Vincent Bugliosi - Helter Skelter

Q.“What did you feel after you stabbed her?”

A.“Nothing—I mean, like what is there to describe? It was just there, and it’s like it was right.”

On the murder of Rosemary LaBianca: According to Katie, she and Leslie took Rosemary LaBianca into the bedroom and were looking through the dresses in her closet when, hearing Leno scream, Rosemary grabbed a lamp and swung at them.

On the mutilation of Leno LaBianca: After murdering Rosemary, Katie remembered seeing Leno lying on the floor in the living room. She flashed, “You won’t be sending your son off to war,” and “I guess I put WAR on the man’s chest. And then I guess I had a fork in my hands, and I put it in his stomach…and I went and wrote on the walls…”

On cross-examination I asked her: “When you were on top of Abigail Folger, plunging your knife into her body, was she screaming?”

A.“Yes.”

Q.“And the more she screamed, the more you stabbed?”

A.“I guess.”

Q.“Did it bother you when she screamed for her life?”

A.“No.”

Katie testified that when she stabbed Abigail she was really stabbing herself. My next question was rhetorical. “But you didn’t bleed at all, did you, Katie; just Abigail did, isn’t that right?”

The defense was contending, through these witnesses, that the words POLITICAL PIGGY (Hinman), PIG (Tate), and DEATH TO PIGS (LaBianca) were the clue which the killers felt would cause the police to link the three crimes. But when I’d asked Sadie why she’d written POLITICAL PIGGY on the wall of the Hinman residence in the first place, she had no satisfactory answer. Nor could she tell me why, if these were to be copycat murders, she’d only written PIG and not POLITICAL PIGGY at Tate. Nor was Katie now able to give a convincing explanation as to why she’d written HEALTER SKELTER on the LaBiancas’ refrigerator door.

It was obvious that Maxwell Keith wasn’t buying the copycat motive either. On redirect he asked Katie: “The homicides at the Tate residence and the LaBianca residence had nothing to do, did they, with trying to get Bobby Beausoleil out of jail?”

A.“Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought, and the thought came to be.”

Judge Older was becoming increasingly irritated with Kanarek. Repeatedly, he warned him that if he persisted in asking inadmissible questions, he would find him in contempt for the fifth time. Nor was he very happy with Daye Shinn. Shinn had been observed passing a note from a spectator to Susan Atkins. The week before, the girls on the corner had been seen reading court transcripts which had Shinn’s name on them. Confronted with this by Older, Shinn explained: “They borrowed them to look at them.”

THE COURT“I beg your pardon? Are you familiar with the publicity order in this case?”

Shinn admitted that he was.

THE COURT“It appears to me, Mr. Shinn, that you are not paying the slightest attention to the publicity order, and you haven’t been for some time. I have felt, in my own mind, for a long, long time, that the leak—and there is a leak—is you.”

Maxwell Keith very reluctantly called his client, Leslie Van Houten, to the stand. After taking her through her background, Keith asked to approach the bench. He told Older that his client was going to involve herself in the Hinman murder. He had discussed this with her for “hours and hours” but to no avail.

Once she began reciting her tale, the transparency of her fictions became obvious. According to Leslie, Mary Brunner was never at the Hinman residence, while both Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil left before the actual killing took place. It was Sadie, she said, who killed Gary.

Though implicating herself in the Hinman murder, at least by her presence, Leslie did try to provide some mitigating circumstances for her involvement in the LaBianca murders. She claimed she knew nothing about the Tate murders and that when she went along the next night she had no idea where they were going or what they were going to do. The murder of Rosemary LaBianca was made to seem almost like self-defense. Only after Rosemary swung at her with the lamp did she “take one of the knives and Patricia had a knife, and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady.”

Q.“Up to that time, did you have any intention of hurting anybody?”

A.“No.”

Q.“Did you stab her after she appeared to be dead, Les?”

A.“I don’t know if it was before or after she was dead, but I stabbed her…I don’t know if she was dead. She was lying there on the floor.”

Q.“Had you stabbed her at all before you saw her lying on the floor?”

A.“I don’t remember.”

Leslie’s forgetting such things was almost as improbable as her claim that she hadn’t mentioned the murders to Manson until they were in the desert.

Very carefully, Keith tried to establish that Leslie had remorse for her acts.

Q.“Leslie, do you feel sorrow or shame or a sense of guilt for having participated in the death of Mrs. LaBianca?”

A.[Pause]

Q.“Let me go one by one. Do you feel sorrowful about it; sorry; unhappy?”

You could almost feel the chill in the courtroom when Leslie answered: “Sorry is only a five-letter word. It can’t bring back anything.”

Q.“I am trying, Leslie, to discover how you feel about it.”

A.“What can I feel? It has happened. She is gone.”

Q.“Do you wish that it hadn’t happened?”

A.“I never wish anything to be done over another way. That is a foolish thought. It never will happen that way. You can’t undo something that is done.”

Q.“Do you feel as if you wanted to cry for what happened?”

A.“Cry? For her death? If I cry for death, it is for death itself. She is not the only person who has died.”

Q.“Do you think about it from time to time?”

A.“Only when I am in the courtroom.”

Through most of the trial Leslie Van Houten had maintained her innocent-little-girl act. She’d dropped it now, the jury seeing for the first time how cold and unfeeling she really was.

Another aspect of her real nature surfaced when Kanarek examined her. Angry and impatient at some of his questions, she snapped back hostile, sarcastic replies. With each spurt of venom, you could see the jurors drawing back, looking at her as if anew. Whatever sympathy she may have generated earlier was gone now. Even McBride no longer met her eyes.

Leslie Van Houten had been found guilty of two homicides. I felt she deserved the death penalty for her very willing participation in those acts. But I didn’t want the jury to vote death on the basis of a crime she didn’t even commit. I told her attorney, Maxwell Keith, that I was willing to stipulate that Leslie was not at the Hinman residence. “I mean, the jury is apt to think she was, and hold it against your client, and I don’t think that is right.”

Also, during cross-examination I asked: “Did you tell anyone—prior to your testimony on the witness stand—that it was you who was along with Sadie and Bobby Beausoleil at Gary Hinman’s house?”

A.“I told Patricia about it.”

Q.“Actually it was Mary Brunner who was inside the residence, not you, isn’t that correct?”

A.“That is what you say.”