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Jan. 15, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:26
Edition 694 - Ivor Davis - Charles Manson
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, weather report from London, awful.
That's the only word I'm going to say.
A rain-spattered window I'm looking at now, very grey, and the outlook for the next week or so is going to be cold.
But don't forget, we're about six weeks away from the spring, and I can't wait.
That's all I'm going to say about the weather.
Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, for his usual work on the show.
Thank you, Adam.
And thank you to you for all of the emails.
Please keep those coming.
Now, on this edition of the show, and with listener discretion advised, because some of the content is necessarily disturbing, I'm going to let you hear a conversation that's one of a number that I had on the radio show and up to now have never released as a podcast for posterity.
And I think this one should be released, despite the content, but because of the subject.
It's American-based foreign correspondent Ivor Davis, very well known in this country, wrote a book about the Charles Manson case.
Manson exposed a reporter's 50-year journey into madness and murder.
According to the write-up about this book, Ivor Davis is the brutally honest guide to this true crime horror story.
In fact, it shocked the 1960s and continues to shock today.
Also, the write-up about the book says, in this mix of personal memoir criticism and investigative journalism, Davis delivers a truly original take on the Byzantine case that terrified and mesmerized the United States and the United Kingdom, it has to be said, including his new conclusions that the Beatles, their song Helter Skelter, as was always said, did not make them do it.
Davis was on the front lines of the story, offers vivid personal accounts, interviews, hitherto unknown details from the very beginning, right up to the death of the blue-collar psycho, Charles Manson.
He charts the tragic inside stories, not only of those murdered, but of a long list of collateral damage victims.
It is a compelling, difficult listen.
So just to say it again very clearly, this is disturbing material, but this is something that happened.
And I think, even though a lot of things that happened in the past are unpleasant, I don't think we should be sanitizing and not talking about these things, especially when Ivor Davis is a man who was actually there, a British man who was actually there covering these events and covering the trial.
I think his reflections you'll find interesting.
So, Ivor Davis, the guest from the United States, this conversation originally broadcast on the radio show in 2019.
Of course, it's 2023 now and four years on, very nearly.
I think we should be broadcasting this and putting it on the collection of podcasts to make sure that it doesn't disappear.
So that's why I'm going to do it.
If you have a guest suggestion for the unexplained, I'm into a new round of guest booking.
I spent a lot of last week just getting the diary up to date, so we're pretty much clear into the beginning of the spring with bookings.
But certainly there may be guests that I've overlooked, haven't spoken with recently.
We've quite soon got a conversation with Richard Hoagland coming up.
I think it's been a few years since I last spoke with him.
He tells me he's got some new information.
There are some guests who I am trying to get on the show and whose names keep coming up.
And thank you for reminding me.
David Paul Nidis, the missing 411 guy, I've been trying and trying and trying for months to get him on the show.
Hopefully that will happen.
And the same is the case with Graham Hancock, who you often suggest.
Not easy to get Graham to come on the show.
If you know him, please remind him of me.
I have spoken with him many times.
So those are just two of the many names.
But I do not only bid for new guests, but also continually bid for people who've been on the show before.
And as I've said before, at the moment, I'm doing it all myself.
But that is a situation that I hope that one of these days, quite soon, may change and I'll get a little bit of help with the guest booking.
So guest bookings on track, but your ideas, thoughts and suggestions for guests, always welcome.
If you want to go to the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link and you can send me an email from there.
And if you want to put in the subject, guest suggestion, and then the name of the guest.
And if you have contact details for them, that's fine.
Remember, there are some topics that are obviously not appropriate for a broadcast show.
And if they're not appropriate for a broadcast show, I'm not going to do them here.
But there is a world of fascinating material out there.
And, you know, we never fail and never cease to find interesting people to have interesting conversations with.
You're not going to love all of them, but that is in the nature of life.
You know, this is a show that covers a whole cornucopia of subjects, not just UFOs and not just ghosts and not just life after life.
We try and talk about all kinds of things, including true crime and disturbing cases like the one you're about to hear about.
So let's get to the United States.
The year is 2019 when this was recorded on a Sunday night at the studios of Talk Radio.
On that particular night, because of timing reasons, we recorded the last hour of the show before the beginning of the show.
So literally, I think we recorded at 8 p.m. and this was transmitted at midnight on that night.
So this is Ivor Davis talking about his book, Manson Exposed, a Reporter's 50-Year Journey into Madness and Murder.
And for some of you, the Charles Manson case may be new, but just to remind you, this conversation includes some disturbing details.
This is the first time in three and a half years of doing this show on talk radio, and the first time in 15 years of doing it both online and on various stations, that I've ever actually written what I'm going to say to introduce a guest.
Normally, I just, as you may have noticed, let the words appear.
On this occasion, because the story we're about to unfold is a complicated story and a difficult story to tell properly, these words I've written.
So, as we've seen in the news in the last hours, last 24 hours, bloody murder is a shocking and tragic part of the American scene.
