Vincent Bugliosi - Helter Skelter

“If I showed them that I would do anything for my brother—including giving my life for my brother on the battlefield—and then they pick up their banner, and they go off and do what they do, that is not my responsibility. I don’t tell people what to do…

“These children [indicating the female defendants] were finding themselves. What they did, if they did whatever they did, is up to them. They will have to explain that to you…

“It’s all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hellhole that you can think of, and you drag him and put him in a courtroom.

“ You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago. You killed me years ago… ”

Older asked Manson if he had anything further to say.

MANSON“I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed.

“I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven’t decided yet what I am or who I am.”

Some called him Christ, Manson said. In prison his name was a number. Some now want a sadistic fiend, and so they see him as that. So be it. Guilty. Not guilty. They are only words. “You can do anything you want with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love…If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself.”

Telling Manson, “You seem to be getting far afield,” Older asked him to stick to the issues.

MANSON“The issues?…Mr. Bugliosi is a hard-driving prosecutor, polished education, a master of words, semantics. He is a genius. He has got everything that every lawyer would want to have except one thing: a case. He doesn’t have a case. Were I allowed to defend myself, I could have proven this to you…

“The evidence in this case is a gun. There was a gun that laid around the ranch. It belonged to everybody. Anybody could have picked that gun up and done anything they wanted to do with it. I don’t deny having that gun. That gun has been in my possession many times.

“Like the rope was there.” Sure he’d bought the rope, Manson admitted, 150 feet of it, “because you need rope on a ranch.”

The clothes? “It is really convenient that Mr. Baggot found those clothes. I imagine he got a little taste of money for that.”

The bloodstains? “Well, they are not exactly bloodstains. They are benzidine reaction.”

The leather thong? “How many people have ever worn moccasins with leather thongs?”

The photos of the seven bodies, 169 stab wounds? “They put the hideous bodies on display and they imply: If he gets out, see what will happen to you.”

Helter Skelter? “It means confusion, literally. It doesn’t mean any war with anyone. It doesn’t mean that some people are going to kill other people…Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast. If you can’t see the confusion coming down around you fast, you can call it what you wish.”

Conspiracy? “Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? Is that a conspiracy?

“The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music…

“It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says ‘Rise,’ it says ‘Kill.’

“Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

About the witnesses. “For example, Danny DeCarlo. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike…But actually all I ever did with Danny DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect him back at himself. If he said he did not like the black man, I would say ‘O.K.’ So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and say ‘Charlie thinks like I do.’

“But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.

“I don’t think like you people. You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone…”

Linda Kasabian. She only testified against him because she saw him as her father and she never liked her father. “So she gets on the stand and she says when she looked in that man’s eyes that was dying, she knew that it was my fault. She knew it was my fault because she couldn’t face death. And if she can’t face death, that is not my fault. I can face death. I have all the time. In the penitentiary you live with it, with constant fear of death, because it is a violent world in there, and you have to be on your toes constantly.”

Dianne Lake. She wanted attention. She would make trouble, cause accidents to get it. She wanted a father to punish her. “So as any father would do, I conditioned her mind with pain to keep her from burning the ranch down.”

Yes, he was a father to the young girls and boys in the Family. But a father only in the sense that he taught them “not to be weak and not to lean on me.” Paul Watkins wanted a father. “I told him: ‘To be a man, boy, you have to stand up and be your own father.’ So he goes off to the desert and finds a father image in Paul Crockett.”

Yes, he put a knife to Juan Flynn’s throat. Yes, he told him he felt responsible for all of these killings. “I do feel some responsibility. I feel a responsibility for the pollution. I feel a responsibility for the whole thing.”

He didn’t deny that he had told Brooks Poston to get a knife and go kill the sheriff of Shoshone. “I don’t know the sheriff of Shoshone. I am not saying that I didn’t say it, but if I said it, at the time I may have thought it was a good idea.

“To be honest with you, I don’t recall ever saying ‘Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.’ Or I don’t recall saying ‘Get a knife and go kill the sheriff.’

“In fact, it makes me mad when someone kills snakes or dogs or cats or horses. I don’t even like to eat meat—that is how much I am against killing…

“I haven’t got any guilt about anything because I have never been able to see any wrong…I have always said: Do what your love tells you, and I do what my love tells me…Is it my fault that your children do what you do?

“ What about your children? ” Manson asked angrily, rising slightly in the witness chair as if he were about to spring forward and attack everyone in the courtroom. “ You say there are just a few?

“ There are many, many more, coming in the same direction.

“ They are running in the streets—and they are coming right at you! ”

Ihad only a few questions for Manson, none of which came from the notebooks I’d kept.

Q.“You say you are already dead, is that right, Charlie?”

A.“Dead in your mind or dead in my mind?”

Q.“Define it any way you want to.”

A.“As any child will tell you, dead is when you are no more. It is just when you are not there. If you weren’t there, you would be dead.”

Q.“How long have you been dead?” Manson evaded a direct reply.

Q.“To be precise about it, you think you have been dead for close to 2,000 years, don’t you?”

A.“Mr. Bugliosi, 2,000 years is relative to the second we live in.”

Q.“Suffice it to say, Department 104 is a long way from Calvary, isn’t that true?”