In America, few events leave a lasting mark and change the way it thinks. The North-South Civil War and the Vietnam War are certainly among those that have done so, but so are the Manson murders. The latter proved to people that American youth could also be different from what people had imagined, that it could also be extremely violent. Even worse than this realisation was the realisation that such cases are not an isolated phenomenon, but a mass movement. The flower children whose parents merely looked at them with pity and hoped that one day in the future they would come to their senses could become anything other than innocent young men shouting in the streets that they wanted love, not war. All this became clear to the Americans one hot August day in 1969.
It was a normal summer day on 8 August 1969. The Los Angeles Times reported on its front page that a city hospital had failed to save the life of an injured policeman, the legislature had passed a new budget for schools, the Beatles were photographed crossing the street in London, and scientists were convinced that the south side of Mars would be suitable for human habitation.
Late at night that day, at the Spahn ranch, four men and three women climbed into a battered Ford and headed towards Beverly Hills. One of the women said, “We’re going to get these fucking pigs.” It was Susan Atkins, a 21-year-old girl, the daughter of two alcoholics, who had dropped out of school and had worked for a while as a second-rate actress, and was over-indulging in LDS.
Behind her sat Patricia Krenwinkel, also 21, an alcoholic and drug user. In the car was Linda Kasabian, 20, who introduced herself as “Yana the Witch”. She had also had dealings with the police for drugs. Behind the wheel was Charles Watson, a 23-year-old former captain of the school football team and delinquent.
Everyone in the car was dressed in black from head to toe. In fact, they have never been very violent. They were just members of a hippie commune called The Family, and above all they were living the way their leader, 34-year-old Charles Manson, wanted them to live. He also ordered them to go on tonight’s trip.
After a 40-minute drive, the quartet arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the film actress Sharon Tate was living with her husband, the film director Roman Polanski, who was in London filming at the time. The villa was perched on a steep cliff overlooking Los Angeles, and on clear days you could see as far as the Pacific Ocean, 12 kilometres away.
It was after midnight when Watson climbed the outer fence post and cut the phone line. An electric gate led to a private road, and they jumped it and headed for a remote outbuilding. They all had knives, Watson had a revolver. Linda Kasabian remained on guard while the others crawled cautiously down the slope towards the isolated outbuilding.
Steven Parent, 18, was sitting next to him in his car, just heading home. “Please leave me alone, I’ll shut up,” he managed to say before Watson shot him four times. He was instantly dead and blood filled the car. No one in the house heard the shots and, finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a hole in the protective window screen with a knife and entered the building.
He went to the main door, opened it and Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel entered the building. In the living room, they found 32-year-old Wojciech Frykowski, a Polish émigré, sleeping on a sofa. A survivor of the Second World War and the Holocaust, he was now wandering around America.
Frykowski woke up and asked what time it was, thinking that the black figures in front of him were friends. “They’ll be quiet or you’ll be dead,” Watson replied. They tied his hands, then Atkins went to see who was in the adjoining rooms. In the first, through a half-open door, she saw Abigail Folger, the heiress of a coffee manufacturer, and in the next, 26-year-old Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, the daughter of an officer, a multiple beauty queen and on her way to becoming a famous film actress, was lying on the bed. Her former lover and friend Jay Sebring, the most famous fashion hairdresser of film actors, was sitting in the chair next to her, saying something to her.
Everyone had to gather in the living room. After the first shock, they started offering the intruders money to leave them alone. Watson ordered them to lie down on the floor in front of the fireplace. He took a long rope and tied them up, the end of which he secured to a wooden beam on the ceiling. Sebring protested about the treatment of the heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, Watson shot him twice in the lungs and then began stabbing him with a knife. A terrified Sharon Tate asked him, “What are you going to do to us?” He replied, “You are all going to die.”
In the meantime, Frykowski managed to untie the rope he was tied with and tried to disarm Atkins, but Atkins repeatedly stabbed him in the legs. She stabbed him nearly ten times, but he still had enough strength to run to the door and try to escape. He was only stopped by Watson’s shots.
Abigail Folger also managed to loosen the rope that tied her and Sharon Tate together, and Sharon Tate ran towards the door in her nightdress and then on to the grass. Krenwinker ran after her, caught her and stabbed her twenty-eight times.
