The Tate–LaBianca murders are etched into the public imagination. They are, in casual conversation, what people mean when they say “the Manson murders”: two nights of unhinged bloodshed that came out of nowhere.
It’s too often forgotten that the Family had taken another life by then. Gary Hinman, thirty-four, lived in a secluded house in Topanga Canyon, a hippie community about fifteen miles south of the Spahn Ranch. A soft-spoken Buddhist and music teacher, Hinman had treated Manson and his followers with a dignity that few afforded them. He hosted members of the Family for long stays in his home, and he was generous when they needed food or money.
In July 1969, the increasingly agitated Manson was convinced that Hinman had just come into an inheritance of some twenty thousand dollars. Seeing green, he ordered three of his followers—Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins, the last of whom would later participate in the Tate–LaBianca murders—to seize Hinman’s money by any means necessary.
The three showed up at Hinman’s on July 25. Manson was wrong, he said, there was no inheritance, but they refused to take him at his word. They tied him up and ransacked the place, but there was no cash to be found. Manson decided to see for himself, coming over with Bruce Davis, another Family member. But even Manson couldn’t extract anything from Hinman. Finally, incensed, Manson drew a saber from a sheath on his belt and cut Hinman’s ear in half. He and Davis left the house, but he told Beausoleil and the girls to stay until they found the money.
For two days, they battered and tortured Hinman, who insisted he had no inheritance. (They also sewed up his severed ear using dental floss.) By day three, Manson had had enough—he wanted Hinman dead. Over the phone, he ordered his followers to take care of it. Beausoleil tied Hinman up and stabbed him at least four times. As Hinman incanted a Buddhist prayer, Atkins and Brunner took turns holding a pillow over his face until he stopped breathing. Just as Manson would do in the Tate–LaBianca murders, he told his followers to leave signs implicating the Black Panthers. They dipped a rag in Hinman’s blood and smeared the words “political piggy” on the living room wall, surrounding it with bloody paw prints.
[…]
Although no one had seen or spoken to Hinman in the days before his body was discovered, it seemed that a woman had been in his house answering the phone during his captivity. At one point, when a friend of Hinman stopped by, she’d even answered his front door, holding a candle and explaining in a flimsy British accent that Hinman had gone to Colorado to see his parents.
The detectives issued an all-points bulletin for two vehicles missing from Hinman’s driveway: a Fiat station wagon and a VW microbus. Seven days after the body was discovered, the Fiat turned up on the side of a highway in San Luis Obispo, 189 miles north of L.A. Inside was Bobby Beausoleil, fast asleep. A state trooper took him into custody, and Guenther and Whiteley hurried to question him.
Beausoleil had concocted a story that blamed the Black Panthers for the murder, but he kept muddling the details. First he said that he hadn’t known Hinman at all; he’d bought the Fiat from a Black Panther a few days earlier. When the police told him they’d found the murder weapon in the Fiat’s tire well, he half-confessed: sure, he’d been in Hinman’s home, but he hadn’t killed the man. He and two women, neither of whom he would identify, had arrived at the house to find Hinman bloodied and beaten, complaining that a group of Black Panthers had robbed him. They’d stayed and nursed Hinman back to health. As a sign of gratitude, Hinman gave them the Fiat. The murder, Beausoleil speculated, must have occurred after he and the girls left the house—maybe the Panthers had returned seeking more money. So why was the knife in his car? He couldn’t explain. Nor could he say why he’d suddenly changed his story.
[…]
Anyone might wonder: How could the police fail to connect Hinman’s murder to the Tate–LaBianca killings, given their macabre similarities?
[…]
On August 16, 1969, LASO descended on the Spahn Ranch en masse. Just past six in the morning, as the sun was creeping up and most everyone was still asleep, more than one hundred officers swarmed the property, led by the organization’s elite SWAT team. Armed with handguns, AR-15 rifles, and tear gas, they were assisted by two helicopters, numerous ATVs, and a fleet of some thirty-five squad cars. Surrounding the ranch’s two hundred acres, they descended from five prearranged outposts with a show of force the likes of which no one in LASO had ever seen before. They arrested everyone in the Family—twenty-seven adults and seven juveniles. They confiscated seven stolen cars and a vast cache of weapons, including an automatic pistol and a submachine gun. One officer praised the raid’s military precision, telling me, “It was the most flawlessly executed operation I’d ever been involved in.”
The raid had nothing to do with the murders. In the preceding weeks, deputies had been keeping the ranch under close surveillance, perhaps even sending undercover agents to investigate. They suspected that Manson was running an auto-theft ring out of Spahn, stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies.
[…]
But the Family wasn’t charged. Despite the preponderance of evidence—the cars, the guns, the numerous sightings of Manson and his followers with stolen vehicles—the entire group was released three days after the raid, no questions asked. Bugliosi explained it in Helter Skelter: “They had been arrested on a misdated warrant.”
