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It was a warm August night in Los Angeles. The year is 1969. Sharon Tate was 26 years old, eight and a half months pregnant and relaxing at home. She was very tired, as you can imagine, preparing herself and her home to welcome a new baby into this world. She had very recently told friends that she could feel her baby moving. She was so excited. She had already picked out a name. She was looking forward to becoming a mom. Her husband, film director Roman Polonski, was in London away on business. He was working on a film. And at the time, Sharon herself was one of Hollywood's most promising young actresses. And she had every reason to believe that the best years of her life were just beginning. But Sharon Tate would be dead before sunrise, as would every single other person in or around that house. Making the total number of victims that night, five. Her killers had never met her. They did not hate her. They did not know her name before they knocked on her front door. The reason they showed up at her doorstep in the first place with intentions to make her their victim was because they were ordered to. They were sent to that address by a 34 year old man who had spent more than half of his life in prison. A man that those people would have done anything for. His specific instructions had been something along the lines of totally destroy everything in that house. As gruesome as you can. His name was Charles Manson. And what he built in the hills outside of Los Angeles in that summer of 1969 was no sort of murder conspiracy. It was something far more disturbing than that. It was a family. A family that created absolute chaos and installed fear in every single person in Hollywood living there at that time. If you guys don't know the name Charles Manson, I think you're lying. There's no way that you have not heard his name. He is one of the most infamous killers ever, I would say. And I was honestly, to be super honest with you, kind of avoiding doing this video because it's heavy stuff, okay? It's not easy to listen to. There's, there's a lot of brainwashing, manipulation and also just the crime scenes themselves are so incredibly brutal. I made the mistake of looking up the crime scenes. Well, I guess not mistake because I have to for researching purposes. I'm scarred. Yeah, don't look them up. With all that being said, welcome to this episode of I wish you were here. I'm your host, Michelle Cuervo. On November 12th of 1934, a a baby boy was born at the Cincinnati General Hospital in Ohio. His birth certificate did not list a name. Records from that year show that the official name given to this child just born was listed as no name Maddox. It was later on changed to Manson. His mother was 16 year old Kathleen Maddox, someone described to be a wild, rebellious teenager from Ashland, Kentucky. She, she had fled her very strict religious household that she lived in with her parents, left home, ended up in Cincinnati, found herself lonely, 16 years old, pregnant and with nowhere to go. The baby's biological father was a man named Colonel Walker Henderson Scott. Colonel was his given name, not to be confused with a common military title. But he was married to. To a different woman, allegedly. And when Kathleen reached out to him to say, hey, by the way, thought you should know I'm having your baby. His response was, oh, well, I'm kind of busy. I got called away for business and I'm gonna go. Kathleen never saw him again after that. Once she gave birth, she was struggling to give her baby a name. She had not really connected much with her baby when she was pregnant, but she had briefly married a man named William Eugene Manson right before her baby was born. And so the baby event became Charles Mills Manson. That is how the name Manson came to be. However, Kathleen and Williams's marriage was a very quick one. It was extremely short. The couple divorced on April 30, 1937, and by then Charles Manson was only two years old and already in a position in which he had no stable home, no kind of stability in his life really. If you talked to Kathleen Maddox herself, she would tell you that she was no monster, that she was just a teenager who found herself in the wrong situation, someone who was never equipped to become a mother. In 1971, she gave a very rare interview to the Los Angeles Times. And she pushed back against the narrative that she was not a caring or really a present mother at all, saying, quote, I was just 15 years old and a dumb kid, end quote. That said, Kathleen 100% fits into what most people would call the a neglectful mother. She drank heavily, she disappeared for days at a time, leaving Charles her baby with either babysitters, grandmothers, Aunts, uncles, neighbors, she basically left the kid with any adult who was willing to watch him. And when she was present, when she did spend time with her own son, the neglect only turned to abuse. But just to give you an idea of the kind of mother that she was, it has been reported that she once tried to sell her baby to a waitress in exchange for a pitcher of beer. Yeah, here's my human child that I spent nine months creating. If you just give me a drink, you can have him. Sorry. And even though she was very young and she felt like she wasn't in a position to become a parent, the one thing that you cannot deny is the fundamental truth of Charles Manson's earliest years. He was unwanted, he was unloved, he was shuffled between strangers and not shown any type of love or care at all. Especially by the one person who was supposed to love him at all times, no matter what. And then things got worse. On August 1st of 1939, Kathleen, as well as her brother, Luther Maddox, robbed a man at a gas station, bashing him over the head and then ambushing him, sealing what they could, running away. For that, Luther was sentenced to 10 years. Kathleen was sentenced to five. Charles