Deranged gunmen, strange serial killers, politically motivated maniacs all have written their names into a tragic roll call of death.
Days from now, we'll remember the chilling events of August 1969, 50 years ago, when the names Charles Manson and Sharon Tate became household words across the globe.
Charles Manson led a small fanatical cult on a self-styled war against society.
He and several female followers were convicted of at least seven murders.
The world was shocked not just by the cruelty of the crimes, but by the robotic behavior of Manson's so-called family during their trial.
Well, Ivor Davis, an accomplished British journalist, followed the Beatles for the Daily Express, and he's written about the Manson case extensively.
He covered the trial, one of the most strange and memorable in U.S. legal history.
So let's get to Los Angeles now, and let's get to Ivor Davis.
Iva, thank you for doing this.
Well, thank you for having me.
I don't know whether those words, and I sat in front of a computer screen today trying to put those together, whether they summed up what we are about to speak of.
I think nothing does, Howard.
Nothing can sum up the monstrosity of what happened over two days in August 1969.
And I was here and I covered it as a journalist.
And you cover stories, but then you see a story unfolding.
And this became weirder and weirder as time went on.
And what I ended up doing was covering this trial, covering the arrest of Manson, Charles Manson and his crazy gang of killers, and followed it through to the trial and followed the lives of these people all the way through 50 years.
So it's a hell of a story, and as you said, a Byzantine winding story that starts and really never quite finishes.
True enough.
And because it's California, because it's Tinsel Town, the entire story and its aftermath is tinged throughout with connections to Hollywood, with connections to showbiz, from the victim, one of the victims, Sharon Tate, partner of Roman Polanski,
to the fact that in the wake of the crimes that we're about to talk about in more detail, the people behind them, to the fact that a lot of Hollywood celebrities who you will have known, people like Sumatra, people like Tony Bennett, for a period were in fear of their lives after these events.
Indeed, because here's what happened on the night, well, it happened on August 8th, and then the bodies were discovered in this wonderful mansion high in the hills off the canyons of Beverly Hills.
And when the maid showed up at 8 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday morning, she discovered a horror house.
There were corpses everywhere.
And of course, she didn't know, she couldn't recognize the corpses because they were so badly mutilated.
But of course, once the cops got there, they discovered, as you pointed out, the gorgeous Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, her husband, Roman Polanski, was not on the scene.
He happened to be in London at the time.
And also among the corpses was Vojtok Frakowski, who was a friend of Polanski, Abigail Folger, who was Frakowski's girlfriend and the heir to the famous Folger coffee fortune, and Jay Sebring.
Now, Jay Sebring was a former boyfriend of Sharon Tate, and Jay Sebring was the guy that gave expensive haircuts to everybody from Steve McQueen to Frank Sinatra.
So suddenly we had a house full of corpses.
As soon as the dust settled, and it didn't really settle, less than 24 hours later, 15 miles away in another so-called safe neighborhood called Los Felis, which was near downtown Los Angeles, cops found two more people murdered.
And the thing that was unusual, the two murdered other people were Rosemary LaBianca and her husband and Elino.
And I forgot one other murder victim.
Sorry about that, Howard.
But at the Sharon Tate house, in a car, in the driveway, sat the bullet-riddled body of a guy called Stephen Perrin.
Nobody knew what the connection was, but I can tell you, and as everybody knows, poor Stephen Perrin was visiting a pal in the guest house at the estate in Beverly Hills when he was killed just out of the blue.
And he was very much in the wrong place at the wrong time, exactly as I was about to say, as we see so often in news stories, and you'll have seen more than me.
I want to talk about the crime in the next segment, about the crimes and how the police worked on this and how they came back to Charles Manson and his acolytes.
But I want to talk about the fact that there was something involved here that took on, and now we know, all of the proportions of a cult led by a very, very, what's the word I can use for this?
Peculiar, I guess.
Mesmerizing.
Mesmerizing, peculiar, weird, crazy.
Words.
All of the above.
All of the above and many more.
Words I don't think actually cover it.
Charles Manson, let's start with him because he was the magnetic influence.
He was the fulcrum of all of these events.
This is a guy, and let's talk about his background, who had just about the most dysfunctional early life that I've ever seen.
Yes, yes.
Charles Manson was a criminal from an early age because he was neglected, he was abandoned, his mother was a prostitute, his father he never knew.
He was shunted from reform school to reform schools.
And apparently, at these reform schools, he was brutalized, but he survived.
He survived almost a childhood growing up in some pretty bad reform schools.
And then Manson was scarred for life.
However, however, I'm sure you and I know young people who had awful upbringings, but they didn't turn out to be mass murderers, did they?
But it seemed to me, and you hinted at this just now, that he appeared to find something in the custodial setting to his liking.
He learned to function.
And one of the things that he said in one of the various interviews that he did, and I think for British ears, this is going to seem extraordinary because this man did interviews from behind prison bars in a way that nobody does in this country.
