CHAPTER SEVEN

“I knew a guy that used to work in the stockyards and he used to kill cows all day long with a big sledgehammer, and then go home at night and eat dinner with his children and eat the meat that he slaughtered. Then he would go to church and read the Bible, and he would say, ‘That is not killing.’ And I look at him and I say, ‘That doesn’t make any sense, what are you talking about?’”

—CHARLES MANSON, COURT STATEMENT, NOVEMBER 19, 1970

According to Charlie, Helter Skelter was closer than ever.

The Family was instructed to focus on its preparations. The mechanics—heck, anyone who could tighten a lug nut or help lift an engine block—were converting any vehicles they could into dune buggies, the better to negotiate the rough terrain at Barker Ranch.

Family members had been doing so all along, but now there was an intensity to their work. When Barbara Hoyt first joined the Family in the spring of 1969, she had been enthused about their automotive work, even against the backdrop of an impending race war.

“They were building dune buggies with fur seats and gun mounts,” Hoyt would later say. “They were making clothes out of hides. It was like they were all pioneers. I thought, ‘Wow! This is fun. It’s like camping.’”

The activities remained the same, but the mood changed after the Tate/ LaBianca murders. Manson knew he needed to go to Barker Ranch, deeper into the desert, to avoid the worst of the anticipated uprisings. And that meant he had to spur Family members to work harder than they ever had.

“We never had newspapers at the Spahn Ranch, but Charlie got an LA Times with headlines about the Tate/LaBianca killings,” Catherine Share later shared.

“He held it up and said, ‘It’s started.’ He said we had to get out of town, because it was now dangerous. We were up day and night putting food into barrels and getting our last clothes together, the leather outfits we’d been working on. We had three dune buggies with roll bars and machine gun mounts. It was apocalyptic.

“No one spoke of any alternative.”

Despite Manson’s prohibition against eating meat, the Family did use furs and hides, both for its cars and its clothing. Since they would not kill animals, they had to buy or steal their skins.

They didn’t give much thought to the inconsistency. They probably thought that animals were blameless, unlike people. But the reasons did not matter. Manson was, after all, their infallible leader. He also, of course, was insane.

Even so, he was still functioning—and at a high and dangerous level. He had warped the minds of Family members so thoroughly that they would prepare for carnage without thought of their former actual families or loved ones. He had instilled in them his messianic fervor.

“[W]e’d learn to live off the land,” Share recalled. “We’d live in the desert and come in on dune buggies and rescue the orphaned white babies. We’d be the saviors.

“I believed that the cities were going to burn. I believed my only safety was to stay with the Family.

“I believed Charlie knew best.”

Manson continued to prep the Barker Ranch for the Family’s arrival. The ranch, which consisted of a series of stucco and stone buildings, was once pretty. It certainly had a gorgeous vista: it sat on a hill overlooking Death Valley.

And, of course, a settlement atop a hill is easier to defend.

In mid-August, he sent Tex Watson and Dianne Lake to the ranch. Watson was an obvious choice to be sent from Spahn, as he’d been involved with both the Tate and LaBianca murders. If anyone could be linked to both crimes, it would either be him or Patricia Krenwinkel.

Lake, at age fifteen, represented another liability for Manson. She was far and away the youngest non-baby member of the Family, and if she were around when any law enforcement agents happened to drop in, there would be a lot of questions

Manson would not want to answer. So she was sent to the relative isolation of Barker Ranch.

There was someone else Manson would have benefitted from sending away, but did not. Straight Satans treasurer Danny DeCarlo was still hanging around, keeping the weapons working, having sex whenever he felt like it, lying in the sun and drinking—despite Manson’s low tolerance for alcohol, which he considered inefficient as a drug that allowed him to exert control. Manson continued to tolerate him because he was hoping to lure more of the Straight Satans onto the ranch to serve as a militia.

The irony of the messiah served by agents of “Satan” probably did not even occur to him.

Most of the other Straight Satans, however, were not interested in the Manson-centered religious offerings served up at Spahn Ranch. They were outlaws, not disciples. If they had to have a God, it was not going to be Charles Manson but Harley-Davidson.

Furthermore, the club wanted their treasurer back. On August 15, a double handful roared into Spahn Ranch, demanding that Manson turn DeCarlo over to them.

Manson greeted them with open arms. Some of the girls opened other limbs for them, simultaneously taking the edge off the bikers’ fury and also splitting—and exhausting—the group. Once the motorcyclists’ war fires had been cooled, they reconvened in the center of the movie sets that made up the ranch.

Manson had a surprise for them: DeCarlo was nowhere to be found. Neither were several rifles usually kept in the Family’s gun racks. Manson’s men were, in fact, on the roofs of the movie set. From atop the Longhorn Saloon, the Rock City Café, and other structures, Family members were armed and ready to pick off any Straight Satan who made a move on Manson. It was a trap straight out of the westerns filmed on the ranch. If there were any life into which reality and fantasy were destined to become a messy blur, it was that of Charlie Manson.

The Straight Satans backed down. They had no choice. But they left one of their own, Robert Reinhard, to find DeCarlo and convince him to return to them. To avoid having their trip seem like a total rout, they took back the cutlass Manson had been carrying ever since he snatched it from DeCarlo.

Within twenty-four hours, whatever plans the Straight Satans and the Family had had taken a sharp left turn. At dawn on Saturday, August 16, more than one hundred law-enforcement officials swarmed over the ranch, rousting sleepers, scaring animals, and seizing weapons and vehicles.

As helicopters buzzed overhead, ranch hands and Family members alike were rounded up like herds of cattle. In all, twenty-six people were arrested, including DeCarlo, Manson, and Reinhard. Over protests, a handful of babies and toddlers, including Linda Kasabian’s daughter and DeCarlo’s one-and-a-half-year-old son, were placed into foster homes.

Manson was dragged out from under one of the buildings and cuffed; he must have been terrified the raid was in response to the Tate and LaBianca killings. He was a messiah, but he was not prepared to be a martyr. When the arrest warrant indicated authorities were looking for automobiles, auto parts, and guns, it must have been a relief.

Manson would have been even more relieved when, two days later, all charges again him and his Family were dropped. The search warrant had the wrong date on it—the raid was originally scheduled three days earlier than it had occurred—and every one of the arrests was invalid. And with that, the Family returned to Spahn Ranch.

Unfortunately, the vehicles the Family had stolen, including all the cars that were being transformed into dune buggies, were not.

However, with the arrest—and the removal of the vehicles—at least one of Manson’s problems was resolved. Most of the reasons DeCarlo would have had for staying were gone. Absent the promise of the motorcycle gang serving as a brute squad, and given DeCarlo’s flouting of Manson’s alcohol rules and not buying into Manson’s philosophy, DeCarlo had little to offer the Family. So they stopped offering him anything he wanted. DeCarlo had no more reason to stay, and left the ranch within two weeks.

