On Trial
I was held in Atascadero State Hospital from
October 31, 1970, to February 14, 1971. The ambulance
that took me up from the county jail passed fields
of pumpkins, and I thought of Halloweens at home
when I was a kid. Late that night, as we pulled
off the freeway in Atascadero, I remembered the
speeding ticket Dean Moorehouse and I had gotten
two and a half years before in Terry Melcher's
XKE. How had all that talk of love brought me
to this?
I was too weak to walk, so was taken inside on
a gurney. There were only two things in my mind:
the certainty that Christ, whatever and whoever
He was, was with me, so everything would be all
right, and a warning from Sam Bubrick not to speak
to anybody about the murders.
When I woke up the next morning, strapped to
a cot, there was something strange happening:
daylight was pouring into the room. At both Los
Angeles jails you never saw real sunlight, only
the glaring electric bulbs that ran night and
day.
When I got a little stronger (they were spoon-feeding
me), I was moved to a new room that had nothing
but a mattress on the floor and a hole in one
corner for a toilet. It was to be my home for
three weeks, while the doctors and medical assistants
spent hours talking with me, or rather at me.
I responded very little, especially when they
would probe for information about the killings.
Finally, one afternoon I blurted out to one of
the doctors, my chief tormentor, that Charlie
had me so programmed that I could kill anyone,
on any day, even him. I meant, if Charlie told
me to, but the doctor screamed to the MTAs (Medical
Trained Assistants who served as combination orderlies
and guards): "He just threatened to kill
me; you heard him!"
At night I was stripped to shorts and socks and
given one thin blanket in the apparently unheated
room. Even in California, winter nights are cold,
and my strongest memory of the place is shivering
in the dark. Later, a guard would tell me that
this room was the last place the state of California
had to put you-after that there was nothing left
but a box.
I was eventually moved to a regular cell, and
each day the main activity was trying to get me
to eat and checking my weight to see when I would
be strong enough to return to Los Angeles. Some
of the MTAs (who assisted at so-called group therapy
where we would sit in a circle of eight and try
to think of things to say that would please them)
were certain that I wasn't eating meat because
I wanted to stay too sick to go to trial. One
afternoon they took me into an empty office and
held a piece of beef under my nose.
"Eat this," one of them told me.
"No."
I suddenly doubled over as another one of them
started karate-chopping me on the neck and ribs.
Then he popped me just under the sternum, and
the next thing I knew I was waking up in an oxygen
mask, my face and limbs blue. When I was conscious
again, the three of them took me back to my room
and stripped me, checking for bruises. Later,
a hospital psychiatrist would pass this off in
court as "wrestling therapy" intended
to bring out my aggressions so I could "deal
with them." This peculiar therapy was not
all that unusual in Ward 14. Patients who got
out of hand, or sometimes were simply disliked
by certain MTAs, often disappeared into one of
the back rooms for a therapeutic beating.
I finally got a job setting up the "chow
carts" and was allowed extra vegetables as
a reward. By February my weight was back up to
128 pounds, so I was sent to Los Angeles on a
bus with a number of other inmates. It was like
a vacation, sitting at the window and watching
the countryside slide by, full of light and air
and life. Even the freeway made me want to laugh
for joy.
I'd only been back in the County Jail for a few
days when I was called down to the visiting room.
It was Brenda (Nancy Pitman) and one of the young
boys who'd hung around on the edges of the Family.
All I could do was stare at their foreheads-they
had torn ragged X marks in the flesh. Later I
was told that they were copying Charlie, who did
it to show the court that he had X-ed himself
out of the establishment's world. I refused to
see any Family members again.
On March 29, 1971, Charlie, Susan, Leslie, and
Katie were all found guilty of first-degree murder
with a penalty of death. Susan turned to the jury
and screamed: "Better lock your doors and
watch your own kids." On April 19, Judge
Charles Older formally sentenced each of them
to the gas chamber. When the decision was announced,
one of the Family girls who'd been keeping vigil
outside the courthouse skrieked into waiting television
cameras: "Death? That's what you're all going
to get!"
On May 10 I entered a plea of "not guilty
by reason of insanity" before Judge Adolph
Alexander, who by coincidence was a personal friend
of Sam Bubrick's.
