Inside the Case of Charles Manson--a true crime investigation

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: So. Pick the creepiest scariest villain you can imagine. Non-fiction, I mean. Someone from real life. We have lots of possibilities, sadly. And we ask ourselves—who could do that? Why? How do their brains work? 

The lawyer/prosecutor/professor/reporter Lis Wiehl is engaged with those questions in every part of her life—and now, she’s taken the authorial step—maybe a risky one—into delving into the darkest corners of one of this country’s most feared and reviled criminals. And the potentially botched investigation to stop him!  (Did you know Manson was not the actual killer of actress Sharon Tate?) 

HANK: Welcome, Lis. And congratulations on all the buzz about HUNTING CHARLES MANSON.  But I’ve got to ask: Why Manson?

LIS WIEHL: Even after his recent death, the name “Charles Manson” is etched in the consciousness of American culture.  We want to know who was this head of a murderous “Family,” touting a self-made swastika tattoo on his forehead, and somehow persuading young women to brutally kill and torture for him in the late 1960s.  Who he was and what his Family did changed American culture forever. I wanted to explore how that happened, and, perhaps, how it could be prevented from happening again.

 

HANK: So-- you found that the initial investigators on this case, ah, did not do such a good job.

LIS: Well, yeah. The investigators, how can I put it nicely, bungled the case.

First, had parole officers been keeping better tabs on Manson, no murders likely would have taken place--because he was in violation of parole long before the first murders.  True, Manson was conniving and manipulative with his parole officers, but, in my experience as a prosecutor, most convicts are, and Manson wasn’t special in that regard. So, shame on those parole officers.

Second, had the different police departments –including the LAPD and the LA County Sheriff—shared information more efficiently and had evidence not been mishandled, Manson would have been arrested much earlier than he was.

Again, sadly, nothing special about the way law enforcement handled – or mishandled- this case. The case was more high profile, but the jurisdictional squabbling between different law enforcement precincts was (and is) positively pedestrian. We saw the same at the Federal level after 911 when it was revealed that the FBI and the CIA failed to share crucial information involving potential terrorist attacks.

I detail in “Hunting” the instances of law enforcement failing to pick up on crucial clues because of mishandled evidence and lack of information sharing. These errors could have been Manson’s ‘get out of jail free card’.

HANK:  You’d think prosecuting Manson would have been a slam dunk. But it wasn’t? And you found problems there, too?

LIS: Probably the biggest issue facing Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor, was the fact that Charles Manson hadn’t actually plunged the knife in to any of his victims. Yet Bugliosi had charged Manson with multiple counts of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Bugliosi had to convince a jury that because Manson set the murders in motion by essentially ordering Charles “Tex” Watson and the ‘girls’ to “do something witchy”,  that he was guilty of murder, even though he didn’t physically commit murder.  He had to convince a jury that the Helter Skelter motive was real, and that it was all fueled by Manson.

Bugliosi also had the monumental task of deciding which Family member to grant ‘immunity’ to in exchange for their testimony at trial. This is always a tough call in any trial, especially one like Manson where the potential witnesses are also potential co-conspirators with killers. As a prosecutor, Bugliosi had to be careful to not be too lenient in exchange for testimony.

HANK: How about the press coverage? I’m trying to remember.

LIS: Amazing.  Early on in his trial, Manson smiled and stood up at the defense table and raised a copy of the Los Angeles Times for everyone in the courtroom, including the jurors, to see:

MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES,” the tabloid-sized headline read, a violation of the judge’s gag order by the nation’s most powerful elected official.   Manson immediately moved for a mistrial. It was denied.

The prosecution had other challenges within its own ranks. One of the prosecutors, Aaron Stovitz, gave a pretrial interview to two writers for Rolling Stone magazine, trying to get around the court’s gag order by getting the reporters to promise not to use his name.

Having a case that becomes a ‘Trial of the Century’ case can be great fodder for the media, but more a curse than a blessing for the prosecutor charged with actually trying the case.

HANK: So besides your TV and legal careers, you’re a bestselling thriller author. (Whew.) How did you transition to a  true crime book? Or maybe it wasn’t a transition!

LIS: Hunting Manson is told as a fast paced, non-fiction thriller. So, I hope you’ll read the book almost as a novel, with the awareness that the stories really did happen.