Goodbye, Donkey Dan. Goodbye, threat from the Straight Satans.

But not quite.

Without the lure of the Manson girls or the Spahn Ranch lifestyle, DeCarlo had no reason to keep Family secrets. After being picked up on unrelated charges a few months later, he traded evidence on the Manson Family for immunity.

While he was able to duck the local charges, DeCarlo did not get immunity on a federal gun charge. He opted to flee to Canada without collecting his share of the $25,000 reward Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, and others had posted.

Manson, meanwhile, had a new concern. He could not figure out why the Spahn Ranch had been raided. The somewhat banal reason was that a police helicopter had seen a Volkswagen in a ditch on the ranch, checked its license plate, and determined that the car had been stolen. But Manson had no way of knowing that.

Lacking this knowledge, wondering if there might be spies or informants, paranoia within the Family was ratcheted to a new high. And it had a perfect target.

Donald “Shorty” Shea, who lived away from the ranch, had not been arrested. That was the same Shea whom Lynette Fromme had heard ranch owner George Spahn recommend be used as a spy against the Family. The same Shea who had beaten the crap out of Manson earlier in 1969.

On August 15, 1969, Shea delivered yet another affront to Manson.

Manson, who had preached fear of the militant black man.

Manson, whose path to glory was grounded in the idea that blacks were intellectually inferior and, post-Helter Skelter, would have no choice but to recognize his superiority and crown him their leader.

Manson, who was being targeted by the Black Panthers for having killed one of theirs, or so he thought.

On this day, Shea brought his new wife to the Spahn Ranch. He had met the woman Magdalena (sometimes Magdalene) three months previously. She had been performing in a topless bar in Carson, California that Shea managed. She was beautiful. She was bold.

She was black.

When they were introduced, Manson was incensed. As Manson processed the personal disrespect, let alone the clear security breach of introducing a black person to their hideout, he was filled with fury.

In essence, Shorty Shea was a dead man walking.

Shea was a big, tough man, and it was going to require several people to take him down...and not all of them were going to be in the inner circle.

Early one morning on August 26, a few weeks after the Tate/LaBianca killings, Manson pulled Bruce Davis, Clem Grogan, Bill Vance, and Tex Watson aside.

Shea was an informant, Manson said. He needed to die, and they would be the ones to take his life.

Davis would later be asked why he would readily kill someone for Manson with virtually no evidence against that person. Davis said his mental moral facilities had “declined over time,” possibly as a result of his being distanced from society; possibly as a result of the ever-present drug supplies at the ranch. Physical isolation, control of the media, forging personal relationships, and the use of drugs are four of the cornerstones of mind control by cults and by nations. With intuitive sophistication, Manson had deployed them all.

“The state I was in...I didn’t ask any questions,” Davis replied.

Like so much of what went on within both the Family and Manson’s corrupted head, there was probably more than one reason why Shea was killed. The least likely is that Manson felt Shea was a snitch. But he needed a reason that would resonate with anyone he asked to help him. And acting for the good of the Family, and Charlie Manson, had been set up as the most noble possible justification.

But there were a few other reasons. His wife was a big one. The beating he had given Manson earlier in the year was a wound that had continued to fester. His refusal to join the Family was a personal rejection. Each, in Manson’s mind, was all the justification he would need.

At the start of the workday on August 26, the men approached Shea; they needed a lift to where the Family stored auto parts for the cars it repaired and the fresh supply of dune buggies it was building. Shea drove, which would divert his attention from the others in the vehicle. Tex Watson sat next to him in the passenger seat. Clem Grogan sat behind Shea, and Davis was behind Watson.

Manson followed in a second car. They never made it to the auto parts area.

During the ride, Watson told Shea to pull over. Shea refused, and Watson stabbed him. Message received. Shea parked near an embankment. From the backseat, Grogan smacked Shea’s head with a pipe.

Still alive, still vaguely aware, Shea was pulled from behind the wheel and half-dragged, half-thrown down the embankment. Then, like human coyotes, Watson and Grogan set on him, stabbing and beating him.

Davis initially stayed behind in the car, but there was no way Manson would allow that. When Manson pulled up, he quietly went to Davis and quietly urged, “C’mon.” And so Davis followed.

For this particular target, Manson was going to get his hands dirty, joining Grogan and Watson in stabbing Shea.

Davis had a machete, and Manson had wanted him to cut Shea’s head off—but he couldn’t as his knife was too blunt. Manson was not going to let him off without doing some damage, however, so Davis hacked at Shea’s shoulder with a knife.

In his dying moments, Shea looked at Manson and pleaded, “Charlie, why are you doing this?”

“Here’s why,” Manson said, mustering fresh hate and stabbing him again.

Never ask why.

The four buried Shea and returned to the ranch. There were several factors that kept the murder of Donald Shea from being the perfect crime.

The biggest was that most of the people involved could not keep their mouths shut.

Once again, whispers started on the ranch, both internally and externally. Shorty had fled. Shorty was dead. Shorty had been cut up into nine parts, each of which was buried somewhere. Davis himself helped spread that rumor, boasting to Straight Satans member Alan Springer that they had cut off Shea’s limbs and buried the parts around the ranch. The “nine parts” rumor persisted until Clem Grogan drew his map of where the body was buried in 1985, which would help secure his parole.

The next day, a few Family members gathered up Shea’s belongings, threw them into his car, and abandoned it in the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park.

During the next few days, Family members casually mentioned around that Shea had gone to San Francisco to pursue a job opportunity.

* * *

The previous few weeks had delivered a few unexpected and unprecedented cracks in Manson’s seeming omnipotence.

First, there was the raid. The Family was too cut off from society to know whether Helter Skelter was really starting—but if it had, it was not widespread enough to prevent law enforcement from sparing the manpower to converge on Spahn Ranch.

Donald Shea’s disappearance would not normally have been a big deal—he supplemented his income from Spahn Ranch with all sorts of offsite jobs—but there had been rumors among the less plugged-in Family members that he had not really gone to San Francisco. Translation: Manson had lied to them.

And the dune buggies that were supposed to bring the Family from the admittedly unpleasant Barker Ranch to the bottomless pit were gone, although Manson had put a premium on raising cash and car thefts to replace them. How had their leader not foreseen something that big and had a backup plan?

