‘A nightmare B-side to the American dream’: Helter Skelter is the bestselling true crime book of all time – but how true is it?

Approaching midnight on August 8, 1969, an old Ford left Spahn Ranch, an abandoned Western movie set outside Los Angeles. The ramshackle commune housed a group of misfits and renegades who would come to be known globally as the Manson family.

There were four people in the car: Charles “Tex” Watson and three women, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda Kasabian.

Nearly all media reports state emphatically that Charles Manson, self-styled leader of the clan, had ordered them to drive to 10050 Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder everyone there “as gruesomely as you can”. But accounts of how and why that night came to pass differ wildly. The stories changed even at trial.

What we do know is that five people were savagely murdered that night.

Steve Parent, a young friend of the caretaker, was shot by Watson four times in the chest and stomach. He was sitting his car, about to leave. Sharon Tate, pregnant wife of movie director Roman Polanski, was tied up and stabbed 16 times. Watson wrote “PIG” on the front door in her blood.

Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, had been in bed reading when Susan Atkins passed by the room, searching for occupants. She waved. Later, Folger tried to escape via the pool area. She was stabbed 28 times.

Wojciech Frykowski, Folger’s partner and a friend of Polanski’s, fought hard. He was beaten over the head repeatedly with the butt of a gun, shot twice and stabbed 51 times. Celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, who tried to intervene on his former girlfriend Tate’s behalf, was shot and stabbed seven times.

First responders described seeing the bodies of Folger and Frykowksi in the garden. “They looked like mannequins that had been dipped in red paint, then tossed haphazardly on the grass.”

On August 10, 1969, the old Ford left Spahn Ranch again. This time Charles Manson was with them. The hunt was on. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s house was selected at random. Manson remembered the street in Griffith Park because the crew had partied many times at a house across the way. It seemed poor form to attack that house, so they chose 3301 Waverley Drive instead.

When they went inside, a big dog licked Manson’s hand. Watson carved “War” with a bayonet into Leno’s stomach. Krenwinkle used the victim’s blood to write “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” on walls and “Healter Skelter” (a misspelling of “Helter Skelter”) over the refrigerator.

Manson later told journalist Nuel Emmons that while he’d been inside and had helped tie up Rosemary and Leno, who were both murdered, their compliance meant he couldn’t go through with the killing. “Somehow I just couldn’t make the first move.”

Charles Manson is arguably America’s most infamous murderer of the modern era. Except he didn’t kill any of the people he was convicted of killing. What sank him wasn’t hard evidence of his perpetration. Instead, the pervasive power of male persuasion – his own and that of prosecuting attorney in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial, Vincent Bugliosi – set both his downfall and his mythic rise into motion.

‘An uncomfortable experience’

Re-reading Helter Skelter (1974), the book Bugliosi co-wrote (with Curt Gentry) about the murders and the trial, has been an uncomfortable experience. And not in the ways I expected.

Early editions of Helter Skelter – at the time of Bugliosi’s death in 2015, the bestselling true crime title of all time – were subtitled an “Investigation into Motive”. And Bugliosi does spend the better part of 736 excruciatingly detailed pages trying to convince us the prime motivation for the Tate-LaBianca murders was a fantastical end-of-world theory concocted by Manson.

It involved a race war and a portal in the desert where the Family would wait out the war, then emerge triumphant from the bottomless pit as world leaders – even though their official numbers never cracked 100.

Subsequent editions of Helter Skelter were re-badged “The True Story of the Manson Murders”, perhaps because other titles were emerging, making similar claims to ultimate truth – each contradicting the other.

In Chaos: The Truth Behind the Manson Murders (2019), freelance investigative journalist Tom O’Neill goes after Bugliosi, suggesting he was guilty of suborning perjury relating to the testimony of star witness Terry Melcher. O'Neill has hard evidence of this. Regarding his own left-field theories Manson was either an informant for the FBI or training assassins for the CIA: not so much.

Then we have Manson in his Own Words: The True Confessions of Charles Manson as told to Nuel Emmons (1988), where Emmons states “the myth of Charles Manson is not likely to survive the impact of his own words”. He was wrong. The myth has survived, because the truth hasn’t been feeding this machine from the beginning.

What’s the truth?

Who do we believe? The bulldog lawyer who manipulated witnesses and leaned heavily on a far-out theory to get the death sentences he wanted? The well-meaning conspiracy theorist whose paper trails led largely nowhere? Or the delusional rants of a so-called “madman” that are surprisingly lucid?

I don’t think any of these books have the ultimate claim to truth – but the narrative circulating between them matters. Especially when a whole cavalcade of writers, media and filmmakers have been only too happy to participate in the perpetuation of Manson’s demonic mythos.