Abigail Folger was in shock at what was happening and just said to Watson: “I can’t take it anymore. I’m already dead. Knock me out.” The killers, their clothes soaked in blood, looked at Frykowski, who had failed to get any further from the door and was now stumbling towards them. They charged at him and began to stick knives into him. The medical examiner later counted 51 stab wounds, 13 blows to the head and two gunshot wounds.
Meanwhile, a bloodied Sharon Tate was still alive, gasping and crying. She was due to give birth in two weeks. Watson ordered Atkins to kill her. Sharon Tate begged Watson to let her live to have the baby, and Atkins replied, “Woman, there is no mercy for you. You will die and I feel nothing for you.” And she stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined her and together they stabbed her 16 more times until she died. Atkins soaked a towel in her blood and wrote one word on the front door: “Pig.”
Don’t kill animals, kill people
The four returned to the ranch in the early hours of the morning and went to bed. Atkins recalled, “I was gone. It was as if I had died. I couldn’t think of anything and my head was empty.”
The event at 10050 Cielo Drive was so barbaric and destructive that it left a lasting mark on the psyche of the average American. The media reports, of course, added their own, because for the media this was no ordinary murder, but a bloody orgy, a ritual slaughter and a supernatural religious ritual. Maybe drugs were involved, maybe Sebring was a Satanist. There was a lot of speculation. One police investigator who viewed the scene of the crime said that it looked as if the corpses were mannequins, pushed into the red paint.
But that was not the end of the story. The next night, the four were joined at the ranch by a trio of others; 17-year-old musician Steven Grogan, 19-year-old Leslie van Houten and Charles Manson, the leader of the Family. All seven crammed into a car and left to find new victims.
After a three-hour drive through Los Angeles, they stopped at 3301 Waverly Drive, where Manson broke into a house occupied by Leno LaBianca, the owner of a speakeasy, and his wife Rosemary. Manson chose Watson, Krenwinkler and van Houten to kill this way, never having struck a man before. He ordered them to kill the couple. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were stabbed dozens of times each. The killers smeared the walls with their blood and wrote “death to pigs” on the walls.
The police were confused. It had no perpetrators or suspects and was convinced that the two murders were unrelated. Days turned into weeks and then into months, but the police had nothing tangible to say to the public. In December 1969, however, it announced to a crowd of assembled journalists that the murders had been solved, allowing the public to learn the names of the killers for the first time. Arrest warrants were issued for Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian. The names of Charles Manson and Susan Atkins were not mentioned because they were already in prison.
Manson was charged in October with involvement in a carjacking, while Atkins was charged with the murder of another man, Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson’s, and was already in a women’s prison. There, she bragged to her fellow inmates about her involvement in the murder of Sharon Tate, and it was these careless statements that put the police on the right track.
Photos of Family members began to appear on the front pages of newspapers and on TV news reports. Ordinary Americans’ perceptions of the killers and what they heard or read in the media simply did not fit together. These were not photographs of emaciated criminals or lunatics who had escaped from mental institutions. They were photographs of hippies, flower children, unshaven young men with long hair and beards wearing leather jackets, photographs of girls in denim and bralettes, with knotted and unwashed hair. The killers talked like hippies, they were free-lovers, they roamed the communes along the Californian coast, they believed that hallucinogenic drugs were expanding their spiritual horizons, and the hippies were having babies naturally and raising them together.
There was no time for them. There were no good or bad things, and there was no death. All living beings were simultaneously the work of God and the devil. While it was wrong to kill animals, it was permissible to kill human beings because human life had no value. Where did they get such ideas from, having been born and brought up in a traditional American community? Nobody could explain that. The family, with its views, provided everyone with a mirror in which to project their own insecurities and worries.
After Sharon Tate’s murder, it was clear to everyone that hippies were not a marginal phenomenon in American society, but could disrupt its status quo. Moralists condemned their promiscuity, others looked on them with envy. Newspapers sometimes reported violent acts among hippies, but no one could have imagined that they would be capable of a premeditated, planned and bloody murder such as the one that took place on 8 August 1969.
