Thirty-five years ago today, actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Hollywood hair-stylist Jay Sebring, eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, and Voyteck Frykowski, a Polish associate of Roman Polanski, were murdered. Victims were stabbed, beaten, hung, and/or shot, and the word "PIG" was conspicuously written in blood on a doorway in the home. The following evening Rosemary and Leo LaBianca, owners of a supermarket chain, were killed in a similar fashion.
Suspicion fell on friends of Mama Cass, Tate's husband Roman Polanski, and numerous others until nearly four months after the murders when the police arrested a diminutive career criminal and his suburbanite, younger, hippie followers. By the time Charles Manson was charged with murder, the thirty-five year old aspiring musician had spent half his life in correctional institutions. The son of teenage prostitute Kathleen Maddox, Manson was born "No Name Maddox." Shortly thereafter, according to Manson, Miss Maddox sold her son to a waitress for a pitcher of beer. While the '60s are oft portrayed as a time of liberation, for Charley Manson they were a time of confinement. He spent the entire decade in prison until 1967.
The Manson Family, for the most part, led very different lives. When Manson's murderous associates are discussed, words like "impressionable" and "brainwashed" are tossed about in a manner suggesting that the followers somehow don't have a share of ownership of the crimes equal to that of Manson's. Tex Watson was an "A" student who starred in track and football, for instance, and Leslie Van Houten was twice elected homecoming queen. Could these all-American kids really have done such things? Not on their own, much of society answered; let's blame it on the street urchin who must have put them under his spell. Of course, the discomforting reality was that Manson and his middle-class followers were all murderers.
Charlie Manson may have partially served as the human scapegoat for his fellow murderers, but drugs and insanity served as excuses too. The murders weren't random acts of insanity. They were planned out, and conducted, in part, for political reasons. Sandy Good, who was pregnant with Charles Manson's baby at the time of the murders, recalls: "there was a core of people who were very close together and who stayed true to the thought that we had for stopping the war in Vietnam and for protecting our air, our water, our trees and our animals. We were so committed to those causes that the murders more or less evolved out of our desire to change the system." The Weather Underground applauded that "desire to change the system" by adopting at one of their gatherings a spread-fingered greeting representing the fork that the Manson Family stuck into one of their victims. Like the People's Temple, the Manson murders involved a left-wing cult that in part justified their crimes with the political causes they promoted.
The 1960s were the age of The Beatles, civil rights advances, and the peace movement. They were also a time of rationalized violence, drug abuse, reckless sex, and societal upheaval. The Manson Family offers a glimpse at all of these ugly traits from the other side of the '60s.
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