Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Charles Manson: How He Built A Cult Out Of Runaway Kids Pt. 1

Episode Date: September 26, 2026

Charles Manson spent more than half his life locked up, read at a seventh-grade level, and failed at the only thing he ever actually wanted: a record deal with a music label. In the first part of our 3-part series on the Manson murders, Katie Ring traces the childhood that built him, the runaway kids he assembled into a family, and the nine people whose lives were about to run into his.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi everyone, it's Vanessa Richardson. Real quick before today's episode, I want to tell you about a show I host with Forensic Psychologist Dr. Tristan Engels. It's called Serial Killers and Murderous Minds. Every Monday and Thursday, we take you deep into the psychology of the most chilling murderers and uncover what drives them to kill. Follow serial killers and murderous minds available wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House.

At the end of a private road, in Benedict Canyon, behind an electric gate, there's a house at 1,0-50 CLO Drive. It's quiet. And as the sun went down on Friday, August 8, 1969, there were five people inside. A 26-year-old actress named Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant in about two weeks from her due date. Her friends Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Abigail's boyfriend, Vueytec Vrakowski, were staying with her.

Sharon's husband, Roman Polanski, was in London, working on a project for his upcoming film, and he'd asked her friends to stay at the house so she wouldn't be alone while she waited for the baby. The fifth person was 18-year-old Stephen Parent, who had never met any of them. He was just there trying to sell a radio. Meanwhile, 30 miles northwest, up in the hills above Chatsworth, there was a collapsing old movie ranch where about two dozen young people were living in the state of near total dependence on one man. a man who had spent more than half of his life locked up, who read at about a seventh grade level,

and who had completely failed at the only thing he'd ever actually wanted to be, a rock star. But there was one thing he was really, really good at, finding people who are vulnerable, figuring out what they wanted, and then convincing them that he was the only person that could give it to them. He was a career con man and a sex trafficker, and long before anyone was murdered,

he'd already learned how to manipulate people into doing things they never would have done on their own. And on this particular Friday night, he would take four of those people, tell them to change into dark clothes, give them three knives, and send them to that house on CLO Drive. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's most infamous crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still on us today. In the summer of 1969, Charles Manson and his followers killed nine people in and around Los Angeles.

More than 50 years later, we're still arguing about why. And this case changed how this country covers crime, how it thinks about Colts and eventually who gets to speak in a courtroom. Today, I'll tell you about the boy nobody wanted, the family he assembled, and the nine people whose lives were about to collide with his. Charles Manson was born Charles Mills Maddox on November 12, 1934, at a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother was Kathleen Maddox. She was 16 years old. There was no father listed on the birth certificate. Although Kathleen did win a judgment for child support against someone named. Colonel Scott, which was his actual first name, not a military rank, he wasn't involved in the baby's

life at all. From the beginning, they didn't have it easy. Kathleen was a rebellious teenager from a strict West Virginia household who ran off young, drank a lot, and had a child she had no way to raise. She kept showing up in his life and then disappearing out of it again, which is arguably worse than never showing up at all. There's a famous story Manson told about her that she once traded him to a waitress for a pitcher of beer, and an uncle had to go get him back. Now, nobody has ever found proof that this story is true, but I do think it's interesting that he told it. Because Charles Manson understood something very early. People love a good story, especially a story that explains why someone became the way they are. And Manson would spend the rest of his life

creating his own mythology. And part of his story started with his name. A few months before Charles was born, Kathleen married a man named William Manson. That marriage didn't last long, but the name did. And when Charles was four years old, his mother and her brother were arrested for robbery. Kathleen was sentenced to five years, so suddenly this little boy was being sent to live with an aunt and uncle in McMecan, West Virginia. And according to Manson, they were extremely strict and very religious. He later told a story about being sent to school wearing a dress because he'd been crying, supposedly to teach him to toughen up. Again, there's no way to independently verify that story,

but nobody who looked into Manson's childhood came away describing a home where a small boy was safe and consistently loved. What he definitely got in that house was religion and discipline and the constant feeling that he was somebody else's problem. Charles was a kid whose mother was in prison in a town small enough that everybody knew it. Kathleen got out on parole when he was eight. She took him back and then for the next few years she moved him around, boarded him out, tried to place him with people, and eventually stopped crying.

