by Steve Lehto
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The thirty-four-year-old music teacher, Gary Hinman, lived about thirty miles west of Los Angeles, in Topanga Canyon. Hinman was known to befriend strangers easily, especially other musicians. Somewhere along the line he met a group of hippies led by a man whose own musical aspirations had not come to fruition. The failed musician and leader of the group was Charles Manson.
Charles Milles Manson was a small-time criminal who had come to California in the mid-1960s. Born in 1934, he had a rap sheet that involved auto theft, check forgery, and pimping by the time he got to California. Once there, he surrounded himself with people who believed that he was messianic and didn’t mind breaking the law for him. In the hippie culture of the time, it wasn’t hard for him to find followers. There were plenty of people who had drifted to San Francisco looking for answers, and drugs. Manson had plenty of both. He believed that the end of the world was nearing, and he explained to his followers that they would survive the coming apocalypse by following him. His Family members would do anything he asked of them and as time went by, the requests became more and more extreme. Manson’s philosophy has been dissected in many books and films and would be impossible to condense here. Suffice it to say that he became convinced that a race war was impending between blacks and whites in America. He was inspired by the song “Helter Skelter,” from the Beatles’ White Album, which he believed contained coded clues supporting his beliefs. The race war was imminent but needed a spark. One thing that might start the ball rolling, according to his way of thinking, would be a well-publicized murder of white people by some blacks. Manson thought he might be able to carry out a murder or two and make it look like the culprits were militant blacks.
The Manson Family did not actually have any regular income, and Manson and his followers managed to survive by seeking handouts when they could find them and stealing when they couldn’t. Sometimes they dealt drugs. Manson believed that a musician he knew, Gary Hinman, had come into a large inheritance. Manson asked a few of his disciples, Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins, to go to Hinman’s house and get the money from him. It didn’t matter how: They would ask for it first but if he didn’t give it to them willingly, they were to simply take it. Another story has also been given to explain why Hinman ran afoul of the Family. They claimed he had sold them some bad drugs, which they had in turn resold to a motorcycle gang in Los Angeles. When the gang members demanded their money back, the Family naturally felt they should get a refund from Hinman. Regardless of which reason Manson sent the Family members to Hinman’s, the thrust of their visit was clear: They wanted Hinman to give them money.
The three showed up at Hinman’s house on Old Topanga Canyon Road and he told them he had no money, inheritance or otherwise. He was probably surprised by how they treated him. Previously, he had let Manson and some of his Family members stay at the house. Unsure of whether Hinman was telling them the truth, they held him captive in his house for a couple of days. When it was clear that Hinman was not going to give them any money, one of his tormentors called Manson and asked for advice. Manson came to the house—carrying a sword—and spoke with Hinman, who continued insisting he did not have any money he could give them. Manson didn’t believe him and got angry; he slashed Hinman with the sword to emphasize his point. Hinman still could not furnish them any money. Manson left, after telling Beausoleil and the others to make the killing look like the work of Black Panthers. Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death and one of the members of the group scrawled Political Piggy on the wall with Hinman’s blood. This strange murder on July 27, 1969, would baffle local law enforcement, but soon there would be other murders in the news.
Manson hoped that a race war would break out when word of the killing became public, but one failed to commence. It is unclear why Manson believed this murder would launch anything other than a murder investigation. Worse, neither Manson nor any members of his Family were very clever when it came to committing crimes. They were so sloppy, the only reason police didn’t catch them sooner was simple incompetence on the part of the police. Bobby Beausoleil was arrested a short while later driving Hinman’s car with the murder weapon in the tire well. It was a theme that would often repeat. Members of the Manson clan acted as if they didn’t believe or didn’t care whether they would ever be caught.
The first Helter Skelter trigger had fizzled and now one of Manson’s clan was in jail. Despite the setback, Manson would move ahead with his plans to start the race war. On the evening of August 8, 1969, the Manson Family—without Charles Manson present—committed one of the most gruesome crimes in U.S. history. Manson sent several members of the Family to a home at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills. The property sat at the end of a cul-de-sac on the edge of a canyon above Los Angeles. At one time it had been rented by a music producer named Terry Melcher. Melcher had met Manson and had even made several trips to Manson’s various haunts to hear songs Manson played on the guitar. Manson was convinced he would someday outsell the Beatles and he believed his music would be prophetic, bringing the message of his weird philosophies to the masses. Apparently Melcher’s initial interest had waned and now Manson was upset. Manson had tried to talk to Melcher in March but when he went to the house on Cielo Drive, new tenants there told him that Melcher had just moved out. Not sure if he should believe them, Manson walked around the property and ran into Rudy Altobelli. Altobelli owned the property but lived in the guesthouse out back so he could rent the larger main living quarters to others. Altobelli confirmed that Melcher and his housemate, Candice Bergen, had moved out. Manson recognized Altobelli; the two had met previously and Altobelli was also in the entertainment business. Altobelli told Manson he could not talk any longer as he was packing for a long trip to Europe.
