August 31, 2024 • 46 mins
The '60s ended with a lot of turbulence, not the least of which was the Manson Family Murders. What made Charles Manson so alluring to his family? What makes one person kill for another? And what did The Beatles have to do with it all? Learn all this and more in this first part of our two part classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody, Chuck here on Saturday with this selects with
a very gruesome pick trigger warnings. It's a true crime episode,
perhaps one of the most infamous crimes in American history.
And it's a two parter, so you get part one
this week, you get part two in two weeks. It's
called The Manson Family Murders. Art One from January twenty fifth,
(00:24):
twenty eighteen. Beware. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, and there's Jerry over there,
and we make up the Stuff you Should Know family,
the peace Lovin, Acid Lovin, non murdering nice family. Did
I say acid Levin in there?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
You did?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Oh? Weird, peace Lovin non murdering family.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah. And you know what, hopefully there are no kids
listening to this one anyway, so we can let everyone
else know that we take LSD before every episode.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Sure, I mean, the slogan of our show is wowie zowie.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah. So CoA. For those of you who did not
see the title, if you're listening to your kids about
The Manson Family Murders without a CoA, then you need
a parenting CoA.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, for real.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
But there are lots of grizzly details in this, so
obviously you may want to skip this one. With a
a on a family picnic picnic, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
It might kind of bring it down a couple of degrees.
It might be a drag, you know, probably so, uh,
speaking of drags, Chuck, I'll tell you who is a drag,
Charles Manson. He was. He was so like, there's this,
there's this reputed legend that Charles Manson tried out for
the monkeys and was rejected and that was ultimately why
(02:04):
he ordered these these grizzly murders of what that we'll
definitely get into. But it turns out that's absolutely false.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, that I've heard that, and it always sounded to
me like an urban legend.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Well, so the thing is, it's got like all sorts
of interesting facets to it, though, right, it's demonstrably false.
He was in prison at the time the monkey's tryouts
were held. But it kind of coincides with this larger
part of Charles Manson's life that not everybody's fully aware of,
which is that he wanted to be a star. He
(02:39):
wanted to be a musical recording star, and he actually had.
He made some inroads into that career. And I have
read theories that it is possible that these murders were
ordered as a means of venting Manson's frustration that his
music career wasn't going as well as thought it should
(03:00):
ye and sending a message to some people in the
music industry that he'd made contacts with to basically say, hey,
I can't kill you because I need you, but I
can kill other people to get you going and get
my music career off the ground. What's the hold up?
Which is just like the Manson family murders on their face,
as they're largely understood, is nuts. But if that's the
(03:25):
real thing behind all of this, that's just the depths
of depravity, of human depravity that people are capable of.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I bet that's not like the sole reason.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
But you know, like if you really strip reasons down,
like what are motivations for things? Like is it really
you know, to bring on Helter Skelter? Is it because
he was a frustrated musician? You know? Like you can
say the same thing about Hitler, like was there a
kernel of Hitler's rejection from the art world and from
people at large that drove him to order the horrible
(03:59):
things that he ordered the Nazis to do. Like, it
makes you wonder, like what is the motivation behind world
changing events when you break them down to a personal level.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, I mean, well, Manson, to be fair, was had
mental illness in a lifetime of rejection, so right, this
could all affect her in for sure.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah. But so I mean you you you asked for
this article to be written, didn't you. Was this your jam?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah? Yeah, ed the grabster. We can sort of petition
him to write articles at times, and this was definitely
one of them.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah. So did you know a lot about the Manson
family murders and the family themselves and all that stuff already?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, so you this was this is probably still part
of like the cultural zeitgeist when you were becoming like
aware of the world as a kid. Huh.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah. Like, I definitely remember the book Helter Skelter being
a huge, huge thing, And I remember a time before
like media so robust, when the idea of Charles Manson
was just so terrifying to me. I do too, And
then I got older and saw interviews and I was like, oh,
(05:11):
he's just a little tiny redneck. Yeah, Like it all vanished.
I was like, oh my god, he's just he's just
a little redneck.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah. I think that's what. There were two things that
kids of the eighties went through as far as awakenings.
Were concerned that the Soviet people went out to murder
all of us, yeah, and that Charles Manson was not
actually scary. He was just a dumb redneck behind bars.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. I mean what he did was horrific, to be sure,
so I'm not like minimizing that. But as far as
the person, he was this larger than life, scary as
crap dude to me. Until you know, interviews started coming
out and sit downs with like Diane Sawyer, I was like,
this guy's a joke.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
But for a little while there, he was legitimately America's
worst nightmare because at the time, like a lot of
people say, when the Manson family committed these murders, and
it came out, you know, a couple months later, that
some depraved acid head hippies had actually committed these gruesome
crimes that had captured the nation's attention, it suddenly gave
(06:17):
the establishment, who had been looking for anything to lay
on to hippies to say, see, see we told you
you can't be trusted. Your whole peace, love free stuff
like that doesn't work. You can't do that because this
is the outcome of it. Manson was that personified, and
for a lot of for that reason, a lot of
people say this guy, these murders ended the Summer of
(06:40):
love and the era of hippies and ushered in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, timing wise, it just seems
very natural. And Ed even points out like even during
the trial that narrative was being laid down, it wasn't
like years later people look back and said this. And
he also, I thought it was really interesting. I never
really put it into context like Ed did. But the
moon landing, the very first moon landing that is, happened
(07:06):
two weeks before the Manson family murders, and then a
week after the murders was Woodstock, So that was a
that was a nutty month. It really wasn't know in America.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
And again these murders when they took place, they were
just no one had any idea who the Manson family
was except for a handful of people out in LA
and some cops that had run ins with them, but
they were not famous, and no one realized that the
Manson family had been responsible for these murders. They were
just these gruesome, unsolved murders in between the moon landing
and Woodstock. Yeah, so a lot of people let's start
(07:44):
at the what a lot of people consider the beginning,
which is the night of August ninth, in a house
at one zero zero five zero c Yellow Drive, which
is in Beverly Hills, up in the hills, right.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah. I looked at like three different places how to
pronounce that, and they all said yellow except for Diane.
Sawyer said cello, And I'm like, man, is Dian soil?
You're wrong? No about anything?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
No, whatever she says is absolutely right. She could make turtlenecks, right.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I used to love turtlenecks.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Sure they had a real heyday, for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
You don't see him anymore.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
I used to wear them on. Don't be dumb, but
it was kind of a gag.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I think I could still pull one off, maybe, especially
with the beard.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah. The beard would definitely help, you know, because you
could you could turn a certain way and be like
regular shirt, turtleneck, regular shirt, turtleneck just by just by
moving your head and your beard out of the way.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, And of course in the eighties I would rock
the mock turtleneck regularly.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Did you I never really did. Did you wear them
with Zeke Varici's.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
No, no, no, no, it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
You didn't dress like ac Slater.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
No, it was sort of believe it or not. That
was like a post preppy thing where the mock turtleneck
was acceptable and not cheesy really in a preppy sense.
I gotcha, Because I was sort of a prep before
I became a human monster.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
I could see that. Did you Did you wear the
LaCosta alligator and stuff?
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Nah? We couldn't afford that stuff, so I or the knockoffs,
I gotcha. Or if I had the la cost the
alligator was like accidentally so onto the collars.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Oh yeah, yeah, we've had this conversation. Yeah, all that
good stuff factory seconds, Yep, that's mactory Remnant's nice. So
on this night on August ninth, are we going with
Cello or Diane Sawyer's Cello?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
I don't know. Let's just say that the house that
Satan built, right, it's not there anymore, by the way.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
No, they tore it down, but not before Trent Rezner
went in and recorded at nine Inch Nails album.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
There, because why not?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Why not? So at this at this house at one
zero zero five zero Yellow Drive, that's not there any longer.
There was a knock at the door on the night
of August ninth, around midnight, so I don't know if
that makes it August ninth or tenth. I couldn't get
a definitive answer, but the door was answered by a
guy named Voytek Freikowski, who was known as a Polish playboy.
(10:15):
He was friends of the director Roman Polanski and he
was there because inside that house was Roman Polanski's wife,
Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with their I
believe their first child. I don't think they had any
other children. Sharon Tate was pretty young at the time.
But also inside was Abigail Folger, who was the heiress
(10:37):
to the Folger Coffee fortune. And I think, oh, one
other guy, Jay Sebring, who was a stylist who is
known as the guy who introduced hair styling to men.
So he was pretty well off and pretty well known
as far as la went. And they're just kind of
this hip industry party crowd inside this this residence, and
(11:01):
there was a knock at the door and this guy
was there on the other side of the door, and
he had a mustache and he was tall, kind of
a natural athlete, tight type from Texas. And he said,
I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business.
