August 11, 2026 • 17 mins
George Noory and author Eli Frankel explore the grisly Manson Family murders that took place in August 1969 and how Charles Manson was able to manipulate his cult followers to commit the crimes, plus his theories on another infamous Hollywood murder case of the Black Dahlia.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori with you.
Eli Frankel with us again. His book is called Sisters
and Death to back the Black Dahlia, the Prairie Eris
and their Hunter, which is a bizarre still unsolved story,
isn't it. Eli.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, if you read the book, you might find out
what the solution is.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
You may have answers, that's true, but in terms of
the prosecution, it's unsolved.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Right, that's correct.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah, back to Charlie Manson, what kind of charisma did
he have to get so many of these young kids
at the time to follow him.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Very charismatic and also psychologically very adapt He was one
of these kind of guys who could talk to you
and within two minutes figure out what you wanted, what
you were seeking in life, and what was missing from
your life. And that was kind of his secret ingredient
is he could figure out how to kind of seed
(01:01):
all the things you'd want. And in fact, you know,
we talked a little bit earlier about recordings and him
doing music and working with the Beach Boys and all that.
In some of the recordings the music that he played.
There was one particular session in nineteen sixty seven that
was recorded, and in between the recordings you can hear
Charlie talking about how, oh, this next song, that's gonna
(01:23):
make you a lot of money. Oh, this one's gonna
be a big hit. You're gonna make a lot of
money off this. And he keeps mentioning that in between
the songs to the producers, and so you can tell
you can see a little bit of that charlieism there
where he thinks, Okay, these guys it's all about money,
which of course it is. It's a music business and producers,
and he's weaving that in. But for him, it's not
(01:43):
about the money. It's the fame, it's the notoriety, it's
the attention and love. So that's what he did, you know,
that was his secret sauce is figuring out what people
wanted and then presenting it, or at least appearing to
present a solution to how to get it.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
In your opinion, he did a few interviews over the course,
did he not.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Yeah, he did a few interviews. He was always very
much in control and he selected who he wanted to
do an interview with and when he got hundreds of
requests from all over the world, every media outlet seemed
to want to interview him, but he would only grant
them at certain times. We don't know why, and we
don't know why he selected certain interviewers, but every single interview,
(02:28):
it's fascinating. He's completely different. He reacts differently to the interviewers.
He's a different person. He's a chameleon. And if you
watch just snippets, like a minute of each of his interviews,
easy to find a bunch of them on YouTube, you
will see twenty different personalities there. And that's the chameleon
at play.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
But if he was not at the murder scenes, how
did he get convicted on the murders.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Well, essentially it was by proxy, you know. It was
he used other people to kill for him, He ordered
them to So he was convicted through that that He
was essentially the vehicle through which you know, these people
committed these murders. He ordered them, and so he was
liable as well for them.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
What if he told a prosecution though I didn't say
anything like that proved.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
He absolutely that was his defense that he never ordered
anybody to kill anybody, And that the followers as members
who he referred to as just friends who he hung
out with. They played music on the ranch that they
lived at. There was no follower guru relationship. He wasn't
a cult leader. He claimed that these people just decided
(03:38):
to go off on their own and do this, and
that was up to them. But there were so many
people that were in the cult and also tangentially were
around it. And this was not a This was not
a group of people who would, you know, keep their
mouths shut. This wasn't the mafia. These were kids. They
were proud and boastful about what they had done, and
(04:00):
word traveled quickly throughout the family, and some other people
heard about it, and there were enough folks that were
able to give testimony at the trial, and Vincent Bugliossi
and the prosecution team put together a pretty amazing case
and were able to convince the jury that Manson was
the mastermind and had ordered the murders.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
He was eighty three years old when he died in prison.
Did they get roughed up in prison at all?
