Charles Manson
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Cult leader Charles Manson's thousand-mile stare -- captured in one of the most famous mug shots 
of all time -- and the story of his followers' murderous two-night rampage in 1969 Los Angeles 
terrified America. How, a nation asked, could one small, failed songwriter's apocalyptic drivel 
spark such savagery? The slayings by Manson's followers -- of a beautiful, pregnant actress, as 
well as at least a half-dozen other innocents -- were horrible enough. But the motives behind 
the murders seemed, if possible, even more sinister, securing Manson and his "family" of misfits 
a permanent perch in the darkest corner of American pop and crime culture.

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Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known 
as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the late 1960s. He was convicted 
of conspiracy to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders, carried out by members of the group at his 
instruction. He was found guilty of the murders themselves through the joint-responsibility rule, 
which makes each member of a conspiracy guilty of crimes his fellow conspirators commit in 
furtherance of the conspiracy's object.

Manson is associated with "Helter Skelter," the term he took from the Beatles song of that name 
and construed as an apocalyptic race war the murders were putatively intended to precipitate. 
This connection with rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, 
in which he became an emblem of insanity, violence, and the macabre. Ultimately, the term was used 
as the title of the book that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.

At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half 
his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. In the period before the murders, 
he was a distant fringe member of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association 
with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs 
written and performed by him were released commercially. Artists including Guns N' Roses and 
Marilyn Manson have covered his songs in the decades since.

Manson's death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a 1972 decision by 
the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state's death penalty. California's 
eventual reestablishment of capital punishment did not affect Manson, who is an inmate at Corcoran 
State Prison.

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On the night of August 8, Manson directed Watson to take Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia 
Krenwinkel—one of the hitchhikers allegedly picked up by Dennis Wilson — to "that house where 
Melcher used to live" and "totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can." He told 
the women to do as Watson would instruct them.

When the four arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who had previously been 
to the house on Manson's orders, climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It 
was now around midnight and into August 9, 1969.

Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked there and 
walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm, they 
climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came 
their way from farther within the angled property. Telling the women to lie in the bushes, Watson 
stepped out, gave a command to halt, and shot to death the approaching driver, 18-year-old Steven 
Parent. After cutting the screen of an open window of the main house, Watson told Kasabian to keep 
watch down by the gate. He removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and 
Krenwinkel in through the front door.


Slaughter

As Watson whispered to Atkins, Polanski's friend Wojciech Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; 
Watson kicked him in the head. When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, 
Watson replied, "I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business."

On Watson’s direction, Atkins found the house's three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel's help, 
brought them to the living room. The three were Tate, eight and a half months pregnant; her friend 
and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; and Frykowski’s lover Abigail Folger, heiress to 
the Folger coffee fortune. Polanski, Tate's husband, was in London, at work on a film project.

Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with rope he'd brought and slung up 
over a beam. Sebring's protest—his second—of rough treatment of Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. 
After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, out of which she gave the 
intruders $70, Watson stabbed Sebring seven times.

Frykowski, whose hands had been bound with a towel, freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, 
who stabbed his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him. As Frykowski fought his 
way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson, who joined in against him, struck him 
over the head with the gun multiple times (breaking the gun's right grip in the process), stabbed 
him repeatedly, and shot him twice. Around this time, Kasabian, drawn up from the driveway by 
"horrifying sounds", arrived outside the door and, in a vain effort to halt the massacre, told 
Atkins falsely that someone was coming.

Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area. 
Folger was pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed – and finally, tackled – her. She 
was dispatched by Watson; her two assailants had stabbed her twenty-eight times. As Frykowski 
struggled across the lawn, Watson ended his life with a final stabbing; the victim had been stabbed 
a total of fifty-one times during the assault.

Back in the house, Atkins, Watson, or both killed Tate, who was stabbed sixteen times. Tate pleaded 
to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby; she cried, "Mother... mother..." until she was 
dead.

Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the women to 
"leave a sign… something witchy". Using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, Atkins wrote 
"pig" on the house’s front door, in Tate's blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody 
clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.

In initial confessions to cellmates of hers at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins would say she killed 
Tate. In later statements to her attorney, to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and before a grand jury, 
Atkins indicated Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson. In his 1978 autobiography, Watson himself said 
that he stabbed Tate and that Atkins did not. Since he was aware that the prosecutor, Bugliosi, 
and the jury that had tried the other Tate-LaBianca defendants were convinced Atkins had stabbed 
Tate, he falsely testified that he did not stab her.