Fourth Reich Archaeology - She Harvey Oswald, Part Six, Side B

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

It’s the end of the line for Squeaky, as this week we wrap up our tale on the first of the two would-be assassins who, in September 1975, pointed their pistols at President Gerald R. Ford.  In this episode we pick things up on the morning of September 5, 1975, just moments after Squeaky is taken into custody for making an attempt on our boy Jerry’s life. We begin the tale on the eve of Ford’s visit to Sacramento from Squeaky’s point of view. Squeaky was, to say the least, frustrated with how things were going. Charles Manson’s newfangled quasi-religion known as ATWA (Air Trees Water & Animals), of which Squeaky and her Sac-town roommate Sandy Good were the prime exponents, was falling flat. Prison authorities were blocking Manson from receiving visitors or making public statements. And the media don’t seem to care about Squeaky and Sandy’s “International People’s Court of Retribution,” the threatening letters they were sending to corporate executives of polluting industries, or the environmental destruction being wrought in the Nixon/Ford era.We then turn to the event itself, Lyn’s arrest and pretrial phase, and the cast of characters in the drama that was her trial. It was truly a bizarre spectacle, which we compare and contrast with the “trial of the century” of Jack Ruby in Dallas. Spoiler alert: she’s convicted, and the whole story passes into the realm of spectacle. We consider Squeaky’s trial as a window into the pros and cons of propaganda of the deed - relevant today in a time when political assassination and spectacular violence is very much back in the mainstream.Finally, we end with two overarching questions.  Did she really intend to kill Jerry, or was it just a performance?  And did she act alone or was there a conspiracy? Listen to SideB of Squeaky’s swan song for free today. If you like what you hear, head on over to ⁠patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology⁠ and become a member of our community to get access to the full 3.5 hour episode. Otherwise, you’ll just have to hang tight until Side C makes its way onto the free feed.

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is one. is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are.

In 1945, we began to acquire information which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds, vendors the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, the CIA. He has a mile. He knows so long as a die. Freedom can never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. A lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a model.

This is a day. This is a model. This is fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Hello and welcome back to our show. We are coming back at you this week with another installment of our ongoing series within a series. She, Harvey Oswald.

If you recall, we are wrapping up that story about the first of the two would-be assassins who tried to kill President Gerald Ford, or at least that's how the story goes. And we are wrapping up the tale about the first of these two, whose name is Lynette Squeaky From Me. Now, this episode is Side B of our last. installment about the story about Squeaky and Squeaky's attempt on the president, so-called attempt on the president. For those of you who are in our Patreon family, you would have already received this episode in full. So this is actually just a new release for those on the free feed, and this is just side B. And so you're not even going to get the full release today if you're on the free feed. You will have to just wait until side C comes out to really get the full.

story on Squeaky. And thus far in this tale, we've covered everything leading up to the day of the deed on September 5th, 1975, when Squeaky walked up to the president in California, the state of California's capital, and pointed her pistol and was intercepted by a member of the public and then by the Secret Service. And inside A, we covered everything that has. happened that day, that fateful day on September 5th, and we covered the events immediately after leading up to the arraignment of Squeaky. And in this side of the episode, Side B, we are going to pick up where we left off. We're going to talk a little bit about the pretrial phase of Squeaky's criminal trial. And we are going to talk about some of the details surrounding her

psychological evaluation, the evaluation that the court had done on her in camera, which is sort of the legal way of saying in private and the only people that were around were the court and the court staff and the doctors, of course, and this is something that never really made it to light until many years after the trial. And we are going to cover some of the quirky evidentiary issues that came up in the pretrial phase of. the matter and again if you are in the patreon family you will have gotten this full episode already this is a release we're doing on the free feed and again we're only releasing it part of this episode the final part of this episode side see is right now it's only available on patreon so if you

want to listen to more you're just going to have to join us on our patreon and we're over at patreon dot com slash fourth rike archaeology and without any further ado let's get right into it let's get digging kre's mary murky had on occasion several months ago to get rather involved with some of the members of the manson family mary tell us a little bit about this woman like other mansum girls Lynette frome was extremely antagonistic toward her family and in charlie she thought she had found her savior. At his trial, she said Manson once hit her so hard he knocked her clear across the room, but she said it was just what I needed. Though not directly connected with the Tate La Bianca murders, Lynette Fromm was twice arrested for murder, but both times those charges were dropped.

They said they wanted to meet Governor Brown and Attorney General Evel Younger, and they had ideas on how the state should be run. But they were really very politically aware, which surprised me, And there were a lot of underground literature on how this country is being run, who's running it, a lot of conspiracy theories. And they would bring out pamphlets from time to time to show me. And she actually thinks that Charlie could

be president of this country and run it better than the present political leaders. Officers brought out Sandra Good, a Manson family member, and another woman, Kathleen Murphy. Both were taken in for questioning on the theory the assassination attempt may have been a conspiracy. But several hours later, authorities released the two women, apparently satisfied that they were not involved. And the good return to her apartment and answered reporters' questions.

Unless Manson gets a court rule and it's allowed to speak, the country will be bloodier than the Tate Law Beyond the House is put together. You people need somebody to help you with your problems. She has more concern for your children, all of you, all of you, than you yourselves do. Think she knew what she was doing today? Of course she knew what she was doing. She was moved to do what she did. And you'll have to talk to her to find out why. I can't speak for her.

