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Beware. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
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, nice family.
Did I say acid-loving in there?
You did. Oh, it's weird.
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 with the 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.
He was. He was. So like 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 monkeys 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 and sending a message to some people in the music industry that he'd 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? Which is just like the Manson family murders on their faces.
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, 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, was had mental illness and a lifetime of rejection.
So this could all factor in for sure.
Yeah. But so I mean, you, you, you asked for this article to be written, didn't you?
Was this your jam? Yeah.
Yeah. Ed, the Grabster, we can sort of petition 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, this is 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 weren't 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 down.
So it's like, Diane Sawyer 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 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 suddenly gave the establishment who had been looking for anything to lay onto hippies to say, see, see, we told you, you can't be trusted.
Your whole piece of 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, this guy, these murders ended the the summer of love and the era of hippies and ushered in the seventies.
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 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. In America.
And then 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 LA 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. So a lot of people, let's start at the, 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 kind of, I looked up like three different places, how to pronounce that.
And they all said Cielo, except for Dian Sawyer, said Cielo.
And I'm like, man, is Dian Sawyer wrong?
No. About anything? No.
Whatever she says is absolutely right.
She could 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 turn a certain way and be like, regular shirt, turtleneck, regular shirt, turtleneck.
Just by 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 Cavarichis?
No, no, no, no. It wasn't.
You didn't dress like AC 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 got you. Because I was sort of a prep up before I became a human monster.
I could see that. Did you, uh, did you wear the LaCoste alligator and stuff?
Nah, we couldn't afford that stuff.
So I wore the knockoffs.
I got you. Or if I had the LaCoste, the alligator was like accidentally sewn onto the collar.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We've had this conversation.
Yeah, all that good stuff.
Factory seconds. Yep, that's factory remnants.
Nice. So on this night, on August 9th, are we going with Ciello or Diane Sawyer's Ciello?
I don't know. Let's just say the house that Satan built.
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, at this house at 10050 Ciello Drive, that's not there any longer.
There's 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 Fajkowski, who was known as a Polish playboy.
He was friends of the director Roman Polanski.
Uh, 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 is 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 LA went.
And they're just kind of this hip industry party crowd inside this, this residence.
And there was a knock at the door and this guy was there at the, on the other side of the door.
And he had a mustache and he was tall, kind of a natural athlete type, 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 Crenwinkel, 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, Steven 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 Cato Kalen.
There you go. Which is, yeah, that would have been a bad thing to be, I think.
Talk about a mock turtle neck.
Yeah. I think he has one permanently tattooed on his neck.
There was also a third Manson family member, Linda Cassabian, 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 the valid driver's license out of that group.
So Linda Cassabian sitting outside, Tex Watson, Patricia Crenwinkle 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 Crenwinkle found Abigail Folger reading in bed and started to kill her.
I believe Sharon Tate and JC Bring were in the living room together and they were both killed there in the living room.
Vojtek Fajkowski 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 an apt description.
Like 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 Fajkowski, in addition to being stabbed, were also shot.
And obviously, Sharon Tate's unborn child was, you know, 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 like post-mortem stab wounds, there was stuff written on the walls in their blood, like pig.
And well, I think pig was the only thing written on the wall at this one.
Right. On the front door.
Which is a, 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 was one of the places they were staying.
So then two nights later, Manson orders the family 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 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 it was talked 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.
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. Labiancas 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, they wrote things around the house, like they wrote political, no, they wrote pigs again.
Yeah, there were 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 release.
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 and then 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 then the Manson family would be the only people left and they could rule the world.
Yeah, those supposedly the whole thing behind Helter Skelter.
So the cops in LA, the Sheriff's Department and the LA cops have two different murder scenes that are obviously related, but early on, they didn't, they didn't connect them yet.
It took 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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Okay Chuck, so everybody knows about the the Tate-Labyanka 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 weeks before the the Tate and Labyanka murders happened.
I think in like late July of 1969, right?
Yeah, I mean there was one other murder and an attempted murder and then a 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.
And so the Manson family went over to Rob him.
I think Bobby Bosele was the leader of that.
They went over to Rob him or 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 like 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 Bosele 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.
Bosele was eventually arrested while driving that car of Hinman's.
So Hinman's dead. Bosele was in jail and you have to actually go back even further to find the first at least attempted murder by the Manson family.
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 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 the Manson thought that he might have been a Black Panther I don't think that was ever confirmed.
I read 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 Crow 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 no. That's why uh no Tex Watson.
Well either way he would not go to the cops right 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 as 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 Heman's murder scene right?
