girl. ‘No, there will be no other girls moving in with me!’ Mary says. She flatly refused to consider the idea. After the girl had moved in, two more came along. And Mary says, ‘I’ll accept one other girl but never three!’ Four, five, all the way up to eighteen. This was in Frisco. Mary was the first.”
The Family had been born.
By this time Manson had discovered the Haight. According to a tale Manson himself often told his followers, one day a young boy handed him a flower. “It blew my mind,” he’d recall. Questioning the youth, he learned that in San Francisco there was free food, music, dope, and love, just for the taking. The boy took him to Haight-Ashbury, Manson later told Steven Alexander, a writer for the underground paper
They were also young, naive, eager to believe, and, perhaps even more important, belong. There were followers aplenty for any self-styled guru. It didn’t take Manson long to sense this. In the underground milieu into which he’d stumbled, even the fact that he was an ex-convict conferred a certain status. Rapping a line of metaphysical con that borrowed as much from pimping as joint jargon and Scientology, Manson began attracting followers, almost all girls at first, then a few young boys.
“There are a lot of Charlies running around, believe me,” observed Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer during his San Francisco period.
But with one big difference: somewhere along the line—I wasn’t yet sure
Many automatically assumed the answer was drugs. But Dr. David Smith, who got to know the group through his work in the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, felt “sex, not drugs, was the common denominator” in the Manson Family. “A new girl in Charlie’s Family would bring with her a certain middle-class morality. The first thing Charlie did was to see that all this was worn down. That way he was able to eliminate the controls that normally govern our lives.”
Sex, drugs—they were certainly part of the answer, and I’d soon learn a great deal more about how Manson used both—but they were only part. There was something more, a lot more.
Manson himself de-emphasized the importance of drugs, at least as far as he was concerned. During this period he took his first LSD trip. He later said that it “enlightened my awareness” but added “being in jail for so long had already left my awareness pretty well open.” Aware Charlie was.
Manson claimed he foresaw the decline of the Haight even before it came into full flower. Saw police harassment, bad trips, heavy vibes, people ripping off one another and OD’ing in the streets. During the famous Summer of Love, with free rock concerts and Owsley’s acid and a hundred more young people arriving every day, he got an old school bus, loaded up his followers, and split, “looking for a place to get away from the Man.”
Mary Brunner eventually left her job and joined Manson’s wandering caravan. She had a child by him, Michael Manson, the whole Family participating in the delivery, Manson himself biting through the umbilical cord.
Interviewed in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where she had gone following her release from jail, Mary Brunner agreed to cooperate with the police in return for immunity in the Hinman murder. She supplied numerous details regarding that crime. She also said that in the latter part of September 1969, Tex Watson had told her about the murder of Shorty. They had buried his body near the railroad tracks at Spahn, Tex said, and Gypsy abandoned his car in Canoga Park near a residence the Family had previously occupied on Gresham Street. On the basis of this information, LASO began a search for both the body and the vehicle.
Obviously, Mary Brunner would be an important witness in both the Hinman and Shea cases. Though she had been in jail when the Tate and LaBianca murders occurred, for a time I even considered using her as a witness in that case, since she could testify to the beginnings of the Family. But I remained very leery of her. According to others I interviewed, her devotion to Manson was fanatical. I just couldn’t visualize her testifying against the father of her child.
The Tate case had been big news abroad since the murders occurred, eclipsing even the incident at Chappaquiddick. The arrests commanded just as much attention.
Because of the time difference, it was nearly midnight of December 1 before reports of the “hippie kill cult” reached London. As in the United States, the sensational dispatches dominated the headlines of the papers the next day, led off radio and TV broadcasts.
At eleven that morning a maid in the Talgarth Hotel, on Talgarth Road in London, tried to open the door of a room occupied by an American youth named Joel Pugh. It was locked from the inside. Shortly after 6 P.M. the hotel manager unlocked the door with a passkey. “It only opened about one foot,” he stated. “There seemed to be a weight behind it.” Kneeling down and reaching in, “I felt what seemed like an arm.” He hastily called the police. A constable from Hammersmith station arrived minutes later and pushed the door open. Behind it was the body of Joel Pugh. He was lying on his back, unclothed except for a sheet over the lower half of his body. His throat had been slit, twice. There was a bruise on his forehead, slash marks on both wrists, and two bloody razor blades, one less than two feet from the body. There were no notes, although there were some “writings” in reverse on the mirror, along with some “comic-book type drawings.”
According to the manager, Pugh had checked into the room on October 27 with a young lady who had left after three weeks. A “hippie in appearance,” Pugh was quiet, went out rarely, seemed to have no friends.
There being “no wound not incapable of being self-inflicted,” the coroner’s inquest concluded that Pugh “took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed.”
Although the circumstances of the death, including the wounds themselves, were equally if not more consistent with murder, it was considered a routine suicide. No one thought the drawings or writings important enough to take down (the manager later recalled only the words “Jack and Jill”). No attempt was made to determine the time of death. Nor, though Pugh’s room was on the ground floor and could be entered and left through the window, did anyone feel it necessary to check for latent prints.
At the time no one connected the death with the big American news that day. If it hadn’t been for a brief reference in a letter over a month later, we probably would have remained unaware that Joel Dean Pugh, age twenty-nine, former Manson Family member and husband of Family member Sandra Good, had joined the lengthening list of mysterious deaths connected with the case.
When she and Squeaky moved out of their motel room in Independence, Sandy left some papers behind. Among them was a letter from an unidentified former Family member which contained the line: “I would not want what happened to Joel to happen to me.”
DECEMBER 3, 1969
About eight that night Richard Caballero brought the Susan Atkins tape to LAPD. He requested that no copy be made; however, I was allowed to take notes. In addition to myself, both Lieutenants Helder and LePage and four or five detectives were present while the tape was being played. We said little as, with all the casualness of a child reciting what she did that day in school, Susan Atkins matter-of-factly described the slaughter of seven people.
The voice was that of a young girl. But except for occasional giggles—“And Sharon went through quite a few changes [laughs], quite a few changes”—it was flat, emotionless, dead. It was as if all the human feelings had been erased.
I’d soon know. Caballero had agreed that before we took the case to the grand jury, I could personally interview Susan Atkins.
The tape lasted about two hours. Although the monumental job of proving their guilt remained, when the tape had ended—Caballero saying to Susan, “O.K., now we’re going to get you something to eat, including some ice cream”—we at least knew, for the first time, exactly who had been involved in the Tate and LaBianca murders.
Though Manson had sent the killers to 10050 Cielo Drive, he had not gone along himself. Those who did go were Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian. One man, three girls, who would mercilessly shoot and stab five people to death.
