by Ray Black
During his extensive periods in prison, Charles Manson began to study religion and religious philosophies.
THE FAMILY IS BORN
In 1967, and in spite of his pleas to stay in prison, Charlie was awarded parole and sent to San Francisco. Re-entering the world in the ‘Summer of Love’ though, Charlie found it easier to adapt to the outside than he had anticipated. A keen musician, he used his guitar and the influential powers of readily-available drugs to attract friends, mainly girls, and soon followers. When he managed to sell the rights to one of his own songs, Charlie used the money to buy a bus, in which he and his entourage travelled, gathering more followers and spreading ‘love’.
The bus eventually broke down, and Charles Manson and his girls moved in with Gary Hinman, a music teacher. When they had outstayed their welcome there, they moved on, and Charlie conned George Spahn into letting him and his group stay at his Ranch. With a following of such eager and attractive girls, Manson made it worth Spahn’s while to agree. The group lived a decadent and carefree life at the Ranch. They scavenged for food, stealing what the supermarkets threw away each day.
Still determined to launch his music career, Charlie used his contacts to get in touch with Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher. Manson hoped that Melcher could be interested in using his music as the soundtrack for a film, and invited him to the Ranch to listen to a few of his compositions. Melcher came to listen to Charlie and his girls a couple of times, but ultimately was not interested in the music. The disappointment hit Charlie harder than Melcher could have realised, for he truly believed that this was his opening into the music business.
CHARLIE’S PROPHECY
Along with a passion for music, at the centre of ‘The Family’, the name which Charlie was now using to refer to his group of followers, was the development of a prophecy of impending Armageddon. Charles Manson preached to his followers that the black people of the world were going to rise up, steal from and slaughter all white men. Charlie and his followers (which he estimated would total 144,000 by this time) would survive this war, as he was going to lead them to a secret civilization in Death Valley where they would sit out the slaughter until the black men were all that remained. Then The Family would return to the cities, take back power from the black men, enslave them and rule the world. A great follower of The Beatles, Charlie gave the name ‘Helter Skelter’ to this race war, as he believed that the song lyrics described perfectly the Final Reckoning that was to come, and he prophesied that Helter Skelter would begin in the summer of 1969.
But when the summer days of 1969 did come and the black people had not unleashed this prophesied violence against the whites, Charlie spoke to his followers and told them that the blacks did not know what to do and therefore that they, The Family, would have to lead the way and show them. So it was that Manson’s followers set out to begin the predestined and necessary slaughter.
CIELO DRIVE
The home of Sharon Tate, the heavily pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, was one of The Family’s first targets. With her sorely missed husband away shooting a film in Europe, Sharon was spending the evening of August 9, 1969 with friends in Los Angeles. These included Abigail Folger, Folger’s boyfriend Voytek Frykowski, and the internationally renowned hair stylist, Jay Sebring. Sharon was entertaining her friends, not uncommonly, in the house she rented on Cielo Drive – a house owned by Terry Melcher, who had recently shattered Charles Manson’s dreams of a music career…
Shortly after 4 a.m. the following morning, the LAPD received a call from a private security guard who was on patrol in the area. He claimed to have heard gunshots. He wasn’t the only one to have heard disturbing noises. Reports later came in that gunshots had also been heard earlier in the morning, and the chilling screams of a woman begging, ‘Oh, God, no, please don’t! Oh, God, no, don’t, don’t . . .’ None of these earlier disturbances however, had been reported.
The morning dawned as usual over the Tate house, although on arrival at the property to begin work at around 8 a.m., Sharon Tate’s housekeeper Winifred Chapman noticed the telephone wire hanging over the main gate. Swinging the gate open, she walked up the drive and saw another unfamiliar sight – a white Rambler parked on the drive. On entering the house, she made her way towards the living room, noticing as she went some unusual splashes of red across the walls. On discovery of pools of blood and what appeared to be a body on the lawn, Winifred Chapman ran screaming from the house. As she ran back up the driveway and past the white Rambler, she noticed a second body inside the car.
