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Nineteen seventy five. Context of tape recording is the interview prior to forty two forty four findings of the defendant Lynette from in the case of the United States versus Lynette from criminal number S seven five four five one. Place of interview the Sacramento County Jail. Persons present during interview Doctor Richmond, the defendant Lynette From Assistant Federal Defender Robert Holly, Federal Defenders Investigator David Kraft. All parties are
now present. The time is three p forty one pm.
Competency right now to understand what's going on and to be able to work with counsel. And so, if it's all right with you, I like to receive the session examination. I'll be giving a report to the judge and a report to mister Walker of the Public Defender's Office, and a copy to you. The crew order specifies it. Each of you gets a copedy. So if it's okay, well get started, go ahead.
Do you buy Lynette?
Yes?
Okay, what's your date of birth?
Lynette on twenty second, forty eight, what's your means?
Right now?
Who do you charge with?
Lynett attend to the assassination with the president of the Lasts.
In nineteen seventy five. Lynette from was widely known for being a prominent member of Charles Manson's cult or quote unquote family. Lynette, who was known by her Manson nickname Squeaky, hadn't actually been present at either the murders at Sharon Tate's home or at the LaBianca house, but she had very openly supported Manson during his murder trial. That meant that the public linked her to the homicidal rampage of
August nineteen sixty nine. The murders actually started on July twenty seventh that year with the stabbing murder of Gary Hinman. Manson believed Hinman owed him money over a drug deal gone wrong, so he had one of his followers, Bobby Boussolet, kill Hinman. Bossolet wrote political piggies on the wall in Hindman's blood. He also drew a pop print. The idea was to put suspicion on the Black Panthers, but it didn't work. Twelve days later, on August eighth, newspapers reported
that Bosolet had been arrested for Hinman's murder. A cop found him sleeping in Hindman's station wagon, which had been reported stolen. In the rear of the vehicle, the cops found a bloodstained knife. The night that Bossolet's arrests was reported, members of the Manson family brutally murdered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others at a house on Los Angeles' Clo Drive, in.
A scene described by one investigator as reminiscent of a weird religious rite. Five persons, including actress Sharon Tate, were found dead at the home of Miss Tate and her husband, screen director Roman Polanski.
The following night, they killed a businessman named Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their home. History is written by the victors, and in nineteen seventy five, the victor was Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi. In the trial and in his mega best selling book Helter Skelter, Bugliosi laid out his theory of the crime. Manson told his followers that our race war was imminent, and that the Beatles song Helter Skelter was about this war.
Manson told his followers that this would be a blood bath in the streets of every American city. Manson foresaw that the black man would win this war, but later on he said, the black man, because of an experience, would simply not be able to handle the reins of power. So you'd have to look around at those white people who had survived, who had escaped from Helter Skelter. In other words, turn all the reigns of power to Charles Manson and his family.
These were all things that Manson had in fact talked about, and Bugliosi tied them to the murders, making Manton both the architect of the crimes and also providing a motive for what seemed to be absolutely senseless acts. But were they the reason behind the Tate LaBianca murderers or the main reason Manton was not at the scene of any of the murders. This thinking goes, so Bugliosi had to find a way to make him culpable. The Helter Skelter
theory did that, but the truth might be simpler. The Tate and LaBianca murders were committed while Bobby Bousolet was in custody. Were they an attempt to take the heat off Bosolet to reinforce the clues left by Bassolet at Gary Hinman's house that this was the work of the Black Panthers. Author Jarret Kobek.
What seems to be the hardening consensus about the real motivation of the subsequent murders was this idea of doing copycat murders that then would make it seem like black radicals had done Bousolet's murder.
But that's not what people were thinking in nineteen seventy five, and maybe the specifics of why these killings were committed don't matter much. After Manson and the others were arrested, many of his followers slipped away. They hadn't signed up for murder. Lynette, though, remained loyal despite the death toll. That's what people knew about her in nineteen seventy five.
