"OUI" MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 1981
JAILHOUSE INTERVIEW: BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL AND THE MANSON MURDERS
THE MAN WHO PAVED THE WAY FOR THE TATE-LaBIANCA MURDERS
FINALLY SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT
It was July 25th, 1969, and the merciless summer heat beat down on the dusty
northwestern reaches of Los Angeles. When Bobby Beausoleil, a slim, handsome
21-year-old musician, hit the Pacific Highway and coastal stretch of beach he
was tempted to stop for a swim. But Beausoleil had more important business. His
destination late this afternoon was the rustic hippie enclave embedded in
Topanga Canyon just south of Malibu, the home of Gary Hinman.
Beausoleil had spent the previous evening with his friend Charlie Manson at
Manson*s desert spread, the Spahn
Ranch. It was at the ranch that Beausoleil claims he delivered 1000 tabs of
Hinman*s home-manufactured
mescaline to Manson*s buddy, Danny
DeCarlo, who also served as club treasurer for the motorcycle gang, the Straight
Satans. Several hours later, according to Beausoleil, the bikers reported back
that the substance was actually strychnine and demanded their money returned,
pronto. Beausoleil decided to confront Hinman and retrieve his money the next
day. While preparing to leave, two of Manson*s
groupie girlfriends asked Beausoleil if they could come along for the ride
because "they liked Gary Hinman." Their names were Mary Brunner and Susan
"Sadie" Atkins.
The man Beausoleil planned to confront, Gary Hinman, was a kind of hippie
renaissance figure in the ‘60s, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at U.C.L.A., a
political activist, Zen Buddhist devotee, a musician and a piano teacher...and a
drug dealer with a mescaline factory tucked away in his basement. Assuming that
Hinman would see the folly of a drug burn with a biker club, Beausoleil did not
anticipate much resistance.
On July 31st, Gary Hinman was found dead in his Topanga Canyon home. He had
been stabbed twice in the heart and badly slashed across the left side of his
face. His house had been ransacked and both of his cars were missing.
scrawled on the wall in Hinman*s
blood was the macabre epithet, "Political Piggy." The police, with no
leads in the case, were resigned to tagging the crime just another unsolved
hippie weirdo murder in Los Angeles.
On August 5th, the California Highway Patrol found Beausoleil napping in the
rear of Hinman*s Fiat station
wagon near San Luis Obispo. Beausoleil told the police that the car had broken
down while he was driving to San Francisco. Beausoleil didn*t
have a driver*s license— only some
false ID and a sheath knife attached to his belt. It was not long before Robert
Kenneth Beausoleil was booked for the murder of Gary Hinman.
Within three days of Beausoleil*s
arrest, all the occupants of the Sharon Tate and La Bianca homes were brutally,
senselessly slaughtered. Though blood writing on the walls was a common factor
at all three murder sites ("Pig" on the Tate wall and "Death to the
Pigs" on the La Bianca refrigerator), investigators failed to link up the
obvious. According to Beausoleil, this came as something of a shock to the
Manson group who had hoped that the authorities would assume the same killer
responsible for all three homicidal sprees, and then release Beausoleil; being
in jail during the Tate-La Bianca blood orgies, he was obviously not the Hinman
killer. Such was the lunatic logic of the Manson family.
Beausoleil*s first trial in
November, 1969 ended in a hung jury. chances are he would have been acquitted
had the police not picked up the erstwhile Danny DeCarlo who had a rap sheet as
long as a roll of paper towels. DeCarlo offered to turn state*s
evidence against Beausoleil in exchange for immunity on some dozen charges (from
dope dealing to gun smuggling and car theft). Decarlo arrived at the Beausoleil
trial after both sides had already rested. Against the ravings of the defense,
the court permitted the testimony of DeCarlo who fingered not only Beausoleil as
the Hinman killer but also a man whose name had never been heard during the
trial, Charlie Manson. It was an extremely inauspicious day for Beausoleil.