My transition wasn’t much of one at all because my mystery novels are largely based on cases I’ve prosecuted, or stories I’ve covered as a journalist. I take bits and pieces of reality to make up a fictional world. In writing Hunting Manson, I followed leads so I could document and source material. And we are talking a vast amount of material. A huge manhunt. And then multiple trials with multiple defendants. And then multiple parole hearings, that are still on going.

And then there is the question of the missing boxes in the L.A. County Superior Court. Yes, you heard me correctly. Many boxes containing documents of the Manson case have gone missing. Very strange!   Sounds like it could be a good plot for a novel. Whoops, I’m flipping between fiction and non-fiction

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HANK:  Your past fiction dedicated to your family. Not this one.

LIS: I dedicated the book to the victims of the Manson Family. In the more than two years I’ve spent working on this book, I got to know their stories well. My prosecutor instincts kicked in as I retraced the scenes of the crimes. In Los Angeles, I visited the outside of El Cielo and Waverly Drive, the houses where the victims were so brutally murdered. I even went to the restaurant and sat in the very booth where Sharon Tate and her friends had enjoyed their last meal. I went to Spahn Ranch where the Manson family lived, and where the “witchy” plan was hatched. It was such an eerie feeling.  And I kept thinking of those victims.  

HANK: Did you get to know the victims’ families?

LIS: I was the only reporter allowed at the last parole hearing of Charles “Tex” Watson in California.  He was the one who actually did commit the murders, plunging the knife multiple times in multiple victims. When one of the girls couldn’t quite bring herself to finish the job, Tex would step in and do it. Tex murdered Sharon Tate and her unborn child as well.

I sat only three feet away from Watson during the nearly nine-hour parole hearing, and listened to him calmly recite the facts of those nights in the Summer of 1969.  He actually was reading from notes, as if he needed notes to remind him of what he’d done! I was shocked by how well he looked. Groomed, and clean shaven. He probably spends time at the gym and eats well. He’d also found religion.

The members of the victims’ family were there. At first, many were reluctant to speak with me, but soon we were eating donuts and commiserating during breaks. They were concerned – validly so – that certain changes in California law might mean that Watson could be granted parole, a proposition that truly spooked them. I tried to allay their fears as best I could.

At the end of the hearing when the parole officer announced that the parole board would not be granting parole to Watson, one of the victims’ family members asked me why I was sticking by their side. Why I wasn’t assuming my role as reporter and rushing off to report that the parole had been denied. I told her that I’d let another reporter have the news scoop. My place was with the victims who were processing the fact that Watson was denied parole. That was a good day for them.  

HANK: Whoa. Amazing, Lis!  Well, Reds, when do you first remember hearing about Charles Manson? Were you riveted to the case?  (It's okay--we're crime fiction aficionados, so it's all research.) Do you remember Casey Anthony? Gacy? Dahmer? Have any of these people fascinated or intrigued you? Are you a fan of true crime? What books do you suggest?

HUNTING CHARLES MANSON

Hunting Charles Manson is the first book in a major new series of thrilling works of history that tell of the pursuit of justice in the aftermath of some of history’s most devastating and sensational crimes.

In the late summer of 1969, the nation was transfixed by a series of gruesome murders in the hills of Los Angeles. Newspapers and television programs detailed the brutal slayings of a beautiful actress — twenty-six years-old and eight months pregnant with her first child — as well as a hair stylist, an heiress, a small businessman, and other victims. The City of Angels was plunged into a nightmare of fear and dread. In the weeks and months that followed, law enforcement faced intense pressure to solve crimes that seemed to have no connection.

Finally, after months of dead-ends, false leads, and near-misses, Charles Manson and members of his “family” were arrested. The bewildering trials that followed once again captured the nation and forever secured Manson as a byword for the evil that men do.

Drawing upon deep archival research and exclusive personal interviews — including unique access to Manson Family parole hearings — Lis Wiehl gives readers a propulsive, page-turning historical thriller of the crimes and manhunt that mesmerized the nation. And in the process, she reveals how the social and political context that gave rise to Manson is eerily similar to our own.

www.huntingcharlesmanson.com

Lis Wiehl is one of the nation’s most prominent trial lawyers and highly regarded commentators. She is the author of 18 books, including Hunting Charles Manson: The Quest for Justice in the Days of Helter Skelter (Thomas Nelson, June 2018) and was a legal analyst and reporter for Fox News for fifteen years. Lis is currently an anchor for the Law & Crime Network and a Professor of Law at New York Law School and the host of the podcast 

Pursuit of Justice” (available for download and subscription on iTunes or at LawAndCrime.com).