What did you do before you left? Did you tie the LaBiancas up and leave them for Tex and the girls to deal with, which is what Tex claims?
“No,” he says, quietly. “Hell, no.”
So much death, so much violence.
“What violence?” he says, speaking louder. Then the subject turns from knives to guns. “What’s violent about pulling your finger across the trigger? There’s no violence. It’s just a person there and you move your finger and they’re gone. What’s violent about that? But let me ask you this. Will you ever forgive me for what you think I did? Think about it. Don’t let your brain be lame. I didn’t kill nobody. So will you ever forgive me for what you think I did?”
Forty-four years on, the facts in the Manson case aren’t really facts anymore – they’re beliefs and conclusions fashioned out of bits and pieces of bent and redirected light, or, as Charlie likes to call them, they’re “perspectives.” “Helter Skelter wasn’t a lie,” he says. “It was just Bugliosi’s perspective. Everybody’s saying it the way they want to remember it. Sooner or later, we all got to submit to each other’s point of view. Sure, it was going on. But it was just part of the part. The reasons was all kinds of different things that were happening in Tex’s mind and all of our minds together, and there’s lots of different discrepancies in there that don’t correlate to be straight. There was a lot of motives, man. You got a motive for every person there. It was a collective idea. It was an episode. A psychotic episode, and you want to blame me for that?”