Selects: The Manson Family Murders Part 1
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chookbright, and there's Jerry over there, and we make up the Stuff You Should Know family. The peace-loving, acid-loving, non-murdering family. Did I say acid-loving in there? You did. Oh.

It's weird. It's meant peace-loving, non-murdering family. Yeah, and you know what? Hopefully there are no kids listening to this one anyway. So we can let everyone else know that we take LSD before every episode. Sure. I mean, the slogan of our show is wowie zowie. Yeah, so COA, for those of you who did not see the title, if you're listening to your kids about the Manson family murders –

Without a COA, then you need a parenting COA. Yeah, for real. But there are lots of grisly details in this. So obviously, you may want to skip this one on a family picnic. Picnic. Yeah, it might kind of bring it down a couple of degrees. It might be a drag, you know? Probably so. Speaking of drags, Chuck, I'll tell you who is a drag. Charles Manson. Yeah.

He was. He was. So like there's this there's this reputed legend that Charles Manson tried out for the monkeys and was rejected. And that was ultimately why he ordered these these grisly murders of what that will definitely get into. But it turns out that's absolutely false.

Yeah, I've heard that, and it always sounded to me like an urban legend. Well, so the thing is, it's got like all sorts of interesting facets to it, though, right? It's demonstrably false. He was in prison at the time the Monkees tryouts were held.

But it kind of coincides with this larger part of Charles Manson's life that not everybody's fully aware of, which is that he wanted to be a star. He wanted to be a musical recording star. And he actually had he made some inroads into that career. And I have read theories that it is possible that these murders were ordered.

As a means of venting Manson's frustration that his music career wasn't going as well as he thought it should. Yeah. And sending a message to some people in the music industry that he made contacts with to basically say, hey, I can't kill you because I need you, but I can kill other people to get you going and get my music career off the ground. What's the holdup? Huh.

Which is just – like the Manson family murders on their face as they're largely understood is nuts. But if that's the real thing behind all of this, that's just the depths of depravity, of human depravity that people are capable of. I bet that's not like the sole reason. But, you know, like –

If you really strip reasons down, like what are motivations for things? Like, is it really, you know, to bring on Helter Skelter? Is it because he was a frustrated musician?

You know, like you can say the same thing about Hitler. Like, was there a kernel of Hitler's rejection from the art world and from people at large that drove him to order the horrible things that he ordered the Nazis to do? Like, it makes you wonder, like, what is the motivation behind world changing events when you break them down to a personal level? Yeah. I mean, well, Manson, to be fair, had mental illness in a lifetime of violence.

So... Right. This could all factor in, for sure. Yeah. But so, I mean, you asked for this article to be written, didn't you? Was this your jam? Yeah. Yeah. Ed, the Grabster, we can...

sort of petitioned him to write articles at times, and this was definitely one of them. Yeah, so did you know a lot about the Manson family murders and the family themselves and all that stuff already? Yeah. Yeah? So you... This was probably still part of, like, the cultural zeitgeist when you were becoming, like, aware of the world as a kid, huh? Yeah, like, I definitely remember the book Helter Skelter being a huge, huge thing. And I remember a time before...

Like media was so robust when the idea of Charles Manson was just so terrifying to me. I do, too. And then I got older and saw interviews and I was like, oh, he's just a little tiny redneck. Yeah. Like it all vanished. I was like, oh, my God, he's just he's just a little redneck.

Yeah, I think that's what – there were two things that kids of the 80s went through as far as awakenings were concerned. That the Soviet people went out to murder all of us. Yeah. And that Charles Manson was not actually scary. He was just a dumb redneck behind bars. Yeah, I mean, what he did was horrific to be sure. So I'm not like minimizing that. But as far as the person, he was this larger than life, scary as crap dude to me until –

you know, interviews started coming out and sit downs with like Diane Sawyer. I was like, this guy's a joke. But for a little while there, he was legitimately America's worst nightmare because at the time, like a lot of people say when the Manson family committed these murders and it, it came out, you know, a couple months later that some depraved acid head hippies had actually committed these gruesome crimes that had captured the nation's attention. It,

It suddenly gave the establishment who had been looking for anything to lay on to hippies to say, see, see, we told you you can't be trusted. Your whole peace, love, free stuff like that doesn't work. You can't do that because this is the outcome of it. Manson was that personified. And for a lot of for that reason, a lot of people say Manson.