In retrospect, the Tate Loabianca murders became one of the symbols of the mythic end of the sixties, but the cultural, political, and social movements of the nineteen sixties did not end in nineteen sixty nine. As we saw last episode, they continued well into the seventies. In fact, two assassination attempts by radicalized women in September nineteen seventy five might be
a more apt symbolic end. Two failed attempts on Gerald Ford, a man so representative of the Middle American establishment that he was chosen to unite and lead the wounded country in the wake of Watergate. I'm Toby Ball.
And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
It just escalated.
It was in and it was crazy.
And then he heard about the Bottomless Pit, and so we're looking through the bottomless pit because he thinks this war's gonna happen if we need a place the.
High Episode two. Don't want Out and You're Free. The Tate LaBianca murders will always define the Manson family, and rightfully so. But for Lynette, from those events brought an end to a period in which she'd experience a radical alternative to her troubled but traditional upbringing. She koremed from classic Middle America to a tiny traveling commune led by an ex conguru who came to define the furthest extreme of all that Middle America felt was wrong with the
radical young. The meeting that changed the trajectory of Lynette's life occurred, in her telling, on a night in nineteen sixty seven, beneath a gazebo on Venice Beach, California. She was, in her words, alone and at a standstill. She just dropped out of college, was alienated from her father, and her future seemed uncertain. Seemingly out of nowhere, Charles Manson appeared.
Over the course of several years, Lynette wrote a memoir of her time with Manson from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty nine, titled Reflection spelled with an X. In the book, she presents a utopian view of Manson and his followers. She is a very unreliable narrator. Still when it comes to understanding her actions in nineteen seventy five, her perceptions of the experience are probably more important than
what actually happened during her time with Manson. About that meeting at the gazebo, she writes names Charlie, he said, looking directly in my eyes. In San Francisco, they called me the gardener. He appeared both big and small. I was enchanted yet flustered and mentally hiding. And then he wasn't there at all until I sought him back in earnest and he was seated on the wall. I gathered
the pieces of my mind. Manson seemed to know that her father had kicked her out of the house, and Lynette responded by telling him about her life that she wanted something different. He told her the way out of that room is not through the door. She was confused, and when he explained further, Lynette noticed his West Virginia twang. Don't want out and you're free. The want ties you up, be where you are. You've got to start someplace. This advice reminded her of a poem that she'd written during
a period of deep depression. She'd been staring at her red and gray checked pajamas and imagined herself trapped on a gray square again from her memoir, around and around its edges. I'd paced like a caged animal, collapsing in one corner to gnaw the bare bones of despair. But when I'd looked up within this fantasy, my square had become a diamond. Changing my perspective had changed my world. Manson told her that he had just spent seven and a half years in prison, and that he had experienced
hurt and anger until he found peace with himself. He was now traveling to see his mother. Lynette could come if she wanted. This is from the psychiatric interview conducted with Lynette to determine her competency to defend herself in the trial for her failed attempt on Ford. Here she talks about her relationship with her parents as she was growing up.
And if you were growing up, how would you generally categorize your relationship with them? Smooth? Locky times? Oh, let's say up until your teen years. In your preteen years, we had a good relationship with both mommy and dad. Were you closer to one late the other? No.
The mixture of the unusual and the conventional that was a theme of Lynette's upbringing can be seen in her participation in a dance troupe called the Westchester Lariats. Lynette wrote, I was ten when I took the first of four cross country tours with a troop and a chartered bus and without my parents. Nearly every night in a different city, we performed a two hour song and dance show in
theaters and auditoriums, military bases, and outdoor arenas. Her mother accompanied her on the first tour after that, though, starting when Lynette was eleven, her parents stayed behind. But while this seems unusual, the content of the tour was actually extremely square.
This evening, we bring you a musical Tiller to Spring.
Led by a professor from the University of Southern California, the group performed all kinds of dances, square dancing, polka, rumba, samba, Viennese, waltz, can can, Charleston, and so on, with.
Songs like Spring Is Here, April Love, and Springtime in the Rockies.
The Lariats even appeared on The Lawrence Welk Show, which is about as square as it gets.
