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20. Psychedelic Nightmare Pt. 4: Lovebomber Supreme
3 Plays2 years ago
CULT: Charles Manson
Segment 4 of Psychedelic Nightmare brings us to one of the most well known cult murders in American history. We’re talking about Charles Manson’s racist, LSD fueled doomsday conspiracy and the young people he convinced to execute what we know now as the Tate Murders. Join us as we unpack the evolution of this cult, historical context of the time, the dynamics of grooming, and how mainstream media consistently positions the murder of these Hollywood elite above the horror of Manson's white supremacist agenda. We also take some time to uplift the legacy of the Black Panther Party (who the cult unsuccessfully framed for these murders).
CW: grooming, abuse, murder, sexual assault, anti-Black racism
Sources
Outro last updated April 2023
FYI: we've recently unpublished older episodes as we are in process of re-editing for a smoother flow & audio experience. they will be available again as we finish.
Thank you for listening to our passion project <3 You can find us on social media here! We're a team of 2 people & have always been ad-free. If you are enjoying, please consider supporting our sustainability on Patreon or by making a one-time contribution via CashApp $unpacktheeerie.
- your grateful hosts
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:00
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Yeah.
00:00:01
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Yeah.
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Cause he's ew.
00:00:02
Speaker
He is ew.
00:00:03
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And he stinks.
Introduction to 'Unpacking the Eerie'
00:00:09
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Hi, I'm Akshi.
00:00:11
Speaker
And I'm Shana.
00:00:12
Speaker
And you're listening to Unpacking the Eerie.
00:00:15
Speaker
A podcast that explores the intersections of our dark and morbid curiosities through a social justice lens.
00:00:22
Speaker
You're welcome.
00:00:33
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Just a brief content warning, this episode contains mentions of grooming, violence, drugs, child abuse, child sexual abuse, and incarceration.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hello.
00:00:46
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Hello.
Psychedelic Nightmare Series Continuation
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Welcome back to our, what is this?
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Fourth installation of Psychedelic Nightmare.
00:00:55
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Psychedelic Nightmare.
00:00:56
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This goes on and on forever.
00:00:58
Speaker
You know, the nightmare does not end.
00:01:00
Speaker
No.
00:01:01
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Yeah, that's, I mean, that's how nightmares feel, so one day we'll be done with the Psychedelic Nightmare series.
00:01:09
Speaker
But that day is not today.
00:01:10
Speaker
No, it's not.
00:01:10
Speaker
Wow, it's going to be so long.
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Speaker
And it's not next time either.
00:01:14
Speaker
No, so I hope you, I hope this is your genre.
00:01:17
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Yeah.
00:01:18
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Okay, so before we get started, I wanted to do a Patreon shout out.
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Thank you so much to Ellen and Brittany for becoming new patrons.
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Thank you.
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We appreciate you.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yes, we do.
00:01:32
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Enjoy your perks.
00:01:34
Speaker
Okay.
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Merch is available.
00:01:36
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You can get a hoodie.
00:01:37
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Hoodie.
00:01:38
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And a cute proof mug.
00:01:40
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Yes.
00:01:41
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Which I'm using right now.
00:01:43
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It's very cool.
00:01:45
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Would recommend it.
00:01:45
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Yeah, it is very cool.
00:01:46
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It's kind of spooky.
00:01:48
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Mm-hmm.
00:01:49
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Perfect for Halloween time, so, you know?
00:01:52
Speaker
Oh, and we're recording in my new apartment.
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First time recording here.
00:02:00
Speaker
That's true.
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It's not haunted, supposedly.
00:02:04
Speaker
You're breaking it in.
00:02:07
Speaker
Breaking it in.
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Breaking it in.
Charles Manson's Infamous Case
00:02:11
Speaker
Okay, well today we are talking about...
00:02:16
Speaker
A cult and a series of murders and, I don't know, just like a ton of wild conspiracies that are tied to it, which I think everybody knows this name.
00:02:29
Speaker
It's a household name in the U.S. of A.,
00:02:34
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Maybe the world.
00:02:35
Speaker
Maybe the world.
00:02:37
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I think the world.
00:02:51
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Five people, including famous actress Sharon Tate, were found brutally murdered in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, California.
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And then two days later, a couple in Los Feliz were found murdered in a similar fashion.
00:03:05
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The people who were covering it described it as ritualistic.
00:03:08
Speaker
And this likely honestly started like the foundation for the satanic panic that would then follow in the 70s and 80s.
00:03:17
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And at both scenes, death to pigs, rise, helter-skelter, amongst other things, were written on the wall with the blood of the victims.
00:03:25
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So if you haven't guessed already, we're talking about Charles Manson and his quote-unquote family.
00:03:30
Speaker
Another family.
00:03:31
Speaker
It's not really a family story.
00:03:35
Speaker
No, it's a cult.
00:03:38
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But, you know, who the fuck is Charles,
Manson's Troubled Background
00:03:41
Speaker
Akshi?
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this also, this event marked the end of the summer of love and the whole, like, free love era of the 60s.
00:03:51
Speaker
Oh, for sure.
00:03:52
Speaker
This was the end.
00:03:54
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They ruined it for everyone, as per usual.
00:03:57
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White people ruining it for everyone.
00:03:59
Speaker
Okay, who's Charles?
00:04:01
Speaker
So rewind, rewind.
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It's November 12th, 1934, and Charles Manson is born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
00:04:13
Speaker
He's a Scorpio sun, Aquarius moon, and a Taurus rising.
00:04:17
Speaker
Wow.
00:04:18
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And he actually has a stellium of Scorpio and a stellium of Aquarius, so he's a mix of us two.
00:04:25
Speaker
Wow.
00:04:26
Speaker
He's a Scorpio, Venus, and Jupiter, and he has Aquarius moon and Saturn north node.
00:04:32
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That's aggressive.
00:04:32
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Yeah.
00:04:33
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Okay.
00:04:34
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Anyways, moving on from that, his mom, her name was Kathleen Maddox, and she was 16 and not married at the time.
00:04:42
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His father was Colonel Walker Henderson Scott Sr., who only knew her briefly, and he ran away when Kathleen told him she was pregnant.
00:04:52
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Originally, Charles was named No Name Maddox, and then he was later renamed Charles Miles Maddox.
00:05:01
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And then he picked up the last name Manson from William Eugene Manson, who Kathleen began dating later in the year.
00:05:07
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That year, Eugene or William Eugene was a heavy drinker.
00:05:13
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And in 1937, they got divorced.
00:05:15
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So that's three years later.
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Kathleen also struggled with alcoholism and would go missing for days at a time, leaving Charles to take care of himself or with a variety of babysitters.
00:05:25
Speaker
Hmm.
00:05:27
Speaker
In 1939, so when he was five years old, she was involved in a robbery and got a 10-year prison sentence.
00:05:33
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And so from that time to 1942, Charles spent time with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia.
00:05:41
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They were very religious, but also pretty, like, well off.
00:05:43
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So he, like, lived in a nice house and, like, went to church and...
00:05:48
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Stuff like that.
00:05:50
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In 1942, his mom was paroled.
00:05:52
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But by this time, he was, like, getting in a lot of trouble pretty often.
00:05:56
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And so his mom sent him to the Gibault School for Boys in Indiana.
Manson's Criminal Path
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It was, like, a juvenile detention school that was run by Catholic priests.
00:06:06
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He ran away from the school twice.
00:06:08
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The first time to his mom, who, like, pretty much rejected him and sent him back.
00:06:12
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Okay.
00:06:14
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And then he learned that he's never going to do that again.
00:06:17
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So the second time he ran away, he went to Indianapolis, rented a room, and started just, like, kind of engaging in petty crimes, like stealing, to support himself.
00:06:27
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Eventually, he was caught, and then a sympathetic judge sent him to another juvenile detention school called Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska.
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He was there for four days, after which him and another child stole a car and drove to Illinois, and
00:06:43
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They were caught by the police and then he was sent to the Indiana Boys School, which is another juvenile detention center.
00:06:50
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So he says while he was at the Indiana Boys School, he was beaten and raped by the people running the school.
00:07:00
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And I like looked some stuff up about it and there's like.
00:07:02
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definitely other allegations of abuse from that school and it doesn't surprise me because a lot of um these juvenile detention schools especially around that time especially ones run by catholic priests have a lot of allegations of abuse that are coming up now so he tried running away from that school 18 times and finally in 1951 he escaped
00:07:25
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Again, he was caught, sent to a different juvenile detention center in D.C.
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called the National Training School for Boys.
00:07:33
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At this point of time, he was psychologically evaluated and found to be, quote, aggressively antisocial, whatever the heck that means.
00:07:41
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Yeah.
00:07:43
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And then he was transferred to Natural Bridge Honor Camp.
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At this camp, he was caught trying to rape another boy at knife point right before he was scheduled to parole.
00:07:56
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And so then he was again transferred to the federal reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia.
00:08:01
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And then what I read said that while he was there, he was caught, quote, committing several homosexual crimes, right?
00:08:11
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So I'm not sure what that means.
00:08:13
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I'm not sure if he was, like, caught committing sexual assault or whether he was caught, like, engaging in consensual sex.
00:08:21
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Yeah.
00:08:21
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Whatever.
00:08:22
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Well, yeah.
00:08:23
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After which he was transferred to a maximum security prison in Ohio.
00:08:29
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So pretty much...
00:08:30
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His entire childhood was spent in juvenile detention and he was released to his aunt and uncle in 1954 at the age of 20.
00:08:38
Speaker
Wow.
00:08:41
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So pretty much all that he has known up until this point is like prison, juvenile detention, spent all his time pretty much around like boys and men.
00:08:51
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Set up for success.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yep.
00:08:53
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Yep.
00:08:53
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I did.
00:08:54
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I wanted to kind of look into what the impacts of our like growing up.
00:08:59
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in this kind of environment.
00:09:00
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I did not have time to do that though, but we can imagine that it's not great.
00:09:04
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I'm sure it's not great now, but it probably was even worse in the 1950s.
00:09:09
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Yeah.
00:09:11
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Or maybe the same, who knows?
00:09:13
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So in between 1954 and 1967,
00:09:19
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He engaged in a lot of different kinds of crimes.
00:09:22
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Between the time that he was released from prison in 1967, he engaged in a lot of different kinds of crimes, including male theft, forgery, and pimping.
00:09:33
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He got married to Rosalie Jean Willis and moved to LA with her.
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During that time, he was in prison for stealing a car and his wife met someone else that got divorced.
00:09:43
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Then he got married a second time to a 16-year-old girl that he had been pimping.
00:09:49
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And the reason that he married her was so that she couldn't testify against him for forgery.
00:09:54
Speaker
Piece of shit.
00:09:57
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He's a piece of shit.
00:09:58
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So right before he was about to get released from prison, he asked not to be released because he felt like prison was his real home and he didn't want to be in the outside world.
00:10:08
Speaker
Hmm.
00:10:10
Speaker
And during this short period of time that he was in prison, he also learned the steel guitar.
00:10:16
Speaker
So it's March 21st, 1967.
00:10:19
Speaker
He gets out of prison at the age of 32, has spent pretty much all of his life in institutions, has been divorced twice, has two kids, is learning about Scientology, has worked as a pimp a lot, and is a car thief and, I guess, a guitarist at this point.
00:10:36
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He's got some Richard energy as well.
00:10:38
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He really does.
00:10:39
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He really does.
00:10:40
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A lot of chaos.
00:10:42
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So now it's like 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s
00:10:48
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This is the context that he's entering.
00:10:52
Speaker
1967, it's the summer of love.
00:10:53
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During this time, a lot of young people that were very idealistic and creative and going through this cultural shift of what it is to be un-American, I guess, are coming to the hate as it has been labeled the birthplace of the hippie movement.
00:11:12
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As there were a lot of peaceful protests and psychedelic experimentation happening there, as we talked about in the last episode.
00:11:21
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So this is like when the kind of like tune in, turn on, drop out, turn on something like that.
00:11:29
Speaker
Known as the dropout gospel was happening.
00:11:32
Speaker
It was like a lot of like life, love, peace, self-discovery, anti-war protests.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:38
Speaker
We're happening at Berkeley specifically.
00:11:41
Speaker
So this is the context that Charles Manson is entering.
00:11:44
Speaker
He feels pretty out of his element because like this is not his thing.
00:11:48
Speaker
His entire life, he has not experienced love at any point in time.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, I have a quote.
00:11:54
Speaker
from him oh let's hear it oh he uh at the beginning of one of the documentary episodes he's quoted saying and then i got out of prison and all these kids got a hold of me saying we've got to stop the vietnam war and and he says what there was a war i didn't
00:12:11
Speaker
He doesn't give a fuck.
00:12:12
Speaker
No, but he also doesn't know what's happening.
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:12:15
Speaker
He's like, I don't know what's happening.
00:12:16
Speaker
I've been in jail my whole life.
00:12:18
Speaker
Ever seen me in vocational school?
00:12:19
Speaker
Rehabilitation?
00:12:20
Speaker
They never planned no rehabilitation.
00:12:22
Speaker
I sweep the floor in the kitchen, go out and play handball.
00:12:24
Speaker
I'm still 10 years old in your world.
00:12:26
Speaker
In your world, I'm still a kid.
00:12:28
Speaker
Which I thought was interesting.
00:12:29
Speaker
Right, yeah.
00:12:30
Speaker
He's very disconnected from...
00:12:32
Speaker
reality his whole life.
00:12:34
Speaker
Like there's a lot here.
00:12:36
Speaker
I think he's committed to this like victim complex but also like it just goes to show that like prison really isn't about
00:12:48
Speaker
Like he's a perfect example of how prison doesn't help people.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:12:53
Speaker
Like, you know, I mean, we know that, but I think like the narrative, the general narrative is that people do their time and they learn something and then they get out of it.
00:13:00
Speaker
And like, he's stuck basically is what I'm saying.
00:13:03
Speaker
His, his brain is not.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:06
Speaker
Yes.
00:13:07
Speaker
I mean, it's also just like, this is a super like strange environment because there's like tons of people doing psychedelics.
00:13:16
Speaker
There's a lot of like houseless folks as well.
00:13:19
Speaker
And a lot of like houseless youth.
00:13:21
Speaker
And there's like groups of people that are actually like trying to support them and like feed them.
00:13:25
Speaker
And there's a lot of like mutual aid and community support going on, which is actually pretty cool.
00:13:29
Speaker
Cause there's like a whole group of people that's like, why do you need to work at a job if we're going to just give you the things that you need to do?
00:13:35
Speaker
So like there's like a bunch of places that you can go to get free clothes and free food and just like do what you want in life, you know?
00:13:42
Speaker
And so like there's like cool stuff happening, but then there's also like a lot of like traumatized children because most of these like kids' parents, like dads are like World War II veterans.
00:13:55
Speaker
And so like they're having like the generational trauma of having like parents that either were killed or traumatized in the war.
00:14:05
Speaker
And they're looking for guidance in this like kind of really chaotic environment.
00:14:10
Speaker
And in that environment, there's also dozens of people claiming that they're like these gurus.
00:14:16
Speaker
So I'm like, why everyone got to use the term guru?
00:14:19
Speaker
They really do that.
00:14:20
Speaker
They really do do that.
00:14:22
Speaker
But they're claiming that their way of thinking and their way of life is the right way.
00:14:27
Speaker
And we talked about how...
00:14:30
Speaker
If someone is saying that in a previous episode, questionable.
00:14:33
Speaker
It's a red flag.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:14:35
Speaker
Also, I was, like, noticing, like, yeah, it's really cool that people really came together and was like, here's free clothes, free food, free medical care, all this shit.
00:14:43
Speaker
But it just goes to show, like, when white people are struggling en masse, there's, like, an immediate galvanizing to help them out.
00:14:54
Speaker
It was really striking.
00:14:56
Speaker
And Hate Ashbery still kind of has that kind of vibe.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yep.
00:14:59
Speaker
I was going to talk about that a little, just like go into the neighborhood a little bit more.
00:15:04
Speaker
So that was like in the 1960s.
00:15:07
Speaker
But by like the fall of 1967, the whole neighborhood was pretty much abandoned, trashed.
00:15:13
Speaker
And like pretty much the only people that were living there were houseless folks.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:19
Speaker
This is stated by blogger John Newman, who wrote an essay called Death of the Hippie Subculture.
00:15:25
Speaker
He said, with the Hayton and Ruins and most of its residents gone, it was simply unable to operate as a hub for music, poetry and art.
00:15:33
Speaker
So since then, the neighborhood has just become very fractured because of the housing and houselessness crisis in San Francisco.
00:15:41
Speaker
Until the 1960s, it was a working class neighborhood.
00:15:44
Speaker
And it was one of the few neighborhoods in San Francisco that didn't institute redlining and 40% of the population was black.
00:15:51
Speaker
But Mayor Joseph
00:15:53
Speaker
began sending cops into the neighborhood, like railing against the hippies.
00:15:59
Speaker
He also created a committee in the 1970s to, quote, restore the neighborhood.
00:16:05
Speaker
And basically the neighborhood was preserved, but the housing prices went up a lot.
00:16:11
Speaker
And then this like tourist industry was created for what's known as nostalgia retail.
00:16:17
Speaker
And that also increased the housing prices even more.
00:16:21
Speaker
And because of houselessness and housing prices rising in SF, there's like a fracture in the neighborhood of people who are basically trying to come together to support the unhoused folks and like other kind of more right wing people who are saying that the unhoused people are making the neighborhood unsafe and trying to create policies to push them out.
00:16:42
Speaker
So like these crises are obviously happening across the city of San Francisco.
00:16:48
Speaker
But this article that I read said that the hate has grappled with this the most because it like pretty much started happening in the 60s and continued after like policies began shifting.
00:17:02
Speaker
To quote Carly Schwartz from the Huffington Post, as a new generation of groups organized in the hate to fight over housing and homelessness, the neighborhood's history is deeply relevant to San Francisco's complicated, precarious situation right now.
00:17:16
Speaker
It's a mix of stunning wealth and gross inequality, housing scarcity, and jarring disconnects between intentions and reality.
00:17:24
Speaker
And it's all in play with a few square blocks.
00:17:27
Speaker
So that's right now, but it really connects back to what was happening in the 60s as well.
Manson's Grooming Tactics
00:17:33
Speaker
So that's kind of the environment in which Charles is entering.
00:17:40
Speaker
Right.
00:17:41
Speaker
So he arrives.
00:17:44
Speaker
Right.
00:17:45
Speaker
He's at Berkeley.
00:17:46
Speaker
He's like, what the heck is going on?
00:17:47
Speaker
What is this war?
00:17:48
Speaker
I'm completely disconnected from this.
00:17:51
Speaker
And he meets Mary Brunner, who was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
00:17:59
Speaker
She moved to California after graduation, graduating from the University of Wisconsin and took a job as a library assistant.
00:18:07
Speaker
at UC Berkeley.
00:18:09
Speaker
She was also pretty disconnected from this hippie culture.
00:18:12
Speaker
It was like not her vibe at all.
00:18:15
Speaker
She meets Charles while she's walking her dog.
00:18:17
Speaker
He uses this charm and then mentions he needs a place to stay.
00:18:21
Speaker
And she's just like, sure, you can stay at my apartment.
00:18:23
Speaker
The boundaries are so bad in the 60s, bro.
00:18:29
Speaker
And then they become lovers after several weeks.
00:18:33
Speaker
Like, I guess he just, like, figured out a sad way to convince her to sleep with him.
00:18:39
Speaker
So at this time, she's, like, working.
00:18:41
Speaker
And he is, quote, working on his music.
00:18:44
Speaker
Whatever the heck that means.
00:18:45
Speaker
Such a fucking music.
00:18:46
Speaker
She thinks that they're, like, dating and together.
00:18:48
Speaker
But then he starts bringing girls homes and convinces her that it's fine.
00:18:53
Speaker
You know, like, and he's like, oh, it's, like, free love.
00:18:57
Speaker
He sucks so much.