This guy, these murders ended the summer of love in the era of hippies and ushered in the 70s. Yeah, for sure. I mean, timing wise, it just seems very natural. And Ed even points out, like even during the trial, that narrative was being laid down. It wasn't like years later, people look back and said this. And he also I thought it was really interesting. I never really put it into context like Ed did. But yeah.

The moon landing, the very first moon landing, that is, happened two weeks before the Manson family murders. And then a week after the murders was Woodstock. So that was a that was a nutty month.

It really was. You know in America. And again, these murders, when they took place, they were just – no one had any idea who the Manson family was except for a handful of people out in L.A. and some cops that had run-ins with them. But they were not famous, and no one realized that the Manson family had been responsible for these murders. They were just these gruesome, unsolved murders in between the moon landing and Woodstock. Yeah. Yeah.

So a lot of people, let's start at what a lot of people consider the beginning, which is the night of August 9th in a house at 10050 Cielo Drive, which is in Beverly Hills, up in the hills, right? Yeah. I looked up like three different places how to pronounce that.

And they all said Cielo except for Diane Sawyer said cello. And I'm like, man, is Diane Sawyer wrong? No. About anything? No. Whatever she says is absolutely right. She can make turtlenecks right. I used to love turtlenecks. Sure. They had a real heyday for sure. You don't see them anymore.

I used to wear them on Don't Be Dumb, but it was kind of a gag. I think I could still pull one off maybe, especially with the beard. Yeah, the beard would definitely help, you know, because you could...

You could turn a certain way and be like, regular shirt, turtleneck, regular shirt, turtleneck, just by moving your head and your beard out of the way. Yeah, and of course in the 80s I would rock the mock turtleneck regularly. Did you? I never really did. Did you wear them with Z Cavaricci's? No, no, no, no. It wasn't. You didn't dress like A.C. Slater? No, it was sort of, believe it or not, there was like a post-preppy thing where the mock turtleneck was acceptable and not cheesy.

Really? In a preppy sense. I gotcha. Because I was sort of a prep before I became a human monster. I could see that. Did you wear the Lacoste alligator and stuff? Nah, we couldn't afford that stuff, so I wore the knockoffs. I gotcha. Or if I had the Lacoste, the alligator was like accidentally sewn onto the collar or something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've had this conversation. Yeah, all that good stuff. Factory seconds. Yep, that's me. Factory remnants, nice.

So on this night, on August 9th, are we going with Cielo or Diane Sawyer's Cielo? I don't know. Let's just say the house that Satan built. Right. It's not there anymore, by the way.

No, they tore it down, but not before Trent Reznor went in and recorded a Nine Inch Nails album there. Because why not? Why not? So at this house at 10050 Cielo Drive that's not there any longer, there was a knock at the door on the night of August 9th, around midnight. So I don't know if that makes it August 9th or 10th. I couldn't get a definitive answer.

But the door was answered by a guy named Wojtek Frykowski, who was known as a Polish playboy. He was friends of the director Roman Polanski. And he was there because inside that house was Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant with their, I believe, their first child.

I don't think they had any other children. Sharon Tate was pretty young at the time. But also inside was Abigail Folger, who was the heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. And I think, oh, one other guy, Jay Sebring, who is a stylist who is known as the guy who introduced hair styling to men. So he was pretty well off and pretty well known as far as L.A. went. And they're just kind of this hip,

industry party crowd inside this residence. And there was a knock at the door and this guy was there on the other side of the door and he had a mustache and he was tall, kind of a natural athlete type from Texas. And he said, I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's business. And that was Tex Watson. And he entered the house and this massacre of everybody inside began.

Yeah, so what had happened previous to that knock was Tex Watson climbed up a telephone pole, cut the phone line, and then climbed the fence with a couple of other people, one Susan Atkins and one Patricia Krenwinkel, all Manson family members. And we'll get into the whole family thing in a minute.