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah, there were a few incidents.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
He was once doused with paint thinner and set on fire, which,
as you can imagine takes a little while to recover
from He was beat up a few times. But Charlie
was also very adept at surviving in prison. He'd spent
a lot of time in reform schools and most of
his life in prison, so he figured out how to
essentially avoid trouble most of the time. But he was
(04:49):
a troublemaker in prison as well. He wasn't easy, especially
with the staff there. Yeah, I mean it was a
pretty rocky road.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
I think you think if he finally really knew that
Harry Melcher was not in the house, he would have
called this off.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
No, he did know that Melcher wasn't there. He had
stolen a telescope off of or he sent somebody to
go steal a telescope off of Melcher's deck at the
home he was actually living at in Malibu at the time.
But I don't think it mattered to Manson. He actually
this is a fascinating story. In March of nineteen sixty nine,
(05:26):
about five or six months before the murders, Manson actually
showed up at the Colo Drive house where he thought
Melcher was still living. He wanted to confront Melcher because
he hadn't shown up for he had promised Charlie he
was going to stop by Spawn Ranch, where Charlie and
the Manson family lived, and he was going to finally
listen to Charlie play music and decide whether he wanted
(05:48):
to sign him, give him a record deal or not.
And he didn't show up for that meeting, which enraged Manson.
It made him look really bad in front of his followers,
and so Manson couldn't get a hold of Melcher and
he drove up to Benedict Canyon, went to the clo house,
which he was not allowed to enter before, and walked
onto the grounds and right outside on the front door
(06:10):
at that moment was Sharon Tate.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
She was being.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Photographed by Sharrack hat to me, a photographer, and they
locked eyes Manson and Sharon Tate, which is pretty fascinating.
And he was kind of thrown off the grounds by
Rudy Altabelli, who owned the property. But he saw Sharon
Tate there. Whether he recognized her as a movie star
(06:34):
or not, we don't know. The Manson was aware that
some wealthy and fairly important people.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Were living there.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
He didn't know that Roman Polanski was living there, but
a beautiful beautiful woman was and I think that that
was just in his mind that that represented everything he.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Wanted to destroy.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Did he have any money to himself.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
No, the family was perennially out of money, which is
a big part of what they were doing was a
lot of their actions were trying to scrounge and steal
for money. It's why they stole cars, it's why they
made drug deals with biker gangs, and they got into
a lot of trouble because they know there was no
concept of going on in earning money. They felt because
(07:17):
that was what Charlie preached, that the world owed them
and that nobody owned anything and that all possessions were
to be shared. And therefore, if they broke into somebody's
house or stole a car, or happened to seal steal
some drugs from a drug deal, Jayler, that was fine
because everything is everybody's and we should have access to
(07:38):
what everybody else has access to.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
And I know you're going to want some them after
hearing this. This is an amazing story. We've got Steven
and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand. I understand that Malachi,
who is eight almost nine years old now was suffering
with not just one or two warts, but I mean
as significant outbreak of warts all over his body, so
significant it impacted his ability to to really function.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (08:01):
Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to
right was Tie's book.
Speaker 7 (08:05):
Actually that got me thinking about it. I'm not surprised.
Speaker 6 (08:08):
It is an amazing immunal modulator, and so I can
see that it would work.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
And so at what point did you see that there
was actually improvement it's really going to work.
Speaker 6 (08:18):
Well, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller
and then going down to with just little red monks.
The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's
you know one the size of the warner. I thought,
no way, that's gonna wow. It's just been miraculous to
see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 7 (08:40):
It's great to see him so happy and yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Competent, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 7 (08:44):
Friends that have seen it, that is blown away.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Hi, this is awesome. Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 8 (08:48):
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Speaker 2 (09:10):
What is your fascination? Do you lie with the story?
Speaker 4 (09:13):
You know, That's the one question I really can't answer it.
I say that with the Black Dhalia as well. I
think sometimes with really you know, big true crime cases.
It's a fascinating subject unto itself. Why they remain so
popular and what it is, what it speaks to in
the human psyche that has made it kind of persist,
(09:36):
Like the why is Jack the Ripper such a huge
story that occurred, you know, one hundred and forty years ago,
Why would that remain relevant? There have been so many
other murders since then, even in London, even in Victoria.
