August 10, 1969…2009…The End…
Leslie and Katie made their way through the open side door and were met by that oh, so large but friendly
and immediately spied Tex standing guard over Leno seated in the couch, his trusty cutlass at Leno’s throat. The trio then left the living room for the kitchen to better discuss the soon-to-be evenings events in a whisper not entirely unheard.
“You and Leslie go into the bedroom where the woman is and I’ll deal with the guy.” whispered Tex to Katie.
“Are we supposed to kill her?” asked Katie, knowing full well what the answer would be.
“Yes.” was all Tex said.
“What? What are you going to do? I’ll give you whatever you want!” Leno pleaded, sensing now, for the first time, more than just a robbery was at play. In his fear, Leno attempted to rise up from the sofa,
his wrists still bound behind his back with Charlie’s leather thongs. Seeing Leno struggling to rise and becoming more of a hassle than he was worth, Tex left the girls to find their own way to the bedroom while he marched right back into the living room and to the next male “Pig” who was speaking out of turn. Before Leno could say one more word, Tex threw Leno to the carpet, his body landing diagonally between the couch and the coffee table. Tex dropped onto his knees, ripped open Leno’s pyjama top, the buttons flying in all directions, and,
Thwack!…Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!…Thwack! Thwack!…Thwack!Thwack!
he began to thrust that cutlass deep into Leno’s chest and back eight times,
the blood immediately hitting the over-turned couch seat cushion and soaking into his pyjamas and the carpet below. Along with Katie’s “artwork” that would come later, Leno would suffer 12 stab, 14 puncture and various slicing wounds, any one of the six stab wounds were, in and of themselves, fatal blows. Leno LaBianca, wearing only a top and bottom pyjama set, soon-to-be dead, at age 44, the secret owner of nine race horses, Kildare Lady being the most famous, and a chronic gambler who paid off his $200,000 debt by embezzling funds from his family-owned Gateway Markets grocery stores.
The girls never witnessed Tex’s struggle with Leno, as they had obeyed Tex and entered the bedroom, having their own hands full with Rosemary.
When Rosemary heard the guttural sounds Leno made during the stabbing, she got up from her lamp cord confines and yelled,
“Leno, Leno! What are you doing to my husband?! Leno!”
As she did, Rosemary grabbed one of the bedside table lamps she was tethered to and started wildly swinging it at her captors. Rosemary wasn’t going down without a fight. (This wouldn’t have happened if you had tied her wrists to her back, huh Tex? Geez…)
Leslie got hold of the lamp, flung it on the bed as Katie shoved Rosemary down to the ground, face first, between the bed and the dresser. Leslie fell down beside the woman too and held her down by her arms while Katie, now straddling Rosemary raised high that Buck knife of hers, and with all the force she could muster, went,
Thwack! Thwack!Thwack!…Thwack!Thwack!…Thwack!…
slicing into her left cheek and repeatedly hitting Rosemary’s collarbone so hard that that sturdy #119 Buck bent, rendering it useless. To Katie’s credit, though, she did manage to penetrate BOTH lungs in the process and sever Rosemary’s spinal cord by stabbing into the back of her neck. Obviously a wee bit better at hitting squishy flesh than bone since Tate, but not any better at bringing death in Los Feliz than Benedict Canyon.
The girls then switched roles and it was Leslie’s turn to do some damage,
Thwack!…Thwack!Thwack!…Thwack!Thwack!Thwack!…Thwack!…
as Katie yelled for Tex to come and finish the job. And Tex did, rolling the woman over and,
Thwack!…Thwack!Thwack!
then rolling her back,
Thwack! Thwack!…Thwack! Thwack!Thwack!
stabbing her a total of eight times with that cutlass, all eight, in an of themselves, fatal blows. The total damage done to Rosemary LaBianca, aged 38, wearing only a sheer pink nightgown and a blue and white striped peignoir, a millionairess and owner of the Boutique Carriage dress-shop, would be 41 stab wounds, inflicted on her upper front and lower back torso and buttocks and the nape of her neck, severing her spinal cord, penetrating both lungs, suffering countless defensive wounds as well.
Tex, satisfied that the cutlass had done its job, put icing on that blood-soaked cake by grabbing a pillow-case from one of the bed pillows, threw it over Rosemary’s head and grabbed the electrical cord from the lamp Rosemary had tried to use as a weapon. He wrapped the cord around her neck and over that pillow-case, throttling her but good.
Job One done.
Packaged and Sealed for Freshness!
