Lucifer, Arisen

When the Milky Way split up after only one gig, BeauSoleil went on the road with a few girlfriends in tow. "I was in escape mode," says BeauSoleil. "I was disgusted with the scene, the music business, the society and government of this country. I had these weird visions of sailing away to Jamaica and living on the beach and eating lobster."

In the beginning of 1969, BeauSoleil moved to a little apartment in Laurel Canyon. Manson's group had moved onto an old western movie set in Topanga Canyon called the Spahn Movie Ranch.

"There was this sense when you visited whether you were 'in' or not. I was always on visitor status," says BeauSoleil, disputing the myth that he was part of Manson's so-called Family. "Spahn Ranch was a really fun place. It was on the fringes, and at that point the cops weren't bothering them so much. It was fun to go out there on the weekend and drink beer with the bikers."

Members of a local motorcycle gang, the Straight Satans, sometimes dropped by the ranch. BeauSoleil, who was feeling "depressed and drifting," began to idealize their seemingly free, rebellious lifestyle.

The actual facts of how and why BeauSoleil killed Gary Hinman, a music teacher and associate of the Manson crowd, will probably forever remain a mystery. Some of BeauSoleil's version of the events can be corroborated by the testimony of Danny DeCarlo, a Straight Satan who claimed BeauSoleil confessed to him and who testified at BeauSoleil's first trial, which ended in a hung jury. Some cannot. According to BeauSoleil (who denies confessing to DeCarlo and who claims DeCarlo got his information from one of BeauSoleil's accomplices), the nightmare started when the Straight Satans asked him to buy them some mescaline, and BeauSoleil scored from Hinman. Then, says BeauSoleil, he found out from the gang that the drugs had been "bunk." When BeauSoleil returned to Hinman's with two of Manson's girlfriends, he says, it was to try to get the money back for the Satans.

According to both BeauSoleil and DeCarlo's testimony, BeauSoleil held a gun to Hinman, then pistol-whipped him. The music teacher insisted he had no money, BeauSoleil says, and one of the girls telephoned Manson during the scuffle. Hinman had already agreed to sign over ownership of his two junker cars, BeauSoleil says, when there was a knock at the door. According to both BeauSoleil and DeCarlo, Manson rushed in and slashed Hinman's face with a small sword, splitting his ear.

"I heard Manson say something to me like, 'That's how you be a man,'" BeauSoleil said in a revealing interview with writer/ musician Michael Moynihan in Seconds magazine.

Manson left, and, panicking, BeauSoleil says he tried to sew up Hinman's face with dental floss. "I knew he'd tell them what happened if he went to the hospital," says BeauSoleil. "I was trying to tell him, 'Gary, it will heal, you don't have to go to the hospital.' But he was freaking out -- for obvious reasons -- worried about infection ... he was going to have a scar for life."

BeauSoleil dialed Manson again, screaming at him for leaving him in such a terrible position.

"Well, you know what to do as well as I do," Manson told him, according to DeCarlo and BeauSoleil.

"I kind of had to screw up my courage," BeauSoleil says. "I went outside and paced. I freaked out. Just freaked out. There wasn't anybody in the room when I stabbed him. I rushed at him. I stabbed him once, and he didn't fall. Then I did it again, and he did."

In DeCarlo's version of things, there was no drug burn; BeauSoleil and the girls just wanted money, and Hinman wasn't cooperating. It was BeauSoleil, DeCarlo told investigators, who called Manson the first time, complaining Hinman wouldn't give it up.

In a clumsy attempt to make the police think one of Hinman's radical lefty friends had done him in, a member of the trio (BeauSoleil says he can't remember who) scrawled "political piggies" on the wall in blood before leaving. Ten days later, BeauSoleil was arrested driving one of the dead man's cars with the murder weapon in the rear wheel well.

The Tate-LaBianca murders went down within three days of BeauSoleil's arrest. Some speculate the motive for the murders was to free BeauSoleil, by making it look like Hinman's "real" killer had struck again. On the wall of the LaBiancas' house, police found the word "piggies" written in blood.