Original subtitles

- My dad, he was very handsome.

He was very loving.

He had a very nice smile.

Family was the most important.

My dad was really a special man.

He was the kind of man

that people looked up to and respected.

My mom and dad split up.

He was single for a few years, and then he met Rose.

Rose and Dad seemed to me like very good friends.

They discussed plans together as equals.

She was very stylish. She liked to go shopping.

She had a very spiritual side too.

She was kind of complex.

- Abigail Folger was 26.

The cause of her death

and the deaths of the four people murdered with her

is the concern of scores of investigators

in Southern California.

She had attended Santa Catalina School for Women

near Carmel and was graduated from Radcliffe.

Ms. Folger was the daughter of Peter Folger,

chairman of the board of the Folger Coffee Company.

- The funeral for writer Voytek Frykowski

will be held in New York City this week.

Those for 18-year-old youth Steven Parent

were conducted elsewhere in Los Angeles.

- Services were planned

for men's hair stylist Jay Sebring.

- He was a very personable, a very confident

little guy, 5'6", 122, but had big stature.

Jay and Sharon were living together three years,

and I knew he was still hung up on her.

- The services for Ms. Tate, a remarkably pretty actress

who was about to become a mother,

were held in west Los Angeles.

- All of you know how beautiful she was.

But only few of--of you know how good she was.

The last few months as much as

the last few years I spent with her

were only time of true happiness in my life.

- There's no need to feel guilty.

I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of.

- There is no wrong.

Aren't we all born to die?

- Friday night in Los Angeles, a movie actress

and four of her friends were murdered,

and the circumstances were lurid.

And a short time later, not far away,

a middle-aged couple was found murdered

in similar circumstances.

With daylight, police searched the premises.

They found no evidence of robbery,

no suggestion of motive.

A baffling crime, and bizarre.

- Meantime, at the Bel Air home

of movie director Roman Polanski,

police continued their investigation

of the five slayings.

Police said the actress's husband

had not visited the home and was in seclusion.

Beyond these few meager facts,

police clamped a shroud of secrecy around the case.

- As I say, there's no reason to hold him.

He's not involved.

- Late this afternoon, police released

the only suspect they had, 19-year-old William Garretson,

caretaker of the Polanski home.

- As soon as the murders took place

and there was no reason,

Hollywood went into a kind of collective panic.

They started getting guns, and they had guard dogs in.

I remember Steve McQueen

got himself a shotgun and a pistol.

He put the shotgun under his bed

and the pistol under his pillow.

Because this was a safe neighborhood,

and all of a sudden, were there a bunch of killers

running around, gunning for celebrities?

- LA was a very open place in 1969, and very permeable.

The rich and the poor,

the hippies and straight society comingled,

and you could walk in and out of a party or a bar

and be with someone who was

of a different station in life than you.

After the Tate killings, the city just tightened up.

LA changed forever.

- Everybody started locking their cars,

and nobody was picking up hitchhikers anymore.

It was an incredible, horrific story.

I mean, it brought the-- a curtain down

on the bricks and ferns and tie dye of the '60s.

- Back at Spahn Ranch,

there was strange things going on.

I mean, it-- it seemed more serious.

Straight Satans, the motorcycle gang,

was involved,

and there were knives and there were guns.

They were like a protection and provider of weapons,

but they also had mechanical skills for, you know,

converting these Volkswagens into dune buggies.

That seemed to be part of their purpose

for this long-term move

from Spahn Ranch to Death Valley.

- Those dune buggies would carry barrels

that would keep us alive when we ran to the desert.

And everybody in this town, LA and all around,

would be in this horrible revolution,

fighting each other and killing each other in the streets.

It was no more fun and games.

We weren't just there to hang out.

It was like, "Get ready.

We have to get out of here as soon as possible."

- Innocent people were being murdered by this family

that I didn't wanna be a part of anymore.

- I felt like I was facing death.

This was the opportunity that I could escape,

knowing that I could not take my daughter with me.

I left.

I left.

- Seven days after the killings,

the LA County Sheriff Department descended on mass

on Spahn Ranch at 6:00 in the morning.

