We have thousands of free subscribers who receive snippets of my work. I appreciate their attention in this age of distraction. Hopefully at some point more will choose to join the hundreds of paid subscribers who have access to the entirety of my Substack studies and who sustain my work in the face of many challenges, including attacks by adversaries determined to cancel this writer.
Missing Pieces in a Flagrant Case of the Revelation of the Method
Continued from Part I
The Uncensored Confession of Susan Atkins
Where can we find Atkins’ very first, raw testimony? O’Neill: “If there’s an unvarnished account—a sense of what Susan Atkins said about the crimes before she came under the control of her attorney in the DA’s office—it’s the one she shared on November 2 with her female cellmate, Ronnie Howard. We will never get to hear that account verbatim, but there’s something that comes close. In the files of LAPD Lieutenant Paul LePage, I found notes from the detectives’ November 18, 1969 interview with Ronnie Howard; they contain several inconsistencies with what became Atkins’ official story…She said the killers were tripping on LSD the night of the Tate murders. If that were true, the defense could’ve argued that they had diminished capacity, sparing them the gas chamber…
“Atkins also said that they killed the La Bianca couple because of something to do with ‘blackmail’ although she couldn’t elaborate.
“What’s just as remarkable is everything that (Atkins said to Ronnie Howard) that Howard didn’t mention in that first interview. She (Atkins) said nothing about Helter Skelter, Manson’s race war…she made no mention, in other words, of a racist motive, black people, holes in the desert, Armageddon, or the Beatles, all of which became central to Bugliosi’s prosecution.
“And as you might expect by now, she made no mention of Manson instructing anyone to go anywhere or kill anyone—all of which would be repeated incessantly in Atkins’ later accounts.
“As for Atkins’ most heinous act—the stabbing of Sharon Tate as she begged for the life of her baby— Howard was much more equivocal about it than we’ve been led to believe. She said that Atkins ‘didn’t admit that she did the stabbing in the Tate deal.’ And yet the next time Howard talked, after Caballero had arrived, she said without reservation that Atkins had boasted about stabbing Tate in nauseating detail.” (262—265)
“Think of all the unanswered questions that have swirled around the Manson case for 50 years now. Here are a few:
“Why did the killers target strangers for murder? Why would previously non-violent kids—except for Atkins, none of them had a criminal record — kill for Manson, on command, and with such abandon and lack of remorse? And if Manson hoped to ignite a world-ending race war, why didn’t he order more killings, since the two nights of murder didn’t trigger that war?
“Bugliosi made a fortune and achieved worldwide fame from his prosecution of the Manson family and (his book) Helter Skelter. Over the years, many people in law-enforcement have told me that they never believed the ‘Helter Skelter’ motive.
“…Eventually, all the killers settled on a story similar to the one that Atkins told after her attorney swap (i.e. Caballero and Caruso). And all of them have sought parole releases based on that story’s thesis: that they were not responsible for their actions because they were under Manson’s control. The only person who never endorsed Atkins’ final story, and the Helter Skelter motive along with it, was Manson. After his conviction, he said little about the crimes, except that he didn’t know what his ‘children’ were going to do before they did it, and that he had no explanation for why they’d done it.” (262—265).
Observe Bugliosi heap ridicule on his own big lie, as promoted in his bestseller: