A LIFE OF CRIME
Charlie’s first spell in reform school came at the age of nine, when he was caught stealing. Convicted of the same offence again at the age of 12, he was once again institutionalised and thus began the cycle of his life, in and out of reform schools and, later, prisons. In total, Charles spent more than half of his first 30 years incarcerated. The litany of offences committed by Manson was wide-ranging: burglary, armed robbery, car theft, assault, sodomy, pimping, rape, fraud.
During his extensive periods in prison, Charles Manson began to study religion and religious philosophies.
THE FAMILY IS BORN
In 1967, and in spite of his pleas to stay in prison, Charlie was awarded parole and sent to San Francisco. Re-entering the world in the ‘Summer of Love’ though, Charlie found it easier to adapt to the outside than he had anticipated. A keen musician, he used his guitar and the influential powers of readily-available drugs to attract friends, mainly girls, and soon followers. When he managed to sell the rights to one of his own songs, Charlie used the money to buy a bus, in which he and his entourage travelled, gathering more followers and spreading ‘love’.
The bus eventually broke down, and Charles Manson and his girls moved in with Gary Hinman, a music teacher. When they had outstayed their welcome there, they moved on, and Charlie conned George Spahn into letting him and his group stay at his Ranch. With a following of such eager and attractive girls, Manson made it worth Spahn’s while to agree. The group lived a decadent and carefree life at the Ranch. They scavenged for food, stealing what the supermarkets threw away each day.
Still determined to launch his music career, Charlie used his contacts to get in touch with Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher. Manson hoped that Melcher could be interested in using his music as the soundtrack for a film, and invited him to the Ranch to listen to a few of his compositions. Melcher came to listen to Charlie and his girls a couple of times, but ultimately was not interested in the music. The disappointment hit Charlie harder than Melcher could have realised, for he truly believed that this was his opening into the music business.
CHARLIE’S PROPHECY
Along with a passion for music, at the centre of ‘The Family’, the name which Charlie was now using to refer to his group of followers, was the development of a prophecy of impending Armageddon. Charles Manson preached to his followers that the black people of the world were going to rise up, steal from and slaughter all white men. Charlie and his followers (which he estimated would total 144,000 by this time) would survive this war, as he was going to lead them to a secret civilization in Death Valley where they would sit out the slaughter until the black men were all that remained. Then The Family would return to the cities, take back power from the black men, enslave them and rule the world. A great follower of The Beatles, Charlie gave the name ‘Helter Skelter’ to this race war, as he believed that the song lyrics described perfectly the Final Reckoning that was to come, and he prophesied that Helter Skelter would begin in the summer of 1969.
But when the summer days of 1969 did come and the black people had not unleashed this prophesied violence against the whites, Charlie spoke to his followers and told them that the blacks did not know what to do and therefore that they, The Family, would have to lead the way and show them. So it was that Manson’s followers set out to begin the predestined and necessary slaughter.
CIELO DRIVE
The home of Sharon Tate, the heavily pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, was one of The Family’s first targets. With her sorely missed husband away shooting a film in Europe, Sharon was spending the evening of August 9, 1969 with friends in Los Angeles. These included Abigail Folger, Folger’s boyfriend Voytek Frykowski, and the internationally renowned hair stylist, Jay Sebring. Sharon was entertaining her friends, not uncommonly, in the house she rented on Cielo Drive – a house owned by Terry Melcher, who had recently shattered Charles Manson’s dreams of a music career…
Shortly after 4 a.m. the following morning, the LAPD received a call from a private security guard who was on patrol in the area. He claimed to have heard gunshots. He wasn’t the only one to have heard disturbing noises. Reports later came in that gunshots had also been heard earlier in the morning, and the chilling screams of a woman begging, ‘Oh, God, no, please don’t! Oh, God, no, don’t, don’t . . .’ None of these earlier disturbances however, had been reported.
The morning dawned as usual over the Tate house, although on arrival at the property to begin work at around 8 a.m., Sharon Tate’s housekeeper Winifred Chapman noticed the telephone wire hanging over the main gate. Swinging the gate open, she walked up the drive and saw another unfamiliar sight – a white Rambler parked on the drive. On entering the house, she made her way towards the living room, noticing as she went some unusual splashes of red across the walls. On discovery of pools of blood and what appeared to be a body on the lawn, Winifred Chapman ran screaming from the house. As she ran back up the driveway and past the white Rambler, she noticed a second body inside the car.
When the police arrived, they found the blood-soaked body in the Rambler, along with another two heavily wounded bodies on the lawn. As they entered the house, first to catch their eye was the word ‘PIG’, written in blood on the lower half of the front door. As they progressed cautiously through the house, they could not imagine the horror they were about to encounter. Lying on the couch in the living room was a very heavily pregnant woman, her face covered in blood, her body covered in multiple stab wounds, and a ligature around her neck. The rope had been thrown over a rafter in the ceiling, and the other end was tied around the neck of a man lying close by, equally drenched in blood.
As the police looked on in horror, they heard the voice of a man. It was the caretaker, William Garretson, and he was arrested immediately and taken away.
The victims at the Tate house were later identified as Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski. Theirs were the bodies on the lawn. Steve Parent, a friend of the caretaker whose body was found in the car, and Sharon Tate, her unborn baby boy, and Jay Sebring, who had died in the living room. All the victims, with the exception of Steve Parent, had been stabbed repeatedly and furiously. Parent, Frykowski and Senring had also been shot. A total of 102 stab wounds had been administered to the victims.
LABIANCA KILLINGS
No less than 48 hours later, police were called to the scene of a second bloodbath, this time in the Los Feliz area of LA. Frank Struthers, son of Rosemary LaBianca and step-son of her husband Leno LaBianca, had returned home after a camping trip to find a couple of things out of the ordinary as he walked up the drive to his parents’ house. He could see Leno’s speedboat still on the drive, very out of character for his step-father who would always put it away for storage in the garage. Secondly, all the window shades in the house were down, again very unusual. Frank could get no answer either at the front door or on the phone, so he called his sister Susan, and her boyfriend, and waited for them to arrive.
The three entered the house through the open back door, and the two men left Susan in the kitchen while they went to have a look around. As they entered the living room, they saw the body of Leno, covered in blood, with a pillowcase over his head and some kind of object sticking out from his stomach. The men retreated back through the house, grabbed Susan, and called the police immediately.
On further inspection by the police and ambulancemen who subsequently arrived, the protrusion from Leno’s stomach was a carving knife. His hands had been tied together behind his back, a lamp-cord wound around his neck, and the word ‘WAR’ carved on to his body. In the bedroom, the police discovered that Rosemary had suffered a similar fate. Graffitied in the blood of the victims, in different places around the house were the statements ‘DEATH TO PIGS’, ‘RISE’, and the misspelled ‘HEALTHER SKELTER’. The couple had been stabbed a combined 67 times.