It's no secret that I love true crime. I can't explain my fascination, and I don't really know when or how it started. I remember watching Jonathan Creek and Midsummer Murders with my grandad as a kid. I remember when Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells were abducted and killed by Ian Huntley - I was about 13 at the time, only a few years older than they were, but I remember being fascinated by it. Only 5 years later, Madeline McCann was abducted whilst on holiday and again I was gripped. I was now 18 and the mystery of it really got me. I couldn't get my head round her parents leaving her and other kids unattended whilst they ate - I'm not victim blaming, it just wasn't my family experience - but trying to work out how someone could have taken her was something that plagued me.
Maybe all of these things moved my interests along maybe not, who knows! But now I listen to true crime podcasts, read true crime books and magazines and love a good mystery (real or fictional). I recently started looking round for a new podcast and started listening to one I didn't hate, but I didn't exactly love. They did a 2 part episode on Charles Manson and the Manson family and they mentioned some things I didn't know before. It's a classic true crime story, and everyone knows it to some extent (even if it's just the Tarantino version of events), but I was really struck by these facts I didn't know.
I'd bought an audiobook a couple of years ago about Charles Manson and I'd put off reading it because it was so long, but I decided to finally give it my time. I wasn't having much joy finding a podcast I liked, and my interest in Charles Manson was piqued. Boy, I was not disappointed.
The book is called Helter Skelter and is written by the prosecuter of the Tate and LaBianca murder trials, Vincent Bugliosi, so you know the story is going to be detailed and accurate, hence the running time for almost 25 hours. He takes his time and tells the story in 3 key parts - 1) the crime scene, how the bodies were found, and what happened immediately beforehand (the investigation); 2) The Family - Charles Manson's background and how his Family came to be, everything about who they were, what they did and how they lived; 3) the trial and the events surrounding it - the run up to it and how the Family left outside court behaved, as well as those on trial.
Every single element is meticulously detailed, nothing is left out, or to the imagination - down to the tiniest, seemingly insignificant detail. It took me about 2 months to work my way through the whole book. I'd listen to it whenever I was in the car or doing chores at home. Every time I listened, I had something to talk about with my family - something that had astonished me, or amazed me, something that I hadn't known before, despite listening to several podcasts and reading several books about the cases.
Charles Manson is oftened pictured as a psychotic and crazy man, but after listening to this, I'm left in no doubt that he was calculated and careful in his behaviour. The case against him was tenuous at best, and Bugliosi did a fantastic job of securing the conviction. Manson was not present at the Tate murder, and he had been at the LaBianca house and tied the couple up, but had not participated in the killings. He left the Family members to carry out the actual crimes.
It's never an excuse, but he had a terrible childhood - he was an unwanted child to his mother, and he never knew his father, though there was plenty of speculation that his father was black. His mother traded him when he was a baby for a pitcher of beer. His relatives returned later to reclaim him from the bar. By the time he was 30, he had spent half his life in prison of some description. He only knew violence and aggression, and the system failed him by not truly rehabilitating him.
The crimes themselves were atrocious - murder is always violent and terrible, but the depravity and dehumanisation displayed by the Family members is unreal. When the evidence is displayed as cold facts, it could be easy to distance the reader (or listener in my case) from the act, but it's testament to the monstrosity of the acts that it still renders you speechless. Sharon Tate was 8 months pregnant - she begged for her life, asked just to live long enough to birth her son, and she died crying for her mother. She was stabbed multiple times including in the abdomen. The coroner gave testimony that if emergency services had been on the scene within half an hour, there's a good chance her son would have survived the night. Unfortunately Sharon, her unborn child, and Sharon's friends would remain undiscovered until morning.
Chilling testimony was given by ex-members of the Family - Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were random victims, and several random people were passed over for various reasons before Charlie landed on the LaBiancas. They had done nothing wrong, they were just living their lives. They were at home, they hadn't crossed Charlie or the Family in any way. They just happened to live next door to a house Charlie had been to a few years before for a party, so he knew the neighbourhood. It's truly chilling.
Bugliosi wrote this book in 1974, and added the epilogue in 1994. It was a bit of a horrible discovery when Bugliosi talked about the British interest in Manson, that the UK Manson fan base was based in Warrington, and Manchester was another city worth him noting for their pro-Manson leanings. I did do a quick Google search to see if Helter Skelter UK still existed in Warrington (and how worried we should be) but no hits came up, just lots of images of the helter skelter rides.
The point remains that the Manson Family story is crazier than fiction. If this had been a fiction novel, no one would have believed it. There are so many details that are so hard to be believed. It was also the end of innocence - mass murders like that had never happened before, and they grabbed the attention of everybody. After the Manson Family came what's known as the 'golden age of serial killers' - there might be many reasons why there was a influx in killers, but the door had definitely been opened by Charlie and his followers.
I've now bought the hard copy of this book, so I can thumb through it every now and then.
I highly recommend this book, if you've ever wondered about the facts of the case or you think you know what happened - I can guarantee that you don't. Pick it up and you can find out the real story of Charles Manson and his Family.
