LOS ANGELES, Apr. 2 – Jurors had little difficulty convicting Charles Manson and his three “girls” or deciding that they should be executed for the Tate-LaBianca murders, jury foreman Herman C. Tubick disclosed Thursday.

The silver-haired, 58-year-old mortician held a press conference at the Ambassador to answer dozens of queries and to end lengthy efforts by news media to contact him.

His disclosures included:
— One juror had been impressed with defense attorney Maxwell Keith’s argument on behalf of Leslie Van Houten, 21, in the guilt-or-innocence phase of the trial, but had not offered prolonged or stubborn resistance before finding her guilty.

— Jurors never disagreed over whether death was a proper verdict for the four defendants, only whether death should be decreed for each of 27 counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder.

— One juror, Larry D. Sheely, proposed after the death verdicts were returned, that jurors could possibly share $200,000 from a magazine if they would stick together and not release their stories.

— He has no knowledge that some jurors supposedly engaged in “promiscuous” behavior during sequestration, as claimed by a panel member in a television interview.

— Jurors thought Miss Van Houten, Susan Atkins, 22, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 23, were lying when they said in witness stand confessions that Manson had had nothing to do with the seven murders.

— The jury never thought the three women defendants were mentally ill or that they did what they did because of the chronic use of LSD.

Tubick said there were problems which were discussed by the jurors, but he said, “We had no problems about reaching a decision.”

He declined to single out a “most important” factor.

“We took all the evidence that came off that witness stand and nowhere else,” he said.

Asked about reports that someone had talked about, a “package deal” for the jurors’ story, Tubick confirmed that they were true. He said Sheely brought up the subject in the jury room after jurors had delivered the death penalties.

“He just came right out and said there was a package deal and if all the jurors stuck together they could all benefit from it,” Tubick said.

“… I believe it was Life magazine … that they were going to approach … his attorney.” (Life has denied offering money to jurors for their story.)

Tubick said he and others were “shocked” by the proposal and that he walked from the room.

“I didn’t think it was right,” he said. “I believe it was God’s will that I was performing a service and was my civic duty to society and that justice was served.

Had the proposal affected the jury’s life-or-death decision in anyway?

“Oh, God, no,” Tubick declared. “It hasn’t. I mean our decision was already made before Mr. Sheely brought this offer up.”

Sheely could not be reached for comment.

Tubick was asked about reports attributed to juror William H. Zamora that some jurors had been “promiscuous” during their seven months of sequestration.

“We had our inside jokes and we played around,” he said. “We had to in order to amuse ourselves but if anybody was having any hanky pankies or anything like that, I really don’t know.”

“He (Zamora) was nice in a way,” Tubick said, “but we had disagreements. I couldn’t see eye-to-eye with him on everything but in the jury room we did see eye-to-eye.”

Tubick said jurors considered Manson as the leader, despite his “girls” insistence that the 36-year-old defendant was just another member of the Manson “family.”

“We looked at it that they were lying all the way down,” he said. “The stories they were bringing out and the way they were talking was just like a broken record … it was repetitious all the way through … that Charlie wasn’t there or that Charlie didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Tubick admitted that repeated interruptions of the trial by Manson and the three young women “didn’t help them any.” He said they seemed to be “ridiculing the judge, the court and our laws.”

But, he said, jurors gave the defendants the presumption of innocence and reiterated that decisions of guilt and penalty had been reached strictly on what they heard from witnesses.

In the case of the state’s key witness, Linda Kasabian, Tubick said that jurors found her story believable. However, he added, he and his fellow panelists followed the court’s instructions in dealing with an accomplice’s testimony.

“We didn’t ever consider it (Mrs. Kasabian’s testimony) until we went through all the testimony of the other witnesses and then we brought hers in,” he said.

The defendants would have been convicted of murder without Mrs. Kasabian’s eyewitness account of the two nights of murder on Aug. 9 and 10, 1969, the foreman added.

Whether Mrs. Kasabian was granted “immunity” from prosecution was not his decision, Tubick declared, but he said that if she had been sitting in court as a defendant he would have found her guilty of murder.

He looked at Manson and the three girls as “God’s children” and fellow human beings and had not judged them because of their different life-style, he said.

The lack of remorse by the defendants did not influence his decisions, the foreman continued, nor did he give “two hoots” about an arrangement between the district attorney’s office and Miss Atkins not to seek the death penalty if she testified truthfully before the grand jury.

As for the death penalty, Tubick said it “wasn’t a pleasant thing to give anybody,” but, “I feel they deserved the death penalty.”

“It was a proper punishment. It could happen again. Anybody who takes the life of anybody else, I think should pay one way or the other … should be punished,” he said.

“There wasn’t anything good about those persons.

“I don’t think anybody felt bad about giving them the death penalty.”

Tubick said he thought the jury’s long sequestration was “proper” and had been successful in guarding jurors against news reports about the trial.

“I’d have no objection to being sequestered all over again if it was necessary,” he said.

By JOHN KENDALL