Beausoleil*s second trial came
during March, 1970, following a five-month media blitz on the Manson family. It
was not a healthy time to be known as a friend of Charlie Manson. The
prosecution asked for the death penalty and got it with Beausoleil*s
conviction for 1st degree murder. Knowing how close he had been to an acquittal,
Beausoleil was bitter in his closing remarks: "You can*t
judge me. There is no possible way to feel any remorse," he declared before
feebly quoting Bob Dylan at his conclusion, "Only God can judge me and God is on
my side."
During more than ten years, Beausoleil has proclaimed his innocence in the
murder of Gary Hinman. However, in the summer of 1980 he granted this reporter
the following interview at Deuel vocational Institute, commonly known as Tracy
Prison. For the first time, Beausoleil admitted his guilt in the murder and
related what he claims were the actual events, motives and relationships within
the Manson family.
Bobby Beausoleil has now been in jail for almost 12 years. He escaped from
death row after 26 months when California voters repealed the death penalty (it
was reinstated a few years later and automatically his sentence was commuted to
life with an indeterminate sentence).
Beausoleil was born in 1948, the eldest of a large French Catholic working
class family from Santa Barbara. His father worked as a milkman for twenty years
for Arden Farms before stepping tip to a managerial position. From age 12, he
was in and out of small-time trouble ("walking my (log without a leash, stolen
Christmas tree ornaments, bomb scares, hitchhiking on the freeway") which landed
him a one-year stay as Las Priestas reform school when he was 15. Shortly
thereafter, he drifted down to Los Angeles where he played music and joined a
series of hippie bands (The Weeds, Grassroots, Love) and was featured in some
early porn classics, notably Ramrod and The Tennis Shoe Indian Classic.
In the mid-*60s he moved in
with author/filmmaker Kenneth Anger in an apartment above the Russian Embassy in
San Francisco. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship, both personally and
professionally. Anger had chosen Beausoleil to play Lucifer in the sequel to his
under-ground classic, Scorpio Rising, aptly titled Lucifer Rising,
and Lucifer Rising has finally been released, ten years later, with a
film score composed by Beausoleil recorded at Tracy Prison. After a fight with
Anger, Beausoleil stole both Anger*s
film and his car and headed for Los Angeles. Anger maintains that following a
curse he put on Beausoleil, the car broke down outside the Spahn Ranch. From the
film remnants left behind, Anger made another film, Invocation of My Demon
Brother, about Beausoleil and the incident. The film plays, not
infrequently, at art movie theaters. Since his conviction, Anger has again
befriended Beausoleil.
Although nicknamed "Cupid" during his teen years, Beausoleil has promoted a
Mephistophelean image while behind bars. He sports a full torso of tattoos.
While flesh painting is not uncommon in jail, the designs and extensiveness of
his tattoos are a rarity. Emblazoned across his chest in large dark letters is
his pet name, LUCIFER. It has taken nine years to decorate his body with
cartoon-like nymphets, "done with ink and a broken guitar string."
His incarceration has done little to dampen the zeal and lust of curious
California girls. Beausoleil is known in and out of jail as a womanizer. In
early 1980, he married a 21 year old blond devotee. Learning of Beausoleil*s
predilection for "more than one," she is presently seeking an annulment.
In jail, he is a busy man, painting his erotic drawings (some have been
published in Puritan magazine), working in the prison video room, and
writing music for his prison ensemble, The Freedom Orchestra.
Notwithstanding some gray hairs in his goatee, Beausoleil appears fit and
reasonably well adjusted to prison rigors. One suspects that he would make out
okay in virtually any environment. In accordance with prison propriety, he is
admired, disliked and feared by the appropriate numbers of prisoners and guards.
AB: When and how did you meet Charlie Manson?
BB: Listen, one thing that you should establish about me—I was not then nor
am I now a member of the Manson family. There never was a Manson family. That
didn*t happen until every. body
got busted. There were a bunch of girls, a few guys, a couple of ex-cons, a
bunch of kids, some runaways with no support from home, and they were living in
a garbage dump called the Spahn Ranch.