They had a warrant to investigate auto theft.

Manson and his family had been stealing everything,

and they'd been retrofitting the stolen vehicles

into dune buggies and riding around firing guns.

Manson was the last person arrested.

He'd been hiding in a crawl space

under one of the buildings on the ranch.

- I was with the whole group.

I guess I assumed that, "Here's the establishment

coming down on us, you know, for no reason at all."

They smashed my guitar,

looking for drugs inside of it, I guess.

I don't know.

They just smashed it against the wall.

I didn't understand that. I was pretty upset.

They took us in and then let us go.

- In the end, they couldn't pinpoint which of them

stole the two cars they had the warrants for,

so they were all released.

Charlie got a sense

that the heat was going to come down.

There was a lot of blood on their hands.

They got together their dune buggies,

which were outfitted with machine gun posts,

and they drove out into the desert.

- There was talk today about drugs and a mad killer,

but the Los Angeles police are no closer to a solution

of the seven killings of last weekend

than they were then.

- Homicide officers would not say

the two separate murders were connected.

They theorized the LaBianca killer may have used

the same technique as the Bel Air killer

to throw police off the track.

- The LAPD made some bad mistakes

in investigating the Tate and LaBianca killings.

The first of which was they didn't connect

the Tate murder to the Gary Hinman murder.

Gary Hinman was murdered

in the part of LA covered by the county,

and the LaBianca and Tate killings

were both in the city.

LAPD didn't see the similarity and ignored it.

- One of the detectives on the Hinman murder case,

who later became a friend of mine,

said that he had called LAPD

after the Tate murders and said,

"I think there's some similarities between

a murder that I had out in Topanga Canyon,"

and the LAPD basically, as he put it,

"Told me to go pound sand."

They didn't wanna hear.

And they, for several days,

kept calling it a copycat murder.

- The police were clueless, and there were so many rumors.

Is it a drug deal gone wrong? Is it the mafia?

Is it the--the victims that brought these crimes

upon themselves and they deserved it?

Because this is the way they lived.

They're corrupt, decadent.

- "Yeah, well, they're devil worshippers.

"See, he did that movie,

"and they're getting back at him.

"You know, 'Rosemary's Baby.'

That's why this happened."

It was speculation gone crazy.

- And since there were no culprits,

and since the murder itself was so hideous and horrendous,

that they thought-- they instinctively felt that

the best way is to blame the victims

for their own deaths.

First of all, forgive me if my words

will be a little bit incoherent.

The last film she made

was not a very happy experience for her,

but her greatest picture she was doing

was her pregnancy.

I never seen a woman more preoccupied with it.

The house is open now.

And I tell you last thing.

There was a lot of talk about drugs and use of drugs.

Sharon not only didn't use drugs,

she didn't touch alcohol, she didn't smoke cigarettes.

And facts, which will be coming out day after day

will make ashamed a lot of newsmen

who, for a selfish reason,

write--unbearable for me-- horrible things about my wife.

I'm sorry, I must step from--

- I remember the coverage because I was part of it.

Everybody and their brother was trying to figure out

who committed these murders, why the murders had stopped,

what was going on,

and we all went and did these ridiculous interviews.

They sent me to interview a-- a psychic named Peter Hurkos.

I interviewed him after

he went to the house with Polanski.

I had to ask my question of his publicist,

who would repeat my question to him.

Then he would answer her.

I don't know what he told Polanski,

but if he told Polanski the same thing he told me,

then there was no information that was useful.

- From time to time, I wrote a news story.

I'd go down to Parker Center

for briefings by the police chief,

and they'd tell us nothing, you know.

They've interviewed people.

They've spent 600 hours padding around,

trying to find the killers.

There was nothing we could write about.

Those who had to write stories had to write with--

with rumors and innuendo and--

and--and-- and false information.

Roman became detective.

He thought for a few crazy moments

that somebody in his inner circle

was responsible for killing Sharon.

He thought Bruce Lee might be responsible

because Bruce Lee was the only kind of guy

that could kill five people singlehandedly.

