Manson’s Real Motives for Murder & the Context for Malice Aforethought

Manson’s Real Motives for Murder & the Context for Malice Aforethought

Peter Chiaramonte

The first time I read Helter Skelter in 1976—where my novel begins—I found the writing, if not the logic or characterization—majestic. More recently, reading Jeff Guinn’s Manson I felt just the opposite: the logic was sound but the writing as mundane as Curt Gentry’s was polished. For insight, I found Roman, by Polanski, most enlightening and entertaining. But the mainstream source that I found both suggestive and revealing about our times and culture overall, was Jonathan Gould’s wonderful book about The Beatles, Britain, and America, Can’t Buy Me Love.

 

By putting this entire catastrophe within confirmable frameworks I hoped to better comprehend—among other unsolved mysteries about this case—why music producer Terry Melcher, and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, didn’t go to the police right away—before the LaBiancas were assaulted—and explain to detectives and the District Attorney why they should be questioning Charlie Manson about what happened at 10050 Cielo Drive?

So You Want to Be a Rock ’n Roll Star…?

            Where’s the distinction in that?

 

When his (delusional) preordained rock stardom in 1969 just wasn’t happening, Charlie became ever-more paranoid and violent. He could feel the heat closing in. He knew he would need lots of money to pack up his Family and hide out in Death Valley. That is, he imagined, before the Black Panthers invaded Spahn Ranch and attacked him. Because those were the kinds of delusions this bozo was under. Because Charlie Manson was a racist, his hallucinations tended to take that form. That’s what you see when you’re on acid. The distinction between what’s going on inside you and what you see on the outside become blended, blurred and disturbed. In Charlie’s case—metaphorically speaking—this was a short ride on an awfully swift bus.

Excerpt from No Journey’s End, chapter 7, PLEASE TELL ME YOU’VE MISSED ME:

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Both Leslie’s boyfriend, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charlie Manson imagined themselves making inroads into the recording industry. The whole reason Manson decided to move his Family to LA in the first place was to make a name for himself in rock music. Both he and Bobby felt they had all the talent they needed in hand. What they lacked were contacts directly inside the business.

Then, along comes Dennis Wilson of the rock band The Beach Boys, driving his silver GT 250 Ferrari. Wilson stopped one day to pick up Patricia Krenwinkel and another Manson girl called ‘Yeller,’ who had their thumbs out. The girls went with Dennis back to his place for a full-on sexual frolic like the three- some in A Clockwork Orange—the scene Stanley Kubrick set to the rhythm of the “William Tell Overture” in fast forward.

The Manson girls didn’t really know who Wilson was, but, when they told Charlie about the event, he knew right away what that meant. He insisted the girls take him and the rest of the Family back to Wilson’s house at 14400 Sunset Boulevard—a beautiful log cabin estate first owned by Will Rogers. It was similar, in fact, to the one Wilson’s friend, Terry Melcher, rented with his girlfriend actress Candice Bergen way up in the clouds above Benedict Canyon.

When Dennis pulled into the driveway, he could already hear loud Beatles music playing and noticed a party going on with his house full of girls running ’round naked. When he opened the door, there stood all five feet two-and-a-half inches of Charlie Manson. Manson dropped to his knees to pay homage to a rock and roll legend, first by kissing his feet, then by offering Dennis drugs and whatever, or whomever, however often he wanted. He was welcomed to have all the girls one at a time or in countless formations.

Since the girls reliably proved themselves willing to engage in whatever drug-induced sexual fantasies Dennis desired, The Beach Boys drummer consented to Charlie and these nubile groupies staying at his house, eating his food, driving his cars, and peeing in his pool, if they had to. Not known for his brains, style, or good sense, Dennis thought Charlie was some kind of deep thinker. But, more than that, he was seduced by the orgies Manson set up for him and his friends who fancied chasing sexy, naked sprites and fairies around the pool. Someone should have thought to invite Roman Polanski.

Before what there was left of Wilson’s milk of human kind- ness had completely run dry, Manson put the bite on every celebrity musician who showed up at Dennis’ door looking for a party. Besides Dennis’ famous brother, Beach Boys composer Brian Wilson, Manson was introduced to another bona fide rock legend at the house, Neil Young. One time when Young came by the house, he tried to improvise a few chords on the guitar to go with the insane lyrics that Charlie made up on the spot.