AB: When did you first meet Manson?
BB: I met him shortly after he got out of prison. I think he had been out ten
months or so. This was ‘66, I believe. Living in Topanga Canyon.
AB: Were you living at Gary Hinman*s
at the time?
BB: No, I wasn*t living with
Gary. I had stayed with him previous to that. Ijoined a band, The Milky Way,
that Charlie was in. That*s
how I met him. He was a verytalented songwriter, good musician, lyrically, just
excellent. He was somebody with an incredibly intense, vivid, expanded
imagination because of all the time he*s
done.
AB: Was his imagination the magic that people attributed to him?
BB: Charlie Manson grew up in a tomb. To describe his personality, you have
to understand that aspect. Like I*ve
been in a state of incubation for a decade. For Charlie, it was more than a
decade. He had been locked up since he was a little kid, I mean locked up all
the time. I think his first commitment to a prison environment was at 13
years old in West Virginia and his life before that was foster homes and
orphanages. When he got out at 33, it was the first time he ever had anybody to
care about him.
AB: Did he really care about his "family" or were they each disposable units?
BB: That was the only family he ever had, the only people who ever really
cared about him and showed it. Let me explain this: Charlie made a commitment
that he would be willing to die for his family. And when you make this
commitment, it*s very easy to fall into the
trap of: "I would be willing to kill for the family."
AB: Did he have an hypnotic effect on people?
BB: I never thought of him that way. I suppose with some people he did.
AB: Some sources say that the girls looked up to Manson, but that Manson
looked up to you. And Kenneth Anger once said that you and Manson had a
homosexual relationship.
BB: I would say he was attracted to me, but not.... He*s
not homosexual at all. Ken was indulging in wishful thinking, daydreaming. That
idea came first from Capote*s
interview of Andy Warhol in Rolling Stone magazine (See Box). And, of
course that was Andy Warhol*s
wishful thinking. Ken just picked it up. It was good gay gossip (laughs. Aside
to the photographer). Truman Capote just wants to get dicked in the ass and
killed. There*s never been any
homosexual relationship between me and Charlie Manson.
AB: Well, it*s certainly not
uncommon in jails.
BB: Yeah, I*m sure he*s
fucked a few fat butt boys, yeah. So have I. In that respect, maybe I*m
homosexual, you know? But it*s a
different kind of thing.
AB: What else did you and Manson do together?
BB: Made love to women once in a while. AB: How long did you know Manson?
BB: About three years.
AB: What were some of the things that you did together?
BB: Oh, mostly played music. And a million crazy things that a lot of crazy
guys do together. One time Charlie and I drove two trucks through Death valley,
just for the hell of it. We didn*t
drag race. We just wanted to ride through that kind of terrain. We took two
4-wheel drive Army surplus power wagons. He had his group up in the desert. It
took two days. We left the trucks, ate their beans and rice, stayed a couple of
days. We wanted to hellraise and it was a blast.
AB: Did Manson have many male friends? BB: A few. Charles Manson was lonely.
He used his women to attract a man because he liked having other men around to
do "men things" with. What man couldn*t
be attracted by having the opportunity to go to bed with several women? To cater
to his every fantasy, whatever. I didn*t
have that attraction to that group. I didn*t
need it. His women could not attract me. He could attract me because I
admired his creativity.
AB: Then, you were indifferent to Charlie*s
girls?
BB: Oh no. I wouldn*t say that.
Some of the girls were awfully cute, and I went to bed with some of them. But,
it was never because I needed that. I never lacked having women around me.
AB: Did Manson really care or like women?
BB: Oh. Charlie loved women. He showed them plenty of respect. He treated
those women better than most men ever treat their women.
AB: Were there many orgies and group sex events?
BB: Once in a while. They were beautiful. Usually ten women, at least. And
three or four men.
AB: When did you fir*st meet
Gary Hinman?
BB: I guess about six or eight months after I came down (to L.A.) from San
Francisco. AB: That was in 1966 and he invited you to stay at his home?