Despite the multi-person, multi-weapon attack on this petite woman, Rosemary managed to grab four brown-coloured hairs in her left hand and six brown-coloured hairs in her right, pulled, no doubt, from one or all of her attackers. Rosemary, even after all the stabs and jabs, her right and left lungs penetrated, and her spinal cord severed probably rendering her legs useless, still managed to crawl forward, leaving a good
two foot long blood trail on that carpet, in her til-death struggle to reach her husband, the electrical cord, wrapped around her neck, stretched to the breaking point, her efforts all in vain.Rosemary LaBianca went out alright but she went out in a blaze of glory. We should all be that courageous.
While Tex and Leslie put the finishing touches on Rosemary, Katie remembered Charlie’s order to leave blood writing as a copycat sign to the Hinman slaying. Katie left the bedroom and went out into the living room, intent on completing the blood-writing if still a failure at bringing death.
As she passed by the coffee table, she heard the laboured breathing of Leno, his body not yet spent and fighting for life.
Her Buck useless now, she left Leno to his gasps and strolled into the kitchen, on a K.O.A. camp counsellor treasure hunt of her very own, not for dark clothes as Sadie had been, but for a Buck knife replacement, or two. Opening and closing various drawers, she finally found the utensil drawer of her dreams. Whether she remembered the lyrics of that White Album song or not, about the fork and knife in bacon, is anyone’s guess, but a knife and fork she did find and choose to properly carve up the gasping “Pig” in the living room.
A lovely
10 inch long carving fork, and a wonderful 9.5 inch long
serrated blade steak knife. “Perfect”, was all she whispered to herself.
Making her way back to the living room, she knelt beside her new “Piggy” project, grabbed the knife with both her hands and,
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!…Thwack!
stabbed Leno’s stomach four times, ripping through his small bowel and colon as she did.
Leno was a big man, six feet tall, weighing 220 pounds, and Katie’s killing efforts were still coming up short. Dropping the knife on the carpet in disgust, she then picked up the carving fork, hoping for better results as she,
Jab!Jab!…Jab!Jab!Jab!…Jab!Jab!
puncturing his bare chest fourteen times with seven sets of jab wounds, the seventh time, leaving the fork deep inside his chest, up to the bifurcation of the tines, so Katie could “watch it wobble back and forth”.
The wobbling was from Leno’s still-laboured breathing.
He still wasn’t dead.
Katie still didn’t bring death. (What a failure you are, Katie!)
Pissed now more than just perturbed, Katie was going to bring death to this man the only way she knew how and with that serrated steak knife back in her blood-soaked hands, Katie,
Jab! Sllllliiiccceeeee!
stabbed it into Leno’s throat on the right side and, with what could only be described as a man’s strength, slowly and deliberately carved it all the way through his neck, completely severing his right carotid artery and penetrating his trachea as Katie left the knife embedded up to the hilt (5 inches deep!) in the left side of his neck.
Blood came spurting out from Leno’s neck, as if Katie had struck red oil, and seeing this, Katie was finally satisfied that she had indeed brought death to at least one of her victims. (Yet, when asked by the Board of Prison Terms in one of her countless Parole Hearings, “Do you remember seeing any blood?” “No. Not really.” was her answer. From an artery severing…okee dokee, Katie, if you say so.)
Katie then went on to the artistic portion of the evening, and as she pondered the exposed chest of Leno LaBianca, she retrieved her bent Buck from her back pocket and confidently carved the word
“WAR” into his stomach. “This is one Pig who won’t be sending his kid off to war.” Katie whispered through her Cheshire Cat grin.
Knowing that the word “WAR” wasn’t a Hinman copycat word, Katie turned around and spied the coffee table for a writing instrument to finish the job. A white paper – maybe Leno’s racing form – was found in amongst the Sunday morning L.A.Times Sports section Leno had been reading. Katie grabbed it, scrunched it, folded it in half and dipped it into the pool of blood now collecting on the carpet below Leno’s neck wound. (Artery-severing is a life-saver for blood-writers, it seems.)
The living room walls would be her second canvas. She proceeded to rip a tapestry off of the north facing wall, and above some family pictures and paintings, wrote the words,
“Death to Pigs”. On the south wall, just left of the front door, Katie sprawled the word,
“Rise”.- Still no paw-print.
- Still “Death To Pigs” was NOT “Political Piggy”.
- Still two victims were NOT one victim.
- Still the weapons used didn’t match the Hinman weapon.
