Charlie Manson, the lunatic they followed (Part 2)

In the previous article, I described the background of Manson and his followers and explained just how crazy they were. In this article, I will tell you about the murders they committed.

The murder of Gary Hinman

On July 25, 1969, on orders from Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Bobby Beausoleil, and Mary Brunner went to the home of Gary Hinman. Why they went there is a matter of contention. Some reports say they went there to confront Hinman for a bad batch of LSD they had received from him. Other reports say that Charles Manson had heard that Hinman had inherited a large sum of money and they wanted to rob him. In any event, Hinman was beaten by Beausoleil and when Hinman didn't give in to their demands, Manson wielded a sword and cut off Hinman's ear and slashed his face. Atkins and Brunner were order to stay behind and tend to Hinman’s wounds. After two days and a phone call from Manson, Beausoleil killed Hinman. Atkins would later plead guilty to being involved in this murder. Beausoleil was arrested on August 7, 1969 while asleep in the victim's vehicle still wearing the bloody clothes from the murder almost 2 weeks earlier.

The Murder or of Donald “Shorty” Shea                    

Donald "Shorty" Shea was born on September 18, 1933 (a month before I was born) and prior to his death, he was a Hollywood stuntman and actor. Donald Shea was a very tall man, standing at almost 6 feet 5 inches. He worked as a bouncer and a ranch hand at Spahn Ranch; which had at times been used as old Hollywood movie set and later had become a horse riding stables. Shea reportedly got along with the other ranch employees. When the Manson family moved into Spahn Ranch, Shea initially co-existed with them peacefully, but in time, Charles Manson began to look down on Shorty because he had married a black woman by the name of Magdalena. Eventually Shorty planned to help George Spahn evict the Family from the Spahn Ranch when the Manson family’s brushes with the law grew out of control.

Manson had decided to have Shea killed because they believed he had reported them to the police resulting in a raid on the ranch on August 16 where the family had been all taken into custody on suspicion of car theft.                   

The decision to kill Shea came from Manson because he considered Shorty to be a snitch. Manson told Davis, Tex Watson and Steve Grogan to ask for a ride to a nearby car parts yard on the ranch. According to Davis, he sat in the back seat with Grogan, who then hit Shea with a pipe wrench and Watson stabbed him. They dragged the dying man down a hill behind the ranch and Manson stabbed and brutally tortured Shea to death by stabbing him repeatedly in his belly.  

In grand jury testimony, Family member Barbara Hoyt recounted hearing the screams which terrified her so much that she left after deciding to escape the family since she was frightened that she might be next.

She testified, “It was about 10:00 pm when I heard a long, loud, blood curdling scream. It went quiet for a minute or so and the screams came again and again, it seemed to go on forever, I have no doubt that Shorty was being murdered at that time.”

When Shea was dead, Grogan buried him, and the rumor was that Shea had been dismembered into nine pieces. Shea was 35 years old when he was murdered                                             

On March 23, 1969, Manson, uninvited, entered 10050 Cielo Drive, which he had known as Melcher's residence. (Manson only casually knew him) It turned out that it was Rudi Altobelli's property. Melcher was no longer the tenant. As of that February of that year, the tenants were Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.

Sharon Marie Tate (January 24, 1943 was an American actress and sex symbol. During the 1960s she played small television roles before appearing in several motion pictures. She also appeared regularly in fashion magazines as a model and cover girl. After receiving positive reviews for her comedic and dramatic performances, Tate was hailed as one of Hollywood's most promising newcomers. She made her film debut in the occult-themed Eye of the Devil in 1966. Tate also starred as Jennifer North in the cult classic, Valley of the Dolls in 1967 which earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination.

Tate married film director and her co-star in The Fearless Vampire Killers Roman Polanski in 1968 in London. Tate was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with the couple's soon-to-be-born son.

Manson was met by Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and Tate's friend. Hatami was there to photograph Tate in advance of her departure for Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted.

When Manson told Hatami he was looking for someone whose name Hatami did not recognize, Hatami informed him the place was the Polanski residence. Hatami advised him to try ‘the back alley’, by which he meant the path to the guest house, beyond the main house. He was concerned about the stranger on the property (especially since Manson was scruffy-looking). Hatami went down to the front walk, to confront Manson. Appearing behind Hatami, in the house's front door, Tate asked him who was calling. Hatami said a man was looking for someone. Hatami and Tate maintained their positions while Manson, without a word, went back to the guest house, returned a minute or two later and left the property.

That evening, Manson returned to the property and again went back to the guest house. Presuming to enter the enclosed porch, he spoke with Rudi Altobelli, who was just coming out of the shower. Manson asked for Melcher. Speaking through the inner screen door, Altobelli told Manson that Melcher had moved to Malibu. He lied that he said that he didn`t  know Melcher's new address.

When Manson tasked Watson with obtaining money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black drug dealer named Bernard ‘Lotsapoppa’ Crowe. That angered Crowe who then  responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered that threat on July 1, 1969, by shooting and wounding Crowe at his Hollywood apartment.