And who was Charles Manson, a not particularly charismatic young man who spent half his life in various institutions, yet managed to secure such power over young girls in particular? None of them were under his control for even two years, and yet they did everything he told them to do. He was the son of a 16-year-old mother, born in 1934, he did not know his father and he has known only deprivation and suffering in his life. His mother did not take care of him, as she was imprisoned several times, and Charles was a regular guest in various boarding schools for children whose parents did not take care of them. He ran away from there several times and worked in small places. His educators pointed out his maladjusted behaviour and psychological trauma.
He married early and became a father, but he couldn’t give up the place. He was sentenced to three years in prison the first time and ten years the second time for forging a cheque. He continued his career as a pimp and car thief. In prison, he started to learn to play the guitar and showed a certain talent. He came out of prison at the age of 32. He liked it and had no plans for what he would do on release and no place of refuge to go.
After his release, he recruited members for his Family in the backwoods of the Californian countryside, and soon it numbered almost 100. Members were attracted to him by his skilful oratory, his radical views on free love and his drug use. The family first settled in San Francisco and then went to the Spahn Ranch in the San Fernando Valley, where they were able to consume drugs and play sex games without interference. Among the members were many young girls convinced that Manson was another Jesus.
The trial of the six defendants – Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Leslie van Houten, Steve Grogan and Linda Kasabian – began in July 1970. Watson was tried separately and apart from the other members of the Family, as he had fled to Texas and was awaiting extradition to California. The trial was one of the longest in American history and very complicated because, after all, Charles Manson did not murder anyone himself. He was not at Sharon Tate’s house and he left the LaBiance house before the others murdered them. But under the law, he could be guilty of murder if the prosecution could prove that he ordered the killing.
On the first day, Manson appeared in court with an X carved on his forehead, the wound still bleeding. The next day, three of the defendants also appeared in the courtroom with X’s carved into their foreheads. They laughed and posed for photographers. Similar spectacles took place outside the courthouse, where women members of the Family gathered every morning to protest. Some of them had shaved heads, came with their babies and nursed them in front of the courthouse, and were laughed at by passers-by. They all had an X carved on their foreheads.
The most fundamental question that the prosecution had to deal with was why Sharon Tate and others and Mr and Mrs LaBianca were chosen as victims. Manson knew the previous tenant of the house where Sharon Tate lived. His name was Terry Melcher, he was a music producer and had promised Manson that he would record a record with him. When Manson found out that he had moved out, he was disappointed and asked one of the tenants of the house for his new address. The answer angered him.
Manson also used to live close to the house where the LaBianca couple lived, so the victims were not chosen at random. For him, they were just part of a system that had to be destroyed. It was only in time that Charles Manson came to say what the real reasons for his Family’s actions were, and what he revealed was very strange.
He said he first heard of The Beatles when they visited America in 1964. He immediately became obsessed with them. Listening to their song Helter Skelter, he had a flash of insight that it predicted an apocalyptic race war between blacks and whites. The blacks would no longer have access to white wives, and so they started killing. He was convinced that there were important and secret messages hidden in this poem.
Paul McCartney, who wrote the lyrics, later claimed that the song was about nothing other than an amusement tower, of which there were many in England, and from which one could go down a winding slide.
But Manson saw a different message in the song, explaining it in twisted and dubious words: ‘Helter Skelter means confusion. It doesn’t mean war with anyone. It doesn’t mean that people will kill other people. It means what it means. Helter Skelter is the confusion that is coming. If you do not see the confusion coming, you can call it whatever you want. It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I only hear what it says. It says, rise up and kill. So why are you blaming me, because I did not write this song. I am not the one who pushed it into your social consciousness.”
The song Helter Skelter became so famous that everyone attributed it to Manson and almost no one associated it with The Beatles anymore.
The trial dragged on for seven months, with the defendants’ testimony as detailed as possible and the defence claiming that Manson had “brainwashed” the members with LSD. But how? If someone is psychologically controlling someone else, who is responsible for their actions? Were the defendants mere chess pieces, but the real moves were pulled by Manson, who used a precise combination of drugs, hypnosis, persuasion and violence to turn non-violent persons into crazed, psychopathic killers?
Some former members of the Family who managed to escape his pernicious influence have described Manson’s methods of seducing new members. He allegedly offered them free love, sex and drugs. He organised weekly orgies at the Spahn ranch and dosed each participant individually with drugs. Then, at the start of the orgy, he would start dancing and the others would follow. He began to take off his clothes and others began to undress too. Manson was in charge of the orgy, determining the couples, the combinations and the positions. All this, according to the story, he did in a casual way. If anyone didn’t want to participate, he would exclude them. He took the virginity of underage girls and the others had to watch.