And then he thought it was John Phillips,

and Roman knew that John Phillips knew

that Roman had had a one-night stand

with John's wife, Michelle, in London.

And somehow Roman translated that into,

"Well, he bumped off Sharon."

Of course, it was ridiculous.

- I was also looking for any trace of blood in--

in cars of people that I knew.

I had chemicals, you know, that I could smear

and check whether there were any traces of blood in--

on--on--on the pedals or steering wheel

or seats or whatever.

So I spent my night sometimes in the garages of my friends,

you know, just going through those cars.

I did think that it must have been someone who knew her.

And as it happened, it wasn't.

- Does that strike you now as unbalanced behavior?

Would you say you were unbalanced at the time

from grief or shock?

- Yes, I think I was unbalanced, yeah.

- After that raid at Spahn Ranch,

we had to start over.

We were filling up barrels with food, water, gasoline,

and we were taking them up to the desert.

We were surviving the coming doom,

and I believed that.

I believed it was gonna happen.

- We were hiding out in the desert,

and I was afraid.

On the other hand, I still, you know, was vulnerable,

and I wanted Charlie's approval.

We're working at Barker Ranch at night

and do laundry and cook and dig lookouts.

At dawn, we would go back about--

probably about two miles behind the ranch.

There were several vehicles,

but the girls would follow behind the vehicles

and wipe away the tire tracks with willow branches.

And we would stay under these sand-colored parachutes.

The day was basically spent sleeping.

Maybe if it wasn't too hot,

looking for the bottomless pit.

We came back, and our path was blocked

with all these boulders, and Charlie was so mad.

When we finally got over that, here's this big road grader.

So I think it was he and Tex and Bruce Davis

that took the gas from the jeep,

emptied the gas onto the tires, and lit it.

- While at Barker's Ranch,

a man named Paul Crockett and another

drove into the yard.

- On the night that I arrived, I met Brooks Poston.

They were living in the big house on the ranch.

We would go and stay in the cabin

that was just to the left of the house.

We would sit in the evenings and talk,

and we began to learn and hear about Charlie.

- Paul had offered me a job

to go up and down the mountains

and to help him get gold ore

down from some mines that they had in that area.

- I got Brooks to go and work with me,

and then Paul Watkins came.

Every day we would go and inspect

old mine sites, old diggings,

and I could explain to them what Charlie was doing.

That it was ridiculous, it was idiotic,

that it had no value whatsoever to them.

And they decided to quit Charlie

and come and go with me.

- And later on, when Charlie and the crew

came back up to the desert when we were there,

I watched him and Crockett

do this little dance of the gurus.

It just seemed to me that--that Paul's stuff

packed more reality than Charlie's.

That was my way out.

- I had no one to go back to,

and everybody else had given up their families.

So what do you go back to if you think

that everyone else is gonna die?

We were everything to each other,

and it's hard to give that up

when things go completely dark.

- We were up in the desert.

I think we'd taken LSD.

The girls started telling me what they did.

I mean, they were, like, bragging,

and they were almost gleeful

that they had done this for Charlie.

Sadie, Susan Atkins, told me

how Sharon begged for the life of her baby.

And it was--it was just, you know, her--

unbelievable that they could talk about it,

the--these horrendous events, the way they did.

The girls had told me, Tex had told me,

"I did this. Charlie told me to."

The whole time, you know, I was afraid to leave

because I was afraid that they would kill me,

'cause now I knew this horrible secret.

- The dream that I had about the hippie commune

that we were gonna live on wasn't--

wasn't-- wasn't what I signed up for.

For some reason or another, I probably got the feeling

that Kitty wanted out too.

Maybe the fact that we were both pregnant.

We would talk about all the things we were missing.

Thanksgiving dinners.

We'd talk about Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

And then one night, we just decided, "This is it."

And that night, when we went to bed,

we made sure that we were sleeping

a little bit further away from everybody else

so that we could sneak away without them hearing us.

I don't even think we had shoes.

We snuck off.

And we decided to head to the top of a wash

and walk along the top of a wash.

We'd been gone about an hour walking,

and we could see they had started up the dune buggies,

and they were out looking for us.

