Donkey Dick Relives The Good Ol' Days.

Thanks to Cats....

What I like about this is how casual it all sounds- which is likely how it really was.

You Say It's Your Birthday

At 75, Charles Manson still has power to influence others

From Ted Rowlands, CNN

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Gray Wolf moved so he could be closer to California prison Manson calls home
• Prison has shaped Manson's views on preserving the environment, Wolf says
• Officials say Manson still gets mail, spends his days playing guitar, on phone with followers
• "The main goal is to basically save life on the planet Earth from the humans," follower says

RELATED TOPICS

• Charles Manson
• Susan Atkins
• Murder and Homicide

Corcoran, California (CNN) -- At 75, Charles Manson has spent more than half his life in prison for masterminding the notorious Helter Skelter killing spree that left actress Sharon Tate and six others dead in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969.

Manson spent his 75th birthday this week at the state prison in Corcoran, California, where he is in the protective housing unit. Some records indicate that Manson was born on November 12, but Manson's current associates and other records indicate his birthday was on Wednesday, November 11.

"He spent the day the same way he spends every day in prison," said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state department of corrections. "Lately, the prison has told me, he doesn't come out of his cell very often."

She added that Manson didn't mention his birthday to anyone, and only emerged from his cell for about 20 minutes on Wednesday.

While his appearance has changed significantly from the wide-eyed cult leader who appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1969, Manson continues to wield influence over some who consider him a wizened messenger.

Prison officials say Manson still gets lots of mail and spends most of his days singing and playing guitar in a high security unit. He also spends time speaking to associates like "Gray Wolf," 60, and "Star," a 24-year-old fast food employee.

Wolf said Manson gave him his name -- just as he named members of his infamous "Family" of followers during the 1960s. Wolf said he moved close to the prison in Corcoran so he could be near the man he believes possesses deep insight into environmental issues.

"Manson thinks the destruction of the environment is much more serious than we are being made out to believe," Wolf told CNN. "Our government keeps covering up problems with pollution, with coal, with automobiles. Charlie says we need to get back to the horse."

Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Manson and sent him to prison for life, is not surprised that Manson continues to hold sway over some people.

"This is just a microcosm of the tremendous interest and fascination that people still have with Charles Manson," Bugliosi said. "The Manson Family no longer exists. There's no group calling itself the Manson Family on the outside. And these people -- I wouldn't say they're followers of Manson, that's too strong a word --they're supporters."

Their names and words sound similar to those of Manson's past followers.

Gray believes Manson's time in prison has given him a unique perspective on the environment.

"You can characterize prison as an ashram or a retreat where you have all this time to be by yourself and think and so he's had time to turn these issues over and over in his head," Gray said.

"A legend has been made about Charlie Manson and there's a media image that people make money off of every day, but it has nothing to do with Charlie personally. He is a personable person," he added.

Star also got her name from Manson, and moved from Illinois to be closer to him.

"He's really witty and really sharp and he's got a lot of good humor," she said. "He's got a weird sense of humor but I like it, it fits with me."

The conversations range from small talk about life in prison to issues related to ATWA -- an acronym for Air, Trees, Water, Animals -- the ecological philosophy espoused by Manson and his followers, according to Wolf.

What's really criminal, they say, is the way the environment is being poisoned.

"Crime is anything that's done against your survival. Any sin against your life is crime. The problem is the atmosphere is dying, anything that sins against the air is a sin against your life, anybody that sins against the air should be considered a criminal and any sin against the air should be considered a crime," Manson said in a recorded phone conversation.

In a recent recorded conversation with Star, Manson discussed the flooding in Malaysia:

"They had some bad rains and floods and a lot of people in trouble over there, so we're sending them packages to help take care of them. They are half Muslim and half Christians so we have to hold a balance," he said in a recorded conversation. "The way we live is freedom of religion so we don't want [any] war against people. We want a war against pollution. A war against people isn't going to help anyone, a war against pollution will help everyone."

Star says she was drawn to the man she described as a "monk in a monastery" by his environmental views.

"There's a lot of people all around the world that would say they support Charles Manson and his vision of ATWA," she said.

"The goal, really, the main goal is to basically save life on the planet Earth from the humans," she said. "We have a key to make this goal accomplished, and that key is Charlie Manson."

But Bugliosi says there's a darker attraction to Manson that reaches beyond the green movement.

"There's a certain mystique that has developed around Manson," he said. "And one reason is that the very name Manson has come to be a metaphor for evil. He's come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, for whatever reason, people are fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil."

CNN's Emanuella Grinberg and Ann O'Neill contributed to this story.

Welease Woger! Welease Woderick!

I've gotten a few emails asking about Bruce Davis' upcoming parole hearing. It's like his 592nd and he's married and has a stepdaughter and would like to be set free into society again.

The argument I hear most often is that he hasn't owned up to these other murders and therefore doesn't deserve release into polite society. Doreen Gault, Scientologists, Joel Pugh, etc etc.

Personally I don't even know if he's guilty of any of these others. It feels like this is just BUG weaving a tapestry of masturbatory lies and fantasy. BUG knows a convicted murderer has no claim for defamation, so he alleged whatever the fuck he wanted to in his novel and it has taken on a life of its own as the "Official" story.

That's not to say that Davis is a hell of a nice guy or anything. He for sure was there at Hinman. He for sure knew all about Lotsapoppa and TLB. He for sure was intimately involved in Shorty Shea. And if nothing else, he confuses the shit out of me in the Hendrickson documentary because he looks and sounds like Charlie.

But I don't really care to fight his parole hearing.

You see, I've always been firm in my belief that none of the men are getting out. Not in this day and age. Maybe when they had their first parole hearing.

But the Bug-based legend of Manson is now fully permeated throughout the culture. It's done for these guys. Clem/ Adam Gabriel managed to convince people to release him in the middle of the night because he was not in his right mind. What that shows me is more about how fearful the authorities were that Shorty might still be alive than anything else.

No one is letting a member of the Manson Family out ever again. Orca Tate can come get her 30 pieces of Silver TV Fame at each hearing, but it ain't because of her that Davis will be denied.

He can thank his old friend Charlie.

Where Have You Gone ColScott, a Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You

Wow.
Six whole weeks and not a single posting here on the only Official Blog in the case. I would have to check, but I think that's the longest we've had without something brilliant and astonishing to bring to you all.
Sure, I've been busy. It's hard out there for a pimp. And I don't make the rent money from typing to you all. Homey makes it the old fashioned way, one quarter at a time.
So I knew I was going to have to broach my reasoning here, and so I wondered what it actually was. And voila, it became clear.

The Col is frustrated.

I'm frustrated that in all the bullshit coverage of the bullshit 40th Anniversary the only new items to come out where that Linda went over to Parent's car and Linda demanded the immunity from prosecution. Interesting tidbits, but nothing new.

You mean after all this time NO ONE is willing to tell the truth? The closest we got to reality was when addled Larry King asked Linda the obvious question, "Why did you go the second night knowing what you know?" and Bug changed the subject.

That's all we get?

The Col is frustrated. He now believes there might be some new explosive information in Tom O'Neill's book. But when is it coming out? No one knows. The last Manson book didn't even come out in the US. Sure it wasn't good, but....

The Col is frustrated. Do we live our lives in easily digested fairy tale morsels? Is it possible that people like Mary, Bobby and others have forgotten what happened and now just remember "their" versions? Why does NOT A SINGLE media venue point out that the BUG demonstrated mentally disturbed behavior BEFORE and AFTER the TLB trials?

The Col is frustrated...the burden of running the Official Site is a hard one. All those You Tube videos deleted because JimNY Savage is a crybaby asswipe. That was a lot of work. Bret's site is up and down like a YO YO and hasn't been updated this quarter. Mark Turner's site is like People Magazine. Long forgotten idiots like Wheat IM and email the Col insanity and banality.

The Col is frustrated.

Hopefully this post means I have overcome the frustration and am BACK.

But it has not been easy days on this case. Tons of coverage with nothing to show for it. Depressing even.

Thank you for your interest.

Into The Valley of Death

Charles Manson follower Susan Atkins dies
By LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch, Ap Special Correspondent Fri Sep 25, 8:26 am ET

LOS ANGELES – Susan Atkins, a follower of cult leader Charles Manson whose remorseless witness stand confession to killing pregnant actress Sharon Tate in 1969 shocked the world, has died. She was 61 and had been suffering from brain cancer.

Atkins' death comes less than a month after a parole board turned down the terminally ill woman's last chance at freedom on Sept. 2. She was brought to the hearing on a gurney and slept through most of it.

California Department of Corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said that Atkins died late Thursday night. She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2008, had a leg amputated and was given only a few months to live.

She underwent brain surgery, and in her last months was paralyzed and had difficulty speaking. But she managed to speak briefly at the Sept. 2 hearing, reciting religious verse with the help of her husband, attorney James Whitehouse.

She had been transferred to a skilled nursing facility at the California Central Women's Facility at Chowchilla exactly one year before she died.

Tate, the 26-year-old actress who appeared in the movie "Valley of the Dolls" and was the wife of famed director Roman Polanski, was one of seven murdered in two Los Angeles homes during the Manson cult's bloody rampage in August 1969.

Atkins was the first of the convicted killers to die. Manson and three others involved in the murders — Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Charles "Tex" Watson — remain imprisoned under life sentences. Thornton said that at the time of Atkins death she had been in prison longer than any woman currently incarcerated in California.

Atkins, who confessed from the witness stand during her trial, had apologized for her acts numerous times over the years. But 40 years after the murders, she learned that few had forgotten or forgiven what she and other members of the cult had done.

Debra Tate, the slain actress's younger sister, told the parole commissioners Sept. 2 that she "will pray for (Atkins') soul when she draws her last breath, but until then I think she should remain in this controlled situation." Debra Tate noted that she would have a 40-year-old nephew if her sister had lived.

Atkins' prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, had spoken out earlier in favor of release, saying the mercy requested was "minuscule" because Atkins was on her deathbed.

Atkins and her co-defendants were originally sentenced to death but their sentences were reduced to life in prison when capital punishment was briefly outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s.

During the sensational 10-month trial, Atkins, Manson and co-defendants Krenwinkel and Van Houten maintained their innocence. But once they were convicted, the so-called "Manson girls" confessed in graphic detail.

They tried to absolve Manson, the ex-convict who had gathered a "family" of dropouts and runaways to a ranch outside Los Angeles, where he cast himself as the Messiah and led them in an aberrant lifestyle fueled by drugs and communal sex.

Watson had a separate trial and was convicted.

One night in August 1969, Manson dispatched Atkins and others to a wealthy residential section of Los Angeles, telling them, as they recalled, to "do something witchy."

They went to the home of Tate and her husband. He was not home, but Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and four others were killed. "Pigs" was scrawled on a door in blood.

The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife were found stabbed to death in their home across town. "Helter Skelter" was written in blood on the refrigerator.

"I was stoned, man, stoned on acid," Atkins testified during the trial's penalty phase.

"I don't know how many times I stabbed (Tate) and I don't know why I stabbed her," she said. "She kept begging and pleading and begging and pleading and I got sick of listening to it, so I stabbed her."

She said she felt "no guilt for what I've done. It was right then and I still believe it was right." Asked how it could be right to kill, she replied in a dreamy voice, "How can it not be right when it's done with love?"

The matronly, gray-haired Atkins who appeared before a parole board in 2000 cut a far different figure than that of the cocky young defendant some 30 years earlier.

"I don't have to just make amends to the victims and families," she said softly. "I have to make amends to society. I sinned against God and everything this country stands for." She said she had found redemption in Christianity.

The last words she spoke in public at the September hearing were to say in unison with her husband: "My God is an amazing God."

She spent 37 years in the California Institution for Women at Frontera. When she fell ill, she was moved to a medical unit at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. She died there.

Susan Denise Atkins was born May 7, 1948, in the Los Angeles suburb of San Gabriel. Her mother was stricken with cancer and died when she was 15. Her father, reportedly an alcoholic, sent her and her brother to live with relatives.

While still in her teens, she ran away to San Francisco where she wound up dancing in a topless bar and using drugs. She moved into a commune in the Haight Ashbury district and it was there that she met Manson.

He gave her a cult name, Sadie Mae Glutz, and, when she became pregnant by a "family" member, he helped deliver the baby boy, naming it Zezozoze Zadfrack. His whereabouts are unknown.

The Manson slayings remained unsolved for three months, until Atkins confessed to a cellmate following her arrest on an unrelated charge. Police found Manson and other cult members living in a ranch commune in Death Valley, outside Los Angeles.

Besides Tate, their other victims were celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, filmmaker Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of Tate's caretaker; and grocery owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Atkins also was convicted with Manson of still another murder, of musician Gary Hinman, in July 1969.

Atkins married twice while in prison. Her first husband, Donald Lee Laisure, purported to be an eccentric Texas millionaire. They quickly divorced. Whitehouse, her second husband, is a Harvard Law School graduate and had recently served as one of her attorneys.

___

Linda Kasabian now Linda Chiochios on Larry King

I cannot embed this because the Youtube guy who illegally posted it doesn't allow it. Not sure why. Probably retarded. You can start watching it

HERE

Now we can play the same game of obviousness- I'll start and you can finish in the comments....

1- BUG jumps in to make sure Linda sticks to the script
2- Linda stays in disguise for no reason
3- Linda's new story makes her a worse accessory than ever
4- Even addled Larry thinks she should have done something and been charged.
5- Debra now has a full on fantasy about her involvement, with no mention of being disowned by her family and refusing a proper burial for her father.
6- Another hour wasted

We are Back From Vacation

YouTube asses took down the History Channel Doc.

Here it is illegally from someone else--
here

The Lord is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Stab Pregnant Actresses

L.A. Now
Southern California -- this just in

Manson follower Susan Atkins loses 13th attempt at freedom -- and it may be her last
September 3, 2009 | 8:16 am

Lat-atkins

Thirteen times, Manson family member Susan Atkins has asked to be released from prison. And 13 times, the parole board has denied her request.

The latest denial came Wednesday, when the state parole board voted unanimously to deny one of Charles Manson’s fiercest followers her request for “compassionate release” so she could die at home.

Dying of cancer, this might have been her last attempt at freedom, which has met with strong resistance.

“As sad as Mrs. Atkins looks today, it pales against the crime scene photos,” said Patrick Sequeira, an L.A. County deputy district attorney who has opposed the release of the Manson killers at several hearings.
Atkins, 61, has only months to live, doctors say. The issue of mercy has long dogged Atkins. Nearly 40 years ago, actress Sharon Tate begged the knife-wielding killer to spare her life and that of her unborn child. “She asked me to let her baby live,” Atkins told parole officials in 1993. “I told her I didn’t have mercy for her.”

On Wednesday night, the parole board, meeting at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, had little mercy for Atkins, who slept on a gurney for much of a hearing that began in the early afternoon.

It was the same result as last year when, despite the presence of a number of supporters and the approval of the prosecutor who put her behind bars, the 12-member California Board of Parole unanimously voted to deny Atkins’ release.

She is serving a life sentence for the slaying of Tate, 26, who was 8 1/2 months' pregnant, and musician Gary Hinman.
She has served 38 years in prison, longer than any other female in the state. The victims’ relatives and supporters opposed Atkins’ release, saying she showed no mercy on Aug. 9, 1969, when she and other Manson followers entered a hilltop Benedict Canyon home and murdered the five people.

A former topless dancer who used to sing in her church choir, Atkins was one of Manson’s most loyal disciples.

After fatally stabbing Tate, prosecutors said, Atkins tasted the actress’ blood and used it to write “PIG” on the front door of the home.


During her trial, which took more than nine months, Atkins seemed to show no remorse and maintained utter devotion to Manson, whom she called “Jesus Christ,” “the devil” and “the soul.”

During sentencing, she taunted the court, saying, “You’d best lock your doors and watch your own kids.”

Atkins is now considered a model prisoner known for helping others. She has been married to an Orange County attorney for 21 years.

In recent years, she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. One of her legs has been amputated and the other is paralyzed, authorities said.

Some of her supporters have argued that releasing Atkins would save the state substantial amounts of money in medical and prison expenses.

Former Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi said it was time for the state to show Atkins mercy. He told The Times last year that it was wrong to say “just because Susan Atkins showed no mercy to her victims, we therefore are duty-bound to follow her inhumanity and show no mercy to her.”

“She’s already paid substantially for her crime, close to 40 years behind bars. She has terminal cancer. The mercy she was asking for is so minuscule. She’s about to die. It’s not like we’re going to see her down at Disneyland,” said Bugliosi, who wrote the best-selling book “Helter Skelter.”

Atkins was first denied parole in 1976. She will be eligible to go before the parole board again in 2012, but doctors say it’s unlikely she’ll live that long. As she lay on a gurney, death seemed to be on Atkins’ mind. She read from Psalm 23 with her husband, James Whitehouse.

But family members of those killed by Atkins and other members of the Manson clan said she should die behind bars.

“I will pray for her soul when she draws her last breath,” said Debra Tate, the sister of Sharon Tate.

During a parole board hearing last year in Sacramento, supporters of Atkins spoke for more than 90 minutes, offering glowing testimonials of her transformation into a decent human being. But even though they were outnumbered then, family and friends of the Manson victims offered haunting portraits of the pain left in the wake of the killings, and of Atkins’ unmerciful response to Tate as she pleaded with the killer.

-- Richard Winton, Hector Becerra and special correspondent Ann Ellis reporting from Chowchilla

Susan Looks Like Kathy Bates (I'm Just Saying)

L.A. Now
Southern California -- this just in


Manson follower Susan Atkins denied parole
September 2, 2009 | 9:12 pm
Atkins For the second time in as many years, a state parole board voted Wednesday to deny one of Charles Manson’s fiercest followers her request for a “compassionate release” from prison so she can die at home.

Convicted murderer Susan Atkins, 61, is terminally ill with cancer and has only months to live, doctors say. The issue of mercy has long dogged Atkins. Nearly 40 years ago, actress Sharon Tate begged the knife-wielding Atkins to spare her life and that of her unborn child.

“She asked me to let her baby live,” Atkins told parole officials in 1993. “I told her I didn’t have mercy for her.”

On Wednesday night, the parole board meeting at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla had little mercy for Atkins, who slept on a gurney for much of a hearing that began in the early afternoon.

The result was the same as last year when, despite the presence of a number of supporters and the approval of the prosecutor who put her behind bars, the 12-member California Board of Parole unanimously voted to deny Atkins’ release.

Atkins is serving a life sentence for the slaying of 26-year-old Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and musician Gary Hinman. She has served 38 years in prison, longer than any other female in California.

The victims’ relatives and supporters opposed Atkins’ release, saying she showed no mercy Aug. 9, 1969, when she and other young followers of Manson entered a hilltop Benedict Canyon mansion and murdered the five people.

A former topless dancer who used to sing in her church choir, Atkins was one of Manson’s most loyal disciples. After fatally stabbing Tate, prosecutors said, Atkins tasted the actress’ blood and used it to write "PIG" on the front door of the mansion.

During her trial, which took more than nine months, Atkins seemed to show no remorse and maintained utter devotion to Manson, whom she called "Jesus Christ," "the devil" and "the soul." During sentencing, she taunted the court, saying, "You’d best lock your doors and watch your own kids."

-- Richard Winton and Hector Becerra

Sadie Still Alive Wants Out

September 3, 2009, 10:57 am
No Compassionate Release for Manson Follower Involved in Killing Spree

By Robert Mackey

DESCRIPTIONPool photograph/Ben Margot, via Associated Press During a break in her parole hearing on Wednesday, Susan Atkins, a convicted murderer with brain cancer, was comforted by her husband and attorney James Whitehouse in a California prison.

California is not Scotland. That’s the message one British newspaper took from Wednesday’s decision by a California parole board to turn down an application for compassionate release submitted on behalf of Susan Atkins, who is serving a life sentence for her part in the 1969 killing spree carried out by followers of Charles Manson.