I know that we're very, very sensitive to what's going on in this country right now. And we see that there's no leadership. There's nobody that the people can trust or put faith in. You must let Manson up. When it starts getting crazy, when the money won't spend, you better let him up. You're going to need him. Okay, so let's get into the actual trial or the events leading up to the trial, the pre-trial phase, and then, of course, the trial and the verdict. And I think a good way to start. I think we did a little bit of this, but let's really get into it.

Let's go over the cast of characters, and let's start with the head honcho, the federal judge that was presiding, Judge Thomas McBride. Now at age 61 years old, he was the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the Northern Division, which was of course Sacramento, and he was appointed to the bench by none other than JFK in 1961. Like you mentioned, Don, it's worth noting here that the reason we're in federal court as opposed to state court is because, unlike in 1963, there was. was no federal assassination statute. Murder is a state crime. There's no like federal law saying murder is a crime. Murder is a state by state thing. And by 1965, assassination becomes a federal offense.

By the time Lynn comes around, unfortunately for her, there is a federal statute saying that assassination is a federal crime. and that's how she ends up in federal court because she's facing this federal offense. But let's talk about McBride because McBride has the classic Fourth Reich background. He really does. Yeah, this is something that, I mean, the kill-bill siren went off in my mind when I read about his background. because McBride,

Judge McBride, during World War II, was a naval intelligence officer on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur. And those of you who are familiar with Doug MacArthur's intelligence operation, perhaps you will have tuned in to Eyes Wide open on YouTube, incredible channel, friend of the pod, who has gone deep on this aspect of

American history, imperial history. The head of MacArthur's G2, his intelligence staff, was a guy by the name of Charles Willoughby. And Charles Willoughby, anybody who knows that name will know, was referred to by MacArthur as my little fascist. He had worked directly for Francisco Franco in Spain. He was German by birth. Willoughby was an adopted name. His actual given name was Adolf Karl Widenbach

And he was born in Heidelberg in Germany in 1892 and he oversaw MacArthur's intelligence services as you would expect a Nazi to so he had a hardcore

fascist ideology he imposed it on his underlings and he really fostered the growth of this cell of hard right-wing fascists in the U.S. National Security State, among these Asia hands, right? Because MacArthur was, of course, on the Eastern Front in World War II. He oversaw the occupation of Japan, of the Philippines after the fighting ended. and Willoughby was, I mean, really just, there's really no other way to put it than that he was an American fascist,

highly positioned to influence not only policymakers, but also a large amount of intelligence officers under his employ, which included Thomas McBride, a young Thomas McBride, neighbor, Naval Intelligence Officer working under Willoughby. So, you know, this is a fact that it just bears mentioning. You can't not say it because certainly that will leave a mark on anybody that's working in that environment. But not for lack of trying. We've not really been able to find any indication that McBride was a overt or covert operative,

for this sort of fascist government within a government, many of whom had worked under Willoughby during World War II. He was a bit of a power broker in Sacramento, but he was pretty localized. Like, you know, he was a state legislator for a while for the Democratic Party out of Sacramento. he became a judge and he's like a community fixture as an attorney and as a leader but nothing on his resume there's nothing at least in the written record as far as we've been able to uncover that actually bears out fruit that Judge McBride remained sort of under the sway of this hard right-wing fascist ideology that the MacArthur Willoughby operation became so famous for. But McBride, you know, it's a bit of a head scratcher for me, at least, that he came out

of that group, but then just kind of becomes a Sacramento guy. Yeah, he's like this folksy Sacramento guy, bespeckled guy, thin-faced, wire-rimmed spectacles. He's at the time of the Lynn trial. He at least he's balding. And he's an outdoorsman. He's a guy who took pride in his fishing and hunting skills. And very much a Sacramento guy. I think it's worth noting his first job as a lawyer. And this goes to your point because he really was like this centrist. His first job as a lawyer, he worked for Attorney General Earl Warren. So before he was in the state legislature, he was, he was an aide to Earl Warren, who was A.G. at the time. And so he is like sort of at least superficially the centrist and this folksy guy.

And it's kind of hard to reconcile like the MacArthur Willoughby stuff with. his work as a lawyer, at least in the early days, and then eventually his ascension to the bench. Yeah. I think what we could say as kind of a baseline for Judge McBride is he's a patriot. He has died in the wool American patriot, to be sure. You know, he did his service. He came up in that environment. He worked for Earl Warren, who was a Republican, right, as AG. He became an assemblyman as a Democrat. He gets involved in all kinds of civic activities as any prominent lawyer in a provincial town like Sacramento would. I think he ran the governor's annual prayer breakfast for a while during Governor Reagan's administration.

So he's crossing over back and forth, both sides of the aisle, and establishing himself as a trustworthy pillar of the community. He's not viewed as a suspicious character, not viewed as an ideological character. he's like you said, I think, a folksy local guy who's well respected in the community. And this trial is probably the biggest trial he will ever have, right? The attempted assassination of a president? I don't know if it gets much bigger for a federal judge in a backwater town.

