Manson: Yeah, well, your inflection and your voice tones were, uh, implications there.[12]
Rise of the Family
On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in Berkeley. In prison, he had been taught to play steel guitar by 1930s bank robber Alvin Karpis;[11][13][7] now, living mostly by panhandling, he soon got to know Mary Brunner, a twenty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate working as an assistant librarian at UC Berkeley. After moving in with her, he overcame her resistance to his bringing other women in to live with them. Before long, they were sharing Brunner's residence with eighteen other women.[14]
Manson also established himself as a guru in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967's Summer of Love, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison,[15] he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.[11]
Before the summer was out, Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. Hitting the road, they roamed as far north as Washington State, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice — western parts of the city and county.[14]
In an alternative account, which included no mention of the eighteen girls at Brunner’s place, Manson, apparently accompanied by Brunner, acquired Family members during some months of travels that were undertaken, in part, in a Volkswagen van; it was November when the school bus set out from San Francisco with the enlarged group.[16]
Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.
The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring 1968, when, by some accounts, Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he had no such intent, Manson began kissing Wilson's feet.[17][18] (According to the quasi-autobiographical Manson in His Own Words, Manson first met Wilson at a friend's San Francisco house where he, Manson, had gone to obtain marijuana. The Beach Boy supposedly gave Manson his Sunset Boulevard address and invited him to stop by when he would be in Los Angeles.)[7]
Inside the house, Wilson discovered twelve strangers, mostly girls.[17][18] Over the next few months, as their number doubled, the Family members who had made themselves part of Wilson's Sunset Boulevard household cost him approximately $100,000. This included a large medical bill for treatment of their gonorrhea and $21,000 for the accidental destruction of an uninsured car of his they borrowed.[19] Wilson would sing and talk with Manson, whose girls were servants to them both.[17]
Wilson paid for studio time to record songs written and performed by Manson, and he introduced Manson to acquaintances of his with roles in the entertainment business. These included Gregg Jakobson, Terry Melcher, and Rudi Altobelli, the last of whom owned a house he would soon rent to actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski.[17] Jakobson, who was impressed by "the whole Charlie Manson package" of artist/lifestylist/philosopher, also paid to record Manson material.[20][21][22][23]
Spahn Ranch
By August 1968, when Wilson had his manager clear the Family members from his house, Manson had established a base for the group at Spahn's Movie Ranch, not far from Topanga Canyon.[24][25] The evictees joined the rest of the Family there.[17]
Located in (or near) Chatsworth, the ranch had once been a location for the shooting of Western films; then, with its old movie sets run down, it was primarily doing business in horseback rides. While Family members did helpful work around the place, Manson kept the nearly-blind, octogenarian owner, George Spahn, on his side by having Lynette Fromme act as Spahn's eyes and, along with other girls, attend to Spahn sexually.[26][27] For a tiny squeal she would emit when Spahn would pinch her thigh, Fromme, one of the early Family members who had boarded the school bus,[14] won from Spahn the nickname "Squeaky."[19]
The Family was soon joined at Spahn Ranch by Charles Watson, who had met Manson at Dennis Wilson's house. A small-town Texan who had quit college and moved to California,[28] Watson had given a lift to Wilson, who had been hitchhiking because his cars had been wrecked.[24] Watson's drawl earned him, too, a George Spahn nickname, "Tex."[25]
Helter Skelter
-
In the first days of November 1968, Manson established the Family at alternate headquarters in Death Valley's environs, where they occupied two unused or little-used ranches, Myers and Barker.[23][29] The former, to which the group had initially headed, was owned by the grandmother of a new girl in the Family. The latter was owned by an elderly, local woman to whom Manson presented himself and a male Family member as musicians in need of a place congenial to their work. When the woman agreed to let them stay there if they'd fix up things, Manson honored her with one of the Beach Boys' gold records,[29] several of which he'd been given by Dennis Wilson.[30]
While back at Spahn Ranch, no later than December, Manson and Tex Watson visited a Topanga Canyon acquaintance who played them the Beatles' White Album, then recently released.[23][31][32] Despite having been twenty-nine years old and imprisoned when The Beatles first came to America in 1964, Manson had been all but obsessed with the group. At McNeil, he had told fellow inmates, including Alvin Karpis, that he could surpass the group in fame;[11][33] to the Family, he spoke of the group as "the soul" and "part of 'the hole in the infinite.'"[32]
For some time, too, Manson had been saying that racial tension between blacks and whites was growing and that blacks would soon rise up in rebellion in America's cities.[34][35] He had emphasized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, which had taken place on 4 April 1968.[29] On a bitter cold New Year's Eve at Myers Ranch, the Family members, gathered outside around a large fire, listened as Manson explained that the social turmoil he had been predicting had also been predicted by The Beatles.[32] The White Album songs, he declared, told it all, although in code. In fact, he maintained (or would soon maintain), the album was directed at the Family itself, an elect group that was being instructed to preserve the worthy from the impending disaster.[34][35]
In early January 1969, the Family escaped the desert's cold by establishing yet another base, at a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park, not far from the Spahn Ranch. Because this locale would allow the Family to remain "submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world,"[36][37] Manson called it the Yellow Submarine, another Beatles reference. There, the group prepared for the impending apocalypse, which, around the campfire, Manson had termed "Helter Skelter," after the White Album song of that name.
