The logical inference, I felt, was that the killers brought along the rope intending to hang their victims. It was only a guess, but I suspected it was correct.
The wire cutters presented their own problems. Linda Kasabian said the pair found in Manson’s dune buggy looked like the pair that had been in the car that night. Fine. Joe Granado of SID used them to test-cut a section of the Tate telephone wire and concluded that the two cuts were the same. Great. But then officer DeWayne Wolfer, considered LAPD’s foremost expert on physical evidence, made some test cuts also, and he concluded that these wire cutters couldn’t have been the ones used.
Not about to give up, I asked Wolfer if the tautness of the wire could have been a factor. Possibly, he said. I then asked Wolfer to accompany telephone company representatives to 10050 Cielo Drive and make another cut, only this time I wanted him to sever the wire while it was strung up and tight, the way it was the night of the murders. Wolfer eventually made the test, but his opinion remained unchanged: the actual cut made on the night of the murders and the test cut did not match.
While it was possible that the cutting edge of the wire cutters could have been damaged subsequent to the Tate murders, Wolfer’s tests literally severed this important link between Manson and the Tate evidence.
When I’d accompanied LAPD to Spahn Ranch on November 19, 1969, we’d found a number of .22 caliber bullets and shell casings. Because of the terrific windstorm, and the necessity of following up other leads, our search had been cursory, however, and I’d asked Sergeant Lee to return and conduct a more thorough search. The much repeated request became even more important when, on December 16, 1969, LAPD obtained the .22 caliber Longhorn revolver. Yet it was not until April 15, 1970, that Lee returned to Spahn. Again concentrating on the gully area some two hundred feet behind George Spahn’s residence, Lee found twenty-three more .22 caliber shell casings. Since twenty-two had been found during the first search, this brought the total to forty-five.[59]
It was not until after the latter search that Lee ran comparison tests on any of the Spahn shell casings. When he finally did, he concluded that fifteen of the forty-five had been fired from the Tate murder gun.[60]
Belatedly, but fortunately in time for the trial, we now had scientific evidence linking the gun to Spahn Ranch.
Only one thing would have made me happier: if Lee had returned and found the rest of the shell casings before the gun was discovered. As it was, the defense could contend that during the four and a half months between the two searches the police and/or prosecution had “planted” this evidence.
For months one item of physical evidence had especially worried me: the pair of eyeglasses found near the trunks in the living room at the Tate murder scene. The natural conclusion was that if they didn’t belong to any of the victims, they must belong to one of the killers. Yet neither Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, nor Kasabian wore glasses.
I anticipated that the defense would lean heavily on this, arguing that since they didn’t belong to any of the defendants, at least one of the killers was still at large. From there it was only a short step to the conclusion that maybe the wrong people were on trial.
This posed an extremely serious problem for the prosecution. That problem, though not the mystery itself, vanished when I talked to Roseanne Walker.
Since Susan Atkins had confessed the murders to both Virginia Graham and Ronnie Howard, it occurred to me that she might have made incriminating statements to others, so I asked LAPD to locate any girls Atkins had been particularly close to at Sybil Brand.
One former inmate who agreed to talk to me, though she wasn’t very happy about it, was Roseanne Walker. A pathetic, heavyset black girl who had been sent to Sybil Brand on five drug-related charges, Roseanne had been a sort of walking commissary, selling candy, cigarettes, and makeup to the other inmates. Not until the fifth or sixth time I interviewed her did Roseanne recall a conversation which, though it seemed unimportant to her, I found very significant.
Susan and Roseanne were listening to the radio one day, when the newscaster began talking about a pair of eyeglasses LAPD had found at the Tate murder scene. Amused, Susan remarked, “Wouldn’t it be too much if they arrested the person the glasses belonged to, when the only thing he was guilty of was losing his glasses?”
Roseanne replied that maybe the glasses did belong to the killer.
Susan said, “That ain’t the way it went down.”
Susan’s remark clearly indicated that the glasses did
Other problems remained. One of the biggest concerned Linda Kasabian’s escape from Spahn Ranch.
Linda told me that she decided to flee after the night of the LaBianca murders; however, Manson sent her to the waterfall area later that day (August 11) and she was afraid to leave that night because of the armed guards he had posted.
Early the next morning (August 12) Manson sought her out. She was to put on a “straight” dress, then take a message to Mary Brunner and Sandra Good at Sybil Brand, as well as Bobby Beausoleil at the County Jail. The message: “Say nothing; everything’s all right.” After borrowing a car from Dave Hannum, a new ranch hand at Spahn, Linda went to Sybil Brand, but learned that Brunner and Good were in court; at the County Jail her identification was rejected and she wasn’t allowed to see Beausoleil. When she returned to the ranch and told Manson she had been unsuccessful, he told her to try again the next day.
Linda saw her chance. That night she packed a shoulder bag with some clothing and Tanya’s diapers and pins, and hid it in the parachute room. Early the next morning (August 13) she again borrowed Hannum’s car. On going to get the bag, however, she found Manson and Stephanie Schram sleeping in the room. Deciding to forget the bag, she went to get Tanya, but discovered that the children had been moved to the waterfall area. There was no way she could go there to get Tanya, she said, without having to explain her actions. So she left the ranch without her.
Instead of going to Los Angeles as instructed, Linda began driving to Taos, New Mexico, where her husband was now living. Hannum’s car broke down outside Albuquerque. When she tried to have it repaired, using a credit card Bruce Davis had earlier given her for gas, the gas station owner checked and learned the card was no longer valid. Linda then wrote a letter to Hannum, enclosing the keys, telling him where he could find the car, and apologizing. She then hitchhiked the rest of the way.
(Susan Atkins apparently intercepted the letter, as she gave Hannum the information and keys, but didn’t show him the rest of the letter. Understandably unhappy, Hannum took a bus to Albuquerque to reclaim the vehicle.)
Linda found her husband living with another girl in a commune at Lorien, outside Taos. She told him about the Tate murders, the events of the second night, and leaving Tanya at Spahn. Bob Kasabian suggested they return to Spahn together and get Tanya, but Linda was afraid Manson would kill them all. Kasabian said he wanted to think about it for a few days. Unwilling to wait, Linda hitchhiked into Taos and went to see Joe Sage. Sage, who had a reputation for helping people, was a rather colorful character. When the fifty-one-year-old Zen monk wasn’t busy running his Macrobiotic Church, he was campaigning for president of the United States on an anti-pollution ticket. Linda asked Sage for enough money to return to Los Angeles to get her little girl. Sage, however, began questioning Linda, and eventually she told him and a youth named Jeffrey Jacobs about the murders.
Not believing Linda’s tale, Sage placed a call to Spahn Ranch, talking first to an unidentified girl, then to Manson himself. Sage asked Manson—whose reaction can only be imagined—if Linda’s story was true. Manson told him Linda had flipped out; that her ego was not ready to die, and so she had run away.
Linda did not talk to Charlie, but she did talk to one of the other girls—she believed, but was not sure, it was Squeaky—who told her about the August 16 raid. The authorities had kept Tanya, she learned; she was now in a foster home. Linda also spoke to Patricia Krenwinkel, Katie saying something to the effect, “You just couldn’t wait to open your big mouth, could you?”
Linda subsequently called the Malibu police station and learned the name of the social worker who was handling Tanya’s case.[61] Sage gave Linda enough money for round-trip air fare, as well as the name of a Los Angeles attorney, Gary Fleischman, who he felt might be able to help her reclaim Tanya. When Linda saw Fleischman, she did not tell him about the murders, only that she had left the ranch to look
