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You wanted to know how I met Charlie?
Not really much to tell. I played music with Charlie.
Tried to help him get a recording contract…
…by helping him to record some good quality demos.
I was in that music community in Los Angeles.
I was friends with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Charlie had some talent.
People thought that he should be able to
get his songs out there in the world.
Gregg Jakobson, Dennis Wilson, and I…
were interested in getting Charlie to settle down,
come into a studio, just him and his guitar,
play and sing his songs.
And let's see if we can get a decent recording to use as a demo.
I showed up at Spahn Ranch just for a visit.
Charlie pulled me aside and he told me that he had killed a Black Panther.
His name is Bernard Crowe, he's a low-rent drug dealer in Los Angeles.
He was not a Black Panther.
He looked the part
because it was fashionable in those days to be that.
Charlie assumed, wrongly, that he had killed the guy.
He thought that he had killed a Black Panther.
He said that he was expecting a retaliation from the Black Panthers.
He asked me if I would stay and help
because there were not enough men at the ranch.
That was part of my downfall.
Everybody was on the lookout for a carload of Black Panthers.
Every car that came up was being examined.
Meanwhile, there just wasn't much going on
and there were bikers hanging out there.
I was building a motorcycle at that time, so I sort of idolized these bikers.
I got involved in a drug deal with them.
I had a friend in Topanga Canyon, Gary Hinman,
who had a batch of encapsulated mescaline that he was selling.
The next day, the bikers came back and wanted their money back.
The reason was that they said they all got sick on it,
and they probably didn't like the hallucinations.
They threatened me, held a knife to my throat.
The only option
was to see if Gary would give me the money back.
I pulled the gun on him.
And he said, "I don't have it anymore."
I said, "Look, Gary, I just need something to get the bikers off my back."
He said, "You can have my cars."
Suddenly, Manson shows up at the door.
Gary says, "Hi, Charlie!"
Charlie steps in and slashes him across the face.
My exact words. "Charlie, why did you do that?"
Realizing his mistake, Manson left me with the problem.
So I sat with Gary for a day,
trying to smooth everything over.
I used dental floss and a needle to sew up his ear.
But it should have been stitched. There's no question.
But if I took him to an emergency room,
I knew that he was going to tell what happened.
It was gonna bring the whole world down on top of me.
I called Charlie.
I said, "This is your problem."
"You need to come and take care of what you created."
His response was I knew what to do as well as he did.
And hung up the phone.
And I made this decision.
I had to kill him and get out of there.
I just ran at him, stabbed him twice.
He went down, and he died.
Because he would tell on me.
I don't remember who put the paw print, "POLITICAL PIGGY" on the wall.
I remember that everybody had it in their minds about the Black Panthers.
We'd been kind of absorbed in that for a couple of weeks
since the Bernard Crowe shooting,
and what Charlie had said, that the Black Panthers were the enemies.
There was an idea
to make it seem that the Black Panthers were responsible for killing Gary.
Hence, the panther paw on the wall.
Was it the next day?
I don't really think that had a lot to do with what happened.
In order to understand what happened,
you have to go back to the Bernard Crowe shooting.
Remember, Charlie thought that he had killed him.
He was afraid somebody was going to snitch on him.
The person that he was afraid of the most was Tex Watson.
He was part of Charlie's Family living at Spahn Ranch.
Tex Watson was a disciple of Charlie.
He was worshipful.
Watson had orchestrated the drug deal with Bernard Crowe that backfired
and put Charlie in the position of having to kill Crowe.
He really didn't know the guy.
He just decided he was going to save the day,
get in the middle of something that Tex Watson had created.
Charlie's way of protecting himself from Watson
was the typical convict way of insurance.
If someone is a potential snitch,
then you make that person complicit in illegal activity.
You have something on them just as they have something on you.
I don't know if he knew that I was in jail.
There's no evidence of that.
I can see where you would have
thoughts about the correlations of those things.
I think it's important
that the story be stripped down to the bare bones.
The bare bones of the thing.
There's no doubt in my mind what the motivation was. None. Zero.
Charlie had gotten paranoid of his own people.
He wanted to bind them to him through their committing bad crimes.
That was the true motive.
So he sent Tex Watson
to kill Terry.
Terry lived at Cielo Drive.
All the time that Charlie knew him, he lived at Cielo Drive.
He didn't know that Terry had moved.
Watson asked, "What if there's somebody else there?"
Charlie just told him to kill whoever's there.
The ignorance of not knowing that Terry had left that residence
meant that five other people got murdered.
Bugliosi knew what the truth was, but didn't reveal it.
It was not to start a race war, which was Bugliosi's theory.
He knew what the truth was.
He knew that Manson talked about that kind of shit.
Stories told around the campfire that really were just that.
But it had nothing to do with the murders.
His intention from the get-go
was to do exactly what he did.
Write a book, make a bazillion dollars on that book,
and live on it for the rest of his life.
And sell the movie rights.
Which is what he did.
His writer was sitting in the courtroom
taking notes for the book that they were already writing
while he was trying Charlie and those three girls.
He had to get a conviction.
He wanted to portray himself in this book
as the white knight protecting all the people of America.
How can I control your mind? Can I make a robot out of you?
Can you control mine or make a robot out of me?
People had Leslie van Houten long before I had her.
Her mother had her first.
Her dad had her. Her parents had her. Her school had her.
The TV had her. The movies had her.
And then you come up and say, "Well, you had influence over her."
Certainly I had influence over her,
I have influence over everybody I meet.
But that doesn't mean that I directed her to be herself.
I didn't set your house on fire.
Don't blame me for your children.
You raised your children, you programmed your children,
and you made your children.
The problem with this story in particular
is that people are very fond of their…
fantasy.
They don't want to hear how mundane the story actually is,
how not a mastermind Charlie actually was.
In his paranoid delusions,
in his miscalculations,
it was just
blunder after blunder after blunder.
If you only knew what I know now in terms of
the criminal mindset.
Yeah, they do.
They want it to be more complicated than it is,
and it's so hard to disabuse people from those fantasies.