In October 2012, in the middle of a court fight over some old cassette tapes, the Los Angeles Police Department said something it had never said publicly before. Detectives were looking at about a dozen unsolved homicides that had happened near places where Charles Manson’s followers lived and moved in the late 1960s. “These cases have circumstances that are similar to some of the Manson killings,” Commander Andy Smith said. The department wanted hours of recordings made in 1969 between Charles “Tex” Watson and his lawyer, and hoped they might help. It did not name the cases.
That announcement gave official form to a suspicion that had been around since the winter the Family was arrested. The record of what Manson’s followers were proven to have done is fixed: nine murders. Gary Hinman, a musician, was killed in his Topanga Canyon home in July 1969. Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent were killed at 10050 Cielo Drive on August 9. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were killed the next night. Donald “Shorty” Shea, a stuntman and ranch hand at Spahn Ranch, was killed later that month. Around those nine, a much larger list has grown up of deaths that were said to fit. Some of the names on it belong there as open questions. Others have no real connection at all. One is a double murder that people around the Family did commit, three years later.
The two killings outside the Tate and LaBianca cases show how the Family’s crimes actually came to court, and why the suspicion of more never went away. Gary Hinman, a thirty-four-year-old musician, was stabbed to death in his Topanga Canyon home in July 1969. Bruce Davis was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy in his death, and Manson was convicted too; by 1975 the Associated Press was describing Manson as convicted of murder in the deaths of nine people. Donald Shea, a forty-year-old bouncer, stuntman and ranch hand at Spahn Ranch, was last seen alive at the end of August 1969. In December 1970 a Los Angeles grand jury indicted Manson, Davis and Steve Grogan for his murder. All three were convicted without a body. Shea’s remains were not found until 1977, when Grogan drew investigators a map of the grave. In 1985 Grogan became the first of Manson’s convicted followers to be paroled.
That case is the template for everything that follows. For eight years the Family had committed a murder that the authorities could prove only by testimony, and the victim stayed in the ground until one of the killers chose to say where. Anyone who believed there might be others had a precedent to point to.
On November 24, 1969, a week before Los Angeles police announced that they had the Tate suspects in custody, a newspaper report counted thirteen brutal, unsolved killings in the Los Angeles area since New Year’s Day. Authorities, it said, refused to speculate on any connection between them. The only thing they shared was savagery, and the county coroner had used the word “overkill” for one of them.
Three of the cases on that list have been tied to the Family in print ever since.
Marina Habe was seventeen, the daughter of the writer Hans Habe and the actress Eloise Hardt. In the early hours of December 30, 1968, her mother was woken at about 3:30 a.m. by the sound of a loud car outside her West Hollywood bungalow. Looking out, she saw a man standing beside a dark sedan. He called out “Let’s go” and climbed in on the passenger side, and the car pulled away. Marina’s own car was still in the driveway. Marina was not. Her body was found on New Year’s Day 1969 at the bottom of a ravine off Mulholland Drive, a short distance west of Bowmont Drive, in heavy brush in the Santa Monica Mountains. She had been stabbed many times.
Her case belonged to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, not the LAPD. Once the Family was arrested, it was suggested she might have known some of them, and writers noticed that her killing shared the knife-driven overkill of Cielo Drive. Michelle McNamara, writing about the case in 2013, put the official position in a single line: a connection was suspected but never confirmed. Nothing on the record shows that Marina knew anyone in the Family. Her mother spent the rest of her life waiting for an explanation. “I’m only staying alive so I can get some answers,” Eloise Hardt once said. The murder has never been solved.
Habe was not the only young woman found along Mulholland in that stretch of years, and it is worth keeping the others in view, because they show how crowded the field of possible connections really is. Rose Tashman, nineteen, was found in a ravine near Mulholland Drive on May 19, 1969, raped and strangled with wire. Robin Graham, eighteen, vanished on November 15, 1970, after she was seen with her car on the shoulder of the Hollywood Freeway; the car, out of gas, was found a few miles south of where Tashman had been found, and Robin has never been heard from again. Police at the time reportedly wondered whether some of these cases were connected to each other. None has ever been tied to the Family.
On November 16, 1969, a birdwatcher found the body of a young woman in thick brush off Mulholland Drive, about six miles from Cielo Drive. She had been stabbed about 150 times in the upper body and neck. She carried no identification and became Jane Doe No. 59 in Los Angeles police files. For forty-six years she had no name.
