Charlene Cafritz: The Questions and The Controversies

 Charlene Lawley Cafritz is a figure of mystery in the Manson saga. She is described as a recent divorcee from her marriage to a member of an influential, prominent Washington D.C. family, and was left a pile of money in her divorce settlement. Allegedly she met Charlie at one of those Hollywood parties; or maybe she met him at Dennis Wilson's house, sometime in 1968, when Cafritz would have been 22. Her name does not appear in Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, nor in most other books about the TLB saga.


Ed Sanders was the only journalist at the time to mention her. From his book, The Family, pg136:

"In December of 1968 Charlie and three girls drove in an old Studebaker to an exclusive dude ranch near Reno, Nevada where they spent two weeks as guests of Charlene Cafritz, whom Manson had met the previous summer at Dennis Wilson's beach home. Mrs. Cafritz was in Reno logging enough time to get a divorce. 
    Manson seems to have had a great effect on the young lady in terms of material detachment. As a result of her divorce settlement, the lady was left with a fortune in excess of two million dollars. This sum she spent in something like ten months, aided in early phases of her spend-frenzy by guess who.
    Sometime toward the end of December, a friend named Warnick drove the young divorcee back to Los Angeles from Reno. In January '69 Mrs. Cafritz visited New York where she spent $92,000 during that month.
    At one point Manson told the young lady that he wanted a blue Fleetwood Cadillac. The young lady erred and purchased instead a fire engine red Cadillac and he told her to take it back. She also evidently purchased a number of thoroughbred horses which Charlie gave away for her. ...
Mrs. Cafritz took numerous motion pictures of Manson and the family in Reno which no one seems to want to discuss. Mrs. Cafritz was a friend of Sharon Tate and Terry Melcher and many others associated with the oncoming tragedy."


Here is Lynette Fromme's version, from Reflexion, pg371:

"When it came to getting money Charlie went for what he knew. Her name was Charlene, a boot and whip-style girl with a curvy body. I read later that she was some kind of heiress, but he never mentioned it. He had met her at a party in Beverly Hills and invited her to The Ranch. She didn't come. She had invited him to her ranch in Nevada, and instead of going alone, he asked Sandy, Brenda, Paul, and me to go with him.
Charlene's Nevada ranch had an old-time hotel with a cowboy cafe at the front. Tired and hungry from the overnight drive, we went in for breakfast. Charlie sent one of the workers to let Charlene know that he had arrived. I almost missed seeing her. She was coming toward Charlie, but, after seeing the rest of us, she wheeled on her high heeled boots and let the screen door slam behind her. He went out to talk to her, and pretty soon an employee showed the rest of us to a bare rustic room with two beds, no telephone, and no TV. I don't know what gave me the impression that this ranch was more about women than horses, but I knew about Nevada's Mustang Ranch and I was beginning to think that Charlene might be running such an establishment. In any case, it was not an entertaining trip for us - we slept most of the time - and the next day Charlie returned to say we were leaving. As we drove away, he said that he had offered Charlene a place with us, but she didn't want it. I found out later that she had offered him a Cadillac, but he refused it. Apparently, this wasn't about stuff or money."


Gregg Jakobson had his own version:

Ed Sanders Cafritz file from the Sanders collection at Princetion University
LAPD interview form, dated 4-6-70
Mr. Jakobson informed investigators that Miss Cafritz had spent some time at Spahn Ranch with the Manson "family" and had taken numerous photographs of Spahn Ranch and the Manson "family".


This is what Charlene herself said at the time:

LAPD interview form, dated 6-11-70
Miss Cafritz stated she had never been to Spahn Ranch. ....
She was introduced to Charles Manson at Dennis Wilson's home in Malibu. ...
She took numerous still pictures and movie pictures of various members of the family when they visited her in Reno, Nevada, and at the Wilson residence.


Author Nick Schreck claimed this is what Manson told him:

Schreck post on FB of Sept 20, 2023
Further confirmation of what I stated in the File concerning Charlie's lover and cash cow, Charlene Cafritz, referencing my December 2012 conversation with Charles at Corcoran:
"Charlie readily confirmed long-standing rumors claiming that in December 1968 he and some of the girls in his commune performed in pornographic film shoots Cafritz had arranged at her dude ranch in Reno, Nevada."


