mistakes. For example, pieces of a gun grip that were first seen near the entryway ended up under a chair in the living room. According to the official LAPD report: "They were apparently kicked under the chair by one of the original officers on the scene…." (Bugliosi 16). On December 16 these pieces would be matched to the gun that had been in police custody since September 10, 1969 when the Los Angles boy had found it in his yard. Police probably would never have made the connection if the boy's father, having heard about the caliber of gun used in the murders, had not insisted that the police check it out. Since guns and other property are routinely disposed of after a period of time, prosecutors were rather lucky that the gun was still around. Officers were also unable to locate any of the knives or bloody clothing from the murders. One of the Manson accomplices (Susan Atkins) divulged to a cellmate her involvement in the crimes, including a suggestion of the location where these items were thrown from the vehicle. A television news crew set out to find them. They used statements made by Atkins, such as "mountain on one side" and "ravine on the other" to guide their search. On December 15, much to the chagrin of the police, they found the clothing. Forensic professionals were also lacking in the performance of their duties. One in particular, Officer Joe Granado, a forensic chemist assigned to both cases, failed to note or sample blood spatters around the bushes where someone had apparently fallen at the Tate residence. He also did not take samples from the pools of blood around the two bodies in the living room, nor from the two bodies on the lawn. He later testified that he presumed that the blood surrounding the victims was their own and he would get those samples from the coroner later. Granado obtained forty-five blood samples from the Tate scene and he failed to run subtypes on twenty-one of those. Two days later at the ...