And, later on in the recording studio that Brian Wilson had in his house, Dennis had an engineer try to record some of Charlie’s singing and playing. One song Charlie thought would make him a star was sophomorically titled, “Ego is a Too Much Thing.” At least he was partially right about something. But, of course, nothing came of the demo.

Regardless, Manson kept on bugging everyone to help find him a record deal with some major label. He had started to piss some people off. People like Mo Ostin of Warner Brothers Records had heard the demo and said they weren’t interested. However, Terry Melcher, a musical producer at Columbia with more than eighty top-selling hits to his name (including those by The Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders), hired Dennis Wilson’s friend Gregg Jakobson to find him new talent. In ex- change for getting him stoned and laid on a whim, Jakobson promised Manson he would bring Terry Melcher to hear Charlie sing.

Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson finally succeeded in dragging music producer Terry Melcher to Spahn Ranch to give Charlie Manson a listen—complete with a backup chorus of naked strippers that Charlie choreographed for himself.

Jakobson said he hoped to capture the “spell” Manson and Beausoleil had cast over their rapt cult of women. But, reading this, I got the impression Jakobson might just be trying to get himself laid.

Charlie felt sure a recording contract would be soon to follow once Melcher heard him play, and he told the girls what they must do to help make this happen. Although Melcher’s assessment was that the music did not merit further time or investment—not to appear rude or ungrateful—the producer shone Charlie on.

“You’re good,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know what to do with you.”

Of course, Melcher never returned any of Manson’s phone calls, hoping that he’d get the message. He got it all right, but it wouldn’t suffice. Not by a long shot.

As Melcher and Wilson were leaving Spahn Ranch, Manson invited himself along for the ride. He took his guitar and hopped into the jump seat of Wilson’s Ferrari. When they drove Melcher home, Charlie got out to see where the son of Doris Day lived with his girlfriend Candice Bergen. He wasn’t invited in.

He and Tex Watson returned to that same address (10050 Cielo Drive) more than a few times after that, ostensibly looking for Melcher, even after Terry had moved out and the Polanskis had taken the residence over. And since Melcher kept putting him off (in order to save face), Manson reframed this rejection as an insufferable treason. And you know what they do to traitors.

Terry Melcher returned once again to hear Charlie audition at Spahn Ranch. Not so much because he’d changed his mind about Manson’s singing, but because he was partial to having sex with a cutely attractive, precocious teen named Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka ‘Quisch.’ Her name was derived from the sound most men made the first time they saw her: “Ooh whee!” Unlike Dennis Wilson—who would do just about anyone—and Gregg Jakobson who was happy to lick up the leftovers, Melcher promised to return to hear Manson audition in exchange for another romp. Somehow Candice Bergen caught on and put the nix in on that. She knew what was going on with Terry even if Charlie didn’t. And however groovy Charlie’s songs may have sounded to fanatics ripped on mesc and meth at the ranch, Manson’s songs made little impact on a veteran critic like Melcher. He went for the Quisch, not the magic.

When Melcher didn’t show up as planned, Manson went ballistic. His unwarranted sense of prerogative made him high dudgeon and fuming over this blatant rejection. He was frantic to find Terry and bring him back to the ranch so he might save face with his brethren. He drove to the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, but Melcher didn’t live there anymore. The landlord, business agent Rudi Altobelli (who was washing up in the guest house) asked Charlie to leave.

The next day, during a flight to Rome, Sharon Tate asked Altobelli, “Did that creepy-looking guy come back there to see you?”

She had been face-to-face with the Devil himself.

In order to save face and keep faith with his followers, Manson made up a tale about Melcher having deliberately betrayed him and the Family. Charlie made Terry into a villain of Biblical proportions, saying he’d promised a contract for lots of money then reneged for no reason. Surely treachery of such magnitude must be a sign of the oncoming Apocalypse? For sup- port, Manson referred his followers to what was proclaimed by The Beatles as well as the Bible. All the more reason, Manson told his disciples, for them to ready themselves and surrender to the divine magistrate of Helter Skelter. It was on.

