Parole Granted For Bruce Davis but.......

this time it was different. Bruce Davis was granted parole again on January 22nd. What was different about this parole hearing is that the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office did not send a prosecuter to represent the victims at the hearing. Victim representation was left to the relatives and victim's advocate, Debra Tate. Gary Hinman's cousin, Kay Martley was there but no one was present to represent Shorty Shea. 

 A related post on this subject

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Relatives of Manson 'family' murder victims outraged by DA's new policy

Kay Martley said she was stunned by the Los Angeles County DA’s decision to stop opposing parole for the Manson follower convicted of killing her cousin.

This 1969 file photo shows Charles Manson being
escorted to his arraignment on conspiracy-murder
charges in connection with the Sharon Tate murder case.

By Andrew Blankstein and Eric Leonard (NBC)

Whenever the notorious killer Charles Manson or one of his convicted followers would come up for parole over the last 40 years, a Los Angeles County prosecutor joined victims' family members at a California state prison to argue against the release. 

But when Kay Martley joined a California Board of Parole Hearings video conference to consider parole for convicted Manson "family" killer Bruce Davis earlier this month, she was stunned to learn she would be making the case on behalf of her murdered relative alone. 

"I had no one to speak for me," said Martley, 81, whose cousin Gary Hinman was tortured and killed by Manson followers on July 27, 1969. "I felt like no one cares about the victim's families anymore. We are totally forgotten." 

Charles Manson follower Bruce Davis l
eaving court after a hearing in Los Angeles
on Dec. 22, 1970.Harold Filan / AP file

The absence of a prosecutor was no oversight. It was the result of a policy shift ordered by newly elected Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, who campaigned on promises to reduce the number of people in prison. 

The new mandate puts a halt on Los Angeles County prosecutors opposing parole for inmates sentenced to life who have already served their mandatory minimum period of incarceration. 

Gascón's directive is part of a sudden shift in how his district attorney's office, the largest in the nation, is considering victims' rights before, during and after criminal trials. 

The move is not likely to have a direct effect on Davis' fate, experts say. Even though the state board recommended parole - the sixth time it has done so - California Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to deny the convicted murderer's early release. 

But the dynamic of a victim's family member feeling abandoned by prosecutors represents an unintended - but thorny - consequence of the new push by some progressive-minded district attorneys to stop trying to influence parole decisions. 

Gascón is among a handful of district attorneys in places like New Orleans and Brooklyn, New York, to rethink their stance on automatically opposing parole requests. The movement has gained momentum in the wake of the national reckoning over racial inequity in the criminal justice system spurred by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody last May. 

The Davis case illustrates how victims' family members can feel as if they're left out in the cold. 

"My jaw drops. I'm outraged," said Debra Tate, whose actress sister, Sharon Tate, was murdered by Manson followers. 

American actress Sharon Tate in 1966.
Hulton Deutsch / Corbis via Getty Images

Tate joined the parole board hearing for Davis earlier this month and said she, too, was shocked by the absence of a prosecutor. 

"At the most horrible moment, when you have to relive the gruesome details of the loss of your loved ones, you are now also supposed to perform the job and act as the DA would," she said. 

Under the new policy, Los Angeles County prosecutors will no longer attend parole hearings and will support in writing the grant of parole for a person who has already served their mandatory minimum sentence, Gascón said in a memo to his staffers on Dec. 7, the day he was sworn in to office. 

Gascón said should state prison officials determine that a person represents a "high" risk for recidivism, a prosecutor "may, in their letter, take a neutral position on the grant of parole." 

Underlying the argument is the idea that state parole officials, not prosecutors, are best equipped to make judgements about whether or not to release inmates. 

"The prosecutors' role ends at sentencing," said Alex Bastian, special adviser to Gascón. "There's been a tug of war between public safety versus equity. The DA believes you can do both." 

Asked to respond to specific questions about the Davis case, Bastian said the office is focused on providing "trauma-informed services" when a "heart-wrenching crime occurs." 

"In any case where an individual has spent nearly half a century in prison, the parole board has likely reviewed generations of behavioral health evaluations and has determined that a nearly 80-year-old elderly man is not the same person he was when he was 30 years of age," he added. "The people's interest in continued incarceration, at extraordinary cost to taxpayers, is likely to have informed their release decision." 

Former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon
speaks at a Los Angeles County Democratic Party
news conference in Los Angeles on Oct. 1, 2020.

Bastian noted that the office will continue to provide a victims advocate to support family members. He acknowledged that no victims advocate attended the virtual hearing but said that was because family members opposed it. Martley disputed that characterization, saying she was never told about the possibility of one participating in the hearing. 