Manson at the time was only four years old. And because he was now in a position where his mother had to serve time, he was sent to live with relatives in West Virginia with his aunt and uncle there. He lived in a very strict religious household that was pretty much the opposite of everything that a child his age, or any child at all for that matter, needed. Kathleen was paroled in 1942, and Charles later said that those first few weeks after she returned home, after he would, she was starting to get used to having his mother around again, were the happiest years of his life. But in his situation within his family, the happiness never seemed to stay. She moved them to Charleston, then she remarried. And then because selling him didn't work out, I guess she tried and failed to have her son placed in foster care in 1947. Charles was then sent to, I think you pronounce it Gibboot School for Boys in Indiana. It was a boys reform school and he did not like it there so much so that he ended up running away. But when he did, he was found sent back, only to then run away again following that, when he was only around 13 years old in 1948, he got caught for robbing a grocery store in Indianapolis. Actually, I forgot to mention that a few years prior to that, he attempted to burn his school down. Or at the very least he purposefully started a fire inside of the school building. So from a very, very young age, there were signs that he was not growing up with any sort of good influence in his life whatsoever. He didn't know what was right or what was wrong. And when he was told, which wasn't often, he didn't really care to listen to. In my own opinion, because he lacked so much love and so much care, there is a really big chance that he craved attention. And once he figured out that the only way for him to get attention was to act out, he continued to do so. After the grocery store robbery, Manson was sent to Father Flanagan's Boys Town in Nebraska. That's a famous institution for troubled youth there. He lasted a whole four days. 1, 2, 3, 4, before running away. By the early 1950s, he was just cycling through juvenile detention facilities, reformed schools, federal prisons. He was kind of trading off. If he was in one, he was in the other one at a pace that was almost mechanical. It became routine for him at that point to just jump from one to another, basically. One of those was the National Training School for boys in Washington, D.C. he was there in 1951. And while he was there, he met a counselor. The counselor's report from that period of time described Charles Manson as suffering from, quote, a marked degree of rejection, instability and psychic trauma. And another evaluator noted that he had, quote, developed hostility towards women, end quote. That assessment of him would later become one of the most prescient, alarming assessments ever written about an offender as young as his age. And something else that you need to know about Charles Manson is that he learned how to manipulate people at a very, very young age because he had no backbone. I don't know how else to explain it. Like, I feel like he had no one in his corner fighting for him or with him. And he felt that way too, because he didn't. I assume he was also a little bit insecure because, again, he was never shown love by any person in his life. He had no friends as a kid. His family had no interest in caring for him, really. And because of that, he knew that he wasn't just going to make friends and have people want to hang out with him, also back him automatically, especially in a place such as a reformatory school or a jail or a prison, which meant that he needed to understand how people worked, to be able to use that, to win them over with his words in his favor, so that he wasn't the lonely, weird, awkward kid in the corner that no one was talking to. You know, What I mean. And when he was a teenager, he would practice this, and he would talk to people in a certain way to get them to trust him so that he could then feel more powerful over time. And I hate to say it, but he did become an expert at brainwashing people and making them believe whatever it was that he wanted to make them believe. And by being in and out of custody as well, that also shaped Manson to be extremely comfortable with being isolated, with being alone. And he got arrested and convicted so many times that it wired his brain to not be scared of punishment. All of that combined shaped Manson to be an excellent manipulator who wasn't scared of much. And when you have a person like that, it becomes very dangerous very quickly. In 1954, Charles Manson was only 19 years old when he was paroled. Of course, that didn't last long. He did manage to get a job for a very brief period of time, working as a gas station attendant, but then he stole a car and then another, and then he decided to drive them across state lines, which then made his crime federal. He was convicted again and sent to Terminal Island Federal Prison in San Pedro, California. And it was around that time when he was in his early to mid-20s, where he really practiced his manipulation tactics, I guess you could say, because while he was serving his sentence, he began studying Scientology. There was a Scientologist there. And it's believed that Manson underwent 150 hours of the Scientology process known as auditing. Auditing is essentially a form of intense, one on one questioning designed to surface and clear past traumas and negative experiences. And while he was doing that, staff members working at the prison did see it as a positive thing, because he was talking about his trauma, he was talking about his experiences and whatnot. They were thinking that he was healing. One staff member noted that Manson appears to have developed a certain amount of insight into his problems through his study of his discipline. However, they were far off because he wasn't spending all of this