We were up high, and they had to be down low.

The dune buggies couldn't go to the top of the wash.

Scared to death.

- Charlie had us all beating the bushes

for these girls into the late night.

I was terrified.

At that point, I didn't know what happened to them.

They just disappeared.

- And we walked through the night.

We finally found a road, and there was a sheriff

that just happened to be going by,

and we flagged him down.

He took us to Inyokern jail.

We got out of there just in time.

- I felt the vibe that if they had been found,

that they would've been killed.

They knew what had happened too.

Tex, at some point in the desert,

he, like, disappeared.

They had escaped, and I had wanted to,

but I just felt like, "Where would I go?"

I was washing my hair

at the sink inside Barker Ranch,

and the door just slams open,

and I've got a gun pointed at me,

you know, "Put your hands up."

And Charlie, like, in the blink of an eye, he's gone.

And I could hear the walkie-talkies.

I--you know, I could see that it was--

that it was the sheriff.

And they found Charlie hiding under this tiny,

tiny little bath vanity.

Somehow he managed to squeeze in there,

but I guess some of his hair was--

was showing up out of the door.

They sent us all outside,

and they put everybody in pickup trucks.

And they took us to Independence

on charges of grand larceny, of burning this road grader.

- We have been watching these

so-called hippies for some time,

and they live like animals, not like people.

The food that they had stashed was candy.

Not what I would call staple food

such as potatoes, beans, and whatnot.

It was mostly candy.

And this is for-- for my opinion only.

I think carbohydrates or sugar is our bigger--

bigger menace right now than marijuana will ever be.

They have a great desire to run around in the nude,

both men and females.

In the jail here, we gave them jail clothes,

and the matron tells me that whenever she had to have one

come out for interrogation or to see the lawyer,

why, you had to wait to put their clothes on.

- Sheriff, does Manson seem to be the leader of these people

even while they're behind bars,

the ones that you still have here?

- Well, apparently, ye-- he is,

but I'm not so sure that Manson is the leader.

I don't believe-- I'm not so sure

that this is the right man, Manson.

- All the girls are in the same cell together,

and then Susan gets taken to LA

because she had a warrant out for her arrest.

- I was in a dormitory in prison

with quite a few people, and Susan Atkins

slept about, I believe it was three to five beds up from me,

and for some reason, which to this day I'll never know,

she started talking to me and got friendly with me.

We were talking, and she mentioned,

did I know about the killings of Benedict Canyon?

And I said, "Why?"

And she says that she was the one

that--that did the killings.

Well, truthfully, I thought she was a little ding-a-linger,

there was something wrong or on drugs or something.

She didn't know it, naturally,

but I had been in that house.

I had almost decided to rent that house.

So I started questioning her, and when she described to me

about the beams in the living room,

I knew then that she had been there.

I had to speak up. I had to say something.

- Sharon Tate, a beautiful, young motion picture actress,

and four of her friends were murdered last August

in the sumptuous Hollywood mansion rented by her

and her directing--director husband Roman Polanski.

The police have been looking for the murderer

or murderers ever since,

and up until today, they had had no luck.

But today, there was a dramatic break in the case.

- Police apparently got their break in the Tate case

when this girl, Susan Atkins, a member of Manson's family,

was arrested in another Los Angeles murder

and talked to a cellmate about the Tate killings.

- It was like, "What?"

Where did these people come from?

You couldn't conceive of hippies committing murders.

I--I mean, that would be-- "Oh, you're crazy.

The love children? They would never kill anybody."

- The wandering band of members of a so-called religious cult

with a leader they called Jesus

has had three of its followers arrested in the investigation

of the murder of Sharon Tate and six others.

Those arrested are two women and one man,

and the Los Angeles police said that they would ask

murder indictments against several others.

- Charles D. Watson was the kind of boy

a community like Copeville could be proud of,

until yesterday.

Yesterday, it was learned that Watson,

who once taught Sunday School in this church

and who worked behind his father's country store counter

had been arrested in McKinney, charged with the brutal,

ritualistic slaying of Hollywood actress Sharon Tate

and four other persons.