Her sister finally gave her one. Anne Jurvetson, living in Montreal, came across a photograph of the dead woman posted online and recognized her younger sister. DNA confirmed it in December 2015, and in April 2016 police announced that Jane Doe 59 was Reet Jurvetson, nineteen, from Montreal’s small Estonian community. A friend who grew up with her remembered her as intelligent and vivacious. Her sister called her free-spirited and naive. In 1969 she had met a man known as John, or Jean, in Toronto, and flown to Los Angeles that summer to be near him. On October 31 she sent her parents a postcard from a Hollywood apartment: “The weather is nice and the people are kind. I have a nice little apartment.” It was the last they heard. Her parents never reported her missing, assuming she was living her own life somewhere. “My little sister was savagely killed,” Anne Jurvetson said in a statement released by police. “I am horrified to think of how terribly frightened and alone she must have felt as she died.”
Detectives looked at the Manson connection because of where and when she was found, and in early 2016 they interviewed Manson in prison about her. He told them nothing new. “We don’t rule anything out,” said Detective Luis Rivera, but police said they had found no concrete link to the Family. Others pointed out that Manson and many of his followers were already under arrest by the time she died, and that Mulholland Drive was a well-known dumping ground for bodies in those years. “It doesn’t feel like a Manson killing,” said Sandi Gibbons, a retired reporter who had covered the trial.
The renewed attention brought up other threads. The CBC’s the fifth estate, which looked into Jurvetson’s death in 2016, reported that the LAPD detectives who first handled her case in 1969 never examined a possible link to Marina Habe’s murder, which had happened in the same hills less than a year earlier under the sheriff’s jurisdiction. Detective Rivera said there was no DNA from either case that would let anyone say they were related. The program also reported that a man believed to have lived in the building where Jurvetson stayed had allegedly tried to set another man on fire on Mulholland Drive in the late 1960s; the LAPD declined to discuss it in detail. A retired LAPD detective, Cliff Shepard, would not say the Habe and Jurvetson killings were the work of the same person, “but boy, you piqued my interest.” In September 2016 the LAPD released sketches of two men, drawn with the help of a Montreal witness who had met Jurvetson and the man called John at a café in 1969. Her murder is still open.
The third pair was found the weekend before that November newspaper report. Doreen Gaul, nineteen, from Albany, New York, and James Sharp, fifteen, from Crestwood, Missouri, were found dead and badly mutilated. The contemporary report said they had been beaten to death; later accounts describe repeated stabbing as well as beating. Their bodies had been dumped in downtown Los Angeles. Both were Scientologists, and that detail is what drew the Family’s name to them. Bruce Davis, who was later convicted in the Hinman and Shea murders, had been involved with Scientology, and it was rumored that he had dated Doreen Gaul. That rumor has never been confirmed, and no court or official finding has linked Davis or anyone else in the Family to the two deaths. When the LAPD finally obtained the Tex Watson tapes in 2013, McNamara suggested the Gaul and Sharp case was one the recordings might help with. No such result has been announced, and the murders remain unsolved.
One death on the list happened on the other side of the Atlantic. Joel Pugh, twenty-nine, was the boyfriend of Sandra Good, one of the women closest to Manson. In 1969 he was found dead in a London hotel. British authorities recorded his death as a suicide and said he had been depressed. The prosecutor Stephen Kay was among those who never accepted that. “Manson despised him,” Kay said of Pugh, and he and others have suspected that a member of the Family killed him. No British inquiry has ever said so, and the official finding stands. Kay’s broader suspicion rested partly on Manson’s own talk: Manson, he said, bragged about other murders without giving details, and once told a cellmate that his followers had committed as many as thirty-five. A boast to a cellmate is not evidence of anything except the boast, and none of those thirty-five has ever been named.
The case that comes closest to a real lead is older and farther north. On October 14, 1968, near Ukiah in Mendocino County, an eight-year-old boy found his mother, Clyda Dulaney, dead on a walkway between two trailers, and then his great-grandmother, Nancy Warren, dead in her living room with the television on. Dulaney was twenty-four and eight months pregnant. Warren was sixty-four. Both had been strangled with a leather thong about three feet long and beaten. Cash in the trailers was left untouched. Heavy rain overnight washed away much of the trace evidence. Blood found under Warren’s fingernails did not match the blood type of Donald Dulaney, the Highway Patrol sergeant who was the father of her expected child, and he was cleared.
The Manson connection came more than a year later. In December 1969 the Mendocino County sheriff, Reno Bartolomie, recognized faces in the news coverage of the Tate arrests: some of the same people, Susan Atkins among them, had been held in his jail under other names. Leather thongs had been used to bind some of the Family’s victims, and the pregnancy invited comparison with Sharon Tate. But nobody could tie the Family to the trailers. Years afterward, Dulaney’s former husband asked Manson in prison about “that thing up in Ukiah.” According to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Manson answered, “You’ll never know, will ya?” The case has never been solved.