Manson and his followers carried out a series of gruesome murders in Los Angeles in 1969. 

Davis, now 78 years old, was sentenced to life in prison in 1972 for the killings of Hinman and Donald "Shorty" Shea. 

Hinman, an aspiring musician, was tortured and killed after Manson mistakenly believed he had come into an inheritance. According to court testimony, Davis held Hinman at gunpoint while Manson slashed his face and sliced his ear with a sword. 

Authorities called to the home on July 31, 1969, discovered Hinman's body and a Black Panther symbol and "political piggy" written on the walls of the home in what was later identified as Hinman's blood. 

Shea, who worked at the ranch where Manson and some of his followers had lived, was stabbed and clubbed to death. He was then dismembered, and his remains were not discovered until 1977. 

Davis was not involved in the more notorious killings of Tate and six others by Manson and his followers. 

Steve Grogan, who was convicted in Shea's murder, was the only Manson follower convicted in the killings to be paroled from prison, in 1985. Manson, who died in 2017, was repeatedly denied parole. 

Davis, who has had a total of 33 state parole hearings, has been found suitable for parole six times beginning in 2010. In each case, the sitting governor blocked his release from prison. 

The parole board's latest recommendation for his release, referred to in official documents as "parole suitability," will be finalized over the next few months. Corrections officials will conduct a legal review, then Newsom has one month to either reject the decision, take no action or make modifications to the decision by adding a parole condition or changing the date of release. 

Newsom's office did not respond to requests for comment. 

Davis' attorney, Michael Beckman, said his client was the "most rehabilitated" of any of the roughly 2,000 inmates serving life sentences whom he has represented. 

"He got seven years to life, and if he was anyone else rather than a Manson family member, he would have gotten out 30 years ago," Beckman said. "There is no question there is a visceral reaction [to the Manson murders]. But the law says you can only hold someone responsible for their participation in the crime. He cannot be held responsible for what Charles Manson did. Bruce didn't kill anyone. He participated in two homicides. And he's taken responsibility for all of it." 

Retired Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay said he believes that Gascón, in trying to do the right thing, went too far by issuing a blanket policy. 

He said prosecutors play an important role in the process by ensuring parole boards are presented with the facts of the underlying conviction, along with the impact of the crimes on the victims' families. 

"Basically, he has taken the people's lawyer out of the equation and left it in the hands of the defense," Kay said. 

Kay said at the first parole hearing for Manson family participant Patricia Krenwinkel, the board had been presented with a two-page probation report that, he said, downplayed her role in the brutal murder of Tate, her unborn baby and four other victims: Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent and Abigail Folger. 

Four of the victims had been stabbed a total of 102 times and the fifth had been shot to death. Kay recited the gruesome details of the murders. 

"I think we owe it to society not to turn loose a member of the Manson family, such as Patricia Krenwinkel, who has participated in seven of the most vicious, brutal murders in the history of American crime," Kay told the board, according to a transcript. "I think it would be a great deterrent value to show the public that not everybody who commits murder can automatically get out on parole." 

It was the first draft of an argument he would deliver some 60 times, from 1978 until 2005, when he retired and a new generation of prosecutors began to make appearances at parole hearings. 

Martley, the cousin of victim Gary Hinman, has been attending parole board hearings since 2012. She said she was in a "state of shock" when she realized no member of the district attorney's office was going to be participating in the Jan. 22 hearing. 

"I don't think it's fair that the prisoner has legal representation at the hearing and I do not," she said. 

"It was a horrendous crime," she added. "God willing, I will be healthy to be able to keep fighting these people." 

Mind control, levitation and no pain: the race to find a superman in sport

The US and Soviet Union both believed people could develop superpowers. And, reveals The Men on Magic Carpets, their psychic experiments played out in the sporting arena

by Ed Hawkins (The Guardian)

Candlestick Park, San Francisco, 1964. The wind is whipping off the Bay on a typically cold night at the ballpark. Mike Murphy takes his seat in Section 17. A jazz band pipes up and the vendors shout their wares: Hamm's or Falstaff beers, Oscar Mayer hot dogs with Gulden's mustard. Murphy is close enough to talk to the San Francisco Giants players – but he's not interested in hero worship. He wants to put a voodoo curse on the opposition, the LA Dodgers.

He tells two friends it's called a "whammy" or "occult backlash". He's been practising for years, perfecting the very particular cries and exact hand gestures to transmit negative energy to players. He reckons he's a baseball witch doctor, sending psychic waves to scramble minds and zap energy from muscles.