- Hinman had no connection with the LaBiancas and neither the Tate nor LaBianca victims had any connection with the Panthers.
Oh well, I guess you can’t have everything when you’re busy coming off acid trips, snorting meth/cocaine and bringing death, if only half-assed and messy to exonerate old Cupid and free the girls, now can you? Ho-hum…
As Tex and Leslie now joined Katie in the living room, all three surveyed her artwork from a distance, like patrons at the Louvre appreciate the Mona Lisa smile, left arm against your stomach, right hand holding your chin. Can’t you just smell the tobacco smoke and hear the clinking of champagne glasses from these three art enthusiasts! I know I can. (Geez, me thinks my sleep deprivation has gone onto delirium…sigh…)
Satisfied at their efforts, the girls wandered into the kitchen, looking for something to eat. (Killing is hard work, Man!)
No one seemed anxious to escape for fear of being discovered as if their “work” had been pre-ordained and protected by God, well, at least, by their God, Charlie!
Tex liked what he did to Rosemary (Packaging and Sealing for Freshness!) so he grabbed the other bedroom pillow-case to package and seal Leno for freshness too, careful to cover the still-embedded steak knife that was Katie’s calling card. The nearby lamp-cord was used too but no need to throttle here. Katie had done a fine job! She finally brought death! Tex just plopped a couch throw pillow over top his “package” just for good measure.
Job Two done.
Packaged and Sealed for Freshness!
As the girls washed off that sticky, icky blood in the kitchen sink and sat down at the table to some chocolate milk and cheese from the fridge…,
(Betcha the snack was gouda! Get it? Gooda! Ha! I slay me! That’s okay TLB2’ers, I’m voluntarily surrendering to rehab right after I post on Shorty’s murder…I promise!)
…Tex sauntered into the bathroom nearest the back door and showered away the night’s work. His muscles tense and sore, that LaBianca hot water did the trick and he was re-born, a living human being, in the home, as a not-so-welcome guest of dead people.
Sure they had left blood stains, hair fibres, palm and finger prints all over the house but heck, you can’t make a cake without breaking some eggs, now can ya? Ho-hum…
“How do you like what I wrote?” asked Katie, sitting across from Leslie as cheese crumbs hit the kitchen table and the floor.
“That’s perfect, Katie. That’s exactly what Charlie would have wanted.” But how ‘bout in other rooms? Wouldn’t Charlie want writing in other rooms too?” asked Leslie, as she drank the chocolate milk right from the carton, dribbling some down her cheek and wiping it away with the back of her hand.
“Yeah, maybe. What about in here? What about that fridge?” asked Katie.
“Yeahhhhh. It’s huge! Write something on there too! Write ‘Helter Skelter’ from the White Album!” squealed Leslie, forgetting the need for Hinmanisms over Beatleisms.
Katie put down her hunk of cheese, rose from her seat and walked back into the living room to retrieve her blood-writing “quill”, the blood ink drying now but useable just the same.
When she returned to the kitchen, Katie put “quill” to enamel, and wrote,
“Healter Skelter”, misspelling the British name for a giant amusement park slide, that meant confusion/war to old Charlie, the words having nothing to do with Panthers nor Pigs. Ho-hum…The writing done, the “quill” discarded on the dining room floor, the milk drank and the cheese eaten, the girls switched places with Tex, and as he chowed down on the same, they returned to the master bedroom to change out of their blood-soaked clothing and to search through Rosemary’s closet for something new to wear, careful not to trip over
her dead head as they tried on her wardrobe. Sure the closet light was left on and a lovely palm print was left on the right side of the closet door but nobody’s hand, scalp or foot got hurt this night. Safety first, at all times, from now on.The trio now washed and dressed and satisfied that the work was done to Charlie’s specifications, grabbed their murder clothes, “all drippy with blood” (Yeah, I know, I need help, but Rehab is for Quitters!) , petted all three dogs and skulked out through that side door and down the drive of 3301 Waverly.
No knives were lost.
There was writing on the walls.
And all the “Piggies” were dead.
Practice does make (almost) perfect after all!
It was still just the wee hours of the morning on August 10, 1969, and as the killers hitch-hiked back to the ranch, their day was finally over.
But the killing wasn’t.
There would be another day, a week from now, that had nothing to do with a Hinman copycat. The Family was diversifying, branching-out, the enemy-list growing, the killers still unknown and at large.
And as the August calendar flipped its pages, one wondered, would the blood ever stop flowing in the hills above L.A.?
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