On the night of August 8, 1969, Charles Manson stayed behind at a ranch on the western edge of Los Angeles. He told Linda Kasabian to get a change of clothes and her driver’s license and to go with "Tex" and do whatever Tex told her. As the car began to move he called it to a halt, leaned in at the window and said, "You girls know what I mean, something witchy." Then he let it go. By the account Kasabian gave from the witness stand, which the jury believed and an appeals court accepted, he was not in the car, and within a few hours five people were dead.
Nine first-degree murder convictions followed, and not one proven fatal blow was assigned to him. That is the legal puzzle at the center of these cases. Some killers lead; others only follow. When a man at the center of a group is accused of directing murders that other hands carried out, courts have to decide how much of the guilt travels up the chain and how much stays with the people who did the deed. The cases below give different answers. A California jury convicted the leader of every death. A Mexican prosecutor never got the chance, because the man named as leader was dead within weeks of his group’s exposure. In Australia, South Australia and Japan, the courts held the leader at least as responsible as the followers, in Japan while also holding that a woman who acted under his domination deserved a lesser punishment. In Ukraine and Colorado, the question was who led a small band of young men and whether that mattered. In Chicago, a man who said he took orders from his employer went to death row, while the employer was never convicted of murder at all.
Manson was convicted of the murders of Gary Hinman; Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant; Jay Sebring; Wojciech Frykowski; Abigail Folger; Steven Parent, 18; Leno LaBianca, 44; Rosemary LaBianca, 38; and Donald "Shorty" Shea. The killings took place in Los Angeles County between July and late August 1969. He was arrested on October 12, 1969, in Inyo County, California, and tried twice: seven murder counts and one of conspiracy at the Tate-LaBianca trial, which ended in January 1971, and two murder counts and conspiracy at the Hinman-Shea trial that November.
He is filed in popular memory with serial killers, but the term fits him badly. The criminologist Scott Bonn, writing in Psychology Today in 2014, noted that serial murder is defined by a cooling-off period between killings, and that the Tate and LaBianca murders, on consecutive nights, had none. Bonn called the two nights a spree, described the followers as "mission killers" sent out to carry out Manson’s vision, and concluded that "Manson murdered seven people by proxy." The California Court of Appeal reached the same place by a legal route. If the jury believed Manson was a conspirator, it wrote in 1976, he was "culpable for all of the homicides regardless of who held the knife."
The proof was built almost entirely from his own followers. The commune around him, which called itself the Family, numbered about twenty at its core, most of them young women, and Manson decided where they slept, what they wore and when they moved. Witnesses testified that membership meant giving him everything and never disobeying; Kasabian said the others told her, "We never question Charlie." He preached a coming race war, which he called Helter Skelter after a Beatles song, and Dianne Lake testified that he told the group "we had to be willing to kill pigs to help the black people start revolution." Another witness, Paul Watkins, described a plan for murders in wealthy districts of Los Angeles meant to make white people blame Black people and start the war. The Court of Appeal counted Manson’s familiarity with two of the victims' addresses among the evidence against him.
Manson did not fit the picture of the leader who never touched anyone. At the second trial, witnesses described his own admissions about the Hinman and Shea killings, and two of them described his own part in the Hinman killing.
He was sentenced to death in 1971. After the California Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in People v. Anderson struck down the state’s death penalty, the sentence was modified to life on February 2, 1977. Parole was denied twelve times. He died in a Kern County hospital on November 19, 2017, at 83.
### Bruce Davis
Bruce Davis, one of the men who joined the group, was tried separately. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him in 1972 of the first-degree murders of Hinman and Shea, with conspiracy. He was never charged in the Tate or LaBianca killings. His case sits at the other end of the chain from Manson’s: a follower convicted of murders in which he took part, tried apart from the man who set the group in motion.
Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was 26 when he died in Mexico City on May 6, 1989, shot by one of his own followers as police closed in. A month earlier, Mexican federal police had uncovered a string of deaths on a ranch about 20 miles west of Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. Among the dead was Mark Kilroy, a 21-year-old University of Texas student on spring break. The men arrested said they belonged to a group of marijuana smugglers who believed human sacrifice gave them magical protection from police and bullets, and they named Constanzo, whom they called "El Padrino," the Godfather, as their leader.
He was never charged in court. Everything said about his part in the killings rests on the statements of arrested followers, the findings of Mexican and Texas police, and the reporting of the time. The legal word for it is attributed.
