Sadie and the Champ

This photo is not evidence of anything criminal, just kind of funny and coincidental. Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the high school of none other than Susan Atkins, standing directly to the left of her (from our view) and they took a very cool and happy photo together.

Who is Bernard Crowe?

(and why did Manson think he was dead?)

   To get to that answer you first need to know that, like many other live-ins at Spahn, Tex came and went one or two times. November of 1968 was one of those times. He decided to move out and live with a friend, Luella, with whom he had made a decent amount of money selling weed. He liked Luella but she was pretty into the whole “free spirit” type of thing. He elaborates greatly on their relationship and their life in the Hollywood apartment in his book ‘Would you die for me?’ in a chapter called “Happy in Hollywood”. Their friendship got a little weird when she ended up getting pregnant and having an abortion in Mexico, as it typically does. By March of 69’ he was back with the Fam, commuting between there and Hollywood trying to get Luella to go with him. His attempts were sincere but she refused to go past the front gate.

   Living back in Hollywood had changed Tex, he was dressing nicer, he was getting his hair styled and started to go by “Charles” again. When he left mainstream society again, it seemed the need to prove himself to his old friends outweighed his need to not get arrested. So then this happened:

   This photo is referred to as the “Belladonna Mug Shot” for obvious reasons, which I am about to tell you. This photo was taken in April in Van Nuys, CA after Charles was arrested for taking an insane amount of Belladonna root and slithering on all fours yelling, “beep beep beep!”. He describes himself in the mug shot as looking like a “demented animal”. (Side note: This arrest is the reason why he was fingerprinted for the first time in his life, a print that was later collected from the front door at 10050 Cielo Dr.)

   Because of Mansons new driving force (the upcoming race war), money was their main focus. He had heard Tex talk about Luella and their life together and she was semi-loaded, he thought it necessary for her former roomie to ask her for money so they could buy dune buggies. She wasn’t really feelin’ that. So he decides to setup a fake drug transaction that ended up involving a man by the name of Bernard “Lotsapapa” Crowe (told ya I’d get to it).

And I’ll let the man himself explain how it was to be done:

   “I called Luella… on July 1 and said that the Family had $100 and wanted to buy a kilo of grass, but our Mafia vending-machine connection would only sell 25 kilos at a throw, for a cool $2,500…. She called back and told me that she knew somebody who was interested in buying the extra kilos, but she needed to make some money out of the deal as well.”

   They made an arrangement where they would pay the Family’s “connection” $2,500 for the 25 kilos, but charge Luella’s client $125 a piece that way they would get 3 kilo’s free and Luella would make a couple hundred bucks. The only stipulation was that Watson was the only one allowed to meet with the Family’s connection.

   “T.J. would drive me down to LA and drop me near Luella’s apartment to make it look like I’d hitchhiked. He’d then go on to the dealer’s place on the other side of town, parking in the back of the apartment house out of which the man worked. Luella would drive me back there with the money, and I’d go in the front door and out the back with the bread, leaving her to explain things to her friend.”

   Here is the problem, you guys. Luella had herself a friend and, you guessed it, it was Bernard “Big Crow” “Lotsapapa/Lotsapoppa/Lotsanicknames” Crowe. Crowe was her client who was prepared to spend $2750 on all of those fake kilos and he wasn’t really cozy with the idea of just handing it over to this shifty looking hippie with no security. “While he and one of his boys waited downstairs in their big black Caddy, another one of his men tried to talk Luella and me into letting them come with us. I tried everything I could think of, including walking out of the door, but finally we ended up riding out to the connection’s apartment in Crowe’s big black car, with his men on either side of us, just like something out of a movie.”

   They allowed Tex to go in alone and kept Luella in the car as collateral. “When Crowe threatened violence to her if I tried to cheat them, I gave him one of my Texas grins and drawled that they should know I’d be coming back when they had my girl.” I think we could all guess what happens next. “… it didn’t much matter to me what they did to Luella, as long as I got the money for Charlie. They gave me the cash and I went straight into the front of the apartment and straight out the back and T.J. and I were off to the ranch.” Such a peach.

   They got to the ranch and were mid-shoulder pat when the phone rang, how annoying. Guess who! It was now Charlie’s turn to do his part. He tried to explain to Crowe and Luella that Tex had left weeks ago and he had no idea where he had gone but they were not really buying it. According to Tex, Crowe then threatened to come down to Spahn ranch and kill everyone there. He sent Sadie and Tex to the hills with a sleeping bag and said he’d “deal with Crowe”.

