Convicted killer Charles “Tex” Watson, the muscle behind the
Tate-LaBianca murders, has filed a motion to stop the Los Angeles
Police Department from obtaining tapes of him talking with his
lawyer in the aftermath of the Manson Family arrests. The eight
hours of tape, access to which Watson had once granted to an
author, became available as a result of the deceased attorney’s
bankruptcy proceedings.
The LAPD seeks to possess rather than merely listen to the
recordings because of suspicions that they might shed light on
Manson Family murders beyond those affirmed by the courts. Accounts
of a supposed one-man-game of Russian-roulette-gone-wrong played by
a cultist with a fully-loaded revolver (strangely witnessed only by
other Family members), the mysterious disappearance of a defense
attorney, and a follower’s throat-and-wrist-slashed suicide in
London continue to raise suspicions. Of this last case a Family
member cryptically wrote, “I would not want what happened to Joel
to happen to me.”
Forty-three summers after the Helter Skelter murders, the Manson
Family still provokes headlines and head-scratching. One needn’t
six-degrees-of-separation to connect the villains and victims to as
diverse a collection of characters as Doris Day, Steve McQueen,
Neil Young, and Lou Costello, proving that the entertainment Mecca
was still like a village where everyone’s connection extended to
everybody. A friend of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson killed friends of
the Mamas and the Papas’ John and Michele Phillips for reasons
found on a Beatles album.
It didn’t make sense, but then again so little during the late
1960s did.
Most mysterious of all is why what we know, and not just what we
don’t, remains so obscure. Specifically puzzling is why a group so
mired in the leftist counterculture is so disassociated or at least
considered anomalous from the sixties Left.
“His words and courage inspired us,” explained Yippe Jerry
Rubin, who visited Manson in jail. “I fell in love with Charlie
Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on
TV.” Counterculture newspapers fell for a conman’s Christ complex
by depicting the establishment crucifying Manson. Weatherman
adopted a split-fingered greeting, and featured a cell named “The
Fork,” in homage to the culinary implement stuck into the murdered
Leno LaBianca’s stomach. A banner even spelled out victim Sharon
Tate’s name in bullets at a 1969 “War Party” gathering in Flint,
Michigan.
Like Weatherman, the Manson Family started on a college
campus—Berkeley, to be precise, where the group’s messiah recruited
his first follower, University of California librarian Mary
Brunner. Both groups fetishized African Americans as the vanguard
of a pending world revolution. Whereas the Weathermen appropriated
Bob Dylan lyrics for their name and manifesto, Manson discovered
cryptic messages embedded in The Beatles’ white album. Both cults
used communal living, sex on demand, and narcotics as means of
control.
Most importantly, Weathermen and Manson cultists set out to kill
people they regarded as “pigs”—sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and
murder.
But it’s somehow uncouth to draw parallels between, say,
Bernardine Dohrn and Charles Manson. Was Manson’s “Helter Skelter”
prophecy of race war really any more outlandish, or that different,
than the Weatherman manifesto’s contention that “the real interests
of masses of oppressed whites in this country lie with the Black
Liberation Struggle,” its overthrow of the U.S. government, and the
world communism that would supposedly ensue?
The Manson Family provokes endless curiosity. Desert excavations
in search of bodies and periodic parole hearings stoke public
interest. Suggest the reopening of a case connected to Weatherman,
as Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid did several years ago
regarding the 1970 murder of San Francisco police sergeant Brian
McDonnell, and listen to the crickets.
The media frenzy that greets new information in a case in which
the major figures remain incarcerated strangely becomes media
indifference when the reinvestigation focuses on scot-free
academics with powerful friends and enormous bank accounts. Never
is the search for truth (and justice) so maligned as a campaign of
harassment as when it involves the crimes of well-connected old
lefties.
If Brian McDonnell had been a movie star rather than a cop his
murderers would be behind bars instead of lecterns.
Weatherman cultists found sinecures in academia, won generous
publishing contracts, and even cultivated friendships with a future
president. Manson Family members, on the other hand, hide from
society, change their names, and rot in jail.
This status discrepancy, like certain deaths surrounding both
cults, remains an unsolved mystery.
