December 8, 2017 • 42 mins
After spending decades in prison, former cult leader Charles Manson passed away in November of 2017. In the wake of his death, millions of people re-examined his strange, disturbing life story, tracing his evolution from an abused child to one of the most infamous prisoners in U.S. history. So how exactly did he get started? What led him and his followers down their grisly path? Join the guys as they separate fact from folklore in part one of this two-part episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and you can turn back now
or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
M Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
(00:26):
my name is Nolan. They call me Ben. You are you?
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Everybody listening please wave a silent hello to our super
producer Paul Decont on the ones and twos. I'm doing
it right now, and you guys are great at this.
By the way, you guys should see Matt and all
at this. I was thinking we could open this up
(00:48):
with an out of context quote that will later turn
out to be really important. Uh okay, alright, you ready?
Are we gonna say who it's from. We're just doing
it totally out of contact you no attribution what so
if then ever? Perfect? All right? Agreements are the forces
we used to locate ourselves in time and space. Everything
(01:12):
that we do is from some agreement that we have
set up. Everything that we have in this physical universe
is something we have laid out and agreed to. Most
people never set time limits to their agreements, so they
are forces that continue with no end. Okay, al right,
out of contacts. We're just setting up this is this
(01:33):
is ridiculous foreshadowing, but we do promise it comes into
play later. What are we talking about. Something hit the
air waves just recently as we record this, and we
kind of knew it was coming, but not so soon. Yeah.
I had no idea of a figure that has been
in my life for ever since I was born, of
(01:57):
as a kind of a specter, sort of an American boogeyman. Yeah,
that's a great phrase. Yes, we are talking today For
anyone who didn't read the title, Uh, we're talking today
about the death of Charles Manson. Charles Manson is dead.
Charles Mills Manson died on November nineteen seventeen in the
(02:19):
Kent County Hospital of Bakersfield, California. Yeah, and never since
I've been born, he's been in jail. He was incarcerated
in nineteen seventy one and he was serving time in
a California state prison outside of Bakersfield. And he was
eighty three years old when he died. And after his death,
Manson's grandson revealed that this former cult leader American boogeyman,
(02:44):
like you said, had been in treatment for cancer. So
as as large as Charlie Manson loomed over the culture,
this country, pop culture, all kinds of things. He's been
just this the specter, Like you said, he was human,
and he had been being treated for cancer for the
past year, and it had been kept a secret and
(03:06):
kept inside the family. And Manson died as he lived
a disturbing figure. And again not to harp on it
too much, but I love that Phrasier came up with
American Boogeyman, a disturbing figure and that was caught somewhere
between a protagonist for some members of society and ubiquitously
(03:27):
regarded as a symbol for the dark, fascinating fall of
the so called hippie era. I think that's why the
Boogeyman thing rings true for me, because that was such
a time of unhinged you know, opportunity, prosperity, potentially just
like you know, letting. It was like our country like
spreading our wings and flying into our new destiny, and
(03:49):
there was this dark byproduct the summer of free love.
Turned out there was quite a price to pay. It
was an unhinged cult leader who despite decades of incarceration
still managed to garner a following amid the loners, the outcast,
and the mentally vulnerable the world over, and so a
lot of the people who are alive at the time
(04:10):
when all of the press was coming out when these
crimes were committed by Charles Manson um people who saw
the trial and then the sentencing. Charlie Manson should have
died a long time ago had California not suspended the
death penalty on April nineteen seventy one. If they wouldn't
have done that, he would have been long gone by
(04:31):
this year. It's crazy, Ben, because it's like to his supporters,
it's almost as though he can have one right right
because he died in a hospital rather than a prison.
The single most significant aspect of Manson's turn as a
cult leader and his criminal career is his masterminding of
(04:51):
the infamous Tate Lebianca murders, and it leads us to
a series of questions that you have probably heard examined
at length before in documentaries, in adaptations, in other podcasts,
and in numerous uh printed works. The questions all run
(05:12):
around the same sort of orbit, which would be what
possessed these people? What compelled otherwise normal people to join
the Manson family and follow this fellow. How is Charles
Manson capable of such cunning manipulation? And are any of
the conspiracy theories that surround Charles Manson and the entire
Manson family are they true? Here are the facts we
(05:36):
we we must start at this point, So we're we're
journeying back to November twelfth four to answer these questions
and sort of a circuitous, perhaps but accurate way, the
most accurate we can find. Charles Manson was born Charles
(05:56):
Mills Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio, there in November twelfth. His
mother's name was Kathleen Maddox. She was sixteen at the time,
and according to Manson, she originally named him no name
Maddox in O space in a M. E. Maddox. His
father is currently unknown, or at least publicly unidentified. Eventually,
(06:22):
Charles Maddox took his stepfather's surname, which made him officially
Charles Manson, and his earlier years were in a single word, horrific. Yeah.
And what we've done has gone through some of the
facts and fiction, some of the mythology here trying to
figure out what's what? And here are some of the
the proven examples of terrible things that happened to the
(06:45):
young Charles Manson. As stuff is pretty bleak. Manson's mother
sold him for a picture of beer to a woman
who wanted to have children. Um, and his uncle had
to seek out this woman and get young Charles. Yeah,
apparently the story went to Charles's mother. Uh said, I
(07:06):
heard the server. She was liking the server at this
bar and said, you know, I heard you want kids.
You can't have mine for a picture of beer. That
they were joking. The server thought they were joking. She
brought the beer and Uh, Manson's mom down the picture
did a did uh dine in what is it? Dine
(07:28):
and dash? That's the word, that's the phrase. She did
a dine and dash and left the baby. There's I mean,
she was clearly mentally bill in he's caught stealing and
he's sent to a school for boys in Indiana and
there from that point he spent the next two decades
in and out of reform schools, juvenile detention, and eventually prison. Yeah.
(07:50):
And then Manson himself alleged staunchly for his entire life
that he was sexually assaulted numerous times by multiple assailants
while at this and other institutions, so saying that you know,
not only was his child childhood terrible, with all these
things happen a mother who wouldn't even give him a name.
Then he moved on to living in these institutions where
(08:13):
he was just abused, at least according to Charles Manson,
And as he continued committing crimes, being imprisoned and released,
then imprisoned again, he became a career offender, more comfortable
arguably outside of the bounds of the law than within them.
And then in nineteen sixty seven, when he was set
(08:33):
to be released from prison, he actually begged to stay
inside the jail. He said he was incapable of living
outside the walls of the prison, as though I can
function inside here, but not out there anymore, because this
is my new home. And that's I mean, that's sad.
But it's also something we've kind of heard before, where
(08:54):
once you get used to that the structure of a
prison life, it's very difficult to unchin outside. It was
that like in the Shawshank Redemption, where when Morgan Freeman's
character finally gets released at the end, and he just
doesn't know how to go about day to day life
because he's been in for so long. It's a real
thing that real people experience all the time. It makes sense,
(09:15):
but it is absolutely, as you said, quite quite sad.
And what a world Charles Manson found when he was
released in nineteen sixty seven. This is, as we said,
the height of the free love movement. Hate Ashbury becoming
a mecca of sorts, uh, a holy site for this
(09:37):
ideology which is sweeping the nation, running counter to US
foreign policy in Vietnam and abroad. Manson is by now
a hardened criminal, and he's released from a place called
McNeil Island Prison in Washington State. Uh. He had at
this point been serving seven years for transporting women across
(09:59):
state lines the purpose of prostitution and also for forging checks. Yeah.
He traveled to San Francisco and he attracted a following
among many rebellious young people with troubled emotional lives, sort
of a drift in the world. He was a little
older than most of his followers, he was thirty two
(10:19):
years old. And there was this amazing people described it
as almost palpable feeling in the air that the world
could be changed in a positive way, that with enough
positive thought we might be able to set things right.