Finally, the Family was under-equipped and everyone knew it. While they still had caches of guns and fuel that had been buried, it was much more difficult to hide dune buggies and other vehicles, and the authorities, aided by helicopters, had done a good job of rooting them from their hiding spots. The Family stole a few cars, perhaps taking risks it might not have under different circumstances. But there was no time to be cautious, if they ever were. The Family, minus a few women left behind so the welcome mat at Spahn Ranch would not be completely rolled up but plus a handful of newer recruits, was going to go deep into the desert of Death Valley.

To a large degree, the return of familiar routine re-established both Manson’s control and a sense of general well-being among the Family.

By the end of the first week in September, most of the Family had resettled at Barker Ranch. Manson kept them busy preparing for an attack, although who exactly was going to attack them—the Black Panthers, the Straight Satans, another round of law enforcement—changed as frequently as Manson’s mood.

Men were assigned guard duty, which kept them isolated, in the shade, and off the harsher work details. Manson instinctively knew what political leaders since the Roman emperor Octavius have known: above all, keep your military happy.

Manson’s girls were kept busy cooking, cleaning, and chopping firewood in the desert heat. For them, a cushy work detail—one in which men participated as well—was grabbing one of the dune buggies and going into the desert, looking for the bottomless pit Manson promised would lead them to an underground paradise, where they would wait out Helter Skelter.

The desert lectures continued, but the free-love idyll of Stranger in a Strange Land was gone. This was the trial by fire; Manson’s nightly sermons, augmented by acid whenever he could get it, were now almost exclusively about the next world. It was one of the few enticements he could still offer. Food supplies were low, reflecting the Family’s isolation. Drugs, so useful in keeping his followers docile, were available only sporadically. But the promise of a world to come was something he could draw on without limits.

“He felt a weird sense of responsibility when the Family thing was happening and they were in the desert,” said Marlin Marynick. “I think when he hit a point where he thought The Beatles were talking to him and there’s going to be this race war and they have to dig into the center of the earth...to me it sounds like a psychotic break. I think the guy had a nervous breakdown,” he added. He had experience with this type of thing from his time working as a psychiatric nurse. “Everyone calls him a master manipulator. I don’t see it, myself—I think they were all fending for themselves, but there was a lot of drugs, a lot of communal living and I think he obviously had some mental health issues for sure.”

Some seemed to buy into the religious mania wholeheartedly. Leslie Van Houten was not shy about describing herself in divine terms.

“I think I’m an angel, so to speak,” she would later tell one of her attorneys.

“Not with wings, you know. Naturally I know I don’t have wings. But...I believe I’m one of the disciples. I’m one of the people spoken about in the Bible.”

Was Van Houten angling for a diminished capacity consideration when she said that? It’s possible, but believing that flies in the face of the effective brain-washing techniques Manson had used on his group.

Furthermore, Van Houten was only one among many who, whether through desire to believe Manson or sheer exhaustion, had surrendered to his vision.

And Manson’s visions were getting wilder. Like a prophet in the wilderness, isolation affected him, too. Paul Watkins described how Manson painted a vivid picture of the bottomless pit the Family was seeking.

The entrance would be guarded by rattlesnakes, and the Family’s first lesson would be making friends with the snakes and learning how to get around them, according to Watkins. In his prison writings posted online, he also described how once past the snakes, there would be a series of chambers and tunnels which would eventually open into a city of gold.

There would be light without sun. And, in an image taken from Revelation 22:2, there would be trees that bore fruit, with a single tree producing a different type of delicious fruit every month.

To people scrabbling in the hard soil of the desert, that alone would have sounded like paradise.

But Manson was not the only one talking. While he did his best to keep the Family constantly occupied, if not in a state of perpetual exhaustion, the isolation of the Barker and Myers ranches loosened tongues.

“In early September, I was taking a nap in the bedroom at Myers Ranch, a half mile away” from Barker Ranch, Barbara Hoyt later recalled.

“I woke up and heard Sadie [Susan Atkins] talking to Ruth Ann Morehouse. I didn’t pay any attention until I heard the name ‘Tate.’ Then I started listening. She said that Sharon Tate was the last to die, that she had to watch the others die first. She said that Sharon had called for her mother. She said that Abigail had called for God, and she said that Tex ran over and gutted her.”

These were the people with whom Hoyt was living in isolation. She was hours away from the nearest settlement, which was over desert terrain. But by early October, she did not care. She grabbed Sherry Cooper—one of the other Manson girls she felt she could trust—and the two of them walked through desert terrain to Ballarat, a former supply point for mining operations.

Cooper was a good choice for Hoyt’s traveling companion. She had been involved with Danny DeCarlo, and apparently shared his concerns about the Family.

But before that could happen, the girls had to get to safety. The town of Ballarat lies just under 22 miles north and west of Barker Ranch, and Family members who had been living at Barker would occasionally go to its general store for supplies.

Hoyt would later estimate it took them between fifteen and sixteen hours to walk there. This may have been because they were moving slowly due to heat or exhaustion. Or they may have been careful to stay hidden in what little cover they could find when they heard anyone coming; Manson had posted armed guards around the perimeter of the ranch, nominally to keep trespassers out.

Or, given Manson’s refusal to let them have watches, they may have just over-estimated their journey.

Regardless, it must have been grueling, and there was not much there for the girls when they arrived. At its peak, Ballarat had three hotels, seven saloons, and a post office, but its peak had been right around 1900. By the time Cooper and Hoyt showed up, it had little more than the general store. Still, one of the four or five people who lived there gave the girls a lift to Los Angeles.

After Cooper fled Barker Ranch, she and DeCarlo would go to Canada together and get married.

Hoyt stayed with her family—her biological family, alternating between her grandmother’s and mother’s homes. But during the first months away from Manson, she remained certain the Family would come for her.

“I slept all day and stayed up all night,” she would later tell Los Angeles magazine. “I kept my mother’s biggest kitchen knife with me. I was guarding the house. I went from one window to another.”

“When I told my mother what I knew, she didn’t want to believe it.”

Cooper and Hoyt were not the only people at Barker Ranch who had seen flaws in their leader. Spahn Ranch worker Juan Flynn did not consider himself a Family member, but had gone into the desert with Manson in an attempt to pick up clues about what had happened to Donald Shea. By this point, Manson and others were openly bragging about what they had done.

That knowledge did not do Flynn much good. The Family had only a few vehicles, so taking one and trying to bolt would have caused suspicion. Besides, there were the armed guards Manson had posted—the same ones Cooper and Hoyt had avoided by quietly walking away from the ranch. Juan waited, looking for an opportunity to do...something.

Manson would ultimately give Flynn his opportunity. By early September 1969, when the Family began using the ranch as its primary base, Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins were occasionally seen prospecting with Paul Crockett, the miner who had pulled them from the Family.

In mid-September, Manson approached Crockett, trying to draw the prospector and his two former Family assistants back into the fold, but Crockett stood his ground.