In London there were many other horrible murders. And same
thing with the Manson family. But I think with Manson
there's two things going on. It's just an unbelievable story
(09:59):
what happened, And I'm sure a lot of your listeners
know many of the details, and I have to go
into all of them, but the fact that they were
living on spawn ranch, this cult of hippies, and they
had given themselves up to this man, this guru, this
savant who had hypnotized them. The whole story is just
so bizarre and filled with these kind of rich details.
(10:23):
You get, you know, you really get pulled into that world.
And then the other part of it, too is I
think that at the heart of why we're so fascinated
by this story is the question of why these kids
gave themselves up to manson. A lot of them were
pretty average American kids. They had graduated from high school
two three, four years earlier. Some of them were actually fourteen,
(10:44):
fifteen years old, and their parents said, yeah, go off,
it's the sixties. And they went from being the average
American teenager to becoming these horrific killers. And I think
there's a part of us that fears that there is
prob all around us that were being sort of trained
in a way by advertising, or by society or social
(11:06):
media or whatever it is, to think in a certain way,
and we question whether our own thoughts are truly our own.
And I think that's where there's a little bit of
a relatability. There is that maybe it's an extreme version,
but with these with the kids who joined the Manson called,
we wonder, you know, could any of us have been
susceptible to this?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Of the Beach Boys? Was it Dennis or Carl Wilson.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
That he knew it was Dennis Wilson.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Did Dennis promise him anything?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You know? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Sure, I mean Dennis was absolutely entranced by Manson, and Manson,
as he often did in his life, came at just
the right time, at the right place, at the right moment.
Wilson and the Beach Boys were down on their luck
in nineteen sixty eight when he met Charles Manson. Things
were not going well. They weren't selling as many albums,
(11:58):
their tours weren't doing as well, and Dennis was lost.
He'd also his relationship with his father Murray had really
become severed at that point. I think he was very
resentful against the world, even though he was hugely successful.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And Manson comes in and provides.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Again we talked earlier about Manson figured out what people needed,
and in a way he became a father figure to
Dennis Wilson, which was something he had always been missing
in his own father. And so as a result, Manson
provided guidance to Wilson and showed him a way of
letting go of the past and not being caught up
(12:35):
in the trauma of his family and his brothers and competition.
And as a result, Dennis felt a certain obligation to Manson,
which everybody else seemed to have too.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
You'd hang out with Manson and somehow, by the end
of the night, you'd feel that you owed him.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
You know, he was very good at making you feel
that he had given you something even though he hadn't,
and that therefore you owed him something in exchange. And
Dennis did everything he could to get Manson the record
deal that he wanted.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
How long after the murders did it take for the
prosecution and the police to arrest Manson?
Speaker 3 (13:12):
So this is a great question.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
You know, people always talk about how after the events
of August ninth and August tenth that America changed, that
the murders had such a profound impact on the country,
which is true. But the truth is is that in
the weeks and months after the murders, you know, the
first two weeks, every newspaper, every radio program in America
(13:34):
was talking about the murders. Except for Los Angeles. It
pretty much fell out of the news. Especially there were
major other events going on, the moon landing Woodstock and
all the chaos of nineteen sixty nine, and so the
news kind of moved on. But then on December ninth,
nineteen sixty nine, the Charles Manson is finally arrested in
(13:55):
Inyo County, which is the desert. When I say desert,
I mean desert desert of of California. It's not Palm Springs,
this is Ballarat and the Panama Mountains. It's just, you know,
really definitly not Vegas, right exactly. And so he gets
arrested there and the press is stunned because he's not
(14:15):
what they expect, right They everybody's been picturing some you know,
rabid looking maniac and instead it's a hippie cult leader
who's kind of stylish and he's enjoying it. He's smiling,
and he's got this charisma, and surrounding him are thirty
forty people who worship him. And that's the moment I
(14:36):
think that America changed.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Unbelievable, it truly was. Yeah, and off he goes. He
gets convicted, and at the time, California had the death
penalty and they changed that.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
Yeah, so they were actually they had been convicted at
that point. They were convicted in nineteen seventy one, and
then as they were awaiting death row, state of California
abolished the death penalty, which meant that they were going
to be they were going to be.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Up for parole in seven years or something.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
So it was a big moment of celebration, but I
think that that turned sour pretty quickly once his followers
began to realize that they'd essentially been conned, and the
last thing Manson wanted was to go back to prison,
and he sort of deteriorated once he was there.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
The Black Dahlia Elizabeth short. They called her the back
black Dahlia because of her hair, was it not.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
That's correct. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
The way she wore her hair was like a people
said it was like a large dahlia flower and it
was black as night, and so that's how she got
the name.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Her body was found in nineteen forty seven, all chopped up.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yep, that's correct.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Police looked at like one hundred and fifty suspects.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I think it was more it was about three hundred actually,
that they looked at.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Can't give away your book, But do you think you
know who did it?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I do.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
I did many years of research and the person that
I point out as being the murderer was verified to
have known her and was with her for three days
before she escaped to San Diego for a month, and
then as soon as she came back, she was murdered.