I spent the following summer talking to psychiatrist
after psychiatrist, having electroencephalograms
made, taking tests, telling Bubrick everything
I could remember about my use of drugs, Manson's
domination, and my mental state at the time of
the murders. Bubrick was convinced we could at
least have the charge reduced from first- to second-degree
murder on the basis of diminished mental capacity,
if not win an acquittal and have me hospitalized.
When I was alone, I'd read the Bible. Gradually,
more of it began to open up to me. Things I should
have known all my life-raised in a religious home
and taken to a Christian church-somehow now started
to make sense to me for the first time. My understanding
was groping and incomplete, but I caught the first
glimpses of what I would know more clearly later:
that my own horrors were part of a larger horror,
a whole world gone wrong because creatures made
by and for a loving God (not the bearded judge
I'd imagined when I was a kid) tried to be gods
themselves and run their world without Him. That
in no way took away my responsibility for what
I'd done, what I'd allowed myself to become, but
it explained why, when I had opened myself to
whatever was around me in this broken world, what
flooded the emptiness inside me was demonic and
deadly.
I began to see, too, that even for guilt as gross
as mine, a penalty had already been paid. A death
penalty, carried by God Himself in His Son Jesus.
I could see easily how the power of death and
destruction ruled this present world, or seemed
to-I'd served that power, expressed through one
diabolical man who wanted to be a god. Slowly
I began to see, as well, the power of God's love
to overcome that death and destruction, to heal
it, not just abstractly but immediately and specifically-for
me. Even for me.
If my self had been shattered into a thousand
disjointed pieces, the God who made that self
to begin with could mend it. If I had so torn
apart my consciousness by a dozen different mind-bending
drugs that I was barely human anymore, God could
heal what I'd done to myself.
But what about what I'd done to others, to seven
others and one never born? Nothing could make
that right. No, Chaplain Goffigan told me, but
it could be forgiven.
Somehow, in all those years in church, I'd missed
the incredible news that church was supposed to
be all about: that the Creator of all there is
had become part of His own Creation; that He did
it for love and that He let His creatures, people
like us, kill Him so that we could live-so that
we could be free from the death that was the only
thing left for us once we turned away from Life
Himself. That was what love was all about: God,
dying for us in His Son, to put an end to the
death that is our living without Him and to make
new life out of the death that seems to end our
lives.
Charlie's trip had been death, but this Jesus
promised life. Charlie had taught me to fear so
I could love, but this Bible said in 1 John 4:18
that perfect love destroyed all our fear. If only
it could be true. Yet it was! Hadn't I learned
that when I was strapped to the cot in the hospital
and He'd made it so clear that He was with me?
That was what love was like, what I'd felt then.
Slowly-as I read and tried haltingly to talk
to God with words in my head-the cross I'd seen
in all those old Bible illustrations made more
and more sense, because at that cross the Son
of God had taken everything that mankind had bent
and twisted and perverted in God's good Creation
onto Himself.
If it was true, that meant that God didn't turn
away from anything I'd dragged myself into. God
didn't turn away from Family members squirming
together in mindless sexual orgies-He took that
on Himself and nailed it to the cross. God didn't
turn away from the destruction I'd wreaked on
my mind and body-that too was spiked through and
crucified. He didn't even turn away from those
two nights of butchery. He took all that anguish
and horror. He took the guilt of my bloody hands,
and that, too-even that, if I would let go of
it-could be nailed up, done away with. It seemed
impossible, too good to be true, but the Bible
said it and Chaplain Goffigan said it. Something
inside of me said it, too. There could be light,
even in my darkness.
I might have to die for what I'd done, as Charlie
and Sadie and Leslie and Katie were supposed to
die, but even if I were executed, the eternal
death, the death of the true Bottomless Pit that
Charlie so appropriately distorted into his hellish
vision of heaven, that death was broken by Christ
for me. All I had to do was accept what had been
done for me-say yes.
As best as I could in my mental state, I think
I did say yes, I think the yes had somehow been
said several months before as I lay strapped to
that cot repeating Psalm 23 over and over. But
it was a yes that would take time to have its
effect.
During my trial, Prosecutor Bugliosi would insist
that my claim to feel remorse was untrue, just
as my apparent mental collapse was a fake as far
as he was concerned. But he was wrong. As much
as my scarred conscience was capable of feeling
anything at the time, I had genuine sorrow for
what I had done, for the unspeakable pain I had
caused both the victims and those who loved them.