Manson had another reason for engaging Crockett: The prospector had managed to pull two of his Family members from him.

“[H]e knew he had the power to get people to do anything he wanted once he got them,” Crockett said. “What he was more interested in was, how did I...undo what he had already done to them?”

Crockett was willing to engage in discussions about Scientology with Manson, but he was not going to give too much away about how he had been able to lure away Manson’s followers. As long as Crockett kept a little mystery, he maintained his chances of staying alive.

Crockett was also willing, on a very limited basis, to help Manson transport supplies to Barker Ranch. It was all part of being a good, cooperative neighbor. Your people can work with me. We can help each other.

And again, being useful helped keep him off Manson’s hit list...or so he thought.

Having failed to co-opt Crockett, Manson turned to his fallback solution—eliminating him. But again, Manson made a poor choice. Rather than turn to one in his inner circle to do the job, he decided to entrust Juan Flynn with the task.

Flynn was tall, physically imposing, strong from all the ranch work he had done, and a Vietnam vet. He was a perfect choice to serve as Manson’s hit man.

Except it didn’t work. Like Poston and Watkins before him, Flynn threw his lot in with the prospector. Manson was incensed.

Fate once again threw an obstacle in the way of Manson getting revenge on Crockett. This time, the obstacle was physical. The Family had been tearing up the desert in a variety of vehicles, including dune buggies, a Ford rented with a stolen credit card and a four-wheel-drive red Toyota Land Cruiser stolen shortly before the move to Barker Ranch. On September 19, Family members came across a Michigan front-end loader earth-moving machine blocking one of their favorite roads.

Manson ordered it set on fire. Speculation regarding why has ranged from his fury at the road being blocked—yet another challenge to his authority—to what the machine represented in terms of environmental damage. This impulse turned out as well as Manson’s other crimes. Inyo County had just paid $35,000—close to a quarter million dollars at 2019 prices—for the machine. County officials wanted heads.

Park rangers investigated. They noted several sets of tire tracks leading from the crime scene, including those belonging to a Toyota Land Cruiser. When they asked around the few people within driving distance of the incident, they heard that yes, people had seen a Land Cruiser recently. A bright red one, which was being driven by some hippies who lived up around the Barker Ranch.

On September 29, Powell and California Highway Patrolman James Pursell visited Barker Ranch, but did not find much. Only two of the Manson girls were in residence, with the rest of the Family having gone out on various errands. They had also taken their vehicles with them.

Bad luck. But the rangers got some good luck as they were driving away when they came across a truck containing two prospectors. Brooks Poston was at the wheel, and next to him was Paul Crockett.

The two seemed nervous, and after interviewing them police understood why. They told a wild tale of a messianic hippie cult in which sex, drugs, and preparing for a racial war were the orders of the day. They also were storing tires, tanks of gasoline, and weapons in stashes throughout the desert.

Intrigued, Powell and Pursell turned around and did a sweep of the area around Barker Ranch. This time, they ran into seven of the Manson girls, camped out and enjoying the sun. Several were enjoying it fully—they were completely naked.

Lynette Fromme, who had been sunbathing in the altogether, stood up as the officers approached. Pursell demanded to know who they were and what they were doing, but could not help noticing she was a natural redhead.

“We’re a Girl Scout troop from the Bay Area,” Fromme said. “Would you and the ranger like to be our scoutmasters?”

They clearly were not Girl Scouts. Girl Scouts would not have had two vehicles, each with gun scabbards holding a rifle, near their campsite. One was a dune buggy.

The other was a red four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser.

Pursell took the vehicle identification numbers from each car. He could not call them in, as his radio would not work in the valley. But when Pursell returned to his station, he ran them. Unsurprisingly, both came back listed as stolen.

* * *

Crockett and Poston were spooked; the Family had been creepy crawling around their lodgings.

“[T]his Charlie...he can sneak into your camp, he can sit six feet from you in the back of a window or something like that and hear everything that is going on. The next time he sees you he tells you your whole conversation, and he starts laughing,” Crockett would tell investigators.

During the next few days, Crockett and Poston would end up speaking to more park rangers, sheriffs, and highway patrolmen, filling out the picture at Barker Ranch. They were advised to leave the site immediately.

Manson knew Crockett was speaking to law enforcement, and paid him one final visit.

“He said I should be more afraid of him than I was of the law,” Crockett said. “And he said it with a straight face, calmly and everything else. And that is the first time he had ever put on a straight face with me.”

Crockett and Poston went back to their base and packed while Flynn was out scouting for alternate locations where the prospectors could live and work; Paul Watkins had been shuttling back and forth between Barker Ranch and Crockett’s site.

Crockett and Poston packed a few cans of food and walked 20 miles through the desert. They would eventually rendezvous with Flynn and Watkins at a new site in the appropriately named Independence, California.

* * *

Tex Watson, too, was having doubts as the Family lived at the Barker Ranch. The heat was oppressive and the drug supply was thin. In addition, Manson had been more prone to anger. The endless hours of guard duty were not as much fun as the time spent doing auto repair, or playing music, or being able to have sex with whomever he wanted.

Then Powell and Pursell started sniffing around Barker Ranch.

Manson felt sure they would soon come back. He gave Watson a shotgun and told him to kill them. With that, Charlie Manson, leader of the Family, savior and messiah who would lead his followers into the glories of the bottomless pit as they sang songs he wrote, left the ranch on a fundraising run.

For Watson, being ordered to murder law enforcement was finally going too far. “[T]he next morning I took off in an old pickup and ran from Charlie. I drove the truck as far as it would go. I hitchhiked to the city, called my parents for money, and flew to Texas.”

There is a key difference between paranoia and fear. Fear arises from a clear and present threat. With paranoia, someone suspects that enemy forces are out to get them. A grandiose person can believe he is smarter, stronger, or otherwise better equipped to fend those forces off.

Manson had been paranoid for a while. But with the loss of Watson, fear came to the forefront. Tex had been involved in eight Family killings—including Donald Shea’s, in which Manson, too, had an active hand. Losing Watson—losing control of Watson—made Manson vulnerable to being prosecuted, if he were again arrested.

Manson could not have known that Watson, back in his home state, would spend several weeks in a near-catatonic state. He had had—or really wanted people to think he had—a complete mental breakdown.

Manson likely would not have cared. During his sermons, when he would draw on his prison experiences, he always said that if he were arrested, he would “act crazy” in prison to avoid being hassled. If Family members ever heard of him being crazy while locked up, they would do well to remember that was just Charlie once again outplaying the system.

There was no reason to believe Watson would not do the same. After all, Manson had taught him well.

