Charles Manson’s Right-Hand Man Is Up for Parole. Here’s What to Watch For.
Tale of the Manson Tapes Redux: Today’s hearing could be a game-changer
Five dead bodies, including the beautiful eight-and-half-month-pregnant actress and wife of a famous movie director. One-hundred and two stab wounds in total. “Pig” written in blood on the front door of the secluded estate, high above Sunset Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills. The only sound heard by the arriving cops? Insects buzzing over two victims’ bodies strewn across the front lawn. The next night, two more bodies across town: a grocery store magnate and his wife, similarly slaughtered. Sixty-seven stab wounds, more blood writing, the word “war” carved into the male victim’s abdomen, a fork and knife protruding from his bound and hooded corpse. Unsolved for four months, then the announcement of arrested suspects: a killer “hippie” cult, led by a barely literate ex-con who convinced his young followers he was Jesus Christ and the Devil. You’ve heard the story. You know the story.
Or do you?
For nearly five decades, one version of the Manson murders has been told — the one presented by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi at trial and in his bestselling book about the case, Helter Skelter. His narrative that the murders of Sharon Tate and six others in August 1969 were ordered by Manson to ignite an apocalyptic race war he called “Helter Skelter,” has never been challenged — in fact, it’s been retold in countless books, television shows and movies that continue to roll out to this day. Just the past year has seen a Lifetime movie, Manson’s Lost Girls, a second season of NBC’s hit series based on the crimes, Aquarius, a wildly successful podcast, Charles Manson’s Hollywood, the announcement of two new feature films, The Family and Manson Girls, and a New York Times best-selling novel inspired by the murders, Emma Cline’s The Girls.
But what if there was another version of how and why the murders happened, a scenario only uncovered recently from a long-sealed confession of the lead killer who carried out the slayings? If it contradicted the official motive of the murders — which had secured the conviction of five notorious killers — would the authorities reveal it now?
Charles “Tex” Watson, the self-described “right-hand man” of cult leader Charles Manson, who oversaw the horrific slaughters of August 1969, on Manson’s orders, has appeared 16 times before the California Board of Parole since 1978. Thursday’s hearing at the Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, however, will be his first since the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office won a bitterly fought year-long court battle against Watson to gain custody of a taped confession he’d made to his attorney 47 years ago describing the murders.
Since obtaining the recording in 2013 — the first known taped account of the crime, made before Watson was even publicly identified as a suspect in the Tate-LaBianca murders — the DA and the Los Angeles Police Department, the only ones to have listened to the tapes, have released minimal (and at times confusing and contradictory) statements about their content. Today’s hearing could change all that.
Before I outline what might happen at the hearing, allow me to set the stage.
In 2008, Watson’s original attorney, Bill Boyd of Dallas, Texas, told me in an interview that after Watson turned himself in for questioning in the then-still unsolved Tate-LaBianca murders on November 30, 1969 — before even being identified as a suspect — he had described the killing of Sharon Tate and six others on tape. He was “very straightforward” and “candid” about his involvement in the crimes, Boyd said, and he also described “other” murders that the group committed. Murders that hadn’t been discovered by the authorities. (Watson, a Texas native, had fled the Manson Family compound shortly after the murders, returning to his parents’ home in Copeville, Texas; Boyd represented him until late 1970, when he finally lost his battle to prevent Watson’s extradition to California for trial; Watson left, but the tapes remained behind with Boyd.)
As I recounted in a September 16, 2014 story for Medium (“The Tale of the Manson Tapes: Why doesn’t Los Angeles law enforcement want to reveal what’s on the 45-year-old Tex Watson tapes — and why isn’t the press reporting it?”), Boyd refused my request to listen to the tapes, fearing he had inadvertently violated his one-time client’s attorney/client privilege. In 2011, after Watson’s last parole hearing, I inquired again and learned that Boyd had died a year after I interviewed him (in 2009) and that his bankrupt law firm’s holdings had gone into receivership — including the then-42-year-old eight hour cassette recordings which Boyd had told me he kept in a safe in his office.