In London, The Daily Mail contrasted the decision with one taken two weeks earlier by the Scottish regional government to free Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of murder for his role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Mail’s headline suggested “Scotland Take Note” of the fact that Ms. Atkins lost her bid for parole “DESPITE Being on Her Death Bed.”

In a this brief Twitter update announcing the decision on Wednesday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation made no mention of the fact that Ms. Atkins has terminal brain cancer:

CDCR’s Board of Parole Hearings today denied parole for convicted mass murderer Susan Atkins

A news release on the department’s Web site noted that this is the second time the board “denied a recommendation for recall of commitment (compassionate release) for Atkins.” On July 15, 2008, the board made the same decision when Ms. Atkins was said to have no more than six months to live.

It seems the board was not moved by the evidence presented by her husband and attorney, James Whitehouse, or by the Web site SusanAtkins.org, which is dedicated to:

Her life, her accomplishments since incarceration, her work with the Church, the Community and the needy, and her eligibility for parole.



Testimony from the family members of her victims seemed to carry more weight. On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Ms. Atkins “slept through most of the four-hour hearing Wednesday during which her husband-lawyer pleaded for her release and families of victims of the Sharon Tate-LaBianca killings urged that she be kept behind bars until she dies.”

Leaving aside compassion, the board was apparently also not swayed by the more pragmatic argument made last year by a California lawyer who argued that, in general, “incarcerating people who are permanently medically incapacitated is a policy that produces no benefit to taxpayers at astronomical expense.”

Last year, before the board rejected Ms. Atkins’s first request for compassionate release, Debra Tate, a sister of the murdered actress, explained in this video interview that she opposed the release since, “she didn’t show any of her victims any compassion whatsoever — as a matter of fact, she personally killed Sharon, and Sharon was begging for the life of her unborn baby at the time.” This 2008 video report by ABC News includes excerpts from an interview with Ms. Atkins in 2002 in which she said that Mr. Manson is “the one person that is the most difficult person in my life to forgive. I work on that. I don’t want to live a life with any unforgiveness in it.”

AesNihil Gets Strange Props

The Last Supper: Mansonites Converge at El Coyote

By Skylaire Alfvegren

Published on August 12, 2009 at 4:53pm

El Coyote is Movieland’s idea of a Mexican restaurant: The lighting is garish, the margaritas stiff. Waitresses clad in petticoated, off-the-shoulder cotton fiestas have been serving, as they call it, “authentic California-style Mexican food” to actors and others since 1931, but the blood-red leather booth in the back played host to its most infamous party on the night of August 8, 1969, when actress Sharon Tate dined there with Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger. Later that night, the group would be slain by followers of Charles Manson in Tate’s home at 10050 Cielo Drive. Tall, blond, and forever gripping a camcorder, odd-teur Jon Aes-Nihil (director of the gory cult classic Manson Family Movies) gathered his unusual band of miscreants for “the Last Supper” this past Saturday night, as he has done every August 8 since 1979. Manson’s long-standing appeal? “It was the first time the hippies struck back,” one diner commented. Or was it?

Never a true crime buff nor serial-killer dilettante, I had long viewed Manson symbolically — a guitar-strumming ecoterrorist with a Messiah complex, who effectively extinguished the Age of Aquarius, but on this, the 40th anniversary of the Tate/LaBianca slayings, a different picture emerged.

Manson, suspected of being both an FBI informant and agent provocateur, may well have been a patsy. “The FBI took out the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the Weather Underground, and it’s a contention that the murders were orchestrated,” author Adam Gorightly pointed out between sips from a margarita. Manson’s connections to military intelligence, the Church of Scientology, government-sponsored mind-control experiments and the ’60s occult underground ripple through The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Gorightly’s definitive Manson tome, recently rereleased by Creation Books.

Manson referred to his family as “slippies,” and only grew his hair long in the months preceding the murders; but because of Manson, “it was a long time before you saw longhairs portrayed in a positive light.”

Aes-Nihil’s group of historians, writers, musicians and filmmakers traded stories of the weird, twisted Hollywood of old, attracting the attention of a pudgy industry type who, with no prompting, described the “peaceful vibe” surrounding Tate’s house when Trent Reznor recorded “Helter Skelter” there with a not-yet-famous Marilyn Manson. Archivist Aes-Nihil (short for “aesthetic nihilism”) poked his ever-present camera in the man’s face, adding to the hundreds of hours of Manson-related footage he’s acquired over the decades, smirking all the while.

In all the years I’d known Aes-Nihil, I’d always thought it was the Family’s creep factor that had attracted him. But “there’s infinitely more to the Manson thing than Tex Watson killing people,” he explained. “I’m obsessed with the effect the murders had on the ’60s, since I was there, part of a group somewhat like the Family. When the story came out, we didn’t believe it for a second.”

A man of few words, he resumed shooting the party’s chatter: Church of Satan founder Anton La Vey had cursed Tate’s husband, director Roman Polanski, after they’d had a falling-out on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. Drug-addled orgies at the house on Cielo Drive were filmed and later sold on the black market by crooked LAPD cops, who’d stolen them from the crime scene. Family member Patricia Krenwinkel, in correspondence with researcher John Judge, swore she had been a victim of mind control. The acid Manson gave his followers was allegedly of the same, government-issued variety “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz had been dosed with while in the military. Standard dinner-party conversation.

Gathering the assembled for a postdinner portrait, Aes-Nihil continued: “Charlie and Sharon [Tate] have been baptized in the well of eternity via mass culture and universal myth. As for Charlie, he’s a modern-day Nietzsche.” This is apparent, he says, in Manson’s unedited interviews. “If a lot of what Charlie has said had been attributed to someone who is politically correct, it would be hailed as genius.”

I heard him out, knowing that many people don’t, and smiled for his camera.

History Channel Doc

Wow- what an awful documentary. They actually made the story boring. It takes real skill to do that.

Random Thoughts

- how seriously can we take you when you state on a fucking title card that Spahn Ranch is in Benedict Canyon which is 20 miles away?

- I know you couldn't afford to license Beatles songs, but do you really expect anyone to believe Charlie listened to the WHITE ALBUM on fucking HEADPHONES?

- Gypsy is back to tell us her lies...she was lying in all that Henrickson footage and News footage then but she is telling the truth now- or something. I love Charlie kicking her though- such BS but I was cheering HIM on.

- Who is that one tooth freak that keeps appearing? No one in the Family was inbred.

- Jakobsen is now called Shapiro? Because any Jew will do?

- They are using the Tate Home Movies that I posted before YOUTUBE scum (Thanks Savage) took them down.

- Debra is there but doesn't get the chance to make too much up.

- Who knew that Linda Kasabian had become a transexual? I missed that part. She sounds like she is reading a script. No mention of her continued legal troubles, or of Tanya growing up to become Lady Dangerous. Of course.

This played in the UK and Canada and will play in USA in a month. And still suck.

Debra Pimps

Restoring Sharon Tate

'ICON: Life Style Love Sharon Tate' celebrates the actress as 'a style icon, not a tragic headline,' according to artist Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell.

By Steffie Nelson

Her closet may have been full of designer dresses, but Sharon Tate was a flower child all the way down to her toes. Most comfortable barefoot, she used to skirt the "shoes required" laws in snooty late '60s Beverly Hills by looping leather string around her toes and across the tops of her feet, and then tying the ends around her ankles. Voila: sandals. Even the Malibu Barbie doll, said to be inspired by the actress and her bikini-clad character, Malibu, from the 1967 beach comedy "Don't Make Waves," was barefoot in her box.

Details like these seem trivial when held up against the events of Aug. 9, 1969, when Tate, 26 years old and eight months pregnant with her husband Roman Polanski's child, was murdered by Charles Manson's followers in her Benedict Canyon home. Indeed, it's difficult to utter Tate's name without Manson's following close behind, and it will be even more so on this 40th anniversary weekend, as the face of the cult leader, now 74, looms large in the media.

Is it possible to remember her now as the free-spirited natural beauty who prided herself on wearing the shortest miniskirts in town, instead of as the victim of a horrific crime? Santa Monica artist Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell is attempting to tease apart the intertwined images with the exhibition "ICON: Life Style Love Sharon Tate," which celebrates, in his words, "a style icon, not a tragic headline." Taking over an 8,000-square-foot space in Culver City this weekend, the multimedia show expands upon a series of photographs Corbell shot last year of up-and-comer Lauren Hastings modeling pieces from Tate's wardrobe.

The clothes came courtesy of Tate's sister Debra, who shared them with the public for the first time on a 2008 episode of "Inside Edition." "No one ever really, in her opinion, cared to know about this other part of [Sharon's] life, her passion for clothing and her sense of style," explains the program's producer Esmeralda Servin, who had come to know Debra, now 56, through other stories (most related to Manson family parole hearings). Debra, she says, was immediately receptive to the idea of focusing on the clothes, with Servin and in the Corbell project that flowed from it.

For the cameras, Debra pulled plastic-wrapped pieces from a cedar hope chest, including the high-necked, puff-sleeved, micro-mini wedding dress that Sharon designed for her 1968 marriage to Polanski. News footage from the couple's reception at the Playboy Club in London -- attended by L.A. pals including Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Mia Farrow and many others -- shows them looking like some kind of mod fairy-tale prince and princess; the diminutive auteur (only 5 foot 5 to her 5 foot 6) in a frock coat and cravat, feeding cake to his bride, fresh white flowers woven into her elaborate do. Her beauty -- which her husband claimed she was "embarrassed by" -- is timeless, yet she effortlessly embodied her time: glamorous starlet in heavy false eyelashes and fur one moment, haute hippie with beach-blond hair and languid gaze the next.

It's that image that still resonates powerfully in the design world, where, at least in some quarters, she seems to survive in memory more as muse than martyr. "It wasn't only her looks, it was the way she carried herself," says Dear Creatures' Bianca Benitez, who invokes the "Valley of the Dolls" ingenue in her spring 2009 collection. There's even a pair of high-waisted denim "Sharon Shorts," although Tate herself was partial to dresses.

Each piece worn by Hastings captures a different side of Tate, and of the '60s: There's a short, black mink coat with the name "Sharon Tate" embroidered inside; an Ossie Clark tunic worn with an op-art Yves Saint Laurent scarf; a full-sleeved paisley minidress by British hippie chic designer Thea Porter (who famously put Talitha Getty in a caftan); the black lace, strapless Christian Dior gown Tate wore to the premiere of "Rosemary's Baby"; and the simple, flowered sundresses she wore around the house that fateful summer at 10050 Cielo Drive.

Resurrection Vintage owner and designer Katy Rodriguez, who lives nearby, has visited that address "many times." "She is a huge inspiration to me," says the designer, who has played with '60s silhouettes in several collections. "She is the ultimate L.A. woman. There is no other."

Rodriguez tells a story about visiting her friend Nils Stevenson in London. "He was the Sex Pistols' PR person in the '70s and his brother is the rock photographer Ray Stevenson. Nils had a black-and-white image that Ray shot of Sharon at a party in the '60s. She looked so glamorous in something shimmery with that big hair. We had more than a few drunken nights staring at the photo and saying the same thing: They just don't make girls like that anymore. Everyone loved her, even the punks."

Undeniably, the darkness of Tate's fate somehow throws her into brighter relief. But, Rodriguez asserts, "The Manson connection is only one part of her story. Her life and her promise was as compelling as her death. She traveled between light and dark. . . . It's what makes her so interesting. Other people died that night, but we gravitate toward Sharon."

Tate's path certainly didn't follow the storybook fantasy of her wedding. By 1969 she was considering divorcing the womanizing Polanski, according to author Greg King, and lamented the direction her film career had taken. To her friends, Sharon disparaged her media image as "sexy little me."

"She did these movies that critics like Pauline Kael and others made fun of," notes Adam Parfrey, a book publisher whose catalog encompasses Hollywood history as well as the Manson Family. "She wasn't a star; she was a starlet. She never had a chance to demonstrate much acting prowess."

Star billing came only after her death, when "Valley of the Dolls" and the Polanski-directed horror spoof "The Fearless Vampire Killers" were rereleased within days of the murders, preserving her image in the bloom of youth and possibility.

Corbell spent more than a year pondering Tate's story as he reworked the photographs he'd shot with an old press Polaroid camera: enlarging them, painting on them, and embedding them in antique window frames. He believes our fascination goes deep, to a subconscious level. "Is she an icon just because of her death," he asks, "or is she an icon because she represented something -- some spirit of purity or love -- that was brought to light by the way she died?"

The 32-year-old, self-described "accidental artist" freely admits that when he was first approached by Servin about doing the shoot, he found the concept a little creepy. "I made that same equation, Sharon = Manson." But as he grew to understand Debra Tate's situation -- robbed of almost every positive memory of her sister -- Corbell "saw the potential to tell a story that was bigger. That's what I care about as an artist."

Asked why he chose the anniversary of Tate's death to celebrate her life, Corbell says that he'd actually considered having the show on her birthday, "but what I'm trying to do is change the equation on a day that acts as this launchpad to repeat the negative mantra of fear. I'm trying to turn fear into hope."

ICON is open to the public from 1 to 5 p.m. today at High Profile Productions, 5896 Smiley Drive, Culver City.

John Waters Lies about Leslie CUATRO

Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 4 of 5

Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of "Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship".

Initially both my mother and Leslie's were nervous about our friendship. "Does the Manson Family have to have our address?" my mother moaned when I once had a letter sent there. And in 1998, Leslie commented to The Baltimore Sun in a long profile of me that she "found it ironic" that her mother and supporters initially "were concerned" for Leslie, as "if knowing him could somehow hurt my reputation." But over the years our mothers softened and grew used to the idea. Leslie's mother went to see Pecker and my mother needle-pointed me a pillow that says "Leslie". As our parents got older and poor health struck, Leslie and I commiserated on how lucky we were to have parents who had lived long enough so we both could make peace with them over our notorious pasts. "None of this" was her parents' fault, Leslie told a parole board. And when Mrs. Van Houten died in 2005, Leslie wrote her friends a great tribute admitting it was "very hard for me not to be there for her at this terrible time (of her illness) just to fix her hair, read to her, just be near her. As it is, I cherish all the qualities of her that are alive in me. She lived a good life. She was a world-traveler, helped in unionizing the L.A. teachers, she was part of the Mothers Marching Against Vietnam and was very proud of that. Mama liked Hillary Clinton and wrote her support letters. So I share with you, my friends, the life of Jane Louise Edwards Van Houten. A woman who was a good mother who I loved dearly. We worked our way over very hard times and came through with sincere tenderness. She was pleased you were my friend. Take a moment to say, 'Hear, hear,' for a life that was well-lived."

But, yes, I know the La Bianca kids don't have a mother around anymore partly because of my friend Leslie. No matter how patient Leslie or her supporters are, we know this terrible fact will never change. But when, if ever, will there have been enough punishment? Vincent Bugliosi, the original and fairest Manson Family prosecutor and author of Helter Skelter, originally predicted in his book that the "girls" would serve "fifteen to twenty years" and called Leslie "the least committed to Manson", but later told The National Enquirer, "I want Leslie Van Houten to remain in prison for the rest of her life." He once admitted to Larry King after hearing Leslie speak on the show, "I was impressed by her. In defense of her I can say this, she seems to be a model prisoner and everyone seems to say she is very remorseful for the murders." But Stephen Kay, who prosecuted Leslie in her later trials and has argued against her parole many times since, seems even more confused on how much time she should serve. Admitting "I've always said she [Leslie] was the smartest and maybe the most normal of them all," he also commented in The Los Angeles Times, in 1980, that he didn't feel Leslie Van Houten should be locked up forever but it was "too soon to release her now." He would rather "wait until she was at least forty years old." Sixteen years after that, a Court TV reporter asked him, "Will you always fight Leslie Van Houten's parole?" And he answered, "Always is a long time. I'm not saying she will never be suitable for parole, I've not said 'never.'" But when the old National Enquirer comes around he encourages their readers to send in coupons against her release and claims, "Leslie Van Houten should never be let out."

The Parole Board can be equally confusing when it comes to sending signals to Leslie about a possible release. After eighteen parole hearings, some members praised her -- "You've come a long way," "You're closer [than] you might realize" -- while denying her a date always citing "the enormity of the crime," the only thing she can never change. It is painful to watch Leslie sit there year after year, her face lined in sorrow in long Warholian close-ups on Court TV as she listens to the same gruesome details of her crime that they read into the record at every hearing. No matter how much progress she's made, how good the psychiatric reports, she is forced to re-describe or come up with new details of that terrible night or be accused of "not opening up" to her part in the crime and then is punished as the prosecutor takes her honest memory of the insane Manson reasoning and uses it against her in future hearings. As Christie Webb, Leslie's last parole defense attorney, so succinctly put it in 2004, "Deputy D.A. has proved that Leslie Van Houten was a danger in 1971 and, yes, she was. She was when she was with the Manson cult. She tried to explain her relationship to Manson -- how she would die for him, how she would kill for him. She tried to explain that and told that to psychiatrists in 1970 and 1971 when she was still under the influence of cult indoctrination and then it's used it against her 38 years later."

In 2002 a California Supreme Court judge realized that a rejection of [her] parole was made "without any explanation of reason" and ordered the parole board to get back to him in ninety days to show "some evidence" of why Leslie should not be released and what she must do to rehabilitate herself. In November of that same year Judge Bob Krug said of the parole board's finding, "I cannot find any indication where Miss Van Houten has done anything wrong in prison. They can't keep using the crime forever and ever. That turns her sentence into life without parole. If I was Ms. Van Houten I wouldn't have a clue what to do at the next hearing."

"Unreasonable risk to the community" is another reason used to turn down Leslie year after year. "I don't want anyone to wake up and find Leslie Van Houten is the next door neighbor," Stephen Kay argued in 1986, conveniently forgetting that Leslie had had next door neighbors when she lived peacefully on parole between her second and third trial. An even more persuasive argument against this reasoning was the successful parole and release of Steve "Clem" Grogan a.k.a. "Scramblehead", one of the most brainwashed men in the Manson Family. Grogan was convicted (along with two other defendants) in a separate trial for the murder of ranch hand Shorty Shea, because Charlie thought Shea was a snitch. Sentenced to life in prison but released after serving fourteen years (maybe because there was at least a reason for this type of murder that someone could understand), Mr. Grogan commented to the parole board, ""I still haven't gotten over the emotional part... the atrocity I did." Grogan, who was certainly as committed to Manson's lunatic cause as Leslie was at the time of the crimes, has never been heard from by the law since. Away from Manson, he got his life back together, found employment, and now lives lawfully and quietly out of the eyes of the press, crime historians, or Manson groupies. Contrary to what Charlie preached, sometimes sense does make sense.

"Not taking responsibility" is another charge thrown at Leslie each time she comes up for parole. Because she once said she stabbed Mrs. La Bianca after she was already dead, the D.A. always brings up the fact that Leslie doesn't "come clean" to details of her involvement. But Leslie has already stated that "earlier in my incarceration, in my sobriety, in my coming to terms with what I had done, I used to find a lot of relief in thinking she was dead. But really honestly looking at it, it is of no consequence whether she was or not. The action was reprehensible." "Each day I wake up," she told the board, "I know why I'm waking up where I am." "I feel a great responsibility for what I did to the world," she sadly stated at a 1991 hearing, "I carry this crime with me as if I was the only one," she said in 2000. "Each act we did in that house, I take responsibility for," she testified in 2004, adding, "I can't...place the blame on someone else. It was me."

