- Crime News
"OUI" MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 1981
JAIL HOUSE INTERVIEW: BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL AND THE MANSON MURDERS

THE MAN WHO PAVED THE WAY FOR THE TATE-LaBIANCA MURDERS FINALLY SETS

THE RECORD STRAIGHT
It was July 25th, 1969, and the merciless summer heat beat down on
the dusty northwestern reaches of Los Angeles. When Bobby Beausoleil,
a slim, handsome 21-year-old musician, hit the Pacific Highway and
coastal stretch of beach he was tempted to stop for a swim. But
Beausoleil had more important business. His destination late this
afternoon was the rustic hippie enclave embedded in Topanga Canyon
just south of Malibu, the home of Gary Hinman.
Beausoleil had spent the previous evening with his friend Charlie
Manson at Manson*s desert spread, the Spahn Ranch. It was at the
ranch that Beausoleil claims he delivered 1000 tabs of Hinman*s home-
manufactured mescaline to Manson*s buddy, Danny DeCarlo, who also
served as club treasurer for the motorcycle gang, the Straight
Satans. Several hours later, according to Beausoleil, the bikers
reported back that the substance was actually strychnine and demanded
their money returned, pronto. Beausoleil decided to confront Hinman
and retrieve his money the next day. While preparing to leave, two of
Manson*s groupie girlfriends asked Beausoleil if they could come
along for the ride because "they liked Gary Hinman." Their names were
Mary Brunner and Susan "Sadie" Atkins.
The man Beausoleil planned to confront, Gary Hinman, was a kind of
hippie renaissance figure in the `60s, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology
at U.C.L.A., a political activist, Zen Buddhist devotee, a musician
and a piano teacher...and a drug dealer with a mescaline factory
tucked away in his basement. Assuming that Hinman would see the folly
of a drug burn with a biker club, Beausoleil did not anticipate much
resistance.
On July 31st, Gary Hinman was found dead in his Topanga Canyon home.
He had been stabbed twice in the heart and badly slashed across the
left side of his face. His house had been ransacked and both of his
cars were missing. scrawled on the wall in Hinman*s blood was the
macabre epithet, "Political Piggy." The police, with no leads in the
case, were resigned to tagging the crime just another unsolved hippie
weirdo murder in Los Angeles.
On August 5th, the California Highway Patrol found Beausoleil napping
in the rear of Hinman*s Fiat station wagon near San Luis Obispo.
Beausoleil told the police that the car had broken down while he was
driving to San Francisco. Beausoleil didn*t have a driver*s license—
only some false ID and a sheath knife attached to his belt. It was
not long before Robert Kenneth Beausoleil was booked for the murder
of Gary Hinman.
Within three days of Beausoleil*s arrest, all the occupants of the
Sharon Tate and La Bianca homes were brutally, senselessly
slaughtered. Though blood writing on the walls was a common factor at
all three murder sites ("Pig" on the Tate wall and "Death to the
Pigs" on the La Bianca refrigerator), investigators failed to link up
the obvious. According to Beausoleil, this came as something of a
shock to the Manson group who had hoped that the authorities would
assume the same killer responsible for all three homicidal sprees,
and then release Beausoleil; being in jail during the Tate-La Bianca
blood orgies, he was obviously not the Hinman killer. Such was the
lunatic logic of the Manson family.
Beausoleil*s first trial in November, 1969 ended in a hung jury.
chances are he would have been acquitted had the police not picked up
the erstwhile Danny DeCarlo who had a rap sheet as long as a roll of
paper towels. DeCarlo offered to turn state*s evidence against
Beausoleil in exchange for immunity on some dozen charges (from dope
dealing to gun smuggling and car theft). Decarlo arrived at the
Beausoleil trial after both sides had already rested. Against the
ravings of the defense, the court permitted the testimony of DeCarlo
who fingered not only Beausoleil as the Hinman killer but also a man
whose name had never been heard during the trial, Charlie Manson. It
was an extremely inauspicious day for Beausoleil.