time, 150hours, to heal his inner scars, not at all. What he was doing was learning how the sessions worked in order to then strip the parts that were useful to him and. And then just discard the rest from Scientology. He took the auditing process, in which a person confesses their deepest fears, traumas, and secrets to another person. And he essentially created this manual for how to get inside of someone's head and be able to control them. Manson took it and used it later on to build the family's loyalty and dependency. And by the way, If I say the family, the family, I'm referring to the cult that he created, because that's what they refer to themselves to be. By the time that he was released on March 21st of 1967, after serving seven years, Charles Manson was no longer the same broken, impulsive child that he had been when he was arrested as a teenager. He was something. I almost said mature. That would have been a big mistake. Not mature at all, but. But he was something more calculated and I think in his eyes, also more powerful. He was also notably not ready for the outside world because when his release date arrived, the world that he was stepping out into was a completely different place. The state of California released Charles Manson, and he headed north toward San Francisco, toward an entirely new, different generation of young people who were searching for meaning and. And young people who would never see him coming. Taking a quick break to thank today's sponsor, Quinn's. If you guys follow me on social media, you know that Mitchell's birthday just passed. I was trying to think of what I should give him as a birthday gift. We live together. We're getting married in June. If you didn't know, I know the guy pretty well. I bought him birthday presents every year for the last however many years. I was struggling, to say the least. Don't know why I was struggling because then I remembered quints. Listen, you guys also know that Mitchell and I just moved from the Midwest to Texas, AKA we pretty much threw out anything in our closets that we did not use. We didn't want to carry any baggage into the new house. 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You're not going to be wearing a crop top out, but you still look like you have good style when you're wearing their pieces and they're going to last you forever. These are pieces that you are going to be able to leave for your future children or you're going to be able to hand down for your children if you already have them. Trust me when I say they are worth it. Quinn's clothing is consistently rated so highly by every single person that owns Quint, every single one of their customers. Real people wearing these pieces every day and actually loving them right now. Go to quint.com wish for free shipping and 365 day returns. That is a full year to wear it and love it and you will now available in Canada too. Do not keep settling for clothes that do not last. Go to quinc.com wish for for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com wish thank you so much Quints for sponsoring this video. Also need to thank Mint Mobile for sponsoring this video as well. 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Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for $15 a month. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.com wish that is mintmobile.com wish upfront payments of $45 for 3 months 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month for new customer offer for the first 3 months only then full price plans options available, text and amps fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Thank you so much Mint Mobile for sponsoring this video. In the late 1960s, the neighborhoods of San Francisco were the center of the counterculture universe. Young people had flooded into the District from across the country, drawn by promises of free love, communal living, and a lot of psychedelic drugs. When he first arrived, San Francisco was about to host what was called, what people were calling the Summer of Love. And the biggest thing that had kind of reshaped this new generation of people was lsd, or at least one of the biggest things in the 50s. Teenagers and young people in their 20s were, for a lack of a better word, to kept on a tight leash, living under strict rules or in religious household, whatever the case was. But Fast forward to 1967 and now the cool thing was to rebel. To reject the rules, reject your parents, forget your values, go out and be free, do drugs and live life to the fullest. Streets were always flooded by so many people, either singing or dancing, having fun, taking lsd. There was someone in the streets playing music at all times of the days and nights, live music everywhere. Everyone was crazy, everyone was happy. That time period is often referred to as a psychedelic scene. And there was also a hippie movement going on. Charles Manson, now 32 years old, had gotten into playing the guitar himself. So he was seen, I guess, for people that were meeting him for the first time. He was seen as the fun guy who played good music and was kind of not bad. It, like some people would say, it was good music. And he was full of confidence from learning how to control people's way of thinking, how to identify people who needed to be needed, and how to tell them exactly what they needed or wanted to hear. He walked into the exact kind of city that would prove to have the perfect victims for him to recruit. And I say victims because you could argue that he took advantage of young people in their 20s that were vulnerable, but of course, they eventually would turn into willing accomplices. One of the few things that Charles Manson would do to establish confidence right off the bat is he would walk up to strangers and ask, don't you know who I am? And very quickly, the family, just like that, began to form around him. The first and most devoted members were young