And I think that all those events are connected. There's
(16:23):
all kinds of tissue between them. So it's a pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Story, fascinating to be sure. She was how old was
she when she died?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Twenty four years twenty two years old? Sorry?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
And she wanted to be an actress?
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I guess right, No, she didn't.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
And that's actually one of the big myths about Elizabeth Short,
the Black Dahia, is that she was in Hollywood to
become famous and was going on auditions and that's why
she was in Los Angeles. But the truth is that
she never auditioned, she never sought fame. She didn't she
didn't want to.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Meet Hollywood people.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
She wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, and in fact,
she was just out in California for some adventure and
to hopefully find somebody to fall in love with.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
That's all she wanted in this world was to be loved.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Why kill the lady?
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Boy?
Speaker 4 (17:12):
I wish we knew To get in the mind of
a killer, that's a difficult one.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast tocoastam dot com
for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast. George Nori with you.
Eli Frankel with us again. His book is called Sisters
and Death to back the Black Dahlia, the Prairie Eris
and their Hunter, which is a bizarre still unsolved story,
isn't it. Eli.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Well, if you read the book, you might find out
what the solution is.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
You may have answers, that's true, but in terms of
the prosecution, it's unsolved.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Right, that's correct.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah, back to Charlie Manson, what kind of charisma did
he have to get so many of these young kids
at the time to follow him.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Very charismatic and also psychologically very adapt He was one
of these kind of guys who could talk to you
and within two minutes figure out what you wanted, what
you were seeking in life, and what was missing from
your life. And that was kind of his secret ingredient
is he could figure out how to kind of seed
(01:01):
all the things you'd want. And in fact, you know,
we talked a little bit earlier about recordings and him
doing music and working with the Beach Boys and all that.
In some of the recordings the music that he played.
There was one particular session in nineteen sixty seven that
was recorded, and in between the recordings you can hear
Charlie talking about how, oh, this next song, that's gonna
(01:23):
make you a lot of money. Oh, this one's gonna
be a big hit. You're gonna make a lot of
money off this. And he keeps mentioning that in between
the songs to the producers, and so you can tell
you can see a little bit of that charlieism there
where he thinks, Okay, these guys it's all about money,
which of course it is. It's a music business and producers,
and he's weaving that in. But for him, it's not
(01:43):
about the money. It's the fame, it's the notoriety, it's
the attention and love. So that's what he did, you know,
that was his secret sauce is figuring out what people
wanted and then presenting it, or at least appearing to
present a solution to how to get it.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
In your opinion, he did a few interviews over the course,
did he not.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Yeah, he did a few interviews. He was always very
much in control and he selected who he wanted to
do an interview with and when he got hundreds of
requests from all over the world, every media outlet seemed
to want to interview him, but he would only grant
them at certain times. We don't know why, and we
don't know why he selected certain interviewers, but every single interview,
(02:28):
it's fascinating. He's completely different. He reacts differently to the interviewers.