On the night of August 8, 1969, Manson directed Watson to take Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel to “that house where Melcher used to live and totally destroy everyone in it and be as gruesome as you can.” He told the women to do as Watson instructed them.

The occupants of the house that night in which all of them were strangers to the Manson followers, were movie actress Sharon Tate, wife of famed director Roman Polanski who was in London working on a movie project, Tate’s friend and former lover Jay Sebring who was a noted hairstylist, Polanski's friend and aspiring screenwriter, Wojciech Frykowski and Frykowski's lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.

When the murder team arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who had been to the house on at least one other occasion, climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into August 9, 1969. Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, the group parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm; they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Watson ordered the women to lie in the bushes. He then stepped out and ordered the approaching driver, 18-year-old student and hi-fi enthusiast Steven Parent, to halt. As Watson leveled a 22-caliber revolver at Parent, the frightened youth begged Watson not to hurt him, claiming that he wouldn't say anything. Watson first slashed at Parent with a knife, giving him a defensive slash wound on the palm of his hand (severing tendons and tearing the boy's watch off his wrist), then Watson shot him four times in the chest and abdomen. He then ordered the women to help push the car further up the driveway. After traversing the front lawn and having Kasabian search for an open window of the main house, Watson cut the screen of a window. Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate; she walked over to Steven Parent's Rambler and waited.^–He then removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.

As Watson whispered to Atkins, Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; Watson kicked him in the head. When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, Watson replied, "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business.”

On Watson's direction, Atkins found the three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel’s help, brought them to the living room. Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with rope he'd brought with him and slung up it over a beam just below the ceiling. Sebring's protest (his second) of rough treatment of the pregnant Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. Folger was then taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, out of which she gave the intruders $70. After that, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.

Frykowski’s hands had been bound with a towel however after freeing himself; Frykowski began struggling with Atkins, who then stabbed at his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him. As he fought his way towards and out the front door and onto the porch, Watson joined in the fight against him. Watson struck Frykowski over the head with the gun multiple times, then stabbed him repeatedly in his back and shot him twice. Watson broke the gun's right grip in the process. Frykowski was stabbed a total of 51 times.

Around this time, Linda Kasabian who was waiting in the car was drawn up from the driveway by (as she later said) “horrifying sounds”. She arrived outside the door. In a vain effort to halt the massacre, she told Atkins falsely that someone was coming.

Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area. Folger was pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed and finally, tackled her. She was shot by Watson while her two assailants had repeatedly stabbed her 28 times. Back in the house, Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby, and even offered herself as a hostage in an attempt to save the life of her unborn child. Her killers would have none of it. I was Watson who murdered Tate while Atkins held the naked actress down on the floor. She was stabbed 16 times. Watson later wrote that Tate cried, “Mother ... mother ...” as she and her unborn baby were being slowly stabbed to death.

Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the women to “leave a sign….something witchy.” Using the towel that had bound Frykowski's hands, Atkins wrote “pig” on the house's front door, in Tate's blood. En route home, the killers changed out of their bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.

The next night, six Family members—Leslie Van Houten, Steve "Clem" Grogan, and the four from the previous night—rode out to their next destination at Manson's instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, "to show them how to do it, After a few hours' ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them, Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive. This was the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, a dress shop co-owner. Located the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, it was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.

Watson later stated that, having gone up to the LaBianca alone, Manson returned to take him up to the house with him. After Manson pointed out a sleeping man through a window, the two of them entered through the unlocked back door. Manson roused the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint and had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Manson's instructions to cover the couple's heads with pillowcases. He bound these in place with lamp cords. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instructions that the couple be killed.

Before leaving Spahn Ranch, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night's weapons. After sending the women from the kitchen with knives in their hands, to the bedroom, to which Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet. The first thrust went into the man's throat. Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew Watson there to discover Mrs. LaBianca keeping the women at bay by swinging the lamp  that had been tied to her neck with the electric chord. After subduing her with several stabs of the bayonet, he returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of 12 times with the bayonet. When he had finished, Watson carved the word WAR on the man's exposed abdomen.

Returning to the bedroom, Watson found Krenwinkel stabbing Rosemary LaBianca with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen. Heeding Manson's instruction to make sure each of the women played a part, Watson told Van Houten to stab Mrs. LaBianca also. She stabbed Mrs. LaBianca approximately 16 times in the back and the exposed buttocks. At trial, Van Houten would claim that she wasn’t absolutely sure that Rosemary LaBianca was really dead when she stabbed her. However, evidence later showed that many of Mrs. LaBianca's 41 stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted after she was dead.

Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Helter Skelter” on the refrigerator door, all in LaBianca blood. She gave Leno LaBianca 14 puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach. She also planted a steak knife in his throat.

After leaving the victim’s house, the reptilian killers slithered back to the Spahn Ranch to gloat over their horrible and inhuman deeds.

The next article is The Aftermath of the Charlie Manson murders