The 40th Anniversary of Helter Skelter

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and Steven Parent were all murdered 40 years ago yesterday. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered 40 years ago today.

The murders were every negative adjective you can think of: horrible, senseless, grisly, barbaric, something worse than imagination. On the other hand as horrible as they were it only affected 7 people (well, a few more if you add in the crimes of Beausoleil and Grogan et al, but 7 that were actually Helter Skelter), and there have been any number of far more prolific and even far more brutal murders all over the country. Dahmer, Bundy, Lucas, others- all had far more victims. Sharon Tate was a beautiful woman and a movie star but… really not that famous, and her husband who was famous wasn’t really that well known outside of Hollywood (most people couldn’t tell you who directed their favorite movie), and as mentioned in a Squeaky Fromme thread the Ramon Novarro torture & murder was pretty much forgotten within a couple of years. So what is it about Helter Skelter that just lingers over the national consciousness?

I was just over 2 1/2 so I don’t remember the crimes when they occurred but I do remember them being talked about later. The only two topics that were verboten at my family’s dinner table were defecation and menstruation (to this day they’re the only two I get at all squeamish about while eating) so I remember the topic coming up: “And they stabbed the baby right through her stomach, bunches of times, and they tried stringing them up… it’s hard to believe any human could do that… pass the catfish”. I didn’t know who they were talking about but they didn’t sound like our kind of folks; on the other hand when you’re little and have no concept of the size of the world this may have well as happened in the town 20 miles down the road so it was terrifying when I’d see a pregnant woman or a hippie (there were a few die hards left in the '70s, plus Alabama is always on the tail end of such trends).

The first real exposure was the miniseries Helter Skelterwhen I was 9 years old. That scared the holy everloving fuck out of me, plus it made the book a bestseller again (it had already been one before) and so even in tiny towns in Alabama you’d find it at the grocery store or department stores and it was hotter than porn on the 4th grade underground. For those not familiar, the books have crime scene photos in which the bodies themselves have been removed- there’s just an obviously pregnant white silhouette of Sharon Tate on the carpet surrounded by blood for instance- and in many ways that was way more terrifying than the actual photographs (which I won’t link to but you can find them all over the internet).
Also the miniseries- at least when I was 9- made it look like Charles Manson wasn’t a manipulative hippie but some sort of literal demon. He stops Bugliosi’s watch when he looks at him for the first time (which is loosely based on something that actually happened but wasn’t nearly as spooky IRL as in the miniseries), he’s said (by his hippie loyalists) to have made a bus fly through the desert and to have brought a bird back to life and worked other feats of magic (which when you’re 9 and in a religious school where miracles are talked about everyday seems perfectly feasible, thus there really are evil wizards out there). He seems to telepathically communicate with his ‘girls’ who stand up and speak in unison at his trial (which again is based on something that actually happened but wasn’t quite as eerie and was also, per the women in later interviews, choreographed and rehearsed in their prison cells where they were in continual if indirect contact with Manson through other Family members).
Whatever the case, that miniseries fucked up a generation of kids who watched it and got all kinds of misconceptions about the events. Then Jonestown happened- more evidence of evil powers at work, then came *The Amityville Horror *(the original in '79) which was big news at the time as a book and as a movie (1979), then the miniseries on Jonestown a few years later, which was just as terrifying as Salem’s Lot but true (well, tru-ish for Jonestown and Helter Skelter; it’s now generally believed that the only terrifying thing at Amityville were the initial murders).

Anyway, I think if you ask many people my general age- late 30s to mid 40s- they’ll all agree that the late 70s were just truly a terrifying time to watch TV when you believed in the true and supernatural satanic presence of evil, and much of it started with Charles Manson and that Helter Skelter miniseries.

Then in the pre-Internet days it’s unreal how many people still believed all the stuff from the miniseries and the urban legends. Even Sharon Tate’s mother said in an interview that her unborn grandsonw as ripped from Sharon’s body and stabbed through the heart (he wasn’t). The crimes were horrifying enough but the embellishment just made them far more frightening than the Holocaust- among other things, 6 million is a number you can’t really identify with, but everyone knows 7 people, and the houses in those white redacted crime scene photos looked a lot like most middle class houses we had been in. And there were supernatural rumors and all that which even though I knew they weren’t true it still flavored the boogieman that he was over the childhood.

