American History Hit - The Manson Family: Cult Murder in Hollywood

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

In the summer of 1969, Hollywood was shaken by a set of brutal murders. Their perpetrators? The infamous Charles Manson and his 'family'.In this episode Jeff Melnick joins Don to discuss how Manson and his followers came to occupy such a strong position in our cultural imagination.Jeff is Graduate Program Director for American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, and the author of 'Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family'.Edited by Aidan Lonergan, produced by Sophie Gee, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello, movie lovers. It's February 2020, and time for the 92nd Academy Awards here in Los Angeles, California. Once more, the glittering elite of Hollywood are gathered to honor the year's biggest movies and the nominees who made them. Yes, the paparazzi are hiving to the stars. There's the wonderful Tom Hanks, waving warmly to his fans. Joaquin Phoenix steps up, brooding darkly, the beautiful Natalie Portman, dressed in velvet, and Keanu Reeves being, well, Keanu Reeves.

And there's DiCaprio, Pitt, and Margarabi, the glamorous entourage from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood nominated in ten categories. It'll only win in two, but who's counting when you've already packaged an infamous slaughter into a box office bonanza, featuring that wacky crew of cult killers, the Manson. family. On this celebrated evening, their names may not be mentioned, but their shadows are lurking, stalking the edges of a blood-red carpet. This is American History Hit, and I am Don Wildman. Glad you're listening. The 1960s in America were a whirlwind. War abroad, protests at home, civil rights advances, and then assassinations. And all the while, NASA racing to the moon. Old values

were crumbling, flower power energized a psychedelic generation, searching for meaning, belonging, and truth. Into this cultural chaos, stepped Charles Manson, a drifter with a guitar, strange charisma, and a warped vision of the world. He created a small community, drawing on the lost and disillusioned, offering peace, purpose, and a place to belong. But this commune, rooted in music, drugs, and counterculture, would spiral into cult violence and fear. The Manson family is where the promise of the 60s turned into one of its darkest nightmares. And we tell the story today with Jeff Molnick, historian and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of Creepy Crawley, Charles Manson and the many lives of America's most infamous family,

which explores the Manson murders and how they've become embedded in American culture. Hello, Jeff. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you as well, Don. Jeff, the details of this crime are infinite. There are so many different personalities, so many young women in this family. Let's have a conversation that doesn't get too much into names. I just want to draw broad strokes here through this time. It becomes not only the investigation, but also the prosecution of it.

That's its own story entirely. Let's start with Charles Madsen himself. Has the sadly typical broken home childhood becoming a boy to young man with a rap sheet so long and take an episode to describe it? Where is he born and how does he come to the? this life of crime? The question of where Manson's born has been debated for quite a while. The more interesting question is how quickly, and at what a young age, he entered the prison system. By the age of 12, he was already being charged with fairly major crimes. And one of the things I like to kind of frame

when we talk about the Manson family is that he is what we call these days an incarcerated personality. He always said that the jailhouse was my father. And that was like a real rhetorical flourish. But I think it's actually useful for us to think about rather than think about him in traditional sense of where did he grow up, who was his mother, what was her occupation, and folks love to talk about that. Maybe she was a sex worker, maybe he was the product of one of her work assignations. I mean, I think what we really need to focus on with Manson is that he's raised in jail. He comes of age in prison in the Midwest and then later on out on the West Coast. And that's where I really like to kind of press the gas, if that makes sense, to sort of say the details of his own early

biography are sad and dark, but they don't really tell us that much about who he ended up being. That story begins when he's about 12 and his prison life begins. So, Jeff, I have 1934 as his birthday. He's from the American Midwest from Ohio. And the story of Madsen Will spread nationally. It's amazing. I mean, forget about the later on. He's all over the place with his prisons and reform schools all through the 50s, all through his youth, right? That's right. I mean, there was some talk, and I don't know if this has ever been completely nailed down, that he was in Boys Town for a while, you know, kind of classic, you know, orphan or quasi-orfin scenario. So yeah, he's in the Midwest and then

makes his way, I think, after his grand theft auto, the joy ride out to California and ends up foraging a treasury check and ending up in prison for quite a while in California. And that's where the Manson that we are familiar with really sort of like comes of age, comes into being. He's in fairly intense penitentiary, you know, seen in the 50s. And by his own account, and this has been, you know, well confirmed. Like, that's where he starts meeting, like, the real bad guys who shape him in a number of different ways, including quite crucially this guy, Alvin Carpus, creepy carpus is his nickname, who was in jail because he was a member. It's almost, it moves with, like, the cadence of mythology. He was a member of Mob Barker's gang, you know, and also a guitar

player. He taught Manson to play guitar, and he also seemed to have taught him a bunch of other things as well. Right. About how to be a more successful criminal. I mean, Manson always says his other big influence in the 50s besides prison was Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people. Right. And that's where it all sort of seems to come together, you know, that like he's in jail and he learns how to be a player. He learns how to control people. He kind of develops his individual talent and charisma. You know, many years later, Ed Sanders would refer to him as the first performance murderer ever, you know, that like he was always very aware of theatricality, you know, and putting on a good show.

And he learns that, I think, in jail in the 50s. This is the story of the opposite of rehabilitation, you know, where somebody finds themselves, you know, literally at home in this system, which is a nightmare. Exactly. After that 1967 release, it's reported that he wanted to stay there. He asked to remain in prison. I mean, that's how dependent he was on this. That's right. Interestingly, he is a nonviolent criminal to that point, right? There's not a lot of reports of him abusing people. I guess there's abuse is in there as well, right, in the reform school. Right, absolutely.

He's, I mean, it's like a little bit hard to talk about because it plays into some kind of like almost like bullying language, but like he's a little guy. Yeah. He's not physically prepossessing. You know, he, I think, figures out how to make it in jail through his wiles and through his personality and through his ability to kind of figure out. He's a good reader. That's the main thing.