Naturally, the victims' families' words and anger are incredibly strong and hard to argue against. What they say can actually never be wrong. If Leslie had killed my mother, could I forgive her? For many years the La Bianca children did not come to Leslie's parole hearings. "You may have wondered why I haven't attended," wrote Leno's oldest son in 2004, "let me tell you why. When confronted with the nightmare at the time, I decided to put my faith in the legal system. I tended to my wounds privately, knowing that if I let my parents' death define me the rest of my life, then those who killed them would have gotten me, too." But when it looked like Leslie had a real chance at parole in 2000, Stephen Kay encouraged La Bianca's nieces and nephews to attend and their words were devastating. "How many times must we come!?" asked an indignant La Bianca nephew, frustrated at having to appear yet again, given what he thought was Leslie's iron-clad life sentence. Seeing the family testify on TV, I kept thinking how they didn't want to have to be there. How they had to take off work. Drive to the prison. Pay for gas. Buy an outfit they knew they'd be photographed in. How painful an ordeal this intrusion on their attempt to come to terms with their tragedy. "We lost our privacy and suffered untold depression, frustration, anxiety and financial ruin," a La Bianca relative testified, calling the hearing a "sacrilege to Leno's memory that the family has to be confronted with parole hearings of these individuals." A resentful La Bianca niece continued, "I don't personally support execution but I feel life in prison is an adequate punishment for what was done." Sometimes the family's words were so terrible they could have come from a horror movie: "The house was a family sanctuary... one of the murder weapons used was the carving fork that was used for our holiday festivities. I saw, as a youngster, my grandfather Leno and my father use these instruments of joy that were turned into tools of torture and death. We are stained for life." It doesn't matter that Leslie herself never touched this fork; it was her co-defendant Patricia Krenwinkle who plunged it into Mr. La Bianca's neck after "Tex" had already stabbed him to death. But what awful details to keep straight! Who cares who did what? Leslie knew they weren't going trick-or-treating when they went into that house. And she has to pay for everything that happened. Every single gruesome detail.

Even I am sometimes still horrified. To me, almost more incomprehensible than the murders is the fact that my friend Leslie, after stabbing Mrs. La Bianca, changed into her clothes before hitching back to the Spahn ranch. "How could you!?" I once asked Leslie, who looked back at me stricken with disgust and humiliation. "I know," she mumbled, "Tex made me change my clothes and I told him I didn't have to." "Did you actually pick out one of her outfits?" I whispered, horrified to imagine fashion decisions in the time of such bloodshed. "No," she gasped as she lowered her eyes in horror that I would even think of such a thing, "I just grabbed the first thing I found!" What a terrible, terrible question to have to answer!

At the parole hearing, a La Bianca niece testified she was outraged to have "never heard from Leslie Van Houten, not by phone, email or letter. She should apologize to me," she added with anger. But Leslie wasn't even aware of these nieces and nephews until they came to parole hearings decades after the crimes. She knew about "two children" but not cousins. Leslie had earlier told a parole member that she had wrestled with writing a letter of apology because she thought "how I would feel if it had been my own mother and father -- not sure I would have wanted the perpetrator to have contacted me." In 1994 Leslie told The Washington Post that she had written dozens of apologies and never mailed them because they would amount to a request for a favor.

When the La Bianca nieces and nephews first appeared at Leslie's hearing, Leslie said, "I am relieved that family members came forward...it's really hard to live with the murders when no one was there. It was incomplete dealing with it." And she had apologized to the unseen La Bianca family many times at earlier parole hearings. "I feel great shame and remorse when I think of the La Bianca children and their family today...when I think back on the night of August 10th, all I think about is the horror these two very innocent human beings were subjected to. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."

Leslie has agreed to meet with the victims' relatives, but only if there is no tape of the meeting to be exploited by the media. "If the family works with the Institute I certainly would welcome a chance to apologize to them in a personal way." In other words, not on Court TV, not on videocassettes bought and sold on line on Manson groupie websites and not for the whole world to see. "A virtuoso performance," a commentator blurted on TV after seeing footage of Leslie baring her soul at a parole hearing. And this is exactly the kind of "entertainment" value she is trying to avoid.

"She cannot repay," a La Bianca nephew told the Board before turning to Leslie and saying, "Therefore accept your punishment and pray for the good Lord's forgiveness in the hereafter." Worse yet, Patty Tate, sister of Sharon, who is not allowed to testify at Leslie's hearing because Leslie is not convicted of the Tate murders but is allowed to be there in "victim support," told the news media outside the hearing her feelings about all the convicted Manson Family members. "I have no animosity," she reasoned, "I want these people to flourish within the confines of these [prison] walls. I want them to be productive and have lives within the confines of these walls right here."

Yet, forgiveness can seem insane, too. Susan Le Barge, the born-again Christian daughter of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, outraged her family and Sharon Tate's mother by appearing at Charles "Tex" Watson's 1990 parole hearing and testifying that the man who stabbed to death both her mother and father should be released. "I believe twenty-one years of imprisonment and his having to live with the memory of what he did is punishment enough," she told a startled and disbelieving board. "It's my belief Charles could live in society peacefully and should be given a parole date," she concluded as "Tex" Watson sat there seemingly stunned.

Knowing the schism Susan Le Barge's testimony must have caused with the La Bianca family, Leslie never tried to hop on board this almost ludicrously forgiving bandwagon but I'm sure she felt some relief to hear one of the victims' family trying to get past their hatred of her. Leslie must have been encouraged to read the words of the father of murder victim Myra Opshal, who was killed in a bank robbery committed by the Patty Hearst-kidnapping Symbionese Liberation Army. When one of its members, Kathleen Soliah, was about to be released on bail for taking part in this crime, he was angry but expressed hope, according to The Los Angeles Times, "that Soliah can emerge from jail to offer society some productive years. I hope she [Soliah] has learned something from this," he continued, "and can go out and be a good citizen and contribute to the community where she lives. And she'll have some life left to live."

Most likely Leslie would be inspired by the forgiveness the Amish community showed the gunman who insanely shot to death five school girls and severely wounded five more before killing himself in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. A year later a local historian gave a speech on the anniversary of this horrible event called "Why the Amish Forgave a Killer." "The Amish community believes forgiveness is about giving up," he said, "giving up your right to revenge. And giving up feelings of resentment, bitterness and hatred, replacing them with compassion toward the offender and treating the offender as a human being."

John Waters Lies about Leslie TRES

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Posted: August 5, 2009 09:09 AM
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Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 3 of 5
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Read More: Charles Manson, Charles Manson Murders, Cry-Baby, Helter Skelter, John Waters, Johnny Depp, Leslie Van Houten, Entertainment News

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of "Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship".

Attorney Paul Fitzgerald, after many years' involvement defending the Manson women at various trials, said to The Los Angeles Times, "If Leslie Van Houten had never existed, the La Biancas still would be dead." But Leslie won't let herself off that easily. "I blame myself," she answered. "I'm part of what made him [Manson] a leader. If he didn't have followers, he wouldn't be a leader," and she later told Karlene Faith, "A follower is as responsible [as a leader] for allowing a leader to lead them foully."

As much as the sex angle was built up in the press, the truth was surprising to some. Leslie slept with Manson "maybe three times," she testified in court, and only "in the first month" she was with the group. Leslie would never admit this but she had better taste in Manson men. Bobby Beausoleil, a.k.a. "Cupid", was the most traditionally handsome of Charlie's boys and had starred in Kenneth Anger's movie Lucifer Rising and was Leslie's first boyfriend inside the Family. Even Charlie was a little in love with Bobby, and Leslie remembers being shocked at seeing Bobby orally service Charlie during one of their group sex evenings. "I didn't 'sleep with the devil,'" Leslie told Karlene Faith, "I slept with an ex-con who had an extensive record of pimping and abusing women. But I didn't know that." "The ranch," she remembers to Connie Turner, "was set up and run the same way as a stable of hookers although none of us realized it at the time."

"Are you crazy enough to believe in me?" Charlie asked Leslie and after months of LSD trips, isolation in the desert, and hours and hours of his continuous insane political rantings, Leslie, like most of the other "girl" converts, was. "'Bow like sheep,' Manson would order us," Leslie remembered in 1983. "We wore Bowie knives on belts around our waists and were only [dressed] in our underwear, I think, unless it got cold," she told Connie Turner. "We'd sit around on our feet and grunt...we were seeing how long we could go without drinking water...I was carrying a twenty-pound backpack filled with rice. We were building roads from nowhere to nowhere by moving rocks around...it was hard." Susan Atkins, Leslie's co-defendant, said in one of her parole hearings that they "were three young women clearly not in our right minds who lived in slavish obedience to a madman." Catherine Share, an early Manson Family member who finally managed to break free after serving time for the gun robbery, remembers Manson "just stealing everyone's soul." "Thinking is stinking," he used to say. And while Gypsy never killed for Charlie she understood the state of mind of the ones who did. "The killers couldn't even form a thought," she sadly remembered from her own experience. "Tex" Watson's psychological-reports doctor stated that "Tex" "had confusion as to who or what he was. Sometimes he 'felt like a monkey.' He actually believed that the victims were imaginary people." "Tex" told the shrink that he looked in the mirror at the Tate house, trying to figure out who he was. "I wasn't anyone," he remembered, "I wasn't Charles Watson, I was an animal. The end of the world was then. I was the living death..."

Seeing Leslie today in the visiting room, it's hard to imagine her with this past. The X on her forehead has almost faded away and she looks like an upscale intelligent woman I would definitely come across in my life in New York or Los Angeles. She could be seated next to you at any dinner party of professional people and it would never dawn on you that this woman has been in prison for four decades. She even went to the Oscars with a female friend in 1978 when she was out on bail and nobody recognized her! "But what did you talk about to the people you met that night?" I wondered, knowing she had been released from death row not that long before, not exactly a center of industry screenings or "For Your Consideration" Oscar campaigns. "If someone brought up one of the nominees," she shrugged, "I'd just say 'No, I missed that one' or 'I was away when that was playing.'"

Leslie and I have gotten older together in that visiting room and I've seen the prison rules constantly change. I used to be able to buy her three packs of cigarettes to take back to her cell but now it's illegal to smoke anywhere in jail in California. What used to feel so old-school-Women Behind Bars-cigarettes-as-money is gone forever. Now I get to buy her three cans of Pepsi! Stylistically, it's just not the same thing. Worse yet, about five years ago suddenly none of the women in Leslie's jail were allowed to use any kind of hair coloring.

Overnight the entire prison population aged ten years in appearance and on my first visit since the ban, I knew something was wrong but it took me several minutes to realize that everybody had two inch gray roots. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment!

Leslie and I have shared good times and bad times. And yes, Leslie does have good times. She's taught illiterate women to read in prison classes, she's stitched a portion of the AIDS quilt, made bedding for the homeless, recorded books on tape for the blind. She has clerked for the administrators, the nurses, the associate warden, the head of education, the kitchen, and the priest. And it's not that she jumps from job to job -- rules restrict inmates from working longer than two years in the same position. She can be lighthearted, too. She even sang "Santa Baby" at the prison Christmas show one year.

Yet somehow Leslie continues to live through the bad times without despair and inspires others to do the same. When Divine died suddenly in1988, Leslie was one of the first to console me by letter. "I'm so sad and wish I could be closer for you. I know you loved him and enjoyed in the success of his life and helped him through his hard times... I am sorry I will not get to know him."

She counseled me on a personal level, too. After a relationship of mine ended, Leslie was a good shoulder to lean on and I hope I've given her good advice, too, when she's had crushes from prison on men in the outside world. I've met two of her longest-lasting roommates: Becky the bank-robber whom I adored and is now free, and another inmate I called "Little Miss Manslaughter" because she was so bubbly and was an actual fan of my movies before she was sentenced.

Since no cable TV is available in jail, Leslie has seen few of my movies but did finally get to see my version of Hairspray and it was nice to get her good review. "I loved it," she wrote to me, "I was really into the public dances and all that. I lived to go to the Harmony Ballroom in Anaheim. I bought my shoes by how well they slid on the wood floor. I'm telling you it was my life!" It was her life. From Mashed Potatoes to Manson's Monster Mash in just a few short years. Luckily for her, Leslie still has a sense of humor. She even joked about my role in Hairspray as an evil psychiatrist who uses a ridiculous optical medical tool to hypnotize a teenage white girl into never dating black boys. "I never had one of those spinning wheels flashed in front of my face," Leslie admitted after decades of therapy, "Do you think it would help?"

I've always secretly wondered if Leslie ever felt "cool" when she was with the Manson gang and I finally got up the nerve to ask. She looked at me in confusion. "Cool? We had no concept by then of any such possible word!" she answered. And now the "celebrity" was even more unfathomable. "There's nothing sadder than to be asked for an autograph because of infamy," she once wrote to me, "I've had to explain I'm not proud of what I have done or why they [people] are aware of me. It's an awful feeling. The 'unwilling star'" And when her autograph or letters are sold on murder memorabilia sites it makes her feel worse because someone she has written to has betrayed her, and she's not sure who -- "So creepy. All disgusting and distasteful."

We've always discussed current events, how paralyzed she was with sadness over the Waco tragedy and how similar David Koresh was to Manson -- even more so than Jim Jones. Or how she understands the mind-set of kamikaze suicide bombers because this is how she was trained by Manson to feel and act once. And when the riots broke out in L.A. in 1992, after the Rodney King beating, an event Manson loyalists likened to Helter Skelter finally happening for real, Leslie was so far away from the Manson ideology that the comparison never even occurred to her. "This has been a really emotional time for me," she wrote that week, "First there was the first execution in nearly half a century in California," (Robert Alton Harris who was strapped into the gas chamber for thirteen minutes, released due to appeals, and then put back in the same day and executed) "and then the days L.A. went mad. I sat watching on TV images usually seen in other countries. John, it was so frightening -- to think of what is supposed to be safe as totally out of control."

I've tried to be her "agent" in the world of Hollywood. She agonized with me whether to co-operate and be interviewed for the TV news magazine show Turning Point but after meeting Diane Sawyer, Leslie agreed this news correspondent was "a class act". After seeing the completed show, Leslie admits she "had been treated better than I ever have." When the distressing news came in 2003 that CBS was remaking Helter Skelter again as a new TV movie, I called the director John Gray, whom I didn't know, at his home. Probably wondering why I was calling, or worse yet, thinking I was happy about the news, he took my call and listened quietly as I begged him to realize what a terrible unfair effect this project would have on Leslie's parole chances, how she was ashamed and horrified about the crimes, how further notoriety on the case would only please Manson and hurt the privacy of victims' families. I think my call may have worked a little because when I saw the finished project, Leslie's character was minimal and her part in the crime was truthfully shown to have been ordered by a vengeful Manson. A year or two later, my hunch was proven correct. In Los Angeles, in a restaurant to meet my agent and five minutes early, I was shown to my table alone and the waitress approached me with an odd expression. "Can I ask you something personal?" she shyly requested. "Sure," I replied, realizing she recognized me but never expecting what was coming next, "Are you the head of that 'Friends of Leslie' organization?" "No, there is no 'head' and that group has been disbanded officially, but there are many people who support her parole chances," I answered. "Because I played Leslie in the newest Helter Skelter," she revealed. Only in L.A.! Her name was Catherine Wadkins and I suddenly felt bad realizing I might have contributed to making an actress' part smaller. "Yes, you did," she confided after I told her the story of my call to her director, which she already knew about. "That's okay," Catherine smiled. "I think Leslie should get out and I tried to play the part in a way to show how brainwashed she was."

Leslie never asked me for money or material goods over the years. I've sent her books I loved and together we've discussed James Purdy, Mary McGarry Morris, Michael Cunningham, and Anne Tyler novels. After maybe one too many of my intense choices, Leslie started requesting her own titles, many of which had to do with the history and plight of the Native American Indian and I was happy to oblige. The only reading material I sent her that was rejected by the mailroom was, oddly enough, an issue of Paper Magazine that contained a fashion shoot that must have contained a little too much nudity. Once I offered to buy Leslie a TV for her cell but she declined. My kind of gal.

I was lucky enough to meet some of Leslie's friends on the outside, too. She has a support group that is tireless and relentless. "I like that several people close to me are also now friends of yours," Leslie wrote me after years of visiting. The most dedicated is Linda Grippi, a friend of Leslie's since high school who began visiting her not long after she was convicted and has never stopped. Linda is practically a nun in the religion of Leslie's rehabilitation and the firmest believer that Leslie should be paroled. Linda has dedicated her life to the cause of Leslie's freedom. She is a kind but convincing, level-headed pit bull who goes after anyone who believes otherwise with a reasoned defense. If Linda could testify at Leslie's parole hearing as "support" the way the victims' families can, I think Leslie might have already received a release date.

But Leslie meeting my friends was more problematic because of the East Coast locations and the strict rules about visiting high profile prisoners like her. I am afraid I have betrayed Leslie, too. A long time ago she mentioned to me that she "hoped I never 'used' our friendship or her plight for freedom" as dinner party conversation in my travels around the world. And I am embarrassed to admit, in my enthusiasm for her rehabilitation and my pride in our friendship, I have. Leslie Van Houten is quite a name to drop and famous people are eager to hear her story. When we were filming Cry-Baby, Johnny Depp heard my pleas concerning Leslie's parole and offered to visit her. Leslie, like everyone else in the world, had great respect for Johnny Depp and was moved that he, as my buddy, cared about her case. But we must have been nuts! Can you imagine the press if they found out? Think of the headlines -- "Johnny Depp joins Manson Family". Luckily for all of us, Johnny's visiting form was turned down because of an "impending assault charge", probably a hot-headed reaction to paparazzi.

Dumpster Diving- The Movie?

Anyone have any idea what this piece of shit is?

Here.

General if Decent

The Manson murders — 40 years later

TERROR: The brutality of the killings destroyed a period of innocence and changed the city forever.

By Tony Castro, Staff Writer

Forty years ago on Aug. 8, from his ranch in the San Fernando Valley, Charles Manson dispatched a band of devoted fanatics on a high-profile killing spree that shocked the world and terrified Angelenos, who never left their doors and windows unlocked again.

"It was a scary thing back then and it continues to this day," says Vincent Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted the Manson "family" for one of the city's most notorious murder binges.

Among the seven victims of the two-day murder spree was actress Sharon Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time.

As details of the crimes emerged, fear spread in a city that simply could not comprehend the sheer brutality of the murderers, many of whom were long-haired young women who could be mistaken for peaceniks.

Six of the seven victims were stabbed a total of 169 times and the seventh was shot dead.

"It had a definite effect throughout L.A., and it did induce fear throughout the city," Bugliosi said.

In the early hours of Aug. 9, 1969, the Manson family killed Tate, 26, and four others in Benedict Canyon - coffee fortune heiress Abigail Folger, 25; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; Polish film director Voyteck Frykowski, 32; and Steven Parent, 18, friend of the caretaker at Tate's home.

Manson stayed at the Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth while his devotees committed the Tate murders. The following night, Manson went

---

with the group, but stayed in the car while his followers murdered wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca, 44, and wife Rosemary, 38, in Los Feliz.

The killers also scrawled "Healter Skelter" and "Pigs" in the victims' blood at both murder scenes - references to the Beatles song "Helter Skelter" released the year before, which the killers misspelled, and a slur directed at police and the white establishment.

"There were people in L.A. back then, in 1969, who didn't lock their doors," says Bugliosi. "It was a certain period of innocence to a certain degree and that all stopped with the Tate-LaBianca murders."

James Schamus, screenwriter and producer of the upcoming film "Taking Woodstock," grew up in North Hollywood, in the hills right off Mulholland Drive, and remembers the fear that overtook the city.

"I was under lockdown, as were all of my friends because just a few days before, the Manson family went on a rampage in the neighborhood," he recalls. "My parents were like, `You're not going out!'

"They didn't know it was the Manson family until they were arrested a couple of months later. But they knew that they were hippies who did it, because they used the blood to scrawl `pig' on the wall."

Four decades after what Bugliosi calls an "orgy of murder," the legacy of Manson looms disturbingly over pop culture and an entertainment capital that still seems to be coming to grips with the madness of the convicted mass murderer.

Manson was given the death penalty along with Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten. When the courts overturned the death penalty, their sentences were commuted to life in prison.

