The Other End of Society

THE people of the State of California against . . . whom? Against what unknowable madness? The trial of Charles Manson and three of his tribe was under way, but the law seemed to lack the strictures to codify the case; there was a disquieting essential truth in the outcast's declaration that "I'm the other end of your society."

The people of the State of California must dispose, legally, of the murder of Actress Sharon Tate and six other people on two successive nights last August--murders in which the killers and the killed were unknown to each other. Last week Manson--pale but composed, in blue prison denim, his dark hair a flowing frame for his pinched face--walked into the Los Angeles courtroom where the concerns of the state must be met. On his forehead was his symbol of apartness: an X, in his own dried blood, cut there because "I have X-ed myself from your world." He went on, in a statement of indifference and martyrdom: "I stand with my X, with my love, with my God and by myself. My faith in me is stronger than all your armies, governments, gas chambers ... I know what I have done and your courtroom is man's game. Love is my judge."

Secret Smile. It was only the beginning of otherworldliness. Before the day ended, Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi --Manson's opposite in a carefully tailored gray suit and vest, possessor of an enviable record of successful prosecutions--had attributed to the vagueness of a Beatles' song part of Manson's motive in directing the murders. In an outline of his case, delivered to the jury of seven men and five women in an understated manner that belied its content, Bugliosi elaborated on the Beatles' theme.

There was Manson's passion for violent death, his anti-establishment hatred --and Helter Skelter, the Beatles' song whose lyrics appear to suggest sex, if anything, to the normal eye; helter-skelter is simply a British term for a carnival slide. A representative sample:

When I get to the bottom I go back to

the top of the slide.

Where I stop and I turn and I go for a

ride.

Till I get to the bottom and I see you

again.

Do you, don't you want me to love

you.

You may be a lover but you ain't no

dancer.

Helter skelter helter skelter

Helter skelter.

To Manson, Bugliosi said, the meaning of helter-skelter was clear: a violent black uprising against whites. Manson would escape it by leading his drugs-and-sex caravan of followers into the California desert, but first he would precipitate helter-skelter by making other whites think it had arrived. That is why the words were written in blood when Mr. and Mrs. Leno LaBianca, a middle-aged couple, were murdered in their home in the Los Feliz area the night after the Tate killings.

Manson, a model prisoner in his special-security jail cell, has been quiet in court. He sat listening carefully to the 40-minute outline of the prosecution's case, sometimes smiling his secret smile. Near him, chattering animatedly at times, were his codefendants, three essentially ordinary-appearing young women accused of extraordinary personal violence: Susan Atkins, 22, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 22; and Leslie Van Houten, 20, who is on trial only for the LaBianca murders.

Get a Knife. This week Bugliosi plans to bring to the stand the only defector from Manson's apparently total control, Linda Kasabian, 21. Mrs. Kasabian is the mother of two; her second child was born recently while she was in jail. Like many of Manson's young women, she came from a broken home. When she left her second husband for the desert life, she took their child and a friend's $5,000 with her. She was indicted along with the three other women but has been granted immunity in return for her testimony.* According to the prosecution, Mrs. Kasabian went along when Miss Tate and her house guests were murdered but took no part in the killings. Through her Bugliosi will lay before the jury the details of the bizarre and nightmarish crimes.

One of the strangest elements in the case is that no one places Manson at the Tate murder scene, but he is charged with being the moving force. Nothing has emerged to explain how Manson exerted his remote control at the time of the murders.

He is said to have had a hypnotic effect on his followers, but none have said they were in fact clinically hypnotized when the murders occurred. The Manson tribe used hallucinogenic drugs frequently, but there has been no claim so far that they were tripping the fatal night. Mrs. Kasabian will testify, Bugliosi said, that Manson instructed her to get a knife, a change of clothes and her driver's license and accompany the other defendants to the Tate home in Benedict Canyon. There, the prosecution charges, five people were murdered only because they were unlucky enough to be in a house that at one time had been lived in by a man who had slighted Manson.

The jury hearing the case is in itself a measure of its strangeness. The defense effort, dominated by Manson, precluded an attempt to get a favorable jury; Manson had decided that this was impossible, so less than one-fifth of the defense challenges were used. As a result, the jury includes both a former deputy sheriff and a private security guard, as well as a juror who admits he believes Manson is guilty. But the defense is expected to attack the credibility and competence of Mrs. Kasabian with evidence that--though Bugliosi described her as a relative neophyte in the Manson family--she had taken 300 LSD trips.

* Another defendant is Charles Watson, a member of Manson's family who is in a Texas jail fighting extradition; he will be tried separately.

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