January 25, 2018 • 46 mins
The '60s ended with a lot of turbulence, not the least of which was the Manson Family Murders. What made Charles Manson so alluring to his family? What makes one person kill for another? And what did The Beatles have to do with it all? Learn all this and more in this two part episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and we make up the Stuff you Should Know family,
(00:21):
the peace loving, acid loving, no murdering nice family. Did
I say acid loving in there? You did? Oh? We
just meant peace loving, non murdering family. Yeah. And you
know what, hopefully there are no kids listening to this
one anyway, so we can let everyone else know that
(00:43):
we take LSD before every episode. Sure, I mean the
slogan of our show is wow, He's Alie. Yeah, so
c o A. For those of you who did not
see the title, Uh, if you're listening to your kids
about the Manson family murders out of c o A,
then you need a parenting c o A. Yeah for real.
(01:04):
But there are lots of grizzly details in this, so
obviously you may want to skip this one. With a
on a on a family picnic, Yeah, it might kind
of bring it down a couple of degrees. Might be
a drag, you know, probably so Uh, speaking of drags, Chuck,
I'll tell you who is a drag Charles Manson. He was.
(01:26):
He was so like, there's this, there's this reputed legend
that Charles Manson tried out for the Monkeys. It was rejected,
and that was ultimately why he um ordered these these
grizzly murders. Um of what that will definitely get into.
But it turns out that's absolutely false. Yeah, that that
I've heard that and it always sounded to me like
(01:47):
an urban legend. Well, so the thing is, it's got
like all sorts of interesting facets to it, though right,
it's demonstrably false. He was in prison at the time
the Monkeys tryouts were held. But it kind of coincides
with this larger part of Charles Manson's life that not
everybody is fully aware of, which is that he wanted
(02:07):
to be a star. He wanted to be a musical
recording star, and he actually had. He made some inroads
into that career, and I have read theories that it
is possible that these murders were ordered as a means
of venting Manson's frustration that his music career wasn't going
(02:29):
as well as he thought it should, and sending a
message to some people in the music industry that he
made contact with to basically say, hey, I can't kill
you because I need you, but I can kill other
people to get you going and and get my music
career off the ground. What's the hold up? Which is
just like the Manson family murders on their face, as
(02:50):
they're largely understood, is nuts. But if that's the real
thing behind all of this, that's just the depths of pravity,
of human depravity that people are capable of. I bet
that's not like the sole reason. But but you know,
like if you really strip reasons down, like what are
(03:11):
motivations for things? Like is it really you know, to
bring on Helter Skelter? Is it because he was a
frustrated musician? You know? Like you can say the same
thing about Hitler, like was there a kernel of Hitler's
rejection from the art world and from people at large
that drove him to to order the horrible things that
he ordered the Nazis to do? Like it makes you wonder,
(03:33):
like what is the motivation but behind world changing events
when you break them down to a personal level. Yeah,
I mean, well, Manson, to be fair, was had mental
illness in a lifetime of rejection, so this could all
affector in for sure. Yeah. But so I mean you
you you asked for this article to be written, didn't you.
(03:54):
Was this your jam? Yeah? We yeah. At the Grabster
we can sort of petition him to write articles at times,
and this was definitely one of them. Yeah. So did
you know a lot about the Manson family murders and
the family themselves and all that stuff already? Yeah? So
you this was this is probably still part of like
(04:15):
the cultural zeitgeist when you were becoming like aware of
the world as a kid. Huh. Yeah. Like I definitely
remember the book Helter Skelter being a huge, huge thing. Um.
And I remember a time before, like media was so
robust when the idea of Charles Manson was just so
terrifying to me. I do too, uh. And then I
(04:37):
got older and saw interviews and I was like, oh,
he's just a little tiny redneck. Yeah, like it all vanished.
I was like, oh my god, he's just he's just
a little redneck. Yeah. I think that's what. There were
two things that kids of the eighties went through as
far as awakenings. Were concerned that the Soviet people were
(04:59):
not murder all of us, and that Charles Manson was
not actually scary. He was just a dumb redneck behind bars. Yeah,
I mean he what he did was horrific to be sure,
so I'm not like minimizing that. But as far as
the person, he was this larger than life, scary as
crap dude to me, until you know, interviews started coming
(05:20):
out and sit down with like Diane Sawyer was like,
this guy's a joke. But for a little while there
he was legitimately America's worst nightmare because at the time,
like a lot of people say, when the Manson family
committed these murders and it it came out, you know,
a couple of months later, that's some depraved acid head
hippies had actually committed these gruesome crimes that had captured
(05:43):
the nation's attention. It suddenly gave the establishment, who had
been looking for anything to lay on two hippies to say, see, see,
we told you you can't be trusted. Your whole piece
love um free stuff like that doesn't work. You can't
do that, because this is the outcome of it. Manson
was that personified and for a lot of for that reason,
(06:05):
a lot of people say, this guy, these murders ended
the the summer of love and the era of hippies
and ushered in the seventies. Yeah, for sure. I mean
timing wise, Uh, it just seems very natural. And and
Ed even points out like even during the trial that
narrative was being laid down, it wasn't like years later
people look back and said this. Um. And he also,
(06:27):
I thought it was really interesting. I never really put
it into context like Ed did. But Um, the moon landing,
the very first moon landing that is, happened two weeks
uh before the Manson family murders, and then a week
after the murders was Woodstock. So that was a that
was a nutty month, it really was in America. And
(06:50):
and again, these murders when they took place, they were
just no one had any idea who the Manson family
was except for a handful of people out in l
A and some cops that had run ins with them.
But they were not famous, and no one realized that
the Manson family had been responsible for these murders. They
were just these gruesome, unsolved murders. In between the moon
landing and Woodstock. Yeah, so a lot of people let's
(07:14):
start at the what a lot of people consider the beginning,
which is the night of August nine, um in a
house at one zero zero five zero C Yellow Drive,
which is in Beverly Hills, up in the hills, right, yeah,
I kind of looked up like three different places how
to pronounce that, and they all said yellow except for
(07:34):
Diane Sawyer said cello. And I'm like, man, is dians
what You're wrong? No about anything? No? Whatever? She says,
it's absolutely right. She could make turtlenecks, right. I used
to love turtlenecks. They had, They had a real heyday.
For sure. You don't see him anymore. I used to
(07:55):
wear him on. Don't be dumb, but it was kind
of a gag. I think I could still pull one off, maybe,
especially with the beard. Yeah. The beard would definitely help,
you know, because you could you could turn a certain
way and be like regular shirt turtleneck, regular shirt turtleneck,
just by just by moving your head and your beard
out of the way. Yeah. And of course in the
eighties I would rock the mock turtleneck regularly. Did you
(08:16):
I never really did. Did you wear them with Ze
cavaricis No? No, no, no, it wasn't. You didn't dress
like a c Slater. No, it was sort of um,
believe it or not, that was like a post preppy
thing where the mock turtleneck was acceptable and not cheesy.
Really in a preppy sense. I got you because I
(08:36):
was sort of a prep before I became a human monster.
I could see that did you did you wear the
La cost alligator and stuff? We couldn't afford that stuff,
So a word, the knockoffs or if I had the
lacost the alligator was like accidentally sewing onto the collar.
So oh yeah, yeah, we've had this conversation. Yeah, all
(08:57):
that good stuff factory seconds. Yep, that's Jory Remnant's nice.
So on this night on August nine, are we going
with Ciello or Diane Sawyer's cello? Just let's just say
that the house that Satan built, right, it's at there anymore?
By the way, No, they they tore it down, but
(09:18):
not before Trent Risner went in and recorded at nine
inch Nail's album There. Why not, um so at this
at this house at one zero zero five zero Ciello drive,
that's not there any longer. There's a knock at the
door in the night of August nine, around midnight. So
I don't know if that makes August nine or ten.
I couldn't get a definitive answer. But the door was
(09:39):
answered by a guy named Voitech fried Kowski, who was
known as a Polish playboy. He was friends of the
director Roman Polanski. Uh, and he was there because inside
that house was Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, who was
eight months pregnant with their I believe their first child. Um.
(10:00):
I don't think they had any other children. Sharon type
was pretty young at the time, but um. Also inside
was Abigail Folger, who was the heiress to the Folger
Coffee fortune. And um, I think. Oh, one other guy,
J C. Brin, who was a stylist who was known
as the guy who introduced hair styling two men, So
(10:21):
he was pretty well off and pretty well known as
far as ELI went. And they're just kind of this
hip industry party crowd inside this this residence. And there
was a knock at the door and this guy was
there at on the other side of the door, and
he had a mustache and he was tall, kind of
a natural athlete type type from Texas. And he said,
(10:42):
I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business.
And that was Texas Watson, and he entered the house
and this massacre of everybody inside began. Yeah, so what
had happened previous to that knock was Texas Watson climbed
up a telephone pole, cut the phone line, and then
climbed the fence with a couple of other people, one
(11:04):
Susan Atkins and one Patricia krin Winkle, all Manson family members.