- The Family left the Spahn Movie Ranch

in the early fall after the Tate Murders.

The Family set up another camp

in the desert near Death Valley.

Five members are now in jail on other charges

in the desert town of Independence.

The Family's leader, Charles Manson,

is jailed here.

It is expected that he will be charged

in the Tate murders.

- People who lived with Manson on the ranch and in the desert

deny that they were a violent group.

- We was just playing.

That's what the whole thing is, that we--we were--

all we was doing out there was playing, or you know...

- Manson was arrested

during a raid last month at the desert camp

where he and his young followers were living.

Some of the girls from the camp were spectators

in court today during his preliminary hearing

on charges of auto theft

and concealing stolen property found in the camp.

- He seems to be a-- a deep person, philosophical.

Yeah. Friendly person.

I don't know at this time

that he is a leader of any particular group.

- Among his followers, members of the Family,

Manson is regarded as a saint.

Many call him Jesus.

Police view him somewhat differently,

as a dangerous ex-convict with a long record,

who may have masterminded the Tate killings and others.

- All of us girls got sent to testify, you know,

for the indictments of the grand jury.

And it wasn't until then, when I was standing

before the bailiff, just ready to, you know,

enter the grand jury to be questioned,

and he asked me what my name is, and I--I said,

"I'm--I'm-- my name is Dianne Lake.

"I'm 16, and I want my mommy.

"I want--" you know, I was, like--

I suddenly woke up to,

"I'm in--I'm in deep doo-doo here, and I want out,

and you know, help me."

They made me a ward of the court,

and they sent me for 90 days observational

at a mental health institute in San Bernardino County.

And that--that turned out to be a good thing.

You know, I was protected in a--

in a--in a safe environment that was nurturing.

- It took the grand jury just 20 minutes to agree

that six members of the hippie tribe should be indicted

in the Sharon Tate murders

and those of a supermarket owner and his wife.

- Shocking. Very shocking.

It was a terrible group of murders.

It was probably the worst in the history of California.

- Pardon me.

- Was it the testimony of Susan Atkins that really cinched it?

- Well, that certainly was a part of it.

- Susan Atkins, who told the shocking story of the crimes,

was one of those indicted.

Her lawyers say she was hypnotized.

Her father, who didn't want to be identified, disagrees.

- I think they're all on dope.

And if you get under enough dope,

you can be involved in almost anything.

- Do you plan to stand by her side

in what undoubtedly will be the trial which she faces?

- I don't know how to stand by her side.

I lost her.

- Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten,

and Linda Kasabian, who is five months pregnant,

were the first Tate suspects called into court.

Each were given more time

to enter a plea on murder charges.

- I was 23 or 24 during the Manson trial.

I was covering the biggest trial in the country

for the world's largest news-gathering agency.

I was not much older than they were,

and I was looking at them and thinking,

"There but for the grace of God."

What if I had been dragged into some cult like this?

- The interest in this trial has been created

by the 60 reporters who cover it.

Each recess, they rush from their assigned seats

in the courtroom to their newly installed telephones

across the hall to tell the world the latest happening.

- In those days they allowed the press

into the hallways of the old Hall of Justice,

and every camera crew in town was up there along with us.

Manson was brought in for arraignment.

And finally, down a long hallway

comes this little figure.

And the camera crews went crazy.

And they were pushing forward against each other

to get shots of him, and they knocked

a water fountain out of the wall in the hallway,

and the whole hallway was flooded.

And then when you saw his picture on the cover

of "Life" magazine with the crazy eyes and the hair,

he looked like the devil incarnate.

- Charles Manson, the leader of a Los Angeles cult,

charged with eight murders, including Sharon Tate,

was arraigned today.

While he was in court, the police were searching

the ranch where his group used to live,

looking for evidence of other murders they suspect occurred.

For one, a movie stuntman who moonlighted

as a beer-hall bouncer who once had an argument

with Manson and has not been seen since.

- Oh, I've known him for ten years or more.

We worked together in lots of pictures and circuses.

Shea came here to work on a picture, do some stunt work,

and he saw the gang of hippies here.