Constanzo was born in Miami on November 1, 1962, the son of a Cuban immigrant mother, and grew up partly in Puerto Rico. Infobae and Vanguardia report that his mother raised him in Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Cuban religion that uses animal sacrifice. Texas Monthly, in a June 1989 account by Gary Cartwright, wrote that she sent him at about 18 to study with an older practitioner. By the mid-1980s he was in Mexico City, gathering close followers and clients who came to include drug traffickers. In Matamoros he became spiritual adviser to the Hernandez family, who had run marijuana out of the city since the early 1980s. Texas Monthly reported that he offered protection in exchange for a share of the profits, styled himself the group’s high priest, and named Elio Hernandez Rivera and a gunman, Alvaro de Leon Valdez, his "executioner priests." The magazine thought Constanzo probably the first to propose human sacrifice, while noting that others in the group might have.
The case surfaced by chance. On April 9, 1989, according to Texas Monthly, a member of the group drove through a federal police checkpoint, and the officers who followed him reached the ranch. Associated Press reported in 1994 that the driver believed the group’s rituals had made him invisible. The next day a caretaker recognized a photograph of Kilroy. Elio Hernandez Rivera, 22, told a news conference, "We killed them for protection." Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox said the group had about ten members. Police said the sacrifices had gone on for about nine months. The dead included a 14-year-old boy, a 16-year-old, a Matamoros police officer, a federal police volunteer and rivals in the drug trade. By June 1989 Mexican prosecutors had filed charges in the deaths of 15 people.
Serafin Hernandez Garcia told police that Constanzo killed Kilroy himself, according to the Associated Press. Constanzo was never tried for it. Sara Maria Aldrete Villarreal, an honors student at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville whom police called the group’s "high priestess," was convicted in Mexico, and in May 1994 the court sentenced her to 62 years; Elio Hernandez Rivera, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, David Serna Valdez and Sergio Martinez Salinas received 67 years each. Aldrete has always denied taking part in the killings. She says she joined one ceremony as part of her anthropology studies, and in 2026 told Grupo Animal that she had never been to the ranch. Constanzo’s own death came when de Leon, who said Constanzo had ordered it, shot him; de Leon was charged with the deaths of Constanzo and of Martin Quintana Rodriguez, another follower. Aldrete has since said Constanzo "could not be left alive," and a 2023 report says the circumstances are still disputed.
The press label for the group, "narcosatanicos," was widely used in Mexican media. Infobae describes it as an invention of the 1980s press, and the group’s members did not call themselves Satanists.
Archibald Beattie McCafferty was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder by the Supreme Court of New South Wales on April 26, 1974. ABC News reported that the gang he led killed three people in 1973, and that the death of his young son had started voices in his head telling him to "kill seven." The Scotsman later described his convictions as the murder of three people. ABC News also reported that he was branded "Australia’s Charles Manson" because he led a group of young, drug-using killers. The label is the press’s. The names of the three victims, where they died and what became of the other members of the group in court have not been reported.
McCafferty was born on December 15, 1949, and emigrated to Australia with his family as a child. As a teenager he was twice sent to the Institution for Boys at Tamworth, in northern New South Wales; ABC News, working from a freedom of information release, recorded his stays as April to September 1966 and September 1967 to March 1968. The same investigation linked the institution to more than 35 violent deaths involving former inmates but presented the connection as drawn from inmate lists and the men’s own accounts, not as proof that the institution caused the later crimes.
While serving his sentence he was convicted of the manslaughter of a fellow prisoner, and 14 years were added in 1981. His legal fight came afterward. A deportation order was made against him on April 10, 1991, and on October 15, 1991 the Supreme Court fixed a minimum term, counted from August 30, 1973, making him eligible for parole consideration from August 29, 1993. Immigration officials took the view that letting a prisoner under a deportation order out of jail for even one day would oblige them to arrest and deport him, and he was refused day leave. In the Federal Court of Australia, Justice Davies held on December 21, 1995 that day leave was not the release that triggered immigration custody, set aside the direction to hold him and ordered the minister to pay his costs. The Scotsman reported that he served 25 years and was returned to Scotland in 1998. In Edinburgh, as James Lok, aged 58, he pleaded guilty to reset of a stolen car and was sentenced to 200 hours of community service.
John Justin Bunting led a small group of men in Adelaide’s northern suburbs who killed at least 11 people between August 1992 and May 1999. A jury in the Supreme Court of South Australia convicted him of 11 murders on September 8, 2003. He had been charged with 12; the jury could not agree on the death of Suzanne Allen, and prosecutors did not seek a retrial. On October 29, 2003, Justice Brian Martin sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count and declined to set a non-parole period. His appeal, which he argued himself, was dismissed on May 24, 2005.