Laurence Merrick made the 1972 documentary Manson, which included interviews with armed women from the Family and was nominated for an Academy Award. Sharon Tate had once been a student at his acting school in Hollywood. On January 26, 1977, a gunman shot him once in the back in the school’s parking lot. He made it inside, lifted his shirt to show the wound, and died about an hour later at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. He was fifty.
Because of the film, the killing went straight onto the Manson list. The investigating detectives did not think it belonged there. Witnesses said the gunman, a heavy-set man in his twenties, had been hanging around the school for two days and had asked people which one was Merrick, apparently because he could not recognize him. “The feeling is they had nothing to do with it,” the Hollywood homicide detective Paul Osten said two days after the shooting.
The death closest to the trial itself was that of a defense lawyer. Ronald Hughes was thirty-five, a burly, bearded man who had passed the California bar on his fourth attempt and had known the Family before the murders. He had no office and slept on a mattress on the floor of a garage with holes in the roof. The press called him the “hippie lawyer,” for his long hair and beard, his way of living and his frank admission that he had used hallucinogens. The Tate-LaBianca case was his first trial. According to one account, he went into it wearing a suit he had bought for five dollars at an MGM prop auction in May 1970, a suit Spencer Tracy had worn in Inherit the Wind, because it was cheap and it fit. At the Tate-LaBianca trial he represented Leslie Van Houten, and by the end his defense of her appeared to be running against Manson’s. Stephen Kay, one of the prosecutors, later recalled Manson telling Hughes: “I don’t want to see you in the courtroom again.”
The prosecution rested on November 16, 1970, after twenty-three weeks of evidence. Three days later the judge denied the defense motions for acquittal, and each defense lawyer, Hughes included, told the court that the defense rested without calling a witness, although Van Houten and the other women had wanted to testify. Over the Thanksgiving weekend that followed, as the trial neared its end, Hughes drove into the remote Sespe Hot Springs country of Ventura County with two teenage friends to camp and read the trial transcripts. Torrential rain turned the creek into a flood. The teenagers left when their car bogged down in mud; Hughes stayed behind. When he failed to appear in court on November 30, nobody was much alarmed, because he had been late before. Searches, including one led by a psychic, found nothing. In March 1971, after an anonymous caller told the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department that the Family had killed Hughes and buried him at Barker Ranch, deputies searched there too. They found no trace of him.
On Saturday, March 27, 1971, two fishermen from Glendale found a body face down in a pool in the Sespe Narrows, several miles downstream from where Hughes was last seen. Two days later, on March 29, the jury returned death sentences for Manson and the three women. The body was badly decomposed and one arm was missing. Paul Fitzgerald, another defense lawyer and Hughes’s friend, viewed it and said he was positive it was Hughes. The local paper reported no outward signs of foul play. Maxwell Keith had already replaced Hughes at Van Houten’s side.
Vincent Bugliosi later wrote, and said in interviews, that he believed Manson ordered Hughes killed, and that a Family member had called it “the first of the retaliation murders.” Kay said he was on the fence. Charlie Rudd, the Ventura County sheriff’s sergeant assigned to the investigation, said years later that the death probably had nothing to do with Manson and that there was little evidence of foul play where the body was found. Investigators at the time thought the likeliest explanation was that he drowned when the storm sent flash floods down the canyon. Accounts of the medical findings differ: one says the autopsy ruled out foul play, another that a cause of death was never determined. Both agree that nothing found on the body proved murder. No one was ever charged.
Hughes’s disappearance had one lasting legal consequence. The trial went on without him, with a new lawyer for Van Houten who had not sat through the evidence, and that was a major reason a state appeals court overturned her 1971 conviction in 1976 and ordered her retried. On July 11, 2023, after fifty-three years in custody, she was released on parole. The man whose absence reopened her case has never had his own death explained to everyone’s satisfaction.
Two other episodes are not rumors at all. In September 1970, Barbara Hoyt, an eighteen-year-old former member who was due to testify for the prosecution, was persuaded to fly to Hawaii. At the Honolulu airport, after seeing her companion off, she was encouraged to eat a hamburger and became sick; she ended up in a hospital psychiatric ward with what appeared to be an overdose of LSD. She testified anyway, on September 25. In December a grand jury indicted Catherine Share, Lynette Fromme, Ruth Ann Moorehouse, Steve Grogan and Dennis Rice for conspiracy, with the alleged objectives including assault to commit murder and preventing a witness from testifying. Asked as she left the grand jury room whether she thought someone had tried to kill her, Hoyt said, “Yeah.” Share and Rice later served short jail sentences after pleading no contest.