He's a different person. He's a chameleon. And if you
watch just snippets, like a minute of each of his interviews,
easy to find a bunch of them on YouTube, you
will see twenty different personalities there. And that's the chameleon
at play.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
But if he was not at the murder scenes, how
did he get convicted on the murders.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Well, essentially it was by proxy, you know. It was
he used other people to kill for him, He ordered
them to So he was convicted through that that He
was essentially the vehicle through which you know, these people
committed these murders. He ordered them, and so he was
liable as well for them.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
What if he told a prosecution though I didn't say
anything like that proved.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
He absolutely that was his defense that he never ordered
anybody to kill anybody, And that the followers as members
who he referred to as just friends who he hung
out with. They played music on the ranch that they
lived at. There was no follower guru relationship. He wasn't
a cult leader. He claimed that these people just decided
(03:38):
to go off on their own and do this, and
that was up to them. But there were so many
people that were in the cult and also tangentially were
around it. And this was not a This was not
a group of people who would, you know, keep their
mouths shut. This wasn't the mafia. These were kids. They
were proud and boastful about what they had done, and
(04:00):
word traveled quickly throughout the family, and some other people
heard about it, and there were enough folks that were
able to give testimony at the trial, and Vincent Bugliossi
and the prosecution team put together a pretty amazing case
and were able to convince the jury that Manson was
the mastermind and had ordered the murders.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
He was eighty three years old when he died in prison.
Did they get roughed up in prison at all?
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah, there were a few incidents.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
He was once doused with paint thinner and set on fire, which,
as you can imagine takes a little while to recover
from He was beat up a few times. But Charlie
was also very adept at surviving in prison. He'd spent
a lot of time in reform schools and most of
his life in prison, so he figured out how to
essentially avoid trouble most of the time. But he was
(04:49):
a troublemaker in prison as well. He wasn't easy, especially
with the staff there. Yeah, I mean it was a
pretty rocky road.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
I think you think if he finally really knew that
Harry Melcher was not in the house, he would have
called this off.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
No, he did know that Melcher wasn't there. He had
stolen a telescope off of or he sent somebody to
go steal a telescope off of Melcher's deck at the
home he was actually living at in Malibu at the time.
But I don't think it mattered to Manson. He actually
this is a fascinating story. In March of nineteen sixty nine,
(05:26):
about five or six months before the murders, Manson actually
showed up at the Colo Drive house where he thought
Melcher was still living. He wanted to confront Melcher because
he hadn't shown up for he had promised Charlie he
was going to stop by Spawn Ranch, where Charlie and
the Manson family lived, and he was going to finally
listen to Charlie play music and decide whether he wanted
(05:48):
to sign him, give him a record deal or not.
And he didn't show up for that meeting, which enraged Manson.
It made him look really bad in front of his followers,
and so Manson couldn't get a hold of Melcher and
he drove up to Benedict Canyon, went to the clo house,
which he was not allowed to enter before, and walked
onto the grounds and right outside on the front door
(06:10):
at that moment was Sharon Tate.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
She was being.
Speaker 4 (06:13):
Photographed by Sharrack hat to me, a photographer, and they
locked eyes Manson and Sharon Tate, which is pretty fascinating.
And he was kind of thrown off the grounds by
Rudy Altabelli, who owned the property. But he saw Sharon
Tate there. Whether he recognized her as a movie star
(06:34):
or not, we don't know. The Manson was aware that
some wealthy and fairly important people.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
Were living there.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
He didn't know that Roman Polanski was living there, but
a beautiful beautiful woman was and I think that that
was just in his mind that that represented everything he.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Wanted to destroy.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Did he have any money to himself.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
No, the family was perennially out of money, which is
a big part of what they were doing was a
lot of their actions were trying to scrounge and steal
for money. It's why they stole cars, it's why they
made drug deals with biker gangs, and they got into
a lot of trouble because they know there was no
concept of going on in earning money. They felt because
(07:17):
that was what Charlie preached, that the world owed them
and that nobody owned anything and that all possessions were
to be shared. And therefore, if they broke into somebody's
house or stole a car, or happened to seal steal
some drugs from a drug deal, Jayler, that was fine
because everything is everybody's and we should have access to
(07:38):
what everybody else has access to.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
And I know you're going to want some them after
hearing this. This is an amazing story. We've got Steven
and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand. I understand that Malachi,
who is eight almost nine years old now was suffering
with not just one or two warts, but I mean
as significant outbreak of warts all over his body, so
significant it impacted his ability to to really function.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (08:01):
Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to
right was Tie's book.