Beausoleil*s second trial came during March, 1970, following a five-
month media blitz on the Manson family. It was not a healthy time to
be known as a friend of Charlie Manson. The prosecution asked for the
death penalty and got it with Beausoleil*s conviction for 1st degree
murder. Knowing how close he had been to an acquittal, Beausoleil was
bitter in his closing remarks: "You can*t judge me. There is no
possible way to feel any remorse," he declared before feebly quoting
Bob Dylan at his conclusion, "Only God can judge me and God is on my
side."
During more than ten years, Beausoleil has proclaimed his innocence
in the murder of Gary Hinman. However, in the summer of 1980 he
granted this reporter the following interview at Deuel vocational
Institute, commonly known as Tracy Prison. For the first time,
Beausoleil admitted his guilt in the murder and related what he
claims were the actual events, motives and relationships within the
Manson family.
Bobby Beausoleil has now been in jail for almost 12 years. He escaped
from death row after 26 months when California voters repealed the
death penalty (it was reinstated a few years later and automatically
his sentence was commuted to life with an indeterminate sentence).
Beausoleil was born in 1948, the eldest of a large French Catholic
working class family from Santa Barbara. His father worked as a
milkman for twenty years for Arden Farms before stepping tip to a
managerial position. From age 12, he was in and out of small-time
trouble ("walking my (log without a leash, stolen Christmas tree
ornaments, bomb scares, hitchhiking on the freeway") which landed him
a one-year stay as Las Priestas reform school when he was 15. Shortly
thereafter, he drifted down to Los Angeles where he played music and
joined a series of hippie bands (The Weeds, Grassroots, Love) and was
featured in some early porn classics, notably Ramrod and The Tennis
Shoe Indian Classic.
In the mid-*60s he moved in with author/filmmaker Kenneth Anger in an
apartment above the Russian Embassy in San Francisco. Theirs was a
tumultuous relationship, both personally and professionally. Anger
had chosen Beausoleil to play Lucifer in the sequel to his under-
ground classic, Scorpio Rising, aptly titled Lucifer Rising, and
Lucifer Rising has finally been released, ten years later, with a
film score composed by Beausoleil recorded at Tracy Prison. After a
fight with Anger, Beausoleil stole both Anger*s film and his car and
headed for Los Angeles. Anger maintains that following a curse he put
on Beausoleil, the car broke down outside the Spahn Ranch. From the
film remnants left behind, Anger made another film, Invocation of My
Demon Brother, about Beausoleil and the incident. The film plays, not
infrequently, at art movie theaters. Since his conviction, Anger has
again befriended Beausoleil.
Although nicknamed "Cupid" during his teen years, Beausoleil has
promoted a Mephistophelean image while behind bars. He sports a full
torso of tattoos. While flesh painting is not uncommon in jail, the
designs and extensiveness of his tattoos are a rarity. Emblazoned
across his chest in large dark letters is his pet name, LUCIFER. It
has taken nine years to decorate his body with cartoon-like
nymphets, "done with ink and a broken guitar string."
His incarceration has done little to dampen the zeal and lust of
curious California girls. Beausoleil is known in and out of jail as a
womanizer. In early 1980, he married a 21 year old blond devotee.
Learning of Beausoleil*s predilection for "more than one," she is
presently seeking an annulment.
In jail, he is a busy man, painting his erotic drawings (some have
been published in Puritan magazine), working in the prison video
room, and writing music for his prison ensemble, The Freedom
Orchestra.
Notwithstanding some gray hairs in his goatee, Beausoleil appears fit
and reasonably well adjusted to prison rigors. One suspects that he
would make out okay in virtually any environment. In accordance with
prison propriety, he is admired, disliked and feared by the
appropriate numbers of prisoners and guards.
AB: When and how did you meet Charlie Manson?
BB: Listen, one thing that you should establish about me—I was not
then nor am I now a member of the Manson family. There never was a
Manson family. That didn*t happen until every. body got busted. There
were a bunch of girls, a few guys, a couple of ex-cons, a bunch of
kids, some runaways with no support from home, and they were living
in a garbage dump called the Spahn Ranch.