On the night of August 21, 1971, robbers smashed the gun racks of the Western Surplus Store on Hawthorne Boulevard and loaded about 140 guns into a van. A silent alarm brought the police, and a ten-minute gunfight followed in which a patrol car was hit twenty times. Catherine Share, Mary Brunner and Lawrence Bailey were wounded by shotgun pellets and arrested with Dennis Rice and Kenneth Como, a Folsom Prison escapee. A sheriff’s homicide lieutenant noted that threats had been made against judges, prosecutors and lawyers in the Manson cases, and that it had been said Manson and the others would be freed. Reports at the time linked the raid to talk of a plan to break Manson out. Nobody died. It showed that, two years after the murders, people around Manson were still willing to fire on the police.
One case on the list did end in court. On November 8, 1972, a hiker near Guerneville, a Russian River resort town in Sonoma County, noticed a hand protruding from the ground in a redwood grove. It belonged to James Willett, twenty-six, a former Marine from Los Angeles, buried headless in a Marine’s blue tunic. He had been shot with a .22 pistol and two shotguns, probably around October 10. Within days, Stockton police looking for one of the men who had shared a cabin with the Willetts found Willett’s station wagon parked outside a house at 720 West Flora Street. In the basement they found freshly turned earth, a pick and a shovel, and under it the body of his wife, Lauren, nineteen, shot once in the head. Their seven-month-old daughter was in the house, unharmed.
Five people were arrested there: Michael Monfort, twenty-four, and James Craig, thirty-three, both ex-convicts; Priscilla Cooper, twenty-one; and two women long identified with Manson, Nancy Pitman, twenty-four, and Lynette Fromme. Television news film from November 13 shows Monfort, Craig, Pitman and Cooper being led in handcuffs from police cars. A third man, William Goucher, already arrested in a Stockton liquor store robbery, was charged with Monfort and Craig in James Willett’s murder. The Sonoma County district attorney, John Hawkes, said Willett had been killed because the men feared he would tell police about robberies they had committed around Los Angeles. The two men had the letters “A.B.” marked on their chests, which authorities said was the symbol of the prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood; police said the possible link was being investigated. Fromme told the Associated Press from jail that she was innocent. In December the murder charge against her was reduced to being an accessory.
On April 2, 1973, Monfort pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Lauren Willett’s death. Craig, Pitman and Cooper had their murder charges reduced to being accessories after the fact, and pleaded guilty to that. Monfort, Craig and Goucher still faced murder charges in James Willett’s death. According to a 2017 account in The Kentucky Standard, Goucher confessed to James Willett’s murder and implicated the others, and Monfort and Goucher were each sentenced to five years to life for that killing. The same account says Goucher received seven years to life for Lauren’s death, which does not match the earlier report that Monfort was the one who pleaded guilty to it; the exact division of the sentences is not settled by the sources here.
James Willett deserves more than a place in a list of Manson crimes. He was a Marine who had served in Vietnam and was living in Los Angeles with Lauren and their baby daughter. The couple had fallen in with former Manson associates in 1972. A few months before he died, his father later said, James had told him he wanted to move away from Los Angeles. Why he was killed has never been settled in public. Prosecutors said the men feared he would tell police about their robberies; other accounts say he had threatened to turn them in. Either way, he and Lauren were killed by people they had been living alongside, and their daughter was left in a house with her mother buried in the basement. Neighbors on West Flora Street later told a student reporter that when police raided the house, one of the women opened the door with the baby in her arms.
This is the one death on the list that people around the Family were convicted of. It happened while Manson himself was in prison.
The last episode that kept the Manson name attached to political violence was not a killing either. On September 5, 1975, Lynette Fromme, one of the most loyal of the women, pointed a loaded .45-caliber pistol at President Gerald Ford from arm’s length as he shook hands near the State Capitol in Sacramento. That summer she and Sandra Good had been visiting newspaper offices with statements in Manson’s name, one of which warned that homes would be “bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca houses and My Lai put together.” FBI agents interviewed Manson at San Quentin for an hour and a half. “We came up with absolutely nothing of any evidentiary value or any lead value either,” an FBI spokesman said, and the U.S. attorney and Sacramento’s police chief both said they had no evidence of Manson’s involvement.
The 2012 announcement that opened this story came out of a fight over property, not a fresh investigation. After the 1969 arrests, Tex Watson talked for hours with his lawyer, Bill Boyd, and the conversations were recorded on eight cassette tapes. In 1976 Boyd let a chaplain buy a copy of the tapes for $49,000, as partial payment of Watson’s legal fees, and the recordings fed into Watson’s 1978 book, Will You Die for Me? Boyd died in 2009, his firm went bankrupt, and the tapes sat among the assets.