And that was Tex Watson, and he entered the house
and this massacre of everybody inside began.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, so what had happened previous to that knock was
Tex Watson climbed up a telephone pole, cut the phone
line and then climbed the fence with a couple of
other people, one Susan Atkins and one Patricia Krinwinkle, all
Manson family members. And we'll get into the whole family
thing in a minute. And so they climbed over the fence,
(11:44):
went in. There was a kid, a teenager named Steve
Parent who was leaving in his car already, and he
did not make it out. He was shot five times.
He was slashed and shot five times by Tex Watson
before he could get down the tway. So one murder
had already been committed on that property by the time
(12:04):
they even got to the house.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, and if any of these people, which you can
definitely make the case all of them were in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Stephen parent was just
doubly so he was visiting the caretaker of the house,
so he had nothing to do with the Hollywood jet
set people inside or the Manson family. He was just
friends with somebody who was like a worker at the
(12:28):
house and he was leaving at the time too.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, he would have been friends with what was a
guy's name from.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
The oj oh Man.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
He would have been friends with kat o'kalin, which is Yeah,
that would have been a bad thing to be I.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Think talk about a mock turtleneck.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah, I think he has one permanently tattooed on his neck.
There was also a third Manson family member, Linda Kasabian,
who was not in the house, but she waited. Essentially
was the getaway driver.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Right and she just come into the family like a
month before, And apparently the reason she was out with
them was because she was the only one with a
valid driver's license out of that group. So Lenny Kasaven's
sitting outside, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Susan Atkins all
enter the house and they just start killing everybody. Apparently
(13:24):
Texa was the only one with a gun, but all
three of them had knives. Patricia Krenwinkle found Abigail Folger
reading in bed and started to kill her. I believe
Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were in the living room
together and they were both killed there in the living room.
Voytech freed Kowski made it out of the house, but
(13:46):
he was killed in the front lawn. Abigail Folger I think,
made it out the back and she died on the
back lawn. And one of the things about this is
like the reason the word massacres like such an apt description.
These were just basically, like I don't know how old
text was, he was a little bit older, but these
are basically like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old girls who
(14:10):
had never done anything like this before and were really
not very good at it while they were doing it
this first time, and it was just bad for everybody. Apparently,
it's very brutal. There was a lot of fear and
terror and a lot of pain and torment among everybody
who was being killed in this house. It wasn't easy clean.
You wouldn't characterize it as like a hit it was
(14:32):
a massacre.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah, Abigail Folger herself was stabbed twenty eight times and
then see bring in Forrakowski. In addition to being stabbed,
were also shot, and obviously Sharon Tate's unborn child was
killed in this process as well. And supposedly, and this
is a direct quote apparently I guess from the trial
(14:55):
the directive from Charles Manson. And if you don't know this,
I guess we should go ahead and say Charles Manson,
even though later on other people said that Tex Watson
was more acting on his own and misunderstood Manson's directive.
But Charles Manson ordered these killings, which we'll get into.
But he told Watson supposedly totally destroy everyone in that
(15:17):
house as gruesome as you can. So in addition to
the mutilation of the bodies and like post mortem stab wounds,
that was stuff written on the walls and their blood
like pig, and well I think pig was the only
thing written on the wall at.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
This one, right on the front door.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Which is a obviously was a reference to cops at
the time.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right, and they wrote it in Sharon Tate's blood, right,
So pig is on the door in blood the perpetrators
got away, The Manson family got away. They made it
back to I think the Spawn Ranch, which is one
of the places they were staying. So then two nights later,
Manson orders the family to go do it again. He
actually said that they done according to text and the
(16:04):
rest of them. He actually said that they'd done it wrong.
They had created panic and fear in these people, and
they needed to do it right this time. But to
go go out and butcher another family. And he took
him to a house, and it was a house next
door to this house that the Manson family used to
party at. It was a friend of one of Manson's
(16:26):
record producer friends. And next door was just this normal,
unassuming couple who had from what I understand, no interaction
with the Mansons at any point in time. It was
this couple named Leno and Rosemary Labiyanca, and they were
just about his middle class, upper middle class America establishment
(16:48):
as you could get.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, he was actually lived less than two miles from
this house. It was in the Los Filis neighborhood. And
just the night before they had had a party at
this dude's house who and the reason he didn't want
to go back to that house is because he thought
maybe it could be tied back to him in some
way because he was there the night before. So they
just randomly picked the neighbor and there was six of
(17:12):
the followers there, the original four from the Tate House
plus Leslie van Houghton and Clem Grogan I think it
was his name. And yeah, it was talking about wrong place,
wrong time. They were just in there enduring their evening
and Manson did break. He was, actually, like you said,
(17:32):
there for this one, whereas he wasn't even there for
the Tate one. And he took part in the tying up,
but then he left, which very cowardly left. And this
whole thing just reeks of cowardice, like go do my
dirty work for me, exactly kind of in most of
these cases.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Right, So they tie up the lot beyond because they
murdered them brutally again. They carved war in mister or
la Bianca's stomach with a knife. They left the knife
sticking out of his neck, They left a fork sticking
out of his stomach. It was just another really gruesome scene.
And then again in blood they wrote they wrote things
(18:15):
around the house like they wrote political you know, they
wrote pigs again.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, they wrote death to Pigs, they wrote they misspelled it.
They wrote Helter Skelter, which we'll get into. That was
a Beatles song, which factors in pretty heavily. And then
they wrote Rise. And the whole notion here and we'll
cover this in detail more later too, was that Manson
was trying to, or at least he says, he was
(18:41):
trying to ignite a race war and have it appear
that black people and maybe even black panthers had killed
these white people, which would and then turn spark a
race war. They would all kill each other and the
Manson And the reason I'm laughing is because it's just
so ridiculously impive, im plausible, and then the Manson family
would be the only people left and they could rule
(19:02):
the world.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, that was supposedly the whole thing behind Helter Skelter.
So the cops in LA, the Sheriff's Department and the
LA Cops have two different murder scenes that are obviously related,
but early on they didn't They didn't connect them yet.
It took it took a minute, but once they did,
(19:24):
these two murders came to be known as the Tate
LaBianca murders before anyone knew who the Manson family was,
and it was a big deal. But you have to
go back even further to understand what's going on and
to understand the eventual prosecution of the Manson family to
another murder, and we will dive into that one after this. Okay, Chuck.
(20:13):
So everybody knows about the Tate LaBianca murders, so much
so that they're frequently called the Manson family murders. But
it turns out that the Manson family was already involved
in another previous murder a couple of weeks before the
Tate and LaBianca murders happened. I think in like late
July of nineteen sixty nine, right.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, I mean there was one other murder and an
attempted murder and then an not quite attempted murder also, right.
So the one you're talking about, I think is probably
Gary Henman, who he was, Well, why don't you go
and explain how he fit into this whole thing?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Okay? So Gary Henman was a music teacher who was
a friend of the Manson family. I don't think he
ever was considered like a Manson family member, but he
was a buddy of them, and he either had a
trust fund coming or there was a rumor that he
had access to a trust fund of like twenty thousand dollars,
(21:17):
and so the Manson family went over to rob him.
I think Bobby boso Let was the leader of that,
and they went over to rob him. Or he had
supplied the Manson family with a bunch of mescaline that
they in turn sold to a motorcycle gang that was
not happy that when it turned out the mescaline was
(21:37):
bad who wanted their money back. So the Manson family
had gone to go get their money back from this guy,
and apparently he had said, like, I don't have any money,
but here, I'll sign over the title of my cars
to you. Here are the keys. And at this point
they had him tied up and I'm not entirely certain why,
but Charles Manson, and this is widely agreed upon, I
(21:58):
think even by Manson himself, that Manson came over to
the house to basically assist in getting this guy to
cough up his money. Maybe that's what it was. And
he took a sword and chopped off part of the
guy's ear.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, And depending on who you believe, some say Manson
actually ended up killing him. Other people say that Bobby
Bosalil ended up stabbing him to death. Manson was on
the scene for this one, though, which was different than
the other murders, And I guess it just depends on
who you believe it was. Bousoalia was eventually arrested while
driving that car of Hinman's.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
So him instead, BOSSI Little's in jail. And you have
to actually go back even further to find the first
at least attempted murder by the Manson family earlier in July,
on July first. This is just a bad jam if
you really start thinking about it, like all these dates
are so compressed, and you think about the Manson family
(22:58):
just being in this crazy like murderous killsprey and it
really only went for like a month, basically, you know,
four or five weeks. But they did a lot of
damage in that time. But the whole thing started, and
you can make the case, and a lot of people
do that. The whole thing, everything else that followed actually
started on July first, when Charles Manson went to the
(23:20):
apartment of a syndicate drug dealer, like a big time
drug dealer named Bernard lots of Papa Crow, right.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Yes, and Manson thought that he might have been a
black panther. I don't think that was ever confirmed. I
read a lot of articles kind of going back and forth.
