First Published in Good Weekend on June 17, 1989
Holding the hippie killer
Charles Manson and his disciples bloodied the 1960s with a horrifying mass murder. MARTIN KASINDORF studies the man who's fighting to keep the unrepentant killers behind bars for life.
The most superfluous traffic sign in California is the one on the short spur road that winds along the bay front to the state penitentiary at San Quentin. The sign says, "Not a Through Street".
On a freezing February morning, Stephen Kay, a tall, deaconish attorney drives past the sign and parks at the road's windswept end. A body search is completed, Kay is escorted to a prison conference room. He has a few minutes to arrange his papers for the latest in nearly 20 years of confrontation with Charles Milles Manson, mastermind of the peculiarly unforgettable mass murders that badly rattled California in August 1969.
The morning's conflict promises to be one-sided. Manson, led from his single cell in San Quentin's Security Housing Unit, has waived his right to an attorney. He is long past trying to ingratiate himself with the three-member Board of Prison Terms panel that will decide whether to grant him a parole date. Now 54, his flying beard going grey, the 1.6-metre-tall life-termer has the shrunken, unkempt appearance of a Death Valley hermit, which is precisely what he has said he would like to be if ever released.
He searches the door behind which the hearing officers and Kay wait with two "pool" reporters and two TV cameras. The Tate-LaBianca killings are still news. New American Library late this year is publishing an updated version of Ed Sanders' 1972 book, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion.
The proceedings are being wired to a guardroom where 25 reporters and TV news technicians hover, hoping Charlie will say something suitably Mephistophelean. He often does. At the Vacaville facility in 1981, Mason warned Kay that he would be killed in the parking lot after the hearing. At Manson's 1986 evaluation, Kay asked why Manson spends hours in his cell constructing scorpions out of thread from his socks. Manson, the razor-sliced swastika in his forehead emphasised in blue-black ink, took the bait. "From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment," he announced. That unremorseful response was good, Kay triumphantly thought, for another three year parole denial. He was right.
This year, Manson abruptly decides that he is having none of this legally mandated but manifestly futile ritual. His wrists are being clamped into manacles in the normal procedure when he protests, "They'll think I'm dangerous." He refuses the restraints and demands to return to his cell.
With Manson in absentia for the third time in his nine hearings, Kay, a 22-year veteran of the district attorney's office, begins his 38th argument against parole for the five people convicted of murdering Sharon Tate and six other victims. Kay has been making these arguments for 11 years, ever since Manson, Susan (Sadie Mae Glutz) Atkins, Charles (Tex) Watson, Patricia (Katie) Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten first became eligible for parole.
"The Tate-LaBianca case had all the good things and bad things of the '60s," says Ed Sanders, a Woodstock, New York, poet and author. "It had sex and murder, lifestyles, counterculture, Hollywood, rock-and-roll stars like Dennis Wilson ??? everything that makes for a circus. The trial was a combination of fascination and revulsion, like a snake with its tail in its mouth. It just kept rolling along, this repulsive snake. It's still rolling along."
SHARON TATE was 26, a classically beautiful but not quite top-rank movie actress 8 1/2 months pregnant, when a dark-dad band on a mission from Manson invaded the Benedict Canyon estate she and her film-director husband Roman Polanski were renting on Cielo Drive. The ensuing pre-dawn horror of August 9 was not without its complex of motives ??? a fusion of the Beatles, the Bible and plain old resentment. A previous tenant there, Terry Melcher, the record-producer son of actress Doris Day, had snubbed Manson and his musical ambitions a year earlier. Sharon Tate and four visitors to the secluded hilltop were slaughtered, as Atkins told a grand jury, "to instil fear into the Establishment".
The following night, after the sensational celebrity murders failed to trigger the black-white race war Manson had prophesied from his dark interpretation of Revelations and the Beatles' Helter Skelter during long group LSD sessions, Manson himself entered the Los Feliz home of Leno LaBianca, owner of a small supermarket chain. He tied up LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, then left them to die at the hands of three demonic disciples, who carved away with knives and forks from the LaBianca kitchen.