And we'll get into the whole family thing in a minute. Uh.
And so they climbed over the fence, went in. There
was a kid, a teenager named Steve Parent who was
leaving in his car already and he did not make
it out. Um. He was shot five times. He was
(11:25):
slashed and shot five times by tex Watson before he
could get down the driveway. So one murder had already
been committed on that property by the time they even
got to the house. Yeah. And if any of these people,
which you can definitely make the case all of them
were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stephen
Parent was just doubly so he was visiting the caretaker
(11:47):
of the house. So he had nothing to do with
the the um, the Hollywood jet set people inside, or
the Manson family. He was just friends with somebody who
was like a worker at the house and he was
leaving at the time time too. Yeah, he would have
been friends with what was the guy's name from the
o j oh oh man. He would have been friends
(12:10):
with Kat o'kalin, which is Yeah, that would have been
a bad, bad thing to be I think talk about
a mock turtle neck, yeah, I think he has one
permanently tattooed on his neck. Uh. There was also a
third of Manson family member, Linda Kasabian, who was not
in the house, but she waited. Essentially was the getaway driver,
(12:32):
right and she'd just come into the family like a
month before. And apparently the reason she was out with
them was because she was the only one with the
valid driver's license out of that group. So Lenny Cassabian
sitting outside, tex Watson, Patricia Krannwinkel, and Um Susan Atkins
all entered the house and they just start killing everybody. Um.
(12:53):
Apparently Texas is the only one with a gun, but
all three of them had knives. Patricia Cranwinkle found Abigail
Folder reading in bed and started to kill her. Um.
I believe Sharon Tate and J. C. Bring were in
the living room together and they were both um killed
there in the living room, um voytech fried Kowski made
(13:15):
it out of the house, but he was killed in
the front lawn. Abigail Folder, I think, made it out
the back and she died on the back lawn. And
one of the things about this is like the reason
the word massacres like such a an apt description like
these were. These were just basically like I don't know
how old text was. He was a little bit older,
(13:35):
but these are basically like seventeen eighteen, nineteen year old girls, um,
who had never done anything like this before, and we're
really not very good at it while they were doing
it this first time, um, And it was just bad
for everybody. Apparently, it's very brutal. There's a lot of
fear and terror and a lot of pain and torment
among everybody who was being killed in this house. It
(13:58):
wasn't easy clean. You would characterize it as like a hit.
It was a it was a massacre. Yeah. Abigail Folger
herself was stabbed twenty eight times. Uh, and then see
bringing Furkowski in addition to being stabbed, were also shot
and obviously Sharon Tate's unborn child was you know, killed
in this process as well. Uh. And supposedly and this
(14:21):
is a direct quote apparently, I guess from the trial, um,
the directive from Charles Manson. And if you don't know this,
I guess we should go ahead and say Charles Manson um.
Even though later on other people said that Tex Watson
was more acting on his own and misunderstood Manson's directive.
But Charles Manson ordered these killings, um, which we'll get into.
(14:42):
But he told Watson supposedly totally destroy everyone in that
house as gruesome as you can. So in addition to
the to the mutilation of the bodies um, and like
post mortem stab wounds, there was stuff written on the
wall and their blood like pig and uh, well I
(15:04):
think pig was the only thing written on the wall
at this one, right on the front door, which is
a obviously was a reference to cops at the time, right,
and they wrote it and Sharon takes blood, right, So
pig is on the door and blood. Um. The perpetrators
got away, the Manson family got away. They made it
back to I think the Spawn Ranch, which is one
(15:24):
of the places they were staying. So then two nights
later Manson orders the family to go do it again.
He's he actually said that they according to texts and
and the rest of them, he actually said that they'd
done it wrong. They had created panic and fear in
these people, and they needed to do it right this time.
But to go go out and butcher another family. And
(15:45):
he took him to a house and it was a
house next door to this house that the Manson family
used to party at. Um it was a friend of
one of Manson's record producer friends. And next door was
just a normal, unassuming couple who had, from what I understand,
no interaction with the Manson's at any point in time.
(16:07):
Um it was this couple named Leno and Rosemary Labianka,
and they were just about his middle class, upper middle
class America establishment as you could get. Yeah, he was
actually lived less than two miles from this house. It
was in uh the Lows Fieless neighborhood, and just the
(16:28):
night before they had had a party at this news
house who And the reason he didn't want to go
back to that house is because he thought maybe it
could be tied back to him in some way because
he was there the night before. So they just randomly
picked the neighbor. Uh. And there was six of the
followers there, the original four from the Tate House plus
Leslie van Houghton and Clem Grogan I think it was
(16:50):
his name. Uh, And yeah it was. It was talking
about wrong place, wrong time. They were just in there,
joining their evening, and um Manson did break. He was, actually,
like you said, there for this one, whereas he wasn't
even there for the Tate one. And he took part
in the tying up. Uh. But then he left, which
(17:12):
very cowardly left. And this whole thing just reeks of cowardice, like,
go do my dirty work for me, kind of in
most of these cases. Right. So they tie up the
la Bianca's um. They murdered them brutally again. Um. They
carved war in Mr la Bianca's stomach um with a knife.
(17:32):
They left of the knife sticking out of his neck.
They left a fork sticking out of his stomach. It
was just another really gruesome scene. And then again in
blood they wrote they wrote things around the house like, um,
they wrote political No, they wrote um pigs again. Yeah,
they were death to pigs. They wrote they misspelled it.
(17:54):
They wrote helter skelter, which we'll get into that was
a Beatles song, which factor is in pretty heavily. Uh.
And then there wrote Rise and the whole notion here
and we'll cover this in detail more later too, was
that Manson was trying to, or at least he says,
he was trying to ignite a race war and have
it um appear that black people and and maybe even
(18:17):
black panthers had killed these white people, which would and
then turn spark a race war. They would all kill
each other and the Manson And the reason I'm laughing
is because it's just so ridiculously impulse implausible, and that
then the Manson family would be the only people left
and they could rule the world. Yeah, that was supposedly
the whole thing behind Helterskelter. So the cops in l A,
(18:41):
the the Sheriff's Department and the l A cops have
um two different murder scenes that are obviously related, but
early on they didn't they didn't connect them yet. It
took it took a minute, but once they did, these
two murders came to be known as the Tate la
Bianca murders. Before anyone knew who the Manson family was,
(19:01):
and it was a big deal. Um, but you have
to go back even further to understand what's going on
and to understand the eventual prosecution of the Manson family
to another murder, and we will dive into that one
after this. Okay, Chuck. So everybody knows about the Tate
(19:45):
La Bianca murders, so much so that they're frequently called
the Manson family murders. But it turns out that the
Manson family was already involved in another previous murder um
a couple of weeks before the Tate and La Bianca
murders happened. I think in like late July of nineteen
sixty nine, right, yeah, I mean there was one other
(20:06):
murder and an attempted murder and then and not quite
attempted murder also right. Uh. So that the one you're
talking about, I think is probably Gary Henman, who uh
he was, Well, why don't you go and explain how
he fit into this whole thing? Okay? So Gary Henman
(20:28):
was a music teacher, um who was a friend of
the Manson family. I don't think he ever was considered
like a Manson family member, but he was a buddy
of them, um and he either had a trust fund
coming or there was a rumor that he he had
access to a trust fund of like twenty thousand dollars,
and so the Manson family went over to rob him.
(20:51):
I think Bobby Bosley was the leader of that um,
and they went over to rob him. Or he had
supply the Manson family with a bunch of mescal and
that they in turn sold to a motorcycle gang that
was not happy that when it turned out the mescaline
was bad who wanted their money back. So the Manson
family had gone to go get their money back from
(21:12):
this guy, and apparently he had said, like, I don't
have any money, but here, I'll sign over the title
of my cars to you. Here are the keys um
And at this point they had him tied up and
I'm not entirely certain why, but Charles Manson, and this
is widely agreed upon, I think even by Manson himself,
that Manson came over to the house to basically assist
(21:36):
in in like getting this guy to cough up his money.
Maybe that's what it was. And he took a sword
and chopped off part of the guy's ear. Yeah, and
depending on who you believe, some say Manson actually ended
up killing him. Other people say that Bobby Bosliel ended
up stabbing him to death. Uh, Manson was on the
scene for this one though, which was different than the
(21:57):
other murders, and uh guess it just depends on who
you believe it was. Bussola was eventually arrested while driving
that car of Henman's, so um him instead Busy Little's
in jail. And uh, you have to actually go back
even further to find the first at least attempted murder
(22:18):
by the Manson family, um earlier in July, on July one.
This is just a bad jam if you really start
thinking about, like all these dates are so compressed, and
you think about the Manson family just being in this
crazy like murderous kill spree and it really only went
for like a month basically, you know, four or five
weeks um. But they did a lot of damage in
that time. But the whole thing started, and you can
(22:41):
make the case and a lot of people do that.
The whole thing, everything else that followed actually started on
July one, when Charles Manson went to the apartment of
a syndicate drug dealer, like a big time drug dealer
named um Bernard. Lots of Papa Crow right. Yeah, and uh,
(23:02):
the Manson thought that he might have been a black panther.