And he embraced this mysticism wholeheartedly. Yeah. I mean, I
(10:44):
think think about his life up until this point. This
is why it's so important. Let's just say for argument here,
Manson probably hasn't experienced a whole lot of physical love
the way a child would throughout their life and then
growing up maybe a teenager and then maybe a twenty something. Um,
he there is free love, free food, lots of hugging,
(11:05):
there's there's marijuana, there's acid. They're girls, so many, so
many girls. Do you say, lots of hugging. Lots of hugging.
I mean yeah, yeah, hugging and just touching like um,
affectionately without strings attached to kind of thing. I mean,
anyway I'll walk down the street without some GIBRONI trying
(11:26):
to put their arms around you, yeah, and just be like,
you know what, everything's good man. It was a real
hug so But but specifically, and not jokingly, we're talking
about these women, these young women that he ended up
being around, most of them lost girls or lost girls, um,
looking for someone to tell them that they'd been found
(11:47):
in some way in a place that would accept them.
Remember that book, Go ask Alice, did you have to
read that in high school? It's like about the girl
who leaves home and becomes like when she's on LSD
and up like and horrible situations, but it's that total
lost girl kind of scenario. And I believe it turned
out that book was kind of just like almost borderline propaganda,
(12:09):
but it was so effective because it was a real story,
you know, in terms of like that type of thing
happened quite often. And a guy like Manson would be
the perfect um, I don't know, it's they would be
the perfect mark for a guy like Manson who kind
of had his wiles, and you know it was a
musician and kind of seen as this like edgy kind
(12:29):
of figure. You know, well, yeah, he he had a
certain set of skills, right right, Yes, he he thrived
this guru slash fill in father figure, played the guitar.
He had that dangerous mystique of an ex con. And
one thing that's interesting is he studied a lot of
stuff extensively in prison. We'll get to some of that.
(12:52):
And when he landed and hate Ashbury, he walked around
and listened to the various street preachers, the various poets
and prophets, and picked the pieces of their What they
called raps at that time doesn't resemble the kind of
rap that we listened to today. Uh more like a
a almost free flowing, occasionally rhyming, um declarative mode of speech.
(13:18):
It was almost just that, like that cadence of like
a revival preacher, a big tent revival preacher or something
like that. In a way, yeah, stuff you could dig, right,
And so he agglomerated this and created his own sort
of mixtape of that you can be free metaphysical rap,
and people loved it. He started garnering followers like Mary Brunner,
(13:44):
Lynnette from later known as Squeaky Shusan Atkin, Sandra Good,
and this was the beginning of what prosecutors would later
call the Family with a capital lef Yeah, and the
family eventually moved to Los Angeles because Manson wanted to
be a rock star, and he actually was successful, at
least in making some good contacts. He was friends with
(14:07):
Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. Belie. There's even an
incident where he cut him or they cut his ear off,
or something like that. What was that about? They got
it did turn ugly. Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll
get to that. But he was also friends with a
very well known record producer by the name of Terry Melcher.
And just to give you a little taste, you guys
might have heard this, but yeah, Manson wasn't very good musician.
(14:29):
And here's an example. Oh garbage dump, Oh garbage dump.
Why you're called a garbage dump? Oh garbage dump? For
garbage dumb? Why are you called a garbage dumb? That
(14:53):
was a snippet of garbage dump by Charles Manson. Why
do they call it a garbage dump? That's the the
you know, that's the question. That's a great question. Uh yeah,
but yeah, you know, I think I think that's interesting.
It's great to put that in context because he learned
a slide guitar originally while he was incarcerated, and so
(15:17):
much of an individual success in the music industry then,
as today, hinges upon one's charisma, and there are there
are critics of plenty who will tell you that such
and such and so and so we're skating by on
charisma rather than musical merit. However, after after Manson was
(15:38):
making these connections along with his family is an entourage
by the way he racked up uh Dennis Wilson claims
that the family racked up a hundred thousand dollars plus
and expenses for food, for drugs for socially transmitted disease treatment,
(15:59):
and this arker turn occurs in nineteen sixty nine. Manson
had always been physically and emotionally abusive to the women
under his sway, but with the release of The Beatles
White Album, he took a sharp turn into apocalyptic beliefs,
signified perhaps most apparently by his complex interpretation of the
(16:22):
song Helter Skelter by The Beatles. Yeah, that's not a
bad that's not a bad one, man. I'm glad that
you put some levity in here, because we're gonna need
it in a little bit. We can't play a clip
from that song because it's the Beatles, right, We can't
legally play one for you, but we can invite you
to check out the song if you haven't heard it before.
(16:45):
Should we just do a little lyrics snippet perhaps, Yeah,
maybe a reading to a little reading. So here's a
snippet from the lyrics. Elder Scott is actually pretty pretty
simple lyrics, but Manson really took a lot out of it.
It goes like this, when I get to the bottom,
I go back to the top of the slide where
I stop and I turn and I go for a
ride until I get to the bottom and I see
(17:05):
you again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hey, do you don't you
want me to love you? I'm coming down fast, but
I'm miles above. You tell me, tell me, tell me,
come on, tell me the answer. Well, you may be
a lover, but you ain't no dancer. Helter skelter, helter skelter,
helter skelter. Yeah, and man, what Charles Manson heard when
(17:26):
he listened to those lyrics and the music combined was
something um beyond what I interpret when I listened to
the song. And let's get exactly into what he thought
it meant after a quick word from our sponsor. So Manson,
from these lyrics are using these lyrics as a basis
(17:49):
or a foundation, told his followers, as he was building
them into a cult that he had an epiphany of
sorts and revelation from the lyrics of Helter Skelter. He
did not see it as his interpretation. He saw it
as a divine message to himself. He also believed that
(18:11):
all people were God h He saw it as a
divine message that a race war was imminent, specifically between
the white population of the United States and the black population,
that the black population would win, but be, according to
his beliefs, inherently unable to self govern, and that during
(18:33):
the race war, the family, the Manson family would hide
out in an underground cave, a cavern system that he
called the Bottomless Pit, the land of Milk and Honey.
And after the race war, when all the quote unquote
pigs and the and the squares and the other white
people were dead from America, that would emerge five ruling
(18:55):
angels Manson who would play the role of a new
Jesus Christ, a company by his disciples, and the four
members of the musical group the Beatles. Wow sounds pretty compelling.
Um I yeah, it sounds like you know, it's weird
because it sounds like a lot to take in. It
(19:17):
sounds like a tall milkshake when you're just when you're
just hearing it laid out as an elevator pitch sounds
like level three, right right. We have to be careful
and that's right, Matt, not for nothing. But we are
definitely we are definitely going to have to mention how
our good buddies the Church of Scientology at some point later,
(19:41):
either in this episode or in part two, if we
get to a part two. The thing is with these
sorts of beliefs, with any belief that seems unreasonable, we
have to realize the context in which it occurs. It's
like the salesperson footing the door technique. You don't get
all of this at once. You get it after your time,
(20:01):
your money, and your mental energy have become sunk cost,
which we're borrowing a phrase from economics, and the point
is that you feel like every time you've been like, well,
I've already put this much time in, I just have
to keep going, right, Like if you're watching a movie
that's four hours long and you're three hours and forty
(20:21):
minutes into it, can't just stop and I'm like, oh God, yeah,
what am I gonna do? I gotta see it to
the end. Manson's descent into madness began at a place
called really kicked into gear, we should say a place
called spawn Ranch, span Ranch. I just want to know,
like how he took so much meaning from those simple
Beatles lyrics, like what if you had just seen a
kid playing on a slide? You think you would have
(20:44):
had the same revelation. Interesting. I think maybe when you
combine the musical portion of that song with perhaps the
right cocktail of drugs or you know, whatever you're going through,
and some of the other ideas that were already kind
of seeping into him, like triggering, or the right confidence
in the right um like lamania. That's a perfect word, Matt.