Prominent as some of the victims were, Manson immediately surpassed them in public interest. Kay recalls, "With his picture on the cover of Life magazine ??? that stare ??? Manson was like everybody's Freddy." Here was a man, prefiguring Jim Jones in the Guyana jungle, with the mysterious power to command others to kill for him, even to dispatch themselves to the gas chamber by taking all the blame at trial and trying to exculpate the leader they regarded as both Jesus and the devil.
Many mass- and serial-murder cases since then have involved greater numbers of deaths ??? 25 in the cast of Juan Corona, for example. What set the Tate-LaBianca murders apart and made them particularly frightening was that the killers included young women, mainly from peaceable middle-class backgrounds (Van Houten had been a homecoming princess at high school).
"Better lock your doors and watch your own kids," Susan Atkins eerily warned the jury that convicted her.
"That was the end of the '60s for a lot of people in LA," recalls Joan Didion, whose deal to write a book with star prosecution witness Linda Kasabian went awry. "...I mean, it was everybody's nightmare."
NOTORIOUS CASES may fade from the headlines, but they continue testing the legal system and its entanglements with politics for decades. Manson has effectively surrendered, but the others are fighting seriously for freedom, using skilled lawyers. For these convicts and Kay, all in middle age now, the combat over the evil of that distant summer has never really ended.
Kay's side ??? the mocked "straight" society perfectly embodied in his conservative pinstripes and gold collar pin ??? has won almost every time. The social rebellion of the '60s was carried to a horrible extreme in the depredations of Manson and his drop-out "family" of acid habitues. The Tate-LaBianca carnage was, as Sanders says, "the death of the hippie". Outraged middle-class values have reasserted themselves with a vengeance ever since.
Juries in the nine-month 1970-71 trial of Manson and the three "Manson girls" and in Watson's separate trial asked for vengeance by condemning them to death for first-degree murder and conspiracy. In 1972, the California Supreme Court invalidated the capital punishment statute. The sentences were commuted to indeterminate terms as long as life. It was the defendants' only victory. Since 1978, they have been eligible for parole. They remain in prison.
The leading voice for unforgetting retribution has belonged to Stephen Kay, a non-smoking, non-drinking, non-swearing, Presbyterian, boys' soccer coach and father of three suburban teenagers. His role, largely self-appointed and not without criticism, has been to demand continuing punishment ??? with little or no allowance for personal rehabilitation ??? for those gunshots in the canyon, for the pagan smearing of "Pigs" and the illiterate "Helter Skelter" on the walls of the wealthy in their own blood.
"The reason I'm on the tail of all these people and I won't let up on them," Kay explains, "is that they wanted to destroy society in a race war and have hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered. They tried to have it happen."
Of the eight Manson "family" members convicted in the nine murders that officials were able to establish, only one, Steve (Clem Tufts) Grogan, has been paroled. Grogan, convicted in the killing of a cowboy named Donald (Shorty) Shea, has been quietly painting houses in the San Fernando Valley since 1985 after serving 13 years. He profited from showing authorities where Shea's previously undiscovered remains were buried near Spahn Ranch, Manson's dusty Chatsworth base. Kay had no part in the bartering.
AT SAN QUENTIN, a month before Manson is transferred to the new maximum-security Corcoran facility in the San Joaquin Valley, Kay's argument runs for 27 minutes. He retells the crimes in painstaking detail, reviving the months of widespread fear before the killers were identified through Atkins' euphoric blabbering to two Sybil Brand Institute cellmates. Atkins, Manson and 22 others coincidentally had been rounded up in mid-October at their Death Valley retreat and booked for unrelated arson and auto thefts. Atkins was jailed as a suspect in the Topanga torture-murder of musician Gary Hinman a few days before the Tate-LaBianca slayings. "Wow, what a trip!" she blurted out to fellow prisoners about tasting Sharon Tate's blood. After more investigation, Los Angeles police chief Ed Davis announced on December 1, 1969, that the case was solved.