While sitting in the bleachers at Candlestick Park, Murphy asked for assistance from the fellow Giants fans around him to explore his powers, explaining with a straight-face that the gestures had been developed by shamans in the Amazon basin to kill enemies. If they wanted the Giants to win, this would help. And so he exhorted the crowd to close their two middle fingers over the thumb, leaving the index finger and little finger pointing, like devil horns, towards their target. And he told them to shout and wail as they thrust their horns towards the Dodgers players.

That night would prove Murphy's most successful as a conjuring cheerleader; according to his account, he enlisted almost 200 fans, all their negative energy flowing through him as he stood at the front, like the arrowhead. With several hundred horns pointing towards the tip, he began to feel dizzy. Whenever the wave of gestures and curses was at its strongest, the Dodgers began to make inept plays. The Giants went on to win.

Murphy staggered out of the stadium, drained, exhausted and fearing a heart attack. But believing that he had made it happen.

Baguio City, the Philippines, 14 years later. Mental combat has begun for the World Chess Championship. Anatoly Karpov, the golden boy of the Soviet Union, is playing Viktor Korchnoi, a defector the regime loves to hate. Despite sitting opposite each other for hour after hour, day after day, they have not spoken. But somebody is talking to Korchnoi. There is a voice inside his head. It is incessant. Over and over and over it berates him: "YOU. MUST. LOSE."

Viktor Korchnoi and Anatoly Karpov  compete
for the 1978 World Chess Championship.
Photograph: Jerry Cooke/Corbis via Getty Images

Korchnoi recognises the voice. It's not his. It belongs to the man sitting in the front row of the audience since the match began. His heart starts to beat a little faster. He begins to sweat.

"YOU. SHOULD. STOP. FIGHT. AGAINST. KARPOV."

The demands keep coming. Korchnoi is not afraid but he is angry. He understands perfectly what is happening. The man is trying to control his thoughts.

"YOU. ARE. TRAITOR. OF. SOVIET. PEOPLE."

The man sits cross-legged, dressed immaculately in a white shirt and dark brown suit, reclining with a hint of arrogance. He looks like an accountant, albeit a somewhat demented one. A slight smirk plays across his face. His eyes are terrifying, bearing into Korchnoi. He does not blink until Korchnoi is defeated.

Both of these stories are true. Murphy, the zany hippy in bell-bottom jeans warbling occult orders, would, in time, have the US government dancing to his tune. And Dr Vladimir Zoukhar, the immaculately dressed communist spook, staring demonically for comrade and country, was considered the KGB's mind control expert. Both men were protagonists in an extraordinarily paranoid chapter of human history: the cold war.

Murphy was no regular football fan. Known as "the godfather of the human potential movement", he co-founded the Esalen Institute, a famed new age retreat and pillar of the counterculture movement in 60s California. It was a centre for eastern religions, philosophy, alternative medicines, and a fair amount of nude hot-tub bathing. Controversial eroticist Henry Miller swam at the hot springs in the grounds, Beatle George Harrison once landed his helicopter there to jam with Ravi Shankar, and Timothy Leary, whom Richard Nixon called "the most dangerous man in America", taught regular workshops on the benefits of LSD, claiming that women could orgasm hundreds of times during sex when under the influence. And most recently, in the final frames of Mad Men, advertising executive Don Draper was seen smiling on Esalen's lawn.

While Murphy was establishing Esalen, if Soviet state security wanted to place a negative or damaging thought in someone's head, they called Zoukhar. That's why Zoukhar was at Korchnoi's match; communism trumped capitalism if it could produce a world chess champion. Korchnoi, hang-dogged and pot-bellied with his mistress in tow, was not the image they were going for. He could not be allowed to win against Karpov, the poster boy for true Soviet values.

'He was Professor X, and Esalen was his
Westchester Academy' ... Mike Murphy.
Photograph: Wally Skalij/
LA Times via Getty Images

Murphy and Zoukhar hailed from opposite cultures teetering on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. But for all their differences, America and the Soviet Union held a common belief: the existence of superhumans. Both world powers believed in a race of cosmic beings who could, just like in the sci-fi movies, slow down time, speed it up, change their body shape, feel no pain, levitate, see into the future, and more. With boggle-eyed mind control and harnessing the occult, both nations believed they could put a thought in someone's head, or stop a man's heart at 100 paces. Both nations thought these powers would win them the war. From the west coast of America to the far corners of the Soviet Union, yogis, shamans and psychics were sought out to aid these alternative war efforts, with millions spent on attempts to create a real life Superman or Wonder Woman.