But regardless, Manson thought he was a black panther. There
was a double crossing deal that went on, and they
went over and Manson actually shot Crow and thought he
(23:51):
had killed him, but he did not die. And he
did not go to the cops because he you know,
what do you do go to the cops and say, hey,
a double cross these weirdo rednecks hippies.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
No, they doublecross him. They double crossed him.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Oh see I read that he double cross them? No, no,
why no? Tex Watson, Well, either way, he would not
go to the cops right in his condition, and so
that's why it was never reported. But he was interviewed
in the transcript is pretty interesting to listen to.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, but yeah, and he wouldn't go to the cops
because he would just handle it himself. And that's basically
what he vowed to do. So there's this guy who
Manson shot in the gut and left for dead, who
now wants to kill Manson. In the whole family and
that Manson's convinced as a black panther, which suddenly makes
sense as to why you would have found something like
political piggies and a Paul print in blood at Gary
(24:45):
Heimman's murder scene. Right, Yeah, because this is about the
time that this whole helter skelter thing is happening starting out.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
The whole idea that there is a race war coming
and that the Manson family might be able to nudget
a long by framing the black community or black panthers
for these murders of white people is the basis of
this idea of what was behind the Manson family murders
as far as the prosecution is concerned.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, so I mentioned an almost attempted murder, jumping back
forward again the very night of the The idea of
the night of the Lobbianca murders was to have two
separate murders on the same night, and Manson ordered a
few I think three different followers, including Linda Kasabian, to
murder this kind of little known Lebanese actor named Saladin Nadar,
(25:39):
and Kasabian basically got there, didn't want to do this
and so intentionally knocked on the wrong door of the apartment,
basically giving her an excuse to get out of there.
So weirdly, Saladin Nadir was never was a near victim
of the Manson family. So that's talk about a talk
(26:00):
about a close call.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yeah for real, you know. Yeah, And I looked him up.
He basically was a famous actor by that time, and
then just didn't do much after that. So I wonder
if that had if that like just broke his brain
or something, you know, I don't know. I think it
would have done that to me.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
All right, So I think it's about time for another
ad break. Let's do it, all right, We'll be right
back after this, all right, Chuck, we're back. Should we
(26:50):
talk about Charles Manson a little bit?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, let's so, like, well, let's recap real quick, Okay.
Manson has shot lots of Papa Crow in his stomach,
lots of Crow, has vowed to kill the whole Manson family.
Bobby Bosolt killed Gary Hinman, tried to frame the Black
Panthers by writing political piggies in blood on the wall.
Bobby Bosolet is arrested the Manson family, supposedly trying to
(27:15):
make it look like somebody besides Bobby bosolet might have
killed Gary Henman, kill the people at the Tate residence,
kill the people at the LaBianca residence. Write things like
political piggies and rise and pig in blood on the
walls there. And that's where we've left off so far.
The Manson family hasn't been caught yet. Let's talk about
(27:37):
Charles Manson, all right.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
So Manson, it's sort of mixed up on what you
want to believe because a lot of the information about
his life came from him, and anyone who knows anything
about Charles Manson knows that he had a tendency to
overstate things and certainly lie about things. But what we
do know is that he was born in nineteen four
(28:00):
to a teen mom and dad, and the dad basically
would not assume any paternity or responsibility, sort of split.
His name was colonel, his actual name was colonel, and
he convinced people that he was an army colonel even
though he was not. So he was just never on
the scene at all, and he ended up taking the
(28:22):
name Manson from his stepfather, who you know, his mom married.
She was an alcoholic, may have been a prostitute, She
was in and out of jail for most of her life,
or most of his young life, and it was just,
you know, a truly bad scene for a young Charles Manson.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Right, So he actually went and lived with relatives while
she was in jail for a five year stretch. She
got out, they reunited, he said, He apparently said that
reuniting with her was one of the few truly joyful
moments in his life. But in very short order, she
basically was like, I can't take care of you. I
(29:01):
don't really want this responsibility and handed him over to
the state, which begun, which began a just basically a
string of institutionalization that would keep going for basically his
whole life.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, I mean by the time he was eventually sent
to federal prison, I think he was thirty two years
old when he was released in sixty seven, and they
calculated that he had spent half of his life in
and out of institutions, whether it be orphanages or juvie
or real deal prison in jail.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Right, And that was just the first part of his life.
So he was out for two years before they got
him again after these murders. By the time he died
in prison at age eighty three this past November twenty seventeen,
he had spent, from my calculations, only thirteen years of
his life as a free man. Yeah, thirteen out of
eighty three years outside of institutions. So he had a
(29:58):
lot of the deck stacked again. But you can also
go back to I think March nineteen sixty seven, when
he was released on parole from federal prison, where he
was given a choice like, hey, man, here you go.
You're out. You can decide what to do with your life.
Do you want to go straight, do you want to
(30:18):
go have a nice family, Do you want to just
be a productive member of society, or are you going
to go the exact opposite direction. And as we know
in hindsight, Charlie Manson chose the exact opposite direction.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Yeah. I don't know if he was ever officially diagnosed,
but I did see that doctors over the years and
mental health professionals say that he was probably schizophrenic, suffered
from schizophrenia, and had a paranoid delusional disorder.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
At the very least, I hadn't heard the schizophrenia, think
paranoid delusional disorder totally buy.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, So he was a troubled dude. Of course, not
excusing anything, but it was clearly a case of mental
illness combined with rejection and institutionalization really led to like
the man that he would eventually become right.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
So he gets out of prison right and he is
basically released into San Francisco nineteen sixty seven. So it's
like Hippiedum, the Kingdom of Hippiedom, where he shows up
and there's you know, at the time, everybody's looking for
like something new, something different, something that's an alternative to
(31:33):
the establishment of the mainstream or anything different. And so
Charles Manson says, like, oh, I can totally exploit a
lot of these people. And he starts out by meeting
a girl, a librarian named Mary Brunner, and he moves
into her apartment and she apparently was very fascinated with
him because she had led a fairly straight laced life.
(31:55):
She went to college again, she was a librarian, and
all of a sudden there's this wild like x Khan
who is preaching this kind of gospel of love and
no materials. And apparently before November nineteen sixty eight, which
we'll explain what happened then before that time, Charles Manson
(32:16):
supposedly did pretty closely resemble an actual hippie, like he
felt like he could take anything of yours that he wanted,
but you could also take anything of his. And he
apparently walked the walk when it came to stuff like that,
and there are plenty of stories of him just giving
up whatever material possessions saying they didn't matter before things
(32:39):
really took a dark turn. So there's if you really
kind of dive in, it becomes clear how he could
have amassed some of these early followers. And the first
one was Mary Brunner.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yeah, I get the feeling that this probably would not
have happened in any other era other than this generation.
When you know, we've talked about it in our Brainwashing
in our Cults episodes, where this time it was just
just a weird time in America and people were really,
(33:13):
I don't know about prone, but at least ripe for
the picking when it comes to falling into situations like
this and believing these what looked like crackpots to us now,
but at the time everyone was. It was very anti establishment.
People were taking tons of drugs and reject rejecting mainstream
society and embracing the counterculture, and they were just really
(33:36):
open to all kinds of weird stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Right, So he again, he just kind of figured out
that he could he could work this to his own means.
So there's a couple of things that there's there's two
basic things that you needed to know about Charles Manson
from from everything I've seen. One was that his main
goal was to become a recording artist, a very successful
(34:01):
star of a recording artist. And two that he could
he had a good ability to manipulate people into giving
them what he wanted, and mostly that that amounted to
sex and drugs, and he used that ability to get
other people to do what he wanted. So, for example,
(34:24):
when he started doing mask, like a substantial amount of
girls in the Manson family, it was it was just
a free love commune the whole time. So the guys
who came in all of a sudden had access to
these the women, and in return for Charlie granting them
access to them, they would basically do his bidding or
(34:47):
offer him physical protection because he wasn't a big guy.
He's kind of a shrimpy dude. But there everything from
from if you look at it from an outsider's perspective,
every relationship be had it was one of extraction. He
was taking something from everyone around him. It wasn't just
a normal friendship or a normal relationship. It was it
(35:09):
was what can you do for me? And what can
I use from you to get something out of other people.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yeah, and if you've never seen an interview with him,
I encourage you to check some of him out. He
does have a very stream of consciousness, circular, sort of
talks NonStop and doesn't make a lot of sense. But
one thing that's often said about him is that he
can be mesmerizing with the way he does that. And
(35:36):
I imagine in the late sixties, if you've got a
head full of acid and there's this guy that has
the ability to like almost rebreathe like a trumpet player
and talk for minutes and minutes and hours on end,
they could be kind of you know, they would fall
under this weird spell, right, So I definitely don't get
it because now when I watch him again, tiny weird redneck.