AB: When did you first meet Manson?
BB: I met him shortly after he got out of prison. I think he had been
out ten months or so. This was `66, I believe. Living in Topanga
Canyon.
AB: Were you living at Gary Hinman*s at the time?
BB: No, I wasn*t living with Gary. I had stayed with him previous to
that. Ijoined a band, The Milky Way, that Charlie was in. That*s how
I met him. He was a verytalented songwriter, good musician,
lyrically, just excellent. He was somebody with an incredibly
intense, vivid, expanded imagination because of all the time he*s
done.
AB: Was his imagination the magic that people attributed to him?
BB: Charlie Manson grew up in a tomb. To describe his personality,
you have to understand that aspect. Like I*ve been in a state of
incubation for a decade. For Charlie, it was more than a decade. He
had been locked up since he was a little kid, I mean locked up all
the time. I think his first commitment to a prison environment was at
13 years old in West Virginia and his life before that was foster
homes and orphanages. When he got out at 33, it was the first time he
ever had anybody to care about him.
AB: Did he really care about his "family" or were they each
disposable units?
BB: That was the only family he ever had, the only people who ever
really cared about him and showed it. Let me explain this: Charlie
made a commitment that he would be willing to die for his family. And
when you make this commitment, it*s very easy to fall into the trap
of: "I would be willing to kill for the family."
AB: Did he have an hypnotic effect on people?
BB: I never thought of him that way. I suppose with some people he
did.
AB: Some sources say that the girls looked up to Manson, but that
Manson looked up to you. And Kenneth Anger once said that you and
Manson had a homosexual relationship.
BB: I would say he was attracted to me, but not.... He*s not
homosexual at all. Ken was indulging in wishful thinking,
daydreaming. That idea came first from Capote*s interview of Andy
Warhol in Rolling Stone magazine (See Box). And, of course that was
Andy Warhol*s wishful thinking. Ken just picked it up. It was good
gay gossip (laughs. Aside to the photographer). Truman Capote just
wants to get dicked in the ass and killed. There*s never been any
homosexual relationship between me and Charlie Manson.
AB: Well, it*s certainly not uncommon in jails.
BB: Yeah, I*m sure he*s fucked a few fat butt boys, yeah. So have I.
In that respect, maybe I*m homosexual, you know? But it*s a different
kind of thing.
AB: What else did you and Manson do together?
BB: Made love to women once in a while. AB: How long did you know
Manson?
BB: About three years.
AB: What were some of the things that you did together?
BB: Oh, mostly played music. And a million crazy things that a lot of
crazy guys do together. One time Charlie and I drove two trucks
through Death valley, just for the hell of it. We didn*t drag race.
We just wanted to ride through that kind of terrain. We took two 4-
wheel drive Army surplus power wagons. He had his group up in the
desert. It took two days. We left the trucks, ate their beans and
rice, stayed a couple of days. We wanted to hellraise and it was a
blast.
AB: Did Manson have many male friends? BB: A few. Charles Manson was
lonely. He used his women to attract a man because he liked having
other men around to do "men things" with. What man couldn*t be
attracted by having the opportunity to go to bed with several women?
To cater to his every fantasy, whatever. I didn*t have that
attraction to that group. I didn*t need it. His women could not
attract me. He could attract me because I admired his creativity.
AB: Then, you were indifferent to Charlie*s girls?
BB: Oh no. I wouldn*t say that. Some of the girls were awfully cute,
and I went to bed with some of them. But, it was never because I
needed that. I never lacked having women around me.
AB: Did Manson really care or like women?
BB: Oh. Charlie loved women. He showed them plenty of respect. He
treated those women better than most men ever treat their women.
AB: Were there many orgies and group sex events?
BB: Once in a while. They were beautiful. Usually ten women, at
least. And three or four men.
AB: When did you fir*st meet Gary Hinman?
BB: I guess about six or eight months after I came down (to L.A.)
from San Francisco. AB: That was in 1966 and he invited you to stay
at his home?