Now here's your host, Lawrence, Well war'd your girls.
Here's Lynette again talking about her parents during her psychological interview.
Could you just very briefly characteria his business, warm, cold, friendly, distant, wild, quiet, passy. You know how about Dad?
I would describe them those passes.
Mom and Dad both relatively quiet people.
That's right, Well, they're very afraid.
Do you know what he was afraid of?
People have difference to it. Some some people were afraid of water. Some people were afraid of other people. They're afraid their own image, getting in class the sun. He had various fears on that good.
Lynette's characterization of her father as harboring various fears probably stems from the complete dissolution of their relationship in her teens. Typical for the times, he was a dominant member of the family, his feelings and decisions determined the family's actions. Lynette traced the origin of their estrangement to her decision at age thirteen to go to the beach with an
older cousin instead of her family. Apparently this offended her father's notion of Lynette's obligations to the family, and his reaction was harsh. In reflection, she writes, from that day he forbade my presence in any room of the house he occupied, and instructed my mother to refuse me an allowance or travel money. He permitted her to set a plate for me in the kitchen, but thenceforth ignored any
other arrangements, effectively blocking me out of his life. Reads as a wild overreaction to what seemed like a relatively minor transgression, and it must have been traumatic for Lynette, who was in her teens, her grades fell, she dropped out of the Lariettes and began to drink. But despite their failed relationship, Lynette is clear that her father stopped short of any kind of violence.
I never said that she was physically abused by her father. I laid out the possibility that could have happened. I mean, I said people thought that, but she was very insistent that that never happened. There was no physical abuse. There was emotional abuse, but nothing physical, she said. I'm Jess Braven and I wrote a book called Squeaky, The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Frommy or from as it's more commonly pronounced.
Even with the rocky home life, Lynette managed to make a positive impression in her high school.
She was considered very talented in high school. She certainly was not isolated. She had many connections. She was in a play with Phil Hartman, who went on to be on Saturday Night Live. They were friends. He gave me an interview about her and had very fond memories of her being very talented and funny. Her English teachers and everyone they imagined really great things for her.
When you were in high school, what kind of grades did you get?
During the former parer heart schooling years did great. The latter part of high school I became dis interesting.
Didn't you have any particular run ins with teacher's principles?
No?
How did you get along with the other kids?
Fine?
In nineteen sixty six, the from family moved from Redondo Beach Inland to Torrance, California. Lynette had been living at different people's houses, escaping from the damage relationship with her father and the dysfunction in her home and Torrance, though she returned to live with her family before finally leaving for good. She took classes at Alchemino College, but was disappointed in the experience. From her psychiatric interview.
I was also just outside the schools. I wasn't roning into the person has to be wilpen to learn.
Ye that it was a time for you to do that. The paper or newsweek or somebody haven't. I don't remember where it was. You've been written about in many different publications.
They said something about your having a handsome kind of a major clash when you were sixteen or something and getting fooded.
Out of the hole.
I know they like them times like that.
Yeah, what did happen? What were the circumstances of your leaving home.
How adore you?
And when I left, I was at Okay and you were leaving because somebody said get out, we don't want you around, or something like that.
Oh, my father and I had a discussion and we didn't agree.
It was about something, probably very minor. I don't even remember the super.
In Reflections, Lynette says that she and her father clash over something minor, in her words, a word or definition. Then, she writes, suddenly enraged, he pointed to the door and yelled, you get out of this house and never come back. I cried, stuffing a big purse full of books and makeup and miscellaneous junk. I called my college boyfriend to pick me up, but he said he was too drunk to drive and suggested I hitchhike. She walked to the nearest freeway on ramp and thumb a ride on the
other end of that ride. Charles Manson After the break, like.
Most young people during the late sixties, we did a lot of traveling around.
We did a lot of meeting people. We will not she evenistic or solely autumn to be out only for pleasure.
We were concerned about what was going on what people were thinking.
I don't know how people were being treated.