The Commune also had to make a living, so Manson assigned daily tasks to the members and forbade them to have contact with their families. There were no newspapers on the ranch, nor were there clocks or calendars. Thus, the members of the Family slowly drifted away from real life and accepted that death was equal to life, good was equal to bad, and God was indistinguishable from Satan.
He who lives madly, dies madly
Finally, the court gave its verdict and sentenced Manson, Krenwinkel, Atkins and van Houten to death. Linda Kasabian was granted immunity as a prosecution witness. All three girls jumped to their feet when the verdict was announced and shouted: “You have condemned yourselves! Your system is nothing but a game! Blinded stupid people! Your children will turn against you!”
Outside the courthouse, someone looked into the TV camera and said, “Death, you’re all going to get that too.” So that was it. The accused had their say, the court judged and convicted. Manson and the others were sentenced to death, but because the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in 1972, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Manson served his sentence at Corcoran State Prison. He was not a model prisoner, as he continuously broke the rules of his sentence. He used unknown means to obtain mobile phones and drugs. His request for early release was rejected twelve times. At the time, he said: “I put five people in the grave. I am a very dangerous man.”
On 3 January 2017, he was rushed to hospital because of health problems. He died there of natural causes on 19 November 2017, aged 83. The last photograph of him showed him as a bald old man with a grey beard and a pecked cross on his forehead.
Patricia Krenwinkel was found guilty on seven counts, including the murder of the LaBianca couple. She later condemned Manson and urged young people not to see him as a hero. “Looking back, I can see how cowardly I was,” she used to say. She was a model prisoner and took part in a rehabilitation programme. She can only reapply for early release in 2022.
Susan Atkins died in prison in 2009, aged 61. When she heard she was sentenced to death, she told the judge: “The best thing you can do is to lock the door of your home and keep an eye on your children.” In prison, she clung to Christianity and apologised for her actions. She also married twice in prison. In 2008, she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour. She applied for early release, but was refused for the 13th time.
Leslie van Houten, a prison psychiatrist, described prison as “a psychological loaded gun just waiting to go off”. She had been impulsive and frustrated since childhood, but in prison she accepted responsibility for her crime. In prison she published a prison newspaper, sewed for the poor and wrote short stories. Her application for early release was refused.
Charles Watson, who was tried separately from the others, claimed, “I am the devil, and I have come to do the devil’s work.” Although he claimed to be Manson’s slave “who does not think”, he renounced his guru in prison. He became a Christian, married in prison and had three sons.
Justice should therefore be done. But was that really all? A number of questions remain unanswered. Were the victims in Sharon Tate’s house possibly connected to the killers? Did Terry Melcher, the previous tenant of the house, know who the killers were but did not inform the police? Did the police know about Manson’s role in the murders almost from the beginning, but delayed arresting him because they wanted to protect someone or some circle? How did Hollywood react to all this, since the rule still applied here that whoever lives madly also dies madly?
Immediately after the murders, Beverly Hills was gripped by panic. No one opened the door to anyone anymore. Steve McQuinn walked around with a revolver in his pocket, Frank Sinatra hired a special security guard to spend every night for months in his kitchen with a shotgun ready to fire. People bought alarms and security devices like crazy and flushed their drug supplies down toilets. But Hollywood residents refused to give statements to the press. Did they perhaps know what was going on at the Hollywood Villa’s private parties?
What was life like in the Polanski villa before the murder and what was going on there? The Hollywood elite were known for their parties, loose morals, drug use and links to organised crime. A photograph of Roman Polanski, the director, was circulating in magazines when he returned to Hollywood from London, visited his former house at 10050 Cielo Drive and knelt in front of the front door, which still bore the word “pig”. Inside, the house was full of white dust, which the police were using to try to get the fingerprints of the perpetrators, and dried brownish bloodstains on the floor.
10050 Cielo Drive was a place where, before the tragedy, the parties never stopped. When the Polanskis were away or on location, Frykowski and Abigail Folger took care of the house, and the parties were especially crazy. Frykowski bought drugs for everyone, and the drugs got stronger and stronger. There was always enough cocaine and mescaline. People came to the parties who nobody knew, because they were friends of a friend, and they stayed in the house for days. It was possible to meet completely primitive people and educated people, and there was no difference between them.
