Tate Murder Case Charges Prepared
Friday, December 5th, 1969
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 5 – Murder and conspiracy indictments will be sought against “six or more” members of a cult suspected of the Sharon Tate murders, the district attorney’s office said Thursday.
Deputy District Attorney Aaron H. Stovitz said he will ask the County Grand Jury to charge Charles Manson, leader of the cult, and other unnamed persons with the slayings.
The group, known as “The Manson Family,” may be connected with a total of 11 senseless slayings since the beginning of the year, authorities have indicated.
Susan Atkins, 19, the prosecution’s star witness, was expected to testify voluntarily about a “band in black” that descended on the Tate home—and on the house of a wealthy couple a day later—in an orgy of murder that left seven persons dead.
In another development in the sensational case, the defense attorney for a woman he said was the informant that broke the Tate case said she told him Manson’ s cult murdered a total of 18 persons.
“Many more were reportedly marked for death” by the group, according to Wesley Russell. His client, Shelley Joyce Nadell, 31, was a cellmate and confident cf Miss Atkins, the lawyer
He said Mrs. Nadell understood the killers believed the stabbings and slayings were supposed to release the “souls of the victims.”
“Mrs. Nadell turned over all the name she said she got from Mrs. Atkins to police,” Russell said. He said he feared for her life because she informed on the group. “I don’t know if she would be safer inside or outside,” he said.
Prosecutors take their case for murder indictment before the County Grand Jury Friday and Miss Atkins, who faces trial in still a third murder case, was expected to relate her almost unbelievable horror story.
Paul Caruso, her attorney, said she told him both raids were directed by Charles Manson, 34, the leader of a roving band of young people who fell under his Mystical spell.
“A man used a pair of boll cutters to cut utility lines, then crept around to the side of the house, opened a window, and then opened the front door,” Caruso said of the Tate slayings.
The five members of the “family,” dressed in black clothes and wearing black hoods, brought Sharon Tate into the living room of the Benedict Canyon estate. “Miss Tate became fearful,” Miss Atkins told Caruso. “She tried to make sure her baby wasn’t harmed. She pleaded, let me have my baby. But they killed her.”
Miss Atkins, who Caruso says was only a witness to the slayings, has said the Tate home was “a symbol of rejection” to Manson, who had a grudge against affluent people because of his troubled childhood.
She said Terry Melcher, who produces “The Doris Day Show” for his mother, once lived in the home and refused to help Manson, an aspiring singer, to cut a record.
Manson told his followers to kill the “pigs” at the estate as revenge for his rejection, she said. But by then Melcher had moved out and Sharon Tate had moved in.
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