(21:08):
After the falling out with Dennis Wilson, the family relocated
to this ranch, which was about twenty miles away from
Los Angeles, but a very different environment. And we can
give you a little bit of a little bit of
background because the ranch is an interesting place. Yes. Spawn
Ranch was founded in eighteen eighty five, and after changing
(21:29):
hands a number of times, it became the property of
George Spawn in nineteen fifty three. Is this you're doing,
like the resort style commercial for Spawn Ranch. That's exactly
what's happening. I was I was hoping for a Robin Leech,
but this is great too. In nineteen sixty eight, when
the family came to the ranch, Spawn was in his
late seventies, terribly lonely and mostly blind. His wife managed
(21:52):
the property, but the two didn't seem to have a
close relationship, and Spawn let out of work ranch hands
live on the property exchange for labor. At the time,
the ranch was occasionally used as a backdrop in TV shows,
and it also made money renting horses to tourists. Interesting
side note, this area had hosted cults before the nineteen
(22:14):
forties and fifties. There was another cult called the Fountain
of the World in nearby Box Canyon. They were led
by a charismatic figure who called himself Krishna Venta, although
of course that was not his birth name. They built
a monastery on the property. Charles Manson himself allegedly had
been at the monastery some time before or after. Disgruntled
(22:34):
X members blew up the building in ninety eight, killing
Venta and seven others. Those two ex members who blew
it up, by the way, uh did so because, as
is so common in many cults of personality, the leader
had a revelation that he should be sleeping with everybody's wife. Yep.
(22:55):
And actually there was a pretty interesting account of Manson
at Spawn Ranch that came out not long after he
passed away, Brian Cranston from Breaking Bad and Malcolm in
the Middle Fantastic actor who was sixty one, wrote on
social media quote, hearing Charles Manson is dead, I shuddered.
I was within his grasp just one year before he
(23:17):
committed brutal murder in nineteen sixty nine. Luck was with
me when a cousin and I went horseback riding at
the Spawn ranch and saw the little man with crazy eyes,
whom the other hippies called Charlie. Interesting. What a web
we see weaving here? And you know, regardless of the
previous Cults activities in the forties and fifties, Charles Manson
(23:41):
and George Spawn came to an understanding. The family. They
decided would live on the property, help out around the ranch,
and in exchange, the female members of the family would
attend to George Spawn's daily needs, including everything from cooking
and cleaning to laundry and sexual satiation. For Manson, however,
(24:02):
there was a much much more important and perhaps sutler advantage.
He would finally have the followers of the Manson family
isolated from the world and completely subsumed into his influence. Yeah,
it was during this time at the Spawn Ranch that
he began really working on these techniques that are common
(24:26):
to cult leaders. He was a big fan of forcing
dissociative states on his followers through drug use largely and
also the kind of emotional and physical abuse you could
probably imagine as well. UM. This allowed him to remove
a sense of self, ego, and esteem UM from his
(24:48):
followers uh. And some of these techniques included things like
mandatory orgies. UH. He also compelled his followers to listen
to long, repetitive lectures on the coming race war and
UM as the cult began to take this darker, more
sinister and violent turn. UM. During this time, these times
(25:09):
of isolation, the ranch Handsum at the ranch and as
well as the Spawn's estranged wife warned him to to
take it easy. Take it easy, George, you really need
to distance yourself from this guy. He's uh, he's he's
kind of freaking us out. Yeah, he's kind of freakings out.
Even Brian Cranston doesn't like and everybody loves Brian. This
(25:31):
so this shows us, Um shows us a very disturbing
pattern that's common in a lot of cults in the past.
We have asked ourselves you know what is the difference
between a religious movement and what's the difference between a cult,
because one person's true religion is another person's cult, and
(25:53):
is the term cult just always a pejorative. We did
a YouTube episode, right was just I We did one,
I think episode on the common practices of cults, and
we highly recommend it because the steps are almost distressingly
(26:13):
and eerily similar from one cult to the next. You
can also see some neat vignette's cameos featuring Charles Bryant
from Stuff You Should Know and Jonathan Strickland from Tech
Stuff of Tech Stuff Fame. Yeah, and you can also
see how some of these same techniques you would use
to garner a following in that way are used outside
(26:34):
of cult activities as psychological almost weapons to get people
to do certain things. When you look at I don't
want to get too dark, but you look at marketing
and pr sometimes and you see some of these same
things occurring. Oh absolutely, And just to plant the seed
(26:54):
for later discussions about magic and the occult, I'm always
drawn back to one of my favorite quotes from our
friend Damian Patrick Williams, who said, if you have problems
believing in magic as a concept. Just think of it
as weaponized psychology. And when you think about that, it
makes a much more real So as Asnal said, things
(27:17):
are getting dire, right, Manson is lying to his followers
and probably to himself. You know, there's a there's a
certain uh, there's a certain necessity and believing one's own
rap as they would call it. And he told them,
you know, they were hunting for this enormous cavern, Helter
(27:38):
Skelter was on the way, and they have chosen few.
That's another thing very common with cults. Would safely wait
out the coming army Gedton. Eventually, you see, what happened
is that Manson grew tired of waiting for the world
to end, and he told his followers to prime the pump,
and what happens next we'll live in for me forever.
(28:02):
I was saying. It's one of the most horrific cult
based murders of all time, and we're going to talk
very specifically about that right after one more quick sponsor
break Helter Skelter. The apocalyptic prophecy of Manson, as told
(28:24):
to his followers, was seen as inevitable but on a
flexible timeline, meaning that in their internal logic, it was
possible to nudge this into occurring a little bit earlier
than they would then they would otherwise expect. They began
committing murders. Um, you'll hear a lot about Tate la Bianca.
(28:49):
But on July nine, some of his followers killed a
man named Gary Hinman, allegedly because he would not join
Manson's rock band. In August eighth, nine, six nine, four
of Manson's followers drove to a place called Clo Drive,
breaking into the home of the then not yet exposed
(29:10):
and disgrace director and pedophile Roman Polanski as his pregnant
wife actress Sharon Tate entertained friends at the residents. Manson
was not there, No, not that night, but he sent
four of his followers. Yeah, he sent the we're gonna
call them cult members Texts Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian,
(29:33):
and Patricia Kranwinkle. They were all acting under orders from
Manson to destroy, destroy its important here, destroy everyone in
the house, and as gruesome a manner as possible. The
victims um were as noted, the the eight and a
half months pregnant Sharon Tate, which is just awful, her
(29:58):
former lover Ja see Bring the screenwriter voice tech Freakowski Um,
his lover Abigail Folder, who was the heiress to the
Folder Coffee company, and one other person, a student named
Stephen Parent who was literally just there to visit the caretaker.
The caretaker lived on site. After brutally choking, stabbing, and
(30:23):
executing their victims, these cult members followed Manson's orders to
leave a sign quote something witchy Atkins wrote pig on
the front door of the house and Tate's blood. They
ditched their clothes and weapons in the hills on their
escape from the scene. In the logic of the family,
this murder was a false flag of sorts. Manson was
(30:47):
perturbed that his predicted race war had yet to begin,
and he believed that the murders would nudge these racial
tensions in the US, that white observers would believe this
is the work of militant black supremacist group, and that, naturally,
in his as you can see his clearly racist mindset,
naturally things would progress. But he was displeased by what
(31:11):
he saw as a sloppy performance on the part of
his cult members. That's another thing you do when you're
a cult leader. You constantly degrade, undermine um. What's the
word pickup artists used? Neg? You constantly neg your followers.