In 2016, scholars from Lomonosov University in Russia examined The New York Times coverage of Manson, from the time of his arrest to his sentencing. They found:

The New York Times journalists depict Charles Manson as a nationwide celebrity and a mystic monster and endow him with supernatural properties and outstanding abilities. Such depiction has a great influence on the audience’s perception of the killer.

Bugliosi got in on the act, depicting the Manson clan as Dionysian crazies, with a heavy dose of fire and brimstone thrown in:

As the ranch hands tried to save the horses, The Manson girls, their faces illuminated by the light of the conflagration, danced and clapped their hands, crying out happily, “Helter Skelter is coming down! Helter Skelter is coming down!”

He does not attribute this scene to any witness. In the last section of the book, where Bugliosi espouses various personal theories on Manson, he suggests Manson was caught up in a Satanic cult. Again, without evidence.

Even today, media reports can’t help conjuring the resident evil of Manson and rolling around in the clickbait – but reading Helter Skelter, you don’t come away feeling convinced.

What you begin to see is that this was not a firestorm of Satanic maniacs, or a highly organised covert rebellion, but a sad conflation of time, circumstance and thwarted ambition – a mishmash of alternative beliefs, agitation, drug abuse and sexual manipulation, the insecurity of “runaways, dropouts, kicked-outs, and fantasy seekers”, who according to Manson were “all in need of a friend and a direction in life”.

It is too easy to suggest Manson was evil without understanding the whole mise-en-scène, which was defined by the times. These young people (many underage) were operating under a maelstrom of influences – not least, high-octane levels of LSD – which did not get adequate or informed coverage in the trial.

In a telling passage from his book with Emmons, Manson explains the state Tex Watson (often cited in the media as the most brutal of the Manson killers) was in when Manson asked him to assist the women in “their” plans.

I found Tex […] stoned in the back of the house. When I walked in, he was sitting on an old couch, his head bobbing and his hands tapping his legs in time to some music that no one else could hear except Tex […] I knew Tex was wiped out, but I also knew he could function well on one of his trips. Tex had a good retention of what he said and did until he reached a state of complete unconsciousness.

A creature of captivity

Manson spent much of his first 25 years in captivity: in and out of schools for juvenile delinquents, and prisons. And while he was inside, he learnt about mechanisms of control from jailers and studied good spin from the best ad men: preachers, the whack spec-fic of Scientology, the deep seductive pulse of rock ‘n’ roll.

Manson was an opportunist who nested in the philosophies of others. A rat in a cage, dreaming of the day he could oversee the lever. He thought this would happen via his music, but “things turned out bloody and bad”.

Manson’s greatest weapons weren’t the occult, or some kind of voodoo-inspired mind control. He wielded drugs and sex in such a way he made everyone think the ideas he planted were their own.

When he got out of prison in 1967, he was, by his own admission, pretty lousy in the sack. It was one of the reasons he said he made such a bad pimp. That all changed. He was blown away by the countercultural sixties fervour and combined his prison education with a deliberately cultivated ability to give runaway women what they wanted. Manson gave good head.

By the summer of ‘69, Manson was living a “fantasy come true” – not the Bryan Adams version, but the free-love version – crisscrossing the country and picking up women in his van. The van was procured, he says, after he manipulated a well-meaning pastor into giving him his piano. The van gave him the means and a man of God set him on his way.

Initially, Manson had no other motivations than sleeping with as many women as he could. But he cottoned on pretty quickly to the power an all-female entourage gave him, dropping in on his ex-con mates to clock the effect. Manson’s bus full of half-naked women gave him currency.

And no one can deny the sway – the heavy-circulation images of barefoot young women outside the courthouse, crude Xs branded into their foreheads with hot knives, calling him the messiah. Young women groomed and raped and toyed with so often, they must have thought – so it goes. This is love.

Manson would tell the vulnerable to call him Daddy and the followers to call him Jesus. And for the freer-thinkers: call me anything you want. He dosed his entourage on acid, while partaking only slightly himself. And Spahn Ranch, an enclave of westerns past, was perfect for manipulating the minds of renegade young women and appealing to the outlaw gene of lost young men.

Even the big, strapping cowboys who got out of Manson’s orbit after they tired of sleeping with his girls were afraid, they told detectives, of how sometimes they could still feel his vibrations.

But Manson wasn’t the devil or Jesus, though many believed he was. What those cowboys were feeling wasn’t supernatural. It was the ricochet of their own complicity. The Jesus trip, Helter Skelter: the guy who could, according to Bugliosi, stop watches and clocks. For Manson, just another rant, another role. In Manson in his Own Words, he tells Emmons how reality and fantasy began to conflate at Spahn Ranch.