When the police arrived, they found the blood-soaked body in the Rambler, along with another two heavily wounded bodies on the lawn. As they entered the house, first to catch their eye was the word ‘PIG’, written in blood on the lower half of the front door. As they progressed cautiously through the house, they could not imagine the horror they were about to encounter. Lying on the couch in the living room was a very heavily pregnant woman, her face covered in blood, her body covered in multiple stab wounds, and a ligature around her neck. The rope had been thrown over a rafter in the ceiling, and the other end was tied around the neck of a man lying close by, equally drenched in blood.
As the police looked on in horror, they heard the voice of a man. It was the caretaker, William Garretson, and he was arrested immediately and taken away.
The victims at the Tate house were later identified as Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski. Theirs were the bodies on the lawn. Steve Parent, a friend of the caretaker whose body was found in the car, and Sharon Tate, her unborn baby boy, and Jay Sebring, who had died in the living room. All the victims, with the exception of Steve Parent, had been stabbed repeatedly and furiously. Parent, Frykowski and Senring had also been shot. A total of 102 stab wounds had been administered to the victims.
LABIANCA KILLINGS
No less than 48 hours later, police were called to the scene of a second bloodbath, this time in the Los Feliz area of LA. Frank Struthers, son of Rosemary LaBianca and step-son of her husband Leno LaBianca, had returned home after a camping trip to find a couple of things out of the ordinary as he walked up the drive to his parents’ house. He could see Leno’s speedboat still on the drive, very out of character for his step-father who would always put it away for storage in the garage. Secondly, all the window shades in the house were down, again very unusual. Frank could get no answer either at the front door or on the phone, so he called his sister Susan, and her boyfriend, and waited for them to arrive.
The three entered the house through the open back door, and the two men left Susan in the kitchen while they went to have a look around. As they entered the living room, they saw the body of Leno, covered in blood, with a pillowcase over his head and some kind of object sticking out from his stomach. The men retreated back through the house, grabbed Susan, and called the police immediately.
On further inspection by the police and ambulancemen who subsequently arrived, the protrusion from Leno’s stomach was a carving knife. His hands had been tied together behind his back, a lamp-cord wound around his neck, and the word ‘WAR’ carved on to his body. In the bedroom, the police discovered that Rosemary had suffered a similar fate. Graffitied in the blood of the victims, in different places around the house were the statements ‘DEATH TO PIGS’, ‘RISE’, and the misspelled ‘HEALTHER SKELTER’. The couple had been stabbed a combined 67 times.
UNCONNECTED CASES?
These apparently motiveless crimes left the LAPD in the dark. Even when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office contacted the LAPD to tell them of the similar circumstances in which they had found the body of Gary Hinman, one-time friend of Charles Manson, the LAPD made no connection between the three cases and clues were left uninvestigated. Hinman had been stabbed to death in his own home on July 31, and written in his shed blood on the wall of his living room were the words ‘POLITICAL PIGGY’. Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Office had arrested a man named Bobby Beausoleil in connection with the Hinman murder. Bea
usoleil, it transpired, had been living in a hippy commune led by the charismatic and influential Charles Manson. The LAPD just weren’t interested, even though their case against William Garretson, the caretaker who claimed to have slept through the events at the Tate house had collapsed following the results of a polygraph test.
Theories and speculation as to who was behind these murders flew around, and it seemed like everyone had an opinion. The police however, were getting no further in their investigations. Until, that is, a little boy in Sherman Oaks found a gun in his back garden. He showed it to his father who immediately turned it in to the police. It was a Hi Standard .22 caliber Longhorn revolver, an exact match for the weapon which the police had traced to the Tate murders. This in itself did not offer any further information to the LAPD, but being three months since the murders, it renewed interest in the cases – so much so that the LAPD began to talk to the Sheriff’s Office about the possible connection between the crimes.
