Ep.7 The Manson Family

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to Hidden Cults, the podcast that shines a light
into the shadows. Here we explore the strange, the secretive,
and the spiritually seductive. From fringe religions to doomsday prophets,
from communes to corporate empires. These are the movements that
promised meaning and sometimes delivered something far more dangerous. I'm
your host, and in each episode, we uncover the true
stories behind the world's most controversial cults, the leaders who

(00:47):
led them, the followers who followed, and the echoes they
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(01:10):
Reach out. The first step is often the hardest, but
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future Listener Stories episode. Your anonymity is guaranteed always today's episode,
let's begin the Manson Family. Part one. The Drifter and

(01:31):
the Dream The early life of Charles Manson. Charles Manson
was not born into infamy. He was born into instability.
On November twelfth, nineteen thirty four, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a
child entered the world without a father, without a plan,
and without a clear future. His mother, Kathleen Maddox, was
just sixteen at the time. Unmarried and adrift. Kathleen had

(01:53):
run away from home, dabbled in petty crime, and drifted
through fleeting relationships. When she gave birth, the name on
the certain was no name, Maddocks. It would take weeks
before the child had a name, Charles Mills Manson. From
the beginning, Charlie's world was built on absence. His mother
was young, impulsive, and unprepared. His biological father, a man

(02:15):
named Colonel Scott, vanished almost immediately after Kathleen became pregnant. Later,
she married a man named William Manson, giving Charles his
last name, but that marriage, too was short lived. What
followed was a childhood defined by movement, by neglect, by
a boy learning early that nothing stays, not parents, not homes,
not affection. By the time he was five years old,

(02:38):
Charles had already experienced abandonment in its most literal form. Kathleen,
still in her teens and already struggling to survive, would
sometimes disappear for days, leaving the boy with neighbors or relatives.
Once she traded him for a picture of beer to
a childless waitress, only to return hours later to reclaim
him with the help of her brother. These weren't urban legends.

(03:00):
These were the stories Manson himself would later confirm in interviews,
sometimes laughing, sometimes distant. They were early markers of a
fractured mind forming without anchor. In nineteen thirty nine, when
Charles was just five, Kathleen was arrested and sentenced to
five years in prison for armed robbery. During her incarceration,
Charles was sent to live with his strict religious aunt

(03:21):
and uncle in West Virginia. They believed in discipline, in rules,
in hard work, and they had little patience for a
child who had already learned how to manipulate adults to
get what he wanted. When Kathleen was finally released, Charles
was nine, He ran into her arms at the prison gates.
He later said, thinking that everything was going to change,

(03:41):
that everything would be different now it wasn't. They moved again,
this time to a run down neighborhood in Indianapolis. Kathleen
tried to stay straight, taking work when she could, drinking
when she couldn't. Charles, now an elementary school, began getting
into trouble. He stole from stores, he skipped class, He
started lying as naturally as breathing, and somewhere in those

(04:04):
early years, the need to control began to take root.
If he couldn't trust adults to keep their promises, he
would learn to make people do what he wanted. By
the time he was thirteen, Charles had been sent to
Gibalt School for Boys, a Catholic reform school in Tererehote, Indiana.
It was the first in a long series of institutions.
From there, it was an endless cycle, boys homes, juvenile

(04:27):
detention centers, reformatories. At each stop, Charles learned something new.
He learned how to charm the staff, how to exploit
the weaknesses of other boys, how to fake remorse, how
to vanish emotionally when threatened. But most of all, he
learned that the system could not change him. That he
could survive it, bend it, even use it. But he
would not be shaped by it. His time in reform

(04:49):
school was punctuated by escapes. He ran away, often living
on the streets, stealing cars, committing petty theft, and always
getting caught. He spent time at the Indiana Boys School,
a notoriously harsh institution where beatings and humiliation were part
of the culture. There, Manson claimed he was repeatedly assaulted,
both physically and sexually. Whether all of his stories were

(05:11):
true as difficult to verify, but the trauma, real or embellished,
became part of his mythology. Pain turned into currency, abuse
into leverage. In nineteen fifty one, at the age of seventeen,
Manson was transferred to federal custody after stealing a car
and driving it across state lines, a federal offense under
the Dire Act. He was sent to the National Training

(05:33):
School for Boys in Washington, d c. Where he was
classified as aggressive, ants to social, with an IQ of
one hundred and nine. Not a genius, but bright, manipulative, unstable.
His psychological evaluations revealed a pattern of deceit, dependency and
a growing resentment of authority. He was transferred again, this
time to the Natural Bridge Honour Camp in Virginia, a

(05:54):
facility with less security. The plan was to prepare him
for release. Instead, he raped another boy at knife point.
He was transferred yet again, this time to a maximum
security facility. By the time Charles Manson turned twenty one,
he had spent more than half his life in institutions.
He had no formal education beyond the basics, no home,

(06:16):
no stable relationships. But what he did have was a talent.
He could read people. He knew what they wanted to hear.
He could mimic sincerity, he could invent stories. He could
make himself into whatever the moment demanded, and slowly those
skills became his identity. Not a liar but a shape shifter,
not a criminal, but a survivor of the world's indifference.

