FITZGERALD “I’m sorry, continue.”
Calling counsel to the bench, Judge Older said, “She can only harm the defendants doing what she is doing.”
I explained to Older, “If the Court is wondering why I am not objecting, it is because I feel that her testimony is helpful to the prosecution.”
So helpful, in fact, that there was little need for cross-examination. Among the questions I had intended to ask her, for example, was one Kanarek now asked: “Did you think that Charles Manson was Jesus Christ?”
Squeaky hesitated a moment before answering. Would she be the apostle who denied Jesus? Apparently she decided she would not, for she replied: “I think that the Christians in the caves and in the woods were a lot of kids just living and being without guilt, without shame, being able to take off their clothes and lay in the sun…And I see Jesus Christ as a man who came from a woman who did not know who the father of her baby was.”
Squeaky was the least untruthful of the Family members who testified. Yet she was so damaging to the defense that thereafter Fitzgerald let the other defense attorneys call the witnesses.
Keith called Brenda McCann, t/n Nancy Laura Pitman, nineteen. Though not unattractive, Brenda came across as a tough, vicious little girl, filled with hostility that was just waiting to erupt.
Her father “designed the guidance controls of missiles over in the Pentagon,” she said. He also kicked her out of the house when she was sixteen, she claimed. The dropout from Hollywood High School asserted there was no such thing as a Family, and Charlie “was not a leader at all. It was more like Charlie followed us around and took care of us.”
But, as with Squeaky and the girls who would follow her, it was obvious that Brenda’s world revolved around a single axis. He was nobody special but “Charlie would sit down and all the animals would gather round him, donkeys and coyotes and things…And one time he reached down and petted a rattlesnake.”
Questioned by Kanarek, Brenda testified that Linda “would take LSD every day…took speed…Linda loved Tex very much…Linda followed Tex everywhere…”
On cross-examination I asked Brenda: “Would you give up your life for Charles Manson if he asked you to?”
A. “Many times he has given you his life.”
Q. “Just answer the question, Brenda.”
A. “Yes, I would.”
Q. “Would you lie on the stand for Charles Manson?”
A. “No, I would tell the truth on the stand.”
Q. “So you would die for him, but not lie for him?”
A. “That’s right.”
Q. “Do you feel that lying under oath is a more serious matter than dying, Brenda?”
A. “I don’t take dying all that seriously myself.”
All these witnesses were extremely antagonistic toward their real families. Sandra Good, for example, claimed that her father, a San Diego stockbroker, had disowned her, neglecting to mention that this was only after he had sent her thousands of dollars and was threatened by Manson if he didn’t give her more.
Manson had severed their umbilical cords while fastening one of his own. And throughout their testimony it showed. Even more than Squeaky and Brenda, Sandy rhapsodized on Manson’s “magical powers.” She told the story of how Charlie had breathed on a dead bird and brought it back to life. “I believe his voice could shatter this building if he so desired…Once he yelled and a window broke.”
It was not until the penalty trial that the jury learned of the vigil of the Family members on the corner of Temple and Broadway. Rather movingly, Sandy testified to life there. “You can hardly see the sky most of the time for the smog. They are always digging; every day there is a new project going; something is always under construction. They are always ripping out something and putting something in, usually of a concrete nature. It is insane out there. It’s madness, and the more I am out there the more I feel this X. I am X’d out of it.”
After I’d declined to cross-examine Sandy, she very angrily asked, “Why didn’t you ask me any questions?”
“Because you said nothing which hurt the People’s case, Sandy,” I replied. “In fact, you helped it.”
I had anticipated that Sandy would testify that Manson wasn’t even at Spahn Ranch at the time the murders had occurred. When she didn’t, I knew the defense had decided to abandon the idea of using an alibi defense. Which meant they had something else in mind. But what?
Manson and the three female defendants had been allowed to return to court during the penalty phase. They were much quieter now, far more subdued, as if it had finally got through to them that this “play,” as Krenwinkel had characterized it, might cost them their lives. While Squeaky and the other Manson girls testified, their mentor looked thoughtful and pulled on his goatee, as if to say: They’re telling it like it is.
The female witnesses wore their best clothes for the occasion. It was obvious that they were both proud and happy to be up there helping Charlie.
The jurors shared a common expression—incredulity. Few even bothered to take notes. I suspected that all of them were mulling over the astonishing contrast. On the stand the girls talked of love, music, and babies. Yet while the love and the music and the babies were going on, this same group was going out and butchering human beings. And to them, amazingly enough, there was no inconsistency, no conflict between love and murder!
By February 4, I was fairly sure, from the questions Kanarek had been asking the witnesses, that Manson was not going to take the stand. This was my biggest disappointment during the entire trial, that I wouldn’t have the chance to break Charlie on cross-examination.
That same day our office learned that Charles “Tex” Watson had been returned to Los Angeles and ruled competent to stand trial.
Only three days after his transfer to Atascadero, Watson had begun eating regular meals. Within a month, one of the psychiatrists who examined him wrote: “There is no evidence of abnormal behavior at the present time except his silence, which is purposeful and with reason.” Another later noted: “Psychological testing gave a scatter pattern of responses inconsistent with any recognized form of mental illness…” In short, Tex was faking it. All this information would be useful, I knew, if Tex tried to plead insanity during his trial, which was now scheduled to follow the current proceedings.
Catherine Share, aka Gypsy, was the defense’s most effective liar. She was also, at twenty-eight, the oldest female member of the Family. And, of all its members, she had the most unusual background.
She was born in Paris in 1942, her father a Hungarian violinist, her mother a German-Jewish refugee. Both parents, members of the French underground, committed suicide during the war. At eight, she was adopted and brought to the United States by an American family. Her adoptive mother, who was suffering from cancer, committed suicide when Catherine was sixteen. Her adoptive father, a psychologist, was blind. She cared for him until he remarried, at which time she left home.
A graduate of Hollywood High School, she had attended college for three years; married; divorced a year later. A violin virtuoso since childhood, with an unusually beautiful singing voice, she had obtained work in a number of movies. It was on the set of one, in Topanga Canyon, that she became involved with Bobby Beausoleil, who had a minor role. About two months later Beausoleil introduced her to Charles Manson. Though it was, on her part, love at first sight, she continued traveling with the Beausoleil menage for another six months, before splitting for Spahn Ranch. Although she was an avowed Communist when she joined the Family, Manson soon convinced her that his dogma was ordained. “Of all the girls,” Paul Watkins had told me, “Gypsy was most in love with Charlie.”
She was also the most eloquent in his defense. But, though brighter and more articulate than most of the others, she too occasionally slipped up.
“We are all facing the same sentence,” she told the jury. “We are all in a gas chamber right here in L.A., a slow-acting one. The air is going away from us in every city. There is going to be no more air, and no more water, and the food is dying. They are poisoning you. The food you are eating is poisoning you. There is going to be no more earth, no more trees. Man, especially white man, is killing this earth.
“But those aren’t Charles Manson’s thoughts, those are my thoughts,” she quickly added.
