Thirty-five years ago this evening, the Manson Family went on night two of its mass-murder spree. They killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, using their blood to write "Death to Pigs" on the wall of their home. The murderers carved "war" and "XXX" onto Mr. LaBianca's chest. In addition to political rationalizations for the killings, Charles Manson had a more practical motivation: to exonerate a Manson Family associate who had been charged in an earlier murder.

A few days prior to the Manson Family murder spree, Bobby Beausoleil, a friend of Charles Manson and a fellow musician, murdered Gary Hinman. According to Beausoleil, Hinman had sold him some phony mescaline that he had in turn sold to the Straight Satans motorcycle gang. Feeling that he had been had and fearing that his life was in danger from reprisals from the Straight Satans, Beausoleil confronted Hinman in his home. The confrontation ended with Beausoleil stabbing Hinman to death. To confuse the police, Beausoleil painted "Political Piggy" on the wall with Hinman's blood. Since Hinman was a Ph.D. candidate who traveled in Marxist circles, Beausoleil painted the slogan to make it seem that one of Hinman's fellow activists killed him.

"Well," inmate Beausoleil recalled in 1980 about the blood-stained graffiti, "it was my idea to do it. Susan Atkins was on that wall. The whole thing was to take the heat off the trail. Gary Hinman was into his revolutionary communism. His whole living room was a library of Communist literature. I figured I'd make it look like one of his cohorts, you know."

The police didn't fall for it, partly because Beausoleil stole the dead man's car and proceeded to use it as his personal vehicle, which had the effect of defeating his scheme. When the Manson Family embarked on their murderous rage a few days later, one objective, it seems obvious, was to spring Beausoleil from jail by committing murders that would appear too similar to the one their friend had been charged with. But again, the police didn't fall for it. Amazingly, they apparently never made a connection between the two murders.

Three murders featured political slogans involving variations of the word "pig" painted in human blood, and the police failed to draw a connection between the Hinman murder on the one hand, and the Tate-LaBianca murders on the other. Rather than helping Beausoleil beat the rap, drawing such a connection would have likely served to have fingered Beausoleil's friends in the later killings in a more timely fashion.

Theories regarding The White Album, a race war, and the Book of Revelations often cloud other, more central, inspirations for Charles Manson's blood lust. These include political motivations, a desire to exonerate a friend on murder charges, and intimidating music industry figures who spurned Manson, including Doris Day's son, producer Terry Melcher, who had previously lived in the Tate-Polanski home. If we do not know exactly why the Manson Family murdered, it is in part because they probably don't exactly know why either. All we know is that they did it.

Of course we know why the Manson family murdered-The Beatles told them to in order to begin the imminent race war. Its all there on the white album. Your just not "tuned-in" its because your part of the "white establishment" who will soon be destroyed.

Thanks for the links...very interesting.

Let's not forget the Wilson brothers and the album "Pet Sounds" in all this.

Yeah, there were a lot of celebrities tangentially connected to all this--Polanski, Tate, Mama Cass, Dennis Wilson, etc. The Manson Family essentially lived in Dennis Wilson's house for a while, crashing his car and leeching off him. A guy who later managed The Doors dated one of the Manson girls. Candace Bergen lived with Terry Melcher, the producer who discussed perhaps making a record with Manson, at the time, so I'm sure this freaked her out quite a bit. When Tate was killed, I read that many LA celebrities went and bought guns. On top of all this, the Manson Family lived on a movie set--Spahn Ranch. Some family members appeared in porn and B-movies. Manson himself wrote a number of songs, one of which the Beach Boys changed and recorded. Some serious people who have heard his music actually believe that he might have made it in the music industry had he made a record deal. This seems hard to imagine, but when you realize that an act as massive as the Beach Boys recorded his work it doesn't seem altogether implausible.