00:18:58
Speaker
So I'm going to pause at this point to talk about grooming, which I know that we have talked about before, but I wanted to go into it a little in depth before, like stating how the other members of the family joined, because you can see like how things played out when you connected to the process of grooming.
00:19:21
Speaker
So...
00:19:26
Speaker
Grooming, as defined by Grant Cinnamon, who is a researcher, he says, grooming refers to an act of preparing or training someone for a particular purpose or activity.
00:19:42
Speaker
Grooming is often used as a means to prepare an individual or to place an individual into a position in which they are unwittingly subjected to abusive and or exploitative behavior.
00:19:54
Speaker
It is an insidious form of predatory behavior that is a characteristic practice of con artists.
00:20:01
Speaker
sexual abusers, and antisocial and narcissistic personality types as a means to target and manipulate vulnerable people and may be motivated by a pursuit of power, revenge, financial gain, or sexual gratification.
00:20:17
Speaker
For example, sexual, elder, and financial abuse, extortion, human trafficking, and slavery.
00:20:24
Speaker
So most of the literature on grooming is focused around child sexual abuse, but grooming can also occur in teens
00:20:31
Speaker
adults as well.
00:20:33
Speaker
So the goals of the grooming process are masking and priming, which is basically like priming both the target and the target social environment and masking the groomers true intentions.
00:20:46
Speaker
This process, the goal of this process is so that the person is never suspected because they are too nice and
00:20:54
Speaker
They can be seen as very helpful.
00:20:56
Speaker
It removes suspicion.
00:20:58
Speaker
And oftentimes when they integrate themselves into the lives of their targets or victims and like make themselves seem a certain way, it like removes...
00:21:08
Speaker
sounding boards for the like targets to talk to about like what's happening because they're like kind of integrating into their life in this way to make them seem a certain way to people in the target social environment as well.
00:21:20
Speaker
So the six stages of grooming adults and teens from this website that I found first is targeting the victim, which is selected based on ease of access and perceived vulnerability.
00:21:33
Speaker
So oftentimes it's like people who are experiencing trauma.
00:21:36
Speaker
problems with their family, they lack confidence, they have a low self-esteem, they have a mental illness or physical disability, they are already survivors of abuse.
00:21:47
Speaker
And at this stage, they also start gaining information and knowledge about the target.
00:21:55
Speaker
And the second stage is gaining the target's trust.
00:21:58
Speaker
And also kind of adding more like gaining knowledge about them.
00:22:01
Speaker
So this is a stage where like love bombing can happen and there's like extreme flattery.
00:22:06
Speaker
They make them feel like they have a really caring relationship and they start to learn more about them.
00:22:11
Speaker
And specifically, they try to identify a specific issue.
00:22:14
Speaker
need that needs to be fulfilled in this person's life and that goes to the next stage which is fulfilling a need and the predator or abuser seeks to fill a void in the person's life and then tells them that they are the only person who can fill that need so like because tries to really like put their hooks in and become a really integral part of their life in that way fourth stage is isolating them so
00:22:40
Speaker
demanding secrecy, telling them people in their life are not trustworthy.
00:22:44
Speaker
And like I said before, there have been cases where the perpetrator introduces themselves to friends and family, deliberately presenting themselves as very charming.
00:22:53
Speaker
And as a result, the victim may be met with disbelief if they express their concerns to people in their life.
00:22:58
Speaker
The aim is to keep others from seeing what's actually going on.
00:23:04
Speaker
The end goal of all of this is abuse.
00:23:06
Speaker
Oftentimes it is sexual abuse.
00:23:08
Speaker
In this case, you'll see that it's sex trafficking pretty much and later on like
00:23:14
Speaker
pushing people to be violent against others and commit crimes.
00:23:18
Speaker
But it can also be forced criminal activity, violence against yourself or others.
00:23:22
Speaker
Oftentimes the victim persuades themselves that the abuse is normal, even desirable for the quote benefits it brings with the price only becoming apparent later.
00:23:31
Speaker
It may take years or decades for victims to process what actually went on for the realization that like they weren't partaking in a special relationship, but they were like victims of abuse and
00:23:42
Speaker
And the final stage is maintaining control, which is pretty much just like making threats to harm the victim, using emotional blackmail to like keep them within the relationship.
00:23:52
Speaker
Cinnamon had like a seven stage model of adult sexual grooming, which is like slightly different.
00:23:59
Speaker
He also has a victim selection, targeting, gathering information, research, creating a personal connection, meeting needs.
00:24:05
Speaker
And then he has priming the target, which is using credibility to isolate the target from friends.
00:24:11
Speaker
Hmm.
00:24:11
Speaker
and increasing psycho-emotional dependence.
00:24:14
Speaker
And then his is talking specifically about sexual grooming.
00:24:18
Speaker
So the sixth stage is instigating sexual contact, but it can also be the stage where abuse begins.
00:24:24
Speaker
And then the seventh stage is again, maintaining control.
00:24:27
Speaker
So what can oftentimes happen in the grooming process is during the priming
00:24:35
Speaker
or instigation stage.
00:24:37
Speaker
So like when they're trying to isolate the target or when the abuse is starting, there can be a fracture of trust.
00:24:45
Speaker
And that often results in abandonment of the target or reversing to other stages to rebuild trust and credibility.
00:24:54
Speaker
So what that means is, if they're caught in the priming or instigation stages, depending on
00:25:03
Speaker
on like the personality of the person or the circumstances of the trust fracture, they may appear apologetic, admit to guilt, or they may present as indignant and hurt that their actions have been misrepresented or misinterpreted.
00:25:18
Speaker
And they could either decide to like end the relationship instead of rebuild, rebuild it because they have access to other people.
00:25:27
Speaker
Or if they've spent considerable time like
00:25:30
Speaker
building this trust, they might choose to like loop back to earlier stages, like the love bombing stage to reestablish trust and credibility that have been lost.
00:25:40
Speaker
So just depending on the situation, either could happen.
00:25:44
Speaker
This is so important.
00:25:45
Speaker
Like, I feel like we talk about like the cycle of violence.
00:25:51
Speaker
Without this piece, it's mentioned, but it's not like there are stages before the stages of abuse.
00:25:59
Speaker
Yeah, there are stages that occur before the abuse can occur.
00:26:05
Speaker
And I think, yeah, we don't talk about it that often.
00:26:11
Speaker
Because it's sort of disconnected from the abuse where like we don't talk about the fact that groomers go through grooming a lot of people who they don't end up abusing because they lose them in these stages.
00:26:26
Speaker
And they just leave because they're like, oh, I can't do this with this person.
00:26:30
Speaker
You know?
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:32
Speaker
So this author in this paper that I read identifies that grooming has recognizable themes and
00:26:39
Speaker
And initial stages typically involve substantial emotional or physically rewarding experiences with the perpetrator.
00:26:46
Speaker
And then later on, manipulation and exploitation begin.
00:26:51
Speaker
But the predator may or may not cross the line between exploitation and abuse.
00:26:57
Speaker
But it's often really hard to distinguish where this line is in reality.
00:27:04
Speaker
The traits of a groomer is that they're usually...
00:27:07
Speaker
Like have this external masking persona of being trustworthy, dependable, an upstanding person in the community.
00:27:14
Speaker
They present as carers.
00:27:16
Speaker
They present as sincere, open, truthful, and are usually apparently likable.
00:27:22
Speaker
Sadly, there's a lot of people who are groomers who are in helping professions like teachers, therapists, social workers, therapists.
00:27:32
Speaker
I have this horrible story about this dude who used to teach at the, at my undergrad.
00:27:39
Speaker
He was like one of the, I think he might've been the Dean of the psychology department or like, at least he was like someone who had been tenured and like, you know, he was in a high position.
00:27:51
Speaker
He'd been there for a long time and he was also a therapist in his like, his like side life.
00:27:59
Speaker
And, uh, he ended up,
00:28:03
Speaker
sleeping with his client who was a survivor of sexual assault, who was a college student.
00:28:09
Speaker
So like she was someone who had gone to the school and then also saw him as a therapist.
00:28:15
Speaker
And then he built her trust and framed it as like, you know, this is a safe environment to revisit your issues with intimacy.
00:28:28
Speaker
um he he was fired but then they like really tightened up their like um procedures around who they hire and shit isn't that disgusting yeah but pretty much the reason that they go into these professions is because it gives them easy access to people who are vulnerable yeah right yeah fucked up the the author of this paper notes that there's two primary personality types that
Manson's Manipulative Techniques
00:28:52
Speaker
are like
00:28:53
Speaker
groomers narcissistic and antisocial so the narcissists exaggerate their own power success attractiveness and they seek excessive praise and admiration and they need this to restore their self-esteem and these factors are the reward of grooming for narcissists superiority and like prowess the antisocial personality thrives on the fact that they're being deceptive which allows them to feel like oh like you know I'm I'm I have the sense of power because I'm like
00:29:23
Speaker
deceiving this person and they don't know.
00:29:25
Speaker
And like for them, it's like, oh, people are just objects and I can play around with them how much ever I want.
00:29:31
Speaker
And that's how grooming benefits these both personality types in a different way.
00:29:37
Speaker
Things that often help groomers succeed even more are being a celebrity, which is why you hear about this happening in Hollywood a lot.
00:29:45
Speaker
Charisma, charm, personal standing.
00:29:49
Speaker
And these are all really carefully developed states.
00:29:54
Speaker
So just to end, some statistics about grooming across Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe is
00:30:01
Speaker
it has been estimated that only 4% to 8% of adults who are abused or exploited as a result of sexual grooming behaviors come forward and report their abuse.
00:30:11
Speaker
And this statistic comes specifically from research conducted at the hands of perpetrators who are in helping professions.
00:30:17
Speaker
So there's like really not like generalizable stats about this at all.
00:30:21
Speaker
And I think only now in the past few years, it's been coming out a lot in the media about how common grooming actually is.
00:30:28
Speaker
Like, you know, there's like,
00:30:30
Speaker
the Hulu documentary and then there's a Hulu TV show, both specifically about grooming.
00:30:34
Speaker
And then in that, in last time we talked about like betrayal trauma and in that podcast, I mentioned betrayal.
00:30:41
Speaker
They also talk about grooming and that one.
00:30:43
Speaker
And obviously like survivors of grooming and this kind of abuse, um,
00:30:47
Speaker
experience of your betrayal trauma because this is just like a really intense form of deception and betrayal from someone who you thought you were close to.
00:30:57
Speaker
Yeah, connection to the last episode.
00:30:59
Speaker
Also, if you're jumping in and you haven't listened to the first three episodes,
00:31:03
Speaker
You got to go back because there's a lot of context.
00:31:05
Speaker
There's a lot of context.
00:31:07
Speaker
But we talk about betrayal trauma in the last episode and betrayal blindness, which it sounds like.
00:31:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:12
Speaker
You were naming earlier.
00:31:14
Speaker
Reasons that people don't come forward with this, like to report this kind of.
00:31:21
Speaker
is fear of the abuser, fear of hurting family, friends, community, fear of not being believed or being blamed, stigma associated with abuse, not knowing who to turn to, feeling isolated, not feeling capable of dealing with whatever the fallout is of reporting, and not realizing that they're a victim of this until a substantial time.
00:31:41
Speaker
has passed so there's that context of grooming and i just shared the story of how he meets mary and like somehow convinces her to live with him and then he's like in a relationship with her bringing the girls home convinces her that it's okay and you can see sort of like some parts of this in there pretty much what happens um sorry i cut that um
00:32:11
Speaker
This person who wrote this article on Slate, Jack Hamilton, said, Manson drew from his years of experience as a pimp to use violence, drugs, and promises of protection to lure and control women.
00:32:23
Speaker
He then used the sexual promise of those women to lure and control men.
00:32:27
Speaker
For young people desperately searching for utopia, Manson instead gave them something closer to hell, then convinced them it was everything they ever wanted.
00:32:38
Speaker
So what he does, he actually like hangs out around Golden Gate Park, listening to what these other like gurus and like Timothy Leary and all these people are like spouting to learn and gain information on like, what do these young people want to hear so I can like get them to join me?
00:32:56
Speaker
And then he learns the terminology about like free love and peace and all this kind of thing and figures out what to say to get like vulnerable young people to like him and connect with him.
00:33:07
Speaker
So a couple months later, it's May 1967, he mates Lynette Fromme.
00:33:14
Speaker
She was from Santa Monica, California.
00:33:16
Speaker
She was a dancer as a child.
00:33:21
Speaker
In 1963, her family moved to Redondo Beach and she started using alcohol and drugs.
00:33:27
Speaker
Then she graduated from high school.
00:33:28
Speaker
She moved out of her parents' house, but then was kicked out, unsure why, and she was homeless.
00:33:37
Speaker
In 1967, at 19, she dropped out of college and was at Venice Beach after her parents had thrown her out.
00:33:45
Speaker
And she was pretty depressed at that point of time.
00:33:47
Speaker
She said that she was sitting on a curb.
00:33:49
Speaker
When she watched a bus arrive and Charles Manson exited, he stopped and looked at her and said, your parents threw you out, didn't they?
00:33:57
Speaker
And she thought that he was psychic and so decided to follow him after this one instance occurred.
00:34:03
Speaker
Wow.
00:34:04
Speaker
These people are so hungry to be seen.
00:34:06
Speaker
Right, right.
00:34:07
Speaker
They just jump in on that.
00:34:09
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:34:09
Speaker
So she's a second member.
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:11
Speaker
And at this point in time, he's like in his 30s and she's 19.
00:34:14
Speaker
I'm not really sure how old Mary was, but I think in her early 20s at this point.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:19
Speaker
So the three of them started living together in San Francisco.
00:34:23
Speaker
In 1967, they meet Ruth and Morehouse.
00:34:25
Speaker
So...
00:34:30
Speaker
This is like some random fucked up story also.
00:34:34
Speaker
Ruth's father made friends with Charles Manson after he picked him up as a hitchhiker.
00:34:40
Speaker
Ruth's father was like a minister, I think.
00:34:43
Speaker
And the two of them discussed the Bible, sang religious songs because he invited him over for dinner that night and he ended up spending the night and he just like became friends with the family.
00:34:53
Speaker
And that's how he met Ruth Ann, who was 15 years old at the time.
00:34:57
Speaker
Hmm.
00:35:00
Speaker
And he took an interest in her and took her on a trip up the coast in like a micro bus that he had just acquired.
00:35:10
Speaker
When this happened, her parents reported her as a runaway and they were caught in July 1967.
00:35:19
Speaker
And Manson was arrested at this point of time.
00:35:22
Speaker
But a year later, he convinced her to marry a bus driver so that she would be emancipated from her parents.
00:35:30
Speaker
And so she did that.
00:35:31
Speaker
And then she went to L.A.
00:35:32
Speaker
to join Manson and his followers.
00:35:35
Speaker
So that's like kind of the third person that he meets, but she only ends up joining them a year later at the age of 16.
00:35:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:44
Speaker
I'm just wondering all of the shit that he's saying to all of these girls, you know, because like clearly there is a need that he is filling that is drawing them.
00:35:53
Speaker
to to him yeah um this is really reminding me i think i've probably said it in a previous episode maybe lorena but like working with survivors and like especially especially when they're just reaching out and like untangling the situation that they're in there's always this there's or not always but there's often this like oh well i thought i met like the person of my dreams and
00:36:17
Speaker
He was the most charming, gentle, generous, chivalrous person I thought I had ever met.
00:36:25
Speaker
And so when things changed, I thought it was my fault because I thought that it was, I was the one who brought about the change.
00:36:32
Speaker
And so maybe if I just stayed long enough and if I was just good enough, they would be who they were when I first met them, when they were unchanged by me and my behavior.
00:36:42
Speaker
And that shit really just like,
00:36:44
Speaker
You know, like that's so common and so haunting.
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:52
Speaker
And then to like get people to finally like, it takes a really long time to be, to untangle how that's actually not, like it's not your fault.
00:37:03
Speaker
And like also you are not the one who convinced yourself of that.
00:37:08
Speaker
of this dynamic, you know?
00:37:10
Speaker
Like, there were so many small things throughout that they were doing to make you feel like it was your doing, this entire relationship.
00:37:19
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:37:20
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:23
Speaker
Fucked.
00:37:24
Speaker
Fucked.
00:37:25
Speaker
So a few months later, it's the summer of 1967.
00:37:29
Speaker
Patricia Krenwinkel, she came from a family of divorce.
00:37:33
Speaker
She was bullied at school, had a low self-esteem, was often teased for being overweight and had excessive body hair because she had an endocrine condition.
00:37:43
Speaker
And she was in kind of an unstable living situation when she meets Charles Manson at Manhattan Beach, along with
00:37:51
Speaker
Lynette and Mary Brunner.
00:37:53
Speaker
In later interviews, she says that she had sex the first night they met and that he was the first person who told her she was beautiful, that she was mesmerized by his charisma and starved for attention.
00:38:06
Speaker
So she decided to go to San Francisco with him.
00:38:09
Speaker
She quotes from her that I saw in this, any, any documentary that I watched, she said, I felt really loved by him.
00:38:16
Speaker
I was desperate for someone to care.
00:38:19
Speaker
She also said he was an excellent pimp, whatever he believed I would believe.
00:38:24
Speaker
So, damn.
00:38:26
Speaker
Then he meets Susan Atkins.
00:38:30
Speaker
She was a second of three children, grew up in Northern California.
00:38:34
Speaker
Her parents were alcoholics and her mother died of cancer three years prior to this.
00:38:40
Speaker
In 1966, she left for San Francisco by herself and never returned to her hometown.
00:38:45
Speaker
And she met Manson when he played guitar at the house she was living in with several friends.
00:38:50
Speaker
Her house was later raided by the police and she was homeless.
00:38:54
Speaker
And so Manson invited her to join us group who were about to go on a road trip.
00:39:01
Speaker
And apparently he particularly cherished her because she was beautiful and he used her as sexual bait to get men into his group.
00:39:16
Speaker
So at this point, I'm just going to switch to talking about this clinic that was in Haight-Ashbury.
00:39:25
Speaker
So David Smith,
00:39:27
Speaker
was this doctor who founded the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.
00:39:31
Speaker
And in this period of time, oftentimes it was there to help people who were having bad trips.
00:39:38
Speaker
It was opened in June of 1967, and he met Charles Manson and these girls.
00:39:45
Speaker
And he's quoted to say that it was almost creepy how much control he had over them.
00:39:51
Speaker
He felt like it was really weird that he was controlling their behavior a lot.
00:39:56
Speaker
But then he also goes on to say, but there was a lot of weirdness going on at that time.
00:40:00
Speaker
So, like, it's just so wild to me that people see this and they're just like, well, shrug, you know.
00:40:10
Speaker
Okay, so here's a wild connection.
00:40:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:15
Speaker
Another of the clinic's researchers, Louis West, is...
00:40:20
Speaker
ran a secret study about LSD and drug use among hippies.
00:40:29
Speaker
He was a CIA psychologist with a background in deprogramming victims of brainwashing.
00:40:39
Speaker
West used to work with CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb.
00:40:44
Speaker
Here he is.
00:40:45
Speaker
There's a connection.
00:40:49
Speaker
And he came to San Francisco, refitted a broken down Victorian home near the clinic, labeled it a hippie crash pad, which was actually a ploy to study drug addiction and houselessness.
00:41:02
Speaker
And like, basically, it was one of MKUltra's little hubs.
00:41:07
Speaker
After working for Gottlieb at this Air Force base in Texas and at the University of Oklahoma, that's when he moved to San Francisco, where he met David Smith,
00:41:19
Speaker
who is the founder of this clinic, who has met Charles Manson.
Manson's Overlooked Activities
00:41:23
Speaker
And then he also met Roger Smith, who was another researcher at the clinic.
00:41:28
Speaker
But get this, Roger Smith was Charles Manson's parole officer.
00:41:36
Speaker
And he was a doctoral student at Berkeley.
00:41:38
Speaker
Wow.
00:41:39
Speaker
And Roger Smith, even though he was Charles Manson's parole officer, was supposed to be making sure that he's not engaging in fucked up behavior.