Since the first millennium, Hindus and Buddhists have believed that spiritual practice – like yoga – was capable of giving rise to a siddhi, a Sanskrit word that roughly translates as "superpower". Siddhis included an ability to master pain, levitation, invisibility, being able to read minds at a distance – basically, any comic book superpower you can think of. And in America, Murphy was Professor X, and Esalen was his Westchester Academy.

As a trust-fund kid at Stanford University, Murphy had once wanted to be a priest, maybe a scientist; his parents preferred doctor. But on the second day of spring classes in 1950, Murphy went to the wrong classroom and ended up listening to a comparative religion lecture. It was providence. Murphy was hooked. He quit his class, enrolled in Indian philosophy and devoured The Life Divine, a 1939 book by Indian mystic, yogi, guru and poet Sri Aurobindo. It was a handbook for spiritual powers. From then on, Murphy would dedicate his life to the pursuit of the extraordinary.

"Hunter S Thompson was Esalen's first security guard; Aldous Huxley, then often high on mescaline, helped establish it"

It just so happened that there was a big chunk of Murphy family land on the cliffs of Big Sur, California, which would do nicely as a base for teaching superpowers. Murphy provided the land , and his friend Dick Price, a co-founder, brought the cash. Before Esalen even opened, in 1962, the plot needed a security guard; a young Hunter S Thompson, pioneer of gonzo journalism, got the job.

"He was 21," Murphy told me, on our first phone call. "Unpublished. Fully armed. With a small arsenal. He seemed to love tracer bullets. He'd fire hundreds out into the night sky so every night was like the fourth of July. Sometimes he'd fire his gun out of the unopened window of one of the houses that was on the grounds."

Thompson was the first of many colourful and culturally significant characters in the Esalen story. Aldous Huxley, the English novelist and psychedelic grand philosopher, followed. He was another inspiration for Murphy, who attended a Huxley lecture at the University of California with Price, entitled Human Potentialities, in 1962. Huxley, then often high on mescaline, was a key figure in Esalen's establishment, before his death a year later from throat cancer.

Murphy believed that the best place for the superpowers to reveal themselves was on the sports field. Sports, he said, was the west's yoga. He collated thousands of stories of athletes describing siddhis experiences. John Brodie, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, once told Murphy that he could move the ball with the power of his mind and reported seeing rivals shape-shift to avoid tackles. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the martial art aikido, was said to be able to make himself invisible. Murphy found "scores" of reliable witnesses who had seen Ueshiba elude attacks, with one writing: "Completely surrounded by men with knives, Ueshiba disappeared and reappeared at the same instant, looking down at his attackers from the top of a flight of stairs."

What about a human passing through solid matter? Murphy cites Pelé, one of the world's greatest footballers, as once saying: "I felt that I could dribble through any of their team … that I could pass through them physically." In 1970, ice hockey star Bobby Orr was said to have called on abilities of thought projection to hypnotise Chicago Black Hawk players during a four-game winning sequence on the way to the Stanley Cup finals for his Bruins team.

Bobby Orr leaps with joy after scoring the goal
that won the 1970 Stanley Cup for the Boston Bruins.
Photograph: Ray Lussier/AP

Unsurprisingly, the American military and CIA began to take note of Esalen. Prompted by intelligence reports about the Soviets experiments, the Americans felt they had to start programmes of their own, in which Murphy would become a key figure. His friendship with Democratic senator Claiborne Pell, a supporter of Esalen and Murphy’s jogging partner, was instrumental. In White House intelligence meetings, Pell spoke forcefully of the benefits of supporting their experiments. He argued that if the Russians had it, and the Americans didn’t, they would be in serious trouble.

Murphy was an adviser for the Jedi warrior training programme at West Point Military Academy in New York. Code-named Project Jedi, soldiers in the programme were taught invisibility, seeing into the future and extraordinary intuition, like knowing how many chairs were in a room before walking in – but also stopping the hearts of animals. It was similar to the First Earth Battalion (FEB), best known from the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. Jim Channon, the founder of the FEB, thought it a good idea that each of his “warrior monks” should carry pouches of herbs into battle, give out flowers as a sign of peace, and play indigenous music to calm and confuse the enemy. Channon had been given a small Pentagon budget and two years to research ways for the US military to use new age methods in warfare. He spent most of that time at Esalen, being taught by Murphy.

In 1975, the Chicago Tribune reported that the CIA was attempting to develop a new kind of "spook", after finding a man who could "see" what was going on anywhere in the world. CIA scientists would show the man a picture of a place, and he would then describe any activity going on there at that time.

In fact, there was more than one of these men. Russell Targ, who had taught this psychic power at Esalen, was one; another was Uri Geller. (You might have heard of him and his bendy spoons.) There was a whole team of psychics based at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California, as part of the CIA's Stargate programme to find psychic warriors. Targ and Geller would sit in that office, close their eyes, breathe deeply and then after a few minutes draw the location of Soviet missiles. Sometimes, they were right.

