16 January 1971: In the courtroom, Manson and the three girls have acted roles ranging from indifference and disdain to explosive fury

Los Angeles, January 15

The jury in the murder trial of hippy cult leader Charles Manson and three young women disciples retired to begin considering its verdict today – exactly seven months after the trial began.

It has been seven months of courtroom shenanigans punctuated with testimony of horror almost beyond human comprehension, a macabre comic opera, directed, at times reluctantly, by Superior Court Judge Charles H. Older.

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The case has cost the city and county of Los Angeles more than half a million dollars, including $100,000 to investigate the savage butchery of actress Sharon Tate and four others in her Hollywood area mansion on August 9, 1969, and the slayings the next night of wealthy supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife at their home. Since last July, the county has paid $1,500 a day just to feed and house the twelve jurors and five alternates sequestered at the Ambassador Hotel.

It is impossible to measure the subtler effects, but even in this nation, inured by an era of sensational public trials, political prosecutions, and organised crime, the facts have stood out as bizarre symptoms of social sickness.

Angel of doom

The State contends Manson was a self-appointed angel of doom who, though he is not charged with the actual killings, planned and ordered them to strike against society. He hoped, the prosecution said, that blacks would be blamed and that the murders would start a race war.

Manson is 36. He has spent most of his life in gaols or prisons. He and the other members of his “family” of cultists were arrested at the desert commune he ruled with hypnotic charisma.

In his prosecution of Manson and the three girls, Susan Atkins, 21, Patricia Krenwinkel, 22, and Leslie Van Houten, 20, assistant district attorney Vincent Bugliosi, with passion belying his slender, ascetic appearance, described the principal defendant as a “dictatorial maharaja of boot-licking slaves who were willing to do his killing for him… he preached love and practised cold-blooded murder.”

Manson’s defence counsel, Irving Kanareck, whose long speeches and delaying tactics have irritated the court, concluded the case was a “lynching” of his client because of his nonconforming life style.

“This is a political trial in which Mr Manson is brought here because he is a symbol of one of the confrontations that is going on in this country,” he charged.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susan Denise Atkins, (left), Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten (right), laugh after receiving the death sentence for their part in the Tate-La Bianca killing at the order of Charles Manson. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

In his much shorter final argument, the chief defence attorney, Paul Fitzgerald, representing Miss Atkins, hit at the State’s case by claiming the star prosecution witness, Linda Kasabian, a 21-year-old ex-member of Manson’s group, lied to save her own life. She was the only eye-witness to testify.

Miss Kasabian, granted immunity from prosecution in return for her testimony, described the grisly series of events at the Tate and LaBianca homes. She said Manson was dissatisfied with the “messy” killings of Miss Tate and her four companions and led his tribe on a random search the next night for more victims “to show us how to do it.” The erratic journey allegedly ended at the residence where, the State says, Manson tied up the LaBiancas and left his followers behind to kill them.

The seven men and five women of the jury could not contrast more sharply with the Manson clan, whose girls sunbathed in the nude at their abandoned movie ranch. Most are over 40. They represent a cross-section of the middle class. One is a retired deputy sheriff 74 years old. Two are secretaries. One is a retired, newspaper drama critic. They include a social worker, two electricians, and an undertaker.

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Without visible complaint they have listened to months of testimony and advocacy, living quietly at their heavily guarded hotel. They have remained idle during delays caused by incidents of which, presumably, they have been ignorant. For weeks after the evidence was concluded in November, for instance, they waited while a substitute was found for Ronald Hughes, attorney for Miss Van Houten, who disappeared in the mountains on a camping trip during a court recess.

The jury could not be shielded entirely from some incidents outside the courtroom, in spite of a lack of newspapers and carefully controlled television watching. Last August President Nixon, in a nationally televised press conference, remarked that Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.” The statement, later moderated by the lawyer-President, none the less may provide grounds for an appeal.

In the courtroom, Manson and the three girls have acted roles ranging from indifference and disdain to explosive fury. All four have been dragged away for repeated outbursts and in October Manson was wrestled to the floor after he beat across the counsel table at Judge Older screaming “Someone should cut your head off.”

The defence attornies presented no witnesses or evidence of their own and successfully fought the stated desires of the three girls to take the witness stand. According to court sources the women, still loyal to Manson, were determined to confess and clear him.

But Judge Older refused to let the girls testify after they declined to tell their stories first out of hearing of the jury.

Manson did testify in November, in spite of his attorney’s objections. In a rambling account given without any questions asked, he tried to describe his philosophy and that of his “family.”

“You people think with your mind but that’s not the way I do it,” Manson said, “I’ve spent my life in gaol, I’ve stayed a child while you have grown up.

I don’t judge anyone. I judge only myself and I am content with myself. You want to put me in a penitentiary, but that is nothing. You kicked me out of the last one. I didn’t want to go. I liked it there.

And then children come at you with knives. You told them what to do. I didn’t tell them. They’re the children that you didn’t want, and I took them on my garbage dump.”

The defendants had their original death sentence commuted to life in prison in February 1972 when California declared the death penalty unconstitutional.