Speaker 7 (08:05):
Actually that got me thinking about it. I'm not surprised.
Speaker 6 (08:08):
It is an amazing immunal modulator, and so I can
see that it would work.
Speaker 5 (08:13):
And so at what point did you see that there
was actually improvement it's really going to work.
Speaker 6 (08:18):
Well, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller
and then going down to with just little red monks.
The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's
you know one the size of the warner. I thought,
no way, that's gonna wow. It's just been miraculous to
see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 7 (08:40):
It's great to see him so happy and yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Competent, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 7 (08:44):
Friends that have seen it, that is blown away.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Hi, this is awesome. Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 8 (08:48):
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Speaker 2 (09:10):
What is your fascination? Do you lie with the story?
Speaker 4 (09:13):
You know, That's the one question I really can't answer it.
I say that with the Black Dhalia as well. I
think sometimes with really you know, big true crime cases.
It's a fascinating subject unto itself. Why they remain so
popular and what it is, what it speaks to in
the human psyche that has made it kind of persist,
(09:36):
Like the why is Jack the Ripper such a huge
story that occurred, you know, one hundred and forty years ago,
Why would that remain relevant? There have been so many
other murders since then, even in London, even in Victoria.
In London there were many other horrible murders. And same
thing with the Manson family. But I think with Manson
there's two things going on. It's just an unbelievable story
(09:59):
what happened, And I'm sure a lot of your listeners
know many of the details, and I have to go
into all of them, but the fact that they were
living on spawn ranch, this cult of hippies, and they
had given themselves up to this man, this guru, this
savant who had hypnotized them. The whole story is just
so bizarre and filled with these kind of rich details.
(10:23):
You get, you know, you really get pulled into that world.
And then the other part of it, too is I
think that at the heart of why we're so fascinated
by this story is the question of why these kids
gave themselves up to manson. A lot of them were
pretty average American kids. They had graduated from high school
two three, four years earlier. Some of them were actually fourteen,
(10:44):
fifteen years old, and their parents said, yeah, go off,
it's the sixties. And they went from being the average
American teenager to becoming these horrific killers. And I think
there's a part of us that fears that there is
prob all around us that were being sort of trained
in a way by advertising, or by society or social
(11:06):
media or whatever it is, to think in a certain way,
and we question whether our own thoughts are truly our own.
And I think that's where there's a little bit of
a relatability. There is that maybe it's an extreme version,
but with these with the kids who joined the Manson called,
we wonder, you know, could any of us have been
susceptible to this?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Of the Beach Boys? Was it Dennis or Carl Wilson.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
That he knew it was Dennis Wilson.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Did Dennis promise him anything?
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You know? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Sure, I mean Dennis was absolutely entranced by Manson, and Manson,
as he often did in his life, came at just
the right time, at the right place, at the right moment.
Wilson and the Beach Boys were down on their luck
in nineteen sixty eight when he met Charles Manson. Things
were not going well. They weren't selling as many albums,
(11:58):
their tours weren't doing as well, and Dennis was lost.
He'd also his relationship with his father Murray had really
become severed at that point. I think he was very
resentful against the world, even though he was hugely successful.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And Manson comes in and provides.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Again we talked earlier about Manson figured out what people needed,
and in a way he became a father figure to
Dennis Wilson, which was something he had always been missing
in his own father. And so as a result, Manson
provided guidance to Wilson and showed him a way of
letting go of the past and not being caught up
(12:35):
in the trauma of his family and his brothers and competition.
