Inside
It would seem a simple matter-once a warrant
has been issued on seven counts of murder-to extradite
the accused for trial. Los Angeles Deputy District
Attorney Vincent Bugliosi certainly thought it
would be. In fact, I ended up remaining in Texas
for nine months before I was taken to California.
My extradition case went all the way to the United
States Supreme Court (which, in declining to admit
it, effectively sent me to Los Angeles) and the
major result of the nine-month delay was to grant
me a separate trial from Charlie and the women.
My attorney in Texas was Bill Boyd, the son of
Roland Boyd (who'd counseled me and my family
several years before in the matter of the stolen
typewriters). At that time the younger Boyd had
been district attorney for Collin County, but
now - his term completed-he had returned to private
practice in the family firm. Roland Boyd was a
big man with the courtly manner and grand Southern
sheen of another generation of gentlemen, but
Bill was a mild, soft-spoken man with glasses,
the beginnings of baldness, and a conservative
taste in his clothes. He was also, as the next
nine months would prove, a tenacious fighter for
what he believed was right.
We had our first meeting the morning after my
arrest, in a dingy little upstairs room at the
jail, a room which would become very familiar
to me over the next nine months. My parents were
present, and I continued to insist that I had
no idea what the warrant was all about. (Chief
Davis had not yet held his press conference-it
took place at 2:00 P.M. Los Angeles time.) It
was only after they had gone back to Copeville
that I called Boyd back and told him that there
was one thing that had happened in California-I
had been involved in the Tate LaBianca killings.
Lawyers, like poker players, need poise - and
Bill Boyd handled the moment well. We would need
to talk a lot, he said.
Two detectives from Los Angeles arrived later
that day, assuring the waiting newsmen that they
would be taking me back to Los Angeles within
a few days at the most (apparently assuming I
would waive extradition). They had not reckoned
with Bill Boyd.
At the time of my arrest, there was only one
piece of "hard" evidence (physical evidence
as opposed to the testimony of witnesses) against
me: a fingerprint taken from the front door of
the Tate house which matched a fingerprint of
mine made when I was arrested on my belladonna
trip of April 23. (Since the maid at the Tate
residence had washed down the door the day of
the murders, there was no way this print could
have been explained away as the result of an earlier
visit, even if I'd wanted to try.)
The D.A.'s office knew a great deal more than
what that one print could have told them, however.
They'd gotten information from some of the girls
arrested in the mid-October raid on Barker Ranch
and also from Straight Satan Danny DeCarlo and
a buddy of his-Al Springer-who'd spent the two
days after the murders at Spahn. Most of all,
Sadie hadn't been able to resist the urge to share
her secret. She'd done a lot of talking to some
of her fellow prisoners at the Sybil Brand Institute
for Women in Los Angeles.
Sadie had been arrested with the rest of the
Family during the three-day raid on Barker Ranch,
and while she was still in custody in Independence,
Kitty Lutesinger (Bobby Beausoleil's girl friend
who was five months pregnant with his child) had
implicated her in the Hinman murder. When interviewed
by detectives on that case, Sadie had talked freely,
throwing all the blame on Bobby. She apparently
thought the police already knew everything she
had to say, anyway.
She was booked for murder and transferred to
Los Angeles and Sybil Brand. While she was there,
she began trying to impress some of the other
inmates-first Virginia Graham, then later Ronnie
Howard-with tales of the Family and Charlie, finally
confiding that she had been one of the Tate-LaBianca
killers. (In fact, she had never been inside the
LaBianca house, a point she finally made clear
to Ronnie Howard. She exaggerated other things,
however, such as claiming that she had stabbed
Sharon and then tasted her blood.) After a great
deal of trouble with prison bureaucracy, Ronnie
Howard finally managed to reach the D.A. with
what she had heard.