(36:00):
But when you you know, when you see him doing
a thing, even with like Diane Sawyer, who doesn't fall
for it, by the way, she clearly is just like
very it's a great interview. She's pro and she stays
very on point, basically kind of like, you're not going
to get me to like fall for your charms, right,
but it's pretty interesting. So he's got Mary Bruner as
(36:21):
this first girlfriend. Then he said, hey, what do you
think about a triad? Or rather, what do you think
about a triad? That's how he sounded. And Mary Brunner,
from what I understand, wasn't super into it, but she
was under his spell, so she said sure. So Squeaky
from Lynette, Squeaky from came into the picture and they,
(36:46):
you know, they lived as a threesome that traveled together
up and down the coast out there, and he just
sort of started accumulating mostly women along the way to
this sort of traveling party is probably how he framed it,
and people were hip to it. There were men though,
besides Tex Watson and Bobby Busolill, those guy name Danny
(37:09):
DeCarlo who were kind of early men who joined up.
And by all accounts, most of those men who joined
up were there because Manson was said, you know, you
can have these women. You got plenty of drugs, and
so before you know it, the Manson family was born.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, and they were just kind of this weirdo hippie
group that used to commit burglaries. Manson, there has long
been it's long been said that he beat a lot
of the women in the group and would prostitute them
for cash to pay for things for the family, like rent.
(37:44):
They ate a lot of their food from like going
through dumpsters behind grocery stores and stuff like that. And
they just basically hung out and did drugs and had
sex all day. That was basically their aim and their goal.
And then at night they would have bonfires out in
the desert and they'd all just take a bunch of
acid and listen to Charles Manson to do his mesmerizing thing.
(38:06):
And again, at first it was it was weird. There's
a lot of ideas that Manson was this reincarnation of
Jesus Christ, or that he was not even the reincarnate
of Jesus Christ. He was the same Jesus Christ who'd
been alive for you know, almost two thousand years. And
just like all this stuff you would find in the
(38:27):
desert among hippies in the late sixties, on acid at
night around a bonfire. Right, but when by this time,
like by the time they're out in the desert, Manson
had had this really amazing chance encounter that you just
would never have and the fact that it did happen
is just totally mind blowing. But become a recording artist.
(38:50):
To help ensure his success at becoming a recording artist,
he moved the family from San Francisco down to Los
Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry,
and it just so happened in that one night in
nineteen sixty eight, a couple of Manson family girls were
hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard and were picked up by none
other than Dennis Wilson, one of the co founders of
(39:13):
the Beach Boys.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
That's right, it was sixty nine, but same deal. All
those years just ran together back then, and Dennis Wilson
was he was a party, party dude and liked his ladies.
Because it sounds very weird to say that he picked
up a couple of hitchhikers and basically brought them home,
but it was a different time, and like I said,
(39:36):
he was a party dude. So they ended up being Eli,
Joe Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Crinwinkle, so they move
in basically, and he goes to the studio, comes home
and the Manson family had moved in, which again it
sounds really strange, but at the time he I mean
(39:57):
Ed says he was frightened that I get the feeling.
He was more like, you know, what trip are you on,
not like, oh my god, I need to call the cops. Yeah,
he I think they lived there for a while, like
he let them live there.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah. I think the part it was partially out of fear.
I saw and I read an interview with Charles Manson
when he was talking about Dennis Wilson, and he was like,
you know, I'd say whatever, he just lay his weirdo
trip on Dennis Wilson, and Dennis's response would be like, yeah,
I mean that's cool. Listen, look I gotta go. I
really got to go do this thing. Just always trying
to get away from Charles Manson. So maybe he was
(40:31):
afraid that he was they were going to kill him.
Maybe he liked having access to like all his free
love from all the Manson family women, or maybe he
just felt like he couldn't get out of it. But he, uh,
he did let them live there for a few months.
It wasn't like they crashed there for a weekend. They
moved in, they wrecked his ferrari. Yeah, they they met
(40:53):
a bunch of his friends. It was it was a
big It was a big deal that Dennis Wilson came
into Charles Manson life because it really bolstered this idea that, yes,
he is going to become a recording artist. Because not
only did he hang out with Dennis Wilson, he hung
out with a guy named Terry Melcher who is a
record producer, hung out with another guy named Phil Kaufman
who is a record producer, and he met all these
(41:15):
people in the industry who were in a position to
get Charles Manson's career off of the ground. And when
you're dealing with this crazy little ticking time bomb like
Charles Manson, who wants you to do something like get
his musical career off the ground, but you don't think
his music is good enough to actually launch, you've got
a problem on your hands. And Dennis Wilson and his
(41:37):
buddies all knew this.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yes, And two quick things here, One big shout out
to Dennis Wilson's only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Is it good.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
I think it's great.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
I got to check that out. And I love the
Beach Boys.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
I mean he Dennis Wilson was clearly not the brains
or voice behind the Beach Boys as the drummer, but
he was a sort of I think, kind of picked
on a little bit for not being the most talented dude,
and he was just in the band because he was
handsome and related. But I think Pacific Ocean Blue is
(42:12):
like one of the great lost classics.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
I'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
It's very good.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
He was supposedly also the only true surfer in the band.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, exactly. And the other thing was that Terry Melcher,
that producer that you mentioned. The reason he factors in
so heavily is because he actually lived at the Tate
House in Beverly Hills before Tate and them moved in. Yeah,
so that was sort of the connection there. I guess
(42:40):
Manson was going to kill him, right, No, No.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So here is what a lot of people think. They
think that again, he was sending a message to Terry
Melcher saying, I can't kill you, but I can get
close to you. And I know you're going to hear
about this because this happened at the house you were
living in a month or so before. I'm just going
to go in and have my people into criminentally slaughter
whoever's there. But this is this is you, this is
(43:03):
what's going on. He supposedly was well aware that Terry
Melcher didn't live there any longer, because he'd spoken to
the guy who actually owned the house and was asking
him where Terry Melcher went, and all the guy would
tell him was Malibu, So he knew it wasn't Melcher
in that house.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
In y gotcha, all right? So they eventually leave Dennis
Wilson's house. Dennis Wilson's like, you guys are great, and
all the ladies are nice. The acid is decent, but
it's time for you to go. So they leave in
nineteen sixty eight still and he they go to Spawn Ranch,
(43:40):
which you mentioned earlier. SPA h N. And this was
a it was kind of weird that they ended up
living here, but it was. It was out in kind
of the outskirts of LA There are lots of ranches
like the Disney Ranch or the Universal Ranch where they
shoot a lot of stuff and they have old sets
that are still there. Whether it's mash or Planet of
the aa Apes or just an old West set, and
(44:03):
Spawn Ranch was one of these that had closed down,
and it was an old West set and they actually
it's a state park now, but they did have permission
to live there. They didn't just squat there. They sort
of had a little agreement to do a little maintenance
work and they were allowed to stay. So some of
them are there, some of them are at places like
at a camp in Death Valley, and then just scattered
(44:25):
all over La as far as Manson family members and
just random houses and apartments. But the main place that
Manson in the Inner Circle was at Spawn Ranch, and
they would go on what they called creepy crawls, which
were these little crime spreees would like you said, they
would go out and burgle cars or rob people and
(44:46):
just to kind of keep the money and the drugs flowing.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Right, And so Spawn Ranch was almost like a little
more legit. They were in much closer contact with other
people out in Death Valley. At the Barker Ranch that
was far more secluded, way out in the desert, way
more disconnected from society, and that was the place where
they expected to wait out helter skelter while the everybody
(45:11):
else in the country killed one another.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
So you've got this whole weirdo family. They're criminals, they're
engaged in prostitution. There's violence, you know, there's physical violence.
But ultimately they kind of resemble hippies here or there,
super counterculture. But things turned dark, and they turned dark
after this seminal thing that happened to the rest of
(45:37):
the world but really really spoke to Charles Manson in particular,
and that was the November twenty second, nineteen sixty eight
release of the Beatles White album.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
All Right, you know what, this is going to be
a two parter. It's pretty clear. So let's go ahead
and end this one on a cliffhanger featuring the Beatles.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Right, does that sound good? Yeah? It does.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Pick back up part two with a wide album.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Let's do it?
Speaker 1 (46:06):
All right? All right?