I don't think that was ever confirmed. I read a
lot of articles kind of going back and forth. But um, regardless,
Manson thought he was a black panther. There was a
double crossing deal that went on, and they went over
and Manson actually shot Crow and thought he had killed him,
(23:22):
but he did not die. And he did not go
to the cops because he you know, what do you
do go to the cops and say, hey, a double
crossed these weirdo rednecks hippies. No, they double crossed him.
They double crossed him. Oh see I read that he
double cross them. No, that's why no, Tex Watson, Well,
either way, he would not go to the cops, uh,
(23:44):
in his condition, and so that's why it was never reported.
But he was interviewed. Uh. The transcript is pretty interesting
to listen to. Yeah. Um, but yeah, and he wouldn't
go to the cops because he would just handle it himself.
And that's basically what he vowed to do. So there's
this guy who Manson shot in the gut and left
for dead, who now wants to kill Manson and the
whole family and that Manson is convinced as a black panther,
(24:06):
which suddenly makes sense as to why you would have
found something like political piggies and a Paul print in
blood at Gary Heman's murder scene, right, because this is
about the time that this whole helter skelter thing is
happening starting out and um, the whole idea that that
(24:26):
there is a race war coming and that the Manson
family might be able to nudge it along by framing um,
the black community or black panthers for these murders of
white people. Uh, is the basis of this idea of
what was behind the Manson family murders as far as
the prosecution is concerned. Yeah, so I mentioned an almost
um attempted murder jumping back forward again the very night
(24:50):
of the The idea of the night of the Lobbianca
murders was to have two separate murders on the same night,
and Manson ordered a few I think different followers, including
Linda Kasabian, to murder this um kind of little known
Lebanese actor named Saladine Nadar, and Kasabian basically got there,
(25:12):
didn't want to do this and so intentionally knocked on
the wrong door of the apartment, um, basically giving her
an excuse to get out of there. So um. Weirdly,
Saladine and Nadir was never it was a near victim
of the Manson family. So that's talk about it. Talk
about a close call, yeah for real, you know, yeah, uh.
(25:34):
And I looked him up. He he basically was a
famous actor by that time, and then just didn't do
much after that. So I wonder if that had if
that like just broke his brain or something, you know,
I don't know. I think it would have done that
to me. Alright, So I think it's about time for
another ad break. Let's do it, all right, we'll be
right back after this, all right, Chuck, we're back. Should
(26:20):
we talk about Charles Manson a little bit? Yeah? Less so, like, well,
let's recap real quick, Okay. Manson has shot um lots
of Papa Crow in his stomach, lots of pop Crow,
has vowed to kill the whole Man's of family. Bobby
Bosle killed Gary Henman, tried to frame the Black Panthers
by writing political piggies and blood on the wall. Bobby
bos Is arrested Um. The Manson family supposedly trying to
(26:45):
make it look like somebody besides Bobby bos might have
killed Gary Henman. Um, kill the people at the Tate Residents,
kill the people at the La Bianca Residents, right, things
like political piggis and rise and pig in blood on
the walls there, and and that's where we've left off
so far. The Manson family hasn't been caught yet. Let's
(27:07):
talk about Charles Manson, all right. So Manson, UM, it's
sort of mixed up on what you want to believe
because a lot of the information about his life came
from him, and anyone who knows anything about Charles Manson
knows that he had a tendency to overstate things and
uh certainly lie about things. But what we do know
(27:27):
is that he was born in nineteen thirty four to
a to a teen mom and dad, and the dad
basically um would not assume any fraternity or responsibility, sort
of split. His name was colonel, his actual name was colonel,
and he convinced people that he was an army colonel
even though he was not. So he was just never
(27:48):
on the scene at all. And um he ended up
taking the name Manson from his stepfather who you know.
His his mom married, She was an alcoholic, may have
been a prostitute. She was in and out of jail
for most of her life and uh or most of
his young life. And it was just, you know, a
truly bad scene for a young Charles Manson. So he
(28:12):
he actually um went and lived with relatives while she
was in jail for a five year stretch. She got out,
they reunited, he said. He apparently said that reuniting with
there was one of the few truly joyful moments in
his life. But in very short order, she basically was like,
I can't take care of you. I don't really want
this responsibility and handed him over to the state, which begun,
(28:36):
which began a just basically a string of institutionalization that
would that would keep going for basic basically his whole life. Yeah,
I mean by the time he was eventually sent to
federal prison, I think he was thirty two years old
when he was released in sixty seven, and they calculated
that he had spent half of his life uh in
(28:57):
and out of institutions, whether it would be orphanages or
um juvie or real deal prison in jail, right, And
that was just the first part of his life, So
he was out for two years before they got him
again after these murders. By the time he died in
prison at ag A d three this past November two seventeen,
(29:17):
he had spent from my calculations, only thirteen years of
his life as a freeman, thirteen out of eighty three
years outside of institutions. So he had a lot of
the deck stacked against him. But you can also go
back to I think March nineteen sixty seven when he
was released on parole um from federal prison, where he
(29:40):
was given a choice like, hey man, here you go.
You're out. You can decide what to do with your life.
Do you want to go straight, do you want to
go have a nice family, Do you want to just
be a productive member of society, or are you going
to go the exact opposite direction. And as we know
in hindsight, Charlie Manson chose the exact opposite direction. It's
(30:00):
I don't know if he was ever officially diagnosed um,
but I did see that that doctors over the years
and mental health professionals say that he was probably schizophrenic.
Uh suffered from schizophrenia and had a paranoid delusional disorder
at the very least, I hadn't heard the schizophrenia thing.
Paranoid delusional disorder totally buy Yeah, so he was. He
(30:25):
was a troubled dude. UM of course, not excusing anything,
but it was clearly a case of um mental illness
combined with rejection and institutionalization. UM really led to like
the man that he would eventually become right. So he
gets out of prison right and he um is basically
(30:46):
released into San Francisco seven. So it's like Hippie Dum,
the Kingdom of Hippie Dum, where he shows up and
there's you know, at the time, everybody's looking for like
something new, something different, something that's an alternative to the
establishment of the mainstream or anything different. And so Charles
(31:08):
Manson says like, oh I can, I can totally exploit
a lot of these people Um, and that he starts
out by meeting a girl, a librarian named Mary Bruner,
and he moves into her apartment and she apparently was
very fascinated with him because she had led a fairly
straight laced life. She went to college again, she was
a librarian, and all of a sudden there's this wild
(31:29):
like X con who is preaching this kind of gospel
of love and no materials, um, and apparently before November night,
which will explain what happened then before that time, Um,
Charles Manson supposedly did pretty closely resemble an actual hippie
(31:50):
like he did. He he felt like he could take
anything of yours that he wanted, but you could also
take anything of his. And he apparently walked the walk
when it came to stuff like that, And there are
plenty of stories of him just giving up whatever um
material possessions, saying they didn't matter, um, before things really
took a dark turn. So there's if you really kind
(32:13):
of dive in, it becomes clear how he could have
amassed some of these early followers. And the first one
was was Mary Bruner. Yeah. I get the feeling that, um,
this probably would not have happened in any other era
other than this generation when um, you know we talked
(32:33):
about in our Brainwashing in our Cults episodes, where this
time it was just it's just a weird time in
America and people were really um, I don't know about prone,
but at least ripe for the picking when it comes
to falling into uh situations, like this and believing these
what looked like crack pots to us now, but at
(32:55):
the time everyone was. It was very anti establishment. People
were taking tons of drugs and rejecting rejecting mainstream society
and embracing the counterculture, and they were just really open
to all kinds of weird stuff. So he again, he
just kind of figured out that he could he could
work this to his own means. So there's a couple
(33:17):
of things that there's there's two basic things that you
needed to know about Charles Manson from from everything I've seen.
One was that his main goal was to become a
recording artist, a very successful star of a recording artist.
And two that he could he had a good ability
(33:38):
to manipulate people into giving him what he wanted um
and mostly that that amounted to sex and drugs um.
And he used that ability to get other people to
do what he wanted. So, for example, when he started
to a mass like a substantial amount of girls in
(33:58):
the Manson family, um, it was it was just a
free love commune the whole time. So the guys who
came in all of a sudden had access to these
the women, and in return um for Charlie granting them
access to them. They would basically do his bidding or
offer him physical protection because he wasn't a big guy.