Then came the truth. Charles Manson it turned out was basically an evil kid brother of Ernest T. Bass who hit paydirt by being in the right time/right place to get a following; it’s almost inconceivable that it could have happened in the 1980s or 1950s or in Milwaukee or Orlando. It was basically a phenomenon that was completely glued to late 60s hippie counterculture California. It was also a great lesson in skepticism- don’t believe everything you read or see on TV, the truth can be more bizarre but less mystical, etc… Yet I still have that residual tingle when I see Manson on TV, and if any documentary about the murders is seen while I’m channel surfing you can be pretty sure I’m going to keep watching it regardless of what I’m surfing from.

So what’s your “take” on the murders? Do you remember when you first heard about them? Was Manson a boogie man in your school childhood? Or for that matter share any insights or opinions or comments, tithes and offerings regarding Helter Skelter.

2

I just read the Wikipedia article on Manson. He has three kids out thier somewhere, did not know that. I wonder if they know?
I was about eleven when it happened, all I remember is seeing the whole front page of the paper covered with the killers pictures and knowing it was a big deal. It wasn’t until Bugliosi’s book came out that I really had an idea what it was all about.

3

Count me in as someone totally effed up by that movie. To this day I remember the bloody Helter Skelter on the screen as it went to commercial. Also, I envision California as nothing but desert, filled with dirty, murderous, drug-addled drifters.

For a somewhat different take on the whole thing, The Family, by Ed Sanders, is pretty good. He started out with the belief that Manson, et al were framed, and spent a lot of time with the Family. Really interesting read–I wonder if I still have it somewhere…

I remember being most surprised by how short Manson is–only 5’3" or so? The whole thing was just so tragically random–that Manson had visited the house previously looking for the record producer, that Steve Parent just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I also remember being freaked out by the description from the caretaker at Cielo Drive about the doorknob of his cottage having been turned from the outside at some point–honestly, it creeps me out just to type that…

4

His son with cult memberMary Brunner was inexcusably “outed” by a tabloid show (“A Current Affair”) a few years ago. Fortunately he already knew who his biological parents were, though he was raised by his maternal grandparents, had never met Manson, and barely knew his birth mother until he was a teenager. He lives a normal life, married, job, kids, law abiding, but lives under an assumed name and spoke with them under condition of anonymity.

His oldest legitimate son committed suicide in 1993, though details and reasons aren’t known (i.e. it’s unknown if being Manson’s son contributed). Another basically disappeared from radar, which is probably for the best.

Manson may be the father of other children born to cult members, some of whom were placed in foster care and their records sealed. A musician named Matthew Robert, lead singer of a band called New Rising Son, claims to be one of these kids but I think he’s pretty much dismissed as a publicity seeker.

5

A few months later, Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret and M.D., cashed in on the trend by murdering his wife and two kids, claiming it was done by invading hippies who all the while chanted “acid is groovy,” like Beverly Hillbillies-version hippies. First tragedy, then farce.

A lot of people saw it as the flip side of the peaced-out hippies, but I personally I don’t beleive that. Things had already gotten ugly enough in San Francisco and the East Village, as well as on the Sunset Strip to burst that bubble.

Los Angeles has always taken a perverse pride in its belief that it’s where the world will end. Nathanel West picked up on it as soon as he arrived, and mde it a literary genre. In the 60’s, white kids living in the perfect suburbs looked at the smoke and shrugged “Watts cooking!” Earthquakes, streets that crack open as you drive down them and belch flames, water that could stop flowing any day and leave 10 million people to die in the desert, rootless losers who come west and do bad, etc., etc.

Charlie Manson’s family was a product of this eschatology. He used it to convince his followers that it was already so possible that they could trigger it themselves, something that would be a harder sell in Rhinelander Wisconsin.

6

Exactly what River Hippie said.

I remember reading Helter Skelter and it giving me nightmares. I think it was the portrayal of Manson as some demon was what terrified me the most.

I’d forgotten, Sampiro, about the white silhouettes in the crime scene photos in the book, until you mentioned it. And I agree. What I imagined was far worse than the actual photos.

I grew up in Charleston, WV, which is where Manson was from – he went to the high school where my sister did her student teaching – and I think the murders got a whole lot of play in Charleston because of that.

7

I think the weirdest thing is the timing of Squeaky Fromme’s release. True, she didn’t play an active role in the murders at Cielo and the LaBianca residence, but she was a suspect in other murders, she essentially ran the family in Charlie’s absence, and unlike Atkins, Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten she’s never even pretended to be repentant or reformed. From all accounts I’d have let out any member of the Family save Charlie himself before her (though I’ve serious reservations as to whether I’d ever release any of them; personally I think it would have been not a bad thing if they’d all be executed instead of commuted).

I suppose the most horrifying thing about the Manson family is the notion that "Okay, one psychopath or sociopath is explicable, two or even three getting together somehow is perhaps possible (though generally sociopaths aren’t known for their bonding), but an entire damned tribe of them? A Texas high school football star and three chicks all of whom are psychopathic just happen to meet up and decide to do this? Somehow unlikely.