Like, he learns how to read people. Like there's the, some people argue that's the Scientology Part 2. He learns Scientology and in prison. and he kind of figures out how to read personalities and what people need and how to ingratiate himself. Yeah. So he's like a, like I want to, if it's okay, put him in the context like great American tradition of con men, you know, confidence men.

He knows how to run the game. Right. He might not be the biggest guy, the strongest guy, the best looking guy, but like he knows how to read people. He knows how to flatter them. Yeah. He becomes a cultural figure because he's so intuitive about things, isn't he? He's not just able to read people.

He also sees the times around him. He's a very wily character. That's right. Wiley is a great word. He really is like a trickster. Yeah. And we often talk on this podcast about the power of media, you know, in American culture. And it really has come completely to the four at this point in the 1960s.

And people are getting rich off of it. You know, rock stars are being born and all that sort of thing. And he sees that, which is weird because he's been in a prison the whole time, how he, how he understands this. So, you know, on a gut level is really interesting. That's great done. And that's like, that's like an amazing. amazing moment because he'll always say, I'm not a 60s guy. I'm a 50s guy. He's like, I'm a Bing Crosby guy. You know, like that, like that's who he grows up listening to thinking about. And then he comes out of prison. It's the summer of love in San Francisco. He sees this whole other thing going on. Right. Exactly. I mean, there's going to be a pivot point in his personality, which is a really important factor in understanding him or not, you know, might be apocryphal, but it seems like that happens to this guy.

For whatever terrible childhood he had, which is typical of these guys who are institutionalized, that was, you know, perhaps blamable on those parents that raised him, alcoholic mother, all the rest of that stuff. But then comes the emergence into becoming a man. And you see this sort of intelligence and this sort of intuitive quality to this guy, which gets applied to crime for whatever reason, maybe his background. But there will come a time in this conversation when it turns, when this guy turns into, into a really scary person. And that's what's interesting to me. So, 1967, he's released from prison

in California, right? He was. He was, like sort of inland in the state. Yeah. Okay. But he's in the northern area. So he heads for San Francisco. I mean, and that's where it's happened in the summer of love, hate Ashbury, LSD, and Charles Manson is a pig in the sty. Yeah. But let's remind you listeners, and you said that you already mentioned his birth date. He's not hippie age, right? He's like in his early mid-30s, right? So he comes out and he's kind of scoping. the scene clearly as an outsider just in terms of, we picture those, you know, all the documentaries we've seen of, you know, summer of love, like these are young folks and he comes out and he's a wolf. He gets the scene. He quickly ascertains that there's a lot of vulnerable young people,

right, who have made their way. And this is something I'm particularly interested in that, like, not immediately, but he pretty quickly starts realizing that a lot of the young folks in the Bay Area, California in general, are runaways, either literally or quasi-runner. away, you know, left families that were uncomfortable for them at best or literally abusive at worst, as, you know, when he meets Lynette from a little bit later. But he, he begins this process. It's kind of an amazing moment. He gets to the Bay Area. He's like, it's all opportunity for him, right? He's this, you know, charismatic, talented. It's hard to say this in respect to the guy who ended up responsible for these murders, but he's, he's sensitive. He's like a good listener.

and he finds these young women who need a good listener. And he's an older guy and he's got that appeal on that level. And so he starts meeting people. First he meets this Berkeley librarian, connects up with her. Then he meets, you know, a few other women. And before long, like, they're established in the Bay Area. They get studied by the Hayd-Ashbury Free Clinic, some doctors there who see them as a fascinating example of plural marriage, you know, essentially.

And they publish an article. Wow. This is before any of the controversy or the notoriety. They just like, see Manson as kind of one more iteration of new social arrangements. It's interesting. Well, so much was going on, especially in the Bay Area, I'm sure, in the academic world. I mean, there was so much study being done of the effects of psychedelics and not legally, but I mean, it was a great deal of interest in what LSD was doing. There was also rumors of the CIA being involved in this community in some way.

I mean, there was a lot going on behind the scenes. And he was tapping into all of this zeitgeist, wasn't he? Absolutely. And that's, I mean, again, it's, I always try to be careful about what language I use and talking about him because I don't want to like overcredit him or sound like I'm sort of supporting, you know, or proving of what he did. But he's incredibly savvy. Like what you just said down is so right. Like, he is part of this cultural moment of recognizing that there's this new youth culture. Some people are studying it.

Some people are trying to sell stuff, you know, to them. Some people are trying to prosecute them and crack down on them. But it's this, like, intense. Like, who are these young people? What are they, like, why are they wearing clothes like this? Why do they dance like that? Why is the music sound like this? What are these drugs?

You know, and he steps in as like what I want to call like a cultural entrepreneur. He sees this and he sees this is just like a rich vein of opportunity. And he figures it out, like in a minute. But he's straddling two things. I mean, he's still a young guy. I mean, he still likes young women. And that's an, you know, incredibly powerful position to be in for a guy like this. who's going to, you know, tip off into the dark side of all of that pretty soon.

That's right. But having these adoring young things around it. But that was the thing in those days, communes were in, group, you know. Group marriage. Yeah. It was all kind of bred for a cult in those days. It was really dangerous. And he would also have an incredible radar for vulnerable youth who were troubled, you know,

who ran away for the same reasons that he had trouble when he was a kid. So he could talk to talk. He really understood it. So he connects. But this is all about this. part one of Charles Manson in my mind, and part two comes pretty soon. But at what point does this now family, and how many people are we talking about in San Francisco? It's like a small handful at this point. At some point, they decide to grab a bus, you know, not unlike Ken Kesey and all of them,

and head on down south to L.A. Everybody's got their connections. There's family connections. People have people that they're going to go for money. You know how it is when you're young. So off they go thinking they have a pretty good bead on a new life down in Los Angeles. Where does that take him? Yeah, that's amazing. And that's where the story gets. I mean, obviously, we wouldn't be talking about him if they didn't end up in L.A. and everything that ensues. And I mean, that's part of, you know, I called him before a cultural entrepreneur. Like, he begins to really fancy himself a musician. Yeah. And he begins to imagine himself as a musician with real potential. And so L.A. is where it's happening. I mean, this is L.A.'s moment. I mean, when I started researching this stuff, I was like,

