chapter one

THE FORMOSA CAFÉ

1995

 

I walked into the Formosa Café, adjusted my eyes to the relative dark, and scanned the bar, looking for George, the man I was scheduled to meet. It was 1995 and I was researching a story about settled gypsies, and George, who was one, wanted to meet in Hollywood, far from the authoritarian eyes of the patriarch of his clan in Northern California. I’d suggested the Formosa Café because it was close to where he was living or said he was living, and it was the only bar I still knew in Hollywood, having left the city, my youth, and the bad food at the Formosa more than thirty years before.

I didn’t see him when I arrived, so I sat idly watching a tennis match on the TV above the bar. A fleshy man in his late forties, looking uncomfortable in a starched white shirt and pinstriped suit, took the stool next to me. He ordered an Anchor Steam and asked the bartender if he minded switching the channel to the O.J. trial—a request I found puzzling. Even in L.A., most people were taking a break from the proceedings; criminalist Dennis Fung had been droning on for days and all but the most ardent trial watchers had tuned out.

The bartender, a lean, upright man in a waiter’s uniform left over from the same era as most of the movie stars whose autographed black-and-white photos were displayed on the walls, handed him the remote. The man clicked through the channels, stopping when he heard “crime of the century.” But Dennis Fung wasn’t on the screen. Instead, a pretty woman who resembled Mary Tyler Moore was talking about remorse. In 1969, she and three others were involved in the murder of a couple—a thirty-nine-year-old woman, a wife and mother of two, and her forty-four-year-old husband.

“Who is that?” my bar partner said.

“Leslie Van Houten,” I said. “One of the Manson women.”

I hadn’t seen her face for twenty-five years. Of all the actors in that horror show, she was the most puzzling to me. Maybe it was her wholesomeness, her doe eyes, her fresh face.

She was saying that the older she got, the harder it was to reconcile herself to what happened. “Mrs. LaBianca was younger than I am now. I took away all that life.”

We were watching a documentary about Charles Manson called A Journey to Evil. There were clips of prison interviews with two of Manson’s accomplices: Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. Both were expressing remorse.

“It’s bullshit,” the guy on the next stool said. “It’s an act. They’re sick. The whole lot of them.”

Manson’s diabolical face then appeared on the screen to proclaim his resolute lack of remorse. “Woman, that doesn’t wrinkle my forehead none,” he said when the interviewer asked how he felt about Sharon Tate’s murder.

He continued with his trademark mumbo jumbo, and the guy at the bar decided he was more interested in the current trial of the century and switched to Dennis Fung. After a half hour I gave up on the gypsy and walked out into the afternoon sun.

It was February and one of those rare L.A. days when the air is cool, the sky the color of cornflowers, and the tops of the palm trees more than an impressionistic blur. The Santa Monica Mountains that bound that end of the city were startlingly clear. I remembered being delighted years before when a man at a dinner party in San Francisco proclaimed that nowhere else on earth was there an uglier juxtaposition of mountain and ocean than in Los Angeles.

I had fled the city because of the usual culprits: the car-choked freeways, the ubiquity of strip malls and asphalt, the lung-bruising air. But I was also fleeing the very thing that drew my grandparents there in the early years of the century: the atmosphere of boundless possibility. Since its inception, L.A. had been a place to experiment, to shed the past. But a place that lends itself so readily to transformation is, by its very nature, ephemeral, and when I was growing up, it all felt a little too impermanent.

But now the city stirred some ineffable longing in me; it was no longer the bad air, but other particulates—the night-blooming jasmine, seedy cocktail lounges, red hibiscus, and bungalow courts—that made it hurt when I breathed. What once seemed so transient had become bedrock.

I walked down Formosa Avenue past the Warner-Hollywood Studios, the costume supply and post-production companies, and stucco garden apartments with bars on the windows. Even in the days when Hollywood could claim some glamour, this neighborhood was the underbelly. I thought about the Manson women and how the guy in the bar declared them “sick” with such certainty. His characterization was kinder than prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s who, in Helter Skelter, the best-selling account of the murders, described them to the jury as “human monsters, mutations without hearts, without souls.”

I first read Helter Skelter in 1975 when I was at home luxuriating in what were supposed to be deliciously indolent days following the birth of my youngest child. A good friend had given it to me, as he wrote in the inscription, “to entertain you while you nurse your new baby.” My husband thought another book for my infant care collection might have been a more appropriate gift, but this friend and I had long shared an interest in the murders.