Being on peyote and singing along around the campfire, Charlie’s visions and songs may have sounded like prophecy, but, deep down, Manson’s take on “Helter Skelter” was primarily an excuse for settling a score. And being a con man par excellence, he could make up a legend as he went along. He wanted to scare the bejesus out of everyone and get Beausoleil to clam up about who ordered the hit on Hinman and why. Besides sending Terry Melcher, Dennis Wilson and their stripe a pretty clear message, Charlie thought he could combine this myth with a plot to get Beausoleil out of jail or at least make Bobby think so. So he and the others would keep quiet about such goings on.

It angered Manson, who liked his followers to think of him as the ‘fifth Beatle’, when his message wasn’t embraced—let alone paid no attention at all. But who could blame Terry Melcher for passing on songs with such lines as “Cease to exist?” Pretty telling—though not exactly “Cortez the Killer.”

It didn’t matter how many drugs you had taken. Manson’s lyrics all sound like gibberish to me, and I’ve written a few bad poems in my time. Except that a very pretty girl I was eager to know better had at one time taken this runt and his wearisome banter to heart. So what did I know? Dennis Wilson thought he saw something in Charlie’s song about getting a girl to submit herself and let go her ego to the point that she ceased to exist. Working on his own, Wilson recast the lyrics. In his version, the singer is asking the girl to cease to resist—which was more to his liking. He changed the title to “Never Learn Not to Love,” and he and his brothers, The Beach Boys, recorded the song on their label. Thinking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Manson Family’s invasion had already cost him, Dennis listed himself as sole composer, cutting Charlie out.

When Wilson told Manson that he’d recorded his song with The Beach Boys, Charlie at first was elated. He expected “Cease to Exist” to appear on the next Beach Boys album that winter. But instead, The Beach Boys released “Never Learn Not to Love” as the B-side of their new single, “Bluebirds over the Mountain.” And, of course, there was no mention of Charles Manson.

To Charlie, this represented yet another timeless disloyalty in the long saga of persecution he’d claimed to have suffered for thousands of years. There was sure to be hellfire and fury whipped upon the backsides of those rich and famous that dared dick around with the Devil.

According to what Jakobson later wrote in Rolling Stone un- der a pseudonym, Charlie once gave Gregg a .44 caliber slug to pass along. “Tell Dennis I got one more for him,” said Manson.

In another credible report, Manson once held a knife to Wilson’s throat and asked, “How would you like if I killed you?”

Wilson tested, “Go ahead, do it.”

Fortunately for him, Charlie was more mouth than action. He’d always pissed far more than he’d drunk.

Wilson eventually cut his loses. Finally sick of all the theft, destruction and lies visited upon him by these worm-festered squatters, Dennis defaulted on his lease and left the Manson clan there on their own to await the sheriff’s eviction. All tallied— what with all the stolen items, dental treatments and serious damage to an uninsured Mercedes-Benz—Dennis Wilson was out hundreds of thousands of dollars. The medical bills alone had been staggering, especially after the girls all suffered an out- break of virulent gonorrhea.

After they were kicked out of the house on Sunset Boulevard, things back at the ranch with Charles Manson became even more crazy and violent. One sign of the changes taking place at the end of the summer of ’69 was how obsessively Manson kept playing The Beatles White Album over and over again with everyone tripping like mad whores on acid. He’d program these malleable teens with endless mantras and repetitions.

“Can you hear it? Can you hear it? Can you hear it? They’re speaking to me. They’re speaking to me. They’re speaking to me…”

Crap upon piles of crap like that ad infinitum. Can you imagine the effect that would have on your mind over time? Especially if you’d taken to dropping a hit or two of pure white Owsley acid?

Sometimes Manson needed more than drugs and hypnotic suggestion to keep the stronger-willed girls like Leslie and Patricia in line. That’s why he kept them away from outside influences that might challenge the dogmas he was spewing.

More and more of Manson’s canons had to be memorized. Junk like: society is corrupt; forget everything your parents and teachers taught you; there is no right or wrong, good or evil; life and death are the same thing; death is the next step on the way to creating a better life. What a mix: naked nymphs, programmed ego killing and moral abandonment. Something for the whole Family.

And Manson had other more conventional ways too of weaving his evil magic. Once, when Pat Krenwinkel managed to escape and get pretty far away, somehow he found her. (Just how far she got I’d be sure to ask Leslie.) That fact alone was enough to frighten her into believing there was no escaping his power. And one time when Leslie had been grumbling about being ordered to have sex with some of the bikers, Charlie threw her into his dune buggy and drove to the top of the Santa Susana Pass, where he dragged her to the edge of a steep cliff and told her, “If you want to leave me, go ahead jump.” Because that was her only alternative to staying. So Leslie ended up staying so long and doing so much and many drugs that it no longer mattered. She had little individual sense of self left and what there was had nowhere else to go at the time.