earlier in my career did a book about when New York Jews first musicians first, you know, Gershwin and that whole crew in the 1920s first moved out to Hollywood because that's where the action was going to be for musicians, you know, making making music for movies. And from that moment on, like L.A. slowly becomes the heart of the American music business. And it's off the hook in 67, 68. The kind of sunset strip action, the clubs that just kind of in the street hanging out, you know, informal rituals of hanging out. And then the record companies who are looking for, you know,

constantly looking for new young talent. So it's this amazing moment. It is Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s, primarily the 60s, is where company town meets counterculture. And it's this fascinating mix because it never loses the fact that everybody's there to make money. Yeah. All those guys who moved out from New York,

the gangsters there, everybody who's there is because big money can be made. And those people know how to, you know, they can smell that kind of. And it's the cheap apartments. It's the cheap, you know, Oceanside houses that are there. This amazing playground is there for these very smart men and women who are ready to cash out or cash in. And along come all these hangers on. And that's kind of the Manson family thing that's going on here. So he, you know, very famously crosses paths with the beach boys or at least one member of them, Dennis Wilson. Where in the in the chronology of this does this happen? Pretty early, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, it's, Sometime in 68, like, and people argue about exactly when, it seems like a couple of the women of the family get picked up hitchhiking by Dennis Wilson.

Like, it's this totally, you know, just phenomenal, lucky accident. Yeah. But it's like the way the story gets told, it's like they get picked up hitchhiking. And then next, they're basically living in his house, the whole family. You know, like they're crashing at Dennis Wilson's Pacific Palisades house. And Dennis Wilson's got this whole crew of guys who begin noticing this. It's incredibly, I mean, I just want to make sure that we don't laugh it up too much because, like, it's incredible. incredibly exploitive scenario. Like in the research I did, I really focused on this category

that we've come to called groupies, which is, you know, it's a really complicated category, right? It can mean just fan, but like baked into it in this moment in the late 60s is it's young women, it's vulnerable young women, it's young women who are being kind of sexually exploited by much older men who are being promised things that, you know, maybe they're going to get, maybe they're not going to get, but there are power differentials. Right. And the Manson women, become something like that role for Dennis Wilson and for Terry Melcher, who's this incredibly important music producer, produces first Paul Revere the Raiders, the birds, like he's right at the art of it. He's Doris Day's son. He's literally the son of like the image of white bread in

American culture. He is taking rock and roll into country rock and making this new Western sound. He's one of those guys that sort of took the baton from Spill Specter. It's huge. Exactly. He's a big time guy. So is the Beach Boys. Let's not forget. This is a major group. They are making a lot of money. And the people around them are serious businessmen.

Along come these nutty people. But that's what I said before. This is the weird thing about L.A. It's this mixed bag of serious business, but also cultural weirdness. And in those days, it was all being embraced because that was, you know, ironically, these guys were like tapping in. They knew that the money was to be made with this crowd. Don, you're so right.

And that's something that, like, they all, I mean, One of the fascinating things when I started doing the research for the book is like how little any of those people wanted to talk about. You know, I reached out to a few of them just, you know, want to do an interview. Some of the people connected to the Beach Boys and they were nobody wanted to touch it. Of course. To the level that like even when I wanted to quote Neil Young's song that's, you know, loosely based on the Manson case, his people were just like, no, you can't. Like usually, this is like in the weeds a little bit, but like usually when you ask to quote lyrics, the company that owns it says, sure, send us $5,000. bucks like that. It's a money making thing. New Young's people, all these years later were like,

he does not want to be associated with this. This was the line that got crossed with the Manson. Exactly. Oh my God. And they were all, they were hanging out together. They were dancing together, you know, in the sunset strip clubs. And it's not just music people. It's film people, too, right? Because this is the moment of the new Hollywood. So Dennis Hopper is tied up with these, you know, with these people, right? Like these names who are like crucial people in American culture are dancing with these marginal freaks. Yeah, yeah. We left two little bio notes out of Terry Meltcher.

He's the son of Doris Day. I mean, Doris Day, as commercial a star as you get from old Hollywood. And he's the boyfriend at the time of Candace Bergen, who's also a big Hollywood icon as well. Yeah. So where does Charles Manson find any kind of grounding here? They basically kind of take over Dennis Wilson's life, don't they? They do. And Dennis Wilson, I mean, he's in his own way of vulnerable.

character. He's not the creative engine of the group. He's an important musician, but... If there was a real beach boy, it was Dennis Wilson. Yeah, exactly. Like, he's the only one who surfs of the beach boys, you know? Like, and he not only takes up with the mans and women, like, he gets kind of convinced by Charlie's rap, and he, like, he very famously gives an interview to a British music magazine in 68 saying, like, oh, my, you know, me and the, me and my brothers have a record company at one of our first acts is going to be this guy you know charlie manson he's a wizard he's like a guru you know and like he's talking this up in public you know like this very kind of dark weird scenario he's presenting as like this guy's great he's a great musician we're going to record him

and he he gives manson personally this this sense of legitimacy that he like belongs in this scene and that he's a part of it and he never gets really that like what these guys want from him are women up, you know, like he's like a pimp in a few different ways, you know. Exactly. Yeah. Which he had spent time doing. So he's doing. Yes.

He's disposed in that direction. Yeah. Most of these women are in their teens and 20s. Let's not forget. These are very vulnerable girls. Yeah. White middle class girls that went to places like this. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

I don't want to digress. But I ended up in L.A. in the 70s. I missed the wave. But I remember that kind of seedy quality of the place back then. It would still had that. whiff in the air of all that kind of strange thing that was going on at that point. That's right. If you got there in 1965, 66, you were into something very mysterious and very interesting.

Yeah. And the house parties were amazing. And the whole place was just taking off because it didn't cost any money to be there. They could just sort of overwhelm the place with this new new thing because the old guard was dead. You know, that whole studio system was gone. The studio, right. That's right. The structure of the place was completely wiggly at this point.