One thing is certain---none of the photos and film taken have ever seen the light of day. Though investigators may have had access to them:

LAPD interview form, dated 6-11-70
"Additionally she(Charlene) stated that she also had a tape recording of Charles Manson which he had made for promotion of an album. She does not know where this tape recording is. She could not recall where this tape recording or the pictures were at this time.
   Note: In an earlier conversation with Miss Cafritz's mother, investigator learned that Charlene had numerous items stored in her mother's basement. Her mother indicated that the movie pictures were in the basement as were some tape recordings."

----------------------------

After her time with Charlie, Charlene seems to have fallen into a spiral of self-destruction. The timeline(from researcher Casey Fields):


December 25, 1968 - Manson visits Charlene Cafritz near Reno.

August 22, 1969 - Charlene Cafritz allegedly called Spahn Ranch from St. Elizabeth mental hospital in Washington D.C.

December 19, 1969 - Charlene Cafritz (23) was arrested for trying to sell fourteen capsules of heroin to an undercover police officer. The arrest kept her from potentially testify in the trial.

April 5, 1970 - Charlene Cafritz was interviewed by LAPD investigator Sergeant Manuel P. “Chick” Gutierrez at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington D.C. Cafritz came to Gutierrez’ attention following his interview with Gregg Jakobsen. LAPD’s Jakobsen Interview Report stated, “Due to a misspelling in Miss Cafritz’ name, officers were unable to locate her until the above date. Cafritz was being held by the Washington D.C. court pending psychiatric examination."

April 14, 1970 - Charlene Cafritz was indicted for selling fourteen capsules of heroin to an undercover police officer.

April 17, 1970 - Charlene Cafritz and her mother were interviewed by LAPD Homicide Detective Sergeants Frank J. Patchett and Manuel Gutierrez via long-distance call.

September 4, 1970 - Charlene Cafritz died from an overdose of Nembutal.

September 8, 1970 - Charlene Cafritz was buried at Mt. Olive Cemetery in Washington D.C.

 Charlene's family, on both her parent's side, and her husband Carter Cafritz' side, had extensive, high-level connections to the diplomatic and intelligence worlds of Washington.

Researcher Paul Hart:
"Charlene’s mom (Lucille Lawley) worked for Raymond E. Murphy, who was the State Department’s liaison to the CIA. Charlene’s in-laws (Morris & Gwen Cafritz) were close to J. Edgar Hoover ever since the early 50s. ... They were also deeply in bed with the FBI, CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (which her father Jack Lawley was with)."


Because of this, and other inconsistencies in the evidence, many speculate that Charlene was some kind of intel operative, and that her death was faked (she was then presumably given a new identity and life). Consider:

Researcher Paul Hart:
"Charlene only wanted to deal with Charlie, and to secretly funnel him funds. She wanted nothing to do with the rest of the Family. In fact, she didn’t even want to be seen by them when they visited her at a ranch in Nevada… Her mysterious disappearance after the TLB killings and her supposed “death” had Tom O’Neill chasing leads in DC for weeks. There was no death certificate or Social Security Death Index # for Charlene. ...

"Tom O'Neill found a former administrator of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in DC who said the FBI seized all the hospital’s records on Charlene after she supposedly died later in her apartment. ... Tom also interviewed a DC police detective who said all their records on Charlene were seized as well. ... Everything about her has been removed from public scrutiny. Photos, death notices, social security records, everything."

"Charlene's mom, Lucille A. Lawley died in 2008. On the website Find-A-Grave, someone posted the announcement of her death along with a bio and a photo of her grave. In the announcement, it says Lucille was survived by her husband Jack S. Lawley (the guy I told you was in military intelligence) and her daughter Charlene Marie Lawley!!! But Charlene supposedly died in 1970."


Also this odd note:

Paul Hart:  "TomO also interviewed a DC friend of Charlene’s who said she brought Manson to DC at least once. Explosive finding if true."
 

Confirmation?

From Death to Pigs, pg318    Phil Phillips describes a visit by Charlie at some point.
"...The next time I saw Charlie he came to Vegas and it was in the middle of the night, about three o'clock in the morning... but he came up and knocked on the door.. And he was acting real strange. He told me that he'd just come on a plane..."


