The Tate-LaBianca murders, a.k.a. the Manson Family murders, profoundly shook America’s perception of itself. They upended ideas of safety, security, and innocence, and effectively sounded the death knell of ’60s counterculture, ushering in a new decade of darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America’s seedy underbelly. The ritualistic nature of the killings set the stage for the rise of Satanic Panic, a phenomenon that never fully went away.
And Manson continues to loom large in the cultural imagination, even 50 years after the murders and two years after his death in 2017. Media depictions of him proliferate in pop culture. Quentin Tarantino even revisits the topic of the murders in his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
But what you may not know is that Manson’s followers had killed both before and after their most famous murders. The cultural narrative around the Tate-LaBianca murders is that they happened out of nowhere — that Manson’s followers simply erupted into unthinkable violence on command, after being thoroughly brainwashed. But in fact, Manson was a career criminal by the time he moved to California, and the Tate-LaBianca murders were part of a long period of escalating criminality from him and his followers. Their other major crimes included multiple murders, torture, hostage-taking, and the attempted assassination of a US president.
Another longstanding public perception about the Manson Family murders is that they were a kind of psychic attack on America itself — an explosive release of tension, an inevitable result of the freewheeling, drug-happy counterculture of the ’60s. In countless depictions of the murders over the 50 years since they took place, they have largely been framed as a drug-fueled, randomized frenzy. But as we learned from a deep dive into the Mansons gleaned from books, trial transcripts, and archival media reports, the murders weren’t random at all, nor were they a reactionary backlash to normative American culture; rather, they were an outgrowth of Manson’s warped sense that he was entitled to all the power and fortune he desired.
Manson, like many psychotically predatory men whose violence has hypnotized American culture, was really just an everyday misogynist. He wasn’t a product of ’60s counterculture — he was a master manipulator of it, one who used the “free love” ethos of the time to prey on a cadre of troubled, abused young women, who continued to carry out his thirst for violence even after he was in jail.