And it's so shady. I mean, this isn't just L.A. this is like the sites that matter are like Venice Beach, real honky ton, really marginal folks, you know, what we would now call, you know, street people and just kind of folks who are not mainstream culture. And all of a sudden they find themselves in Dennis Wilson's mansion, you know, like up on the hill. And it's a wild woman of cultural mixing. Yeah, for sure.

At the same time, or is it at the same time, they end up at a ranch called Spawn Ranch. This is where they're sort of based, right? Yeah. And Spawn Ranch, just to try to draw a picture for listeners, like, I'm always, whenever I was out on research trips in L.A., I was always like, I got to Spawn Ranch or where it was in Shatsworth. And for East Coast people, this is shocking because it's like this is still L.A. Like, because it's, it just feels like this kind of hard, scrabbled, deserty, you know. So yeah, the Manses basically take over Spawn Ranch, which had been from the 30s on, an actual movie ranch. Right. There's a bunch of them like that. There's a bunch of those weird ranches, Maverick. and all these places that you shoot commercials at nowadays. Yes. And they're all out there.

And this guy was George Spahn, who was one of those guys who owned this land. That's right. How did he know them? How were they even able to approach him? They just went out to the ride horses. At that point, the ranch was basically like a tourist site where you could get, like they were still filming some like TV commercials. And also, I think Bobby Boussela, who ends up associated with the family, actually

filmed a porn Western out there. It was on its last commercial legs, but you could go out there and ride horses. And then they they kind of ingratiate themselves with very elderly George Spahn, who likes the young women to one in particular, Lynette. You know, Lynette Fromm becomes like quite literally his handler. And they just move in there and they take it over. It's such the story of people just using each other all over the place. I mean, here's an 80-year-old guy who's going to be blind and suddenly manna from heaven. These young women sort of arrive and they're willing to give him massages.

or whatever, you know, like that's the story. And so, yeah, good with the bad, you get these creepy guys like Tex Watson and all these other, you know, dangerous fellows, but he's mainly there for the girls. That's right. And they just set up shop there. They live there. And they set up, you know, and this is, there's a really, a cool novel called The Girls by Emma Klein that's about the Manson family. And one of the things that she really gets about Spawn Ranch, I think absolutely right, is that the women, what they got more than anything was that there was like a real camaraderie. for them among themselves. It was very gender segregated in a lot of ways.

So they're in the kitchen, they're preparing meals, they're going out during the dated dumpsters to try to come up with produce that's been thrown out. And so there's this whole kind of girl-slash-women culture of Spawn Ranch that's obviously being run by Charlie for Charlie, but has a lot of space in it for the women to kind of have their own lives. How does he have his effect on them? Is it purely through drugs or is it some sort of,

does he have a protocol to this? far as training a group and making a cult? Again, I want to put it in the language of sexual exploitation. You know, because so many of these women are vulnerable in a number of different ways. And he individually grooms, just to use that word that we use, you know, in that context. Virtually each woman who comes to him, they find women when they're out partying. They find women who have just made their way to the ranch one way or another. And Charlie, like, laser beam, you know, for a while will make that person his object of attention.

he'll figure out what their biggest vulnerability is, what their relationship with their father is, and then he'll kind of like provide this seemingly loving, gentle, paternal care for them, which then obviously almost always turns it to sexual attention. And the LSD part is definitely in there. I think that gets like a little overstated in our own kind of anti-halucinogen moment, you know, of the 80s and beyond the kind of just say no stuff that we're still living with. But he like he knows how to use drugs as part of this. For sure, there's these kind of group, you know, trip experiences where he's the master of, you know, literally the master's ceremonies.

And he arranges people. He tells people who they should have sex with and they listen, you know. So he's arranging these kind of like orgeastic trip scenarios. But it's really, it's that one-on-one thing that I think he masters. Like, he's got a great rap. Right. And he knows how to apply it differentially. So it'll be effective.

They speak of his eyes that he had this mysterious gaze. Yeah. And that goes on until even in prison. People talk about it later on. What do you think that really was? I think the whole thing about Charlie's eyes is just that he paid attention. He would really lock in. I think this is the Scientology training.

He had this idea of how you become like your fullest person. And it was really about presence, about being there. A lot of these young women, some of them were literally directly abused by their fathers, but some of them were just victims of or people who had experienced what we call neglect. Like they just had very, very typically absent 1950s dad's dad went out to work during the day. He didn't really have much to do with the family. And to get this kind of attention from an older man, I think, was really hypnotic for a lot of women. And so we talked about it in terms of his eyes, but I really think our focus should be on the kind of whole package is that he knew how to lock in.

Sure. We mentioned this before. This is a guy in his mid-30s at this point, 1960s, 34 years old. Things start to change. And I mentioned before a pivot point for this guy. Things start to change when you're in that period of time, no matter who you are. And I can't help but think this moment that I hinted about before happens because of the commercial aspect of the music industry. And the fact that he was realizing in the midst of this hope and dream of, hey, I got the ticket here.

I wrote a song, they even like it. We didn't mention this. The Beach Boys actually record one of his songs, which was called Cease to Exist, and they rename it into Learn Not to Love, I learned to not love. Never learn not to love. That's a terrible title. It's a terrible title. I wonder it failed.

Hippie bullshit. Yeah. But the disappointment that comes from this and the frustration of not getting his due as he sees it in the soul of a person who is basically a narcissist ego is a dangerous brew. And this is really what happens. This is what tips him over, not to mention the LSD, I'm sure. I think that's right. And I'm really glad you framed it as such, Don, because. it's like we're all still like in the thrall of the prosecutor, you know, Vincent Bouliosi's

Helter Skelter and the race war narrative, which I'm, I'm sure we'll take a minute to talk about. But, you know, Manson, his animus, his engine of his resentment is that he can't make it in the music business. Yeah. Like he has like a solid year at L.A. where like he believes his own, like he's high in his own supply. Like he believes his own story. He thinks he's going to be a star.