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Well, in the meantime, while you guys are chewing over
what Chuck just said, you can send us an email
the Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and as always,
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff Youshould
Know dot Com. Stuff You Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
For more podcasts, My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody, Chuck here on Saturday with this selects with
a very gruesome pick trigger warnings. It's a true crime episode,
perhaps one of the most infamous crimes in American history.
And it's a two parter, so you get part one
this week, you get part two in two weeks. It's
called The Manson Family Murders. Art One from January twenty fifth,
(00:24):
twenty eighteen. Beware. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, and there's Jerry over there,
and we make up the Stuff you Should Know family,
the peace Lovin, Acid Lovin, non murdering nice family. Did
I say acid Levin in there?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
You did?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Oh? Weird, peace Lovin non murdering family.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah. And you know what, hopefully there are no kids
listening to this one anyway, so we can let everyone
else know that we take LSD before every episode.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Sure, I mean, the slogan of our show is wowie zowie.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah. So CoA. For those of you who did not
see the title, if you're listening to your kids about
The Manson Family Murders without a CoA, then you need
a parenting CoA.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yeah, for real.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
But there are lots of grizzly details in this, so
obviously you may want to skip this one. With a
a on a family picnic picnic, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
It might kind of bring it down a couple of degrees.
It might be a drag, you know, probably so, uh,
speaking of drags, Chuck, I'll tell you who is a drag,
Charles Manson. He was. He was so like, there's this,
there's this reputed legend that Charles Manson tried out for
the monkeys and was rejected and that was ultimately why
(02:04):
he ordered these these grizzly murders of what that we'll
definitely get into. But it turns out that's absolutely false.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, that I've heard that, and it always sounded to
me like an urban legend.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Well, so the thing is, it's got like all sorts
of interesting facets to it, though, right, it's demonstrably false.
He was in prison at the time the monkey's tryouts
were held. But it kind of coincides with this larger
part of Charles Manson's life that not everybody's fully aware of,
which is that he wanted to be a star. He
(02:39):
wanted to be a musical recording star, and he actually had.
He made some inroads into that career. And I have
read theories that it is possible that these murders were
ordered as a means of venting Manson's frustration that his
music career wasn't going as well as thought it should
(03:00):
ye and sending a message to some people in the
music industry that he'd made contacts with to basically say, hey,
I can't kill you because I need you, but I
can kill other people to get you going and get
my music career off the ground. What's the hold up?
Which is just like the Manson family murders on their face,
as they're largely understood, is nuts. But if that's the
(03:25):
real thing behind all of this, that's just the depths
of depravity, of human depravity that people are capable of.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I bet that's not like the sole reason.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
But you know, like if you really strip reasons down,
like what are motivations for things? Like is it really
you know, to bring on Helter Skelter? Is it because
he was a frustrated musician? You know? Like you can
say the same thing about Hitler, like was there a
kernel of Hitler's rejection from the art world and from
people at large that drove him to order the horrible
(03:59):
things that he ordered the Nazis to do. Like, it
makes you wonder, like what is the motivation behind world
changing events when you break them down to a personal level.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, I mean, well, Manson, to be fair, was had
mental illness in a lifetime of rejection, so right, this
could all affect her in for sure.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah. But so I mean you you you asked for
this article to be written, didn't you. Was this your jam?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah? Yeah, ed the grabster. We can sort of petition
him to write articles at times, and this was definitely
one of them.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah. So did you know a lot about the Manson
family murders and the family themselves and all that stuff already?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, so you this was this is probably still part
of like the cultural zeitgeist when you were becoming like
aware of the world as a kid. Huh.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah. Like, I definitely remember the book Helter Skelter being
a huge, huge thing, And I remember a time before
like media so robust, when the idea of Charles Manson
was just so terrifying to me. I do too, And
then I got older and saw interviews and I was like, oh,
(05:11):
he's just a little tiny redneck. Yeah, Like it all vanished.
I was like, oh my god, he's just he's just
a little redneck.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Yeah. I think that's what. There were two things that
kids of the eighties went through as far as awakenings.
Were concerned that the Soviet people went out to murder
all of us, yeah, and that Charles Manson was not
actually scary. He was just a dumb redneck behind bars.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yeah. I mean what he did was horrific, to be sure,
so I'm not like minimizing that. But as far as
the person, he was this larger than life, scary as
crap dude to me. Until you know, interviews started coming
out and sit downs with like Diane Sawyer, I was like,
this guy's a joke.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
But for a little while there, he was legitimately America's
worst nightmare because at the time, like a lot of
people say, when the Manson family committed these murders, and
it came out, you know, a couple months later, that
some depraved acid head hippies had actually committed these gruesome
crimes that had captured the nation's attention, it suddenly gave
(06:17):
the establishment, who had been looking for anything to lay
on to hippies to say, see, see we told you
you can't be trusted. Your whole peace, love free stuff
like that doesn't work. You can't do that because this
is the outcome of it. Manson was that personified, and
for a lot of for that reason, a lot of
people say this guy, these murders ended the Summer of
(06:40):
love and the era of hippies and ushered in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, timing wise, it just seems
very natural. And Ed even points out like even during
the trial that narrative was being laid down, it wasn't
like years later people look back and said this. And
he also, I thought it was really interesting. I never
really put it into context like Ed did. But the
moon landing, the very first moon landing that is, happened
(07:06):
two weeks before the Manson family murders, and then a
week after the murders was Woodstock, So that was a
that was a nutty month. It really wasn't know in America.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
And again these murders when they took place, they were
just no one had any idea who the Manson family
was except for a handful of people out in LA
and some cops that had run ins with them, but
they were not famous, and no one realized that the
Manson family had been responsible for these murders. They were
just these gruesome, unsolved murders in between the moon landing
and Woodstock. Yeah, so a lot of people let's start
(07:44):
at the what a lot of people consider the beginning,
which is the night of August ninth, in a house
at one zero zero five zero c Yellow Drive, which
is in Beverly Hills, up in the hills, right.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah. I looked at like three different places how to
pronounce that, and they all said yellow except for Diane.
Sawyer said cello, And I'm like, man, is Dian soil?
You're wrong? No about anything?
Speaker 2 (08:12):
No, whatever she says is absolutely right. She could make turtlenecks, right.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I used to love turtlenecks.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Sure they had a real heyday, for sure.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
You don't see him anymore.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
I used to wear them on. Don't be dumb, but
it was kind of a gag.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
I think I could still pull one off, maybe, especially
with the beard.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah. The beard would definitely help, you know, because you
could you could turn a certain way and be like
regular shirt, turtleneck, regular shirt, turtleneck just by just by
moving your head and your beard out of the way.
Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, And of course in the eighties I would rock
the mock turtleneck regularly.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Did you I never really did. Did you wear them
with Zeke Varici's.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
No, no, no, no, it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
You didn't dress like ac Slater.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
No, it was sort of believe it or not. That
was like a post preppy thing where the mock turtleneck
was acceptable and not cheesy really in a preppy sense.
I gotcha, Because I was sort of a prep before
I became a human monster.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
I could see that. Did you Did you wear the
LaCosta alligator and stuff?
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Nah? We couldn't afford that stuff, so I or the knockoffs,
I gotcha. Or if I had the la cost the
alligator was like accidentally so onto the collars.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Oh yeah, yeah, we've had this conversation. Yeah, all that
good stuff factory seconds, Yep, that's mactory Remnant's nice. So
on this night on August ninth, are we going with
Cello or Diane Sawyer's Cello?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
I don't know. Let's just say that the house that
Satan built, right, it's not there anymore, by the way.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
No, they tore it down, but not before Trent Rezner
went in and recorded at nine Inch Nails album.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
There, because why not?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Why not? So at this at this house at one
zero zero five zero Yellow Drive, that's not there any longer.
There was a knock at the door on the night
of August ninth, around midnight, so I don't know if
that makes it August ninth or tenth. I couldn't get
a definitive answer, but the door was answered by a
guy named Voytek Freikowski, who was known as a Polish playboy.
(10:15):
He was friends of the director Roman Polanski and he
was there because inside that house was Roman Polanski's wife,
Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with their I
believe their first child. I don't think they had any
other children. Sharon Tate was pretty young at the time.
But also inside was Abigail Folger, who was the heiress
(10:37):
to the Folger Coffee fortune. And I think, oh, one
other guy, Jay Sebring, who was a stylist who is
known as the guy who introduced hair styling to men.
So he was pretty well off and pretty well known
as far as la went. And they're just kind of
this hip industry party crowd inside this this residence, and
(11:01):
there was a knock at the door and this guy
was there on the other side of the door, and
he had a mustache and he was tall, kind of
a natural athlete, tight type from Texas. And he said,
I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business.