BB: Yeah. He had a two level house and I stayed in the basement for two or
three weeks. I never knew the man very well. He was a recluse.
AB: But you did live with him.
BB: A very short while. He gave me the loan of his basement, and he was very
rarely home. Gary Hinman was not some body you could be close with. I was never
a close friend of Gary Hinman*s.
He was just somebody that I knew among a crowd of people in Topanga Canyon. His
ideologies were very different from mine. He was into communism and all that
sort of thing. I couldn*t relate
to that at all. He was a political science major with a piano on the side for
some kind of an income.
AB: Did you play music with him?
BB: I did a little work with Gary. I didn*t
know how to read or write music. He gave me a few basic lessons on how to
notate.
AB: Why did you go to Gary Hinman*s
home on July 25th, 1969?
BB: I didn*t go there with the
intention of killing Gary. If I was going to kill him, I wouldn*t
have taken the girls (Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins). I was going there for one
purpose only, which was to collect $1000 that I had already turned over to him,
that didn*t belong to me.
AB: When had you given him the $1000?
BB: The night before.
AB: You paid Hinman $1000 for 1000 tabs of mescaline and then returned to the Spahn Ranch?
BB: Right. The whole transaction with the straight Satans motorcycle club
took place at Spahn*s Ranch. There
were a few Satan slavers hanging out there as well. The Straight Satans took the
mescaline back to the motorcycle club at Venice where they were intending to
party. They were really mad about it.
AB: How did you know that it was strychnine instead of mescaline in such a
short time? If you didn*t try the
drug yourself, how could you be certain that it was bogus on poison?
BB: I don*t think that those
guys would have lied tome. They wouldn*t
have been that mad.
AB: How long had you and Hinman been doing these transactions?
BB: Very rarely. I just happened to know that he had something. I was trying
to be a nice guy, trying to be in with the fellows, trying to impress somebody.
AB: Impress the bikers?
BB: They represented to me an element of freedom in America. On the road, and
in their lifestyle, the freedom that they express with each other. I felt so
desperate in this situation, being put in a cross with the motorcycle club.
Naturally, they are going to be mad at me—not at him. They didn*t
even know him. I*m the one who
took their money and brought back this mescaline, supposed mescaline. I*m
in a helluva bind. If I don*t give
them something, who knows about their plans.
AB: Why did you bring susan Atkins and Mary Brunner to the Hinman house?
BB: Because they were friends of Gary Hinman. Mary Brunner was close to him
because she stayed with him for a while. She was as close as anybody could be
with him. The girls didn*t even
know what was going on. They just wanted to go party and see him. No one was
going there with any intention of killing Gary Hinman.
AB: In neither of your two trials, nor in Ed Sanders*
or Bugliosi*s books, is there any
mention of the Hinman murder stemming from a drug burn.
BB: I never testified about it. I never told anybody. I didn*t
know how to deal with it. What happened to me that day was the culmination of a
whole lot of pressures that had been on me for several years.
AB: Alright. You arrived at Hinman*s
and asked fon your money back?
BB: I demanded it. I wasn*t
going to take no for an answer. I had a motorcycle band on my back.
AB: And Hinman refused to return the money?
BB: Right. I was carrying a knife in a sheath at that time, more for utility
than anything else. I had been wearing a knife for three to four years prior to
that because I was always on the road.
AB: Who had the gun?
BB: I gave the gun to Susan Atkins. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I
was looking for something worth $1000 that I could take back to these people.
"If he moves." I said, "shoot him." She wasn*t
going to shoot him. I was right about that. But he decided to be a hero and dove
at the gun. And she*s (Atkins)
yelling and screaming, "He*s got
the gun. he*s got the gun. Oh God.
We had a hell of a night. I wasn t going to let him get the gun.
AB: How long were you in Hinman*s
house?
BB: A little less than 24 hours. It got dark again.
AB: When you killed Hinman, were you high on anything?
BB: No. Nothing. I think I had a glass of wine at Gary*s
that night.
