![]() ![]() There was great fear of Manson and his disciples, at least in Los Angeles during the trial, among those associated with movies and the music business. The cell had previously held Sirhan Sirhan, the man prosecuted for the assassination of Robert F. The weekend before the trial began, I learned that Manson had been moved to a super secure cell at the Hall of Justice, the same place he was to be tried. Together we made arrangements to tip off the police. I contacted a CBS reporter who was covering the trial and told him what I knew. In writing and researching the book, however, I began to feel sympathy and respect for a number of police officers whose work I began to understand and appreciate. Later, as someone whose face had been on the cover of Life magazine as a leader of the so-called “other culture,” I was doubly suspicious of the police. In my youth, I had been counseled by friends never to catch the eye of a police officer and to be very wary in their company. I wanted them to think that an escape meant nothing to me so they wouldn’t become suspicious. I told them I didn’t care about their plans. They had talked to the filmmaker about chopping off heads as a distraction to aid the escape. They said there was a set of parallel dry tunnels running all the way from downtown to the edge of the desert, which you could barrel through on motorcycles to freedom. Members of the Manson family said that he had maps of the Los Angeles sewer system. The young man in the van, I found out, had during our trip asked a member of the film crew, “What would you say would happen if one night 75 heads were cut off?” From what was being tossed about, it was obvious an escape attempt for Manson was being planned. I had also begun learning about a plot to free Manson. That’s when I began to get the shivers about the Manson group. (When investigators finally located Shea’s body, over a decade later, his head was attached.) ![]() When I called one of the prosecutors, Burton Katz, he was dumbfounded to learn that I had slept in that van beside the guy he believed had cut off the head of Shorty Shea, a former stuntman working on Spahn Ranch who had disappeared several weeks after the Tate-LaBianca murders. Along with Folger and Tate, who was married to the director Roman Polanski, the victims that night included Folger’s boyfriend, the Polish writer Wojtek Frykowski Tate’s friend, the hair-stylist-to-the-stars Jay Sebring and a young man named Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate’s caretaker.Įven though I often dressed more like a Manson family member than like Bugliosi, I nevertheless had an assignment from Esquire and a book contract from a major publisher, so I had access to the prosecution and homicide investigators. The ultra-brutal killings that followed stunned the world, prompting headlines about Hippies and Weirdos and Ritual Murder. Folger, an heir to the Folgers coffee fortune and a guest of the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, waved hello. 8, Abigail Folger was lounging in a Cielo Drive guest room in Benedict Canyon, reading a book, when a knife-wielding Susan Atkins walked into her bedroom unannounced. It was as if the whole Los Angeles scene were being protected by the hippies at Hog Farm commune, who provided security at Woodstock consisting of what their leader called “seltzer bottles and cream pies.” No one had guards packing pistols or rifles in the summer of 1969. It exposed how defenseless the folk-rock stars, the movie stars, the producer stars, the drug stars, the limo driver stars and thousands of would-be and wannabe stars were in their pretend fortresses up in the hills of Los Angeles and Malibu. ![]() The Manson case had a touch of evil to it - in fact, more than a touch it was, in many minds, a post-apocalyptic deluge.
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