(06:37):
In nineteen fifty five, Manson married a waitress named Rosalie
Jean Willis in West Virginia. She was young, impressionable, and
drawn to his confidence. They moved to Los Angeles, where
Manson was arrested yet again for stealing a car. While
in prison, Rosalie gave birth to his first child, Charles
Manson Junior. For a brief moment, Manson imagined a normal life,

(06:58):
but the moment didn't last left him. His parole was
revoked and the cycle resumed. The next decade would blur.
Manson cycled through petty crime, short term jobs, arrests, parole violations.
He forged checks, pimped underage girls, and spent time in
at least three different prisons. But it was during this
time behind bars that a new version of Manson began

(07:19):
to form. He studied scientology, He read Dale Carnegie's How
to Win Friends and Influence People. He practiced guitar. He
watched how the Black Muslims recruited new members, how the
Nation of Islam built loyalty, how groups could be constructed
from the inside out. He paid close attention. By the
early nineteen sixties, Manson had begun crafting a leaf system

(07:40):
that blended bits and pieces of everything. He'd absorbed scientology's
internal cosmology, Christianity's prophetic cadence, Eastern mysticism, and his own
fantasy of being someone with power over life and death.
He wasn't yet a cult leader, but the blueprint was
already in his mind. In nineteen sixty seven, at the
age of thirty two, Charles Manson was released from Terminal

(08:02):
Island prison, in California. He had spent seventeen of the
last twenty years in custody. When the authorities asked him
where he wanted to go, Manson reportedly said, I don't
want to leave prison. This is my home. But they
let him out anyway. He arrived in San Francisco at
the tail end of the Summer of Love, a city
buzzing with revolution, music, drugs, and dreams. Young people were

(08:26):
fleeing the expectations of their parents, rejecting the war, searching
for meaning. They were wide open to anyone who spoke
with conviction, who offered answers, who promised truth wrapped in charisma.
Manson saw that he didn't just see it, he saw
himself in it. A generation wandering in the wilderness, and
he would be their voice, their shepherd, their savior. He

(08:48):
began building his following almost immediately. He played guitar on
street corners, He quoted scripture, he spoke in riddles, and
most importantly, he listened. He listened to the broken pieces
people carried, their disappointments, their confusion, their hunger for love.
He mirrored them back with intensity, made them feel chosen,
made them feel seen. His earliest followers were young women, runaways, dropouts, drifters,

(09:13):
women like Mary Brunner, Susan Atkins, Patricia Creenwinkle. They gave
him their time, their devotion, their bodies. In return, he
gave them a vision that the world was dying, that
a great race war was coming, that only they, the
chosen few, would survive to rebuild it. His message wasn't
fully formed yet, but the seed had been planted. Charles Manson,

(09:35):
the neglected child of the depression, the institutionalized drifter, the
failed criminal, had finally found his audience, and in the
cracked sidewalks of hate Ashbury, he began to shape his truth.
Not to save people, but to own them. In Part two,
we follow the Manson families migration from San Francisco to
the California Desert. The commune takes shape, the prophecy takes form,

(09:57):
and the line between ideology and control begins to vanish.
Part two, the family grows from Hayde Ashbury to the desert.
When Charles Manson walked out of prison in March of
nineteen sixty seven, he was stepping into a world that
had finally caught up to him. San Francisco, by then
had become the spiritual epicenter of America's counterculture. It was

(10:17):
a place where young people came not just to rebel,
but to reimagine everything, religion, politics, sexuality, even identity itself.
And here came Manson, a man who had spent most
of his life locked away, stepping into a city teeming
with seekers, wanderers and lost children looking for something to
believe in. He arrived with a guitar slung across his back,

(10:40):
a mindful of ideas lifted from prisons and paperbacks, and
an uncannyability to read the room. While other men preached
revolution through politics or poetry, Manson offered something more intimate.
He offered belonging love, a spiritual awakening tailored for the moment.
He didn't shout over crowds. He whispered, He listened, and

(11:02):
when someone gave him their pain, he didn't judge them.
He reflected it back, shined it up, and made it sacred.
That was the hook. Manson's early days in San Francisco
were modest. He played guitar in Golden Gate Park, He
loitered in cafes and on the sidewalks of hate Ashbury,
engaging in long looping conversations with the kind of people
no one else bothered to talk to. Young women, mostly alone, high, disoriented.

(11:27):
They were exactly the kind of people he understood. He
had been abandoned too, he had been overlooked, and now
he told them he saw them. He knew they were special,
that they had a destiny, that the world had lied
to them, but he never would. The first to join
him was Mary Brunner, a twenty three year old librarian
from Wisconsin. She had moved to Berkeley hoping for change,

(11:48):
but found loneliness instead. Manson spoke to her gently, with patience.
Within weeks, he had moved into her apartment, and soon
after he began inviting other women to stay there too.
The communal life began not on a farm or in
a desert, but in a small apartment crowded with mattresses
and marijuana smoke. Manson called his group the family. He

(12:08):
did not define it with rules. He shaped it like
a dream. There were no fixed ideologies, only mantras. Love
is everything, ego is death, the system is broken, everything
is now, And at the center of it all was Charlie.
Not just a man but a mirror. His followers believed
he was more than human. Some thought he was Jesus returned.