I contacted the bankruptcy trustee assigned to the case, Linda Payne, and she confirmed that the safe — along with the tapes — were in her possession in Dallas (she also said she hadn’t listened to them). Payne refused to release them to me, stating that they were still protected by confidentiality laws, but when I informed her that Watson had waived his privilege in 1976 to allow the co-author of his prison memoir access to a portion of the tapes, she was eventually persuaded. However, instead of releasing them to me, she contacted the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and offered the tapes to them. When Watson learned of the planned transaction, he went to court to stop it and thus began a year-long battle in the Texas courts for the tapes.
The original bankruptcy judge assigned to the case ruled that the tapes were no longer privileged and awarded them to the LAPD. (The DA had asked the LAPD to be their frontperson in the case so as not to appear biased at future parole hearings.) Watson appealed to a higher court, arguing they were still privileged, and also publicly stated that there were no murders described on the tapes besides the seven he was convicted of committing. In court filings he claimed that he didn’t want the tapes released, because he wanted to protect the surviving members of the victims’ families from hearing his graphic accounts of their loved ones’ deaths.
After a year of back-and-forth motions from both sides — during which the LAPD tried to circumvent the court’s authority by serving Trustee Payne with a warrant for the tapes, it failed, and the furious judge chastised the LAPD for their unprecedented attempt to usurp his authority — the judge ultimately affirmed the lower court’s ruling and on April 11, 2013, two LAPD homicide detectives flew to Texas and retrieved the tapes.
As my story also detailed, upon receiving the tapes, the LAPD and DA’s office were just as — if not more — protective of their content than Watson, refusing to allow me access to them (as I’d originally been promised) and even denying the victims’ family members’ requests to listen to them or read their transcripts. (Watson never received his promised copy either, according to his attorney.)
Odder still, though, were the two agencies’ ever-changing reasons for not releasing the tapes.
I was originally told by Patrick Sequeira, the deputy DA who’d been behind the effort to get the tapes since learning about their existence from me, that, as Watson originally maintained, there were no murders mentioned on the tapes beside the seven Tate-LaBianca murders that Watson, Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten had been prosecuted for. Sequeira also told me that there wasn’t even information on the tapes that could be used against any of the convicted Family members at their parole hearings — nothing diverged from the narrative Watson had already provided in his testimony at his own trial, in his two books and at his many parole appearances when he was required to recount the crimes he’d committed with the Family.
When I asked why, then, I couldn’t listen to the tapes as had been promised, if they contained no evidentiary or pursuable information, Sequeira replied that if they allowed me to listen to them, they’d also have to release them to the media. They didn’t want the information on the tapes to be distorted by the press and public. Shortly after these conversations in the spring of 2013, the deputy DA who’d spoken to me regularly since 2011 cut off communications with me entirely, before retiring from the department in 2014 (and never publicly speaking about the tapes again).
Anthony DiMaria, the nephew of Manson Family murder victim Jay Sebring, and Debra Tate, the sister of Sharon Tate, were told more or less the same thing in a spring 2014 meeting with Sequeira and Lt. Dan Jenks, the LAPD unsolved homicide detective assigned to the case. There was nothing new on the tapes, nothing that could be used at parole hearings and they wouldn’t be permitted to listen to them — as they’d requested — because that would obligate them to release the tapes to the media, as well.
DiMaria, as he told me afterward, was disappointed with the officials’ decision, but he didn’t contest it because he trusted their reasoning. Tate, however — the highest profile member of the victims’ family members and a longtime advocate against the release of any Manson Family members from prison — felt differently. She told me after the meeting, and recently reaffirmed, that she believes the DA and police are hiding something on the tapes, something damaging to the case or to the decades-old convictions of Manson and the others.
(Tate also said after the meeting that she and DiMaria had been informed that Watson “minimized the involvement” of his female co-defendants — Krenwinkel and Van Houten — in the LaBianca killings, and Sequeira and Jenks had expressed concern that this might “help” the women at their parole hearings, but DiMaria disputed her account, insisting he never heard the remark; Jenks and Sequeira declined to comment when contacted at the time by a Medium fact checker.)