By February, Manson's vision was complete. The Family would create an album whose songs, as subtle as those of The Beatles, would trigger the predicted chaos. Ghastly murders of whites by blacks would be met with retaliation, and a split between racist and non-racist whites would yield whites' self-annihilation. Blacks' triumph, as it were, would merely precede their being ruled by the Family, which would ride out the conflict in "the bottomless pit" — a secret city beneath Death Valley.[38]
At the Canoga Park house, while Family members worked on vehicles and pored over maps to prepare for their desert escape, they also worked on songs for their world-changing album. When they were told Terry Melcher was to come to the house to hear the material, the girls prepared a meal and cleaned the place; but Melcher never arrived.
Encounter with Tate
On March 23 1969,[39] Manson entered uninvited upon 10050 Cielo Drive, which he had known as the residence of Terry Melcher.[20] This was Rudi Altobelli's property, where Melcher was no longer the tenant; as of that February,[40] the tenants were Tate and Polanski.
Manson was met by Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and Tate friend, who was there to photograph Tate in advance of her departure for Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted.[39]
When Manson told Hatami he was looking for someone whose name Hatami did not recognize, Hatami informed him the place was the Polanski residence. Hatami advised him to try "the back alley," by which he meant the path to the guest house, beyond the main house.[39]
Concerned over the stranger on the property, Hatami was now down on the front walk, to confront Manson. When Tate appeared behind Hatami, in the house's front door, and asked who was calling, Hatami said a man was looking for someone. Hatami and Tate maintained their positions while Manson, without a word, went back to the guest house, returned a minute or two later, and left.[39]
That evening, Manson returned to the property and again went back to the guest house, where, presuming to enter the enclosed porch, he spoke with Rudi Altobelli, who was just coming out of the shower. Although Manson asked for Melcher, Altobelli felt Manson had come looking for him.[41] (Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who would eventually prosecute Manson, obtained information that suggested Manson had been to the place on earlier occasions since Melcher's departure from it.)[39][42]
Speaking through the inner screen door, Altobelli told Manson that Melcher had moved to Malibu; he lied that he did not know Melcher's new address. In response to a question from Manson, Altobelli said he himself was in the entertainment business, although, having met Manson the previous year, at Dennis Wilson's home, he was sure Manson already knew that. At Wilson's, Altobelli had complimented Manson lukewarmly on some of his musical recordings that Wilson had been playing.[39]
When Altobelli informed Manson he was going out of the country the next day, Manson said he'd like to speak with him upon his return; Altobelli lied that he would be gone for more than a year. In response to a direct question from Altobelli, Manson explained that he had been directed to the guest house by the persons in the main house; Altobelli expressed the wish that Manson not disturb his tenants.[39]
Manson left. As Altobelli flew with Tate to Rome the next day, Tate asked him whether "that creepy-looking guy" had gone back to the guest house the day before.[39]
Family crimes
Crowe shooting; Hinman murder
By June, Manson was telling the Family they might have to show blacks how to start Helter Skelter.[36][43][44] When Manson tasked Tex Watson to obtain money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black drug dealer named Bernard "Lotsapoppa" Crowe; Crowe responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered on July 1, 1969, by shooting Crowe at his Hollywood apartment.[45][46][26][47]
Manson's mistaken belief that he had killed Crowe was seemingly confirmed by a news report of the discovery of the dumped body of a Black Panther in Los Angeles. Although Crowe was not a member of the Black Panthers, Manson, concluding he had been, expected retaliation from the group. He turned Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards.[45][48] "If we'd needed any more proof that Helter Skelter was coming down very soon, this was it," Tex Watson would later write. "[B]lackie was trying to get at the chosen ones."[45]
On July 25, 1969, Manson sent sometime Family member Bobby Beausoleil along with Mary Brunner and Family member Susan Atkins to the house of acquaintance Gary Hinman, to persuade him to turn over money Manson thought Hinman had inherited.[49][45][50] (In a 1981 Oui magazine interview[51] and 1998-99 Seconds magazine interviews,[52] Beausoleil said he went to Hinman’s house to recover money paid to Hinman for drugs that had turned out to be bad. He said Brunner and Atkins, unaware of his purpose, went with him idly, to visit Hinman.)