In 1947, when Charles was 12, she attempted to put him in a foster home, but there wasn't one available. So a judge sent him to the Gibalt School for Boys. The name sounds like a fancy prep school, but it was far from it. Jebalt was a Catholic reform school in Indiana, which is also a nice way of saying Juvie. Although I despise this man, it is quite a very much. sad. He was sent to Juvi at 12 years old, but his only crime was having a mother who didn't want him, a foster care system that couldn't take him, and a judicial system that failed him.

Manson entered the American correctional system because no one cared to do the work. And once you're in that system at 12, the system is fairly good at keeping you in it. That was a pattern in his life for the next seven years. He ran, he got caught, he got sent somewhere worse. He escaped from Jabal and went back to his mother. For a moment, he was a moment he was. He was a he thought she'd let him stay. Instead, Kathleen sent him right back to the school. That rejection hit him hard and he ran again. But this time, he didn't go home. He made his way to Indianapolis and started living on his own, stealing from stores to get by. There, he was caught and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile detention center. He escaped after just one day, but was recaptured shortly

afterward. And instead of sending him back to the same facility, a sympathetic judge sent him to Boys Town in Nebraska. Four days after arriving at Boys Town, Manson and another boy Blackie Nielsen escaped, obtained a gun, and stole a car. They committed two armed robberies while making their way towards Nielsen's uncle in Illinois. He was arrested for those and then sent to the Indiana Boys School, where he stayed on and off from the time he was 14. Manson later said he escaped 18 times, He also described being beaten and sexually assaulted there by other boys. And the worst part is that he said the staff knew. He described a specific routine where staff would encourage the older boys to attack a new

arrival and then stand back and watch it happen. Again, that's his account and Manson was a habitual liar, but the conditions in mid-century American reform schools aren't in dispute. And later investigations of that specific institution found exactly the kind of violence he described. So it's very likely a true story. But as is the case in so many of these stories, we can have empathy for that young child, and it might explain parts of why he became the person he did,

but it does not excuse the person who he became. Plenty of children survived those places and didn't do what he did. At 16, Manson and two other boys stole a car and drove west, breaking into gas stations along the way. They eventually got picked up in Utah, and since they crossed state lines in a stolen line, car, it became a federal case. So they sent him to the National Training School for Boys in Washington,

D.C. There, a caseworker gave him an aptitude test and found something worth noting. The kid was illiterate or close to it, but he wasn't unintelligent. He was described as aggressively antisocial, and in a phrase that would age strangely, as having a tendency to make a good initial impression. His measured IQ came back at 109, slightly above average, but in no way, remarkable. After that, Manson got sent to a minimum security honor camp. He assaulted another boy there with a razor blade to his throat, which got him transferred to a tougher facility. And then another one. He finally was paroled in 1954 when he was 19. In January of 1955, Manson married a young waitress named Rosalie Jean Willis. For a few months, he tried an ordinary life. He worked odd

jobs, but quickly became restless, and he started stealing cars on the side to make extra money. Then Rosalie got pregnant. That summer, Manson stole a car in Ohio and the two of them drove it across the country to Los Angeles where they moved in with his mother. That's the closest he ever came to a normal life, and it lasted a matter of months. Because in October of 195, police in L.A. found the stolen car. Taking it across the state line made it federal again, and a judge gave him five years probation. Then a second identical charge caught up with him out of Florida. So Manson and Rosalie took off for Indianapolis and he skipped the Los Angeles hearing.

The police tracked him there and he was arrested in March of 1956. His probation was revoked and he was sent to Terminal Island prison for three years, which means that when Charles Manson Jr. was born that April, his father was already in a cell. Rosalie visited for about a year. Then she stopped, and then she divorced him. Once Manson got out in the late 1950s, he decided to try another criminal enterprise, becoming a sex trafficker. Manson found young women who just arrived in the city with no money and no one to call,

telling them he'd look after them and then putting them to work. It was the same skill he would later be described as having, supernatural powers of persuasion. In May of 1959, he got picked up trying to cash a forged government check, A stolen treasury check worth $37.50. That September, he pleaded guilty. He should have gone straight back to prison, but one of the women he was involved with told the judge

the two of them were in love and would marry if Manson was free. The judge suspended a 10-year sentence and gave him probation instead. He married her and then he got caught taking her and another woman across the state line for prostitution. That trafficking charge was eventually dropped, but Manson had violated his probation. So in 1960, when he was 25, a court ordered him to serve the 10 years it had suspended. He served most of it at McNeil Island, a federal penitentiary in Washington State. In prison, Manson took a Dale Carnegie self-improvement course,

which was basically just content from how to win friends and influence people. He also picked up Scientology from another inmate. And most importantly, he asked an older prisoner to teach him the guitar. Surprisingly, he had a decent voice and an easy way. with people. Manson was obsessed, and near the end of his sentence, he met a guy named Phil Kaufman who actually worked in the music business. Kaufman listened to his songs, thought a couple of them had something, told him to go pursue it, and gave him names to call. So Manson left prison in 1967 with a plan, but his plan wasn't to build a colt. It was to get a record deal. He was released on March 21st,