[…]
Guillory’s thesis was this: Manson had gotten away with far too much at the Spahn Ranch in the months before the murders. Even though he was a federal parolee, Manson had no job; he had ready access to drugs, alcohol, and underage girls; he had a cache of firearms. And LASO officers knew all about it. At LASO’s Malibu station—Spahn was in its jurisdiction—Manson’s lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said. Firemen patrolling the ranch’s fire trails had even encountered Manson and the Family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The cops always looked the other way. According to Guillory, that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”
And so, despite the raft of crimes that Manson and the Family were committing, they were never apprehended, and Manson never had his parole revoked. There was even an occasion where Manson was picked up by LASO police for statutory rape, but they ended up cutting him loose.
Even as the station instituted this hands-off policy, they kept a close watch over Manson. Guillory was sure that LASO’s intelligence unit, or some other intelligence unit, was running surveillance on the Spahn Ranch. He alluded to memos about Manson—with cover sheets to protect against prying eyes—that went straight to the station captain, and who knows where after that. Guillory didn’t think the surveillance “was just a local thing.”
Then came the murder of Gary Hinman, and soon after it the Tate–LaBianca murders. How had LASO failed to see this coming? They’d been monitoring Manson constantly. Guillory theorized that the massive August 16 raid on the Spahn Ranch was LASO’s effort to cover its tracks after the murders. Calling it “the biggest circus I’ve ever been involved in,” he marveled at the fact that all the charges had been dropped seventy-two hours later. Something didn’t add up about the raid—all that force, all those arrests, for nothing? It was “like we were doing something perhaps a week late to show that we had really been watching,” he said on the radio.
But that raised a bunch of problems. If the sheriff’s office was surveilling Manson before the raid, it would’ve known enough to bring him in for the murders. If it wasn’t watching him, then how had it amassed enough evidence to get the search warrant authorizing the raid?
When the LAPD held a self-congratulatory press conference to announce that Manson and his group were suspects in the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory decided to become a whistle-blower. He went to a news station, KCAL, and told them everything he knew, thinking the press would be all over this story. They hardly touched it. Worse, the leak cost him his job: LASO’s internal affairs department got wind of his remarks and sent him packing.
After his departure, LASO did all it could to discredit him. An internal memo said that no one should discuss his previous employment there. It implied that he was a drug addict and an unrepentant leftist bent on smearing the office’s reputation.
[…]
“We were told not to bother these people,” he told me, referring to the Family. The order came in a memo from his captain. “Tell him whatever we saw or heard, that was one of the first things that I was told when I got to Malibu.” Peter Pitchess, the sheriff of Los Angeles County at the time, was “memo-minded,” Guillory explained. He exerted immense authority—and that authority extended to his officers’ conduct with Manson. “We were asked to generate memos every time we had contact with any member of the Family,” Guillory said.
Despite this intense period of information gathering, Manson was never charged when he was arrested. Why was a law-breaking parolee allowed to go free? “A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets. My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason—I don’t know.” It was “very unusual” that someone with a record like Manson’s would be left on the streets.
The shock of the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory thought, forced the sheriff’s office to hide its own intelligence-gathering efforts. If Manson were guilty of homicide, “How could anybody possibly say we let him on the streets?” There would’ve been civil liability issues. Careers would have been destroyed. And, of course, it would’ve cost Pitchess the next election.
But that didn’t explain why the police allowed Manson to go free for another three months after the Tate murders, knowing he could have killed more people. Why not just arrest him right away, and keep their surveillance program quiet?
Guillory had no idea—he’d been asking himself the same question. All he knew was “that Manson was under some kind of loose surveillance by our department or somebody else. We know he’s being watched by somebody, but we don’t know who. The thing is this—if he was under surveillance, those people left the ranch on two occasions, committed the seven homicides… why was there no intervention?” He added that there was no legal obligation for LASO to intervene; they could’ve chosen to let the murders pass without action, if Manson were so important that they didn’t want to risk interrupting their surveillance.
Guillory was fairly confident that someone from LASO knew right away that the Family had committed those murders. “Probably someone saw them come and go and there’s a log entry someplace and then, of course, later they found where they went and all hell would’ve broken loose.”
Plus, he reiterated, LASO never could have launched such an extraordinary raid without sound intelligence—enough to persuade a judge to grant a search warrant. “You don’t mount a raid without surveillance like this!” he said. More infuriating still: none of it stuck. The sheriff’s office went to all that effort for nothing. And it didn’t have to be that way, Guillory was sure. “We did find evidence of enough criminal activity—stolen property, narcotics—to violate [Manson’s] parole in the first place. It was astounding! I never could figure out why he was released.” Guillory had been part of the operation that day, and he remembered finding stolen purses, wallets, and pocketbooks with IDs—all damning evidence, and all seemingly ignored. After the raid, he said, the surveillance ended, as mysteriously as it had started.
