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, twenty eighteen. Beware. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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?
You did?
Oh? Weird, peace Lovin non murdering family.
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.
Sure, I mean, the slogan of our show is wowie zowie.
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.
Yeah, for real.
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.
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 he ordered these these grizzly murders of what that we'll definitely get into. But it turns out that's absolutely false.
Yeah, that I've heard that, and it always sounded to me like an urban legend.
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 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 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 real thing behind all of this, that's just the depths of depravity, of human depravity that people are capable of.
I bet that's not like the sole reason.
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
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.
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.
Yeah. But so I mean you you you asked for this article to be written, didn't you. Was this your jam?
Yeah? Yeah, ed the grabster. We can sort of petition him to write articles at times, and this was definitely one of them.
Yeah. So did you know a lot about the Manson family murders and the family themselves and all that stuff already?
Yeah?
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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 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 love and the era of hippies and ushered in the seventies.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
No, whatever she says is absolutely right. She could make turtlenecks, right.
I used to love turtlenecks.
Sure they had a real heyday, for sure.
You don't see him anymore.
I used to wear them on. Don't be dumb, but it was kind of a gag.
I think I could still pull one off, maybe, especially with the beard.
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.
Yeah, And of course in the eighties I would rock the mock turtleneck regularly.
Did you I never really did. Did you wear them with Zeke Varici's.
No, no, no, no, it wasn't.
You didn't dress like ac Slater.
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.
I could see that. Did you Did you wear the LaCosta alligator and stuff?
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.
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?
I don't know. Let's just say that the house that Satan built, right, it's not there anymore, by the way.
No, they tore it down, but not before Trent Rezner went in and recorded at nine Inch Nails album.
There, because why not?
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.
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 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 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.
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, 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 they even got to the house.
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 house and he was leaving at the time too.
Yeah, he would have been friends with what was a guy's name from.
The oj oh Man.
He would have been friends with kat o'kalin, which is Yeah, that would have been a bad thing to be I.
Think talk about a mock turtleneck.
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.
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 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 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 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 a massacre.
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
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
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.
This one, right on the front door.
Which is a obviously was a reference to cops at the time.
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 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 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 as you could get.
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 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, 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.
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 around the house like they wrote political you know, they wrote pigs again.
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 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 the world.
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, 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. 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.
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?
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, 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 apartment of a syndicate drug dealer, like a big time drug dealer named Bernard lots of Papa Crow, right.
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
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.
No, they doublecross him. They double crossed him.
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.
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
Heimman's murder scene. Right, Yeah, because this is about the time that this whole helter skelter thing is happening starting out.
And.
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.
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, 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 about a close call.
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.
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 talk about Charles Manson a little bit?
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 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 Charles Manson, all right.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
At the very least, I hadn't heard the schizophrenia, think paranoid delusional disorder totally buy.
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.
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 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. 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 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
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.
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, 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 open to all kinds of weird stuff.
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
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, 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 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 was what can you do for me? And what can I use from you to get something out of other people.
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 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.
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 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, 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 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.
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. 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. 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 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.
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 the Beach Boys.
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,
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 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.
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 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 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 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 buddies all knew this.
Yes, And two quick things here, One big shout out to Dennis Wilson's only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue.
Is it good.
I think it's great.
I got to check that out. And I love the Beach Boys.
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 like one of the great lost classics.
I'll check it out.
It's very good.
He was supposedly also the only true surfer in the band.
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 Manson was going to kill him, right, No, No.
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
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.
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, 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 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 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 just to kind of keep the money and the drugs flowing.
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 else in the country killed one another.
That's right.
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 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.
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.
Right, does that sound good? Yeah? It does.
Pick back up part two with a wide album.
Let's do it?
All right? All right?
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.
For more podcasts, My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.