If Kay, as some of his opponents suggest, is simply seeking publicity, he would logically welcome these hearings. Instead, he was instrumental in lobbying for 1982 and 1983 legislation allowing the Board of Prison Terms to deny parole in multiple-murder cases on as much as a three-year basis, rather than hold annual appraisals.
He tells the board that Manson has "a serious and severe personality disorder", although the prison psychologist's latest report maintained that Manson "is not psychotic and probably never was and never will be". After citing a string of prison disciplinary infractions to demonstrate the inmate's unfitness for freedom, Kay reaches his conclusion.
"Mr Manson remains locked in an Armageddon with society," he tells the sombre commissioners. "It's a battle to the death. Society has a slim advantage now because we have Manson behind bars. Manson is probably the best advertisement that California ever had for the death penalty, because, frankly, as long as Mr Manson is alive, he is a great danger." Minutes later, the board votes Manson another three-year denial.
As Kay points out in lectures to explain why he keeps pushing when it seems implausible that Manson will ever be freed, he does remain a role model of sorts to a fringe of satanists, neo-Nazis and skinheads. Manson gets letters and gifts from young people who idolise him as the ultimate outsider.
Kay wasn't always professionally identified with the case that author Ed Sanders expects will continue to horrify California "at least until the turn of the century". It was Vincent T. Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor, who got the glory surrounding the convictions. Bugliosi's 1974 book, Helter Skelter, sold 6 million copies.
Kay was a boyish 27, three years out of Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School, when Bugliosi was keeping him and Donald Musich on short leashes as his muffled assistants in the long first trial, its singsong craziness one of the strangest courtroom spectacles grown from the '60s. Kay and Bugliosi were officially granted equal status at Watson's trial. Bugliosi left in 1972. Kay chose a long-term career with the district attorney's office. Uncomfortable with the notion of defending criminals, he has remained a prosecutor. Of all the figures in the story, only he has stayed with the Manson case.
He went on to prosecute Bruce Davis, an accomplice of Manson and Grogan, to a life sentence for the Shea murder. Then he handled Van Houten's retrial, ordered because her lawyer, Ronald Hughes, disappeared during the first trial. (Hughes' remains were found months later, and Bugliosi believes the "family" killed him.)
At the second Van Houten trial, Kay suffered a setback: a hung jury, teetering toward accepting defence arguments that Van Houten was victimised by a mass delusion that psychiatrists called folie a famille (family madness). Kay recovered with a 1978 third-trial guilty verdict.
No love is lost between Kay and Bugliosi. Kay's testimony bedevilled Bugliosi in inconclusive perjury proceedings against him arising from the mysterious leak of Atkins' lurid "celebrity death list" to reporter William Farr, in an attorney's apparent violation of a judicial gag order. Farr spent 46 days in jail rather than reveal his source, whose name has never been disclosed (Farr died in 1987). Bugliosi misspelt Kay's first name "Steven" in Helter Skelter, "just to tweak me", says Kay. Bugliosi's praise for his continuing work is grudging. But Tate-LaBianca fully belongs to Kay now. Always ready to comment on the case, he sometimes borders on personalising it.
When Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme aimed a pistol at President Ford in Sacramento in 1975, Kay confidently told reporters that Manson had ordered the assault ??? a theory never established. On Christmas Eve, 1987, Fromme escaped from prison in West Virginia. Notified within 90 minutes and fearing that Fromme was heading west specifically to kill him out of devotion to Manson, Kay got himself what he calls "added security" until the prattling little redheaded suspect was caught near the prison two days later.
SINCE AGREEING to leave his well-publicised "special trials" work in 1981, Kay has held a series of increasingly responsible administrative posts. He is not formally assigned to the parole hearings. With the tacit approval of higher-ups, he does it on his own. He prepares for the sessions as if there were an imminent prospect of the concededly shattered Manson group reuniting for its predawn "creepy-crawl" missions. He collects damaging anecdotes about the defendants' conduct from prison guards and other inmates. Lest new official faces be too young to remember the crimes, Kay maintains at his fingertips the facts about the deaths of Sharon Tate, Wojiciech (Voytek) Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent and the LaBiancas, as well as Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman.