(12:29):
Others believed he was the devil reimagined as a prophet.
Manson encouraged both interpretations. He was a sponge of other
people's wisdom, a thief of philosophy. He borrowed language from
the Beatles, from Eastern mysticism, from the Bible, and from
the fringe spiritual texts he had read in prison. Then
he filtered it through a voice that was part seduction,

(12:49):
part's sermon. When he spoke, he used repetition, rhythm, and contradiction.
He confused people, disoriented them, then offered himself as the answer.
It wasn't just mind games, it was psychological seduction. As
the family grew, they began to drift away from hate Ashbury.
The scene had changed. The summer of love was over,

(13:10):
The drugs had gotten harder, the energy had curdled. What
had once felt like utopia was becoming darker, more desperate.
Manson sensed it, and, just like he had learned in prison,
when things got unstable, it was time to move. They
traveled south along the California coast, crashing in abandoned buildings
and makeshift camps. Charlie stole cars, the women panhandled. They

(13:31):
lived off garbage and handouts, moving like nomads. But even
in that chaos there was ritual. Manson kept a tight
grip on his followers minds. He would force them to
do LSD, then deconstruct their personalities. He stripped them of
their names, their histories, their boundaries. He broke them down
until all that remained was the family. In the fall

(13:52):
of nineteen sixty seven, they made their way to Los Angeles. There,
in the fringes of the city's sprawl, they found new
terrain to an habit Beaches Hills Canyons. They met Dennis Wilson,
drummer of the Beach Boys, who picked up two of
the family women hitchhiking and brought them to his home.
That encounter would change everything. Wilson became enchanted by the

(14:14):
women and by Manson, who soon moved his entire group
into Wilson's mansion on Sunset Boulevard. They lived there for months,
eating his food, spending his money, and using his connections.
Manson saw the music industry as his next frontier. He
wanted to be famous, not just a guru, but a star.
Through Wilson, he met record producers, musicians and actors. He

(14:36):
played his songs, he passed out acid. He preached the
coming transformation, but the industry people didn't take him seriously.
They humored him. Some saw him as talented, others saw
him as dangerous. No one gave him a contract. This
rejection lit something in Manson. It confirmed what he already believed.
The world was corrupt. The system would never let someone

(14:58):
like him win, not through talent, not through charm. He
needed something bigger, something beyond music. He began speaking more
frequently about a coming war. He called it Helter Skelter,
borrowing the name from a Beatles song, but in Manson's mind,
it meant the collapse of the white world, a race war,
an apocalypse. He believed it was imminent, and he believed

(15:20):
the family would survive it, not just survive, but emerge
as leaders. They needed a base, somewhere remote, somewhere they
could disappear from the world. They found it at Spawn Ranch,
a dilapidated old movie set on the edge of the
San Fernando Valley. The owner, George Spahn, was in his
eighties nearly blind. Manson convinced him to let the family
stay in exchange for chores and sex. They moved in horses,

(15:44):
roamed the dusty trails, old Western buildings sat baking in
the sun. The family lived in trailers, lean tos, and shacks.
They dressed in rags, bathed in dirt, and performed mock
rituals under the moon. At Spawn Ranch, the line between
theater and reality began to vanish. Manson set up strict rules,
no watches, no calendars. Time had to disappear. Followers were

(16:06):
renamed Susan Atkins became Sadie. Patricia Crenwinkle became Katie, Linda Kasabian,
Leslie Van Houghten. They were all given new roles, their
old lives erased. He forbade eye contact without permission. He
chose who could sleep with whom he declared himself the
axis of all love and pain. The drugs intensified LSD, mescaline, psilocybin,

(16:27):
but always under Charlie's guidance. He would dose his followers heavily,
then stay sober to control the trip. He used the
psychedelic experience not for liberation, but for indoctrination. He would
whisper his visions into their heads while they were at
their most vulnerable He told them that he was God,
that the Beatles were sending him secret messages, that Helter

(16:49):
Skelter was coming and they had to be ready. Violence
became part of the teaching. He made them slaughter animals,
sometimes for food, sometimes for ritual. He spoke of death
as release, of killing as cleansing. The family would gather
in the evenings around a fire, singing songs, retelling their stories,
repeating his phrases like scripture, and always the same refrain,

(17:11):
Charlie loves you, Charlie knows, Charlie sees. By nineteen sixty nine,
Manson's paranoia was growing. He believed the government was watching,
that Black revolutionaries were preparing for war, that the end
was near. He trained the family in survivalism, how to
live off the land, how to use weapons, how to
obey without thought. Dissent was punished, Escape was nearly impossible.

(17:34):
He controlled their food, their sleep, their access to the
outside world, and still more people came. The family was
now dozens strong, a blend of runaways, ex cons, middle
class dropouts, and starr eyed idealists who had been shattered
and remade in Manson's image, And the desert was calling.
In Part three, we follow the family's descent into darker territory,

(17:56):
the failed dreams of stardom, the tightening grip of paranoia,
and the moment when words turned into blood. Part three,
Prophecy and Blood, The Road to Helter Skelter. By early
nineteen sixty nine, the world outside spawn Ranch had started
to feel more like fiction to the people living within it.
Days blurred into each other, time had no meaning. The

(18:18):
news from Los Angeles, from the country at large, was
filtered entirely through Charlie. He explained the headlines, He interpreted
the music. He read hidden meanings into album lyrics and
public events. The family didn't watch television. They watched Manson,
and he told them that everything they saw unfolding, the protests,
the assassinations, the chaos, was proof that Helter Skelter was coming.