But he was right if he meant that what I felt
was still far less than what a person who had
not spent two years blasting all trace of humanity
out of him would feel. When I came to trial on
August 2, 1971, I was more than I had been when
Manson had reduced me to nothing, but I was a
long way from what God, by His grace, would make
me, and farther still from what I trust I'll someday
be in Him.
It was strange, but sitting in judge Alexander's
courtroom, listening to the trial that would presumably
determine whether I lived or died, I felt practically
nothing. Even the fact that my mother was in the
audience each day, seeing and hearing all the
horror of what the son she'd been so proud of
had done and become, even that didn't really touch
me. When she came up to, the defense table one
morning early in the trial and put her arms around
me, I pulled away. I didn't want to feel any more
than I had to, there was enough reason for anguish
already.
The first witnesses were Paul Tate, Sharon's
father, and Steven Parent's dad, Wilfred. Watching
them, listening to them give evidence as to when
and where they'd last seen the people they'd loved
so much, the people I'd destroyed, I felt more
deeply than ever before the reality of what we'd
done those nights, but I couldn't show it. What
was going on inside me was somehow unconnected
with my body. I sat quietly in my chair at the
defense table each day-dressed in the shirt and
tie and blazer that Bugliosi was so sure were
for effect-sat with my Bible in front of me and
my mouth sagging in an attempt to breathe. In
the holding tank during recesses and before court
started in the morning, I'd read that book, trying
to draw out all the life that was in it for me.
Sometimes on days we weren't in court, Bubrick
would bring my mother to visit me at the jail,
but there was little I could say. She was hearing
too much in court as it was, sitting almost motionless
behind the dark glasses she always wore in case
she wanted to cry. She never did cry in that courtroom,
even with the enormity of what she heard. She
saved her tears for nighttime in the squalid little
room she'd rented in the Astor Apartments on Hill
Street, within walking distance of the court in
downtown Los Angeles. She didn't have access to
a car, so each day she trekked to the court and
every Sunday she'd walk several miles to a large
Methodist church in the heart of the city. She
never missed a Sunday, even though the minister
made a point of ignoring her after her first visit,
when she introduced herself in hopes he might
give her some spiritual support and encouragement.
"I guess city Methodists just aren't like
country Methodists at home," she once said
wistfully.
For someone who grew up on Perry Mason television
dramas, the pace of an actual murder trial was
excruciatingly slow. I did learn some things I
had not known before, however. One was that in
our orgy of death we'd missed the caretaker William
Garretson, who was a few hundred feet away, across
the swimming pool in a guest house listening to
music while the slaughter went on. I had actually
heard about him from one of my lawyers before
the trial began, but now I saw him: a nervous,
thin boy about my age. He avoided my eyes. I'm
still amazed that he didn't hear the shots or
Frykowski's screams for help, but as Bugliosi
later said in his book, sounds did strange things
in the canyons.
I also found out we'd missed almost a hundred
dollars in cash in the Tate house, most of it
in Jay Sebring's wallet, and I learned for the
first time the full extent of our ferocity. Los
Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi laid it
out carefully in his precise, high-pitched voice:
Sharon Tate, stabbed sixteen times (any five of
the wounds in and of themselves fatal); Abigail
Folger, stabbed twenty-eight times; Voytek Frykowski,
stabbed fifty-one times (seven of the wounds fatal),
struck over the head with a blunt object thirteen
times (the wounds collectively fatal), and shot
twice. It went on and on, Deputy Medical Examiner
David Katsuyama replacing Noguchi for descriptions
of the LaBianca victims. I kept wondering how
I could have, we could have, struck so many times.
Later a defense psychiatrist, Dr. Ira Frank, would
explain that speed sometimes creates a phenomenon
called "preservation"-the mechanical
repetition of a manual act or series of acts.
That was how it had been, over and over, again
and again, my arm like a machine, at one with
the blade.
Dean Moorehouse made an appearance. I had not
seen him since the day over three years before
when he'd taken off for his second trial in Ukiah.
He had not changed. When asked to state his occupation,
he answered: "Turning people on to the truth."