He does not get that while he's playing Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher. for certain things they're playing him as well. So, you know, he has a formal audition and he blows it, you know, like he, by his own account, he's like he freezes up, he can't sing into a microphone. He's not a professional musician. Like, he's just not. He's cool around a campfire, you know, and we've all seen that, right? Like, we've all seen that guy who, you know, who takes over the campfire and sing some songs.

And that's cool. But he's not, he's not at all a trained musician. He doesn't know how to play in a, you know, in a studio. And Terry Meltcher at that point, like, they, He basically throws him to an associate of his who's like got anthropological interest. He's a guy who had gone out, you know, you know, recording Native American, you know, tribes and so on. And he's like, he's kind of like, you know, it's kind of tribal, you know. And Manson cannot believe it.

He cannot believe he's not getting a contract. And, you know, to his, I don't want to say his true of credit, but like folks who heard in play thought that he could have been brought along. Like Neil Young very famously said, if Manson had the right band, he could have been like mid-60s, Gillet. Like, he couldn't have been that kind of, like, wild, you know, electric sound, but he didn't. Like, he was too full of himself. He thought everyone wanted to hang on every word of every song he wrote, but he couldn't. And Terry Melcher basically cuts him, I mean, it's, Terry Melcher's the heart of this story. In what way? Well, Manson really believes, I mean, let's just put this out there, because we haven't said it yet. The first set of murders will happen at 10,050 Cello Drive, which is where

Sharon Tate and Roman Polansky lived. But that's where Terry Melcher has. had lived previously. And so Manson knows the house. And he's got this resentment that just boils up about Melcher. Like Melcher for years barely appeared in public because he was so spooked by, I mean, I think he knew. I think he knew that Manson, if Manson wasn't literally targeting him, that Manson's anger, you know, the kind of murderous rage that ended up in these two nights of murder, I think

was very much out of this disappointment that Melcher didn't give him a contract. Yeah. Like, he really believed that Melcher was going to be his meal ticket. You're setting us up for the big part of the story, but I want to cover one other cultural aspect of this, which is the Beatles. I mean, the fact, you've got the, on one hand, the Beach Boys are the American Beatles, but when the Beatles hit with their edgier albums, not least of which is the white album in 1968, these guys take the world by storm.

I mean, I'm really, maybe I'm off mark, but I find this such an interesting story from this other angle, which is this commercial. angle of the times, that this whole generation was realizing that they were into a global world and global music and global marketing. And suddenly, you know, out of England comes this song Helter Skelter and people in Southern California are being guided by it. It's a nutty thing. You know, when you think about it, when you pull back and wonder, what happened to the world? Well, that's what happened to the world in many ways. We just suddenly got a global perspective on everything. I think that's right, but I want to kind of, it's obviously out there while what Manson does with the Beatles music and how he reads it.

But it's part of a larger wave of understanding rock and roll music and popular music more generally as having cultural weight, as having important political meaning, right? Like this obviously, it's not just the Beatles, it's obviously Dylan too. And it's all manner of musicians. It's some really important jazz musicians who are reaching, you know, in terms of black power. Or, you know, music begins to be understood in the mid-60s as a social force. That which the beatniks were tapping into in the 50s is suddenly right smack in the middle on your FM dial. Exactly.

Commercial. It's top of the charts. And that's a rich brew. And Manson, I mean, he's not like you and me. Like we have the wherewithal to hear music understand that it's a kind of distinct artistic form. But it's not like, I mean, most of us who are dedicated music listeners have moments where we think, wow, they're talking right to me, right?

Like they know me. They understand, you know, Manson had that in a pathological way. Like it tipped over into him thinking it was secret messages. He listened to other music, too, that he didn't take that. Like, his second favorite band was the Moody Blues. And it's like he didn't get any secret messages, you know, from them. Like, they weren't telling him, you know,

that he should dress his knights in white satin or whatever. You know, like he, it was something about the Beatles that really reached him and a lot of people. Yeah. And it was the apocalyptic. aspect of it, that there was this end of world coming that Helter Skelter is really sort of about. And he certainly, at this point of his life, with his disappointments that he was struggling with or dealing with, suddenly sort of taps into the theme. And he begins to pull those poor young girls into this thing. Having said poor young girls, we have to discuss the fact that

they are responsible for their actions at some point, my lord. Absolutely. They have agency. And that, you know, like there's a one or two of them I want to sort of separate out because they were literally what we would now call underage, and so not legally responsible, you know, for, but yes, these are women who have agency, and they are making decisions to join Manson in this delusional quest. We have mentioned this. How much of a white supremacist racist was Charles Manson and how much of that play into his actions? Yeah. I want to answer really carefully the question of how much of a white supremacist Manson was. Charles Manson was clearly a racist. Like he was clearly someone who believed that black people were, you know, subhuman and he articulated that again, again in his life.

That, as we spoke about earlier, was very much a product of his prison training. Like that was clearly part of the kind of segregated antagonistic world. I'm not excusing this in any way. I'm just trying to understand it. Was he mostly motivated by this thing that Vincent Bouliosi framed at the trial as this race? I mean, that was a fairly late-breaking thing in the life of the family. Manson did begin talking about it with them, but it had nowhere near the weight that the music business stuff had for the family.