But so that's Judge McBride. And then we have for the prosecutor, we have Don Heller, of course, we've covered, who is the AUSA, and Dwayne Keyes, who was the U.S. attorney at the time. Now, let's talk about the defenders and Lynn's lawyers. And so we should say from the get, Lynn wanted to represent herself, right? From the get go, she wanted to put on her own defense. And for reasons that we may get into later, terrible idea. Unless you're like Angela Davis, unless you're someone who's like got the chops, it's really not a good idea to say that you want to defend yourself.

But the federal public defender who was appointed to be Lynn's co-counsel, eventually co-counsel, because she does sort of get some reign to defend herself, guy by the name of Richard Dick Walker. and Dick Walker is a important guy to know because he was in 1971 the very first federal defender in the Eastern District of California. The Eastern District of California was created right around that time. And Walker, who had previously clerked for a Northern District of California judge was appointed to be the federal defender in the Eastern District. to Walker's assistance was an assistant federal defender by the name of Bob Holly, a younger guy. I think he was only in his 20s by the time he was working this case.

And so Holly and Walker were helped, you know, their investigators. So, you know, lawyers often work closely with investigators. And this defender's team had a private investigator who was hired special by Walker. guy by the name of Phil Shelton. And when I read about Phil Shelton, there's one thing that I loved very much about him. And so he's this methodical investigator. And he's got this style that I can really, I really like. One of the things is he kept two notepads when he was working.

And they were color-coded. And one of them was white. And that covered everything that needed to get done in the immediate future, like the next four weeks. And one was yellow. everything that came after. So it's like a four-week pad and then like everything after. So that's like Lynn's defense team from the start. We will get into it.

But Lynn is not the easiest client to work for. And there's a lot of turnover and our defense team. And ultimately, the guy, by the time you get to the trial and the closing arguments on all of that, there's a guy by the name of John Virga. He's an attorney in private practice. that takes over as Lynn's co-counsel for much of her defense, for much of the trial. The one thing that I want to note about her cycling through these lawyers in this almost comical way, where she keeps on saying, like, and at the littlest thing, right, like, she'll have one disagreement,

and she'll go before Judge McBride and ask to get rid of this guy. Like, and she wanted to leapfrog Dick Walker, who's the boss, right? He's the, he's the guy in charge. And so she requests that his subordinate be the lead attorney. So that I thought was a funny move by Lynn to reverse the hierarchy in the federal defender's office and be like, no, I want this brand new, like, two years. years out of law school guy to be my co-counsel get the gray hair out of here like we're gonna we're gonna do this us young folks and i think bob i think dick walker was like kind of down with that he was like look whatever

he had like no ego about it he's like look if that's what she wants yeah yeah it can't really be overstated just how unique the Sacramento legal scene comes out of this whole story as just a real it almost gives me Twin Peaks vibes of just like yeah totally real kind of low-key backwater informal air about the whole thing that is well as we'll see a very different picture from San Francisco, which is where the next assassination attempt takes place, of course, and just a totally different world, a couple, you know, however many miles down south from there. But Sacramento, very small town vibes in the way that all of these legal proceedings shake down. Yeah. And so, okay, so we have the prosecution, we have the defense. And of course, we had mentioned that Lynn,

much wanted to defend herself in the case and very much wanted to be her own advocate. This was a problem because I think both the prosecution and the defense, much like I think many of these cases where the facts are really bad, you got people sort of dead to right, both sides are thinking, okay, what's the best sort of, what's the case here? And at least initially, certainly the prosecution and even the defense, they were thinking, okay, it's got to be the insanity plea, right? It's got to be that Lynn was out of her mind. And if that's going to be the approach, you're going to have a really hard time convincing the judge that that's the approach. And also this person should be able to defend herself.

And so needless to say, there is a bad. of psychological evaluation psychological tests and starting with this you know this major one where Lynn is sort of question I think this is the one that's sort of in camera by the court there is this evaluation to see whether Lynn can defend herself is competent to defend herself right yeah it's double right it's both competent to stand trial in the first place and then competent to defend herself so in all criminal cases, the defendant has to be ruled competent to stand trial before the trial can actually take place. And that basically just means that they are in control of their mental capacities,

in sufficient control of their mental capacities. And so this was kind of a double, it was two birds with one stone, really, to test for both her competence and her aptitude. to defend herself. And the entire interview of this psychological evaluation is available to listen to on YouTube. If you are so interested, I know that both Dick and I have listened to the entire thing in full. And it's pretty interesting. I'll pass the mic to you in a second, Dick, but I'll just start out with my reflections on this psychological evaluation. it is remarkable having studied Squeaky's biography just how much she lies her way through the whole thing.

Like, for example, when asked, she says that she did acid a handful of times or like 10 times maybe when many, many other people who spent years with her have attested that they were doing. acid daily and that the Manson family in their period of time at Spawn Ranch and out in the desert, they did acid thousands of times over a period of years. And she's like, no, we weren't doing acid that much. It was like maybe maybe a few times, like 10 times, a dozen times. Yeah, she gives some mealy mouth response. She doesn't really stick to She doesn't really stick. I think she eventually says it's like a 10 times or a handful of times. But the reality being that there's so many other accounts, maybe even in her book,

there's so many accounts of her drop in acid. And remember, when she dosed Barbara Hoyt. The little girl. Yeah, with 10 doses of acid in a hamburger. Like, it's not going to be a dabbler who's moving. vast quantities of tabs like that. It's just simply not really true the way that she described her drug use to this guy.

