Q. “Did Charlie ask you to steal?”
A. “No, I took it upon myself. I was—we’d get programmed to do things.”
Q. “Programmed by Charlie?”
A. “By Charlie, but it’s hard for me to explain it so that you can see the way—the way I see. The words that would come from Charlie’s mouth would not come from inside him, [they] would come from what I call the Infinite.”
And sometimes, at night, they “creepy-crawled.”
Q. “Explain to these members of the jury what you mean by that.”
A. “Moving in silence so that nobody sees us or hears us…Wearing very dark clothing…”
Q. “Entering residences at night?”
A. “Yes.”
They would pick a house at random, anywhere in Los Angeles, slip in while the occupants were asleep, creep and crawl around the rooms silently, maybe move things so when the people awakened they wouldn’t be in the same places they had been when they went to bed. Everyone carried a knife. Susan said she did it “because everybody else in the Family was doing it” and she wanted that experience. These creepy-crawling expeditions were, I felt sure the jury would surmise, dress rehearsals for murder.
Q. “Did you call your group by any name, Susan?”
A. “Among ourselves we called ourselves the Family.” It was, Susan said, “a family like no other family.”
I thought I heard a juror mutter, “Thank God!”
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. Vincent Bugliosi, Curt Gentry