On a plane? Hmmm... was he flying in from having visited Cafritz in DC, as one of her friends asserted to Tom O'Neill?

 

 ------------------------------------

 Unanswered questions:


--Did the Family just have contact with Cafritz one time--near Reno, or were there multiple contacts--at Dennis Wilson's, at Spahn, and at the ranch near Reno?

--Did they spend two days in Reno, or two weeks?

--Did she run a prostitution ring at the 'dude ranch'? If she made a porno movie with the Family, who was it made for?

--What happened to the extensive photo and film collection she made of the Family?

--Was she ever actually interviewed in person by LAPD investigators? Or was there just a phone call with the mother?

--Was her death faked?


On the very day the detectives in LA learn of Charlene's location--April 6, 1970--she is committed to a hospital in DC for mental observation, and is still there in August. One wonders if the purpose of the heroin bust in Dec. '69 was to damage her credibility as a witness, and if the purpose of her being committed was merely to keep her away from the investigators.

Affluent society divorcees generally don't get involved in running houses of prostitution or making porno movies. Nor do they generally get involved in dealing heroin out of parking lots in DC. Lots of unanswered questions about this person.


There are different ways to interpret this evidence:

--scenario #1

Charlene was just an adventurous young lady out to enjoy life ("young, dumb, wanna have some fun"). She meets Charlie by chance, and is quickly entranced and enamored by his charisma and presence, like so many others. Enough to give Charlie money, but not enough to actually join the Family. But then she gets strung out on the hard stuff, and accidentally ODs.

Schreck:
"Charlie told me he had no doubt she was dead, said she was always very likely to o.d. due to her constant hard drug abuse."


--scenario #2

Cafritz was sent out by the covert operators to contact Charlie, make sure he has funds to operate, and document the Family lifestyle. After the murders, she starts to doubt her employers, and figures out that her trust may have been abused. Her suspicions and her guilt drive her to drugs, and to an OD, either accidental or intentional(suicide).


--scenario #3

Cafritz was sent out by the covert operators, but they didn't plan on her involvement being outed by Jakobson, and now start to worry that a young and disillusioned Charlene will spill the beans to the experienced investigators. So they arrange her death via an OD(murder). Or they tell her that she has no choice and will have to fake her death and accept a new life with a new identity.

 
https://www.facebook.com/groups/DramaFreeNoDealers/posts/7928466610535911/
"The famous missing collection of Charlene Lawley Cafritz. Yearbooks, school books and more."      

1966   "...includes pictures of Charlene.  Nicknamed "Charlie," has senior year book..."

oo-ee-oo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Out of Charles Manson's Shadow: Rehabilitated Cult Member Seeks Parole

Join Dr. Steven Hassan, leading expert on cults LIVE on Monday, October 5, 2025, at 3:00 PM Eastern, for an in-depth conversation with Keith Wattley, attorney for Patricia Krenwinkel, a former Charles Manson follower recommended for parole after 56 years in prison. Pat Krewinkel is currently California's longest serving inmate.

As Governor Gavin Newsom prepares to decide whether to uphold or reverse her 2025 parole grant, Dr. Hassan will unpack how coercive control, psychological manipulation, and cult mind control shaped Patricia’s actions as a 21-year-old under Manson’s brainwashing and how decades of rehabilitation, trauma recovery, and accountability have changed her life.

 Story found here:

https://stevenhassan.substack.com/p/brainwashed-by-charles-manson-transformed

Looking at the politics behind 'POLITICAL PIGGY'

 The political component in the Hinman murder


Given that two clues left at the Hinman crime scene--the words "Political Piggy" written in blood on the wall, and a half-burnt pile of what was described as 'political tracts' found on the floor of the house--specifically pointed to a political motive, you'd think the detectives would have investigated the victim's political beliefs and activities,  Though there is no evidence they ever did.  

 

Other clues also brought up the political angle:

--BB returns to the scene to remove the word 'political' from the wall

Box 59b pg493of1120   Ella Jo Bailey testimony:
"The words "Political piggy" was written on the wall and later Charles Manson told them that they were going to have to take the word "Political" off the words."