The Sheriff’s Office had first become interested in Beausoleil when his 13-year-old girlfriend had informed them that Beausoleil had been sent by Manson, with a woman called Susan Atkins, to Hinman’s house to retrieve some money that Hinman owed Manson. When Hinman refused to pay up, the duo kept him prisoner in his own home for a couple of days before they killed him, and the girl recounted how she had heard Susan tell others that she had stabbed the victim several times in the legs during the attack.
What was interesting about the young girl’s story was that Hinman had not been stabbed in the leg. This therefore led the Sheriff’s Office to believe that Atkins may well have been connected to one, or even both, of the other bloody attacks too.
SUSAN ATKINS’S CONFESSION
Susan Atkins confessed as much to fellow inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute, where she was awaiting trial for the Hinman murder. She gleefully announced that not only had she slashed Hinman while Beausoleil held him (believed to be the other way round by the police at the time), but that she was also the proud murderer of Sharon Tate. She claimed that Charles Manson, her lover, was Jesus Christ and that he was going to lead his Family to a civilization in a hole in Death Valley. First they had to commit a crime that would shock the world. Susan spared no details in describing the bloodthirsty and crazed way in which they had killed those at the Tate house, adding that she had wanted to go much further than they did. She wanted to cut Sharon’s baby out of her womb, to gouge out the eyes of their victims, crush them against the wall, and to cut off their fingers. Throughout this history, Susan Atkins laughed manically, danced and sang. She was considered insane by those listening to her story, although she must have been convincing enough as her cellmates did report her confession to the authorities.
TRIAL
Had the police not already made a connection between the Manson Family and the murders, they may have considered Atkins mad too. With what they had already discovered though, along with Atkins’s seemingly detailed knowledge of the crimes, the case came to trial.
Charles Manson and Susan Atkins stood trial, along with two other female members of The Family. There was no hard evidence against the Manson Family. Only a blood-stained fingerprint connected one of them to the Tate house, but when questioned, all but Manson did confess to the crimes, although none in quite as jubilant a fashion as Susan Atkins. Throughout the whole, agonising 22-week trial, Manson’s followers never once denounced him. In fact, if ever any evidence was revealed which looked to incriminate Manson in the murders, his Family would deny his involvement, admit to all the accusations themselves and divert the attention from him. Manson’s participation in the murders could not be proved, and although at least one criminologist believed that Manson was present at the murders, perhaps involved in tying up the victims or instructing his followers to kill, this could not be proved either. At one point, the lawyer for one of the other female defendants stood up and tried to implicate Charles Manson in one of the crimes his client had been accused of in order to lessen her own involvement. His client vehemently denied Manson’s participation, and the lawyer’s murdered body was found a couple of days later.
PECULIAR BEHAVIOUR
All of Manson’s followers were present at the trial, and they behaved throughout in a very peculiar way. They imitated Charles Manson’s speech and movement, and at one point, when Manson carved the sign of an ‘X’ into his forehead – a sign that he had exited from one world into another – the girls did the same. Manson himself created distractions whenever he could, even lunging at the judge at one point, shouting that someone should cut his head off! The court was in uproar and as the authorities tried to restrain Manson, the other three defendants began chanting loudly in Latin. Evidence was incomplete, testimonies clearly falsified, and witnesses threatened with death – their own or of their families – if they continued.
Eventually, the trial was complete, and the jury had reached their verdict. Manson and the three women arrived at the court with shaven heads to hear the outcome of their case.
GUILTY
Charles Manson was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death. Upon hearing the verdict, the female defendants declared that the judge had just passed sentence on himself, and that he should take to locking his own doors and carefully watching his children from that point on. All four defendants were given the death penalty, although when this was abolished in 1972, their sentences changed to life imprisonment.
