Manson murder case: First big celebrity trial
Slayings cause Hollywood and environs to totally shut down
LOS ANGELES – The voices are spectral and chilling, broadcast from speakers inside the white van with the black funeral wreath on its grill. On a recent summer morning, Scott Michaels, founder of Hollywood-based Dearly Departed Tours, prepares his passengers as he heads toward Cielo Drive Benedict Canyon.
“This is the story of the Tate murders told by the killers.”
But it is still unsettling to hear the disembodied voices of Charles “Tex” Watson, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins describe that awful night 50 years ago – Aug. 9, 1969. They were Manson family stalwarts, 20 to 23 years old at the time. The recordings were taken from parole hearings in
and old media interviews.
Watson, with a slight twang, describing Manson’s instructions: “‘I want you all to go together and go up to Terry Melcher’s old house. And I want you to kill everyone in there.’ Terry Melcher was Doris Day’s son. And we had previously met him and had been in that house before.”
Kasabian: “I was told to get a change of clothing and a knife and my driver’s license.”
Atkins, sounding like a breathy little girl: “We drove to the house with instructions to kill everyone in the house, and not just that, but we were instructed to go all the way down, every house, hit every street and kill all the people.”
Michaels has christened this the Helter Skelter Tour, which takes the curious around various Manson family landmarks – minus the Spahn Movie Ranch and Death Valley, where the family lived at various times – and regularly sells out, even now, 50 years after the murders.
It’s four hours long, costs $85 a head and touches on each victim killed in the summer of 1969: Steven Parent, 18, who was visiting a resident of the guesthouse on the grounds of the Cielo Drive estate that Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski, had rented after Melcher moved out; Folger; her boyfriend, Voytek Frykowski; Sebring; Tate; the Labiancas; Donald “Shorty” Shea; and Gary Hinman.
Michaels cues up the killers again, talking about the Tate murders.
Atkins: “The people in the house were all bound. And Voytek Frykowski, I believe was his name, I tied his hands with a towel. And I was instructed to kill him.”
Kasabian: “I was told to stay there and just kind of wait. Listen for sounds. And I did that. And then I started hearing, like, just horrible screaming. So I started running toward the house. … And that’s when I saw Voytek Frykowski being murdered, slaughtered, knifed.”
Krenwinkel: “Abigail Folger started to get herself undone. She took off. At that point in time, I left and followed her. … We went out a back door. And I ran her down. And I began to stab her. … I remember her saying, ‘I’m already dead.’”
One night later, Manson’s recruits stabbed the Labiancas to death and mutilated their corpses.
“Up until this time, we all knew what the bad guys looked like,” Michaels says. “They wore black and they hid out in shadows, and they had shady expressions. They were predictable. Now these murderers were kids, and these kids became known as the Manson
family.”
** In the aftermath of the slayings, Hollywood and environs went on lockdown. Four months would pass between the grisly deaths and Manson’s indictment on murder charges. In that empty space, headlines screamed and fear blossomed.
“Ritualistic murders.” “EXTRA – SECOND RITUAL KILLINGS HERE.” “Drugs Found Near Tate Murder Site, Pills, Marijuana Located in Slain Hair Stylist’s Car Outside Estate.” “Police Seek Link in New Killings.”
Barrett, whose job it was to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous, says, “Everyone went crazy for a moment.” Everyone was frightened, no one wanted
to go out, and everyone wanted protection. Gun sales jumped. There was a run on security services and guard dogs.
“I think it changed everyone’s feelings about protecting themselves, and especially those who had
important names and had made some success,” says Barrett, who is now 82.
Kay was a district attorney in Los Angeles County for 37 years and nine months. Only twice during that long career, he says, has he seen people “so frightened in L.A. First with the Manson case, and the second one was with the Night Stalker.”
Barrett felt that fear firsthand. She lived not far from Tate and considered the beautiful young actress a friend. The morning after the murders, she got a phone tip, raced over to the house on Cielo Drive and was the first journalist on the scene.
