Jan. 27 – A jury of representative citizens has pondered the evidence and reached its verdict, and now the long and arduous trial phase of the Manson murder case is over. Ahead lies still more testimony as prelude to the recommendation of penalties. Then the jury will mercifully be done with its labors. After that will come the lengthy and exhaustive process of appeals.

But for a worldwide public that has followed the whole grisly affair with shocked fascination, the case to all purposes is over. The law has done its work. The guilt of individuals accused of premeditated murders has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. In a narrow sense this is the end of it.

In a narrow sense only, however. For in the case of Charles Manson and his “girls” there plainly is far more involved than the determination of responsibility in the killing of seven persons. A trial can tell us what happened; it cannot always tell us why. In this case we have seen potboiler fiction come to life, pornographic fantasy made real. And the great troubling questions remain.

The answers we seek are locked away in the minds of the defendants, and perhaps not even they have the keys to release them. We do not know, we may never know, what combination of compulsions and influences caused them to act as they did, caused them to commit mass murder. We are confronted in this case with the incomprehensible, and our ignorance leaves us all uncomfortable and a little afraid.

One begins with the special horror that the victims in this case were random, accidental choices. They were not killed for profit or vengeance or in the heat of passion. Presumably they were murdered only because their tormentors wanted the thrill of murdering. The victims could have been anyone. The purpose of the killers would have been served the same.

Was the strange subculture from which the killers emerged somehow responsible for their behavior? Certainly it provided a camouflage, a background into which they could blend. Certainly, too, its rejection of conventional values, its deliberate antisocial code, made it far easier for them to violate the ultimate prohibition of law and morality, the taking of other lives.

First, however, the potential for sadistic violence must have had to exist within each of the killers. The drugs and orgiastic sex which seem to have been so prominent a part of their lives together almost surely were symptoms, not causes, of the inner turmoil which finally found bloody outward release. The moral emptiness of the killers must have existed long before their lives came together, long before they set out to do murder. The hippie subculture was a convenience, perhaps in some ways a catalyst. It was probably not in itself decisive.

The killers can be condemned by law and morality, but we are still left with questions that have no clear answers. The clues perhaps are there, if we know how to read them: In the self-pitying, self-dramatizing Manson, the accused turned accuser, blaming society for the evil in him, justifying his depravity in the name of a private freedom and in his personal vision of being a second Christ.

And in the girls who still cling to him: desperately needing to be dominated, seeking always to find other selves, choosing new names, dressing up in their costumes, playing their roles, lacking all remorse and seemingly all sense of wrong to the end.

What is one to make of them all? The law has its answer; the answer in human terms is far less certain. We can lock up the convicted killers In this case, but we cannot lock away the questions of motivation and cause which their actions have raised and left unresolved.