And so they climbed over the fence, went in. There was a kid, a teenager named Steve Parent who was leaving in his car already, and he did not make it out. He was –

shot five times he was slashed and shot five times by tex watson before he could get down the driveway so one murder had already been committed on that property by the time they even got to the house yeah and if any of these people which you can definitely make the case all of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time stephen parent was just doubly so he was visiting the caretaker of the house so he had nothing to do with

the Hollywood jet set people inside or the Manson family. He was just friends with somebody who was like a worker at the house. And he was leaving at the time, too. Yeah, he would have been friends with, what was the guy's name from the OJ? Oh, man. He would have been friends with Kato Kaelin. There you go. Which is, yeah, that would have been a bad thing to be, I think. Talk about a mock turtleneck. Yeah.

Yeah, I think he has one permanently tattooed on his neck. I think so, too. There was also a third Manson family member, Linda Kasabian, who was not in the house, but she waited. Essentially was the getaway driver. Right. And she'd just come into the family like a month before. And apparently the reason she was out with them was because she was the only one with a valid driver's license out of that group.

So Linda Kasabian sitting outside, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwekel, and Susan Atkins all enter the house, and they just start killing everybody. Apparently, Tex was the only one with a gun, but all three of them had knives. Patricia Krenwekel

Crenwinkel found Abigail Folger reading in bed and started to kill her. I believe Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were in the living room together and they were both killed there in the living room. Wojtek Frykowski made it out of the house, but he was killed in the front lawn. Abigail Folger, I think, made it out the back and she died on the back lawn. And one of the things about this is like the reason the word massacre is like such a

an apt description. Like these were, these were just basically like, I don't know how old Tex was. He was a little bit older, but these are basically like 17, 18, 19 year old girls who had never done anything like this before and were really not very good at it while they were doing it this first time.

And it was just bad for everybody. Apparently it was very brutal. There was a lot of fear and terror and a lot of pain and torment among everybody who was being killed in this house. It wasn't easy clean. You wouldn't characterize it as like a hit. It was a massacre. Yeah, Abigail Folger herself was stabbed 28 times.

And then Sebring and Frikowski, in addition to being stabbed, were also shot. And obviously Sharon Tate's unborn child was killed in this process as well. And supposedly – and this is a direct quote apparently I guess from the trial, the directive from Charles Manson. And if you don't know this, I guess we should go ahead and say Charles Manson –

Even though later on, other people said that Tex Watson was more acting on his own and misunderstood Manson's directive. But Charles Manson ordered these killings, which we'll get into. But he told Watson, supposedly, totally destroy everyone in that house as gruesome as you can. So in addition to the mutilation of the bodies and post-mortem stab wounds, there was –

stuff written on the walls and their blood like a pig. And, uh, well, I think pig was the only thing written on the wall at this one, right on the front door, which is a, uh, obviously was a reference to cops at the time.

Right. And they wrote it in Sharon Tate's blood, right? So Pig is on the door in blood. The perpetrators got away. The Manson family got away. They made it back to, I think, the spawn ranch, which is one of the places they were staying. So then two nights later, Manson orders the family to

to go do it again. He actually said that they, according to Tex and the rest of them, he actually said that they'd done it wrong. They had created panic and fear in these people and they needed to do it right this time. But to go out and butcher another family. And he took them to a house

And it was a house next door to this house that the Manson family used to party at. It was a friend of one of Manson's record producer friends. And next door was just this normal, unassuming couple who had, from what I understand, no interaction with the Mansons at any point in time. It was this couple named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. And

And they were just about as middle class, upper middle class America establishment as you could get. Yeah, he was actually lived less than two miles from this house.

