Steel Notes Magazine
July & August 2016
After her arrest, Atkins
was housed at Dormitory 8000 in Los
Angeles. On November 6, she told another inmate, Virginia
Graham, an almost
unbelievable tale. She
told of “a beautiful cat”
named Charles Manson. She told of murder: of finding Sharon
Tate, in bed with her
bikini bra and underpants, of her victim’s
futile cries for help, of
tasting Tate’s blood.
Atkins expressed no
remorse at all over
the killings. She even
told Graham a list of
celebrities that she and other Family members planned to kill in the future, including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard
Burton, Tom Jones, Steve McQueen, and Frank Sinatra. Through an inmate friend of Graham’s, Ronnie Howard,
word of Atkins’s amazing story soon reached the LAPD. About the same time, detectives on the LaBianca case
interviewed Al Springer, a member of the Straight Satan biker’s group that Manson had tried to recruit into the
Family. Word had leaked to police that the Straight Satans might have some knowledge about who was responsible for another recent murder with several similarities to the LaBianca killings. Springer told detectives that
Manson had bragged to him in August at Spahn Ranch, after offering him his pick from among the eighteen or
so “naked girls” scattered around the ranch, about “knocking off ” five people. When Springer told detectives that
Manson had said t he Tate killers “wrote something on the...refrigerator in blood”, “something about pigs”, the
detectives knew they might be onto something. Still, it struck them as odd that anyone would confess to several
murders to someone that they barely knew. It took another member of the Straight Satans, Danny DeCarlo, to
move the focus of the investigation decisively to Charles Manson. DeCarlo told police he heard a Manson Family
member brag, “We got five piggies,” and that Manson had asked him what to use “to decompose a body.”
Based on Ronnie Howard’s account of Susan Atkin’s jailhouse confession and interviews conducted with various
Manson Family members, the LAPD eventually identified the five persons who participated in the actual Tate
and LaBianca murders. The suspects consisted of four women, all in their early twenties, and one man in his
mid-twenties: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, Linda Kasabian, and Charles “Tex” Watson.
Atkins remained in custody at Dormitory 8000. Van Houten was picked up for questioning in California. Watson was arrested by a local sheriff in Texas. Patricia Krenwinkel was apprehended in Mobile, Alabama. Kasabian
voluntarily surrendered to local police in Concord, New Hampshire.
Chief Defense Lawyers: Irving Kanarek (for Manson), Daye Shinn (for Atkins), Paul Fitzgerald (for Krenwinkel), Maxwell Keith, Ronald Hughes, and Ira Reiner (for Van Houten).
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