   T.J. informed him the next day that Charlie had gone to the apartment where Crowe lived with Randy Starr’s .22 Bluntline Revolver (sound familiar?). T.J. was supposed to shoot him but he froze up and just hid behind Manson. After a brief back and forth, Charlie grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger…aaaand nothing. Twice. Just as the towering black man begins to taunt them, the gun goes off and Crowes got a hole in his chest/stomach. Before running out, Charlie points the gun at one of she victim’s friends and demands he give him his jacket. Why? Because it was buckskin and it had fringe, duh. (This is the jacket he would later be wearing when arrested for “grand theft auto” at Barker Ranch, his last moment of freedom) Ok but then they bailed.

Charlie was on a high and couldn’t stop talking about how he “plugged the blackie” back at home. They had all assumed he was dead by the next day when news had come out that the body of a Black Panther had been dumped near UCLA. Charlie’s delusions of Helter Skelter were heightened as was his paranoia when more black men were renting horses at the ranch than usual. He thought the Panthers were really zeroing in on him at this point so they should probably get moving soon.

Ready for the happy ending? Well, for one person.

“Much later I learned that Bernard Crowe- who in fact never had anything to do with the Panthers- had not been killed, only wounded. His friends had taken him away and had lain low, fearful that if Charlie found out the Big Crow was still alive he might have come after him again.” Crowe lived his entire life with that bullet sitting in his stomach. During the trials of the Tate-LaBianca murders, the prosecution offered to have the bullet removed because it would prove the same gun was used in both shootings, Crowe refused because it’s a slightly risky operation. Charlie said he thought he saw a ghost the day that Bernard Crowe took the stand at his trial. That was the first time Manson had seen him since he left him bleeding on the floor of his apartment that day.

Mystery about the connection between Manson Family to the Satanic Church solved! There is none...

In the days and weeks following the Tate-LaBianca murders the term"ritualistic" and "satanic" were thrown around loosely and often. The LaVey family had a big problem with these rumors. Anton Lavey, mentioned in previous posts, was the founder of the Satanic Church and writer of the Satanic Bible (among other published works). The quote below is taken from an interview with Zeena LaVey, Anton's Daughter, the full interview can be found HERE

Zeena, Le Dossier Manson tries to put some truth in a story which is rather based on myths and fantasies than on what really happened. Can you clear up for us the myth about the relationships between the Manson family and the Church of Satan? Were they just at the same place at the same moment or were there much more intimate connections between the two?

Zeena : The story of how there came to be a perceived connection between Manson, Polanski, and The Church of Satan could be a book in itself. And although I’m centrally positioned with all the data to pen such a volume, I have no interest in that endeavor so this answer will have to suffice.

It's well known that my father hired Susan Atkins as a stripper for his Witch's Review night club act in San Francisco. Bobby Beausoleil's involvement with Kenneth Anger, who was very enmeshed in my family's lives at the same time, has also been well documented. But those two drifted into my family’s orbit independent of each other. And these brief connections were made before Atkins and Beausoleil even met Manson. Even when the news of Beausoleil’s murder of Hinman reached us, which came to us personally via Anger, we had no knowledge of the name "Manson". Only when the news broke about Susan Atkins’s involvement in the Hinman and Tate murders did we recognize Atkins and first heard media talk of her supposed "guru". But we just assumed she was the type of drifter there were so many of in the 60's that got "passed around" from one group to the next, looking for a leader.

After the media depicted Manson as a "satanic" cult leader, The Church of Satan, with its then very "law and order" and pro-Hollywood public image as counter-culture to the counter-culture stance needed to take a hard-line opposition to the murders and the so-called Manson Family. There was also the fear that someone might leak the fact that Susan Atkins had been directly associated with a Church of Satan event, which would’ve been a public relations disaster at the height of LaVey's popularity. So, LaVey granted numerous interviews in part to take the opportunity to do damage control to avoid guilt-by-association media accusations. Many of his early 70s interviews in my files underscore the difference between what he thought the Manson Family, and even the victims - who he also disliked for their "hippie aesthetic" - represented as opposed to the Church of Satan ideology. Even during Manson's trial, one of the Manson girls wrote a standard form letter asking The Church of Satan for help for his case. My mother filed it away, never to speak of it again until she met Nikolas many years later and gave him a photocopy of it. But to her it was just something to be filed away under "nut cases" - "do not respond", which certainly makes it clear there was no prior connection between the two groups.

Without a doubt, the media’s inaccurate portrayal of the Tate-LaBianca murders as ”ritual” and the Manson "Family" as a satanic cult directly led to satanism as we experienced it from being thought of as a "fun cocktail party", a devilish Playboy-After-Dark, to something dangerous that needed to be stamped out. By the early '70's, by the time Helter Skelter came out, there was a marked shift in the difficulties The Church of Satan had to deal with both publicly and privately in terms of daily harassment and vandalism to our home, death threats, letter bombs, telephone abuse, murderous stalking, kidnapping, murder and rape threats against my sister and me, and accusations of sacrifice, murder, and what later became the full-blown '80s "satanic panic".

