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Charles Milles Manson (né Maddox; November 12, 1934 – November 19, 2017) was an American criminal, cult leader, and musician who led the Manson Family, a cult based in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some cult members committed a series of at least nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. In 1971, Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people, including the film actress Sharon Tate. The prosecution contended that, while Manson never directly ordered the murders, his ideology constituted an overt act of conspiracy.

Before the murders, Manson had spent more than half of his life in correctional institutions. While gathering his cult following, he was a singer-songwriter on the fringe of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly through a chance association with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who introduced Manson to record producer Terry Melcher. In 1968, the Beach Boys recorded Manson’s song “Cease to Exist”, renamed “Never Learn Not to Love” as a single B-side, but Manson was uncredited. Afterward, he attempted to secure a record contract through Melcher, but was unsuccessful.

Manson would often talk about the Beatles, including their eponymous 1968 album. According to Los Angeles County District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, Manson felt guided by his interpretation of the Beatles’ lyrics and adopted the term “Helter Skelter” to describe an impending apocalyptic race war.^[1] During his trial, Bugliosi argued that Manson had intended to start a race war, although Manson and others disputed this. Contemporary interviews and trial witness testimony insisted that the Tate–LaBianca murders were copycat crimes intended to exonerate Manson’s friend Bobby Beausoleil. Manson himself denied having ordered any murders. Nevertheless, he served his time in prison and died from complications from colon cancer in 2017.

Tate murders

On the night of August 8, 1969, Watson took Atkins, Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to 10050 Cielo Drive. Watson later claimed that Manson had instructed him to go to the house and “totally destroy” everyone in it, and to do it “as gruesome as you can”.Manson told the women to do as Watson instructed them.

The occupants of the Cielo Drive house that evening were Tate, aged 26, who was 81⁄2 months pregnant; her friend and former lover 35-year-old Jay Sebring, a noted celebrity hairstylist; Polanski’s friend 32-year-old Wojciech Frykowski; and Frykowski’s 25-year-old girlfriend Abigail Anne Folger, heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune and daughter of Peter Folger. Also present on the property were 19-year-old caretaker William Garretson and his friend, 18-year-old Steven Earl Parent. Polanski was in Europe working on a film. Music producer Quincy Jones was a friend of Sebring who had planned to join him that evening before changing his mind.

Watson and the three women arrived at Cielo Drive just past midnight on August 9. Watson climbed a telephone pole near the entrance gate and cut the phone line to the house. The group then backed their car to the bottom of the hill that led to the estate before walking back up to the house. Thinking that the gate might be electrified or equipped with an alarm, they climbed a brushy embankment to the right of the gate and entered the grounds.

Headlights approached the group from within the property, and Watson ordered the women to lie in the bushes. He stepped out and ordered the approaching driver, Parent, to halt. Watson leveled a .22 caliber revolver at Parent, who begged him not to hurt him, claiming that he would not say anything. Watson lunged at Parent with a knife, giving him a defensive slash wound on the palm of his hand that severed tendons and tore the boy’s watch off his wrist, then shot him four times in the chest and abdomen, killing him in the front seat of his white 1965 AMC Ambassador coupe. Watson ordered the women to help push the car up the driveway.

Watson next cut the screen of a window, then told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate; she walked over to Parent’s car and waited. Watson removed the screen, entered through the window and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.He whispered to Atkins and awoke Frykowski, who was sleeping on the living room couch. Watson kicked him in the head, and Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there. Watson replied, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”

On Watson’s direction, Atkins found the house’s three other occupants with Krenwinkel’s help^[ and forced them to the living room. Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with a long nylon rope which he had brought, then slung it over one of the living room’s ceiling beams. Sebring protested the rough treatment of the pregnant Tate, so Watson shot him. Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, and she gave the murderers $70. Watson then stabbed Sebring seven times.Frykowski’s hands had been bound with a towel, but he freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed at his legs with a knife. He fought his way out the front door and onto the porch, but Watson caught up with him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times, stabbed him repeatedly and shot him twice.