--A zine called "the Maotist" found by detectives in the mailbox at Hinman's house

Beausoleil trial, Nov 14, 1969
Witness sees copy of "Maotist Review" in Hinman's mailbox.
"... It is a paper, that's got the views of Mao Tse Tung on it. ...  This is the Chinese Communist philosophy."

cielodrive.com/bobby-beausoleil-parole-hearing-2005.php
Hinman was known to associate frequently with radical militant (indiscernible) on the UCLA campus and Beausoleil decided to try to make it look as though Hinman had been killed by some of these other associates by burning some of Hinman's Marxist newspapers on the floor, and by drawing 'political pig' on the wall in the victim's blood.  

web.archive.org/web/20140209204015/http://truthontatelabianca.com/threads/true-detective-1970.2881/
DeCarlo said that for several days before the death of Hinman he had overheard conversation between Beausoleil and Manson in which they referred to Hinman as a "political pig who should die."

www.mansonblog.com/search/label/Mary%20Brunner
...during Bobby's 2010 parole hearing he told the board that the reason he put blame on black people is because he wanted to blame the murder on some of the "radical" people that Gary Hinman was involved with at UCLA. He also told the board that Gary was involved with black people that were radicals, and that he (Gary) was into radical philosophies, etc.

www.bardachreports.com/articles/oa_19811100.htm
Gary Hinman, had been a hippie renaissance figure in the '60s: a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at U.C.L.A., a political activist...

cielodrive.com/bobby-beausoleil-parole-hearing-2008.php
DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY SEQUEIRA: And why would the inmate(BB) tell the police that he bought it(the stolen Fiat) from a Black man?
INMATE BEAUSOLEIL: Possibly for the same reason that I tried to make it look like it was a Black Panther -- the Black Panther Party ... had problems with Gary.

http://www.cielodrive.com/bobby-beausoleil-trial-11-14-69-am.php#gk
Glen Krell testimony
 A:    He(Hinman) was very close to a Ph.D. in political science at U.C.L.A.   ,,,  He was very firm, and I believe he would have stood by his convictions to the point of death, and he had very firm political beliefs.

---------------------------------------------------------------

 Now I don't think Gary's politics were the motive for his murder, though that may have contributed to Charlie's dislike of Hinman generally.   To me the most interesting thing is the way both Manson and the LASO seemed to want to avoid this topic altogether.

There is a good possibility that the Gary Hinman name may have come to the attention of the various government agencies --the LAPD, the FBI, the CIA, Army Counter-Intelligence--due to his radical leftist beliefs.  Especially if he was an activist, and especially if he associated with the Black Panthers, who were being intensely surveilled.

It should be noted the Nicherin Shoshu Buddhist Temple that Gary had joined was bugged by the FBI at the Rancho Cucamonga main temple(for their anti-nuclear weapons stance).

 Were the powers-that-be worried that going down this road would expose a sensitive national security operation that consisted of illegally keeping files on US citizens based solely on their political beliefs?  Could Gary Hinman even have been under surveillance by these agencies in July of '69?

Laurel Canyon Episode 9 - Outtakes/Analysis (Abigail's Story)

 

Manson Trial TV Footage - ABC - Remaster

 

The Mystery Man of Spahn Ranch: Part 3

 

The Mystery of Spahn Ranch - Part 2

 

The Mystery of Spahn Ranch - Part 1

 

Why did Joan Didion abandon her book about the Manson murders?

(Illustration by Matthew Billington/For The Washington Post: Frank Edwards/Fotos International/Getty Images: George Brich/AP; Wally Fong/AP; AP Images)

Didion's recently opened archives contain extensive notes about the project, which was based on her access to Manson Family member and star witness Linda Kasabian

August 16, 2025
By Lesley M. M. Blume

In late July 1970, at the beginning of the murder trial of Charles Manson and three young women in his Family, a 21-year-old named Linda Kasabian took the stand. Kasabian had recently given birth to her second child, and journalists noted how different this turncoat appeared from the other strange, seemingly feral Manson girls sitting at the defense table. By comparison, Kasabian exuded innocence: Her wide-set green eyes, blonde pigtails and "little girl's voice" were regularly noted in coverage of the trial — even though this serene accomplice managed to make even veteran crime reporters blanch when she recounted the events of Aug. 9, 1969: the horrific slaughter of actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant, and four others.