Despite the stubborn silence, journalists have managed to dig out a few details. Perhaps, some argued, all was not rosy between the Polanskis, as Polanski was quite difficult. Others denied this, claiming that the marriage was happy, but almost everyone agreed that Sharon Tate almost hated Frykowski and Abigail Folger, complaining that there were too many drugs in the house and that they both acted as if the house was theirs. But Polanski demanded that they stay, as he did not want Sharon to be alone in the big house in his absence. What bothered her most was that Frykowski was constantly arguing with those who brought him drugs, claiming that the drugs were not of a high enough quality for his clients.
Last but not least, Jay Sebring was not a blank slate. He was Sharon Tate’s former lover until she decided that Polanski was the right man for her. Nevertheless, they remained on good terms. Sebring made a reputation for not only cutting his clients’ hair, but also “styling” it so that it stayed in shape all day. This is how he became the hairdresser of many Hollywood actors.
He was also a hairdresser for mob godfathers and partied with them in Chicago and Las Vegas. Could the massacre at Sharon Tate’s house have been linked to some drug case gone wrong involving both Frykowski and Sebring?
The Lonely Ranch
Terry Melcher’s name hardly came up during the trial, although without him the massacre at 10050 Cielo Drive would probably not have happened. He was the closest link between Manson and the Hollywood elite. As a former tenant at 100500 Cielo Drive, he promised to record Manson’s playing on a record, but later cancelled and Manson went berserk.
The two men met several times at 10050 Cielo Drive. Was Manson trying to scare him now? Why didn’t Melcher tell the police immediately? Did the police deliberately not question him too harshly because Melcher was a well-known music producer with good connections and the only son of famous Hollywood parents who didn’t want their name in the papers?
Manson was therefore well acquainted with 10050 Cielo Drive, and an acquaintance of his, whom Watson had visited several times, had also lived there for a short time. The choice of Sharon Tate’s house was therefore by no means accidental. Terry Melcher remained silent for many years after the terrible event and when he died in 2004, he took many secrets to his grave. Thus, the real motives for the murders, the links of some members of the Family to the Hollywood elite, and how the killers managed to remain undetected for so many months never came to light.
When people talk about the Tate-LaBianca killers, they talk about the “Manson murders”; about the two nights when blood flowed and the killers who emerged from the darkness. But they often forget that the Family took another life in the meantime. The life of 34-year-old Gary Hinman, who lived in a hippie commune 20 kilometres from the Spahn ranch. He was a friend of the Family, giving them food and sometimes money.
In July 1969, Manson learned that Hinman had inherited about $20,000 and was convinced that this money belonged to the Family. Three of its members, including Susan Akins, came to Hinman and demanded the money. He told them that he had never had it. They tied him up and searched the house, but could not find the money. They tortured and beat him for two days until Manson ordered them to kill him. They stabbed him and then suffocated him with a pillow. They wrote “political pig” in his blood on the living room wall.
Police found his body six days later and started to investigate where his two cars had gone. One was found in northern California and it was Bobby Beausoleil who stabbed Hinman. He was difficult to answer at the hearing and was arrested on 7 August and charged with first-degree murder.
For a long time, the police failed to link Hinman’s murder to the “Manson murders”, although the similarities were striking. Even the coroner who witnessed the autopsies was convinced of the connection. After all, there were similar words written in the blood of the victims on the walls of the houses of the murdered.
On 16 August, police surrounded the Spahn Ranch. Around 100 police officers, armed to the teeth, with more than 20 cars and two helicopters assisted them. All members of the family, 27 adults and 7 children, were arrested.
But the whole police operation had nothing to do with the murders. The police had been watching the ranch for a long time, convinced that Manson was dealing in stolen cars. All those arrested were back on the loose three days later. The reason was simple: the police search warrant had been wrongly written.
How is it possible that the police did not pay more attention to Mason? They knew that he was only on parole, unemployed, had access to drugs and alcohol, was in contact with under-age girls and had a concealed weapon. The police sometimes patrolled the area around the ranch and noticed armed men walking around, but they always looked away and left.
