Los Angeles. On November 1, after completing orientation, she was assigned to Dormitory 8000, and given a bunk opposite one Ronnie Howard. Miss Howard, a buxom former call girl who over her thirty-some years had been known by more than a dozen and a half aliases, was at present awaiting trial on a charge of forging a prescription.
On the same day Susan moved into Dormitory 8000, one Virginia Graham did also. Miss Graham, herself an ex–call girl with a sizable number of aka’s, had been picked up for violating her parole. Although they hadn’t seen each other for five years, Ronnie and Virginia had not only been friends and business associates in the past, going out on “calls” together, but Ronnie had married Virginia’s ex-husband.
As their work assignments, Susan Atkins and Virginia Graham were given jobs as “runners,” carrying messages for the prison authorities. In the slow periods when there wasn’t much work, they would sit on stools in “control,” the message center, and talk.
At night, after lights-out, Ronnie Howard and Susan talked also.
Susan loved to talk. And Ronnie and Virginia proved rapt listeners.
On November 2, 1969, one Steve Zabriske appeared at the Portland, Oregon, Police Department and told Detective Sergeant Ritchard that a “Charlie” and a “Clem” had committed both the Tate and LaBianca murders.
He had heard this, the nineteen-year-old Zabriske said, from Ed Bailey and Vern Plumlee, two hippie types from California whom he had met in Portland. Zabriske also told Ritchard that Charlie and Clem were at present in custody in Los Angeles on another charge, grand theft auto.
Bailey had told him something else, Zabriske said: that he had personally seen Charlie shoot a man in the head with a .45 caliber automatic. This had occurred in Death Valley.
Sergeant Ritchard asked Zabriske if he could prove any of this. Zabriske admitted he couldn’t. However, his brother-in-law, Michael Lloyd Carter, had also been present during the conversations, and would back him up if Sergeant Ritchard wanted to talk to him.
Sergeant Ritchard didn’t. Since Zabriske “did not have last names nor did he have anything concrete to establish that he was telling the truth,” Sergeant Ritchard, according to the official report, “did not place any credence on this interview and did not notify the Los Angeles Police Department…”
The girls in Dormitory 8000 called Sadie Mae Glutz—as Susan Atkins insisted on being known—“Crazy Sadie.” It wasn’t just that ridiculous name. She was much too happy, considering where she was. She would laugh and sing at inappropriate times. Without warning, she would stop whatever she happened to be doing and start go-go dancing. She did her exercises sans underpants. She bragged that she had done everything sexual that could be done, and on more than one occasion propositioned other inmates.
Virginia Graham thought she was sort of a “little girl lost,” putting on a big act so no one would know how frightened she really was.
One day while they were sitting in the message center, Virginia asked her, “What are you in for?”
“First degree murder,” Susan matter-of-factly replied.
Virginia couldn’t believe it; Susan looked so young.
In this particular conversation, which apparently took place on November 3, Susan said little about the murder itself, only that she felt a co-defendant, a boy who was being held in the County Jail, had squealed on her. In questioning Susan, Whiteley and Guenther hadn’t told her that it was Kitty Lutesinger who had implicated her, and she presumed the snitch was Bobby Beausoleil.
The next day Susan told Virginia that the man she was accused of killing was named Gary Hinman. She said that she, Bobby, and another girl were involved. The other girl hadn’t been charged with the murder, she said, though she had been in Sybil Brand not too long ago on another charge; right now she was out on bail and had gone to Wisconsin to get her baby.[16]
Virginia asked her, “Well, did you do it?”
Susan looked at her and smiled and said, “Sure.” Just like that.
Only the police had it wrong, she said. They had her holding the man while the boy stabbed him, which was silly, because she couldn’t hold a big man like that. It was the other way round; the boy held him and she had stabbed him, four or five times.
What stunned Virginia, she would later say, was that Susan described it “just like it was a perfectly natural thing to do every day of the week.”
Susan’s conversations were not limited to murder. Subjects ranged from psychic phenomena to her experiences as a topless dancer in San Francisco. It was while there, she told Virginia, that she met “a man, this Charlie.” He was the strongest man alive. He had been in prison but had never been broken. Susan said she followed his orders without question—they all did, all the kids who lived with him. He was their father, their leader, their love.
It was Charlie, she said, who had given her the name Sadie Mae Glutz.
Virginia remarked that she didn’t consider that much of a favor.
Charlie was going to lead them to the desert, Susan said. There was a hole in Death Valley, only Charlie knew where it was, but deep down inside, in the center of the earth, there was a whole civilization. And Charlie was going to take the “family,” the chosen few, and they were going to go to this bottomless pit and live there.
Charlie, Susan confided to Virginia, was Jesus Christ.
Susan, Virginia decided, was nuts.
On the night of Wednesday, November 5, a young man who might have been able to provide a solution to the Tate-LaBianca homicides ceased to exist.
At 7:35 P.M. officers from Venice PD, responding to a telephone call, arrived at 28 Clubhouse Avenue, a house near the beach rented by a Mark Ross. They found a youth—approximate age twenty-two, nickname “Zero,” true name unknown—lying on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. Deceased was still warm to the touch. There was blood on the pillow and what appeared to be an entrance wound in the right temple. Next to the body was a leather gun case and an eight-shot .22 caliber Iver & Johnson revolver. According to the other persons present—a man and three girls—Zero had killed himself while playing Russian roulette.
The stories of the witnesses—who identified themselves as Bruce Davis, Linda Baldwin, Sue Bartell, and Catherine Gillies, and who said they had been staying at the house while Ross was away—tallied perfectly. Linda Baldwin stated that she had been lying on the right side of the mattress, Zero on the left side, when Zero noticed the leather case in a stand next to the bed and remarked, “Oh, here’s a gun.” He removed the gun from the case, Miss Baldwin said, commenting, “There’s only one bullet in it.” Holding the gun in his right hand, he had then spun the cylinder, placed the muzzle against his right temple, and pulled the trigger.
The others, in various parts of the house, had heard what sounded like a firecracker popping, they said. When they entered the bedroom, Miss Baldwin told them, “Zero shot himself, just like in the movies.” Bruce Davis admitted he picked up the gun. They had then called the police.
The officers were unaware that all those present were members of the Manson Family, who had been living at the Venice residence since their release following the Barker Ranch raid. Since when questioned separately all told essentially the same story, the police accepted the Russian roulette explanation and listed the cause of death as suicide.
They had several very good reasons to suspect that explanation, although apparently no one did.
When officer Jerrome Boen later dusted the gun for latents, he found no prints. Nor were there prints on the leather gun case.
And when they examined the revolver, they found that Zero had really been bucking the odds. The gun contained seven live rounds and one spent shell. It had been fully loaded, with no empty chambers.
A number of Family members, including Manson himself, were still in jail in Independence. On November 6, LaBianca detectives Patchett and Sartuchi, accompanied by Lieutenant Burdick of SID, went there to interview them.
