Some of them would eventually escape his grasp. The ones he didn’t chose for the killing, the ones who stayed home and helped him achieve his mad vision in … different ways. But while those girls were out murdering, there were other girls.

One of them had been a homecoming queen, for God’s sake. The girls, of course, attracted the most attention. They had done what Manson wanted them to do: they’d forced the world to pay attention. But over the course of two bloody nights, this ramshackle group of nobodies had changed the course of history and put a permanent stain on the 1960s. They were a group of losers, really, who buoyed themselves along with banal statements about love and one-ness and the looming apocalypse. It wasn’t until almost four months later that the murderers were arrested, and when the world saw their faces-four lanky-haired hippie girls, two drugged-out looking men, and their leader, a tiny, wild-eyed man named Charles Manson who sort of looked like Jesus, if Jesus had stopped showering, done way too much LSD, and been hit by a truck several times-they were shocked.

Before their names came out in the press, the details of their mutilated bodies did:ĭetectives said the man’s head was covered with a white hood, his chest pierced by a meat carving fork which had evidently been used to cut the word “war” and “XXX” into the flesh… the woman’s body, clad in pajamas, was found in the bedroom of the isolated single-story house at 3306 Waverly Drive, her back ripped to pieces by what police said may have been a knife or a whip. The papers didn’t know it yet, but the two dead victims were Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Said another: “It looked like a battlefield up there.”īefore anyone in the city could catch their breath, the next day’s headlines broke: 2 RITUAL SLAYINGS FOLLOW KILLING OF 5. “It seemed ritualistic,” said one investigating officer. It ran over a beam in the open-beam ceiling and was tied around the neck of Sebring, whose body lay nearby. A bloodied nylon cord was around her neck. In the living room, dressed in underwear-bikini panties and a brassiere-was Miss Tate. Twenty yards away, under a fir tree on the well-trimmed lawn, was the body of Miss Folger, clad in a nightgown.

On the lawn in front of the ranch-style home was the body of Frokowski. …In a white two-door sedan in the driveway was the body of the young man, slumped back in the driver’s seat, shot to death. On August 10, 1969, a horrible headline screamed from the front page of the Los Angeles Times: RITUALISTIC SLAYINGS: SHARON TATE, FOUR OTHERS MURDERED.

Lynette fromme