A chilling encounter with a murderer
By June of 1968, Dennis Wilson’s marriage had broken up and he was renting an old hunting lodge on Sunset Boulevard. Late one night, he pulled his Ferrari into his driveway and out walked a small man with long dark hair and a scruffy beard, wearing jeans and a work shirt. Dennis had no idea who this guy was, and something about him was frightening. ‘Are you going to hurt me?’ Dennis asked. ‘Do I look like I’m going to?’ the man replied. The stranger fell to his knees and kissed Dennis’s feet. That was how Dennis, inset, met Charles Manson, above right.
Manson was a 33-year-old former convict (armed robbery and car theft) who believed he was a talented singer-songwriter. Dennis was the perfect mark – a famous, well-connected entertainer who could help him get discovered.
Guileless about others, indifferent about his own possessions, Dennis was all too happy to allow Manson and his girls to move in, use his charge cards, take his clothes, eat his food, drive his Mercedes. Manson, after all, had something for Dennis – a stable of young women who catered to his every desire.
Bruce Johnston and I finally drove out to Dennis’s house to meet his new roommates over dinner. After we’d eaten, Manson told us to come into the den, where he turned on a strobe light and revealed all of his girls lying there, naked. He started passing out LSD tabs and orchestrating sex partners. I love the female form, but this was too much even for me.
For my cousin, the truth about Manson slowly emerged. His house was ransacked. They took most everything that wasn’t nailed down. They also totalled his Mercedes. By summer’s end, Dennis figured he had lost about $100,000, and even for him, that was too much. Not wanting a confrontation with Manson, he simply moved out and let the lease lapse.
For me, there was a troubling postscript. In 1968, my wife Suzanne told me she wanted to end our marriage. We were still living together when she revealed she was having an affair with Dennis, my own cousin. Later, I was told that after we separated, Suzanne and Dennis would go out and leave our two young children with a babysitter. On one occasion, the babysitter was Manson disciple Susan Atkins. Arrested after the Manson killings at 10050 Cielo Drive, Atkins was convicted of participating in eight murders and was sentenced to death. And she was our babysitter.