And that's important, of course, because all of her responses here, all of what she's doing totally undermine the insanity defense that her attorneys might have wanted to build for her because, of course, if you are rendered psychotic or if you're rendered permanently incapacitated by massive exposure to psychedelics, then you could tell that to the court and maybe get off for the charge. But if your official story is that you've only done it a handful of times, well, that's not going to make you go psychotic.

So it's very funny how she's building up a picture of herself really as kind of the ideologically coherent person that is pursuing a cause. This is how she comes through in the interview rather than, you know, the character that we have kind of traced throughout this series. another big sort of misleading portion of her psychological evaluation is when she's talking about her relationship with her family and says that her relationship with her father is pretty good and that they got along okay and had only some minor squabbles here and there when as we have recounted, it was not okay. It was borderline abusive, very possibly physically abusive, although later in her life she's maintained that it wasn't a physically abusive relationship. Who knows, right? It all comes down to who says what. Her biographer, Jess Bravin,

reports friends of hers from high school saying that she was, rused and appeared to have been beaten up at home. And meanwhile, you know, she says didn't happen. So we'll leave that indeterminate. But to the evaluator, to the psychologist, she's very clear and paints a much more sort of stable picture of her life and upbringing that seems to all be leading up to her desire to be declared fit for trial, to be declared competent to represent herself. Like, it's outcome-driven her performance.

And we've discussed a lot that she was a capable actress, you know, going all the way back to her childhood to sort of twist things and perform in a certain kind of way. Yeah, the other thing I'll point out, like one of the, one of the, one of the, the things that sort of show her relationship with her father and her family is, you know, she's on trial for attempting to assassinate the president. You would think that these members of her family would show up and support her. And all those people in her close circle that would sort of stand up and, you know, say nice things about her, none of those people actually ever showed up, right? So whatever she's saying about her relationship with her dad and with her family, like the way

the weeks that followed after the trial actually went about, like none of those people showed up. And so that goes to show that like, you know, it certainly wasn't like a good relationship or else her dad would have showed up for that, right? Yeah, totally. That gives a pretty good picture of the psychological evaluation. We'll probably put some snippets of the actual evaluation

because it was recorded. It was held in camera, so meaning that, you know, neither side actually got to hear what was being said. It was sort of in private because she does sort of go into her what I would consider her defense and case strategy.

But it was released at some point after the trial. And so we might post some of those snippets. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, what condition my condition was in. What? Would you estimate to be your percentage chance at this point of being found not guilty?

Oh, I feel definitely that I have probably a 70% chance. Chance of being found not guilty. On the percentage scale. I have a definite conviction within my entire heart and mind to carry this through. do the best that I can and therefore feel satisfied no matter with the outcome. I just dropped in to see what condition was in. As I said before, I've already considered all the possibilities and I feel that I will be spending some time at prison. I feel this because of the evidence against me.

I don't feel that I'll be convicted of attempted assassination. I pushed my soul in a deep dark told and then I followed it in the press has made a number of comments to the effect that you're a rather daft and broad wandering about in this world following you'll be gotten causes and so far how do you feel about that i'm working through it the best way i can i feel this trial conducted uh with a little bit of dignity would help tremendously the judge has already stated that this is not informed for me to express my views or for me to do anything for my image in other words i'm just saying that incidentally You think your image would improve though by how you would conduct yourself in a corner wall.

The newspapers have said, what in the validity I don't know, that you have at times used drugs very heavily. You've been on hundreds of acid trips or something like that. The news means love to say that. Yeah. That's not true. I would say maybe. But I don't think that might be. What effect did you get out of the acid? Oh, that would be out of the acid.

that would be a long, long story. I became aware of the possibilities of different realities as seen through different eyes, as seen through the Chicano, for example. I traveled in my mind into their world in East Los Angeles, and then I traveled into the ghetto, and I traveled into Pais society. And I never was very much And I never was very rebellious. I never got in very much trouble.

Actually, I think it's a unique understanding. My parents and my... Rather than viewing me even as a problem child, they accepted the fact that I wished to be independent And they actually literally allowed me to do what I want to do it. Going back to Lynn and eventually she is given the opportunity to sort of defend herself with the public defender as her co-counsel. And so the lawyer that was her co-counsel would handle sort of the technical aspects of the case, maybe work on the motions practice and work on the procedural stuff,

while Lynn would have the opportunity to put forward her defense. And from the get-go, it was not an easy time working with her. Understatement of the century, yeah. Yeah, and like you mentioned, from the start, she was trying to leapfrog the public defender, right? She was leapfrogging the boss to work with the more junior guy. but even if we take a step further back and just think about like the cause of all this friction and the cause of the friction is that was that there were very different objectives right as a lawyer your objective is to if you can get your client off but if you can't trying to secure the most

lenient best possible outcome right the lowest possible sentence the easiest sort of path for your client. And for Lynn, it seemed pretty obvious early on that she wasn't really concerned about all that. I think there were multiple instances where she was ready to put in a guilty plea so long as she was able to get her like 30 minutes of a statement out to the court. But to Lynn, her goals were, A, reunite the Manson family members and bring them all into this trial to testify. So like get Charlie Manson to come and testify. Part of that was like subpoena Charlie to come into court so that I guess see him again so that she could see him again in

