In the 90s the rock group Guns N’ Roses recorded a Manson song, Look at Your Game, Girl.
Three years later one of Manson’s followers, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, was given a life sentence following an assassination attempt on the then president, Gerald Ford. Manson and the group were sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment when California’s supreme court abolished the death penalty in 1972. In a further trial, Family members were also found guilty of the murders of Hinman and Donald Shea, a stuntman and hired hand at the Family ranch who was killed at the end of August 1969, but whose body was not recovered for another eight years. Newspaper articles continued for decades.
The prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, made a fortune with his bestselling book on the case, Helter Skelter (1974).
One of the defending lawyers, Ronald Hughes, disappeared mid-trial during a 10-day court recess and his body was found on the day the women were due to be sentenced. Once Manson, who converted his sign to a swastika, lunged at the bench. Manson and the women carved Xs on their foreheads and, sitting with their backs to the bench, insulted the judge.
PICTURES OF CHARLES MANSON JR TRIAL
The ensuing long trial was equally bizarre. Although it was these followers who had committed the brutalities, it was Manson who had ordered the killings, and, at the LaBianca home, had tied up the couple before leaving his followers to their butchery. Three months after the killings Manson was arrested with his cult: five middle-class young women and two men. Manson either did not know or did not care who lived there by August the following year. He had also been rejected in 1968 by a record producer who had originally occupied the Benedict Canyon house. But Manson, who had been living on Wilson’s ranch until the musician threw him out, had received no recognition for the song. In California in the early 60s he had befriended the Beach Boys’ drummer, Dennis Wilson, and the group had retitled a song by Manson, Cease to Exist, as Never Learn Not to Love on their 20/20 album. Neil Armstrong may have landed on the moon, but on Earth the then US president, Richard Nixon, saw the period as one in which “ drugs, crime, campus revolution, racial discord and draft resistance” challenged the very basis of “civilisation’s continuity”.Īlthough at the time of Manson’s trial hippy culture and its attendant drugs were blamed, it was Manson’s failed musical career that seemed to be one key to the killings. The Manson murders occurred in a late 1960s atmosphere of social upheaval, and stirred up moral panic. Guns sold out in Beverly Hills and security firms trebled their business. The killings, and the wall scrawlings in blood of “Death to pigs”, and the misspelled “Healter Skealter” – Manson’s song title borrowed from the Beatles in which he described the apocalyptic racial war he wanted to create – produced lurid headlines. A month before, the body of an LA drug dealer and musician, Gary Hinman, had been discovered. The night after what became known as “the Tate murders”, the deaths of a wealthy couple, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, were added to the Family’s toll.
Prisoner No B-33920 was originally sentenced to death for the murders of the actor Sharon Tate, the wife of the film director Roman Polanski and eight months pregnant at the time the coffee heiress Abigail Folger Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairdresser and Steven Parent, who had the misfortune to pass through the grounds of the Polanski mansion in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, on 9 August 1969.
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