VENTURA, Aug. 6 – To this day, Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Michael Pitts cannot say what made him want to spend time with the charismatic man who would become one of this country’s most notorious mass murderers.

As a young deputy assigned to the Bureau of Identification in 1968, Pitts needed only about five minutes to fingerprint Charles Manson and take his picture.

Instead he spent 30 to 35 minutes chatting with Manson while booking him into the old Ventura County jail, and in the process took a mug shot that captured the wild, hypnotic look in Manson’s eyes as few others have.

So striking was the jailhouse photo that it later wound up on the cover of Life magazine and on the dust jacket of Vincent Bugliosi’s best selling book, “Helter Skelter.”

“Intuitively or instinctively, I sensed there was something very, very different about him,” Pitts recalled. “There was just something about him that made me want to talk to him and find out what the hell made this guy tick.”

The date was April 21, 1968, more than 15 1/2 months before the gruesome murders at Sharon Tate’s mansion in Benedict Canyon shocked the world.

In a brightly painted bus, the Manson “family” — five men and nine young women — had been traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They turned off the Pacific Coast Highway on to Deer Creek Road and got stuck.

A surprised Ventura County sheriff’s deputy, who has long since left the department, found the group, huddling nude in the weeds under blankets.

He suspected incorrectly that the van was stolen and arrested them.

“You could feel the intensity,” Pitts said. “Everybody said he was a mystic or some crap, but he didn’t mystify me in that way. But I sensed that this was a very different, intense person, and I couldn’t quite nail down what the hell it was that was bothering me.”

By that time, Pitts had booked thousands of people into jail, rarely speaking to any of them. But Manson asked a question.

“Just out of the blue, when I was rolling his fingerprints, he asked something like ‘Why do you do this for a living?’ Pitts recalled. “Well, that got me started. As I recall, I told him that I had this bad habit called eating.”

What followed was a lengthy discussion about the differences between Manson’s nomadic, hippie lifestyle and Pitts’ middle-class, working way of life, which Manson thought was wrong,
Pitts said.

Pitts, 50, Ventura, a 28-year veteran of the County Sheriff’s Department, works in Camarillo.

By JIM McLAIN