Denis Tuohy: the day I came face to face with Manson’s killer cult in a remote mountain ranch
The death of Charles Manson earlier this month closed a chapter on one of the most notorious murder sprees in US history. Followers of Manson, on his instructions, killed nine people including actress Sharon Tate in 1969. Former BBC journalist Denis Tuohy
FUTURE historians may determine,” wrote a Los Angeles journalist, “that the Tate murders were the Pearl Harbour of the war between the generations.” I read those words during a BBC Television assignment in the United States in early 1970. One Saturday night the previous August the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and four of her friends had been brutally murdered in her Los Angeles home by a combination of guns, blunt instruments and knives. The next day, businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary had been stabbed to death and a knife and fork left sticking in the husband’s body.
Since then, an ex-convict called Charles Manson and five members of a hippie group he led called the Family had been charged with the murders and were in jail awaiting trial.
Americans had been appalled that flower children from the 1967 “summer of love” could become psychopathic killers two years later. But my producer colleague and I couldn’t see any immediate new angle and would have ignored the story if we hadn’t been given a tip-off we found hard to believe.
A freelance journalist in Malibu had heard that members of the Family who had not been arrested may have been spotted at the Spahn ranch in a mountainous area north of Los Angeles, a place where Hollywood used to film B-level westerns. In August 1969, at the time of the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Family had all been living there.
Immediately afterwards Manson led an exodus to the desert, to Death Valley, their last hideaway before the arrests in November. But if those who had not been charged were indeed occupying the Spahn ranch once again surely some local news would have carried the story? Then again, never discount the improbable.
So we set off into the rugged rocky terrain of the Santa Susana Pass. There were three of us, producer Tony Summers, later to become a best-selling author, cameraman and sound recordist Slim Hewitt, and myself.
In the bare landscape you couldn’t miss the place, a ramshackle spread of shacks and outlying stables.
As we turned off the road and drove along a dirt track we could make out what had once been filmed as a saloon and a jail.
A fair-haired woman with a baby on her back was the first person we came across. She eyed us cautiously. “Where are you guys from?” “Hello. We’re from England.” “You’re from England?” The eyes widened. “So I guess you know the Beatles?”
“Sure we know the Beatles,” said Tony, “but we’ve come here because in England these days the Family is very famous too. Do you belong to the Family?” She nodded and smiled. “Would you like to talk to British television, you and your friends?”
Some other women had begun to emerge from what looked like the main building. She waved to them.
“Hey guys, we can be on TV in England where the Beatles can get to see us!”
Manson had linked some of the Beatles’ songs with an apocalyptic vision of the future, a vision he preached to followers who were constantly high on LSD and amphetamines.
Armageddon, he told them time and again, was on the way. The Family would retreat to a cave beneath Death Valley and breed in secret. The Beatles were prophets of all this, particularly with these lyrics.
“Look out helter skelter
She’s coming down fast
Yes she is,
Yes she is coming down fast.” The dreamy young people I interviewed, most of them women, made clear their devotion to the leader.
“His power,” said Gypsy, “that people make sound bad, it only lies in his happiness. You’re drawn to him like people are drawn to babies.”
“So what kind of man is he? How would you describe him?”
“Charlie is your father, your brother, your lover, your little boy. He’s all men. He’s Man-son, Son-of-Man.”
Yet the man who was all men, whose power derived from his happiness, was charged with having masterminded seven sadistic murders. Four of his followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie van Houten and Charles Watson — were accused of having committed them. All of them, as well as Manson himself, would in due course be convicted and jailed for many years, but that hadn’t happened yet. Their fellow Family members, about a dozen of them, sat around for an hour or so that sunny afternoon, chatting amicably on camera. I asked if it was possible, perhaps without letting the rest of them know, that their leader and their friends could have carried out the killings.
“How could they?” said a petite redhead. “We were all eating ice cream together!”
And everybody laughed.
The redhead was Lynette Fromme, nicknamed Squeaky, who was making daily visits to Manson in jail. Five years later she would make the cover of Time magazine as “the Girl who almost killed Ford”. She attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford as he was leaving a hotel in Sacramento but failed to load the gun properly. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
For a while, the Spahn ranch encounter was all sweetness and light. They told us how the world was changing, how “everything’s coming to now”. They told us how the police had been harassing them for years, how their parents, including a stockbroker, a psychologist and a Pentagon scientist, resented Manson for showing them the way to freedom and they assured us several times that Family members had not
The dreamy young people I interviewed, mostly women, made clear their devotion to their leader Manson
been involved in the Tate-LaBianca killings.
As the sun began to drop below the surrounding hills a January chill set in and the mood darkened. Manson had long dreamed of making it as a singer and we were allowed to copy part of a tape of his songs. It was not musical talent that captivated us. It was the voice, ranging from sepulchral to frantic.
“Give your evil soul, ha ha ha, to the devil, ha ha …”
That was the start of one track which included the line,
“Can you imagine if there were no laws?”
At that point someone pressed the stop button on the player. Our hosts turned away and began to mutter among themselves. Gypsy, the darkhaired woman who had earlier told us about the power of happiness, was no longer happy. She was resentful. “We think it’s time for you guys to leave.” “Okay,” we said.
We had seen no traffic on the road for hours. We were in desolate territory, outnumbered by members of a group whose friends may have slaughtered seven people.
We thanked them, promised to give their fond regards to the Beatles and loaded our equipment into the car. As we were about to drive off a young man sidled up, seemingly to shake hands. He kept his back to the others.
“If I were to know the answers,” he whispered, “to the questions you’ve been asking, why would I give you the burden of knowing?”
Through the car window he pumped my hand and walked away. Producer Tony Summers switched on the engine.
“Time to go.”