By the time my original Medium story was published online (September 16, 2014), nearly a year and a half had passed since officials received the highly coveted tapes, and they’d never made an official comment about what might or might not be on them. They chose, instead, to respond to requests for information by repeating the same thing they’d said to DiMaria, Tate and myself about nothing new on the tapes and nothing that could be used at parole hearings, but curiously, they refused to make their statements on the record to the press.
After my story came out another reporter who covered the court battle — the one who actually broke the story, NBC News4 Los Angeles’s investigative reporter, Patrick Healey — did a broadcast story about my article and reported for the first time that he had been told by LAPD spokesperson Commander Andrew Smith that “there is no new information worth pursuing” on the tapes and that Smith “reaffirmed” this position to him in a second conversation after my story came out.
Which made what happened next, in a renewed court battle for the tapes — this time in Los Angeles and waged by an attorney for one of the Manson Family members against the DA and the LAPD — all the more intriguing.
After finally going on the record in September 2014 that there was “no new information worth pursuing” on the tapes, the LAPD and DA’s office did an about-face when challenged for them in court by Richard Pfeiffer, the attorney for Leslie Van Houten (convicted in the LaBianca murders, but not present at Tate). Pfeiffer, who became interested in the tapes after reading Debra Tate’s statement in my story that Watson had allegedly “minimized” his client’s involvement in the murders of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, contacted the LAPD in October 2014, seeking “informal discovery” on the tapes, because, as he explained in later court filings, he believed they contained “exculpatory information” about his client.
What occurred next, as outlined in Pfeiffer’s most recent filing to the court (October 7, 2016), and continues to the present, has been a constantly shifting — and often contradictory — representation by the DA’s office of the content of the tapes. Originally, Pfeiffer’s associate, Christie Webb, was told by John Morris, Head Deputy DA, Parole Division, that after consulting with the LAPD he’d learned Van Houten was “barely mentioned” in the tapes and that the recordings consisted of little more than “Mr. Watson talking about his ‘drug upbringing’ and ‘Manson’s control over him.’”
When Webb responded that “Manson’s control” over his followers was exactly the kind of information they were seeking because the state had accused Van Houten of exaggerating the amount of control Manson exerted over her at her parole hearings, Morris replied that the tapes would still not be released.
Pfeiffer and Webb responded by serving the LAPD with a Deposition Subpoena for the tapes (March 26, 2015), but the LAPD refused to comply. Webb then wrote to DDA Morris seeking confirmation that the DA’s office concurred with the LAPD’s decision to ignore their subpoena and Morris responded by letter (June 19, 2015) that it did. What he wrote next in the letter came as a surprise to the attorneys, however, as it directly contradicted all previous statements made by the agencies about the content of the tapes. As Morris wrote:
The District Attorney’s Office, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office all agree that we cannot provide the tape(s) you have requested because there are unsolved crimes Manson Family members are suspected of committing. The information in the tape(s) are part of the investigation of those crimes and could be used to solve them. Releasing the tape(s) could endanger the investigation [sic] those crimes.
The attorneys pointed out the contradiction in their first Petition for Writ of Mandate to the Superior Court seeking the tapes (September 11, 2015), but the writ was denied. Pfeiffer and Webb filed a second writ for the tapes in the Appellate Court (November 19, 2015), but it was rejected, too. When they appealed to the California Supreme Court for a review of the two lower courts’ denials (December 2, 2015), they suggested that at the very least the DA turn over the tapes and/or their transcripts to the Court to allow for an in camera review (enabling the judge to review the disputed material and make his own decision). That produced the most baffling motion by the DA’s office yet.
After the California Supreme Court ordered the DA to explain why the tapes shouldn’t be released in camera, the DA responded (December 21, 2015), “The People do not believe it necessary for the Court to arduously labor through the 326 pages of rambling musings about LSD, secret worlds beneath Death Valley and bizarre racial theories.” (The motion added, “However, if the court requests a copy of the transcript we would submit one under seal.”)
So now the DA was reverting back to its previous — and earliest — position, that there was nothing on the tapes worth pursuing? Pfeiffer and Webb pointed this out in their Reply to the DA’s Answer on December 29, 2015, asking how the People could state on one hand “that the transcripts are nothing but ‘rambling musings about LSD, secret worlds beneath Death Valley and bizarre racial theories’” while on the other hand declare, as they had in Morris’s June 19, 2015, letter, that the tapes couldn’t be released “because there are unsolved crimes Manson Family members are suspected of committing. The information contained in the tape(s) are part of the investigation…Releasing the tape(s) could endanger the investigation [of] those crimes.”