AB: It was stated at your trial and assumed by virtually all parties that
Charlie Manson made an entrance at the Hinman home, sometime during the period
when you were there. Didn*t Manson
show up at one point?
BB: No, no, no. You see the Sheriff*s
Homicide Department wanted to get Manson involved in my case, which was very
difficult because Manson was not involved.
AB: Both prosecutor/author Vincent Bugliosi and Ed sanders (in his book
The Family) maintained that Charlie Manson came to Hinman*s
during the night and slashed off Hinman*s
ear with his knife. Now you say that you alone cut his face and killed
him.
BB: Yeah. yeah. That was the prosecution*s
theory because they wanted to get Manson into the act (laughs). They tried every
trick in the book and I*ll tell
you why. The Tate-La Bianca murders fell under the jurisdiction of the Los
Angeles Police Department. However, the Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman murders both
came into the jurisdiction of the Sheriff*s
Department (LASO). And the Sheriff*s
Dept. was in competition. Actually Hinman*s
ear was never gone. never cut off. It was more his cheek sliced, actually a cut
on his cheek that intersected the edge of his ear. That slash across his face
occurred the night before he died in the fight over the gun.
AB: If you had no intention of killing Hinman. why did you bring a 9 mm.
Radon pistol?
BB: I borrowed it from Bruce Davis. I didn*t
actually ask him. It was around (the Spahn Ranch). I just borrowed it. I didn*t
even know how to use the damn thing.
AB: But you did fire a shot that missed Hinman.
BB: Struggling with Gary Hinman for the gun, it went off in the kitchen. (The
bullet) went through the sink. That was the only time it was fired. I knew so
little about operating this gun that after it went off and not knowing that it
was a semi-automatic, I cocked the gun which jammed it. I didn*t
know that it wouldn*t fire again
without removing the clip and the shell.
AB: Did Gary Hinman bleed to death?
BB: No. no. no. Nobody was killing him until the last minute.
AB: I think that*s at odds with
the coroner*s report. The
prosecution at your trial charged there was torture involved. BB: There had been
some suggestion that I tortured him, a theory used by the district attorney to
justify a 1st degree conviction a felony murder. District attorney, Burton Katz,
with a red Cadillac pitted against a paunchy Jewish public defender [Leon
Salter].
AB: You*re saying that you
attacked Hinman with the knife after a struggle over the gun.
BB: Right. And I sewed up his ear too, by the way with dental floss.
AB: That was mighty white of you.
BB: Oh, stop being sarcastic. We had a helluva fight. I wasn*t
going to let him get the gun.
AB: When did you decide to kill Hinman? And why?
BB: Gary Hinman would not have died if he had not told me that he was
going to blow the whistle as soon as I was gone.
AB: Blow the whistle to whom?
BB: He told me that he was going to the police (and tell them) that I had
come and assaulted him to get money*
from him. I had my* back against
the wall. He said, "I*m going to
tell the police what you did to me. Up until that point I had assumed that every*thing
was square between us. This guy is a drug dealer. He*s
playing the game. And if you*re
going to dance, you*ve got to pay
the fiddler. You burn somebody, that*s
the way* it is. You expect
somebody to knock on your door to collect. I figured we were straight. He had
signed over the pink slips of his two cars to me. They were pieces of junk but
they were worth between them, perhaps one thousand dollars. I figured that I*d
give these cars to the motorcycle club, hoping they would accept them in return
for their $l000, and get myself out of my bind with them. The only reason that I
stayed over was so that I wouldn*t
be seen driving his beat-up VW van during the daylight.
AB: Did you ever call the Spahn Ranch during this period?
BB: Yes. I did and talked to a guy named Bruce. I said, "Come over and pick
up a car." He did. He came over and picked up the car.
AB: Was this after you had killed Hinman?
BB: No, At the time that Bruce Davis was coming over to pick up the car,
everything between Gary and I was straight. Bruce came to the house and stay*ed
just long enough to pick up the car. He didn*t
even come inside. He picked up the car keys and somebody w*ho
was with him—it was more than likely Elda who was tight with Bruce—drove the car
back that he came in. That was Bruce Davis*
only involvement. He had no idea what was going on.