On that morning, she saw Parent slumped over the wheel of his car, bodies covered in blankets on the lawn. Not long after, rumors swirled about a hit list. Her broadcast company hired a private guard for her. An editor friend who worked on Barrett’s movie magazines came to stay with her.
“In the middle of the night, there was a gunshot sound,” Barrett recalls. The guard had been hit. “I never knew what the final outcome was. But he was taken away, and the next thing I knew is, I had three major police people come to my house, set up big guns, everything. I mean, it was like a scene from a movie.”
There were also death threats, she says. They were “short little letters.” They said, “you are next.”
“I’ll never be able to say that the threats were really linked to the Sharon Tate murder,” Barrett says. “But I can’t say that they were not.”
** Manson was formally charged with seven counts of murder Dec. 9, 1969, while in police custody in Inyo County. The big break in the case had come a month earlier when Atkins, who was being held on other charges, bragged to her cellmates at Sybil Brand Institute for Women about her involvement in the slayings.
Deutsch was at the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles when Manson arrived that same day, a tiny figure in buckskin, hair a scraggly disarray. The hall outside the courtroom was jammed with camera crews, packed so tight it was hard to move.
They spotted Manson, surged forward, knocked a drinking fountain off the wall. Water flooded the corridor. Deutsch turned to her friend Sandi Gibbons, who covered the Manson case for City News Service.
“And I said, ‘This is crazy,’” Deutsch recounts. “And I didn’t know how crazy it was going to be for the entire trial.”
** Gibbons still has a copy of Bugliosi’s opening statement in the trial of Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, 13 typewritten pages explaining that “one of Manson’s principal motives for the Tate-labianca murders was to ignite Helter Skelter.”
“In other words,” the chief prosecutor wrote, Manson wanted to “start the black-white revolution by making it look like the black people had murdered the five Tate victims and Mr. and Mrs. Labianca, thereby causing the white community to turn against the black man and ultimately lead to a civil war between blacks and whites, a war Manson foresaw the black man winning.”
Manson had his own opener. He walked in that morning with an X gouged into his forehead. Supporters outside the courtroom distributed a lengthy declaration from the cult leader. Gibbons copied a single sentence of Manson’s statement onto the first page of Bugliosi’s opening remarks: “I have Xed myself from your world.”
During the trial, some of Manson’s female followers camped outside the Hall of Justice, heads shaved, Xs carved into their own foreheads, selling Manson’s album “Lie: The Love and Terror Cult” for five bucks. Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas showed up, along with other celebrity friends of Tate and Polanski.
An artist calling herself the Whore of Babylon charged into the courtroom one day during the nine-month proceeding and announced that she had “come to save my brother Manson.” She was arrested. Actor Robert Conrad, set to play a hardnosed district attorney in a television drama, showed up to study Bugliosi in action.
“The ultimate was when Manson got upset,” Deutsch says, “and he propelled himself across the counsel table at the judge with a pencil in his hand, screaming, ‘Someone should cut your head off!’”
All four defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. When the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in 1972, their sentences were commuted to life in prison. They have never been granted parole. Atkins died in 2009; Manson in 2017.
Deutsch and Gibbons, fast friends after their time covering Manson, get together regularly to reminisce. They have covered a long line of celebrity trials since: O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Patty Hearst. They argue that the Manson drama holds a special place in California jurisprudence and left its mark on Los Angeles.
“It was the first big celebrity trial of modern Los Angeles,” says Deutsch, whose home office is filled with grim memorabilia. “It was a trial that put the era on trial, the entire ’60s culture.”
The killings, the trial, the court proceedings, she says, “began to give Los Angeles a reputation as a place where violence could happen, senseless violence. There had never been killings like this before, where people were butchered for no reason.”
Says Gibbons, “It was indeed the weirdest trial that I’ve ever covered.”
(To Be Continued.)