With Watson gone, Manson was running out of males he could rely on. The only one left was Clem Grogan. So when Manson left, the Family’s enforcement branch was being headed by a young man people called Scramblehead. Kathy Lutesinger, well into her second trimester with Bobby Beausoleil’s child, saw a chance. On the night of October 9, 1969, she tapped Manson’s main squeeze,

Stephanie Schram. That night, the two set out from Barker Ranch. Yet again, they proved Manson girls should not be confused with Girl Scouts. Absent a compass or knowledge of navigation by starlight, they walked a wide circle around the ranch, rather than away from it.

Dawn was coming. With it, their absence would be discovered. And then Grogan, who was eager to prove he would kill for Charlie Manson, who had access to several dune buggies, would be after them.

Although they did not know it, however, the cavalry was coming.

Shortly before dawn on October 10, a small joint force made up of officers from the California Highway Patrol, Inyo County Sheriff’s Department, and the National Parks Service maneuvered into position around Barker Ranch. Some were on foot, as the terrain would not allow most vehicles to pass—especially being that Family members had piled rocks in the roads.

One team, which was approaching the ranch from the west, was riding in on a Toyota Land Cruiser owned by one of the officers. It was one of the few vehicles the force had that could travel across the rough terrain.

The first Family members picked up were, perhaps, payback for Manson’s misplaced faith. On a hilltop, supposedly on guard duty but actually fast asleep with a sawed-off shotgun between them, were two guards. One was fifteen-year-old Hugh “Rocky” Todd, a relatively new recruit. The other was Manson’s hand-picked consigliere, Clem Grogan. The team in the Land Cruiser found and arrested them. Another lookout, eighteen-year-old Robert Ivan Lane, was also apprehended by that team.

There had been three arrests without even one shot being fired.

James Pursell, the California Highway Patrol officer who had gone to Barker Ranch two weeks before, and his partners, officers Jack O’Neil and Dave Steiber, were part of a team approaching from the east. O’Neil spotted a small cave, some-what protected from the elements by sheets of corrugated steel covered in dirt and sagebrush, in the side of a rise. O’Neil decided to hike around the rise so he could approach the cave from above. Pursell and Steiber remained in place, keeping an eye on it.

As the sun rose, they watched as three girls—Patricia Krenwinkel, Catherine Share, and Leslie Van Houten—ambled out of the cave and leisurely stretched.

When they were done, they went back into the cave. The girls never saw Pursell and Steiber.

The two officers crept toward the cave. When they were close, O’Neil picked up a large rock and dropped it on the corrugated steel. The noise was sharp in the gully. To those in the cave, it must have been deafening. They would later complain about having been shot at.

“Come on out of there!” ordered O’Neil.

The three girls did.

When the officers went into the cave, they found military field phones, the sort that are operated by a crank. They would find another one in the main cabin. The cave was being set up as a lookout point, but it had not been finished. It never would be.

No phone line meant the girls in the cave could not call the ranch house (while east and west teams approached the ranch house together). In short order they arrested Susan Atkins, twenty-three-year-old Madaline Cottage, and Lynette Fromme.

After the girls were placed in custody, Pursell did a quick head count. Where were the three guards who had been arrested?

Lane had been captured near a site called the Lotus Mine. The officers glimpsed him when he popped his head up from behind a rock. They had nabbed him and handcuffed him to an inch-and-a-half water pipe that led into the mine.

And Grogan and Todd?

“There was a big ore car beside the road, and [arresting officer Ben Anderson] said they handcuffed them around its axle and told them if they could carry that ore car then they were free to go,” Pursell said.

As the Barker Ranch teams started to pack up, two more girls came running out from an encampment.

It was Kathy Lutesinger and Stephanie Schram, who flagged the officers down and gave themselves up.

At the nearby Myers Ranch, another raiding party effortlessly rounded up Sandra Good, Ruth Ann Moorehouse, Nancy Pitman, and Diane Von Ahn, whose age was variously given as nineteen or twenty-one.

The raids had netted three men, ten girls, and two babies—Susan Atkins’s son

Zezozose, and Sunstone Hawk, whom Good had given birth to a month before. Both were sunburned and malnourished. They were immediately put under the care of a matron.

The raid turned up dune buggies, most of which had been made from stolen cars; a pistol; several knives; food; gasoline; and other survivalist supplies. The teams also found sleeping bags—more than the thirteen needed for those just arrested, indicating there were people living at the ranch who had not been caught. The raiding party would need to return for the rest.

All thirteen were brought to a jail in Independence, California. Steiber began interrogating the two girls who had given themselves up. He also called their homes. One of the parents told him their daughter was being sought by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a witness to a homicide. Steiber reached out to the department.

“He got a hold of a detective down there, and the detective said, ‘Hold. On. To. Them,’” Pursell recalled.

In the pre-cable days of 1969, the town of Independence did not get a lot of television news, and the only newspaper regularly serving the community was published in San Bernardino. Officers there had not received a lot of information about the Tate/LaBianca killings, and certainly would not have known about Gary Hinman or Donald Shea.

Pursell made good on his plan to go back to two days later. On October 12, he and three park rangers headed toward Barker Ranch. Along the way, they passed a stake bed truck loaded with drums of gasoline, dried food, and boxes of cold-weather gear that had gotten stuck in the sand.

Manson had scored on his cash run, and was bringing back a bounty.

Pursell called for backup, and he and his team continued toward Barker Ranch.

Two rangers set themselves up so they could cover both the front and side doors to the main cabin. Pursell and another ranger went to a vantage point and waited. Soon enough, they saw four people walking toward the cabin, including one bearded man clad head to toe in buckskin, to whom the others were clearly deferring. None of them saw the rangers as they entered the cabin.

The sun was setting, and Pursell did not want to start a gunfight at night.

When he saw reinforcements from the sheriff’s department in the distance, he decided to act.

Pursell and the rangers moved in, two to a door. Pursell drew his gun and threw open his door. Several Family members were sitting around a table, and Pursell told them to put their hands on their heads.

“And...everyone ignored me,” Pursell said. “I thought, ‘This isn’t how it’s done in the movies.’”

He repeated his order, emphasizing it with his gun. This time, they all obeyed. The rangers led them out of the cabin, one by one. Very soon, Family members including Bruce Davis, John Philip Haught, and Dianne Lake were all under arrest.

Charlie Manson was nowhere to be found.

It was getting dark, and the cabin was not wired for electricity. There was a candle in a glass mug on the dining room table, which Pursell grabbed with his left hand. Leading with his right—his gun hand—he went into the small bathroom.

The flickering candle revealed a sink with a small cupboard beneath it. The door to the cupboard was slightly open, and strands of long chestnut-colored hair were sticking out.

Pursell stood still, holding the candle and pointing his gun at the cupboard, which slowly opened further.