(34:20):
He's kind of a shrimpy dude. Um. But they're everything
from from If you look at it from an outsider's perspective,
every relationship be had was one of extraction. He was
taking something from everyone around him. It wasn't just a
normal friendship or a normal relationship. It was it was
what can you do for me? And what can I
(34:42):
use from you to to get something out of other people. Yeah,
and if if you've never seen an interview with him,
I encourage you to check some of them out. He
does have a very um stream of consciousness, circular sort
of talks NonStop and doesn't make a lot of sense,
but um. One thing that's often said about him is
that he can be mesmerizing um with the way he
(35:05):
does that. And I imagine in the late sixties, if
you've got a headful of acid and there's this guy
that has the ability to like almost rebreathe like a
trumpet player and talk for minutes and minutes and hours
on end, they could be kind of you know, they
would fall under this weird spell. So I definitely don't
get it because now when I watch him on again,
(35:27):
tiny weird redneck. Um, but when you you know, when
you see him doing a thing, even with like Diane Sawyer,
who doesn't fall for it. By the way, she she
clearly is just like very it's a great interview. She's
pro and she stays very on point, basically kind of
like you're not gonna get me to like fall through
your charms. Uh, but but it's pretty interesting. Um. So
(35:50):
he's got Mary Bruner is this first girlfriend. Then he said, hey,
what do you think about a triad? Or rather, what
do you think about a triad? That's how he sounded.
And um, Mary Brunner, from what I understand, wasn't super
into it, but she was under his spell, so she
said sure. Uh so Squeaky from Lynette Squeaky from came
(36:12):
into the picture, and um, they you know, they lived
as a as a threson that traveled together up and
down the coast out there, and he just sort of
started accumulating mostly women along the way to this sort
of traveling party is probably how he framed it, and
people were hipped to it. There were men though, um,
(36:36):
besides Tex Watson and Bobby Busslil those guy named Danny
de Carlo who were kind of early men who joined up.
And by all accounts, most of those men who joined
up were there because Manson was said, you know, you
can have these women. You've got plenty of drugs. And
so before you know it, the Manson family was born
and they were just kind of this weirdo hippie group
(36:57):
that um used to commit burglary. These Manson there has
long been um. It's long been said that he beat
a lot of the women in the group and would
prostitute them to for cash to pay for things for
the family, like rent um. They they ate a lot
of their food from like going through dumpsters behind grocery
(37:19):
stores and stuff like that. And they just basically hung
out and did drugs and had sex all day. That
was basically their aim and their goal. And then at
night they would have bonfires out in the desert and um,
they'd all just take a bunch of acid and listen
to Charles Manson do his mesmerizing thing. Um. And again
at first it was it was weird. There's a lot
(37:40):
of like ideas that Manson was this reincarnation of Jesus Christ,
or that he was not even the reincarnated Jesus Christ.
He was the same Jesus Christ who had been alive
for you know, almost two thousand years um. And just
like all the stuff you would find in the desert
among hippies in the late sixties, On I said, at
night around a bonfire, right but when when um, by
(38:06):
this time, like by the time they're out in the desert,
Manson had had this really amazing chance encounter that you
just would never have and the fact that it did
happen is just totally mind blowing. But become a recording artist.
To help ensure his success of becoming a recording artst
he moved the family from San Francisco down to Los
Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry.
(38:29):
And it just so happened that one night in nineteen UM,
a couple of Manson family girls were hitch hiking on
Sunset Boulevard and we're picked up by none other than
Dennis will And Wilson, one of the co founders of
the Beach Boys. That's right, it was sixty nine, but
same same deal. All those years just ran together back then. Uh,
(38:50):
and Dennis Wilson was, Um, he was a party, party
dude and liked his ladies. Because it sounds very weird
to say that he picked up a cup of hitchhikers
and basically brought them home. But um, it was a
different time, and uh, he was, like I said, he
was a party dude. So they ended up being Ella,
Joe Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Crinwinkle. So they move
(39:13):
in basically, and he goes to the studio, comes home
and the Manson family had moved in, which again it
sounds really strange, but at the time he I mean
Ed says he was frightened at I get the feeling.
He was more like, you know, what trip are you on?
(39:34):
Not like, oh my god, I need to call the cops. Yeah,
he um, because they lived there for a while, like
he let them live there. Yeah. I think the party
it was partially out of fear. I saw and I
read an interview with Charles Manson. He was talking about
Dennis Wilson, and he was like, you know, I'd say whatever,
he just lay his weirdo trip on Dennis Wilson, and
Dennis is responsibly like, yeah, man, that's cool. Listen, look,
(39:55):
I gotta go, I really gotta go do this thing.
Just always trying to get away from Charles man Inson.
So maybe he was afraid that he was they were
going to kill him. Maybe he liked having access to
like all this free love from all the Manson family
women um, or maybe he just felt like he couldn't
get out of it. But he uh, he did let
them live there for a few months. It wasn't like
(40:16):
they crashed there for a weekend. They moved in, they
wrecked his ferrari um, they they met a bunch of
his friends. It was it was a big It was
a big deal that that Dennis Wilson came into Charles
Manson's life because it really bolstered this idea that, yes,
he is going to become a recording artist. Because not
only did he hang out with Dennis Wilson, he hung
(40:37):
out with a guy named Terry Melcher who was a
record producer, hung out with another guy named Phil Kaufman
who was a record producer, and he met all these
people in the industry who were in a position to
get Charles Manson's career off of the ground. And when
when there's you're dealing with this this crazy little ticking
time bomb like Charles Manson, who wants you to do
(40:58):
something like get his musical career off the ground, but
you don't think his music is good enough to actually launch. Um,
you've got a problem on your hands. And Dennis Wilson
and his buddies all knew this, yes, And uh, two
quick things here. One big shout out to Dennis Wilson's
only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue. Is it good? And
I think it's great. I gotta check that out. And
(41:20):
I love the Beach Boys. I mean he Dennis Wilson
was was clearly not the the brains or voice behind
the Beach Boys as the drummer, but U and he
was always sort of, um, I think, kind of picked
on a little bit for not being the most talented dude.
And he was just in the band because he was
handsome and related. But um, I think Pacific Ocean Blue
(41:42):
is like one of the great lost classics. Let's check
it out. It's very good. He was supposedly also the
only true surfer in the band. Yeah, exactly. Uh. And
the other thing was that Terry Melcher, that producer that
you mentioned. The reason he factors in so heavily is
because he actually lived at the Tate House in Beverly
(42:02):
Hills before Tate and then moved in, So that was
sort of the connection there. Um, I guess Manson was
going to kill him right now. So here is what
a lot of people think. They think that again, he
was sending a message to Terry Melcher saying, I can't
kill you, but I can get close to you. And
I know you're gonna hear about this because this happened
(42:25):
at the house you were living in a month or
so before. I'm just gonna go in and have my
people indiscriminately slaughter whoever is there. But this is this
is you, this is what's going on. He he supposedly
was well aware that Terry Melcher didn't live there any longer,
because he'd spoken to the guy who actually owned the
house and was asking him where Terry Melcher went, and
all the guy would tell him was Malibu, So he
(42:46):
knew it wasn't Melcher in that house. And alright, so
they eventually leave Dennis Wilson's house. Dennis Wilson's like, you
guys are great and all the ladies are nice. The
acid is decent, but it's time for you to go.
So they live. Uh they leave in night still and
um he uh they go to Spawn Ranch, which you
(43:11):
mentioned earlier s P A h N. And this was
a it's kind of weird that they ended up living here,
but it was. It was out in kind of the
outskirts of l A. There are lots of ranches like
the Disney Ranch at the Universal Ranch where they shoot
a lot of stuff, and they have old sets that
are still there, whether it's uh Mash or Planet of
the Apes or um, just an old West set. And
(43:33):
Spawn Ranch was one of these that had closed down,
and it was an old West set and they actually,
um it's a state park now. But they did have
permission to live there. They didn't just uh squat there.
They uh sort of had a little agreement to do
a little maintenance work, uh and they were allowed to stay.
So some of them are there, some of them are
at places like at a camp in Death Valley, and
(43:54):
then just scattered all over l A as far as
Manson family members and just random houses in a artments.
But the main place that that Manson in the Inner
Circle was it Spawn Ranch, and they would go on
what they called creepy crawls, which where these little crimes
Freeze would like you said, they would go out and
burgle cars or robbed people and um, just to kind
(44:17):
of keep the money and the drugs flowing, right um.
And so Spawn Ranch was almost like a little more legit.
They were in much closer contact with other people out
in Death Valley at the Barker Ranch. That was far
more secluded, way out in the desert, way more disconnected
from society, and that was the place where they expected
to wait out helter skelter while the the um everybody
(44:41):
else in the country killed one another. That's right. So, um,
you've got this whole, this whole weirdo family there. They're criminals,
they're engaged in prostitution. There's violence, you know, there's physical violence.
But ultimately there they kind of resemble hippies. Here they're
super counter culture. Um. But things turned dark, and they
(45:04):
turned dark after this seminal thing that happened to the
rest of the world but really really spoke to Charles
Manson in particular, and that was the November twenty two
release of the Beatles White album all Right, you know
what this is gonna be a two parter. It's pretty clear. Uh,
(45:24):
so let's go ahead and in this one on a
cliffhanger featuring the Beatles. Right, does that sound good? Yeah?
