Manson Murders: Five Killed in Hollywood Horror

Sharon Tate was eight and a half months pregnant when members of Charles Manson's cult entered the rented house on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills and murdered everyone inside. On the night of August 8-9, 1969, four of Manson's followers — Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian — killed five people at the home: Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the property's caretaker. The killings were carried out with a brutality that shocked even hardened homicide investigators. Manson, a charismatic ex-convict and failed musician, had gathered a commune of young followers at Spahn Ranch outside Los Angeles. He preached a delusional philosophy built from a distorted reading of the Beatles' White Album and the Book of Revelation, predicting an apocalyptic race war he called "Helter Skelter." Manson believed the murders would be blamed on Black Americans and trigger the conflict he prophesied. The word "PIG" was written in Tate's blood on the front door. The following night, Manson personally accompanied his followers to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in the Los Feliz neighborhood, where the couple was murdered. "DEATH TO PIGS" and "HEALTER SKELTER" — misspelled — were written in blood on the walls and refrigerator. The murders went unsolved for months, terrorizing Los Angeles. The break came when Susan Atkins bragged about the killings to fellow inmates at a detention facility. Manson and several followers were arrested in December 1969 and convicted in 1971. The Tate-LaBianca murders effectively ended the cultural optimism of the 1960s counterculture, becoming a symbol of how the decade's idealism about communal living and consciousness expansion could curdle into something monstrous.