women, a lot of runaways, hitchhikers, girls from broken homes who had made their way to San Francisco looking for something different, a fresh start. What Manson had to offer was a feeling of belonging. He told them that they were special. He told them that society had lied to them, that conventional morality was a cage, that love itself was total and unconditional, and that the ego, the sense of self, was the enemy of true freedom. He told them to let go of everything that they had been taught. And he positioned himself to be Someone, the person that they would need to teach them how to really live life the way that they were meant to. And slowly but surely, he kind of became this almost parental figure in a way, but definitely a teacher in most of their eyes. And of course, in true cult leader fashion, his teachings were a mix of Scientology concepts, the Bible, Book of Revelation, and his very own paranoid thoughts, beliefs and ideas. In their eyes, he was not only a compelling speaker, he was also this unpredictable, charismatic man. And then it escalated and he started to dictate what the group was going to do, where they were going to do it, who they were going to see, and where they would spend their time. That eventually turned into then being controlling and controlling the access of drugs, sex, food and shelter. But even when the dynamic started to feel a bit different, more aggressive on his end, the girls stayed. And eventually some young men did as well. Among one of the most devoted and loyal followers were Susan Atkins, a troubled young woman who had drifted through San Francisco's psychedelic scene. Patricia Krenwinkel, a quiet, insecure young woman from a middle class family in Manhattan beach. And Leslie Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from the Monterey park who had recently had an abortion and fallen into drug use. There was also Charles tex Watson, a 23 year old Texan who had been a track star at his high school at one point in time and enrolled at North Texas State University before eventually dropping out and drifted his way towards Los Angeles. That guy, Charles Tex Watson, became one of Manson's most loyal followers, I would say. And he was great. He was great because not only was he utterly loyal, but he was also incredibly obedient. Anything that Manson said he would do, anything Manson did, he would copy. And the best part in Manson's eyes was that not once did he ever challenge him for power or control. He was extremely fine and comfortable just following along and not having to be the one in charge. Of course, Manson loved this. He's also so interesting because he came from such a, like a normal, for lack of a better word, normal childhood. He had such a solid family background, a normal family, what most people would consider a normal guy. He was an athlete. He has so much going for him at one point, but then I guess he just ended up using drugs. And then he met Charles Manson and things for him just took a completely wrong turn, leading him to go down the completely wrong path. The group moved constantly. Eventually they got a hold of an old school bus and as was a common thing back then, they started traveling around California. They pretty much just went On a very long road trip of sorts. And they were meeting other people along the way and then recruiting them to be a part of their group. I'm putting pictures on screen if you're watching the video version, so you can kind of get an idea of what life looks like back then. But if you're only listening to the audio version of this, just picture a very chilled, relaxed Charles Manson. He's sitting behind, he's playing guitar. Like I said, he was really into music. So I assume that it sounded very appealing for some of the girls to be like, hey. I mean, he would tell them, hey, you are so beautiful and cool. And we are cool and we like to play music and hang out all the time. Come hang out with us. And for the young men, it was like, hey, we party, we chill, we play music, and we have cute girls come and join us. And they would. The bus itself was an old converted vehicle. It had the seats removed, it had rugs and pillows laid down in their place. And it was also painted in all kinds of different colors. For roughly 18 months, the group wandered around in said bus, traveling through the American west, through New Mexico, through Texas, through the Pacific Northwest, and then eventually circling back around to California. Manson called it a traveling commune. He would preach from the driver's seat as everyone was sitting behind him listening to him. He would also preach at the campfires when they would stop and have one. He told his followers that they were purging themselves of their egos, stripping away the conditioning of a corrupt society, becoming something new, something free. New members joined and the number just kept growing. Eventually it was decided that they were going to need to find something more permanent for them all to stay somewhere outside of the city, somewhere big enough with space for all of them. And a family member by the name of Catherine Scher had heard about this place in the Hills in the northwest area of Los Angeles. In it was a former movie ranch in the hills about 30 miles away from downtown. It was called Spann Ranch, named after its owner, George Spann, an 80 year old man who had bought the property decades earlier. In its prime, this property, Spann Ranch, had been one of the most frequently used outdoor filming locations in all of Hollywood. Westerns had been shot there for television or film movies throughout the 1940s and the 1950s. There was a main ranch house. There was also so many trails for either walking or horseback riding. And the owner, George Spann, just so happened to be nearly blind. And you know what that means, a little light bulb going off in Manson's head because nearly blind meant more vulnerable. And vulnerable