It does. Um pick back up part two with a
white album. Let's do it all right? All right? Well,
in the meantime, while you guys are chewing over what
Chuck just said, uh, you can tweet to us at
s Y s K podcast or on Facebook dot com
(45:46):
slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email the Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com
and as always, joined us at at home on the
web Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on
this thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
(46:09):
M hm hm
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and we make up the Stuff you Should Know family,
(00:21):
the peace loving, acid loving, no murdering nice family. Did
I say acid loving in there? You did? Oh? We
just meant peace loving, non murdering family. Yeah. And you
know what, hopefully there are no kids listening to this
one anyway, so we can let everyone else know that
(00:43):
we take LSD before every episode. Sure, I mean the
slogan of our show is wow, He's Alie. Yeah, so
c o A. For those of you who did not
see the title, Uh, if you're listening to your kids
about the Manson family murders out of c o A,
then you need a parenting c o A. Yeah for real.
(01:04):
But there are lots of grizzly details in this, so
obviously you may want to skip this one. With a
on a on a family picnic, Yeah, it might kind
of bring it down a couple of degrees. Might be
a drag, you know, probably so Uh, speaking of drags, Chuck,
I'll tell you who is a drag Charles Manson. He was.
(01:26):
He was so like, there's this, there's this reputed legend
that Charles Manson tried out for the Monkeys. It was rejected,
and that was ultimately why he um ordered these these
grizzly murders. Um of what that will definitely get into.
But it turns out that's absolutely false. Yeah, that that
I've heard that and it always sounded to me like
(01:47):
an urban legend. Well, so the thing is, it's got
like all sorts of interesting facets to it, though right,
it's demonstrably false. He was in prison at the time
the Monkeys tryouts were held. But it kind of coincides
with this larger part of Charles Manson's life that not
everybody is fully aware of, which is that he wanted
(02:07):
to be a star. He wanted to be a musical
recording star, and he actually had. He made some inroads
into that career, and I have read theories that it
is possible that these murders were ordered as a means
of venting Manson's frustration that his music career wasn't going
(02:29):
as well as he thought it should, and sending a
message to some people in the music industry that he
made contact with to basically say, hey, I can't kill
you because I need you, but I can kill other
people to get you going and and get my music
career off the ground. What's the hold up? Which is
just like the Manson family murders on their face, as
(02:50):
they're largely understood, is nuts. But if that's the real
thing behind all of this, that's just the depths of pravity,
of human depravity that people are capable of. I bet
that's not like the sole reason. But but you know,
like if you really strip reasons down, like what are
(03:11):
motivations for things? Like is it really you know, to
bring on Helter Skelter? Is it because he was a
frustrated musician? You know? Like you can say the same
thing about Hitler, like was there a kernel of Hitler's
rejection from the art world and from people at large
that drove him to to order the horrible things that
he ordered the Nazis to do? Like it makes you wonder,
(03:33):
like what is the motivation but behind world changing events
when you break them down to a personal level. Yeah,
I mean, well, Manson, to be fair, was had mental
illness in a lifetime of rejection, so this could all
affector in for sure. Yeah. But so I mean you
you you asked for this article to be written, didn't you.
(03:54):
Was this your jam? Yeah? We yeah. At the Grabster
we can sort of petition him to write articles at times,
and this was definitely one of them. Yeah. So did
you know a lot about the Manson family murders and
the family themselves and all that stuff already? Yeah? So
you this was this is probably still part of like
(04:15):
the cultural zeitgeist when you were becoming like aware of
the world as a kid. Huh. Yeah. Like I definitely
remember the book Helter Skelter being a huge, huge thing. Um.
And I remember a time before, like media was so
robust when the idea of Charles Manson was just so
terrifying to me. I do too, uh. And then I
(04:37):
got older and saw interviews and I was like, oh,
he's just a little tiny redneck. Yeah, like it all vanished.
I was like, oh my god, he's just he's just
a little redneck. Yeah. I think that's what. There were
two things that kids of the eighties went through as
far as awakenings. Were concerned that the Soviet people were
(04:59):
not murder all of us, and that Charles Manson was
not actually scary. He was just a dumb redneck behind bars. Yeah,
I mean he what he did was horrific to be sure,
so I'm not like minimizing that. But as far as
the person, he was this larger than life, scary as
crap dude to me, until you know, interviews started coming
(05:20):
out and sit down with like Diane Sawyer was like,
this guy's a joke. But for a little while there
he was legitimately America's worst nightmare because at the time,
like a lot of people say, when the Manson family
committed these murders and it it came out, you know,
a couple of months later, that's some depraved acid head
hippies had actually committed these gruesome crimes that had captured
(05:43):
the nation's attention. It suddenly gave the establishment, who had
been looking for anything to lay on two hippies to say, see, see,
we told you you can't be trusted. Your whole piece
love um free stuff like that doesn't work. You can't
do that, because this is the outcome of it. Manson
was that personified and for a lot of for that reason,
(06:05):
a lot of people say, this guy, these murders ended
the the summer of love and the era of hippies
and ushered in the seventies. Yeah, for sure. I mean
timing wise, Uh, it just seems very natural. And and
Ed even points out like even during the trial that
narrative was being laid down, it wasn't like years later
people look back and said this. Um. And he also,
(06:27):
I thought it was really interesting. I never really put
it into context like Ed did. But Um, the moon landing,
the very first moon landing that is, happened two weeks
uh before the Manson family murders, and then a week
after the murders was Woodstock. So that was a that
was a nutty month, it really was in America. And
(06:50):
and again, these murders when they took place, they were
just no one had any idea who the Manson family
was except for a handful of people out in l
A and some cops that had run ins with them.
But they were not famous, and no one realized that
the Manson family had been responsible for these murders. They
were just these gruesome, unsolved murders. In between the moon
landing and Woodstock. Yeah, so a lot of people let's
(07:14):
start at the what a lot of people consider the beginning,
which is the night of August nine, um in a
house at one zero zero five zero C Yellow Drive,
which is in Beverly Hills, up in the hills, right, yeah,
I kind of looked up like three different places how
to pronounce that, and they all said yellow except for
(07:34):
Diane Sawyer said cello. And I'm like, man, is dians
what You're wrong? No about anything? No? Whatever? She says,
it's absolutely right. She could make turtlenecks, right. I used
to love turtlenecks. They had, They had a real heyday.
For sure. You don't see him anymore. I used to
(07:55):
wear him on. Don't be dumb, but it was kind
of a gag. I think I could still pull one off, maybe,
especially with the beard. Yeah. The beard would definitely help,
you know, because you could you could turn a certain
way and be like regular shirt turtleneck, regular shirt turtleneck,
just by just by moving your head and your beard
out of the way. Yeah. And of course in the
eighties I would rock the mock turtleneck regularly. Did you
(08:16):
I never really did. Did you wear them with Ze
cavaricis No? No, no, no, it wasn't. You didn't dress
like a c Slater. No, it was sort of um,
believe it or not, that was like a post preppy
thing where the mock turtleneck was acceptable and not cheesy.
Really in a preppy sense. I got you because I
(08:36):
was sort of a prep before I became a human monster.
I could see that did you did you wear the
La cost alligator and stuff? We couldn't afford that stuff,
So a word, the knockoffs or if I had the
lacost the alligator was like accidentally sewing onto the collar.
So oh yeah, yeah, we've had this conversation. Yeah, all
(08:57):
that good stuff factory seconds. Yep, that's Jory Remnant's nice.
So on this night on August nine, are we going
with Ciello or Diane Sawyer's cello? Just let's just say
that the house that Satan built, right, it's at there anymore?
By the way, No, they they tore it down, but
(09:18):
not before Trent Risner went in and recorded at nine
inch Nail's album There. Why not, um so at this
at this house at one zero zero five zero Ciello drive,
that's not there any longer. There's a knock at the
door in the night of August nine, around midnight. So
I don't know if that makes August nine or ten.
I couldn't get a definitive answer. But the door was
(09:39):
answered by a guy named Voitech fried Kowski, who was
known as a Polish playboy. He was friends of the
director Roman Polanski. Uh, and he was there because inside
that house was Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, who was
eight months pregnant with their I believe their first child. Um.
(10:00):
I don't think they had any other children. Sharon type
was pretty young at the time, but um. Also inside
was Abigail Folger, who was the heiress to the Folger
Coffee fortune. And um, I think. Oh, one other guy,
J C. Brin, who was a stylist who was known
as the guy who introduced hair styling two men, So
(10:21):
he was pretty well off and pretty well known as
far as ELI went. And they're just kind of this
hip industry party crowd inside this this residence. And there
was a knock at the door and this guy was
there at on the other side of the door, and
he had a mustache and he was tall, kind of
a natural athlete type type from Texas. And he said,
(10:42):
I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business.
And that was Texas Watson, and he entered the house
and this massacre of everybody inside began. Yeah, so what
had happened previous to that knock was Texas Watson climbed
up a telephone pole, cut the phone line, and then
climbed the fence with a couple of other people, one
(11:04):
Susan Atkins and one Patricia krin Winkle, all Manson family members.
And we'll get into the whole family thing in a minute. Uh.
