Murder threat by Manson

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32564, 25 March 1971, Page 11

Murder threat by Manson

(N.Z.P. A. -Reuter—Copyright!

LOS ANGELES, March 24. The Sharon Tate murder trial jury were ordered back into supervised confinement today after the accused hippie leader, Charles Manson, had threatened murder and bloodshed if he was sentenced to death.

Thus, the jurors lost overnight their freedom of movement, restored after seven months of the nine-month-long trial. Judge Charles Older ordered the jury of seven men and five women into confinement to prevent them from seeing the text of Manson’s threat, which was published in Los Angeles last night under banner headlines in the newspapers.

Manson was quoted as saying: “If I get the death penalty, there’s going to be nothing but murder and bloodshed afterwards, because I’m not going to take it.”

Manson, who is 36, is charged with sending a group of his followers to kill five people in the home of the actress, Sharon Tate, on August 9, 1969, and of sending them to kill a couple the next night because the first murders were “too messy.” Patricia Krenwinkel, aged 23, Susan Atkins, aged 22, and Leslie van Houten, aged 21. are on trial with Manson. For van Houten, Mr Maxwell Keith told the jury that the naivete and drug habits of his young client, a high school drop-out from a good middle-class family, had left “a vacuum for the intrusion of the devil.” Mr Keith did not name Manson as the “devil” in his address, but he told reporters outside the courtroom that he would do so if given an opportunity of rebuttal argument. For Krenwinkel, Mr Paul Fitzgerald said: “She got on a bus and was driven down a one-way road to madness—a one-way road to a demen-

ted, perverse land of Alice in Wonderland, where reality was fantasy and fantasy reality, where love i was hate and hate love.”