00:41:48
Speaker
was collaborating with David Smith.
00:41:50
Speaker
They're not related, by the way.
00:41:51
Speaker
They just have the same last name.
00:41:52
Speaker
Okay.
00:41:54
Speaker
They were collaborating, doing these, like, studies together, basically doing the MKUltra shit together.
00:42:01
Speaker
Later on, after they moved to LA, one of their other research assistants actually visited the Manson family's compound and stayed with them for four months to do, like, immersive research and,
00:42:14
Speaker
And they co-wrote a paper together called The Group Marriage Commune, a case study that was published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs.
00:42:22
Speaker
Wow.
00:42:23
Speaker
And it was about the Manson family.
00:42:25
Speaker
And David Smith says, we found that the Manson served as the group's absolute ruler, often performing drug-involved magic tricks to show his mental powers.
00:42:35
Speaker
The group consisted of 20 core members.
00:42:38
Speaker
Manson would use the sex lives of the women to determine who was truly committed to the philosophy and his control.
00:42:44
Speaker
Failure to adapt brought discipline.
00:42:46
Speaker
Many were asked to leave involuntarily.
00:42:48
Speaker
Failure to conform to Manson's philosophy or refusal was
00:42:51
Speaker
to have sex with any member of the group were also grounds for expulsion.
00:42:54
Speaker
So literally his parole officer knew that he was doing all of this shit and did absolutely nothing.
00:43:02
Speaker
Even though he had the power to send Manson Brack to prison for violating the terms of his parole, which he was a hundred percent doing, he never reported any of these infractions.
00:43:11
Speaker
So Manson remained free.
00:43:13
Speaker
Why the fuck would he do that?
00:43:14
Speaker
Maybe because he was doing a study.
00:43:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:43:19
Speaker
Anyways, so that's the connection back to MKUltra.
00:43:25
Speaker
Bro, what the fuck?
00:43:26
Speaker
The CIA really just fucked everything up.
00:43:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:32
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:43:33
Speaker
Man, man.
00:43:34
Speaker
Thanks for hanging on.
00:43:35
Speaker
I know I've been talking for a while.
00:43:37
Speaker
I'm almost done talking.
00:43:38
Speaker
I'm going to pass it to Shayna very soon.
00:43:41
Speaker
So at this point, they're still in San Francisco.
00:43:44
Speaker
They're still connected to the outside world.
00:43:46
Speaker
So if you kind of think back to the Jim Jones episode where we're thinking about like the stages of abuse, it hasn't reached the part of isolation really just yet.
00:43:57
Speaker
So it sort of has, but they're still connected to the outside world in these ways where they're like meeting with other people in the outside world, at least.
00:44:06
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:44:06
Speaker
But he was also saying stuff to them like, your families don't love you.
00:44:10
Speaker
Only I love you.
00:44:11
Speaker
Come be part of this real family with me is kind of what he would spew to people to get them to join.
00:44:18
Speaker
In 1967, Mary got pregnant and she gave birth to a son named Valentine Mitch Michael, who was also nicknamed Pooh Bear.
00:44:28
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:29
Speaker
And then they moved to go live at this condemned house in Topanga Canyon, which is in Southern California.
00:44:37
Speaker
So at this point in time, a few more people like join.
00:44:41
Speaker
There's Diane Lake, who was like 14 years old when she joined the family.
00:44:50
Speaker
And she also said that she was 14, that the first night that she met him,
00:44:55
Speaker
She said, that was my very first, you know, introduction to Charlie and the girls.
00:44:59
Speaker
And it was extremely loving and I felt welcome.
00:45:02
Speaker
And she made love with him for the first time.
00:45:05
Speaker
And he was 34 at that point in time.
00:45:06
Speaker
Oh my God, so gross.
00:45:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:09
Speaker
She said, he took me into the bus that night and made love to me like I'd never experienced before.
00:45:14
Speaker
And she said it made her feel very special and she felt totally accepted and totally loved and adored by the group.
00:45:20
Speaker
She was kicked out of the commune she was living in before because she was sexually active.
00:45:26
Speaker
And then she was introduced to Charles right after that happened.
00:45:30
Speaker
I see.
00:45:32
Speaker
So Diane Lake, a.k.a.
00:45:34
Speaker
Snake, was one of the most...
00:45:37
Speaker
I feel like featured in this docu-series.
00:45:39
Speaker
She described him as impish and playful and funny.
00:45:44
Speaker
She said that he'd be in the middle playing music and saying, we've been waiting for you.
00:45:49
Speaker
She said it all ended up feeling like Providence or something.
00:45:52
Speaker
It was different in the beginning.
00:45:53
Speaker
There was just six of us girls.
00:45:55
Speaker
She talked about all the girls.
00:45:57
Speaker
She said Mary Brunner.
00:45:59
Speaker
She'd like to call her Mother Mary, that she was the matriarch, and she kind of resented sharing Charlie, but did it anyway.
00:46:06
Speaker
There was, she was reflecting on Patty Krenwinkel, called her like Mother Earth, one of the sweetest, humblest, most nurturing girls in the family, which is wild considering what we learn about her later.
00:46:19
Speaker
She described Leslie Van Hooten as a giggly high schooler, a bit haughty, was homecoming queen.
00:46:24
Speaker
She came off like that.
00:46:26
Speaker
She said Sandra Good was smart but needy and a bit entitled.
00:46:30
Speaker
And she remained one of Charlie's most ardent followers to the end.
00:46:35
Speaker
She said Susan was worldly.
00:46:37
Speaker
She was talking about how I guess like she had previously been a stripper.
00:46:40
Speaker
So she felt like Susan had like...
00:46:43
Speaker
street smarts and like life experience.
00:46:47
Speaker
She said Catherine Cher, AKA Gypsy was playful, played the violin.
00:46:52
Speaker
She called her a true hippie, described Lynette as someone who would mostly like her role was like looking out for George.
00:47:00
Speaker
She was the closest confidant to Charlie and he confided in her more than anybody else.
00:47:06
Speaker
And she said, Charlie played a different role for all of us.
00:47:09
Speaker
I was falling under his spell.
00:47:12
Speaker
They also interviewed Catherine Cher.
00:47:15
Speaker
And she was like, we were in a group marriage with all the lines blurred.
00:47:18
Speaker
Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, lovers, everything to each other.
00:47:22
Speaker
One of the reasons we were pulled to each other was because Charlie was a musician and we all wanted to be musicians.
00:47:28
Speaker
And that's what we did every night was just play music.
00:47:30
Speaker
Charlie would administer LSD like a sacrament.
00:47:34
Speaker
There's this like
00:47:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:35
Speaker
Ritualistic, religious kind of vibe to it.
00:47:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:47:38
Speaker
On LSD, you can see the trees growing.
00:47:40
Speaker
You feel at one with everything, the universe.
00:47:42
Speaker
And then he orchestrated, quote unquote, love in.
00:47:45
Speaker
We didn't call it an orgy, but that's what it was.
00:47:47
Speaker
We were dependent on each other.
00:47:49
Speaker
He didn't want us to think about our families.
00:47:50
Speaker
Forget about your parents.
00:47:51
Speaker
Get rid of your inhibitions.
00:47:53
Speaker
What society says is wrong.
00:47:55
Speaker
We're going in the right direction.
00:47:56
Speaker
So, like, this was like...
00:47:58
Speaker
This is like grooming land, right?
00:48:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:01
Speaker
Like using LSD on top of it to like enhance.
00:48:04
Speaker
Yes.
00:48:07
Speaker
So there was this dude, Paul Watkins, who showed up at their house because he thought he could get good weed from there.
00:48:14
Speaker
And then he ended up becoming his chief recruiter to get other girls because he was attractive.
00:48:22
Speaker
Charles Manson convinced him to pretend to be a high school student to get more people into the family.
00:48:28
Speaker
I'm sure he wasn't.
00:48:29
Speaker
I'm sure he was just like, whatever.
00:48:31
Speaker
White?
00:48:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:35
Speaker
What is Paul Watkins?
00:48:37
Speaker
Watkins.
00:48:39
Speaker
Watkins.
00:48:41
Speaker
Absolutely not.
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:42
Speaker
Absolutely not.
00:48:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:45
Speaker
Ew.
00:48:46
Speaker
What the love?
00:48:46
Speaker
Dude, he convinced him to pretend to be a high school student to get teenagers to come join the family.
00:48:53
Speaker
That's gross.
00:48:54
Speaker
He does look like a baby face.
00:48:56
Speaker
God.
00:48:57
Speaker
And then there was Bobby Cupid Beausoleil, who is also a good looking dude who got a lot of attention from women.
00:49:05
Speaker
He wanted to be a musician.
00:49:06
Speaker
So him and Charles were, I guess, in a band together at one point.
00:49:11
Speaker
So this connects to this really random story where during this whole period of time, Charles is also like trying to get signed with a record label, which is why he ended up going to L.A.
00:49:23
Speaker
because he like wants to be a rock star and he learned how to play the guitar while he was in prison.
00:49:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:29
Speaker
And so in April of 1968, Dennis Wilson, who is one of the Beach Boys, is driving through Malibu and picks up Patricia a couple of times while they were hitchhiking.
00:49:42
Speaker
And he talks to them about his involvement with some spiritual stuff.
00:49:47
Speaker
And then they told him about Charlie.
00:49:49
Speaker
And then literally like the next day, Charles shows up at his house with 12 other people and they just like move into his house.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:56
Speaker
I have no idea how this happened, but clearly he charmed some way.
00:50:00
Speaker
And then Dennis Wilson said that he had this initial fascination with him and that Charles was like pretty much using him to try to get signed on a record label.
00:50:10
Speaker
There was a couple people who did recording sessions, but they said that they only did it because of Dennis Wilson and not because they actually thought that he was a good performer and he was not.
00:50:21
Speaker
But actually, there was a song that was written by him that was on a Beach Boys album, but he was never credited for it.
00:50:31
Speaker
And Wilson explained that he relinquished his crediting rights because he stole a bunch of stuff from
00:50:38
Speaker
And so this was around the same time this family destroyed his Ferrari.
00:50:43
Speaker
And they also... He was getting threats of murder from Charles Manson.
00:50:49
Speaker
So he moved out of his own house.
00:50:54
Speaker
And all his possessions were stolen.
00:50:56
Speaker
They were later evicted.
00:50:58
Speaker
So wild.
00:50:59
Speaker
But that was this kind of connection to Charles Manson as a dude from the Beach Boys.
00:51:04
Speaker
And Charles Tex Watson...
00:51:07
Speaker
was actually, this is how he became part of the family and he's like important later on.
00:51:14
Speaker
But he was born in Texas, was an honor student, wasn't a frat.
00:51:19
Speaker
He like went to visit one of his frat brothers in LA and he picked up Dennis Wilson, who is a beach boys hitchhiking.
00:51:28
Speaker
And that's how he met Charles.
00:51:30
Speaker
Last person I'll mention is,
00:51:32
Speaker
is Leslie Van Hooten.
00:51:34
Speaker
She's like one of the last people that met Charles and she met him in the summer of 68.
00:51:39
Speaker
She also grew up middle-class church-going family.
00:51:42
Speaker
She began taking drugs when she was around the age of 15, but she did complete high school.
00:51:49
Speaker
She, at the age of 17, became pregnant, but said that her mom forced her to have an abortion and bury the fetus in the backyard.
00:51:57
Speaker
So obviously was very traumatized after this and felt removed from her mom.
00:52:02
Speaker
Then she started like having an interest in yoga and like lived at a commune where she met Catherine Cher and Bobby Beausoleil.
00:52:10
Speaker
And they were like in a poly relationship after which she went to join Catherine and Bobby and Charles's commune.
00:52:17
Speaker
Wow.
00:52:19
Speaker
There's so much.
00:52:20
Speaker
There's so much there.
00:52:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:22
Speaker
And again with the yoga.
00:52:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:25
Speaker
There's a lot going on.
00:52:27
Speaker
It's clearly very chaotic.
00:52:28
Speaker
There's like a lot of like drugs.
00:52:32
Speaker
There's like grooming.
00:52:36
Speaker
There's like people like running away from their families.
00:52:40
Speaker
There's like communes that like I just I don't know.
00:52:47
Speaker
It seems just very chaotic and unsafe environment.
00:52:51
Speaker
Yes.
00:52:51
Speaker
Yeah, anyway, I will pass to you to talk about the ranch that they were all living on.
00:52:58
Speaker
Yeah, okay.
00:52:59
Speaker
At this point in time.
00:53:01
Speaker
So, you know, I didn't even feel bad about Dennis.
00:53:05
Speaker
I'm like, the Beach Boys are racist.
00:53:06
Speaker
Yeah, also, like, I'm like, how are you going to have 13 people live at your house?
00:53:12
Speaker
You clearly allowed that to happen somehow, you know.
00:53:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:18
Speaker
I don't know.
00:53:19
Speaker
He's some white dude.
00:53:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:20
Speaker
Arrogant.
00:53:21
Speaker
Probably hadn't even considered that something like that would happen to him.
00:53:24
Speaker
Definitely.
00:53:24
Speaker
Definitely not.
00:53:27
Speaker
I have this quote from the documentary.
00:53:29
Speaker
This dude, Johnny Eccles, who was a lead guitarist of love, was talking about Charles.
00:53:34
Speaker
And he was like, he wasn't a friend, but I knew him.
00:53:37
Speaker
He would know where we'd be and he would just show up there.
00:53:39
Speaker
I thought he was a seedy little character.
00:53:41
Speaker
And he also didn't bathe.
00:53:43
Speaker
None of them did.
00:53:44
Speaker
You knew he was there from a block away.
00:53:46
Speaker
And I was like, he's really charming.
00:53:48
Speaker
These people smelling like shit.
00:53:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:50
Speaker
We, another thing that I, that I read, which like connects to the Beach Boys being racist is that, um, apparently Dennis Wilson had watched, um, Charles Manson apparently shoot a black man in half with an M16 rifle and hid the body inside of a well.
00:54:09
Speaker
What?
00:54:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:11
Speaker
Are you serious?
00:54:12
Speaker
Yeah, this was said by Mike Love in his 2016 memoir.
00:54:18
Speaker
And he said that Wilson had been aware that the family were killing people and was so freaked out that he just didn't want to live with them anymore.
00:54:26
Speaker
And he was like afraid of him and he didn't go to the authorities.
00:54:32
Speaker
Okay.
00:54:32
Speaker
Like, what don't we know?
00:54:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:34
Speaker
Bro.
00:54:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:36
Speaker
Okay, so I'm going to introduce y'all to Spawn Ranch, which is where they all ended up living together most of this time.
00:54:46
Speaker
After they were fucked up Dennis' life, they moved to this ranch in Chatsworth, California.
00:54:56
Speaker
It used to be a place that they'd shoot Old Western, so it was like a rundown movie set.
00:55:01
Speaker
They said that there was a corral to the left when you entered.
00:55:04
Speaker
There was a big barn.
00:55:06
Speaker
Corral, like, where you would, like, keep cows and shit.
00:55:10
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:55:10
Speaker
Got it.
00:55:11
Speaker
Got it.
00:55:12
Speaker
I don't know.
00:55:12
Speaker
This is reminding me of the X movie.
00:55:14
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:55:16
Speaker
If you haven't watched, definitely check it out.
00:55:20
Speaker
Honestly, yes.
00:55:21
Speaker
A classic.
00:55:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:22
Speaker
A new classic.
00:55:23
Speaker
A new classic.
00:55:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:24
Speaker
So there was a big barn.
00:55:25
Speaker
There was a jail.
00:55:26
Speaker
A saloon.
00:55:27
Speaker
There were rooms behind them.
00:55:28
Speaker
There was a kitchen.
00:55:30
Speaker
There was, like...
00:55:32
Speaker
a band of what they called outlaw shacks way in the back.
00:55:36
Speaker
And then behind there was this, was George Spahn's place.
00:55:40
Speaker
So George owns the whole set and he was blind and he was older.
00:55:46
Speaker
And so I think like he just like let them live there because they were, they were cleaning the place.
00:55:53
Speaker
They rented the horses and then he had like people around the
00:55:58
Speaker
During a time he would otherwise not really have anyone on this like random movie set in the middle of nowhere.
00:56:03
Speaker
Not in the middle of nowhere.
00:56:05
Speaker
It's in Chatsworth, but whatever.
00:56:07
Speaker
It's kind of like a standalone off the side, you know?
00:56:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:11
Speaker
Apparently, like most of the time, they just like got high and danced and cooked together.
00:56:15
Speaker
A lot of like the beginning of this cult life was just chillin'.
00:56:19
Speaker
Helm's Bakery would come by and they'd drop off their day-old pastries.
00:56:22
Speaker
So a lot of the stuff that, like, they were able to get some stuff for free.
00:56:26
Speaker
They dumpster dived to, like, I don't know, these fancy places and, like, take the food and they made food that way.
00:56:34
Speaker
So they're really just, like... The way that they made it sound in the documentary, the survivors who were interviewed was, like, you know, this felt, like, idyllic.
00:56:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:44
Speaker
You know, especially, like...
00:56:46
Speaker
a departure from the lives that they had prior.
00:56:52
Speaker
And every time Charles was introduced, he was introduced as an idol and a leader.
00:56:57
Speaker
And they were like, he dances, he sings, he looks beautiful.
00:57:02
Speaker
All we have is brothers and sisters.
00:57:03
Speaker
Charles is your brother was like the introductory kind of phrase that they would bring in new people with.
00:57:09
Speaker
I also heard that he would like quote shit from the Bible.
00:57:12
Speaker
He would.
00:57:13
Speaker
This was part of his doomsday belief.
00:57:16
Speaker
So sounds like Jim Jones.
00:57:19
Speaker
He is very Jim like.
00:57:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:22
Speaker
So this is, this is where the like, this is where things shift.
00:57:31
Speaker
He, he started talking about how a race war was coming and he was convinced that the Beatles white album was singing to him.
00:57:41
Speaker
Like they were sending subliminal messages to him because they were so tuned in like he was and
00:57:46
Speaker
And he really took that and ran with it as a way to get all of these girls into his conspiratorial thinking and get them looped into this greater big thing that was going to happen.
00:57:56
Speaker
Because he wanted to look powerful, like an idol.
00:57:59
Speaker
And he also wanted to be a rock star.
00:58:02
Speaker
But I think as he realized that that was less and less and less a possibility, he had to shift the way.
00:58:07
Speaker
The rock star thing.
00:58:08
Speaker
Yes.
00:58:09
Speaker
So instead of promising some great magical thing,
00:58:15
Speaker
via his upwards... Becoming a rock star.
00:58:18
Speaker
Yeah, to fame.
00:58:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:20
Speaker
He started, like, inserting fear-based tactics.
00:58:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:26
Speaker
Which is really where this shit starts taking a huge... And you can see that he probably falls more in the narcissistic personality, but he also has these, like, antisocial tendencies, but definitely, like, is, like, more like, oh, I want people to think I'm, like, powerful and superior and, like...
00:58:43
Speaker
this god-like person.
00:58:45
Speaker
Yeah, he's a malignant narcissist.
00:58:47
Speaker
Like Jack.
00:58:49
Speaker
And Jim.
00:58:50
Speaker
And Jim.
00:58:51
Speaker
All of such basic-ass fucking names, too.
00:58:54
Speaker
And Donald Trump.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:55
Speaker
Donald.
00:58:56
Speaker
Donald.
00:58:59
Speaker
Oh, gosh.
00:59:00
Speaker
The parallels are just... But, I mean, you know, we were talking earlier about how when you, like, watch or, like, hear Charles Manson talking, you're just like, what are you even saying?
00:59:10
Speaker
Like, it doesn't make any sense, and it's, like, really similar to how Donald Trump is just spewing shit.
00:59:16
Speaker
He doesn't make any fucking sense.
00:59:17
Speaker
And I wonder, like, I haven't listened to Jim Jones speak, because I just didn't want to, but I wonder if it sounds similar.