However, this he did, despite his notoriety.
He said that in a prison context, I learned to lie.
And lying was something that was at the heart of everything that was to come.
Yes, because, I mean, he had to lie to survive.
I mean, he was a very small guy, five foot two.
And once he started going to jails where he was getting beaten up, he used his smooth tongue to stay out of trouble.
I mean, he could have been killed in jail, but he wasn't because he developed this incredible mouth, his incredible way of deflating brutality by talking people out of it.
And this turned out to serve him in good stead.
I hate to use the word good, but you know what I mean, in his survival in the prison system and took him to, in 1967, San Francisco, Haight Ashbury, where gullible young women listened to him, fell in love with him, thought he was Jesus Christ, thought he was their father, their lover, their everything, and followed him to the horrible, horrible thing that we're talking about, which is those brutal murders in August 1969.
Well, here you have somebody who was a criminal.
He was in and out of prison.
In fact, he preferred to be in prison.
He actually said at one point, I think in 1967, they were going to release him.
He didn't want to be let out because he understood prison.
But he was, and we don't at any stage want to make this man sound like a victim because he was the embodiment, it seems to me, of a lot of evil for whatever reasons.
But he was, to some extent, the subject of, let's not say victim of, circumstance.
Because not only did he have a horrible dysfunctional childhood, a mother who was into prostitution, he was bounced between various places.
He lived in various schools and institutions.
But he also committed, in between being in and out of these things, a number of crimes.
And those crimes were unique to America in many ways because they were crimes that, although we would not see some of them as big in our terms, they were federal crimes.
And they were crimes that had large penalties.
I think one of them, either 10 years behind bars for something that we wouldn't see as very big.
No, and also part of the problem was those crimes that weren't that big.
I mean, they were driving over state lines as a pimp and then cashing checks in one jurisdiction to the other.
But it put him into the spotlight of the federal institution, the cops, the feds.
So by doing that, he landed himself in deep water and ended back in California in two different prisons.
And finally, of course, he was released in 1967 and he discovered that San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury district was ripe for the plucking.
And he'd learned.
Another interesting thing was when he was in jail, it became his education, how to succeed in business without really trying kind of courses that he went to.
And he learnt a lot in jail thanks to the government expense.
Self-educated, but educated behind bars.
And it served him very well, really, to get him out and face the real world and manipulate people as we know he did.
This is a story of, as you say, manipulation, a story of influence.
He was not a man who pulled the trigger or wielded a knife, but he was the man who influenced the people who did.
It is a quite extraordinary influence.
And you have to be in a particular mindset.
You have to have particular mental proclivities, if that is the word.
I don't know.
I'm searching for the right one, but be a particular mental state.
To do that, did anybody at any time through his progress through the various institutions and prisons spot that this man had a strangeness about him mentally?
Well, I think basically it was a survive or die behind bars.
And he came up with this kind of unique education.
I mean, he was educated in prison, and anybody educated in the prison system is going to come out with a certain shrewdness, a certain survival instinct.
And that was Manson.
I mean, he learned to play the guitar.
He wrote songs.
And when he was in jail, he actually watched the Beatles on their black and white TV set when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.
And he liked the Beatles.
And he decided he wanted to become a rock star like the Beatles.
So when he finally did get out of jail, that was what he pursued.
But of course, you know, instead of achieving any kind of success in the music world, he became America's answer to Jack the Ripper, if you like.
What was it about him that made him want to, as he did, and we'll talk about this when we get into the crimes and the trial, what was it about him that made him want to overturn the system, to become what he saw as a rebel?
We'll see him as an evil killer, but he saw himself as some kind of rebel.
He saw himself as a rebel because he knew that he got a rotten deal in life.
I mean, in many of the interviews, he sort of berated the interviewer and said, when you wanted money, you went to your mummy.
When you were in jail, you went to the lawyer.
I don't have any of that.
I'm a deprived guy.
And so he considered himself, as you pointed out, a rebel.
And unfortunately, rebels, you can be, you know, you can be rebels without a cause, as that James Dean movie was.
But Charles Manson was a rebel with a horrible cause.
And he decided, through a warped thinking that he would manipulate everybody.
And it was so masterful.
I mean, how can you, think about it today, how can you actually talk to people and persuade them to go out and kill people they don't know?
I mean, even in this era, and you talked about it at the beginning, even in this era of terrible shootings, Manson was able to, as I say, manipulate these young runaway kids, women, men who came to him looking for the meaning of life.
He managed to manipulate them and persuade them to kill innocent people.
That is something that is, I mean, manipulation is great in certain fields, but in murder, it doesn't cut.
Quickly, before we get to commercials, Ivor, and I don't know, you must have given this a lot of thought over these decades, I'm sure.
A lot of people suggested, in retrospect, that this man had some kind of paranormality about him.
And certainly I've watched a couple of the interviews that he did from behind prison bars today, and he has an intensity.