1967. He was 32 years old, and he'd spent about 17 of those years in institutions. He said afterward that he'd actually asked to stay, that prison was his home and that he had nowhere else. That may be true, or it may be one of the many things he said because it sounded good, but it is a common thread between prisoners. What isn't a question is that he had a guitar, a parole officer, permission to relocate to San Francisco, and no idea that the city he was walking into was about to fill up with 100,000 kids who had nowhere else to go either. Over the years, I've met people whose lives were changed forever in a single moment. In my new podcast, Before and After, I explore what happens after after that decisive moment.

Personal, powerful conversations with Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, and others. Join me wherever you get your podcasts. Search before and after with Lester Holt to listen completely free or subscribe. to Dateline Premium to unlock new episodes early. In 1967, something close to 100,000 young people came to San Francisco's hate Ashbury District. A lot of them had nothing. No money, no plan, no room, and in plenty of cases, no adult back home who was going to come looking for them.

The city was overwhelmed. Free clinics ran out of everything. Runaway shelters filled up. And into that, walked a 32-year-old man who'd spent two decades studying how to read people and get them to hand him things. By that fall, the neighborhood was full of hard drugs, hepatitis, and predators. In October of 1967, a group of local activists staged a mock funeral through the streets and called it the death of hippie. So the young people Manson was meeting weren't in the middle of a beautiful movement.

They were in the wreckage of one, in a city that had stopped being able to feed them. He collected loyal followers in San Francisco and L.A. The first one was Mary Brunner. She was a 23-year-old library assistant at UC Berkeley with a college degree in a small apartment. Manson talked his way in, and then he moved in, and then he started moving other people in. He would find a young woman who was alone. He'd tell her she was the only person who had ever really seen him, and that he was the only person who had ever really seen her.

Then he'd take away everything she could use to check that against reality. Lynette Frum was 18, sitting on a curb in Venice, after a fight with her father, when Manson walked past and talked to her. Susan Atkins had been a topless dancer in San Francisco and had already been chewed up by that city. Patricia Crenwinkel was 19 working as a secretary in Manhattan Beach. She left her car in a parking lot, left her last paycheck, uncashed, and went with him. She would later tell parole boards she believed she had finally found someone who loved her. Leslie Van Houten was 19, Homecoming Princess, middle-class family,

divorced when she was 14, and Diane Lake was just 14 years old. Her parents were living in a commune, and they gave her a note saying she was free to live on her own. Then they drove away, and she went to him. Some of them recruited each other. A woman named Catherine Cher brought Leslie Van Houten in. Cher had been recruited by a young musician named Bobby Boussela, who was 21, chasing a record deal just like Manson, and good-looking enough that people called him Cupid. Nobody in the story was recruited by a stranger in a robe. They were recruited by a friend or a boyfriend or somebody who seemed happy. One of Manson's control tactics was to give them new names.

Susan Atkins became Sadie. Patricia Crenwickle became Katie. Leslie Van Houten became Lulu. Lynette From became squeaky. If you answer to a name your family never used, you've already left part of your identity behind. Manson also dose the group with LSD in amounts he decided. and he consistently took less than he gave. Everyone else went out of their minds

while he stayed lucid and told them what they were experiencing. He orchestrated the sex, including group sessions where he assigned who did what with whom. It functioned as recruitment, as a reward, and as a way of destroying whatever privacy or shame anyone had left. And he also took away their concept of time. There were no clocks allowed, no calendars, no radio. Later, under questioning in court,

member after member could not tell you what months something happened in. One of them told her own attorney that she couldn't track months only seasons. Another said she couldn't say whether a day had been a Monday or a Friday because one day just ran into the next. That was on purpose. If a person can't locate herself in time, she can't tell you how long she's been there or how much she's given up. Or when it started, she's just in the now and the only person who knows what now means is him. And then, once someone was fully inside, he'd flip. He'd humiliate her in front of the group. He'd withdraw completely, and she'd work to get back in his good graces.