After meeting Charles Manson at gazebo in Venice Beach, Lynette joined him in a small group of followers as they drove around California and the Southwest. These were the early days of the family, before they settled at two ranches near Los Angeles, and before Manson's philosophy grew stranger and stranger.
And we found dozens of young people out in the streets. Some of them were taking care of themselves blind, others of them were being abused by Henny. Number of people being found out that they could just swoop into San Francisco and picked people up. And it was my feeling too.
Off of these people are place to stay.
Manson proved to be very adept at recruiting followers among this population.
At its very basic level, it was a form of trafficking.
And I didn't realize it then, of course, but I'm sure he saw me that I was a valuable commodity.
I'm Deborah Herman, author and indie publisher, and I was fortunate enough to collaborate with Diane Lake, formerly known as Snake, who was the youngest member of the Manson family cult.
I'm Diane Lake, former member of the family, and I'm now going to be seventy.
Which I can't believe. When we first connected with one another to do this book, Diane had kept her secret for how many years? Forty seven? Pretty much nobody, her children didn't even know. Manson did things so much on instinct of how to survive based on a lifetime of being in penalage.
Today and this was a whole new I mean, he came out of jail. He'd had lessons on how to be a pimp, a successful pimp, because he'd been out before and tried it and failed. He'd gotten more lessons. But he came out in the middle of the lommer e the summer of love, you know, where it's like free love and free secks and free drives. Yeah, you know, I'm sure that he was just like.
Wow, think about this. Manson started his second prison stent in nineteen sixty Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president, the civil rights movement had not yet begun. In earnest there was only Middle America. He was released in May of nineteen sixty seven, straight into the strangeness of the psychedelic sixties. The number one song was the Beatles Penny Lane. Timothy Leary had just participated in a public debate with a
professor from MIT about the use of LSD. Manson traveled up to San Francisco at the peak of hate Ashbury. The radical Young hadn't existed when he'd entered prison in nineteen sixty. Now he was in their midst. It might as well have been a different planet.
Imagine the hate Ashbury District as a lion peering through a tambourine with intense, dark golden eyes.
This is from a KPIX television documentary on the Hate which aired on January first, nineteen sixty seven.
With a cross hanging down from the tambourine and mushrooms and roses growing below it, and the lion peering through the tambourine with intense dark golden eyes. And think of it as being an image disappearing, peering, coming back, retracting itself, manifesting itself, being beautiful, and it is all perfect. This is really it, and it is all perfect. This is really it, and it.
Is all perfect.
Manson was known as the Gardener in San Francisco because the skills that he had used as a pimp proved effective with the vulnerable population of young people, mostly women in the hate, who he could bring under his influence. He considered this tending to the Flower children.
Young people would come to our house and say can I stay here?
And would say you could stay here, but you know, you're going to have to be quiet.
You're going to have to respect the place and you and if you just want attention from your parents, and if you're going to take drugs and you can't be here as we don't do that.
This is clearly Lynette twisting the truth to the court appointed psychiatrist, trying to make herself look as law abiding as possible. The Manson family definitely took drugs. Manson used LSD in particular to control his followers. In nineteen sixty eight, the Manson family more or less settled in the undeveloped areas outside Los Angeles.
We came back, lived different places in Tipanga Canyon. Then we found the Spawn Ranch and it was like an old movie set up in the hills of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. George was the blind owner and he loved the place. But George didn't really know everything that was going on, and Squeaky was in charge of kind of taking care of George and making him happy.
George Spawn, the owner of Spawn Ranch, gave Lynette the nickname Squeaky because of the pitch of her voice. As Diane said, Lynette had the job of keeping Spawn content. This reportedly included keeping him sexually satisfied. This utilitarian relationship with a much older man would be echoed years later in Sacramento. In her psychiatric interview and in reflections, Lynette
made her best case for the Manson family lifestyle. And there must have been attractions in order for people to join and then stay.
Yes, bad things happened there, but I don't The overriding thing was the beauty of the whole area.
The arrangement in a general sense was not unusual for the time.
That's funny, how.
She where did you come back?
Then?