No matter what they do, it's never good enough. And
he accompanied them along with two other followers, Leslie Van
(31:35):
Houghton and Steve Clem Grogan, to quote show them how
to do it. They went to a different house. So
they arrived at the home of a supermarket executive by
the name of Leno La Bianca and his wife Rosemary,
which was just next door to a house where Manson
and his crew had been to a party before. Um. So,
(31:55):
after killing La Bianca and his wife, the crew left
the word war car into the wife's abdomen, along with
rise death to the Pigs and helter helter skelter. They
actually miss misspelled it, added an A to make it
a helter skelter um, and they wrote down on the
fridge door, also in the victim's blood. And for a
(32:17):
time it seemed as though the family would get away
with this right. The same forensic techniques that law enforcement
possesses today we're not in play in the late nineteen sixties.
Within days after the murders to Manson, family members are
actually arrested for car theft. Yeah, and then everybody else,
(32:43):
the Manson family, including the man himself, they fled to
hideouts in Death Valley because they were fearing I'm sure
that hey, two of our people got picked up. Something's
going down where we might get caught. And then October twelfth,
Manson himself was found hiding in a cupboard in Parker Ranch.
All in all, twenty seven people were arrested four car
(33:06):
theft ye. So there's no connection at this point still
between these murders, these horrific murders, and this thing that
appears for all intents and purposes to be a cult
themed grand theft auto ring. Susan Atkins, however, roles in prison.
(33:28):
She's boasting of murders that they've committed, and then later
she ends up cutting a deal with prosecution. December nineteenth
of the same year, this hits the mainstream in Life magazine.
There's a feature that's run Manson gains global notoriety. Is
the Western world learns of Helter Skelter. There's a seven
(33:50):
month trial, a seven month trial that arguably today would
maybe be a mistrial because the president at the time,
Richard Nixon, President Nixon is going this guy is guilty,
put him under the jail, kill him, you know, And
we were we were talking before off air, and you
(34:10):
have to wonder nowadays, the three of us were always
wondering what an historical event would be like if it
occurred in the age of Twitter, right, Well, what Nixon
strikes me as a Twitter friendly president. I can imagine
Nixon's Twitter account, and I can imagine, you know, people
were chiming in with the with these various opinions before
(34:32):
an elected official to say someone's guilty before a trial
comes out. For the highest elected official in the land
to say this could very well have injured the proceedings, right. Nonetheless,
the jury finds all the defendants guilty on January nineteen
seventy one, and in March of nine seventy one March
(34:54):
twenty nine, Manson, Cranwinkle, Atkinson, Van Houghton are sentence with
the death penalty. Watson is also sentenced, but at a
later date receives the death penalty. But then, as we
said in the beginning, California suspends the death penalty shortly thereafter,
and the families sentences are commuted to life imprison The
(35:19):
only two family members have been as of seventeen paroled,
Steve Gagan, who was seventeen at the time and he
was the guy who served as the lookout, and also
Lynnette Squeaky from who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford rights.
That is, you know, that's after Watergate occurs here, so
(35:41):
when we're also seeing his a tremendous amount of strange
and tragic events, right, disastrous events in a very short
frame of time, span of time. An important note as
we were recording this today, it is quite possible that
a third family member may see freedom. Leslie Van Houghton
(36:04):
was recently granted parole, however, is not out of the
gate or should I say out of the bars yet,
because this situation has come up before, and the governor
of California, the state in which Finn Houghton is currently incarcerated,
has a hundred and twenty days from the parole ruling
(36:24):
to either reverse the ruling, modify it granted, or make
no comment. And in other cases the governor has consistently
denied parole, so it did. It is quite possible that
by the time this podcast publishes, there may be a
third member out in the free world. But currently that's
(36:46):
not the case. In the the indications are not really
in the favor of parole have passed, you know, past
behavior as a precedent. Charles Manson, however, the person that masterminded,
at least according to the law and according to witnesses,
masterminded all of these murders and other nefarious deeds that
the family did. He spent the rest of his life
(37:09):
from this point forward in prison, where he lived as
a celebrity. As Dal said, an American boogeyman. I promise
him that I I can to overuse that, but I think
it's really good. Thanks man. Manson received more mail than
any inmates in US history, and he formed intense bonds
with admirers. He readily agreed to interviews, clips of which
(37:33):
you can see on YouTube today. He had various marriage proposals,
gets marriage licenses, He rolls the Nichols. Yeah, my favorite
interview segment. How how did you find that one? Actually?
Was it? Should we play a little? That's a good one.
I don't want to take my time going to work.
(37:53):
I got a motorcycle of a sleeping bag and chater
fifteen girls. What the hell I want to go off
into and go to work for it. For what money?
I got all the money in the world. I'm a
chain man. I run the underworld. Guy. I decide who's
just what and where they do it? At what Am
I going to run around and act like I'm some
cheenybopper somewhere for somebody else's money. I make the money man.
(38:15):
I rolled the Nichols. The game is mine. I deal
with the card and Yeah, and that you can hear
even later in his life, he's pretty's older at this point.
He's got that mannic kind of cadence of the street
preacher going for him. You know, right, well, I don't
want to take my time going to work. Yeah, And
(38:37):
there's a bit of cadence of poetry of course to it,
at least in terms of the language. And now, despite
all the claims of godhood and divine nature, Charles Manson
is dead. It's strange that the three of us have
not explored this topic before. Earlier, we noted that our
(39:03):
mission for this series was going to be to determine
what if any conspiracy theories surrounding the Manson family, Manson's background,
the murders in his later time in prison. We're true
and as as we've realized diving into this extremely disturbing
rabbit hole. This is more than one episode. In fact,
(39:26):
we have to dedicate an entire episode apart two, solely
to the conspiracy theories surrounding the life of Charles Manson.
So it is here that we must pause for a moment.
But although we are you know and we know that
it can feel kind of strange for us to say
(39:49):
here is the background. Here is part one of an episode.
But we will return with part two of the episode.
And in the meantime, we don't want to leave you
in the dark. We'd like to invite you to check
out some further reading. Yes, one thing we urge you
to check out until we meet again is a book
(40:10):
called Member of the Family, written by Diane Lake and
Deborah Herman. It is the story of Charles Manson, uh
the the life inside his cult, and the darkness that
ended the sixties. And it's written by a person Diane Lake,
who was a part of the family, someone who had
inside experience of what it was like to be manipulated
(40:33):
by Charles Manson and how the techniques that we've been
discussing that he was using, what it felt like to
be under the spell of some of that stuff, and
it gets a lot into the lost the lost girl
mentality that we were speaking about, all a lot of
that feeling of not having a family but then being
accepted into this this group, and the techniques of the girls,
(40:57):
the the the family itself that were surrounding Charles Manson,
how they would bring in almost as an amiba, bringing
other girls into the fold um. It's fascinating and pretty
dark stuff, but it's worth reading. You can also check
out the one of the most well known and comprehensive
(41:18):
books written about the trial in Manson's Background, which is
Helter Skelter, published in nineteen seventy four by Vincent Bugliosi
and Kurt Gentry, Vincent being the primary prosecutor for the
Manson trial, and in there you will find quite a
few things that don't make it into many examinations of
(41:41):
this strange, tragic, dare i say, disastrous tail in American history.