Kasabian had driven the getaway car from the "Tate residence," as she primly referred to 10050 Cielo Drive during her testimony, and had been briefly present at the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca when Manson's followers murdered them the day after the Tate killings. Initially charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy, Kasabian had agreed to become the prosecution's star witness in exchange for immunity. The intrigue surrounding her was palpable.

Toward the end of her grueling 18-day testimony, during which she described the relentless orgies and acid trips at Spahn Ranch, the Family's headquarters, Kasabian revealed during cross-examination that she was working on a book about her life with "author Joan Didion." The defense lawyers hoped that the revelation would help discredit Kasabian as a seeker of fame and fortune. For other reporters and writers already entrenched in their own ambitious book projects about Manson's world — including an underground press reporter and poet named Ed Sanders and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi — this exclusive arrangement with Didion was very unwelcome news. Few in the trial press corps had detected Didion's presence when she visited the courtroom earlier in Kasabian's testimony: She had been discreetly seated not in the media section but among the public spectators.

The press corps covering the trial was "big enough to start its own country," recalled one crime reporter. Two quickie, sensationalist Manson books had been released before the trial even began. Rolling Stone had just run a blockbuster cover story featuring interviews with Manson and prosecutor Aaron Stovitz. One of the story's co-authors, a young music reporter named David Dalton, had, along with his wife, essentially embedded with Manson Family members who were still at Spahn Ranch. Sanders had been working on his own Manson book since early 1970, and Bugliosi had quietly planted his co-author, Curt Gentry, in the courtroom.

Linda Kasabian,  A Manson Family member turned prosecution witness. Author Joan Didion spent time with Kasabian for a planned book. (David F. Smith/AP)

In a crowded, feverishly competitive field, a book by Didion posed a unique threat. Following the publication in 1967 of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," her report for the Saturday Evening Post on the onetime hippie nirvana in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which had spiraled into hellish dissolution (the country's "center was not holding," it began), and the release of her essay collection of the same name the following year, Didion was seen by many as a cultural clairvoyant. Letters to her from solicitous editors at publications across the country revealed their view of her as uniquely equipped to parse for readers just exactly what the hell was going on with America's youth and what it all portended for the nation's soul. Even better that she was a product of, and a critic of, California, a place by then becoming accepted — sometimes begrudgingly — by those same editors as a cultural nexus and bellwether.

Luckily for the other writers immersed in the Manson world (some of whom were buying dead bolts for their doors), Didion's book with Kasabian did not ultimately come to fruition. As I've researched my own book in progress about coverage of the Manson saga, I've been flummoxed by the reasons behind Didion's apparent abandonment of the book, which had commanded a substantial monetary advance and received its own wave of media attention. What journalist would give up that sort of coveted exclusive? When others questioned Didion throughout the 1970s about the project's fate, she often gave vague responses. Members of the Manson Family were reportedly smug that she had walked away, convinced that their intimidation efforts against other journalists may have done the trick with her, too.

About a year after Didion's death near the end of 2021, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired her papers, along with those of her husband and longtime creative partner, John Gregory Dunne: more than 300 boxes of the couple's writings, records, photos and other memorabilia. When the archive opened this year, I scored the first appointment to view it and flew to New York from Los Angeles, with hopes of finding material related to the Kasabian project.

When the archivist gave me a box containing some of Didion's reporting materials from the late 1960s and early 1970s, I sat for a moment before opening it. I willed it to be a trove but steeled myself for disappointment. Then I opened it and saw the item right at the top: a neatly stapled, 10-page document typed on onionskin paper bearing the simple title "Linda." I scanned it quickly, hands trembling. I felt certain I was holding a fragile draft of literary history, possibly even an early version of an unpublished "White Album" essay on Kasabian and her role in the Manson trial. Also in the box was a stack of neatly typed notes from Didion's interviews and interactions with Kasabian and other Manson-related research.