His eyes, I say he has, of course he died a few years ago, but his eyes were deep and intense.
Then you combine that with the hair, the beard.
This man had almost the intensity of a guru, but an evil one.
Well, let me tell you that when we were in jail, when we were covering the trial, I covered the trial for nearly a year.
And when we would come in there, Charlie would turn, almost like kind of, he thought he was a magical act.
I mean, if it was a pretty young woman, he would, you could see him.
He tried to stare them out.
He tried to scare them.
And people were scared by that gaze, by that look.
But he played the game.
He knew he could do it.
I mean, many of the young women that were covering the trial said to me, and it was mostly women, he didn't try it on me sitting in the second row, but on the women, he would stare them.
He would stare at them and almost try to hypnotize them.
I know it sounds weird, but it was weird.
And if I'm watching those videos today, in my home with a cup of black coffee, I still found that man's presence made my flesh creep.
Ivor Davis is here, author, journalist, and a man who's followed the Charles Manson case and the Charles Manson phenomenon for all of his life.
And the murders that continue to shock the world 50 years on.
A man with a twisted magnetism about him, a man with a power to hook and reel people in, a power that arose from a dysfunctional life and childhood.
Years behind bars learning to survive there.
And a man who had an ability to get people to follow where he led.
And we'll talk with Ivor Davis, the author of Manson Exposed, a reporter's 50-year journey into madness and murder, more about the actual events.
Now, I have to say, before we describe the crimes here, and there are two of them, there were two crime scenes, which people often forget, that led back to Charles Manson and his people, the family, as they called them.
The details that you may hear in the next minutes, some of them will be bloody.
It's after midnight, and if you are in any way squeamish, then maybe you want to miss these 15 minutes.
But, you know, we'll keep it as watered down as we can.
But you can't talk about something like this without going into the bare bones of the thing, if that's the way to put it.
Okay.
Ivor Davis, let's talk about Charles Manson and the acolytes he had.
And I think at one point there were anything up to 100 of them.
He called them the family.
Yes, he called them the family.
They were mostly girls.
They were mostly runaways.
They were mostly pretty well-to-do, I mean, kids that were not poor.
And they showed up at the Spahn Movie Ranch.
Many of them were picked up as hitchhikers, brought to the Spawn Movie Ranch, which was a ratty old, decrepit ranch that had seen its finest hour.
And that's where they lived.
And that's where they used as their headquarters on the nights of the two killings, on the nights that Charlie Manson sent out Charles Tex Watson and the girls to kill.
And that was his bastion, if you like.
And Manson, of course, and we're going to talk about Helter Skelter, had this cockeyed, mad, mad professor idea of what Helter Skelter by the Beatles meant.
Wasn't he of the opinion that Helter Skelter as his plan, the way that he saw it, was a ruse by which he could start a race war?
He felt a race war was coming, but he felt that he could be instrumental in making that thing reach the tipping point.
Not only did he think he could tip them over the edge into a race war, he brainwashed everyone at the Spahn Movie Ranch, all of them, to believe that the Beatles White album, which came out in 1968, and which had songs like the one you just played,
Helter Skelter, Pig Ears Revolution, he actually had them believing that the Beatles were sending secret messages to Charlie Manson predicting an American race riot, a war, and in which blacks would rise up and they would destroy whites.
There would be rivers of blood.
But the Manson family, thanks to the wisdom and genius of Charlie Manson, would escape to the desert in Death Valley, California.
And when the fighting and the killing was over, they would come out and they would survive.
I mean, today, as we talk about this, it's absolutely ridiculous, outrageous.
You think of Jonestown, you think of Waco.
Well, this is of the same order of those things.
Well, I mean, actually, that's a brilliant comparison, because at Jonestown, 900 people were persuaded to take a drink of poison Kool-Aid, and they all died.
So the power of persuasion in death even is weird.
But the idea of thinking songs like Helter Skelter, And if you look at the lyrics, there's nothing in there that says black and white race war.
Nothing.
I mean, I played the song today.
And in fact, you ran it past.
And I think there's one word that John Lennon used in his reply that I'd be grateful if you didn't use.
But you ran this past John Lennon, and I think McCarthy.
Yeah, I did.
Well, I mean, they were outraged that their lyrics should be linked to some of the most horrendous murders ever.
And Lennon, in his usual way, said, I think we can say, let's say, explicative deleted.
I mean, the guy is crazy.
Paul said, what the hell does Helter Skelter have to do with kniving people to death, which is what happened at the Manson, when Manson sent his people out to the Sharon Tate House?
I mean, the Beatles were disgusted that their music should be used, or should be supposedly used, to create murder and mayhem.
And in my opinion, that wasn't the reason for the murders, but that's a more complex story.
But the Beatles were not responsible for any of the murders, even though in the long trial that I attended, the prosecutor made the jury believe that the Beatles' lyrics were responsible.
