“Then why would they do what they’re doing for you? Why would they be willing to follow you anywhere— even to the gas chamber at San Quentin?”
“Because I tell them the truth,” Manson replied. “Other guys bullshit them and say ‘I love you and only you’ and all that baloney. I’m honest with them. I tell them I’m the most selfish guy in the world. And I am.”
Yet he was always saying that he would die for his brother, I reminded him. Wasn’t that a contradiction?
“No, because that’s selfish too,” he responded. “He’s not going to die for me unless I’m willing to die for him.”
I had the strong feeling that Manson was leveling with me. Sadie, Katie, and Leslie were willing to murder, even give their own lives, for Charlie. And Charlie personally couldn’t have cared less about them.
Though he wasn’t even present when the witnesses testified, Maxwell Keith, arguing for Leslie Van Houten, delivered the best of the four defense arguments. He also did what no other defense attorney had dared do during the entire trial. He put the hat on Charles Manson—albeit with a ten-foot pole.
“The record discloses over and over again that all of these girls at the ranch believed Manson was God, really believed it.
“The record discloses that the girls obeyed his commands without any conscious questioning at all.
“If you believe the prosecution theory that these female defendants and Mr. Watson were extensions of Mr. Manson—his additional arms and legs as it were—if you believe that they were mindless robots, they cannot be guilty of premeditated murder.” To commit first degree murder, Keith argued, you must have malice aforethought and you must think and plan. “And these people did not have minds to make up…Each of the minds of these girls and Mr. Watson were totally controlled by someone else.”
As for Leslie herself, Keith argued that even if she did all the things the prosecution contended, she still had committed no crime.
“At best, if you want to believe Dianne Lake, the evidence shows that she was there.
“At best, it shows that she did something after the commission of these homicides that wasn’t very nice.
“And at best, it showed that she wiped some fingerprints off after the commission of these homicides, which does not make her an aider and abetter.
“As repugnant as you may feel this is, nobody in the world can be guilty of murder or conspiracy to commit murder who stabs somebody after they are already dead. I’m sure that desecrating somebody that is dead is a crime in this state, but she is not charged with that.”
This case, Keith concluded, must be decided on the basis of the evidence, and “on the basis of the evidence, ladies and gentlemen, I say to you: You must acquit Leslie Van Houten.”
I began my final summation (closing argument) on January 13.
In my opinion, final summation is very often the most important part of the trial, since it’s the final word to the jury. Again, several hundred hours had gone into the preparation. I began by meeting head on each of the defense contentions. In this way I hoped to dispose of any questions or lingering doubts that otherwise might distract the jury during the last phase of my argument during which I summarize, as affirmatively as I can, the highlights and strengths of my case.
Taking on each of the defense attorneys in turn, I cited twenty-four misstatements of either the law or the testimony in Fitzgerald’s presentation. As for his suggestion that if Manson ordered these murders he would have sent men rather than women, I asked, “Is Mr. Fitzgerald suggesting that Katie, Sadie, and Leslie were inadequate to do the job? Isn’t Mr. Fitzgerald satisfied with their handiwork?” Fitzgerald had also contended that perhaps Linda planted the bloody clothing a few days before it was found. I reminded the jury that Linda was returned to California on December 2, in custody, and that the clothing was found on December 15. “Apparently Mr. Fitzgerald wants you to believe that one night between these dates Linda snuck out of her room at Sybil Brand, rounded up some clothing, put some blood on them, hitchhiked out to Benedict Canyon Road, threw the clothing over the side of the hill, then hitchhiked back to the jail and snuck back into her room.”
Fitzgerald had likened the circumstantial evidence in this case to a chain, saying that if one link were missing the chain was broken. I, instead, likened it to a rope, each strand of which is a fact, and “as we add strands we add strength to that rope, until it is strong enough to bind these defendants to justice.”
Shinn had raised very few points that needed rebutting. Kanarek had raised a great many, and I took them on one by one. A few samples:
Kanarek had asked why the prosecution didn’t have the defendants try on the seven articles of clothing to see if they fitted. I reversed this, asking why, if they didn’t fit, the defense didn’t illustrate this to the jury.
As for the absence of Watson’s prints on Parent’s vehicle, I reminded them of Dolan’s testimony that 70 percent of the times LAPD goes to a crime scene no readable prints are found. I also noted that in moving his hand, it was very likely Watson had created an unreadable smudge.
When I lacked the answer to a question, I frankly admitted it. But usually I offered at least one and often several possibilities. Whom did the glasses belong to? Frankly, we didn’t know. But we did know, from Sadie’s statement to Roseanne Walker, that they did not belong to the killers. Why was there no blood on the Buck knife found in the chair? Kanarek had raised this point. It was a good one. We had no answer. We could speculate, however, that Sadie had lost the knife before she stabbed Voytek and Sharon, possibly while she was in the process of tying up Voytek, and that at some later point she borrowed another knife from Katie or Tex. “Much more important than what knife she used was the fact that she confessed stabbing both of the victims to Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard.”
The whole thrust of Irving Kanarek’s seven-day argument, I told the jury, was that the prosecution had framed its case against his client, Charles Manson.
“In other words, ladies and gentlemen,” I observed, “there are seven brutal murders, so the police and the District Attorney got together and said, ‘Let’s prosecute some hippie for these murders, someone whose life style we don’t like. Just about any hippie will do,’ and we just arbitrarily picked on poor Charles Manson.
“Charles Manson is not a defendant in this trial because he is some long-haired vagabond who made love to young girls and was a virulent dissenter.
“He is on trial because he is a vicious, diabolical murderer who gave the order that caused seven human beings to end up in the cold earth. That is why he is on trial.”
I also hit, and hard, Kanarek’s claim that the prosecution was responsible for the excessive length of the trial. The jury had missed both Christmas and New Year’s at home, and I didn’t want them entering the jury chambers resenting the prosecution for this.
“Irving Kanarek, the Toscanini of tedium, is accusing the prosecution of tying up this court for over six months. You folks are the best witnesses. Every single, solitary witness that the prosecution called to the stand was asked brief questions, directly to the point. The witnesses were on that stand day after day after day on cross-examination, not on direct examination.”
As for Maxwell Keith, he did “everything possible for his client, Leslie Van Houten,” I observed. “He gave his best. Unfortunately for Mr. Keith, he had no facts and no law to support him. Mr. Keith, if you look at his argument very closely, never really disputed that Linda Kasabian and Dianne Lake told the truth. Basically, his position was that even if Leslie did the things Linda and Dianne said she did, she is still not guilty of anything.
“I wonder if Max would concede that she is at least guilty of trespassing?”
KEITH “I will.”
Max’s response surprised me. He was in effect admitting that Leslie had been in the LaBianca residence.
Even if Rosemary LaBianca was dead when Leslie stabbed her, I told the jury, she was guilty of first degree murder as both a co-conspirator and an aider and abetter. If a person is present at the scene of a crime, offering moral support, that constitutes aiding and abetting. But Leslie went far beyond this, stabbing, wiping prints, and so forth.
Also, we had only Leslie’s word for it that Rosemary was dead when she stabbed her. “Only thirteen of Rosemary’s forty-one stab wounds were post-mortem. What about the other twenty-eight?”
Yes, Tex, Sadie, Katie, and Leslie were robots, zombies, automatons. No question about it. But only in the
