Helter Skelter

watch any program they wished, except the news, a bailiff changing the channels. Tonight it would remain dark. Newspapers would also be banned from the courtroom, Older specifically instructing the attorneys to make sure none were on the counsel table, where they might inadvertently be seen by the jury.

When we returned to court, there was a smug grin on Manson’s face. It remained there all afternoon. It isn’t every criminal who merits the attention of the President of the United States. Charlie had made the big time.

The jury was brought down, and Atkins’ defense attorney, Daye Shinn, began his cross- examination of Linda.

Apparently intent on implying that I had coached Linda in her testimony, he asked: “Do you recall what Mr. Bugliosi said to you during your first meeting?”

A. “Well, he has always stressed for me to tell the truth.”

Q. “Besides the truth, I’m talking about.”

As if anything else were important.

Q. “Did Mr. Bugliosi ever tell you that some of your statements were wrong, or some of your answers were not logical, or did not make sense?”

A. “No, I told him; he never told me.”

Q. “The fact that you were pregnant, wasn’t that the reason that you stayed outside [the Tate residence] instead of going inside to participate?”

A. “Whether I was pregnant or not, I would never have killed anybody.”

Shinn gave up after only an hour and a half. Linda’s testimony remained unshaken.

With a heavy, ponderous shuffle, Irving Kanarek approached the witness stand. His demeanor was deceiving. There was no relaxing when Kanarek was cross-examining; at any moment he might blurt out something objectionable. There was also no anticipating him; he’d suddenly skip from one subject to another with no hint of a connecting link. Many of his questions were so complex that even he lost the thought, and had to have the court reporter read them back to him.

It was excruciatingly tiring listening to him. It was also very important that I do so, since, unlike the two attorneys who preceded him, Kanarek scored points. He brought out, for example, that when Linda returned to California to reclaim Tanya, she told the social worker that she’d left the state on August 6 or 7—which, had this been true, would have been before the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred. If accurate, this meant that Linda had fabricated all of her testimony regarding those murders. And if she had lied to the social worker to get her daughter back, Kanarek implied, she could very well lie to this Court to get her own freedom.

But mostly he rambled and droned on and on, tiring the spectators as well as the witness. Many of the reporters “wrote off” Kanarek early in the proceedings. Given a choice of defense attorneys, they quoted Fitzgerald, whose questions were better phrased. But it was Kanarek, in the midst of his verbosity, who was scoring.

He was also beginning to get to Linda. At the end of the day—her sixth on the stand—she looked a little fatigued and her answers were less sharp. No one knew how many days of this lay ahead, since Kanarek, unlike the other attorneys, consistently avoided answering Older’s questions about the estimated length of his cross- examination.

On my way home that night I was again thankful the jury had been sequestered. You could see the headlines on every newsstand. The car radio had periodic updates. Hughes: “I am guilty of contempt for uttering a dirty word, but Nixon has the contempt of the world to face.” Fitzgerald: “It is very discouraging when the world’s single most important person comes out against you.” The most reported quote was that of Manson, who had passed a statement to the press via one of the defense attorneys. Mimicking Nixon’s remarks, it was unusually short and to the point: “Here’s a man who is accused of murdering hundreds of thousands in Vietnam who is accusing me of being guilty of eight murders.”

The next day in chambers Kanarek charged the President with conspiracy. “The District Attorney of Los Angeles County is running for attorney general of California. I say it without being able to prove it, that Evelle Younger and the President got together to do this.”

If this was so, Kanarek said, “he shouldn’t be President of the United States.”

THE COURT “That will have to be decided in some other proceeding, Mr. Kanarek. Let’s stay with the issues here…I am satisfied there has been no exposure of any of these jurors to anything the press may have said…I see no reason for taking any further action at this time.”

Kanarek resumed his cross-examination. On direct, Linda had stated that she had taken some fifty LSD “trips.” Kanarek now asked her to describe what had happened on trip number 23.

BUGLIOSI “I object to that question as being ridiculous, Your Honor.”

Though there is no such objection in the rule books, I felt there should be. Apparently Judge Older felt similarly, as he sustained the objection. As well as others when I objected that a question had been repeated “ad nauseam” or was “nonsensical.”

Just after the noon recess Manson suddenly stood and, turning toward the jury box, held up a copy of the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

A bailiff grabbed it but not before Manson had shown the jury the huge black headline:

MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES

Older had the jury taken out. He then demanded to know which attorney, against his express orders, had brought a newspaper into court. There were several denials but no one confessed.

There was no question now that the jury would have to be voir dired. Each member was brought in separately and questioned by the judge under oath. Of the twelve jurors and six alternates, eleven were aware of the full headline; two saw only the words MANSON GUILTY; four only saw the paper or the name MANSON; and one, Mr. Zamora, didn’t see anything: “I was looking at the clock at the time.”

Each was also questioned as to his or her reaction. Mrs. McKenzie:

“Well, my first thought was ‘That’s ridiculous.’” Mr. McBride: “I think if the President declared that, it was pretty stupid of him.” Miss Mesmer: “No one does my thinking for me.” Mr. Daut: “I didn’t vote for Nixon in the first place.”

After an extensive voir dire, all eighteen stated under oath that they had not been influenced by the headline and that they would consider only the evidence presented to them in court.

Knowing something about jurors, I was inclined to believe them, for a very simple reason. Jurors consider themselves privileged insiders. Day after day, they are a part of the courtroom drama. They hear the evidence. They, and they alone, determine its importance. They tend, very strongly, to think of themselves as the experts, those outside the courtroom the amateurs. As juror Dawson put it, he’d listened to every bit of the testimony; Nixon hadn’t; “I don’t believe Mr. Nixon knows anything about it.”

My over-all feeling was that the jurors were annoyed with the President for attempting to usurp their role. It was quite possible that the statement might even have helped Manson, causing them to be even more determined that they, unlike the President, would give him every benefit of the doubt.

A number of national columnists stated that if Manson was convicted, his conviction would be reversed on appeal because of Nixon’s statement. On the contrary, since it was Manson himself who brought the headline to the attention of the jury, this was “invited error,” which simply means that a defendant cannot benefit from his own wrongdoing.

One aspect of this did concern me just a little. It was a subtler point. Although the headlines declared that Manson—not the girls—was guilty, it could be argued that as Manson’s co-defendants the guilt “slopped over” onto them. Although I assumed this would be an issue they would raise on appeal, I felt fairly certain it would not constitute “reversible error.” There are errors in every trial, but most do not warrant a reversal by the appellate courts. This might have, had not Older voir dired the jury and obtained their sworn statements that they would not be influenced by the incident.