Rick Spence: evaluation

Transcript context

…How was he able to do that? Sorry to interrupt. Because you said he was a petty criminal. It does seem he was pretty prolific in his petty crimes. He did a lot of them. He had a lot of access to LSD. Which he started getting at the free clinic in San Francisco. So lots of it floating around. Some descriptions of the family at Spahn Ranch is that people were basically taking acid on a daily basis, which by the way was also a potential problem with Linda Kasabian’s testimony since she also admitted to being high most of the time, and also thinking she was a witch. Where do you want to go with that? See, if Manson wasn’t Manson, if he hadn’t actually acted like the crazed hippie, psycho goofball that Bugliosi painted him as being, then Kasabian’s testimony wouldn’t have been as strong because you could… I mean, the first thing against her is you’ve got an immunity for telling the story the prosecution wants. That’s a little iffy, and we won’t even bring in the witch and the drugs and being in love with Bobby Beausoleil. So if Manson had been dressed like you, sitting there in a suit and tie, and behaved himself and spoken normally… This isn’t to say that he wasn’t guilty as hell. So what he supposedly did to inspire all of these killings, and I think that’s probably beginning with the Hinman killing, he told him to go over there and get the money one way or the other. I don’t know whether he told him, “If you don’t get the money, kill him.” But, Hinman’s dead. And then he might also have seen the value in terms of having copycat killings as a way of throwing off any other blame. The other story you get is that one of the people who had lived at the Cielo house where Sharon Tate was before, was a record producer by the name of Terry Melcher. Melcher supposedly, as the general story goes, had welched on a deal with Manson in terms of a record contract. He screwed over Manson in some sort of a record deal, and Manson wanted to get revenge and sent them to kill everybody in the house, which again, doesn’t make much sense. One, Manson knew that Melcher wasn’t living there anymore. He probably knew where Melcher was living. If he wanted to get Melcher, he could have found him. It wasn’t that difficult to do. And so it’s not revenge on Terry Melcher that drew him there. He was familiar with the house. So if the idea was to simply commit random killings that would muddy the whole waters with the Hinman killing, then you might pick some place you knew of. He knew the place was [inaudible 02:44:23]. There would be someone there, and you really didn’t care, in the same way that the LaBiancas seemed to have been. Manson was familiar with that because it supposedly had been the scene of creepy crawling. This is little interesting things that the family would be taught to do. Creepy crawling is when you sneak into somebody’s house at night while they’re there asleep, or when they’re not there, and you move things around. So when they get up in the morning or they come home, they’ll suddenly notice that someone has been in their house, which will freak them out, which is the whole point of that. But it doesn’t seem like the murder or the creepy crawling was the… Well, creepy crawling maybe. But it doesn’t seem like the murder… Like some of the other people you’ve covered like the Zodiac Killer, the murder is the goal. Maybe there’s some psychopathic artistry to the murder that the Zodiac Killer had and the messaging behind that. But it seems like, at least the way you’re describing it with the Charles Manson family, the murder was just… They just had a basic disregard for human life, and the murder was a consequence of operating in the drug underworld.…

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