Now Playing
Cielo Drive, 1969: The Murders That Shattered an Illusion
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On August 9, 1969, Charles Manson's followers descended on Cielo Drive and killed five people — including Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant — in a crime that shattered America's peace-and-love decade. This episode traces Spahn Ranch to the blood-written walls, Helter Skelter to the courtroom, and asks how a Beatles song became a blueprint for mass murder.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Picture August ninth, nineteen sixty-nine. A warm Los Angeles night.
To understand the night of August ninth, you have to go back a few miles and several months. Out on the edge of the San Fernando Valley sat Spahn Ranch, an abandoned movie set that had once doubled as the Wild West for low-budget westerns.
By the summer of nineteen sixty-nine, Manson was frustrated. The race war hadn't started.
The killers entered the house. What followed was prolonged and brutal.
The messages written in blood were deliberate. At the LaBianca house the following night, where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered by Watson, Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, the killers wrote "Helter Skelter" on the refrigerator and "Rise" and "Death to Pigs" on the walls.
The investigation took months. The LAPD initially struggled to connect the two nights of murders.
The death sentences were never carried out. In nineteen seventy-two, the California Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional.
The Tate-LaBianca murders did something beyond the criminal. They became the moment that many people point to as the symbolic end of the nineteen sixties.
Bugliosi's prosecution gave the public a framework for understanding all of this, and his subsequent book about the case became the definitive account. The argument that Manson weaponized music and ideology to turn ordinary young people into killers was something the culture could hold onto.
Sharon Tate has never really left the public consciousness. She's become more than a victim.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.