BB: Yeah. He had a two level house and I stayed in the basement for
two or three weeks. I never knew the man very well. He was a recluse.
AB: But you did live with him.
BB: A very short while. He gave me the loan of his basement, and he
was very rarely home. Gary Hinman was not some body you could be
close with. I was never a close friend of Gary Hinman*s. He was just
somebody that I knew among a crowd of people in Topanga Canyon. His
ideologies were very different from mine. He was into communism and
all that sort of thing. I couldn*t relate to that at all. He was a
political science major with a piano on the side for some kind of an
income.
AB: Did you play music with him?
BB: I did a little work with Gary. I didn*t know how to read or write
music. He gave me a few basic lessons on how to notate.
AB: Why did you go to Gary Hinman*s home on July 25th, 1969?
BB: I didn*t go there with the intention of killing Gary. If I was
going to kill him, I wouldn*t have taken the girls (Mary Brunner and
Susan Atkins). I was going there for one purpose only, which was to
collect $1000 that I had already turned over to him, that didn*t
belong to me.
AB: When had you given him the $1000?
BB: The night before.
AB: You paid Hinman $1000 for 1000 tabs of mescaline and then
returned to the Spahn Ranch?
BB: Right. The whole transaction with the straight Satans motorcycle
club took place at Spahn*s Ranch. There were a few Satan slavers
hanging out there as well. The Straight Satans took the mescaline
back to the motorcycle club at Venice where they were intending to
party. They were really mad about it.
AB: How did you know that it was strychnine instead of mescaline in
such a short time? If you didn*t try the drug yourself, how could you
be certain that it was bogus on poison?
BB: I don*t think that those guys would have lied tome. They wouldn*t
have been that mad.
AB: How long had you and Hinman been doing these transactions?
BB: Very rarely. I just happened to know that he had something. I was
trying to be a nice guy, trying to be in with the fellows, trying to
impress somebody.
AB: Impress the bikers?
BB: They represented to me an element of freedom in America. On the
road, and in their lifestyle, the freedom that they express with each
other. I felt so desperate in this situation, being put in a cross
with the motorcycle club. Naturally, they are going to be mad at me—
not at him. They didn*t even know him. I*m the one who took their
money and brought back this mescaline, supposed mescaline. I*m in a
helluva bind. If I don*t give them something, who knows about their
plans.
AB: Why did you bring susan Atkins and Mary Brunner to the Hinman
house?
BB: Because they were friends of Gary Hinman. Mary Brunner was close
to him because she stayed with him for a while. She was as close as
anybody could be with him. The girls didn*t even know what was going
on. They just wanted to go party and see him. No one was going there
with any intention of killing Gary Hinman.
AB: In neither of your two trials, nor in Ed Sanders* or Bugliosi*s
books, is there any mention of the Hinman murder stemming from a drug
burn.
BB: I never testified about it. I never told anybody. I didn*t know
how to deal with it. What happened to me that day was the culmination
of a whole lot of pressures that had been on me for several years.
AB: Alright. You arrived at Hinman*s and asked fon your money back?
BB: I demanded it. I wasn*t going to take no for an answer. I had a
motorcycle band on my back.
AB: And Hinman refused to return the money?
BB: Right. I was carrying a knife in a sheath at that time, more for
utility than anything else. I had been wearing a knife for three to
four years prior to that because I was always on the road.
AB: Who had the gun?
BB: I gave the gun to Susan Atkins. We were sitting at the kitchen
table. I was looking for something worth $1000 that I could take back
to these people. "If he moves." I said, "shoot him." She wasn*t going
to shoot him. I was right about that. But he decided to be a hero and
dove at the gun. And she*s (Atkins) yelling and screaming, "He*s got
the gun. he*s got the gun. Oh God. We had a hell of a night. I wasn t
going to let him get the gun.
AB: How long were you in Hinman*s house?
BB: A little less than 24 hours. It got dark again.
AB: When you killed Hinman, were you high on anything?