There were lots of communes, there were lots of guru varieties, you know, and he kind of pawned himself off as this wise philosopher, you know, through his music, rather than your city.
Here's Lynette again from her psychiatric interview. Remember that she is trying to put herself in the best possible light. She may not be completely candid.
Here we've got a branch, kind of a foster home lovel.
Well.
We weren't telling these people anything, these young people, we just offered them our land.
I believe it's healthy for anyone to live in the words.
I don't.
I wouldn't send a kid to the to the streets. So we had this land available and let them live on it.
We did not have sex orgies and drug orgies, or cult meetings, or hanging Christ in effigy or contending Charlie was Christ, or anything of that nature.
This all comes out of Papa's imagination. We were actually very healthy.
We found out that by giving to each other and supporting each other and building each other up, and realizing that there is a joy in giving, there was a purpose in being able to serve each other, we found great satisfaction.
They were this group of hippies, and they loved each other, and they were living from They were manifesting everything they needed. They would go dumpster diving for food or people would give them things. And Charlie was always saying that he was what did he call it? He was postulating for things. And then somehow they would happen until my horse is down down.
But beneath the idyllic surface there were darker currents now.
Of course, he may have been scheming, and he may have been bargaining, or people need to remember he had learned to be a pimp, so he may have actually been trading some of the women for some of the things that they all needed.
This is soft peddling, a practice that has been documented where at least some of the girls were expected to have sex with visitors to the ranch whom Manson wanted to curry favor with. Venereal disease was reportedly rampant on the ranch.
You know, you've got several sides to what was happening, but the side he was presenting to the women was one of a guru and a musician and their lover.
And he just had this uncanny ability to read people and then use it, you know, for.
His survival or his forward movement.
Manson, like so many male gurus, structured the group around his sexual relations with his female followers.
We were like sisters, like you know, the sister wives, because we were all having sex with him and sometimes with each other with him. It was like a family. I mean, you've got to feed twenty people every night. We did the cook the cleaning, learned Charlie songs and sang them. We played music, and we smoked marijuana, and we got high on LSD, you know, probably once a week. It's not like anybody really had a job. So we had to learn how to take care of ourselves, finding
housing that was free and panhandled for money. I mean that it was basically survival. So however you could eke out an existence. That's what we did. And then we you know, we moved to the spawn ranch, found that and ended up moving to the back house.
The change in a single year from Lynette's conventional life to this new existence at the impoverished margins of society must have been disorienting, but she embraced it.
So those girls they continued, I think to be part of the inner circle, especially Lynette. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right hand woman.
Lynette's education was especially helpful to Manson.
She was smart, and then I don't think he read well. I think he might have even been on the spectrum of autism because he had incredible auditory recall, but he could not and he hadn't really been to school. He'd always been you know, the bad boy at school and reform school in prison, and so Lynette did all any reading to him. I think that he and Lynette were closer than any of the girls, and she was.
Also very, very dedicated to him.
And as often happens, the relative isolation and lack of restraints led Manson to increasingly unhinged theories.
But he got kind of frenzied. And I remember one time at the ranch on the saloon, he'd gotten all these like forest service maps and he taped them all together, and he was looking for a pathway to the desert because we had got introduced to Barker Ranch through one of the girls that joined the family.
The Manson family lived at two ranches, starting in nineteen sixty eight and continuing after the nineteen sixty nine murders into the early seventies. In addition to Spawn Ranch and Laurel Canyon, they also lived at the far more remote Barker Ranch in Death Valley.
He was looking for a path from there up to Barker Ranch, or you know that part of the Death Valley on these you know, topographical forestry maps, and he just there was this frenzy to get money and supplies gas. He talked about digging a huge trench and then hijacking a gas tanker and burying it so that we would have like, you know, lots of gas.
Yeah, so that he could be independent.
But it just it just escalated.
It was in and it was crazy.
And then he heard about the bottomless pit, and so we're looking for the bottomless pit because he thinks this war is going to happen and we need a place to hide, and you know that the winner's not going to be able to rule.
The entrance to this bottomless pit was supposed to be somewhere in the desert. In his book Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi quotes Manson as saying about this pit.