And so they climbed over the fence, went in. There
was a kid, a teenager named Steve Parent who was
leaving in his car already and he did not make
it out. Um. He was shot five times. He was
(11:25):
slashed and shot five times by tex Watson before he
could get down the driveway. So one murder had already
been committed on that property by the time they even
got to the house. Yeah. And if any of these people,
which you can definitely make the case all of them
were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Stephen
Parent was just doubly so he was visiting the caretaker
(11:47):
of the house. So he had nothing to do with
the the um, the Hollywood jet set people inside, or
the Manson family. He was just friends with somebody who
was like a worker at the house and he was
leaving at the time time too. Yeah, he would have
been friends with what was the guy's name from the
o j oh oh man. He would have been friends
(12:10):
with Kat o'kalin, which is Yeah, that would have been
a bad, bad thing to be I think talk about
a mock turtle neck, yeah, I think he has one
permanently tattooed on his neck. Uh. There was also a
third of Manson family member, Linda Kasabian, who was not
in the house, but she waited. Essentially was the getaway driver,
(12:32):
right and she'd just come into the family like a
month before. And apparently the reason she was out with
them was because she was the only one with the
valid driver's license out of that group. So Lenny Cassabian
sitting outside, tex Watson, Patricia Krannwinkel, and Um Susan Atkins
all entered the house and they just start killing everybody. Um.
(12:53):
Apparently Texas is the only one with a gun, but
all three of them had knives. Patricia Cranwinkle found Abigail
Folder reading in bed and started to kill her. Um.
I believe Sharon Tate and J. C. Bring were in
the living room together and they were both um killed
there in the living room, um voytech fried Kowski made
(13:15):
it out of the house, but he was killed in
the front lawn. Abigail Folder, I think, made it out
the back and she died on the back lawn. And
one of the things about this is like the reason
the word massacres like such a an apt description like
these were. These were just basically like I don't know
how old text was. He was a little bit older,
(13:35):
but these are basically like seventeen eighteen, nineteen year old girls, um,
who had never done anything like this before, and we're
really not very good at it while they were doing
it this first time, um, And it was just bad
for everybody. Apparently, it's very brutal. There's a lot of
fear and terror and a lot of pain and torment
among everybody who was being killed in this house. It
(13:58):
wasn't easy clean. You would characterize it as like a hit.
It was a it was a massacre. Yeah. Abigail Folger
herself was stabbed twenty eight times. Uh, and then see
bringing Furkowski in addition to being stabbed, were also shot
and obviously Sharon Tate's unborn child was you know, killed
in this process as well. Uh. And supposedly and this
(14:21):
is a direct quote apparently, I guess from the trial, um,
the directive from Charles Manson. And if you don't know this,
I guess we should go ahead and say Charles Manson um.
Even though later on other people said that Tex Watson
was more acting on his own and misunderstood Manson's directive.
But Charles Manson ordered these killings, um, which we'll get into.
(14:42):
But he told Watson supposedly totally destroy everyone in that
house as gruesome as you can. So in addition to
the to the mutilation of the bodies um, and like
post mortem stab wounds, there was stuff written on the
wall and their blood like pig and uh, well I
(15:04):
think pig was the only thing written on the wall
at this one, right on the front door, which is
a obviously was a reference to cops at the time, right,
and they wrote it and Sharon takes blood, right, So
pig is on the door and blood. Um. The perpetrators
got away, the Manson family got away. They made it
back to I think the Spawn Ranch, which is one
(15:24):
of the places they were staying. So then two nights
later Manson orders the family to go do it again.
He's he actually said that they according to texts and
and the rest of them, he actually said that they'd
done it wrong. They had created panic and fear in
these people, and they needed to do it right this time.
But to go go out and butcher another family. And
(15:45):
he took him to a house and it was a
house next door to this house that the Manson family
used to party at. Um it was a friend of
one of Manson's record producer friends. And next door was
just a normal, unassuming couple who had, from what I understand,
no interaction with the Manson's at any point in time.
(16:07):
Um it was this couple named Leno and Rosemary Labianka,
and they were just about his middle class, upper middle
class America establishment as you could get. Yeah, he was
actually lived less than two miles from this house. It
was in uh the Lows Fieless neighborhood, and just the
(16:28):
night before they had had a party at this news
house who And the reason he didn't want to go
back to that house is because he thought maybe it
could be tied back to him in some way because
he was there the night before. So they just randomly
picked the neighbor. Uh. And there was six of the
followers there, the original four from the Tate House plus
Leslie van Houghton and Clem Grogan I think it was
(16:50):
his name. Uh, And yeah it was. It was talking
about wrong place, wrong time. They were just in there,
joining their evening, and um Manson did break. He was, actually,
like you said, there for this one, whereas he wasn't
even there for the Tate one. And he took part
in the tying up. Uh. But then he left, which
(17:12):
very cowardly left. And this whole thing just reeks of cowardice, like,
go do my dirty work for me, kind of in
most of these cases. Right. So they tie up the
la Bianca's um. They murdered them brutally again. Um. They
carved war in Mr la Bianca's stomach um with a knife.
(17:32):
They left of the knife sticking out of his neck.
They left a fork sticking out of his stomach. It
was just another really gruesome scene. And then again in
blood they wrote they wrote things around the house like, um,
they wrote political No, they wrote um pigs again. Yeah,
they were death to pigs. They wrote they misspelled it.
(17:54):
They wrote helter skelter, which we'll get into that was
a Beatles song, which factor is in pretty heavily. Uh.
And then there wrote Rise and the whole notion here
and we'll cover this in detail more later too, was
that Manson was trying to, or at least he says,
he was trying to ignite a race war and have
it um appear that black people and and maybe even
(18:17):
black panthers had killed these white people, which would and
then turn spark a race war. They would all kill
each other and the Manson And the reason I'm laughing
is because it's just so ridiculously impulse implausible, and that
then the Manson family would be the only people left
and they could rule the world. Yeah, that was supposedly
the whole thing behind Helterskelter. So the cops in l A,
(18:41):
the the Sheriff's Department and the l A cops have
um two different murder scenes that are obviously related, but
early on they didn't they didn't connect them yet. It
took it took a minute, but once they did, these
two murders came to be known as the Tate la
Bianca murders. Before anyone knew who the Manson family was,
(19:01):
and it was a big deal. Um, but you have
to go back even further to understand what's going on
and to understand the eventual prosecution of the Manson family
to another murder, and we will dive into that one
after this. Okay, Chuck. So everybody knows about the Tate
(19:45):
La Bianca murders, so much so that they're frequently called
the Manson family murders. But it turns out that the
Manson family was already involved in another previous murder um
a couple of weeks before the Tate and La Bianca
murders happened. I think in like late July of nineteen
sixty nine, right, yeah, I mean there was one other
(20:06):
murder and an attempted murder and then and not quite
attempted murder also right. Uh. So that the one you're
talking about, I think is probably Gary Henman, who uh
he was, Well, why don't you go and explain how
he fit into this whole thing? Okay? So Gary Henman
(20:28):
was a music teacher, um who was a friend of
the Manson family. I don't think he ever was considered
like a Manson family member, but he was a buddy
of them, um and he either had a trust fund
coming or there was a rumor that he he had
access to a trust fund of like twenty thousand dollars,
and so the Manson family went over to rob him.
(20:51):
I think Bobby Bosley was the leader of that um,
and they went over to rob him. Or he had
supply the Manson family with a bunch of mescal and
that they in turn sold to a motorcycle gang that
was not happy that when it turned out the mescaline
was bad who wanted their money back. So the Manson
family had gone to go get their money back from
(21:12):
this guy, and apparently he had said, like, I don't
have any money, but here, I'll sign over the title
of my cars to you. Here are the keys um
And at this point they had him tied up and
I'm not entirely certain why, but Charles Manson, and this
is widely agreed upon, I think even by Manson himself,
that Manson came over to the house to basically assist
(21:36):
in in like getting this guy to cough up his money.
Maybe that's what it was. And he took a sword
and chopped off part of the guy's ear. Yeah, and
depending on who you believe, some say Manson actually ended
up killing him. Other people say that Bobby Bosliel ended
up stabbing him to death. Uh, Manson was on the
scene for this one though, which was different than the
(21:57):
other murders, and uh guess it just depends on who
you believe it was. Bussola was eventually arrested while driving
that car of Henman's, so um him instead Busy Little's
in jail. And uh, you have to actually go back
even further to find the first at least attempted murder
(22:18):
by the Manson family, um earlier in July, on July one.
This is just a bad jam if you really start
thinking about, like all these dates are so compressed, and
you think about the Manson family just being in this
crazy like murderous kill spree and it really only went
for like a month basically, you know, four or five
weeks um. But they did a lot of damage in
that time. But the whole thing started, and you can
(22:41):
make the case and a lot of people do that.
The whole thing, everything else that followed actually started on
July one, when Charles Manson went to the apartment of
a syndicate drug dealer, like a big time drug dealer
named um Bernard. Lots of Papa Crow right. Yeah, and uh,
(23:02):
the Manson thought that he might have been a black panther.