Another family member, Linda Kasabian, who stood watch at the Tate murder site, turned state's evidence. She served no time.

Today, Manson, 74, short and balding, bears little resemblance to the long-haired, bearded menace whose likeness became a pop culture icon. What does remain is the devilish stare and the swastika, which he carved on his forehead while on trial.

"But the shadow of Charles Manson continues to haunt our nation's psyche, especially in Los Angeles," says Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist on the clinical faculty at UCLA who specializes in violence and terrorism.

"Why? First, the scattered contamination of spots in Los Angeles where the Manson family lived and killed. From Malibu to Los Feliz, the San Fernando Valley to Venice, and numerous places in between.

"Secondly, the randomness or `helter skelter' aspect to the crimes, which causes us to realize that we are not safe, even within our fancy homes."

Though America has seen dozens of notorious serial killers since Manson, the fascination with this Ohio-born drifter who spent most of his life in reform schools and behind bars persists.

"The main reason for the continued fascination at such a late date (is) the murders were probably the most bizarre in the recorded annals of American crime," says Bugliosi, who later authored a best-selling book about the crimes - "Helter Skelter."

Manson construed the expression as the harbinger of an apocalyptic race war he hoped the murders would trigger.

"For whatever reason," says Bugliosi, "people are fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre. Manson himself. Just how many Charles Mansons are out there?

"The incredible motive: To ignite a war between blacks and whites, an Armageddon. The killers printed words from Beatles songs in blood, mind you, at the murder scene. The fact that these kids (Manson's killers) came from average American homes. Who would ever dream that, of all people, they would be mass murderers?"

Today, dozens of bands, especially in Europe, play songs penned by Manson or that were written in support of the mass murderer. The Internet has millions of pages devoted to him. Manson cult groups abound throughout the world.

At the Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth where Manson and his followers lived while in the Valley, locals say they occasionally see visitors searching for the Santa Susana Mountain location, once a western movie set and now fenced off and owned by the state of California.

"Some people don't think Manson was crazy but a genius to be able to manipulate people like he did," says horse trainer Candy Cooper who lives not far from the ranch. "People were horrified by the killings and the way they were done, and they come here, I guess, looking for where the man who masterminded that lived."

Holly Huff, who lived in Box Canyon where the ranch was and had just graduated from high school when the murders took place, remembers that Manson and his clan had taken control of George Spahn's movie ranch, over the objection of the ranch's caretaker.

"George was blind, and the story was that they had seduced him by having the girls have sex (with him)," says Huff, who remembers that the caretaker soon mysteriously disappeared.

"I don't think anyone ever heard from him again."

Huff also recalled that in the months before the murders, many residents of the Box Canyon area complained of returning to their homes and finding their furniture and furnishings moved around - though nothing was taken.

"I think they called it `creepy crawling,' and many thought (the Manson family) was responsible," she says.

Then, just days before the killings, Huff said, a friend found his garage looted of equipment used to cut steel. It was common knowledge the Manson family was converting old cars into dune buggies.

"He was gonna go up to the ranch and confront them, but didn't," said Huff. "And it's probably good that he didn't."

Others with an interest in Manson also look for the former site of a two-story house at 20910 Gresham St. in Canoga Park, not far from the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson family lived in late 1968 and early 1969.

That house was known to Manson's followers as "The Yellow Submarine," referring to another Beatles song.

"It was like a submarine in that when you were in it, you weren't allowed to go out," Watson tells Bugliosi in his book. "You could only peek out of the windows."

Today, the house is gone. The former single-family home neighborhood has been converted to apartment buildings - but memories of Manson and his family remain.

Longtime Chatsworth resident Virginia Watson remembers that the Manson family became a fixture in the area in the months leading up to the murders.

"They weren't here long, but they made a big impression," says Watson, who is now curator of the Chatsworth Historical Museum. "They were like a gang, and they would come in to shop at the Hughes Market or the Arco gas station.

"They would steal things from the market, and you would see them scavenge through trash cans, and everyone would stay away from them as much as possible."

But it was not until Manson and the family were linked to the killings, says Watson, that local residents realized how close they had been to potential harm.

"Before they had just seemed like renegades," says Watson. "But when we found out what they did, I think we realized we had been right in avoiding them as much as we could."

No Show Without Punch

Taking on Charles Manson
No matter what else he does, the lawyer and author will always be known for prosecuting the infamous murder case.

August 8, 2009

Vincent Bugliosi has moved on, but the world hasn't. Forty years after the impossibly grisly Tate-LaBianca murders, he is still "the Manson prosecutor." This, in spite of his many books since, arguing with magisterial fury about the JFK assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bush vs. Gore case and now the Iraq war.

His book about the murders masterminded by Charles Manson, "Helter Skelter," written with coauthor Curt Gentry, hasn't been out of print since it appeared in 1974. It's blurbed as the bestselling true-crime book of all time, at what Bugliosi figures is about 7 million copies. His 2007 JFK book, "Reclaiming History," got its start in a 1986 mock trial on television, in which Bugliosi prosecuted Lee Harvey Oswald, using actual assassination witnesses, and proved that Oswald alone killed the president. It has sold considerably fewer copies than "Helter Skelter," but, as he says, "if you want to make money, you don't put out a book that weighs 7 1/2 pounds and costs $57 and has over 10,000 citations and a million and a half words."

Bugliosi still writes voluminously -- and without a computer -- but he's had to put down his pen for the moment because journalists like me are swarming around, asking for his insights, 40 years on, about the 1969 slaughters, now known the world over as the Manson murders, and their chief instigator, the hideously and evidently perpetually fascinating Charles Manson.

Aren't you tired of people asking about Manson?

I've actually had a copilot come out of the cockpit on a trip from L.A. to New York and ask me about Charles Manson. I was at a book convention, in a cab -- on one side of me was Arthur Schlesinger, on the other side was William Manchester, real heavyweights. All they were doing was asking me about Charles Manson. The only thing that enables me not to be bored is the people talking about it -- they're so interested. The durability of this case is just incredible.

Why? There have been more prolific murderers and gorier killings since then.

Many factors. The single most important is that the murders were probably the most bizarre in American crime, and people are fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre. It's not the brutality -- they were extremely brutal murders, but like you say, there have been more brutal murders. Not the prominence of the victims. Another reason -- the very name "Manson" has become a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure.

So he's become the Hitler of murderers, by which all other murderers are measured?

You said it -- I can't say that. Just one [example] among many: Mike Tyson's applying for renewing his boxing license before the boxing commission in Nevada. He says, "Look, I'm a bad guy, but I'm not Charles Manson." His name is used in that context. Now [O.J.] Simpson -- you don't hear [that] about the Simpson case. It was kind of a garden-variety case. The Manson case just never ends.

What do you make of the enduring cottage industry of Manson shirts, music, posters?

He's got this image, almost a glamorous outlaw type, an anti-establishment figure, like Dillinger or Jesse James, but [kids] really don't know who he is. They don't know how evil he is. I think if they really knew who Manson was, they would not be wearing those shirts.

In 1972, the Supreme Court overturned the death penalty, including those in the Manson case. Are you sorry he and the others weren't executed?

Well, that would have been the proper sentence. The execution of a condemned man is a terrible thing, but murder is an even more terrible thing. They deserved to die, these people, and I asked for the death penalty and I would do so again. I don't know if "sorry" is a good word -- I'm disappointed, of course, particularly with respect to Manson.

Yet you also supported Manson family member Susan Atkins' parole request not long ago, and got a lot of grief for it.

The visceral response would be, "Well, she showed no mercy so she gets no mercy." But there are several things which militate against that easy conclusion. She's already paid substantially for her crime, close to 40 years behind bars. She has terminal cancer. The mercy she was asking for is so minuscule. She's about to die. It's not like we're going to see her down at Disneyland.

If you were writing your own Wikipedia entry, what would you put first?

I guess it would be [Manson]. It's a shorthand way of defining me, no matter what else I do. I can no more separate myself than I can jump away from my own shadow, and it tends to dominate the other things I've done.

What are you proudest of?

Certainly my magnum opus, "Reclaiming History." It's the most important murder case in American history. I put the best of what I know as a prosecutor into that book. It was just moonshine, these conspiracies. All these allegations made no sense whatsoever, so I decided to set the record straight. Oswald killed Kennedy. He acted alone. Because of these conspiracy theorists who split hairs and proceeded to split the split hairs, this case has been transformed into the most complex murder case in world history. But, at its core, it's a simple case.

"The Betrayal of America," attacking the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in the disputed 2000 presidential election -- not at first blush a case for a criminal prosecutor.

I'm not a political activist. But whenever something is so egregious, I jump in. Even many Republican scholars [said], "The court should be ashamed of itself; we've lost respect for the court." And I kept saying, "That's all? You lost respect?" These five [justices] are among the biggest criminals in American history. How dare these people have the audacity to do what they did? I think I made my case pretty well that these people deliberately tried to steal the election.

And now your latest book, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," published in May, makes a murder case against Bush for waging war unnecessarily and shows how he could be prosecuted for it.

Bush [told] unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own federal intelligence agencies told him. What could be more criminal than the Bush administration keeping the all-important conclusion from Congress and the American people, with the lives of millions in the balance?

Every day, I think of those people in their graves now -- no one is fighting for them. You can see that I'm upset. I don't like to see anyone get away with murder. O.J. Simpson got away with two, and I wrote the book "Outrage." If I can get that angry over one or two murders, you can imagine the way I feel about Bush.

Some people must have said, "Bugliosi's gone off the deep end on this one."

Jerry Brown called me: "I understand you have a book out about Bush, about impeachment," and I said, "No, Jerry, it's about murder."

My first challenge was to see if a president taking the nation to war on a lie fell within the conventional principles of criminal law, and I've come up with very solid evidence that it does. There are many sophisticated issues, but here's the main issue. I've established jurisdiction, federal and local. If a prosecutor could prove that Bush took this nation to war under false pretenses, then these killings of American soldiers in Iraq would become unlawful and therefore murder.

I get the feeling you wish reporters were coming to your door to talk about your Bush book instead of Manson.

Oh, absolutely. I would much prefer to talk about this, but people don't want to.

You have a theory about why the book didn't get much press.

I had a very difficult time getting this book published, and I've never had trouble getting a book published. I couldn't get on any networks, no cable. Everyone has been terrified to talk about this. My only master, my only mistress, is the facts. If a Democratic president had done this, I would have written the same identical book, so it has nothing to do with politics. I'm 95% sure the left in this country is terrified of the right. The right has no fear of the left -- the left is terrified of the right.

What do you think of televising trials?

We should not televise trials. There's only one purpose for a criminal trial. It's to determine whether or not the defendant committed the crime. Anything that interferes or has the potential of interfering with that should automatically be prohibited. The idea of education is nonsense. Televise an automobile-collision case or breach-of-contract case and see how many people watch. It's all about entertainmen

Good Reporter Dumb Article

Free Manson 'family' members haunted by horror

By LINDA DEUTSCH (AP) – 13 hours ago

LOS ANGELES — Forty years ago, they were kids. Vulnerable, alienated, running away from a world wracked by war and rebellion. They turned to a cult leader for love and wound up tied to a web of unimaginable evil.

They were part of Charles Manson's "Family" and now, on the brink of old age, they are the haunted.

"I never have a day go by that I don't think about it, especially about the victims," says Barbara Hoyt who was 17 the summer of the Sharon Tate-LaBianca murders. "I've long ago accepted the fact it will never go away."

The ones who aren't in prison are scattered across the country. Some live under assumed names to hide their past from friends and business associates. Some have undergone surgery to remove the "X" that Manson ordered them to carve on their foreheads, showing they were "X"ed out of society. Some live with endless regret.

Those who escaped taking part in the spasm of terror that snuffed out at least nine lives would seem to be lucky. But their lives have been linked forever to one of the craziest mass murders in history.

"Manson made a lot of victims besides the ones he killed," said Catherine Share, who once lived with the Manson Family under the nickname "Gypsy." "He destroyed lives. There are people sitting in prison who wouldn't be there except for him. He took all of our lives."

It was 1969, the summer of the first moon landing. War was raging in Vietnam. Hippies were in the streets of San Francisco, the last bastion of the waning counterculture movement.

For many, that summer is remembered for one thing — the most shocking celebrity murders to ever hit Los Angeles. Mention of the Sharon Tate murders or the name Manson four decades later is enough to make people shudder.

On the morning of Aug. 9, a housekeeper ran screaming from a home in lush Benedict Canyon. She had discovered a scene of unspeakable carnage. Five bodies were scattered around the estate.

The most famous, actress Sharon Tate, 26, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, had been stabbed multiple times. But there were four others that day and two more the next.

Abigail Folger, 25, heiress to a coffee fortune; Jay Sebring, 35, celebrity hair stylist; Voyteck Frykowski, 32, a Polish film director and Steven Parent, 18, friend of the caretaker, were found stabbed or shot in a bloody scene.

On the front door the victims' blood was used to scrawl the words, "Death to Pigs."

The city was thrown into a state of fear. If that was not enough, a similar murder scene was discovered the next night.

Wealthy grocer Leno La Bianca, 44, and his wife Rosemary, 38, were found stabbed to death in their home across town. A killer had carved the word "WAR" on Leno La Bianca's body. The words "Helter Skelter" were written in blood on the refrigerator.

"These murders were probably the most bizarre in the recorded annals of American crime," said Vincent Bugliosi, the former deputy district attorney who prosecuted the killers and wrote the book, "Helter Skelter."

It would be more than three months before the name Charles Manson was linked to the crimes. And then the story became even weirder.

The discovery of Manson's clan living in a high desert commune opened up the astounding story of an ex-convict who had gathered young people into a cult and ordered them to kill. His reasons still remain a subject of debate. Some say he wanted to foment a race war; others say it was senseless.

"It was a real-life horror story," recalled Stephen Kay, who also prosecuted the Manson Family. "Manson is the real-life Freddie Kruger."

The former prosecutors worry that Manson, 74, is becoming a folk hero to a new generation. He is the subject of several Web sites, and Manson souvenirs are sold online.

"Evil has its lure and Manson has become a metaphor for evil," said Bugliosi.

Those cult members lucky enough not to have killed for Manson on Aug. 9-10, 1969 have spent decades trying to bury their past and free themselves from his grasp.

Some never succeeded. Sandra Good and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme committed crimes later that they said were for Manson and went to federal prison.

When Good, 65, was paroled she moved near the maximum security prison that holds Manson, reportedly so she could "feel his vibes." Fromme, 60, is due for parole this summer after serving 33 years for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford.

In 1969, there were perhaps 30 of them, a ragtag band of runaways and dropouts living on a movie ranch in the San Fernando Valley, all loyal to a shaggy-haired con man who preached a gospel of violence. Five of the "Family" members and Manson are in prison for the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. Three are in prison for others crimes and two have been released.

Those who are free are still trying to sort out how they fell under his spell and how they came so close to one of the worst crimes of the 20th century. This is the anniversary of their nightmare.

They were very young when they found Manson — or he found them. Some were just 14. Others were in their late teens and early 20s.

Share muses how she might have been a lawyer or journalist had she never met Manson.

"We were just a bunch of kids looking for love and attention and a different way to live," recalls Share, 66. "He was everything to us. He was a con, a manipulator of the worst kind."

Hoyt was a 17-year-old who had left home after an argument with her father. She was sitting under a tree eating her lunch when a group of Manson followers came along in a van and asked her to go with them. They went to a house in the San Fernando Valley.

"I met Charlie the next morning," she said. "He took me for a motorcycle ride and we went for doughnuts. He was very nice. I thought he was pretty neat."

She said she was told by others of Manson's prediction of a race war that would destroy all but his followers who would go to the desert to live in a bottomless pit until it was safe for them to emerge and take over the world. She said she didn't believe much of it, but they were fixing up dune buggies for their escape and it was fun.

Hoyt and Share eluded being tapped for the Tate-LaBianca murders for different reasons.

"I was very young and I hadn't been there very long," said Hoyt. Others had joined the family long before she had and had been subject to Manson's "deprogramming," which included group sex and LSD trips.

"I wasn't as dead in the head as others. He asked me one time if I could kill and I said if someone asked me I would talk my way out of it. There were other people willing to do it."

Share said she was never asked, partly because she was older. But there was another reason: an extra 20 pounds that would have made it difficult for her to climb through windows.

"Let me tell you," she said, "I was just short of murdering for him. If he had told me to get some black clothes and get in a car, I would have."

The two women, who are not in touch with each other, have struggled back to normalcy. Share became pregnant while living at Spahn Ranch and has a grown son who served in the Marines. She declines to identify the father but said it was not Manson or any other notorious cult figure.

She went to prison for five years for involvement in a Manson Family robbery and later did more time for credit card fraud. She said the time in prison helped her recover and she became a Christian. Some of those in prison also have embraced Christianity.

Share went into retail sales and has just finished a book on her experiences with the Manson Family.

Hoyt went to college and became a nurse and is proud of her accomplishments.

"I raised my daughter; I have my own home and I've had some vacations," she said. But memories haunt her and she doesn't reveal where she's living.

"People freak out when they find out about my past," she said.

She keeps track of the Manson Family members in prison and writes letters urging that they never be released.

Share is more sympathetic to those who were convicted. Susan Atkins, 61, who is dying of brain cancer and had a leg amputated, has been turned down for compassionate release and has a parole hearing coming up in September. Leslie Van Houten, 59, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 61, convicted with her, remain in prison for life as does Charles "Tex" Watson, 63, another of the killers.

"Everyone wants to make them monsters," said Share. "They weren't monsters. They did a monstrous thing and now they're older people and they're not monsters anymore. None of those people ever would have been violent if it weren't for Manson."

More Superficial REegugitation

Manson Murders: 40 Years Ago

It was 40 years ago Sunday that America's worst fears of the hippie generation crystallized when Sharon Tate and four others were slaughtered by Charlie Manson's "family" in her rented Benedict Canyon home.

On Aug. 9, 1969, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent and Tate -- who was 26 years old, eight months pregnant and married to film director Roman Polanski -- were slain "to instill fear into the establishment," one of the killers, Susan Atkins, later told a grand jury.

A day later, Manson's followers struck again -- slashing to death grocery store chain owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their Los Feliz-area home.

The murderers left bloody messages at both crime scenes, including the title of a Beatles song, "Helter Skelter," in what authorities believe was an effort to start a race war.

Following a nine-month trial in 1970-71, jurors convicted Manson, Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel -- and Charles "Tex" Watson in a separate trial -- of first-degree murder and recommended they die for their crimes. In 1972, however, the California Supreme Court invalidated the then-existing statute for capital punishment, and their sentences were commuted to life in prison.

Shocking Celebrity Deaths: Tate Murdered 40 Years Ago

Manson's brief reign of terror is four decades ago, but it continues to have a hold on America's psyche.

Sandi Gibbons covered their trial for City News Service. Today, she is a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case.

What Charlie Manson meant to America was "the death of the hippie movement," Gibbons told CNS.

The Manson family was "the dark side of the peace, love and brotherhood movement," she said. "These were still the '60s, with flower children, love-ins ... peace-loving druggies ... but Manson was another side altogether. This was murder. This was killing people."

She said that from the moment Manson's family was uncovered at their commune in Death Valley a couple months after the murders, "people looked at hippies in a different light."

She added that the commune movement also "started shrinking."

But Gibbons said she never considered Manson a hippie. Rather, she said, he was simply a "con man."

She said he knew "how to get people to do his bidding through drugs, spouting a bunch of philosophy to a bunch of drugged-out kids, promising them a home -- sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The main thing was that Charlie was never a hippie."

She noted he had been institutionalized for most of his life since he was a child and that he discovered the hippies in the late '60s after he got out of prison in Washington state and "wandered down the coast to the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco."

She said he played the guitar and gathered a small following, and that "his visions didn't turn dark until he got rejected in Los Angeles on the music front."