He'd use the typical abuse cycle with degradation followed by adoration. That's not mysticism. It's a standard control pattern, and it works incredibly well once you isolate your victims. They called themselves the family, and when it became clear that Manson's music career wasn't taking off in San Francisco, they bought a converted school bus, painted it black, and moved down to L.A. And in the spring of 1968, they met someone who seemed like he might give Manson everything he wanted. Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys, picked up two female members of the Manson family

who were hitchhiking and dropped them off. Wilson invited them back to the house, and when he later returned from a recording session, he found Manson and a group of his followers there. Rather than immediately throwing them out, Wilson became fast. fascinated by Manson. Manson was charismatic, spiritual, sexually liberated, and had a harem of women, and was also a musician. Before he knew it, the whole Manson family moved in. They stayed for months. Some estimate that it cost Wilson something in the neighborhood of $100,000, food, medical bills for the whole group, and a wrecked car on top of it. But it also got Manson what he'd been chasing.

Wilson introduced him to Greg Jacobson, a talent scout, and to Terry Melcher, a successful record producer. For a few months in 1968, Manson was closer to the center of the Los Angeles music industry than most working musicians ever get. The Beach Boys actually recorded one of his songs. It was called Cease to Exist. They rewrote the lyric, retitled it, never learned not to love, released it, and credited to Dennis Wilson. Manson was not happy about it. People around him the time said he made threats. And in August of 1968, he moved the group out to Spawn Ranch and Chatsworth. An old Western movie set turned horse rental operation run by the owner George Spawn, who was in his 80s and nearly blind. In return for letting them stay there, the family did chores

and looked after the place, and Manson offered up some of his female family members to keep him company. Around the same time, a young man from Copeville, Texas turned up. Charles Watson, who everyone called Tex. He was a former high school athlete was on the honor roll and was the kind of kid a small town is proud of. He'd moved to L.A., met Dennis Wilson hitchhiking,

and found his way to the family. Life at Spawn Ranch was far from idyllic. They ate out of dumpsters behind grocery stores, panhandled for money, and there were guns around. There was also a practice the group had picked up

that they called creepy crawling, breaking into houses in the hills at night while the owners slept, moving the furniture around, taking almost nothing, and then leaving. The point wasn't theft. The point was to prove they could walk into a stranger's house in the dark without waking anyone. They did it for months and it worked every time. Then in November of 1968, the Beatles released the white album and it changed everything.

Manson decided the record was a coded message to him personally about a coming race war. He'd been talking about a racial apocalypse for a while already. In explicitly racist terms that black Americans were going to rise up and destroy white America and that he and his followers would survive it by hiding in a bottomless pit in the desert. And that when it was over, they'd come out and rule what was left. It was a white supremacist fantasy dressed up in Bible verses and pop lyrics. Manson built it out of specific songs, most famously one called Helter Skelter. Although Manson was obviously way out there reading hidden meaning into that album,

him was practically a national pastime in 1969. Millions of people played those records backwards looking for messages. That part wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that he had two dozen young people around him with no clocks, no families, and no way to tell him he was wrong. And then in the middle of 1969, the last door closed. Terry Melcher agreed to come out to Spawn Ranch and hear him play. This was the meeting.

Everything he'd been working towards since a bank robber taught him. in three chords on a prison guitar. The family cleaned the place up, they set out a spread, and everybody performed. Melcher listened, then he handed over $50, which people around the ranch understood was charity rather than interest.

And then he left, and he didn't come back with a contract. The record deal was never happening. Manson was 34 years old, living in a horse stable, and the world was not going to give him a single thing he'd asked for. So he stopped asking and decided

to start taking. Hey, did you hear? Watermelon is back at booster juice all summer long. Nice! I love the watermelon explosion. And the watermelon wave. Yep. They even got a new watermelon assaye pool this year.

The one in a melon bowl. And what does that sound like? Mmm. Like that. Booster juice. Canadian born, blending since 1999. Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people.

It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CVC's Uncover and the Fifth Estate, an investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone. The Mile Zero Murders, available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Before I go any further, I want to stop and tell you about some of the people at the center of this story,

because this case has a bad habit of turning them into a body count. Sharon Marie Tate was born in Dallas on January 24, 1943, the oldest of three girls. Her father was an army officer, so the family moved constantly. Texas, Washington State, Italy. She was the new kid everywhere. By the time she was in high school, she'd lost count of the school she'd gone to. Being the perpetual new girl is a specific kind of childhood, and the people who knew her later said you could still see it in her after she grew up.