AB: Where is he now?
BB: He*s in Folsom Prison.
AB: For the murder of Hinman...
BB: Yeah and they tied him tip with the Shorty Shea thing. (Stuntman Shorty
Shea who lived at the Spahn Ranch prior to his death/murder).
AB: How did Gary Hinman die?
BB: Stabbed in the heart twice. He died immediately*.
He had signed over both pink slips to me athd I figured that we were square. One
car had already been picked up. and I was going to drive the other. So I stayed
over and the next evening he tells me. "I*m
sending you to prison for assault," or whatever. I thought, well, here goes my
life. My freedom is my life. The slash on his face is pretty bad. I didn*t
really know what to do. Hinman would have a scar on his face now for the rest of
his life. He was a lot more upstanding than me. He*s
a homeowner and so forth, a college student. I*m
at a loss trying to resolve this situation, where we can go from there and not
get in each other*s way. And it
was a stupid decision. I should have taken my*
chances with whatever he was going to do,
AB: Did Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner simply stand around and watch you kill
Hinman?
BB: Well, noone wanted to kill him. They had just come along for the ride.
AB: What did the girls do?
BB: They didn*t know what to
do. He (Gary) was closer to them than he w*as
to me. Susan Atkins seemed to think. "Oh, what fun, how interesting." Mary*
Brunner was just scared to death. Mary Brunner just faded into the woodwork. She
w*as a librarian. Susan Atkins is
now* a Jesus freak in jail. She
gave five different testimonies and in one of them, she claimed that she
killed Hinman. (laughs).
AB: Who actually w*rote
Political Piggy on the wall in Hinman*s
blood?
BB: I didn*t, but I had it
written. Well, it was my idea to do it. Susan Atkins w*as
on that wall. The whole thing was to take the heat off the trail. Gary Hinman w*as
into his revolutionary communism. His whole living room was a library of
Communist literature. I figured I*d
make it look like one of his cohorts, you know.
AB: Make it look like a Black Panther killing?
BB: I wasn*t thinking about
blacks necessarily.
AB: That was Manson*s trip.
BB: It*s never really been his
trip. I mean, he*s from the South.
West Virginia. Since he*s been in
(prison) he gets along with blacks better than anybody.
AB: When you returned to the Spahn Ranch and returned the jammed gun to Bruce
Davis, did you tell him that you had killed Gary Hinman?
BB: I didn*t talk to anybody
about it. But Susan Atkins has a motor mouth. She (Atkins) was the one, not
me, that Danny* DeCarlo had
the conversation with, The district attorney and Danny DeCarlo were drinking
buddies and that is how he (DeCarlo) got the two felony charges and a federal
gun charge dropped in return for his testimony.
AB: If Hinman died immediately as you say, why did Susan Atkins run back
inside the house and suffocate him?
BB: It was death gasps. He was dead but there are spasms that people go
through. What do they call it? Death rattle, I mean it*s
a normal thing that happens, She ran back in to the house and laid a pillow over
his face to muffle the sound. There was no suffocating. He was dead,
AB: Was this the first time that you had ever killed somebody?
BB: The first and only time. I*m
not ordinarily violence-prone. I*ve
been in some situations here (in prison) where I*ve
had to stand up for myself, but I*ve
never had any preoccupation with violence.
AB: Were you frightened after you killed Hinman?
BB: It*s hard to say. You go
through a lot of things. Guilt. Anxiety over getting busted.
AB: Were you surprised that it took a week before you were caught?
BB: No. I thought the body would be discovered later than it was because the
cars were gone and, by all appearances, Hinman was gone too, The heat of the
summer and decomposure attracted flies and some attention, The body was found
five days later,
AB: And when you were caught driving his car, you had some of his blood on
you. True?
BB: No. Well, in a matter of speaking. I wasn*t
wearing the clothes I was wearing then. There were a couple of spots and they
(forensic) couldn*t even tell if
it was animal blood. It was probably not Gary Hinman*s
blood.
