copping out to her. But there was another coincidence even odder. Virginia had been to 10050 Cielo Drive. Back in 1962 she and her then husband and another girl had been looking for a quiet place, away from things, and had learned 10050 Cielo Drive was up for lease. There had been no one there to show them around, so they had just looked in the windows of the main house. She could remember little about it, only that it looked like a red barn, but the next day at lunch she told Susan about having been there and asked if the interior was still decorated in gold and white. It was just a guess. Susan replied, “Huh-uh,” but didn’t elaborate. Virginia then told her about knowing Sebring, but Susan didn’t appear very interested. This time Susan wasn’t as talkative, but Virginia persisted, picking up miscellaneous bits and pieces of information.
They’d met Terry Melcher through Dennis Wilson, one of the Beach Boys rock group. They—Charlie, Susan, and the others—had lived with Dennis for a time. Virginia got the idea they were hostile toward Melcher, that he was too interested in money. Virginia also learned that the Tate murders had taken place between midnight and one in the morning; that “Charlie is love, pure love”; and that when you stab someone “it feels good when the knife goes in.”
She also learned that besides the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders, “there’s more—and more before… There’s also three people out in the desert…”
Bits and pieces. Susan had said nothing that would establish whether she was or wasn’t telling the truth.
That afternoon Susan walked over and sat down on Virginia’s bed. Virginia had been leafing through a movie magazine. Susan saw it and began talking. The story she related, Virginia would say much later, was even more bizarre than what Susan had already told her. It was so incredible that Virginia didn’t even mention it to Ronnie Howard. No one would believe it, she decided. For Susan Atkins, in one spurt of non-stop talking, gave her a “death list” of persons who would be murdered next. All were celebrities. She then, according to Virginia, described in gruesome detail exactly how Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Tom Jones, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra would die.
On Monday, November 10, Susan Atkins had a visitor at Sybil Brand, Sue Bartell, who told her about the death of Zero. After Sue left, Susan told Ronnie Howard. Whether she embellished it or not is unknown. According to Susan, one of the girls had been holding Zero’s hand when he died. When the gun went off, “he climaxed all over himself.”
Susan didn’t seem disturbed to hear of Zero’s death. On the contrary, it excited her. “Imagine how beautiful to be there when it happened!” she told Ronnie.
On Wednesday, November 12, Susan Atkins was taken to court for a preliminary hearing on the Hinman murder. While there, she heard Sergeant Whiteley testify that it was Kitty Lutesinger—not Bobby Beausoleil—who had implicated her. On being returned to jail, Susan told Virginia that the prosecution had a surprise witness; but she wasn’t worried about her testimony: “Her life’s not worth anything.”
That same day Virginia Graham received some bad news. She was being transferred to Corona Women’s Prison, to serve out the rest of her sentence. She was to leave that afternoon. While she was packing, Ronnie came up to her and asked, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Virginia replied. “Ronnie, if you want to take it from here—”
“I’ve been talking to that girl every night,” Ronnie said. “Boy, she’s really weird. She could have, you know.”
Virginia had forgotten to ask Susan about the word “pig,” which the papers had said was printed in blood on the door of the Tate residence. She suggested that Ronnie question her about this, and anything else she could think of that might indicate whether she was telling the truth.
In the meantime, they decided not to mention it to anyone else.
That same day the LaBianca detectives received a call from Venice PD. Were they still interested in talking to one of the Straight Satans? If so, they were questioning one, a guy named Al Springer, on another charge.
The LaBianca detectives had Springer brought over to Parker Center, where they interviewed him on tape. What he told them was so unexpected they had trouble believing it. For Springer said that on August 11 or 12—two or three days after the Tate homicides—Charlie Manson had bragged to him about killing people, adding, “We knocked off five of them just the other night.”
NOVEMBER 12–16, 1969
LaBianca detectives Nielsen, Gutierrez, and Patchett interviewed Springer on tape, in one of the interrogation cubicles of LAPD Homicide. Springer was twenty-six, five feet nine, weighed 130 pounds, and, except for his dusty, ragged “colors,” as bikers’ jackets are known, was surprisingly neat for a member of an “outlaw” motorcycle band.
Springer, it turned out, prided himself on his cleanliness. Which was one of the reasons he personally hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with Manson and his girls, he said. But Danny DeCarlo, the club treasurer of the Straight Satans, had got mixed up with them and had missed meetings, so around August 11 or 12, he, Springer, had gone to Spahn Ranch to persuade Danny to come back. “…and there was flies all over the place and they were just like animals up there, I couldn’t believe it, you know. You see, I’m really clean, really. Some of the guys get pretty nasty, but I myself, I like to keep things clean.
“Well, in comes this Charlie…He wanted Danny up there because Danny had his colors on his back, and all these drunkards, they come up there and start harassing the girls and messing with the guys and Danny walks out with his Straight Satan colors on, and nobody messes with Charlie, see.
“So I tried to get Danny to come back, and Charlie is standing there, and Charlie says, he says, ‘Now wait a minute, maybe I can give you a better thing than you’ve got already.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He says, ‘Move up here, you can have all the girls you want, all the girls,’ he says, ‘are all yours, at your disposal, anything.’ And he’s a brainwashing type guy. So I said, ‘Well, how do you survive, how do you support these twenty, thirty fucking broads, man?’ And he says, ‘I got them all hoofing for me.’ He said, ‘I go out at night and I do my thing.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what’s your thing, man; run your trip down.’ He figured me being a motorcycle rider and all, I’d accept anything including murder.
“So he starts getting in my ear and says how he goes up and he lives with the rich people, and he calls the police ‘pigs’ and what not, he knocks on the door, they’ll open the door, and he’ll just drive in with his cutlass and start cutting them up, see.”
Q. “This is what he told you?”
A. “This is what he told me verbally, right to my face.”
Q. “You’re kidding, is that what you really heard?”
A. “Yeah. I said, ‘When’s the last time you did it?’ He says, ‘Well, we knocked off five of them,’ he says, ‘just the other night.’”
Q. “So he told you that—Charlie stated that he knocked over five people?”
A. “Right. Charlie and Tex.”
Springer couldn’t recall the exact word Manson used: it wasn’t “people”; it might have been “pigs” or “rich pigs.”
The LaBianca detectives were so startled they had Springer run through it a second time, and a third.
A. “I think you’ve got your man right here, I really do.”
Q. “I’m pretty sure we have, but in this day and age of feeding people their rights, if we’re going to make a decent case on him, we can’t do it with his statement.”
Exactly when had Manson told him this? Well, it was the first time he went to Spahn, and that was either August 11 or 12—he couldn’t remember which. But he sure remembered the scene. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I’ve never been to a nudist colony or I’ve never seen real idiots on the loose…” Everywhere he looked