00:59:23
Speaker
Probably, like, less rambly, because I feel like it was more, like,
00:59:27
Speaker
put together narcissist versus like chaotic, like, you know, all over the place narcissist.
00:59:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:34
Speaker
He was, he's organized versus disorganized.
00:59:36
Speaker
That kind of reminds me of like Modi versus Trump.
00:59:39
Speaker
Like Modi is very like, oh, I'm going to speak in this like very formal way to make it seem like I'm really like smart and knowledgeable, which I'm sure he is, but he's also, you know, fucked up.
00:59:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:54
Speaker
I wonder, cause I'm also thinking about what's her name?
00:59:59
Speaker
We just did this.
01:00:00
Speaker
Catherine.
01:00:01
Speaker
No, no.
01:00:02
Speaker
The person from the family.
01:00:04
Speaker
Anne Hamilton Byrne.
01:00:05
Speaker
Anne Hamilton Byrne.
01:00:07
Speaker
You know what?
01:00:07
Speaker
She had multiple names.
01:00:08
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:00:09
Speaker
But yeah, you know how they said that she kept playing her voice on these tapes over and over, saying a bunch of random shit?
01:00:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:17
Speaker
I don't know exactly what she was saying, but I imagine it was somewhere similar.
01:00:20
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:00:21
Speaker
I mean, she had her conspiracy belief also about the world ending and them needing to repopulate, which is...
01:00:29
Speaker
I mean, you haven't gotten into what this is about, but I'm sure it's somewhat similar.
01:00:33
Speaker
It is super similar.
01:00:34
Speaker
Also how she's the second coming.
01:00:36
Speaker
Right.
01:00:36
Speaker
He has that.
01:00:38
Speaker
He has that complex as well.
01:00:39
Speaker
So this dude in the documentary was like, problem as presenting a...
01:00:44
Speaker
The problem with someone presenting as an idol who promises great things will happen and can't follow through on that promise, you lose your magic.
01:00:51
Speaker
And so he had to take a different approach to tap into fear, which is kind of what I had said.
01:00:55
Speaker
But this is his words.
01:00:58
Speaker
Okay.
01:00:59
Speaker
So like one of the more like quiet things that he would do before he really went gung ho with this theory, he would just ask kind of like in passing, do you hear the messages the Beatles are sending us?
01:01:13
Speaker
And he would just kind of have this album playing over and over and over and over and over.
01:01:16
Speaker
The White Album?
01:01:16
Speaker
The White Album.
01:01:17
Speaker
Interesting.
01:01:18
Speaker
On the compound.
01:01:20
Speaker
And there was a lot of songs that he could connect to, his theories.
01:01:32
Speaker
There's Blackbird, there's a song called Piggies, and then there's also Helter Skelter.
01:01:38
Speaker
Okay, so...
01:01:40
Speaker
Here's his interpretation of these fucking songs.
01:01:45
Speaker
So for Honey Pie, the lyric is, Oh, Honey Pie, my position is tragic.
01:01:49
Speaker
Come show me the magic of your Hollywood song.
01:01:52
Speaker
So he takes that as the Beatles know Jesus has returned to Earth and is in Los Angeles.
01:01:58
Speaker
And they want Charles to create his song, quote unquote.
01:02:01
Speaker
What?
01:02:01
Speaker
That is his album that will set off Helter Skelter.
01:02:05
Speaker
So...
01:02:06
Speaker
Helter Skelter, according to Charles, was doomsday.
01:02:12
Speaker
Helter Skelter was going to be the day where he believed that black people were going to start an uprising and that they were going to kill off the white population for all the things that they've done to the other races and that they were going to fail after that uprising and it would be up to him and his family to repopulate the earth with their supreme leadership.
01:02:33
Speaker
Oh my god.
01:02:34
Speaker
Yes.
01:02:34
Speaker
Wow.
01:02:38
Speaker
Yeah, Brooks Poston, who was a part of the cult, said, One of Charlie's basic creeds is that there's no crime, there's no sin, that it's all just a game, and that God is getting ready to pull the curtain down on his game and start over with his chosen people.
01:02:51
Speaker
When Helter Skelter comes down, there will be a mass hysteria, and the beast will fall, and the black man will take over.
01:02:57
Speaker
End quote.
01:02:58
Speaker
My God.
01:02:59
Speaker
Well, it's kind of like, well, it's their interpretation of like, just like the end of the world.
01:03:05
Speaker
What is it?
01:03:06
Speaker
What do the Christians call it?
01:03:09
Speaker
Oh.
01:03:11
Speaker
Day of Judgment?
01:03:11
Speaker
Judgment Day.
01:03:12
Speaker
Judgment Day.
01:03:13
Speaker
That's what it is.
01:03:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:14
Speaker
So Helter Skelter, according to him, was Judgment Day.
01:03:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:17
Speaker
It is no surprise that Charles Manson was like incredibly racist.
01:03:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:21
Speaker
And you know what I was thinking also?
01:03:24
Speaker
Like, I'm sure his racism was also building up through his entire life growing up in prison.
01:03:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:32
Speaker
They were... I was...
01:03:34
Speaker
reading online that a lot of his like animosity came out of like the segregated nature of prison and he was radicalized in a white supremacist way there because you have to choose and he was he both had a lot of disgust for the black folks who were in prison with him and he had a special fear of black muslims jesus i don't know i'm like bro he said the race war is coming they will either murder you or enslave you wow yeah
01:04:05
Speaker
Wow.
01:04:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:10
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:11
Speaker
If you want to, you can look it up online.
01:04:14
Speaker
There's a Wikipedia page all about the Beatles songs and how they interpreted different lines of the songs to... The family specifically?
01:04:23
Speaker
The family specifically.
01:04:24
Speaker
Wow.
01:04:24
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:04:25
Speaker
Yep.
01:04:27
Speaker
So I kind of wanted to share about what was happening during this time, because there's a lot here.
01:04:36
Speaker
This is happening in 1968, which was a really tumultuous time in U.S. history.
01:04:41
Speaker
This is still at the height of the Vietnam War, which began in 1955.
01:04:45
Speaker
On April 4th, MLK Jr. was assassinated, which then set off a bunch of uprisings in over 100 American cities.
01:04:53
Speaker
After that, and then there was like a lot of like military, militarized police presence in those areas.
01:05:01
Speaker
So it really was just like so violent and chaotic when the state responded to those uprisings.
01:05:08
Speaker
April and May, there was students protesting against the war, not just in the U.S., but all over the world.
01:05:14
Speaker
On June 5th, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
01:05:17
Speaker
On October 16th, this was the summer Olympics, and at the 200-meter sprint, Tommy Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised their black foot.
01:05:26
Speaker
black love fists in a protest during the national anthem um and now it's like this iconic photograph they were kicked off the team but they like made history and then on november 5th racist ass nixon was elected president so during this entire year we're like seeing we're seeing the backdrop of his bullshit and like
01:05:51
Speaker
people are like, oh, he's so crazy.
01:05:53
Speaker
He's, like, hearing these things in the Beatles songs.
01:05:55
Speaker
He's coming up with all this nonsense.
01:05:57
Speaker
When I'm like, this is a really carbon copy of, like, so many white supremacist theories that have existed for centuries.
01:06:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:03
Speaker
And he uses the same language around, like...
01:06:08
Speaker
White people are going to be taken out.
01:06:11
Speaker
There's this great quote from this person from Vox who said, Charles Manson as a person is honestly not that interesting.
01:06:20
Speaker
He was a mediocre failed musician.
01:06:22
Speaker
He built his cult on recycled Scientologist ideas and an elaborate theory about a race war.
01:06:27
Speaker
Wow.
01:06:28
Speaker
absolutely there it is there it is it's not even his fucking ideas no it's not yeah it is not yeah he's just like spewing shit that he's gotten from different places
01:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, and like, you know, I don't think that what he was saying was that far off from like a lot of people who are trying to get political power during this time all over the country.
01:06:56
Speaker
Even the president who was elected, like, President Nixon was a fucking segregationist, you know?
01:07:04
Speaker
So like, I just feel like he's such an embodiment of America and like American media likes to showcase him as some
01:07:15
Speaker
Weird, anomalous, like, crazy man.
01:07:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:20
Speaker
When he is a direct product of what we've created here in this country.
01:07:28
Speaker
And also, I'd like to point out that...
01:07:32
Speaker
Similar to MKUltra, where we don't hear at all about the fact that the majority of the people that were harmed because of those studies were, like, Black Americans, we never hear about the fact that, like, we don't really hear about the race war stuff.
01:07:50
Speaker
We just hear about the murders of these celebrities.
01:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:07:54
Speaker
We never hear about what was at the root of them and how, you know, yeah, I might get to that, but, like, that you're gonna get to that, but...
01:08:02
Speaker
Like, these are always things that are just, like, excluded from most media coverage.
01:08:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:07
Speaker
And, like, it just begs the question of, like, why are all of those things excluded from the media coverage when they're true?
01:08:15
Speaker
Right.
01:08:17
Speaker
Infuriating.
01:08:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:20
Speaker
So, anyways, his whole thing was, do you want to die or come with me and save the world, basically.
01:08:25
Speaker
So people really ate that shit up.
01:08:27
Speaker
So in 1968, the same year, he met Catherine Gillies, who also ends up becoming one of his like biggest followers.
01:08:38
Speaker
She was born on August 2nd, 1949 in Santa Cruz, California.
01:08:43
Speaker
She had been following around Buffalo Springfield, which is like
01:08:47
Speaker
a Canadian-American rock artist.
01:08:49
Speaker
This is, like, her whole life.
01:08:52
Speaker
She meets Charles sometime during this process while he's running around trying to be an artist.
01:09:00
Speaker
And she actually really enjoys what he's singing.
01:09:03
Speaker
And I guess, like, when they meet, they go on a motorcycle ride.
01:09:07
Speaker
And then by the time she comes back, she's convinced that he's the second coming of Jesus Christ, which I'm like, wow.
01:09:14
Speaker
Just the swift, I don't know how he did that.
01:09:17
Speaker
Like, who are these?
01:09:18
Speaker
I'm, I don't know.
01:09:19
Speaker
That's just some shit.
01:09:21
Speaker
Dude, I, like, I am, I'm really just, like,
01:09:26
Speaker
such a wild situation of just like how he gets gets these people so somewhat seemingly so easily what phil kaufman at one point said every time charlie saw a girl he liked he'd tell someone get that girl and when they brought her back charlie would take her out into the woods and talk to her for an hour or two and she would never leave
01:09:51
Speaker
Jesus.
01:09:52
Speaker
Which is like, I mean, you know, take him on a bike ride or like, oh, we, I had sex with him the first night I met him and he told me I was really special.
01:10:01
Speaker
And I'm like, he literally does this with everyone.
01:10:03
Speaker
And they're so young and he's like gross in his thirties.
01:10:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:09
Speaker
Yeah.
Manson Family's Isolation at Barker Ranch
01:10:10
Speaker
And then he would just like, you like make them have sex with other people and take care of their children and like be their servants.
01:10:19
Speaker
And I'm just like, oh my God.
01:10:23
Speaker
grosses me out.
01:10:24
Speaker
I'm wondering how many times like I feel like he just probably like threw it you know threw that out until it stuck.
01:10:31
Speaker
I wonder how many people just like didn't.
01:10:33
Speaker
That's true.
01:10:33
Speaker
You know like we're talking about like how many people don't end up yeah like it doesn't end up sticking.
01:10:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:39
Speaker
Like it keeps doing it.
01:10:41
Speaker
Like, I remember watching that documentary about Ted Bundy and how, like, he really approached so many people.
01:10:49
Speaker
It's called the empathy trap.
01:10:50
Speaker
The empathy trap.
01:10:51
Speaker
I saw a TikTok about it where they're like, oh, feel bad for me.
01:10:56
Speaker
My arm is broken.
01:10:57
Speaker
Right.
01:10:59
Speaker
Shitheads.
01:10:59
Speaker
He's just like a love bomber.
01:11:01
Speaker
Yes.
01:11:02
Speaker
Supreme.
01:11:03
Speaker
But yeah, I do wonder how many people that he did this to who are like, ew.
01:11:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:08
Speaker
Because he's ew.
01:11:09
Speaker
He is ew.
01:11:10
Speaker
And he stinks.
01:11:13
Speaker
He smells bad.
01:11:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:15
Speaker
Like, I'm like, what?
01:11:18
Speaker
Anyways, so Catherine, she's directly related to the reason why the family was able to use Barker Ranch, which is located in Death Valley, which later becomes the place that they want to relocate as they are deciding that, like, the race war is coming any day now.
01:11:37
Speaker
So they can't stay at the Spong Ranch anymore?
01:11:41
Speaker
They had been planning to move all their shit.
01:11:43
Speaker
Okay, okay.
01:11:44
Speaker
But also, like...
01:11:46
Speaker
That was too out in the open.
01:11:48
Speaker
I think that there was a sense of urgency to go in the middle of nowhere.
01:11:52
Speaker
Also, because I think he could tell his shit was falling apart.
01:11:55
Speaker
So similar to Jim Jones, too.
01:11:57
Speaker
Where they're like, oh, a sense of urgency to go to, like, Guyana.
01:12:00
Speaker
Yes.
01:12:01
Speaker
Like, Chatsworth is, like, in L.A.
01:12:04
Speaker
County, relatively close to other things.
01:12:07
Speaker
But he wanted to, like, Death Valley?
01:12:10
Speaker
Nothing there.
01:12:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:13
Speaker
So there's the Barker Ranch, and then there's also an isolated ranch called Myers Ranch, which was just a half a mile away.
01:12:20
Speaker
So Catherine's grandparents owned this ranch, and she convinced her grandparents to, like, let them all stay there.
01:12:29
Speaker
And they started staying there in November of 1968.
01:12:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:35
Speaker
It's coming up.
01:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's coming up.
01:12:38
Speaker
She was like, can me and a few friends stay at the ranch?
01:12:43
Speaker
And then they ended up taking the entire family to try to stay there.
01:12:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:49
Speaker
But he really, like...
01:12:52
Speaker
He really identifies with this place.
01:12:54
Speaker
He's like, this is a, this is a like forsaken, desolate, isolated place, discarded, just like me.
01:13:02
Speaker
I'm like, shut up.
01:13:03
Speaker
Because of his mom.
01:13:04
Speaker
God, what's all these dudes?
01:13:06
Speaker
And they're just like, it's because my mommy left me.
01:13:09
Speaker
I'm like, bro, plenty of people have mommy issues.
01:13:12
Speaker
Do you know how many people's mommies have left them?
01:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, plenty of people have mommy issues.
01:13:18
Speaker
Like, it's not an excuse.
01:13:21
Speaker
Even Jim Jones was just like, I was bullied.
01:13:24
Speaker
I was an outsider.
01:13:25
Speaker
There's this absolute victim complex.
01:13:27
Speaker
And that's also what they say for all of the fucking school shooters.
01:13:34
Speaker
They're like, oh, they were bullied.
01:13:36
Speaker
There's like tons of people are bullied that don't end up being extremely violent assholes.
01:13:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:45
Speaker
You know?
01:13:46
Speaker
It's the entitlement piece.
01:13:48
Speaker
It's the, this should have never happened to me.
01:13:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:51
Speaker
I'm deserving of better.
01:13:52
Speaker
Right, right, yeah.
01:13:54
Speaker
It's that white man shit.
01:13:55
Speaker
It is.
01:13:55
Speaker
It's not exclusive to white men, obviously, but, you know.
01:14:00
Speaker
There clearly is a trend, as in most of school shooters and just mass shooters are.
01:14:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:14:11
Speaker
It's very reminiscent to me, also, like, when we think about domestic violence.
01:14:18
Speaker
yeah but like you know when like there's always this moment where this the abusive person's like so fucking violent and then it's like look what you made me do yeah um and then they cry i'm like what the fuck literally is that anyways it's uh okay some amount of self-hate
01:14:41
Speaker
Oh, for sure.
01:14:42
Speaker
No one who loves themselves needs to feel like they have to control people in order to get the attention that they think they need and deserve.
01:14:49
Speaker
Like nobody who loves themselves actually is treating people like that.
01:14:55
Speaker
No.
01:14:56
Speaker
Because what you're doing is you're like, you don't have an option to leave.
01:14:59
Speaker
Mm hmm.
01:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:15:01
Speaker
You know, which kind of like indicates to me that you're scared that you at the end of the day are not worth staying for, which is probably true because you're a piece of shit anyway.
01:15:12
Speaker
And I want everyone to know that if you truly love someone, you want the best for them, even if it doesn't include you.
01:15:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:20
Speaker
100%.
01:15:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:21
Speaker
So anyway, he likes this place.
01:15:25
Speaker
I think Diane was saying that like every time they spent time there, they had to be naked because it was warm enough.
01:15:30
Speaker
He's so dramatic.
01:15:31
Speaker
So that they could like cultivate sexual desire for when the time came to repopulate the earth.
01:15:38
Speaker
There is like a day where he gets lost in the desert.
01:15:41
Speaker
He calls it his 40 hours, which is reminiscent of like Jesus's 40 hours.
01:15:45
Speaker
And he totally got lost in the desert on purpose.
01:15:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:50
Speaker
Uh, in, yeah, in the Bible.
01:15:52
Speaker
And then he learns about the lore of people disappearing in the area around, like, caves and shit in Death Valley.
01:15:58
Speaker
And I'm just, like, it's not a habitable space.
01:16:00
Speaker
I'm sure people get lost and die all the time.
01:16:03
Speaker
Dehydrate.
01:16:03
Speaker
Dehydrate.
01:16:04
Speaker
Get just, there's nothing.
01:16:07
Speaker
Uh, but apparently there's a lot of rumors about UFOs and, like, secret passageways.
01:16:12
Speaker
I'm curious about that.
01:16:13
Speaker
I know that's, like, you know, different than this story, but I'll look into it.
01:16:18
Speaker
Okay.
01:16:19
Speaker
But he uses this to further his narrative.
01:16:24
Speaker
And he's using this as the bottomless pit narrative, which is a part of Revelations that there's a place you go underground to repopulate the earth.
01:16:34
Speaker
I don't know.
01:16:35
Speaker
Something like that.
01:16:36
Speaker
Interesting.
01:16:37
Speaker
So he's trying to find this bottomless pit, basically.
01:16:40
Speaker
And he says, everyone who's actually tuned in will be able to escape the destruction of their race by coming out to the desert and hiding underground.
01:16:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:50
Speaker
Okay.
01:16:52
Speaker
I'm learning a lot.
01:16:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:16:54
Speaker
He's out here.
01:16:55
Speaker
So it quickly becomes all about money after this.
01:16:59
Speaker
Classic.
01:16:59
Speaker
Because he doesn't have any.
01:17:04
Speaker
he failed at becoming a rock star yeah he failed at becoming a rock star he gets like the straight satans which is a motorcycle gang involved in the like the commune too the commune the coal the compound i don't know to serve as protection and to provide weapons and so like he's really locking shit in like if you were thinking of leaving before and
01:17:26
Speaker
You're not thinking of leaving now.
01:17:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:42
Speaker
I don't know, in a delusional spiral, all ramped up and excited to like destroy things.
01:17:49
Speaker
And then at this point, Bobby Beausoleil, who had left, he calls them to come back and he calls them to come back and help at the ranch with his girlfriend.
01:18:02
Speaker
So Bobby goes, okay, you need me.
01:18:08
Speaker
He moves into a home with Gary Hinman and,
01:18:11
Speaker
who rented out his basement.
01:18:12
Speaker
It's like a family friend.
01:18:13
Speaker
Gary was this Buddhist dude.
01:18:15
Speaker
He's a white dude.
01:18:17
Speaker
but he's this Buddhist dude.
01:18:18
Speaker
He had plans to go to Japan.
01:18:21
Speaker
He, he like sold some pot mescaline on the side to help make ends meet.
01:18:25
Speaker
But overall, he's just like chilling and doing his thing.
01:18:26
Speaker
And he happens to let Bobby stay in the basement, put a pin in this because this ends up being important later.
01:18:31
Speaker
Okay.