In another interview, with the writer Paul Krassner, Guillory explained, “It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought… There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I never had the feeling the raid was necessary.” He speculated that Manson was never arrested “because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers.” Their intelligence had revealed that Manson had shot Bernard Crowe, whom he mistakenly believed to be a Black Panther, in July, and this apparently convinced LASO that Manson “was going to launch an attack” on the whole organization.
Of Guillory’s many outrageous claims, this one was maybe the hardest to swallow—but, again, he stuck by it when I asked him. “I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on,” he said. “Cause a stir, blame it on the Panthers… I’ve got to believe he was involved, based on all info we have. Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.”
When Manson was finally brought to justice for the murders, LASO took dramatic precautions to hide its surveillance of the ranch. “I thought what they were doing was illegal,” Guillory told me. “All the crime reports disappeared from the station. Everything was gone, all of our reports were gone. Normally you had access to your own reports; they were all gone, disappeared. The whole file was gone, and the memo went up that no one involved in the Spahn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone outside the department.” That convinced Guillory to go to a reporter—the move that cost him his job.
[…]
And the police had already shown a willingness to look the other way. The search warrant related an incident from an Officer Williams of the LAPD. He told Deputy Gleason that
within the last two weeks he and his partner were on duty at the Spahn Ranch… Mr. Manson was bragging to the officers about the weapons available to him and his friends at the Ranch. Mr. Manson told the officers that while he was talking to the officers that his friends had rifles trained on the officers… this is standard procedure whenever officers approach the Ranch.
Manson had flouted the law and bragged about it to LAPD officers as he had his followers train rifles on them—something else, incidentally, not reported in Helter Skelter.
Manson’s cavalier, taunting behavior continued. Elsewhere in the warrant, the LAPD’s Ted Leigh said he had found three loaded ammunition clips for a carbine that “fell from a dune buggy while on the highway” sometime on or around July 29. Leigh soon heard from Manson himself, who said the ammunition was his and that he would stop by and pick it up.
So Manson, a paroled ex-con with a known history of violence, had simply called up the cops and asked them if he could come collect the ammunition he’d lost? And he’d done this a little more than a week before the Tate–LaBianca murders. Manson, the warrant noted, had been “mentioned in prior memos,” which fit with Guillory’s insistence that police knew how dangerous he was.
Whether that awareness was the result of surveillance was an open question. The warrant explained that LASO deputies had cultivated an informant at the ranch, someone who “has seen guns in practically every building on the property. The informant was also threatened by Charles Manson.” And there was extensive reconnaissance by the same Officer Leigh, who “flew over the Spahn Movie Ranch approximately August 1, 1969, and… observed a 1969 Volkswagen laying [sic] in a ditch.” How often did the LAPD use planes to investigate car theft? Why were they flying over the ranch, which was out of their jurisdiction?
[…]
I found a one-page arrest report for Manson dated August 16, the day of the raid. In addition to the stolen cars and weapons, the arresting officer wrote that Manson had four stolen credit cards in his possession that day: they “fell out of his shirt pocket” when he was taken into custody. This had never been reported before.
In summary: Manson, the known federal parolee, walked away from an arrest that caught him with stolen cars and credit cards, an arsenal of weapons, and underage runaways. And meanwhile, two of the LASO’s best homicide detectives failed to realize that the biggest raid in California history was going down at the very same ranch that their murder suspect had called.
Bugliosi, you may recall, had chalked up the failure to a simple mistake—the search warrant was “misdated.” But now that I had it in my hands, I saw no evidence of any misdating. The warrant was clearly dated August 13, 1969. According to the California penal code, a warrant is good for ten days after its date. The raid was completely legal on August 16, a fact I verified with many police and attorneys.
[…]
[Lewis Watnick, the former head deputy DA of Van Nuys] spent a while reading my documents in silence, and then he sighed. “Chicken shit!” he croaked. “This is all a bunch of chicken shit.” The size of the raid; the fact that the DA’s office kept releasing Manson when they had enough evidence to charge him, or at least violate his parole… “It dovetails right in,” he said. “Manson was an informant.”
It was only a guess, he conceded, but an educated one, based on his thirty years in the job. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the theory. One of my LASO sources had wondered if Manson “had his finger in a bigger pie.” Having been in the office’s intelligence division, he’d seen stuff like this before. “What happens in those situations is either he’s giving up somebody bigger than himself or he’s on somebody else’s list as far as a snitch, or he’s ratting out other people.” And if he were informing for someone else, the DEA or the feds, no one in the LASO would know about it, necessarily. Robert Schirn, the DA who authorized the raid only to dismiss the charges, had made the same suggestion: “Another possibility, sheer speculation, is that [Manson] may have been an informant for somebody.” But LASO deputies had all denied it.
“Of course,” Watnick said when I told him that. “Confidential informant means they’re confidential.”