By contrast to the Soviet plan, Targ and Geller seemed harmless. "They were using it to kill people," Targ said. The Russian term for superpowers was "Hidden Human Reserves".

Senator Claiborne Pell, a high-profile supporter
of Esalen, pictured in 1972. Photograph:
Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

"They created a replica of the Oval Office and they would have people in there 24 hours a day concentrating on the US president in such a way to try to muddle his thinking," said Jim Hickman, a key figure at Esalen during the cold war. Hickman spent much of the 70s and 80s travelling in the USSR to research siddhis, often with Murphy at his side. Hickman told me they learned about strange, disturbing things. Even stranger and more disturbing than a whole bunch of Dr Zoukhars trying to influence the thought patterns of a head of state from great distances? "There was much deeper work going on," he said. "We knew that we were only talking to the people they let us talk to."

"In one creepy experiment, scientists implanted electrodes in a mother rabbit's brain, took her young litter off to a submarine and killed them one by one"

Those people were probably among the 60 Soviet-based scientists who worked at what was called Special Department 8. Their job was to investigate distant mind control. It was just one of 40 centres at Science City, Novosibirsk, in south-west Siberia, which housed thousands of scientists and their families from across the communist bloc, in a kind of nerdy utopia. Road names included Calculators Street, Thermophysics Street and Hydrodynamics Square. Here, Soviet scientists were attempting to prove the existence of extrasensory perception (ESP). In one creepy experiment, the scientists implanted electrodes in a mother rabbit's brain, took her young litter off to a submarine and, when it was deep below the surface, killed them one by one. At each synchronised time of death, the mother's brain reacted.

At the Kharkov University Neurology Institute, the rat brains were attached to electrodes and put in solution. The best Russian psychics, having been tested in research centres dotted around the state, were brought in to transmit emotions and thoughts to the brains. The most popular response recorded was laughing but the brains also "enjoyed" sums. (It is not known whether the brains were better at fractions or algebra.)

Unsurprisingly, some of the morally questionable experiments began to make the experts feel uncomfortable. One lab was even shut down in 1974 as the resident scientists en masse rejected what they called "the negative work".

It is widely believed that a mega-secret lab was set up in its place, in a sub-sub-basement below the Filatov Institute in Odessa. Only clandestine couriers knew how to access these secret paranormal departments. KGB guards made sure there were no unwanted visitors. There, death row prisoners were "bombarded" with pulsing magnetic fields to see if they would become clairvoyant. Years later, in 1991, one Dr Bryukhanov would publicly claim that he had run the project and said they had believed that animals they tested it on had developed the ability to see through walls. Alas, their small animal brains could not cope with the onslaught from the magnetic fields, and simply disintegrated. The prisoners reportedly suffered the same, horrible fate.

A nude encounter group therapy session at the Esalen
Institute, in 1968. Photograph: Ralph Crane/The LIFE
Picture Collection/Getty Images

By 1984, the cold war was heating up. The Doomsday Clock, the timepiece those cheery folk at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists kept ticking to judge how close man-made global catastrophe was, nudged the little hand to three minutes to midnight and oblivion. Luckily, help was at hand in the most unlikely of places. The hippies, gurus, shamen and yogis wanted to start a thaw and they knew exactly how to do it: nude hot-tub bathing.

With their friends in Washington giving them a nod and a wink, a series of Soviet – American exchanges had been organised from 1980. After several visits, Murphy and Hickman revealed they had discovered a Soviet Esalen: a group of believers and free thinkers who believed in the existence of siddhis. Contacts ranged from the obligatory psychic to Kremlin influencers. As a result, astronauts and cosmonauts, writers, KGB agents, military veterans, politicians (like Claiborne Pell) and diplomats were frequently invited to Esalen. There, they were told to sit crosslegged on the floor with pillows and just talk to each other. Then it was time to jump in the hot tub.

The idea behind the exchanges was to convince Americans and Russians to recognise that they were not so different after all. The brains at Esalen wanted to call this project The Institute for Theoretical Studies. When someone pointed out that the acronym for that was TITS, it was renamed the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program. It still exists today, albeit under a different name – Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy – and is run by Murphy's wife, Dulce.

"We had KGB guys and CIA guys at Esalen talking to each other," Murphy said. "The KGB knew communism wasn't working. It was their job to know everything … they could fucking see it. When we hosted people, it was just confirming what they already knew."

