To understand the Manson murders, we need to understand the times in which they were committed. Often called “the man who ended the sixties”, his crimes – mostly committed by his brainwashed followers on his behalf – would come to represent a turning point in American history, and the end of America’s cultural innocence.
Charles Manson – Charlie to his devotees in what came to be known as “The Family” – would rise to prominence as an emblem of the dark side of sixties counterculture. And in Los Angeles, the police are wondering what could possibly connect a dead music teacher, a mansion full of brutally murdered Hollywood royalty, and the bloodied corpses of a couple who made it big in the grocery business, savagely butchered in their own home.īy mid-1970, all would be revealed. It feels like the world’s been spinning out of control for a good decade or so and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. The prison island of Alcatraz is being held by an armed group of American Indian Movement (AIM) members, who will end up holding the authorities at bay for the next eighteen months as a protest against the forced dispossession of First Nations peoples across America. Just a few months prior, the world watched awestruck as NASA astronauts landed on the moon (yes, of course they actually did). JFK’s been assassinated, as have Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X, and Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers has been murdered by police. Bombs are falling in Vietnam, secret wars are being fought in Cambodia and Laos, and Nixon’s in the White House.
It’s December 1969, the last gasp of the swinging sixties.