person because remember she had not been able to get visitation. So that seems like A, that was her first and maybe the most important thing for her during the trial was to get the Manson family back together again and specifically to get Charlie Minson in court to testify on her behalf. Yeah, and remember one other thing that we mentioned in a prior episode two on this score, that the family members who were incarcerated in different places were sort of turning against her. Like a lot of them, the women especially had begun to change their story, to get out from underneath Charlie. Like some of them would go on to become born again Christians,

stuff like that. So there's either that trajectory for the former Manson family members or the trajectory that they would turn against the people on the outside, the people who didn't get caught, who didn't commit acts of violence, who didn't get arrested and incarcerated, and to consider those people, namely Squeaky and Sandy, really, if that's, I mean, they're the main ones that are living on the outside

and to consider them to be sort of inadequate followers of Charlie because they had not put skin in the game to advance his message and his thought. And so part of, you know, the potential motives that led Squeaky to take this action. in the first place, to show up to Capitol Park armed in the first place, was that she felt herself inadequately devoted to Charlie, or that there was an inadequate amount of evidence of her devotion to Charlie such that she needed to do what the rest of the followers had done and take some action and sacrifice some piece of herself for this cause. And it can't really be understated how much this fact motivated squeaky in her thinking

both up to September 5th and in the conduct of her trial. 100%. Like throughout the trial, it almost seemed like the actual attempt. the assassination attempt and the case that was being brought against her, it seemed like that was like a secondary thing for Lynn. It was like almost on a weekly basis almost. It seemed like she was laser focused on getting Charlie Manson to come into court to testify on her behalf. She was doing everything she could to get Charlie to come in.

And we will talk about that in just a moment. But so that was, you know, if we're making a list, That was goal number one. That was our bullet point. That was A, get the Manson family, specifically Charlie Manson to come to court. And point B is to, was to spread this message of environmentalism. And to get this message that she was trying, you know, seeking to disseminate for years without much success to get that front and center. So every chance she could get, she would go off on this rant about the tree.

and the air and all of the things that were being done by these corporations to harm the planet really not relevant to what she was being charged with. And I'd just go back to that point the night before she actually does the deed and, you know, the intense dialogue she was having with her roommate and those hanger-ons the night before and indeed the month before when she, you know, had tried to go see Charlie and she had tried to go to the TV station to get her message across. It seemed like those were the things that she was most interested in during the trial and that's what she wanted to make the focus of the trial. The only problem with that is that neither of those things are relevant at all for the actual, you know, the case being brought against her, which was, the attempted assassination of the president.

And why don't we do a quick sort of lawyerly side note on how trials work and what sort of the purpose is of a federal criminal trial? Yeah. So, first of all, this is not legal advice. Just in case any of you out there are taking this as such, it's not. what it is is a very, very brief discussion of the rules of evidence and the concept of relevance, which I think it's something that TV shows about like courtroom procedures really blast away the coherence of this concept and the mind of observers of the American legal system.

because, you know, in courtroom dramas, right, they'll be talking about whatever on the stand with the witnesses, whatever. In fact, though, without spending too much time delving into the rules of evidence or of criminal procedure or anything, suffice it to say, trials are limited to the presentation of relevant evidence. and to be relevant, evidence must tend to make a given material fact more or less likely to be true. And a material fact is something that relates, that weighs on the guilt or the innocence of the defendant. Now, that's fairly broad and fairly vague, to be sure, but at the same time, you know, you can't

like the stuff that we were talking about, right? Like talking about what Charlie Manson was trying to accomplish in 1969, for example, or talking about what Charlie Manson's followers did in committing their acts of violence in Cello Drive. Or talking about, you know, even talking about the degree of environmental destruction in the Redwood Forest, none of those facts actually bear on whether or not Squeaky committed the act that she's accused of having committed. You know, this is to bring it to the current day, right? Think about the Luigi Mangione trial, something that we talked about way back long time ago

when, you know, close in time to the arrest. but don't watch that trial and expect to hear about the U.S. healthcare system, right? Don't expect United Healthcare to be on trial or the profit motive in the distribution of health care services in the United States to come up because at the end of the day, none of those facts are actually relevant to whether or not it was the defendant who pulled the trigger that killed the victim, right? This concept is something that is very important, you know, to people pursuing political agendas that may involve criminal activity that a lot of the time, most of the time, in fact, the nature, the justification of the act in the first place is

unlikely to be admissible at all or to affect the outcome of a criminal trial. So in the case of Squeaky, you know, the question ultimately belongs to the judge to make the determination. The judge is the one that decides these evidentiary. disputes, not the jury. This is all deliberated outside the presence of the jury, and, you know, the judge has this leeway, but nine times out of ten, or even ten times out of ten, if we're, you know, very close to ten times out of ten, the judge is not going to allow in political considerations or personal considerations of the sort that Squeaky in her mind wanted to build her entire defense around. And I think that it's

one of the things that makes this actually relevant today, this episode and this series more broadly, because, as we've said many times, the facts on the ground today do sort of approximate the conditions, the political conditions of the mid-1970s where you have a government that appears to be utterly unaccountable, that is committing crimes out in the open, that is highly unpopular, that, you know, is leaving the electorate with very little recourse in the legal paths to change. and so, you know, before taking an illegal action, you should be aware of the likelihood that any illegal action will actually permit you to get your message out to a broader audience. You know, the legal system is set up to mitigate the perceived benefits of any proper. of the deed.

