Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, was just back from vacation, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), in early September, 1969:
The horrors of the Tate–LaBianca murders, then only a month old, still dominated the news. The killers remained at large, and no one even knew who they were. Ross was struck by reports that they’d left the bloody word “Pig” in conspicuous areas of both the Tate and LaBianca homes. His Hinman murder scene featured such writing, too. He took one look at the case and immediately connected it to the unsolved Tate–LaBianca murders. “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to,” he said.
[…]
In Independence, California, the group of twenty-some bedraggled hippies [from the Manson “family”] sat in the cramped county jail [for auto theft]. LASO detectives Guenther and Whiteley drove 225 miles to the dusty desert town to seek out a possible witness in the Hinman murder.
[…]
Atkins agreed to speak to the detectives without an attorney present. They told her that her fingerprints had been found at the Hinman crime scene and that Beausoleil had already ratted on her—both lies, but they got her talking about the crime. Atkins admitted to having held Hinman while Beausoleil stabbed him, but she claimed she never hurt him. She was booked on a first-degree-murder charge and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, in downtown Los Angeles.
Atkins’s cellmate was a longtime con artist and call girl who went by Ronnie Howard. The two became fast friends. Almost immediately, Atkins was telling Howard and another inmate, Virginia Graham, all about her role in the Tate–LaBianca murders. She had personally stabbed Sharon Tate to death, she bragged, as Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby. After Tate died, Atkins said she’d tasted the dead actress’s blood; it was “warm and sticky and nice.”