In countless depictions of the murders over the 50 years since they took place, they have largely been framed as a drug-fueled, randomized frenzy. Their other major crimes included multiple murders, torture, hostage-taking, and the attempted assassination of a US president.Īnother longstanding public perception about the Manson Family murders is that they were a kind of psychic attack on America itself - an explosive release of tension, an inevitable result of the freewheeling, drug-happy counterculture of the ’60s. But in fact, Manson was a career criminal by the time he moved to California, and the Tate-LaBianca murders were part of a long period of escalating criminality from him and his followers. The cultural narrative around the Tate-LaBianca murders is that they happened out of nowhere - that Manson’s followers simply erupted into unthinkable violence on command, after being thoroughly brainwashed.
Vernon Merritt III/LIFE via Getty Imagesīut what you may not know is that Manson’s followers had killed both before and after their most famous murders. Quentin Tarantino even revisits the topic of the murders in his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.Ĭharles Manson was indicted for multiple murders in 1969. Media depictions of him proliferate in pop culture. The ritualistic nature of the killings set the stage for the rise of Satanic Panic, a phenomenon that never fully went away.Īnd Manson continues to loom large in the cultural imagination, even 50 years after the murders and two years after his death in 2017.
They upended ideas of safety, security, and innocence, and effectively sounded the death knell of ’60s counterculture, ushering in a new decade of darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America’s seedy underbelly. the Manson Family murders, profoundly shook America’s perception of itself. The next night, desperate to make the first round of deaths look like part of a race war, Manson ordered his followers to a different address in Central Los Angeles, this one owned by middle-class couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, to kill again. The up-and-coming actress and wife of director Roman Polanski was just 26, and eight and a half months pregnant, on August 8, 1969, when four people broke into her home at 10500 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills - a house their cult leader, Charles Manson, had previously visited as a guest - and killed everyone inside. Even if you don’t know much about vintage Hollywood, you probably know the name Sharon Tate.
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