(18:42):
This was not a metaphor not to him and not
to them. Helter Skelter, in Manson's cosmology, was the coming
race war. He believed, or claimed to believe, that black
Americans would rise up and overthrow the white establishment in
a violent revolution, but they wouldn't know how to lead,
He said, the wouldn't know how to rule, so they
would need a guide a savior, and that savior would

(19:05):
be the Manson family, who would survive the conflict by
hiding out in the desert, waiting until the dust settled
before emerging to take control of the new world. It
was absurd, it was delusional, and it was deadly serious.
Manson's obsession with this prophecy escalated as his dreams of
musical success collapsed. He had pinned his hopes on Dennis

(19:26):
Wilson and Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day and
a well connected record producer. Melcher had visited Spawn Ranch once.
He had listened to Manson play, but he hadn't signed him.
In fact, by early nineteen sixty nine, Melcher had moved
out of the house at ten hundred and fifty Cellow
Drive in Benedict Canyon, the home Manson would never forget.

(19:47):
That rejection stung. It wasn't just a personal slight. It
was a denial of power. Manson believed his music was
more than art, it was prophecy. He insisted that the
Beatles White Out album had been written for him, that
songs like Helter Skelter, revolution Ie and Piggies were secret messages,
codes pointing toward the coming apocalypse. He played these songs

(20:09):
on repeat, He preached over them, he built rituals around them,
and every time someone doubted, he would take them deeper
into the acid trips and deeper into the doctrine until
doubt dissolved. The desert became central to the plan. Manson
believed that beneath the desert floor in Death Valley, there
was a bottomless pit, a place of refuge, a network

(20:30):
of caves where the family would live through the war.
He spoke of it like a real location, as vivid
as any map. In the spring of nineteen sixty nine,
he sent some of the family members out to scout
the area to locate this underground sanctuary. They found an
abandoned mining outpost called Barker Ranch. It was remote, accessible
only by rough winding trails, surrounded by the vast silence

(20:53):
of the Mojave. Manson believed it was close, that the
entrance to the final phase of their destiny was near.
They weren't ready, not yet. The war hadn't started, the
world had not yet ignited, so he would help it along.
Manson began speaking openly about needing to show Blackie how
to do it, to ignite the chaos himself. He framed

(21:14):
it as a spark an event that would trigger the uprising,
and like everything else in the family, it would be
done without fear, without ego, without question. He had spent
years breaking his followers down. Now he would build them
into soldiers. In July nineteen sixty nine, a man named
Bernard Lots of Papa Crow called Manson in a rage. Crow,

(21:35):
a black drug dealer, believed that one of Manson's followers,
Charles Tex Watson, had ripped him off. Crow threatened retaliation.
Manson responded by shooting him in the stomach at point
blank range inside an apartment in Hollywood. Manson believed he
had killed him. He hadn't, but the event solidified something
in his mind. The war had begun. It was time

(21:56):
to act. Tex Watson Wants, a clean cut athlete from Texas,
had become Manson's enforcer. He was deep in the ideology.
He had given up his old life completely, and now
Manson would use him. On August eighth, nineteen sixty nine,
Manson gave the order. He told Watson to take three
family women, Susan Atkins, Patricia Crenwinkle, and Linda Kasabian and

(22:20):
go to that house where Melcher used to live. He said,
totally destroy everyone in it. Make it as gruesome as
you can. The house was no longer occupied by Terry Melcher.
It had been rented to film director Roman Polanski and
his wife, actress Sharon Tate. Polanski was in Europe at
the time. Tate, eight and a half months pregnant, was
at home with several friends. What happened that night was

(22:41):
not just a murder. It was theater ritual chaos made manifest.
Watson cut the phone lines before entering the property. They
climbed through a window. Inside were Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring,
Abigail Folger, wotchiek Rakowski, and Stephen Parent, a visitor who
had come to see the caretaker. Parent was shot first
in his car as he tried to leave. Inside the house,

(23:03):
the violence was staggering. Watson stabbed and shot the women
followed his lead. Atkins carved the word pig into the
door with Tate's blood. They left messages in blood on
the walls. They believed they were initiating helter skelter. Tate
begged for the life of her unborn child. She was
stabbed sixteen times. The next night, they struck again. This time,

(23:25):
the target was chosen more deliberately. Manson himself went to
the house first, scouted the layout, and selected the victims.
He left before the murders took place, but his fingerprints
were all over it. The victimss were Leno and Rosemary LaBianca,
a wealthy couple living in the Los Filese neighborhood. They
were bound, stabbed, mutilated. The words death to pigs and

(23:47):
Helter Skelter misspelled were written in blood on the walls.
A fork was left protruding from Leno Labianca's stomach. Manson
had his chaos. For a brief period, Los Angeles was
paralyzed with fear. The press linked the murders to the occult,
to Satanism, to unknown forces hiding within the city's glamorous surface.

