Manson Family

Manson Family, cult and criminal organization active in California, U.S., in the late 1960s, led by Charles Manson. The Manson Family was made famous by the Tate-LaBianca murders, a series of gruesome killings carried out by several followers under orders from Manson. The Family—who practiced free love, lived communally, consumed large amounts of recreational drugs, and subscribed to Manson’s idiosyncratic philosophy—would become one of the major symbols of the excesses of the hippie movement of the 1960s. The Family has gained a near-mythic status in American culture, and many point to their crimes as one of the major events that brought about the end of the 1960s counterculture.

Band of followers

The Manson Family took form in San Francisco in 1967, following Charles Manson’s release from prison. The 32-year-old Manson had passed more than half of his life in reform institutions for a variety of offenses. The charismatic Manson played the guitar, and he quickly established himself as a musician and guru (a spiritual teacher or guide) in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which at the time was a center of American hippie culture. He soon gained a number of followers, primarily young women, later called the “Manson girls,” from middle-class backgrounds. A 1970 Rolling Stone report said that the group was “a real family, with real feelings of devotion, loyalty and disappointment.”

The Family members are known to have addressed Manson as “Satan,” “Jesus,” and even “God.” Manson’s teachings were largely drawn from 1960s pop culture, Scientology, occultism, and racist ideologies. Central to the Family’s beliefs was the idea of a race war, which Manson termed “Helter Skelter,” for a Beatles song, that would leave thousands dead and culminate in the Family dominating the world.

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Manson controlled his followers by encouraging heavy drug use and through constant abuse and manipulation. He sexually abused his female followers, and men in the orbit of the Family have made clear that Manson offered up the women sexually on numerous occasions for various forms of payment. His followers were largely teenage runaways—Patricia Krenwinkel was 19 and Dianne Lake was 14 when they first met Manson—who saw the Family as a new home and became deeply devoted to Manson. Manson Family members would continue to attract attention long after their leader’s imprisonment for the Tate-LaBianca murders, most notably Lynette (“Squeaky”) Fromme, who in 1975 tried to assassinate Pres. Gerald Ford.

In 1968 Manson and his band of followers moved to Los Angeles, where they lived for several months in the home of drummer Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. In fact, some of the women in the Family first befriended Wilson and introduced Manson to him. Manson struck a chord with Wilson, collaborating with him on music. Wilson took part in the group’s drug-fueled orgies and tried to help Manson launch a musical career but eventually tired of the group’s unpredictability and high expenses and moved, leaving his manager to evict the Family. Manson and his followers then moved to the largely abandoned film set Spahn Movie Ranch, where they lived until the Tate-LaBianca murders. Although the number of followers is uncertain, it is believed that the Family had more than 30 dedicated members. In a 2018 interview with History, Lake said about Manson’s group of girls, “We were there to serve Charlie, and we formed a sisterhood.” On an average day the members sang songs with Manson, picked food from dumpsters, and looked after some horses, which they likely rented out. The group reportedly engaged in sex work, drug dealing, and theft to make money.

Murders and trials

The Manson Family was also known for being violent. In late July 1969 members including Bobby Beausoleil and Susan Atkins, acting on Manson’s orders, killed musician Gary Hinman because Manson believed Hinman had come into money. Before leaving, Beausoleil scribbled “Political Piggy” on the wall using Hinman’s blood. He was arrested on August 6 after police found him in Hinman’s car with a bloody knife.

Manson had also begun to believe that it was on him to begin what he envisioned as the race war. On August 8, 1969, he ordered Family members Charles (“Tex”) Watson, Linda Kasabian, Krenwinkel, and Atkins to drive to the home of the famous Hollywood couple filmmaker Roman Polanski (who was in London at the time) and actress Sharon Tate. Having been instructed to kill, the cult members brutally murdered all five people at the house, including Tate, who was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant. The following day Manson, Steve (“Clem”) Grogan, and Leslie Van Houten joined the previous four to find more people to murder. They went to the home of grocery store executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca. After Manson and Watson tied the couple up and robbed them, Manson left with Atkins, Kasabian, and Grogan. Watson, Van Houten, and Krenwinkel remained and, acting on orders from Manson, stabbed the couple to death with a bayonet and knife. The brutal violence of the murders, their famous victims, and the Family’s eccentricities made the case and trial a national sensation.

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Later that month Manson ordered Family members to kill Donald (“Shorty”) Shea, a stuntman who lived at Spahn Movie Ranch. Manson believed Shea was helping to plan the Family’s eviction and also disapproved of Shea’s marriage to a Black woman. Following Manson’s directives, Grogan and Bruce Davis beat and stabbed Shea to death, with Watson possibly also involved.

Manson and his codefendants became a media spectacle for their disturbing and blasé behavior, such as carving X’s, and in Manson’s case a swastika, onto their foreheads, shaving their heads in jail, and laughing as they walked into their sentencing hearing. Members of the Family who were not on trial also garnered media attention for camping outside the courthouse. In the aftermath of the murders, Manson and his coconspirators—excluding Kasabian, who was granted immunity for her testimony—were given the death penalty, though their sentences would be reduced to life imprisonment when California’s Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1972. Each of the convicted Family members repeatedly petitioned for parole, and all have been denied except for Grogan, who served some 14 years before being released in 1985, and Van Houten, who was released in 2023 at the age of 73.

Aftermath

The Manson Family and their crimes are commonly referred to as a synecdoche for the disillusionment with the counterculture movement that occurred in the later 1960s. The Family became representative of the dark side of the hippie movement, and culture writer Joan Didion, who interviewed Kasabian in jail, wrote that the 1960s “ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive [Tate’s residence] traveled like brushfire through the community.” Even decades later members of the Family who had not been associated with the murders, such as Catherine Share and Barbara Hoyt, lived with the scars of their experience with Manson and the stigma of having been associated with him. The enduring fascination with the era, the Family, and the evil represented therein has persisted, and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974; with Curt Gentry) remains among the most popular true-crime publications of all time. Additionally, the success of director Quentin Tarantino’s fictionalized film Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) and journalist Tom O’Neill’s revisionist history Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019; with Dan Piepenbring) shows a continual fascination with the group and case in the public psyche.