was just what Manson was looking for. He arranged for the young women of the family to look after George. They cooked for him, they cleaned for him, they read for him. They kept him company. They guided him around the property. Given that he could not really properly see anymore, they made sure that he was comfortable and cared for. In exchange, George then allowed the family to live at his property rent free. And he may not have fully understand the scale of what he had allowed to move in around him. He may not have wanted to know at all. But the point is that he did not ask them to leave. And the family dug in. They took over that place. They occupied the old movie set buildings, the bunk houses, the outbuildings, the barn. They found old buggies for transportation. They ran electrical wires and set up a kitchen. They made themselves right at home. Charles Manson, throughout it all, continuing to preach his teachings. His belief was that everything that you have been taught is wrong. But don't worry, I will teach you the right way because I'm so nice, and I will teach you how to be free. So basically, forget everything that you think you know and let me reshape your mind. And of course, that meant that he would strip them free, quote, unquote, free of any of their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own beliefs, so that then he could make them believe and agree with everything that he was claiming was true. It's so interesting because he did it in such a way that would make the family members think that they did have a choice, so that he could make them feel like they were in control of their own personality and thoughts and ideas, when in reality, in control was the last thing that they were. Manson told his followers that the apocalypse was coming. Of course he did. He described the isolated place where they were living in as the place where they would wait out, eventually, the end of the world. He preached that all men, including himself, were both Jesus and the devil all in one. He assigned roles and built loyalty through a system of total psychological dependence. Again, controlling access to food, to drugs, to sex, to sleep, and to the entirety of the outside world. And as you know from the beginning of this episode, the loyalty that he grew to get from his followers eventually led to senseless murders. But to really understand why Charles Manson ordered the murders of seven people to happen in two separate nights in August of 1969, you first have to fully understand what he believed or what his followers thought that he believed. Warning. You're gonna think that I sound mental when I'm telling you this, but I'm only repeating what he thought was true or what he wanted to make people believe was true. And it is mental. Just know I agree with you. So in late 1968, the Beatles released their double album, commonly referred to as the Wide Album. Charles Manson listened to this album obsessively, and in his mind, the album, the lyrics, more specifically of the songs, were a message, a message to him. He told his followers that the Beatles themselves were prophets and that their lyrics described a coming apocalypse that he called Helter Skelter, after one of the songs in the album. For whatever reason, don't ask me why, I have no idea, but for whatever reason, even though this song was written about an amusement park ride, the Manson family was absolutely fully convinced that it was about a race war. Meaning that in Manson's mind, well, again, whether he believed it or not, we don't know. But this is what he was telling his followers that he believed. He claimed that this apocalypse that was coming would take over in the form of a race war. Black Americans would rise up and slaughter the white establishment. White Americans would then retaliate, and all of the violence that came with it would be total and civilization ending. The Family, meanwhile, would be safe because they would make plans to go to an underground city in the desert, a literal bottomless pit beneath Death Valley that Manson described with very specific and very detailed conviction. And they would be there safely waiting out the war. When it was over, the survivors would then emerge and Manson would lead the New World Order. Paul Watkins, one of Manson's top recruiters, later testified at trial about Manson's teaching, saying, quote, there would be some atrocious murders, that some of the spades from the Watts would come up into the Bel Air and Beverly Hills district and just really wipe some people, people out. Just cut up bodies and smear blood and write things on the wall in blood and cut little boys up and make parents watch. End quote. The problem, though, was that by the summer of 1969, Helter Skelter was not starting up on its own. The race war that Manson had predicted and told all of his followers about was not happening. And he was getting really, really frustrated about this because Charles Manson had a timeline in mind. And the war not starting yet. The war not happening, was not matching up, was not in line with his schedule. So he told his followers his solution for this was that he would have to show them how it was done. The Family would have to start the war themselves by committing murders so horrifying, so heinous, and racially provocative, that they would then ignite the conflict Manson was convinced was inevitable. They would leave messages at the murder scenes written in the victim's blood that would apparently. Then they were supposed to make people think that black people committed the murders, because then finally the war would begin and they would be back to schedule. However, the family members were going to be the ones who needed to commit these crimes. Charles Manson would be just hanging out. I guess he'd be waiting underground, ready to rule the world. Yeah, I. Is that not the most insane thing you've ever heard? Like, I. I don't know. Anyway, that