I don't think that was ever confirmed. I read a
lot of articles kind of going back and forth. But um, regardless,
Manson thought he was a black panther. There was a
double crossing deal that went on, and they went over
and Manson actually shot Crow and thought he had killed him,
(23:22):
but he did not die. And he did not go
to the cops because he you know, what do you
do go to the cops and say, hey, a double
crossed these weirdo rednecks hippies. No, they double crossed him.
They double crossed him. Oh see I read that he
double cross them. No, that's why no, Tex Watson, Well,
either way, he would not go to the cops, uh,
(23:44):
in his condition, and so that's why it was never reported.
But he was interviewed. Uh. The transcript is pretty interesting
to listen to. Yeah. Um, but yeah, and he wouldn't
go to the cops because he would just handle it himself.
And that's basically what he vowed to do. So there's
this guy who Manson shot in the gut and left
for dead, who now wants to kill Manson and the
whole family and that Manson is convinced as a black panther,
(24:06):
which suddenly makes sense as to why you would have
found something like political piggies and a Paul print in
blood at Gary Heman's murder scene, right, because this is
about the time that this whole helter skelter thing is
happening starting out and um, the whole idea that that
(24:26):
there is a race war coming and that the Manson
family might be able to nudge it along by framing um,
the black community or black panthers for these murders of
white people. Uh, is the basis of this idea of
what was behind the Manson family murders as far as
the prosecution is concerned. Yeah, so I mentioned an almost
um attempted murder jumping back forward again the very night
(24:50):
of the The idea of the night of the Lobbianca
murders was to have two separate murders on the same night,
and Manson ordered a few I think different followers, including
Linda Kasabian, to murder this um kind of little known
Lebanese actor named Saladine Nadar, and Kasabian basically got there,
(25:12):
didn't want to do this and so intentionally knocked on
the wrong door of the apartment, um, basically giving her
an excuse to get out of there. So um. Weirdly,
Saladine and Nadir was never it was a near victim
of the Manson family. So that's talk about it. Talk
about a close call, yeah for real, you know, yeah, uh.
(25:34):
And I looked him up. He he basically was a
famous actor by that time, and then just didn't do
much after that. So I wonder if that had if
that like just broke his brain or something, you know,
I don't know. I think it would have done that
to me. Alright, So I think it's about time for
another ad break. Let's do it, all right, we'll be
right back after this, all right, Chuck, we're back. Should
(26:20):
we talk about Charles Manson a little bit? Yeah? Less so, like, well,
let's recap real quick, Okay. Manson has shot um lots
of Papa Crow in his stomach, lots of pop Crow,
has vowed to kill the whole Man's of family. Bobby
Bosle killed Gary Henman, tried to frame the Black Panthers
by writing political piggies and blood on the wall. Bobby
bos Is arrested Um. The Manson family supposedly trying to
(26:45):
make it look like somebody besides Bobby bos might have
killed Gary Henman. Um, kill the people at the Tate Residents,
kill the people at the La Bianca Residents, right, things
like political piggis and rise and pig in blood on
the walls there, and and that's where we've left off
so far. The Manson family hasn't been caught yet. Let's
(27:07):
talk about Charles Manson, all right. So Manson, UM, it's
sort of mixed up on what you want to believe
because a lot of the information about his life came
from him, and anyone who knows anything about Charles Manson
knows that he had a tendency to overstate things and
uh certainly lie about things. But what we do know
(27:27):
is that he was born in nineteen thirty four to
a to a teen mom and dad, and the dad
basically um would not assume any fraternity or responsibility, sort
of split. His name was colonel, his actual name was colonel,
and he convinced people that he was an army colonel
even though he was not. So he was just never
(27:48):
on the scene at all. And um he ended up
taking the name Manson from his stepfather who you know.
His his mom married, She was an alcoholic, may have
been a prostitute. She was in and out of jail
for most of her life and uh or most of
his young life. And it was just, you know, a
truly bad scene for a young Charles Manson. So he
(28:12):
he actually um went and lived with relatives while she
was in jail for a five year stretch. She got out,
they reunited, he said. He apparently said that reuniting with
there was one of the few truly joyful moments in
his life. But in very short order, she basically was like,
I can't take care of you. I don't really want
this responsibility and handed him over to the state, which begun,
(28:36):
which began a just basically a string of institutionalization that
would that would keep going for basic basically his whole life. Yeah,
I mean by the time he was eventually sent to
federal prison, I think he was thirty two years old
when he was released in sixty seven, and they calculated
that he had spent half of his life uh in
(28:57):
and out of institutions, whether it would be orphanages or
um juvie or real deal prison in jail, right, And
that was just the first part of his life, So
he was out for two years before they got him
again after these murders. By the time he died in
prison at ag A d three this past November two seventeen,
(29:17):
he had spent from my calculations, only thirteen years of
his life as a freeman, thirteen out of eighty three
years outside of institutions. So he had a lot of
the deck stacked against him. But you can also go
back to I think March nineteen sixty seven when he
was released on parole um from federal prison, where he
(29:40):
was given a choice like, hey man, here you go.
You're out. You can decide what to do with your life.
Do you want to go straight, do you want to
go have a nice family, Do you want to just
be a productive member of society, or are you going
to go the exact opposite direction. And as we know
in hindsight, Charlie Manson chose the exact opposite direction. It's
(30:00):
I don't know if he was ever officially diagnosed um,
but I did see that that doctors over the years
and mental health professionals say that he was probably schizophrenic.
Uh suffered from schizophrenia and had a paranoid delusional disorder
at the very least, I hadn't heard the schizophrenia thing.
Paranoid delusional disorder totally buy Yeah, so he was. He
(30:25):
was a troubled dude. UM of course, not excusing anything,
but it was clearly a case of um mental illness
combined with rejection and institutionalization. UM really led to like
the man that he would eventually become right. So he
gets out of prison right and he um is basically
(30:46):
released into San Francisco seven. So it's like Hippie Dum,
the Kingdom of Hippie Dum, where he shows up and
there's you know, at the time, everybody's looking for like
something new, something different, something that's an alternative to the
establishment of the mainstream or anything different. And so Charles
(31:08):
Manson says like, oh I can, I can totally exploit
a lot of these people Um, and that he starts
out by meeting a girl, a librarian named Mary Bruner,
and he moves into her apartment and she apparently was
very fascinated with him because she had led a fairly
straight laced life. She went to college again, she was
a librarian, and all of a sudden there's this wild
(31:29):
like X con who is preaching this kind of gospel
of love and no materials, um, and apparently before November night,
which will explain what happened then before that time, Um,
Charles Manson supposedly did pretty closely resemble an actual hippie
(31:50):
like he did. He he felt like he could take
anything of yours that he wanted, but you could also
take anything of his. And he apparently walked the walk
when it came to stuff like that, And there are
plenty of stories of him just giving up whatever um
material possessions, saying they didn't matter, um, before things really
took a dark turn. So there's if you really kind
(32:13):
of dive in, it becomes clear how he could have
amassed some of these early followers. And the first one
was was Mary Bruner. Yeah. I get the feeling that, um,
this probably would not have happened in any other era
other than this generation when um, you know we talked
(32:33):
about in our Brainwashing in our Cults episodes, where this
time it was just it's just a weird time in
America and people were really um, I don't know about prone,
but at least ripe for the picking when it comes
to falling into uh situations, like this and believing these
what looked like crack pots to us now, but at
(32:55):
the time everyone was. It was very anti establishment. People
were taking tons of drugs and rejecting rejecting mainstream society
and embracing the counterculture, and they were just really open
to all kinds of weird stuff. So he again, he
just kind of figured out that he could he could
work this to his own means. So there's a couple
(33:17):
of things that there's there's two basic things that you
needed to know about Charles Manson from from everything I've seen.
One was that his main goal was to become a
recording artist, a very successful star of a recording artist.
And two that he could he had a good ability
(33:38):
to manipulate people into giving him what he wanted um
and mostly that that amounted to sex and drugs um.
And he used that ability to get other people to
do what he wanted. So, for example, when he started
to a mass like a substantial amount of girls in
(33:58):
the Manson family, um, it was it was just a
free love commune the whole time. So the guys who
came in all of a sudden had access to these
the women, and in return um for Charlie granting them
access to them. They would basically do his bidding or
offer him physical protection because he wasn't a big guy.
(34:20):
He's kind of a shrimpy dude. Um. But they're everything
from from If you look at it from an outsider's perspective,
every relationship be had was one of extraction. He was
taking something from everyone around him. It wasn't just a
normal friendship or a normal relationship. It was it was
what can you do for me? And what can I
(34:42):
use from you to to get something out of other people. Yeah,
and if if you've never seen an interview with him,
I encourage you to check some of them out. He
does have a very um stream of consciousness, circular sort
of talks NonStop and doesn't make a lot of sense,
but um. One thing that's often said about him is
that he can be mesmerizing um with the way he
(35:05):
does that. And I imagine in the late sixties, if
you've got a headful of acid and there's this guy
that has the ability to like almost rebreathe like a
trumpet player and talk for minutes and minutes and hours
on end, they could be kind of you know, they
would fall under this weird spell. So I definitely don't
get it because now when I watch him on again,
(35:27):
tiny weird redneck. Um, but when you you know, when
you see him doing a thing, even with like Diane Sawyer,
who doesn't fall for it. By the way, she she
clearly is just like very it's a great interview. She's
pro and she stays very on point, basically kind of
like you're not gonna get me to like fall through
your charms. Uh, but but it's pretty interesting. Um. So
(35:50):
he's got Mary Bruner is this first girlfriend. Then he said, hey,
what do you think about a triad? Or rather, what
do you think about a triad? That's how he sounded.
