The devil's business

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

DEATH VALLEY, Calif. - Paul Dostie: You're so far from civilization the rules don't count anymore. There's no one to hear you scream up here. 

And here they dig.  Down through the searing heat.  Down through the dry rocky sand.  One last attempt to find – What? Here at the graveyard of innocence.

Paul Dostie: You can do what you wanted to do, particularly in 1969.

Death Valley, Calif.  In the land of make-believe, this plays the part of the end of the world. Once it was the godforsaken Eldorado of wild-eyed gold prospectors, once a hideout for western outlaws, and once, for a time, in the twilight of the age of Aquarius, here up a gash in the valley's side, was the family home of that most dysfunctional of American families, the Mansons.

Bugliosi: These people liked to kill.  That was their religion, their credo.

Religion?  Yes, and it’s closing on a religiously mythic 40 years since the rumors began to swirl here in the desert. Are there macabre secrets still buried here? Is there more to learn about the crimes of Charlie Manson?

Bugliosi: 35 people. Many of the bodies are buried out in the desert and will never be found.

Video   Manson speaks, Part One Aug. 28: Part one of Charles Manson's chilling jailhouse interview with NBC’s Tom Snyder. Dateline NBC

It was Vincent Bugliosi, the famous former Los Angeles county prosecutor, who wrote about the possibility of other Manson victims out here somewhere.

Bugliosi: Two boys and a girl were believed to be buried about eight feet deep behind Barker Ranch.

Here it is. Rotting now, a gallery of rusted things, bullet holes... Part of Death Valley National Park these days. This is one of two old homesteads in the Pamamit Mountains the Manson family haunted in their final days.

It's twenty miles off the nearest paved road, perhaps the perfect place to conceal evidence of a murder.

Dr. Marc Wise: It would be a very good place to bury someone.  You can dig a hole out there and that hole disappears as soon as you fill it back in.

Until - perhaps - now.  Could the desert finally yield up more dead... More Manson family murders? Scientists are out here looking.

Manson: We're convicting you for being Jesus Christ, we're convicting you for being the devil.

Bugliosi: The very name Manson has become a metaphor for evil. Manson has come to represent the malignant side of humanity.  And for whatever reason there's a side to human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil.

Manson: Did I kill anyone?

(Voice off-camera): Did you tie up the Labiancas?

Evil, yes, and still it lingers in the American imagination. Nearly 40 years on how could it not after the unspeakable events of August, 1969.

Manson: Maybe I should have killed 4,500 people, then I would've felt better.

Here is where it began, another secluded hideout: The Sphan ranch, an old movie set in the Santa Susana Pass, northwest of L.A.

Before the murders, this was the home of the "family," a ragtag collection of twenty or so anonymous dropouts. Their leader: Charles Manson a 34-year-old ex-con turned guru.

Friday night, August 8th.

Charles Manson gave four of them an address in an affluent part of the city called Benedict Canyon. Gave them detailed instructions and stayed behind as they headed away from Spahn Ranch.

Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, armed with a .22 caliber revolver and several knives, arrived around midnight.

10050 Cielo Drive, the sort of place you'd live if you'd made it here. In fact Manson and Watson had been here before - several times.  Manson was an aspiring musician, had auditioned for the home's former tenant, legendary music producer Terry Melcher, who lived here with his girlfriend Candice Bergen. The secluded location served Manson's purposes dreadfully well.

There is no evidence Manson knew or cared that Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate had taken over the house. He, the famous director. She, the riveting beauty who's star was on the rise since her role in “Valley of the Dolls.”

Video   Manson speaks, Part Two Aug. 28: Part 2 of Charles Manson's in-depth jailhouse conversation with NBC’s Tom Snyder. Dateline NBC

Polanski was in London finishing a movie. Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was at home. Around midnight the four Manson family members parked at the bottom of the hill below the house. Tex Watson moved first. Watson, who was a high-hurdles champion in Texas, climbed up that telephone pole, cut all the phone wires going into the residence.

While kasabian waited near the car, the others crept onto the property, just in time to encounter a young man leaving in a car. Steven Parent. And then it began. Watson shot the 18-year-old dead. Inside the house, the intruders surprised Wojteck Frykowski, a friend of the Polanskis, who was dozing in the living room.

Tex Watson woke Frykowski up and he said, "I'm the devil, here to do the devil's work." 

Sharon Tate  and her other house guests -  hair stylist Jay Seabring, and Abigail Folger, Frykowski's girlfriend and heir to a coffee fortune - were herded into the living room. When Seabring protested the treatment of the pregnant Tate, Watson shot and stabbed him. Frykowski fought for his life with Atkins.

When Voytek Frykowski was running out of the living room, she stabbed Voytek in the leg-- three or four times to try and get him to stop.

Susan Atkins: And he and I got into a struggle. And I started screaming for help, um and when Tex Watson came and took him off of me. And he and I got into a struggle. And I started screaming for help, um and when Tex Watson came and took him off of me.

Frykowski made it to the front lawn before he was hacked to death by Watson.  At the same time, Abigail Folger tried to escape.

Steve Kay: Krenwinkel chased her out of the-- the living room with an upraised knife and ended up-- pouncing on her in the front yard, and-- and stabbing her, and and Watson came over and helped stab her 28 times.

Atkins: She was tied up, I believe she was tied up.

Q: Did she say anything to you?

A:Yes.

Q: What she say?

Atkins: Oh God. She asked me to let her baby live.

Q: What did you say to her?

Video   Prosecutor explains Manson's mania Aug. 28: The head prosecutor of the Manson family case explains how cult leader Charles Manson influenced his followers. Dateline NBC

Atkins: I told her that I didn't have any mercy on her. She was tied up, I believe she was tied up.

Susan Atkins restrained the pleading Sharon Tate as Watson stabbed her and her unborn baby to death. Charles Manson had instructed his followers to leave a sign, "Something witchy", so Atkins dipped a towel in the blood flowing from Sharon Tates’ chest and used it to write the word "pig" on a door.

Then they drove back to Spahn ranch.

As the Manson family members rested that Saturday, they watched on television as Los Angeles learned of the carnage in Benedict Canyon.

Police: Where were the bodies found? All in one room?

A: No, two of the bodies were found inside the house, one in the vehicle and two on the front lawn.

Veteran Los Angeles TV news director Pete Noyes: From day one, It was a horror story.

Cop in driveway: The tentative identification of the persons are as follows: Sharon Polanski, Jay Seabring...

Pete Noyes: I remember when those cops came of that house up on Cielo Drive, the look on their faces.  It looked like they had been to hell and back.  I mean, it-- it was that bad.

It was about to get worse.

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