The public reaction to The Manson Family after the trial was unexpected. The revulsion that had first greeted Charles Manson when he entered the courtroom had, over the course of the trial, transformed into a strange fascination and it appeared that the charisma which had seduced and hypnotised the young girls of Los Angeles into joining him and following him in his beliefs, was possibly having an effect on the general public too. Newspapers reported the story of the trial, placing Manson in a strangely favourable light. Concerns grew that his notoriety may spread to cult-hero. Fortunately, this never transpired, although Manson’s story did capture the public to the extent that it has been produced and re-told on both stage and in film. The music he wrote, and so believed in, has also been performed by Guns ’n’ Roses.
BEHIND BARS
Manson remains a prisoner today and is unlikely ever to be released. He receives more mail than any other prisoner in the United States and therefore, over 30 years on, perhaps he is still as dangerous as he always was – still appealing to those who need someone to follow and something to believe in. Also still dangerous physically, Manson has been isolated in prison at different times for various offences: threatening prison staff, damage to prison property, assault on an officer, drug-dealing, smuggling in a bullet and even, from within his prison walls, twice plotting to assassinate the president of the United States.
Charles Manson has been up for parole ten times. Every time, parole has been refused.
The Lebarons
A story of a Mormon fundamentalist family
Alma Dayer LeBaron was an American Mormon who relocated to a Mormon settlement in Colonia Juarez, northern Mexico in the early 1900s.
He was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, that was set up by Joseph Smith in 1830, and just like many other LDS fellows of that time, Dayer LeBaron was a practising polygamist, which was usually referred to by Latter Day Saints as the act of ‘Plural Marriages’.
When the United States Congress made the practice of polygamy illegal in 1862 many LDS members fled to other countries such as Canada in an attempt to set up free polygamy practicing communities without the fear of persecution or prosecution.
This was the reason that Dayer LeBaron had ended up at a settlement in Mexico and it was here that he fathered five of his seven children; Benjamin, Ross Wesley, Joel, Ervil and Alma.
It was also at this Mormon colony that Dayer LeBaron met Rulon Allred. Allred was convicted of polygamy in the US in 1947, skipped bail and escaped to Mexico where Dayer LeBaron gave him refuge whilst he
sorted himself out. Rulon Allred would go on to wish that he had never encountered the LeBaron clan.
In 1944, Dayer LeBaron received a revelation from God which told him to acquire a piece of Mexican land, this became the base for Colonia LeBaron, Dayer’s Mormon fundamentalist sect.
THE LEBARON CLAN
Dayer LeBaron’s children were just as religiously Mormon as their father, and each one ended up setting up their own off-shoot church at some point in their lives. Three in particular became historical members of the LeBaron clan.
In 1944, Benjamin LeBaron the eldest of Dayer LeBaron’s sons had a vision and proclaimed that he was in fact a prophet of God. He believed that he was the ‘Lion of Israel’, and to prove his point would roar at the top of his voice in the middle of the street. On top of this, Benjamin also wished to prove to the rest of humanity that he was ‘Mighty and Strong’. One particular time he stopped the traffic on a motorway in the middle of Salt Lake City – the geographical heart of Mormonism and the LDS – lay face down and did 200 press-ups to show people just how mighty and strong he really was. Benjamin was soon shunned by the majority of his family and friends and spent a lot of his life in and out of mental institutes. But one person did believe him and that was his brother Ervil.
The next child of Dayer LeBaron’s to have a spiritual experience was Ross Wesley. He too claimed that he was a mighty and strong prophet and related his visions to claims made by the founder of the LDS Church – Joseph Smith.
With Benjamin LeBaron in Utah State Mental Hospital and Ross Wesley’s prophecies not amounting to much, Joel and Ervil were the brothers to emerge as the chosen ones.
Joel LeBaron was the third sibling to become a self-proclaimed prophet after being visited by two angel messengers from heaven in the 1960s. Joel was an extremely charismatic man who people warmed to immediately. He was softly spoken and could explain the Scriptures like no other.