The Manson Murders
9 AUGUST 1969: Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, writer Wojciech Frykowski, coffee heiress Abagail Folger, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, and 18-year-old Steven Parent are brutally murdered at the Polanski residence. Parent, a friend of Tate’s gardener and the first murder, is shot for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sebring is shot defending Tate. Frykowski and Folger, both heavily wounded, manage to escape the house; Frykowski is clubbed to death, and Folger is stabbed 28 times on the front lawn. Tate herself pleads for mercy, especially for the sake of her baby, but is stabbed in the stomach after being told that “[she is] going to die and [she had] better get used to it.” The word PIG is then smeared on the front door in Tate’s blood.
The subsequent day, Leno LaBianca, supermarket executive, and Rosemary LaBianca, his wife, are murdered in their home.
After investigation, it came to light that the murders on 9 August were committed by Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian, and those on 10 August were by the hands of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten – all of whom were members of Manson’s Family. Charles Manson, charismatic career criminal, Armageddon fanatic, and sociopath, attracted a crowd of about a hundred people – mostly young, impressionable women who rebelled against their families – with a penchant for unorthodox living and hallucinogens to his cult of personality. He was deeply convinced, by end of times cults and ‘hidden’ messages in the Beatles’ White Album, that there was a race war on the horizon and his Family would be there to pick up the pieces; as such, he reasoned that they should be the ones to instigate it. He convinced these young people to commit these horrible, brutal murders of ‘beautiful white people’ in an attempt to start a war that would span the globe.
Manson himself never wielded a weapon. He merely talked his followers into the murders. He was initially given the death sentence (but was later convicted to life in prison, as the Supreme Court of California invalidated all death sentences before 1972) for first-degree murder on 25 January 1971.
(Due to the violent nature of the murders, I refrained from posting photos of them. However, here is a Beach Boys song that was written by Charles Manson – lyrics were then edited by Dennis Wilson, which led to death threats from Manson. Original lyrics can be found here, under the title “Cease to Exist.”)