BB: No. Nothing. I think I had a glass of wine at Gary*s that night.
AB: It was stated at your trial and assumed by virtually all parties
that Charlie Manson made an entrance at the Hinman home, sometime
during the period when you were there. Didn*t Manson show up at one
point?
BB: No, no, no. You see the Sheriff*s Homicide Department wanted to
get Manson involved in my case, which was very difficult because
Manson was not involved.
AB: Both prosecutor/author Vincent Bugliosi and Ed sanders (in his
book The Family) maintained that Charlie Manson came to Hinman*s
during the night and slashed off Hinman*s ear with his knife. Now you
say that you alone cut his face and killed him.
BB: Yeah. yeah. That was the prosecution*s theory because they wanted
to get Manson into the act (laughs). They tried every trick in the
book and I*ll tell you why. The Tate-La Bianca murders fell under the
jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. However, the
Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman murders both came into the jurisdiction
of the Sheriff*s Department (LASO). And the Sheriff*s Dept. was in
competition. Actually Hinman*s ear was never gone. never cut off. It
was more his cheek sliced, actually a cut on his cheek that
intersected the edge of his ear. That slash across his face occurred
the night before he died in the fight over the gun.
AB: If you had no intention of killing Hinman. why did you bring a 9
mm. Radon pistol?
BB: I borrowed it from Bruce Davis. I didn*t actually ask him. It was
around (the Spahn Ranch). I just borrowed it. I didn*t even know how
to use the damn thing.
AB: But you did fire a shot that missed Hinman.
BB: Struggling with Gary Hinman for the gun, it went off in the
kitchen. (The bullet) went through the sink. That was the only time
it was fired. I knew so little about operating this gun that after it
went off and not knowing that it was a semi-automatic, I cocked the
gun which jammed it. I didn*t know that it wouldn*t fire again
without removing the clip and the shell.
AB: Did Gary Hinman bleed to death?
BB: No. no. no. Nobody was killing him until the last minute.
AB: I think that*s at odds with the coroner*s report. The prosecution
at your trial charged there was torture involved. BB: There had been
some suggestion that I tortured him, a theory used by the district
attorney to justify a 1st degree conviction a felony murder. District
attorney, Burton Katz, with a red Cadillac pitted against a paunchy
Jewish public defender [Leon Salter].
AB: You*re saying that you attacked Hinman with the knife after a
struggle over the gun.
BB: Right. And I sewed up his ear too, by the way with dental floss.
AB: That was mighty white of you.
BB: Oh, stop being sarcastic. We had a helluva fight. I wasn*t going
to let him get the gun.
AB: When did you decide to kill Hinman? And why?
BB: Gary Hinman would not have died if he had not told me that he was
going to blow the whistle as soon as I was gone.
AB: Blow the whistle to whom?
BB: He told me that he was going to the police (and tell them) that I
had come and assaulted him to get money* from him. I had my* back
against the wall. He said, "I*m going to tell the police what you did
to me. Up until that point I had assumed that every*thing was square
between us. This guy is a drug dealer. He*s playing the game. And if
you*re going to dance, you*ve got to pay the fiddler. You burn
somebody, that*s the way* it is. You expect somebody to knock on your
door to collect. I figured we were straight. He had signed over the
pink slips of his two cars to me. They were pieces of junk but they
were worth between them, perhaps one thousand dollars. I figured that
I*d give these cars to the motorcycle club, hoping they would accept
them in return for their $l000, and get myself out of my bind with
them. The only reason that I stayed over was so that I wouldn*t be
seen driving his beat-up VW van during the daylight.
AB: Did you ever call the Spahn Ranch during this period?
BB: Yes. I did and talked to a guy named Bruce. I said, "Come over
and pick up a car." He did. He came over and picked up the car.
AB: Was this after you had killed Hinman?
BB: No, At the time that Bruce Davis was coming over to pick up the
car, everything between Gary and I was straight. Bruce came to the
house and stay*ed just long enough to pick up the car. He didn*t even
come inside. He picked up the car keys and somebody w*ho was with him—
it was more than likely Elda who was tight with Bruce—drove the car
back that he came in. That was Bruce Davis* only involvement. He had
no idea what was going on.
