Q. “That puts you in a pretty shitty spot, you’re aware of that?”
Danny was. And he got in even deeper when one of the detectives asked him if he knew anything about lime. When arrested, Mary Brunner was carrying a shopping list made up by Manson. “Lime” was one of the items listed. Any idea why Charlie would want some lime?
Danny recalled that Charlie had once asked him what to use “to decompose a body.” He had told him lime worked best, because he had once used it to get rid of a cat that had died under a house.
Q. “Why did you tell him that?”
A. “No particular reason, he was just asking me.”
Q. “What did he ask you?”
A. “Oh, the best way to ah, ah, you know, to get rid of a body real quick.”
Q. “Did you ever think to say, ‘Now what in the fuck makes you ask a question like that, Charlie?’”
A. “No, because he was nuts.”
Q. “When did that conversation take place?”
A. “Right around, ah, right around the time Shorty disappeared.”
It looked bad, and the detectives left it at that. Although privately they were inclined to accept DeCarlo’s tale, suspecting, however, that although he probably had not taken part in the murder, he still knew more than he was telling, it gave them some additional leverage to try and get what they wanted.
They wanted two things.
Q. “Anybody left up at Spahn Ranch that knows you?”
A. “Not that I know of. I don’t know who’s up there. And I don’t want to go up there to find out. I don’t want nothing to do with the place.”
Q. “I want to look around there. But I need a guide.”
Danny didn’t volunteer.
They made the other request straight out.
Q. “Would you be willing to testify?”
A. “
There were two charges pending against him, they reminded him. On the stolen motorcycle engine, “Maybe we can get it busted down to a lesser charge. Maybe we can go so far as to get it knocked off. As far as the federal thing is concerned, I don’t know how much weight we can push on that. But here again we can try.”
A. “If you try for me, that’s fine. That’s all I can ask of you.”
If it came down to being a witness or going to jail—
DeCarlo hesitated. “Then when
Q. “He isn’t going to get out of jail on no first degree murder beef when you’ve got over five victims involved. If Manson was the guy that was in on the Tate murder. We don’t know that for a fact yet.
We’ve got a great deal of information that way.”
A. “There’s also a reward involved in that.”
Q. “Yes, there is. Quite a bit of a reward. Twenty-five grand. Not to say that one guy is going to get it, but even split that’s a hell of a piece of cash.”
A. “I could send my boy through military school with that.”
Q. “Now, what do you think, would you be willing to testify against this group of people?”
A. “He’s going to be sitting there looking at me, Manson is, isn’t he?”
Q. “If you go to trial and testify, he is. Now, how scared of Manson are you?”
A. “I’m scared shitless. I’m petrified of him. He wouldn’t hesitate for a second. If it takes him ten years, he’d find that little boy of mine and carve him to pieces.”
Q. “You give that motherfucker more credit than he deserves. If you think Manson is some kind of a god that is going to break out of jail and come back and murder everybody that testified against him—”
But it was obvious DeCarlo didn’t put that past Manson.
Even if he remained in jail, there were the others.
A. “What about Clem? Have you got him locked up?”
Q. “Yeah. Clem is sitting in the cooler up in Independence, with Charlie.”
A. “What about Tex and Bruce?”
Q. “They’re both out. Bruce Davis, the last I heard, sometime earlier this month, was in Venice.”
A. “Bruce is down in Venice, huh? I’ll have to watch myself…One of my club brothers said he spotted a couple of the girls down in Venice, too.”
The detectives didn’t tell DeCarlo that when Davis was last seen, on November 5, it was in connection with another death, the “suicide” of Zero. By this time LAPD had learned that Zero—aka Christopher Jesus, t/n John Philip Haught—had been arrested in the Barker raid. Earlier, in going through some photographs, DeCarlo had identified “Scotty” and “Zero” as two young boys from Ohio, who had been with the Family for a short time but “didn’t fit in.” One of the detectives had remarked, “Zero’s no longer with us.”
A. “What do you mean he’s ‘no longer with us’?”
Q. “He’s among the dead.”
A. “
Q. “Yeah, he got a little too high one day and he was playing Russian roulette. He parked a bullet in his head.”
While the detectives had apparently bought the story of Zero’s death, as related by Bruce Davis and the others, Danny didn’t, not for a minute.
No, Danny didn’t want to testify.
The detectives left it at that. There was still time for him to change his mind. And, after all, they now had Ronnie Howard. They let Danny go, after making arrangements for him to call in the next day.
One of the detectives commented, after Danny had left but while the tape was still on, “I kind of feel like we’ve done a day’s work.”
The DeCarlo interview had lasted over seven hours. It was now past midnight on Tuesday, November 18, 1969. I was already asleep, unaware that in a few hours, as a result of a meeting between the DA and his staff that morning, I would be handed the job of prosecuting the Tate-LaBianca killers.
PART 3
The Investigation—Phase Two
“No sense makes sense.”
NOVEMBER 18, 1969
By now the reader knows a great deal more about the Tate-LaBianca murders than I did on the day I was assigned that case. In fact, since large portions of the foregoing story have not been made public before this, the reader is an insider in a sense highly unusual in a murder case. And, in a way, I’m a newcomer, an intruder. The sudden switch from an unseen background narrator to a very personal account is bound to be a surprise. The best