He delights in contradicting the prisoners' sometimes self-serving latter-day accounts. In recent years, for example, Susan Atkins has taken to denying that she wielded a weapon. Kay goes back over the evidence showing that Atkins inflicted many of the 16 stab wounds in Tate's body and stabbed Frykowski in the legs. The first hearing was Krenwinkel's in 1978. Kay says she blamed Watson and Atkins for the Cielo Drive massacre, and she took umbrage when Kay testified that she had chased and struggled with Folger until Watson stabbed the victim, who was found with 28 wounds. "She swore at me, right in front of the board," he says. "Called me the f-word and everything."
In off hours, Kay's reputation is anything but that of an obsessed, win-at-any-cost prosecutor. But he loses his compassion when asked about the Tate-LaBianca defendants. He cannot resist ridiculing them and enjoys relating how the histrionic Atkins, who, like Watson, professes "born-again" Christianity, cried copiously before one hearing board, then left the room and snappishly berated a guard for not having her lunch ready. Watson, says Kay, is "like a used-car salesman". If Kay respects any of them, it is Manson. "Manson's just himself," he says. "He has changed so little over the years. He's basically the same old Charlie."
Kay's critics mutter about excessive zeal in his implacable crusade. Above all, they cite the fact that he has changed his mind in currently making no exception for Leslie Van Houten. Parole has seemed a real possibility only for Van Houten. She remains, for some, the most appealing of the defendants. She was 19 at the time of the killings, came from a wholesome, churchgoing background and was present on only the second night; her direct involvement consisted of stabbing Rosemary LaBianca after Krenwinkel may already have killed the woman.
"Why are they keeping the little Van Houten girl in jail?" demands Gary Fleischman, Linda Kasabian's former lawyer. "She's more than paid her debt to society."
Loretta Collier, associate chief deputy parole commissioner, agrees. "I think she got caught up in being a flower child, allowed herself to be carried along by the rest of them." Van Houten, to be sure, is burdened by something she said during her first trial. Asked if she was sorry for her acts, she replied, "Sorry is only a five-letter word."
Now 39 and by most accounts a model prisoner at the California Institution for Women at Frontera, where she obtained a degree in psychology and literature, Van Houten has some dedicated advocates. They are the most ardent in casting suspicion on Kay's motives.
Van Houten's present lawyer, Dan Mrotek says, "He likes to play to the drama of the thing a little bit. It's the TV camera that makes the difference."
Consistently underestimated by the Friends of Leslie support group, Kay has been trumping them in a long fight that he has smoothly escalated from hearing rooms to the public forum of mass-media appearances and nationwide petition drives.
Momentarily shaken in 1982 when the Friends of Leslie presented parole officials with 900 signatures urging Van Houten's release, he countered by enlisting Sharon Tate's mother, Doris. With her husband, retired army colonel Paul Tate, she lives near the spotless house Kay and his wife, Diane, a teacher, have owned since 1971 in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood. Kay galvanised Doris Tate into collecting 352,000 signatures opposing parole for not only Van Houten but all of the Tate-LaBianca killers.
The experience persuaded Tate to become active in a national group called Parents of Murdered Children. She has spoken effectively since, at parole hearings held for Atkins and Watson. As one of the defence lawyers admits: "It was Doris Tate who killed us." A release date was denied for Van Houten in 1982, then in 1985 (when one board member told her she was "closer than she might realise") and, again for the maximum three years, in 1987. "I'm ecstatic," Kay declared on that occasion. "If she gets out by the turn of the century, she'll be lucky."
Kay's monitoring of the Manson group has reached deeply into the prisoners' daily lives to cause them trouble. Learning that Watson, who has married and fathered three children while incarcerated, was serving as assistant Protestant pastor in jail, Kay complained that Watson was "building a personal power base". Watson is now fixing cars.