It's our little lawyerly way of saying, you know, don't get too excited about vigilantism as praxis because, you know, the system is lined up against it. Right. By the time you get to court, it boils down to the crime or criminal statute and the elements of that crime. And those are really the things that are the focus of, for example, trial and it really does become like whether a fact is relevant to proving one of the elements or disproving one of the elements satisfying the elements of the crime at issue right so you're not

going to really get and indeed you don't get during a trial an opportunity to get up and sort of make a statement about like your political motives or you know why you did what you did And in fact, if you are a defendant in a criminal case, odds are you're not going to testify about anything. It's a rare case that a criminal defendant will be put up on the stand to testify. Don't believe what you see on TV. Bottom line. But as we're talking about this relevant stuff, let's talk about one of the major evidentiary issues. You know how they have like these days they have these criminal trials of like rappers or whatever.

they're like trying to show that they're dealing drugs or shooting guns when they're not supposed to. And then they put up a YouTube video of them or something they found online of them. I think Squeaky was maybe the first iteration of this because in 1975, when she's on trial for this assassination attempt, there is a movie in the works. Or at least at this point, I think actually it's being distributed. It's the Manson movie. and the way this works out is so during the Tate Labyanka murder prosecution and trial so that sort of scene a documentary film crew went over to Spawn Ranch remember the Spawn Ranch and they filmed something like 10,000 feet of film footage capturing everything that was going on on the ranch capturing the remaining Manson family members the family members that were free at the

time in their natural environment. And these family members were singing and dancing and shooting guns and saying all sorts of kooky things to the documentary film crew. And wouldn't you know it at the time? Of course, Lynn and Sandy were free. And so naturally they featured heavily in this film. Now, relevant to this case is that there are several scenes in this film that show Lynn brandishing knives and firearms and speaking about her rifle. She's saying things like, you have to make love with it. You have to know every part of it. To know you know it is to know it so that you could pick it up at any second and shoot. She also said something like,

we respond with our knives. We respond with whatever we have. It feels good. It feels good to be ready to face death and love it. Anybody can kill anyone. The court was worried that the jury was going to see this film. Yeah. The defense sought a gag order to prevent the film from being shown

within a several mile radius of Sacramento so that the jury wouldn't be able to watch it. And then like the ACLU gets involved and is trying to lift that order. So the order applied to the surrounding counties around the courthouse from where the jury pool was being drawn and it was in effect during the entire jury. selection process until the jury could be sequestered, at which point it wouldn't be able to go to the movie theaters anyways, and the issue would no longer potentially prejudice the jury. So it was very controversial because it suppressed the First Amendment free speech rights of the filmmaker to distribute his speech and subordinated his First Amendment rights to Squeakies rights under

the Fifth and Sixth Amendment, right to a speedy trial, right to due process, etc. And yeah, it is interesting that the ACLU got involved in this, but it didn't end up going anywhere because by the time that litigation could move forward, it had already been mooted by jury sequestration. Right. And this is another sort of procedural thing where the mere exposure to this radical film would make someone think, by God, this woman's guilty, notwithstanding any other facts, notwithstanding any other evidence that's presented, just by seeing this film, you would think that this crazy lady is guilty of whatever it is that she's being put up

on to trial for. So the judge actually did put a injunction or gag order on this film being released in Sacramento or the immediate vicinity so that the jury wouldn't be exposed to it. When the jury is sequestered, basically means you don't get any sort of outside contact. You can't watch the news. You can't watch TV. You can't go to the movies. You can't do any of that stuff. You're in a very confined sort of space, usually your holdup at a hotel and basically your days are going into court, sitting in the jury, and then getting something to eat with your fellow members of the jury and then going to your hotel room, getting some rest, and then coming back to court the next day. And famously, like the OJ trial, members of the jury were sequestered for weeks and weeks and weeks.

and it can really be a slog, you can imagine. Yeah, you may be familiar with the 90s Polly Shore comedy jury duty. You ever see that one? Yeah, of course. Polly Shore is on a sequester jury. Classic. Since the days of our founding fathers, justice has always been blind. Now,

Fear not, citizens. She's dumb. Justice will be. be served. You're in good hands. Ow! So it's just a little trivia thing. This Manson movie, it does get eventually released. It's like this classic 70s trippy film and really shocking the 70s film audiences,

film moviegoers. And it was nominated for an Oscar, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah, again, it's inflating the spectacle of the hippies gone decadent and gone psychotic and gone violent and all this stuff, it is the cultural exponent of that narrative, you know, that cements and the fact that it comes out right in the middle of Squeaky's trial, you know, again,

Squeaky becomes another entry in the hippies gone crazy, gone violent, cultural discourse that is so dominant, you know, thanks to the Manson phenomenon. Once upon a time, there was a group of teenagers who lived on a run-down old movie ranch hidden in the hills above Los Angeles, California. The kids would play together, sing together, and make love together. Just like a family, those without a home were taken in for the night and the family grew. Soon, music and rituals filled the night.