The exchange programme's biggest coup was bringing Boris Yeltsin to America in 1989. At the time, as a critic of the communist regime, Yeltsin was considered a political lightning rod. It was a visit that played a part in ending the cold war.

Yeltsin's aides had contacted Russian activists connected to Hickman and Murphy, and took part in Esalen's exchange programme.They asked the institute to ask if they would be interested in hosting Yeltsin.

"It turned out to be a gigantic deal 'cos he flipped!" Murphy said.

"When Boris Yeltsin visited a Houston grocery store, he sobered up quickly. He was shocked by the bountiful aisles – with no queues – and felt sick with despair"

Yeltsin spent most of the trip drunk. But when he visited a Houston grocery store, called Randall's, he sobered up pretty quickly. One of the Communist party's great lies was that America staged its wealthy image through fake stores. He was shocked by the bountiful aisles of meats, cheeses and vegetables. He asked why no one was queuing. He stopped shoppers to ask how much they earned per month and what they spent on food. Yeltsin became upset. "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," Yeltsin later wrote in his autobiography. Two years after that supermarket trip, he quit the party, stood on a tank in Red Square and became a capitalist. It was the start of the Iron Curtain's fall.

But neither side stopped searching for a superman. Murphy, now approaching his 90s, is still looking. Every year he holds a conference, the Sports, Energy and Consciousness festival in San Francisco, where he holds workshops advising people how they can experience the siddhis. The American military haven't stopped, either, spending millions of dollars a year on research for "alternative powers". And just like the Russians and their chess experiment, they are using the sports field as a training ground.

This is an edited extract from Ed Hawkins' new book The Men on Magic Carpets: Searching for the Superhuman Sports Star (Bloomsbury, £16.99).

Charlie Fuzz Wah Wah Pedal

Brownrice recently sent me the following: 

I don't know if you were ever into guitars enough to remember "fuzz boxes". They were one of the first distortion pedals available for guitars back in the 60s and along with "wah wah" pedals enjoyed a considerable vogue from the late 60s through the 70s. Some time in the late 70s they got renamed as "distortion pedals" and are still a stock in trade of many electric guitarists. Anyway..... recently I stumbled on a small pedal company in Melbourne, Oztralia who make a variety of such pedals and was kinda amused to find that one of their more popular models is marketed as the "Charlie Fuzz". It's a dinky little thing that features the classic Life photo of Chuckles on it. The eyes are 2 red LEDs which light up when the pedal is turned on. I'm certainly not a "Manson apologist" but the sick fuck in me just couldn't resist buying one... I thought it might make for a good (and suitably divisive) post :-) 

If you are interested, here's where you can get one!

Filippo Tenerelli aka Raymond Petrozzi?

Filippo Tenerelli (officially a suicide victim, unrelated to the Manson case) 

 

 

 

Now compare Tenerelli's pics above to that of one Raymond Petrizzo, from the collection of Family mugshots:

Features that are similar:

--Tenerelli's eyes were slightly 'cock-eyed,'* noticeable in the above two photos. And so is the guy pictured in the bottom photo, in the same way.

*aka 'Strabismus'  [Strabismus is a condition in which the eyes do not point in the same direction.]

--dark hair, parted on the same side

--deep scar, noticeable on the left side of Tenerelli's face in the middle photo.  Similar depression in the cheek of "Petrizzo."

--nose is exactly the same

--prominent eyebrows

--prominent, well-rounded forehead

 

Could it be the same person?   If they are, then it of course means that Tenerelli was a Manson Family associate, which makes it much more likely that he was murdered.   It also means the various investigative agencies have a lot of 'splainen to do.  oo-ee-oo!

 

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

 

Driver's License pic of Tenerelli, much closer to the pic of Petrozzi

Sherry Cooper

Happy New Year, TLB Junkies. Let's begin 2021 by revisiting this blog's (long ago) roots and what made us a fun destination very quickly. 

Long time lurker, Jen contacted us recently believing she had located Sherry Cooper. After a short period of due diligence we have confirmed that this is indeed her. Thank you, Jen! 

Sherry Ann Cooper was born in 1953 in Simi Valley, California. She was one of the Manson Family followers who stayed with the family at both Spahn Ranch and Barker Ranch.

Less is known of Sherry than many of the other members of The Family as she was said to be more of a "local girl" and drifted inside and outside of the circle unlike the others who came from other parts of the States to stay with Charles Manson. Some suspect that since Sherry’s home in Simi Valley was so close to the Spahn Movie Ranch, it was highly likely that she would go back and forth from Spahn to home for food and showers.