The family was organized for months and months and months around getting Charlie a contract. It's not like they actually made a lot of plans for living in a hole in the desert and waiting out the race war and then taking, you know, I mean, that was when he was really starting to fall apart. And it was very much a symptom of his, you know, what psychologist is. we're called decompensation, you know, like he was losing his shit. And he, and he, the direction it took, not surprisingly in American culture, given that where culture kind of rooted in systemic racism is that he kind of grabbed that narrative and

ran with it. You mentioned the desert. I just want to keep track of where these people are and how large a group they've become. How many kids were in this cult at this point? You know, it's almost impossible to do a headcount on the cult because people are coming and going. There are people who are not all the time with them, like Bobby Boussela and, you know, folks who are like associates of the family. But there's like, you know, a core of a couple dozen people who are always at the ranch. Yeah. That's a surprising number. I don't think people think

that way of it. Oh, it's a big operation. And yet so few will really take part in the murders themselves. Right. So that's not like we're all sitting down for meetings about how we're going to do this whole thing. There's clearly an inner circle too. And those are the folks who end up being responsible for the two nights of mayhem, you know, in August of 69. And there's clearly, like, he has his lieutenants, you know, like tax Watson is clearly the second in command. You know, man and Lynette Frum and a few of the other women are clearly like the ones running the ranch, you know, the ones who are like in charge of the daily operations. But then there's all these other folks, you know, they, you, if you read deep enough in the literature, you,

you come up on these names and you're like, who's that again? You know, like somebody else just showed up a month or so before the murders and lived there for a while. people come and go, Charlie didn't like to let people go. Like they would chase people down if they tried to leave. Right. Because he needed that like intactness. Yeah. So for whatever thematic reasons, race war, et cetera, we really are talking about a guy, a vengeance murder here as far as his feelings about Terry Melcher. So let's talk about what happens. August 8th, 1969. They've been living this life in Los Angeles for about a year or more, I suppose, at that point. A little bit more. Yeah. And this small inner circle is engaged on his behalf to do mayhem. They scope this thing out, right? They figure out where they're going to go first. And Charles probably had something to do with that. But on the night itself, take me through the events that lead to them inside this house and killing people. First night, they head out to Benedict Canyon, which again, I don't know how, you know, how familiar your listeners will be with geography of L.A., but Benedict Canyon is one of these beautiful areas. I

a little bit north of where the cultural action is, you know, the sunset strip, you know, it's, you can get, it's not a long drive, but it's a whole other world. Yeah. You know, again, if your, if your listeners are not on the West Coast, like what LA geography looks like is always a mystery to those of us on the East Coast or elsewhere. So it's this really remote feeling part of L.A., right? When you drive up in those hills, you have no relation to L.A. geography. It's a totally different world up there. Right. It's beautiful. It's remote. So they make it to this house, which is the house of the actor Sharon Tate and her husband, the film director, Roman Polanski, who have a few house guests and the few members of the Manson family make their way

in are clearly intent on just wreaking havoc. It's not that they're just there to kill people. They are there clearly with some instructions, you know, the line that always gets quoted is, you know, that Charlie tells one of the women of the family to do something witchy. Right. And so there's this, there's clearly this aspect to the first night of crime. especially, that's about leaving evidence that will freak out observers, that will just undo people. I want to be clear. This is the house that was previously occupied, and he aren't there right now by Terry Melcher and his girlfriend, Candice Bergen. They've gone to London, I think it is, and they're doing business somewhere else. Yeah.

The house is occupied by the following people. Sharon Tate, Roman Polansky, who is not present on the night. Jay Sebring, who is a hairstylist and a big, you know, man about town in those days, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and Folger's boyfriend, Voitek Vrykowski. So this group of people are in this house. There's also a little house in the back, typical of these hill houses. Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant. Young, what is she, 26 at this time?

Right. A huge rising star in Hollywood, Watch Valley of the Dolls. And she's about to become a mom. And that's how vicious this murder really is. What happens? Yeah. So, you know, the members of the family come in, you know, and folks love to quote, you know, the lines that particularly text Watson said, which is always, I'm always a little suspicious of because the only person, people who could have reported that are members of the family themselves because everyone else dies. And so this is clearly part of a mythology.

They want to promote that, you know, they walk in, you know, Sharon Tate says, who are you, what are you doing here? in, you know, Texas, I'm the devil, I'm here to do the devil's work, you know? And it's like, it's like you didn't need to wait for Quentin Tarantino all those years later. It was like already a film script, you know? Right, yes. How much Charlie scripted it? We don't know. But like, there's clearly this effort to make a performance.

And it's this horrifying, tragic, terrible performance. Like, they kill this ready to deliver a baby woman. And then her compatriots, the young guy lived back in the carriage house, had a friend who was coming to visit. They kill in the driveway. You also hang them from the ceiling? I mean, it's like really bizarre. No, it's hard. I mean, this is horror movie stuff.

Like it was, you know, I, I'm one of the things I thought about a lot when I was doing the research is how much the murders actually influenced actual horror movies of the 1970s. Yeah. You know, home invasion movies and cutting out babies. You know, I mean, you know, it's just, they're writing a script and it's a horrifying script and they do this terrible thing. They kill all these people.

And head back to the ranch. I'll be back with more. American history after this short break. Then the crime scene photos show that they've used the blood to draw words on the, peg is on the wall, all of this suggestive of this race war that they're trying to initiate. Right. I guess they hoped that the police would think that black people had done this and therefore whatever was going to happen and that didn't stick at all.

I mean, the race war, it's wild that Bouliosi sold, you know, this idea of, you know, that this marginal hippie cult was going to start a race. war because two things. First of all, the United States is actively at war in Vietnam, you know, war against Asian people. Like you can call that a race war. And a few years earlier in L.A., there had been a major riot or rebellion, as some people want to call it in Watts, when police officers killed a black motorist who had not done anything wrong and there's a dispute, right? So, like, if you want to talk about racial violence in the United States, in L.A., committed by the United States or in LA, there's plenty of race war going on. It's not Charlie Manson doing it.