"The bottom line is that Charlie was a con man, and he's still conning people," she said. "I was raised in the South, and Charlie to me was a redneck Southerner who did not like women -- they were something to use, and he used them well."

Manson has repeatedly been turned down for parole, as have the so-called Manson women, even when one of them became terminally ill with brain cancer.

When asked for her personal opinion on whether the women should be paroled after 40 years, Gibbons said that as a spokeswoman for the District Attorney's office she couldn't discuss that.

"So far, this office has opposed parole," she said.

Gibbons noted the Manson women were in their mid 20s when they committed their crimes, and that she wasn't much older at the time.

"I could easily have been them -- but I wasn't," she said.

She said she sat behind Manson during some of the trial, and did not consider him to be charismatic in the least.

"He was like 5 feet 2 inches, a little redneck Southerner. I did not find him charismatic, or fascinating or interesting. He was a little creep."

Sadie Claimed She would be long dead by now

Susan Atkins On Quest For Parole, Forty Years After Charles Manson Murders

The Convicted Killer Is Very Ill and Faces a Hearing in September

By JIM AVILA and FELICIA PATINKIN

Aug. 7, 2009—

These days, it is difficult to recognize the face of Susan Atkins, a notorious murderer from the Charles Manson cult. Still imprisoned, she's now gravely ill with brain cancer and asking for mercy that she did not give her victims.

Forty years ago, Atkins, 61, was a member of Charles Manson's "family," and took part in one of the most evil crimes in American history.

It was Atkins who held down pregnant actress Sharon Tate while she was stabbed 16 times.

Atkins described the crime in blood-curdling detail at a parole hearing 16 years ago.

"She asked me to let her baby live," Atkins said at the time. " I told her I didn't have mercy for her."

Manson ordered Atkins and other "family" members to kill eight people, including Tate and wealthy store owners Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, in the Los Angeles area in August 1969.

Manson masterminded the murders hoping to start a war between blacks and whites, which he believed was foretold in the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter."

In the months after the bloody spree, Manson and his "family" were swept up. Atkins initially agreed to cooperate with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty, but soon she stopped cooperating. Instead, she and other women loyal to Manson disrupted court proceedings and sang songs written by Manson on their way to court. Atkins later testified that Manson was not involved in the Tate murders. For the crimes, Atkins was sentenced to death along with Manson and three others. When the Supreme Court struck down all death sentences in 1972, Atkins' sentence was automatically commuted to seven years to life with the possibility of parole, the maximum sentence at the time.

In prison, Atkins claimed to be a born again Christian and in 1980 married Donald Lee Laisure who claimed to be wealthy and would work to get her out of prison. She divorced Laisure soon after, and married James Whitehouse, a lawyer who has been devoted to Atkins ever since and has argued for her release.

Should Susan Atkins Be Released?

Today her family argues that Atkins is so ill that she can no longer pose a threat to society.

With the California budget in meltdown, they argue that Atkins should be released. They contend that it would save the state up to $10,000 a day when she's hospitalized. For example, last year alone she spent six months in an intensive care unit at the state's expense.

"She's paralyzed just about 85 percent of her body. She can nod her head and she can look left and right and she has limited use of her left arm," said her husband, who drives 1,000 miles a week to see her.

Now virtually alone and dependent on her devoted husband, Atkins is asking that her life sentence be cut short so she can die at home, rather than in the California prison system where she has been for 39 years. She has been denied parole repeatedly, despite expressions of regret to her victims and their loved ones.

"She's expressed her remorse and grief at every single one of her 17 other parole hearings going back to 1972," says Whitehouse.

In 2002, "Good Morning America's" Diane Sawyer met Atkins in prison while she was working with other women who had life sentences.

She said she was a changed woman.

"I am not the same person that I was when I came in here," she told Sawyer at the time. When asked if she expected to be released from prison, Atkins replied, "I would like to be out some day."

Still clinging to that hope, Atkins and her family will again appear before a parole board this September to make their plea official.

But the Manson victims' families and their advocates dismiss economics as a good reason for early release.

"The very release of a killer like that & sends a message to people that this life sentence doesn't mean a life sentence, that the victims' families are going to have to go through this over and over and over again," said Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, an advocate for the victims. "She needs to, in grace and dignity, finish her sentence."

Let's Claim Charlie was a Hippie

Forget Woodstock, Charles Manson was the real face of 1969 TheStar.com - Insight - Forget Woodstock, Charles Manson was the real face of 1969

SUPPLIED PHOTO/AP FILE PHOTO

Charles Manson, 74, was photographed on March 18, 2009, at Corcoran State Prison, Calif. At right, Manson is seen in a 1970 file photo.

Nostalgia tells us 1969 was the height of hippiedom, when individualism, non-conformity and the creative impulse reigned. The dark underside of those ideals gave America a bloody jolt 40 years ago tomorrow

August 08, 2009

Murray Whyte
Toronto Star

There's no use going looking for 10050 Cielo Dr. any more. It's gone, razed more than a decade ago. On the rough, tumbling northern slope of the San Fernando Valley's western edge, north of Beverly Hills, the house that stands there now shows a different address.

But that hasn't stopped legions of gawkers from rubbernecking their way up the scrubby valley wall along Cielo Dr., spectrally still and remote. It is a macabre pilgrimage, to the place where, 40 years ago tomorrow, a generation's defining criminal atrocity took place.

Four decades later, the multiple murders of actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant at the time; her former fiancé, hairstylist Jay Sebring; Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Tate's husband, director Roman Polanski; and Abigail Folger, the Folger's Coffee heiress, still resonate with a grim, consuming clarity.

Feel-good nostalgia tells us that 1969 was the height of the hippie, warm-fuzzy era of peace and love, and that this week's other 40th anniversary, of the Woodstock music festival, was its pinnacle: A moment where individualism, non-conformity and the creative impulse reigned, where repression was challenged and, in many ways, fell.

But that's rose-coloured hindsight of a fractious time that unleashed demons as much as it seeded naïve idealism. The Cielo Dr. killings, and the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Feliz a day later, were as much a product of those times. No one embodies this dark flowering more than the murderers' puppetmaster, Charles Manson. And his stamp on the culture is arguably deeper and more lasting than Woodstock's.

Part of it, surely, is the extremeness of the violence, executed with a cool sense of purpose – 102 stab wounds inflicted on the four victims in the house plus Steven Parent, an 18-year-old delivery boy shot dead in the driveway on his way home as the killers made their way to the house.

The next night, the killing continued, this time in the hills of Los Feliz, where Leon and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered in much the same way, stabbed with a knife and fork. Leon's stomach had carved on it the word "WAR."

But just as horrifying as the brutal nature of the crimes were the killers themselves: Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins – long-haired flower children, and proverbial "good kids," for the most part; Watson was an A student and high-school star athlete; Krenwinkel the daughter of an insurance executive and an actual choirgirl.

But Manson, their patriarch and orchestrator of the murders, looms huge over them all, and the entire counterculture generation.

The killings were a perplexing infusion of revulsion in what was, by now, a waning countercultural movement: The Manson "family," as they called themselves, were hippies, for all appearances – charter members of the peace and love generation, which met violence with sit-ins, and guns with flowers. They were political and anti-establishment, as were so many of their generation. They were indulgent users of drugs like marijuana and LSD. They lived on a commune, the Spahn Ranch, and were, by many eyewitness accounts, practitioners of "free love."

But when their time came in court, the world was shocked to see the women, in hippie garb, holding hands and singing, ridiculing prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, laughing at his accounts of their crimes.

"The mantra of the era was `peace, love and sharing,'" says Bugliosi. "Prior to (the Manson case), people just didn't identify hippies with violence. Then the Manson family comes along, looking like hippies, but being mass murderers. And that shocked America: How could this be?"

Trying to derive meaning from seemingly random acts orchestrated by a pyschopath is dangerous territory. But there's little question that the murders, both at the time and in hindsight, cast a pall over the counterculture. Violence in America was nothing new; neither was murder, nor were high-profile cases. But brutal, unjustifiable violence from within, committed in its name? This was something new.

A week after the murders, Woodstock took place in upstate New York, swelling spontaneously to a half-million kids listening to acts like Country Joe and the Fish, Santana and Jimi Hendrix. But it was revelry cast in dark shadow.

"The first thing to recognize is that the past and history are different," says John Storey, a cultural historian in the U.K. and the author of Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. "The struggle over the meaning of the '60s, for example, changes on whether we highlight Woodstock or Manson. This, in simplified form, could be said to be the difference between those who view the '60s and its legacy as positive or negative."

Meanwhile, the counterculture – to the conservative establishment at the time, not much more threatening than a bunch of lazy, misguided kids who needed to grow up – was morphing quickly from social revolution into fashion trend and marketing opportunity.

Earlier festivals, like The Human Be-In in San Francisco in 1967, were free; later that year, the Monterey Pop Festival was intended to raise money for free clinics (though the $500,000 it raised mysteriously disappeared).

By Woodstock, the naive sheen had dulled. "The real thing Woodstock accomplished," Bill Graham, the former manager of Jefferson Airplane, told Storey, "was that it told people rock was big business."

If Woodstock was the beginning of the end, then the murder indictments on Dec. 8, 1969, of Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and two other family members, Linda Kasabian and Leslie Van Houten, were to many its grim, undeniable conclusion.

"Is Charles Manson a hippie?" asked Rolling Stone in one cover story. "The '60s abruptly ended on August 9, 1969," the date of the murders on Cielo Dr., wrote Joan Didion in her 1979 collection of personal essays on life in the '60s, The White Album.

That was a philosophical take. At the time, others were more practical, driven by fear. In the October 1969 issue of Los Angeles magazine, spurred by the Manson family murders, Myron Roberts wrote an alarmist indictment of a generation run wild, fuelled by drugs, lax morals and a loss of standards.

He chided Life magazine's special edition on Woodstock for making it "a cultural event of monumental import, just behind Genesis and landing on the moon." Woodstock was lauded for being civil, to which Roberts wrote that "no one stopped to ask why the absence of violence at a large, public gathering of the young should be considered more remarkable than the fact that the fans who go to football games ... do not customarily tear up the stadium or attack one another."

He then compared Woodstock to "another youth festival – the Nuremberg Rallies – where Hitler, Goebbels & Co. were the featured group and the multitudes of fans were stoned on slogans, not grass." Not finished yet, he concluded the article with a practical guide to "protecting yourself from `freaky' crime" – meaning drug-induced, of course, perpetuated by a darkening culture of hippiedom.

And this was before any of the Manson crew had been caught. When Manson, looking beatific, long hair and beard flowing, was arrested, the dark side of the era had a face. And when the grisly details of the murders came out, the death knell for the counterculture was sounding loud and clear.

It is, by now, a gruesome litany: Manson was obsessed with the Beatles, who were central to the countercultural movement. The White Album in particular. He believed they were sending him messages, enlisting him to start a revolution. The song "Helter Skelter" became, for him, a command to start a race war between blacks and whites; "Piggies," ridiculing the British upper classes eating "with forks and knives," was for Manson an invitation to wipe out the wealthy ("what they need's a damn good whacking," the song went).

The Tate house was chosen over an old grudge that had nothing to do with Tate or any of the other victims. Manson, an aspiring songwriter, had auditioned there for producer Terry Melcher when he lived there with his then-girlfriend, Candice Bergen. Melcher, after witnessing Manson in a frenzied fight one night, broke off ties, which infuriated Manson.

The night of the murders, when the family members arrived, Parent was rolling down the driveway. Watson shot him dead at the wheel. He then cut the phone line, and the three made for the house.

Slitting a screen, the threesome slipped inside. Tate, Sebring and Folger, thinking they were being robbed, were tied by the neck with a rope, which was flung over a support beam in the living room. They asked what would happen to them. "You're all going to die," Watson said calmly. Panic took hold.

Frykowski got loose and burst outside, screaming for help. Watson stabbed him 51 times. Inside, Tate, Sebring and Folger struggled to get free. The stabbing, 102 wounds altogether, came in a flurry. Tate, who was eight months pregnant, begged to be allowed to have her baby. Atkins stabbed her 16 times. In custody, she told Bugliosi that she told Tate, before she killed her: "Bitch, you're going to die. I don't have any mercy on you." When she was done, she wrote "PIG" in Tate's blood, before taking a shower and leaving the scene.

The next night, the Manson family, this time joined by Kasabian, Van Houten and Manson himself, went looking for more victims. They chose the LaBianca house at random.

"If you were white and appeared financially well-off, you qualified to be murdered," Bugliosi said. The killers used knives and forks – an apparent reference to the Beatles song – and left the LaBiancas butchered in their home, but not before raiding their refrigerator and showering.The fallout was severe. Once the Manson family was revealed, the establishment's dim view of counterculture turned rabid and extreme. Even Polanski himself was implicated.

"In their rush to assess what had happened, some of the mainstream press brought the nature of Roman Polanski's movies into the nature of the crime and held (his) movies responsible," Warren Beatty told Los Angeles magazine recently. "Roman was a total innocent. Neither his life nor his movies had anything to do with this. But because he'd made Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby he was made to seem responsible."

For some, the counterculture was already teetering under the weight of its own portent. Indulgent and hedonistic, it had become bloated and without focus – a set of superficial trends, not a social revolution. The Manson crimes represented a shocking extreme to a culture that was becoming increasingly incoherent.

"What struck me about the Manson murders was how at the moment they happened, it seemed as if they were inevitable," Didion said, during an interview at the National Book Awards. "It seemed as if we had been moving toward that moment for about a year."

Bugliosi had no such sense at the time. "I'm not a sociologist. I was just trying one murder case after another," he says. "But looking back, it seems to be the consensus of many that the Manson case sounded a death knell for hippies and everything they symbolically represented."

High above the San Fernando Valley, on Cielo Dr., the quiet absence of No. 10050 says much the same thing.

Squeaky Gonna Move Next Door to YOU

After 34 years, Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme to be released

• Story Highlights
• "Squeaky" Fromme was convicted in 1975 of pointing a gun at then-President Ford
  
• For years, she was one of Charles Manson's few remaining followers
  
• According to reports, she for years waived her right to a parole hearing
  
• She was not involved in the murders that landed Manson, other followers in prison
  

By Ashley Hayes
CNN

(CNN) -- The president she once pointed a gun at has been dead for nearly three years, and her longtime idol and leader, Charles Manson, remains in prison.

However, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme is about to get her first taste of real freedom in more than three decades.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Fromme, now 60, is set to be released on parole August 16.

Fromme is housed at the Federal Medical Center at Carswell, Texas.

For years, she was one of Manson's few remaining followers, as many other "Manson Family" members have shunned him. A prison spokeswoman would not say whether Fromme continues to correspond with Manson.

Fromme was convicted in 1975 of pointing a gun at then-President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California. Secret Service agents prevented her from firing, but the gun was later found to have no bullet in the chamber, although it contained a clip of ammunition.

In a 1987 interview with CNN affiliate WCHS, Fromme, then housed in West Virginia, recalled the president "had his hands out and was waving ... and he looked like cardboard to me. But at the same time, I had ejected the bullet in my apartment and I used the gun as it was."

She said she knew Ford was in town and near her, "and I said, 'I gotta go and talk to him,' and then I thought, 'That's foolish. He's not going to stop and talk to you.' People have already shown you can lay blood in front of them and they're not, you know, they don't think anything of it. I said, 'Maybe I'll take the gun,' and I thought, 'I have to do this. This is the time.' "

She said it never occurred to her that she could wind up in prison. Asked whether she had any regrets, Fromme said, "No. No, I don't. I feel it was fate." However, she said she thought that her incarceration was "unnecessary" and that she couldn't see herself repeating her offense.

"My argument to the jury was, if she wanted to kill him, she would have shot him," John Virga, a Sacramento attorney appointed to defend Fromme, told CNN on Tuesday. "She'd been around guns. And let's be realistic: We know the Manson family, at least some of them, are killers."

Fromme was sentenced to life in prison, but parole was an option at the time, although the federal system later abolished it, said Felicia Ponce, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons. Inmates do receive "good time" -- for every year and one day they serve, Ponce said, 54 days are lopped off their sentence.

Fromme became eligible for parole in 1985, Ponce said. According to reports, she for years waived her right to a parole hearing. The Bureau of Prisons would not say whether she changed her mind and requested a hearing, but the U.S. Parole Commission's Web site says that everyone who wishes to be considered for parole, except those committed under juvenile delinquency procedures, must complete a parole application.

Federal inmates serving life are generally paroled after 30 years, unless the parole commission decides to block the release, according to a commission spokesman. Inmates who are paroled remain under supervision until the commission decides to terminate the sentence.

Fromme was not granted parole until July 2008, Ponce said. She was not released then, however, because of extra time added to her sentence for a 1987 escape from the West Virginia prison, which occurred after her interview that same year. She was found two days later, only a few miles from the prison. At the time, prison officials said they were looking into rumors that Fromme escaped after hearing Manson was ill, according to news reports.

FMC-Carswell spokeswoman Maria Douglas would not comment on Fromme's behavior in prison in recent years.

Fromme reportedly joined Manson's family after meeting him in California in 1967. She was not involved in the murders of seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, on August 9 and 10, 1969, that landed Manson and other followers in prison. However, she and other Manson followers maintained a vigil outside the courthouse during his trial.

In the WCHS interview, Fromme said that Manson should not be incarcerated because "he didn't kill anybody. ... I would rather be in, because I know I laid a lot of my thinking in his mind."

Virga said he told the jury that Fromme assaulted Ford, but did not attempt to assassinate him. If Fromme had killed the president, no one would have listened to her, he said. "She didn't want people to think she was a kook."

And she wasn't, he said, recalling that Fromme was very cooperative during her trial and describing her as "a bright, intelligent young woman" from a middle-class family. "It's just hard to imagine how she got all caught up with Manson," he said.

Fromme wanted to be heard on issues including the environment, he said. "She had certain causes that she wanted to talk about. But first and foremost in her mind was always Manson."

Explaining herself after the attempt, according to the book "Real Life at the White House," Fromme said, "Well, you know, when people treat you like a child and pay no attention to the things you say, you have to do something."

During her trial, Virga traveled to Washington to depose Ford, who testified on videotape about the incident.

In the 1978 interview, Fromme called Manson "a once-in-a-lifetime soul. ... He's got more heart and spirit than anyone I've ever met." She said she still corresponded with him. "He's got everything he wants coming from me, 'cause he gave me everything."

She said then she didn't plan to seek a parole hearing: "The parole board does not hold my life in its hands. And I don't want to be too critical, but men tend to think they do. Charlie never thought he did. He never expressed all this desire for power, this desire for acceptance."

Ford died in 2006 at age 93. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation did not respond to CNN requests for comment on Fromme's release.

Virga, who is still practicing in Sacramento, said he had not heard from Fromme since her sentencing in 1975. "I wish her the best, and hope everything works out for her, and hope she stays out of trouble," he said. "She needs to stay out of trouble. She's been in prison a long time ... it was, in my mind, a tragedy that she wound up a disciple of Manson."

Alice LaBianca Letter

Here is an old letter from Nelson's site which is much more to the point about Leslie than the John Waters Bull Shait

--------


To Board Of Prison Terms
Manson and his minions thrust our family name into public focus when they murdered Sharon Tate and her house guest one night, then they killed my former husband and his wife in a most brutal manner the next night. Their shocking criminal actions became known as the TATE-LABIANCA MURDERS. We lost our privacy and our obscurity.

My family never became vocal, we did not become activist, we relied on the justice system to seek and find the justice that was due us. We have never been asked by the District Attorney’s Office to participate in opposing the release of any of the killers. After all, they all received the death penalty, and that was all our family could expect.

But we can no longer remain silent. Let me preface my remarks by this statement:

We do not desire to become activist. We do not desire to be bombarded by the media and have our privacy destroyed. Yet, we must make a statement about the parole hearing for convicted murderer , Leslie Van Houten.

