SANTA CRUZ, Jan. 24 –A young Bill McBride was puzzled by the maze-like path to the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles through which bailiffs led him and other prospective jurors.

It was a labyrinth — and now a faded picture — of back hallways, narrow alleys, and freight elevators.

Not knowing the widely publicized Tate-LaBianca trial was impending, McBride stepped into a packed courtroom.

He saw Charles Manson with his Jesus-like hair and beard and his three young disciples standing nearby. He then knew exactly where he was.

“I had pretty long hair, so I thought the prosecution would identify me with the defendant,” McBride says 25 years later.

Yet weeks of questioning followed. Other prospective jurors were dismissed.

A month later, McBride, a virgin juror, found himself among the chosen 12.

“I couldn’t believe they selected me,” McBride says.

Since the O.J. Simpson case has gripped the media spotlight in the past half year, McBride, 49, of Bonny Doon, has been asked numerous times to revisit his civic stint in the case of the notorious cult leader who orchestrated the slayings of actress Sharon Tate, her four friends, and wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife.

Early speculation that the jury in the Simpson trial would be sequestered renewed interest from reporters from Entertainment Tonight to Prime Time LIve in what it is like to live in a little colony of jurors.

And nobody knows it better than the seven men and five women who decided the fate of Manson.

They were apart from society and constantly chaperoned for 225 days – the longest period in American judicial history that a jury has been sequestered.

For McBride, it meant he had nearly all the time in the world to read every new bestseller, listen to his James Taylor records, build a miniature wooden model of a home, and eat and visit places at the county government’s expense.

“I was young, unattached, and still living at my parent’s house,” he says. “So I didn’t have the problems that other jurors did.”

The marathon trial from June 16, 1970, to Mar. 29, 1971, even inspired him to become a court reporter – a job he still thoroughly enjoys to this day.

But the experience was not without the cost of his freedom, a price – difficult as it was to endure – that McBride believes was necessary.

Sitting in the Santa Cruz County courthouse where he has worked since 1976, McBride says, “I look back at the thing as a real positive experience in my life. It was a unique experience that only 12 of us got to go through.”

He was 24, the youngest of the lot and 50 years younger than the oldest one. He had no wife and no children. (He says he was engaged at the time but the relationship broke up for reasons not related to the trial).

He had recently returned from Vietnam after serving in the Air Force as a clerk in a finance office in Saigon. He had no grand plans and did not know what to study in college.

Despite missing his best friend’s wedding, “it was probably one of the best things that could’ve happened to me,” McBride says.

“You don’t have to do your laundry. You don’t have to cook your own food. You have transportation to everywhere you want to go or where you don’t want to go,” McBride says. “You’re just asked to be a good listener.”

That’s one way of looking at it.

For more than seven months of the 10 month trial, McBride was confined to living on the sixth floor of the Ambassador Hotel, or the “Ambassador Jail” as one juror’s mother called it.

Roughly from the Fourth of July in 1970 to Easter of the following year – with Thanksgiving, Christmas and a trip to the moon in between – McBride, the other jurors and five alternatives, stayed under a 24-hour watch by five bailiffs.

After eating breakfast everyday and dinner almost everyday at the hotel coffee shop, the menu inevitably got tiresome

“After a few months, the coffee shop gets old no matter how good it is,” McBride says.

Jurors had their own rooms. Record players – but not televisions or radios – were allowed.

They watched television in the “day” room. A deputy stood next to it prepared to turn the dail anytime the broadcast focused on the Manson case or other crime-related stories.

They read censored newspapers. “The papers looked like paper dolls when we got them,” he says.

For exercise, they had a jogging track, paddle tennis and a swimming pool. Bailiffs also took them on nightly walks – the slower placed, older crowd in one group, and the faster-paced ones in another.

They were all strangers who quickly discovered which fellow jurors they got along with and which ones they did not.

McBride says he stuck with the younger jurors and was part of the group of practical jokers who toilet-papered one of the bailiff’s rooms and hid rubber chickens in people’s toilets.

Fridays were nights out for dinner on the town. The bailiffs went, too, of course.

Optional field trips were planned for some weekends.

The prosecution presented 84 witnesses and more than 300 pieces of evidence.

In the meantime, jurors face 36-year-old Mnason, with his evil stare, every day.

He would “stare down” different jurors on different days. He always won the staring contest, McBride says.

On trial with Manson were Susan Atkins, 22, Patricia Krenwinkel, 23 and Leslie Van Houten, 21.

On more than one occasion, Atkins looked at McBride and mouthed, “My life is your life.”

In the end, McBride and the others returned 27 guilty verdicts of first-degree murder. They also recommended the death penalty, but the executions were commuted to life in prison when capital punishment was outlawed temporarily.

With the strong evidence and credible witnesses, McBride says, the decision of guilt was fairly clear cut. But deciding on whether the defendants should be sent to life in prison or the gas chamber was not as easy, McBride says.

“It’s a heavy weight,” McBride says. “I really thought about it a lot after the trial.”

Today, in Judge Michael Barton’s courtroom, he is recording every spoken word in a trial against 23-year-old Matias Espinoza Soto of Watsonville. The jury in the case has already convicted Soto of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Mariana Zavala of Watsonville. Now they must choose between sentencing him to life in prison or death.

McBride says he could understand what they’re going through.

As for any words of wisdom to the sequestered jurors in the O.J. Simpson case, McBride offered this: Bring plenty of books to the hotel and take your common sense into the courtroom.

By MAY WONG