We'd like to know what you think. You can find
us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter. You
can find us on Facebook, where we are conspiracy stuff
on most of those. On Intagram, we are a conspiracy
stuff show. But if you don't want to do any
(42:04):
of that stuff. If you have any tales that you
wish to tell us, any ideas right to us. We
are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events, and you can turn back now
or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
M Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
(00:26):
my name is Nolan. They call me Ben. You are you?
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Everybody listening please wave a silent hello to our super
producer Paul Decont on the ones and twos. I'm doing
it right now, and you guys are great at this.
By the way, you guys should see Matt and all
at this. I was thinking we could open this up
(00:48):
with an out of context quote that will later turn
out to be really important. Uh okay, alright, you ready?
Are we gonna say who it's from. We're just doing
it totally out of contact you no attribution what so
if then ever? Perfect? All right? Agreements are the forces
we used to locate ourselves in time and space. Everything
(01:12):
that we do is from some agreement that we have
set up. Everything that we have in this physical universe
is something we have laid out and agreed to. Most
people never set time limits to their agreements, so they
are forces that continue with no end. Okay, al right,
out of contacts. We're just setting up this is this
(01:33):
is ridiculous foreshadowing, but we do promise it comes into
play later. What are we talking about. Something hit the
air waves just recently as we record this, and we
kind of knew it was coming, but not so soon. Yeah.
I had no idea of a figure that has been
in my life for ever since I was born, of
(01:57):
as a kind of a specter, sort of an American boogeyman. Yeah,
that's a great phrase. Yes, we are talking today For
anyone who didn't read the title, Uh, we're talking today
about the death of Charles Manson. Charles Manson is dead.
Charles Mills Manson died on November nineteen seventeen in the
(02:19):
Kent County Hospital of Bakersfield, California. Yeah, and never since
I've been born, he's been in jail. He was incarcerated
in nineteen seventy one and he was serving time in
a California state prison outside of Bakersfield. And he was
eighty three years old when he died. And after his death,
Manson's grandson revealed that this former cult leader American boogeyman,
(02:44):
like you said, had been in treatment for cancer. So
as as large as Charlie Manson loomed over the culture,
this country, pop culture, all kinds of things. He's been
just this the specter, Like you said, he was human,
and he had been being treated for cancer for the
past year, and it had been kept a secret and
(03:06):
kept inside the family. And Manson died as he lived
a disturbing figure. And again not to harp on it
too much, but I love that Phrasier came up with
American Boogeyman, a disturbing figure and that was caught somewhere
between a protagonist for some members of society and ubiquitously
(03:27):
regarded as a symbol for the dark, fascinating fall of
the so called hippie era. I think that's why the
Boogeyman thing rings true for me, because that was such
a time of unhinged you know, opportunity, prosperity, potentially just
like you know, letting. It was like our country like
spreading our wings and flying into our new destiny, and
(03:49):
there was this dark byproduct the summer of free love.
Turned out there was quite a price to pay. It
was an unhinged cult leader who despite decades of incarceration
still managed to garner a following amid the loners, the outcast,
and the mentally vulnerable the world over, and so a
lot of the people who are alive at the time
(04:10):
when all of the press was coming out when these
crimes were committed by Charles Manson um people who saw
the trial and then the sentencing. Charlie Manson should have
died a long time ago had California not suspended the
death penalty on April nineteen seventy one. If they wouldn't
have done that, he would have been long gone by
(04:31):
this year. It's crazy, Ben, because it's like to his supporters,
it's almost as though he can have one right right
because he died in a hospital rather than a prison.
The single most significant aspect of Manson's turn as a
cult leader and his criminal career is his masterminding of
(04:51):
the infamous Tate Lebianca murders, and it leads us to
a series of questions that you have probably heard examined
at length before in documentaries, in adaptations, in other podcasts,
and in numerous uh printed works. The questions all run
(05:12):
around the same sort of orbit, which would be what
possessed these people? What compelled otherwise normal people to join
the Manson family and follow this fellow. How is Charles
Manson capable of such cunning manipulation? And are any of
the conspiracy theories that surround Charles Manson and the entire
Manson family are they true? Here are the facts we
(05:36):
we we must start at this point, So we're we're
journeying back to November twelfth four to answer these questions
and sort of a circuitous, perhaps but accurate way, the
most accurate we can find. Charles Manson was born Charles
(05:56):
Mills Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio, there in November twelfth. His
mother's name was Kathleen Maddox. She was sixteen at the time,
and according to Manson, she originally named him no name
Maddox in O space in a M. E. Maddox. His
father is currently unknown, or at least publicly unidentified. Eventually,
(06:22):
Charles Maddox took his stepfather's surname, which made him officially
Charles Manson, and his earlier years were in a single word, horrific. Yeah.
And what we've done has gone through some of the
facts and fiction, some of the mythology here trying to
figure out what's what? And here are some of the
the proven examples of terrible things that happened to the
(06:45):
young Charles Manson. As stuff is pretty bleak. Manson's mother
sold him for a picture of beer to a woman
who wanted to have children. Um, and his uncle had
to seek out this woman and get young Charles. Yeah,
apparently the story went to Charles's mother. Uh said, I
(07:06):
heard the server. She was liking the server at this
bar and said, you know, I heard you want kids.
You can't have mine for a picture of beer. That
they were joking. The server thought they were joking. She
brought the beer and Uh, Manson's mom down the picture
did a did uh dine in what is it? Dine
(07:28):
and dash? That's the word, that's the phrase. She did
a dine and dash and left the baby. There's I mean,
she was clearly mentally bill in he's caught stealing and
he's sent to a school for boys in Indiana and
there from that point he spent the next two decades
in and out of reform schools, juvenile detention, and eventually prison. Yeah.
(07:50):
And then Manson himself alleged staunchly for his entire life
that he was sexually assaulted numerous times by multiple assailants
while at this and other institutions, so saying that you know,
not only was his child childhood terrible, with all these
things happen a mother who wouldn't even give him a name.
Then he moved on to living in these institutions where
(08:13):
he was just abused, at least according to Charles Manson,
And as he continued committing crimes, being imprisoned and released,
then imprisoned again, he became a career offender, more comfortable
arguably outside of the bounds of the law than within them.
And then in nineteen sixty seven, when he was set
(08:33):
to be released from prison, he actually begged to stay
inside the jail. He said he was incapable of living
outside the walls of the prison, as though I can
function inside here, but not out there anymore, because this
is my new home. And that's I mean, that's sad.
But it's also something we've kind of heard before, where
(08:54):
once you get used to that the structure of a
prison life, it's very difficult to unchin outside. It was
that like in the Shawshank Redemption, where when Morgan Freeman's
character finally gets released at the end, and he just
doesn't know how to go about day to day life
because he's been in for so long. It's a real
thing that real people experience all the time. It makes sense,
(09:15):
but it is absolutely, as you said, quite quite sad.
And what a world Charles Manson found when he was
released in nineteen sixty seven. This is, as we said,
the height of the free love movement. Hate Ashbury becoming
a mecca of sorts, uh, a holy site for this
(09:37):
ideology which is sweeping the nation, running counter to US
foreign policy in Vietnam and abroad. Manson is by now
a hardened criminal, and he's released from a place called
McNeil Island Prison in Washington State. Uh. He had at
this point been serving seven years for transporting women across
(09:59):
state lines the purpose of prostitution and also for forging checks. Yeah.
He traveled to San Francisco and he attracted a following
among many rebellious young people with troubled emotional lives, sort
of a drift in the world. He was a little
older than most of his followers, he was thirty two
(10:19):
years old. And there was this amazing people described it
as almost palpable feeling in the air that the world
could be changed in a positive way, that with enough
positive thought we might be able to set things right.
