Defense attorneys Daye Shinn, Irving Kanarek, and Paul Fitzgerald, and prosecutors Steven Kay, Donald Musich, and I all took the stand. All six denied under oath giving the statement to Farr. At least two of the six were apparently lying. All I know is that I didn’t give Farr the statement. As for who did, the reader’s guess is probably as good as mine.
Judge Older held Farr in civil contempt and sentenced him to an indefinite jail term. He served forty-six days in the Los Angeles County Jail before being freed by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on January 11, 1973, pending the outcome of a new appeal. Had Farr been cited for criminal contempt and given consecutive sentences, the maximum penalty would have been sixty-five days in jail. But Older cited him for civil contempt, and gave him an indefinite sentence, which could mean that if the higher courts rule against Farr, he could remain in jail for as long as fifteen years, until fifty-five-year-old Charles Older reaches seventy, the mandatory age of retirement!
Many, though not all, of the hard-core Manson Family members are now serving time in various penal institutions. Other Family members split to follow new leaders. Cathy Gillies, according to information I received, was a “mom” with a motorcycle gang. Maria Alonzo was arrested in March 1974 and charged with plotting to kidnap a foreign consul general to secure the release of two prisoners in the Los Angeles County Jail. As this is written, she has yet to be brought to trial.
For a time there was a spate of books, plays, and motion pictures which, if not glorifying Manson, depicted him in a not wholly unfavorable light. And, for a time, it looked as if a Manson cult was emerging. Not only were there buttons reading “FREE THE MANSON FOUR,” that cancerous growth known as the Family again began growing. When interviewed, the new converts—who had never had any personal contact with Manson—looked and talked exactly like Squeaky, Sandy, and the others, giving rise to the very disturbing possibility that Manson’s madness might be communicable. But the strange phase quickly passed, and there is little left of the Manson Family now, though little Squeaky, chief cheerleader of the Manson cause, is still keeping the faith.
Although undisputed leader of the Family while Charlie is in absentia, and presumably involved in the planning of their activities, and though arrested more than a dozen times on charges ranging from robbery to murder, she has only been convicted a few times, and always on minor charges. Moreover, not long ago she found a champion in, of all places, the District Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.
One of the young deputy DAs, William Melcher, first became acquainted with Squeaky while the group was holding its vigil on the corner of Temple and Broadway. For Christmas 1970, Melcher’s wife baked cookies for the Manson girls, and a friendship developed. Not long after Squeaky was released on the Stockton murder charge, she was rearrested as a suspect in a Granada Hills armed robbery. Convinced they had the wrong person, Melcher successfully proved this to the police and she was freed. Clearing her was, Melcher told the Los Angeles Times, “my greatest satisfaction in three years as a prosecutor.” Noting that the group had “a lot of ill-feeling about the police and courts, I wanted them to know that justice also works on their side of the street.” Someday he would like to write a book on the girls, Melcher added. “I’d like to write not an exposé of the tragedy and violence, which I do not condone, but a book about the beauty I’ve seen in that group—their opposition to war, their truthfulness and their generosity.”
The fate of Charles Manson, Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Robert Beausoleil was decided on February 18, 1972. That day the California State Supreme Court announced that it had voted 6–1 to abolish the death penalty in the state of California. The opinion was based on Article I, Section 6, of the State Constitution, which forbids “cruel or unusual punishment.”[90]
The sentences of the 107 persons awaiting execution in California were automatically reduced to life imprisonment.
Manson, in Los Angeles as a defense witness in the Bruce Davis trial, grinned broadly on hearing the news.
In California a person sentenced to life imprisonment is eligible to apply for parole in seven years.
By August 1972 the last prisoners had left California’s Death Rows, most to be transferred to the “yards,” or general inmate population, of various state penal institutions. Although at this writing Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten remain in the special security unit constructed for them at the California Institute for Women at Frontera, it is likely that in time they will join the general population also.
In his psychiatric report on Patricia Krenwinkel, Dr. Joel Hochman said that of the three girls Katie had the most tenuous hold on reality. It was his opinion that if she were ever separated from the others and the Manson mystique, it was quite possible she would lose even that, and lapse into complete psychosis.
With regard to Leslie Van Houten, who of the three girls was least committed to Manson, yet still murdered for him, I fear that she may grow harder and tougher; I have very little hope for her eventual rehabilitation.
Writing of Susan Atkins, Los Angeles Times reporter Dave Smith expressed something which I had long felt. “Watching her behavior—bold and actressy in court, cute and mincing when making eye-play with someone, a little haunted when no one pays attention—I get the feeling that one day she might start screaming, and simply never stop.”
As for the other convicted Manson Family killers—Charles Watson; Robert Beausoleil; Steve Grogan, aka Clem; and Bruce Davis—all are now in the general inmate population. Tex is no longer playing insane and has a girl friend who visits him regularly. Bobby received a certain amount of national attention when he was interviewed by Truman Capote during a TV documentary on American prisons. Not long afterward his jaw was broken and his hand dislocated in a brawl in the yard of San Quentin. The fight was the result of a power struggle over the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood, with which Beausoleil had become affiliated. The AB, which is believed responsible for more than a dozen fatal stabbings in various California prisons in the last few years, is the successor to several earlier groups, including a neo-Nazi organization. Its total membership is not known, but it is believed to have about two hundred hard-core inmate followers, and it espouses many of the same racial principles that Charles Manson did. The legacy lives on.
Of all the Manson Family killers, only their leader merits special handling. In October 1972, Charles Manson was transferred to the maximum security adjustment center at Folsom Prison in Northern California. Described as “a prison within a prison,” it provides special housing for “problem inmates” who cannot be safely controlled in the general prison population. With the transfer Manson lost not only all of the special privileges afforded those awaiting execution, he also lost his regular inmate privileges, because of his “hostile and belligerent attitude.”
“Prison is my home, the only home I ever had,” Manson often said. In 1967 he begged the authorities not to release him. Had anyone heeded his warning, this book need never have been written, and perhaps thirty-five to forty people now dead might still be alive.
90
In June 1972 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in a 5–4 decision, that the death penalty, if imposed in an arbitrary fashion with the jury being given absolute discretion and no guidelines, constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Although a number of states, including California, have since passed laws restoring the death penalty and making it mandatory for certain crimes, including mass murders, at the time this is written the United States Supreme Court has yet to rule on their constitutionality.
Even if the California law is let stand, it would not affect the Manson Family killers, since the new statute is not retroactive.