was the theory that ultimately sent. Tex Watson, Susan Adkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian toured Cielo Drive on the night of August 8, 1969. Oh, and if you're wondering exactly how the Family was able to operate without anyone noticing, authorities were beginning to notice that there was some sort of weird behavior coming from this odd group of people. But they didn't know exactly what was happening. So their tactic was, what they wanted to do was send undercover officers toward that campsite, pretending that they were there to buy drugs so that then they would be let in so they could really figure out what was really going on. You know what I mean? But that was proven very quickly to be impossible because Charles Manson ran a tight ship. So they were never able to get close enough to really understand the dynamic of the Family. But Charles Manson did know that authorities were onto him, and. And they, the whole family, knew that they were being watched. In turn, Manson then assigned people to spread out throughout the campsite, like on top of the hills. If you're watching the video version of this, you can see there's, like, mountains all around where they were staying. And he would have people stand over those and watch for cops. Meanwhile, cops would have officers stand nearby as well and watch them. And because they were both aware that they were watching each other, it was. I mean, it was pretty pointless because they were just watching each other, guarding their own people, but, like, no one was really doing anything. But back to August 8th. That afternoon, Charles Manson gathered several family members together at Span Ranch, and he announced, quote, now is the time for Helter Skelter, unquote. So at this time, some of his followers were starting to get a little bit suspicious of Banson, because what he would often preach and, and talk about, he would say all these things and talk about the future of the war and whatever, the end of the world, nothing was happening. He would say that these things were going to happen, and then they wouldn't happen. So you did have some people that started to be like, is this guy really telling the truth? Does he really know what he's talking about? And some of them eventually started even talking about trying to leave the Family. Well, Charles Manson couldn't have that. He needed to do something to keep the control over these people that he had worked hard for. And Helter Skelter was pretty much the last thing that he had, which is why he needed to make it happen as soon as possible. That evening, he instructed four members, Tex, Susan, Patricia and Linda to go and get a change of clothes, a knife, and a driver's license. Linda Kasabian had joined the Family just weeks earlier, so she still had her valid driver's license. So she would be the one driving the car. Their destination was to go to the house of the film director Roman Polanski and his actress wife, Sharon Tate. The house that they were renting and living in. When they got there, Tex Watson climbed up over the telephone pole at the gate. He cut the phone lines, then he helped the others jump over the fence. They climbed into a house through the open window, which is when Text then announced, quote, I am the devil and I've come to do the devil's business. End quote. And they attacked. And they did not hold back. That crime scene. I already warned you. I need to warn you again, if you look this up, there are pictures of the crime scene online and they are scarring. I mean, it looks like a literal bloodbath. Inside the house, Sharon Tate was spending the evening with some of her friends. She was 26 years old and 8 and a half months pregnant with her first child, a boy that she and Roman Polonski had planned to name Paul Richard Polonski. That night, Roman wasn't home because he was away in London working on a film. And with Sharon were 35 year old Jay Sebrig and a celebrity hairstylist who was a close friend of hers, as well as 25 year old Abigail Folger and 32 year old, I think you pronounce his name, Wojciech Frikowski. All close friends of not only Sharon, but also her husband, Roman. It was supposed to be any other ordinary night, but when Tex cut out the screen from the window and entered through the house, leaving the others behind him, what followed was an act of violence so savage it defined comprehension. Wojciech was shot twice. He was stabbed 51 times and bludgeoned over the head 13 times. Abigail managed to run outside before being stabbed 28 times on the lawn. Jay was shot once and stabbed seven times. Sharon Tate, again, eight and a half months pregnant, begging for the life of her unborn child, was stabbed 16 times. She was the last one of them to die. Linda Kasabian, part of the family, who had actually stayed outside as a lookout, described hearing Sharon Tate plead, quote, please don't kill me. I don't want to die. I want to live to have my baby. Please let me go. End quote. According to a later prosecution testimony, Susan's response was, quote, look, I have no mercy for you. You are going to die and you'd better get used to it. Before leaving, Susan Atkins used Sharon Tate's blood to write the word pig on the front door of the house. Five people were dead. Everyone who had been inside of the house earlier that night, as well as 18 year old Steven Parent. In the middle of the attack, the group saw headlights in the driveway. Stephen was the person who was driving the car. He was a friend of the estate's caretaker, William Garrettson, and he had been visiting his friend who lived in the guest house when they noticed him text. Watson shot Stephen Parent four times and slashed him with a knife. Minutes after, just like that, Steven Parent was dead, still in his car, still in the driveway. The group then got rid of their bloody clothing, went back to the ranch, said goodnight to each other and went to bed. By the following