And he embraced this mysticism wholeheartedly. Yeah. I mean, I
(10:44):
think think about his life up until this point. This
is why it's so important. Let's just say for argument here,
Manson probably hasn't experienced a whole lot of physical love
the way a child would throughout their life and then
growing up maybe a teenager and then maybe a twenty something. Um,
he there is free love, free food, lots of hugging,
(11:05):
there's there's marijuana, there's acid. They're girls, so many, so
many girls. Do you say, lots of hugging. Lots of hugging.
I mean yeah, yeah, hugging and just touching like um,
affectionately without strings attached to kind of thing. I mean,
anyway I'll walk down the street without some GIBRONI trying
(11:26):
to put their arms around you, yeah, and just be like,
you know what, everything's good man. It was a real
hug so But but specifically, and not jokingly, we're talking
about these women, these young women that he ended up
being around, most of them lost girls or lost girls, um,
looking for someone to tell them that they'd been found
(11:47):
in some way in a place that would accept them.
Remember that book, Go ask Alice, did you have to
read that in high school? It's like about the girl
who leaves home and becomes like when she's on LSD
and up like and horrible situations, but it's that total
lost girl kind of scenario. And I believe it turned
out that book was kind of just like almost borderline propaganda,
(12:09):
but it was so effective because it was a real story,
you know, in terms of like that type of thing
happened quite often. And a guy like Manson would be
the perfect um, I don't know, it's they would be
the perfect mark for a guy like Manson who kind
of had his wiles, and you know it was a
musician and kind of seen as this like edgy kind
(12:29):
of figure. You know, well, yeah, he he had a
certain set of skills, right right, Yes, he he thrived
this guru slash fill in father figure, played the guitar.
He had that dangerous mystique of an ex con. And
one thing that's interesting is he studied a lot of
stuff extensively in prison. We'll get to some of that.
(12:52):
And when he landed and hate Ashbury, he walked around
and listened to the various street preachers, the various poets
and prophets, and picked the pieces of their What they
called raps at that time doesn't resemble the kind of
rap that we listened to today. Uh more like a
a almost free flowing, occasionally rhyming, um declarative mode of speech.
(13:18):
It was almost just that, like that cadence of like
a revival preacher, a big tent revival preacher or something
like that. In a way, yeah, stuff you could dig, right,
And so he agglomerated this and created his own sort
of mixtape of that you can be free metaphysical rap,
and people loved it. He started garnering followers like Mary Brunner,
(13:44):
Lynnette from later known as Squeaky Shusan Atkin, Sandra Good,
and this was the beginning of what prosecutors would later
call the Family with a capital lef Yeah, and the
family eventually moved to Los Angeles because Manson wanted to
be a rock star, and he actually was successful, at
least in making some good contacts. He was friends with
(14:07):
Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. Belie. There's even an
incident where he cut him or they cut his ear off,
or something like that. What was that about? They got
it did turn ugly. Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll
get to that. But he was also friends with a
very well known record producer by the name of Terry Melcher.
And just to give you a little taste, you guys
might have heard this, but yeah, Manson wasn't very good musician.
(14:29):
And here's an example. Oh garbage dump, Oh garbage dump.
Why you're called a garbage dump? Oh garbage dump? For
garbage dumb? Why are you called a garbage dumb? That
(14:53):
was a snippet of garbage dump by Charles Manson. Why
do they call it a garbage dump? That's the the
you know, that's the question. That's a great question. Uh yeah,
but yeah, you know, I think I think that's interesting.
It's great to put that in context because he learned
a slide guitar originally while he was incarcerated, and so
(15:17):
much of an individual success in the music industry then,
as today, hinges upon one's charisma, and there are there
are critics of plenty who will tell you that such
and such and so and so we're skating by on
charisma rather than musical merit. However, after after Manson was
(15:38):
making these connections along with his family is an entourage
by the way he racked up uh Dennis Wilson claims
that the family racked up a hundred thousand dollars plus
and expenses for food, for drugs for socially transmitted disease treatment,
(15:59):
and this arker turn occurs in nineteen sixty nine. Manson
had always been physically and emotionally abusive to the women
under his sway, but with the release of The Beatles
White Album, he took a sharp turn into apocalyptic beliefs,
signified perhaps most apparently by his complex interpretation of the
(16:22):
song Helter Skelter by The Beatles. Yeah, that's not a
bad that's not a bad one, man. I'm glad that
you put some levity in here, because we're gonna need
it in a little bit. We can't play a clip
from that song because it's the Beatles, right, We can't
legally play one for you, but we can invite you
to check out the song if you haven't heard it before.
(16:45):
Should we just do a little lyrics snippet perhaps, Yeah,
maybe a reading to a little reading. So here's a
snippet from the lyrics. Elder Scott is actually pretty pretty
simple lyrics, but Manson really took a lot out of it.
It goes like this, when I get to the bottom,
I go back to the top of the slide where
I stop and I turn and I go for a
ride until I get to the bottom and I see
(17:05):
you again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hey, do you don't you
want me to love you? I'm coming down fast, but
I'm miles above. You tell me, tell me, tell me,
come on, tell me the answer. Well, you may be
a lover, but you ain't no dancer. Helter skelter, helter skelter,
helter skelter. Yeah, and man, what Charles Manson heard when
(17:26):
he listened to those lyrics and the music combined was
something um beyond what I interpret when I listened to
the song. And let's get exactly into what he thought
it meant after a quick word from our sponsor. So Manson,
from these lyrics are using these lyrics as a basis
(17:49):
or a foundation, told his followers, as he was building
them into a cult that he had an epiphany of
sorts and revelation from the lyrics of Helter Skelter. He
did not see it as his interpretation. He saw it
as a divine message to himself. He also believed that
(18:11):
all people were God h He saw it as a
divine message that a race war was imminent, specifically between
the white population of the United States and the black population,
that the black population would win, but be, according to
his beliefs, inherently unable to self govern, and that during
(18:33):
the race war, the family, the Manson family would hide
out in an underground cave, a cavern system that he
called the Bottomless Pit, the land of Milk and Honey.
And after the race war, when all the quote unquote
pigs and the and the squares and the other white
people were dead from America, that would emerge five ruling
(18:55):
angels Manson who would play the role of a new
Jesus Christ, a company by his disciples, and the four
members of the musical group the Beatles. Wow sounds pretty compelling.
Um I yeah, it sounds like you know, it's weird
because it sounds like a lot to take in. It
(19:17):
sounds like a tall milkshake when you're just when you're
just hearing it laid out as an elevator pitch sounds
like level three, right right. We have to be careful
and that's right, Matt, not for nothing. But we are
definitely we are definitely going to have to mention how
our good buddies the Church of Scientology at some point later,
(19:41):
either in this episode or in part two, if we
get to a part two. The thing is with these
sorts of beliefs, with any belief that seems unreasonable, we
have to realize the context in which it occurs. It's
like the salesperson footing the door technique. You don't get
all of this at once. You get it after your time,
(20:01):
your money, and your mental energy have become sunk cost,
which we're borrowing a phrase from economics, and the point
is that you feel like every time you've been like, well,
I've already put this much time in, I just have
to keep going, right, Like if you're watching a movie
that's four hours long and you're three hours and forty
(20:21):
minutes into it, can't just stop and I'm like, oh God, yeah,
what am I gonna do? I gotta see it to
the end. Manson's descent into madness began at a place
called really kicked into gear, we should say a place
called spawn Ranch, span Ranch. I just want to know,
like how he took so much meaning from those simple
Beatles lyrics, like what if you had just seen a
kid playing on a slide? You think you would have
(20:44):
had the same revelation. Interesting. I think maybe when you
combine the musical portion of that song with perhaps the
right cocktail of drugs or you know, whatever you're going through,
and some of the other ideas that were already kind
of seeping into him, like triggering, or the right confidence
in the right um like lamania. That's a perfect word, Matt.
