LOS ANGELES, Oct. 22 – “Nobody’s crying,” said Charles (Tex) Watson Thursday in a low voice to his attorney, Maxwell Keith, as he scanned the jurors filing into their seats, “and that’s bad.”

He was right. Moments later in the hushed courtroom Clerk John Pappas read the verdict: “Having found the defendant, Charles Denton Watson, guilty of murder in the first degree … we, the jury, fix the penalty as death.”

Watson had gambled and lost. The jurors could and did believe that the neatly groomed young man in the Ivy League clothes seated before them — a scholastic and athletic whiz in high school, a fraternity man in college, properly raised in a God-fearing, small-town Texas home — was reconcilable with a wild-eyed, shaggy-haired brute who murdered Seven persons he had never known or even seen before in his life.

Watson’s only defense was that Charles Manson, leader of a murderous cult, had stolen his mind by brainwashing and selective administration of mind-altering drugs.

And that on Aug. 9 and 10, 1969, at the homes of actress Sharon Tate and Leno LaBianca he shot and stabbed the victims not as himself but as a mindless extension of Manson’s will.

Day by day for almost 12 weeks, since the trial began Aug. 2, Watson sat in his chair at the counsel table, the picture of a young conservative.

He showed little emotion when the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on Oct. 12, or last Tuesday when it rejected his plea of innocent by reason of insanity.

In character to the end, he stared vacantly while the clerk read the verdict of death.

But as he strode from the courtroom, flanked by deputy sheriffs, and faced a platoon of photographers and questions of “Anything to say, Tex?” his lips parted in what appeared to be a faint smile. He said nothing and walked, chin up, into the courthouse elevator.

Superior Judge Adolph Alexander set Nov. 11 for Watson’s formal sentencing.

In a Hall of Justice Courtroom, meanwhile, Manson’ s guilt or innocence in the 1969 murders of musician Gary Hinman and ranch hand Donald (Shorty) Shea was placed in the hands of a jury.

Keith, who joined with Atty. Sam Bubrick in Watson’s defense, said he was “upset and downcast” by the Watson verdict.

“I felt Tex had a good chance,” said Keith, “but I was wrong.”

Dep. Dist. Attys. Vincent T. Bugliosi and Stephen Kay said they felt that the verdict reflects the conscience of the community of seven million persons.

“This is the final page and the final chapter in the Tate-LaBianca case,” said Bugliosi, “and I think we can all go home now.”

Bugliosi also was the prosecutor of Manson and three female members of his cult in a 9 1/2-months’ trial which ended last April in death sentences for them in the same homicides.

The jurors — six men and six women — refused to comment on the case. Two of the women, however, broke down and cried as they returned to the jury room after the verdict.

Alexander told the jurors that in all his years as a lawyer and a judge he had “never seen a more sincere and conscientious jury.”

He noted that despite the length of the trial, not one of the 12 jurors and four alternates asked to be excused.

“And, in fact,” he said, “when one of them was ill briefly she begged me to allow her to remain.”

Watson was not tried with Manson and the others because he was fighting extradition from Texas when their trial began.

Shortly after his return here he fell into a catatonic state but recovered sufficiently to stand trial after three months’ treatment at Atascadero State Hospital.

Watson’s trial in most ways was a rerun of the Manson trial, which produced testimony almost without parallel for bizarreness in Los Angeles County.

Manson was portrayed as an obsessed, diabolical man with extrordinary magnetic power to proselyte young, commune-oriented, drug-ingesting persons to believe in his anti-social philosophy.

One of Manson’s obsessions was that a race war between blacks and whites was imminent. But the war, as he incessantly preached to his “family,” would end with him and his followers in control of the world.

This would come about, he predicted, when the victorious blacks would seek him out in his hiding place “a bottomless pit in the desert” — and ask him to take over the government.

It was to foment such a war that Manson sent Watson and three young women, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian (who turned state’s evidence to avoid prosecution) to the Benedict Canyon estate of Miss Tate with orders “to kill everyone there.”

Killed that night were Miss Tate, eight months pregnant; Steve Parent, Voityck Frykowski, Abigail Folger and Jay Sebring. They died as a result of more than 100 gunshot and stab wounds.

On Manson’s orders, the killers scrawled in blood the word, “Pig” on the front door, to make It appear that the assailants were blacks.

On the following night, Manson selected at random the Los Feliz district home of Mr. and Mrs. Leno LaBianca and sent Watson, Miss Krenwinkel, Miss Kasabian and Miss Leslie Van Houten inside to murder them after he had tied them up.

The LaBiancas were stabbed more than 50 times. Again words were spelled out in blood to imply that the murderers were blacks.

By ED MEAGHER