AB: Where is he now?
BB: He*s in Folsom Prison.
AB: For the murder of Hinman...
BB: Yeah and they tied him tip with the Shorty Shea thing. (Stuntman
Shorty Shea who lived at the Spahn Ranch prior to his death/murder).
AB: How did Gary Hinman die?
BB: Stabbed in the heart twice. He died immediately*. He had signed
over both pink slips to me athd I figured that we were square. One
car had already been picked up. and I was going to drive the other.
So I stayed over and the next evening he tells me. "I*m sending you
to prison for assault," or whatever. I thought, well, here goes my
life. My freedom is my life. The slash on his face is pretty bad. I
didn*t really know what to do. Hinman would have a scar on his face
now for the rest of his life. He was a lot more upstanding than me.
He*s a homeowner and so forth, a college student. I*m at a loss
trying to resolve this situation, where we can go from there and not
get in each other*s way. And it was a stupid decision. I should have
taken my* chances with whatever he was going to do,
AB: Did Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner simply stand around and watch
you kill Hinman?
BB: Well, noone wanted to kill him. They had just come along for the
ride.
AB: What did the girls do?
BB: They didn*t know what to do. He (Gary) was closer to them than he
w*as to me. Susan Atkins seemed to think. "Oh, what fun, how
interesting." Mary* Brunner was just scared to death. Mary Brunner
just faded into the woodwork. She w*as a librarian. Susan Atkins is
now* a Jesus freak in jail. She gave five different testimonies and
in one of them, she claimed that she killed Hinman. (laughs).
AB: Who actually w*rote Political Piggy on the wall in Hinman*s blood?
BB: I didn*t, but I had it written. Well, it was my idea to do it.
Susan Atkins w*as on that wall. The whole thing was to take the heat
off the trail. Gary Hinman w*as into his revolutionary communism. His
whole living room was a library of Communist literature. I figured
I*d make it look like one of his cohorts, you know.
AB: Make it look like a Black Panther killing?
BB: I wasn*t thinking about blacks necessarily.
AB: That was Manson*s trip.
BB: It*s never really been his trip. I mean, he*s from the South.
West Virginia. Since he*s been in (prison) he gets along with blacks
better than anybody.
AB: When you returned to the Spahn Ranch and returned the jammed gun
to Bruce Davis, did you tell him that you had killed Gary Hinman?
BB: I didn*t talk to anybody about it. But Susan Atkins has a motor
mouth. She (Atkins) was the one, not me, that Danny* DeCarlo had the
conversation with, The district attorney and Danny DeCarlo were
drinking buddies and that is how he (DeCarlo) got the two felony
charges and a federal gun charge dropped in return for his testimony.
AB: If Hinman died immediately as you say, why did Susan Atkins run
back inside the house and suffocate him?
BB: It was death gasps. He was dead but there are spasms that people
go through. What do they call it? Death rattle, I mean it*s a normal
thing that happens, She ran back in to the house and laid a pillow
over his face to muffle the sound. There was no suffocating. He was
dead,
AB: Was this the first time that you had ever killed somebody?
BB: The first and only time. I*m not ordinarily violence-prone. I*ve
been in some situations here (in prison) where I*ve had to stand up
for myself, but I*ve never had any preoccupation with violence.
AB: Were you frightened after you killed Hinman?
BB: It*s hard to say. You go through a lot of things. Guilt. Anxiety
over getting busted.
AB: Were you surprised that it took a week before you were caught?
BB: No. I thought the body would be discovered later than it was
because the cars were gone and, by all appearances, Hinman was gone
too, The heat of the summer and decomposure attracted flies and some
attention, The body was found five days later,
AB: And when you were caught driving his car, you had some of his
blood on you. True?
