I then said, “Tell me about Sharon.”
In the short time he had known her, Rudi said, he had grown very fond of her. She was a beautiful person. Of course she was physically beautiful, but by this he meant something else. She had a kind of warmth, a niceness, which you sensed immediately on meeting her, but which, thus far in her career, no director had ever managed to bring out on the screen. They’d had many long talks. She’d called 10050 Cielo Drive her “love house.”
Rudi then told me something he said he had never told anyone else. I knew there was no way I could use it in the trial: it was hearsay, and though there are many exceptions to the hearsay rule, this couldn’t come in under any of them.
On the flight to Rome, Sharon had asked him: “Did that creepy-looking guy come back there yesterday?”
So Sharon had seen Manson, the creepy-looking little guy who four and a half months later would mastermind her murder!
Something must have happened to have caused such a strong reaction. A confrontation of some sort. Could it be that Voytek, who had an unpredictable temper, had got into an argument with Manson? Or that Manson had said something offensive to Sharon, and Jay had come to her defense?
I called LAPD and told them to find Shahrokh Hatami.
Lieutenant Helder contacted a friend of Colonel Tate’s, who in turn located Hatami. I interviewed him in my office. Very emotionally, the Iranian photographer told me how much he had loved Sharon. “Not romantic, but”—he apologized for his broken English—“one human being loving qualities other human being has.”
I told him I doubted if it could be better expressed.
Yes, he’d once sent someone to the back house. One time. He didn’t know the date, but it was the day before Sharon left for Europe. It was in the afternoon. He’d looked out the window and noticed a man walking into the yard, hesitant, as if he didn’t know where he was going, yet cocky, as if he thought he owned the place. His manner irritated Hatami, and he went out on the porch and asked him what he wanted.
I asked Hatami to describe the man. He said he was short, like Roman Polanski (Polanski was five feet five, Manson five feet two), late twenties, thin, with long hair. What color hair? Dark brown. He didn’t have a beard but looked as if he needed a shave. How could he tell that? He’d walked off the porch onto the stone walk to confront him; they were at most three or four feet apart.
With the exception of the age—Manson was thirty-four, but could easily have been mistaken for younger— the description fitted.
The man said he was looking for someone, mentioning a name Hatami did not recognize.
Could it have been Melcher? I asked. Possible, Hatami said, but he really couldn’t remember. It had meant nothing to him at the time.
“This is the Polanski residence,” Hatami told him. “This is not the place. Maybe the people you want is back there,” pointing. “Take the back alley.”
By “back alley” Hatami meant the dirt pathway in front of the residence which led to the guest house. But, as I’d later argue to the jury, to an American “back alley” meant a place where there were garbage cans, refuse. Manson must have felt he was being treated like an alley cat.
I asked Hatami, “What tone of voice did you use?” He illustrated, speaking loudly and angrily. Roman was away, Hatami said, and he felt protective of Sharon. “I wasn’t happy that he was coming on the property, and looking at people he doesn’t know.”
How did the man react? He appeared upset, Hatami said; he turned and walked away without saying “excuse me” or anything.
Just before this, however, Sharon came to the door and said, “Who is it, Hatami?” Hatami told her that a man was looking for someone.
Showing Hatami a diagram of the house and grounds, I had him point to the spots where each was standing. Sharon was on the porch, the man on the walk not more than six to eight feet away, with no obstruction between them. There could be no question that Charles Manson saw Sharon Tate, and she him. Sharon had undoubtedly looked right into the eyes of the man who would order her death. We now had, for the first time, evidence that prior to the murders Manson had seen one of his victims.
Hatami had remained on the walk, Sharon on the porch, while the man went down the path toward the guest house. According to Hatami, he came back up the path in “a minute or two, no more,” and left the premises without saying anything.
It was not as abrasive an incident as I was looking for, but, together with Melcher’s rejection and Altobelli’s subtle putdown, Hatami’s “take the back alley” was more than sufficient cause for Manson to have strong feelings against 10050 Cielo Drive. Too, not only were these people obviously establishment, they were establishment in the very fields—entertainment, recording, motion pictures—in which Manson had tried to make it and failed.
There was one discrepancy: the time. Hatami was positive the incident had occurred during the afternoon. Altobelli, however, was equally insistent that it was between eight and nine in the evening when Manson appeared on the guest house porch. While it was possible one or the other was confused, the most logical explanation was that Manson had gone to the guest house that afternoon, found no one there (Altobelli was out most of the afternoon, making arrangements for his trip), then returned that evening. This was supported by Hatami’s statement that Manson had come back up the path after “a minute or two, no more,” which hardly left time for his conversation with Altobelli.
I had Hatami look at photographs of a dozen or so men. He picked out one, saying it looked like the man, though he couldn’t be absolutely sure. It was a photograph of Charles Manson.
In interviewing Hatami, I hadn’t mentioned Manson’s name. Not until the interview was almost over did Hatami realize that the man he had spoken to that day might have been the man accused of plotting Sharon’s murder.
Melcher to Altobelli to Hatami. If I hadn’t suspected that Melcher was withholding something, it was possible that we might never have placed Manson inside the gate of 10050 Cielo Drive.
A similar chain, which had begun with my discovery of a short notation in the Inyo County files, led me to the missing piece in the motive for both the Tate and LaBianca murders.
Finally, nearly three months after first requesting it, I obtained the tape Inyo County Deputy Sheriff Don Ward had made with the two miners, Paul Crockett and Brooks Poston.
Ward had interviewed the pair on October 3, 1969, at Independence. This was a week before the Barker raid, and nearly a month and a half before LAPD learned of the Manson Family’s possible involvement in the Tate- LaBianca murders. Ward’s interview had nothing to do with those murders, only the activities of the “hippie types” who were now living in Golar Wash.
Crockett, a weather-worn miner in his mid-forties, had been prospecting in the Death Valley area in the spring of 1969 when he came across Manson’s advance party at Barker Ranch. At this time it consisted of only two persons, a young runaway named Juanita Wildebush and Brooks Poston, a slender, rather docile eighteen-year-old who had been with the Family since June 1968. Nights, Crockett would visit the pair, and the talk would invariably turn to one subject, Charlie. “And I couldn’t believe what they were saying,” Crockett observed. “I mean, it was so utterly ridiculous.” It became obvious to Crockett that these people believed this Charlie to be the second coming of Christ. It was just as obvious that they feared him. And so Crockett, who was no stranger to mysticism, did something perhaps a little odd but at least psychologically effective. He told them that, just like Charlie, he too had powers. And “I planted them with the idea that I had the power to keep Charlie from coming back up there.”
Other Family members—including Paul Watkins, Tex Watson, Brenda McCann, and Bruce Davis—would occasionally show up at Barker with messages and supplies, and it didn’t take long for the word to get back to Manson.
Initially he scoffed at the idea. But each time he tried to go to Barker something happened: the truck broke down, Spahn Ranch was raided, and so on. Meanwhile Juanita eloped with Bob Berry, Crockett’s partner, and Crockett succeeded in “unconverting” several of Manson’s most important male followers: Poston; Paul Watkins, who often acted as Manson’s second in command; and, somewhat later, Juan Flynn, a tall, strapping Panamanian cowboy who had worked at Spahn.
When Crockett first met young Poston, he was “a zombie.” The phrase was Poston’s own. He said that he