Because there was a lot of talk at that time, like backwards lyrics on Beatles albums, hidden meanings in all sorts of things.
So we have to put it into context at the time.
Well, there's the 1966 thing of Paul McCartney's Dead, which people still talk about and some people still believe for reasons of their own in this day and age.
But this was an era where those things were prevalent.
So I'm not surprised that it would play a part in the trial.
I think we have to get to the twin crimes, and we have to say again that there were two crime scenes.
It wasn't just the home of Sharon Tate.
It was also the home of a business person called LaBianca and his partner.
And, you know, they were two, incredibly, as you hinted at the beginning of our conversation, bloody crime scenes.
I suppose the question we need to ask is, number one, how did Manson pick the people that he would depute to do this?
And number two, how did he pick his victims?
Well, to be honest with you, my theory, based on 50 years of covering the case, is that he didn't pick Sharon Tate.
He didn't even know probably that she lived at the house, at the house on Cielo Drive.
But what he did was he told Charles Tex Watson, who was pretty well zonked out on LSD and mescaline and an assortment of drugs, to get out there, to go out and murder people and leave what he called witchy signs, witchy signs.
Now, they did.
They went out to the Cielo Drive house, and I don't know if you know this, Howard, but Tex Watson had stayed at the Sharon Tate house, not with Sharon Tate.
He stayed there with Terry Melcher's friend.
Terry Melcher was the son of Doris Day.
And Terry Melcher used to live at the Sharon Tate house.
So Charles Tex Watson knew the house intimately.
And do you think that Charles Tex Watson, who was of course a big part of the trial, subsequently, do you think that he helped Manson pick the venue for the first crime?
Well, I think he did because Charlie said, go out to the Melchia house and you know what to do.
And he coached them about what to do.
And he said, when you've done the killings, leave these witchy signs.
And this is what they did in both murder scenes.
The Sharon Tate house, they mutilated everybody with dozens of stab wounds and they shot them.
And then they painted in the victims' bloods words like helter-skelter and pigs on the walls and on the door.
And I think in Sharon Tate's own blood on the door.
And as you say, on the second night, it was the lobby anchor house.
But I think, just to put this in context, at the first crime scene, I believe there were a total of something like, was it 102 stab wounds in total?
Absolutely.
I mean, I think Sharon was stabbed maybe 20 or 30 times.
And then, of course, they put a rope around her neck and a pillow over her head.
And the horror of this was the fact that she was two weeks away from delivering Roman Polanski's baby son.
And they were frenzied in their murders.
I mean, let me just tell you that when the cops went to see Abigail Folger's body, they thought that she was wearing a red dress, but it wasn't a red dress.
It was just covered in so much blood.
The scene was, well, I mean, I can't even, I think of Dante's Inferno.
There's nothing like that on earth.
And grown homicide detectives said when they walked in there, they almost threw up at the carnage.
It was awful.
I mean, I've read more detailed descriptions, and thank you for sparing some of the less broadcastable details for our listener here.
But it was a terrible, terrible thing.
In fact, no words that a human being in English can use can express what those cops who attended that scene came across.
But the question that it prompts, doesn't it, is what kind of power was Manson exercising over Tex and those other people, the women, to make them do it?
There was the suggestion which I only saw today was the fact that he was using drugs to manipulate them.
He was carefully controlling the drugs that they were on.
He wasn't actually taking the drugs himself, but he was using a carefully controlled cocktail of drugs to manipulate and control them.
Yes, he did.
I mean, he very cleverly, whenever they went, look, when they were at the Spahn Ranch, and when I went to the Spahn Ranch and spoke to those who were not involved in the murders, they gave me, blow by blow, a sort of ritualistic description of the way Charlie organized his orgies, And handed out these multiple mind-blowing drugs like candy, like sweets.
And Manson never took much himself.
So he was in control and he had control of their minds and their bodies and their actions.
And that was what it was all about.
And that's how he got them to do what they did.
So as we see in cults today, and sadly in 2019, I know that there are still cults existing and there are still people who follow cults, people that you wouldn't believe would follow a cult.
They can be middle-class people, they can come from well-to-do backgrounds, they can have good educations, but somehow their rational faculties will be diminished if they come into contact with the right individual at the right time.
And it seems not to absolve these people who did these terrible things.
You can never do that.
That plays into all of this.
Yeah, but they're desperately looking for the meaning of life.
I mean, it happened 50 years ago.
And if you pick up the newspapers or listen around the world, there is somebody else who pops up, who is a monstrous leader of a cult and gets people to do things that you and I cannot even imagine.
So Manson not only knew his power, but he had these young people, the disenchanted, the strange, the bewildered, the confused, the runaways in the palm of his hand, and he knew how to manipulate them and he manipulated them to the tune of mass murder.
In the case of both venues for the crimes, in the Tate Polanski House and the La Bianca House, where was Manson when these things were happening?
Well, this was the problem.
