Helter Skelter

“In literature a murder scene is often likened to a picture puzzle. If one is patient and keeps trying, eventually the pieces will fit into place. Veteran policemen know otherwise […] some pieces will always be missing.”

The Manson killers left evidence scattered all over Los Angeles county. It was to be found and catalogued over the course of months. Additionally, the Family itself was a diffuse organization which could not internally distinguish between petty crimes and more serious ones.

“The curious thing: as in the Tate homicides, a message had been left at the scene. On the wall in the living room, not far from Hinman’s body, were the words POLITICAL PIGGY, printed in the victim's own blood.”

The unique gruesomeness of the murders defined the case. Manson, in his deranged cosmology, believed that words like “PIG” and “RISE” would lead investigators to automatically pin these crimes on the Black Panthers, though that group was never in contention as suspects.

“They had one thing in common, though that similarity widened the distance between them. Both were operating on a basic assumption: in nearly 90 percent of all homicides the victim knows his killer.”

In retrospect, the similarities between these bizarre murders are glaringly obvious. Nevertheless, criminal investigation is methodological. Though many aspects of the evidence collection were botched, detectives in the Tate-LaBianca case were doing what had worked most commonly in the past, over the greatest number of cases.

“November was a month of confessions. Which, initially, no one believed.”

The trail to the killers was cold when Atkins, in jail for the murder of Gary Hinman, began bragging about the murders to her cellmates. It took months for the information to become actionable, but when it did, it broke the case.

“What stunned Virginia, she would later say, was that Susan described [murder] ‘just like it was a perfectly normal thing to do every day of the week.’”

A common assertion among the Family was that “Charlie is Love,” a distortion of the peace-and-love ethos of the 1960s. Throughout her time in the public eye, Atkins would display a childlike, blissed-out aspect, even as she described her role in the murders.

“But there are psychological as well as physical distances and, as noted, while the Tate detectives were largely the ‘old guard,’ the LaBianca detectives were for the most part the ‘young upstarts’ […] several of the latter, rather than the former, had been assigned to L.A.’s last big publicity case, Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.”

Not only were the detectives in the case caught up in methodology, but here Bugliosi suggests that there was an interdepartmental rivalry that held up the case, which made coordination impossible for months.

“Look, bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you’re going to have a baby. You had better be ready. You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”

This is what Atkins reported saying to Tate as she stabbed her. It was also reported in the news, in an interview she gave to the press, making jury selection difficult. It was hard finding anyone in Los Angeles unprejudiced concerning the Manson Family.

“By now the reader knows a great deal more about the Tate-LaBianca killings than I did on the day I was assigned the case.”

Bugliosi, in recounting his own investigation leading up to the trial, has the difficult task of recreating what it was like to not know anything about the Manson Family. Helter Skelter continues to be the leading source of information on the subject to this day.

“The primary duty of a lawyer engaged in public prosecution is not to convict, but to see that justice is done…”

Bugliosi quotes from the Canon of Ethics of the American Bar Association, reminding us that it’s not his job to go after hippies, pass judgment, or win at all costs, but to be an indifferent balancing factor in the justice system. Nevertheless, a current of emotion runs through his account, and he is affected by what he has seen.

“A run-down movie set, off in the middle of nowhere, from which dark-clad assassins would venture out at night, to terrorize and kill, then return before dawn to vanish into the surroundings.”

In the late 1960s, the movie industry was in a slump. Television had taken away a good deal of the movie-going audience, and new directors were challenging the old heroic norms with a more cynical, youth-oriented cinematic style. The Spahn Ranch, formerly a movie set for heroic Westerns, became the base of operations for a cult of murderous hippies. 

“Associates with troublemakers...seems to be the unpredictable type of inmate who will require supervision both at work and in quarters...In spite of his age, he is criminally sophisticated…”

This is from a psychological evaluation of Manson performed in 1952 at the Federal Reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio. Manson was largely ignored by the system of reformatories, jails, and prisons in which he’d spent half his life and was released on parole with dizzying regularity, only to be locked up again.

“On the morning Charles Manson was to be freed, he begged the authorities to let him remain in prison. Prison had become his home, he told them. He didn’t think he could adjust to the world outside.”

Manson’s personality had been shaped by long stretches of incarceration. By some accounts, he thrived in prison, learning to read, write, play music, and write his own songs. It also taught him a perverse but rigid hierarchical order that was easy to understand.