BB: No. Well, in a matter of speaking. I wasn*t wearing the clothes I
was wearing then. There were a couple of spots and they (forensic)
couldn*t even tell if it was animal blood. It was probably not Gary
Hinman*s blood.
AB: Whose blood could it have been?
BB: More than likely it was my own. I have a tendency to cut myself.
I work with my hands a lot.
AB: In light of the murder you had committed only* a week before, it
doesn*t appear that you were taking precautions against getting
caught. Driving a dead man*s car, for instance.
BB: I*m not sure that I was trying so desperately to prevent my
apprehension. I was kind of devastated by what I had done. I drove
the car off on the pretense of ditching it somewhere. I picked up
some hitchhikers and took them to where they were going and just
continued north. In retrospect, it was definitely a stupid move.
AB: What are your thoughts about Gary Hinman now? Are you still
bitter?
BB: No. I don*t begrudge anything that happened. Gary Hinman was as
stupid as me. If he w as going to do something like that (report
Beausoleil), he should never have told me. It was done and finished.
He had a thin cut on his cheek. It would have healed and he would
have had a thin line to show for it. Well, he burned somebody. He
sold some drugs that would have killed people.
AB: What was your biggest mistake that night, and at your trials?
BB: My biggest mistake was simply in killing Gary Hinman. I told the
judge that I didn*t feel any remorse because I wouldn*t give him that
satisfaction. That*s the only reason I told him that. As far as I*m
concerned that man (Judge John Shea) is a helluva lot more diabolical
than Charlie Manson ever was. But the thing is, I*ve felt a great
deal of remorse within me. I think I wanted to pay for Gary Hinman*s
death. I think I owed Gary that. I*ve worshipped life my whole life.
What*s heartbreaking to me more than anything else is that killing
Gary Hinman has negated all of my creative efforts. (The world)
doesn*t concentrate on anything other than that one mistake I made in
my life. And it was a big mistake. You can*t give a life back.
AB: Did it ever occur to you to turn state*s evidence or offer your
hunch on who committed the Tate-LaBianca murders in exchange for
having the Hinman charge dropped?
BB: Yes, But there*s no future...
AB: For a snitch?
BB: Not to me. I wouldn*t be able to.
AB: Do you still get letters from (Manson) family members?
BB: I*ve gotten a few from Squeaky. Squeaky and Sandra Goode are
trying to hold together the illusion of this Manson family thing.
They*re into this fanatical religion hype.
AB: What do they ask you to do?
BB: They just preach. I don*t know why. I can*t relate to that.
AB: Do you have any letters from Manson?
BB: Oh, heavens yes.
AB: When was the last time you heard from him?
BB: Probably about eight years ago.
AB: Have you heard from your old girlfriend Kitty Leutsinger who
testified against you when she was pregnant with your child?
BB: Not for many, many years. The last time I heard she was living
with a junkie in Santa Cruz.
AB: How old is your child?
BB: A girl. She*s eleven now and lives with her grandparents. Kitty*s.
AB: Who was killed first? When did the murder sprees begin?
BB: Gary Hinman was killed before anybody was killed. Before that
nobody had any real plans of killing anybody, but when it happened...
AB: It became contagious?
BB: Yeah, sort of.
AB: You*re saying then that the Hinman murder was almost a catalyst
for mass killing.
BB: I think it did have some kind of triggering effect. Yes.
AB: As a consequence, the people in the Tate and La Bianca homes were
killed. Did you have any notice that they were going to be killed?
BB: No, nothing at all. When it happened, I knew who had done it. I
was fairly certain.
AB: What made you so certain? Because you knew that the Tate house
used to be Terry Melcher*s? Did they think they would find Terry
Melcher?
BB: Yeah, I would assume. Yeah, That*s what I*ve heard.
AB: And the style of the murders was a grotesque exageration of the
way you killed Gary Hinman. More blood writing on the wall, theway
you did it. It has been said that the Tate-LaBianca murders were done
to try to spring you from jail. An attempt to prove that they were
all connected by the consistent motif of writing on the walls with
the victim*s blood. Hence, if you were in jail during the Tate-La
Biancas and they were done by the same person who killed Hinman,
their aazy logic was that the police would have to release you.