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Throughout the last half of 1969, the ranch owner George Spahn had begun asking his men to run an increasingly violent, deluded and megalomaniacal Charles Manson and his Family off of his property. This was being encouraged in particular by one of his ranch hands, Donald ‘Shorty’ Shea. The big record deal Manson was counting on never ensued and the Family had al- ready been kicked out of Wilson’s cabin on Sunset Boulevard. Things weren’t looking so rosy for Charlie.

When his preordained stardom just wasn’t happening, Charlie became ever-more paranoid and violent. He could feel the heat closing in. He knew he would need lots of money to pack up his Family and hide out in Death Valley. That is, before the Black Panthers invaded Spahn Ranch and attacked him. Because those were the kinds of delusions this bozo was under. Because Charlie Manson was a racist, his hallucinations tended to take that form. That’s what you see when you’re on acid. The distinction between what’s going on inside you and what you see on the outside become blended, blurred and disturbed.

Members of the Straight Satans motorcycle gang were of course similarly racist outlaws whom Manson hoped would become his protectors. They were planning a wild and wicked orgy up at the ranch one summer weekend. So they sent Bobby Beausoleil to buy a thousand tabs of mescaline from his “friend” Gary Hinman. Hinman, who in addition to going to graduate school at UCLA, manufactured his own methamphetamine and mescaline in the lab in his basement. The bikers later claimed the drugs were tainted and demanded their money back. So Manson seized this opportunity to embezzle even more cash from Gary, who was rumored to have recently inherited tens of thousands of dollars. At least that’s what Mary Brunner had heard and passed on to Manson.

On July 25, 1969, just two weeks before the killings at 10050 Cielo Drive and 3301 Waverly Drive, Charles Manson sent Bobby Beausoleil, Susan Atkins, and Mary Brunner (the mother of Manson’s child) to pay Hinman a visit at his house in Topanga Canyon. Since at one time they had acted as friends, at first there was no cause for alarm. Bobby had often used Gary’s place as a crash pad to hang out, fuck around and do drugs. But very soon the intruders, who came armed with a knife and a gun, began demanding their money back for the mescaline Hinman had sold them to pass on to the Satans.

When Hinman tried to grab the gun from Susan Atkins’s hand, it went off without hitting anyone. But, for even making the attempt to free himself, Beausoleil lit into Hinman and is- sued him a terrible beating. Gary still insisted he didn’t have any money to give them so they tied him to a chair and cuffed him. When he continued to resist, the whole gang took turns hammering him in the face until he eventually turned over the titles and keys to his Volkswagen and Fiat. Hinman signed them away all right, but threatened to call the police once the invaders finally left him alone. A frustrated Bobby Beausoleil telephoned Charlie back at the ranch. Manson came over with cult member Bruce Davis and brought with him a razor-sharp sword.

Manson knew if Hinman were to tell the police about all the drug and car theft dealings he had with the Straight Satans, it might lead them to investigate the shooting of Bernard Crowe, aka ‘Lotsapoppa,’ whom Manson shot and presumed he had killed only weeks before over another drug deal gone sour. Charlie had sent Tex Watson to promise suspected Black Panther associate Lotsapoppa twenty-five kilos of marijuana. They kept the $2,500 they were fronted but never delivered the pot. Crowe told them if he didn’t get his weed or his money back, he was coming up to Spahn Ranch with some pipe-wielding brothers to kill the whole Family. That’s when Charlie shot him.

Crowe survived the gunshot and never involved the police, so nobody knew—certainly not Manson, who had boasted to Family members that he’d offed a Black Panther. He hoped it would serve as a warning to others. He also worried it may have marked him for dead with the Panthers. So, in exchange for un- limited party favors with any of the girls, the Straight Satans furnished Manson with bayonets, machetes, handguns, shotguns, rifles and ammo—not a lot, but plenty enough to create havoc.

That’s where Charlie got the sword he would use to scare Gary Hinman.