It was in the Los Feliz neighborhood. And just the night before, they had had a party at this dude's house who – and the reason he didn't want to go back to that house is because he thought maybe it could be tied back to him in some way because he was there the night before. So they just randomly picked the neighbor. And there was six of the followers there, the original four from the Tate house –

Plus Leslie Van Houten and Clem Grogan, I think was his name. And yeah, it was talk about wrong place, wrong time. They were just in there enjoying their evening. And Manson did break. He was actually, like you said, there for this one, whereas he wasn't even there for the Tate one. And he took part in the tying up, but then he left, which very cowardly left. Right.

And this whole thing just reeks of cowardice, like go do my dirty work for me. Exactly. Kind of in most of these cases. Right.

So they tie up the LaBiancas. They murdered them brutally again. They carved war in Mr. LaBianca's stomach with a knife. They left the knife sticking out of his neck. They left a fork sticking out of his stomach. It was just another really gruesome scene. And then again, in blood, they wrote things around the house. Like they wrote political – no, they wrote pigs again.

Yeah, they wrote Death to Pigs. They wrote – they misspelled it. They wrote Helter Skelter, which we'll get into. That was a Beatles song, which factors in pretty heavily. And then they wrote Rise. And the whole notion here – and we'll cover this in detail more later too – was that Manson was trying to –

Or at least he says he was trying to ignite a race war and have it appear that black people and maybe even black panthers had killed these white people, which would in turn spark a race war. They would all kill each other. And the Manson and the reason I'm laughing is because it's just so ridiculously impossible and plausible. And then the Manson family would be the only people left and they could rule the world. Yeah, that was supposedly the whole thing behind Helter Skelter.

So the cops in L.A., the sheriff's department and the L.A. cops have two different murder scenes.

that are obviously related, but early on they didn't connect them yet. It took a minute. But once they did, these two murders came to be known as the Tate-LaBianca murders before anyone knew who the Manson family was. And it was a big deal. But you have to go back even further to understand what's going on and to understand the eventual prosecution of the Manson family to another murder. And we will dive into that one after this.

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OK, Chuck. So everybody knows about the Tate-LaBianca murders, so much so that they're frequently called the Manson family murders. But it turns out that the Manson family was already involved in another previous murder a couple of weeks before the Tate and LaBianca murders happened. I think in like late July of 1969, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there was one other murder and an attempted murder and then and not quite attempted murder also. Right. So the one you're talking about, I think, is probably Gary Hinman, who he was. Well, why don't you go and explain how he fit into this whole thing?

Okay, so Gary Hinman was a music teacher who was a friend of the Manson family. I don't think he ever was considered like a Manson family member, but he was a buddy of them. And he either had a trust fund coming or there was a rumor that he had access to a trust fund of like $20,000. Okay.

And so the Manson family went over to rob him. I think Bobby Beausoleil was the leader of that. They went over to rob him or rob

He had supplied the Manson family with a bunch of mescaline that they in turn sold to a motorcycle gang that was not happy that when it turned out the mescaline was bad, who wanted their money back. So the Manson family had gone to go get their money back from this guy. And apparently he had said, like, I don't have any money, but here I'll sign over the title of my cars to you. Here are the keys. And at this point they had him tied up.

And I'm not entirely certain why, but Charles Manson, and this is widely agreed upon, I think even by Manson himself, that Manson came over to the house to basically assist in getting this guy to cough up his money. Maybe that's what it was. And he took a sword and chopped off part of the guy's ear.

Yeah, and depending on who you believe, some say Manson actually ended up killing him. Other people say that Bobby Boussalil ended up stabbing him to death. Manson was on the scene for this one, though, which was different than the other murders. And I guess it just depends on who you believe. It was – Boussalil was eventually arrested while driving that car of Hinman's. Mm-hmm.

So, um, him instead, Bo Cilillo's in jail. And, uh, you have to actually go back even further to find the first, at least attempted murder by the Manson family. Um, earlier in July, on July 1st, this is just a bad jam if you really start thinking about it. Like, all these dates are so compressed. And you think about the Manson family just being in this crazy, like, murderous kill spree. And it really only went for, like, a month, basically. You know, four or five weeks. Yeah.