The problem, Howard, was that Manson never actually stabbed or killed anyone on the two nights of murder.
On the second night, Manson drove them to the La Bianca's house.
He went into the house.
He tied up the La Bianca, telling them nothing would happen to them.
He left them tied up.
He went back to the car and he sent Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkle in and said, you know what to do.
Leave those witchy messages.
Charlie then drove away and he said to the killers, hitchhike home.
I mean, weird, isn't it?
Why did he do that?
Was it because he didn't want to draw attention to himself or it was just part of his weird and twisted scheme?
Well, I think he had, I mean, he had the sense to know that if he, in his mind, if he never wielded a knife, if he never pulled the trigger, if he never stabbed anybody, then they would not have a case against him and he would not be thrown back into prison.
He worked the probation system very well and he knew that if he was not implicated in the actual killings, then he would not be thrown back into jail.
However, the district attorney using the Helter Skelter theory was able to show that Manson was the head of the conspiracy.
And for all you criticize Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor, he got his convictions no matter how outlandish the whole Helter Skelter Beatles made me do it theory was.
He got his conviction.
The cops didn't immediately connect these two crime scenes, did they?
That was one of the problems.
I mean, look, you actually had three murders over a period of two weeks that were similar, similar modus operandi.
I must tell you about the murder of on July 27th, 1969, two weeks before Sharon Tate was murdered.
A musician named Gary Hinman, who was a friend of Manson and a friend of Bobby Beausole, who was another acolyte of Manson, was brutally murdered, tortured, stabbed, and left dead.
And they wrote on the walls, pig and helter skelter.
And then Charlie's friend, Bobby Beausolei, was arrested for the murder of Hinman.
Beausole did not blow the whistle on Charlie.
Charlie felt obligated to get him out of prison.
So Charlie set up the two murders, Sharon Tate and the La Bianca, thinking in his warped brain that the cops would say, hey, there's two similar murders.
Bobby Beausole, who's in prison, couldn't have done it.
Let's give him a ticket to ride.
Let's send him home.
I mean, that's crazy reckoning, but this is a crazy mind we're talking about.
Ivor Davis, journalist, author who we're speaking with now from Los Angeles, it's been a part of his life for all of those 50 years.
He's written a book, a summation of it all called Manson Exposed, a reporter's 50-year journey into madness and murder.
He's online to us here.
And Ivor, we've got to get to the process of getting this man charged and getting him in front of the court along with the other people.
How did that happen?
Well, it actually happened by accident, believe it or not.
The cops never really solved it.
What happened in a nutshell was this.
In October 1969, Susan Atkins, who was one of the chief killers in the Sharon Tate house, was in jail on another murder charge, the murder of Gary Hinman.
She suddenly started boasting to her cellmates and telling them that she killed Sharon Tate.
Well, the cellmates thought she was bragging, but she gave them so much detail that they began to believe her.
They finally thought, we've got to tell the cops, we've got to tell the authorities.
And they did.
The authorities, believe it or not, took three weeks, three weeks to listen.
But when they did, the avalanche happened.
Susan Atkins spilled her guts, implicated Charles Manson, gave a blow-by-blow, gruesome description of what happened to Sharon Tate, and the cops had solved their case.
And that was how it happened.
Who was on trial?
Who was on trial was Susan Atkins, of course, the one who blew the whistle on Manson, Manson, and two girls, Leslie Van Houghton, who never participated in the Sharon Tate murder, but did participate in the murder of the Balabiankas, and Patricia Crenwinkle, who also killed Sharon and participated in the second night of killings.
They were the people on trial.
One thing I should mention, the leader of the killer pack, Charles Tex Watson, battled extradition for a year and therefore was not on trial.
He had his own trial.
And like all of them, after the two trials, they were all convicted of first-degree murder and sent to the San Quentin gas chamber.
The trial?
And they never died.
They didn't die because there was a change in the law.
California got rid of the death penalty.
Correct.
So Manson and the others were lucky because they would certainly have been, you know, even if their smart lawyers had, you know, tried to claim that they were acting through insanity or whatever.
The United States to this day continues to execute people who are in a worse mental condition than they were, it seems to me.
Yeah, but let me ask you this question, if I may throw it back at you, Howard.
Do you think you and I would be having this conversation if in 1971 they would have sent Charlie Manson to the San Quentin gas chamber and he would have died?
Now, the trial itself, Manson was determined to conduct his own defense, which he was not allowed to.
But at one point, he was so incensed by this, I believe he attacked the judge or tried to.
Yep.
We were sitting, I was sitting in the second row, and then all of a sudden, Manson grabbed a sharp pencil and he literally dived at the judge.
Fortunately, one of the bailiffs in the court, rugby tackled him and brought him down.
And Manson screamed, to the judge, you're going to die, old man.
And of course, he was put in a holding cell.
And for the rest of that day, he watched his own trial on a small television.
But he behaved like a lunatic, and the girls behaved in similar fashion throughout the whole almost year-long trial.