And that was Tex Watson, and he entered the house
and this massacre of everybody inside began.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, so what had happened previous to that knock was
Tex Watson climbed up a telephone pole, cut the phone
line and then climbed the fence with a couple of
other people, one Susan Atkins and one Patricia Krinwinkle, all
Manson family members. And we'll get into the whole family
thing in a minute. And so they climbed over the fence,
(11:44):
went in. There was a kid, a teenager named Steve
Parent who was leaving in his car already, and he
did not make it out. He was shot five times.
He was slashed and shot five times by Tex Watson
before he could get down the tway. So one murder
had already been committed on that property by the time
(12:04):
they even got to the house.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Yeah, and if any of these people, which you can
definitely make the case all of them were in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Stephen parent was just
doubly so he was visiting the caretaker of the house,
so he had nothing to do with the Hollywood jet
set people inside or the Manson family. He was just
friends with somebody who was like a worker at the
(12:28):
house and he was leaving at the time too.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, he would have been friends with what was a
guy's name from.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
The oj oh Man.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
He would have been friends with kat o'kalin, which is Yeah,
that would have been a bad thing to be I.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Think talk about a mock turtleneck.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah, I think he has one permanently tattooed on his neck.
There was also a third Manson family member, Linda Kasabian,
who was not in the house, but she waited. Essentially
was the getaway driver.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Right and she just come into the family like a
month before, And apparently the reason she was out with
them was because she was the only one with a
valid driver's license out of that group. So Lenny Kasaven's
sitting outside, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Susan Atkins all
enter the house and they just start killing everybody. Apparently
(13:24):
Texa was the only one with a gun, but all
three of them had knives. Patricia Krenwinkle found Abigail Folger
reading in bed and started to kill her. I believe
Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were in the living room
together and they were both killed there in the living room.
Voytech freed Kowski made it out of the house, but
(13:46):
he was killed in the front lawn. Abigail Folger I think,
made it out the back and she died on the
back lawn. And one of the things about this is
like the reason the word massacres like such an apt description.
These were just basically, like I don't know how old
text was, he was a little bit older, but these
are basically like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen year old girls who
(14:10):
had never done anything like this before and were really
not very good at it while they were doing it
this first time, and it was just bad for everybody. Apparently,
it's very brutal. There was a lot of fear and
terror and a lot of pain and torment among everybody
who was being killed in this house. It wasn't easy clean.
You wouldn't characterize it as like a hit it was
(14:32):
a massacre.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Yeah, Abigail Folger herself was stabbed twenty eight times and
then see bring in Forrakowski. In addition to being stabbed,
were also shot, and obviously Sharon Tate's unborn child was
killed in this process as well. And supposedly, and this
is a direct quote apparently I guess from the trial
(14:55):
the directive from Charles Manson. And if you don't know this,
I guess we should go ahead and say Charles Manson,
even though later on other people said that Tex Watson
was more acting on his own and misunderstood Manson's directive.
But Charles Manson ordered these killings, which we'll get into.
But he told Watson supposedly totally destroy everyone in that
(15:17):
house as gruesome as you can. So in addition to
the mutilation of the bodies and like post mortem stab wounds,
that was stuff written on the walls and their blood
like pig, and well I think pig was the only
thing written on the wall at.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
This one, right on the front door.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Which is a obviously was a reference to cops at
the time.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right, and they wrote it in Sharon Tate's blood, right,
So pig is on the door in blood the perpetrators
got away, The Manson family got away. They made it
back to I think the Spawn Ranch, which is one
of the places they were staying. So then two nights later,
Manson orders the family to go do it again. He
actually said that they done according to text and the
(16:04):
rest of them. He actually said that they'd done it wrong.
They had created panic and fear in these people, and
they needed to do it right this time. But to
go go out and butcher another family. And he took
him to a house, and it was a house next
door to this house that the Manson family used to
party at. It was a friend of one of Manson's
(16:26):
record producer friends. And next door was just this normal,
unassuming couple who had from what I understand, no interaction
with the Mansons at any point in time. It was
this couple named Leno and Rosemary Labiyanca, and they were
just about his middle class, upper middle class America establishment
(16:48):
as you could get.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, he was actually lived less than two miles from
this house. It was in the Los Filis neighborhood. And
just the night before they had had a party at
this dude's house who and the reason he didn't want
to go back to that house is because he thought
maybe it could be tied back to him in some
way because he was there the night before. So they
just randomly picked the neighbor and there was six of
(17:12):
the followers there, the original four from the Tate House
plus Leslie van Houghton and Clem Grogan I think it
was his name. And yeah, it was talking about wrong place,
wrong time. They were just in there enduring their evening
and Manson did break. He was, actually, like you said,
(17:32):
there for this one, whereas he wasn't even there for
the Tate one. And he took part in the tying up,
but then he left, which very cowardly left. And this
whole thing just reeks of cowardice, like go do my
dirty work for me, exactly kind of in most of
these cases.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Right, So they tie up the lot beyond because they
murdered them brutally again. They carved war in mister or
la Bianca's stomach with a knife. They left the knife
sticking out of his neck, They left a fork sticking
out of his stomach. It was just another really gruesome scene.
And then again in blood they wrote they wrote things
(18:15):
around the house like they wrote political you know, they
wrote pigs again.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, they wrote death to Pigs, they wrote they misspelled it.
They wrote Helter Skelter, which we'll get into. That was
a Beatles song, which factors in pretty heavily. And then
they wrote Rise. And the whole notion here and we'll
cover this in detail more later too, was that Manson
was trying to, or at least he says, he was
(18:41):
trying to ignite a race war and have it appear
that black people and maybe even black panthers had killed
these white people, which would and then turn spark a
race war. They would all kill each other and the
Manson And the reason I'm laughing is because it's just
so ridiculously impive, im plausible, and then the Manson family
would be the only people left and they could rule
(19:02):
the world.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, that was supposedly the whole thing behind Helter Skelter.
So the cops in LA, the Sheriff's Department and the
LA Cops have two different murder scenes that are obviously related,
but early on they didn't They didn't connect them yet.
It took it took a minute, but once they did,
(19:24):
these two murders came to be known as the Tate
LaBianca murders before anyone knew who the Manson family was,
and it was a big deal. But you have to
go back even further to understand what's going on and
to understand the eventual prosecution of the Manson family to
another murder, and we will dive into that one after this. Okay, Chuck.
(20:13):
So everybody knows about the Tate LaBianca murders, so much
so that they're frequently called the Manson family murders. But
it turns out that the Manson family was already involved
in another previous murder a couple of weeks before the
Tate and LaBianca murders happened. I think in like late
July of nineteen sixty nine, right.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, I mean there was one other murder and an
attempted murder and then an not quite attempted murder also, right.
So the one you're talking about, I think is probably
Gary Henman, who he was, Well, why don't you go
and explain how he fit into this whole thing?
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Okay? So Gary Henman was a music teacher who was
a friend of the Manson family. I don't think he
ever was considered like a Manson family member, but he
was a buddy of them, and he either had a
trust fund coming or there was a rumor that he
had access to a trust fund of like twenty thousand dollars,
(21:17):
and so the Manson family went over to rob him.
I think Bobby boso Let was the leader of that,
and they went over to rob him. Or he had
supplied the Manson family with a bunch of mescaline that
they in turn sold to a motorcycle gang that was
not happy that when it turned out the mescaline was
(21:37):
bad who wanted their money back. So the Manson family
had gone to go get their money back from this guy,
and apparently he had said, like, I don't have any money,
but here, I'll sign over the title of my cars
to you. Here are the keys. And at this point
they had him tied up and I'm not entirely certain why,
but Charles Manson, and this is widely agreed upon, I
(21:58):
think even by Manson himself, that Manson came over to
the house to basically assist in getting this guy to
cough up his money. Maybe that's what it was. And
he took a sword and chopped off part of the
guy's ear.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Yeah, And depending on who you believe, some say Manson
actually ended up killing him. Other people say that Bobby
Bosalil ended up stabbing him to death. Manson was on
the scene for this one, though, which was different than
the other murders, And I guess it just depends on
who you believe it was. Bousoalia was eventually arrested while
driving that car of Hinman's.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
So him instead, BOSSI Little's in jail. And you have
to actually go back even further to find the first
at least attempted murder by the Manson family earlier in July,
on July first. This is just a bad jam if
you really start thinking about it, like all these dates
are so compressed, and you think about the Manson family
(22:58):
just being in this crazy like murderous killsprey and it
really only went for like a month, basically, you know,
four or five weeks. But they did a lot of
damage in that time. But the whole thing started, and
you can make the case, and a lot of people
do that. The whole thing, everything else that followed actually
started on July first, when Charles Manson went to the
(23:20):
apartment of a syndicate drug dealer, like a big time
drug dealer named Bernard lots of Papa Crow, right.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Yes, and Manson thought that he might have been a
black panther. I don't think that was ever confirmed. I
read a lot of articles kind of going back and forth.