morning, all of them had gotten a very good night's sleep. They slept in. Then they all gathered together again to have their morning coffee and they turned on the news. Of course, the brutal murders were all over the news. And those who committed the murders, oh, they were proud. They were proud, they were happy, they were laughing, they were full of joys that their murders were so brutal and so unexpected that they had made the morning news. But Charles Manson, well, he. He was not happy. He was not satisfied. He told his followers that he was even a little bit angry because their murders had been sloppy, way too messy. He told them that he would come along the following night to show them how it was done. And he did. The next night, the night of August 9, the group was larger. It was the same group who had committed the murders the night prior, but now along with Manson and two other Family members. And one of the most terrifying things is that the family did not have their victims picked out, quite literally. The group was driving around neighborhoods in LA searching for the right house to attack. At first, actually, they were hoping that they would be able to break into a church, find a pastor, kill him and then leave him hanging from the cross. But they couldn't do that because the church was closed because it was at night. Then they stopped at several different locations before Manson settled in on a Spanish style home at 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz neighborhood. The home of 44 year old Lino LaBianca, a wealthy supermarket chain executive, and his wife, 28 year old Rosemary. Charles Manson himself walked into that house alone. Initially, he tied up both Lino and Rosemary, told them not to worry, told them that they would not be harmed, and then he robbed them. Then he went back to the car and told his followers that they were ready. He said that they had been tied up and now to go inside and kill them. Lino LaBianca was stabbed 26 times and strangled. A carving for fork was left lodged inside of his body. And with that fork the word war had been carved onto his stomach. Rosemary Labianka was stabbed 41 times. On the walls of the house at the crime scene, the killers used the victim's blood to write the words rise and death to pigs. And on the refrigerator door they wrote Helter Skelter before leaving. The labiancas had absolutely no connection to the Manson family members at all. Neither did his wife. He and Rosemary simply lived in a neighborhood that the family had chosen to attack. And that was part of, only part of what made these series of murders so shocking and unbelievable. Because when they happened, they seemed to be so incredibly random. There was absolutely no sort of connection that authorities could find. And as you can imagine, the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends and the murders of labiancas the night after sent shock waves through Los Angeles and then eventually through the entire country. But investigators were initially baffled. There was no obvious criminal that they could find. There was no obvious motive, there was no obvious link. They felt like they did not know where to turn. And for weeks, not sure why weeks. But for weeks the connection between the Cielo Drive murders and the LaBianca murders were not. The connection was not made immediately. The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department were investigating the two of them as separate individual cases. This is why I say that it's kind of surprising they didn't link them earlier on. But I guess neither noticed the similarities that both attacks had, which were the words were written in blood. There was also like a ritualistic nature of the violence and the fact that both scenes appeared to stage, to have staged, evoke racial terror. The break in the case ended up coming not from the Tate LaBianca investigation at all, but from a different case entirely. Because in late October of 1969, law enforcement raided Span Ranch on suspicion of vehicle theft and arson. Nothing in connection to the murders at all, but Charles Manson, along with dozens of family members, were arrested. Manson was taken into custody. He was not yet charged with murder, but among those arrested was Susan Atkins. And Susan was actually already facing charges in a separate case, the murder of Gary Hinman. Gary Hinman was a music teacher and an acquaintance of the family who had been killed on July 27, 1969, when Charles Manson ordered his death. So, yes, you might be thinking, wait, July's before August. Yes, he had been killed before the Cielo Drive murders and the LaBianca murders. Gary Allen Hinman was born in Colorado. He had a degree in chemistry and was close to completing his PhD in Scientology at UCLA. He was remembered as having a kind and gentle soul. By 1969, he had become a devoted Buddhist and was planning on going on a religious pilgrimage to Japan. Gary Hinman was also the kind of person who would open up his home to people who needed a place to stay, which is how he ended up befriending the Manson family in the first place. Charles Manson was under the impression, for whatever reason, that Hinman had received a $20,000 inheritance. He also believed that Hinman owned his house outright and that he had stocks in different bonds. Manson wanted that money for his family. So on July 25th of 1969, Mansa sent three family members, including Susan Atkins, to Hanman's home to convince him to either join the family. Actually, I think that was pretty much the only option they gave him. Join the family and then turn over your assets so that Manson would have them. The three family members then held Hinman hostage for days when he denied having any money. And on July 27, they killed him by stabbing him twice in the chest and holding a pillow over his head. Then they wrote the words political piggy on a wall in Hinman's blood and drew a