01:18:33
Speaker
As the, as like the biker gang gets more involved, he gets, he gives like more position and authority to these, to these men.
01:18:43
Speaker
And their whole role is to like keep the girls in line, quote unquote.
01:18:47
Speaker
And like all of them had something to prove to him.
01:18:50
Speaker
They just like wanted to be just like him.
01:18:53
Speaker
And so like they really helped him build the conspiracy too.
01:18:56
Speaker
So here we are in 1969.
01:18:58
Speaker
Paul Watkins is like quoted saying that while driving with Manson, they saw a white woman and a black man holding hands.
01:19:05
Speaker
According to Watkins, Manson told him that's why black men have not risen up in rebellion against white people.
01:19:10
Speaker
They are pacified by access to white women, which is just like,
01:19:18
Speaker
This is really reminding me of Lake Lanier.
01:19:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:20
Speaker
It's like the same narrative over and over and over and over for centuries.
01:19:26
Speaker
I mean, they hear it from somewhere.
01:19:27
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:19:28
Speaker
So, I mean, I was just like, this is just a glorified old, like, KKK shit.
01:19:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:35
Speaker
Yeah.
Escalation to Manson Murders
01:19:37
Speaker
Like, recycled.
01:19:38
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:39
Speaker
And then...
01:19:40
Speaker
In March, there's a lot happening here.
01:19:43
Speaker
There's going to be a cavalcade of events.
01:19:46
Speaker
A cavalcade?
01:19:47
Speaker
A cavalcade of events.
01:19:48
Speaker
Never heard this word before.
01:19:50
Speaker
Never?
01:19:51
Speaker
What a great word.
01:19:52
Speaker
I'm going to keep using it.
01:19:59
Speaker
Just like a cavalcade.
01:20:01
Speaker
That's definitely the title of that episode.
01:20:04
Speaker
A cavalcade of wild shit.
01:20:07
Speaker
Oh.
01:20:08
Speaker
Okay, so it's 1969.
01:20:11
Speaker
Paul Watkins is over here really building up this theory, riling people up.
01:20:16
Speaker
In March, the family expected a visit from this dude Terry Melcher, who was a producer for Columbia Records.
01:20:22
Speaker
This is relevant, so just keep up.
01:20:26
Speaker
And they hope that he will agree to record the music that was, according to Paul Watkins and Tex Watson, it was supposed to trigger Helter Skelter.
01:20:38
Speaker
Like this song that they had created.
01:20:40
Speaker
But Terry Melcher never showed up.
01:20:44
Speaker
So that upsets... That upsets Charles.
01:20:49
Speaker
He's upset about that.
01:20:51
Speaker
Every time he gets rejected, there's an escalation that he engages in.
01:20:56
Speaker
He actually goes at the end of March.
01:20:59
Speaker
Charles does.
01:21:00
Speaker
Goes to 10050 Cielo Drive.
01:21:02
Speaker
Which...
01:21:06
Speaker
He knew as the residence of Terry Melcher, but he, who answers the door, is a male friend of Sharon Tate, who is a new leasee.
01:21:17
Speaker
And so, like, Manson, who was like, I'm looking for Melcher, he's told to check the guest house, and he's not in the guest house, and he leaves.
01:21:23
Speaker
So that wasn't even like he was intending to like target this man who wouldn't listen to his song.
01:21:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:29
Speaker
My goodness.
01:21:30
Speaker
Uh-huh.
01:21:30
Speaker
But I think Terry Melcher was like connected to Dennis Wilson.
01:21:36
Speaker
Right.
01:21:37
Speaker
And I'm pretty sure that they were the people that were like the only reason we even like let him record was because Dennis asked us to not because we actually thought that new music is good.
01:21:45
Speaker
So like by this point, he's like, obviously, I'm not going to come to your ranch to listen to your song.
01:21:50
Speaker
Yes.
01:21:51
Speaker
He's delusional.
01:21:53
Speaker
And then, so next month, April 1st, the family starts the move back to Spahn Ranch.
01:22:02
Speaker
Back and forth.
01:22:03
Speaker
And according to Watson, during the Helter Skelter, they need to be at Spahn Ranch.
01:22:10
Speaker
And then from there, they can have a clear escape route to the desert.
01:22:14
Speaker
So now this is the plan.
01:22:18
Speaker
And then in July, there was this drug dispute with Bernard Lotsapapa Crow, who tech sold some drugs to him.
01:22:27
Speaker
He took the money that Crow gave him back to Spahn Ranch, but he did not deliver on the drugs.
01:22:31
Speaker
So Bernard is very mad.
01:22:34
Speaker
Understandably so.
01:22:37
Speaker
And Tex had a girlfriend that lived near Bernard.
01:22:40
Speaker
So he kidnaps her, holds her hostage, calls the ranch, demands his drugs, makes a death threat to the
Black Panther Party's Context
01:22:47
Speaker
family.
01:22:47
Speaker
Right.
01:22:48
Speaker
And then, you know, the family's like, absolutely not.
01:22:52
Speaker
So Charles actually goes to Bernard's apartment, shoots him and then leaves.
01:22:57
Speaker
This is relevant because of a lot of things, but it was a catalyst, this experience, because Charles sees on the news that a Black Panther was found dead in L.A., and he assumes it was Bernard.
01:23:10
Speaker
And so this escalates his delusions that Helter Skelter is coming soon.
01:23:15
Speaker
I kind of want to flip the lens here and stop talking about Charles for a second.
01:23:22
Speaker
Because this particular moment in history where this Black Panther was found dead was a really devastating and catalyzing moment for the Black Panther Party.
01:23:33
Speaker
And so I just wanted to share a little bit about who the Black Panthers were and the work that they did.
01:23:38
Speaker
Because they're often misrepresented also.
01:23:41
Speaker
You know, so I'm going to read from a few articles.
01:23:44
Speaker
This one is Rethinking Schools.
01:23:46
Speaker
It's written by Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian.
01:23:49
Speaker
And it's called What We Didn't Learn About the Black Panther Party But Should.
01:23:53
Speaker
And it opens with a story about how they started.
01:23:59
Speaker
On Monday, April 1st, 1967, George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, California heard 10 gunshots.
01:24:07
Speaker
Sometime after 5 a.m., George came upon his older brother, Denzel Dowell, lying in the street.
01:24:13
Speaker
He was shot in the back and head.
01:24:15
Speaker
Police from the county sheriff's department were there, but no ambulance had been called.
01:24:20
Speaker
The sheriff's office reported that deputy sheriffs Mel Brunkhorst and Kenneth Gibson had arrived at the scene at 4.50 a.m.
01:24:27
Speaker
on a tip from an unidentified caller about a burglary in progress.
01:24:30
Speaker
They claimed that when they arrived, Denzel Dowell and another man ran from the back of a liquor store and fused to stop when ordered to halt.
01:24:38
Speaker
Brunkhorst fired one blast from a shotgun, striking Dowell and killing him.
01:24:44
Speaker
For the Dowles, the official explanation didn't add up and the community members helped the family investigate.
01:24:49
Speaker
There was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise, at Bill's Liquors, the store that Dowell had allegedly been robbing.
01:24:55
Speaker
Further, the police had reported that Dowell had not only run
01:24:58
Speaker
but also jumped two fences to get away before being shot down.
01:25:02
Speaker
But Dal had a bad hip, a limp, and a family claim that he could not run, let alone jump fences.
01:25:09
Speaker
A doctor who worked on the case told the family that judging from the way the bullets had entered Dal's body, Dal had been shot with his hands raised.
01:25:16
Speaker
Mrs. Dowell publicly announced, I believe the police murdered my son.
01:25:21
Speaker
A white jury took little time deciding that the killing of an unarmed Dowell was justifiable homicide because the police officers on the scene had suspected that he was in the act of committing a felony.
01:25:31
Speaker
Outraged, the black community demanded justice.
01:25:35
Speaker
And so they go on to say, this is an excerpt from Black Against Empire, the History and Politics of the Black Panther Party article.
01:25:44
Speaker
So helping North Richmond's black community demand justice for the killing of Denzel Dow was one of the first major organizing campaigns of the Black Panther Party.
01:25:52
Speaker
And the first issue of the Black Panther newspaper, which at its height around 1970, had a circulation of 140,000 copies per week, asked, why was Denzel Dow killed?
01:26:04
Speaker
Anyone reading the story of Dowell today can't help but draw parallels to the unarmed black men and women regularly murdered by police.
01:26:11
Speaker
The disparity between the police's story and the victim's families, the police harassment Dowell endured before his murder, the jury letting Dowell's killer off without punishment, even the reports that Dowell had his hands raised while he was gunned down eerily echo the police killings today that have led to the explosion of the Movement for Black Lives.
01:26:28
Speaker
Yet when we learn about the early years of the Panthers, the organizing they did in Richmond, conducting their own investigation into Dahl's death, confronting police who harassed Dahl's family, helping mothers in the community organize against abuse at local schools, organizing Arm Street rallies in which hundreds filled out applications to join the party is almost always absent.
01:26:48
Speaker
Born just over 50 years ago, the history of the Black Panther Party holds vital lessons for today's movement to confront racism and police violence.
01:26:55
Speaker
Yet textbooks either misrepresent or minimize the significance of the Panthers.
01:26:59
Speaker
Armed with a revolutionary socialist ideology, they fought in black communities across the nation for giving the poor access to decent housing, health care, education and much more.
01:27:09
Speaker
And as the Panthers grew, so did the issues they organized around.
01:27:12
Speaker
This local organizing that the Panthers engaged in has been largely erased, yet it is precisely what won them such widespread support.
01:27:19
Speaker
By 1970, a Market Dynamics ABC poll found that Black people judged the Panthers to be the organization most likely to increase the effectiveness of the Black liberation struggle, and two-thirds showed admiration for the party.
01:27:31
Speaker
Coming in the midst of an all-out assault on the Panthers from the white press and law enforcement, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's claim that the Panthers were the greatest threat to internal security of the country, the support was remarkable.
01:27:49
Speaker
So that's just the beginning, right?
01:27:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:54
Speaker
It just reminds me of transformative justice, mutually.
01:27:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:59
Speaker
Stuff.
01:28:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:28:01
Speaker
And while you were speaking, I was also thinking about a podcast episode I was listening to the other day.
01:28:07
Speaker
It was on the Emergent Strategy podcast, which you've probably listened to.
01:28:11
Speaker
One of their most recent episodes, and it was about grief and collective grief and how grief can be powerful.
01:28:19
Speaker
And it was talking about how
01:28:21
Speaker
You know, these like really violent and unjust deaths lead to these really powerful movements when people come together to process their grief through like social change.
01:28:35
Speaker
Grief is something that we don't talk about that often because...
01:28:38
Speaker
We don't learn how to deal with it at all.
01:28:41
Speaker
It's called Radical Grievance with Malkia Dibik-Syrel.
01:28:46
Speaker
And it is on the Emergent Strategy podcast.
01:28:50
Speaker
And they talk about grief as power and grief as a way to strengthen intimacy or some ideas in that podcast.
01:29:03
Speaker
What else do I want to share from this article?
01:29:06
Speaker
This article is talking about the activities that they're bringing into schools to outline the actual history of the Black Panther movement.
01:29:14
Speaker
And then they have young people discuss what they've learned, what surprised them, what was new.
01:29:23
Speaker
Like now?
01:29:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:25
Speaker
And like one of the big takeaways, one of the big takeaways from the young people was like, oh, this wasn't a siloed movement.
01:29:31
Speaker
The Black Panthers actually worked like across communities to like build a collectivist movement.
01:29:39
Speaker
It was really well organized and strategized.
01:29:42
Speaker
And it was like, I think...
01:29:45
Speaker
I think, honestly, that was also part of the threat for the FBI, right?
01:29:49
Speaker
Realizing that all these other people were getting galvanized and realizing the way that struggles were interconnected.
01:29:57
Speaker
So that also reminds me that the Black Panthers helped Timothy Leary hide from the police.
01:30:06
Speaker
Really?
01:30:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:30:07
Speaker
Wow.
01:30:07
Speaker
He sought asylum with them.
01:30:10
Speaker
I was like, wait, that was something that happened, right?
01:30:12
Speaker
Because...
01:30:13
Speaker
Yeah, he, like, gets asylum in Algeria while he's on the run from the police, and it was, like, through people in the Black Panther Party that helped get him the asylum.
01:30:25
Speaker
No shit.
01:30:25
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:30:26
Speaker
When he was, like, labeled the most dangerous man in America.
01:30:30
Speaker
Timothy?
01:30:31
Speaker
Okay.
01:30:32
Speaker
Wow.
01:30:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:30:33
Speaker
Yeah.
01:30:34
Speaker
So there's this like bit about like the students surprised to learn about who, who was involved in the Black Panther Party and like associated movements.
01:30:45
Speaker
They said students are often surprised to learn the story of Richard Aoki.
01:30:49
Speaker
They'd say, like, I thought they'd only allow black people into their group, but Aoki was Japanese-American.
01:30:54
Speaker
And for many students, this is the first time they learn about Latinx or Asian-American radicals.
01:30:59
Speaker
Another student said it was cool to learn about Gloria and Chacha Jimenez.
01:31:04
Speaker
I didn't know that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans were fighting in the same way as the Panthers.
01:31:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:31:09
Speaker
And then someone else said, yeah, my mom told me about the Brown Berets, but I didn't know that they were connected to the Panthers.
01:31:15
Speaker
So, like, I think that's really powerful.
01:31:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:31:17
Speaker
Especially because, like, Hugh's History does a...
01:31:20
Speaker
in general, does a really good job of bastardizing history, but also does a really, like, thorough job of erasing solidarity movements that are really, like, crucial to collective liberation.
01:31:32
Speaker
And I think that's by design.
01:31:34
Speaker
Right?
01:31:34
Speaker
Like, if you can, you can, like, do the whole divide and conquer strategy, then you can sustain your power by hoping that everyone else is fighting each other.
01:31:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:31:45
Speaker
I mean, you know, it's just, like,
01:31:49
Speaker
so infuriating to me that like around the same time,
01:31:57
Speaker
They're doing all these fucking MKUltra torture things.
01:32:01
Speaker
Yes.
01:32:02
Speaker
And then they're painting these people doing, like, really great organizing and mutual aid and supportive work as, like, terrorists and, like, threats to national security when you're out here, like, traumatizing God knows how many people, killing God knows how many people.
01:32:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:24
Speaker
I mean, it's nothing new for the U.S. government to do that, but it's just really, really infuriating.
01:32:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:30
Speaker
It's a stark parallel.
01:32:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:33
Speaker
I also was reading about how it's a myth that it was a misogynist organization.
01:32:40
Speaker
There's a lot of people who suggest that the Black Panther Party was super sexist when in reality, 66% of the Black Panthers were women.
01:32:48
Speaker
And no one ever fucking talks about that.
01:32:51
Speaker
There's actually a book that was released in 2016, Power to the People, the World of the Black Panthers.
01:32:59
Speaker
It was a photo book that just showed the everyday work that they were engaging in.
01:33:03
Speaker
And then...
01:33:11
Speaker
There's like another book that was noted to be coming out called Comrade Sisters, Women of the Black Panther Party, which is also like a visual storytelling book.
01:33:20
Speaker
And in the forward of this book, Angela Davis points out,
01:33:23
Speaker
that 66% of the membership of the Black Panthers were female.
01:33:26
Speaker
And she writes, because the media tended to focus on what could easily be sensationalized, there has been a tendency to forget that the organizing work that truly made the Black Panther Party relevant to a new era of struggle for liberation was carried out by women.
01:33:38
Speaker
So like in this book, the photographer captured fly on the wall shots of young women at protest rallies and also carrying out on the ground organizing in various Black Panther community initiatives, including the free breakfast for women
01:33:52
Speaker
children program, the People's Free Ambulance Service, and the People's Free Medical Clinics, which offered medical care, including sickle cell anemia testing.
01:34:00
Speaker
Through the series, it's punctuated by images of well-known female members Kathleen Cleaver, who is the law professor and former communications secretary for the party, Elaine Brown, who's a prison activist, writer, and former chair of the party, and the late
01:34:14
Speaker
Afeni Shakur, political activist and mother of the rapper Tupac Shakur.
01:34:18
Speaker
Most of the testimonies come from ordinary Black women whose youthful engagement with the Black Panthers remains the most empowering moment of their lives.
01:34:25
Speaker
So this Guardian article continues and says, Carol Henry, who joined the Oakland chapter of the Panthers, recalls, I joined the BPP when I was 20 years old.
01:34:33
Speaker
I lived in a part of town where the free breakfast for school children program ran.
01:34:37
Speaker
We got up at 3 a.m.
01:34:38
Speaker
It was a real mission, but it was beautiful.
01:34:40
Speaker
We gave these children a full breakfast every day.
01:34:42
Speaker
Cooking that breakfast was the most memorable part because everybody got up so early and everybody worked together.
01:34:47
Speaker
Another woman, Barbara Easley Cox, who was in the Philadelphia chapter, remembers, "'Love is what tied me to the party.
01:34:53
Speaker
It exemplified how I understood love.'"
01:34:56
Speaker
And that is, you have to love people to serve them.
01:34:59
Speaker
I was so loved, so blessed on this earth because of my sisters, all of us who came into the party.
01:35:04
Speaker
It's lacking today when I look out on this landscape in America.
01:35:07
Speaker
As co-author Erica Huggins wrote in the introductory essay and tracked down, as she puts it, the women who were there and whose individual testimonies we could use to evoke how extraordinary that time was.
01:35:18
Speaker
For many of us, Huggins' own moment of political awakening was seismic.
01:35:22
Speaker
Aged 18 and a student at Lincoln University in Philadelphia, she picked up a copy of a radical leftist magazine, Ramparts, and saw a photograph of a young black man strapped to a hospital gurney with a bullet wound in his stomach.
01:35:34
Speaker
Next to him, a policeman stood grinning at the camera.
01:35:38
Speaker
On the Reading a Company report, she found out that the young man was Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the party, who had authored the party's 10-point manifesto with Seal in 1966.
01:35:47
Speaker
I studied the picture for some time, she recalled years later.
01:35:51
Speaker
I didn't have tears for it.
01:35:52
Speaker
I was so appalled.
01:35:53
Speaker
The following day, she left a note for her friend and fellow student John Huggins that read, I'm going to California.
01:35:59
Speaker
I am going to find Huey Newton and work in his defense.
01:36:01
Speaker
Are you coming?
01:36:03
Speaker
The pair subsequently drove across the country to Los Angeles, where they joined the local Black Panther chapter.
01:36:08
Speaker
which then comprised of about 20 members.
01:36:11
Speaker
In January 1969, her husband, who had become a leader of the Los Angeles Black Panthers, was assassinated on the campus of UCLA by alleged members of a Black nationalist group, the U.S. organization.
01:36:22
Speaker
The killing was thought by many in the Black community to be linked to a Cointelpro program that was being conducted clandestinely in
01:36:30
Speaker
and illegally by the FBI against the Black Panthers.
01:36:33
Speaker
In December that year, Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in an FBI orchestrated raid in Hampton's apartment.
01:36:41
Speaker
The word conspiracy was used a lot of the time, she says now calmly.
01:36:44
Speaker
We spent time in jail for a murder we did not commit or have anything to do with.
01:36:48
Speaker
The system then as now was punitive.
01:36:50
Speaker
We were punished before we even entered the courtroom and their aim was to keep us in prison forever.
01:36:56
Speaker
Huggins insists that her experience was not exceptional and that it helped me help the women I contacted to tell their stories because it's hard to sometimes go back.
01:37:05
Speaker
Alongside Shame's powerful images of a moment in Black activism that echoes through the decades to this day, those stories evoke a time in which young Black women experienced life-changing personal empowerment and collective possibility.
Manson Family's Violent Acts
01:37:17
Speaker
These are not war stories, said Huggins, who spent 14 years as a Black Panther, making her the longest serving woman in their history.
01:37:24
Speaker
They are stories of service to humanity.
01:37:26
Speaker
The reason they are so striking, touching, and inspiring is because you can see how beautiful and alive the women were in that moment.
