Of Murders and Messiahs

The witness is girlish, her blonde hair in pigtails, a small, soft figure on the stand. She says:

"He had blood all over his face . . . and we looked into each other's eyes for a minute--I don't know however long --and I said, 'Oh, God, I am so sorry. Please make it stop.' And then he just fell to the ground into the bushes."

The witness is talking now about a long day and two murders later:

"Charlie [Manson] and I started walking hand in hand on the beach. It was sort of nice. He made me feel good, sort of forget everything. . . ."

It had been the Sharon Tate murder case; it had become the Manson trial. Last week it was the fantastic story of Linda Kasabian, 21, whose former friends called her Yana the witch. At the end of the week, when she had finished telling her version of the murder of Miss Tate and six others a year ago, cross-examination led Linda into a description of the existence that brought her to a Los Angeles courtroom.

The First Path. When she joined the Manson "family" shortly before the murders, she said, "I felt like I was a blind little girl in a forest. I took the first path." It was a path that must have looked like many others she had walked, though it ended differently. She left her broken home as a teenager, and by the time she was 20 she had had two husbands and two children. In the past five years she has lived in at least eleven communes, all of them drug-oriented. But Manson was different to the child-woman in the forest: she loved him and felt "he was the Messiah come again."

For Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Mrs. Kasabian represents the heart of his case.

His presentation of her testimony carefully emphasized that she did not know the mission when she served as lookout the night Miss Tate and four houseguests were slain: that she did know the mission but went fearfully the following night when, she said, a Manson angered by the "messiness" of the Tate killings went along himself to arrange the murder of a middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Leno LaBianca. Bugliosi is trying to establish that Mrs. Kasabian, who was originally indicted but has since been promised immunity in exchange for her testimony, is not legally an accomplice in the murders. It is a vital question that Judge Charles Older may eventually decide. If Bugliosi's characterization of Mrs. Kasabian is rejected, his case would be seriously weakened.

At the center of the courtroom stage, Mrs. Kasabian held her audience, particularly the seven men and five women in the jury. They leaned forward attentively, straining to hear her narrative. She approached the details of the Tate murders in a rush of words: "Then all of a sudden I heard people screaming, saying 'No, please, no.' " What kind of screams? "Loud, loud." How long did they last? "Oh, it seemed like forever, infinite. I don't know." At another point: "I saw Tex [Charles Watson, still fighting extradition from Texas] on top of him, hitting him on the head and stabbing him, and the man was struggling, and then I saw Katie [Defendant Patricia Krenwinkel] in the background with the girl, chasing after her with an upraised knife . . ." Watson, she said, told his victims: "I'm the devil here to do the devil's work."

In the courtroom, a young woman spectator in the back row cried softly. There was, audibly, the release of withheld breathing after the most vivid passages. The jurors leaned back, remembering suddenly to use their notebooks. Manson's co-defendants--Miss Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten--sat still and attentive, their foreheads now scratched with the outcast's X that he had cut into himself earlier in the trial.

Even as she testified, Mrs. Kasabian felt the pressure of the Manson cult. At one point Manson placed a thin finger to his mouth, seeking her silence. Susan Atkins caught Mrs. Kasabian's eye and mouthed: "You are killing us." Mrs. Kasabian mouthed back: "I am not killing you. You killed yourselves." One girl member of Manson's entourage, Sandy Good, smuggled a note to the witness: "Are you trying to kill us, Linda? Tens of thousands of pretty young people. The X you see on Charlie's forehead is now being worn by hundreds of people. Look at the faces of the people you are cooperating with." Nothing stopped the damning testimony.

Seeking Victims. The recitation also provided parenthetical glimpses into the existence of Manson and his tribe. They often ate what they could filch from restaurant garbage cans. They stood guard duty against the attack by blacks that Manson had prophesied. Manson directed an orgy where "everybody made love to everybody else. We all shed our clothes and we were lying on the floor, and it was like it didn't make any difference who was next to you."

Finally there was the horror implicit in Mrs. Kasabian's account of a random search for murder victims who still do not know how close they came to death. Before Manson finally settled on the LaBiancas, she said, he and his followers had taken a long, circuitous drive around Los Angeles seeking victims. At one small house the sight of chil dren's pictures made him turn away; a locked door on a church may have saved a clergyman.

The defense through week's end consisted largely of hundreds of objections by Manson's attorney, Irving Kanarek. His tactics earned him a night in jail for contempt; another defense lawyer chose jail for a night instead of a fine after he had uttered an obscenity during a conference at the bench of Judge Older. Insanity as a defense has not arisen in the trial. Under California law, an insanity plea must be considered after the verdict is in, and only the defendants can raise it. The move would be contrary to everything known about Manson, but not beyond imagination in a case where few things are.

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