(24:07):
The LAPD was overwhelmed. There was no immediate connection between
the murders. The randomness of the victims made them harder
to trace, and the family back at spawn ranch carried
on as if nothing had happened. But the spiral was beginning.
The ranch was under surveillance for unrelated crimes. The family
had been stealing cars, converting volkswagens into dune buggies and

(24:30):
stockpiling weapons. On August sixteenth, police rated Spawn Ranch, arresting
Manson and twenty five others, but the charges were minor.
They were released quickly. For a moment, it seemed like
they had gotten away with it. Still, cracks were forming.
Linda Kasabian, who had been present during the Tate murders
but had not participated directly, began to distance herself. She

(24:52):
left the family. Others were growing uneasy, the drugs were
wearing thin, the glamour of the desert was evaporating. In October,
the family relocated to Barker Ranch, deeper in the desert.
It was harsher there, more isolated. Manson believed it was
the final step before the revolution, but law enforcement was
closing in. Another raid took place in late October. This

(25:13):
time the charges stuck. The family was arrested on suspicion
of car theft. Then in custody, Susan Atkins began to talk.
She bragged to a cellmate about the murders, about Helter Skelter,
about how they had killed the actress. She was transferred
to Los Angeles and began testifying before a grand jury.
Her testimony was detailed cold. She spoke of blood, of laughter,

(25:37):
of Manson's orders. The connection was made, The dots were joined,
and the trial of the century was about to begin.
In Part four, the courtroom becomes the stage. Manson turns
the legal system into performance art, his followers stand by him,
and America stares into the face of a new kind
of evil. Part four The Trial theater of control. The

(26:00):
trial of Charles Manson began long before a jury was seated.
It began in whispers and headlines, in the quiet horror
of a city trying to make sense of something senseless.
In the fall of nineteen sixty nine, when the details
of the Tate and LaBianca murders became public, Los Angeles
and the nation was already suffocating under the weight of
a cultural hangover. The peace and Love generation had curdled

(26:22):
into something else, something darker, and now standing at the
center of that rupture was a wild eyed man with
a swastika carved into his forehead and a grin that
never quite reached his eyes. The public didn't know what
to make of Manson. He didn't fit into any recognizable mold.
He wasn't a serial killer. In the traditional sense. He
hadn't physically killed anyone, not with his own hands, yet

(26:45):
he was being charged with seven counts of first degree
murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. The
prosecution argued that he had ordered the killings, controlled them,
orchestrated them with a level of manipulation that rendered him
more dangerous than any man with a night life. The
story wasn't about one killer. It was about a cult,
a family, a prophet who had promised salvation through slaughter.

(27:09):
It was the kind of story that television couldn't look
away from. On December first, nineteen sixty nine, Manson was
officially indicted, along with four of his followers, Susan Atkins,
Patricia Crenwinkle, Leslie Van Houghton, and Charles tex Watson. Watson
was in Texas at the time fighting extradition. The others
were in Los Angeles County jail. Atkins, who had once

(27:30):
been the prosecution's star witness, had recanted her grand jury
testimony by the time the trial began, but it didn't matter.
The investigation had already picked up momentum and the state
was ready to make its case. The lead prosecutor was
Vincent Bugliosi, a young and meticulous attorney from the Los
Angeles District Attorney's Office. Bugliosi didn't just want convictions. He

(27:51):
wanted to prove that Manson's ideology, his philosophy of helter skelter,
had directly led to murder, that the man sitting in
front of the court, rest in buckskin, fringe and barefoot,
was not a joke, not a clown, but a manipulator
so powerful he could kill without lifting a weapon. The
defense was scattered and strange. Manson, who initially tried to

(28:14):
represent himself, constantly clashed with the court. His behavior oscillated
between charming and violent. He carved the swastika into his
forehead mid trial, after earlier etching an X to show
that he had been crossed out by society. He disrupted proceedings,
shouted at the judge, and once leapt across the council table,
trying to attack the bench. His followers, meanwhile, acted like

(28:36):
loyal apostles. They sang outside the courthouse, they shaved their heads,
they carved xes into their foreheads, and they obeyed his
every signal inside the courtroom. The spectacle never stopped from
the beginning Manson refused to play by the rules. He
gave rambling monologue, citing spiritual law instead of civil code,

(28:56):
claimed he was innocent, that the system was corrupt, that
he was being crucified for preaching love. He compared himself
to Jesus, to Hitler, to Buddha. He spoke in riddles.
At times, he said nothing at all, but Bugliosi kept
to the facts. He built the case peace by piece.
Witness by witness Linda Kasabian, who had participated in both
knights of murder but had not physically harmed anyone, was

(29:19):
given immunity in exchange for her testimony. She described in
chilling detail how the killings unfolded, how Manson planned them,
how he handed out instructions, how his words became blood.
Her testimony lasted for weeks. She spoke of the fear,
the drugs, the ritual. She described how Manson controlled the family,
how his philosophy erased guilt, how he framed the murders

(29:41):
as necessary sacrifices for a new world. The defense tried
to portray her as unstable, a liar, but the jury
listened and they believed her. Other witnesses included former family members,
who had defected before the murders. They spoke of the
atmosphere at Spawn Ranch, the rehearsals for Apocalypse, the rill,
the obedience. One woman testified that Manson had once told her,

(30:04):
if you kill someone and you are truly without ego,
it means nothing. Another described how he had beaten her
and said it was to release her from her ego.
The prosecution also presented evidence of the messages written in blood,
the references to Beatles lyrics, the White albums perceived significance.
Bugliosi argued that Manson had constructed a belief system so insular,