01:37:33
Speaker
Every function of the government that could do harm to us did so, but we kept stepping out and stepping up because we were giving our communities what we had never been given before.
01:37:41
Speaker
I think all the women in the book realize that because they can remember how great they felt back then and what they learned and what was indelibly imprinted on their minds and in their hearts.
01:37:52
Speaker
The book is our legacy.
01:37:54
Speaker
So I just want to take some time to put a microscope on this fleeting moment for this fucked up family and Charles Manson.
01:38:05
Speaker
All about how he...
01:38:07
Speaker
You know, like him and his conspiracy.
01:38:10
Speaker
This story that galvanized his bullshit was just like really...
01:38:18
Speaker
earth shattering to this community of people who are working so fucking hard to just like be yeah and then provide for community and then to be called for them to be called the terrorists when charles manson and these fuckers just get to be around doing all this shit yeah and so i just feel like that deserves like a spotlight yeah well thank you for sharing that yeah
01:38:43
Speaker
Back to nonsense.
01:38:47
Speaker
A nightmare.
01:38:48
Speaker
This is a nightmare.
01:38:49
Speaker
This truly is a psychedelic nightmare.
01:38:52
Speaker
Okay, so Charles is like escalated because he thinks that Crow was a Black Panther and he was the one who killed him and what have you.
01:39:00
Speaker
Crow actually ends up surviving and then testifies against him later.
01:39:03
Speaker
Amazing.
01:39:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:05
Speaker
So July 27th, they're still chilling on the ranch.
01:39:08
Speaker
They're like balancing in between like the doomsday is coming, but also we just need to live and party and fuck and play music.
01:39:16
Speaker
It's like a weird, disjointed, horrible party.
01:39:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:22
Speaker
So Charles and the Satan, whatever.
01:39:28
Speaker
The gang.
01:39:28
Speaker
Simple Satan.
01:39:29
Speaker
What are they called?
01:39:30
Speaker
The Becker gang?
01:39:31
Speaker
Yeah, the Becker gang.
01:39:32
Speaker
I put SS, which is interesting.
01:39:34
Speaker
I wonder if they did that on purpose.
01:39:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:36
Speaker
Whatever the SS.
01:39:38
Speaker
They want more than the drugs and alcohol that they had.
01:39:40
Speaker
And so this is where Bobby Beausoleil offers to talk to his roommate, Gary Hinman, who was the Buddhist dude I mentioned earlier.
01:39:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:39:48
Speaker
Gary sells mescaline to them, but they don't know that mescaline makes you sick before it gets you high.
01:39:54
Speaker
So they think that they're sent poison and they demand their money back.
01:39:58
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:39:59
Speaker
So Bobby and some of the girls go to the house to get the money.
01:40:02
Speaker
Gary doesn't have the money because he doesn't,
01:40:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:40:06
Speaker
He doesn't have money.
01:40:09
Speaker
And then Bobby gets very aggressive with him.
01:40:11
Speaker
And in between this like scuffle, he's like, Bobby, this is not you.
01:40:15
Speaker
So there's like this weird like tussle with like morality, I think.
01:40:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:40:19
Speaker
But there's a lot of fear, I think, behind Bobby.
01:40:22
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:40:22
Speaker
You know, he's stuck in it.
01:40:24
Speaker
And then so Gary finally agrees to sign over the ownership of his VW bus and his jalopy.
01:40:30
Speaker
He's like, I don't have money, but here have my cars, whatever.
01:40:32
Speaker
And one of the girls called the ranch, Mary did, and said, get Charlie.
01:40:36
Speaker
So Charlie comes to Gary's house.
01:40:38
Speaker
Gary answers, hi, Charlie.
01:40:40
Speaker
And Charlie slashes his face.
01:40:43
Speaker
Yes.
01:40:44
Speaker
And Bobby goes, why did you do that?
01:40:46
Speaker
And Charlie goes, I'm showing you how to be a man.
01:40:49
Speaker
Oh, God.
01:40:50
Speaker
So Bobby's with Gary.
01:40:52
Speaker
He calls to the ranch and talks to one of the SS people.
01:40:55
Speaker
He goes, I don't know what to do.
01:40:57
Speaker
Because Charlie, like, steps out after that.
01:41:00
Speaker
And he's, like, at a loss.
01:41:02
Speaker
He says, you know as well as I do what you need to do.
01:41:05
Speaker
And so Bobby tends to Gary's wound.
01:41:07
Speaker
But Gary is, like, really wanting to go to the hospital, demanding to go to the hospital.
01:41:10
Speaker
But Bobby knows that if he goes to the hospital, the truth will come out, which he cannot have.
01:41:15
Speaker
So 30 minutes later, he stabs Gary to death.
01:41:17
Speaker
No!
01:41:18
Speaker
Yes.
01:41:19
Speaker
And Mary's horrified.
01:41:20
Speaker
Bobby shares that he felt the same looking at her.
01:41:23
Speaker
Like, he was, like, she looks horrified.
01:41:25
Speaker
I feel horrified.
01:41:26
Speaker
But he was the one who stabbed.
01:41:28
Speaker
Was it his friend?
01:41:31
Speaker
It was a family friend.
01:41:31
Speaker
He's letting him stay in his house.
01:41:33
Speaker
Yep.
01:41:34
Speaker
He's just, yeah.
01:41:36
Speaker
Yep, yep, yep.
01:41:37
Speaker
And then on the wall, political piggy is written in blood, in his blood.
01:41:44
Speaker
I didn't even know about this.
01:41:47
Speaker
I didn't even know that there was a previous murder.
01:41:50
Speaker
I mean, like, obviously there was previous murders, but I didn't know that there was this.
01:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lead up.
01:41:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:55
Speaker
Yeah, this is all part of, like, the escalation.
01:41:58
Speaker
The galvanizing, the radicalizing, the getting people used to violence, you know?
01:42:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:03
Speaker
I mean, it's kind of just, like, a similar vibe to the Jim Jones thing when, like,
01:42:10
Speaker
things are sort of like, uh, and then the, what is his face?
01:42:14
Speaker
Like politician comes and then it just like escalates super fast.
01:42:19
Speaker
That's what I'm getting from that.
01:42:20
Speaker
It's like escalating very quickly.
01:42:25
Speaker
Escalating very quickly.
01:42:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:27
Speaker
Uh, Bobby says like, he doesn't remember what happened after he did that.
01:42:32
Speaker
He was like in a state of shock, which I guess is fair, but they still on masculine when this happened.
01:42:40
Speaker
I think the SS people were, but I think Bobby was not.
01:42:45
Speaker
Bobby was living with Gary.
01:42:47
Speaker
Okay.
01:42:50
Speaker
But yeah, I feel like maybe my feeling is that maybe child wrote political piggy.
01:42:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:57
Speaker
Right?
01:42:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:58
Speaker
I don't know.
01:42:59
Speaker
I have no idea.
01:42:59
Speaker
But anyways.
01:43:02
Speaker
I mean, I also read somewhere that they were, like, also taking amphetamines and stuff.
01:43:07
Speaker
I feel like they're all probably in some state of intoxication most of the time.
01:43:14
Speaker
And even when they're not, they're, like, in a state of withdrawal.
01:43:16
Speaker
So, like... And they're, like, in this weird conspiracy land, too.
01:43:23
Speaker
So... Yeah.
01:43:25
Speaker
No one is in touch with reality.
01:43:27
Speaker
That's what it is, yeah.
01:43:29
Speaker
Either way, that's what was written on the wall.
01:43:30
Speaker
And they did that so that the police would think it was the Black Panther Party.
01:43:36
Speaker
Fucked.
01:43:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:43:38
Speaker
And they really used all of the stuff that was happening during the time to, like...
01:43:44
Speaker
So they also, they drew a panther paw on the wall with the blood as well to really try to falsely symbolize.
01:43:50
Speaker
I hate them.
01:43:51
Speaker
Yes.
01:43:53
Speaker
So this is July 27th.
01:43:54
Speaker
They're really out here killing Gary.
01:43:56
Speaker
And then... It just continues.
01:43:58
Speaker
They really just got to do whatever the fuck for the longest time.
01:44:02
Speaker
August 4th, 1969.
01:44:03
Speaker
So a week later, there's like more people who are being inducted into the family.
01:44:09
Speaker
Stephanie Schramm, who was interviewed in the documentary, said that she was 17 at a gas station when she met him.
01:44:17
Speaker
He said something like, what is a beautiful girl like you doing out here so late at night?
01:44:22
Speaker
Ew.
01:44:23
Speaker
It's like a beginning of a horror movie.
01:44:25
Speaker
I know.
01:44:26
Speaker
And she said, just in a short period of time, he was able to tell me everything I wanted to hear.
01:44:30
Speaker
I bet your dad doesn't love you.
01:44:32
Speaker
I bet nobody really takes you seriously, but I do.
01:44:35
Speaker
And then they said that they were headed to Big Sur.
01:44:38
Speaker
And she was like, I saw the guitars in the van.
01:44:40
Speaker
I always wanted to see Big Sur.
01:44:41
Speaker
I told the guy that I was with that I was going to go with them.
01:44:45
Speaker
I'm just like, wow.
01:44:47
Speaker
And he's just acting hunky-dory like this after he's done all of this too.
01:44:51
Speaker
And apparently like he is still on his music shit, right?
01:44:56
Speaker
And he goes to the Esalen Institute.
01:44:59
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:45:04
Speaker
And he asks her to stay in the car.
01:45:06
Speaker
He went to go perform for them and he was very upset when they were impressed by his talent.
01:45:11
Speaker
He was sure they were going to love him.
01:45:16
Speaker
And I guess he was very quiet in the car, but she asked him to take her back to San Diego to pick up her things before going back up to maybe see Big Sur.
01:45:24
Speaker
And he did that.
01:45:26
Speaker
And once she got there, she said all her items were thrown, or once she got to the ranch, all her items were thrown into the communal pile, including her ID and money.
01:45:34
Speaker
So, you know, she didn't have access to her things anymore.
01:45:38
Speaker
Everything's communal.
01:45:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:45:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:45:40
Speaker
So, a new cult member enters the...
01:45:44
Speaker
enters the building.
01:45:46
Speaker
What was this person's name?
01:45:47
Speaker
Stephanie Schramm.
01:45:48
Speaker
Okay.
01:45:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:45:49
Speaker
But like, here he is with like a rejection, so he's going to escalate again.
01:45:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:45:53
Speaker
Right?
01:45:54
Speaker
Which reminds me of Jack.
01:45:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:45:56
Speaker
Remember how he like wanted to like get a movie made about him and then when the director laughed at him, he like went and killed somebody?
01:46:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:04
Speaker
Oh gosh.
01:46:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:05
Speaker
Two days later, Beau Soleil is arrested after he's caught driving Hinman's car.
01:46:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:46:11
Speaker
He took Gary's car and then he brought the knife that he used to stab him in the car like a dumb dumb.
01:46:18
Speaker
They're all just dumb also.
01:46:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:20
Speaker
One of the journalists said Bobby Beausoleil and his stupidity gets into the car of the murder victim and drives 120 miles to San Luis Obispo.
01:46:28
Speaker
He brings the murder weapon with him, gets pulled over, pretends to sleep.
01:46:32
Speaker
And gets caught.
01:46:33
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
01:46:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:46:36
Speaker
So.
01:46:37
Speaker
Okay.
01:46:38
Speaker
Charles is like fucking now terrified that Bobby is going to tell everything.
01:46:44
Speaker
So he escalates even more.
01:46:47
Speaker
He begins teaching the family how to lethally use knives, how you have to like stab people and wiggle it around so you can get as many organs as possible.
01:46:56
Speaker
And then the SS is continuing to teach them how to use guns.
01:47:01
Speaker
Diane says that he has a distinct personality shift at this time.
01:47:05
Speaker
He's mean 100% of the time there is no more mask.
01:47:08
Speaker
And so people are really like, oh, fuck, I'm stuck here.
01:47:10
Speaker
And then there's no indulgences keeping them content at times.
01:47:17
Speaker
He starts getting the group to break into people's homes and rearrange their furniture to instill fear.
01:47:25
Speaker
Just to get their brains fucked with.
01:47:26
Speaker
Which abusive people do that shit too.
01:47:28
Speaker
I have stories of people who have restraining orders against their exes.
01:47:33
Speaker
And then they come home and they're like, my stuff has been moved.
01:47:36
Speaker
But what the fuck am I supposed to do?
01:47:37
Speaker
Go to the judge and be like, they're breaking in and moving my stuff?
01:47:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:47:41
Speaker
Wild.
01:47:41
Speaker
Oh my god.
01:47:42
Speaker
But basically he was just trying to get them used to the practice of invading space.
01:47:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:47:47
Speaker
This would then turn into burglaries, which would then turn into these infamous murders, which I'll get to in a little bit.
01:47:52
Speaker
Right.
01:47:53
Speaker
This is the stage of grooming where they're like, well, now I am convincing you to engage in violent behavior because you can't leave.
01:48:03
Speaker
Exactly.
01:48:04
Speaker
Exactly.
01:48:06
Speaker
So as he's escalating, he really doubles down on all the control.
01:48:11
Speaker
He dictates who eats, when they eat.
01:48:13
Speaker
Brooks Poston said that he would lay for seven days without food until Charlie allowed it.
01:48:18
Speaker
He controlled who slept with who, when people could pee.
01:48:23
Speaker
One of them said that like she had to pee so bad that she peed her pants and then he like attacked her with a chair.
01:48:30
Speaker
And then he said that group orgies were a way to get tuned in, so they had to do that all the time.
01:48:35
Speaker
He would go up to people and be like, would you die for me?
01:48:37
Speaker
And a lot of people would be like, of course I'd die for you.
01:48:41
Speaker
One of the journalists in the documentary said Charlie was sweet and kind and he was nasty and cruel and they obeyed.
01:48:47
Speaker
And he would go up to, like, I think this was Diane, and go, I could kill you, don't you know?
01:48:52
Speaker
But I wouldn't, because you're one of us.
01:48:54
Speaker
So there's a simultaneous, like, threat of violence, but also, like, this, like, reminder that, like, you belong here.
01:48:59
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:49:00
Speaker
And... But it's like, I could kill you if you, like, tell on us.
01:49:03
Speaker
But I could kill you.
01:49:04
Speaker
Or you betray us, kind of thing.
01:49:05
Speaker
Yes.
01:49:06
Speaker
He would... Because I'm only not going to kill you when you're one of us.
01:49:09
Speaker
But if you betray us, then you're not one of us.
01:49:11
Speaker
Right.
01:49:11
Speaker
Right.
01:49:11
Speaker
He would assault her in front of others and then say, you can handle this.
01:49:15
Speaker
I'm just using you as an example.
01:49:16
Speaker
And then I won't tell story.
01:49:18
Speaker
I won't like get into the stories, but he becomes extremely like sexually assaultive and violent after this.
01:49:25
Speaker
And Diane says, once I got into the other side of his fist, it was too late.
01:49:30
Speaker
So now we're at August 8th, 1969.
01:49:33
Speaker
He says, this is the time for Helter Skelter.
01:49:36
Speaker
And I think this was Susan Atkins who says, you do this by killing, by doing a murder that had no sense to it.
01:49:43
Speaker
Because the more fearful people get, the more frantic people get, and the faster it will happen.
01:49:49
Speaker
And so he sends them to Terry Melcher's house, which ends up being where...
01:49:55
Speaker
It's like Sharon Tate.
01:50:12
Speaker
Tex said that Charlie had instructed him to go to the house and totally destroy everyone in it and to do it as gruesome as he could.
01:50:19
Speaker
And he told the women to do exactly as Tex instructed.
01:50:24
Speaker
So everyone had a role that was dictated by the dudes.
01:50:29
Speaker
Linda was instructed to stay watch.
01:50:31
Speaker
They do some coke and then get at the house so they're strung out as fuck.
01:50:34
Speaker
The rest of them are armed with knives.
01:50:36
Speaker
Abigail Folger, who was one of the heirs to the Folger...
01:50:41
Speaker
yeah company yeah was one of the guests there and she was i guess reading in the back and waved at them because they she assumed they were guests but here's like where this like assumption of like white innocence and privileges i'm just like these people really wander around everyone's like they look like ordinary people yeah you know what fuck you guys anyway and then someone said who are you and tech says i'm the devil here to do the devil's business
01:51:06
Speaker
And so this is when everyone starts, like, attacking all the people in the house.
01:51:09
Speaker
Krenwinkel chases after Abigail, who...
01:51:13
Speaker
realizes that they are not guests, and then stabs her 28 times.
01:51:17
Speaker
Jay Sebring was hit with a gun, shot, stabbed seven times.
01:51:20
Speaker
This dude Wojek runs, and Tex attacks him with a gun.
01:51:24
Speaker
He's hit with it.
01:51:25
Speaker
He's shot, and he's stabbed 51 times.
01:51:28
Speaker
And Susan Atkins ended up murdering Sharon Tate, who was pregnant at the time.
01:51:33
Speaker
She's like eight months pregnant.
01:51:34
Speaker
Yeah, and she's like begging for her life and begging for the life of her child, and she just...
01:51:40
Speaker
There was also some dude, Steve, who was visiting the caretaker of the house and he was about to leave and he was in his car and he got shot, I think.
01:51:52
Speaker
Something like that.
01:51:53
Speaker
He had no association with the people living in the house.
01:51:57
Speaker
But also just collateral damage.
01:52:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:52:01
Speaker
Damn.
01:52:02
Speaker
I mean, they're all pretty much collateral damage.
01:52:04
Speaker
They don't know these people at all.
01:52:05
Speaker
That's true.
01:52:06
Speaker
That's true.
01:52:07
Speaker
They just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
01:52:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:52:10
Speaker
So Terry wasn't even there.
01:52:11
Speaker
His girlfriend wasn't either.
01:52:12
Speaker
They sublet the house to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate months before, so they had just been living there.
01:52:17
Speaker
I noted this quote from an article I was reading.
01:52:20
Speaker
They were like, the murder of a rising film star and several upper-class California residents would help to provoke racial violence, or so the family thought.
01:52:27
Speaker
I remember seeing that like Sharon really represented, she really represented like the all American beauty.
01:52:32
Speaker
She was a ex army brat who then turned into a movie star and is dating this like big time Hollywood director.
01:52:38
Speaker
She represented a lot of like what people wanted to be.
01:52:41
Speaker
And I think like it elicited a lot of fear that people who were otherwise considered untouchable were murdered in this way.
01:52:47
Speaker
And you know, they did the thing where they like took blood and broke pig on the wall, Helter Skelter, all the shit.
01:52:54
Speaker
So same weekend.
01:52:55
Speaker
Like, within the next day or two.
01:52:57
Speaker
Charles goes up to Susan and goes, are you crazy enough to believe what I believe?
01:53:00
Speaker
Are you crazy enough to kill for it?
01:53:01
Speaker
And she's like, yes.
01:53:03
Speaker
So he's really, like, got her in whatever wraps.
01:53:08
Speaker
So Susan Atkins, Tex Watson, Steve Krogan, Linda Caspian, Leslie Van Hooten, Patty Krenwinkel, and Manson are driving to another house.
01:53:17
Speaker
He's agitated.
01:53:18
Speaker
He points at Pat and Leslie and says, do whatever Tex says.
01:53:22
Speaker
And, again, Tex made sure everyone had a role.
01:53:24
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:53:25
Speaker
They show up to Lino and Rosemary LaBianca's house.
01:53:30
Speaker
He was a grocery store owner and she was also a businesswoman.
01:53:34
Speaker
And yeah, that's pretty much it.
01:53:36
Speaker
They were just like business people, grocery store owner.
01:53:39
Speaker
Okay.
01:53:40
Speaker
So not really that famous.
01:53:42
Speaker
Just no.
01:53:43
Speaker
There's some kind of embodiment of American dream though.
01:53:46
Speaker
Lino was like, his parents were Italian immigrants.
01:53:50
Speaker
Father owned two grocery store businesses.