But they did a lot of damage in that time. But the whole thing started. And you can make the case, and a lot of people do, that the whole thing, everything else that followed, actually started on July 1st when Charles Manson went to the apartment of a syndicate drug dealer, like a big-time drug dealer named Bernard Lotsapapa Crow, right? Yes, and...

though manson thought that he might have been a black panther i don't think i was ever confirmed there are a lot of articles kind of going back and forth but

Regardless, Manson thought he was a Black Panther. There was a double-crossing deal that went on, and they went over, and Manson actually shot Crowe and thought he had killed him, but he did not die, and he did not go to the cops because he, you know, what do you do? Go to the cops and say, hey, I double-crossed these weirdo rednecks, hippies. No, they double-crossed him. They double-crossed him.

Oh, see, I read that he double-crossed them. No, no. And that's why – No, Tex Watson – Well, either way, he would not go to the cops in his condition. And so that's why it was never reported. But he was interviewed. The transcript is pretty interesting to listen to. Yeah. But, yeah, and he wouldn't go to the cops because he would just handle it himself. And that's basically what he vowed to do.

So there's this guy who Manson shot in the gut and left for dead who now wants to kill Manson and the whole family. And that Manson's convinced is a Black Panther, which suddenly makes sense as to why you would have found something like political piggies and a paw print in blood at Gary Hemmon's murder scene. Right? Yeah. Because this is about the time that this whole Helter Skelter thing is happening, starting out. And, um...

The whole idea that there is a race war coming and that the Manson family might be able to nudge it along by framing the black community or black panthers for these murders of white people is the basis of this idea of what was behind the Manson family murders as far as the prosecution is concerned. Yeah, so I mentioned an almost attempted murder. Jumping back forward again,

The very night of the – the idea of the night of the LaBianca murders was to have two separate murders on the same night.

And Manson ordered a few, I think three different followers, including Linda Kasabian, to murder this kind of little-known Lebanese actor named Saladin Nadar. And Kasabian basically got there, didn't want to do this, and so intentionally knocked on the wrong door of the apartment, basically giving her an excuse to get out of there. So weirdly, Saladin Nadir was never released.

Was a near victim of the Manson family. So that's, talk about a close call. Yeah, for real. You know? Yeah. And I looked him up. He basically was a famous actor by that time and then just didn't do much after that. So I wonder if that had, if that like just broke his brain or something, you know? I don't know. I think it would have done that to me. All right. So I think it's about time for another ad break. Let's do it. All right. We'll be right back after this. We'll be right back.

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Yeah, let's. So like, well, let's recap real quick, okay? Manson has shot lots of Papa Crow in his stomach. Lots of Papa Crow has vowed to kill the whole Manson family. Bobby Beausoleil killed Gary Hinman, tried to frame the Black Panthers by writing political piggies and blood on the wall. Bobby Beausoleil is arrested. The Manson family supposedly trying to make it look like somebody besides Bobby Beausoleil might have killed Gary Hinman

Kill the people at the Tate residence. Kill the people at the LaBianca residence. Write things like political piggies and rise and pig in blood on the walls there. And that's where we've left off so far. The Manson family hasn't been caught yet. Let's talk about Charles Manson. All right. So Manson.

It sort of mixed up on what you want to believe because a lot of the information about his life came from him. And anyone who knows anything about Charles Manson knows that he had a tendency to overstate things and certainly lie about things. But what we do know is that he was born in 1934 to a teen mom and dad and the dad died.

basically would not assume any paternity or responsibility, sort of split. His name was Colonel. His actual name was Colonel. And he convinced people that he was an Army colonel, even though he was not. So he was just never on the scene at all. And he ended up taking the name Manson from his stepfather, who, you know, his mom married. She was an alcoholic, may have been a prostitute. She was in and out of

jail for most of her life and or most of his young life. And it was just, you know, a truly bad scene for a young Charles Manson. Right. So he he actually went and lived with relatives while she was in jail for a five year stretch.

She got out. They reunited. He said he apparently said that reuniting with her was one of the few truly joyful moments in his life. But in very short order, she basically was like, I can't take care of you. I don't really want this responsibility and handed him over to the state, which begun which began a just basically a string of institutionalization that would that would keep going for basically his whole life.