(21:08):
After the falling out with Dennis Wilson, the family relocated
to this ranch, which was about twenty miles away from
Los Angeles, but a very different environment. And we can
give you a little bit of a little bit of
background because the ranch is an interesting place. Yes. Spawn
Ranch was founded in eighteen eighty five, and after changing
(21:29):
hands a number of times, it became the property of
George Spawn in nineteen fifty three. Is this you're doing,
like the resort style commercial for Spawn Ranch. That's exactly
what's happening. I was I was hoping for a Robin Leech,
but this is great too. In nineteen sixty eight, when
the family came to the ranch, Spawn was in his
late seventies, terribly lonely and mostly blind. His wife managed
(21:52):
the property, but the two didn't seem to have a
close relationship, and Spawn let out of work ranch hands
live on the property exchange for labor. At the time,
the ranch was occasionally used as a backdrop in TV shows,
and it also made money renting horses to tourists. Interesting
side note, this area had hosted cults before the nineteen
(22:14):
forties and fifties. There was another cult called the Fountain
of the World in nearby Box Canyon. They were led
by a charismatic figure who called himself Krishna Venta, although
of course that was not his birth name. They built
a monastery on the property. Charles Manson himself allegedly had
been at the monastery some time before or after. Disgruntled
(22:34):
X members blew up the building in ninety eight, killing
Venta and seven others. Those two ex members who blew
it up, by the way, uh did so because, as
is so common in many cults of personality, the leader
had a revelation that he should be sleeping with everybody's wife. Yep.
(22:55):
And actually there was a pretty interesting account of Manson
at Spawn Ranch that came out not long after he
passed away, Brian Cranston from Breaking Bad and Malcolm in
the Middle Fantastic actor who was sixty one, wrote on
social media quote, hearing Charles Manson is dead, I shuddered.
I was within his grasp just one year before he
(23:17):
committed brutal murder in nineteen sixty nine. Luck was with
me when a cousin and I went horseback riding at
the Spawn ranch and saw the little man with crazy eyes,
whom the other hippies called Charlie. Interesting. What a web
we see weaving here? And you know, regardless of the
previous Cults activities in the forties and fifties, Charles Manson
(23:41):
and George Spawn came to an understanding. The family. They
decided would live on the property, help out around the ranch,
and in exchange, the female members of the family would
attend to George Spawn's daily needs, including everything from cooking
and cleaning to laundry and sexual satiation. For Manson, however,
(24:02):
there was a much much more important and perhaps sutler advantage.
He would finally have the followers of the Manson family
isolated from the world and completely subsumed into his influence. Yeah,
it was during this time at the Spawn Ranch that
he began really working on these techniques that are common
(24:26):
to cult leaders. He was a big fan of forcing
dissociative states on his followers through drug use largely and
also the kind of emotional and physical abuse you could
probably imagine as well. UM. This allowed him to remove
a sense of self, ego, and esteem UM from his
(24:48):
followers uh. And some of these techniques included things like
mandatory orgies. UH. He also compelled his followers to listen
to long, repetitive lectures on the coming race war and
UM as the cult began to take this darker, more
sinister and violent turn. UM. During this time, these times
(25:09):
of isolation, the ranch Handsum at the ranch and as
well as the Spawn's estranged wife warned him to to
take it easy. Take it easy, George, you really need
to distance yourself from this guy. He's uh, he's he's
kind of freaking us out. Yeah, he's kind of freakings out.
Even Brian Cranston doesn't like and everybody loves Brian. This
(25:31):
so this shows us, Um shows us a very disturbing
pattern that's common in a lot of cults in the past.
We have asked ourselves you know what is the difference
between a religious movement and what's the difference between a cult,
because one person's true religion is another person's cult, and
(25:53):
is the term cult just always a pejorative. We did
a YouTube episode, right was just I We did one,
I think episode on the common practices of cults, and
we highly recommend it because the steps are almost distressingly
(26:13):
and eerily similar from one cult to the next. You
can also see some neat vignette's cameos featuring Charles Bryant
from Stuff You Should Know and Jonathan Strickland from Tech
Stuff of Tech Stuff Fame. Yeah, and you can also
see how some of these same techniques you would use
to garner a following in that way are used outside
(26:34):
of cult activities as psychological almost weapons to get people
to do certain things. When you look at I don't
want to get too dark, but you look at marketing
and pr sometimes and you see some of these same
things occurring. Oh absolutely, And just to plant the seed
(26:54):
for later discussions about magic and the occult, I'm always
drawn back to one of my favorite quotes from our
friend Damian Patrick Williams, who said, if you have problems
believing in magic as a concept. Just think of it
as weaponized psychology. And when you think about that, it
makes a much more real So as Asnal said, things
(27:17):
are getting dire, right, Manson is lying to his followers
and probably to himself. You know, there's a there's a
certain uh, there's a certain necessity and believing one's own
rap as they would call it. And he told them,
you know, they were hunting for this enormous cavern, Helter
(27:38):
Skelter was on the way, and they have chosen few.
That's another thing very common with cults. Would safely wait
out the coming army Gedton. Eventually, you see, what happened
is that Manson grew tired of waiting for the world
to end, and he told his followers to prime the pump,
and what happens next we'll live in for me forever.
(28:02):
I was saying. It's one of the most horrific cult
based murders of all time, and we're going to talk
very specifically about that right after one more quick sponsor
break Helter Skelter. The apocalyptic prophecy of Manson, as told
(28:24):
to his followers, was seen as inevitable but on a
flexible timeline, meaning that in their internal logic, it was
possible to nudge this into occurring a little bit earlier
than they would then they would otherwise expect. They began
committing murders. Um, you'll hear a lot about Tate la Bianca.
(28:49):
But on July nine, some of his followers killed a
man named Gary Hinman, allegedly because he would not join
Manson's rock band. In August eighth, nine, six nine, four
of Manson's followers drove to a place called Clo Drive,
breaking into the home of the then not yet exposed
(29:10):
and disgrace director and pedophile Roman Polanski as his pregnant
wife actress Sharon Tate entertained friends at the residents. Manson
was not there, No, not that night, but he sent
four of his followers. Yeah, he sent the we're gonna
call them cult members Texts Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian,
(29:33):
and Patricia Kranwinkle. They were all acting under orders from
Manson to destroy, destroy its important here, destroy everyone in
the house, and as gruesome a manner as possible. The
victims um were as noted, the the eight and a
half months pregnant Sharon Tate, which is just awful, her
(29:58):
former lover Ja see Bring the screenwriter voice tech Freakowski Um,
his lover Abigail Folder, who was the heiress to the
Folder Coffee company, and one other person, a student named
Stephen Parent who was literally just there to visit the caretaker.
The caretaker lived on site. After brutally choking, stabbing, and
(30:23):
executing their victims, these cult members followed Manson's orders to
leave a sign quote something witchy Atkins wrote pig on
the front door of the house and Tate's blood. They
ditched their clothes and weapons in the hills on their
escape from the scene. In the logic of the family,
this murder was a false flag of sorts. Manson was
(30:47):
perturbed that his predicted race war had yet to begin,
and he believed that the murders would nudge these racial
tensions in the US, that white observers would believe this
is the work of militant black supremacist group, and that, naturally,
in his as you can see his clearly racist mindset,
naturally things would progress. But he was displeased by what
(31:11):
he saw as a sloppy performance on the part of
his cult members. That's another thing you do when you're
a cult leader. You constantly degrade, undermine um. What's the
word pickup artists used? Neg? You constantly neg your followers.