Charles Manson is escorted to court in Los Angeles in August 1970. (AP)

Like much of Didion's published reporting, the "Linda" document used a collage approach to journalism, weaving together her keen observations, snippets of dialogue with the principals, and fragments from the trial transcript in which Kasabian talked about drug use and orgies at Spahn Ranch. It was a rough draft by Didion's standards, but an evocative and complete essay by almost anyone else's. I spotted elements that Didion ultimately used in "The White Album," an essay published in 1979 in which she briefly recounted some impressions from jailhouse interviews she had conducted with Kasabian ("Each of the half-dozen doors that locked behind us as we entered Sybil Brand was a little death, and I would emerge after the interview like Persephone from the underworld, euphoric, elated," she recalled) and her interactions with Kasabian's attorney, Gary Fleischman, who had helped broker the book deal. Didion also wrote in "The White Album" of Kasabian telling her that she dreamed of someday owning a restaurant/boutique/pet store. It was the stuff of absurdity, Didion wrote, and the "juxtaposition of the spoken and the unspeakable" — i.e. the slaughters in which Kasabian had been an accomplice — "was eerie and unsettling."

But these were just crumbs; the quantity and quality of material that Didion had relegated to her archives were astonishing. In "Linda," there were glimpses of quintessentially idiosyncratic Didion, too, as she discerned significance in details that everyone else in the teeming Manson press corps had missed or deemed irrelevant.

The Manson trial drew a crowd of reporters (Wally Fong/AP)

Leaving coverage of the gorier details entirely to that crew (the "freakathon" theatrics of the trial, as reporter Ed Sanders put it), Didion carved out her own angle on the circus. Yes, she wanted to know how someone like Kasabian, so seemingly subdued and maternal, could have willingly joined Manson's cadre of murderous sex slaves. But she also wanted to use a study of Kasabian as a way to understand what had gone so desperately awry with "these children of the late forties," as she put it in her unpublished notes. The approach was reminiscent of her pilgrimage to study the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

In the "Linda" document, Didion noted the unnerving properness of Kasabian's diction on the witness stand and her "Magdalene quality, there under the flags of the United States of America and the State of California." She described the titillating effect of the proceedings on visitors who had managed to score seats to the show — a microcosm of the nation's ghoulish fascination with the case.

"This was really worth waiting for," one attendee told Didion. "Just to see them in person," swooned another.

In her jailhouse interviews with Kasabian — and in later interviews with her in New York and in her home state, New Hampshire — Didion dug deep into her subject's early life. Kasabian told her that her childhood had been impoverished but occasionally happy, until her father abandoned the family "just before I entered school," adding that she'd always hoped he'd come back and that he'd given her a parting gift of "a whole bunch of pennies." Soon a violent, predatory stepfather entered the picture. Kasabian spoke of her early sexual precocity, her early marriages, her flirtations with the counterculture — and her urgent desire to get out of small-town New England. Any escape route would do. Life at Spahn Ranch was discussed in detail, as well as Kasabian's fleeing from the ranch after the Tate and LaBianca murders.

Perhaps the most grimly startling scene that Didion documented involved a visit she made with Kasabian and her young kids to Howdy's, a burger joint near Kasabian's ramshackle home in New Hampshire. Kasabian's children — one she had briefly abandoned at Spahn Ranch; the other was born in prison as she waited to testify — ordered hamburgers, french fries and Cokes. Didion observed with incredulousness: It seemed like such a normal, quintessentially American family outing.

"Linda had gone from Howdy's to the Spahn Ranch to Cielo Drive and now she was back at Howdy's, and none of it seemed to make much difference," Didion wrote in her notes. "It seemed to me sometimes that she had been in clinical shock all her life, and only the slightest accident or rupture of circumstances had taken her to Cielo Drive at all, this somnambulist from the depressed underside of New England."

Kasabian and her family also joined Didion in New York City around that time. Didion recounted in "The White Album" an excursion with this onetime Manson disciple to see the Statue of Liberty, her young children again in tow; Didion brought along her own young daughter, Quintana Roo. In her unpublished notes, Didion wrote that the kids — oblivious to the horrific events that had brought Kasabian and Didion together in the first place — sang "Jumping Jack Flash" and played together on the Staten Island Ferry. On a visit to Henri Bendel, an upscale Fifth Avenue department store, Kasabian overheard on the music speakers "Piggies" by the Beatles, a song from which Manson had drawn sinister inspiration. She ran to the bathroom to throw up.

