Loose Diamonds Read Online Free PDF Page A

door” was a
three-mile hike, at best. Nor did we expect that the fear and sense of danger
would be palpable in the flat, desert air.
    Squeaky jumped off the fence to greet me, landing
softly almost on her toes. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had been a
dancer, a professional dancer as a child, as there was an agility to the way
she’d been sitting on the fence, a sort of light-as-a-feather aspect. And it
went along with that self-image thing of even though she was perfectly formed
that her image of herself, as is true of many dancers, was slightly skewed. All
I’m saying is, she was susceptible.
    There was an openness to her that was disarming,
and like I said, she wasn’t under any investigation for anything, so I wondered
why she stayed, which prompted me to ask her how she’d come to be there in the
first place.
    It was like listening to a love story that you knew
was going to go wrong, like a modern-day version of a Jean Rhys story with
darker undertones or a Françoise Sagan tale that wasn’t going to end up with
someone crying in the back of a Jag.
    Her father was abusive. I don’t remember in what
way, if it was alcohol or violence or a combination of both. And, even though
her decision to leave her parents’ home may well have been justified, she was
clearly at a willful adolescent age. She’d had an argument with her father that
left her homeless (or at least believing she was homeless), i.e., she’d left
intending never to return. Witness her stubborn nature, she never did return. As
she tells the story, she didn’t get very far. She didn’t have anywhere to go.
She was sitting under a streetlamp, on the sidewalk in Venice, California (in
those days, a shady neighborhood at best). She was reading a book when Charlie
walked down the street and found her there. They started to talk and as she
explained, and I sort of understood it when she said it, “Charlie was the first
person who ever told me I was pretty.” She hesitated and then she added, “And
so, I went with him.”
    I didn’t ask her about the murders. That was
off-limits as the trial was ongoing. But she did say they thought the whole
thing was a sham, that there was no way Charlie could get a fair trial, and that
the Helter Skelter theory was sort of ridiculous. There were a lot of us
covering the trial who agreed with her about the Helter Skelter theory. The idea
that Charlie Manson had somehow been hypnotized by the Beatles’ song and that
the murders were an attempt to create a race war in Los Angeles seemed a little
far-fetched. There were rumors of more logical explanations—a drug deal gone
bad, prior relationships between the victims and their attackers. But since
Charlie hadn’t been at any of the murders, the prosecutor had to come up with a
“conspiracy” theory in order to convict him, which was sort of brilliant on the
prosecutor’s part and so “out there” that it was sort of astonishing that it
worked. I’m not saying any of them were innocent. There was no question they
were guilty. Except for Squeaky. And I just couldn’t figure out why she stayed.
It was clear whatever train she’d been on had definitely derailed, and if you
were fortunate enough to be able to jump off without even a scratch, why not
take the jump?
    A logical explanation for this would be that she
was dumb. But she was smart and well-read and soft-spoken. She was, however,
under the influence of someone who was arguably the head of a cult or a “family”
as they called themselves. If they’d been a Mormon family (i.e., polygamists
instead of murderers), the state might have intervened and social workers would
have been in evidence, but there was a kind of hands-off attitude around the
state and aid was not in the equation. Stockholm Syndrome might have applied but
that’s not very sympathetic in our society either as, a few years later, Patty
Hearst, after being kidnapped by the Symbionese
Liberation Army, would be convicted for bank