Manson prosecutor: Keep them locked up
It was 50 years ago this week that Charles Manson’s band of followers embarked on their deadly rampage in Los Angeles.
— Stephen Kay LOS ANGELES was a fresh-faced prosecutor just 27 years old and three years out of law school when circumstances handed him the Manson “family” murder case.
Over the next half-century, it would come to define his career and lead to death threats that, to this day, he worries a Charles Manson sycophant might try to carry out.
“I don’t dwell on it, but I’m careful. I always look around to see if I’m being followed or anything,” the retired prosecutor said recently as he paused to discuss the case that punctured the peace, love and happiness movement that flowered in the late 1960s.
Kay helped lock up Manson family members but never really relinquished the case in his decades with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. He attended some 60 parole hearings over the years where he has argued the killers should never be released.
“The crime was simply too heinous,” he said.
It was 50 years ago this week that Manson, a smalltime career criminal who had reinvented himself as a hippie guru, dispatched a band of disaffected young followers on a deadly week- end rampage that would terrorize Los Angeles and forever imprint on the American consciousness the image of the slight, steely-eyed cult leader as the face of evil.
On that first night, Aug. 8, 1969, Manson sent a handful of his young, mostly female followers to the palatial hilltop estate of actress Sharon Tate with orders to kill everyone there. The 26-yearold actress and four friends were bludgeoned, shot and stabbed scores of times. Their blood was used to scrawl the words “Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” on the walls.
Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, was 8½ months pregnant, and her killers later testified that she pleaded in her last moments for her unborn baby’s life. Others killed were coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celeb- rity hairstylist Jay Sebring and Wojciech Frykowski, an aspiring screenwriter and friend of Polanski, who was out of town.
On the way into the estate, the attackers crossed paths with 19-year-old Steven Parent, who was leaving after visiting an acquaintance who lived in the guesthouse. Par- ent was shot to death.
The next night, Manson himself led a handful of followers to the home of wealthy grocer Leno LaBi- anca and his wife, Rosemary, tying up the couple and leav- ing the others to butcher them with knives.
Authorities would say later that it was part of a plot Manson hatched to persuade gullible young followers to launch a race war that only he could hide them from. He’d gotten the premoni- tion, they said, from a twisted interpretation of the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.”
The killers went on trial the following year, and Kay joined the prosecution team two months later after the original lead prosecutor was dismissed and Vincent Bugliosi took over. Bugliosi’s subsequent book “Hel- ter Skelter” became one of the best-selling true-crime tales of all time.
Kay, 76, spent nearly 40 years in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. He says the Manson case was “definitely the most bizarre” he ever tried, adding with understatement: “It was almost a circus.”