Every tuned in tribe of people that's ever lived has escaped the destruction of their race by going underground, literally, And they're all living in a golden city where there's a river that runs through it of milk and honey, and a tree that bears twelve kinds of fruit.
You get the picture. All of this that Diane just talked about. The money, the gas, the trench, the pit were connected to Manson's theory about the helter Skelter race war. He believed that the war would be won by blacks, but that they would for some reason look to Manson to lead them.
And so then they're going to come and ask the family, you know, to I guess, repopulate the world and rule. It just made it makes me crazy to even say it, but that's what I heard from him.
And then there were the strange and unnerving, creepy Crawley missions.
I never was asked to do that, but it was like, you know, they'd dressed in black, and they'd go and sneak into people's houses and move the furniture and eat some food. And as far as I know, they weren't stealing anything. But I don't know.
In retrospect, this may have been conditioning Manson getting his followers used to committing weird and transgressive acts at his whim, a prelude to the murders that would follow.
He'd always been talking about the Black White race war, kind of like you know, apocalyptic moment in time that he'd been hearing about in the jail, and then when the Beatles White Album came out, that's when it got coined as Helter Skelter, he really thought the Beatles were sending him a message about Helter Skelter.
Helter Skelter is a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney. Mostly nonsense lyrics, rockets, instrumentation and screamed vocals.
All is coming down in the past, but don't want to break you.
The phrase helter skelter means chaos, but also a tall spiral slide found at English fairgrounds.
Tell Me, tell Me, tell me the answers it maybe be in love, but you make no dances.
You goward Aileen to kill with skills.
District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's theory of the murders wasn't constructed of whole cloth. Charlie preached that the song Helter Skelter was a coded message about his race war prophecy. The violence of the music pointed to something as well. To people looking for signs the Bliss of nineteen sixty seven and Penny Lane had been supplanted by the Disorder of nineteen sixty eight. Helter Skelter his followers felt that Charlie
believed it, and maybe he did. The song has become associated with Manson largely because of Bugliosi's book of the same name in the subsequent movie. In October, two months after the Tate LaBianca murders, the arrests came. First. Charlie was picked up for leading an auto theft ring. He was found hiding in a cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. He was kept incarcerated on the new murder charges and was never again outside the penal system. His absence left
a void in the Manson family. Author Jess Braven, you.
Know, the Manson family didn't have bylaws. You know, it was not a formally organized institution. And when Manson, who was complete paramount, absolute leader of the group, was removed
by being arrested, there was no succession plan. Lynette essentially emerged as the you know, recognized leader of the group for a few reasons, that Charlie trusted her, that she was known as someone who kept things running during what would pass for more normal times for that commune, and then that the news media recognized her or put her on TV or put her in the newspapers because she was fairly facile at dealing with the press.
Here, for instance, is Lynette being interviewed by NBC news.
Good person, a very good person.
Was he out there all the time?
I don't even know you know who took off over now that.
He was anybody stealing anything out there?
Let's see everyone in a ball and a daughter. Do you know all we want to do is do.
And again? Talking with kse cr Sacramento's NBC station, what about.
People running around naked out there?
Well, I took up my clothes whenever I gas Champ.
It was hot.
But with Manson's arrest and the exodus of many of his followers, things changed for those who.
Remained without Manson there, You know what is it? It becomes a sort of cult surrounding the idea of Manson more than Manson himself.
And Lynette was the most prominent of those that remained. This new reality would lead her to a new phase of her life, one marked by her continued devotion to Manson and by violence. Next time on Rip.
Current Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sannoff. Show art by Jeff Niyaz Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk Rema O'Kelly and Noms Griffin Supervising producer Trevii Young, Executive producers Alexander Williams and Matt Frederick. Recorded at In Your Ear Studios, Richmond, Virginia, engineered by Paul Bruski and Spotland
Productions Nashville, Tennessee, engineered by Ben Holland. Here episodes of Rip Current early completely add free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and visit our website, ripcurrentpod dot com.
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