Later, Susan-Sadie herself told her story to the
D.A.'s office and then to the grand jury (a more
factual version that left out her claim to having
stabbed Sharon Tate) and even had it published
in the Los Angeles Times and various European
papers as "Susan Atkins' Story of Two Nights
of Murder." However, by the time she and
the others were tried, Susan would have repudiated
her confession and the printed account. During
the trial itself-along with Katie and Leslie-she
would try to lay the entire blame for the murders
on me, thus absolving Charlie. By that time, though,
the true story had been told by Linda Kasabian,
the gentle, frightened girl who never actually
harmed anyone (and, in fact, saved one life-the
actor in Venice) and begged us to stop what was
happening at Cielo Drive after it was too late.
Linda received immunity for her testimony, though
she didn't request it, and later explained that
she did not run directly to the police when the
slaughter began at Cielo Drive because she was
afraid of what Manson might do to her little girl,
Tanya, who had been left at Spahn Ranch. She did
escape with Tanya several days after the LaBianca
murders.
Much of this was months down the road, however.
At the time of my arrest, the Los Angeles County
District Attorney's office had a fingerprint,
Susan's story (as told to Ronnie Howard), and
testimony from a number of Family members and
fringe followers like Danny DeCarlo. They also
had a mountain of publicity.
It was the publicity that led Bill Boyd to fight
my extradition for nine months. As Boyd explained
it to me, pretrial publicity is a peculiar thing.
Traditionally, a juror could not be disqualified
(beyond a certain number of automatic challenges
granted both prosecution and defense) for simply
being exposed to it. Rather, only if that publicity
had prejudiced the prospective juror's opinion
as to the guilt or innocence of the accused was
the person not permitted to sit in judgment.
Considering our modern means of mass communication,
this made sense. Otherwise, no one but recluses
and the simple could serve on juries for widely
publicized, "high profile" crimes. However,
the question of whether or not a juror's opinions
had been influenced by what he or she had seen,
heard, or read before a trial was pretty much
up to that person to decide. If a prospective
juror claimed not to be prejudiced, most courts
would accept that claim at face value.
Such was the traditional interpretation of the
law. But there were precedents for Boyd's contention
that if pretrial publicity is extensive enough,
no one exposed to that barrage of prejudicial
information can reasonably be expected to form
an unbiased opinion strictly on the merits of
the case as presented in court. An important decision
was Rideau v. the State of Louisiana, in which
the United States Supreme Court had ruled that-after
a confession made by the accused was videotaped
by the police and shown three times on local television-none
of the 29,000 people in the area from which the
jury was drawn was qualified. Thus, the High Court
reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial.
That was the precedent. What was unprecedented
was Boyd's contention that the massive publicity
of the Tate - LaBianca case, combined with the
sensational nature of the crimes themselves, made
the entire state of California incapable of providing
me with a fair trial and that the venue should
therefore be changed to a court outside that state.
To protect my right to an unbiased jury, he argued,
I should not be returned to the state of California.
The fact that California had no legal provision
for transferring a criminal case to a jurisdiction
outside of the state was their problem, not ours,
he said. The right of the accused to an unprejudiced
jury superseded whatever difficulties that right
might raise for prosecutors or courts.
Boyd was no cynic. He knew I was guilty and his
intent was not to get me off. He simply believed
firmly that under our system of justice every
person-no matter how obvious his guilt or how
horrible his crime-deserves a fair trial. He also
believed, given what he was learning from me about
the Family and Charlie's control and use of consciousness-altering
drugs, that a fair judgment of my guilt would
involve an argument of "diminished capacity,"
since he was convinced I had reached a condition
under Manson's domination where I was not in control
of, nor fully responsible for, my actions. He
was certain that these considerations would be
lost on a jury in California, especially Southern
California, where not only had there been tremendous
publicity and widespread fear generated by the
killings, but where a local judge would be under
greater pressure from his constituency to "hang"
the accused, whatever the circumstances.
Whether or not his concerns were justified, Bill
Boyd insisted up to the time I was finally extradited
on September 11 of the following year that sending
me to California would not serve justice. While
I spent month after month in the little cell in
the Collin County Jail, all I knew was that the
longer he kept me in Texas, the longer it would
be before I had to face whatever was coming.
While later published accounts of my "special
treatment" while I was in jail in McKinney
were exaggerated, it was not a terrible life.