Yeah. I mean, by the time he was eventually sent to federal prison, I think he was 32 years old when he was released in 67. And they calculated that he had spent half of his life in and out of institutions, whether it be orphanages or prisons.

juvie or real deal prison and jail. Right. And that was just the first part of his life. So he was out for two years before they got him again after these murders. By the time he died in prison at age 83 this past November 2017, he was

He had spent, from my calculations, only 13 years of his life as a free man. 13 out of 83 years outside of institutions. So he had a lot of the deck stacked against him. But you can also go back to, I think, March 1967 when he was released on parole from federal prison where he was released.

Where he was given a choice like, hey, man, here you go. You're out. You can decide what to do with your life. Do you want to go straight? Do you want to go have a nice family? Do you want to just be a productive member of society? Or are you going to go the exact opposite direction? And as we know, in hindsight, Charlie Manson chose the exact opposite direction. Yeah, it's I don't know if he was ever officially diagnosed, but.

But I did see that doctors over the years and mental health professionals say that he was probably schizophrenic, suffered from schizophrenia, and had a paranoid delusional disorder at the very least. I hadn't heard the schizophrenia thing. Paranoid delusional disorder, I totally buy. Yeah. So he was a troubled dude. Of course, not excusing anything, but it was clearly a case of –

Mental illness combined with rejection and institutionalization really led to like the man that he would eventually become. Right.

So he gets out of prison, right? And he is basically released into San Francisco, 1967. So it's like hippiedom, the kingdom of hippiedom, where he shows up. And there's, you know, at the time, everybody's looking for like something new, something different, something that's an alternative to...

establishment or the mainstream or anything different. And so Charles Manson says like, oh, I can totally exploit a lot of these people. And he starts out by meeting a girl, a librarian named Mary Bruner.

And he moves into her apartment. And she apparently was very fascinated with him because she had led a fairly straight-laced life. She went to college again. She was a librarian. And all of a sudden, there's this wild ex-con who is preaching this kind of gospel of love and no materials. And apparently, before...

November 1968, which will explain what happened then. Before that time, Charles Manson supposedly did pretty closely resemble an actual hippie. Like he felt like he could take anything of yours that he wanted, but you could also take anything of his. And he apparently walked the walk when it came to stuff like that. And there are plenty of stories of him just giving up whatever material possessions, saying they didn't matter.

before things really took a dark turn. So if you really kind of dive in, it becomes clear how he could have amassed some of these early followers. And the first one was Mary Bruner. Yeah, I get the feeling that this probably would not have happened in any other era other than this generation when, you know, we've talked about it in our brainwashing in our cults episodes where this time it was just –

It was just a weird time in America, and people were really –

I don't know about prone, but at least ripe for the picking when it comes to falling into situations like this and believing these what look like crackpots to us now. But at the time, everyone was it was very anti-establishment. People were taking tons of drugs and reject rejecting mainstream society and embracing the counterculture. And they were just really open to all kinds of weird stuff. Right.

So he, again, he just kind of figured out that he could work this to his own means. So there's a couple of things that, there's two basic things that you needed to know about Charles Manson from everything I've seen. One was that his main goal was to become a recording artist, a very successful star of a recording artist. And two, that

That he could – he had a good ability to manipulate people into giving them what he wanted. And mostly that amounted to sex and drugs. And he used that ability to get other people involved.

to do what he wanted. So, for example, when he started to amass a substantial amount of girls in the Manson family, it was just a free love commune the whole time. So the guys who came in all of a sudden had access to the women

And in return for Charlie granting them access to them, they would basically do his bidding or offer him physical protection because he wasn't a big guy. He's kind of a shrimpy dude. But.

If you look at it from an outsider's perspective, every relationship he had was one of extraction. He was taking something from everyone around him. It wasn't just a normal friendship or a normal relationship. It was, what can you do for me? And what can I use from you to get something out of other people?

Yeah, and if you've never seen an interview with him, I encourage you to check some of them out. He does have a very stream of consciousness, circular mind.