She entered the home of Leno, father of my children, that August 10^th, 1969. She participated in the deaths in that home. I know, she says she only stabbed Rosemary after she was already dead from the relentless stabbing of Tex Watson. I know she denies having stabbed Leno. I even understand she has been a model prisoner for all these years. It doesn’t matter!

Leslie Van Houten has been fed, given medical care, clothed and housed for nearly thirty years. I understand she even completed a college degree and a Masters degree. My children had no such gifts. They, like other law-abiding citizens growing up, have had to face the realities of life without the help of their father. It has not been easy for them. I know Ms. Van Houten has a web site with Susan Atkins. I know she has a lot of friends who work for her freedom. That is unfortunate.

Leslie Van Houten chose her own path. She chose to follow the instructions of Charles Manson. She chose drug crazed killers as her family and she became one of them. But what about my family? When do we get our parole? When does Leno get his parole?

Sympathy for these killers, and especially this one is misplaced. Sympathy, understanding, and compassion should be given to the victims of murder and not the killers. In all these years, not one of those killers have expressed remorse to our family, -- not even Leslie Van Houten who says she did the least in the murders. If she is really ready for parole then amends to the family should have already been done.

Page Two - Alice LaBianca

The Manson murders…Breaking our silence

When Leslie’s father appeared on Larry King Live, my family was denied speaking on air by the producers to answer Mr. Van Houten’s accusations that the LaBianca’s didn’t care!! Not one of us was allowed on the show.

Make no mistake about it, the entire LaBianca family has suffered untold deprivation, frustration, anxiety and financial ruin because of these murders. Leno’s mother died of a broken heart just six years after her son’s murder, losing the business to merciless creditors – the family business that Leno was managing and she and Leno’s father had founded in the late 1920’s.

We emphatically oppose the release of any of the Manson menage. When the death penalty was repealed after their convictions, their sentences were converted to Life with possibility of parole. Even the California State Legislature found that unacceptable! They voted to make the entire Manson family an exception! The California voters also took action so we now have "Life without parole" as it should be!

It’s a sacrilege to Leno’s memory that the family has to be confronted with parole hearings for these individuals every few years. We are glad for her maturity and her model prisoner status, but that does not equate to freedom.

We also want to say that Suzanne LaBerge, daughter of Rosemary, the murdered wife of Leno at the time, does not represent the LaBianca family. She certainly did not represent us at that May 4, 1990 parole hearing for Tex Watson, when she made that pathetic appeal for his release because she "forgave" him.

As Ms. Van Houten continues her incarceration, let her continue to remember that what she did that fateful night was forever. The Manson family mark on this society is deep. As deep as the stab wounds to their helpless victims.

Alice LaBianca, author of NO MORE TOMORROWS through her friend, Bill Nelson, author of MANSON BEHIND THE SCENES, and a leading Manson family expert. www.mansonmurders.com

It was the encouragement from Nelson, that our family is speaking out. Please do not believe our silence has been uncaring.

Alice LaBianca

John Waters Lies about Leslie DOS

John Waters

FIlm director, author, photographer

Posted: August 4, 2009 09:57 AM

Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 2 of 5

Read Part 1 of "Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship" here.

By now I certainly knew that what Leslie had done was anything but "art". Her participation in the La Bianca murders was a very real atrocity that she could never make go away like a bad hairdo or a dose of the hippy-clap. This was no youthful recklessness that today some baby boomer might turn into a nostalgic tattoo. No, this was fucking awful. I used to joke that "we've all had bad nights", well, Leslie really had a horrible one! But of course the La Bianca's night was much, much worse.

I wrote to Leslie to let her know I sympathized about the terrible predicament she must be in now that she realized that the ludicrous truth she once believed in was a complete sham. Leslie was left holding a bag so terrible that few of us could imagine the weight. I hoped in some tiny way to help her carry it by imagining it myself.

Leslie wrote back guardedly. She didn't know my films, of course; she had been on death row when Pink Flamingos had been released and even I know my trash epics were certainly not shown in prison during those years. She admitted my letter did not "put her off" as I had worried, but added she was "not certain of my intentions". "But if you are in a hurry," she warned, our friendship could never happen.

So I took it slowly. I wrote to her of my frustration in trying to get the sequel to Pink Flamingos made and she wrote me back about, what else? Prison. Living in a cell "the size of an average bathroom with another person". Leslie never complained but called jail "a big tragedy. All those broken souls desperately seeking a way to leave themselves." What I soon realized was that Leslie was trying to do the exact opposite -- seeking a way to get back to who she would have been if she had never met Manson. I knew that jail-house manners dictated the prisoner, not the visitor, is allowed to bring up the crime and if mentioned ("Manson is a pathetic, disgusting, worthless, old man") you are allowed maybe one or two follow-up questions. When Leslie finally wrote, "I'd enjoy meeting you", I still hoped to interview her and hopped on a plane.

I have now visited Leslie in the same visiting room in California Institute for Women in Frontera, California, (without freeway traffic problems about an hour's drive east of Hollywood) for the last twenty-four years. The only real change in the cafeteria-style space is the cheesily cheerful, country-style backdrop you can pose in front of with your convict friend, and for five dollars get your Polaroid picture snapped by the in-house prison photographer. The "green screen" of prison happiness has changed three times in my years there -- first a yellow-tinged country scene, then a blue floral motif, and finally a green and blue skyline. When friends look at the pictures of Leslie and me through the years that I have privately displayed on my office bulletin board in my Baltimore house, they often wonder who is the woman with me in front of the misleadingly generic tableaux? "Is that your sister?" many ask. "High school reunion?" others assume. When I trust someone enough to tell the truth they are shocked at "how nice she looks". How "like one of our friends" she appears.

On our first visit, Leslie, who looked then, and still does, very much like actress Hilary Swank, explained that she had no interest in being in Rolling Stone because of what she had done. She was ashamed of it, not proud, and hoped that one day the terrible notoriety would fade. Little did either of us know that this wretched infamy would not only never fade away, it would become stronger through the years as Manson became the great American tabloid boogeyman.

Leslie and I continued to correspond and I was flattered that she grew to trust me. After several more visits she wrote in 1987, "I feel good about you because I do not believe you would harm me. You make me feel good about myself... I need that... not to feel like a freak. I'd like to propose that this year we become closer friends. You inspire me to do something with myself." Leslie inspired me, too. Inspired me to believe that if you wait long enough and work hard enough on your damaged psyche you can eventually come out of it with some kind of self-respect and mental health. I never again asked Leslie to be interviewed until 2007 and by then she knew I wanted to write about her recovery, something she could finally feel good about.

Will there ever be a "fair" answer to how Leslie should pay for these crimes? Can you ever recover from being called "a human mutant" or a "monster" by the government, especially when you know that they were right at one time in your life? How can you feel optimistic about your own rehabilitation when you see yourself reproduced as a bald-headed dummy with an X carved in your head in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum? How do you begin to deal with the pain of the victims' relatives when the world has turned your former image into a Halloween costume?

With patience. God knows, Leslie Van Houten has patience. Patience to not find religious fanaticism that would forgive her instantly and take away her responsibilities for her actions. Patience to know and accept that she can't take back the defiant and deluded things she was programmed to say at her first trial: "Sorry is only a five-letter word. It can't bring back anything." Or her rantings to the jury on hearing all the defendants, including herself, being sentenced to death, "You blind stupid people. Your own children will turn against you". Or the terrible thoughts she admitted to prison psychologists at the time, about how she "felt kind of bad" she didn't get to go the first night (when Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, and four other victims were brutally murdered). Or how she was "hoping if we did it again, I would get to go". Or worse. After "Tex" Watson stabbed both Leno and Rosemary La Bianca he told Leslie to "do something" and "feeling like a shark" or "a primitive animal, a wildcat who had just caught a deer" Leslie remembered, she stabbed Mrs. La Bianca sixteen times with a knife in the lower back.

Decades later, when a parole officer had reviewed eleven different favorable psychiatric reports, all concluding that Leslie was suitable for parole and no longer a danger to the community, he listened to her sadly try to explain her addled thought process at the time of the murders and her shame for "the girl I was at nineteen. The best way to show remorse is to be the best person I can be today". He told her sympathetically but unforgivingly, "You've dug yourself quite a hole and it's going to take a little time to get out of it". It sure has.

Can you ever dig your way out of that hole by trying to explain LSD to a parole board whose members have never taken a trip? Could they understand Leslie's plea that at the time of the murders "it was a constant exercise to try and not come down" as she remembered in Connie Turner's excellent, but as yet unpublished Van Houten book, Straight Up? "We spoke to each other in the nonsensical space the drug induces," Leslie struggled to explain. "I became saturated in acid and had no sense of where those who were not part of the psychedelic reality came from. I had no perspective or sense that I was no longer in control of my mind." Could a parole board ever fathom that Leslie actually believed she was an elf "three inches high" who would "grow fairy wings" at the time of Helter Skelter as she remembered to Michael Farquhar in The Washington Post in 1994? Apparently she was not a lone elf. The Family women "would try to find elves hiding up in the trees and sitting quietly, so they might show themselves". Leslie's Dad backs her up, too, remembering in Connie's book how he visited Leslie "in county jail right after they had been picked up. Leslie told me she didn't know if she should cut holes in the back of her blouse to hold her wings or to put little pockets". Great. What does society do with a killer elf who decades later is now all better? Who could understand?

I could. I took a lot of LSD myself when I was young. From 1964 to about 1969, I took acid many, many times and never once had a bad trip. LSD quickly gave me confidence in my lunacy. "Don't tell young people that!" my mother always begs; but it's true. I remember tripping my brains out and dangerously crawling around the roof of the Marlboro Apartments in Baltimore after an LSD party and suddenly realizing I could make these crazy movies I had been dreaming up. My friends and I cemented our relationship with LSD, and became a parody of a movie studio and together our celluloid madness began to strengthen and grow. We had a "family", too.

But as nuts and angry as we were, would we have committed the atrocious crimes of my movies in real life if we hadn't had the outlet of underground filmmaking? Well, who knows? We certainly never met one of the most notorious con-men of the century, Charles Manson. And we were never looking for a spiritual leader the way Leslie was. I guess I was our gang's leader. My parents never blamed the crowd I ran with; they knew I was the bad egg. "We're not your puppets!" David Lochary used to yell at me when I went overboard on directing or thinking up stunts to film like Divine shooting-up liquid eyeliner for real. My "family" knew how to say "no" to me. Why couldn't Leslie do the same in her distorted world?

Could I have gone off the deep end with my cinematic "orders"? I had planned a raid on the Maryland State Board of Censors where the actors from Desperate Living would "home invade" the offices, chain themselves to the furniture, and refuse to leave until the anticipated cuts from our film were restored. Some of the actors (including 300-pound Jean Hill) had actually agreed to this photo-op if I'd pay the bail but luckily I didn't have to test their dedication to movie cult-madness because right before our Censor Board screening, Governor Harry Hughes took office and disbanded the Censor Board on his first days of power. And even though Divine's character in Female Trouble asks his audience, "Who wants to die for art?" and then shoots a fan who yells "Yes!" (played by Vincent Peranio, my long-time friend and production designer), I don't think any of my movie gang would have killed for cinema.

I never told Leslie this, but off camera I had killed somebody, too. Accidentally. Completely accidentally. In 1970 Mink Stole and I were driving up Broadway, a Baltimore thoroughfare that is divided by a safety island. It was Sunday early afternoon, we were not on drugs or liquor, and an elderly man, without looking, stepped off the curb right in front of my car. His body flipped up and landed on the hood with his face pressed towards mine through the driver side's windshield. This image so horrified me that I have used it over and over in my later films (Tab Hunter run over in Polyester, the school teacher killed by Kathleen Turner in her car in Serial Mom, the "Fidget" character's near-death as he falls off the drive-in marquee and lands on his parents' car windshield in Cecil B. Demented). As I pulled over to the side of the road in shock, the man's body slid off the hood of my car to the street leaving indentation marks that reminded me of the "snow angels" you made as a child by lying down in snow drifts and waving your arms. "He's okay," Mink mumbled in hope. "No, he isn't," I said realistically as I heard his death rattle. A crowd gathered around the car and luckily, oh so luckily, a cop approached and said, "I saw it all happen and it wasn't your fault." What a miracle. I had long oily hair and was dressed in my usual thrift-shop-pimp-meets-hillbilly outfit and Mink was still in her "religious whore" period -- wearing all black clothing with tons of rosaries around her neck way before Goth. We looked like complete lunatics. I called my Dad to get our insurance information and he was immediately nervous -- "Is anybody hurt?" he asked. "...Well, yes... the man died," I had to admit. "Oh, my God!" I heard my poor father moan, "Now this!"

But did I feel guilty? Even when I heard the "victim" was the beloved "peanut man" from the nearby Broadway Market? I didn't know him but some of my friends did. I felt no guilt because I knew the accident wasn't my fault but I certainly felt horrified. When my grandmother called later that night she said, "I'm praying for that man's soul". I honestly replied, "Can't you ask God why he picked my car to walk out in front of?"

If any deaths result from a car accident, you have to go to court no matter whose fault it was. As my "manslaughter" trial began my parents sat next to me in support, worried that, because of my hair and my already notorious cinematic reputation, I'd get convicted. It was a great relief to see that the deceased had no survivors or at least they didn't come to trial. The whole hearing was over in three minutes after the cop testified to seeing the unfortunate man just walk into oncoming traffic without looking. This awful experience will never leave me but it hardly qualifies me as a murderer. I can't begin to imagine what Leslie feels today when it was her fault. All I could do was try to warn future jaywalkers of the dangers with dialogue in my movies. Patricia Hearst, playing a school crossing guard, tells Johnny Depp as he exits school in Cry-Baby, "Look right. Look left. Then walk!"

Excerpted from the book Role Models by John Waters, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010. Role Models is a self- portrait told through intimate literary profiles of his favorite personalities; some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some alarmingly middle of the road.

Questions for the Bug

So this radio station is interviewing Bug. Click here.
It will probably be the same old shit. In the remote chance they have testes, we have sent in these questions to be asked.


1- Why do you still put forward your theory of Helter Skelter as the main motive for the killings? Your predecessor Aaron Stovitz has publicly called it bullshit, the killers themselves have dismissed it yet you persist in this fairy tale. Why?

2- Do you still worry that Herbert Weisel might be the father of your eldest son?

3- Why is it that after 40 years you still show up on almost any program involving Manson? Is this your primary legacy?

4- Whatever happened to Virginia Cardwell, the mistress that you beat up when she lied to you about getting an abortion in 1973

Bug Jabbers in NewsWeek

The Manson Murders at 40

'Helter Skelter' author Vincent Bugliosi looks back.

NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 1, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Aug 17, 2009

The leaves were turning on the summer of love. Vietnam was droning on. Racial unrest was rising. And then, it happened: a crime so heinous, it sent shock waves through the country that are still palpable today. The Manson "family" murders are more than grisly crimes. They marked the close of an era. As Joan Didion wrote in her memoir of the time, The White Album, the '60s "ended abruptly on August 9, 1969," the evening Sharon Tate and four others were brutally slaughtered in cold blood, a night before another round of senseless killing claimed two more lives. >Vincent Bugliosi, the chief prosecutor in the case, secured first-degree murder convictions against Manson and his codefendants; the jury returned verdicts of death, which were subsequently reduced to life imprisonment when California set aside the death penalty in 1972. Bugliosi went on to co-author a book about the case with Curt Gentry titled Helter Skelter (after the Beatles song name printed in blood at one of the murder scenes), which became, according to his publisher, the bestselling true-crime book of all time. Bugliosi spoke with NEWSWEEK's Tom Watson on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Manson murders about what it was like to prosecute the case, and why Manson's chaotic charisma continues to attract global attention to this day.

Watson: Set the scene for us. What was the mood of the country, and of Los Angeles, on the eve of the Manson murders?
Bugliosi: I can't speak for the rest of the country, but I can tell you that in L.A., it was a time of relative innocence. I've heard many people say that prior to these murders, there were areas of the city where folks literally did not lock their doors at night. That ended with the Tate-LaBianca murders. The killings were so terribly brutal and savage: 169 stab wounds, seven gunshot wounds. They appeared to be random, with no discernible conventional motive. That induced a lot of fear throughout the city of Los Angeles, particularly in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, the heart of the movie colony, where the Tate murders happened (the LaBianca murders happened across town, near Griffith Park). Names were dropped from guest lists. Parties were canceled. No one knew if the killers were among them. Overnight, the sale of guns and guard dogs rose dramatically.

Why did the crimes penetrate so deeply in the American psyche? How did the culture change in the immediate aftermath?
I was just involved prosecuting one murder case after another, so I'm not someone who's a sociologist. But the killings tapped a feeling of dread … if you're not safe in your own home, where are you safe? And the very thought of young women dressed in black, armed with sharp knives, entering the homes of complete strangers in the middle of the night and mercilessly stabbing them to death … it's difficult to even contemplate a thought like that.

The other thing that terrified the nation so much is when the identity of the killers became known. And who were they? Young kids from average American homes with fairly good backgrounds. There was a feeling that this could be our own children. Tex Watson, Manson's "chief lieutenant" at the murder scene, was from Farmersville, Texas, hometown of World War II hero Audie Murphy. Watson was a football, basketball, and track star. He had almost an A average in high school. And when the people in Farmersville learned he was being charged with these murders, the general consensus was this is absolutely impossible, it must be a case of mistaken identity. Patricia Krenwinkel—another one of the main killers—her father was an insurance executive; she sang in the church choir; got good grades in school; at one time she even wanted to attend a Jesuit college in Alabama. Leslie Van Houten—another killer—she was a homecoming princess at Monrovia High School here in L.A.

How did Manson seduce these kids?
Manson is this 5-foot-2 guru with a long and checkered criminal history. He gets out of Terminal Island federal penitentiary off Long Beach, Calif., in 1967, goes up to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He's got his guitar, and his street rap, and he sings—a pretty good composer of music, by the way. Guns N' Roses and the Beach Boys have recorded Manson songs. So he mesmerizes these young kids and tells them things they can identify with—about the need for the preservation of wildlife, that there's pollution of the environment by big corporations, that the poor man's fighting the rich man's war in Vietnam …. Their lifestyle was sex orgies and LSD trips. He convinces them he's the second coming of Christ and the devil all wrapped up into one person, and ultimately, as you know, he gets them to kill for him. He tells them the purpose for these murders is to start a war between blacks and whites, which he called Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song.

Fast-forward to the trial. What was the atmosphere at the courthouse, and the most dramatic moments in prosecuting the case?
It was the longest murder trial we'd ever had in America up to that point: nine months. And it was the most expensive up to that point, at $1 million. Outside the courthouse, there was a group of Manson family members conducting a 24-hour-a-day vigil for him. The media was interviewing them every day. Manson came into court one day with an X carved into his forehead, and the next day they all had X's on their foreheads. One day during the trial, he got ahold of a sharp pencil, and from a standing position, he leaps over the counsel's table with this pencil and starts approaching the judge. The bailiffs immediately tackled him and, as they were dragging him out of the courtroom, he shouted to the judge: "In the name of Christian justice, someone should chop off your head." The judge started carrying a .38-caliber revolver under his robe in court after that.

Even President Nixon got into the act. He was in Denver at a law-enforcement convention. He gives his opinion that he thought Manson was guilty. Ronald Ziegler, his press secretary, tried afterward to correct that, saying that the president meant to say allegedly guilty. But it had gone out over the wires. The main headline in the Los Angeles Times: MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES. Manson got ahold of that paper—no one knows how—stands up in front of the jury with a little silly grin on his face, and shows the jury the headline. It was almost as if he was somehow proud the president had taken notice.

