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.
Chapter 1: What were the cultural conditions in America during the 1960s?
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.
Chapter 2: How did Charles Manson rise to prominence?
That's its own story entirely. Let's start with Charles Manson himself. He has the sadly typical broken home childhood, becoming a boy to young man with a rap sheet so long it'd take an episode to describe it. Where is he born and how does he come to 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.
And I think what we really need to focus on with Madsen 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 Manson 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, kind of classic orphan or quasi-orphan scenario. So yeah, he's in the Midwest and then makes his way, I think, after his grand theft auto joyride out to California and ends up forging 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 scene in 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 karpis creepy karpis uh 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 Ma 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.
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Chapter 3: What was the role of Dennis Wilson in Manson's story?
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 LA 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 and he begins to imagine himself as a musician with
real potential and so la is where it's happening i mean this is la's moment it's i mean when i started researching this stuff i was like earlier in my career did a 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 la 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.
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. Yep. 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 thing.
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. Yeah. 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 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... 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.
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Chapter 4: How did the Manson family operate at Spahn Ranch?
And a few of the other women are clearly like the ones running the ranch, you know, the ones who are 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 come upon these names and you're like, who's that again?
You know, like 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, etc., 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 familiar your listeners will be with geography of LA, but Benedict Canyon is one of these beautiful areas, a little bit north of where the cultural action is, the Sunset Strip. It's not a long drive, but it's a whole other world.
Again, if your listeners are not on the West Coast, what LA geography looks like is always a mystery to those of us from the East Coast or elsewhere. So it's this really remote feeling part of LA, right?
When you drive up in those hills, you have no relation to LA 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 houseguests 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.
The line that always gets quoted is that Charlie tells one of the women of the family to do something witchy. And so 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.
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Chapter 5: What psychological tactics did Manson use on his followers?
It was like already a film script, you know, 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, 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 really bizarre. No, it's hard. I mean, this is horror movie stuff. 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.
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Then the crime scene photos show that they've used the blood to draw words on the wall. Pig 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 Bugliosi 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 LA, 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 LA, 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 he, maybe he had that motivation. He's not gonna be able to do anything about it. Sure.
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Chapter 6: What led to Manson's eventual downfall?
So Charlie thinks these murders have been done in a messy way is the word, which is a weird word for it, but 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 street culture versus free culture. Like they end up at the house.
Of Rosemary and Lino LaBianca, 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.
There's all kinds of conflicting testimony about this, but, but be that as it 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.
Angelinos. Yeah. You know, I think of the Menendez when I think of this, I don't know why, but it seems like that same class that we're talking about. I have a note that actually the Mansons knew about these people because 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 Labiancas were part of this thing. But that's even gnarlier 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. You know, 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 would need it 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 way out. 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.
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