And the soul of Satan danced with delight. Just a plain with a poison one. Son and yourself with a devil's son. Charles Manson, he created a special society with a terrifying philosophy. And you kill whoever gets in your way. This is that. Angel of death. of death.

Manson. But I think that that's a good transition to actually start to talk about the trial itself. So, you know, as we've kind of set it up, right, the pre-all, all of these pre-trial proceedings, there emerges a dynamic where Judge McBride is the real sort of down-to-earth but firm father. figure in the whole drama. He develops a real rapport with Squeaky, I think, that they get along reasonably well, and they have almost a informal familiarity. Like, she, obviously, she's not there calling everybody, sir, and respecting all of the

formalities of the process. She is just being herself. and McBride rather than taking a hard line against it really kind of plays along in large part, which is again interesting considering his background. But nevertheless, like he's humoring her. He is calling bowls and strikes, I would say, on the pretrial evidentiary issues that come up. Nothing, Dick, I don't know about you, but to me, none of his. rulings really stand out as being unreasonable or unsupported by the facts in the law.

Like, he's conducting his best of a pretrial, you know, trying to create a solid record and to run the show expeditiously and efficiently. Yeah, he's very concerned about preventing a mistrial. he's very concerned about, you know, he doesn't want to get overturned on appeal. And so he wants to do it right. He wants to be able to walk away from this thing with at least a sound mind that he did everything he could to give Squeaky a clean trial, notwithstanding her own, you know, habit of getting in the way of that.

Yeah. And again, to compare it to the Jack Ruby trial, it's night and day from, Judge Joe Brown in Dallas, right? Who was really by the seat of his pants not at all attentive to the legal standards at play and was really running things more to sell books in the future than to get an expeditious trial. And of course, as we all know, Judge Joe Brown was actually reversed on appeal. and the conviction that took place in his courtroom was overturned as a result of his errors as judge. And so to the extent that Squeaky's trial is kind of the next biggest thing compared to the Jack Ruby trial that was, of course, called the trial of the century back in 1964, well, in, in,

in 1975. And remember, like, at this point, James Earl Ray had entered a plea for the assassination of Martin Luther King. Whereas Lynn gets the full, she gets the full thing. She gets a full jury trial. And I think one of the points that sort of show this relationship between the judge and Lynn, despite eventually, like, Lynn is, eventually, like, there's a gag order put on her, and she isn't even able to participate in her trial. She has to sort of watch it from closed circuit television in a jail cell

because she is so disruptive. But after one of these long days during jury selection, during voir dire, which is the process of selecting the jury, there's this like long sort of exchange on whether they're going to allow a certain member of the jury pool in as a juror. And, you know, after this like,

extended back and forth between the judge and Lynn. Finally, McBride decides like, okay, we're going to let this juror in. And then Lynn is like deciding to use one of her peremptory strikes, right? They get criminal defendants will get, each side will get 10 peremptory strikes, which means you can just strike a juror for any reason. So after this long back and forth, Lynn throws out a peremptory strike and, you know, strikes the guy out of the jury. And the judge goes, all right, anything else miss Fromm? And she goes, yes, from me. Basically correcting how the judge was saying her name. And it was the first time in years she had begun to insist on pronouncing her name that way. And this is for all those listeners out there that have been giving.

us a hard time on how we've been pronouncing her name. So she goes from me. And then the judge goes, from me. And she goes, right. And he goes, have you always gone by that pronunciation? And she goes, well, your honor, I've acquiesced. And, you know, and on occasion, like, McBride at by that point, had called her everything, like even called her. her Miss Manson at some point. And so he's like sort of bewildered and he goes, you know, from, fromey, from me. And she goes, no, no. And she's giggling.

She goes, no, no, from me. And then McBride offers this slight grin and goes, from me to you. Yeah. Yeah, those guys had some real banter going between them. Yeah, there's a real, I think a bit of sympathy, right? A bit of sympathy going on between the judge, from the judge to Lynn. Right. But it didn't stop him from putting her under a gag order from time to time when she grew frustrated,

when she expressed her frustration with the way that things were going, especially on that evidentiary front, right? We talked about her goals of what she wanted to accomplish, but she wasn't really able to achieve those goals. So like with respect to subpoenaing Charles Manson to testify in her trial, there's a whole hearing about whether or not he'll be permitted to come to the trial. And she puts on this very vehement case. She reads into the record this lengthy statement that, you know, maybe we'll

excerpt some portions of it because I think it is an interesting statement that she makes and we can hear from her in her words the case for getting Charlie in front of the jury to speak to her character and the judge rules against her on that and that I think is the big one and that makes all of the little decisions that don't go her way even more frustrating such that she begins to perceive the whole process is unfair, she's complaining. She is like, you know, the way that Jess Bravin describes it in his book is like a teenager and her, you know, stern father almost is how the exchanges between the two of them go. So on occasion, like you said, he orders her taken out of the courtroom.

