The American way of death
Elwyn Jones
The Manson Murders Vincent Bugliosi, with Curt Gentry (Bodley Head £3.95), Most murderers know their victims. Most murderers have a discernible motive for their killings. But in August, 1969, Sharon Tate and four others (not counting her child within weeks of being born) were stabbed, shot, hanged and beaten to death by people who did not know them and whom they did not know. And their motive? Not robbery, not revenge, not sex, not anger, not fear, not jealousy, but a tangled and intangible urge to "kill pigs," to start "helter-skelter," "to warn whitey" that the black revolution was coming. As if that is not confusing enough, be it noted that the killers were not blacks but whites.
At the rowdy centre of this storm of killings (to the Tate five some thirty others can be added) prawled and preached one Charles Manson, all five-foot two inches of him, then thirty-four years old. Illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute, Manson committed his first armed robbery when he was thirteen, at seventeen lost his chance of parole because "he took a razor blade and held it against another boy's throat while he sodomised him." He was already an experienced manipulator of social workers and psychiatrists. One of them stated not only his own but society's dilemma: "This boy is a poor risk for probation; on the other` hand, he has spent nine years in institutions with apparently little benefit except to take him out of circulation" (my italics). He was in circulation in 1969, and no steps were taken to revoke his parole even though he had been charged that year, among other things, with stealing motor cars, possession of narcotics, committing rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Manson thought of himself and was thought of by his Family, as Jesus Christ and as Satan. The influences upon him, and thus upon his devoted followers, ranged from Hitler through Scientology, to the Beatles, whose "White Album" contained for Manson a mess of meanings and prophecies some of which he made gruesomely real. One of his followers put Manson's creed this chilling way: "Whatever is necessary, you do it. When somebody needs to be killed, there's no wrong. You do it, and then you move on. And you pick up a child and move him to the desert. You pick up as many children as you can and you kill whoever gets into your way. That is us." They, or some of them, were convicted after the longest criminal trial in American history, a trial in which the principal author of this book, Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecutor. He fought hard, frequently, and against almost everybody: "Look Aaron," he told his colleague from the District Attorney's Office, "I'm fighting the judge, I'm fighting Kanarek, I'm not going to fight you. I've got enough problems." Kanarek was one of the most boringly interesting problems. This "Toscannini of tedium" appeared for Manson. It was of him that a judge in another trial asked, "Are you paid by the word or by the hour that you can consume the court's time? . . . You ramble back and forth with no chronology of events, to just totally confuse everybody, to the utter frustration of the jury, the witnesses, and the judge." This is one of the points at which (allowing for the split infinitive which not many British judges indulge in) the American trial comes uncomfortably close to experience at the Old Bailey, which is of longer standing than recent appeal court judgements would suggest. We have plenty of counsel who "take interminable lengths of time in cross-examining on the most minute, unimportant details." And we have an increasing number of defendants who are becoming expert at distracting, disrupting and headline-catching tactics.
The book also tempts one to draw uneasy parallels between police organisation in Los Angeles in 1969 and in Britain in 1975. The Tate murders occurred on August 9. On August 10 Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were murdered. Two separate squads of detectives were set up and they didn't talk to each other. The first "Homicide Investigation Progress ,Report — Tate." ran to thirty-three pages. Nowhere in it was there any mention of the LaBianca murders. In turn, the first seventeen-page report of progress into the LaBianca murders , didn't refer to the Tate murders. Yet the geographical proximity was close; the motive was as seemingly impenetrable; there were ghastly similarities involving the brutality of the wounds inflicted and the surely striking joint use of the victims' blood to spell out "pigs" and death to them.Without seeking to create analogies, let it be noted that Manson was almost certainly involved in the murder of someone known as the Black Panther, and that it took a television camera crew to locate some fairly important evidence in the Tate killings.
The book is subtitled "an investigation into motive" and it is here, reasonably enough, that it is least authoritative. Mr, Bugliosi felt, properly, that he needed in the course of the trial to establish the fact of the dominating influence Manson held over his Family. So he had to try to establish not so much a motive as an ideology. It is not one that is easily definable. Hopefully, it is not one readily acceptable even by most "drop-outs". That it has its roots in the conflicts and the terrors of society at large is uncomfortably true. Curt Gentry, co-author, is not identified. I suspect that he is a hard-boiled and very skilled editor. Between them he and Mr Bugliosi have produced a fascinating, horrifying, detailed and decently written book which is also remarkably good value with its 502 pages plus illustrations.
The vital footnote — and society's dilemma — is that in 1978 Manson and his associates will be eligible for parole. Before we strike a holier-(or more real-) than-thou attitude, let us not forget the importance of the pressure currently being exerted to free our very own Myra Hindley, she of the Moors. She didn't know her victims either.
Elwyn Jones has been the principal writer of such television programmes as Z Cars, Softly Softly, Task Force and Barlow
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