After the murders, Sherry and Barbara Hoyt fled the family after Hoyt overheard Susan Atkins talking about the Tate killing spree to Ruth Ann Morehouse. After the two fled, rumors were that Charles Manson was furious and wanted them both killed, with Barbara Hoyt actually experiencing an attempt on her life (The LSD laced Hamburger Incident in Hawaii) which failed and she returned home and became a witness for the prosecution. Sherry however, escaped completely unharmed and eventually fled to Canada with Danny "DDD" DeCarlo where they were married in the 1970s.

In late 1975 (sometime after the assignation attempt on President Gerald Ford by Lynette Fromme), a live video interview emerged which contained both Danny Decarlo and Sherry Cooper speaking about their time with and after Charles Manson. In the film, they  alluded to more murders than those of which have already been reported and often were seen laughing during the interview including through parts of the discussion which involved the murders such as that of Donald "Shorty" Shea:

For a number of years it was suspected that Sherry was killed when an unidentified body with 150 stab wounds matching her description and clothing was found on Mulholland Drive, in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California. However, since the body, which was being called informally "Sherry Doe" and officially "Jane Doe 59", was found in late 1969, and the video interview was released thereafter, it was impossible to have been Sherry Ann. The body was eventually identified by the victims sister in June 2015 as Reet Jurvetson, a then recent migrant to California from Canada. Jurvetson had relocated to California to follow a man she was interested in who had relocated. She was in the US for only a few months before she was found murdered.

Sherry and Danny Decarlo divorced and had one child together (who died at age 19 in a vehicular accident). She lives in California and to date refuses to discuss anything related to her time with Manson and the Family.

Happy New Year!!!!

 

Debra and the new LA DA

 George Gascon is the new Los Angeles District Attorney and Debra Tate does not like him.  Gascon comes to Los Angeles via San Francisco where he first served as Chief of Police.  Later, when Kamala Harris who was SF's district attorney ran for Attorney General of the State of California and won, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Gascon to be SF's district attorney.  Gascon held the job from 2011 until 2018 when he announced he was leaving to go to LA to care for his aging mother.

George Gascon was born in pre-communist Havana, Cuba in 1954.  He immigrated to the US with his family in 1967.  The family settled in Bell, a suburb of Los Angeles.  In 1978 he joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer.  He left LAPD after three years to go into business management.  While working as a civilian he continued working for the police as a reserve officer in the Hollenbeck Division of the LAPD.

In 1987 Gascon returned to LAPD as a fulltime officer working his way up the ranks becoming Assistant Chief of Police under Chief William Bratton.  During this time he went to Western State College of Law earning his J.D. degree in 1996.

In 2006 Gascon left LAPD for Mesa Arizona becoming the Chief of Police.  He had frequent clashes with Mariposa County Sheriff Arpaio over Arpaio's treatment of Latinos.  It was in 2009 that Gascon was hired to be the Chief of Police in San Francisco.

Gascon announced his candidacy for the LA DA's position in 2019 and won the office November 6 2020 beating incumbent Jackie Lacey who had held the office for eight years.  Gascon is considered a criminal justice reformist and that is the platform he ran on.  He is against the death penalty and charging juveniles as adults, furthermore vowed to re-open officer involved shootings from the previous eight years.  He will also re-evaluate any prison sentences where the prisoners has served 20 years.  Once elected he announced his office would not seek cash bail for certain offences and would release those currently awaiting such bail.  His actions have created outrage from some victims and their families as well as some of his own prosecutors.

To be fair, Governor Newsom has also suggested a no cash bail system to the counties in California during the pandemic to lessen the jail and prison population where the virus is running rampant.

All of George Gascon's bio aside, Debra's outrage is probably misplaced because it is the Governor who has the final say as to whether or not a prisoner is released.  Bruce Davis, Leslie Van Houten and Bobby Beausoleil have all been granted parole under former District Attorney Jackie Lacey's tenure, only to have that parole reversed by the Governor.

The following is an interview with Debra Tate by Orange County radio host John Phillips regarding George Gascon.

Tis the Season!

 How do Christmas trees celebrate the holiday?

We, at the blog, wish everyone a happy holiday no matter which one you observe.  This has been a troubling year globally and we hope that the blog has provided you a bit of a distraction.  Here's to better times next year!

Leslie has COVID19

 Cielo Drive has posted a story saying Leslie has Corona virus.  It sounds like she was hospitalized offsite for a few days but is now back at the prison.  I assume she responded to treatment and is recovering.

There was a rumor a few weeks ago that Tex had the virus but it was never verified.  The California prison system has suffered greatly during the pandemic with both prison staff and prisoners being affected.