Sure. Right. Or even if it was, he's not going to affect that kind of change. That's it. That's even better. Like, maybe he had that motivation. He's not going to be able to do anything about it. Jeff, the police work involved, never mind the lawyer worked down the line, putting this kind of crazy crime together is a real mess at first, isn't it? I mean, they don't even know they've got the guys. They arrest them for a different reason. And suddenly they start to piece it together. That's right. It's this very arcane reality that existed in Southern California at the time is that there's the LAPD, but then there's the county sheriff, and they're doing kind of parallel, but investigations, but not talking to each other. And at some point, somebody kind of realizes that

they're looking at the same guy, and they realize that he's also connected to the Tate La Bianca murders. There's a wallet that got left in a gas station toilet. The details are all really arcane, and somebody finally rides in and puts it together. And so by December, they have this idea that Charlie's the one who's responsible for the whole deal. And they must do a kind of roll up on them where they started, you know, they've got a lot of sources of information here. They've got all those girls. So they start hearing the story being told from different angles. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I always wondered, do you happen to know this? Why Manson wasn't at this murder if it was so important to him that I would think he would want to go kill Terry Melcher. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question,

you know, and it kind of bedevils the prosecution because it's like, what do you even? charge him with, you know, like, remote control murder is not like a crime. So it's like conspiracy stuff that he, you know, he ultimately gets jacked up on. And, and it's, I mean, it's a great question. He's not a murderer. I mean, it's, I mean, Charlie, there's, like, there's plenty of evidence that he was physically abusive to women in the family. But he's not, he's not a shoot him up, you know. There's an earlier murder of Gary Hinman in a few weeks before the tape murders that we jumped over, who's this grad student drug dealer. who the family was involved with.

And like Charlie showed up at that house and seemed to have done some of the actual violence. But Charlie's a director. I mean, Charlie's a, you know, he's not a get his hands messy kind of guy. Right. Right. He's a, you know, write the script and tell people what their roles are in the script. And that's very much what happened.

He's a manipulator. He's a manipulator. Yeah. Makes him so creepy. He's also a small guy. He's not a big person. You know, this is not a powerful, you know, physical presence. Unlike Tex Watson, his first lieutenant, who's like a high school football,

literally a high school football hero, big guy, you know. Yeah. So Charlie thinks these murders have been done in a messy way, as the word, which is a weird word for it, but they weren't done according to scripted, right? They needed to be done better. And so he dispatches another group to do another bunch of murders the next night. That's right. And this one is even harder to get a beat on because it's not, it doesn't fit exactly, you know, in the narrative, you know, of Charlie's resentment about the music business or, you know, about kind of straight culture versus free culture. Like, they end up at the house of Rosemary and Lino La Bianca, who are just these middle class, you know, I mean, they're pretty well off. But it's still, to my mind, and if you, if you've got

a different take, I'd love to hear it. Like, it's still not exactly clear how they ended up there. Randomly, as far as I know, right? It seems pretty randomly. Maybe they thought somebody else lived. There's all kinds of conflicting testimony about this, but be that as I may, they end up, you know, in this home in a much different kind of neighborhood, also a nice, nice neighborhood, but not that kind of hill fancy. These are like solidly up the middle. Yeah. These are like solidly up the middle. Yeah.

members of their family had been to a party in that neighborhood. So I guess they had sort of an awareness of the neighborhood, and they would have been chosen at random for that lifestyle, let alone. But whatever it is, it's not clear why the Labyankas were part of this thing. But that's even gnarly or what happens here. They carve the name war into the stomach of one of the victims, death to pigs and rise on the wall, helter-skelter is drawn on the fridge. It's all in human blood.

It's all just gross. It's gross. It's a really creepy horror movie version of this murder. And it does seem to have, I'm telling you what you've already told me, but I just want to underscore it. It seems to have all been scripted. That's what you walk away from. You feel like this is all a picture of what he saw in the world and how this needed to be enacted. Let's talk about how they get caught.

We mentioned that there was another place out in the desert that they were going to called the Barker Ranch. weirdly for a TV job, I went to the Barker Ranch. It's way, way out there in the middle. Have you been there, Jeff? I have not. Oh, my God. Let me explain it to you. It's a really fascinating thing.

I couldn't believe I got this chance to do this. And this is like a little weird onion skin of the TV business. So my job was on cities, the underworld, to go underneath places in the world that people couldn't get to. Quite literally, I crawled in tunnels. So we decided to go out and find these tunnels and these underworlds. and these underworlds of Charles Manson and that, you know, where were these caves

that he was going to go into and find, you know, when the race war went on or whatever was the fabled thing. And so we went out there to the place. It turns out, at least in those days, you could drive down this road. And there's two structures. They're pretty close to each other. But the second one, I believe,

is the actual structure of the Barker Ranch. And it's nowhere near anything. And so you can basically get out of your car, walk into this place. It's not occupied in those days anyway. There was a guest book of all things sitting on the front desk there, which had sort of scribbled names of people. It wasn't very formal. And then it's like tumbleweed city in the place.

You know, it's just dusty and gross and all open. And you can walk around. And so I literally found the cabinet that they found Charles Manson hiding. Or at least a bathroom cabinet in this bathroom. And so one can assume that must have been it. It was such a weird close proximity to the story. And that's interesting to me in this. conversation because when you go to Los Angeles, you will feel that vibe still today,

not the Manson vibe, but this kind of odd quality to that community, which is this sort of desert, arid community, and then this massive commercial enterprise in the middle of it all. It's sort of the juxtaposition of these two is everything about the Manson story in a way, you know, a million other stories too. But when you're out there in the desert, you see how far flung this family really was and how they could get away if they wanted to. And that's what happens. A number of them are arrested at Barker Ranch

on charges of arson and theft, right? 24 of them. Yeah, that's great, Don. I love the way you set that up because it's like, these are marginal people. Yeah. These are not like, I mean, we're so used to like heist movies and like George Clooney in a nice suit.

We have all these kind of mythologized image of the bad guys, you know, whether it's outlaws from old Western movies or, you know, gangsters from our more recent stuff. But the Bansin family, like, they're weirdos and losers. And, you know what I mean? They're in death vat. Like, it's not a nice place to be. Right.

And they're busted out there. And they're like fishing a bet. Like, like, they're not hard to find. They're nobody else's living in. They're not sophisticated criminals is basically. They're not sophisticated criminals. Yeah, that's it. That's it.