BB: I do believe there was something to that, yes, because of the way
the murders were made to look. They (Tate-La Biancas) were a few days
after I was arrested. That was the 9th (August 9, 1969). I don*t
think that whoever*s idea it was to commit these murders would have
been able to get the participation of those involved unless there had
been this noble concept.
AB: Meaning freeing Bobby from jail?
BB: Gary Hinman had his own personal relationship with the so-called
Manson Family and perhaps they interpreted the thing that I had
defended them from him, as well as myself.
AB: Did that enter your mind when you killed him, that he could
squeal on the Family?
BB: It*s not that I did that, but whether they thought I had intended
that. You*ve got to understand that these people were not totally
without some kind of scruples. They had to have some kind of reason
to justify it in their own minds, even if the justification was
twisted and bizarre.
AB: Why would your incarceration be such a threat or loss to them?
BB: I believe that it led to a situation in which Charlie and the
others, who had made similar commitments to each other, were forced
into a situation of acting upon their commitment. I don*t think it
was because of Charlie Manson*s fondness for me, necessarily. I think
that this was a justification—something that would give the whole
episode a more noble cause than just going out to kill some people.
This was 1969. "Kill your Parents"—Jerry Rubin and all of that, There
w*as a lot of doomsday talk around at that time when everybody was
pretty well frustrated and not knowing what to do and still having
some romantic vision of revolution. What the exact motives were I
can*t really say. It wasn*t a plot by Beatles* records and it was not
the "I was hypnotized" concept of Susan Atkins. I think it falls back
to a basic commitment that Charlie made with people. The striking out
was very senseless. I*ve seen it a lot in here, where people are so
desperate that they really don*t know who to strike out at. It was
more that sort of thing than something that was sat down and plotted
out.
AB: How accurate are the descriptions of Manson and the family in
Bugliosi*s Helter Skelter and Ed Sanders* The Family?
BB: They are both so pathetic because neither one took the proper
approach to begin to understand what happened. Everything gets lost
in blood and guts, devil worship, all that stuff that never went on.
This satanic crap and brainwave master never went on. These things
were taken out of light-hearted conversations. There is truth in all
these books. There are facts. Period.
AB: Where did the writers go wrong?
BB: They were never in a situation where they experienced that kind
of desperation. AB: Describe the kind of desperation,
BB: The desperation which leads somebody to go out and almost,,,
AB: Kill?
BB: Yeah. Kill crazily. Just throw* away their lives and murder
people.
AB: What created this so-called desperation? BB: They* were a bunch
of people with their backs against the wall. This wasn*t mere
discontent, This was lunacy, At least in their minds, they were at
the end corner of the world, They couldn*t travel any more together
without a caravan of law enforcement people behind them. The only
place left to go was the desert, They were at the end of the edge of
the world and they were scared to death of being pushed off the edge.
The desert is death, They* wound up in Death Valley trying to live
off the bugs.

• 
  

AB: How do you think Manson has held up over the last decade of
virtual solitary confinement?
BB: I don*t know if he*s burnt out. From what I've heard, the
pressures have taken their toll. All this time he*s been in
protective custody.(*) Some of these guys kill people for real weird
reasons, just to see what it*s like. Some kind of peer pressure or
peer prestige. There*s a lot of sickness in prisons. It*s an
environment that grows this ugly fear mentality, like a culture dish
of bacteria,
AB: Have you changed much being in jail for 11 years? Do you think
you*ve learned anything?
BB: Oh, I*ve learned a lot. Where do I begin? I*ve got my act
together pretty well. I was a lame kid when I came in and when I come
out I*m not going to be any lame kid. They don*t have to worry about
me being a troublemaker because I*ve got enough talent, Believe me,
it*s been hell, but experiences like this temper you. I*ve used it..
(*) In August. 1980. prison authorities at Vacaville Prison released
Manson from protective custody. He had been pleading to enter the
general inmate population for several years.