Questioned by reporters, Davis credited “tenacious investigation carried on by robbery-homicide detectives” with forcing the break in the case. He stated that the investigators “developed a suspicion which caused them to do a vigorous amount of work in this Spahn Ranch area and the people connected with Spahn Ranch which led us to where we are today.”
There was also no mention of that ten-cent telephone call.
The reporters ran for the phones.
Caballero called Aaron. He wanted to interview Susan Atkins on tape, but he didn’t want to do it at Sybil Brand, where there was a chance one of the other Manson girls would hear of it. Also, he felt Susan would be inclined to talk more freely in other surroundings. He suggested having her brought to his own office.
Though unusual, the request wasn’t unprecedented. Aaron made up a removal order, which was signed by Judge William Keene, and that evening Susan Atkins, escorted by two sheriff’s deputies, was taken to Caballero’s office, where Caballero and his associate, Paul Caruso, interviewed her on tape.
The tape was for two purposes, Caballero told Aaron. He wanted it for the psychiatrists in case he decided on an insanity plea. And if we went ahead on the deal, he would let us listen to it before we took the case to the grand jury.
DECEMBER 2, 1969
LAPD called a few minutes after I arrived at the office. All five suspects were now in custody, Linda Kasabian just having voluntarily surrendered to Concord, New Hampshire, police. According to her mother, Linda had admitted to being present at the Tate residence but claimed she had not participated in the murders. It looked as if she wasn’t going to fight extradition.
A somewhat different decision had been reached in Texas.
McKinney was less than thirty miles north of Dallas, and only a few miles from Farmersville, where Charles Watson had grown up and gone to school. Audie Murphy had been a Farmersville boy. Now they had another local celebrity.
The news had already broken by the time Sartuchi and Nielsen reached McKinney. Stories in the Texas papers described Watson as having been an A student in high school, a football, basketball, and track star, who still held the state record for the low hurdles. Most local residents expressed shocked disbelief. “Charles was the boy next door,” one said. “It was drugs that did it,” an uncle told reporters. “He started taking them at college and that was where the trouble started.” The principal of Farmersville High was quoted as saying, “It almost makes you afraid to send your kids off to college any more.”
On the instruction of Watson’s attorney, Bill Boyd, the Los Angeles detectives were not allowed to speak to his client. Sheriff Montgomery wouldn’t even permit them to fingerprint him. Sartuchi and Nielsen did see Watson, however—accidentally. While they were talking to the sheriff, Watson passed them on the stairs, on his way to the visitor’s room. According to their report, he was well dressed, clean-shaven, with short, not long, hair. He appeared in good health and looked like “a clean-cut college boy.”
While in McKinney, the detectives established that Watson had gone to California in 1967 and that he hadn’t moved back until November 1969—long after the murders.
Sartuchi and Nielsen returned to Los Angeles convinced we’d have little cooperation from the local authorities. It wasn’t only a matter of relatives; somehow the whole affair had become involved in state politics!
“Little cooperation” would be a gross exaggeration.
Reporters were busy tracing the wanderings of the nomadic Family and interviewing those members not in custody. I asked Gail to save the papers, knowing the interviews might be useful at a later date. Though still uncharged with the murders, Charles Manson had now taken center stage. Sandy: “The first time I heard him sing it was like an angel…” Squeaky: “He gave off a lot of magic. But he was sort of a changeling. He seemed to change every time I saw him. He seemed ageless…”
There were also interviews with acquaintances and relatives of the suspects. Joseph Krenwinkel recalled how in September 1967 his daughter Patricia left her Manhattan Beach apartment, her job, and her car, not even picking up a paycheck due her, to join Manson. “I am convinced he was some kind of hypnotist.”
Krenwinkel was not the only one to make that suggestion. Attorney Caballero talked to reporters outside the Santa Monica courtroom where his client had just entered a not guilty plea to the Hinman murder. Susan Atkins was under the “hypnotic spell” of Manson, Caballero said, and had “nothing to do with the murders” despite her presence at the Hinman and Tate residences.
Caballero also told the press his client was going to go before the grand jury and tell the complete story. This was the first confirmation we had that Susan Atkins had agreed to cooperate.
That same day LAPD interviewed Barbara Hoyt, whose parents had persuaded her to contact the police. Barbara had lived with the Family off and on since April 1969, and had been with them at Spahn, Myers, and Barker ranches.
The pretty seventeen-year-old’s story came out in bits and pieces, over several interviews. Among her disclosures:
One evening while at Spahn, about a week after the August 16 raid, she had heard screams that seemed to come from down the creek. They lasted a long time, five to ten minutes, and she was sure they were Shorty’s. After that night she never saw Shorty again.
The next day she heard Manson tell Danny DeCarlo that Shorty had committed suicide, “with a little help from us.” Manson had also asked DeCarlo if lime would dispose of a body.
While at Myers Ranch, in early September 1969, Barbara had overheard Manson tell someone—she wasn’t sure who—that it been real hard killing Shorty, once he had been “brought to Now.” They’d hit him over the head with a pipe, Manson said, then everyone stabbed him, and finally Clem had chopped his head off. After that they’d cut him up in nine pieces.
While still at Myers, Barbara had also overheard Sadie tell Ouisch about the murders of Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate. Sometime later Ouisch told Barbara that she knew of ten other people the group had murdered.
Not long after this, Barbara and another girl—Sherry Ann Cooper, aka Simi Valley Sherri—fled the Family’s Death Valley hideout. Manson caught up with them in Ballarat, but, because other people were present, had let them go, even giving them twenty dollars for their bus fare to Los Angeles.[37]
Although very frightened, Barbara agreed to cooperate with us.
That cooperation would nearly cost her life.
About this same time another of Manson’s girls agreed to help the police. She was the last person from whom I expected cooperation—Mary Brunner, the first member of the Manson Family.
Following his release from prison in March 1967, Charles Manson had gone to San Francisco. A prison acquaintance found him a room across the bay in Berkeley. In no hurry to find a job, subsisting mostly by panhandling, Manson would wander Telegraph Avenue or sit on the steps of the Sather Gate entrance to the University of California, playing his guitar. Then one day along came this librarian. As Charlie related the story to Danny DeCarlo, “She was out walking her dog. High-button blouse. Nose stuck up in the air, walking her little poodle. And Charlie’s fresh out of the joint and along he comes talking his bullshit.”
Mary Brunner, then twenty-three, had a B.A. degree in history from the University of Wisconsin and was working as an assistant librarian at the University of California. She was singularly unattractive, and Manson apparently was one of the first persons who thought her worth cultivating. It was possible he recalled the days when he lived off Fat Flo.
“So one thing led to another,” DeCarlo resumed. “He moved in with her. Then he comes across this other