Didion decided, in mid-1971, about a year after the Manson trial began, not to write the Kasabian book — at least not as it was originally conceived. Kasabian became a recluse; while she had been released from her legal obligation of exclusivity for the Didion project, she never spoke at such length with any other reporter. (She died in 2023, at 73.)

Meanwhile, Didion stashed away her material for nearly a decade: "The White Album," with its brief mentions of Kasabian and the Manson saga — about 1,000 words extracted from Didion's reams of reporting — was savvily released just weeks before the 10th anniversary of the murders. During the investigations and trial, some journalists practically sold their souls for comparatively insignificant Manson scoops, which they scrambled to publish as quickly as possible. More reporters had since vied for access to the reclusive Kasabian, with no success. Yet Didion had unapologetically taken what she wanted from their interactions, coolly strategized how to best use it to her literary advantage.

By the time "The White Album" was released, other writers had published big, noisy Manson books: Sanders's lurid account, "The Family," came out in 1971. Prosecutor Bugliosi released "Helter Skelter" in 1974; it became the best-selling true crime book in history. But in the afterword to the 20th-anniversary edition of the book, Bugliosi quoted Didion's famous words in "The White Album" to illustrate how the terrifying murders had defined the era: "Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 … and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

While Bugliosi's book remains a widely read albeit controversial true-crime classic, Didion ultimately claimed a different sort of literary prize, burnishing that clairvoyant reputation with her narrower investigation. Other writers had devoted years and thousands of pages to deciphering the Manson morass, yet she was able to use her findings to define one of the most tumultuous decades in American history in a single, bare-bones essay, years after the fact.

Didion did privately acknowledge that the definitive "why" behind the ordeal remained elusive to her, even after the many hours she spent with one of the saga's protagonists.

"Everything that came to my attention about situations with Linda came down to the same thing: the paradox, the ordinariness of the situation and the extraordinariness of the fact, the mystery (in the theological sense) of the night on Cielo Drive," she mused in her unpublished notes. "I could not penetrate that mystery, or avoid it or evade it or get beyond it."

Lesley M. M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist and historian. She is the author, most recently, of "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World." She is currently finishing her book on the Manson saga, "A Devil's Bargain."

Another cut wire that Bugliosi didn't want to talk about

Bugliosi ignored the cut wires at the Sebring residence.  He also ignored another "cut wire" at the Cielo house.   Researcher Josh Casey has posted this:

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10238133839262352&set=pcb.1366973141060405

Pageant, Nov. 1969 issue

Ironically, the house where Sharon and her friends were found murdered had been wired to the Bel Air Patrol, but the service had been discontinued. It is possible the disaster might have been averted if the service had been "on," because an alarm is set off when power or telephone lines are cut.

"the service had been discontinued."

....uh... by who?  Sharon, Roman, or Rudy?  Or was it at the Bel Air Security Patrol end?

 

 

Under what circumstances? 

 

When?

 

 If the service had been discontinued a year before, perhaps by Altobelli in a cost-cutting move, it would have been unfortunate, but not especially significant.  But what if the service had been 'discontinued' a week before, or the night before?  Then it might have been very significant indeed.  

(It reminds me of the security guard at the estate adjoining the LaBianca residence who was supposed to be there that night but was inexplicably absent.)

 

You'd think a little tidbit like this would have been considered worth investigating, but this is the first I've ever heard of this.  Now the source might be a little sketchy, but it makes sense.  Logically speaking, the exact level of security the Polanskis were entitled to, given what they were paying, would have been of interest to detectives.  But as far as I know, this topic has never come up anywhere.

The Bel Air Security Patrol got a full pass on this, imo. No harsh spotlight was ever shined their way. But they had a lot to answer for.

 

 Chaos, by Tom O'Neill, pg200   

On Doris Tate: "Like her husband, she'd conducted her own investigation through the years, becoming convinced that the Cielo house was under surveillance by some type of law enforcement at the time of the murders."

What would make a more perfect cover for the surveillors than as a member of the Security Patrol?