“Charlie is up in Independence, Sadie.”
She smiled, secure in the knowledge that she was right and I, an outsider, an unbeliever, was wrong.
Looking at her, I thought to myself, This is the star witness for the prosecution? I’m going to build my case upon the testimony of this very, very strange girl?
She was crazy. I had no doubt about it. Probably not legally insane, but crazy nonetheless.
As on the tape, she admitted stabbing Frykowski but denied stabbing Sharon Tate. I’d conducted hundreds of interviews; you get a sort of visceral reaction when someone is lying. I felt that she
I had to interview over a dozen witnesses that same night: Winifred Chapman, the first police officers to arrive at Cielo and Waverly, Granado and the fingerprint men, Lomax from Hi Standard, Coroner Noguchi and Deputy Medical Examiner Katsuyama, DeCarlo, Melcher, Jakobson. Each presented special problems. Winifred Chapman was petulant, querulous: she wouldn’t testify to seeing any bodies, or any blood, or…Coroner Noguchi was a rambler: he had to be carefully prepared so he would stick to the subject. Danny DeCarlo hadn’t been believable in the Beausoleil trial: I had to make sure the grand jury believed him. It was necessary not only to extract from very disparate witnesses, many of them experts in their individual fields, exactly what was relevant, but to bring these pieces together into a solid, convincing case.
Seven murder victims, multiple defendants: a case like this was not only probably unprecedented, it required weeks of preparation. Because of Chief Davis’ rush to break the news, we’d had only days.
It was 2 A.M. before I finished. I still had to convert my notes to interrogation. It was 3:30 before I finished. I was up at 6 A.M. In three hours we had to take the Tate and LaBianca cases before the Los Angeles County grand jury.
DECEMBER 5, 1969
“Sorry. No comment.” Although grand jury proceedings are by law secret—neither the DA’s Office, the witnesses, nor the jurors being allowed to discuss the evidence—this didn’t keep the reporters from trying. There must have been a hundred newsmen in the narrow hallway outside the grand jury chambers; some were atop tables, so it looked as if they were stacked to the ceiling.
In Los Angeles the grand jury consists of twenty-three persons, picked by lot from a list of names submitted by each Superior Court judge. Of that number twenty-one were present, two-thirds of whom would have to concur to return an indictment. The proceedings themselves are usually brief. The prosecution presents just enough of its case to get an indictment and no more. Though in this instance the testimony would extend over two days, the “star witness for the prosecution” would tell her story in less than one.
Attorney Richard Caballero was the first witness, testifying that he had informed his client of her rights. Caballero then left the chambers. Not only are witnesses not allowed to have their attorneys present, each witness testifies outside the hearing of the other witnesses.
THE SERGEANT AT ARMS “Susan Atkins.”
The jurors, seven men and fourteen women, looked at her with obvious curiosity.
Aaron informed Susan of her rights, among which was her right not to incriminate herself. She waived them. I then took over the questioning, establishing that she knew Charles Manson and taking her back to the day they first met. It was over two years ago. She was living in a house on Lyon Street in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, with a number of other young people, most of whom were into drugs.
A. “…and I was sitting in the living room and a man walked in and he had a guitar with him and all of a sudden he was surrounded by a group of girls.” The man sat down and began to play, “and the song that caught my attention most was ‘The Shadow of Your Smile,’ and he sounded like an angel.”
Q. “You are referring to Charles Manson?”
A. “Yes. And when he was through singing, I wanted to get some attention from him, and I asked him if I could play his guitar…and he handed me the guitar and I thought, ‘I can’t play this,’ and then he looked at me and said, ‘You can play that if you want to.’
“Now he had never heard me say ‘I can’t play this,’ I only thought it. So when he told me I could play it, it blew my mind, because he was inside my head, and I knew at that time that he was something that I had been looking for…and I went down and kissed his feet.”
A day or two later Manson returned to the house and asked her to go for a walk. “And we walked a couple blocks to another house and he told me he wanted to make love with me.
“Well, I acknowledged the fact that I wanted to make love with him, and he told me to take off my clothes, so I uninhibitedly took off my clothes, and there happened to be a full-length mirror in the room, and he told me to go over and look at myself in the mirror.
“I didn’t want to do it, so he took me by my hand and stood me in front of the mirror, and I turned away and he said, ‘Go ahead and look at yourself. There is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect. You always have been perfect.’”
Q. “What happened next?”
A. “He asked me if I had ever made love with my father. I looked at him and kind of giggled and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Have you ever thought about making love with your father?’ I said, ‘Yes.’
And he told me, ‘All right, when you are making love…picture in your mind that I am your father.’ And I did, I did so, and it was a very beautiful experience.”
Susan said that before she met Manson she felt she was “lacking something.” But then “I gave myself to him, and in return for that he gave me back to myself. He gave me the faith in myself to be able to know that I am a woman.”
A week or so later, she, Manson, Mary Brunner, Ella Jo Bailey, Lynette Fromme, and Patricia Krenwinkel, together with three or four boys whose names she couldn’t remember, left San Francisco in an old school bus from which they had removed most of the seats, furnishing it with brightly colored rugs and pillows. For the next year and a half they roamed—north to Mendocino, Oregon, Washington; south to Big Sur, Los Angeles, Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico; and, eventually, back to L.A., living first in various residences in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, Venice, and then, finally, Spahn Ranch. En route others joined them, a few staying permanently, most only temporarily. According to Susan, they went through changes, and learned to love. The girls made love with each of the boys, and with each other. But Charlie was complete love. Although he did not have sex with her often—only six times in the more than two years they were together—“he would give himself completely.”
Q. “Were you very much in love with him, Susan?”
A. “I was in love with the reflection and the reflection I speak of is Charlie Manson’s.”
Q. “Was there any limit to what you would do for him?”
A. “No.”
I was laying the foundation for the very heart of my case against Manson, that Susan and the others would do anything for him, up to and including murder at his command.
Q. “What was it about Charlie that caused you girls to be in love with him and to do what he wanted you to do?”
A. “Charlie is the only man I have ever met…on the face of this earth…that is a complete man. He will not take back-talk from a woman. He will not let a woman talk him into doing anything. He is a man.”
Charlie had given her the name Sadie Mae Glutz because “in order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past. The easiest way to do this, to change identity, is by doing so with a name.”
According to Susan, Charlie himself went under a variety of names, calling himself the Devil, Satan, Soul.
Q. “Did Mr. Manson ever call himself Jesus?”
A. “He personally never called himself Jesus.”