“[T]his figure starts unwinding and coming out,” Pursell said. “How he got into that cupboard, I’ll never know.”

“Hi!” said Charlie Manson.

“Make one wrong move and I’ll blow your head off,” replied Pursell.

Through the years, people have asked Pursell what stopped him from just shooting Manson at that moment.

“We really didn’t know what we had,” Pursell explains. “And you can’t just shoot someone that climbs out of a little cupboard and says, ‘Hi!’”

Pursell led Manson to where the others were waiting, and went back to check the last room.

Manson Family member Bill Vance was standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

“I then realized I had my back to him the entire time I was pulling Charlie out,”

Pursell said. “But as we learned later, nobody would do anything without the order from Charlie.”

During the drive to jail, Manson made one request. When he and the three other men had hiked to the cabin, he had stashed his guitar behind a rock to lighten his load. Might he be permitted to get off the truck and retrieve it?

Request denied. We can never know what was behind the query, whether he might have been looking for a desperate effort to escape or seeking a totem to get him through the ordeal ahead.

The Family members were charged with grand theft auto, arson—stemming from the burning of the earth mover—and a variety of other charges. The buckskin-clad leader of the group was booked as Manson, Charles M., a.k.a. Jesus Christ, God. If there were a way the madman could possibly have been angry and pleased at the same time, that was it.

Authorities retrieved eleven vehicles during the raids. While most were stolen, there was no way of linking which of the people arrested were involved in their theft. After a few days, more than half were released, including Bruce Davis, Squeaky Fromme, Sandy Good, and Christopher Haught. They began drifting back to Los Angeles, with some winding up back at Spahn Ranch. Fromme and Good rented a motel room near the jail so they could serve those still in custody.

Those in jail were resolutely loyal to Manson. They had to believe, in their hearts, that he would somehow get them out of this to continue the journey.

Other Family members, however, were talking.

Kitty Lutesinger, who had been picked up during the Barker Ranch raid, was working with investigators and trying to spread the blame. After all, her boyfriend Bobby Beausoleil was being held for the murder of Gary Hinman.

She told investigators he had gone with two other women to collect money from Hinman. Unfortunately, she could only remember the name of one who had been bragging: Susan Atkins.

Manson himself did not seem to have done much in the way of killings, but Lutesinger recalled seeing him at the wheel of one of the stolen dune buggies. Though not enough to pin a grand theft auto rap on him, it would keep him in jail a little while longer.

Lutesinger’s allegations were enough to get Atkins transferred to the Sybil Brand

Institute, a Los Angeles County jail for female inmates. Murder suspicions would trump car theft and arson suspicions, especially because it was hard to tie any specific individual arrested at the Barker or Myers ranches to a given stolen automobile or burning the earth mover. All of the charges would eventually be dropped.

Atkins initially believed her transfer reflected Beausoleil giving her up as part of his defense. But as she participated in the preliminary hearings for his trial, she realized Lutesinger was helping the prosecution. And with her transfer, she was no longer in Manson’s orbit. She would have to rely on her own wits to protect herself.

Even without her drugged and psychologically damaged brain, she would have been extremely hard-pressed to do that.

The move also placed her among a rougher crowd than the then-twenty-one-year-old had been used to. She adapted by taking Manson’s advice to act crazy when in jail, although for her it may have come more naturally. She put on an intense persona, giggling inappropriately, twirling randomly, and singing little songs—often Manson’s, of course.

She got chummy with her bunkmates, thirty-seven-year-old self-described party girl Virginia Graham, who had violated her parole, and thirty-three-year-old Ronnie Howard, who was in for forging a prescription. The two older women had been petty criminals for a good chunk of their adult lives, and Atkins felt the need to run with, if not surpass, them.

Initially, Graham and Howard dismissed her boasts as those of a little girl seeking attention. The wild stories about this Charlie she was following, a mystic religious leader who was going to lead the blacks after a race war, were beyond fantastic. But Atkins persisted, and she also displayed a fair amount of detailed knowledge about the murders.

At first, Atkins limited herself to talking about the Hinman murder. But she was with Graham and Howard 24 hours a day, and could only get so much shock value out of the same story. Slowly, details from the Tate killings crept into her tales.

Atkins likely thought nothing of her boasts. She had done so when she was alone with the Family and not gotten into trouble, and here in prison she was building a new family.

Graham and Howard thought differently. In time, they came to wonder whether this manic girl might be telling at least something of the truth. Prison rules about snitching are close to universal, but there was a difference between boasting about past crimes and revealing the intent to do more. And Atkins was claiming that, in order to start the race war she kept calling Helter Skelter, there would be more killings.

* * *

Back at the Sybil Brand Institute, Howard begged a guard to let her call the Los Angeles police, or at least to make a call on her behalf.

The guard said that she was not authorized to do so.

Howard would not have a chance to make a phone call to investigators until mid-November, just shy of a month after Atkins had started talking to her. But by the end of November, she was able to talk; the ties between the Family and the Tate/LaBianca killings were forming. Furthermore, the teams investigating the killings, which had been separate, were sharing information.

Prisoners and Family members were not the only ones with something to say. On the outside, the outlaws were talking to the cops.

Danny DeCarlo of the Straight Satans had been picked up on a few minor charges which, given his record, could have resulted in solid jail time. But he had something to trade. He’d been hanging with a group of hippies for a while, and had heard a few things about some serious crimes, especially those that had been in the news in August. Were the cops interested? DeCarlo gave up a lot of second-hand information about the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca killings, including the fact that Charlie Manson had used a cutlass he stole from DeCarlo to slash Hinman’s face. That cutlass was now back in the possession of the Straight Satans.

There was more physical evidence DeCarlo could offer. There had been guns, or at least a gun, used in the Tate and Hinman killings. DeCarlo did not have the gun, but he did know where, on the Spahn Ranch, the Family took target practice. Might be some interesting ballistic evidence there.

There was just one problem. As Family members were released from the Barker Ranch raid, they had drifted back to Spahn. DeCarlo was happy to play tour guide, but he asked to be put in handcuffs so it would not look as though he had a choice in cooperating.

Nobody likes a snitch.

The search was done with George Spahn’s permission, so the investigators were spared the trouble of getting a warrant. At the ranch, they found slugs and shell casings...but no gun.

In his cell in the Independence jail, Manson was mulling what the strengths and weaknesses of the case against him might be. The car raps he could beat—after all, he had done so before.

But the murders...Manson had been losing control of those who had been involved with them. It did not console him to imagine that, after all, so had Jesus. Because Manson did not want his story to end the same way.