(30:27):
so air tight, that his followers could no longer distinguish
between metaphor and command. He wasn't just giving them orders,
he was rewriting their reality. Throughout the trial, Manson remained
the center of gravity. Reporters followed his every move, Artists
sketched his every expression, even when he said nothing. The
courtroom turned toward him. The women on trial with him

(30:48):
atkins Creenwinkle van Houghton seemed to look to him for direction.
When he laughed, they laughed, When he glared, they sat still,
And when he was removed from court they carried on
in his name. The trial lasted nine months, one of
the longest and most expensive in California history at the time.
The defense rested without calling a single witness. Manson had

(31:10):
tried to testify but was denied. When he finally did
speak without the jury present, he delivered a long, theatrical soliloquy.
These children that come at you with knives, they are
your children, he said, you taught them. I didn't teach them.
I just tried to help them stand up. It was
a strange, performative moment. The courtroom was silent. Even Bugliosi,

(31:32):
who had heard Manson rant before, admitted later that the
monologue was chilling because it wasn't entirely wrong. These young women,
these killers, had once been ordinary people, daughters, students, workers.
They had not been born into violence. They had walked
into it, and they had done it smiling. The jury
deliberated for nine days. On January twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one,

(31:55):
they returned guilty verdicts for all defendants on all counts.
The trial moved into the penalty phase. The prosecution pushed
for the death penalty, the defense asked for mercy, and
Manson's followers still loyal took the stand to say they
had acted alone, that Charlie was innocent, that he hadn't
given them orders. It didn't work. The jury sentenced all

(32:15):
four to death. The women wept, Manson grinned, but the
story didn't end there. In nineteen seventy two, the California
Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Manson's sentence and those
of his co defendants was commuted to life in prison.
He would remain behind bars for the rest of his life,
filing parole requests that were denied again and again, often

(32:37):
accompanied by rambling statements and dark warnings. The trial had
done more than convict. It had revealed how charisma could
metastasize into command, how belief unmoored from reason could become justification,
how ordinary people could be reshaped into killers by the slow,
relentless erosion of the self. The Manson family was not
just a group. It was a system, a controlled environment,

(32:59):
a laboratory of a edience, and its results had been
etched in blood. In the aftermath, the country tried to
make sense of it. Books were written, films were made,
The word cult entered common usage with a new kind
of weight. Manson became a symbol not just of madness,
but of potential, of what could happen if someone figured
out the formula, if someone wanted power badly enough to

(33:19):
steal minds instead of money. And always behind it all
was the question no one could answer. How had it happened,
Not the logistics, but the conversion. How had these girls,
these quiet suburban daughters, ended up at the LaBianca house
with knives in their hands. How had they become convinced
that murder was mercy, that Charlie was truth. The trial

(33:41):
never answered that, It only recorded it. In Part five,
we moved beyond the courtroom into the long shadow of
the family the years that followed, the parole hearings, the interviews,
the cultural aftershocks. Manson was locked away, but his myth
had already escaped. Part five Echoes of the Family, Aftermath

(34:05):
and Survival. When the doors of the courtroom finally closed
behind Charles Manson and his followers in nineteen seventy one,
it did not feel like an ending. The verdict was
in the nation had watched, the legal system had spoken,
But the Manson family had never been just about one man,
or even one group of murders. What lingered was something
harder to shake, the after image of a story so bizarre,

(34:29):
so steeped in both horror and absurdity, that it refused
to settle into history. For years after the trial, America
would remain haunted by the family's shadow. Charles Manson was
transferred to California's San Quentin State Prison, where he began
serving his life sentence. He would never see freedom again,
but behind bars, he remained a public figure. He granted interviews,

(34:51):
He mailed cryptic letters, He etched swastikas into his forehead
with sharpened razors. His presence lingered on television screens and
in tablet lloyds. Manson became a cultural symbol. Some saw
him as the embodiment of evil, others as a cautionary tale,
and a few, disturbingly as a misunderstood prophet. He did
not fade away. Almost immediately, groups began forming around the

(35:14):
Manson mythology. People who had never met him wrote to
him in prison, visited him, and even declared their allegiance.
A new kind of cult began to emerge, not centered
on direct contact, but on the idea of Manson. The
family name lived on, not through daily rituals or commune life,
but through ideology and obsession. The late nineteen seventies and

(35:35):
nineteen eighties saw a wave of self styled accolytes claiming
they were continuing his work. In nineteen seventy five, Lynnette
Squeaky From, one of Manson's most devoted original followers who
had not been involved in the murders, made headlines again
when she attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento.
She pointed a cult forty five at him less than

(35:56):
forty feet away, but the gun did not fire. Was
tackled immediately and later sentenced to life in prison. From
claimed she had acted to draw attention to environmental destruction
and the plight of the redwoods, but her actions were
deeply rooted in her continued devotion to Manson. She referred
to him as a man of love and claimed she

(36:18):
had never left the family. From's act shocked the country.
It was a reminder that while Manson sat behind bars,
his reach extended beyond the prison walls. The ideology he
instilled had not died with the trial. His followers, even
years later, were willing to kill. In the meantime, the
other members of the family who had been convicted of