Then near the end of the trial, a defense attorney vanishes from the face of the earth. Ronald Hughes was the defense attorney for codefendant Leslie Van Houten. The judge said, "Well, we're going to have to be in recess." Every morning we were hoping that poor Hughes would walk through the courtroom door, but he never did. So the judge had to appoint a substitute lawyer to take his place. On the last day of the trial, Hughes's body was found out in the forest, but the Ventura County coroner's office was unable to determine the cause of death because of the decomposition … I can't say positively one way or the other, but my leaning is that Hughes was murdered by the Manson family.

Give us an example of how widespread the interest in the case has been over the years.
Let me tell you a story. Years ago, I spoke at a book convention in Richmond, Va. I arrived at the station at the same time as William Manchester and Arthur Schlesinger, both Pulitzer Prize winners. The whole cab ride, Manchester and Schlesinger are tossing me questions about Charles Manson. That's all they wanted to talk about: tell me about him. Tell me about his eyes. Did you ever talk to him? How did he get control over these people?

Have you talked with Manson since the trial?
No. He wrote me four letters. I didn't respond to any of them; I turned them over to the Department of Corrections... The latest one could have been 20 years ago. [Bugliosi declined to discuss the letters' contents.]

Leslie Van Houten comes up for parole soon. Have you ever gone to a hearing for one of the family members?
No. If it came down to a point where they were seriously considering releasing, let's say, Manson or Watson, I would intervene—not that I have any clout at all. But I would write to the governor. But it's not going to happen.

Place Manson in the pantheon of American criminal outlaws.
Most mass murderers have turned out to be of rather low intellect—drifters, loners. Basically, they committed the murders for one reason only: to satisfy their own homicidal tendencies. Manson not only is very bright—but as misdirected as his violence was, his murders were revolutionary, political, and therein lies his main appeal to those on the fringes. The other thing that has separated him is the fact that all these other mass murderers committed the murders by themselves. Manson, on the other hand, was pulling strings and getting people to go out and kill strangers at his command without asking any questions. And that makes him more frightening to people.

And people are frightened of his impact still.
Let me just read to you a letter I received from the BBC in 1994. This reporter wrote to me about many British and German rock bands playing Manson songs and songs in support of him. "For some reason the neo-Manson cult seems to center in Manchester, where there are five stores selling "Free Charles Manson" t-shirts, which are fantastically popular on rave dance floors, and bootleg records of his music …. The majority of the supporters of these bands are under 25. The truly frightening part is that many, when asked, turned out to be Manson buffs who have read all they can find about Manson, and strongly approve of 'Helter Skelter.' That was 15 years ago, but Manson is still big.

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/209940

John Waters Lies about Leslie

John Waters

FIlm director, author, photographer

Posted: August 3, 2009 08:29 AM

Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 1 of 5

I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious "Manson girls" who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a "Manson girl" today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it's time to parole her.

I am guilty, too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case. I became obsessed by the Sharon Tate murders from the day I read about them on the front page of the New York Times in 1969 as I worked behind the counter of the Provincetown Book Shop. Later, when the cops finally caught the hippy killers and I actually saw their photos ("Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders", screamed the New York Daily News headlines) I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time! Charles "Tex" Watson, a deranged but handsome preppy "head" who reminded me of Jimmy, the frat-boy-gone-bad pot-dealer I had the hots for in Catholic high school, the guy who sold me my first joint. There was Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz, devil go-go girl, with an LSD sense of humor just like Mink Stole's sister Mary (nickname: "Sick") whom I lived with at the time in Provincetown in a commune in a tree fort. And look at Patricia Krenwinkle, a.k.a. Katie, a flower-child earth-mother just like Flo-Ann who squatted with us that wonderful summer on Cape Cod. And, of course, my favorite, Leslie Van Houten, a.k.a. Lulu, "the pretty one". The homecoming princess from suburbia who gave up her title for acid. The all-American girl who went beyond insanity to unhinged criminal glamour just like Mona, my last girlfriend, who took LSD and shoplifted and starred in my underground movies all under my influence. Until, that is, the day she caught me in bed with a man (who looked kind of like Steve "Clem" Grogan, another Manson fanatic) and dumped the contents of an entire garbage can on us as we lay sleeping.

"The Manson Family" were the hippies all our parents were scared we'd turn into if we didn't stop taking drugs. The "slippies", as Manson later called his followers, the insane ones who didn't understand the humor in Yippie Abbie Hoffman's fiery speeches on his college lecture tours when he told the stoned, revolutionary-for-the-hell-of-it students to "kill their parents". Yes, Charlie's posse were the real anarchists who went beyond the radical SDS group's call to "Bring the War Home". Beyond blowing up their parents' townhouses, draft boards, even the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Sure, my friends went to riots every weekend in different cities in the '60s to get laid or get high, just like kids went to "raves" decades later. But, God, this was a cultural war, not a real one and the survivors of this time now realize we were in a "play" revolution, no matter what we spouted. But the Manson Family! Yikes! Here was the real thing -- "punk" a decade too early. Dare I say it? Yes, the filthiest people alive.

Even before the Manson Family had been caught, "The Dreamlanders", my gang of actors, took credit for the Tate/La Bianca crimes in a $5,000-budgeted movie entitled Multiple Maniacs which I wrote, directed and shot in Baltimore in the fall of 1969. Divine's character tortures David Lochary's with knowledge of the murders. "How about Sharon Tate?" she threatens, "How about THAT?!" "I told you never to mention that again!" David pleads but Divine won't let it go. "Had yourself a real ball that night, didn't you?!" she chortles. "Who's Sharon Tate?" Divine's dimwitted but studly teenage bodyguard character "Ricky" asks. "It doesn't matter, darling," Divine coos lecherously, dismissing his nosiness, "go fix yourself a sandwich."

Later, after Manson was arrested, I drove across the country for the first time in my life to Los Angeles for the California premiere of Multiple Maniacs and the next day began attending the insane LSD media-circus Manson trial which I've never really gotten over. After Manson and the three girls were convicted of the Tate/ La Bianca murders and sentenced to death, my rabid following of the subsequent but much lesser-known Manson-related trials never ceased. I needed to know more. How had these kids, from backgrounds so similar to mine, committed in real life the awful crimes against peace and love that we were acting out for comedy in our films?

In late 1971, still free, second-tiered Manson Family members robbed the Western Surplus Store in the suburbs of Los Angeles and stole 14 guns (supposedly to break Manson out of jail) and a shoot-out with the police occurred. All six robbers were arrested. At their trial, many members of Manson royalty, now awaiting the promised Helter Skelter end of the world from death row, were called as witnesses by the robber defendants so they could have a courtroom reunion of sorts. The nervous trial judge called the proceedings "the biggest collection of murderers in Los Angeles County at one time". There were only two court spectators the day I went to a pre-trial hearing; myself and a lower-echelon Manson groupie with a shaved head and a fresh X carved in her forehead who was furiously writing what looked like a thirty-page letter to one of her "brothers". When about fifteen of the Manson Family were brought into court, hand-cuffed and chained together, women on one side and men on the other, many with their heads shaved, the atmosphere was electric with twisted evil beauty. Not having seen each other in about a year, the cultists started chanting, jerkily gesturing, and speaking to one another in a nonsensical language that only the Family could understand. Sexy, scary, brain-dead, and dangerous, this gang of hippy lunatics gave new meaning to "folie à famille", group madness and insanity as long as the same people are together and united. It was an amazing thing to see in person. Heavily influenced, and actually jealous of their notoriety, I went back to Baltimore and made Pink Flamingos which I wrote, directed and dedicated to the "Manson girls", "Sadie, Katie and Les".

Then I went deeper into the Manson flame and started visiting Charles "Tex" Watson in prison. "What on earth were you thinking?" you may wonder and today it is a question I have to ask myself. In Los Angeles I had met his post-conviction girlfriend Lu, a German hippy girl with an obvious off-kilter sensibility who had come to America speaking little English and accidentally met some of the still-free "Manson girls" as the initial trial was taking place. "God, kids sure are wild in the United States," she told me she remembered thinking, not understanding how different these hippies were from the American love-children she had read about back in Munich and hoped to hook up with when she came to our shores. But Lu would only go so far. Refusing the demands to shave her skull, she broke away from the unincarcerated B-list Family members to the relative safety of a "jailhouse" love affair with "Tex", a convicted killer who was still clearly out of his mind and had almost no chance of ever being paroled.

Charles "Tex" Watson was perhaps Manson's best piece of work; a high-school football star who turned hippy and came to L.A. like millions of other kids to find '60s grooviness. Instead he met Manson and was turned into a killer zombie in just ten LSD, Belladonna-drenched months. "Tex" personally stabbed or shot all nine Tate/La Bianca victims. Lu and I would hitchhike to the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo from either L.A or San Francisco to visit him and I wrote about our times, rather inappropriately and with little insight, in my book Shock Value.

At that time, Charles Watson was no longer "Tex", but he was definitely still coming out of his Manson indoctrination. You could tell by the toy wooden helicopter he made me in jail, decorated with words like "Game is Blame", "Tweak", and "Fear". I used it in the credits of my next movie, Female Trouble, a fictitious biopic of a woman who is brainwashed into believing "crime is beauty". The film was also dedicated to Charles "Tex" Watson, and a few critics -- quite correctly, I guess -- were appalled by my flippant disregard for the terrible aftermath of these crimes. Maybe I had taken too much acid myself? How could these villainous murders seem so abstractly "transgressive" to me? Could a movie ever be as influential as these monstrous crimes?

Was Manson's dress rehearsal for homicide, known as "creepy crawling", some kind of humorous terrorism that might have been fun? Breaking silently into middle-class "pigs'" homes with your friends while you are tripping on LSD and gathering around the sleeping residents in their beds, not to harm them but to watch them sleep (the way Warhol did in that movie) and "experiencing the fear"? It does sound like it could have been a mind-bending adventure. When the Mansonites went further and moved the furniture around before they left, just to fuck with the waking homeowners' perception of reality, was this beautiful or evil? Could the Manson Family's actions also be some kind of freakish "art"?

When Charles Watson left behind his "Tex" persona for good, found Jesus Christ, and became saved, he and Lu broke up and I slowly drifted away from the visiting room. While I understand his need to find comfort and forgiveness I wasn't a born-again believer and I sometimes made insanely sacrilegious movies so we now had little in common. He then got married to a fellow-Christian on the outside, started a ministry, and through conjugal visits fathered three children (who have turned out fine), much to the horror of Sharon Tate's family and the citizens of California. Lu went back to Germany and had an un-Manson child of her own and we stayed in touch right up to her sad death from emphysema a few years ago. I remember once staying in some fancy hotel in Munich on a studio promotional tour for Cry-Baby where I invited Lu over for a visit, not having seen her in person for many years. The concierge called up to my room and said, "We're not sure if it's a man or a woman, but there's somebody here who claims you told them to come over and we're sure it's a mistake." "Is her name Lu?" I asked. "Well...yes," he stammered. "Send her up!" I bellowed. Lu had cut off most of her hair (not sure if for politics or fashion) and was now obsessed with Sarajevo refugees and I loved hearing her rant about jumping out of military helicopters (in her mind?) to spread the word for her new cause. Charles Watson is, to no one's surprise, still in prison and once or twice a year we correspond politely and he always sends kind words.

In 1985, ten years or so after Charles Watson and I had last seen one another, I was doing some journalistic pieces for Rolling Stone and they asked me to interview Manson. I had little curiosity about a man who had reminded me of someone you'd move away from in a bar in Baltimore, and was still much more interested in the followers who had come to their senses and were now definitely ex-followers. Leslie Van Houten always seemed the one that could have somehow ended up making movies with us instead of running with the killer dune-buggy crowd. She was pretty, out of her mind, rebellious, with fashion-daring, a good haircut, and a taste for LSD -- just like the girls in my movies. Instead of being a "good soldier" for Charlie and participating in the murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, which she certainly believed was the right thing to do at the time, I wish she had been with us in Baltimore on location for Pink Flamingos the day Divine ate dog shit for real (our own cultural Tate/La Bianca). Maybe she would have enjoyed cinematic anti-social glee and movie anarchy just as much as a misguided race-war entitled Helter Skelter designed by a criminal megalomaniac who believed The Beatles were speaking directly to him. If Leslie had met me instead of Charlie, could she have gone to the Cannes Film Festival instead of the California Institute for Women? Actually, I think if Leslie hadn't met either of us she might have ended up as a studio executive in the movie business in Los Angeles. A good one, too.

So I pleaded with Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, to let me interview Leslie, "the only one who has a chance of ever getting out", the one I could tell from press reports had broken from Manson's control and was beginning to see that the apocalyptical scenario Manson had preached was complete bullshit. What a painful, horrible realization that must have been!

In 1972, Leslie's death sentence (and those of her co-defendants) had been abolished by the California State Supreme Court and like all death penalty prisoners at the time, her sentence had been changed to life in prison. Not life without parole. The two other female death-penalty cases at the time besides the three "Manson girls", also murderesses with very serious cases, were paroled eight or nine years later with little fanfare or outrage.

In 1976, Leslie's original conviction was thrown out due to "ineffectual counsel" (her original lawyer drowned in the middle of her trial and was replaced) and she was given a new trial in 1977. This time, she was all by herself as a defendant in the courtroom. Remorse had started to creep in soon after she was imprisoned away from Manson. Locked away forever, Leslie, Susan, and Patricia were of no further use to Charlie and he dropped them quickly. The outsider voices of reason from the prison social workers started to seep in and Leslie began to see the holes in Manson's brainwashing. "When I'd be questioned," she later told author Karlene Faith for her very insightful and intelligent but little known book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten, "I'd go blank and become frustrated like when a machine jams and just sits there making noise. In my head nothing was functioning. I was trying to understand, breaking down stiff little slogans that had been drilled into me." When two other "Manson girls", Mary Brunner and Catherine Shaw, a.k.a. "Gypsy", were sent to jail and placed with Leslie, Susan and Patricia, Leslie grew tired of listening to their Manson talk and confided to Patricia that "I've changed. I'm not into this." "It took three years to understand" and five or six years of therapy to "take responsibility" for the terrible crime she had helped commit.

Leslie finally had a good lawyer for her second trial. Taking the witness stand truthfully for the first time, she tried to explain her state of mind through the Manson madness and his control techniques. And the jury listened, too. After about twenty-five days of deliberation there was a hung jury; seven voted for guilty of first-degree murder, and five for manslaughter due to her cult domination and uncertain mental health at the time of the crime.

Refusing to offer a plea bargain, the prosecutor took her to trial for a third time in 1978 and added a felony robbery motive (clothes, a wallet and a few coins had been taken from the La Bianca home), a crime that now couldn't legally be excused by state of mind. But this time Leslie made bail and was released from prison. She found employment as a law clerk and lived in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. She was free for six months and lived quietly, unnoticed by the press. When a few of her new neighbors found out who she really was, after they already thought they knew her, all were "supportive" and "protective" of her anonymity.

When Leslie's third trial finally began, she came to court every day on her own. Long gone was the shaved head, and the X on her forehead was covered by bangs. No more trippy little riot-on-Sunset-Strip, satin miniskirt outfits either, like the ones she and her female co-defendants wore to the first trial. This time she was dressed tastefully and looked lovely, something that obviously didn't sit well with Stephen Kay, the prosecutor who had inherited all the Manson-related cases from Vincent Bugliosi. "All dolled up", Mr. Kay cracked to the press, giving Leslie one of her first, but definitely not last, opinionated fashion reviews. When she was finally convicted of first-degree murder at the end of the trial, life imprisonment suddenly became very real.

Rolling Stone gave me the go-ahead to pursue the Leslie Van Houten interview so, in 1985, seven years after her final conviction, I wrote to "The Friends of Leslie", a now-disbanded, loose-knit support group made up of Leslie's real family (Mom, Dad, brothers, sisters -- all glad to have her back from Manson even if it was in prison) and her jail-house teachers and counselors who had seen how this teenage girl had been completely dominated by one of the most notorious madmen of our time during the 1960s, a decade which may never be surpassed in misguided revolutionary lunacy. Susan Talbot, one of the organizers, who met Leslie through classes offered in prison through Antioch College wrote me back and told me that Leslie was not interested in being in Rolling Stone or any other magazine at the time, but recommended I write Leslie to see if there was any rapport. In other words, Susan (who did know who I was, whereas Leslie did not) was intrigued and slightly puzzled by my offer of support but mistrustful of my intentions. Who could blame her?

Excerpted from the book Role Models by John Waters, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010. Role Models is a self- portrait told through intimate literary profiles of his favorite personalities; some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some alarmingly middle of the road.

Yana Repeats Her Tales

History to tell 'Manson' story

Family's lookout driver featured in Sept. 7 special

By James Hibberd

July 27, 2009, 11:00 PM ET

Charles Manson's lookout driver will tell her story to viewers for the first time in decades in a History special on the Manson Family murders.

For the 40th anniversary of the shocking Hollywood murder spree, the network has scheduled the two-hour "Manson" on Sept. 7. It features an extensive interview with Linda Kasabian, who stood guard while her fellow cult members murdered actress Sharon Tate and others.

The star witness for Manson's prosecution, the reclusive Kasabian hasn't been extensively interviewed since an "A Current Affair" special on the 20th anniversary of the murders in 1989.

The special recounts the nine months leading up to what Manson dubbed Helter Skelter, a two-night murder spree that he and his LSD-addled followers thought would incite a race war.

Susan Werbe, Nick Godwin and Simon Lloyd will executive produce the special.

Yana Kites

So this is something none of us knew- Linda went so far as to fuck up dumb Sadie. Nice lady.

From LA MAG
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Manson Family member Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz, broke the case when she told fellow jail inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute the details of the Tate and LaBianca murders. Initially the prosecution intended to call Atkins as its star witness, but the deal fell apart. The explanation typically given for the collapse is twofold. First, Atkins provided an account of the crime to the Los Angeles Times, thereby polluting the jury pool. Second, she fell back under the sway of Manson. Both stories are true. However, there was also something else

By Steve Oney

GARY FLEISCHMAN, Linda Kasabian’s lawyer. Now 75, he practices in Northern California. Linda Kasabian had seen them committing mayhem at the Tate house. She had driven the killers to the LaBianca residence, but she hadn’t done anything. Still, she was technically guilty of first-degree murder. I said to her, “You’re broke. You’re pregnant, and you were there. You must become a prosecution witness.” The prosecution already had Sadie. I call her Sadie, but her name is Susan Atkins. She was an active participant in the murders and was going to testify against Manson. I told Linda, “Sadie is flaky, and they’re gonna sell her out before it’s done. They promised her no death penalty, but they will screw her over. She killed people. We have to help this process along.” I told Linda, “You start passing Sadie kites.” A “kite” is a letter that goes into the prison system. I said, “Hand her a kite and talk Charlie-talk to her.” Linda knew exactly what I meant. Charlie Manson always spoke in these sort of backward riddles. So I told Linda, hand Sadie some kites that say, “Your lawyer is the D.A., the D.A. is your lawyer, the D.A. is Charlie, Charlie is selling you out, and you’re being sold.” So Linda starts passing these kites to dumb Susan Atkins. This goes on for a couple of months, and Susan clams up. She ain’t gonna say anything else to help the prosecution. They have to find somebody else to testify.

One day Aaron Stovitz, the head of the trial division, called me. He said, “I want to talk to you.” I said, “I’m going to get my hair cut at the barbershop at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. Come on over.” So he drives out, and he makes me an offer. A very strange confluence of events had occurred. They needed Linda Kasabian, and she needed them. They gave her total immunity. They couldn’t make their case without this girl.

Linda Kasabian wasn’t scared of Charles Manson at all. She wasn’t built that way. She was a flower child. The Family started bugging me to get her not to testify, pestering me. Lynette Fromme, you know, Squeaky, was sent by Manson to see me. She would come and sit in my office. One day I threw her out physically. She only weighed about 90 pounds. She looked like a rat. Another woman, Catherine Share, who was even weirder, would also show up. She played the violin. I just saw her on television—she looks like a matron today, very pretty lady. Squeaky and Share kept showing up. So finally one night we went to the jail to see Linda, and they confronted her. They said, “You should be one with us.” And Linda answered, “I am one with myself, and that’s all.” That was the end of that.

