hearing her voice as a call to action, Tex ran over and stabbed her some more.
By then, the powerful blond man had crawled from the front porch onto the lawn, where he was bleeding profusely. Tex went back and stabbed him again, too, just for good measure, then told Katie to check the guesthouse to ensure they left no witnesses alive.
The victims had made sounds as Tex stabbed and shot them, but to him the sounds had no meaning. Their faces were unreal. They didn’t look like people, but like psychedelic cartoons.
Everyone had been running around the house—at him, away from him, screaming and pleading. He was jumping around too. But it wasn’t really happening. It was another reality. It was perfection.
I’m an animal. It’s the end of the world, he thought. I’m the living death.
Inside, Tex found Sadie with the pregnant woman, who was screaming, crying, and begging them for her life.
“Please don’t kill me,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to die. I just want to have my baby.”
Sadie bragged later that she stared the woman dead in the eye and, without a hint of remorse in her voice, said, “Look, bitch. I have no mercy for you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You are going to die.”
Kill her!
Sadie and Tex both claimed later that they stabbed the pregnant woman. Sadie also testified that she thought about cutting out the baby, but couldn’t bring herself to do anything except hold the woman down while Tex stabbed her. Either way, the outcome was the same: the woman and her unborn son died as she lay in a pool of her own blood, calling out for her mother.
Completing the last task to fulfill Charlie’s vision, Sadie took a towel, dipped it in the pregnant woman’s blood, and wrote “PIG” on the white front door, reminiscent of the message Bobby had left at Gary Hinman’s house.
Their job finished, the trio headed back down the driveway toward the gate, which Tex opened with the touch of his bloody finger on the button.
Linda was waiting for them in the car with a change of clean clothes. They drove down the street, looking for somewhere to wash off the sticky red blood and dump their sopping wet pants and shirts.
Stopping near a house, they found a hose and were rinsing off when an older man came out. Tex told him they were out on a late-night stroll and had gotten thirsty. “We’re just getting a drink of water,” he said. “Sorry we disturbed you.”
But the man didn’t believe him. “Is that your car down there?” he asked.
“No,” Tex said. “We’re walking.”
Tex had no idea that the man was a sheriff’s reserve police officer. As the group trotted back to the car, the officer’s wife yelled from the house that he should get their license plate number. Although the officer tried to reach inside the car and take their keys, Tex was able to close the window, start up the car, and drive off before the officer could stop them.
The officer did manage to get the plate number, but he didn’t bother to report the incident to police.
Cruising along Mulholland Drive, Tex swerved all over the road.
“Pull over,” one of the girls said.
They stopped, threw their wet clothes into a canyon, and continued on.
While Linda was wiping the Buck knives clean of fingerprints and tossing them out the window, Sadie announced that she’d accidentally left hers at the house. Tex threw the Buntline out the window and into some bushes.
Once they reached the San Fernando Valley, they stopped at a gas station, where Tex told the girls to go finish washing off the blood.
As he stood in the men’s room, Tex looked in the mirror, trying to figure out who he was. He didn’t see himself. He saw an animal looking back at him. He couldn’t remember the order of the victims he’d killed that night, only that he’d stabbed or shot every single one of them.
When he returned to the car, he was happy to let one of the girls drive back to the ranch.
It was the middle of the night when they arrived at Spahn. But Charlie was still up and waiting for them, wondering why they were back so soon.
Tex explained what they’d just done, gruesome and gory just like Charlie had ordered, and waited for his approval.
“Do you have any remorse for your actions?” Charlie asked each of them.
None of them wanted to disappoint him, so they gave the answer they knew he wanted: “No,” they said.
Truthfully, Katie felt dead inside. Empty. She’d conditioned herself over the past eighteen months to try to feel nothing as she followed Charlie’s orders and subverted her own will. Yet she felt dirty, hopeless, and miserable nonetheless.
“Charlie, they were so young,” said Katie, who, like Sadie, was twenty-one, at least five years younger than all their victims that night.
When Tex had told her to go to the guesthouse, Katie knew that she was supposed to kill anyone she found inside, but she didn’t have the energy to even try. She was simply spent. So she just waited outside until things quieted down, and by the time she returned to the main house it was time to go.
Thinking that Charlie seemed satisfied with their night’s work, Tex went to bed without saying another word about it. He slept late and got up as if nothing had happened, as if it were all a dream.
Later that day, biker Danny DeCarlo sensed that something was up. People knew something they weren’t telling him.
“What did you do last night?” DeCarlo asked Clem, fishing for clues.
Clem was an eighteen-year-old Family member who always had a smile on his face. He didn’t seem very bright, had done a short stint at the Camarillo state mental hospital after an arrest for indecent exposure, and regularly did so many drugs—from mescaline to angel dust, LSD, and heroin—the others called him Scramblehead. But Charlie liked and trusted him, because he was loyal and did what he was told.
Clem gave DeCarlo a half-smile as he looked over DeCarlo’s shoulder. Turning around, the biker saw Charlie standing behind him, looking at the kid with an expression that said, “keep your mouth shut.”
“We took care of business,” Charlie said, then walked away.
Pressed for details, Clem would only say cryptically that, “We got five piggies.”
With no idea what Clem was talking about, DeCarlo shrugged it off.