He even had an X carved into his forehead, and I think the girls followed suit.
The first day we showed up, July 1970, the trial began and out popped Manson with the X's on his forehead.
The girls did it and believe it or not, as I came to court, the other Manson girls who were sitting on the pavement outside the court also carved an X in their foreheads.
I mean, you know, copycat.
And in the meantime, there was a whole circus going on around this thing, a whole chilling macabre circus.
We said that there were about 100 members of Manson's so-called family.
Other members of the cult were outside the court and in the corridors of the court.
Yeah, because they were not allowed in the courtroom.
So they parked themselves at the front door of the courthouse, and we had to run the gauntlet of them.
And I must tell you this.
Squeaky Frome was one of the girls that was not involved in the murders.
She knew that I was negative.
I'd written a book early on.
She knew I was negative about Charlie Manson, and she sweetly called out to me, hey, Ivor, do you know what it feels like to have a sharp knife stuck down your throat?
I was scared, I must say, because I knew what they were capable of.
We saw evidence of that, didn't we?
Because didn't one of the defense attorneys, wasn't one of the defense attorneys killed by somebody connected with Manson?
Ronald Hughes, who was the lawyer for Leslie Van Houten, suddenly disappeared in mid-trial.
And four months later, his body showed up.
Nobody could prove it was murder.
They said he was drowned.
The body was so decomposed, they couldn't tell.
So we knew that anybody that spoke up against Charlie Manson risked losing their life.
And many people had death threats.
The lawyers carried guns.
The judge had a pistol strapped to his ankle.
I mean, crazy.
And the end of the trial, was that anticlimactic in some ways?
Well, we knew the way Manson behaved, the way the girls behaved during the long trial, that they did not endear themselves to the jury.
I think we knew it was coming up, but I must tell you this, that during the trial, Manson and the girls did not testify in their own defense.
They were silent.
Manson did address the court out of the earshot of the jury, but during the whole trial, they never said a word in their own defense.
They wanted to take the wrap for him.
They did.
They thought, I mean, the point is, if Manson had testified and the girls had testified, the prosecution would have ripped them apart.
And they decided not to.
And Manson said he thought it was cut and dried.
He thought he wasn't going to get acquitted.
He knew they wouldn't let him go home.
He knew it.
He was probably right.
But, you know, they did not put on any kind of defense.
Amazing.
So the upshot of it is they all get convicted.
They're all sentenced to death.
And then because of a law change, they don't actually die.
They go to prison for a life jail, the equivalent in this country of a life jail term.
What was the reaction in America to that?
There must have been outrage.
Well, Vincent Bugliosi said, Charlie's won.
Charlie knew.
Charlie is the victory man on this.
I think people in California, those who didn't want the death penalty, were not too upset.
But, you know, as I say, if they had been executed, then the story wouldn't have had the legs it has today.
And then, as you know, Manson then became a celebrity.
I mean, we were all scared out of our minds that Charlie Manson would come into our living rooms.
But he did.
He managed it.
And the way he did it, as you know, he had four interviews.
And just for my UK listeners here, if we say we had a criminal here called Charles Bronson, not the movie star, but you know who I mean either.
Or the Yorkshire Ripper in Broadmoor.
If you can imagine either of those people being rationally interviewed by rational television reporters, Charles Manson had that four times.
He had four interviews at various stages, including towards the end of his life.
Let's just hear now a little bit from 60 Minutes, the 60 Minutes documentary interview with Charles Manson.
And I think this was about 20 years before his death at the age of 83.
I'm not the guy you're trying to make out of me.
I don't know what my way is.
Everybody keeps telling me I got all these things.
I read the other day where I had magical powers, and I told everybody in the chapel, I said, zap, zap, zap, zap.
I said, where's my magical powers?
Now, that to me sounds like a lot of movies that were released in the 1990s.
A lot of character parts that were played.
He sounded to me like he was playing a part and he was playing the part that he was born to play.
He was better than Hannibal Lecter.
It was better than Tony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.
I mean, the guy was a brilliant actor.
I mean, that lion you just played, if they let me out, I might break all the toys.
That is creepy.
I mean, he portrays himself, and this is part of the strangeness of the whole case.
He still, after all of those years, and presumably behind bars, they will have done what they do here.
They will have tried to, if you can, rehabilitate him.
But he still sounds like inside his head, there is a vision and a template for a new world order that he's at the center of.
I think you're right.
But the new world order would never have happened because they would never let him out.
But what was amazing, and believe me, I lived through watching these shows.
It was wonderful entertainment.
It was the bogey man locked up.
You knew he wouldn't come at you because he was locked up.
And he was giving us an Oscar winning performance.
I mean, listen to those words and watch it if you did, or I did, watch every interview.
And he was great value for the money.
Now, while he was behind bars, and I think this was close to the end of his life, somebody discovered that Charlie Manson had got himself a cell phone.
