was relatively uncommon.
Though qualified, T. J.’s testimony was dramatic, as he was the first witness to connect Manson and the gun.
LAPD contacted me that night. Barbara Hoyt was in a hospital in Honolulu. Someone had given her what was believed to be a lethal dose of LSD. Fortunately, she had been rushed to the hospital in time.
I did not learn many of the details until I talked to Barbara.
After fleeing Barker Ranch, the pretty seventeen-year-old had returned home. Though she had cooperated with us, Barbara was extremely reluctant to testify, and when she was contacted by the Manson girls on the afternoon of September 5 and offered a free vacation in Hawaii in lieu of testifying, she’d accepted.
Among the Family members who’d helped persuade her were Squeaky, Gypsy, Ouisch, and Clem.
Barbara spent that night at Spahn Ranch. The next day Clem drove Barbara and Ouisch to one of the Family hideouts, a house in North Hollywood which was being rented by one of the newer Family members, Dennis Rice.[74]
Rice took the pair to the airport, bought them tickets, and gave them fifty dollars in cash plus some credit cards, including, not inappropriately, a TWA “Getaway” card. Using assumed names, the two girls flew to Honolulu, where they booked the penthouse suite of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel. Barbara saw little of the islands, however, since Ouisch, sure the police would be looking for Barbara, insisted they remain in the suite.
While there, the pair, who had been close friends, had several long talks. Ouisch told Barbara, “We all have to go through Helter Skelter. If we don’t do it in our heads, we’ll have to do it physically. If you don’t die in your head, you’ll die when it comes down.” Ouisch also confided that Linda Kasabian was not long for this world; at the most, she had six months to live.
At approximately the same time each morning, Ouisch made a long-distance call. (The number was that of a pay phone in North Hollywood, three blocks from the Rice residence. At least one of these calls was to Squeaky, the unofficial leader of the Family in Manson’s absence.)
Just after the call on the ninth, Ouisch’s manner suddenly changed. “She became very serious and looked at me kind of strangely,” Barbara said. Ouisch told Barbara that she had to go back to California, but that Barbara was to remain in Hawaii. She called and made a reservation on the 1:15 flight to Los Angeles that afternoon.
They caught a cab to the airport, arriving just before noon. Ouisch said she wasn’t hungry, but suggested that Barbara eat something. They went into a restaurant, and Barbara ordered a hamburger. When it arrived, Ouisch took it and went outside, telling Barbara to pay the check.
There was a line at the cash register, and for several minutes Barbara lost sight of Ouisch.
When she came out, Ouisch gave her the hamburger, and Barbara ate it while they were waiting for Ouisch’s flight. Just before she was to board, Ouisch remarked, “Imagine what it would be like if that hamburger had ten tabs of acid in it.” Barbara’s response was, “Wow!” She had never heard of anyone taking more than one tab of LSD, Barbara later said, and the thought was kind of frightening.
After Ouisch left, Barbara began feeling high. She tried to take a bus to the beach but became so sick she had to get off. Panicked, she then started running, and ran and ran and ran until she collapsed.
A social worker, Byron Galloway, saw the young girl sprawled on a curb near the Salvation Army headquarters. Fortuitously, Galloway was employed at the State Hospital, his specialty drug cases. Realizing that the girl was extremely ill, he rushed her to Queen’s Medical Center, where her condition was diagnosed as acute psychosis, drug-induced. The doctor who examined her was able to get her name and her Los Angeles address, but the rest made little sense: according to the hospital records, “Patient said, ‘Call Mr. Bogliogi and tell him I won’t be able to testify today in the Sharon Tate trial.’”
After giving her emergency treatment, the hospital called the police and Barbara’s parents. Her father flew to Hawaii and was able to bring her back to Los Angeles with him the next day.
On receiving the first fragmentary report, I told LAPD I wanted the persons involved charged with attempted murder.
Since Barbara was a witness in the Tate case, the investigation was given to Tate detectives Calkins and McGann.
SEPTEMBER 11–17, 1970
Though I knew Danny DeCarlo was afraid of Manson, the motorcyclist did a good job of disguising it while on the stand. When Charlie and the girls smiled at “Donkey Dan,” he grinned right back.
I was concerned that DeCarlo might qualify his answers, as he had in the Beausoleil trial. After only a few minutes of testimony, however, my concern suddenly shifted from DeCarlo to Older. When I tried to establish the Manson-Watson relationship through DeCarlo, Older repeatedly sustained the defense objections. He also sustained objections to Manson’s dinnertime conversations when he discussed his philosophy about blacks and whites.
Back in chambers Older made two remarks which totally stunned me. He asked, “What is the relevance of whether or not Manson was the leader?” And he wanted an offer of proof as to the relevance of Helter Skelter! It was as if Older hadn’t even been present during the trial thus far.
That I was more than a little disturbed at his stance came across in my reply: “The offer of proof is that he used to say that he wanted to turn blacks against whites. Of course, this is only the motive for these murders. That is all it is. Other than that, it is not much else.”
I noted: “The prosecution is alleging Mr. Manson
THE COURT “I would suggest this to you, Mr. Bugliosi. Over the noon hour give some careful thought as to what you contend your proof is going to show. Now, I realize that part of it may have to come in through one witness and part through another. This is not unusual. But so far I can’t see any connection between what Mr. Manson believed about blacks and whites in the abstract and any motive.”
I sweated through that noon hour. Unless I could establish Manson’s domination of the other defendants, I wouldn’t be able to convince the jury they had killed on his instructions. And if Older foreclosed me from bringing in Manson’s beliefs about the black-white war from DeCarlo, when my heavyweight witnesses on this—Jakobson, Poston, and Watkins—were still to come, then we were in deep trouble.
I returned to chambers armed with citations of authority as to both the admissibility and the relevance of the testimony. Yet even after a long, impassioned plea, it appeared that I had not changed Older’s mind. He still couldn’t see, for instance, the relevance of Watson’s subservience to Manson, or why I was trying to bring out, through DeCarlo, that Tex had an easygoing, rather weak personality. The relevance, of course, was that if I didn’t establish both, the jury could very well infer that it was Watson, not Manson, who had ordered these murders.
BUGLIOSI “I think the Court can tell the relevancy by the fact the defense counsel are on their hind legs trying to keep it out.”
KANAREK “I think the heart of what we have here is this, that Mr. Bugliosi has lost his cool, because he has a monomania about convicting Mr. Manson.”
BUGLIOSI “He is charged with seven murders, and I am going to be tenacious on this…I intend to go back with these witnesses and find out who Tex Watson was other than a name, Your Honor.”
THE COURT “I am not going to stop you from
On returning to court, I asked DeCarlo exactly the same question I had asked hours earlier: “What was your impression of Tex Watson’s general demeanor?”
KANAREK “Your Honor, I will object to that as calling for a conclusion.”
BUGLIOSI “
I so anticipated Older saying “Sustained” that I almost thought I was imagining it when he said, “Overruled.