Sort of talks nonstop and doesn't make a lot of sense. But one thing that's often said about him is that he can be mesmerizing with the way he does that. And I imagine in the late 60s, if you got a head full of acid and there's this guy that has the ability to like almost rebreathe like a trumpet player and.

talk for minutes and minutes and hours on end, they could be kind of, you know, they would fall under this weird spell. Right. So I definitely don't get it because now when I watch them, I'm, again, tiny, weird redneck. But when you, you know, when you see him doing his thing, even with like Diane Sawyer, who doesn't fall for it, by the way, she clearly is just like very,

It's a great interview. She's pro and she stays very on point. Basically kind of like you're not going to get me to like fall for your charms. Right. But it's pretty interesting. So he's got Mary Bruner as this first girlfriend. Then he said, hey, what do you think about a triad? Or rather, what do you think about a triad?

That's how he sounded. Yeah. And Mary Bruner, from what I understand, wasn't super into it, but she was under his spell. So she said, sure. So Squeaky Frome, Lynette Squeaky Frome came into the picture. And they, you know, they lived as a threesome that traveled together up and down the coast out there. And he just sort of started accumulating information.

mostly women along the way to this sort of traveling party is probably how he framed it. And people were hip to it. There were men, though, besides Tex Watson and Bobby Boussali, all those guys named Danny DiCarlo, who were kind of early men who joined up. And by all accounts, most of those men who joined up

were there because Manson was said, you know, you can have these women, you got plenty of drugs. And so before you know it, the Manson family was born. Yeah. And they were just kind of this weirdo hippie group that used to commit burglaries. Manson has long been, it's long been said that he beat a lot of the women in the group and would prostitute them for cash to pay for things for the family, like rent.

They ate a lot of their food from like going through dumpsters behind grocery stores and stuff like that. And they just basically hung out and did drugs and had sex all day. That was basically their aim and their goal. And then at night, they would have bonfires out in the desert. And they'd all just take a bunch of acid and listen to Charles Manson do his mesmerizing thing. And again, at first it was...

It was weird. There was a lot of like ideas that Manson was this reincarnation of Jesus Christ or that he was not even the reincarnated Jesus Christ. He was the same Jesus Christ who'd been alive for, you know, almost 2000 years. And just like all the stuff you would find in the desert among hippies in the late 60s on acid at night around a bonfire. Right.

But when – by this time, like by the time they're out in the desert, Manten had had this really amazing chance encounter that you just would never have. And the fact that it did happen is just –

Totally mind-blowing. But to become a recording artist, to help ensure his success of becoming a recording artist, he moved the family from San Francisco down to Los Angeles to be closer to the center of the recording industry. And it just so happened that one night in 1968, a couple of Manson family girls were hitchhiking on Sunset Boulevard and were picked up by none other than Dennis Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Beach Boys.

That's right. It was 69, but same deal. All those years just ran together back then. And Dennis Wilson was – he was a party dude and liked his ladies because it sounds very weird to say that he picked up a couple of hitchhikers and basically brought them home. But it was a different time. And like I said, he was a party dude. So –

They ended up being Ella Jo Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Krenwinkel. So they move in, basically, and he goes to the studio, comes home, and the Manson family had moved in, which, again, it sounds really strange. But at the time, he I mean, Ed says he was frightened. I get the feeling he was more like, you know, what trip are you on? Not like, oh, my God, I need to call the cops.

Yeah, he... Because they lived there for a while. He let them live there. Yeah, I think it was partially out of fear. I read an interview with Charles Manson where he was talking about Dennis Wilson and

And he was like, you know, I'd say whatever. He'd just lay his weirdo trip on Dennis Wilson. And Dennis' response would be like, yeah, man, that's cool. Look, I got to go. I really got to go do this thing. Just always trying to get away from Charles Manson. So maybe he was afraid that they were going to kill him. Maybe he liked having access to, like, all this free love from all the Manson family women. Or maybe he just felt like he couldn't get out of it. But he...

He did let them live there for a few months. It wasn't like they crashed there for a weekend. They moved in. They wrecked his Ferrari. They met a bunch of his friends. It was a big deal that Dennis Wilson came into Charles Manson's life because it really bolstered this idea that, yes, he is going to become a recording artist.