Manson was once arrested for rape, but was immediately released. One of the detectives who was ordered by his superior to leave the Family alone and who spoke to the press about this police misconduct immediately lost his job. The suspicion that the police had an informant at the Spahn ranch is therefore more than well-founded. Someone even knew to say that this informant was Charles Manson himself. After Manson and other members of the Family were arrested and charged with murder, all official written reports of what the police knew about what was happening at the Spahn Ranch suddenly disappeared.
For reasons unknown to anyone, the Gary Hinmam murder trial was held separately from the Tate-LaBianca murders. The detective who first got his hands on the murder file immediately noticed that in all three cases the walls were covered with the blood of the murdered and with the same words. He pointed this out to the District Attorney’s Office, but the latter told him that it saw no connection and that he should do as he was told and not go through files that did not concern him.
The prosecution’s embarrassment was clear. If the trial of all the murders had been consolidated into a single proceeding, the police would have had to explain why they did not arrest the suspects immediately, when they knew that the killers were members of the Family as early as 10 August. The media and the authorities also pressed for the Tate-LaBianca murders to be tried as soon as possible, and the prosecution was ready to make concessions. Thus, Linda Kasabian became the prosecution’s main witness and was offered immunity for her cooperation. This was all the easier because she was not directly involved in the murders. She was guarding the entrance to the estate during the murders of Sharon Tate and the others, but during the murders of the LaBianca couple she was only the driver of the car. Many grumbled that she would thus escape punishment, although it was acknowledged that she had shown a considerable degree of remorse at her trial.
Few people today remember that Linda Kasabian was not the only person the prosecution was willing to give in to because it needed irrefutable evidence to reach a final verdict. The story of the concessions began to unfold as the Family was beginning to fall apart. A month after the murders, the Family abandoned the Spahn ranch as Manson noticed more and more police in the area. They moved deep into Death Valley to two small ranches and supported themselves by stealing small and selling stolen car parts.
This attracted the attention of the local police, who surrounded their settlement and arrested them. Susan Atkins was imprisoned with a girl on a summons and they became friends. Atkins began to tell her about her role in the Tate-LaBianca murders and bragged that she had stabbed Sharon Tate herself. When she was dead, she tasted her blood, she said, which was “warm, sticky and pleasant”. Her co-defendant was shocked and when she could, she called the police and told them what she had heard. The Tate-LaBianca murders were thus explained.
Stranger in a strange land
The media ridiculed the police for incompetence, and the prosecution, which did not yet have solid evidence, compromised with Atkins. They promised not to sentence her to death if she cooperated with them, but only to life imprisonment without the possibility of early release. The compromise had to be properly explained to the press, and it read:
“Susan Atkins was present at the Tate-LaBianca and Hinman murders. She was under the spell of Manson, but had nothing to do with the murders themselves. She will tell the whole story at trial.”
Susan Atkins was the most famous of all the members of the Police Family. She was sentenced to prison and then released on parole several times, but she never followed the rules required by the US parole system. She changed addresses, was not employed and did not report for regular monthly meetings. But she surprised her parole officer most of all when she informed him by telephone that she had “collectively” married a “travelling preacher” who had just been released from federal prison. It was, of course, Charles Manson.
Atkins and Manson’s seven other “wives”, many of whom were pregnant by him, were bound for Southern California. ‘Charlie’, she did not know his name at the time, ‘loves us all and we love each other. Love is everything and everything is nothing.”
Thus, in 1968, Mendocino County, California, became a haven for hippies fleeing San Francisco because it was no longer the uninhibited paradise it had been just a few days before. Here, the hippie movement was at its peak, there were no more restrictions, members gave each other clothes, took drugs, listened to music, had sex and talked for hours about tolerance. The length of their hair and the guitar in their hand said everything about them.
When the Beatles visited, they were unimpressed. “The Summer of Love is nothing but a bunch of messed-up kids and drugs,” they reportedly said.
But curious tourists also started to gather here and buy souvenirs with the words “Make love not war”. Hippie communions had already set up here in 1965, and in early June 1968 Manson and his girls showed up to recruit some new curious people for his Family. Five of his girls – including Susan Atkins and Particia Krenwinkel – used a well-honed technique. They chose a few dewy-eyed young boys and invited them to an orgy full of girls, offering them marijuana secretly mixed with LDS.
