Since this has been back in the news due to the 50th anniversary, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Has it definitively been established why they went after the Polanski-Tate residence? I have read different things, from they thought Melcher still lived there, to they didn’t care, to the whole rather dubious “wanted a race war”…
Whole the LaBianca murders were supposed to “cover” for the earlier killings, why were the LaBiancas chosen?
Its mentioned on the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood thread but everyone and their uncle claimed to have “just missed” going to the “party”. Has anyone besides Steve McQueen ever been confirmed to have been supposed to have been there?
In reading about this I discovered who cleaned up the blood at the Tate residence.
Manson had a grudge with someone there and had been to the house before. (It’s possible that person wasn’t even at the house at the time.)
But the race war theory was not dubious. It’s literally the reason Manson did these things. Of course, he was mentally ill, and the Beatles weren’t giving him secret messages, but he believe that. (I believe Helter Skelter was actually a song against war.)
He wanted to blame the murders on black people. (It’s more complicated than that, but I’m not sure if you’re interested in details.) After the second murder, Manson told one of the witnesses (the chief prosecution witness, in fact) to dispose of a victim’s wallet in a “primarily black” area. She hid it too well, and the police didn’t find it. She led the investigators to the wallet after she began cooperating with them.
Manson carved a swastika in his forehead. It’s not hard to believe he’s a racist.
He wanted to murder more than two times. He was arrested (on an unrelated, far less serious crime) which stopped the murders. He was actually in jail when they figured out that they needed to investigate him. Otherwise he would have murdered more famous white people, and tried to blame the murders on black people, until someone figured it out.
Does it matter? Manson wasn’t clairvoyant and didn’t have that great of an intelligence network. He knew of a few celebrities (and people who worked with celebrities) were going to be there. Other than that, the more the merrier. (His “troops” actually missed a victim, who claimed to have slept through the murders. Said victim was sleeping in a separate house on the property and was probably on drugs. Making matters worse, he had invited someone there, and that person arrived at the wrong time and got killed. The police arrested the survivor at first because their story seemed unbelievable at the time.)
I hope they waited for the police to do their work first! (There was no mention of this in the attorney’s book. From what I understand, the police don’t clean up, leaving it to the civilians. Pleasant and professional, am I right?)
According to Charles, Tex Watson, who was involved both nights, they were supposed to keep picking houses for murder, but Tex claimed the police were getting suspicious and suggested they start looking for the secret place to hide out.
The book’s called Helter Skelter. It’s a good read, or a good listen - I listened to it on a long road trip, read by Scott Brick, one of my favorite narrators on Audible.
Helter Skelter is a song about riding a slide, although Paul says he was also using it as a symbol for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Frankly, I don’t see it and find that to be more than a bit of a stretch.
Mostly, though, Paul was trying to make it loud and raucous enough to outdo The Who.
It’s been a while since I read Dianne Lake’s book about her time as a member of the Manson family, and an even longer time since I read Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s book (the prosecutor). But that’s some hard stuff to forget, so here’s my poorly cited recollections.
Why the Tate residence? Certainly Manson had a beef with Terry Melcher over the (imagined) record deal that went bad, but I don’t believe that anyone in the family believed he still lived there. Rather, several members of the family, Manson and Tex in particular, had been to that house one or more times and were familiar with the layout. It also fit the bill being somewhat secluded, and likely inhabited by rich white folks whose deaths would inflame the race war.
Why the LaBiancas? Manson drove around looking for a suitable house for the next set of murders. I think they rejected a couple of houses, including one where Manson looked in the windows and saw a bunch of photos of young children, which in some odd way bothered him. They ended up driving to the house that they knew (and had maybe lived in for a while) that was owned or rented by someone in the family’s social circles. The LaBiancas had the misfortune of living right next door and maybe being known in one way or the other to the family.
I recall the “party” story as being debunked. There was no party, just the people that lived there and a couple unfortunate drop-in guests.
Distant memory: According to Bugliosi, the LAPD detectives that investigate the Tate murders were the least-effective, do-nothingest folks he could imagine. Weeks and months would go by and leads he asked the detectives to investigate would still be on the bottom of the to-do list. I recall that TV crews investigating of their own accord found a lot of evidence, including the murder scene clothing and the gun used. The LAPD believed there was no connection between the murders. Or between those two murders and the earlier murder of the grad student that Manson and Tex killed, writing ‘piggies’ or something on the fridge.
The LA Sherrif’s office, on the other hand, investigated the LaBianca murders and were much more on the ball. They believed there was a connection between all three murder scenes, and Bugliosi in frustration finally turned to those detectives to follow up any number of connections that the LAPD kept dropping. I remember being super angry at how useless the cops were. I don’t remember enough details to even partially encapsulate how many opportunities they passed up and how much evidence they overlooked. Just awful stuff.
I read it years ago when it was first published and it was indeed a very good read. I would recommend it to anyone whether or not you have any interest in the murders.
Note to self: when trying to fan the flames of hatred, be sure somebody is actually paying attention first. I mean, can you imagine? Suppose they gave a [race] war and nobody came?
I can tell you from my unfortunate direct personal experience the you either clean it yourself or wait to be contacted by a disaster recovery firm that does that kind of work.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame, lived in the house where the murders took place and built a studio there where he recorded his album The Downward Spiral, and dubbed the studio Pig.
He later claimed he felt bad after a chance meeting with Sharon Tate’s sister and moved out, but he took the door with him to his new studio, just plain bizarre!
I have no idea when it became a specialized business. I’m not sure why people would think that detectives would stop what they are doing and grab mops or that they take officers off the road for a specialized cleanup they aren’t trained for. Or that there is a clean up crew on stand by. It’s not the police department responsibility to clean up crime scenes on private property any more than it’s the responsibility of the fire department to clean up after a fire.