The LAPD wanted them. Chief Charlie Beck wrote to the U.S. Justice Department that detectives believed Watson might have discussed “additional unsolved murders committed by followers of Charles Manson.” A federal bankruptcy judge in Texas, Brenda Rhoades, agreed that the LAPD could have them, on the ground that by letting the tapes be sold for a book, Watson had given up his attorney-client privilege. Watson, through his lawyer Kelly Puls, fought the ruling and maintained that the Family had committed no other killings. In March 2013 U.S. District Judge Richard Schell upheld the decision, noting that Watson had also filed a statement saying he was willing to let the police hear the tapes, which on its own amounted to a waiver. “The LAPD is pleased that the judge ruled in our favor,” Commander Smith said. He had been careful from the start about what the department expected: “Do we expect to find something in the recordings? We just don’t know.”
By the summer of 2013 detectives had the tapes and had begun to listen. In the years since, the department has announced no charge, no closed case and no new victim arising from them. That silence is not proof that nothing is there. It is also not proof that anything is.
The belief that the Family had buried more victims led, in May 2008, to an actual search. A Mammoth Lakes police sergeant, Paul Dostie, had taken his cadaver dog to Barker Ranch, the Family’s last hideout in the Panamint Mountains, and the dog alerted at several spots. Scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory tested the soil, and Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze authorized a limited excavation. Over two days a crew dug and sifted the sites judged most likely to hold remains. They found a shell casing, a pack rat’s nest and an old archaeological site, and no human remains. “There have been no human remains found,” Lutze said, and in June he announced there would be no further testing. Dostie, by then retired, did not accept the result. He continued to believe that bodies could be buried at Barker Ranch and that the searchers had simply not dug deep enough. No later excavation has tested that belief.
Set side by side, the cases sort themselves. Nine murders were proven in court. One more, Lauren Willett’s, ended in guilty pleas by people around the Family. The attempt on Barbara Hoyt, the Hawthorne shootout and the gun pointed at a president were real crimes by Manson’s followers, and nobody died in them. Ronald Hughes’s death remains a matter of opinion among the men who worked the case, with the detective assigned to it doubting any link. Laurence Merrick’s killing was judged by its own detectives to have nothing to do with the Family. The rest are unsolved killings whose link rests on timing, place and the nature of the wounds. That kind of link can be a reason to look. It is not a finding. The one investigation that tested a connection directly, in the case of Reet Jurvetson, went as far as questioning Manson and found nothing.
The LAPD’s dozen cases from 2012 have never been named in public. Until they are, the honest count of Manson Family murders is the one the courts arrived at: nine, and beyond them the killings of James and Lauren Willett three years later, for which people who had stayed near him were convicted.
• October 14, 1968: Clyda Dulaney and Nancy Warren are found strangled near Ukiah. Unsolved. • December 30, 1968: Marina Habe is abducted from her mother’s driveway in West Hollywood. Her body is found on January 1, 1969. Unsolved. • May 19, 1969: Rose Tashman is found strangled near Mulholland Drive. Unsolved; not tied to the Family. • July 1969: Gary Hinman is killed in Topanga Canyon. • August 9 and 10, 1969: Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca are killed. • Late August 1969: Donald “Shorty” Shea is killed at Spahn Ranch. • 1969: Joel Pugh is found dead in a London hotel. Ruled a suicide. • November 1969: Doreen Gaul and James Sharp are found dead in Los Angeles. Unsolved. • November 16, 1969: The body later identified as Reet Jurvetson is found off Mulholland Drive. Unsolved. • September 1970: Barbara Hoyt is given LSD in a hamburger in Honolulu. She testifies on September 25. • November 1970: Ronald Hughes goes missing in the Sespe country. Robin Graham disappears on November 15. • March 27, 1971: Hughes’s body is found. Two days later the jury returns death sentences. • August 21, 1971: The Hawthorne gun-store shootout. • November 1972: James and Lauren Willett are found buried near Guerneville and in Stockton. Guilty pleas follow in April 1973. • September 5, 1975: Lynette Fromme points a pistol at President Ford in Sacramento. • January 26, 1977: Laurence Merrick is shot in Hollywood. Detectives doubt any Family link. • December 1977: Shorty Shea’s remains are found after Steve Grogan draws a map. • May 2008: The Barker Ranch excavation finds no human remains. • October 2012 to March 2013: The LAPD announces it is reviewing about a dozen cases and wins access to the Watson tapes. • April 2016: Jane Doe 59 is identified as Reet Jurvetson.