Manson may have felt slighted by Altobelli and the tenants on the property. He may have been upset that Melcher had moved without telling him. Either way, he decided to target the occupants of the home. On August 8, less than two weeks after the Hinman murder but several months after he had first gone looking for Melcher, Manson sent four Family members—“Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel—to the former Melcher residence and told them to “totally destroy everyone” there. It is unclear if Manson even knew who the current tenants would be when his crew got there. They were film director Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. On the night the Manson Family attacked, Polanski was away on business—Altobelli was also away—but Tate had houseguests. One was Jay Sebring, a friend and well-known hairstylist in Los Angeles. Polanski’s friend Voytek Frykowski was there, along with his girlfriend, Abigail Folger. Folger was not famous in the Hollywood sense but she was part of the family that had made its fortune selling coffee.
Also unknown to the Manson team was that the house out back—the one Altobelli lived in while renting the main house to others—was occupied by a young man who was watching Altobelli’s dogs while their owner was in Europe. William Garretson had been out earlier that evening but returned home. A young man he was friends with dropped by unexpectedly before midnight and the two drank some beer and smoked some marijuana. The visitor was Steve Parent, an eighteen-year-old from El Monte, a suburb east of Los Angeles. It was the unlikeliest of circumstances that led to his presence that evening. Previously, he had picked up Garretson hitchhiking and given him a ride to Cielo Drive. Garretson had told Parent he could drop by if he was ever in the neighborhood. Parent dropped by that night. He was a hi-fi enthusiast—as was Garretson—and had brought over a clock radio he hoped to sell Garretson. Garretson didn’t buy it, however.
The Manson Family members approached the Cielo Drive home quietly. The property was surrounded by a tall fence and had an automatic gate that had no security code—simply pressing the button on the box at the gate caused it to open. Tex Watson climbed the telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone lines to the house. The intruders climbed the fence to enter the yard and headed toward the house. It was shortl
y after midnight.
Walking toward the house, they saw Steve Parent driving toward the gate. Watson waved for him to stop and approached the driver’s-side window of the car. Watson shot Parent four times with a .22-caliber handgun. The group then headed to the house. There, Watson cut a screen so he could climb in a window while Kasabian stood watch on the front lawn. Watson then let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door. Frykowski had been sleeping on the couch but was awakened by Watson and asked who he was. “I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” He kicked Frykowski in the head. The three intruders then rounded up the others in the house and brought them to the living room. They had brought rope with them, which they had apparently planned to use to hang some of the victims. They did manage to tie up a couple of the victims, but Folger and Frykowski each managed to get out of the house. They were chased down and killed on the lawn, beaten and stabbed repeatedly. Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring were gruesomely stabbed to death inside the house.
Tate was stabbed sixteen times, with five stab wounds that would have been fatal by themselves. Sebring was stabbed seven times and shot once. Abigail Folger had been stabbed twenty-eight times. Voytek Frykowski was stabbed fifty-one times, shot two times, and beaten on the head with a blunt object—probably a handgun—thirteen times. One of the killers wrote the word Pig on the front door of the house in Tate’s blood. The killers then fled, running down the driveway and activating the gate. They sped off into the darkness.
The next day, the housekeeper arrived at the home and noticed the phone lines limply hanging over the fence but thought little of it. She let herself in through the front gate and did not notice that there was a dead body sprawled across the front seat of the strange car in the driveway. She let herself in the back door as was her routine and then walked into the house, where she saw bodies and blood. She had not noticed the bodies of Frykowski and Folger on the lawn. Hysterical, she ran to a neighbor’s and asked for the police to be called. Soon, the police and the news media were swarming the area, trying to make sense of it all.
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When the four Manson Family members recounted the story later to Manson, he was disappointed in how they had handled the killings. He told them that he would go out with them and show them how such a murder needed to be committed. And the very next day, he did.
Leno LaBianca, forty-four, and Rosemary LaBianca, thirty-eight, owned a beautiful home in Los Angeles on Waverly Drive, a reward for the success of running a lucrative grocery chain. There is some debate as to why Manson chose this house for his next murder. Manson had attended a party at the home next door to the LaBiancas earlier and may have burglarized the house previously. On Sunday, August 10, Manson merely walked up to the back door of the house and let himself in; the door was unlocked. It was approaching 2:00 A.M. Leno and Rosemary were still awake as they had recently returned from a long trip and had gotten home late. Manson tied the two up.
Manson assured the two that he was only there to rob them. More of Manson’s Family entered the house to help him. After tying up the LaBiancas and putting pillowcases over their heads, the group of intruders brutally stabbed the two to death. There is no question that Manson entered the house, but most experts agree that he was not physically present within the house when the murders took place. Manson may have mistakenly thought this would relieve him of legal culpability for the murders. Leno LaBianca received twenty-six stab or puncture wounds—some were inflicted by a two-tined serving fork—and Rosemary was stabbed forty-one times. Afterward, someone wrote the words Healter Skelter [sic], Rise, and Death to pigs around the house in blood. Someone also carved the word War into Leno LaBianca’s abdomen.
Amazingly, investigators working on the three murder cases—Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca—did not spot the obvious similarities between the crimes. The LAPD, apparently wanting to keep the public from worrying that there might be crazed lunatics on a killing spree in the area, went so far as to tell the press on August 12 that the Tate and LaBianca murders were unrelated. Some people, hearing that the police had declared the killings unrelated, assumed that the second murders were “copycat” killings. Oddly, almost no one linked the three crimes: Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca.
Public interest in the Tate case was overwhelming, because of the horrific nature of the crimes and the celebrity status of the victims. Journalists breathlessly printed everything they could find about the murders, and when the facts ran dry, they printed speculation. As a result, much of what they reported in the days following the murders was fantastic and untrue. Some papers said that Sharon Tate’s unborn child had been torn from her body or that a towel found across Jay Sebring’s face had been a “hood” used in some form of ritual. None of this was true, but it would be a long time before any of it was debunked.
Amazingly, at least one opportunity to link the Hinman murder to the murders at Cielo Drive was missed quite early. During the autopsies for the Cielo Drive victims, a detective from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told an LAPD sergeant about the Hinman killing and how the two crimes bore striking similarities. Both had victims killed with long bladed weapons and messages written nearby in the victims’ own blood. One was Political Piggy and one was Pig. How could these not be connected? The LAPD sergeant waved him off, saying they were convinced that the Cielo Drive murders were somehow drug related. A drug deal gone bad? Some of the victims were known to have been recreational drug users. Maybe one had flipped out and killed the others while on a bad “trip.”
What the LAPD did not realize until much later was that they already had a man in custody who was linked to these crimes. Beausoleil had been arrested on August 6, just a couple of days before Tate. He had been arrested while driving Hinman’s car, with the murder weapon in the trunk and Hinman’s blood on his clothes. He was a known associate of Charles Manson. And law enforcement knew all about Manson and his band of hippies. Still, at the press conference that followed the Tate autopsies, an LAPD detective said, “I don’t feel that we have a maniac running around.”
The police did make one arrest very quickly in the wake of the Tate murders. Garretson, the caretaker of the Cielo Drive residence, had been arrested when they found him in the house out back. He claimed to have not heard anything during the time the murders occurred, and the police thought he was behaving oddly. News spread that the police had arrested a suspect and media reports made it sound like he was the right person. But he passed a polygraph and was soon released. He was not released, however, until after the LaBiancas had been murdered. To even the most amateurish armchair detectives it was clear: Garretson had nothing to do with either set of killings.
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Manson and his Family had been staying at a place called Spahn Ranch, a former western movie set owned by an elderly man named George Spahn. Spahn was half blind, eighty years old, and seemingly only partially aware that Charles Manson and a couple dozen of his followers were living on the sprawling premises not far from Los Angeles. And, while there, they had been stealing cars and committing other petty crimes, when they weren’t out murdering people and trying to start “Helter Skelter.” Within a week of the LaBianca murders, police raided the ranch and rounded up Manson and twenty-five others on a warrant for auto theft. After they were all booked, someone noticed that the warrant was misdated. They were all released.
Fearing that Spahn Ranch was not a good place to hide, Manson and the Family moved out to the desert to hide and prepare for the impending apocalypse. As with so many criminals, they did not manage to lay low or stay off the radar of law enforcement. The Family continued stealing cars and dune buggies and police began noticing that stolen vehicles were seen in and around an area known as the Barker Ranch. Law enforcement once again raided the Manson encampment and rounded up twenty-four people, one of whom was Charles Manson.
Manson was famously found hiding in a cabinet under the bathroom sink of a building the Family had been staying in. Even so, the officers a
rresting him and the others had no idea that the little hippie under the sink was the mastermind of the recent murder spree in Los Angeles. When he was booked, he gave his name as Charles Manson. Asked if he was known by any other names, he told them to list Jesus Christ and God. At that point in his life, Manson had already spent seventeen years of his life—about half—in jail, prison, or some other kind of penal institution.
The Family members sat in jail awaiting various charges related to weapons and stolen autos and managed to stay quiet for a while. A small break in the case came in the form of Kitty Lutesinger, who was picked up by police near the Barker Ranch. She told police that she was scared of the Manson Family and wanted to escape, but she was pregnant with Bobby Beausoleil’s child. She said she did not know where he was—but the police did. He was in jail, having been arrested for the Hinman murder. She gave the police a statement that started connecting up the various crimes to Manson. The rest of the connections would come from Manson Family members talking in jail. One told a cellmate about her involvement in the Hinman murder, and soon the entire chain of events became clear to law enforcement. Warrants were issued for the few Family members not in custody, and the rest were located and rounded up.
Beausoleil was placed on trial for the Hinman murder. In fact, his case was so straightforward that his trial took place before Manson had even been picked up in the Barker Ranch raid. Prosecutors did not realize at first that it was part of a larger picture, involving Manson and his Family. The jury could not reach a verdict, however. Beausoleil was retried, and after Mary Brunner—who had been given immunity for her testimony—described how he had stabbed the music teacher to death, he was convicted and sentenced to death.