Kasabian had heard “horrifying sounds” and moved toward the house from her position in the driveway. She told Atkins that someone was coming in an attempt to stop the murders. Inside the house, Folger escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area. Krenwinkel pursued her and caught her on the front lawn, where shestabbed her and tackled her to the ground. Watson then helped kill her; her assailants stabbed her a total of twenty-eight times.Frykowski struggled across the lawn, but Watson continued to stab him, killing him. Frykowski suffered fifty-one stab wounds; he had also been struck thirteen times in the head with the butt of Watson’s gun, which bent the barrel and broke off one side of the gun grip, which was recovered at the scene.

In the house, Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to give birth and offered herself as a hostage in an attempt to save the life of her unborn child. Instead both Atkins and Watson stabbed Tate sixteen times, killing her. The coroner’s inquest found that Tate was still alive when she was hanged with the nylon rope, although the cause of her death was determined as a “massive hemorrhage”, while in Sebring’s murder it was found that he was hanged lifeless.

According to Watson, Manson had told the women to “leave a sign—something witchy”. Atkins wrote “pig” on the front door in Tate’s blood. Atkins claims she did this to copycat the Hinman murder scene in order to get Beausoleil out of jail, who was in custody for that murder.

LaBianca murders

The four murderers plus Manson, Leslie Van Houten and Clem Grogan went for a drive the following night. Manson was allegedly displeased with the previous night’s murders, so he told Kasabian to drive to a house at 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. Located next door to a home where Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year, it belonged to 44-year-old supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his 43-year-old wife, Rosemary LaBianca, co-owner of a dress shop.

According to Atkins and Kasabian, Manson disappeared up the driveway and returned to say that he had tied up the house’s occupants. Watson, Krenwinkel and Van Houten entered the property. Watson claims in his autobiography that Manson went up alone, then returned to take him up to the house with him. Manson pointed out a sleeping man through a window, and the two entered through the unlocked back door. Watson claims Manson roused the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint and had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. Rosemary was brought into the living room from the bedroom, and Watson covered the couple’s heads with pillowcases which he bound in place with lamp cords. Manson left, and Krenwinkel and Van Houten entered the house.

Watson had complained to Manson earlier of the inadequacy of the previous night’s weapons. Watson sent the women from the kitchen to the bedroom, where Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, while he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet. The first thrust went into his throat. Watson heard a scuffle in the bedroom and went in there to discover Rosemary LaBianca keeping the women at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. He stabbed her several times with the bayonet, then returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of twelve times. He then carved the word “WAR” into his abdomen.

Watson returned to the bedroom and found Krenwinkel stabbing Rosemary with a knife from the kitchen. Van Houten stabbed her approximately sixteen times in the back and the exposed buttocks. Van Houten claimed at trial that Rosemary LaBianca was already dead during the stabbing. Evidence showed that many of the forty-one stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem. Watson then cleaned off the bayonet and showered, while Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Healter [sic] Skelter” on the refrigerator door, all in LaBianca’s blood. She gave Leno LaBianca fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach. She also planted a steak knife in his throat.

Meanwhile, Manson drove the other three Family members who had departed Spahn with him that evening to the Venice home of the Lebanese actor Saladin Nader. Manson left them there and drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home. According to Kasabian, Manson wanted his followers to murder Nader in his apartment, but Kasabian claims she thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. The group abandoned the murder plan and left, but Atkins defecated in the stairwell on the way out.

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Manson Family Movies is a painstaking recreation of the daily lives of the members of Manson’s cult, from the banal to the brutal. Filmed on the actual locations where the family lived and killed, filmmaker John Aes-Nihil blends dramatic footage with real recordings of the Manson family singing and performing music to chilling, gritty effect and audacious authenticity. Bonus disc: The Sharon Tate Home Movies.