She worked hard at being liked and she was careful with people because she'd been an outsider so many times. The thing people who knew her say over and over is that she was unusually kind for that industry. She was the one who remembered names and asked about your family. It all started when Sharon won a beauty title in Richland. Washington when she was 16. When her father was stationed in Italy, she started picking up extra work on film sets around Verona and Rome. By her early 20s, she was in Hollywood on a studio contract doing small television parts, including a recurring role on the Beverly Hillbillies. Then things started to really take off, the fearless vampire killers, Valley of the Dolls, which got her a Golden

Globe nomination, and the wrecking crew, where reviewers noticed she was funny. She had just finished shooting a film in Italy, and at 26, she was on the edge of a real career. She married the director Roman Polansky in London in January of 1968. He's a complicated figure in his own right. In 1977, Polansky pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl, and he fled the country before he could be sentenced. He's been a fugitive from American justice ever since. Other women have accused him of assault in the decades since, and he denies those allegations, but this isn't his story, it's Sharon's. And that's who I want to focus on. After they got married, Sharon got pregnant at the end of 1968. In February of 1969, they rented a

house on CLO Drive, and the house even had a name of its own because of who used to live in it. 1,050 CLO Drive sat at the top of a dead end road behind an electric gate with a guest house out back. The tenants before Sharon and her husband were the record producer Terry Melcher and the actress Candice Bergen. They'd moved out in January of 1969 a few weeks before the Polanskies moved in. In March of 1969, after Melcher had already left and after the audition that went nowhere, a man came up that dead end road looking for him. He got as far as the gate and was told by the people there that Terry didn't live there anymore and that he should leave. That man was Charles Manson. Polansky was in London that summer working on a film, so Sharon spent a lot of time with her

friends to keep her company. One of them was Thomas Cumber who went by Jay Sebring, which was his professional name inspired by a racetrack in Florida. Sebring was raised outside of Detroit and served in the Navy in Korea. When he got back from Korea, he transformed the hair industry. Before Jay Sebring, men got haircuts. After him, men got their hair styled. He had clients like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra. He charged more for a haircut than most people spent on groceries in a week. He franchised the name and he had a salon on Fairfax that men flew in for. He was 35 and at the top of a profession he had essentially created. By every account, he was also a generous friend and a man with some hard edges. He drank, he used, and his personal life was messy. Jay and Sharon

had dated for a couple of years and it hadn't worked out romantically. But despite their failed relationship, he became one of her closest friends. When she got married, he was there. That August, he'd been stopping by the house regularly to check on her while her husband was overseas. Another friend who was around a lot was Abigail Folger. She was 25, and yes, her family's name was the one on the coffee. She was also a Radcliffe College graduate who was spending her time in Los Angeles as a volunteer social worker for the county welfare department doing casework in Watts, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Abigail was dating 32-year-old Voitek Frykovsky, the son of a textile manufacturer in Poland, and Roman Polanski's friend from back

home. He'd come to America a couple of years earlier wanting to write and produce movies, although he hadn't managed much of it yet. When Polanski left for London, he asked Voitek and Abigail to stay at the house with Sharon. That's the only reason either of them were there, which leaves one more. Stephen Parent was 18 years old. He just graduated high school and was working two jobs, a delivery job and a job at a stereo shop, because he was saving for college. He was into electronics and built things. He drove up to Cialo Drive on the night of August 8, 1969, to see the property's caretaker,

a 19-year-old kid named William Garriston, who lived in the guest house outback. Stephen was trying to sell him a clock radio. In the first week of August, the house on Cialo Drive was in the middle of an ordinary, pleasant, slightly boring stretch of time. Sharon had come home from Italy by boat because she wasn't allowed to fly that late in the pregnancy. The nursery was being put together and Jay was checking in. Abigail was making plans for the fall.

Meanwhile, Stephen Parent and William Gerritson sat and talked for a while. Stephen played him the radio, but William wasn't interested. So Stephen said good night and got back in his car a little after midnight. He was a teenager working a side hustle on a Friday night in the wrong driveway. and he is the person this case forgot almost immediately. In most tellings, he's a sentence. Sometimes he's not even that. Sometimes he's just described as a friend of the caretaker,

and his name doesn't come up at all. But before the victims at Cialo Drive, there was Gary Hinman. Gary was 34, a music teacher, and a practicing Buddhist who was saving up for pilgrimage. He had a house in Topanga Canyon, and he was the kind of person who let people crash share, including people from the family.