And they're easy to bust. And they're easy to prosecute because they're, you know, messed up on drugs, among other things. But they're not career criminals. They're not, you know. And they're easily. found and they're easily brought to trial and they're easily convicted. This is a story for another time, that of the trial and all of the whole circus of it all,

really was what it was. It went too crazy. So just know that they were sentenced. They were found guilty and many of them went away for prison. But I will say this about this Manson family, that I don't know that these rather tacky, rather, as you say, marginalized, is a nice word for them, low-life people, would have been the story they would have been, if not for Charles Manson that has manipulated ways, of course. Absolutely. But even Charles Manson wouldn't have been the star, if not for the times he lived in. Absolutely.

The wileliness with which he operated and decided to land himself in the midst of a very successful industry and then failed at it. All of that setup is really why we have this creepy story with us today. And we give these people a lot more credit than they're due in terms of cultural figures, in my opinion. But when we look at them so closely, we're really looking at the times in America and this transition that was happening in media. That's great. And one of the reasons I, you know, I called my book creepy crawling. And we haven't talked about this yet is that the crime that they committed most often was what they called creepy crawling. You know, the family would go into a house of somebody that they could get at near Chatsworth. And they'd literally go into while the family was sleeping, they'd go in the house. house and rearrange the furniture. And this is just like psychological warfare. Like the family would wake up and know someone had been in the house, but not be able to figure out why or what they wanted,

right? And that to me became like the guiding metaphor for what the Manson family has done to us. Like, we can't get them like they're in our heads. We like they're rearranging our furniture. Like we can't like, wow, she looks like just a normal teenage girl. She did what? You know, like, oh, interesting. And that's the metaphor for me that we're still, we can't get done with. Like we're we're still trying to figure out, like, how this happened and what happened to families that our daughters were so vulnerable to this, you know, that's what they were so good at at, just getting in our houses, getting in our minds. Infiltrating lives.

Absolutely. So ironically, we end up still serving him. The irony is that he's infiltrated our culture, hasn't he, Jeff? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that was really what got me started in during the research was this realization that, like, every, it felt like every couple months there would be, I'd hear a song or, or, you know, and I'd hear a song, I'd see a new documentary or there'd be a new bit of visual culture.

There was this great series of photographs of Barker Ranch that some European photographer did. A real art project. And I was like, how come we can't leave this guy alone already? Even after he died, you know. And I started thinking there was this great Rolling Stone cover in the 70s about Jim Morrison, another, you know, shamanic L.A. figure. And it was years after, you know, Morrison had passed. And the headline, if I'm remembering writing Rolling Stone said,

he's hot, he's sexy, he's dead. And I thought about that with Manzan because I was like, no matter how long he was in prison and then after he died, we're still trying to figure out what he did. Like the murders we know, the true crime piece, we're done with. But the cultural part, I mean, he ended up feeding so many different strains of popular culture. You can't have L.A. punk in the late 70s and early 80s without Manson. He's all over the musical and visual culture.

of that moment. Hip hop culture, beginning in the late 80s into the 90s, his name gets, he just becomes like the emblem of an uncontrollable horror.

I mentioned before, and I'll say again, the horror movies of the 1970s, all these home invasion movies. Like that becomes a subgenre in horror that I think is very much

inspired by the Manson, the two nights of Manson murder of like you can be home and you think you're safe and then all of a sudden you got hours of, you know, of horror ending in death in front of you.

So, like, again and again, it was like no surprise to me when, it was the opposite of a surprise when Quentin Tarantino, who is just kind of, if nothing else, just like he keeps wanting to make movies about movies, right? Yeah. And he took this most filmworthy crime and turned it, I mean, I hated the movie, but he turned it into this, you know, even more sensationalistic. You know, I don't want to spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it, but like, he blew it up even more than it already was. Sure. And so that was one of the things of my research. Like, I couldn't do justice. Like at some point I was like, I need to have like a online searchable index, you know, like I need somebody with those skills to index every moment that he's mentioned in popular music, in film culture, in other visual culture, sculpture, paintings, just endless productions.

He took it past the pale. I mean, we were way past any moment that, I mean, it was going to happen sooner or later that murder and mayhem had taken to that point. But really what he is, the important thing is it happens at the time that. it does. That's right. And so you end up with the exploitive nature of media taking advantage of it and making hay with it and all this rest. That's right. And this time in Hollywood, I want to, emphasize that this was the transition in Hollywood from what was a kind of an innocent time in many people's estimation into this much bigger international blockbuster economy. And the paranoia it causes. And it's like really hard not to see this as the moment that that Hollywood switches from

kind of like expansive open-ended drug culture, you know, weed and hashish and LSD to the cocaine intensity of the 70s. Like leave me alone. I'm alone doing it. Those people that were his contemporaries were all getting older. They were having their families. They were building their big houses. They wanted their money. That's right. You know, all that. They want the gates. Keep the freaks out. Yeah. Exactly. So all that little niche of time was where the Manson murders live. You know, it just so happened. Absolutely. If I can say one more thing on that, I've always really resisted. It gets quoted again and again.

Joan Diddyan wrote this essay where she says, you know, we knew the 60s ended that night. And I'm like, well, it was August of 69. It was going to end. The 60s were going to end anyway. Three months, yeah. Yeah, right? And then Mance gets arrested in December. So it's this very neat.

I think you've been hinting at this. And I just want to underline it. It's like a punctuation that like those experiments, the fun, the kind of various communities integrating with each other. Like, this is the punctuation that says, yeah, that, that, that, stuff's over, right? Now we're going to reorganize in a much more hierarchical kind of way. Exactly. It's no coincidence that, you know, a few years later, you have the godfather, you have the big blockbuster start to come. You know, it's that time frame. And Hollywood gets

serious. And that's what happens is that all the innocence is gone. But the innocence also led to Charles Manson, so no thanks for that. Yeah, that's right. There you go. Jeffrey Paul Melnick is the name of the author that I've been interviewing, Jeff, Melton, Thank you very much, cultural historian and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is author of the book we've been talking all about called Creepy Crawley, Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. I encourage you to read it if you're interested in the cultural aspect of this thing. Really fascinating. Thank you so much, Jeff. We'll meet again. Thanks, Tom. That was fantastic.

Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of comments. content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.