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Spahn Ranch to Cielo Drive: The Machine Behind the Murders
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On two August nights in 1969, Charles Manson's followers carried out the Tate-LaBianca murders — acts of calculated terror rooted in a twisted theology built from Beatles lyrics. This chapter traces the Manson Family from Spahn Ranch to the killings that ended the sixties.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you know what happened on Spahn Ranch, it looks like a refuge. Dusty trails, old film sets, horses, a loose community of young people living outside the rules.
Manson himself was not what his mythology later made him. He wasn't a visionary.
By nineteen sixty-nine, Manson had developed what his followers accepted as a complete worldview. He called it Helter Skelter, borrowing the phrase from the Beatles song of the same name on the White Album.
On the night of August ninth, nineteen sixty-nine, Manson sent four of his followers to ten thousand and fifty Cielo Drive in the hills above Los Angeles. Tex Watson led the group.
The following night, Manson came himself. He drove the group to a house on Waverly Drive in Los Feliz.
The investigation that followed was not immediately focused on Manson. It took months, and a confession from Susan Atkins to a fellow inmate, before law enforcement connected the crimes to Spahn Ranch.
In nineteen seventy-two, the California Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional. Every death sentence in California was commuted at once.
The crimes entered American mythology almost immediately, and they've never really left. Bugliosi wrote a book after the trial titled "Helter Skelter." It became one of the best-selling true crime books in history and shaped how most people understand the case to this day.
What Spahn Ranch actually was, in the end, was a controlled environment. Manson had designed it that way, whether consciously or through instinct.
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