01:53:53
Speaker
Well, they break into their house.
01:53:54
Speaker
They tied them up.
01:53:56
Speaker
And Tex tells them this is just a robbery.
01:53:58
Speaker
So they think that they're going to be okay as long as they comply.
01:54:01
Speaker
The women go into the kitchen to grab knives.
01:54:04
Speaker
Van Hooten puts a pillowcase over Rosemary's head with a lamp cord.
01:54:07
Speaker
She overhears Lino being stabbed.
01:54:09
Speaker
So she gets up to run and defend.
01:54:11
Speaker
And this is when Krenwinkel attacks her with a knife and fails.
01:54:17
Speaker
So the others come in and follow and proceed to stab her 41 times.
01:54:20
Speaker
Oh!
01:54:22
Speaker
Oh my god.
01:54:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:54:24
Speaker
The killers, who all participated except Charles.
01:54:28
Speaker
Charles was just watching.
01:54:30
Speaker
Charles left after helping to tie the victims down.
01:54:33
Speaker
They ran a bayonet into Lino 12 times and carved the word war into his chest.
01:54:38
Speaker
Oh my god.
01:54:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:54:40
Speaker
And then again, the word pig was written on the wall in blood.
01:54:44
Speaker
LaBianca, or Lino's corpse, was left with a fork sticking out of his stomach.
01:54:51
Speaker
and helter skelter was in blood in the kitchen yeah it was it was fucked and like at the end like leslie comes like opens the refrigerator and drinks some chocolate milk and then watson grabs some cheese and eats some cheese and the others take a shower fucking dude from japan yeah what is that and it also reminds me of katherine a bit yeah yeah yeah for sure i'm like wow
01:55:16
Speaker
They're so dissociated.
01:55:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:55:19
Speaker
And so like they come back and like half of the cult doesn't know that this happened.
01:55:24
Speaker
So there was only this group of people who were involved.
01:55:26
Speaker
I think that Charles could tell we're going to be loyal.
01:55:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:55:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:55:30
Speaker
So they make start making plans to move to Death Valley because he's feeling everything close in on him.
01:55:34
Speaker
I think.
01:55:35
Speaker
And this is like when people start trying to run away.
01:55:37
Speaker
So Linda runs away, leaving behind a daughter.
01:55:40
Speaker
Seven days after the murder, LAPD comes down to Spahn Ranch on August 16th at 6 a.m.
01:55:45
Speaker
They had a warrant to investigate burglary since everything they had was stolen.
01:55:50
Speaker
They retrofitted old cars into dune buggies.
01:55:53
Speaker
The family was detained, but then for some reason they were released later.
01:55:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:55:57
Speaker
The police were making really messy connections.
01:56:00
Speaker
They didn't connect the Tate killing to Gary's murder at all.
01:56:04
Speaker
They were calling the LaBianca and Cielo Drive murders copycat murders.
01:56:08
Speaker
So they weren't connecting that it was the same people.
01:56:11
Speaker
And then I guess a journalist called LAPD trying to say that Gary's murder had similarities to these murders and they blew him off.
01:56:21
Speaker
So they're just like really just... All over the place.
01:56:25
Speaker
Yeah, doing what they do.
01:56:27
Speaker
Not doing shit.
01:56:28
Speaker
It reminds me of when they were confused about who they were arresting, you know, when they got Richard Ramirez.
01:56:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:56:35
Speaker
They're like, who's in the car?
01:56:36
Speaker
Like, bro, what do you mean?
01:56:40
Speaker
Oh my god.
01:56:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:56:41
Speaker
And then, okay, so Roman, who's another piece of work.
01:56:46
Speaker
yeah who don't even get into it no he was like he but he was uh married to sharon tate yeah he thought someone from the couple's hollywood circle was the killer so he first suspected bruce lee oh my god because he was like he could kill so many people single-handedly he also accused because he like knows martial arts yeah it's on it's giving racism yeah and then the mama and papa singer john phillips was next on the
01:57:12
Speaker
on the list whose wife i guess michelle had a one-night fling with roman at some point so he thought that they had a motive so like for months roman was sneaking into the garages of his friends and he like tested possible blood spots in their cars he was like really on one damn yeah anyways so i know that yes so
01:57:34
Speaker
The family then heads a Barker ranch in Death Valley.
01:57:37
Speaker
They continue their doomsday plan.
01:57:39
Speaker
Charlie takes them in to look for mines.
01:57:42
Speaker
And then things really continue to fall apart because they're like, wow, he really doesn't have a plan here.
01:57:46
Speaker
So these dudes start falling off and leaving.
01:57:49
Speaker
Diane remembers sitting around a fire.
01:57:51
Speaker
Everyone's taking acid.
01:57:52
Speaker
And then the family members who did the killing, Susan and whatever these other girls, started bragging about the murders and remembers that Susan was saying Sharon was begging for the life of her baby and she was proud.
01:58:03
Speaker
This is the first time she hears of this and she gets terrified.
01:58:06
Speaker
And then now she's like, I really can't leave.
01:58:08
Speaker
These people are going to fucking kill me.
01:58:10
Speaker
Sarah and Kitty run away.
01:58:12
Speaker
They run into a sheriff who takes them to a local jail, which also like starts another raid that comes in.
01:58:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:58:18
Speaker
Hoyt.
01:58:19
Speaker
Wait to escape.
01:58:20
Speaker
Family knows that she's going to testify.
01:58:22
Speaker
They send death threats.
01:58:24
Speaker
So she complies with them and goes on a trip to Hawaii.
01:58:26
Speaker
They dose her with 10 tabs of acid to stop her.
01:58:30
Speaker
And then they send her to the hospital where they try to calm her down with Valium, which worsens
Manson Trial Chaos
01:58:34
Speaker
her condition.
01:58:34
Speaker
She said, I felt like my wind was wiped out.
01:58:37
Speaker
Yeah, in the article that I read about it, they were like, they dosed her with a lethal dose of LSD.
01:58:42
Speaker
And I was like, that is not a thing.
01:58:43
Speaker
There's no lethal dose of LSD.
01:58:45
Speaker
They just gave her tons of acid.
01:58:47
Speaker
Yeah, she was unwell, though.
01:58:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they were trying to fuck her brain up, for sure.
01:58:51
Speaker
But as we remember from first of the series, there's no lethal dose of LSD.
01:58:55
Speaker
You can truly fuck your brain up.
01:58:57
Speaker
Right.
01:58:58
Speaker
But can't kill you.
01:58:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:59:00
Speaker
Anyways, I'm going to pass it to you to tell the folks what happened.
01:59:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, in November of 1969, so I guess this is what like really triggered it.
01:59:09
Speaker
Susan Atkins, who clearly is like super excited that she's a murderer.
01:59:13
Speaker
was incarcerated in LA on other charges and was bragging to fellow inmates that she participated in the Tate murders and was telling of the death list of celebrities that the family had targeted.
01:59:24
Speaker
They had a list of celebrities that they were going to target that they hadn't killed yet, but that was what she was saying.
01:59:30
Speaker
And the people that she told then talked to the police.
01:59:34
Speaker
who then, like, it led to the trial, which began on July 24th, 1970, which is known as the Tate-LaBianca murder trial with defendants Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Hooten, and oh wait.
01:59:48
Speaker
I'm just going to give highlights of the trial.
01:59:50
Speaker
First day of the trial, Manson enters the court with a bloody X on his forehead.
01:59:57
Speaker
Outside, his followers were passing around this, like, statement that said,
02:00:03
Speaker
I have X'd myself from your world.
02:00:06
Speaker
That was the point of the X. The trial then resumed a few days later and defendant Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Hooten showed up with X's carved in on their foreheads also.
02:00:18
Speaker
Soon, almost all the family members, even the ones that were not participating in the trial, had X-shaped scars on their foreheads.
02:00:25
Speaker
These people are really out here.
02:00:30
Speaker
So Linda Caspian, who had run away, was granted immunity by Judge Older from prosecution, even though she was there, because she was their star witness.
02:00:40
Speaker
Like you said, she was outside Sharon Tate's house on the night of the murders and in the car with Charles Manson near the LaBianca house the next day.
02:00:49
Speaker
The thing that I said said that she fled the ranch with her daughter, but maybe just like misinformation.
02:00:54
Speaker
I don't know what happened.
02:00:55
Speaker
Yeah.
02:00:56
Speaker
Anyways.
02:00:57
Speaker
So she testified about Manson's control over members of the cult.
02:01:02
Speaker
She said that he kept the mother separate from their children, that he arranged orgies, deciding when they would take place, who would participate.
02:01:11
Speaker
She also talked about how she and everyone else thought that he was a messiah, which is how he described himself.
02:01:17
Speaker
She talked about how they often took drugs and the defense team actually tried to use that against her.
02:01:23
Speaker
They tried to use the fact that she had taken LSD over 50 times to say that she was mentally ill.
02:01:28
Speaker
incapable of testifying, but it did not work because her testimony helped to prove the prosecutor's argument that even though Manson wasn't present at the Tate and LaBianca murders, he was responsible for orchestrating them.
02:01:44
Speaker
But her testimony and her being their star witness provoked a lot of really extreme reactions from his followers and his defense lawyers as well.
02:01:54
Speaker
So like prior to her even entering the courtroom, her...
02:01:57
Speaker
Sandra Good screamed, you'll kill us all at her in the corridor.
02:02:02
Speaker
While she was speaking on the witness stand, Manson drew a finger across his throat, pretty much like threatening that she was going to die.
02:02:10
Speaker
And then also was proclaiming while she was like testifying that he was, that she was telling lies.
02:02:16
Speaker
His lawyer kept objecting every time she was like doing her testimony.
02:02:22
Speaker
And he interrupted it so many times that the judge threw him in jail for contempt of court.
02:02:27
Speaker
Holy shit.
02:02:27
Speaker
He was not the first, he was not the only person who was thrown in jail for contempt of court.
02:02:31
Speaker
In this trial?
02:02:32
Speaker
Yep.
02:02:33
Speaker
Leslie Van Hooten's lawyer, Ronald Hughes, told the prosecutor that is a load of shit that then put him in jail for contempt of court.
02:02:42
Speaker
Susan Atkins' lawyer, Day Shin, received three nights in jail when he admitted he'd brought confiscated pages of the LA Times to the council table because the jury was sequestered.
02:02:54
Speaker
There was also a point where Charles Manson, like... So on August 3rd, President Richard Nixon, so this was during the trial, he brought up Charles Manson during a press briefing and said, here's a man who is guilty directly or indirectly of eight murders, and he was pretty much talking about how the free love people are awful.
02:03:13
Speaker
He was connecting the things.
02:03:14
Speaker
Okay.
02:03:15
Speaker
And then Counter-Rock was like, oh, we have to go for a mistrial because the jury is biased by the president's statement.
02:03:26
Speaker
You already told this story about Barbara Hoyt because they were scared that she was going to testify, so they dosed her with LSD.
02:03:34
Speaker
There was also a ranch hand.
02:03:36
Speaker
named Juan Flynn, who was so scared of them that he confessed to illegally drinking beer at a national park so he could go to jail and prevent the cult members from reaching him.
02:03:47
Speaker
Oh my god.
02:03:50
Speaker
But I mean, they were like scared for valid reason.
02:03:53
Speaker
Sure.
02:03:54
Speaker
Because defense attorney Ronald Hughes was
02:03:58
Speaker
failed to show up to court one day on November 30th, and they realized that he was missing and that he was last seen camping at Sespe Hot Springs.
02:04:08
Speaker
After a few months of searching, they couldn't find him, and then in March of the following year, they found his body,
02:04:16
Speaker
at the springs and even though his cause of death was undetermined sandra good later told lawrence merrick who was a documentary filmmaker that the cult had killed 35 to 40 people and that hughes was the first of the retaliation murders okay so they've there's no proof that they were the ones who were involved but there's a
02:04:39
Speaker
They were like, oh, he's not doing a good job, so let's murder him.
02:04:43
Speaker
During one point during the trial, Manson said that he wanted to testify, and then he goes,
02:04:48
Speaker
The children that come at you with knives are your children.
02:04:52
Speaker
You taught them.
02:04:53
Speaker
I didn't teach them.
02:04:54
Speaker
I just try to help them stand up saying nonsense.
02:04:57
Speaker
So Linda Caspian, she was like, I didn't talk about her, but she was actually born in Maine from a working class family.
02:05:06
Speaker
And as a child, she was described as a good student.
02:05:09
Speaker
She dropped out of high school and ran away from home because of conflict with her stepfather, who she claimed was abusive towards both her and her mom.
02:05:18
Speaker
And then she traveled to the West Coast looking for God.
02:05:21
Speaker
And at the age of 16, she got married, then divorced a short time later, tried to reconnect with her father, moved to Boston.
02:05:27
Speaker
She was like moving all over the place.
02:05:28
Speaker
And then finally, she like moved to LA to like reconnect with her ex-husband.
02:05:33
Speaker
But then he kind of like ditched her.
02:05:35
Speaker
So then somehow she got pregnant with her ex-husband's kid, but then ended up like meeting Catherine Cher and then found out about the ranch.
02:05:47
Speaker
And that's how she became part of the ranch.
02:05:50
Speaker
During her first night with the family, she met and had sexual relations with Tex Watson, but she was the main witness of the trial.
02:05:57
Speaker
And pretty much they all went to, you know, got put in prison because of her.
02:06:05
Speaker
And that is this chaotic ass trial.
02:06:10
Speaker
Okay.
02:06:11
Speaker
Okay.
02:06:12
Speaker
So what happened after Tex avoided extradition for over a year?
02:06:16
Speaker
He had his own trial separate from all of this.
02:06:18
Speaker
He was found guilty of seven counts of murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder for the Tate and LaBianca killings.
02:06:25
Speaker
He was sentenced to death, but he also, during his time in prison, earned a business degree and became a minister.
02:06:31
Speaker
So there's that.
02:06:33
Speaker
Always the minister piece.
02:06:35
Speaker
Always the God piece.
02:06:38
Speaker
It's really wild that...
Manson's Enduring Influence
02:06:41
Speaker
God is used both to enact extreme violence and also absolve you of that violence.
02:06:47
Speaker
Wow.
02:06:47
Speaker
Very convenient.
02:06:48
Speaker
Yep.
02:06:49
Speaker
Bobby Beausoleil was also sentenced to death for the murder of Gary, uh, and the first degree.
02:06:54
Speaker
Uh, and during his time in prison, he composed and records music.
02:06:59
Speaker
He still does to this day.
02:07:00
Speaker
So a lot of these people were sentenced to death, but in February, 1972, the California Supreme court abolished the state death penalty.
02:07:08
Speaker
And so,
02:07:08
Speaker
all of these death sentences were commuted to life in prison.
02:07:13
Speaker
So during this time, Manson's like stoked.
02:07:16
Speaker
He's like commandeering the spotlight.
02:07:18
Speaker
He's like, I'm doing interviews with popular television personalities.
02:07:22
Speaker
He's like, really like lives up to his, like, he's like extra weird in these.
02:07:27
Speaker
You know, at some point he turns that X into a swastika on his forehead.
02:07:31
Speaker
And in 1988, Giraldo Rivera was,
02:07:38
Speaker
interviewed him and he said i'm gonna chop up some more of you fuckers and i'm going to pile you up in the sky people really just giving him screen time that's exactly what he wanted he's like i just want attention yes fucking narcissist yes and then also some of his remaining followers established a website where uh his ramblings were just posted and now there's like a new wave of people who just like love the shit out of this guy
02:08:05
Speaker
I mean, didn't he get married to someone while he's in prison?
02:08:08
Speaker
He sure did.
02:08:09
Speaker
Classic.
02:08:10
Speaker
On a different note, well, not different.
02:08:12
Speaker
It'll be short.
02:08:13
Speaker
But I was watching this documentary, right?
02:08:15
Speaker
And during the trial, all of these girls who were not yet charged and imprisoned for all this shit were doing wild.
02:08:22
Speaker
They were just wild as fuck.
02:08:24
Speaker
Singing, holding hands on the street, exes on their foreheads.
02:08:27
Speaker
At one point, all of them took acid and crawled up a hill.
02:08:32
Speaker
And you see this video of these girls crawling up a hill.
02:08:35
Speaker
Oh, my God.
02:08:36
Speaker
And these people being like, what the fuck is going on here?
02:08:39
Speaker
And I was sitting here thinking, like, white people get to just do the wildest shit ever.
02:08:43
Speaker
And nothing happens to them.
02:08:45
Speaker
Seriously.
02:08:46
Speaker
My God.
02:08:47
Speaker
Like, the wildest shit ever.
02:08:49
Speaker
Anyway.
02:08:50
Speaker
They also, like, were like, he's not guilty.
02:08:54
Speaker
So wild.
02:08:54
Speaker
And they're, like, smiling a lot.
02:08:56
Speaker
Like, especially the ones that did the murders are, like, smiling a lot, laughing.
02:08:59
Speaker
Disturbing.
02:09:00
Speaker
Anyways.
02:09:02
Speaker
So there's a bunch of disaffected youth who are like Manson followers from that time to now.
02:09:10
Speaker
And in November 2014, a 27-year-old named Afton Star Burton announced that she was engaged to her 80-year-old hero.
02:09:22
Speaker
and uh headlines followed when uh manson disavowed the engagement before the bride had the chance to register at target oh god what in the world i don't know i'm just like this is so wild yeah yeah squeaky from who we talked about yeah did her part to keep
02:09:45
Speaker
him in the spotlight as well.
02:09:47
Speaker
Going back to 1975, she attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford.
02:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, I heard that.
02:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, and then she failed because her semi-automatic handgun didn't fire, and Charles denied putting from up to it, but most people believed he definitely had some influence.
02:10:06
Speaker
And then she got life in prison also.
02:10:09
Speaker
Well, I think she got granted parole recently.
02:10:13
Speaker
Oh, I think she was one of the only people that did.
02:10:16
Speaker
Yeah, she's like chilling in New York.
02:10:18
Speaker
Yeah.
02:10:18
Speaker
What the fuck?
02:10:19
Speaker
Yeah.
02:10:20
Speaker
I mean, I've at least seen interviews with Patti and she definitely seems pretty remorseful of what happened.
02:10:28
Speaker
She gets interviewed in the A&E documentary and I think, yeah, there's one other person that does.
02:10:34
Speaker
I can't remember who it is, but.
02:10:36
Speaker
none of the other people like all the other people are still in prison um at least she seems somewhat remorseful she's probably like damn what the fuck i stabbed that woman so many times i mean how do you like inter like how do you process that i don't know like how do you integrate that i don't know into your healing yeah i don't i don't know
02:10:58
Speaker
Because, like, killing people must be traumatic for you as well.
02:11:02
Speaker
Oh, 100%.
02:11:02
Speaker
Like, that's a traumatizing thing.
02:11:04
Speaker
Yeah.
02:11:04
Speaker
I mean, I feel like, you know how every time Baltimore kills someone, he...
02:11:12
Speaker
it's important it's about dissociation yes yes yes you know like when yeah whenever a traumatic events happens you like fracture and like there's a structural dissociation talks about like there's like primary dissociation secondary dissociation and tertiary dissociation yeah and tertiary is when there's so many like traumatizing events that happen over and over again that you're like
02:11:38
Speaker
uh being fractures into so many parts and like baltimore every time he like kills someone he fractures and has another horcrux right so i'm just thinking about like what happens to your being when you're engaging in extreme violence like this especially when it's like something that maybe you didn't actually want to do but you were like coerced into doing like how do you integrate that you know yeah i don't know how you integrate that that's yeah i
02:12:05
Speaker
I don't know.
02:12:05
Speaker
You gotta forgive yourself first.
02:12:08
Speaker
I don't know.
02:12:09
Speaker
I don't know.
02:12:10
Speaker
Rough.
02:12:11
Speaker
Rough.
02:12:13
Speaker
Anyway, so... Some rough shit.
02:12:15
Speaker
Some rough shit.
02:12:18
Speaker
You know, the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, you know, he...