The former Methodist minister went on to say in
his testimony that the more acid I'd taken the
more and more beautiful a person I'd become. I
wondered how beautiful Dean would have thought
I was at 10050 Cielo Drive on August 9, or at
3301 Waverly Drive the following night.
Linda Kasabian was the star witness for the prosecution
and she repeated the story she'd told at the trial
of Charlie and the girls. It was the truth and
it was horrible. My mother sat stiffly in the
back of the courtroom, hearing the details for
the first time. On her way down the corridor afterward,
a photographer snapped her picture. She managed
to get away before a reporter could ask her how
it had felt to hear Linda's description of her
son battering a man to death.
Later, my mother-along with Richard Carson and
the onion farmer I'd worked for so many summers-testified
about the kind of person I'd been before I left
for California. Rich went on to say that once
I'd joined the Family, I seemed to have lost my
identity and any capacity for emotion.
Then I took the stand. Despite some of the truth
I'd begun to see through reading the Bible and
talking to Chaplain Goffigan, self-preservation
won out in court and I admitted only what I felt
I had to, what the prosecution already knew. I
admitted shooting or stabbing everyone at the
Tate house except Sharon. I denied killing her
since Bugliosi and a previous jury were convinced
Susan Atkins had done it. I claimed that Linda
had driven to 10050 Cielo Drive, and tried to
lay all the evidence of premeditation on Charlie
or one of the girls. Also, since all the other
witnesses to the events outside the LaBianca house
had said that Charlie went in alone to tie up
the victims, I went along with that story, figuring
it made me look that much less responsible. I
closed my testimony by saying that, at the time,
the murders and the events around them had not
seemed real to me, and that only since then had
I developed an awareness of the reality of what
I'd done and begun to feel remorse for it.
As both sides anticipated, the real focus of
the trial was a battle between psychiatric experts
as to whether or not I was insane. The defense
called eight witnesses who testified that I was
a paranoid schizophrenic (from intensive and chronic
ingestion of drugs and hallucinogenics), that
I had suffered organic brain damage, that my I.
Q. had sunk from 120 to 89, that I was an insecure,
dependent, immature personality type, and that
I had been part of a folie a deux (a shared madness
between two or more intimately related people).
The witnesses all spoke with absolute assurance
and presented various medical, neurological, and
psychiatric tests to prove that I was insane and
therefore not truly responsible for what I had
done.
The prosecution had its own slate of expert psychologists,
psychiatrists, and neurosurgeons. They were equally
certain that I was either faking mental illness
or suffering a psychological disturbance that
was not so severe as to render me unable to commit
deliberate, premeditated murder and know what
it meant, morally and legally. There was no doubt,
they said, that under the law I was fully responsible
for what I had done on those two nights.
The jury believed Mr. Bugliosi's experts, but
apparently Judge Alexander found ours more convincing.
As Bugliosi later complained, the judge did show
enormous skepticism toward the prosecution witnesses
and equally obvious confidence in ours, and he
did say, on the day I was sentenced, that if he
had tried the case without a jury, he would possibly
have arrived at a different verdict.
Long before the trial ended, I was quite certain
that I would be convicted (though somehow I didn't
think I would be sentenced to death). Bubrick
must have also felt we were fighting a losing
battle, since in his summation he suddenly resurrected
a theory which the girls had tried to use in the
earlier trial. He accused poor Linda Kasabian
of being the primary culprit, the real ringleader
who directed the murders at Cielo Drive and was
rewarded for her success by driving the car the
next night. It was patently ridiculous, but Bubrick
closed his remarks by, pointing out that while
I was in high school "back in Texas playing
football, what was Linda Kasabian doing? She was
going from commune to commune, traveling from
man to man, living off boyfriends, shooting speed,
selling drugs, living by her wits." The jury
still found her testimony compelling-and on October
12, 1971, found me guilty of seven counts of first-degree
murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.
The sanity phase of the trial was short, and
the verdict a foregone conclusion. On October
19, after only two and a half hours of deliberation,
the jury decided I was sane when the murders were
committed.
On October 21, it took them six hours to determine
that I deserved the death penalty. It had begun
with music and love in a Sunset Boulevard mansion
and now it would end with Charlie and me together
again on San Quentin's Death Row.
(Will You Die For Me? Copyright 1978, by Ray
Hoekstra. Published by Cross Roads Publications,
Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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