In Ed Sanders' opinion, Kay has his retributive rap down well. "He's so good at his re-creation of the murders," he says, "that if a person became Mother Teresa and was in all respects a perfect person, that person would never be released from prison. I think it's important to allow for human change."
CHARLES MANSON, born illegitimate in Cincinnati, was placed by an uncaring mother with a series of foster parents. By 1967, he had spent 19 of his 32 years in penal institutions. On parole, Manson gravitated to San Francisco's pulsating Haight-Ashbury district. Through ready administration of LSD and a messianic message, he attracted adoring women he called his "young loves", using offers of sex with them to draw men handy with guns and dune buggies.
In contrast to Manson and his raggedy gang of 25 hard-core members and 60 "associates", Stephen Kay has never experienced anything but mainstream stability. He came to California from Connecticut, at age two, an only child.
Kay was 15 and attending Hollywood High when his mother and a friend of hers, the godmother of a I4-year-old San Diego girl named Sandra Good, squeezed the two kids together for a chaperoned lunch date at a Burbank pancake house. After 30 minutes, Stephen excused himself, considering this stockbroker's daughter "a stuck-up little snob". Twelve years later, Sandy Good was wearing an X on her forehead and Kay was cross-examining her at the Manson trial ??? during which, he says, she and Fromme threatened "to do to your house what was done to Sharon Tate's house".
JOAN DIDION was appalled to hear the Beatles' Piggies over the PA system of a luxury New York department store a few months after Manson's arrest. "It captured everybody's imagination in our generation," says Krenwinkel's trial lawyer Paul Fitzgerald. "It remains vivid in the memories of everybody living in LA ??? people who were getting dogs and guns, terribly freaked out." Kay's old co-prosecutor, Donald Musich, shares Kay's worries that younger generations may be readier to parole the ageing killers.
"As the years go by," he says, "they're not going to understand what went down with the acid rock of the '60s, when people travelled around by bus and lived with the dirt and group sex, and left a beautiful home and wealth."
Dr Louis Jolyon West, director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and an expert on cults and violence, largely blames a drug that is much less pervasive these days. "You can't close the book on the Manson phenomenon without saying something about LSD. We still don't understand its potency and unpredictability," he says. Manson's followers, West says, were also enthralled by their leader's race-war delusions of the group's twisted internal dynamics. And folie a famille, the delusional thinking cited in Van Houten's trials, hardly disappeared with the '60s.
Kay shares the view that a Tate-LaBianca atrocity could happen again, but his reasoning differs. "The Manson clan," Kay says, "was a group of misfits that just came together kind of at the wrong place and the wrong time. I think they were an aberration. You had hippie communes and peace marchers, but you never had the violence and lust for murder that were demonstrated by Manson and the family." By this reading, keeping the Tate-LaBianca killers in prison serves as not only retribution for old crimes but as a deterrent to modern sociopathic gangs.
But it is possible that more liberal State administrations will free some of the killers one day. Bugliosi says that 10 to 20 years from now, the three women are reasonably certain to win parole "only because they are in California. If you were in Arkansas or Texas, the question wouldn't even be asked."
Doris Tate, says compassion for those no-longer-youthful prisoners is misplaced. "When Sharon was begging for her life," she asks, "what compassion did Watson and Susan Atkins give to her? Sharon, with her big heart, would probably say, 'Turn them loose.' But a society has to keep a stringent hold on the judiciary these days."
Strictly speaking, it's the executive branch that Kay watches. The most thoughtful of his adversaries grant him understandable motives and professional respect.
Allen Jan, Tex Watson's experienced lawyer, says: "Sometimes Mr Kay comes across as if he were a hatchet man because of what he has to say. On the other hand, because of the horrible nature of these crimes, what else is there to say? Mr Kay is not willing to let these people's memories die."
First Published in Good Weekend on June 17, 1989