panther paw print. A horrible, horrible murder. And the murder that Susan Adkins was already facing charges for. While she was in jail for those charges, Susan then began talking. She confided in cellmates about her role in the Tate murders, describing what had happened at Cielo drives in graphic detail. Her cellmate, Virginia Graham, passed the information to a detective. The same information then made it to another inmate, Ronnie Howard, who then went to authorities. And By November of 1969, the Los Angeles police Department finally had enough to connect the tape murders to the manson family. On December 1st of 1969, arrest warrants were issued. On December 8th, Charles Manson was charged with seven counts of first degree murder. The trial of Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten combined for both the Tate and the LaBianca murders began on June 15, 1970. And it very quickly became one of the most extraordinary courtroom spectacles in American legal history. It lasted nine and a half months. It generated 209 trial days and a transcript of more than 31,000 pages. Manson's behavior throughout all of it, as you can imagine, was shocking to say the least. He turned that courtroom into some sort of stuff stage for his own entertainment. That's the best way that I could describe it. One of the days at trial, he showed up with an X carved into his forehead. His followers outside of the courthouse immediately then carved X's into their own foreheads to show their loyalty. He brandished a newspaper headline toward the jury. He stood up during testimony to shout out witnesses. And at one point, he launched over toward the judge with a pencil shouting, quote, in the name of criminal Christian justice, someone should cut your head off, end quote. For that, he was removed from the courtroom. The female defendants followed his lead in pretty much everything. They were giggling, they were chanting, they were shaving their heads when Manson shaved his. And when he was asked about his beliefs on the stand, Manson declared, quote, I am the devil, and the devil always has a bald head. The key witness for the prosecution was Linda, the one who had been the driver on both nights. She had been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony. She testified for 18 days straight, the longest testimony in California criminal history at the time. And she described both the events on August 8th and August 9th in devastating detail, but also really without showing much empathy at all. Manson chose not to testify formally, but he did address the court in a statement saying, quote, unquote, these children that come at you with knives, there are your children. You taught them? I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call family were just people that you did not want. People that were alongside the road that their parents had kicked out or they did not want to go to juvenile juvenile hall. So I did the best that I could. I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this, that in love there is no wrong, end quote. On January 25, 1971, the jury returned with guilty verdicts against all four defendants on each one of the 27 separate counts. On April 19th of 1971, Judge Charles Older sentenced Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten to death. Tex Watson was tried separately. He was convicted in October of 1971, and he was also sentenced to death. However, none of them would be executed because on February 18th of 1972, the California Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that the death penalty as then applied in California was unconstitutional. And all death sentences in the state were then automatically commuted to life in prison. Charles Manson spent the remaining 46 years of his life in California prisons. He was denied parole 12 times. He gave interviews to journalists, authors and television programs, and he continued to try and make everything about him. He remained, in the eyes of the public, the most recognizable symbol of evil in modern American history. And at 83 years old, on November 19th of 2017, at Kern County Hospital in Bakersfield, California, Charles Manson was pronounced dead. The cause of death was cardiac arrest, with respiratory failure and colon cancer listed as underlying causes. Susan Atkins died in prison of brain cancer on September 24, 2009. She was 61 years old. Patricia Krenwinkel was denied parole 14 times before finally being recommended for release in 2022, a recommendation, however, that was later reversed by the California governor. She remains incarcerated. Leslie Van Houten was the youngest of the convicted killers. She was only 21 years old when she was sentenced, making her at the time the youngest woman ever on California's death row. She was denied parole 22 times before finally being released on July 11, 2023, after over 53 years in prison. I don't know if I mentioned this. Tex Watson was denied parole 17 times and he also remains in prison. Yeah. The family, as a group is suspected of having committed anywhere from 25 to 35 murders total, according to various investigators and researchers that have really studied this case over the decades, though most were never prosecuted or confirmed due to lack of evidence and the fact that the key perpetrators were already in prison serving life sentences. So we will never really know just how many victims they had as a group and whether or not Charles Manson ever committed murder himself with his own two hands. And that is all I have for you guys today. Insane story, as per usual. This is a pretty highly requested case. So let me know your thoughts on this. And yeah, that is all for me today. Thank you guys so much for spending time with me today. I hope you're having the best day. If not, go do something to make it the best day, make somebody happy, and I will see you in my next video. 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