[Hinman’s left ear had been split in half.]
“So Gary went down, and was really going through some changes about losing his ear…” Manson gave him a choice: sign over everything he had, or die. Manson and Davis then left.
Though Beausoleil did obtain the “pink slips” (California automobile ownership papers) on two of Hinman’s vehicles, Gary continued to insist he had no money. When more pistol-whipping failed to convince him, Bobby again called Manson at Spahn, telling him, “We ain’t going to get nothing out of him. He ain’t going to give up nothing. And we can’t just leave. He’s got his ear hacked off and he’ll go to the police.” Manson replied, “Well, you know what to do.” And Beausoleil did it.
“Bobby said he went up to Gary again. Took the knife and stuck him with it. He said he had to do it three or four times…[Hinman] was really bleeding, and he was gasping for air, and Bobby said he knelt down next to him and said, ‘Gary, you know what? You got no reason to be on earth any more. You’re a pig and society don’t need you, so this is the best way for you to go, and you should thank me for putting you out of your misery.’ Then [Hinman] made noises in his throat, his last gasping breath, and wow, away he went.”
Q. “So Bobby told him he was a ‘pig’?”
A. “Right. You see, the fight against society was the number one element in this—”
Q.
They never did.
DeCarlo went on. Before leaving the house, they wrote on the wall “‘white piggy’ or ‘whitey’ or ‘kill the piggies,’ something along that line.” Beausoleil also dipped his hand in Hinman’s blood and, using his palm, made a paw print on the wall; the plan was “to push the blame onto the Black Panthers,” who used the paw print as their symbol. Then they hot-wired Hinman’s Volkswagen microbus and his Fiat station wagon and drove both back to Spahn Ranch, where Beausoleil bragged about his exploits to DeCarlo.
Later, apparently fearful that the palm print might be identifiable, Beausoleil returned to the Hinman residence and attempted, unsuccessfully, to wipe it off the wall. This was several days after Hinman’s death, and Beausoleil later told DeCarlo that he “could hear the maggots eating away on Gary.”[22]
As killers, they had been decidedly amateurish. Not only was the palm print identifiable, so was a latent fingerprint Beausoleil had left in the kitchen. They kept Hinman’s Volkswagen and his Fiat at the ranch for several days, where a number of people saw them.[23] Hinman had played bagpipes, a decidedly uncommon musical instrument. Beausoleil and the girls took his set back to Spahn Ranch, where for a time they remained on a shelf in the kitchen; DeCarlo for one had tried to play them. And Beausoleil did not discard the knife but continued to carry it with him; it was in the tire well when he was arrested on August 6, driving Hinman’s Fiat.
DeCarlo drew a picture of the knife Beausoleil claimed he had used to stab Hinman. It was a pencil-thin, miniature bowie, with an eagle on the handle and a Mexican inscription. It tallied perfectly with the knife recovered from the Fiat. DeCarlo also sketched the 9 mm. Radom, which as yet hadn’t been recovered.
The detectives asked him what other hand guns he had seen at Spahn.
A. “Well, there was a .22 Buntline. When they did that Black Panther, I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to clean it. I didn’t want to be nowhere around it.”
DeCarlo claimed he didn’t know whose gun it was, but he said, “Charlie always used to carry it in a holster on the front of him. It was more or less always with him.”
Sometime “around July, maybe June,” the gun “just popped up.” When was the last time he saw it? “I know I didn’t see it for at least a week before the raid.”
The Spahn Ranch raid had taken place on August 16. A week earlier would be August 9, the date of the Tate homicides.
Q. “Did you ever ask Charlie, ‘Where’s your gun?’”
A. “He said, ‘I just gave it away.’ He liked it, so I figured it was maybe just stashed.”
The detectives had DeCarlo draw the Buntline. It was nearly identical with the photo of the Hi Standard Longhorn model sent out in the LAPD flyer. Later DeCarlo was shown the flyer and asked, “Does this look like the gun you mentioned?”
A. “It sure does.”
Q. “What’s the difference between that gun and the gun that you saw?”
A. “No difference at all. Only the rear sight blade was different. It didn’t have any.”
The detectives had DeCarlo run down what he knew about the murder of the Black Panther. Springer had first mentioned the killing to them when they interviewed him. In the interim they had done some checking and had come up with a slight problem: no such murder had ever been reported.
According to DeCarlo, after Tex burned the guy for $2,500 on a grass deal, the Panther had called Charlie at Spahn Ranch, threatening that if he didn’t make good he and his brothers were going to wipe out the whole ranch. That same night Charlie and a guy named T. J. went to the Panther’s place, in North Hollywood. Charlie had a plan.
He put the .22 Buntline in his belt in back. On a signal T. J. was to yank out the gun, step out from behind Charlie, and plug the Panther. Nail him right there. Only T. J. had chickened out, and Manson had to do the shooting himself. Friends of the black, who were present when the shooting occurred, had later dumped the body in Griffith Park, Danny said.
Danny had seen the $2,500 and had been present the next morning when Manson criticized T. J. for backing down. DeCarlo described T. J. as “a really nice guy; his front was trying to be one of Charlie’s boys, but he didn’t have it inside.” T. J. had gone along with Manson on everything up to this, but he told him, “I don’t want to have nothing to do with snuffing people.” A day or two later he “fled in the wind.”
Q. “Who else got murdered up there? What about Shorty? Do you know anything about that?”
There was a long pause, then: “That was my ace in the hole.”
Q. “How so?”
A. “I was going to save that for the last.”
Q. “Well, might as well clear the thing up now. Has Charlie got something he can smear on you that—”
A. “No, no way at all. Nothing.”
One thing did worry DeCarlo, however. In 1966 he had been convicted of a felony, smuggling marijuana across the Mexican border, a federal charge; he was currently appealing the sentence. He was also under indictment on two other charges: along with Al Springer and several other Straight Satans, he had been charged with selling a stolen motorcycle engine, which was a local charge, and giving false information while purchasing a firearm (using an alias and not disclosing that he had a prior felony conviction), which was federal. Manson was still on parole from a federal pen. “So what if they send me to the same place? I don’t want to feel a shank in my back and find that little son of a bitch behind me.”
Q. “Let me explain something to you, Danny, so you know where you stand. We’re dealing with a guy here who we are pretty sure is responsible for about thirteen murders. Some of which you don’t know about.”
The figure thirteen was just a guess, but DeCarlo surprised them by saying, “I know about—I’m pretty sure he did Tate.”
Q. “O.K., we’ve talked about the Panther, we’ve talked about Gary Hinman, we’re going to talk about Shorty, and you think he did Tate, that’s eight. Now, we’ve got five more. All right? Now, our opinion of Charlie is that he’s got a little mental problem.
“But we’re in no way going to jeopardize you or anyone else if, for no other reason, we don’t want another murder. We’re in business to stop murders. And in this business there’s no sense in solving thirteen murders if somebody else is going to get killed. That just makes fourteen.”
A. “I’m a nasty motorcycle rider.”
Q. “I don’t care what you are personally.”
A. “The police’s general opinion of me is nothing.”
