Q. “Did you ever call him Jesus?” From my questioning the night before, I anticipated that Susan would be evasive about this, and she was.
A. “He represented a Jesus Christ–like person to me.”
Q. “Do you think Charlie is an evil person?”
A. “In your standards of evil, looking at him through your eyes, I would say yes. Looking at him through my eyes, he is as good as he is evil, he is as evil as he is good. You could not judge the man.”
Although Susan didn’t state that she believed Manson was Christ, the implication was there. Though I was at this time far from understanding it myself, it was important that I give the jury some explanation, however partial, for Manson’s control over his followers. Incredible as all this was to the predominantly upper-middle-class, upper-middle-aged grand jurors, it was nothing compared to what they would hear when she described those two nights of murder.
I worked up to them gradually, having her describe Spahn Ranch and the life there, and asking her how they survived. People gave them things, Susan said. Also, they panhandled. And “the supermarkets all over Los Angeles throw away perfectly good food every day, fresh vegetables and sometimes cartons of eggs, packages of cheese that are stamped to a certain date, but the food is still good, and us girls used to go out and do ‘garbage runs.’”
DeCarlo had told me of one such garbage run, when, to the astonishment of supermarket employees, the girls had driven up in Dennis Wilson’s Rolls-Royce.
They also stole—credit cards, other things.
Q. “Did Charlie ask you to steal?”
A. “No, I took it upon myself. I was—we’d get programmed to do things.”
Q. “Programmed by Charlie?”
A. “By Charlie, but it’s hard for me to explain it so that you can see the way—the way I see. The words that would come from Charlie’s mouth would not come from inside him, [they] would come from what I call the Infinite.”
And sometimes, at night, they “creepy-crawled.”
Q. “Explain to these members of the jury what you mean by that.”
A. “Moving in silence so that nobody sees us or hears us…Wearing very dark clothing…”
Q. “Entering residences at night?”
A. “Yes.”
They would pick a house at random, anywhere in Los Angeles, slip in while the occupants were asleep, creep and crawl around the rooms silently, maybe move things so when the people awakened they wouldn’t be in the same places they had been when they went to bed. Everyone carried a knife. Susan said she did it “because everybody else in the Family was doing it” and she wanted that experience.
These creepy-crawling expeditions were, I felt sure the jury would surmise, dress rehearsals for murder.
Q. “Did you call your group by any name, Susan?”
A. “Among ourselves we called ourselves the Family.” It was, Susan said, “a family like no other family.”
I thought I heard a juror mutter, “Thank God!”
Q. “Susan, were you living at Spahn Ranch on the date of August the eighth, 1969?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “Susan, on that date did Charlie Manson instruct you and some other members of the Family to do anything?”
A. “I never recall getting any actual instructions from Charlie other than getting a change of clothing and a knife and was told to do exactly what Tex told me to do.”
Q. “Did Charlie indicate to you the type of clothing you should take?”
A. “He told me…wear dark clothes.”
Susan ID’d photos of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian, as well as a photo of the old Ford in which the four of them left the ranch. Charlie waved to them as they drove off. Susan didn’t notice the time, but it was night. There was a pair of wire cutters in the back seat, also a rope. She, Katie, and Linda each had a knife; Tex had a gun and, she believed, a knife too. Not until they were en route did Tex tell them, to quote Susan, that they “were going to a house up on the hill that used to belong to Terry Melcher, and the only reason why we were going to that house was because Tex knew the outline of the house.”
Q. “Did Tex tell you why you four were going to Terry Melcher’s former residence?”
Matter-of-factly, with no emotion whatsoever, Susan replied, “To get all of their money and to kill whoever was there.”
Q. “It didn’t make any difference who was there, you were told to kill them; is that correct?”
A. “Yes.”
They got lost on the way. However, Tex finally recognized the turnoff and they drove to the top of the hill. Tex got out, climbed the telephone pole, and, using the wire cutters, severed the wires. (LAPD still hadn’t got back to me regarding the test cuts made by the pair found at Barker.) When Tex returned to the car, they drove back down the hill, parked at the bottom, then, bringing along their extra clothing, walked back up. They didn’t enter the grounds through the gate “because we thought there might be an alarm system or electricity.” To the right of the gate was a steep, brushy incline. The fence wasn’t as high here. Susan threw over her clothing bundle, then went over herself, her knife in her teeth. The others followed.
They were stowing their clothing in the bushes when Susan saw the headlights of a car. It was coming up the driveway in the direction of the gate. “Tex told us girls to lie down and be still and not make a sound. He went out of sight…I heard him say ‘Halt.’” Susan also heard another voice, male, say “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything.” “And I heard a gunshot and I heard another gunshot and another one and another one.” Four shots, then Tex returned and told them to come on. When they got to the car, Tex reached inside and turned off the lights; then they pushed the car away from the gate, back up the driveway.
I showed Susan a photo of the Rambler. “It looked similar to it, yes.” I then showed her the police photograph of Steven Parent inside the vehicle.
A. “That is the thing I saw in the car.”
There were audible gasps from the jurors.
Q. “When you say ‘thing,’ you are referring to a human being?”
A. “Yes, human being.”
The jurors had looked at the heart of Susan Atkins and seen ice.
They went on down the driveway, past the garage, to the house. Using a scale diagram I’d had prepared, Susan indicated their approach to the dining-room window. “Tex opened the window, crawled inside, and the next thing I knew he was at the front door.”
Q. “Did all of you girls enter at that time?”
A. “Only two of us entered, one stayed outside.”
Q. “Who stayed outside?”
A. “Linda Kasabian.”
Susan and Katie joined Tex. There was a man lying on the couch (Susan ID’d a photo of Voytek Frykowski). “The man stretched his arms and woke up. I guess he thought some of his friends were coming from somewhere. He said, ‘What time is it?’…Tex jumped in front of him and held a gun in his face and said, ‘Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.’ Frykowski said something like ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’”
Q. “What did Tex say to that, if anything?”
A. “He said, ‘I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business…’”
Tex then told Susan to check for other people. In the first bedroom she saw a woman reading a book. (Susan ID’d a photo of Abigail Folger.) “She looked at me and smiled and I looked at her and smiled.” She went on. A man and a woman were in the next bedroom. The man, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, had his back to Susan.
