I talked to them for a long time, asking specific questions now, but still getting pat answers. On asking where they were on a certain date, for example, they’d reply, “There is no such thing as time.” The answers were both non-responsive and a guard. I wanted to get past that guard, to learn what they really felt. I couldn’t.
I sensed something else. Each was, in her own way, a pretty girl. But there was a sameness about them that was much stronger than their individuality. I’d notice it again later that afternoon, in talking to other female members of the Family. Same expressions, same patterned responses, same tone of voice, same lack of distinct personality. The realization came with a shock: they reminded me less of human beings than Barbie dolls.
Looking at Sandy’s almost beatific smile, I remembered something that Frank Fowles had told me, and a chill ran up and down my spine.
While she was still in jail in Independence, Sandy had been overheard talking to one of the other girls in the Family. Sandy had told her, “I’ve finally reached the point where I can kill my parents.”
Leslie, Ouisch, Snake, Brenda, Gypsy—Frank Fowles arranged to have them brought over from the jail, where they were still being held on charges stemming from the Barker raid. Like Squeaky and Sandy, they accepted my “bribe,” candy and gum, and told me nothing of importance. Their answers were as if rehearsed; often they gave identical responses.
If we were to get any of them to talk, I knew, we would have to separate them. There was a cohesion, a kind of cement, that held them together. A part of it was undoubtedly their strange—and to me still puzzling— relationship with Charles Manson. Part was their shared experiences, the world known as the Family. But I couldn’t help wondering if another of the ingredients wasn’t fear: fear of what the others would say if they talked, fear of what the others would do.
The only way we could find out would be to keep them apart, and owing to the smallness of the jail, it couldn’t be done in Independence.
Besides Manson, there was only one male Family member still in custody: Clem Tufts, t/n Steve Grogan. Jack Gardiner, Fowles’ investigator, gave me the eighteen-year-old Grogan’s rap sheet:
3-23-66, Possession dangerous drugs, 6 mos. probation; 4-27-66, Shoplifting, Cont’d on probation; 6-23-66, Disturbing the peace, Cont’d on probation; 9-27-66, Probation dismissed; 6-5-67, Possession marijuana, Counseled & released; 8-12-67, Shoplifting, Bail forfeiture, 1-22-68; Loitering, Closed after investigation; 4-5-69, Grand theft money & Prowling, Released insuff. evidence; 5-20-69, Grand theft auto, Released insuff. evidence; 6-11 -69, Child molesting & Indecent exposure…
Grogan had been observed exposing himself to several children, ages four to five years. “The kids wanted me to,” he explained to arresting officers, who had caught him in the act. “I violated the law, the thing fell out of my pants and the parents got excited,” he later told a court-appointed psychiatrist. After interviewing Grogan, the psychiatrist ruled
The court decided otherwise, sending him to Camarillo for a ninety-day observation period. He remained a grand total of two days, then walked away, aided, I would later learn, by one of the girls from the Family.
His escape had occurred on July 19, 1969. He was back at Spahn in time for the Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca murders. He was arrested in the August 16 Spahn raid, but was released two days later, in time to behead Shorty Shea.
Currently, as a result of the Barker raid, he was charged with grand theft auto and possession of an illegal weapon, i.e., the sawed-off shotgun. I asked Fowles the present status of the case.
He said that, at the instigation of Grogan’s attorney, he had been examined by two psychiatrists, who had decided that he was “presently insane.”
I told Fowles I hoped he would request a jury trial and fight the insanity plea. If I brought Clem to trial in Los Angeles, charged with participating in the Tate murders, I didn’t want the defense introducing evidence that a court in Inyo County had already found him insane. Frank agreed to go along with this.
At the moment our case against Grogan was so thin as to be nonexistent. There was no proof that Donald “Shorty” Shea was even dead; to date, no body had been found. As for the Tate murders, all we had was DeCarlo’s statement that Clem had told him, “We got five piggies.”
There was no way we could use that statement in court if there was a joint trial. In 1965 the California Supreme Court ruled, in the case of
Since
Therefore, Manson’s statement to Springer, “We knocked off five of them just the other night,” was useless. As was Clem’s remark to DeCarlo, “We got five piggies.”
Manson and Grogan could have made such confessions on nationwide TV and, if there was a joint trial, we could never use their remarks against them.
So we had virtually nothing on Clem.
In going through Grogan’s file, I noticed that one of his brothers had made application for the California Highway Patrol; I made note of this, thinking maybe his brother could influence Clem to cooperate with us. DeCarlo had described Grogan in two words: “He’s nuts.” In his police photograph—big, wide grin, chipped front tooth, moronic stare—he did look idiotic. I asked Fowles for copies of the recent psychiatric reports.
Asked, “Why do you hate your father?” Grogan replied, “I’m my father and I don’t hate myself.” He denied the use of drugs. “I have my own bennies, adrenalin. It’s called fear.” He claimed that “love is everything,” but, according to one psychiatrist, “he also revealed that he could not accept the philosophy of interracial brotherhood. Quotes supposedly from the Bible with sexual correlation were given in defense of his attitude.”
Other quotes from Clem: “I’m dying a little every day. My ego is dying and knows he’s dying and struggles hard. When you’re free of ego you’re free of everything…Whatever you say is right for yourself…Whoever you think I am, that’s who I am.”
The philosophy of Clem? Or Charles Manson? I’d heard the same thoughts, in several instances even identical words, from the girls.
If the psychiatrists had examined one of Manson’s followers and, on the basis of such responses, found him insane, what of his leader?
I saw Charles Manson for the first time that day. He was walking from the jail to the courtroom for arraignment on the Michigan loader arson charge, and was accompanied by five sheriff’s deputies.
I hadn’t realized how small he was. He was just five feet two. He was thin, of slight build, a shade hunchbacked, wore his brown hair very long, almost to his shoulders, and had a good start on a beard, grown—I’d noticed in comparing the LASO and Inyo mug shots—after his arrest in the Spahn Ranch raid. He wore fringed buckskins, which were not inexpensive. Though handcuffed, his walk was casual, not stiff, as though he was completely at ease.
I could not believe that this little guy had done all the things it was said he had. He looked anything but a heavyweight. Yet I knew that to underrate him would be the biggest mistake I could make. For if the Atkins and DeCarlo stories were true, he was not only capable of committing murder himself, he also possessed the incredible power to command others to kill for him.
Manson’s girls had talked a great deal about the Indian concept of karma. It was like a boomerang, they said. Whatever you threw out would, eventually, come back to you. I wondered if Manson himself really believed this and if he sensed that, nearly three and a half months after these hideous murders, his own karma was finally