No matter what they do, it's never good enough. And
he accompanied them along with two other followers, Leslie Van
(31:35):
Houghton and Steve Clem Grogan, to quote show them how
to do it. They went to a different house. So
they arrived at the home of a supermarket executive by
the name of Leno La Bianca and his wife Rosemary,
which was just next door to a house where Manson
and his crew had been to a party before. Um. So,
(31:55):
after killing La Bianca and his wife, the crew left
the word war car into the wife's abdomen, along with
rise death to the Pigs and helter helter skelter. They
actually miss misspelled it, added an A to make it
a helter skelter um, and they wrote down on the
fridge door, also in the victim's blood. And for a
(32:17):
time it seemed as though the family would get away
with this right. The same forensic techniques that law enforcement
possesses today we're not in play in the late nineteen sixties.
Within days after the murders to Manson, family members are
actually arrested for car theft. Yeah, and then everybody else,
(32:43):
the Manson family, including the man himself, they fled to
hideouts in Death Valley because they were fearing I'm sure
that hey, two of our people got picked up. Something's
going down where we might get caught. And then October twelfth,
Manson himself was found hiding in a cupboard in Parker Ranch.
All in all, twenty seven people were arrested four car
(33:06):
theft ye. So there's no connection at this point still
between these murders, these horrific murders, and this thing that
appears for all intents and purposes to be a cult
themed grand theft auto ring. Susan Atkins, however, roles in prison.
(33:28):
She's boasting of murders that they've committed, and then later
she ends up cutting a deal with prosecution. December nineteenth
of the same year, this hits the mainstream in Life magazine.
There's a feature that's run Manson gains global notoriety. Is
the Western world learns of Helter Skelter. There's a seven
(33:50):
month trial, a seven month trial that arguably today would
maybe be a mistrial because the president at the time,
Richard Nixon, President Nixon is going this guy is guilty,
put him under the jail, kill him, you know, And
we were we were talking before off air, and you
(34:10):
have to wonder nowadays, the three of us were always
wondering what an historical event would be like if it
occurred in the age of Twitter, right, Well, what Nixon
strikes me as a Twitter friendly president. I can imagine
Nixon's Twitter account, and I can imagine, you know, people
were chiming in with the with these various opinions before
(34:32):
an elected official to say someone's guilty before a trial
comes out. For the highest elected official in the land
to say this could very well have injured the proceedings, right. Nonetheless,
the jury finds all the defendants guilty on January nineteen
seventy one, and in March of nine seventy one March
(34:54):
twenty nine, Manson, Cranwinkle, Atkinson, Van Houghton are sentence with
the death penalty. Watson is also sentenced, but at a
later date receives the death penalty. But then, as we
said in the beginning, California suspends the death penalty shortly thereafter,
and the families sentences are commuted to life imprison The
(35:19):
only two family members have been as of seventeen paroled,
Steve Gagan, who was seventeen at the time and he
was the guy who served as the lookout, and also
Lynnette Squeaky from who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford rights.
That is, you know, that's after Watergate occurs here, so
(35:41):
when we're also seeing his a tremendous amount of strange
and tragic events, right, disastrous events in a very short
frame of time, span of time. An important note as
we were recording this today, it is quite possible that
a third family member may see freedom. Leslie Van Houghton
(36:04):
was recently granted parole, however, is not out of the
gate or should I say out of the bars yet,
because this situation has come up before, and the governor
of California, the state in which Finn Houghton is currently incarcerated,
has a hundred and twenty days from the parole ruling
(36:24):
to either reverse the ruling, modify it granted, or make
no comment. And in other cases the governor has consistently
denied parole, so it did. It is quite possible that
by the time this podcast publishes, there may be a
third member out in the free world. But currently that's
(36:46):
not the case. In the the indications are not really
in the favor of parole have passed, you know, past
behavior as a precedent. Charles Manson, however, the person that masterminded,
at least according to the law and according to witnesses,
masterminded all of these murders and other nefarious deeds that
the family did. He spent the rest of his life
(37:09):
from this point forward in prison, where he lived as
a celebrity. As Dal said, an American boogeyman. I promise
him that I I can to overuse that, but I think
it's really good. Thanks man. Manson received more mail than
any inmates in US history, and he formed intense bonds
with admirers. He readily agreed to interviews, clips of which
(37:33):
you can see on YouTube today. He had various marriage proposals,
gets marriage licenses, He rolls the Nichols. Yeah, my favorite
interview segment. How how did you find that one? Actually?
Was it? Should we play a little? That's a good one.
I don't want to take my time going to work.
(37:53):
I got a motorcycle of a sleeping bag and chater
fifteen girls. What the hell I want to go off
into and go to work for it. For what money?
I got all the money in the world. I'm a
chain man. I run the underworld. Guy. I decide who's
just what and where they do it? At what Am
I going to run around and act like I'm some
cheenybopper somewhere for somebody else's money. I make the money man.
(38:15):
I rolled the Nichols. The game is mine. I deal
with the card and Yeah, and that you can hear
even later in his life, he's pretty's older at this point.
He's got that mannic kind of cadence of the street
preacher going for him. You know, right, well, I don't
want to take my time going to work. Yeah, And
(38:37):
there's a bit of cadence of poetry of course to it,
at least in terms of the language. And now, despite
all the claims of godhood and divine nature, Charles Manson
is dead. It's strange that the three of us have
not explored this topic before. Earlier, we noted that our
(39:03):
mission for this series was going to be to determine
what if any conspiracy theories surrounding the Manson family, Manson's background,
the murders in his later time in prison. We're true
and as as we've realized diving into this extremely disturbing
rabbit hole. This is more than one episode. In fact,
(39:26):
we have to dedicate an entire episode apart two, solely
to the conspiracy theories surrounding the life of Charles Manson.
So it is here that we must pause for a moment.
But although we are you know and we know that
it can feel kind of strange for us to say
(39:49):
here is the background. Here is part one of an episode.
But we will return with part two of the episode.
And in the meantime, we don't want to leave you
in the dark. We'd like to invite you to check
out some further reading. Yes, one thing we urge you
to check out until we meet again is a book
(40:10):
called Member of the Family, written by Diane Lake and
Deborah Herman. It is the story of Charles Manson, uh
the the life inside his cult, and the darkness that
ended the sixties. And it's written by a person Diane Lake,
who was a part of the family, someone who had
inside experience of what it was like to be manipulated
(40:33):
by Charles Manson and how the techniques that we've been
discussing that he was using, what it felt like to
be under the spell of some of that stuff, and
it gets a lot into the lost the lost girl
mentality that we were speaking about, all a lot of
that feeling of not having a family but then being
accepted into this this group, and the techniques of the girls,
(40:57):
the the the family itself that were surrounding Charles Manson,
how they would bring in almost as an amiba, bringing
other girls into the fold um. It's fascinating and pretty
dark stuff, but it's worth reading. You can also check
out the one of the most well known and comprehensive
(41:18):
books written about the trial in Manson's Background, which is
Helter Skelter, published in nineteen seventy four by Vincent Bugliosi
and Kurt Gentry, Vincent being the primary prosecutor for the
Manson trial, and in there you will find quite a
few things that don't make it into many examinations of
(41:41):
this strange, tragic, dare i say, disastrous tail in American history.
We'd like to know what you think. You can find
us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter. You
can find us on Facebook, where we are conspiracy stuff
on most of those. On Intagram, we are a conspiracy
stuff show. But if you don't want to do any
(42:04):
of that stuff. If you have any tales that you
wish to tell us, any ideas right to us. We
are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.
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United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
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