the house, grabbed Susan, and called the police immediately.
On further inspection by the police and ambulancemen who subsequently arrived, the protrusion from Leno’s stomach was a carving knife. His hands had been tied together behind his back, a lamp-cord wound around his neck, and the word ‘WAR’ carved on to his body. In the bedroom, the police discovered that Rosemary had suffered a similar fate. Graffitied in the blood of the victims, in different places around the house were the statements ‘DEATH TO PIGS’, ‘RISE’, and the misspelled ‘HEALTHER SKELTER’. The couple had been stabbed a combined 67 times.
UNCONNECTED CASES?
These apparently motiveless crimes left the LAPD in the dark. Even when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office contacted the LAPD to tell them of the similar circumstances in which they had found the body of Gary Hinman, one-time friend of Charles Manson, the LAPD made no connection between the three cases and clues were left uninvestigated. Hinman had been stabbed to death in his own home on July 31, and written in his shed blood on the wall of his living room were the words ‘POLITICAL PIGGY’. Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Office had arrested a man named Bobby Beausoleil in connection with the Hinman murder. Beausoleil, it transpired, had been living in a hippy commune led by the charismatic and influential Charles Manson. The LAPD just weren’t interested, even though their case against William Garretson, the caretaker who claimed to have slept through the events at the Tate house had collapsed following the results of a polygraph test.
Theories and speculation as to who was behind these murders flew around, and it seemed like everyone had an opinion. The police however, were getting no further in their investigations. Until, that is, a little boy in Sherman Oaks found a gun in his back garden. He showed it to his father who immediately turned it in to the police. It was a Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver, an exact match for the weapon which the police had traced to the Tate murders. This in itself did not offer any further information to the LAPD, but being three months since the murders, it renewed interest in the cases – so much so that the LAPD began to talk to the Sheriff’s Office about the possible connection between the crimes.
The Sheriff’s Office had first become interested in Beausoleil when his 13-year-old girlfriend had informed them that Beausoleil had been sent by Manson, with a woman called Susan Atkins, to Hinman’s house to retrieve some money that Hinman owed Manson. When Hinman refused to pay up, the duo kept him prisoner in his own home for a couple of days before they killed him, and the girl recounted how she had heard Susan tell others that she had stabbed the victim several times in the legs during the attack.
What was interesting about the young girl’s story was that Hinman had not been stabbed in the leg. This therefore led the Sheriff’s Office to believe that Atkins may well have been connected to one, or even both, of the other bloody attacks too.
SUSAN ATKINS’S CONFESSION
Susan Atkins confessed as much to fellow inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute, where she was awaiting trial for the Hinman murder. She gleefully announced that not only had she slashed Hinman while Beausoleil held him (believed to be the other way round by the police at the time), but that she was also the proud murderer of Sharon Tate. She claimed that Charles Manson, her lover, was Jesus Christ and that he was going to lead his Family to a civilization in a hole in Death Valley. First they had to commit a crime that would shock the world. Susan spared no details in describing the bloodthirsty and crazed way in which they had killed those at the Tate house, adding that she had wanted to go much further than they did. She wanted to cut Sharon’s baby out of her womb, to gouge out the eyes of their victims, crush them against the wall, and to cut off their fingers. Throughout this history, Susan Atkins laughed manically, danced and sang. She was considered insane by those listening to her story, although she must have been convincing enough as her cellmates did report her confession to the authorities.
TRIAL
Had the police not already made a connection between the Manson Family and the murders, they may have considered Atkins mad too. With what they had already discovered though, along with Atkins’s seemingly detailed knowledge of the crimes, the case came to trial.
Charles Manson and Susan Atkins stood trial, along with two other female members of The Family. There was no hard evidence against the Manson Family. Only a blood-stained fingerprint connected one of them to the Tate house, but when questioned, all but Manson did confess to the crimes, although none in quite as jubilant a fashion as Susan Atkins. Throughout the whole, agonising 22-week trial, Manson’s followers never once denounced him. In fact, if ever any evidence was revealed which looked to incriminate Manson in the murders, his Family would deny his involvement, admit to all the accusations themselves and divert the attention from him. Manson’s participation in the murders could not be proved, and although at least one criminologist believed that Manson was present at the murders, perhaps involved in tying up the victims or instructing his followers to kill, this could not be proved either. At one point, the lawyer for one of the other female defendants stood up and tried to implicate Charles Manson in one of the crimes his client had been accused of in order to lessen her own involvement. His client vehemently denied Manson’s participation, and the lawyer’s murdered body was found a couple of days later.
PECULIAR BEHAVIOUR
All of Manson’s followers were present at the trial, and they behaved throughout in a very peculiar way. They imitated Charles Manson’s speech and movement, and at one point, when Manson carved the sign of an ‘X’ into his forehead – a sign that he had exited from one world into another – the girls did the same. Manson himself created distractions whenever he could, even lunging at the judge at one point, shouting that someone should cut his head off! The court was in uproar and as the authorities tried to restrain Manson, the other three defendants began chanting loudly in Latin. Evidence was incomplete, testimonies clearly falsified, and witnesses threatened with death – their own or of their families – if they continued.
Eventually, the trial was complete, and the jury had reached their verdict. Manson and the three women arrived at the court with shaven heads to hear the outcome of their case.
GUILTY
Charles Manson was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death. Upon hearing the verdict, the female defendants declared that the judge had just passed sentence on himself, and that he should take to locking his own doors and carefully watching his children from that point on. All four defendants were given the death penalty, although when this was abolished in 1972, their sentences changed to life imprisonment.
The public reaction to The Manson Family after the trial was unexpected. The revulsion that had first greeted Charles Manson when he entered the courtroom had, over the course of the trial, transformed into a strange fascination and it appeared that the charisma which had seduced and hypnotised the young girls of Los Angeles into joining him and following him in his beliefs, was possibly having an effect on the general public too. Newspapers reported the story of the trial, placing Manson in a strangely favourable light. Concerns grew that his notoriety may spread to cult-hero. Fortunately, this never transpired, although Manson’s story did capture the public to the extent that it has been produced and re-told on both stage and in film. The music he wrote, and so believed in, has also been performed by Guns ’n’ Roses.
BEHIND BARS
Manson remains a prisoner today and is unlikely ever to be released. He receives more mail than any other prisoner in the United States and therefore, over 30 years on, perhaps he is still as dangerous as he always was – still appealing to those who need someone to follow and something to believe in. Also still dangerous physically, Manson has been isolated in prison at different times for various offences: threatening prison staff, damage to prison property, assault on an officer, drug-dealing, smuggling in a bullet and even, from within his prison walls, twice plotting to assassinate the president of the United States.
Charles Manson has been up for parole ten times. Every time, parole has been refused.
The Lebarons
Alma Dayer LeBaron was an American Mormon who relocated to a Mormon settlement in Colonia Juarez, northern Mexico in the early 1900s.