Because not only did he hang out with Dennis Wilson, he hung out with a guy named Terry Melcher, who was a record producer, hung out with another guy named Phil Kaufman, who was a record producer. And he met all these people in the industry who were in a position to get Charles Manson's career off of the ground. And when you're dealing with this crazy little ticking time bomb like Charles Manson, who wants you to do...

something like get his musical career off the ground, but you don't think his music is good enough to actually launch, you've got a problem on your hands. And Dennis Wilson and his buddies all knew this. Yes, and two quick things here. One, big shout out to Dennis Wilson's only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue. Is it good? I think it's great. I've got to check that out. I love the Beach Boys. I mean, Dennis Wilson was clearly not the –

the brains or voice behind the beach boys as the drummer. But, uh, and he was always sort of, um, I think kind of picked on a little bit for not being the most talented dude. And he was just in the band cause he was handsome and related. But, um, I think Pacific ocean blue is like one of the great lost classics. I'll check it out. It's very good. He was supposedly also the only true surfer in the band. Yeah, exactly. Uh,

And the other thing was that Terry Melcher, that producer that you mentioned, the reason he factors in so heavily is because he actually lived at the Tate house in Beverly Hills before Tate and them moved in. Yeah. So that was sort of the connection there. Yeah.

I guess Manson was going to kill him, right? No. No? So here is what a lot of people think. They think that, again, he was sending a message to Terry Melcher saying, I can't kill you, but I can get close to you, and I know you're going to hear about this because this happened at the house you were living in a month or so before.

I'm just going to go in and have my people indiscriminately slaughter whoever's there. But this is you. This is what's going on. He supposedly was well aware that Terry Melcher didn't live there any longer because he'd spoken to the guy who actually owned the house and was asking him where Terry Melcher went. And all the guy would tell him was Malibu. So he knew it wasn't Melcher in that house anymore. All right. So they eventually leave Dennis Wilson's house. Dennis Wilson's like, you guys are great and all.

The ladies are nice. The acid is decent. But it's time for you to go. So they leave in 1968 still. And they go to Spahn Ranch, which you mentioned earlier, S-P-A-H-N. And this was kind of weird that they ended up living here. But it was out in kind of the outskirts of L.A. There are lots of ranches, like the Disney Ranch or the Universal Ranch, where they shoot a lot of stuff. And they have –

old sets that are still there, whether it's MASH or Planet of the Apes or just an old West set. And Spawn Ranch was one of these that had closed down. And it was an old West set. And they actually, it's a state park now, but they did have permission to live there. They didn't just squat there. They sort of had a little agreement to do a little maintenance work. And they were allowed to stay. So some of them are there.

Some of them are at places like at a camp in Death Valley and then just scattered all over L.A. as far as Manson family members and just random houses and apartments. But the main place that Manson and the inner circle was at Spahn Ranch, and they would go on what they called creepy crawls, which were these little crime sprees. Like you said, they would go out and burgle cars or rob people just to kind of keep the money and the drugs flowing.

Right. And so Spahn Ranch was almost like a little more legit. They were in much closer contact with other people out in Death Valley at the Barker Ranch. That was far more secluded, way out in the desert, way more disconnected from society. And that was the place where they expected to wait out helter skelter while everybody else in the country killed one another. That's right. So –

You've got this whole weirdo family. They're criminals. They're engaged in prostitution. There's violence. There's physical violence. But ultimately, they kind of resemble hippies here or there. Super counterculture. But things turn dark here.

And they turned dark after this seminal thing that happened to the rest of the world, but really, really spoke to Charles Manson in particular. And that was the November 22nd, 1968 release of the Beatles' White Album. All right. You know what? This is going to be a two-parter. It's pretty clear. So let's go ahead and end this one on a cliffhanger featuring the Beatles. Right. Does that sound good?

Yeah, it does. Pick back up part two with the White Album? Let's do it. All right. All right. Well, in the meantime, while you guys are chewing over what Chuck just said, you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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