I haven't found any other news stories but since Cielodrive spoke with Leslie's attorney I'm confident it's true.  It will only be a matter of time before the news outlets pick-up on this.

"The Book of the Dead"

The San Francisco Chronicle revealed, a week or so after Lynette Fromme was arrested for the assassination attempt, that the San Francisco Police Department had confiscated the Manson Family's "Book of the Dead" in 1972. 

 

Manson Clan's Book of the Dead

San Francisco Chronicle September 18, 1975

Excerpts from "The Book of the Dead" believed to have been the guiding "law" of the Charles Manson "family" in the southern California desert, were released to The Chronicle yesterday by the San Francisco Police Department.

 

The photos of the hand printed loose-leaf booklet reveal the leader of the murderous cult to be a male chauvinist. 

 

"Man is god and woman is his.  Woman will be slave to man to serve and bear child.  Woman is the key to paradise when she does what she is told and gives her King, Father, Lord and Master... no talk only her love... woman being directed only by man... and man taking as many as he wants as he ages." it was written in the book.

 

San Francisco Police obtained "The Book of the Dead" and other Manson family memorabilia as evidence in 1972 when Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme was arrested as a murder suspect.  The charges against her were later dropped.

 

Miss Fromme now stands accused of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento earlier this month.  In the 1972 arrest police seized the evidence which included "The Book of the Dead."  There were also a list of names of some of Manson's followers written in blood, a multi-color vest worn by Manson and a number of designs that appear to have some deep meaning, but remain unexplained.

 

Officers photographed the evidence before turning it over to the young suspects defense lawyer.  Since 1972, the material has been part of the police department's intelligence file on the Manson family.

 

In another rather cryptic portion of the book, under the heading "LAW" is written:

"Man is the law... his word is final.  Outside your mark, do what you want to anyone, but inside this mark is only peace, wisdom and understanding with no lie for your brother- he is your life.

"If you are a leader of a pack and sign this book, then you are held for the action of all that follow you.

"Sign this book with your soul!  Giving life to your Lord and Slave Master.  To stand in one thought, think as one head, move as fingers on one hand.  Kill or be killed for one.  Leave your past, come to the thought of dying... Now!  Stay with now in your eyes, willing to die and happy to face death."

 

In another part of the book, under the heading "LAST RUN," there is a list of suggestions or orders on clothing, weapons and vehicles to be used for some apparently paramilitary operation.

 

For the clothing the book recommends dark green, brown or black garments, "clothes for hiding in the night and clothes that will last."

 

Two wheeled and three wheeled motorcycles are recommended- with extra gasoline apparently for cross-country trips.

 

Sandra Good, a Manson disciple and Miss Fromme's roommate, was contacted in Sacramento last night and asked to talk about the book.

 

She declined except to say that it was written for another time, "1969 when we were going into the desert."

 

The Lompoc Record, September 18, 1975, newspaper has some more details about what was in the book. Here are some outtakes from the article. Most of the article is the same as above.

“Knives are advised: “One for eating, one for killing.” 

“Grenades are gold” it says and 18-inch sawed off pump action shotguns are recommended.”

I do not recognize many of the names in the newspaper photo.  The resolution is bad among other things.  However, I do see "Gypsy Wagon" which is likely Catherine Share's signature and it looks like "Sunshine Pierce" under Gypsy's name. That might be "Fatherman", Dennis Rice, under Pierce's name. You can see "Blue" on the right.

The Chronicle article states that the book was confiscated when Lynette was arrested as a murder suspect in 1972.  That would have been the murders of James and Lauren Willett.  It also says that the book was eventually turned over to "the young suspects" defense attorney.  It's unclear to me which of the young suspects attorney the book was given to although the San Francisco police did photograph the book before turning it over.  Presumably they still have the photos in their files.

Robert J. Leahy was the attorney for Billy Goucher.  Unfortunately, Leahy as well as his two law partners have died.  I do not know who Lynette Fromme, Nancy Pitman  and Priscilla Cooper's attorneys were so I was not able to look them up.  Since the article says "young suspects" I doubt that the book was given to either Michael Monfort or James Craig's attorneys as they were older.

I suppose it's possible that which ever attorney received the book gave it back to their client but since it has never surfaced, it seems doubtful.

Back in November 2013 Eviliz wrote a post about "Squeaky's Book".  There seems to be some confusion in the comments about Squeaky's book and the "Book of the Dead."  Robert Hendrickson states in the comments that he has a picture of the cover of the "Book of the Dead" in his book "Death to Pigs" and he does.  But it's unclear if the book that Eviliz possesses is the "Book of the Dead" because she never posted any pages of it.  

From Robert Hendrickson's "Death to Pigs"