(36:39):
murder began serving their life sentences. Patricia Creenwinkle, Susan Atkins,
Leslie Van Houten, and Charles tex Watson were all incarcerated
in California prisons. Over the years, each of them would
appear before parole boards, facing questions from state officials and
outrage from the families of victims. Their testimonies varied. Some
expressed remorse, others remained ambiguous, but none were freed, not

(37:03):
for decades. Susan Atkins, perhaps the most notorious among them
after Manson himself, had been deeply involved in the Tate murders.
She had bragged in jail about stabbing Sharon Tate. Her
early prison years were marked by defiance and loyalty to Manson,
but over time Atkins claimed to have found Christianity and
began to disavow Manson's teachings. She became a model prisoner,

(37:26):
marrying twice while incarcerated. In two thousand and nine, dying
of brain cancer, she applied for compassionate release. Her petition
was denied. She died in prison later that year. Tex
Watson also underwent what he described as a spiritual transformation.
He became an ordained minister and founded a prison ministry
from within the walls of Mule Creek State Prison. He

(37:47):
authored several books, including an autobiography titled Will You Die
for Me. In interviews, he accepted responsibility for the murders
and claimed that he had been brainwashed. He married wile
in prison, fathered children through conjugal visits before such rights
were revoked, and continued to file for parole. He was
denied every time. Leslie van Houghton's case gained particular attention

(38:11):
in the decades that followed. Of all the convicted family members,
van Houghton was the youngest, only nineteen at the time
of the murders. Her lawyers over the years argued that
she had been manipulated, psychologically broken down and should be
considered for release. Given her transformation in prison, she was
described by officials as rehabilitated, remorseful, and no longer a threat.

(38:34):
In the twenty tens and twenty twenties, parole boards repeatedly
recommended her release. Governors rejected it. The public memory of
the Manson killings remained too strong, the stain too deep.
Patricia Creenwinkle, like the others, eventually expressed remorse. She admitted
her participation in the killings and described Manson as a manipulative,
abusive figure who had convinced her to suspend her morality.

(38:58):
She gave multiple interviews over the years, appearing calm, articulate
and deeply reflective, and yet she too remained behind bars,
parole denied again and again outside prison walls. The public
fascination with the Manson family evolved into a kind of
morbid folklore. Movies were made, books filled shelves. Musicians referenced

(39:18):
him in lyrics. He was interviewed by Giraldo, Diane Sawyer,
and a host of lesser known documentarians. With each appearance,
Manson reminded the world why he was so dangerous. He
spoke in riddles, he contradicted himself, he laughed at death,
and sometimes, even through the grainy static of old VHS tape,

(39:38):
he seemed to be staring straight through the screen. By
the nineteen nineties, Manson's image had taken on a new dimension.
He was no longer just a killer's name. He had
become a kind of mythic figure, like a ghost that
lived between fact and fiction. His face appeared on t shirts,
his quotes were printed on posters, and though the horror
of what he'd orchestrated remained, time had sanded the edges.

(40:01):
A new generation knew his name before they knew his crimes.
In nineteen ninety seven, a bizarre moment occurred when a
young woman named Afton Elaine Burton, who called herself Star,
declared that she was engaged to marry Charles Manson. She
had moved to Corkor in California to be near the
prison and ran a website dedicated to defending him. Starr
claimed that Manson was misunderstood and that they were planning

(40:25):
to marry. The story made headlines not because it seemed
likely to succeed California law prevented inmates serving life without
parole from conjugal visits, but because it showed yet again
the enduring magnetism Manson held over certain people. Even in
his seventies, locked away, physically frail, he still held sway
over mines. Throughout all of this, the victims families were

(40:48):
never far from the spotlight. They attended parole hearings, They
spoke to reporters. They reminded the public again and again
of what had been taken. Charonate's mother, Doris became an
outspoken advocate for victim's rights. She worked tirelessly to ensure
that the voices of the murdered were not forgotten. After
her death, her daughter, Debortate, continued that fight. They kept

(41:10):
the wounds open, not out of cruelty, but because forgetting
was not an option. The Manson murders had created a
cultural trauma, one that pulsed through decades. It marked the
end of the nineteen sixties in a way no election
or protest ever could. The dream of peace and love
had been violated by a man who spoke in song,
lyrics and prophecy, who preached love while orchestrating slaughter, and

(41:34):
yet it also forced a deeper reckoning. In the years
after the trial, researchers, psychologists, and writers began to look
more closely at how Manson had done it, how he
had built control not through chains or cages, but through
the slow, deliberate breakdown of identity. Books like the lift
In Model explored thought reform and coercive persuasion. Others traced

(41:56):
the parallels between Manson's methods and those of political cults,
religious sex and extremist movements. The conclusions were uncomfortable because
What they found was not just madness but method. Manson
had isolated his followers. He had cut them off from
outside information. He had dismantled their sense of self through drugs, humiliation,

(42:17):
and contradiction. He had created a shared language, a shared enemy,
a shared destiny. And in that environment, murder had stopped
feeling like murder. It had become a symbol, a ritual,
a step towards something greater. That was the legacy he
left behind, not just death, but a blueprint. In Part six,
we confront that legacy directly, how Manson's methods have echoed

(42:39):
through time, how modern cults, movements, and ideologies still borrow
from his techniques, and how the story of One Man
became a warning far louder than any scream. Part six
The blueprint, influence, replication, and the shadow that remains long
after the courtrooms emptied, after the cell door's slam shut,

