Dylan Howard - 26 Nov

Copyright 2019 by Dylan Howard and Andy Tillett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 221 River Street, 9th Floor, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

Front page Detectives is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

Visit our website at www.start-publishing.com.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Jacket design by 5mediadesign

Cover photo credit: The Mega Agency

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5508-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-951273-02-6

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION

Charles Mansons restless, manic, murderous eyes pierce through youoff the magazine page, out of court footage, through the years, through history.

Those eyes pierce all the way from 1969, when Manson ordered his brain-washed and drug-addled band of hippie kids to savagely murder seven people in a two-night orgy of violence, which shook America to its foundations, led Hollywood to start locking their doors, and in one stroke killed the peace and free love hippie movement.

The killings left seven cadavers stabbed so many times, gallons of their blood oozed across the floors of their luxury homes.

Chilling messages were daubed at the crime scenesPIG, HEALTER SKELTER, and POLITICAL PIGGYpuzzling clues which would baffle cops and only add to the panic and delirium created by the scenes where they were scrawled. They were meant to herald a war which would signal the beginning of the end times.

The Manson Family slaughtered the affluent and famous as barbarically and indifferently as the everyday people they also chose as victims.

The murderers lived in a series of sordid communes as a ragged band of 30taking LSD, hosting orgies and complying with whatever Charlie said. And Charlie didnt mince his words. Although he would later downplay his involvement in the murders, one of his disciples, Dianne Lake, readily described how he had taught female followers to stab victims in the chest and to rip up so their knives would hit the most of the bodys vital organs and cause maximum pain and damage.

The Manson murders provided some of the goriest images in an era studded with shocking crimes, from the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy to the senseless and brutal stabbing death of Kitty Genovese on a New York street in 1964, as pedestrians passively looked on.

The Manson Family killings grabbed headlines away from events of magnitude in the newspapers and evening news: race riots, the Vietnam war, the moon landing.

The Manson-led horrors which would captivate America came to public attention on August 9, 1969. The day before, beautiful actress Sharon Tate, 26, the wife of rising film director Roman Polanski, had been two short weeks from giving birth. She left her hilltop home, 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, for a dinner with friends at El Coyote Mexican restaurant in Hollywood, which still operates to this day.

The group returned to the Tate-Polanski home at around 10:30 and then all hell broke loose as a black-clad team of merciless and unstoppable demon hippies descended to kill them allseemingly for no reason.

The carnage was absolute. It was slow, sadistic, painful, and utterly without mercy. It was the climax of years of brooding and degeneracy, the real-world manifestation of the mad visions of a self-proclaimed messiah.

Serial murders like those carried out by the Manson Family were practically unheard of at the time. As more of his story became known, Manson earned himself a place alongside the most infamous figures in world history, such as Jack the Ripper and Adolf Hitler.

Charles Manson was a monster. And yet, merged with the flood of changefrom flower children to the Vietnam War, from the Woodstock music festival to the militant Black Panthershe became a symbol of a turbulent era. He may well have given the 60s counterculture its ultimate symbol.

***

Charles Manson strove to become a subversive, mind-controlling renegade without anything approaching a moral compassthe very definition of a villain, a title he accepted and relished.

His most notorious photographs are instantly recognizablea captivatingly wild-eyed figure, a shaggy rebel not unlike Che Guevara, cuffed and led by police. They appear on a variety of merchandise aimed at those who feel being disassociated from society is something to be celebrated.

There were, and still are, followers who consider Manson a heroperhaps intrigued by the more gruesome aspects of the Familys murders, or the fact they happened in the bright, shiny picture-perfect heart of Americas glamorous entertainment industryHollywood. Or maybe they are just people angry and jealous of the successful, rich and attractive, who feel murder is a valid way of getting their own back.

Certainly the four people butchered by the Family in the early hours of August 9, 1969, were part of the in crowd.

Sharon Tate was an actress whose accolades for her talent and her great beauty had steadily been getting louder.

Jay Sebrings empire of mens grooming services was flourishing.

Abigail Folger, the heiress to a fortune, was a much-revered socialite.

And Wojciech Frykowski (pronounced Voytek)was a young friend of Tates husband, Roman Polanski, who was trying to scratch out his place in Hollywood.

In contrast, the couple killed by the Family the next night, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were older and publicly anonymous. But they had made a fortune through hard work and had been looking forward to their retirement.

Clues and messages at the Tate/LaBianca crime scenes hinted at a larger, sinister motivation, although its hard to pinpoint what, as the groups acid-soaked beliefs and Mansons prison-learned pseudo-philosophical ramblings never added up to much.

But Manson was a charismatic leader and studied con-man who knew how to say what people desperately wanted to hear. Therein, perhaps, lies Mansons greatest dark attraction. He was a small, slight manarrest records show him at five foot seven, taller than the five foot two some sources ascribe to him. For Manson, bullying people through brute force was less effective than warping their minds.

Manson also knew whom to choose. There is a common thread among the people he controlled. Many came from shattered home lives, or had already been heavily using drugs, or otherwise had their senses of self-worth destroyed. He sought followers who were already damaged, then broke them even further.

Manson may, on some level, have convinced himself he was a hero. As he told counterculture satirist and journalist Paul Krassner, he brought people who had already been discarded by society into a family-like structure. What he encouraged them to do afterwardto completely submit to his dominanceis where the horror lies. He even viewed the word why as a direct challenge to his authority and bullied the word out of his followers mouths.

Given the sheer number of people in the Familybetween a dozen and thirty hardcore members, and up to one hundred on the fringesthere are numerous interpretations of events, a whole host of acid-casualty unreliable narrators.

Through the accounts of those who were there, their friends, police reports, court testimony and interviews, this is the definitive account of the madness of Charles Manson.

It shows how he formed his merry band of hippie killers, forced himself into the media spotlight and went completely insane under it, dying in 2017 after a lifetime of defiance and rage against authority, but leaving an indelible mark on American culture.

As one of his jail confidants would later reveal: He knew his influence and how big he was. Sometimes hed say Ted Bundy was a cowardand then tell you he, Manson, was the greatest serial killer of all time.