We’d met working in a residential program for young, first break schizophrenics. At the time, I was the program director and a psychiatric social worker; he was an intern getting his PhD in psychology. We were both interested in looking at disturbed behavior in the context of family systems. The young people in Manson’s group had rejected their families of origin and had created a new one—one that redefined family and, in the process, stripped them of their basic humanity.

Jacob, the book giver, knew I had more personal reasons to be interested in the case. I’d attended Hollywood High School where I’d been friends with two key figures in the Helter Skelter story—Stephen Kay, the young deputy district attorney who assisted Vincent Bugliosi at the trial; and Catherine Share, aka Gypsy, who had assisted Charles Manson in recruiting young girls into his tribe.

Also, there were issues in my own family of origin that were somewhat parallel, though certainly not as extreme. My brother had served time for a home invasion robbery, and Jacob knew how that had affected me. Like the young people in Manson’s group, my brother was the offspring of middle-class parents who had high expectations of him. Like Leslie Van Houten, he was popular, smart, good looking, affable. He, too, dropped out of college, lived both aimlessly and recklessly, saturating his brain with psychedelics. This described thousands of kids in the 1960s, but few of them committed crimes like my brother—a frightening home invasion that involved an older couple. He had been incarcerated at the California Institution for Men in Chino, just a few miles from the prison where the three Manson women ended up.

So, despite my personal reasons to be interested in the case, I had just as many reasons to avoid it, reasons about which Jacob was oblivious. He was not yet a father and had a limited understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities of nursing mothers. While Helter Skelter was indeed a page-turner, I was so frightened by the contents, the book itself became a totemic embodiment of evil that I couldn’t bear to have in the same room as my freshly minted daughter or my six-year-old son. The idea of random savagery is especially terrifying when your protective hormones are at their peak and safeguarding your baby’s every breath is your total preoccupation.

But it wasn’t Charles Manson, an old-fashioned psychopath with a New Age angle, who was the source of my terror. Because he looked deranged, he was somehow easier for me to dismiss. It was the women. Their seeming normality coupled with the barbarity of the crimes, their insult-to-injury behavior during the trial, their mocking disdain for the grief of the victims’ families—ten families in all—was unfathomable. And because I had known Catherine Share, Manson’s chief recruiter, when she was a bright, pretty, and all-around appealing high school student, her devotion to him was even more startling. While she didn’t directly participate in the Tate-LaBianca murders, she committed other crimes at his direction.

In my mind, the description of the murdered Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, curled in a fetal position, her silky blond hair and the pattern of her floral lingerie nearly obscured by a cloak of blood, were superimposed on the photos of Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins at the trial, holding hands, skipping down the courthouse halls singing Manson’s songs, looking as though they were on their way to some kind of hippie hoedown. The images of those girls and the brutal murders would float in and out of my consciousness for the next couple of decades.

Since the Tate-LaBianca murders, Charles Manson had achieved almost mythic status in the country. To a subgroup of disaffected European and American youth he was a folk hero, an inspiration, an eternal rebel without a cause. To the rest of us, in his pint-size way, he had become as much a symbol of evil as Hitler. Though Manson didn’t personally kill any of those seven people, he was more widely known than any other serial killer.

One of the impenetrable mysteries of Hitler’s Holocaust continues to be the unspeakable brutality of ordinary Germans—middle-class people who contributed in direct and intimate ways to the slaughter of Jews. Similarly, the enduring potency of the Manson myth derives not only from his involvement in the murders but from his deft extermination of the humanity of seemingly normal young people who killed at his behest.

After a glimpse of Leslie Van Houten’s and Patricia Krenwinkel’s apparent penitence, I wanted to find out about their journey, and that of Susan Atkins, the third woman who was convicted with them. I remembered Leslie’s attorney, Maxwell Keith, pleading with the jury: “Study her, don’t kill her.” The jury had decided to kill her anyway—a decision that was later reversed when the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty law, as it was then written, unconstitutional. (See chapter 7.)

So had she been studied? Did the women have, as Vincent Bugliosi contended, something “deep in their souls” that would have propelled them to violence even without Manson? Or were they simply forlorn, impressionable youngsters whose minds were rendered useless because of a combination of social turmoil, drugs, and the exquisite manipulative skills of a psychopath? From their perch of middle age, what was their understanding of why on two successive nights in 1969 they participated in the murders of seven people they did not know?

I wrote to Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel at the California Institution for Women at Frontera, requesting interviews. For reasons I will explain later, I decided to hold off on contacting Susan Atkins.