Unfortunately for them, they came across three underage boys, one of them the son of a Mendocino County Sheriff’s deputy. The 17-year-old awoke from his daze in a ball of his feet, rushed home and told his parents that his “feet were like snakes” and that he saw “rainbow headlights” when he closed his eyes. Shortly afterwards, the five girls were charged with possession of drugs and participation in the seduction of a minor.
But they were lucky, because they were rescued by the officer in charge of checking Manson’s parole. This man must have had an unusually strong influence with the police, because five of the girls should have ended up in prison. This, in fact, was only the beginning of the real Manson story.
Manson was released from prison on 21 March 1967. He was 32 years old at the time. Although he had been in prison for several years for armed robbery when he was a minor, homosexual rape and brutally beating his wife, he was described in official documents as non-violent. After his release from prison, he joined an experimental project funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, which worked on rehabilitation programmes for released prisoners. He was given his own parole officer.
This supervisor was not just someone, but a highly qualified person who had studied criminology. Immediately after leaving prison, Manson had already violated the conditions of his parole, as he was forbidden to leave San Francisco. This violation should have led to his immediate imprisonment. But he was sent to Mendocino. No one knows how he got his hands on the science-fiction book Stranger in a Strange Land. Although he was semi-literate, he somehow managed to understand its contents. He carried the book around with him all the time because it fascinated him.
The story in the book is similar to his. It is about Michael, a man raised on Mars, who has hypnotic powers. He goes to Earth to breed a new perfect race. There he gathers twenty followers, mostly young girls, and uses sex to initiate them into the mysteries of his religion. His followers must surrender their egos to him and submit to him completely. They worship the innocence of children and try to communicate with each other telepathically. The group slept and lived together, and one of their rituals was the “giving of water”, probably the taking of drugs.
In this philosophy, there was no death, only the disappearance of the body, and by killing people they saved their souls, because then they could be reincarnated. Michael, with the help of his group, saves the world in the end, like Christ.
It is almost impossible to imagine a greater similarity between the book and the Manson Family. In the commune, Manson started taking drugs and suddenly became fascinated by spiritualism, and his supervisor wrote in his report that he was making excellent progress. At the time of writing, Manson was already in jail for resisting a police officer who had arrested one of his under-age girls.
In April 1968, Manson was arrested and the newspapers published the whole story under the headline “Police find naked hippies sleeping in bushes”. A night police patrol was driving along the Pacific Highway and saw a bus in a ditch. In the bushes were the bodies, or so the police thought, of seven women and five men. Although they looked dead, they were asleep. They were woken up and told to get dressed and wait for the police bus. They checked the details of the bus and found that it had been stolen a week earlier.
When the police bus arrived and the hippies boarded, one of the women said, “Wait, I forgot the baby in our bus.” The baby was only a week old, dehydrated and with wounds all over his body. The newspapers also reported that “self-proclaimed band leader Charles Manson has been accused of stealing the bus”.
However, no serious consequences were suffered by those involved. The owner of the stolen bus dropped his lawsuit and Manson spent only one day in jail. Everyone else was released, but the unwitting mother was given a two-year suspended sentence.
And what did the defendants say in their defence at the trial? That they were not responsible for their actions because they were under Manson’s control. Many of the psychiatrists who testified in court were convinced that the LDS had such a strong influence on their minds that they were unable to distinguish true memories from false ones.
The only one who did not base his defence on this story was Charles Manson. He did not talk much about the crimes, he just said that he did not know what his “children” would do before they did what they did and that he had no explanation why they did it. Rumours persisted among investigators that Manson had visited Sharon Tate’s house with an unknown person after the murders and had started to move the bodies. Could he have been trying to cover his tracks? But these were just rumours that did not lead to any follow-up.
To this day, so many decades after the end of the trial, America is still obsessed with Charles Manson. He has become a cult figure, so much so that one gets the impression that it all happened yesterday and not decades ago. According to those who knew him, he had a certain charisma. For others, he was a gift from heaven. People write and print books about him, his photographs adorn teacups, his face is printed on T-shirts and he is talked about on numerous websites. He has become a source of income for many.
When he died, he had 8620 followers on Twitter. Before he died, he sent a message to everyone: “I am free, but you are prisoners of your parents’ habits .”