AB: Whose blood could it have been?
BB: More than likely it was my own. I have a tendency to cut myself. I work
with my hands a lot.
AB: In light of the murder you had committed only*
a week before, it doesn*t appear
that you were taking precautions against getting caught. Driving a dead man*s
car, for instance.
BB: I*m not sure that I was
trying so desperately to prevent my apprehension. I was kind of devastated by
what I had done. I drove the car off on the pretense of ditching it somewhere. I
picked up some hitchhikers and took them to where they were going and just
continued north. In retrospect, it was definitely a stupid move.
AB: What are your thoughts about Gary Hinman now? Are you still bitter?
BB: No. I don*t begrudge
anything that happened. Gary Hinman was as stupid as me. If he w as going to do
something like that (report Beausoleil), he should never have told me. It was
done and finished. He had a thin cut on his cheek. It would have healed and he
would have had a thin line to show for it. Well, he burned somebody. He sold
some drugs that would have killed people.
AB: What was your biggest mistake that night, and at your trials?
BB: My biggest mistake was simply in killing Gary Hinman. I told the judge
that I didn*t feel any remorse
because I wouldn*t give him that
satisfaction. That*s the only
reason I told him that. As far as I*m
concerned that man (Judge John Shea) is a helluva lot more diabolical than
Charlie Manson ever was. But the thing is, I*ve
felt a great deal of remorse within me. I think I wanted to pay for Gary Hinman*s
death. I think I owed Gary that. I*ve
worshipped life my whole life. What*s
heartbreaking to me more than anything else is that killing Gary Hinman has
negated all of my creative efforts. (The world) doesn*t
concentrate on anything other than that one mistake I made in my life. And it
was a big mistake. You can*t give
a life back.
AB: Did it ever occur to you to turn state*s
evidence or offer your hunch on who committed the Tate-LaBianca murders in
exchange for having the Hinman charge dropped?
BB: Yes, But there*s no
future...
AB: For a snitch?
BB: Not to me. I wouldn*t be
able to.
AB: Do you still get letters from (Manson) family members?
BB: I*ve gotten a few from
Squeaky. Squeaky and Sandra Goode are trying to hold together the illusion of
this Manson family thing. They*re
into this fanatical religion hype.
AB: What do they ask you to do?
BB: They just preach. I don*t
know why. I can*t relate to that.
AB: Do you have any letters from Manson?
BB: Oh, heavens yes.
AB: When was the last time you heard from him?
BB: Probably about eight years ago.
AB: Have you heard from your old girlfriend Kitty Leutsinger who testified
against you when she was pregnant with your child?
BB: Not for many, many years. The last time I heard she was living with a
junkie in Santa Cruz.
AB: How old is your child?
BB: A girl. She*s eleven now
and lives with her grandparents. Kitty*s.
AB: Who was killed first? When did the murder sprees begin?
BB: Gary Hinman was killed before anybody was killed. Before that nobody had
any real plans of killing anybody, but when it happened...
AB: It became contagious?
BB: Yeah, sort of.
AB: You*re saying then that the
Hinman murder was almost a catalyst for mass killing.
BB: I think it did have some kind of triggering effect. Yes.
AB: As a consequence, the people in the Tate and La Bianca homes were killed.
Did you have any notice that they were going to be killed?
BB: No, nothing at all. When it happened, I knew who had done it. I was
fairly certain.
AB: What made you so certain? Because you knew that the Tate house used to be
Terry Melcher*s? Did they think
they would find Terry Melcher?
BB: Yeah, I would assume. Yeah, That*s
what I*ve heard.
AB: And the style of the murders was a grotesque exageration of the way you
killed Gary Hinman. More blood writing on the wall, theway you did it. It has
been said that the Tate-LaBianca murders were done to try to spring you from
jail. An attempt to prove that they were all connected by the consistent motif
of writing on the walls with the victim*s
blood. Hence, if you were in jail during the Tate-La Biancas and they were done
by the same person who killed Hinman, their aazy logic was that the police would
have to release you.