Yeah. Because this is about the time that this whole helter-skelter thing is happening starting out and the whole idea that 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 lobby anchor 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 was a near victim of the Manson family so that's talk about a 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 and now
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find out how to bring your ideas to life at del.com welcome to now all right Chuck we're back should we talk about Charles Manson a little bit yeah less so like well let's recap real quick okay Manson has shot lots of papa crow in his stomach lots of pop crow has vowed to kill the whole Manson family bobby bossa lay killed gary henman tried to frame the black panthers by writing
political piggies and blood on the wall bobby bossa lay is arrested the Manson family supposedly trying to make it look like somebody besides bobby bossa lay might have killed gary henman kill the people at the tate residence kill the people at the lobby anchor residence write things like political piggies and rise and pig in blood on the walls there and 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 um it's 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 to a teen mom and dad and the dad 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 um he ended up taking the name Manson from his stepfather who you
know his 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 uh 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 um 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 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 the orphanages or juvie or real deal prison in 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 and this past November 2017 he had spent from my calculations only 13 years of his life as a free man yeah 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 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 I did see that 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 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 hippie dumb the kingdom of hippie dumb 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 the establishment of the mainstream or anything different and so Charles Manson says like oh I can I can totally exploit a lot of these people and that he starts out by meeting a girl a librarian named Mary Brunner and he moves into her apartment and she apparently was very fascinated with him
because she had led a fairly straight life she went to college again she was a librarian and all of a sudden there's this wild like 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 did he he 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 there's 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 was Mary Brunner 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 he could work this to his own means so there's a couple of things that there's there's two basic things that you needed to know about Charles Manson from 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 he could he had a good ability to manipulate people into giving them what he wanted and mostly that that amounted to sex and drugs and he used that ability to get other people to do what he wanted so for example when he started to amass like a substantial amount of girls in the Manson family it was it was just a free love commune the whole time so the guys
who came in all of a sudden had access to these 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 there everything from from if you look at it from an outsider's perspective every relationship he had was one of extraction he
he was taking something from everyone around him it wasn't just a normal friendship or a normal relationship it was 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 them I encourage you to check some of them out he does have a very stream of consciousness circular sort of talks
non-stop 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 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 him again tiny weird redneck but when you you know when you see him doing a thing even if like Diane Sawyer who doesn't fall for it by the way she 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 but it's pretty interesting um so he's got Mary Brunner as this first girlfriend then he said hey what do you think about a triad or a rather what do you think about a triad because that's how he sounded yeah and um Mary Brunner from what I understand wasn't super into it but she was under his spell so she said
sure so squeaky from Lynette squeaky from came into the picture and they you know they lived as a as a threesome that traveled together up and down the coast out there and he just sort of started accumulating 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 um besides Tex Watson and Bobby Boussileal
those got him uh Danny Decarlo 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 um used to commit burglaries Manson there
has long been um it's long been said that he uh beat a lot of the women in the group and would prostitute them to for cash to pay for things for the family like rent um they 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 um 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 2,000 years um and just like all this stuff you would find in the desert among hippies in the late 60s on acid at night around a bonfire right but when when um by this time like by the time they're out in the desert Manson 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 um 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 same deal all those years just ran together back then.
Right and Dennis Wilson was he was a party 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 um it was a different time and uh he like I said he was a party dude so they ended up being Ella Jo Bailey and the aforementioned Patricia Crenwinkel 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 um I think because they lived there for a while like he let them live there.
Yeah I think the party was partially out of fear I saw it and I read an interview with Charles Manson when he was talking about Dennis Wilson and he was like you know I'd say whatever he just lay his weirdo trip on Dennis Wilson and Dennis's response would be like yeah I mean that's cool listen look I gotta go I really gotta go do this thing just always trying to get away
from Charles Manson so maybe he was afraid that he was they were gonna kill him maybe he liked having access to like all this free love from all the the Manson family women um or maybe just felt like he couldn't get out of it but he uh 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 yeah they
they met a bunch of his friends it was it was a big it was a big deal that 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 is 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 when there's you're dealing with this this crazy little ticking time bomb like Charles Manson who wants you to do something like get his music career off the ground but you don't think his music is good enough to actually launch um you
got a problem on your hands and Dennis Wilson and his buddies all knew this yes and uh two quick things here uh one big shout out to Dennis Wilson's only solo album Pacific Ocean Blue is it good i think it's great i gotta check that out and i'd love the beach boys i mean he Dennis Wilson was it was clearly not the uh uh 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 because he was handsome and related but um i think Pacific Ocean Blue is like one of the the great lost classics let's 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 the Tate House in Beverly Hills before Tate and then moved in yeah so that was sort of the connection there um 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 gonna hear about this because this happened at the house you were living in a month or so before i'm just gonna go in and have my people indiscriminately slaughter whoever's there but this is this is you this is what's going on he 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 live they leave in 1968 still and um he uh they they go to spawn ranch which you mentioned earlier spahn and this was a it was kind of weird that they ended up living here but it was it was out in kind of the outskirts of LA there are lots of uh 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 uh 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 um it's a state park now but they did have permission to live there they didn't just uh squat there they uh 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 LA as far as mans and family members and just random houses and apartments right but the main uh place that that manson in the the inner circle was at spawn ranch and they would you go on what they called creepy crawls which were these little crime sprees would like
you said they would go out in burgle cars or rob people and um just to kind of keep the money and the drugs flowing right um and so spawn 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 the the um everybody else in the country killed one another that's right so um you've got this whole this whole weirdo family they're they're criminals they're engaged in prostitution there's violence you know there's physical violence but ultimately they're they kind of resemble hippies here they're super
counterculture but things turn dark and they turn 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 beetles white album all right you know what this is going to be a two-parter it's pretty clear uh so let's go ahead and end this one on a cliffhanger
featuring the beetles right does that sound good yeah it does um pick back on part two with the white album um let's do it all right all right well in the meantime while you guys are chewing over what chuck just said uh you can send us an email the stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldknow.com Stuff You Should Know
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