Built from two sworn accounts the archive now carries in full: Susan Atkins to the Los Angeles County grand jury, December 5, 1969, and Linda Kasabian at the Tate-LaBianca trial, 1970.
Four people went up the hill to 10050 Cielo Drive on the night of August 8, 1969. Two of them later described it under oath, and both accounts are now in this archive as the record has them. Susan Atkins spoke first, to the grand jury on December 5, 1969, four months after the killings and before she had a lawyer she trusted. Linda Kasabian spoke eight months later, at the trial, with a grant of immunity. Reading them side by side is the closest thing there is to standing in two places on that driveway at once.
Both women name the same four in the car: Charles Watson, whom they called Tex, Patricia Krenwinkel, Kasabian and Atkins. Both say Manson stayed at the ranch. Both describe the same instruction from him before they left, and describe it in almost the same words. Atkins told the grand jury she never recalled getting any actual instructions from Charlie other than getting a change of clothing and a knife and was told to do exactly what Tex told her to do. Kasabian told the jury he told her to get a change of clothing, a knife, and her driver’s license. Neither says he told them where they were going. That agreement, from two witnesses who by 1970 had every reason to distance themselves from each other, is the core of what the state proved against a man who never entered the house.
They agree on the equipment. Atkins listed it for the grand jury from the back seat: a rope, a set of bolt cutters, Tex with a gun, a knife each for herself, Kasabian and Krenwinkel. Kasabian confirms the knife; she says Atkins asked for it once they were over the fence and she handed it over.
They agree on the first killing, and this is where the difference between them begins. Kasabian saw it. She told the jury they had climbed the fence when a light came toward them, that Tex told them to get back and sit down, that a car pulled up and Tex leaped forward with a gun in his hand, and that the man said, “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything,” before Tex shot him four times. Atkins did not see it. She told the grand jury she saw lights coming from the car and, asked directly, said she didn’t actually see the car, she just saw the headlights. Both are describing the death of Steven Parent, eighteen, and both are telling the truth about what was in front of them.
From that point the two accounts stop overlapping, because the two women were no longer in the same place. Kasabian says Atkins told her to stay by the car and listen for sounds. Atkins went inside. So Kasabian’s testimony about the killings is a testimony of sound: a man screaming “No. No.” and then, in her words, just screams, which she said she had never heard before and had no words for. When she went toward the house, a man came out of the door with blood over his face and stood by a post, and she told the jury they looked into each other’s eyes and she said, “Oh, God, I am so sorry. Please make it stop.” He fell into the bushes. Then Atkins came running out, and Kasabian said it again to her, and Atkins answered, “It is too late.”
Atkins’s account of the same minutes is from inside. She told the grand jury she walked through the house and found a woman reading who looked at her over her glasses, waved and smiled, and went on to the next room, where a man sat with his back to her and a woman lay on the bed, apparently pregnant. She went back and told Tex there were three more people. She tied Frykowski’s hands. She saw Abigail Folger, held by Krenwinkel, look at Tex and say, “I give up, take me,” an instant before he stabbed her, and later saw Folger on the front lawn in a nightgown with blood on it, and Tex stabbing her three or four more times. She said she held Sharon Tate while Tex went to help Krenwinkel. She said she took a towel, touched Tate’s chest, knew there was a living being inside that body and wanted to but did not have the courage to take it. She said she walked to the door and wrote PIG on it with the towel.
Kasabian could not have said any of that, and did not. She was outside. The man at the post is, by his description and the position, Wojciech Frykowski; Atkins never mentions the meeting on the porch, because she was not there for it. The two accounts are not in conflict on a single fact. They are two halves of a scene that nobody saw whole.
Both women also describe the following night, when Manson went along, and here their accounts touch again. Kasabian says she went because Charlie asked her and she was afraid to say no. Atkins describes Manson coming back to the car from the LaBianca house, looking at her, seeing she did not want to go in, and sending Leslie Van Houten instead, telling them he had the people tied up and they were very calm; he had, she said, reassured them with smiles that they were not to be harmed, because the previous night Tex had let the people know they were going to be killed and caused panic. Kasabian gives the instruction that followed from the other side of the car: Manson stuck his head in her window and told them to leave a sign, “You girls know what I mean, something witchy.”
A reader coming to these documents for the first time should know two things about them. Kasabian’s account was tested. She was on the stand for eighteen days, the longest examination in the trial, and the defence cross-examined every part of it. Atkins’s was not. Grand jury testimony is taken without a defence lawyer in the room, and Atkins repudiated hers before the trial began, refusing to repeat it and later giving accounts that differed from it in important ways, including about her own part in the killing of Sharon Tate. Her grand jury testimony is what produced the indictments. It is not what convicted anybody.
That is the reason to read them together rather than choosing one. Where they agree, the agreement is between a witness the defence could not break and a witness who later disowned her own words, and it survived both. Where they differ, the difference is geography. The state’s case against Charles Manson rested on the first kind of fact, and the archive now holds both women’s versions of it in their own words.
Every quotation above is taken from the two documents as published in this archive: TESTIMONY OF SUSAN ATKINS, MANSON GRAND JURY, 1969 and TESTIMONY OF LINDA KASABIAN, PEOPLE V. MANSON, 1970. Kasabian’s testimony survives in the archive as excerpts rather than a continuous transcript. Neither text has yet been checked against an official court transcript, and this article inherits that limitation. Names are given as the witnesses gave them: Tex for Charles Watson, Katie for Patricia Krenwinkel, Sadie for Susan Atkins. Charles Manson’s entry in the roster lists all fourteen documents of the case now held here.