He'd got himself a mobile phone.
I suppose the question we all want to be asking is, who was he calling and what was he saying?
Charlie Manson was calling the girls.
Charlie Manson was directing them to run a little operation of selling his autograph because Charlie Manson was pretty well off in prison.
He got a lot of money from autograph photos that he never signed, but the girls signed.
Some of the girls moved to homes near prisons to be close to him.
They weren't able to visit him, but they were there in close proximity.
So they remained under his allure, under his right.
Well, that would be an interesting interview if you'd been able to get that.
But he was able to get a phone into prison, which is something prison authorities the world over try and stop.
But that's what he was doing.
But it also indicates that the man had a continuing allure for those people.
I must just tell you, not only did he have a phone, but when he was in prison, he recorded an album and he got it out.
I mean, nobody bought it.
Yes, I think I read there were only five copies produced, I think.
Yeah, but now they're worth a lot of money.
I mean, it was live in Folsom Prison or live in Alcatraz or whatever.
But of course, we've got to keep reminding ourselves, haven't we?
This man was no Johnny Cash.
Right.
I mean, yes.
Although, although, although when he was entertaining the Hollywood musical group like Dennis Wilson, Neil Young, the singer, said he thought Charlie Manson was almost as good as Bob Dylan.
So, God.
You know, go figure that.
But again, we have to remind ourselves that this man to his dying day remained unreconstructed, untouched by any supposed efforts to rehabilitate or change him.
This man remained purely what he was all the way through his life.
So for people to say that his music was good, you know, if he'd been a reformed character, if he said, well, I did a terrible thing back then, I didn't know what I was doing.
And please, you know, I will go to my grave begging forgiveness and I can never be forgiven.
That's one thing.
I don't even think you can forgive that or listen to his music.
But for that man to continue through the latter stages of his life exactly as he was 20, 30 years before, it's astonishing that people would say, well, you know, that the music that he produced, he shouldn't have been producing music, but the music that he produced was good.
Do you think, Ivor, it's an indictment of the American system that the circus around Manson was allowed to continue as it did?
I think, in a way, you're right.
Because there was a time when the major interviewers, the one that you just played, who was Tom Snyder, Diane Sawyer, the famous interviewer, and dozens of them lined up to go and, well, not pay homage, but to have the opportunity.
I mean, don't forget America is driven on ratings, ratings, people viewing.
And Charlie Manson was a huge, huge draw.
So there were people knocking on his cell door every week to talk to him.
And I'll say this for Manson.
He gave as good as he got.
He was very combative.
But as you said a moment ago, he never was redemptive.
He never sought forgiveness because he claimed to his dying day that I never killed no one.
And he died at the age of 83 in recent years of ill health.
Yes.
What about the women?
I saw a couple of interviews online today, when I was researching this with a couple of the women.
And as far as you can comprehend it when you're watching this, they seem contrite, but they still seem to be aware of the power that that man holds.
There's a combination of women and who you're talking about.
The women behind bars who have been trying to get probation and parole, like Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkle, all say Manson was a monster.
But there are still many members of the Manson family out there who think he was a misunderstood guy, who still adore him, who went to his funeral.
And there are other people I've heard, I've seen it online, who believe Manson was a good guy who wanted to change the environment.
And as Manson said many times, I didn't kill no one.
So, you know, you take your pick.
Well, of course, you know, Adolf Hitler didn't personally kill people, but he inspired others to do the most horrendous acts.
So I don't think that defense would ever have washed for Manson.
Last question.
This is the kicker in many ways.
The confluence of circumstances in the late 1960s with the music, the drugs, Hollywood, the media as it was at that stage, those things all combined to create a perfect storm of killing and a terrible, terrible situation that the world is still talking about now.
That's why we've had this conversation.
So, last question.
Do you believe, Ivor Davis, anything like this could ever happen again?
I would definitely hope not.
And I would answer your question by saying no.
But in the last few months, I've seen women on the news, in the newspapers, talking about doing horrendous things because they fell under the thrall of their latest guru.
So whether they would go out and murder mindlessly is one thing.
But certainly there are still young people who are prepared to do amazing things, indefensible things, if they think that the person that they adore has the meaning to life.
So the answer to your question is, unfortunately, it could happen, but I don't think it will.
But who the heck really knows?
And 50 years on, will this story ever be over for you?
I hope it will be over.
I talk about it now.
It's become part of my life for the last few weeks since my book came out.
But there is another side of the life, believe me.
And I'm going off shortly to France to have a wonderful time, a great food, a vacation where Manson will not cross my lips.
Right.
Well, you need to stick to that.
Busy time now and enjoy yourself in France.
Ivor Davis, thank you very much for this conversation.
Thank you, Howard.
Ivor Davis, one of those people who's a veteran who's been there, seen it and done it, as you heard there.
Your thoughts about this guest?
Any suggestions for future guests?
Always welcome.
Please go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
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And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until we meet next here, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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