BB: I do believe there was something to that, yes, because of the way the
murders were made to look. They (Tate-La Biancas) were a few days after I was
arrested. That was the 9th (August 9, 1969). I don*t
think that whoever*s idea it was
to commit these murders would have been able to get the participation of those
involved unless there had been this noble concept.
AB: Meaning freeing Bobby from jail?
BB: Gary Hinman had his own personal relationship with the so-called Manson
Family and perhaps they interpreted the thing that I had defended them from him,
as well as myself.
AB: Did that enter your mind when you killed him, that he could squeal on the
Family?
BB: It*s not that I did
that, but whether they thought I had intended that. You*ve
got to understand that these people were not totally without some kind of
scruples. They had to have some kind of reason to justify it in their own minds,
even if the justification was twisted and bizarre.
AB: Why would your incarceration be such a threat or loss to them?
BB: I believe that it led to a situation in which Charlie and the others, who
had made similar commitments to each other, were forced into a situation of
acting upon their commitment. I don*t
think it was because of Charlie Manson*s
fondness for me, necessarily. I think that this was a justification—something
that would give the whole episode a more noble cause than just going out to kill
some people. This was 1969. "Kill your Parents"—Jerry Rubin and all of that,
There w*as a lot of doomsday talk
around at that time when everybody was pretty well frustrated and not knowing
what to do and still having some romantic vision of revolution. What the exact
motives were I can*t really say.
It wasn*t a plot by Beatles*
records and it was not the "I was hypnotized" concept of Susan Atkins. I think
it falls back to a basic commitment that Charlie made with people. The striking
out was very senseless. I*ve seen
it a lot in here, where people are so desperate that they really don*t
know who to strike out at. It was more that sort of thing than something that
was sat down and plotted out.
AB: How accurate are the descriptions of Manson and the family in Bugliosi*s
Helter Skelter and Ed Sanders*
The Family?
BB: They are both so pathetic because neither one took the proper approach to
begin to understand what happened. Everything gets lost in blood and guts, devil
worship, all that stuff that never went on. This satanic crap and brainwave
master never went on. These things were taken out of light-hearted
conversations. There is truth in all these books. There are facts. Period.
AB: Where did the writers go wrong?
BB: They were never in a situation where they experienced that kind of
desperation. AB: Describe the kind of desperation,
BB: The desperation which leads somebody to go out and almost,,,
AB: Kill?
BB: Yeah. Kill crazily. Just throw*
away their lives and murder people.
AB: What created this so-called desperation? BB: They*
were a bunch of people with their backs against the wall. This wasn*t
mere discontent, This was lunacy, At least in their minds, they were at the end
corner of the world, They couldn*t
travel any more together without a caravan of law enforcement people behind
them. The only place left to go was the desert, They were at the end of the edge
of the world and they were scared to death of being pushed off the edge. The
desert is death, They* wound up in
Death Valley trying to live off the bugs.
AB: How do you think Manson has held up over the last decade of virtual
solitary confinement?
BB: I don*t know if he*s
burnt out. From what I've heard,
the pressures have taken their toll. All this time he*s
been in protective custody.(*) Some of these guys kill people for real weird
reasons, just to see what it*s
like. Some kind of peer pressure or peer prestige. There*s
a lot of sickness in prisons. It*s
an environment that grows this ugly fear mentality, like a culture dish of
bacteria,
AB: Have you changed much being in jail for 11 years? Do you think you*ve
learned anything?
BB: Oh, I*ve learned a lot.
Where do I begin? I*ve got my act
together pretty well. I was a lame kid when I came in and when I come out I*m
not going to be any lame kid.
They don*t have to worry about me
being a troublemaker because I*ve
got enough talent, Believe me, it*s
been hell, but experiences like this temper you. I*ve
used it..
(*) In August. 1980. prison authorities at Vacaville Prison released Manson
from protective custody. He had been pleading to enter the general inmate
population for several years.