But regardless, Manson thought he was a black panther. There
was a double crossing deal that went on, and they
went over and Manson actually shot Crow and thought he
(23:51):
had killed him, but he did not die. And he
did not go to the cops because he you know,
what do you do go to the cops and say, hey,
a double cross these weirdo rednecks hippies.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
No, they doublecross him. They double crossed him.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Oh see I read that he double cross them? No, no,
why no? Tex Watson, Well, either way, he would not
go to the cops right in his condition, and so
that's why it was never reported. But he was interviewed
in the transcript is pretty interesting to listen to.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah, but yeah, and he wouldn't go to the cops
because he would just handle it himself. And that's basically
what he vowed to do. So there's this guy who
Manson shot in the gut and left for dead, who
now wants to kill Manson. In the whole family and
that Manson's convinced as a black panther, which suddenly makes
sense as to why you would have found something like
political piggies and a Paul print in blood at Gary
(24:45):
Heimman's murder scene. Right, Yeah, because this is about the
time that this whole helter skelter thing is happening starting out.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
The whole idea that there is a race war coming
and that the Manson family might be able to nudget
a long by framing the black community or black panthers
for these murders of white people is the basis of
this idea of what was behind the Manson family murders
as far as the prosecution is concerned.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah, so I mentioned an almost attempted murder, jumping back
forward again the very night of the The idea of
the night of the Lobbianca murders was to have two
separate murders on the same night, and Manson ordered a
few I think three different followers, including Linda Kasabian, to
murder this kind of little known Lebanese actor named Saladin Nadar,
(25:39):
and Kasabian basically got there, didn't want to do this
and so intentionally knocked on the wrong door of the apartment,
basically giving her an excuse to get out of there.
So weirdly, Saladin Nadir was never was a near victim
of the Manson family. So that's talk about a talk
(26:00):
about a close call.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yeah for real, you know. Yeah, And I looked him up.
He basically was a famous actor by that time, and
then just didn't do much after that. So I wonder
if that had if that like just broke his brain
or something, you know, I don't know. I think it
would have done that to me.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
All right, So I think it's about time for another
ad break. Let's do it, all right, We'll be right
back after this, all right, Chuck, we're back. Should we
(26:50):
talk about Charles Manson a little bit?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, let's so, like, well, let's recap real quick, Okay.
Manson has shot lots of Papa Crow in his stomach,
lots of Crow, has vowed to kill the whole Manson family.
Bobby Bosolt killed Gary Hinman, tried to frame the Black
Panthers by writing political piggies in blood on the wall.
Bobby Bosolet is arrested the Manson family, supposedly trying to
(27:15):
make it look like somebody besides Bobby bosolet might have
killed Gary Henman, kill the people at the Tate residence,
kill the people at the LaBianca residence. Write things like
political piggies and rise and pig in blood on the
walls there. And that's where we've left off so far.
The Manson family hasn't been caught yet. Let's talk about
(27:37):
Charles Manson, all right.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
So Manson, it's sort of mixed up on what you
want to believe because a lot of the information about
his life came from him, and anyone who knows anything
about Charles Manson knows that he had a tendency to
overstate things and certainly lie about things. But what we
do know is that he was born in nineteen four
(28:00):
to a teen mom and dad, and the dad basically
would not assume any paternity or responsibility, sort of split.
His name was colonel, his actual name was colonel, and
he convinced people that he was an army colonel even
though he was not. So he was just never on
the scene at all, and he ended up taking the
(28:22):
name Manson from his stepfather, who you know, his mom married.
She was an alcoholic, may have been a prostitute, She
was in and out of jail for most of her life,
or most of his young life, and it was just,
you know, a truly bad scene for a young Charles Manson.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Right, So he actually went and lived with relatives while
she was in jail for a five year stretch. She
got out, they reunited, he said, He apparently said that
reuniting with her was one of the few truly joyful
moments in his life. But in very short order, she
basically was like, I can't take care of you. I
(29:01):
don't really want this responsibility and handed him over to
the state, which begun, which began a just basically a
string of institutionalization that would keep going for basically his
whole life.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, I mean by the time he was eventually sent
to federal prison, I think he was thirty two years
old when he was released in sixty seven, and they
calculated that he had spent half of his life in
and out of institutions, whether it be orphanages or juvie
or real deal prison in jail.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Right, And that was just the first part of his life.
So he was out for two years before they got
him again after these murders. By the time he died
in prison at age eighty three this past November twenty seventeen,
he had spent, from my calculations, only thirteen years of
his life as a free man. Yeah, thirteen out of
eighty three years outside of institutions. So he had a
(29:58):
lot of the deck stacked again. But you can also
go back to I think March nineteen sixty seven, when
he was released on parole from federal prison, where he
was given a choice like, hey, man, here you go.
You're out. You can decide what to do with your life.
Do you want to go straight, do you want to
(30:18):
go have a nice family, Do you want to just
be a productive member of society, or are you going
to go the exact opposite direction. And as we know
in hindsight, Charlie Manson chose the exact opposite direction.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Yeah. I don't know if he was ever officially diagnosed,
but I did see that doctors over the years and
mental health professionals say that he was probably schizophrenic, suffered
from schizophrenia, and had a paranoid delusional disorder.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
At the very least, I hadn't heard the schizophrenia, think
paranoid delusional disorder totally buy.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, So he was a troubled dude. Of course, not
excusing anything, but it was clearly a case of mental
illness combined with rejection and institutionalization really led to like
the man that he would eventually become right.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
So he gets out of prison right and he is
basically released into San Francisco nineteen sixty seven. So it's
like Hippiedum, the Kingdom of Hippiedom, where he shows up
and there's you know, at the time, everybody's looking for
like something new, something different, something that's an alternative to
(31:33):
the establishment of the mainstream or anything different. And so
Charles Manson says, like, oh, I can totally exploit a
lot of these people. And he starts out by meeting
a girl, a librarian named Mary Brunner, and he moves
into her apartment and she apparently was very fascinated with
him because she had led a fairly straight laced life.
(31:55):
She went to college again, she was a librarian, and
all of a sudden there's this wild like x Khan
who is preaching this kind of gospel of love and
no materials. And apparently before November nineteen sixty eight, which
we'll explain what happened then before that time, Charles Manson
(32:16):
supposedly did pretty closely resemble an actual hippie, like he
felt like he could take anything of yours that he wanted,
but you could also take anything of his. And he
apparently walked the walk when it came to stuff like that,
and there are plenty of stories of him just giving
up whatever material possessions saying they didn't matter before things
(32:39):
really took a dark turn. So there's if you really
kind of dive in, it becomes clear how he could
have amassed some of these early followers. And the first
one was Mary Brunner.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Yeah, I get the feeling that this probably would not
have happened in any other era other than this generation.
When you know, we've talked about it in our Brainwashing
in our Cults episodes, where this time it was just
just a weird time in America and people were really,
(33:13):
I don't know about prone, but at least ripe for
the picking when it comes to falling into situations like
this and believing these what looked like crackpots to us now,
but at the time everyone was. It was very anti establishment.
People were taking tons of drugs and reject rejecting mainstream
society and embracing the counterculture, and they were just really
(33:36):
open to all kinds of weird stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Right, So he again, he just kind of figured out
that he could he could work this to his own means.
So there's a couple of things that there's there's two
basic things that you needed to know about Charles Manson
from from everything I've seen. One was that his main
goal was to become a recording artist, a very successful
(34:01):
star of a recording artist. And two that he could
he had a good ability to manipulate people into giving
them what he wanted, and mostly that that amounted to
sex and drugs, and he used that ability to get
other people to do what he wanted. So, for example,
(34:24):
when he started doing mask, like a substantial amount of
girls in the Manson family, it was it was just
a free love commune the whole time. So the guys
who came in all of a sudden had access to
these the women, and in return for Charlie granting them
access to them, they would basically do his bidding or
(34:47):
offer him physical protection because he wasn't a big guy.
He's kind of a shrimpy dude. But there everything from
from if you look at it from an outsider's perspective,
every relationship be had it was one of extraction. He
was taking something from everyone around him. It wasn't just
a normal friendship or a normal relationship. It was it
(35:09):
was what can you do for me? And what can
I use from you to get something out of other people.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yeah, and if you've never seen an interview with him,
I encourage you to check some of him out. He
does have a very stream of consciousness, circular, sort of
talks NonStop and doesn't make a lot of sense. But
one thing that's often said about him is that he
can be mesmerizing with the way he does that. And
(35:36):
I imagine in the late sixties, if you've got a
head full of acid and there's this guy that has
the ability to like almost rebreathe like a trumpet player
and talk for minutes and minutes and hours on end,
they could be kind of you know, they would fall
under this weird spell, right, So I definitely don't get
it because now when I watch him again, tiny weird redneck.