Charlie threatened that if Hinman didn’t cough up all the money and shut up about the police, he was going to cut him to pieces. Hinman warned again that he would go to the cops if they didn’t leave him alone. So Charlie took his sword and struck a five-inch gash across Gary’s face that nearly sliced off his left ear. The man’s face was a bloody mess. Gary was crying and the girls were screaming and pleading with him to put an end to his own suffering. Just give them the money and be done with it.

Gary refused. Manson ordered Susan and Mary to sew up Hinman’s wounds and clean up the blood. Bobby stood watch. Charlie told him to keep putting on the heat. After Manson and Davis split from the scene (Charlie stole Hinman’s Volkswagen presumably to give to the Satans as compensation for the thou- sand bucks they’d paid for the drugs.), Atkins and Brunner stitched up Gary’s ear with a sewing needle and dental floss. Charlie left instructions for Bobby to keep up the torture and pain until Hinman succumbed.

The torment finally ended, but not abruptly, on Sunday, July 27th, after Bobby called Charlie one last time to say the torture tactic still wasn’t working.

Over the phone, Manson told Beausoleil to kill Gary Hinman, adding, “He knows too much.”

Hinman would not be the last person Charlie Manson condemned for that reason.

Hinman was stabbed five times in the chest. One or two of the wounds penetrated the sac surrounding his heart. He bled to death but not very quickly. His trio of tormentors watched for hours as he slipped into a coma, but Hinman’s lungs stubbornly continued to go on breathing, soaked as they were in his own blood. Bobby and each of the girls finally took turns smothering him with a pillow until his heart stopped beating. Once they were certain he was dead, they used his blood to write “POLITICAL PIGGY” on the wall. Bobby drew the insignia of a paw print with claws, assuming it would lead dimwitted authorities to suspect black militants were involved with the murder. Those were Manson’s instructions.

Since the Panthers’ threat he imagined had weighed heavily on Manson lately, and ever since he shot Lotsapoppa, he wanted detectives to think the Black militants had butchered Hinman over some awful drug deal gone wrong. Thus began both the real and the fake Helter Skelter. This was not a real revolution at all but rather the scam Charlie Manson used to get others to do his rancorous bidding. It was all about vengeance, paranoid delusions and money, despite what Bugliosi might have led us to think. All that shit about Helter Skelter as a race war was just a ruse.

When they hadn’t heard from him for a week, Gary’s friends went up to his house in Topanga and the first thing they noticed were the bustling torrents of insects flying in and out of the windows. Both cars were gone. Inside, they discovered the walls and floors splashed with blood and imprinted with gory inscriptions. What was left of Mr. Hinman’s corpse was shrouded in blankets of champing maggots. The whole house was thick with whirling storm clouds of red-eyed flesh flies buzzing around, like squadrons of evil jet fighters.

As ingenious and cunning as Manson and Beausoleil thought their plan was to mislead police into suspecting the Panthers may have seemed at the time, the cops didn’t buy it. Beausoleil was headed north on the run in Hinman’s Fiat when the car broke down. Highway patrolmen ran a check of the vehicle’s registration and were notified that an APB had been issued in connection with a murder. When they searched the car, police found a bloody knife in the tire well, which tests revealed had Hinman’s blood on it. They arrested and charged this criminal mastermind with cold-blooded murder.

Naturally, Charlie was worried that Bobby would cough him up to the cops. So he assured him that he had a foolproof plan for getting him off. That’s what led to the “copycat” murders at the homes of Tate and the LaBiancas, making it look like whomever killed Hinman was still out there cutting up white people’s bodies and leaving their ritual insignia on the walls in their victims’ blood.

Bobby Beausoleil was tried for the murder of Gary Hinman in November of 1969, and, remarkably, that trial ended in a hung jury. That was odd. But that just goes to show how far a pretty face can get you in Hollywood, particularly since the dunce left a bloody fingerprint at the crime scene. However, during his retrial in 1970—in return for testifying to Beausoleil’s and Atkins’s torture and killing of Hinman—Mary Brunner was granted complete immunity for her role in aiding and abetting his murder. This time the jury found Beausoleil guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to the death chamber. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison along with all the other Manson Family members who were later convicted in 1971.

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NEXT: MORE ON THE HOAX ABOUT HELTER SKELTER, HINMAN, & COPYCAT MOTIVES FOR MANSON, SERIAL KILLER