“A continuing investigation since [1969] based on the contents of the tapes,” wrote Van Houten’s attorneys, “appears to be more substantial and credible than ‘rambling musings.’”
Nonetheless, the Supreme Court decided in the DA’s favor, turning down Pfeiffer’s petition and agreeing that it wasn’t necessary for the court to do an in camera review.
Pfeiffer’s effort to obtain the tapes would come back to haunt his client in April 2016, when Van Houten appeared for the 20th time before the parole board.
Long considered the most likely of the five convicted Family members (Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Watson) to be released first, Van Houten was 19 years old when she helped kill the LaBiancas, the youngest member of the group, and hadn’t participated in the more sensationalized Tate murders. The soft-spoken, gray-haired inmate, now 67 years old, had a perfect prison record, several college and post-graduate degrees, and had founded highly praised self-help groups for her fellow prisoners. Yet at her April 14 hearing, Deputy District Attorney Donna Lebowitz lambasted her for trying to obtain the tapes through her attorney, Pfeiffer, citing the effort as clear evidence that Van Houten still hadn’t accepted full responsibility for her crimes. “If the defendant admits responsibility, as she says here today, there would be no need for her to [seek] exculpatory statements from Tex Watson from 1971” (sic — the tapes were made in 1969), Lebowitz told the commissioners.
When it was his turn, Pfeiffer corrected the DDA, stating that it was his idea to obtain the tapes, not his client’s, and that the reason he sought them was because he had been “told there was some exculpatory information on those tapes” which he felt constituted Brady material (evidence that must be shared with the defense). He also sought the tapes, he added, to show that Van Houten hadn’t exaggerated the degree of control Manson exerted over her, as the DA’s office had regularly accused her of doing at her parole hearings.
Despite the contretemps, Van Houten was approved for parole for the first time in a decision that seemed to catch courtroom observers off guard. Less than two weeks after her approval (which still had to be reviewed by the board’s legal team and then forwarded to California Governor Jerry Brown for approval), the body of a woman long suspected to have been killed by the Manson Family in November 1969 was finally identified by DNA evidence. A flurry of news articles speculating that the Watson tapes led to the identification followed, but, on April 27, 2016, LAPD Robbery-Homicide Commander Billy Hayes dispelled that notion, telling the Los Angeles Times that there was no evidence linking the group to the 47-year-old murder and that there was “nothing of significance on the tapes. Nothing we didn’t already know.”
The following June, after the District Attorney of Los Angeles, Jackie Lacey, wrote a letter to California Governor Jerry Brown urging him not to release Van Houten, Pfeiffer responded with his own letter to Lacey, which he copied to the Governor and the Associated Press. In the letter, the attorney flat-out charged the DA’s office with “lying” when they stated that the tapes were still being used to investigate “47-year-old” crimes, and asked what her office was “trying to hide” by not disclosing them.
When Gov. Brown agreed with the the DA and vetoed Van Houten’s release in July, Pfeiffer vowed to go back to court and try to get the tapes, which he’s done continually since then, filing new writs with the Superior Court on July 29, 2016 (denied October 6, 2016), and the Second Appellate Court, October 7, 2016 (denied October 20, 2016). On October 12, 2016, Pfeiffer filed a formal complaint to the California State Bar against the District Attorney’s office — charging, among other things, that the office had violated the California Rules of Professional Conduct by refusing to release exculpatory evidence (the tapes) to him, and being “untruthful” to the Board of Parole Hearings in their representation of his reasons for wanting them (to show that Van Houten wasn’t lying about the amount of control Manson exerted over her). The result of that action is pending.
Ironically, the District Attorney’s office is guarding the tapes with more fervor than even Watson did when their roles were reversed in 2012–2013. Have the two become allies in their effort to keep the tapes’ contents forever secret? If so, it seems there could be only one reason: the contents of the tapes would hurt both sides. Which brings us back to today’s hearing and what to look for.