And um, Mary Brunner, from what I understand, wasn't super
into it, but she was under his spell, so she
said sure. Uh so Squeaky from Lynette Squeaky from came
(36:12):
into the picture, and um, they you know, they lived
as a as a threson that traveled together up and
down the coast out there, and he just sort of
started accumulating mostly women along the way to this sort
of traveling party is probably how he framed it, and
people were hipped to it. There were men though, um,
(36:36):
besides Tex Watson and Bobby Busslil those guy named Danny
de Carlo who were kind of early men who joined up.
And by all accounts, most of those men who joined
up were there because Manson was said, you know, you
can have these women. You've got plenty of drugs. And
so before you know it, the Manson family was born
and they were just kind of this weirdo hippie group
(36:57):
that um used to commit burglary. These Manson there has
long been um. It's long been said that he beat
a lot of the women in the group and would
prostitute them to for cash to pay for things for
the family, like rent um. They they ate a lot
of their food from like going through dumpsters behind grocery
(37:19):
stores and stuff like that. And they just basically hung
out and did drugs and had sex all day. That
was basically their aim and their goal. And then at
night they would have bonfires out in the desert and um,
they'd all just take a bunch of acid and listen
to Charles Manson do his mesmerizing thing. Um. And again
at first it was it was weird. There's a lot
(37:40):
of like ideas that Manson was this reincarnation of Jesus Christ,
or that he was not even the reincarnated Jesus Christ.
He was the same Jesus Christ who had been alive
for you know, almost two thousand years um. And just
like all the stuff you would find in the desert
among hippies in the late sixties, On I said, at
night around a bonfire, right but when when um, by
(38:06):
this time, like by the time they're out in the desert,
Manson had had this really amazing chance encounter that you
just would never have and the fact that it did
happen is just totally mind blowing. But become a recording artist.
To help ensure his success of becoming a recording artst
he moved the family from San Francisco down to Los
Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry.
(38:29):
And it just so happened that one night in nineteen UM,
a couple of Manson family girls were hitch hiking on
Sunset Boulevard and we're picked up by none other than
Dennis will And Wilson, one of the co founders of
the Beach Boys. That's right, it was sixty nine, but
same same deal. All those years just ran together back then. Uh,
(38:50):
and Dennis Wilson was, Um, he was a party, party
dude and liked his ladies. Because it sounds very weird
to say that he picked up a cup of hitchhikers
and basically brought them home. But um, it was a
different time, and uh, he was, like I said, he
was a party dude. So they ended up being Ella,
Joe Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Crinwinkle. So they move
(39:13):
in basically, and he goes to the studio, comes home
and the Manson family had moved in, which again it
sounds really strange, but at the time he I mean
Ed says he was frightened at I get the feeling.
He was more like, you know, what trip are you on?
(39:34):
Not like, oh my god, I need to call the cops. Yeah,
he um, because they lived there for a while, like
he let them live there. Yeah. I think the party
it was partially out of fear. I saw and I
read an interview with Charles Manson. He was talking about
Dennis Wilson, and he was like, you know, I'd say whatever,
he just lay his weirdo trip on Dennis Wilson, and
Dennis is responsibly like, yeah, man, that's cool. Listen, look,
(39:55):
I gotta go, I really gotta go do this thing.
Just always trying to get away from Charles man Inson.
So maybe he was afraid that he was they were
going to kill him. Maybe he liked having access to
like all this free love from all the Manson family
women um, or maybe he just felt like he couldn't
get out of it. But he uh, he did let
them live there for a few months. It wasn't like
(40:16):
they crashed there for a weekend. They moved in, they
wrecked his ferrari um, they they met a bunch of
his friends. It was it was a big It was
a big deal that that Dennis Wilson came into Charles
Manson's life because it really bolstered this idea that, yes,
he is going to become a recording artist. Because not
only did he hang out with Dennis Wilson, he hung
(40:37):
out with a guy named Terry Melcher who was a
record producer, hung out with another guy named Phil Kaufman
who was a record producer, and he met all these
people in the industry who were in a position to
get Charles Manson's career off of the ground. And when
when there's you're dealing with this this crazy little ticking
time bomb like Charles Manson, who wants you to do
(40:58):
something like get his musical career off the ground, but
you don't think his music is good enough to actually launch. Um,
you've got a problem on your hands. And Dennis Wilson
and his buddies all knew this, yes, And uh, two
quick things here. One big shout out to Dennis Wilson's
only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue. Is it good? And
I think it's great. I gotta check that out. And
(41:20):
I love the Beach Boys. I mean he Dennis Wilson
was was clearly not the the brains or voice behind
the Beach Boys as the drummer, but U and he
was always sort of, um, I think, kind of picked
on a little bit for not being the most talented dude.
And he was just in the band because he was
handsome and related. But um, I think Pacific Ocean Blue
(41:42):
is like one of the great lost classics. Let's check
it out. It's very good. He was supposedly also the
only true surfer in the band. Yeah, exactly. Uh. And
the other thing was that Terry Melcher, that producer that
you mentioned. The reason he factors in so heavily is
because he actually lived at the Tate House in Beverly
(42:02):
Hills before Tate and then moved in, So that was
sort of the connection there. Um, I guess Manson was
going to kill him right now. So here is what
a lot of people think. They think that again, he
was sending a message to Terry Melcher saying, I can't
kill you, but I can get close to you. And
I know you're gonna hear about this because this happened
(42:25):
at the house you were living in a month or
so before. I'm just gonna go in and have my
people indiscriminately slaughter whoever is there. But this is this
is you, this is what's going on. He he supposedly
was well aware that Terry Melcher didn't live there any longer,
because he'd spoken to the guy who actually owned the
house and was asking him where Terry Melcher went, and
all the guy would tell him was Malibu, So he
(42:46):
knew it wasn't Melcher in that house. And alright, so
they eventually leave Dennis Wilson's house. Dennis Wilson's like, you
guys are great and all the ladies are nice. The
acid is decent, but it's time for you to go.
So they live. Uh they leave in night still and
um he uh they go to Spawn Ranch, which you
(43:11):
mentioned earlier s P A h N. And this was
a it's kind of weird that they ended up living here,
but it was. It was out in kind of the
outskirts of l A. There are lots of ranches like
the Disney Ranch at the Universal Ranch where they shoot
a lot of stuff, and they have old sets that
are still there, whether it's uh Mash or Planet of
the Apes or um, just an old West set. And
(43:33):
Spawn Ranch was one of these that had closed down,
and it was an old West set and they actually,
um it's a state park now. But they did have
permission to live there. They didn't just uh squat there.
They uh sort of had a little agreement to do
a little maintenance work, uh and they were allowed to stay.
So some of them are there, some of them are
at places like at a camp in Death Valley, and
(43:54):
then just scattered all over l A as far as
Manson family members and just random houses in a artments.
But the main place that that Manson in the Inner
Circle was it Spawn Ranch, and they would go on
what they called creepy crawls, which where these little crimes
Freeze would like you said, they would go out and
burgle cars or robbed people and um, just to kind
(44:17):
of keep the money and the drugs flowing, right um.
And so Spawn Ranch was almost like a little more legit.
They were in much closer contact with other people out
in Death Valley at the Barker Ranch. That was far
more secluded, way out in the desert, way more disconnected
from society, and that was the place where they expected
to wait out helter skelter while the the um everybody
(44:41):
else in the country killed one another. That's right. So, um,
you've got this whole, this whole weirdo family there. They're criminals,
they're engaged in prostitution. There's violence, you know, there's physical violence.
But ultimately there they kind of resemble hippies. Here they're
super counter culture. Um. But things turned dark, and they
(45:04):
turned dark after this seminal thing that happened to the
rest of the world but really really spoke to Charles
Manson in particular, and that was the November twenty two
release of the Beatles White album all Right, you know
what this is gonna be a two parter. It's pretty clear. Uh,
(45:24):
so let's go ahead and in this one on a
cliffhanger featuring the Beatles. Right, does that sound good? Yeah?
It does. Um pick back up part two with a
white album. Let's do it all right? All right? Well,
in the meantime, while you guys are chewing over what
Chuck just said, uh, you can tweet to us at
s Y s K podcast or on Facebook dot com
(45:46):
slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email the Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com
and as always, joined us at at home on the
web Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on
this thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
(46:09):
M hm hm
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Josh Clark
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