- Charlie Manson thought Shorty Shea

blew the whistle on the Family for car theft.

When the sheriffs raided the Spahn Ranch,

Manson was furious.

So when Charlie got released from jail, he sought revenge.

- He was supposed to have been killed up here and buried.

We've been trying to find him ever since

his life was threatened and he disappeared.

- How do you know this?

- That his life was threatened?

I was here when it was threatened.

- This area right in here is where we're going.

- The last valiant effort to see what the boulders

might conceal was made with plenty of resources.

And all that work revealed was nothing.

- Susan Atkins had said in the "LA Times"

that they were all bloody

and that Charlie told them to take a change of clothes.

The LAPD was looking for the clothes

the Manson family members wore the night of the murder.

And I said, "Look, let us go back to Cielo Drive.

I've got an idea."

How long will it take me to undress and redress

in the backseat of this car, driving up in the canyon?

That gave us an idea of where to look.

Where we were?

The first place you could turn off the road.

We timed ourselves and tried to place ourselves

in the same position that the people would've been in

that night after they left the Tate house.

6 minutes and 20 seconds of moderate driving

up Benedict Canyon led us to this spot.

And looking over the edge of this hill,

we found several pairs of blue jeans

and what appear to be some very dark sweatshirts.

These shirts and the blue jeans

appear to have stains on them.

So without hesitation,

I call Lieutenant Robert Helder, LAPD Homicide,

and told him that I think we have found

the clothes they're looking for.

He said, "What? Where are you?"

I said, "Wait a minute.

"I'm gonna tell you exactly where I am,

"but you're gonna give me a promise.

"You're not gonna broadcast this on any police frequency,

"including the detective frequency,

because everybody monitors that."

This is where we found them. It's right down there.

There are several pairs of blue jeans,

and there are some black T-shirts.

What are you going to do with the evidence now?

- The evidence will be transported

to scientific investigation division,

the laboratory at Parker Center,

and examined by experts.

- How did you get word about this this afternoon?

- We were notified by my boss, Lieutenant Robert Helder,

who received a phone call from

what I believe is Channel 7 News.

- "Channel 7 News."

See, he wouldn't say "Eyewitness News."

That would've been too much of a commercial.

- Shortly after the Tate killing,

a little kid off of Beverly Glen

found the gun that had been used.

And this kid was a Crime Stoppers kind of kid.

He and his dad took the gun

to the Van Nuys LAPD substation.

The LAPD didn't know it had the gun.

It was looking for the gun all these three months,

but it had been shelved in Van Nuys.

So a lot of missing pieces

could've solved the crime earlier.

That's one of the reasons this case was so terrifying

to the city of Los Angeles, because it took months

before they got to the bottom of it.

- Charles Watson, one of the defendants

in the Sharon Tate murder case,

contended through an attorney today

that he cannot get a fair trial in California

and should not be extradited from Texas.

- County attorney Tom Ryan argued, however,

that all of the material evidence

the defense were seeking was not germane to this case,

and the only thing the defense was seeking was delay.

Fingerprint experts testified

that the same prints found in California matched those

of Charles Watson here in McKinney.

Judge Brown set the next hearing for February the 16th.

This is Carl Mayo in McKinney, Channel 8 News.

- Turn around once girls will you?

- Fine, how are you?

- Beautiful, Charlie.

- Yup.

- For an attorney, I have myself.

- For an investigator, I have myself.

I have no police officers working for me.

I have no access to any files. I have no equipment.

My office is a small cell.

I may not take law books into my cell.

The jail law library is totally inadequate for legal research.

I may not have a phone in my name.

I may not receive calls.

- Would you like to comment on the letter

Mr. Manson has written Mr. Younger?

- I'd like to change the baby first.

- Okay.

- Daye, you represent Susan Atkins?

- That's correct. - Now, I understand

the rumor is, and maybe you can confirm or deny it,

that she is gonna deny that everything she said

on the witness stand in the grand jury.

- That's correct. She--she's gonna deny

all of the statements made at the grand jury.

And then they would have to dismiss the indictment.

And they may pursue her for maybe perjury.

But perjury's better than murder.

