Link Sought In Bay, Tate Murders
Tuesday, December 16th, 1969
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 16 – Investigators from four Northern California police jurisdictions were in Los Angeles today seeking possible links between the Sharon Tate murders and unsolved killings in their areas.
Two detectives from San Jose questioned several members of the “Manson family” held as suspects in the Tate slayings.
Several members of the nomadic commune are believed to have been in the San Jose area about the time Kathy Snoozy, 15, and Deborah Furlong, 14, were stabbed to death last Aug. 2.
The two San Jose girls were stabbed more than 100 times each in an apparently senseless double murder.
Investigators from San Francisco and Napa also are interested in the hippie cult in connection with the “Zodiac” slayings in the Bay Area. There are five unsolved murders linked to this “thrill” — four in Napa County and one in San Francisco.
A spokesman for the San Francisco detective in Southern California said there are no concrete links with the Tate case “but we don’t want to overlook anything.”
The fourth investigator is from Mendocino County. There are certain similarities in the Tate murders and a double slaying near Ukiah in the fall of last year. Clyda Dulany, 24, and her grandmother, Mrs. Nancy Warren, 64, were garroted with rawhide boot lacings in their trailer home. Members of the “Manson family” were known to have passed through this area a number of times in their travels to and from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.
Gov. Albert Brewer of Alabama yesterday signed extradition papers for the return of one of the principal suspects in the Tate murders. Similar documents were on the desk of the governor of Texas.
The extradition section of the district attorney’s office said the attorneys general of those states had promised full cooperation in expediting the cases of Charles “Tex” Watson, 24, in McKinney, Tex., and Patricia Krenwinkel, 21, held in Mobile, Ala.
Susan Denise Atkins has told authorities that Watson and Miss Krenwinkel and herself were the three persons who actually went into the Tate residence the night of Aug. 8 when five persons were killed there. All three have been charged with murder that case and in the killing next day of a wealthy Southern California grocery chain owner and his wife.
Miss Atkins, 21, today pleaded innocent to the Tate murders charge. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William B. Keene set trial for Feb. 9.
During the weekend, officers searched the Mulholland Drive area in the mountains north of Los Angeles for a murder weapon and clothes which Miss Atkins says were discarded after the Tate killings. The only find was a rusty revolver and it was not believed to be the one used in the Tate killing.
In another development, a television news crew found three black T-shirts, one white T-shirt and three pairs of black jeans stained with what appeared to be blood near the Benedict Canyon estate where Tate and four other persons were slain.
A spokesman for KABC-TV said the clothing, which was knotted in a bundle, was turned over to police.
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