Word: mansons
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...trial of Charles Manson and his tribe was from the beginning like a species of absurdist theater. The defense, in effect, was no defense at all. The lawyers representing Manson and the three women charged with the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders had no outside witnesses to help their case. The attorneys were afraid to put the women on the stand, believing that they would take full responsibility for the killings in order to absolve Manson...
...without bringing any of the accused to the stand within the jurors' hearing; all four were found guilty of first-degree murder. Curiously, it was only last week, when the court reconvened for a jury trial to determine punishment,* that the defense began probing into the backgrounds of Manson's cultists, trying to suggest to the jury the psychological force that bound them...
...stake now is the question of life sentences v. the death penalty. The defense tried to sow some doubts in the minds of an essentially middle-class jury that could only find the Manson tribe and its life-style as incomprehensible as''its crimes. Women like Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Susan Atkins, the defense meant to show, could have been the jurors' own daughters...
...Camp Fire Girl, sang in church choirs and attended summer Bible school. Then one day in 1967, said Krenwinkel, Pat abandoned her car in a parking lot, left two paychecks uncollected at the insurance office where she worked and, at age 19, disappeared with a man named Charlie Manson. A week later, from Seattle, she sent her father a letter: "For the very first time in my life, I have found inner contentment and inner peace. I love you very much. Take good care of yourself...
Riding the Wind. Next, the defense began calling upon other members of the Manson "family" to describe their lives with him. The object was to portray Manson as a benign figure. Lynette Alice Fromme, 22, a small, freckled girl nicknamed "Squeaky," said that she first met Manson when her father, an aeronautical engineer, kicked her out of the house in Redondo Beach. In Venice, Calif., Squeaky said, "I was sitting down crying and a man walked up and said, 'Your father kicked you out of the house, did he?' And that was Charlie." She joined his nomadic tribe...