So it went without saying that after 1969 The Church of Satan's party-line, for its own survival, was to distance itself from anything to do at all with Manson and his associates. This was a firm Edict passed down from the Black Pope himself. No, I'm not joking, it was deadly serious. In interviews, we were not to even suggest flirting with the very idea of an association with the Manson Family. My father’s cover-up of his having known Susan Atkins succeeded until she let the cat out of the bag in her autobiography, which led to a new wave of problems for The Church of Satan. You’ll notice that even in some of my own interviews as High Priestess of the Church of Satan prior to meeting Nikolas I dutifully maintain my father's party-line about that topic. That’s how firmly The Church of Satan was Anti-Manson.

Until 1988 when Nikolas contacted LaVey to interview him for a book he was doing on satanism in general. When my father saw the treatment Nikolas gave a notorious reviled character like Manson in The Manson File and noticed the media attention it got, I watched LaVey's attitude about Manson change over night. Old LaVeyan satanism's ego stepped in and thought, "If he can do that for Manson, what could he do for ME???" LaVey promptly presented Nikolas with a bright red membership card to The Church of Satan and proclaimed him an "Agent" which basically meant, "I'm flattering you into wanting to write The LaVey File." I was living in Los Angeles at the time and heard from my father about this writer who came to interview him, who'd written a book on Manson. In the past year, I'd already begun to notice that Manson and I were always on the same T.V. shows together, and wondered if Manson wasn’t being as falsely portrayed by the media as I was. Gradually, I began to back off of our party-line about Manson and just leave it out of my interviews. But when my own father who was so rabidly hostile to Manson called me in Los Angeles and told me I've got to see this guy Nikolas on an upcoming TV interview promoting his The Manson File, I thought my father had gone senile. You can imagine after the previous years hearing this sudden turnaround in attitude about Manson and how shocked I was. This was totally against everything he stood for. But anything to get a similar book about himself which might rehabilitate his image too.

There was absolutely NO public connection between The Church of Satan and Manson until 1988 when I was invited to perform at the 8-8-88 rally as the High Priestess of the Church of Satan. By the way, there’ve been numerous reports that Anton LaVey either attended that rally or performed at that rally. Let's set that record straight once and for all. He wasn't there at all that night in any way whatsoever.

After Nikolas completed Charles Manson Superstar, LaVey's insistence on a similar documentary about himself, as with The Manson File, grew even more emphatic. I'll allow Nikolas to describe the details in another forum. Briefly, video footage was shot and the beginning of a Video Werewolf documentary like Charles Manson Superstar for LaVey was begun. But LaVey made the conditions so intolerable that Nikolas put an end to the production. In short, Manson was more professional and easier to work with than LaVey. Now, twenty years later, the historical background is long covered up. People would like to conveniently forget that I've got documentation. We find extremes on all ends claiming wildly differing versions of revisionist Manson/Church of Satan history. On one extreme we find the very squeamish Church of Latter-Day Saint LaVey who believe that "Manson = Nikolas Schreck" so there can be no mention of anything to do with Manson whatsoever. On the other extreme, you've got fantasists like my very own mentally challenged offspring, who ignorantly spout whatever pops into their heads to whomever holds a microphone in front of them, without a clue about what they're talking about. People like this, whose need for attention is so out of control will babble anything, no matter how ludicrous. My estranged son for example is quoted by credulous "authors" and "journalists" as saying that Manson actually co-founded The Church of Satan with LaVey, Susan Atkins, Bobby Beausoleil et al. And the pea-brain journalists never question if this fantastic cast of characters he describes makes any sense, but report it as fact. Nor do they do just a little extra fact checking. They might learn that Manson couldn't possibly have helped found The Church of Satan in 1966 while incarcerated at Terminal Island Prison! Nor could Susan Atkins since she wasn't yet employed by LaVey in 1966 but a little too busy with two boyfriends on a cross-country robbery spree. This sort of rewriting of history is at the other extreme of the squeamish but rather of anything goes, make it up as you will.

What do Anton LaVey, Mick Jagger and Bobby Beausoleil have in common?

Not a lot, you'd think. But thanks to one Kenneth Anger there is just one thing. In an 11 minute film called 'Invocation of my Demon Brother' Anton Lavey, the founder of the church of satan and the writer of the satanic bible, is listed in the cast list as 'His Satanic Majesty', Mick Jagger plays himself, and Bobby Beausoleil, member of the Manson family, plays Lucifer. Side note: This short was created in 1969, in April of 1970 Beausoleil was convicted of the murder of Gary Hinman. He also appeared in a softcore porn film called 'The Ramrodder' which was shot, in part at Spahn Ranch where the Manson family lived. Anyway, heres the movie...