Therefore, if they’re not all natural born psychotic remorseless killers- and most probably aren’t (Atkins is the one I think who comes closest) then it could happen to others. And this of course leads to “could it happen to me?”.

I remember reading a first person narrative from the U.S. Civil War once that stuck with me even though I can’t currently remember the name of the person who wrote it. She was the pampered adolescent daughter of a well to do family whose farm happened to be on the site of a major battle (and hereagain I can’t remember which). One of the armies commandeered her family’s house for use as a field hospital. The first time she saw a bloody wounded soldier brought into the house she screamed and almost fainted.
A couple of days later she and her sisters and brothers were very casually picking amputated limbs off the floor, putting them into a wheelbarrow, and carting them to a pit where they were to be burned and then buried. They had become inured to their surroundings that fast.
Of course millions of soldiers in pretty much every war had similar experiences. Their entire lives they’d been taught that killing and destruction of property and pretty much every other objective of battle was wrong and now they’re doing it daily and most do not go insane, and most actually transition back into civilian life quite well. I’m not exonerating the killers at all when I say I think it’s the exact same part of the brain that allows a soldier to do this or a pampered farm girl to casually pick up sawed off arms that Manson somehow exploited, very well, and thus there is a “there but for the grace of… whatever” factor with the killers that makes them even more hated.

8

The thing that freaked me out the most about reading the book was the background of established Satanist churches that were active at that time. I don’t remember the details but it left me with the idea that Satanism was rampant in SoCal. The one I remember from the book was the Process Church Of the Final Judgement.

9

Oh gosh, yes to many of the things stated in this thread.

I just turned 40 this year, so I was a kid in the seventies when Helter Skelter was presented as if there was actual demonic stuff going on. I was explicitly not allowed to watch the mini-series, but a play by play definitely made the rounds on the playground after. And the little kid rumors - that if you listened to the song Helter Skelter, you risked going insane yourself (with various little kid versions, if you listened to it, if you listened to it ten times in a row, if you listened to it at midnight …). Obviously (I should hope) as I got older, I realized that was a bizarre urban myth, but I was probably in college before I stopped getting a little frisson whenever I heard it.

I also remember being blown away when I realized that Sharon Tate was Roman Polanski’s wife. As a kid, I didn’t get that these were famous Hollywood and society people. I strongly don’t think that excuses his later crimes, but at the same time, wow, you’ve got to feel something for that guy.

After reading the John Waters pieces on Leslie Van Houten, I reviewed the wikipedia articles related to the murders. At one of Krenwinkel’s parole hearings, she was asked who she had harmed the most, and she answered “myself.” And from what I could tell, this answer did not go over very well at all, like who is she to claim more harm than the LaBiancas and the victims at the Tate house. But I also think that’s perceptive in a way … it shows an awareness that she allowed herself to be caught up in crazy Charles Manson’s demented lifestyle. I asked myself if I would rather be murdered, or rather become a murderer. That’s a terrible thing to live with.

10

It didn’t take much deviation from the norm to get marginalized in those days.

11

Does anybody with a legal background know why Fromme could have secured parole? What was the parole board’s reasoning?

12

I don’t see that these examples are really relevant, though. The Manson “family” wasn’t going into battle every day. They weren’t witnessing and becoming inured to atrocities all around them. They were just listening to the rantings of a violent crazy man.

13

I was surprised to find out (probably in the SDMB) that Americans don’t know what Helter Skelters are. I wonder if Manson might have chosen a different name if he’d known that the Beatles song was named after a quaint Victorian fairground attraction for small children. It’s the tower on the left.

14

+1 for the creeped out/gave me nightmares contingency. A year or two ago I thought about those “whited out” crime scene photos and did a google, expecting to find them and instead getting the actual photos. While they were bad, they weren’t as bad as my imagination had conjured.

My memory cells aren’t what they once were, but I could have sworn the book said that Abigail Folger’s nightgown was so drenched in blood that the coroner thought it was pink or red instead of white. This site seems to have paraphrased that.

Folger’s white nightgown was thought to be red there was so much blood on it.

Seeing actual photos now, that can’t be true…from the waist up it isn’t that bloody at all.
NSFW, may require brain bleach
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/
_48YVRp6BZXQ/Rf70vqiaT6I/AAAAAAAAB7c/DxuKyznHRTM/s400/
06folger6.jpg

If I were writing a book, just sticking to the already demonstrably awful, I’d mention how they gashed her face…ow!
NSFW, may require brain bleach
http://
www.members.tripod.com/~VanessaWest/
folger.jpg

I think the crimes persist in our memories because nobody has “topped” them for senseless brutality inflicted on numerous victims. The Clutter Murders/“In Cold Blood” involved two murderers and four victims, but at least had robbery as a motive, the victims weren’t high profile, and there was no “hippie drug culture” involved.