And as a result, Dennis felt a certain obligation to Manson,
which everybody else seemed to have too.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
You'd hang out with Manson and somehow, by the end
of the night, you'd feel that you owed him.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
You know, he was very good at making you feel
that he had given you something even though he hadn't,
and that therefore you owed him something in exchange. And
Dennis did everything he could to get Manson the record
deal that he wanted.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
How long after the murders did it take for the
prosecution and the police to arrest Manson?
Speaker 3 (13:12):
So this is a great question.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
You know, people always talk about how after the events
of August ninth and August tenth that America changed, that
the murders had such a profound impact on the country,
which is true. But the truth is is that in
the weeks and months after the murders, you know, the
first two weeks, every newspaper, every radio program in America
(13:34):
was talking about the murders. Except for Los Angeles. It
pretty much fell out of the news. Especially there were
major other events going on, the moon landing Woodstock and
all the chaos of nineteen sixty nine, and so the
news kind of moved on. But then on December ninth,
nineteen sixty nine, the Charles Manson is finally arrested in
(13:55):
Inyo County, which is the desert. When I say desert,
I mean desert desert of of California. It's not Palm Springs,
this is Ballarat and the Panama Mountains. It's just, you know,
really definitly not Vegas, right exactly. And so he gets
arrested there and the press is stunned because he's not
(14:15):
what they expect, right They everybody's been picturing some you know,
rabid looking maniac and instead it's a hippie cult leader
who's kind of stylish and he's enjoying it. He's smiling,
and he's got this charisma, and surrounding him are thirty
forty people who worship him. And that's the moment I
(14:36):
think that America changed.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Unbelievable, it truly was. Yeah, and off he goes. He
gets convicted, and at the time, California had the death
penalty and they changed that.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
Yeah, so they were actually they had been convicted at
that point. They were convicted in nineteen seventy one, and
then as they were awaiting death row, state of California
abolished the death penalty, which meant that they were going
to be they were going to be.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Up for parole in seven years or something.
Speaker 4 (15:09):
So it was a big moment of celebration, but I
think that that turned sour pretty quickly once his followers
began to realize that they'd essentially been conned, and the
last thing Manson wanted was to go back to prison,
and he sort of deteriorated once he was there.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
The Black Dahlia Elizabeth short. They called her the back
black Dahlia because of her hair, was it not.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
That's correct. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
The way she wore her hair was like a people
said it was like a large dahlia flower and it
was black as night, and so that's how she got
the name.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Her body was found in nineteen forty seven, all chopped up.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yep, that's correct.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Police looked at like one hundred and fifty suspects.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I think it was more it was about three hundred actually,
that they looked at.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Can't give away your book, But do you think you
know who did it?
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I do.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
I did many years of research and the person that
I point out as being the murderer was verified to
have known her and was with her for three days
before she escaped to San Diego for a month, and
then as soon as she came back, she was murdered.
And I think that all those events are connected. There's
(16:23):
all kinds of tissue between them. So it's a pretty interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
Story, fascinating to be sure. She was how old was
she when she died?
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Twenty four years twenty two years old? Sorry?
Speaker 2 (16:35):
And she wanted to be an actress?
Speaker 3 (16:37):
I guess right, No, she didn't.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
And that's actually one of the big myths about Elizabeth Short,
the Black Dahia, is that she was in Hollywood to
become famous and was going on auditions and that's why
she was in Los Angeles. But the truth is that
she never auditioned, she never sought fame. She didn't she
didn't want to.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Meet Hollywood people.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
She wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, and in fact,
she was just out in California for some adventure and
to hopefully find somebody to fall in love with.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
That's all she wanted in this world was to be loved.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Why kill the lady?
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Boy?
Speaker 4 (17:12):
I wish we knew To get in the mind of
a killer, that's a difficult one.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast tocoastam dot com
for more
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