CHAOS: The Manson Murders

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.