In the period leading up to Manson's trial for the Tate–LaBianca murders, Watkins provided the prosecution with information that clarified the "Helter Skelter" motive.
"[citation needed] In the same December 1967 week in which he was put on probation after an arrest for marijuana possession, two friends of his were returned dead from the Vietnam War.
[1] For Watkins, there followed three-and-a-half months of hippie desultoriness, most of it spent taking care of a farm that was near Big Sur and whose owner had picked up the hitchhiking youth before going on to Hawaii.
Watkins returned to the Los Angeles area, where, at a San Fernando Valley street corner, he was recognized and picked up in a hollowed-out school bus that was painted black, driven by the same two Manson girls, who had greeted him at the door of the Topanga Canyon house.
They worked on music for their intended album and began preparing dune buggies and other vehicles for their escape to Death Valley, where, according to Watkins, they would survive the America-ravaging war.
One day, as he looked out a window of the Canoga Park house, he wondered to himself whether the violence of Helter Skelter would reach the Family.
[9] His fear that the Family was lingering too long in the soon-to-be-war-torn Los Angeles area prompted him, in late June 1969, to ask Manson when the group would be leaving for the desert.
(The suspect was William Garretson, a youth who was employed as caretaker of the property where the Tate murders took place and who happened to have been the only person found alive on the premises the morning after the killings.
)[3] The story did not indicate that the words "Healter [sic] Skelter" had been written in LaBianca's blood at the crime site, that information not having leaked to the press.
For a month, Manson, situated at Myers Ranch, vied with Crockett for psychological sway over the Family members who had come into the prospector's orbit.
[14] Manson deployed his women as sexual lures, undertook intimidating visits in which he and others would fire shotguns on the Barker Ranch property, and jousted with Crockett in abstract discussions.
But when, for instance, Manson asked him to join the efforts to find the entry to the underground hideaway in which the Family was supposedly to survive the cataclysm, he declined to do so.
He related a Manson admission, made to him shortly after the Family had moved to the desert, of participation in the killing of Spahn ranch hand Donald "Shorty" Shea, murdered not long after the Tate–LaBianca crimes.
Watkins visited Manson at the Los Angeles County jail and moved in with Family members at a house in Van Nuys.
The girls had learned of statements that Watkins had made to law officers and that Manson's lawyer had obtained through an inevitable motion for discovery.
The testimony of Watkins and one of the other male defectors traced the growth of Manson's view of Helter Skelter from a vague vision to an inspiration for crime.
[3] Most important were the details provided by Watkins in the period leading up to the trial, which enabled the prosecution to understand Manson's stake in the war the killings were intended to trigger.
At war's end, Charles Manson, reform-school boy and convicted criminal, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, would rule California.
He was the unofficial mayor of Tecopa, a small Death Valley town, where he lived with his second wife and their two daughters, one of whom is writer Claire Vaye Watkins.