He has her, you know, gagged. She's not able to get her message out. She's running up against this wall where if she did, you know, come armed to Capitol Park with an objective, with a goal, as the trial progressed, it became clearer and clearer that she's not going to achieve that goal. You know, she didn't obviously hurt Gerald Ford, but to the extent that she had a propaganda a goal, you know, it was not going to be possible to actually advance that goal through this trial. This trial was very much focused on the question of, did she or did she not intend to

assassinate the president? And, you know, after kind of abandoning the insanity defense, what her attorneys sought was the time. she would be convicted of a lesser included offense, like an assault charge, which is equivalent of, you know, instilling a fear in a person without actually attempting to hurt them or without actually touching them. So that was the goal that her lawyers believed, according to their statements, you know, after the trial, they believed that that was actually within reach that, that the evidence itself because there wasn't like a clear narrative that showed that she had pulled the trigger because there wasn't a bullet in the chamber because, you know, she didn't get a shot

off that they believed that all of her propagandistic goals and all of her rhetorical goals that she came into the trial with could serve a storyline where she showed up that, day simply to get the public's attention, to get the president's attention and to get the attention of the media and of the entire society by threatening, you know, basically making an empty threat on the president's life through the wielding of this pistol. But as they're kind of seeking to develop this narrative, they engage in a evidentiary gambit that was unprecedented in any criminal trial. And that is subpoenaing the sitting president of the United States. You want to talk about that one, Dick?

Yeah, so it goes to this idea of like they wanted firsthand witness accounts. of like whether or not Lynn actually pulled the trigger and what the sort of scene was at the moment of the deed and really who better than the target of the attempted assassination than to testify on this only problem is is that the target is the sitting president of the United States Now, there is no reason why the victim of this crime could not testify, except for the fact that he happens to be the president. And so what the defense decides, and they do file a motion and they try and get the subpoena, they say that they need the testimony of the president to show whether or not, at any point that Lynn, you know, was there a click, so to speak, heard by the president? And ultimately what happens is they agree upon a subpoena for video deposition. They go to Washington, D.C.

It's, I think, a 30-minute video deposition, not even, of the president. And that deposition testimony is used during the trial. And this is the first use of a presidential deposition in a trial. And it's also the first use of video deposition. deposition testimony in a trial. So it's another one of these moments where it's like the first time this is happening in federal court. A funny little point about this is that the subpoena that was directed to the president is directed to the Honorable Gerald E. Ford. Of course, it's Gerald R. Ford. Yeah, that's a funny one. Rudolph, that's his middle name, of course.

And as our true Jerry heads, we'll know the great fact about Jerry's middle name is that he Americanized the spelling of Rudolph. He changed it from F, R-U-D-O-L-F, the Germanic spelling of his stepdad to pH, the supposedly more Americanized, less Germanic appearance. But the deposition is wild. I mean, it's also, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube and you can see. And we had a little bit of it playing in the cold open in this episode. And it is wild.

It's, it's, I can't imagine any other president being deposed. Do you imagine Obama in a deposition? I mean, Clinton was deposed, right? He was deposed. Yeah. in the civil suit Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I mean is in this context,

in the context of being a victim of an assassination attempt. That is pure Jerry. It's pure Jerry. And there's a couple of other things about the trial that we also wanted to mention. One of them is that while the jury was sequestered,

they received a bomb threat at some point. I believe it was before they went into deliberations, but towards the end of the trial. And so, you know, the thought was that the threat came from members of the Manson family or maybe the Aryan Brotherhood or something like that. And the court took extra pains to hush up the fact. of the bomb threat and think some of the jurors that hadn't been aware of it, they weren't told

about it, and it was really hushed up because of the capacity that such an event could have to bias the jury probably against the defendant, right? Because the implication would be that the threat is coming from the defendant or from allies of the defendant rather than coming from the government side of the V, right? Yeah. You know, many people have asked the question, why wasn't Len Fromm under observation by the Secret Service? Why didn't they know where she was?

Why didn't they keep a closer eye on it? The President's new secretary, Ron Nesson said that Ms. Fromm was not known to the Secret Service to be a threat to the President. A fact which astonished son, including the chief prosecutor of the Manson case, Vincent Bugliosi. During the trial, she and Manson and several other members of the family expressed open hostility, as you probably well know, towards President Nixon, and President Ford pointee of President Nixon. It's understandable to me that in their minds he should also be the object of their hatred.

I find it absolutely incredible and inexcusable that someone of limbs. Squeaky Fromm's past history and her reputation would be permitted to get within two feet of President Ford. Law enforcement does not deserve any credit for the fact that President Ford is still alive. It seems to me that they should have been watching Squeaky throughout the years, as I don't think they've done. And when President Ford was scheduled to come to Sacramento, law enforcement should have contacted the Secret Service and alerted them about the existence of this person, and perhaps this would never have happened. The man Muleos he put in prison, Charles Manson is in San Quentin prison tonight, starting a life term for murder. Manson learned of the attempt on President Ford's life today by the prison grapevine.

A San Quentin prison official said Manson reacted with what seemed to be non-committal surprise. Alrighty folks, you know what time it is. It is time to give credit where credit is due, and for us to do some shoutouts to our Patreon doctoral candidate and research assistant. Members, thank you so much to Remington, to Sammy Six Guns, to Lenin Party, to Hank, to Sergeant Grumbles, to Cornelia, to Bic, to Dave B. Thank you so much to Raven, to McGee, to Al, to Kelly, to Annie, to Ven, to Wizard of Choice, to Mike. Thank you to John, to UAE Exotic Falconry and Finance.

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And thank you to everyone out there for tuning in. We'll catch you next week. Be well.