02:12:26
Speaker
really was, like, all about the conviction of this dude and these other people.
02:12:30
Speaker
But he also, like, co-authored this book, Helter Skelter, which is, like, the first person account of, like, his capture and his trial.
02:12:41
Speaker
But it became, like, an international hit.
02:12:43
Speaker
It was a best-selling true crime book, you know?
02:12:46
Speaker
And there was a spinoff made for a TV movie two years later, and it set, like, records for the ratings.
02:12:54
Speaker
So, like...
02:12:56
Speaker
I don't know.
02:12:57
Speaker
I just feel like Charles really is getting everything that he wants.
02:13:01
Speaker
Yeah.
02:13:02
Speaker
I mean, there's a movie also called, like, Charlie Says that came out.
02:13:06
Speaker
Like...
02:13:07
Speaker
four years ago.
02:13:08
Speaker
That's, like, yeah, from the perspective of the women, but it's, like, fictionalized.
02:13:13
Speaker
It's on Netflix.
02:13:14
Speaker
It doesn't have that great readings, but, yeah.
02:13:18
Speaker
There's so many movies.
02:13:19
Speaker
There's also that movie, that Hollywood movie.
02:13:21
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
02:13:23
Speaker
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
02:13:24
Speaker
Yeah, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
02:13:27
Speaker
It's a Tarantino film, maybe?
02:13:28
Speaker
Yeah, it is.
02:13:29
Speaker
And Brad Pitt.
02:13:30
Speaker
Yeah.
02:13:30
Speaker
And then people were, like, saying that it was a, like...
02:13:35
Speaker
watered down version of what happened like boots riley was like you really didn't show how this group was actually a bunch of white supremacists classic twin tarantino um and that's fucked up boots riley did uh sorry to bother you yeah well i can't expect anything more from tarantino that's true side note i was an extra in that movie oh yeah i don't think i've seen it really sorry to bother you mm-hmm
02:14:00
Speaker
Sorry to bother you.
02:14:02
Speaker
It's like, it's got magical realism.
02:14:04
Speaker
You like that shit?
02:14:04
Speaker
Oh!
02:14:05
Speaker
It's a little like, it's like an absurdist film.
02:14:07
Speaker
I didn't know that you were in it.
02:14:10
Speaker
It's very brief.
02:14:12
Speaker
Dancing in a bar.
02:14:13
Speaker
Okay, I'll watch it again.
02:14:14
Speaker
Okay.
02:14:16
Speaker
Anyways.
02:14:16
Speaker
Anyway, so a little bit about where these people are now.
02:14:21
Speaker
So Susan Atkins died in 2009.
02:14:23
Speaker
She was imprisoned until her
02:14:25
Speaker
Death from a brain cancer at the age of 61.
02:14:29
Speaker
And at the time, she was California's longest serving female inmate.
02:14:32
Speaker
She had been denied parole 14 times.
02:14:35
Speaker
And her request for compassionate release was also denied.
02:14:38
Speaker
Patty Kranwinkle, who was born in 1947, was imprisoned in 1971.
02:14:40
Speaker
And she's still incarcerated as far as this goes.
02:14:47
Speaker
I don't know what it was written, but it was relatively recent.
02:14:50
Speaker
Following the death of Susan Atkins, Krenwinkel is now the longest incarcerated female inmate in the California penal system.
02:14:59
Speaker
She was also denied parole 14 times, most recently in 2017.
02:15:04
Speaker
And after her, at her 15th parole hearing, actually this year, oh, I guess this is like a real... Yeah.
02:15:10
Speaker
There's a lot of articles I read.
02:15:11
Speaker
Yeah.
02:15:13
Speaker
This June, Crenwinkel was approved by the parole board.
02:15:16
Speaker
Oh, shit.
02:15:17
Speaker
So she's awaiting her final review.
02:15:18
Speaker
Okay.
02:15:19
Speaker
So she could get released.
02:15:21
Speaker
I guess so.
02:15:21
Speaker
And then Leslie Van Hooten...
02:15:23
Speaker
born in 1949 upon her conviction and death sentence in 1971 at the age of 21.
02:15:30
Speaker
She became, she became the youngest woman ever to be put on death row as well as the youngest member of the Manson family convicted of murder, murder.
02:15:38
Speaker
And then, you know, her original conviction and death sentence was overturned on appeal and,
02:15:43
Speaker
She later retried and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
02:15:48
Speaker
So she's still incarcerated.
02:15:50
Speaker
She's been denied parole 23 times, most recently in 2021.
02:15:55
Speaker
And at her most recent parole hearings, she was approved for parole by the board.
02:16:00
Speaker
But in each case, the board's decision was overturned by HB.
02:16:02
Speaker
California's governor.
02:16:03
Speaker
First Jerry Brown, now Gavin Newsom.
02:16:06
Speaker
And then Gavin's like, no.
02:16:08
Speaker
In 2020, she was hospitalized with COVID, actually.
02:16:11
Speaker
Oh, shit.
02:16:12
Speaker
And then Tex, who was born in 1945, he's still incarcerated.
02:16:17
Speaker
He's the one who's like,
02:16:19
Speaker
Yeah.
02:16:19
Speaker
Yeah.
02:16:20
Speaker
And he's been denied parole 17 times, most recently in 2021.
02:16:24
Speaker
And he's become a born-again Christian.
02:16:26
Speaker
Classic.
02:16:27
Speaker
Yeah.
02:16:27
Speaker
Catherine Gillies, who is the reason that they had access to Death Valley, was also found to be present during a suspicious death in 1969 that people don't really talk about.
02:16:38
Speaker
There was, like, a suicide that was claimed a suicide by a Russian roulette.
02:16:44
Speaker
This dude, John Zero Hot.
02:16:46
Speaker
Like, apparently, she...
02:16:49
Speaker
Like these two people were in bed, Zero and this woman Madeline.
02:16:54
Speaker
And then he picked up a.22 caliber revolver and said, oh, look a gun.
02:16:58
Speaker
It has one bullet in it.
02:16:59
Speaker
And then he spun the cylinder and then placed the muzzle against his head and shot himself.
02:17:03
Speaker
Oh, shit.
02:17:04
Speaker
Yeah.
02:17:04
Speaker
So apparently she was there for that.
02:17:06
Speaker
And then after the family kind of disintegrated, she joined a motorcycle gang.
02:17:10
Speaker
She got married to a man named David Coyote Barton.
02:17:14
Speaker
And the couple had four children before divorcing.
02:17:17
Speaker
She's said to have never completely denounced the family.
02:17:19
Speaker
And to this day, Catherine remains upset that she was not chosen to join in on the two nights of murder.
02:17:24
Speaker
And she believes the 1969 events were justified.
02:17:27
Speaker
She died of cancer in 2018 in Cave Junction, Oregon.
02:17:31
Speaker
Yes.
02:17:33
Speaker
So clearly, like, I don't know.
02:17:34
Speaker
The shit lives on.
02:17:35
Speaker
Yeah.
02:17:36
Speaker
Charles Manson died in 2017, which is relatively recent.
02:17:39
Speaker
Yeah.
02:17:41
Speaker
He was imprisoned until he had cardiac arrest from respiratory failure and colon cancer.
02:17:47
Speaker
He had just turned 83 and had spent all but 13 years of his life in some type of supervised setting.
02:17:54
Speaker
And then while he was in prison, he was denied parole 12 times.
02:17:57
Speaker
People were really trying.
02:17:59
Speaker
And then after 1997, he refused to attend any of his parole hearings.
02:18:02
Speaker
He was like, I give up.
02:18:03
Speaker
He's like, I like being in prison.
02:18:05
Speaker
He said that that's his home.
02:18:06
Speaker
Yeah.
02:18:07
Speaker
Yeah.
02:18:08
Speaker
Anyway, that's what's going on with the people.
02:18:10
Speaker
Dang.
02:18:11
Speaker
Dang.
02:18:11
Speaker
What's its relevance today, Akshi?
Manson's Methods and Modern Parallels
02:18:13
Speaker
I mean, we have talked about its relevance today slightly already, but I'm sure people are noticing some, or maybe not, maybe some people are noticing some similarities with spirituality, white supremacy, conspiracy theory.
02:18:32
Speaker
Is it ringing any bells for you?
02:18:34
Speaker
Maybe.
02:18:35
Speaker
So this article was written relatively recently about the emergence of conspirituality defined by the authors Ward and Boas as a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternate worldviews.
02:18:55
Speaker
It has international celebrities, bestsellers, radio and TV stations.
02:18:58
Speaker
It offers a broad broad
02:19:00
Speaker
politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions.
02:19:04
Speaker
First, traditional to conspiracy theory, and the second rooted in New Age spirituality.
02:19:10
Speaker
One, a secret group covertly controls or is trying to control the political and social order.
02:19:15
Speaker
We see the links.
02:19:16
Speaker
And two, humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness.
02:19:20
Speaker
Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of totalitarian new world order is to act in accordance with an awakened new paradigm worldview.
02:19:30
Speaker
And it pretty much is like targeting people who feel very lost and are in need of guidance, who need a belief system to guide their actions.
02:19:38
Speaker
Sure.
02:19:40
Speaker
I mean, I think, honestly, with any kind of religious belief, like, regardless of what it is, like, New Age spiritualism is, like, honestly also just, like, fucking cultural appropriation of, like, tons of different mishmashed things together.
02:19:57
Speaker
And it has always been like that, even in the, like, 60s and 70s when people were, like,
02:20:03
Speaker
engaging with it.
02:20:04
Speaker
It was even at that point of time, very mishmash cultural appropriation.
02:20:09
Speaker
And at that point of time, I read this article that was like also about like New Age spiritualism and far right conspiracy.
02:20:15
Speaker
They were talking about how
02:20:17
Speaker
In the 60s and 70s, it was used politically to bolster leftist ideologies.
02:20:25
Speaker
But we can see that Charles Manson just used it for his own kind of racist delusions, fantasies, delusions of power to engage in violence.
02:20:38
Speaker
But I think people oftentimes use religious beliefs and religious values to...
02:20:44
Speaker
justify violent behavior regardless of what the religion is it's been done across all sorts of religions and here we see it being done through using new age spiritualism and like think about that q anon quote unquote shaman who was present at the january 6 like interruption yes uh what was his name
02:21:09
Speaker
Jake Angely or Jacob Chonsley.
02:21:13
Speaker
He like had all these like Nordic tattoos.
02:21:15
Speaker
And he also was just like appropriating all of these different like kinds of indigenous and like Eastern traditions.
02:21:23
Speaker
And apparently he said that he had a personal commitment to ahimsa, which is the principle of nonviolence.
02:21:29
Speaker
Okay.
02:21:30
Speaker
And he's like a QAnon like follower and he represents like a growing pipeline between new age male spirituality.
02:21:42
Speaker
new masculinity movements and QAnon.
02:21:44
Speaker
So there's just like a lot of different things happening now, which is connecting spiritualism, mysticism, white supremacy, far-right conspiracy, all of these like things entangled together and people are making connections between them in pretty loose ways to just justify their acts of violence.
02:22:04
Speaker
And they are using like the fact that we're in pretty...
02:22:11
Speaker
uncertain times because of COVID, because of like systems kind of like falling apart, political structures falling apart because of like politicians, AKA Donald Trump, like really increasing fear by like, you know, just spewing lies and fear mongering.
02:22:30
Speaker
And this is like, and the internet as well to just kind of like push these like really radical, violent beliefs forward.
02:22:40
Speaker
And we can link this back to Charles Manson, who is often forgotten as a racist.
02:22:46
Speaker
Yeah.
02:22:48
Speaker
Like we were talking about before, we don't often hear that he orchestrated these murders based on the delusion that, like, Black people were going to take over the world, and therefore he had to incite a race war in, you know...
02:23:05
Speaker
To stop that.
02:23:06
Speaker
And this delusion is not different from politics today where that is what Donald Trump is fear-mongering.
02:23:12
Speaker
Yes.
02:23:13
Speaker
That's what all of these Fox News people are pushing with Great Replacement Theory.
02:23:19
Speaker
And the timing is very aligned to... Manson's social unrest of the 60s is very much parallel to social unrest of now as well.
02:23:31
Speaker
This Vice article says...
02:23:32
Speaker
Manson's insistence that social unrest in the black community was a threat to his followers' safety has echoes in the contemporary American life where race baiting can help get you elected president and the White House openly stokes white nationalism.
02:23:47
Speaker
So we can really see the parallels here.
02:23:53
Speaker
And we can see also how in the 60s, Manson really latched on to, okay, free love, peace.
02:24:04
Speaker
How can we change the world by like shifting our consciousness through LSD and sex to like push his delusions forward and engage in acts of violence to these like
02:24:17
Speaker
QAnon, far right conspiracy white supremacists who are also latching on to new age spirituality and picking and choosing parts of it to like use to push their violent actions and justify their violent actions.
02:24:32
Speaker
I mean, that's pretty much it.
02:24:33
Speaker
But you can also tie this back.
02:24:36
Speaker
to how in the previous episode Anne Hamilton Berlin did the same thing where she latched on to yoga and spirituality from South Asia and then engaged in all of these acts of abuse and violence which are completely actually detached from the origins of spirituality.
02:25:02
Speaker
I just think that any kind of religion and spirituality can be used in this way.
02:25:06
Speaker
And that's kind of just like what happens when organized religion goes bad.
02:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, there's so many connections to all of the other episodes in the series.
02:25:15
Speaker
I'm also thinking about like, you know, that book that that woman wrote about MKUltra doing child experiments.
02:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
02:25:24
Speaker
And how that quickly just kind of like,
02:25:27
Speaker
devolves into QAnon conspiracy.
02:25:29
Speaker
Yes, about reptilian people and shit.
02:25:32
Speaker
And then you also talk about, like, conspiracy beliefs and, you know, the development of, like, the different stages of conspiracy theories in the first episode of the series.
02:25:45
Speaker
And you can kind of see the connections to that as well.
02:25:49
Speaker
And then you can also see the direct connections.
02:25:51
Speaker
for Charles Manson and his group of people with MKUltra through the clinic.
02:25:56
Speaker
Yeah.
02:25:58
Speaker
And well, I mean, with that, I didn't want to end on centering Charles Manson and QAnon people and white supremacy.
Black Panther Party's Lasting Impact
02:26:08
Speaker
So I will close with the modern day impact of the Black Panther Party, because I think
02:26:16
Speaker
you know, history has a bad habit of one misrepresenting, but also time capsuling the Black Panther Party as if their legacy isn't still present today.
02:26:27
Speaker
So there's this article by Time magazine about how the Black Panther Party inspired a generation of activists.
02:26:35
Speaker
And they talk about how, like,
02:26:38
Speaker
countering police brutality was at the core of their mission and the central catalyst of their formation.
02:26:44
Speaker
And so like they've had great impact on our like current, like what we see currently with the black lives matter movement.
02:26:53
Speaker
They also have influenced the rise of mutual aid.
02:26:57
Speaker
Like while they fought against police brutality, they invested heavily in community organizing aid.
02:27:02
Speaker
Like we talked about the free breakfast program.
02:27:04
Speaker
It fed thousands of hungry kids before school.
02:27:06
Speaker
They set up health clinics, child development centers, food pantries.
02:27:09
Speaker
They handled pest control, gave away coats and shoes in the winter and started a free bus route.
02:27:14
Speaker
to prisons for people to visit their incarcerated family members or loved ones.
02:27:18
Speaker
And then we see kind of like the role of mutual aid in like COVID times, for example, where communities have really banded together to like support people around us.
02:27:30
Speaker
They're like integral in like abolitionist frameworks.
02:27:34
Speaker
And I think like a great deal of like modern abolitionist theory is informed by Black Panther's work.
02:27:40
Speaker
This article also talks about image control and says it's no accident that the image of the Black Panther Party remains so deeply embedded in the cultural consciousness.
02:27:48
Speaker
Party leaders like Huey Newton were keenly aware of the power images had in raising an organization's profile and constructing a visual mythos.
02:27:56
Speaker
Eldridge Cleaver, for instance, helped devise an imposing image of the seated humanist.
02:28:00
Speaker
Huey P. Newton that would come to define the movement for years to come.
02:28:04
Speaker
Decades later, it was even replicated in a poster for the Marvel film Black Panther.
02:28:08
Speaker
And then there's just like continued impact.
02:28:10
Speaker
They say many activists acknowledge that the Panthers were neither a monolith, no perfect.
02:28:14
Speaker
They were plagued at various points by infighting some sexism and violence.
02:28:18
Speaker
Sometimes they said things that we just cringed from.
02:28:21
Speaker
But Michael Sampson II said that what we've learned from the Panthers is much greater than the failures of what they've done.
02:28:26
Speaker
And many of their ideals continue to reverberate and gain steam.
02:28:30
Speaker
and their call for reparations has been re-energized by the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and congressional candidates who have recently made it a part of their campaigns.
02:28:38
Speaker
While the word socialism alone still rankles many Americans, just like it did when the Panthers championed it, polls have shown that the support for some form of socialism has increased over the decades.
02:28:48
Speaker
Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, in which he united disenfranchised Black, Hispanic, and white organizing groups, has inspired activists like Pulley to form alliances across demographic lines and class solidarity.
02:28:58
Speaker
They also are...
02:29:00
Speaker
deeply influential in espousing ideas of universal basic income, which is something that we see like being used in political platforms today.
02:29:09
Speaker
And the article ends with when the, when the Panthers came out, so many people wondered what they were talking about, but we can go down the demands of the 10 point program one by one.
02:29:18
Speaker
And so many people would agree with all of them.
02:29:21
Speaker
So it's just to say that fuck faces like Charles exist and, you know, he doesn't exist in a vacuum.
02:29:29
Speaker
Yeah.
02:29:30
Speaker
No.
02:29:30
Speaker
He is definitely, like, a small part of, like, who this country is.
02:29:34
Speaker
And also, like, I feel like his story is overshadowed by, like, the legacy of this kind of work that often gets misrepresented and overshadowed.
02:29:44
Speaker
Definitely.
02:29:46
Speaker
That is what I will end on.
02:29:48
Speaker
Thank you.
02:29:49
Speaker
But hope you learned a lot.
02:29:51
Speaker
Yes, hope you learned a lot.
Supporting the Podcast
02:29:53
Speaker
Thanks for still being here.
02:29:55
Speaker
Yeah.
02:29:56
Speaker
And we'll see you in the next episode.
02:29:58
Speaker
Last part of the series.
02:30:01
Speaker
We'll travel to another country.
02:30:04
Speaker
Psychedelic nightmare continues.
02:30:06
Speaker
Yes, part five.
02:30:07
Speaker
Stay tuned.
02:30:08
Speaker
All right, take care of yourselves.
02:30:10
Speaker
Bye.
02:30:11
Speaker
Bye.
02:30:13
Speaker
Thanks for listening and for supporting us.
02:30:16
Speaker
You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Unpacking the Eerie, on Twitter at Unpack the Eerie, and on our website at www.unpackingtheerie.com.
02:30:28
Speaker
Yes, and special thanks to all of you who subscribe to our Patreon.
02:30:33
Speaker
As we've mentioned before, we do all the research for this, we edit, and we don't have any sponsorships or ads.
02:30:42
Speaker
So Patreon support is super helpful in just keeping this project sustainable, keeping the Buzzsprout subscription going, paying for the website, all the stuff.
02:30:52
Speaker
So thank you so much.
02:30:54
Speaker
Sari, Liz, Clifton.
02:30:57
Speaker
Jill, Victoria, and Lindsay.
02:30:59
Speaker
Lauren, Vivian, Valerie.
02:31:01
Speaker
Micheline, Montana, Katrina.
02:31:04
Speaker
Raina, Allie, Jake.
02:31:05
Speaker
Drithi, Daphne, and Katie.
02:31:08
Speaker
Vern, Meredith, H, and Vince.
02:31:11
Speaker
To April, Aaron, and Ellen.
02:31:13
Speaker
And to Brittany, Alyssa, and Meredith R. Yay, thank you so much.
02:31:18
Speaker
Thank you.