Manson prosecutor unchanged
50 years later, says cult leader’s ‘family’ should stay jailed
LOS ANGELES — Stephen Kay was just 27 years old and three years out of law school when fate handed him the Charles Manson “family” murder case to prosecute.
Over the next half-century, it would come to define his career and lead to death threats that to this day he worries a 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 four decades in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. He attended some 60 parole hearings over the years where he argued the killers should never be released.
“The crime was simply too heinous,” Kay, 76, said.
It was 50 years ago this week that Manson, a small-time career criminal who had reinvented himself as a hippie guru, dispatched a band of disaffected young followers on a deadly weekend rampage that would forever imprint on the American consciousness the image of the 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 hilltop estate of actress Sharon Tate with orders to kill everyone there. The 26-year-old actress and four friends were bludgeoned, shot and stabbed scores of times, and their blood used to scrawl “Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” on the walls.
Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, was 8 months pregnant, and her killers later testified that she pleaded for her unborn baby’s life. Others killed were coffee heiress Abigail Folger, hairstylist Jay Sebring and Wojciech Frykowski, a friend of Polanski, who was out of town.
On the way into the estate, the attackers shot to death 19-year-old Steven Parent.
The next night, Manson led a handful of followers to the home of wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, tying up the couple and leaving the others to butcher them.
Authorities would say later that it was part of a plot Manson hatched to persuade gullible young followers to launch a race war. He’d gotten the premonition, 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.
Kay says the Manson trial was “definitely the most bizarre” case he ever tried, adding with understatement: “It was almost a circus.”
The cult leader and his followers carved Xs into their foreheads to show their disdain for society. At one point, Manson leapt over the defense table with a pencil and shouted at the judge that someone should cut off his head. At another, he grabbed a newspaper with a headline declaring President Richard Nixon had concluded he was guilty and held it up for the jury to see.
Outside the courthouse, Manson followers not implicated in the killings gathered daily. One day, two young female followers sneaked up alongside Kay in the courthouse parking lot.
“They said they were going to do to my house what was done at the Tate house,” he said, adding both he and Bugliosi, who died in 2015, retained bodyguards throughout the trial.
Over the years, Manson would threaten Kay’s life from behind bars.
In the end, Manson and three followers — Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel — were sentenced to death but had their punishment reduced to life in prison. Atkins died in 2009 and Manson in 2017.
Another disciple, Charles “Tex” Watson, fled to his native Texas after the killings, but Bugliosi and Kay, by then cocounsels, later won his conviction.
Van Houten was granted a retrial in 1976. By then Bugliosi had left the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, and Kay was the sole lead prosecutor.
After a hung jury, he won a conviction in 1978, and Van Houten returned to prison, where she has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in counseling and leads programs to rehabilitate fellow inmates. She was recommended for parole three times in recent years, but each time the governor dissented.
“I admit that she’s a model prisoner, and I commend her for that, and I think she should keep doing her good work in prison,” Kay said.
Meanwhile, new books and films about Manson seem to come out every year, but Kay says not to expect one from him.
“It would be nice if it would just go away,” he said of the public’s continuing fascination with Manson.