(42:59):
after the headline began to fade, Charles Manson remained where
he had always wanted to be, at the center of
the story. But it wasn't the story he had imagined,
not the one with him as the messiah of a
new world order, not the one where the family emerged
from the desert to lead civilization through the ashes of collapse. Instead,

(43:19):
Manson became something else, something perhaps even more dangerous. He
became a template. The Manson family was never meant to
be a moment. It was meant to be a movement.
That was Manson's vision, Twisted and contradictory as it was.
He had seen himself as a prophet, a musician, a revolutionary.
But when the dream of fame failed, when the record

(43:41):
deal never came, when the culture shifted without him, he
reached for something darker. He turned to control, to performance,
to violence, and in doing so he left behind more
than a series of murders. He left behind a playbook.
The tactics were simple but effective. Isolate your followers, strip
away their identities, feed them a steady diet of love

(44:01):
and fear. Make yourself the only source of truth. Use
language that loops in on itself. Invent an enemy, Declare
war on the world while claiming to be its savior.
And when obedience is absolute, demand proof, not just words, action,
something irreversible. It's a pattern that didn't begin with Manson,
and it didn't end with him. In the decades that followed,

(44:24):
researchers studying cult behavior, radicalization, and extremism, returned again and
again to the family as a case study. They traced
how Manson used drugs not just for escape but for indoctrination,
How he built dependency not through kindness but through ritualized submission,
how he reshaped perception by controlling every variable in his environment,

(44:45):
and how in the end he created a reality where
murder was not only acceptable, it was necessary. This was
the blueprint, a formula, and it didn't stay locked in
spawn Ranch. In the nineteen seventies, as new spiritual movements
blossomed across America, some carried echoes of the family, not
the violence always, but the structure, the charismatic leader, the

(45:06):
communal living, the rejection of external authority, and sometimes the
slow slide into coercion. Groups like Synanon, the Children of God,
and the Source Family shared certain threads. They attracted similar people, searchers, dropouts,
the disillusioned, and they often ended in scandal. Then came
the nineteen eighties and nineties with a different kind of fear.

(45:28):
Jonestown had already happened, Waco was on the horizon, and
Manson's name, once a symbol of the past, resurfaced in
every conversation about cults. His image became shorthand, a warning,
but also for some a symbol of defiance. By the
early two thousands, Manson was being quoted by white supremacists.

(45:48):
His concept of helter skelter, once rooted in a delusional
interpretation of a Beatles song, had been absorbed into broader
narratives about racial apocalypse. He had never explicitly aligned himself
with those movements, but he had flirted with the symbols,
the swastika, the language of us versus them, and his
rhetoric fractured as it was found new life in extremist circles,

(46:09):
in online forums and prison gangs. His name lingered, not
as a prophet anymore, but as a martyr for the
cause of chaos. And still the public fascination never waned.
Documentaries reenactments, each new generation rediscovered the story, each found
itself asking the same question, how did it happen? How
did someone like Manson take so many people so far

(46:30):
from themselves? The answer, as uncomfortable as it is, lies
in the nature of belief. Manson didn't create something from nothing.
He took broken pieces, loneliness, anger, idealism, fear and gave
them shape. He offered simple answers to complex pain. He
promised meaning to people who had been told they didn't matter,
and he wrapped it all in the language of love.

(46:52):
That's why it worked. It wasn't the madness that pulled
people in. It was the dream, the idea that the
world could be different, that they could be different, that
there was a family waiting for them, and once they belonged,
they would do anything to stay. This is what makes
the Manson stories so persistent, not the gore, not the spectacle,

(47:12):
but the reflection, because under the right circumstances, in the
right moment, belief can be shaped into anything, even a knife.
The family no longer exists, not in the way it
once did. The commune is gone, The murders are history.
The core members are aging or dead. Charles Manson died
in twenty seventeen at the age of eighty three. He

(47:33):
had been in prison for nearly fifty years. He died
in a hospital bed, surrounded by armed guards, still convinced
that he had changed the world, and maybe in a
way he had, but not the way he wanted. He
didn't start a revolution, he didn't ignite a race war.
He didn't lead the survivors into the desert to rebuild
a new society. He ended up as a warning label,

(47:54):
a test case, a symbol of how quickly ideals can
curdle into violence when led by someone who knows how
to push the right buttons. The legacy he left behind
is not one of prophecy. It's one of pathology. And
yet we keep returning to it because in every new
story of radicalization, every headline about cults or charismatic figures
gone rogue, we see the same patterns, the same eyes,

(48:18):
the same quiet unraveling of the self. That's the true
horror of the Manson family. It wasn't a closed chapter,
It was a door, and on the other side of
that door, new movements continued to form. In our next episode,
we turned to a cult far stranger, far more sprawling,
and perhaps even more difficult to categorize. A movement that
began with afrocentric teachings expanded into Ufo lore, Egyptian mysticism,

(48:42):
sovereign citizen ideology, and apocalyptic visions of spacefaring gods. A
group that built its own compound, founded its own church,
and operated under many names, but was ultimately known as
the New Wabbian Nation. Join us next time on Hidden
Cults as we unravel the rise and reach of one
of the most bizarre and complex belief systems in modern

(49:03):
American history. That's next time.

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Ep.7 The Manson Family

NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal