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With last week’s rehash episode, there was a little ground covered again this week that we’d already seen before but it wasn’t as egregious. This episode really focused on the downward spiral of Charles Manson that led him to order the infamous killings. The episode begins with a warning that there will be disturbing footage coming, but they don’t tell you when and when it does come, I don’t think you can really be prepared for it. But there is one major piece of information about that infamous night that the docuseries completely omits.
The first two-thirds of the episode recount the good times with The Family, recounted mostly by former members Catherine Share and Dianne Lake. Another member, Stephanie Schram, also has a bit of screen time. Share is the most effusive about her time with Manson. For her, it was all sunshine and rainbows and free love, exactly what Charlie wanted. Anyone could have sex with anyone else, when it was warm enough they were all encouraged to run around the desert naked, and if it was up to him, they would have just stayed in bed all day and made love.
But there were several factors going on all at the same time that really pushed Manson into extremely dangerous and frightening territory. Besides being an acolyte of the Dale Carnegie method of influencing people, he was also sliding into religious fanaticism, pulling lines from the Book of Revelation to prove to his Family that the End Times were upon them. That spurred him to locate a bottomless pit in the Death Valley desert, as described in the Bible according to Manson, in which they would all enter and once they passed through a water-filled cavern, there was a place for them to live, emerging when the Apocalypse was over, with them repopulating the planet — which is way he always looked for the most beautiful people to join The Family. They seemed to have found a place in Death Valley to camp out, but the episode isn’t really clear about if or when they went because for the most part they still seemed to be at the Spahn Movie Ranch. In addition to the Bible, Manson was also heavily influenced by The Beatles’ White Album which he would play constantly for The Family, at varying speeds and even backwards to discern messages that he felt we put there for him.
For Manson, the race riots in Los Angeles were the perfect example of the coming Apocalypse. Again it gets a little blurry — was Manson hoping to start his own race war? We’ve been told that was his plan, but we’ve also been told that wasn’t the whole story. In this episode we’re told that after The Family emerged from the pit, Manson was going to join the new Black leaders of the world to build a new master race. It’s all very confusing and it doesn’t really seem like anyone really knew Manson’s true intentions, but the directive to commit murder was part of his plan to strike fear into people.
Manson was usually very successful in drawing people into the group. One young woman was convinced she’d just met Jesus Christ after speaking with him for half an hour and ditched her friends on the spot to go with him to the ranch. Share also relates how Charlie was desperate to become a recording star, going to meet with music executives and bringing the group together to perform. And at one point he even got record producer Terry Melcher to come to the ranch one night to hear them perform. According to Share, Melcher didn’t seem impressed but told Manson he’d get back to him … and he never did. That fueled Manson’s rage to the point that he began taking it out on the women in the group, including Lake who describes what she was hoping would be a good time with Charlie — she’d been feeling left out since he hadn’t had sex with her in some time — that turned into rape, with Charlie telling her that’s how they did it in prison. It was such a physically and psychologically damaging moment for her that she nearly threw herself off a cliff.
But Manson’s anger was at a boiling point after being snubbed by Melcher and that really pushed his desire to act out, ordering Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel to commit a murder and make it as gruesome as they could, doing whatever Watson told the women to do (yes, on top of everything else, Manson was a misogynist). The house he directed them to was at 10050 Cielo Drive, a home that Manson and Watson had both visited once before so they knew the layout. Prior to this, Family members had gone on what Manson called ‘creepy crawls’ in which they would just break into people’s homes and rearrange the furniture just to freak them out. But Manson was literally out for blood, although he never wanted to get any on his own hands. What the episode omits about the house on Cielo Drive is that it had belonged to Terry Melcher, and he had been living there with his girlfriend Candice Bergen.
Melcher was also the only child of Doris Day (a little tidbit revealed in the first episode), and he had told his mother about the time he’d spent with Manson and Dennis Wilson, and about Manson’s ‘zombie followers’ that he’d been training to defend themselves after Manson believed he’d killed a member of the Black Panthers (which was just a misinterpretation of another news story after Manson had shot a drug dealer named Bernard Crowe, aka Lotsapoppa, who survived). He also told Day that Manson had been to the house on Cielo. Day urged her son to move out, possibly saving his and Bergen’s lives in the process, and Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in shortly afterwards. Manson didn’t know who was living there but he wanted to send a message not only to the world, but one directly at Melcher for not taking his musical aspirations seriously. Neither Manson nor the Family members who committed the horrible act had any idea who was living at the house until the murders hit the news.
And this is where the episode hits you, hard, showing the actual crime scene photos of Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frylowski, Abigail Folger, Steven Parent and the eight-months pregnant Sharon Tate. The horrific images are presented silently which makes them hit even harder. That silence was deafening, and I really was not prepared to see them, especially the bloody corpse of Tate. And after Manson realized the success of the mission and the fear and confusion it instilled in the people of Los Angeles, but upset about the panic and attempts to escape by the previous night’s victims, he personally took the four killers plus Leslie Van Houten and Steve ‘Clem’ Grogan for a drive until he settled on an address that belonged to supermarket executive Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson tied the couple up and then let his Family members do the rest, but he wanted them to leave a very visbile message this time, and in the thankfully black and white photos of the victims, also presented silently, clearly carved into Leno’s stomach was the word ‘war’.
So this confluence of events — race riots, failed music career — coupled with Manson’s religious and Beatles zealotry seems to have been the cataclysmic event that pushed Manson from a free love guru to a homicidal cult leader. And he was actually getting away with it. But the other shoe is about to drop because once you get away with something a couple of times, you begin to get careless.
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