The cell was very small and stuffy, with the noise
and greasy steam of the nearby kitchen pouring
in most of the day. But my parents had brought
me a small television and Boyd provided me with
a tape deck and some Beatles' tapes. I did yoga
exercises which Charlie had taught us at Spahn
and back bends and sometimes I ran in place.
I was still a vegetarian, so my mother brought
me food each time my folks visited (once a day
until sometime into the next year, when they started
coming every other day). Since there was no attorney/client
conference room in the old jail in McKinney, whenever
they or Boyd came to see me, we'd all troop upstairs
to the dingy office on the second floor. There
was an adjacent bathroom with a tub, so I'd bathe
and talk to them through the door.
Boyd claims that my cousin Tom never stretched
the law on my behalf, that he simply enforced
it more rigidly for my protection than was usually
the case. Many extraditions, Boyd said, were little
more than kidnappings arranged with the connivance
of local law enforcement, since-once the suspect
is in the state requesting extradition-questions
as to how he got there become moot. Boyd explained
that Tom was within his rights in refusing to
let the Los Angeles detectives even see me. But
I must confess that, as the months wore on, I
was often sent upstairs to meet my folks or my
lawyer without any guard or restraints. I would
walk by the open door to the sidewalk outside
without anything but my own laziness to keep me
from skipping. To be fair, in the eyes of my jailers
I was a model prisoner who earned their respect
and confidence. And I think in all their minds
was the conviction that "those people"
out in California had to be mistaken, that a good
hometown boy like me couldn't have done what "they"
were claiming. Sometimes I'd fantasize bolting
out that open door and starting to run-down the
dusty streets, out into the level countryside
where there was plenty of space and air-maybe
going fishing. Each time, though, I'd glance out
at the light and life and then turn and trudge
upstairs.
I don't remember when I finally told my parents
the truth. Whenever it was, they refused to believe
me, at least my mother did. She would sob, insisting
I wasn't guilty, that the drugs were just twisting
my mind, and I'd torment her by going on and on
about how beautiful Sharon's face had been as
she was pleading for her life, just before I cut
her. Sometimes I thought my head would split open
with the effort of trying to convince them that
it was all true. Sometimes I'd explode with rage,
attacking my mother verbally, telling her if she
didn't act better I'd tell the deputies not to
let her come and see me anymore. Out of the hell
that was stewing inside me, I caused those two
helpless people more pain than they had probably
ever imagined was possible. But I couldn't see
that at the time. All I knew was the warfare going
on inside my brain between Charlie's reality and
theirs, two great spiritual powers battling for
my soul.
My other Family didn't forget me. I got letters
from the girls who weren't in jail, especially
Squeaky Fromme and Gypsy (Catherine Share). "Why
haven't you written?" they kept asking (Boyd
had told me to sever all contact with the Family),
and in one note Squeaky advised me to get in contact
with Daye Shinn, a lawyer in Los Angeles who was
representing Susan Atkins and seemed willing to
go along with the Family's plan to protect Charlie
at all costs. "If you contact any other lawyer
it will be more difficult for us to help you,"
one letter advised. But mostly it was just rambling,
rhyming nonsense: ". . . circle as in circle
as in living o'bla . . . fool baby drool spool
of thread in my bed, as in yours as is all our
love . . . ." (In this and the following
quote, punctuation and spelling are as in the
original.) Sometimes it wasn't hard to read the
message behind the string of words, as when one
of them wrote:
Time to call time from behind you the illusion
has been just a dream. Valley of death and I'll
find you now is when on a sunshine beam songs
from up out of the dungeons from between the teeth
of the lions who know not what they do-& do
not wish to. Here we belong in love-the song always
sung-the voices in separate cells the heart together
as One dwells in toes and fingers and soft dreams
and the holecost to come quick upon their heads.
If they could be warned-but they can't for they
live in the past and know nothing of now.
No sense is sense, and beneath the strange flow
the sense was all too clear. Don't give up. Helter
Skelter may be taking its time, but it will come
and we are one-one with each other, one with Charlie,
one in waiting. But were we? Was I? Was I part
of Charlie's Family or my parents' family-their
life or his? Who was I? What was I? Was there
an I?
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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