Freaky Crime

You should go read this article from October 1969 Los Angeles Magazine here. I copy it to the blog for the inevitable day when the link goes dead and we need it for research.

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Los Angeles magazine published this fearful story in October 1969, just two months after the Tate and LaBianca murders shocked L.A. Writer Myron Roberts' search for the connection between drugs, madness, and “freaky crime”—not to mention a handy “reasonable person’s guide” to self protection—reveals a city desperate for understanding and a return to order

By Myron Roberts

Los Angeles magazine, October 1969

Some murders, like some men, are singled out for fame because they are peculiarly symbolic of their times.

In the ‘20’s it was the Leopold-Loeb case, with its trappings of flaming youth and the New Rich produced by a runaway stock market.

In the ‘40’s it was the Black Dahlia. The label, affixed to a then anonymous young woman found mutilated in Los Angeles, somehow suggested all those millions of young girls who had left home and family to seek wartime jobs and adventure in the big city, just like in the Betty Grable movies, only with a different ending.

In the ‘50’s it was the Finch-Tregoff case in West Covina, with its cast and setting of the wealthy dentist, an aging, expensive and unwanted wife, the country club, the suburban ranch home with a new station wagon parked in the driveway, and weekends in Las Vegas with a pretty young nurse.

And now we have the Sharon Tate case, surrounded by a dazzling array of exquisite symbols of our time: drugs, strange sex games, a bizarre new culture, “rich hippies,” ritual murder and a poor dumb kid from El Monte who wandered into the midst of this freaky scene to die.

Why, among the thousands of “cheap murders” which occur every year in this country (the current rate is one every 43 minutes) were these crimes pounced upon by the press and the public? Clearly the “celebrated” murder tells us something about where the public’s head and heart are at a given moment.

Homicides very much like the Black Dahlia case occur with depressing regularity these days, for example, and hardly anyone but the police and those close to the victim bothers to regard the event.

Clearly, too, the Sharon Tate case would have been a spectacular event in any era. But it seems to belong to this time and this place. Somehow people identified with it, in the way people seem to identify these days with strange movies like Rosemary’s Baby. Within days there was another, similar murder in Los Angeles which police believe to have been the work of a “copycat killer.” A kind of fear ran through the city that was almost palpable. One overheard women standing in line at the supermarkets comparing, not hair styles or washing powers, but doorlocks. Tract salesmen in places as far away as Palmdale reported they were getting inquiries and actual sales from people who said they’d had it with living in the city, where they were afraid not only to walk the streets at night, but to stay at home as well. On a nationally televised talk show, originating in New York, Peter Fonda, himself a sometime symbol of the “freak” culture, casually remarked that he was going home to his family in Los Angeles—if they were “still alive” by the time he got there.

In the days following the Tate case residents of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air rushed to hire guards and install expensive alarm systems. Most of the city’s plusher pet shops were cleaned out of guard dogs. A Studio City kennel had to airlift German Shepherds in from Iowa to meet the demand. Even so they sold every dog they could supply at prices ranging up to $1250 for a full grown, attack-trained German Shepherd.

What seems to be most frightening to people in Los Angeles and elsewhere is the unpredictability of so much contemporary crime. Note some of the crimes which have happened in Southern California recently:

A woman was trying to cross a street when a car swerved out of its lane, deliberately struck her and knocked her down. The driver stopped, saw her trying to crawl back to the sidewalk, listened to her moaning with pain, then backed up and ran over her again, killing her. He then got out of the car, grabbed her purse and fled.

A couple stopped to give a ride to two young men. The men raped and beat the woman to death, knocked the man out and robbed him.

A man was stalled on the freeway. Somebody stopped to help him. After trying for several minutes to get the car started, the benefactor turned in disgust upon the stranded motorist, slugged him, robbed him and drove off.

Pasadena police report finding jagged bits of broken bottles carefully but lightly covered by sand at the bottom of children’s slides in parks throughout the city.

A semi-official document prepared by the LAPD estimates there are 700,000 paranoids in the U.S., according to the best psychiatric estimates. That means at least 70,000 in California, mostly in large cities.

No one knows how many of these are potential or actual killers. As for the number of potentially homicidal drug addicts or users, the figure is probably astronomical.

Is the sense of public terror real or hoked-up to sell newspapers and magazines and elect politicians who prey on fantasy and fear? Bald figures alone do not tell the story, although the story they do tell is grim enough. In brief, one American in every 22 committed a major crime last year. (In Los Angeles 250,000 serious crimes were committed last year. This means that if you have lived here for five years or more and have not been a victim, statistically, you’re a lucky man.) On the other hand your chances of being killed in a traffic accident are 15 times greater than the probability that you will be murdered. And there is no great hew and cry about auto safety which even remotely compares to the uproar about Law and Order.

Former LAPD Police Chief Thad Brown, for 18 years Chief of Detectives, puts it this way: When he was working homicide during the early ‘forties, there were about 70 murders a year. (Now there are over 400.) In those days he was proud of the fact that 90% of the murders he investigated were solved within a year. The procedure was fairly simple: check out a victim’s family, friends and associates. Find someone with a motive for killing him and in most cases you had the killer. Today police are reluctant to divulge the proportion of solved to unsolved murders. But they admit it’s nothing like 90%. The problem is that so many of today’s murders seem “senseless.” “Homicide used to be a fairly easy crime to solve,” says LAPD Sgt. Don Ferguson. “But today you have so many cases like those Michigan college girl murders— we’ve had many similar cases here in California—where it’s almost impossible to tie the victim and a logical suspect together.”

In Thad Brown’s day, logic, reason, and careful detective work almost always brought results. He likes to tell, for example, about the case of a young woman homicide victim. The only clue was a pack of matches found in the room. He noticed that the matches on the left side of the pack had been used. Deduction: find a left-handed male acquaintance of the victim and he had his killer—and it worked. Or about how he carefully forged a chain of evidence that sent L. Ewing Scott to prison for the murder of his wife despite the absence of a corpus delicti. (He has a theory about where the late Mrs. Scott’s remains are stashed away which may be of interest to San Diego Freeway commuters.)

One difficulty with crime today is that we are beginning to know how little we know. The Victorians could pontificate with great certitude, for example, about “the criminal mind.” But Beverly Hills Police Chief Joseph Paul Kimble, for one, believes “most criminal acts today are committed by so-called normal people who react abnormally to a stress situation.” To disabuse ourselves at the outset of some of the most enduring and least credible clichés held by partisans of the left and right about crime, consider these facts:

1. For many years, liberals and intellectuals have believed and preached that crime was the fruit of ignorance, poverty and social injustice.

Fact: Crime in America seems to rise and fall during given periods for reasons no one really understands. The prosperous ‘20’s, for example, were a period of soaring crime rates, as are the affluent ‘60’s. The depression decade of the ‘thirties was generally a time of falling crime rates. Thus crime seems to rise and fall in inverse ratio to the general prosperity. Finally, in prosperous Sweden where there are almost no extremes of poverty or teeming slums, crime is rising even faster than here in America.

2. Sociologists, psychologists, etc., often argue that crime is the result of a “climate of violence.”

Fact: The violent World War II era saw the lowest crime rate of this century in America.

3. Policemen and other exponents of the hard line in America insist that the real source of much of today’s crime lies in the increasing “permissiveness” shown to the young in this “Spock-marked generation.”

Fact: The most crime-ridden part of the U.S. is the South, instates like George Wallace’s Alabama, where neither Dr. Spock nor the permissive-liberal philosophy is in great vogue. The last time we had a great “crime wave” was in the ‘twenties, a heyday of conservatism, hanging judges and the KKK.

4. The ordinary citizen tends to believe that criminals are a class apart who prey on basically honest and decent folk “like ourselves.”

Fact: Police have surveys which demonstrate that, under the right conditions, 90% of the American people admit to having committed some offense for which they might have been jailed if caught. In an official publication, the LAPD agrees with Rapp Brown that indeed “violence is as American as cherry pie.” And Chief Kimble observes, “crime is an American Way of Life. From the blue collar worker to the white collar executive, it penetrates every strata of our society.” To which Thad Brown (now doing private detective work for business firms) adds, “Hell, I thought I knew something about crime during 42 years on the force. But most of that was penny ante compared to the capers these business men pull on each other every day.”

5. “Crime does not pay.” “Tell that,” says Chief Kimble, “to the slum kid who sees the rich pimps and dope pushers driving around town in caddies and wearing silk shirts.”

6. “Education is the best means of preventing crime.”

Fact: Most educators agree that this is the best educated generation of young people in our history. It is also the most prone to crime. One in every six teenage boys was brought before juvenile authorities last year alone. Those peace-loving, gentle, idealistic Under Thirties are responsible for fully 70% of the crime in the country, including an unprecedented number of rapes, armed robberies and mass slaughters. Both Kennedys were cut down by members of the Now Generation. It was a young man who killed fifteen people and wounded twenty-five one afternoon in Texas. It is a young man who is charged with the murder of the Michigan coeds. This is not meant to indict an entire generation. But even the most violent partisan of the young can hardly deny that this is perhaps the bloodiest and most lawless generation of young people to come along since Hitler’s Storm Troopers turned Europe into a graveyard. Incidentally, the Germans, too, were well educated.

It is practically impossible to travel anywhere in the urban U.S. now without encountering forms of behavior which would have been considered unthinkable even five or six years ago. Girls as young as 14 and 15 hitchhiking alone at night as if they’d never heard of rape. Attractive kids of apparently comfortable backgrounds begging on the streets. Others, sitting hollow-eyed on sidewalks or curbs looking like zombies.

Is there a connection between all this unconventional behavior and soaring crime rates? The police, among others, think so. The common denominator, they believe, is drugs. Perhaps they are drawing an oversimplified picture of the situation, but recent research on the subject doesn’t exactly prove them wrong.

All of the kids’ rationalizations notwithstanding, the fact is, as Dr. Edward R. Bloomquist documents in his carefully researched recent study entitled Marijuana (Glencoe Press), that pot “releases inhibitions and impairs judgment with such predictability that a user with criminal tendencies will readily commit crimes.”

As everything we know about history, psychology and human nature confirms, with certain rare and saintly exceptions, men, particularly young men, are seldom very far from violence. To maintain civilization at all, we usually need all the judgment we can get.

“I tend to be evangelistic about the drug scene” admits Lt. E. E. Kearney of the LAPD. “There simply is no question that there has been a tremendous fallout of violence as the result of widespread use of drugs.”

Moreover Kearney believes that the violence associated with drug use is likely to grow a great deal worse in the immediate future because of two factors: Relatively mild Mexican pot is being replaced by hashish, a form of marijuana made in the Middle East which is approximately twenty times stronger than the now familiar Mexican variety. Secondly, the increasing use of amphetamines, “speed,” by kids promises some charming new developments on the social landscape. In the words of Dr. Donald B. Louria of Cornell University (interviewed by Gail Sheehy in New York magazine), speed is a drug “taken solely for kicks by a subculture increasingly populated by thrill-seekers, psychopaths, angry sociopaths and young persons incapable of functioning in society.” After a few months of use, observes reporter Sheehy, it leads to “depression, weight loss, sexual deviations and finally paranoid psychosis. Speed simply makes people behave as if they were crazy.”

There is not much doubt that most young people in Southern California try some kind of drug at some point in the process of growing up today. Just as not every young man who gets loaded during his adolescence winds up a drunk, so not every youngster who tries pot winds up a heroin addict, a speed freak or a card-carrying member of the “drug culture.” That drugs have transformed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of the young into unpredictable and occasionally criminal personalities is also inescapable, however, in the face of current crime statistics and the expert testimony of virtually everyone, including those entirely sympathetic to the youth revolt. And yet our society remains curiously ambivalent in the face of such a threat. A good many respectable intellectuals, people who wouldn’t dream of shooting speed themselves, seem to regard the right to take drugs as one of our Civil Liberties and have confused the drug scene an the crime scene with political dissent, opposition to the Vietnam War and improved race relations. The fact that young Negroes and Mexican-Americans were the first victims of the drug-pushers has led to a number of people to confuse sympathy for the cause of civil rights to tolerance of drugs—when in fact, as even the most militant black leaders themselves testify, dope is the enemy of the black man’s struggle for liberation.

Of late we have even seen public drug festivals, such as the much publicized Woodstock Festival, where hundreds of thousands of young people, most of them stoned out of their heads, sat listening for days to the drone of rock music. A number of commentators, including Life Magazine (which rushed into print a few days later with a special $1.25 supplement devoted entirely to the festival), have described this as a cultural event of monumental import, just behind Genesis and the landing on the moon. The fact that these rock fans did not engage in the widespread violence which we have come to expect as more or less normal at such gatherings was also widely hailed by commentators in the press. No one stopped to ask why the absence of violence at a large, public gathering of the young should be considered any more remarkable than the fact that the fans who go to a football game every Saturday afternoon in the fall do not, customarily, tear up the stadium or attack one another.

Life’s own house youth apologist, a young columnist named Barry Farrell, found himself somewhat confused by the mass acceptance of the rite. “The press and even the police seem content to write it off as a victory for peace and love,” puzzles Farrell, who had undoubtedly expected to adopt that line himself. “In a way, it was. But I would have thought that the significance of a half-million young Americans spontaneously creating a society based on drugs would have caused some slight concern.”

He then proceeds to define his own “bad vibrations” to the event:

“As one who has believed that the justification for using drugs lay somewhere in the zone of psychic freedom, I was disturbed by the bovine passivity they induced in this mass of free minds. For almost everyone present, the freedom to get stoned together was more than freedom enough.

“The Rubicon we felt ourselves crossing was the line of restraint between the old drug culture of the underground and some new authorized form, dangerously adaptable to the interests of packagers, promoters, the controllers of crowds. It was a groovy show, all right, but I fear it will grow groovier in memory, when this market in our madness leads on to shows we’d rather not see.”

Farrell’s misgivings are quite understandable. Those with somewhat longer memories, in fact, tend to regard the Woodstock syndrome not so much as a new social phenomenon but as a contemporary variation of another youth festival—the Nuremberg Rallies—where Hitler, Goebbels & Co. were the featured group and the multitudes of fans were stoned on slogans instead of grass.

“Don’t put on a black jacket and dark glasses unless you are prepared to kill,” Stokely Charmichael is reported to have advised some of his young followers. It is sound advice. It demonstrates that Stokely understands symbols and their consequences. Charmichael is saying that those who wish to merely talk about “revolution” and dress up as revolutionaries without being prepared for violence, death and prison, are fools or charlatans. So the educated middle class youngster who plays at “freaking out” has, consciously or not, set off along a certain path, and unless he is prepared to go all the way, he is simply a fool. The victims in the Tate massacre would seem to demonstrate how quickly and unexpectedly game-playing can turn into something more serious.

The price of membership in the “drug culture” is firm and fixed: To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes’ description of the miserable conditions of factory workers in the 19th century, the life of the drug addict is “nasty, brutish and short.” This, of course, is hardly true of the occasional pot smoker, but even here some facts tell a much grimmer story than most young people believe. For example, the LAPD recently did a study of 229 juveniles arrested in 1961 for possession of marijuana. The department wanted to know what had happened to these people five years later—in 1966. They found:

38, or 16%, were subsequently arrested for possession of heroin.

76, or 38%, were arrested again for possession of marijuana.

46, or 20%, were arrested for robbery.

17 were arrested for rape.

Of the entire group, almost four in five were re-arrested and 16% served time in a state penitentiary.

The irrationality, the mindless capriciousness of the New Violence, has inspired a new kind of fear among people, which in turn breeds its own alarming consequences.

Because people suspect that criminals are often “dope fiends” who will behave unpredictably, they fear becoming involved in reporting a crime. Police find themselves embattled in an effort to protect themselves and a public which often behaves irrationally. Every policeman can tell stories of neighbors watching someone’s house being broken into, of armed robberies, assaults and even murders without anyone even going to the phone to call the police, let alone trying to help the victim. Vigilante groups and neighborhood “protective associations” often wind up shooting each other and their families. There are more guns in Los Angeles today than in Saigon. “Sportsmen’s” magazines suggest sub-machine guns, even anti-tank guns (just $99.50) as an “ideal Father’s Day gift.” Conservatives, such as Governor Reagan, militantly oppose all efforts to unilaterally disarm the public. “WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS” read the bumper stickers on the pickup trucks and campers.

But gun nuts are only another kind of freak, and the same grim epitaphs could just as easily apply to them: Live violently, die violently. Live freaky, die freaky. Somehow, when and if the Sharon Tate case is finally solved, we are likely to see it not simply as the made act of one or more abberant individuals, but as a symptom of the sickness of our time—just as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, for example was not so much the act of cold-blooded killers, as the inevitable fruit of the way it was in Chicago in the ‘twenties.

Whatever its short term benefits, the drug culture at its worst equals madness, crime, violence and early death. It seems a disproportionate price to pay for the pleasure of “freaking out.”

PROTECTING YOURSELF FROM THE 'FREAKY' CRIME: A REASONABLE PERSON'S GUIDE

What can be done to protect the young—and ourselves—from the “freaky,” drug-related crime?

Some steps are being taken, although they admittedly represent only a beginning. The Sheriff’s Department of Los Angeles County, for example, has launched an educational program at 41 junior highs, high schools and adult schools throughout Los Angeles. The program, called The Citizen and the Law, brings officers into the schools, and takes school children on field trips to police stations, courts, etc. in an effort to break down some of the barriers between the police and the public.

The Sheriff’s Department, meanwhile, is actively seeking innovative approaches to crime prevention in a radically changing society.

Police generally feel that drugs have become so much a part of the scene among the young today that it is unrealistic to hope for complete eradication. “The best we can hope for is control,” says Lt. R. E. Kearney of the LAPD’s Crime Prevention Section. (Psychologists, educators, etc. are generally even more pessimistic. “The best we can hope for,” they believe, “is a reduced rate of growth in the number of drug-associated crimes.”) Kearney believes that control has to begin by isolating known heavy drug-users within the school or college population, “the same way we would isolate someone carrying a dangerous disease.”

Crimes against property are far easier to guard against than crimes against people, particularly of the “freaky” variety. “If someone wants to kill you,” the LAPD lamentably concludes, “and is willing to take some risk, there probably isn’t much you can do to stop him.”

You can, however, avoid associating with freaks. (Most murders are still committed by someone known to the victim.) If attacked, particularly if you are a woman, scream, resist, fight like hell. When driving alone, keep your car windows closed. If stalled on a lonesome stretch of road, stay inside the locked car until the police arrive. Don’t open the door or windows to strangers. Keep your purse out of sight.

Young girls wearing light, flimsy clothing while traveling about the city alone at night are still the favorite targets of rapists—who frequently do not set out intending to commit rape; something about the attractiveness or vulnerability of the victim gives the rapist his clue. Countless rapes, of course, go unreported, especially among female hitchhikers. Most criminals are opportunists. The more opportunities you create for crime, the more likely you are to be victimized.

Armed robbers are usually violent men seeking a bloody confrontation with their victims as an excuse to prove their “manhood.” Burglars, on the other hand, are more often gentler types who simply want to steal your stuff and get out. Usually, if challenged, they run.

The locks on most tract houses are worthless. Ordinary dime store chain locks are useful chiefly to keep the kids inside the house. For minimal protection against burglary, police recommend a good dead bolt lock. Also, a noisy dog is helpful. Burglars ordinarily do not like fuss.

If you see someone acting strangely in your neighborhood, call the police and they will be glad to come out and investigate. They can usually tell within minutes whether the person is engaged in a legitimate activity or not. It’s too bad that “support your local police” became a political slogan for the crank. Right since, generally, it’s a damned good idea.