Thank you, Daye.

- Is this your first case that you'll be trying?

- Yeah, this will be the first case that I've ever tried.

- How long have you been an attorney?

- Just since last June.

- Ronald Hughes was this big, kind of teddy bear guy who--

you could see him wearing flowers in his hair.

He lived in a garage which had holes in the roof,

and those who went to visit him

recalled the rain pouring in on him.

Very strange, but a sweet guy.

Everybody liked Ron.

- Do you feel you're capable of defending him?

- I believe that, as Mr. Manson stated earlier,

that no man is capable of representing another.

- The district attorney's office of Los Angeles county

has--has chosen to use the mass media

to cast their ideas into the community.

- Irving Kanarek was hired by Manson,

and Manson said, "If you don't let me defend myself,

I'm gonna get the worst lawyer to defend me."

And Kanarek said, "I am the worst lawyer.

"I'm the worst lawyer when it comes to judges

"and opposing attorneys.

"They don't like me.

They think I'm too effective."

- It's bad for all of us.

Any one of us could be accused of a crime,

and I ask, would we like to be tried,

or anyone that's near and dear to us--

would we want someone near and dear to us to be tried

in this carnival atmosphere that we have right now?

It's preposterous.

- Paul Fitzgerald came in.

He was in the public defender's office.

He felt that Patricia Krenwinkel

needed a good defense.

He was forced to quit his job

at the public defender's office to do it, and he did.

- We also intend to meet with representatives

of the district attorney's office,

Mr. Aaron Stovitz and Mr. Vincent Bugliosi,

in order to determine what witnesses, if any,

they are going to call at the time of trial.

- Paul was dazzling in the courtroom.

He was basically making the decisions

for the whole defense team.

- By then, there had been a whole mythology--

had already built up about the Manson family.

Everybody was waiting to hear what this group was all about.

- ♪ KHJ Weather

- Mostly sunny today, a little warmer with a high of 77.

There will be light smog.

Currently 64 in Hollywood.

- On June 15th, the case will be called.

The court will ask if all sides are ready,

and then right then and there the jury will be summoned,

and for the next several weeks,

we will be in the process of selecting a jury.

- We were sitting in the jury assembly room in Los Angeles.

The jury commissioner came out and said,

"Will the following names that I draw out of this drum

please go with all these cops?"

And that got my suspicions up, and anyway,

my name was the first one drawn out of the hopper.

They took us in a black and white prisoner bus

over to the Hall of Justice, went down by the morgue,

up the freight elevator, down a back hall,

into the back of the courtroom,

where it was just full of people.

Still didn't know what was going on,

and the judge came out and said

this is the People vs. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins,

Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten.

- Tex Watson managed to dodge extradition for almost a year,

and he finally had his own trial later.

- It could take four or five months just to get a jury

because the attorneys, all six of them,

are going to be very selective.

Because the people picked are going to have to know

that once the trial begins, they're going to spend

every night locked up in a hotel room.

- During jury selection, my company let me know that,

"We can't pay you for that trial.

That's gonna go a long time."

And the judge says, "Well, let me just write

a little letter to the company."

They should be proud to have their employee

serve on jury duty, and that they should pay me.

And they did.

- There will be few spectators in court

while the jury is being selected.

The room will be filled with newsmen

who have been assigned seats.

Some of Manson's followers tried to get in today.

They were turned away.

- Would you like to be on the Manson jury?

- No. - Why not?

- Because I think that no jury could really do a good job

because it's--it's been sort of exploited and messed up

by the--you know, by the media, by the newspapers, and by TV,

and they've just made too much out of it, you know?

- Manson jury?

No, I wouldn't wanna be on that jury.

- Why not? - Because I feel he's guilty.

- This is one I don't want to have anything to do with.

This is one I don't want to have anything to do with.

- I don't accept the whole situation, you know.

Like, I was in the desert minding my business.

This confusion belongs to you.

It's your confusion.

I don't have any confusion.

I don't have any guilt.

I know what I've done, and no man can judge me.

I judge me. - Next.

- I've stayed in the desert and run with the coyotes

and ate off the plants

and found out you can live out there without this society.