Living in Movieland’s make-believe, we began to play act […] if only for the hour or two we spent pretending the cameras were focused on us […] if one of the guys, including myself, had a desire to come on as King Richard, Pancho Villa, Lucifer, Elvis the Pelvis, or Jesus Christ (which may have been my favourite role) everyone joined the cast. Pretending occupied our time and our minds and aided by some dope, the play-acting became so real that sometimes long after the scenes were over, the feeling of really having been that person lingered so strong it became real life.

Revenge of a wannabe rock star

The Tate-LaBianca murders weren’t the most horrific crimes America had ever seen. But because they happened in Hollywood – and the deaths involved the rich and famous – they were the ones we heard about. Helter Skelter was just a story though. The real motivations were personal.

Manson wanted to be a rock star – and when that dream was denied him, the downward spiral began. It’s hard to reconcile, but these senseless murders were not related to some satanic evil let loose. They were the desperate gestures of a reject.

Manson outlines to Emmons how in the early days, he would hassle bartenders to let him play his music. And when he wasn’t happy, he’d hold the bar hostage, saying his mates were gonna rob the place, but he had convinced them he could make more money playing instead.

Now if some of you bastards don’t put a few dollars into this empty hat, so that I ain’t a liar, I don’t know how long I can keep my two partners from walking through those doors with their shotguns.

Threats, manipulation and someone else’s dirty work. Those honky-tonk extortions were a prelude. He was a man rendered so powerless, he got to the point where getting his drugged-up band of followers to run a red streaky line across the evidence of other people’s success, in their own blood, was the ultimate act of defiance.

Helter Skelter was revenge. Even if they misspelled it. When Manson couldn’t become as big as the Beatles, he released a nightmare B-side to the American dream.

Did the women get a fair trial?

From what we know now about trauma, coercion and sexual and mental abuse associated with cults, much of Bugliosi’s assessment of the Manson women on trial appears insensitive and more like a witch hunt. And the defence for all of them, such as it was, is not worth mentioning.

By Manson’s own admission, he “knew what the mice were doing on Spahn Ranch”. He routinely denied women food, drugged them, prostituted them, manipulated their thoughts and feelings, and subsequently reduced their capacity for independent thinking and self-determination.

Again and again, the Manson women are described as dead-eyed, vacant and compliant. And when they did show some resistance, they were vilified. The rhetoric Bugliosi and the media directed at the Manson women is difficult to read without bristling. Bugliosi wrote:

Writing of Susan Atkins, Los Angeles Times crime reporter Dave Smith expressed something I had long felt: “Watching her behaviour – bold and actressy in court, cute and mincing when making eye-play with someone, a little haunted when no one pays attention – I get the feeling that one day she might start screaming and simply never stop.”

I am not a Manson Family apologist, but I don’t think these young women got a fair trial. Cults have long traded in flesh, particularly of women and children. And nearly all of them are run by men.

Manson might never have had the numbers of a Keith Ranieri (leader of the NXIVM cult, which had around 18,000 followers) or a Warren Jeffs (whose Mormon polygamist sect Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is estimated to have 10,000 members). But Manson, too, used women’s bodies as bait, providing his harem for the unlimited use of the Hollywood elite.

How can a law system adequately unpick what happened in a world where women were passed around like popcorn? The Manson women might have believed they were liberated from establishment shackles, but compound life had heavy 1950s overtones. They did all the cooking, child-rearing and cleaning, scavenging, petty theft and bin-diving, and they passed themselves around to whoever Manson wanted to influence, for free. And ultimately, they murdered for him.

As he told Emmons:

I can’t deny making some of the suggestions that led to the events of that night. Nor can I deny that I was the one person who could have prevented that car from leaving Spahn Ranch. But – so goes the feeling of power when coupled with hatred.

Bugliosi argued hard for the death penalty – not just for Mason and Watson, but for all the women. There was no death row for women in California at the time, so when Leslie Van Houten, 19, Patricia Krenwinkel, 20, and Susan Atkins, 21, were sentenced to death, a special wing had to be constructed to house them. One year later, the death penalty in California was repealed and their sentences were commuted to life.

In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi wrote,

With regard to Leslie Van Houten, who of the three girls was least committed to Manson, yet still murdered for him, I fear that she may grow harder and tougher; I have very little hope for her eventual rehabilitation […]

In this respect, Bugliosi was wrong. In July 2023, Leslie Van Houten was released on parole after 53 years. Her attorney, Nancy Tetreault, told The Guardian, “I’ve never had a client who has dedicated herself to reform like she has.”

“I believed that he was Jesus Christ […] I bought into it lock, stock and barrel,” Van Houten said. Asked in 2021 by the Earhustle podcast what she expected her life to be like if she was ever released, she said: “I don’t know the world out there anymore. My plan would be for simplicity.”

Evil is a biblical term. A word that stands in for the monstrous things people do to each other: man-made acts, things not of the sky or the cauldron, but of the world. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “there is no evil in individuals but there is in groups”.

Sally Breen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Feature image: Getty.