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- Clues In The Desert
A link was made between the Manson Family and the murders.
How did Los Angeles detectives eventually arrive at this
conclusion and what was the evidence? Was it sufficient
to make arrests?
Gary Hinman and the Tate LaBianca victims were all killed
within a fortnight of each other. Each murder appeared
motiveless. All died in a particularly bloody manner and
their blood was used to inscribe words on the wall. The
words all had the same connecting theme. And yet at the
beginning, the police made no connection between them.
Gary Hinman's body was found by friends on 31 July 1969,
four days after he had been murdered. They called the
Los Angeles Sherriff's Office (LASO), which deals with
crimes outside the metropolitan area.
Sergeant Paul Whiteley and Deputy Charles Guenther were
assigned to the case, and it was to be their persistence
which finally cracked the whole Family affair. One of
Hinman's killers, Bobby Beausoleil, was picked up very
quickly, on 6 August.
When Whiteley and Guenther read police reports on the
Tate/LaBianca killings, they were intrigued. They knew
Bobby could not have been involved with them because he
was in custody. But they wondered about the bloody scrawling
of the words PIG and DEATH TO PIGS on Hinman's wall.
Family connection
They suspected Bobby had not been alone in the Hinman
killing. He hung out with a weird bunch of hippies who
lived at the Spahn Movie Ranch, led by Charles Manson.
Perhaps whoever had been with Bobby had gone on to do
the Tate/LaBianca murders? Whiteley passed on his ideas
to Sergeant Jesse Buckles, an officer on the Tate investigation
team in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
Buckles dismissed the idea as a non-starter, and did not
even bother to report it to his superior officer. It took
weeks for either team to get anywhere. The Tate investigation
looked promising at first. The grisly scene had been discovered
by the live-out housekeeper, Mrs Winifred Chapman.
There was one person alive and unharmed on the Tate property
residence William Garretson, the young caretaker who lived
in the guest house in the back garden and claimed he had
not heard anything. He was dazed, confused, frightened.
But above all, he had been on the grounds of the residence
when the murders took place. They leant on him, but could
prove nothing.
Drugs clue
The next day. when the LaBianca killings broke, all police
could say definitely was that Garretson had not done it:
he was in custody. In uptown LA. panic swept the poolsides.
Gun sales shot up. security dog handlers had never had
it so good and social life ceased. The pressure was on
the police to be seen to act.
In the Tate murder case, the most promising lead seemed
to be drugs. A terrified Polish friend told the police
that Voytek Frykowski was being set up as a drugs dealer.
And the LAPD was well aware that Jay Sebring, hairdresser
to the stars, was involved in the drug scene, discreetly
supplying the rich and famous.
In contrast, the LaBiancas were eminently respectable,
successful, rich and contented. Leno LaBianca was a supermarket
supremo and Mrs LaBianca had her own retail business.
Without much conviction, police explored the idea of some
sort of mafia connection, or a gambling vendetta (Leno
LaBianca had been a keen gambler and race horse owner),
but there were no convincing leads.
It was not until 15 October that one of the LaBianca team
thought about checking out similar murders on the LASO
patch and found out about the Hinman case. Unlike the
Tate detectives, they considered it an important lead.
But as they were gearing up, news came in from Whiteley
and Guenther about the activities of the desert hippies.
All had not been quiet on the Spahn Ranch.
On 16 August, it had been raided by LASO officers in pursuit
of stolen cars and credit cards. Two months later, on
12 October, Inyo County Police raided the remote Barker
Ranch, in pursuit of car thieves, arsonists and illegal
firearms. This time, they arrested 24 Family members,
again including the scruffy guru himself.
The remoteness of the ranch meant that the raid took three
days. During this time, two frightened young women stumbled
out of a dry gully and begged the police for protection.
They were Kitty Lutesinger. five months pregnant with
Bobby Beausoleil's child, and Stephanie Schram. Charles
Manson's latest and last love. They had been trying to
escape.
Inyo County Police informed LASO of the raid, and Whiteley
and Guenther, who had been looking for Lutesinger for
months in connection with the Hinman case, drove the 200-odd
miles up to Independence to interview her. Kitty had devastating
news.
She had heard that Manson had told Bobby and Sadie Mae
to go and collect money from Hinman. She had also heard
Sadie Mae talk to other Family members at the ranch about
stabbing a man in the legs and him pulling her hair.
Sadie Mae, alias Susan Atkins, was also locked up at Independence.
When interviewed, she told them she was at Hinman's house
when Bobby murdered him. She was booked on suspicion of
murder, and eventually detained in the Sybil Brand Institute
in Los Angeles.
The LaBianca detectives, although not too impressed by
the Hinman connection, nevertheless set their formidable
intelligence gathering machine in motion, pursuing information
on anyone who had anything to do with Manson and his followers.
Something Kitty had said about Sadie stuck in the minds
of Whiteley and Guenther.
Hinman had not been stabbed in the legs. Voytek Frykowski
had. Could Sadie have been talking about the Tate murders?
Whiteley thought the Tate detectives should know, and
so he told them. But to their shame, they did nothing
at all about it for 11 days. Kitty Lutesinger was not
interviewed until 31 October.
A direct link between the Manson Family and all three
murders was becoming visible. Sadie Mae, who loved to
talk, had begun talking in jail to her cellmate, Ronnie
Howard, and her workmate Virginia Graham. It took them
some time to decide she was not making it up, and even
longer to find someone to listen to them.
Linking evidence
The LaBianca conscientiousness paid off. netting Al Springer
and then Danny de Carlo of the Straight Satans who had
lots to say by way of hearsay and circumstantial evidence.
People outside the Manson set such as record producer
Terry Melcher and Greg Jakobsen gave evidence that Manson
had been to the Tate residence (it used to be Terry Melcher's
house) among other things.
On 3 December. Susan Atkins took the stand to testify
to the Grand Jury and describe what really happened on
the night of 8 August at 10050 Cielo Drive. |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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