And that's where I'd like to go live, you know?

Owe them anything?

I've paid with 22 years of my life.

You know, I'm the other end of your society.

You know, so you can ride your bicycles and do your thing.

I've lived in your reform schools and your orphanages.

- Do you feel good feelings towards the judge--

- I feel a little nervous-- a little nervous.

I feel good feelings towards everything.

I feel no bad. I know no bad.

- Okay, gentlemen, that's about it.

- Thank you for your cooperation.

- Charles Manson will be tried by a jury

of seven men and five women.

It took four weeks

and 150 prospective jurors to find them.

- I worked for the "LA Times" for seven years.

The "Rolling Stone" was looking for an LA editor,

and so they hired me.

One of the first assignments was Manson,

which I didn't particularly like.

I mean, I--you know, I-- I hadn't followed it.

I wasn't really a crime writer or anything like that.

David Dalton was also assigned to the story

because he had hung out with Dennis Wilson.

Also, he knew the culture much--he really was a hippie.

So the two of us actually brought

a kind of balance to the story.

- Quite sensibly,

David was ambivalent about the whole thing.

He--he felt, you know, he might've done it.

And I and--and many, many other hippies

figured he had been railroaded.

I argued with David Felton the whole time.

You--you know, like, "You traitor to the cause."

- We interviewed Manson one afternoon in jail.

His record manager, Phil Kaufman,

who he met in jail, he got us in to see him,

because he figured "Rolling Stone"

would promote his album.

- You could see all these different phases

of his character flashing in his face.

That was scary to us.

And then we spent time on Spahn Ranch.

The--the whole place was alternately

sort of joyful and spooky.

Every afternoon, we'd meet on the steps of the Spahn's house

and tell stories about the lake that had no bottom

or other improbable things.

They had this hive mentality.

They seemed to be totally bonded,

channeling Charlie's thoughts absolutely

because they're totally indoctrinated with this.

- I had contacted the police department

and in the the prosecutor's office.

The prosecutor, whose name we disguised in the piece,

was Aaron Stovitz.

- We called him Porfiry after the detective

in "Crime and Punishment."

I thought he was innocent.

I was, by now, a total believer in all of this.

And he pulled out these photographs--

they're, like, 4x4 police photographs

of the LaBianca murders,

and they're the most gruesome things you--you can imagine,

and on it, I saw "piggies" and "Helter Skelter" misspelled.

And at that point, I knew they'd done it.

- Stovitz talked too much.

He--he loved telling this story,

and he just told us everything.

And we had offered to turn off the tape recorder at any time,

and he never asked for it.

- Mr. Stovitz had a private, confidential conversation

with these people from the "Rolling Stones."

They gave him their promises, their assurances

that they would not put it into their publication.

They breached that agreement, and they are the ones, I think,

who violated the gag rule.

This was an obscure article in a periodical

with limited circulation.

- The district attorney was somewhat upset,

and he said to Mr. Stovitz,

"Aaron, if you carry on this way, you know,

you're gonna be taken off the case."

- The Manson trial was going on at a time in our society

when everything was chaotic.

The Vietnam War was raging overseas,

and there had been two major assassinations.

And then to have these crazy "hippies,"

as they called them then, had engineered

one of the most ghastly crimes in American history,

it was something that

just turned everybody's minds around.

They said, "What is going on in this world now?"

And so the Manson trial became symbolic

of everything evil that was happening in society.

- The world is getting crazy.

- All the elements are present for one of the most

sensational murder trials in American history.

Seven people, brutally murdered,

in the glare of Hollywood publicity.

Involvement of a mystical hippie clan,

which despised the straight, affluent society.

Young girls, supposedly under the spell

of a bearded Svengali, allegedly masterminded

the seven murders.

- It was testing the justice system,

and whether it could cope.

And at times, it appeared it could not.

- ♪ As we watch

♪ This world burn

♪ A simple truth, so hard to learn ♪

♪ When things go wrong, it's hard to see ♪

♪ It's not just you

♪ But also me

♪ I will burn this

♪ World to the ground

- Greg, move your head!