Why exactly did the Manson Family kill eight people across Los Angeles in August 1969 — and do the widely-reported motives tell the full story of how and why these infamous crimes unfolded?
As they drove home in the early morning hours of August 10, 1969, a Los Angeles couple named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca stopped off to get gas and pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The newsstand owner, who knew the LaBiancas, later remembered that the couple was disturbed by one of the stories that they saw in the paper.
In fact, that story had disturbed everyone in the city, and from there, the entire country. It was the story of the gruesome murder of 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate and four others at her Benedict Canyon home right nearby, which had occurred only the night before.
Even without knowing the gory details of the homicide — details which would be endlessly dissected in the years to come — the couple was deeply unsettled by the news as they read it there at the newsstand on their way home. Perhaps the most unsettling thing of all was that Sharon Tate had been eight and a half months pregnant when she was killed, making her unborn son the sixth victim of last night’s grisly massacre.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesSharon Tate was the most famous of the Manson Family’s victims.
No one knew it then, but Tate and her companions had been murdered on the orders of a man named Charles Manson, a charismatic cult leader who had grand, delusional plans to incite a race war through a series of shocking murders. His followers, known as the Manson Family, had gone to Tate’s home with the instructions to do something “witchy” and “gruesome.”
Though they’d obeyed — even using Tate’s blood to write “PIG” on her front door — Manson was unsatisfied with their work. And so, the night after the Tate murders, Manson sent them out again.
By the time the LaBiancas left the newsstand somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m. and resumed driving the short distance to their home in the Los Feliz neighborhood, the Manson Family was out too, looking for their next victim. After weighing several options, they ended up at the LaBiancas’ home, where they would commit their next — and even more gruesome — murder, this time with Manson himself involved.
But who was Charles Manson? How did he assemble his family, and what did they actually believe? Today, we’ll discuss Manson’s background, his fateful move to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco during the Summer of Love, and his plan to incite a race war, which he believed would lead to his ascension as a second Christ figure.
Finally, we’ll discuss what came after the Tate-LaBianca murders — the trial of Manson and his followers, and the theory that’s emerged in the years since that he was in fact a subject of the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra project, which, in part, aimed to test the potential of the drug LSD.
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