Mary Brunner had stayed at his place as well as some others. He fed them and gave them a floor to sleep on and he didn't ask for anything back. The group had gotten it into their heads that he was sitting on money, some version of an inheritance or a bank account or a pile of cash. Trial testimony later established that Gary did own his own house and some stocks and bonds. What he didn't have was the pile of cash they'd imagined. On July 25, 1969, three of them went to the house. They asked Gary for the money, but he told him there wasn't any.

So they held him there for two days while they tried to make him sign over what little he did have, which was just a couple of vehicles. Manson himself came by at one point and cut him with a sword. Then Bobby Bousselaerle killed him. Before they left, somebody dipped a hand in his blood and wrote two words on his wall, political piggy, and next to the words, a paw print. That was deliberate. It was meant to look like the Black Panthers had done it to point investigators at

somebody else entirely. On August 6th, a California Highway Patrol officer on routine patrol spotted a Fiat station wagon parked on the shoulder of the Highway 101 near San Luis Obispo. Bobby Bostelaide was asleep in the back of it in a sleeping bag. He told the officer he'd bought the car off a stranger a week earlier for $200 in cash. It was Gary Hinman's car. And once it was impounded, officers found a knife tucked into the spare tire well. Bobby was arrested that day, first for the car, then a few hours later in a cell at the San Luis Obispo County Jail, an officer read him his rights a second time and told him the charge was murder. And 30 miles from that highway at a ranch full of young people who had no calendars and no way home,

the man they all answered to now had a problem. One of his own was in a cell. Whatever happened next had to happen fast. So two days later, on Friday, August 8, 1969, he found Tex Watson at Spawn Ranch, and told him to get a change of dark clothes and three knives. Before we get out of here, it's time for ring the alarm. Today, I want to talk about how people can get sucked into Colts. The reality is that people who join them often don't look or seem that different from anyone

else. In the case of Charles Manson, many of his followers were young people from relatively middle-class or stable backgrounds, not people who were obviously vulnerable or incapable of making their own decisions. That's important because cult recruitment often isn't about finding someone who is weak. It can be about finding people who are searching for something, community, purpose, belonging, freedom, or a sense that their life should mean more. Recruiters can recognize those needs and present themselves as offering exactly what that person has been missing. And that's where Manson was particularly effective. He was charismatic, confident, and very good at making people feel understood.

He could mirror what people wanted to hear and create this immediate sense that he accepted them without judgment. He also took advantage of the counterculture of the 1960s, presenting himself as someone who had rejected the rules and expectations of mainstream society. But once people became emotionally invested, he gradually became the center of their world. The group lived together, became increasingly isolated from outsiders, and began accepting Manson's increasingly extreme beliefs. What makes Manson's story so disturbing is that his control didn't begin with violence,

it began with belonging. He created a community where people felt accepted, then slowly made himself indispensable to that community. By the time his followers were deeply committed, leaving wasn't simply about walking away from Manson. It could mean walking away from their friends, their home, their identity, and everything they had come to believe. That combination of charisma, isolation, emotional dependence, and manipulation.

is a big part of what made Manson such an effective recruiter and leader. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your listening experience, join Crimehouse Plus and get all three parts of each week's America's Most Infamous crime stories dropped at once ad-free every Monday. You also get the rest of the crime house lineup ad-free and early and exclusive bonus episodes. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts,

tap try free at the top of the America's Most Infamous Crime Show page. Come back tomorrow for the next episode on Charles Manson and the Manson family murders. The police closed my sister's case in 2019. Last month, her killer commented on my post. On Reddit, true crime doesn't come from journalists. It comes from the victims, the witnesses, and sometimes the suspects themselves. People post the things they never say out loud, anonymous, unfiltered, and completely real. And every Tuesday, on crimes of Reddit, we read them out loud.

I'm Sabrina Deanna Roga from two girls, one ghost. And I'm Alexis Linkletter from the first degree. Each week, one of us brings the most unhinged, true crime stories the internet has to offer. And the other goes in completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, reacting in real time, same as you. And then we swap. And we pull every thread until the whole twisted picture comes into view. It's dark. It's messy.

And the scariest part is that these are real stories, posted by real people. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen to and follow Crimes of Reddit, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to this episode from Crime House. If you're looking for another show to check out, listen to serial killers and murderous minds. Every Monday and Thursday, Dr. Tristan Engels and myself dig into the most chilling murders and uncover what drives them to kill. Follow serial killers and murderous minds available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thank you.