When agents from the Inyo Sheriff’s Department, aided by rangers of national parks, raided the Barker Ranch in the California desert in October 1969, they thought they had arrested a gang of hippies for vandalizing old shacks. Used as a residence and a base to conduct illegal raids on the nearby Death Valley Park. It was only after he was taken to the cells of the old Independence County Jail, a four-hour drive by car, that he learned his true identity. and the face of the group’s bearded leader, found hidden inside a kitchen cupboard, with an attractive tattoo of a swastika on his forehead.
charles manson He and his group of followers, mostly young women, took refuge in a remote hideout near an old mine after ordering the murders of Tate and LaBianca, which shocked America with the senseless violence that perpetrated them. It was special. On the evening of August 8, 1969, Manson sent his right-hand man Tex Watson, along with Patrika Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian, to the home of music producer Terry Melcher (collaborator with Dave Crosby and Roger Byrd, among others). McGuinn). Melcher was introduced to Manson by Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, and he apparently declined to record an album by Manson himself, whose rock star aspirations, however, did not match his equal talent. The denial apparently prompted Manson to embark on a punitive expedition.
However, in the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, near Benedict Canyon, it was no longer Melcher, but actress Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s young, beautiful wife, eight months pregnant, and four of her friends. News of the massacre of all attendees by Watson and his “assistants”, who were teenage girls, had barely cooled the hot summer in Los Angeles before LAPD detectives discovered another a few miles below the summit of the Hollywood Hills. Horrible discovery. At a home on quiet Waverly Drive in the affluent neighborhood of Los Feliz, authorities found another homicide. Manson himself, accompanied by Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins and Kasabian, and this time also accompanied by Clem Grogan and Leslie Van Houten, entered the villa of wealthy supermarket owners Rosemary and Leno LaBianca.
The house was apparently chosen because Manson had been to a neighbor’s party shortly before, and the victims were chosen at random. Watson stabbed Leno LaBianca 12 times in the living room, while the girls tied up and killed his wife, who had tried to escape into the bedroom. As the previous night, the killers had written slogans against the police on the walls with the victims’ blood.
Crime immediately entered the morbid narrative of true crime, chosen by the press and magazines as a symbol of “diabolical” crime, a paragon of absolute evil and the embodiment of the dark side of the counterculture, given the intersection of youth protest, Hollywood, drugs and Rock music is best represented by the Manson Family. It appears that these crimes were often specifically designed with snooping in order to increase the sensationalism of the crime. Since then they may have been taken explicitly as a metaphor for the loss of generational innocence.
And crimes have never left their central place in fiction. Revisited in books and fiction, cinema and documentaries – Dal messy Written by Vincent Bugliosi, the same prosecutor of the trial. The dark allure of the story is indestructible (the number of fan letters sent to Manson during his 47-year incarceration until his death in 2017 remains a record to this day). just recent events heat of hate Originally revised by Quentin Tarantino’s Ukronia, was actually revised retroactively once upon a time in hollywood, in which the killers get the wrong address and are gunned down by Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. Earlier, charlie saysA film by Mary Harron explored the psychological portrait of content writers, Susan Atkins, Katie Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, who find themselves faced with the reality of plagiarism after crimes committed by twenty-year-olds. The holy man they followed into an apocalyptic hallucination.
young followers He met Manson in San Francisco and Los Angeles between 1966 and 1968. Mostly well-born girls, they followed him to the communes between Topanga Canyon and Spahn Ranch, an Old West movie set at the north end of the San Fernando Valley. Those were the early days when family was above all free love They acid trips, and a tour of Dennis Wilson’s Malibu home where Charlie fulfills his fantasies of becoming a rock star. The idyllic life would soon take a more sinister turn, as Manson’s mood—not a hippie guru but a habitual criminal with a substantial criminal record—turned gloomy, his evening sermons on racial war theories and his activities toward the burgeoning drug trade. Leaned towards
The girls were her personal army, the disciples impressed with absolute devotion, to the extent that some like Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromm, who is now free after serving 34 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, is now also express love for him. At the 1970 trial, the three girls, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten, were found guilty and sentenced to death along with Manson and Watson. It was only by chance that he escaped the gas chamber as capital punishment was repealed in California the following year. The ban was in effect for less than a year, but was sufficient to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. At trial Kasabian demanded immunity in exchange for testifying for the prosecution, and he died last January.
In addition to Manson, who died behind bars at age 83, and Atkins, who also died of cancer while an inmate in 2009, Tex Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten are still alive today—in California history. The two longest serving women. Theoretically both would have been eligible for years of probation, but every recent state governor, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jerry Brown to the current Gavin Newsom, has always exercised the option to veto conditional release. Which politician deserves to go down in the history of the most just nation with compassion shown to absolute evil?
Case Exclusively by Leslie Van Houten. His first conviction was overturned on appeal in 1976, the second trial would end without a verdict and the third, in 1978, would eventually see him convicted of premeditated murder. He then receives a sentence of “imprisonment from seven years to life”. Jailed for 53 years, Van Houten, who was 19 at the time of the events, is today “deeply remorseful” and a model prisoner, which is why the special commission has been deliberating in favor of five years’ probation. Is. However, in any case, the governor intervened to prevent the change. In the latest instance, an appeals court ruled against the action of Governor Newsom, who announced he did not intend to intervene further, paving the way for the release from the women’s prison in Corona, near Los Angeles. His attorney, Nancy Tetreault, described her client as “grateful that the commission has recognized that he is no longer the person who acted at the time.”
This will be the first release for a member of the Manson Family convicted of the infamous murders. Van Houten will be abandoned in a world she will not recognise. His new residence would, for at least a year, be a haven where he would be educated in the basics of contemporary life, from credit card spending to the daily use of electronics, computers and telephones.