The three held the uncooperative Hinman hostage for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. After that, Beausoleil stabbed him to death, ostensibly on Manson’s instruction. Before leaving the Topanga Canyon residence, Beausoleil, or one of the girls, used Hinman’s blood to write "Political piggy" on the wall and to draw a panther paw, a Black Panther symbol.[46][26][53]
On August 6, Beausoleil was arrested after he was caught driving Hinman's car, whose tire well held the murder weapon.[40] On August 8, 1969, Manson told Family members at Spahn Ranch, "Now is the time for Helter Skelter."[54][55][45]
Tate murders
On the night of August 8, 1969, Manson directed Tex Watson to take Family members Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel — one of the hitchhikers allegedly picked up by Dennis Wilson[17] — to "that house where Melcher used to live" and "totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can."[56][57] He told the girls to do as Tex would instruct them.[54][58]
When the four arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who'd been to the house, on Family business,[23] climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into August 9, 1969.
Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm,[58] they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Telling the girls to lie in the bushes, Watson stepped out, gave a command to halt, and shot to death eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, the driver of the approaching car.[56][59] After cutting the screen of an open window of the main house, Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate.[56][58][54] He removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.[58]
As Watson whispered to Atkins, Roman Polanski's friend Wojciech Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; Watson kicked him in the head.[56] When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, Watson replied, "I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business."[58][56]
On Watson’s direction, Atkins found the house's three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel's help,[58][60] brought them to the living room. The three were Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant; her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; and Frykowski’s lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.[40] Polanski, Tate's husband, was in London, England, at work on a film project.[61]
As Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together, by their necks, with rope he'd brought and slung up over a beam, Sebring's protest — his second — of rough treatment of Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, which proved to hold about seventy dollars, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.[40][56]
Frykowski, whose hands had been bound with a towel, freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him.[56] As Frykowski fought his way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson, who joined in against him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times (breaking the gun's right grip in the process), stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice.[56] Around this time, Kasabian, drawn up from the driveway by "horrifying sounds," arrived outside the door and, in a vain effort to halt the massacre, told Atkins falsely that someone was coming.[54][56]
Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area.[62][63] Pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed and, finally, tackled her, she was dispatched by Watson; her two assailants stabbed her a total of twenty-eight times.[56][40] As Frykowski struggled across the lawn, Watson finished him as well, with furious stabbing that brought his total stab wounds to fifty-one.[56][54][40]
Back in the house, Atkins, Watson, or both killed Tate, who was stabbed a total of sixteen times.[40] Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby; she cried, "Mother... mother..." — until she was dead.[56] (In initial confessions, to cellmates of hers at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins would say she killed Tate.[64] In later statements — to her attorney, to Vincent Bugliosi, and before a grand jury — she would indicate Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson.[14][58] In his 1978 autobiography, Watson himself said that he stabbed Tate and that Atkins did not.[56] Aware prosecutor Bugliosi and the jury that had tried the other Tate-LaBianca defendants were convinced Atkins had stabbed Tate, he falsely testified he did not stab her.[65])
Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the girls to "leave a sign… something witchy."[56] Now, using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, Atkins wrote "pig" on the house’s front door, in Tate's blood.
En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which, along with their weapons, they ditched in the hills.[56][64][58]
LaBianca murders
The next night, six Family members, including the four from night one, rode out at Manson’s instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, "to show [them] how to do it."[58][54][66] After a few hours’ ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them,[54][66] Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive, home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner.[59][67] Located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, the LaBianca home was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.[58][68]
After walking up the driveway and looking in a window, Manson took Watson with him through the unlocked back door.[66] (Atkins and Kasabian would tell prosecutors Manson went up to the house alone, returned with a report that he had tied up the house's occupants, and sent Watson up with Krenwinkel and Van Houten.[58][54] In his autobiography, Watson indicated that, after first going up alone, Manson brought him into the house. He added that, at trial, he "went along with" the others' account, which he figured made him "look that much less responsible.")[65]
Rousing the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint, Manson had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary LaBianca was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Manson’s instructions to cover the couple’s heads with pillowcases, which he bound in place with lamp cords. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instructions that the couple be killed.[66][58][54]
Before leaving Spahn Ranch, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night's weapons.[54] Now, sending the girls from the kitchen to the bedroom, to which Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet, the first thrust going into the man's throat.
Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew Watson there to discover Mrs. LaBianca keeping the girls at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. Subduing her with several stabs of the bayonet, Watson returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of twelve times. After Watson was done, he carved "WAR" on the man’s exposed stomach. (Atkins, who did not enter the LaBianca house, told prosecutors that she believed that Krenwinkel had carved "WAR" on Leno LaBianca's stomach; Watson's autobiography makes clear that he had done it.)[58][66]
Returning to the bedroom, where Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary LaBianca with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen, Watson — heeding Manson’s instruction to make sure each of the girls played a part — told Van Houten to stab her too.[66] She did, on the exposed buttocks and elsewhere.[68][60][62] (Many of Rosemary LaBianca’s forty-one total stab wounds would prove to have been inflicted post-mortem, a fact that would lend support to Leslie Van Houten’s equivocal contention that Rosemary LaBianca was dead by the time she stabbed her.)[69]
While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote "Rise" and "Death to pigs" on the walls and "Healter [sic] Skelter" on the refrigerator door, all in blood. She gave Leno LaBianca fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach; she also planted a steak knife in his throat.[66][58][54]
Hoping for a double crime, Manson had gone on to direct Kasabian to drive to the Venice home of an actor acquaintance of hers, another "piggy." Depositing the second trio of Family members at the man's apartment building, he drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home.[58][54] Kasabian thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. As the group abandoned the murder plan and left, Susan Atkins defecated in the stairwell.[70]
Justice system
Investigation and arrest
On August 10, 1969 — while the Tate autopsies were under way and the LaBianca bodies were yet to be discovered — detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which had jurisdiction in the Hinman case, informed LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate case of the bloody writing at the Hinman house. They even mentioned that the Hinman suspect, Beausoleil, was associated with a group of hippies led by "a guy named Charlie." The Tate team, thinking the Tate murders a consequence of a drug transaction, ignored the information.[40]
Parent, the shooting victim in the Tate driveway, was determined to have been an acquaintance of William Garretson, a young man hired by Rudi Altobelli to take care of the property while Altobelli himself was away.[40] As the killers arrived, Parent had been leaving Cielo Drive, after a visit to Garretson.[40] Held briefly as a Tate suspect, Garretson, who lived in the guest house and told police he had neither seen nor heard anything on the murder night, was released on August 11, 1969.[40][67]
On August 12, 1969, LAPD told the press it had ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca homicides.[67] On August 16, the sheriff’s office raided Spahn Ranch and arrested Manson and twenty-five others, as "suspects in a major auto theft ring" that had been stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies. Weapons were seized, but because the warrant had been misdated the group was released a few days later.[71]
By the end of August, when virtually all leads had gone nowhere, a report by the LaBianca detectives, generally younger than the Tate team, noted a possible connection between the bloody writings at the LaBianca house and "the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album."[72]
In mid-October, the LaBianca team, still working separately from the Tate team, checked with the sheriff’s office about possible similar crimes and learned of the Hinman case. They also learned that the Hinman detectives had spoken with Beausoleil’s girlfriend, Kitty Lutesinger, who had been arrested a few days earlier with members of "the Manson Family."[49]
The arrests had taken place at the desert ranches, to which the Family had moved and where, unknown to authorities, its members had been in the midst of a search for a hole in the ground — access to the Bottomless Pit.[39][73] Known to authorities was that someone had set fire to a piece of earthmoving equipment in the area.[74][75] Raiding the Myers and Barker ranches, authorities had found stolen dune buggies and other vehicles and had arrested two dozen persons, including Manson. Manson was found hiding in a cabinet beneath a bathroom sink at Barker.[49][74]
A month after they, too, had spoken with Lutesinger, the LaBianca detectives made contact with members of a motorcycle gang she'd told them Manson had tried to enlist as his bodyguards while the Family was at Spahn Ranch.[49] While the gang members were providing information that suggested a link between Manson and the murders,[64][26] a dormitory mate of Susan Atkins succeeded in informing LAPD of the Family’s involvement in the crimes.[26] One of those arrested at Barker, Atkins had been booked for the Hinman murder after she’d confirmed to the sheriff’s detectives that she’d been involved in it, as Lutesinger had said.[49] Transferred to Sybil Brand Institute, a detention center in Los Angeles, she had begun talking to bunkmates Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham, whom she gave chilling accounts of the events in which she had been involved.[46]