“In the underground milieu into which he’d stumbled, even the fact that he was an ex-convict conferred a certain status. Rapping a line of metaphysical con that borrowed as much from pimping as joint jargon and Scientology, Manson began attracting followers, almost all girls at first, then a few boys.”

By the time Manson had been freed on a 10-year Mann Act sentence in 1967, the world had changed. A greater freedom of movement and expression flowered in places like San Francisco. However, as with increased liberty in all aspects of American life came increased opportunities for exploitation. Manson indulged the new freedom with enthusiasm. 

“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.”

The sensational Manson case set off a media feeding frenzy that became a cultural touchstone. Soon after, a new “heroic”—some would say quasi-fascist—mode emerged in Hollywood films. Fictional cops like the lead character in 1971’s hit movie “Dirty Harry” blew away sociopathic hippies before they could do harm to anyone.

“My own admittedly unprofessional appraisal was that Manson was no worse that many performers in current vogue.”

Here, Bugliosi admits to being cold to the beneficial parts of 1960s youth culture. Reading the book, it’s easy to forget that people like Manson were an anomaly, and that a bevy of talented and young performers in the 1960s would irrevocably reshape what music meant and how it was created.

“Linda [Kasabian] said she couldn’t do it. ‘I’m not like you, Charlie,’ Linda [Kasabian] told Manson. ‘I can’t kill anybody.’”

After Atkins went back on her plea deal for her testimony against Manson, Bugliosi despaired of ever finding credible testimony that would place the killers at the crime scene. Kasabian, the lookout during the night of the murders, was horrified and scarred by what she had seen. Her testimony was crucial for the prosecution.

“The heart of our case against Manson was the ‘vicarious liability’ rule of conspiracy—each conspirator is criminally responsible for all the crimes committed by his co-conspirators if said crimes were committed to further the object of the conspiracy.”

The difficulty with prosecuting Manson for crimes at which he was never present would have been difficult without the “vicarious liability” rule. Manson’s demonstrated control over the other defendants throughout the proceedings assisted Bugliosi in this regard.

“You’ll kill us all; you’ll kill us all!”

The prosecution did what they could to keep Kasabian away from the defendants during the long ordeal of her testimony. She was reviled and threatened by her former gang. The quote above is what Family member Sandra Good screamed at Kasabian as she first entered the courtroom for the prosecution.

“Here’s a man who is accused of murdering hundreds of thousands in Vietnam who is accusing me of being guilty of eight murders.”

Richard Nixon, a president who ran on a “law and order” ticket, unintentionally did more harm than good when he pronounced the guilt of Manson ahead of a jury decision. Manson parroted Nixon’s language back to the media with this quote, pointing out the president’s hypocrisy. 

“Standing up against Manson for the first time, Ronald Hughes observed: ‘I refuse to take part in any proceeding where I am forced to push a client out the window.’”

Among the motley assortment chosen to defend Manson and his crew, Bugliosi develops the most respect for Hughes. In the end, however, the inexperienced Hughes was overmatched by the cunning of both the prosecution and his defendant.

“Manson the nobody. Manson the martyr. Manson the teacher. Manson the prophet. He became all of these, and more, the metamorphosis often occurring in midsentence, his face a light show of shifting emotions until it was not one face but a kaleidoscope of different faces, each real, but only for the moment.”

Bugliosi confesses that he was sometimes taken in by Manson’s near-magical charisma. After all, the prosecution depended on Manson’s being a figure of outsized manipulative power, and any firsthand account of that power by the prosecution could be construed as self-serving.

“They were not suffering, ladies and gentlemen, from any diminished mental capacity. They were suffering from a diminished heart, a diminished soul.”

Here, in arguments during sentencing, after the guilty verdict had been passed, Bugliosi walks a fine line. He must argue that, though the Family members who killed did so at Manson’s unswerving orders, they did so with the full knowledge that what they were doing was evil, and at least partially self-directed. Each participant was sentenced to death.

“Before he killed him, Charles “Tex” Watson told Voytek Frykowski: ‘I am the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business.’”

The Devil appears often in the cosmology of Manson and his followers, with Manson alternatingly calling himself Jesus Christ and the Devil. Among their other faults, it seemed members of the family shared a narcissism that blew their self-images to monstrous heights.