Charles Manson Murder Case

The Manson murder case was originally called the “Tate case,” or sometimes the “Tate- La Bianca case.” But when Charles Manson, a small (5'2") ex-con with a checkered criminal history emerged as the principal suspect and eventual defendant in the case, he was so charismatic that he actually upstaged the victims, three of whom (on the first and main night of murder) were relatively well-known: the beautiful actress Sharon Tate, who was the wife of movie director Roman Polanski; Abigail Folger, heiress to the vast Folger coffee fortune; and Jay Sebring, the famed hairstylist to the stars. (The other two victims were Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent.)

As I said in my summation to the jury at the trial, “On the hot summer night of Aug. 8, 1969, Charles Manson, the Mephistophelean guru who raped and bastardized the minds of all those who gave themselves so totally to him, sent out from the fires of hell at Spahn Ranch three, heartless, blood-thirsty robots ... What resulted was perhaps the most inhuman, nightmarish, horror-filled hour of savage murder in the recorded annals of crime. As the helpless, defenseless victims begged and screamed out into the night for their lives, their life-blood gushed out of their bodies, forming rivers of gore ... The very next night, Leno and Rosemary La Bianca were brutally butchered to death to satisfy Charles Manson’s homicidal madness.”

The Manson murders made headlines around the world, and the world press covered the trial.

Because the murders were not only terribly brutal and savage (169 stab wounds for both nights of murder, seven gunshot wounds), but appeared to be so random and with no discernible or conventional motive like robbery or burglary, they induced a lot of fear throughout Los Angeles, particularly in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, the heart of the movie colony where the Tate murders occurred. People were abruptly dropped from guest lists, and parties were cancelled because no one knew if the killers were among them. Esquire magazine said, “In the great houses of Bel Air, terror sends people flying to their telephones when a branch falls from a tree outside.”

The very thought of young people (the killers, mostly girls, ranged in age from 19 to 24), dressed in black, armed with sharp knives, entering the homes of total strangers in the middle of the night and mercilessly stabbing them to death is so horrendous a thought that it’s difficult for the average person to even contemplate a thought like this for more than a moment. You don’t even see things like this in horror movies.

I believe the main reason for the continuing fascination with the Manson murder case is that it is probably the most bizarre and far-out mass murder case in American history (e.g., Manson himself, whose nomadic band of followers thought was Jesus Christ and the devil all wrapped up into one person; Manson’s motive for the murders, to start a race war he called Helter Skelter; the influence of the Beatles and the bible on Manson and the murders that ensued, etc.). And people, for whatever reason, are magnetically fascinated by things that are strange and bizarre.

But certainly, another compelling reason for the continuing fascination with the Manson case is that evil has its allure, and Manson has become a metaphor for evil. For example, Mike Tyson told the Nevada Boxing Commission when he sought to have his boxing license restored, “I’m a bad guy, but I’m not Charles Manson.” New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman described Osama bin Laden as “a combination of Charles Manson and [corporate executive] Jack Welch.”

Evil’s corollary, fright, also has its allure. The quality of a horror movie, we know, is directly proportionate to the extent it terrifies. What makes Manson particularly frightening is that with other prominent mass murderers — from Henry Lee Lucas, Charles Whitman, and Richard Speck, to Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez and John Gacy — they committed the murders themselves. Manson, on the other hand, got other people, without asking any questions, to murder complete strangers for him at his command, making the probability of death exponential and thus making him more frightening. Years ago, Rolling Stone magazine called Manson “the most dangerous man alive.”

As to the significance of the murders, at a minimum they were a reaffirmation of the verity that whenever people turn over their minds to a dictatorial figure, the potential for this kind of madness exists.

But many see much more significant sociological implications to the murders; namely, that the Manson murders were the “end of innocence” (the '60s mantra of love, peace and sharing) in our country. In Joan Didion’s memoir of the era, The White Album, she writes, “Many people believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, and in a sense this is true.” ABC’s Diane Sawyer says that the Manson case “brought an end to the decade of love. Something changed in the heart of America” with the murders.

Under these views, the murders represented a watershed moment in the evolving social structure of our society, the counterculture flower gone to seed. As Time magazine said on the 20th anniversary of the murders, the three female killers were “any family’s daughters, caught up in the wave of drugs, sex and revolutionary blather that had swept up a generation of young people.”

Although I am not a student of contemporary history, I can add the observation that before the murders, no one identified hippies with murder -- only drugs, free love, and peace. Indeed, the main iconic symbol that came out of the counterculture era’s opposition to the Vietnam War, the political raison d’être fueling the movement, was the peace symbol, a circle within which were the words, “Make Love Not War.” Yes, hippies wanted to change the status quo, but only by peaceful means, not violence. But then the Manson family came along, looking and living like typical hippies, but being mass murderers. And this shocked the nation and unquestionably was injurious to the counterculture movement in our society. One tangible piece of evidence of this is that before the murders it was very common for people to pick up hitchhiking hippies. But it was said many times back then that after the murders, this stopped, drivers seeing the image of a possible Manson when they saw a hippie with long hair.

Charles Manson, and the murders he spawned, remains, to this very day, of interest to millions of people, seemingly endless documentaries continuing to be made for cable television. And next to Jack the Ripper, whose identity still hasn’t been conclusively established, Manson is probably the most famous and notorious mass murderer ever.