He worried about Atkins...she who was so wild and unpredictable that he would periodically send her away when important people were around. Atkins who, more than any other girl, would challenge him for the spotlight. Atkins who was now many miles from him. She could be a problem...and he knew it.

The little girls who had run away from him, Cooper, Hoyt, Lutesinger, and Schram, along with anyone else who might have drifted away after the Barker Ranch raids, angered him, but they were not part of the inner circle.

Clem Grogan still loved him, and at any rate Grogan was locked up alongside him. Bruce Davis, Manson was pretty sure, would remain quiet.

There was, however, one relative newcomer who might be a problem.

John Philip “Zero” Haught had joined the Family some time before the October 12, 1969, raid on Barker Ranch. By now he and a few other Family members moved into a house rented by Mark Ross, who had hung around the Family in 1968. Haught had earned a reputation for being a talker. He could not be trusted to put Charlie above himself, and that sealed his fate.

On November 5, 1969, Haught was at Ross’s home with four other Family members. One later told investigators she and Haught had been in bed when he decided to play Russian roulette with a .22 Caliber Iver Johnson revolver. Haught assured Cottage there was only one bullet in the gun, spun the cylinder, aimed the barrel at his head, and pulled the trigger.

The gun had been fully loaded. Both it, and its holster, had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

Investigators did not realize the four people in the home were Manson Family members. If they had, they might have been more inclined to treat the case as a murder, as opposed to a stoned hippie accidentally offing himself.

Chances are, it was Manson-ordered—or, more in keeping with his style, Manson-suggested—that Haught was a liability who needed to be neutralized. Despite being in jail, Manson was being attended to by Fromme and Good, and had ample communication opportunities with the remaining Family members.

At least one of Manson’s followers was shaken by news of Haught’s death. On November 26, 1969, after Leslie Van Houten has been transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute, she was interviewed by Los Angeles Police Department Sergeant Michael J. McGann. The interview contained the following exchange:

Van Houten: [H]earing about Zero [Haught] has sort of thrown me for a loop because I know—I knew Zero and I know that Zero wouldn’t play Russian roulette.

McGann: That’s what I think, too.

Van Houten: Well, I know that—that Zero wouldn’t because I saw him the day he got released [after the Barker Ranch raid]. I’ve never seen a happier person.

McGann: It’s officially listed as a suicide.

Van Houten: I’m sure. But I—I really don’t know. I don’t know who would be doing that.

...

Van Houten: Zero was playing Russian roulette all by himself?

McGann: Kind of odd, isn’t it?

Haught’s death was not investigated further and nobody was ever charged.

* * *

On November 26, Bobby Beausoleil’s murder trial ended in a hung jury, which was good news for Manson. Beausoleil had gone through the entire process without, apparently, bringing up Manson’s name. He was crossed off as a concern, even if he was going to be re-tried.

Tex Watson, unfortunately, had turned up, thanks to cooperation from Lutesinger. Watson had been arrested in Texas, but the state was fighting extradition to California. He would ultimately be brought to California in late 1970, and tried separately from Manson.

On December 1, police located and arrested Patricia Krenwinkel in Alabama. Spurred by the testimony of Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard, Los Angeles Police Chief Edward Davis held a news conference in which he named three people for whom warrants had been issued: Linda Kasabian, who had yet to be found; Krenwinkel, who was freshly in custody; and Charlie Manson. More names would be shortly forthcoming, Davis added.

The most important aspect, Davis said, was that the case had been cracked.

It had, but it was weak and largely built around Atkins’s testimony. Given her role in the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders, along with her seeming pride in her role, prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi was reluctant to offer any sort of deal. But Davis had been feeling pressure to show progress in a high-profile case, and needed to offer meat to the media.

As it would turn out, Davis’s gamble would work to the prosecution’s benefit. The media now had a name, and free from the rigors of police-style investigative work, was able to start slapping together stories about Manson and his band of hippies that ranged from factual to fantastic. Sketches, and then photographs, of the Family’s captivating leader began to circulate.

Then, on December 4, Richard Caballero, Susan Atkins’s defense attorney, inked a deal designed to save her from the gas chamber. In return for honest and complete grand jury testimony, the prosecution would not seek the death penalty. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who saw her as the craziest and most dangerous of the participants, was incensed at the offer. But the District Attorney’s office was convinced her testimony was necessary for murder indictments against the other participants.

Atkins’s grand jury testimony, which she gave on December 5, 1969, has shaped descriptions of the Tate murders for half a century. It was vivid and compelling. It was also, at times, heartless. Buoyed by the promise of immunity from whatever she said, Atkins described her role in the killings with relish. Next, Bugliosi showed her the photo of Steven Parent’s body sprawled in the driver’s seat of his car, the front of his short-sleeved plaid shirt awash with his blood after Watson had shot him four times.

Bugliosi asked Atkins to identify it.

Atkins: That is the thing I saw in the car.

Bugliosi: When you say “thing,” you are referring to a human being?

Atkins: Yes, human being.

When members of the grand jury began to realize what they were hearing, they paled. The jury foreman had to call for several breaks during her testimony. While others would be called during the two days the grand jury was convened, hers would have been enough.

As Bugliosi would later describe, several of the people in the grand jury were sickened by her testimony.

Atkins also spoke of her love for Charlie Manson. Blind fealty is not a crime. The only question would be whether prosecutors could turn her words into his guilt for the murders he did not physically do.

It was certainly enough to return indictments. On Monday, December 8, 1969, Atkins, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles Manson, and Tex Watson were charged with seven counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. Van Houten, who had only been along on the LaBianca killings, was charged with two counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

The prosecutors were not the only ones nervous about Atkins’s professed obedience of Manson. Defense attorney Caballero was concerned she might recant her testimony once the actual trial started and she was facing the object of her

devotion. He quietly arranged for the interviews she had done with his office to be turned into a quickie book.

A gag order had been imposed on the court, and Atkins’s story was only supposed to be published in Europe. Of course, that seal crumbled—the Los Angeles Times got hold of a copy and reprinted it.

Anyone who bought a newspaper now knew exactly what the prosecution’s star witness was going to claim. And that included Charlie Manson, who was getting ready to serve as his own attorney.

Manson had one other piece of very important information. If the report in the newspaper could be trusted, Atkins still thought Manson was a messiah.

* * *

The counterculture, anti-establishment revolution had been given an evil, wild-eyed face. But unlike modern crime tales, which draw upon forensic analysis, DNA and advanced policing techniques, this one had significant gaps.

Atkins’s details resulted in people filling in some of the holes of the crime. She described in general terms where the Tate killers had disposed of their bloody clothes, which a television news team was able to later unearth. Surprisingly, weeks of searching by police had not.

Additionally, the Los Angeles Times story described the gun used in the killings. Bernard Weiss recalled how his son Steven had found just such a gun in September, and handed it in to Van Nuys police. Ballistics tests matched the gun fired at Spahn Ranch.

The prosecuting attorneys now had the .22 caliber Buntline used in the murders. The police had had it in their possession since September.

A press conference Police Chief Davis had held on December 1 was enough to make some Manson Family members come forward. The following day, Linda Kasabian had turned herself in to police in New Hampshire, where she had been living. Mary Brunner also appeared and traded immunity for her part in the Hinman murder in return for her cooperation. And Barbara Hoyt, even though she was not being sought and had not participated in any of the murders, told investigators what she knew about the murder of Donald Shea, and offered whatever help she could.

Kasabian was ready to testify and otherwise offer whatever help she could without any promises of amnesty from the prosecution. She had felt tremendous guilt about not having done more to stop the killings, despite not being present for any of them. She had even parried the Family’s attempt to murder the actor she had slept with and intentionally misplaced Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet. Nonetheless, she had been incredibly guilty about her Manson Family association, and wanted to tell all. She had returned to Los Angeles voluntarily, and her lawyer, Gary Fleischman, had to rush to secure an immunity deal.

It would turn out to be the best deal the prosecution made during any aspect of the case.

Within a week, the media machine—which, then, was TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, and “instant” books—was blitzing an insatiable public. Any connection to Manson or the Family sold newspapers and periodicals or created viewership. Overnight, Manson—with his thousand-yard stare—had become the most recognizable face in America.

Conversely, within the entertainment industry, connections to the alleged per-petrators were toxic. Both Brian Wilson and Terry Melcher downplayed their interactions with Manson as much as they could, a tactic that did not last very long as details about the Family emerged.

The stories appealed to Americans’ taste for the lurid. But the portrayal, not necessarily always accurate, of a sex- and drug-fueled group of outlaws who led lives of damn-the-consequences derring-do and constant orgies, religious devotion, and against-the-system daring also spurred interest among an ever-widening pool of disaffiliated young people.

* * *

Manson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten and Atkins would be on trial together and Charles was adamant he would lead them, defend them all and make it the trial of the century.

The courts felt otherwise, and despite Manson’s numerous petitions Judge William Keene repeatedly denied his requests to formally serve as his own counsel.

Just as Manson believed his music would cause new converts to flock to him and bring about a race war, he truly believed presenting an unconventional defense was the best way to save himself and by presenting a joint defense along-side his co-defendants, Manson felt he would have greater control.

Worn down by Manson’s repeated motions, on December 24, 1969 Judge Keene reluctantly let him become his own counsel. This did not last long, due to his incompetence with legal process and the amount of court time he immediately set about wasting.

Manson went through a number of lawyers ahead of the 1970 trial, including Ronald Hughes who disappeared and died in mysterious—and unsolved—circumstances before the trial started.

Two weeks before the trail was to begin, Irving Kanarek was named as Manson’s lawyer. Kanarek was known for his obstructionist tactics and frequent interjections, which would lead to many interruptions to legal procedure and to Manson and his counsel coming to blows during the trial.

The girls’ legal team consisted of Albert D. Silverman for Patricia Krenwinkel, Daye Shinn for Susan Atkins and Maxwell S. Keith for Leslie Van Houten.

Early summer 1970 saw the prosecution present its case, with Manson poised to disrupt the proceedings as much as possible. Media coverage had fueled his megalomania.

What swelled Manson’s chest was the way profiles in the New York Times and Rolling Stone brought serious critical and socio-political attention to both him and the Family—and they represented wildly diverse sectors of American life. Rolling Stone, which was at the height of its power as a counterculture bible, and Life magazine, the photo-driven journal of Norman Rockwell’s middle America ideal, both put him on their covers. The New York Times did an extensive profile, providing intellectual heft and legitimacy.

The underground press went even further. They embraced him as either a misunderstood hero or an out-and-out antihero. Hosanna! The short-lived occult-focused newsletter Tuesday’s Child put him on the cover multiple times, including one time when it featured an image of him on a cross, and another when it proclaimed him “Man of the Year.” And in May, high-end literary pulp magazine Argosy ran a picture of him on its cover under a cut line that asked, “Could This Man Control YOU?”

Manson fed into the frenzy and adoration—self-adoration included—by giving interviews whenever he could, behavior he would continue throughout his incarceration.

Manson may have been enjoying the attention, but he still had dreams of getting his message out through his music. No guitars were available to Manson during this period, so anything he wanted to release would have to already be in the can. With Dennis Wilson claiming to have destroyed the recording session tapes he had sponsored, the Gold Star Studios sessions were all that was available. Manson began calling Phil Kaufman continually.

Kaufman had believed in Manson’s music when the two were in prison. Now Kaufman had a chance to make some money. What record company would be able to resist capitalizing on it?

Apparently, all of them. Manson’s stigma within the entertainment industry trumped even the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Kaufman got no takers, and ended up raising $3,000 for a 2,000-copy pressing of LIE: The Love and Terror Cult. Personnel included Manson on lead vocals, rhythm guitar, and tympani; Bobby Beausoleil on electric guitar; Mary Brunner on flute; Clem Grogan on electric bass; and a variety of Manson girls in various backup vocal roles. In March 1970, Charlie Manson finally released an album.

Kaufman started taking the recording around, first to record shops and then to offbeat stores that catered to hippie sensibilities. The same stigma persisted. While there might have been money to be made, the backlash from the viciousness of the Family’s crimes would make any retailer stocking the album a pariah, even among shops that were selling “Free Manson” buttons. Kaufman managed to unload 300 copies before giving up and stashing the rest in his garage.

Predictably, Manson became convinced Kaufman was trying to cheat him. Either the album had sold wildly well and Kaufman was keeping the money, or he had not really tried. On Manson’s orders—because, as ever, nothing was done without his orders—Family members stalked Kaufman, demanding either the unsold copies of the album or money or both. It is conceivable that, behind bars, Manson held more sway than when he was on the outside. Then, he was flesh. Now, he was legend.

Through a series of coordinated visits from free Family members, Manson had a pretty good sense of how the other defense strategies were shaping up—and he influenced them all to get the Family in line and on trial together. It took only one meeting with Susan Atkins to talk her around.

Manson also had motions of his own. He wanted unlimited telephone privileges, a tape recorder, and other considerations—all of which were denied. And he had one other bold request: “I was going to ask [the prosecutor] if he would call the whole thing off,” Manson told Judge George M. Dell, who was hearing the pretrial motions. “It would save a lot of trouble.”

Judge Dell was not above tongue-in-cheek humor himself. “Disappoint all these people?” he replied. “Never, Mr. Manson.”