On December 1 1969, acting on the information from these sources, LAPD announced warrants for the arrest of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in the Tate case; the suspects' involvement in the LaBianca murders was noted. Manson and Atkins, already in custody, were not mentioned; the connection between the LaBianca case and Van Houten, who was also among those arrested near Death Valley, had not yet been recognized.[74][20][58]
Watson and Krenwinkel, too, were already under arrest, authorities in Texas and Alabama having picked them up on notice from LAPD.[20] On December 2, in New Hampshire, Kasabian voluntarily surrendered to authorities.[20]
Conviction and sentencing
At the trial, which began June 15 1970,[60] the prosecution's main witness was Kasabian, who, along with Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, had been charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy.[21] Not having participated in the killings, she was granted immunity in exchange for testimony that detailed the nights of crimes.[22][17][76] (The indictments had been secured on testimony of Susan Atkins at grand jury; a deal had been made with Atkins so that she, at least, would not face the death penalty. When she repudiated her grand jury statement, the deal was withdrawn.)[77]
Although the court had originally, reluctantly granted Manson permission to act as his own attorney,[78] his conduct, including violations of a gag order and submission of "outlandish" and "nonsensical" pretrial motions, had resulted in withdrawal of the permission before the trial’s start.[79] On Friday, July 24, the first day of testimony, Manson appeared in court with an X carved into his forehead and issued a statement that he was "considered inadequate and incompetent to speak or defend [him]self" — and had "X'd [him]self from [the establishment's] world."[80][81] Over the following weekend, the female defendants duplicated the mark on their own foreheads, as, within another day or so, most Family members did, too.[82]
The prosecution placed the triggering of Helter Skelter as the main motive.[83] The crime scenes' bloody White Album references — pig, rise, helter skelter — were correlated with testimony about Manson predictions that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of "pigs" on walls in victims’ blood.[36][84] Testimony that Manson had said "now is the time for Helter Skelter" was supplemented with Kasabian’s testimony that, on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson considered discarding Rosemary LaBianca's wallet on the street of a black neighborhood.[54] Having obtained the wallet in the LaBianca house, he "wanted a black person to pick it up and use the credit cards so that the people, the establishment, would think it was some sort of an organized group that killed these people."[85] On his direction, Kasabian had hidden it in the women's rest room of a service station near a black area.[58][86][54][42] "I want to show blackie how to do it," Manson had said as the Family members had driven along after the departure from the LaBianca house.[85]
During the trial, Family members haunted the entrances and corridors of the courthouse and were denied access to the courtroom itself only by being subpoenaed as prospective prosecution witnesses.[87] When the group established itself in vigil on the sidewalk, each hard-core member wore a sheathed hunting knife that, being in plain view, was being carried legally. Each was identifiable by the X on his or her forehead.[88]
Some Family members attempted to dissuade witnesses from testifying. Prosecution witnesses Paul Watkins and Juan Flynn were both threatened;[89][90] Watkins was badly burned in a suspicious fire in his van.[91] Former Family member Barbara Hoyt, who had overheard Susan Atkins describing the Tate murders to Family member Ruth Ann Moorehouse, was enticed into accompanying the latter to Hawaii. There, Moorehouse allegedly gave her a hamburger spiked with several doses of LSD. Found sprawled on a Honolulu curb in a drugged semi-stupor, Hoyt was taken to the hospital, where she did her best to identify herself as a witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. Before the incident, Hoyt had been a reluctant witness; after the attempt to silence her, her reticence disappeared.[92]
On August 4, despite precautions taken by the court, Manson flashed the jury a Los Angeles Times front page whose headline was "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares," a reference to a statement made the previous day when U.S. President Richard Nixon had decried what he saw as the media’s glamorization of Manson. Voir dired by Judge Charles Older, the jurors contended that the headline had not influenced them. The next day, the female defendants stood up and said in unison that, in light of the President's remark, there was no point in going on with the trial.[93] On October 5, denied the court's permission to question a prosecution witness whom the defense attorneys had declined to cross-examine, Manson leaped over the defense table and attempted to attack Judge Charles Older. Wrestled to the ground by bailiffs, he was removed from the courtroom with the female defendants, who'd subsequently risen and begun chanting in Latin.[42]
