The way Bugliosi saw it, these things were meant to connect the crimes to blacks; the whites would go after the blacks; the blacks would rise up; and the revolution would be joined. He said Manson termed it Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song. It was a loopy, harebrained scenario and one that Bugliosi’s fellow law-enforcement types wished he would ditch in favor of something more down-to-earth, like robbery or a drug deal gone sour. But Bug, as Manson calls him, would not be deterred. He gave Kasabian immunity – she apparently was not present when any of the murders took place – and with her as his star witness, he was able to sell Helter Skelter not only to the jury but also to the rest of the country. In 1971, the defendants were all found guilty and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life when the state briefly did away with the death penalty. Atkins died of cancer four years ago, at the age of 61. Krenwinkel, 65, and Van Houten, 64, are in the California Institution for Women in Chino, where they have been model prisoners and continue to hope for parole. Watson, 67, is incarcerated in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He has confessed to perpetrating all the killings in the case, with the girls mostly just stabbing the victims after they were already dead, for what difference that makes. They have all repudiated Manson. And Bugliosi, 79, after a lengthy career both as an attorney and a bestselling author, is now mostly resting at his California home, battling cancer and giving the occasional interview.
“There are thousands of evil, polished con men out there, and we’ve had more brutal murders than the Manson murders, so why are we still talking about Charles Manson?” Bugliosi says. “He had a quality about him that one thousandth of one percent of people have. An aura. ‘Vibes,’ the kids called it in the Sixties. Wherever he went, kids gravitated toward him. This is not normal. I mean, I couldn’t get someone to go to the local Dairy Queen and get me a milkshake, OK? But this guy, I don’t know what it is. How the hell do I know?”
How the hell would anyone know? It’s inexplicable, and no one will ever really know, just as I will never know or understand why when Manson rested his hand on my arm it felt so good, not passively good, but actively, like leave it there, leave it there some more. It’s a presence. And it’s that presence, coupled with how he used it, that for the past 44 years has made him a face-of-evil superstar symbol second only to Hitler. In 1970, this magazine published the first exhaustive account of Manson and his followers, 22 pages long, titled “The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive,” taking a nuanced approach and allowing Manson to speak at length. Since then, the books and stories have kept on coming. He rarely participates, however, and it’s been around 20 years since he last granted a wide-ranging press interview.
I first talked to Star in September 2012, and spoke to Manson on the phone two months later, after which he became increasingly squirrelly about seeing me, some days half-agreeing, some days saying no, some days berating me for being a media stooge. “You’re a faraway dude, man,” he once said. “I only meet people like you when I’m going to rob you. You’re a flunky, man. I don’t talk to flunkies.” When I went to visit Star this past September, Charlie once again made it clear he wouldn’t see me. But he changed his mind at the last minute and then, after our initial talk, asked me to come back the next day.
Over the years, Manson’s face and name have managed to remain firmly lodged in the public’s imagination no matter what Manson himself wants. You can find his black-hole eyeballs on T-shirts and on reruns of South Park‘s “Merry Christmas Charlie Manson!” episode. He’s inspired an opera and a musical. The deep-thinkers have also had their say. In 2010, theologian David R. Williams wrote, “We, as a collective culture, looked into Manson’s eyes and saw in those dark caves what we most feared within ourselves, the paranoia of what might happen if you go too far. He was the monster in the wilderness, the shadow in the night forest, the beast said to lurk in the Terra Incognita beyond the edges of the map.” The point is, like that lurking beast, he’s always here, always with us. In a 1988 TV interview with Manson, Geraldo Rivera called him “the stuff of a nation’s nightmares,” and if he wasn’t exactly that before the media got ahold of him, he certainly has been ever since.
This also explains why, in part, the case itself has never gone away, especially on the Internet, where every detail is open to re-examination and reinterpretation. Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter race-war theory, for instance, has been bandied about endlessly, with many observers concluding that it’s a bunch of hooey, testimony of well-prepared prosecution witnesses and Spahn Ranch hangers-on notwithstanding. It may have been in the air at the ranch. It may have been talked about during the nightly dinners. But so were lots of things.