15

This reminds me of a bit Dennis Miller did on SNL when the White Album was released on CD–"Charles Manson, commenting from his prison cell, said “The clarity on this is amazing. I guess they weren’t really talking to me after all.”

16

Got the Helter Skelter book when I was about 15. For some inexplicable reason, out of all the horrors related therein, the accounts of “creepy crawling” caused me to lose sleep for days. The thought of being innocently asleep while total strangers sneak past just inches away, not touching you but just…being there…gah!

17

In high school, from time to time, I’d see burn-outs who ordinarily wouldn’t read anything longer than a Stop sign with their nose in Helter Skelter. I never got around to reading it until I was an adult. When I did, my reaction was, “Holy crap, now I see why even the burn-outs couldn’t put this down.”

18

Was it random?

One interesting theory, which may or may not be valid, is that the producer was the REAL target all along.

We DO know, after all, that Manson was an aspiring folk singer/songwriter. But was he really a diabolical genius trying to bring about an apocalypse, or was he just a frustrated, pop star wannabe trying to take revenge on show biz bigwigs who wouldn’t sign him to a record deal?

Manson was and is definitely insane… but he may have been a much more petty, mundane nutjob than was widely thought.

19

I’ve always thought this was the real story. Manson was mad at Terry Melcher because he thought Melcher had backed out of a verbal agreement to record one of Manson’s songs. So he decided to kill Melcher. But he didn’t realize that Melcher had moved so he ended up killing a bunch of people who lived in a house that Melcher used to live in. And then had the LaBiancas killed to throw the police off the track by making the first killings look random.

Manson made up the whole story about trying to start a race war and Bugliosi bought it because he didn’t know about the Melcher connection. And apparently he still believes it - I read an article he wrote for the 40th anniversary.

I’ve known a few serial killers over the years and everyone of them was a fuck-up. So a theory that’s based on Manson being a fuck-up sounds true to me.

20

The house was basically an upscale rental property whose owner rented it on short term leases to wealthy show biz people who needed temporary LA house or were between homes. If you’ve seen the diagrams or the photos (not the crime scene ones but the various “virtual tours” of it online), it’s a very comfortable house and of course it’s location makes it worth 10x more than it would be in most places in the country, but it’s not a mansion. It had an impressive and surprising list of former occupants.

Melcher’s live-in girlfriend there was Candice Bergen (a model and aspiring actress by then but mainly famous for being Mortimer Snerd’s sister). She was terrified for years at how close she may have come to being one of their victims and has actually said it’s one reason she dated Kissinger when she broke up with Melcher- he was as far away from the counter culture as you could get. She snapped out of it.

Cary Grant had lived there for a time when he had leased his own house while away on a movie shoot. (Grant was one of the richest actors but also famous as one of Hollywood’s greatest penny pinchers.) The fact that Grant had lived there at the time William Garretson moved in as caretaker is the only grain of truth in one of the most outlandish rumors about the murders, which is that Grant was present at the time of the murders having a trist with the teenaged caretaker Garretson and his friend Steven Parent. As near as I can figure this myth started with a writer named Charles Higham in a “tell all” bio of Grant- it damned sure didn’t come from Garretson (and obviously not Parent) and even in the super wild event it had been true it’s not likely Grant would have told, so hence there’s no reason to believe it happened and 8 million to believe it’s a lie.
Garretson is still alive but rarely talks with the press, though he did laugh out loud the first time he was asked about the Grant rumor until he realized “you’re serious?”. He said that Grant’s housekeeper once gave him a lift to a store to buy cigarettes and that’s the closest he came to even meeting him.
Garretson knew something was happening at the house but not what. The terrain of the area evidently creates what in military accounts is called acoustic shadows (you can hear something 3 miles away but not something that’s happening 30 feet away) so he wasn’t able to tell if it was a loud out of control party or a crime. He tried to call the cops but his line had been cut (he didn’t know it at the time, just that the phone didn’t work) and decided, quite wisely, to stay put and not go investigate. (The odds he’d have been murdered are probably a thousand times the odds he’d have gotten help.)

Jerzy Kozinski, author of Being There and The Painted Bird, was a close friend of both Polanski (a character in TPB is based on him) and of Frykowski. He was actually supposed to be staying at the house that night but he missed his flight and had to exchange his ticket for a flight the next day.