In the years following their convictions, Watson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten and the late Atkins all renounced Manson, and eventually — in interviews, books, and at their parole hearings — embraced prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s sensational motive for the killings: they were committed to ignite a race war Manson called “Helter Skelter.” The four were completely brainwashed by Manson, they conceded (several years into their prison terms), and followed his orders to slaughter complete strangers at the two homes Manson had selected (Tate and LaBianca). The only one who never embraced Bugliosi’s theory was the fifth defendant, the accused mastermind himself: Manson. Through the decades, in his incessantly scattershot, barely comprehendible interviews and court appearances, Manson has continued to maintain that the murders were Watson’s idea, committed for reasons of his own. He wasn’t at the Tate slaughter, Manson reminds interviewers (though, at times he has claimed to have gone to the house afterward to see what his “children had done,” but then retracted those claims) and he may have been at the LaBianca home, but left before Watson, Krenwinkel and Van Houten began their brutal slaughter.
The crimes gripped the nation in 1970, as their narrative was laid out by prosecutor Bugliosi at trial. They continue to fascinate the public today because of their unfathomable savagery and the defendants’ original lack of remorse or repentance. (At the trial, the women skipped into the courtroom each day, holding hands and singing nursery rhymes; when Manson carved an “X” info his forehead to represent his outsider status, they did, too.) And not only that, but because they told a horrifying story of a man brainwashing young kids and getting them to kill complete strangers, just because he told them to do it.
But what if, in fact, it didn’t happen that way? What if, for instance, there was another reason the houses were selected, and there was nothing random about the victims after all? What if, as Manson has always maintained, he didn’t tell Charles “Tex” Watson to go to the former home of record producer Terry Melcher — the Tate house — and kill everyone inside? And the same the second night, at the LaBiancas?
The killers would still be guilty, except maybe one of them. The question that needs to be answered — more so, perhaps even than whether there are other murders described on the tapes — is did Watson tell his attorney that Manson ordered the murders? Or did he tell his attorney they occurred for a different reason, or reasons, perhaps the other killers (the women) didn’t even know about? Is that why the DA — and Watson — have worked so hard to prevent their release?
What to watch for
At Van Houten’s hearing, as described above, she was attacked by the DA for seeking the release of the Watson tapes. Her attorney’s very act of requesting the information for possible exculpatory reasons was used as an argument that she was still unsuitable for release. That she still wasn’t taking full responsibility for her crimes.
How, then, will the DA depict Watson’s far more egregious act of fighting in court to prevent the release of his taped account of the murders to their office? How does that reconcile to Watson’s claim that he is rehabilitated and suitable for release to the public? More importantly, his claim that he has told the parole commission and law enforcement everything he knows about the crimes of the Manson Family?
Will the DA even go there? If the DA doesn’t — after their previous actions at the Van Houten hearing — why not? Would their bringing up the tapes open them — and their content — finally to public scrutiny? To public, on-the-record, legal proceedings at which the DA would be compelled to release them or, at least, discuss their content in a specific way (something they didn’t do at Van Houten’s hearing)?
Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether the tapes are actually being used in an investigation of now 47-year-old crimes — and, of course, the only crime that can be prosecuted after so many years is the one without a statute of limitations: murder. Setting aside that, would the act of simply raising the issue of Watson’s taped confession at his own parole hearing subject the District Attorney’s office to disclosure of that tape, finally, to Watson and consequently the public? Is that too great a risk for the DA’s office to take?
If so, they will remain mum about it. If so, the subject of the tapes won’t be introduced by the DA. And it may tell us all we’ll ever know about the tapes and their content: that there’s likely something damaging on them. Something damaging to Watson, no doubt, but also possibly more damaging to the 47-year-old verdicts in the case. More damaging to the 47-year-old prosecution motive for the murders that sent five people to prison for life. That may be why, if the tapes are not brought up at this hearing, they need to be kept secret, closed, hidden, forever.
That’s what to watch for today at Watson’s 17th parole hearing
NOTE: This story is a followup to previous story about Watson tapes:
Postscript: To listen to an excerpt of the Boyd interview, click here.