(36:00):
But when you you know, when you see him doing
a thing, even with like Diane Sawyer, who doesn't fall
for it, by the way, she clearly is just like
very it's a great interview. She's pro and she stays
very on point, basically kind of like, you're not going
to get me to like fall for your charms, right,
but it's pretty interesting. So he's got Mary Bruner as
(36:21):
this first girlfriend. Then he said, hey, what do you
think about a triad? Or rather, what do you think
about a triad? That's how he sounded. And Mary Brunner,
from what I understand, wasn't super into it, but she
was under his spell, so she said sure. So Squeaky
from Lynette, Squeaky from came into the picture and they,
(36:46):
you know, they lived as a threesome that traveled together
up and down the coast out there, and he just
sort of started accumulating mostly women along the way to
this sort of traveling party is probably how he framed it,
and people were hip to it. There were men though,
besides Tex Watson and Bobby Busolill, those guy name Danny
(37:09):
DeCarlo who were kind of early men who joined up.
And by all accounts, most of those men who joined
up were there because Manson was said, you know, you
can have these women. You got plenty of drugs, and
so before you know it, the Manson family was born.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, and they were just kind of this weirdo hippie
group that used to commit burglaries. Manson, there has long
been it's long been said that he beat a lot
of the women in the group and would prostitute them
for cash to pay for things for the family, like rent.
(37:44):
They ate a lot of their food from like going
through dumpsters behind grocery stores and stuff like that. And
they just basically hung out and did drugs and had
sex all day. That was basically their aim and their goal.
And then at night they would have bonfires out in
the desert and they'd all just take a bunch of
acid and listen to Charles Manson to do his mesmerizing thing.
(38:06):
And again, at first it was it was weird. There's
a lot of ideas that Manson was this reincarnation of
Jesus Christ, or that he was not even the reincarnate
of Jesus Christ. He was the same Jesus Christ who'd
been alive for you know, almost two thousand years. And
just like all this stuff you would find in the
(38:27):
desert among hippies in the late sixties, on acid at
night around a bonfire. Right, but when by this time,
like by the time they're out in the desert, Manson
had had this really amazing chance encounter that you just
would never have and the fact that it did happen
is just totally mind blowing. But become a recording artist.
(38:50):
To help ensure his success at becoming a recording artist,
he moved the family from San Francisco down to Los
Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry,
and it just so happened in that one night in
nineteen sixty eight, a couple of Manson family girls were
hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard and were picked up by none
other than Dennis Wilson, one of the co founders of
(39:13):
the Beach Boys.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
That's right, it was sixty nine, but same deal. All
those years just ran together back then, and Dennis Wilson
was he was a party, party dude and liked his ladies.
Because it sounds very weird to say that he picked
up a couple of hitchhikers and basically brought them home,
but it was a different time, and like I said,
(39:36):
he was a party dude. So they ended up being Eli,
Joe Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Crinwinkle, so they move
in basically, and he goes to the studio, comes home
and the Manson family had moved in, which again it
sounds really strange, but at the time he I mean
(39:57):
Ed says he was frightened that I get the feeling.
He was more like, you know, what trip are you on,
not like, oh my god, I need to call the cops. Yeah,
he I think they lived there for a while, like
he let them live there.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah. I think the part it was partially out of fear.
I saw and I read an interview with Charles Manson
when he was talking about Dennis Wilson, and he was like,
you know, I'd say whatever, he just lay his weirdo
trip on Dennis Wilson, and Dennis's response would be like, yeah,
I mean that's cool. Listen, look I gotta go. I
really got to go do this thing. Just always trying
to get away from Charles Manson. So maybe he was
(40:31):
afraid that he was they were going to kill him.
Maybe he liked having access to like all his free
love from all the Manson family women, or maybe he
just felt like he couldn't get out of it. But he, uh,
he did let them live there for a few months.
It wasn't like they crashed there for a weekend. They
moved in, they wrecked his ferrari. Yeah, they they met
(40:53):
a bunch of his friends. It was it was a
big It was a big deal that Dennis Wilson came
into Charles Manson life because it really bolstered this idea that, yes,
he is going to become a recording artist. Because not
only did he hang out with Dennis Wilson, he hung
out with a guy named Terry Melcher who is a
record producer, hung out with another guy named Phil Kaufman
who is a record producer, and he met all these
(41:15):
people in the industry who were in a position to
get Charles Manson's career off of the ground. And when
you're dealing with this crazy little ticking time bomb like
Charles Manson, who wants you to do something like get
his musical career off the ground, but you don't think
his music is good enough to actually launch, you've got
a problem on your hands. And Dennis Wilson and his
(41:37):
buddies all knew this.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yes, And two quick things here, One big shout out
to Dennis Wilson's only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
Is it good.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
I think it's great.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
I got to check that out. And I love the
Beach Boys.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
I mean he Dennis Wilson was clearly not the brains
or voice behind the Beach Boys as the drummer, but
he was a sort of I think, kind of picked
on a little bit for not being the most talented dude,
and he was just in the band because he was
handsome and related. But I think Pacific Ocean Blue is
(42:12):
like one of the great lost classics.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
I'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
It's very good.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
He was supposedly also the only true surfer in the band.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, exactly. And the other thing was that Terry Melcher,
that producer that you mentioned. The reason he factors in
so heavily is because he actually lived at the Tate
House in Beverly Hills before Tate and them moved in. Yeah,
so that was sort of the connection there. I guess
(42:40):
Manson was going to kill him, right, No, No.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So here is what a lot of people think. They
think that again, he was sending a message to Terry
Melcher saying, I can't kill you, but I can get
close to you. And I know you're going to hear
about this because this happened at the house you were
living in a month or so before. I'm just going
to go in and have my people into criminentally slaughter
whoever's there. But this is this is you, this is
(43:03):
what's going on. He supposedly was well aware that Terry
Melcher didn't live there any longer, because he'd spoken to
the guy who actually owned the house and was asking
him where Terry Melcher went, and all the guy would
tell him was Malibu, So he knew it wasn't Melcher
in that house.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
In y gotcha, all right? So they eventually leave Dennis
Wilson's house. Dennis Wilson's like, you guys are great, and
all the ladies are nice. The acid is decent, but
it's time for you to go. So they leave in
nineteen sixty eight still and he they go to Spawn Ranch,
(43:40):
which you mentioned earlier. SPA h N. And this was
a it was kind of weird that they ended up
living here, but it was. It was out in kind
of the outskirts of LA There are lots of ranches
like the Disney Ranch or the Universal Ranch where they
shoot a lot of stuff and they have old sets
that are still there. Whether it's mash or Planet of
the aa Apes or just an old West set, and
(44:03):
Spawn Ranch was one of these that had closed down,
and it was an old West set and they actually
it's a state park now, but they did have permission
to live there. They didn't just squat there. They sort
of had a little agreement to do a little maintenance
work and they were allowed to stay. So some of
them are there, some of them are at places like
at a camp in Death Valley, and then just scattered
(44:25):
all over La as far as Manson family members and
just random houses and apartments. But the main place that
Manson in the Inner Circle was at Spawn Ranch, and
they would go on what they called creepy crawls, which
were these little crime spreees would like you said, they
would go out and burgle cars or rob people and
(44:46):
just to kind of keep the money and the drugs flowing.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Right, And so Spawn Ranch was almost like a little
more legit. They were in much closer contact with other
people out in Death Valley. At the Barker Ranch that
was far more secluded, way out in the desert, way
more disconnected from society, and that was the place where
they expected to wait out helter skelter while the everybody
(45:11):
else in the country killed one another.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
So you've got this whole weirdo family. They're criminals, they're
engaged in prostitution. There's violence, you know, there's physical violence.
But ultimately they kind of resemble hippies here or there,
super counterculture. But things turned dark, and they turned dark
after this seminal thing that happened to the rest of
(45:37):
the world but really really spoke to Charles Manson in particular,
and that was the November twenty second, nineteen sixty eight
release of the Beatles White album.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
All Right, you know what, this is going to be
a two parter. It's pretty clear. So let's go ahead
and end this one on a cliffhanger featuring the Beatles.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Right, does that sound good? Yeah? It does.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Pick back up part two with a wide album.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Let's do it?
Speaker 1 (46:06):
All right? All right?
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Well, in the meantime, while you guys are chewing over
what Chuck just said, you can send us an email
the Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and as always,
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff Youshould
Know dot Com. Stuff You Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (46:24):
For more podcasts, My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
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