The case is named for a town that had almost nothing to do with it. The deaths came to light in May 1999 at Snowtown, a farming town about 140 kilometres north of Adelaide, but the killings took place mostly in suburbs north of the city and at Murray Bridge. Nearly all the victims were relatives, friends, partners or neighbors of the men who killed them, and South Australia Police described the group as one that "preyed on itself."
The law spread the guilt in layers. Robert Joe Wagner was convicted of 10 murders, three on guilty pleas and seven by jury verdict. James Spyridon Vlassakis, who was 18 when he took part in his first killing, pleaded guilty in 2001 to four murders and became the Crown’s main witness. Sentencing him in 2002 to life with a 26-year non-parole period, Justice Kevin Duggan said he had been drawn in "through someone who had considerable influence" over him, that he was "besotted" by Bunting and had not instigated any of the murders. Bunting was his stepfather. Mark Ray Haydon, whose wife was among the dead, was convicted of seven counts of assisting the offenders and of no murder. By October 2026, Vlassakis had been released on parole.
Bunting’s stated aim was to rid the suburbs of child abusers. An ABC News account in 2024 reported that the real motives included profit from the victims' property and welfare payments, and that few of the victims fit the description he gave. The group collected about $95,000 in benefits after the deaths, AAP reported. The prosecutor, Wendy Abraham, told the jury that Bunting spoke of people who had to "go to the clinic," meaning, she said, that they had a disease and had to be "made good." In a flow chart of names that he called the "spider wall," he sorted people he considered "dirty." The Orwell-inspired confession note, a passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four copied in Bunting’s handwriting, was read to a court in 2001.
Futoshi Matsunaga, a former door-to-door futon salesman living in hiding in Kitakyushu, Japan, was sentenced to death on September 28, 2005, by the Fukuoka District Court, Kokura Branch. The court held that between about February 1996 and June 1998 seven people died while under his control: a real estate agent of 34, and six members of the family of his common-law wife, Junko Ogata. It convicted him of six murders and one injury resulting in death, together with confinement causing injury, fraud and robbery. Two of the victims were children; the convictions for their deaths were murder, with other charges.
The leader took little part in the hands-on acts. In four of the deaths the court held that other captives, relatives among them, carried out the acts under his and Ogata’s direction. The reporter Kazuteru Ono, who has covered the case since 2002, describes a household run on a strict ranking in which those lower down were punished by those above. In a fifth death, the court held that the defendants refused medical treatment to a man they had confined, intending that he die. For Ogata’s father the court held injury resulting in death, not murder, because intent to kill was not shown. No bodies were ever recovered.
The case came to light in March 2002 only because a 17-year-old girl who had lived with the couple since early childhood escaped and went to the police with her grandfather. Matsunaga was arrested in Kitakyushu on March 7, 2002, on the confinement of the girl, and rearrested for murder from September 18, 2002. He has always denied the killings. The Fukuoka High Court upheld the sentence on September 26, 2007, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal on December 12, 2011. Ogata, who the courts held had acted under his domination, was sentenced to death at first; her sentence was reduced to life imprisonment on appeal. He had not been executed as of August 2026.
Igor Suprunyuk was 19 when he and two former classmates were arrested in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, in July 2007. Within a day, police said the young men had admitted to 19 killings in barely a month. At trial the count had risen to 21. On February 11, 2009, the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Court of Appeal convicted Suprunyuk of 21 murders, 18 jointly with Viktor Sayenko and three that it attributed to him alone, together with robbery and cruelty to animals, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Sayenko was convicted of 18 murders and also received life. The third man, Oleksandr Hanzha, was convicted only of robbery and sentenced to nine years. The Supreme Court of Ukraine upheld the life terms on November 24, 2009.
Who led the group became a courtroom argument. Gazeta.ua’s 2021 account describes Suprunyuk as the leader, and Sayenko’s lawyer said in 2008 that Suprunyuk forced Sayenko to take part. The second claim was a defense argument; it did not change the outcome. The court held that Suprunyuk was responsible for all 21 deaths, and for three in which Sayenko had no part. Police and prosecutors said the victims had nothing in common: young and old, men and women, teenagers, people with jobs and without. Prosecutors said one victim was 13. Reports of the total vary, from 21 in the court’s finding to 22 and 23 in some press accounts.
Prosecutors first described the motive as greed. The court held that the motive was a drive for self-assertion and the overcoming of fear. The young men’s families said the evidence was fabricated, and reports that their parents held official posts and that family influence had protected them earlier, which Gazeta.ua could not confirm in 2007, have never been officially confirmed. Radio Svoboda reported on the day of the verdict that prosecutors had opened three criminal cases against police officers for negligence in the investigation.
Adre Baroz, known as "Psycho," pleaded guilty in February 2024 to murdering five people in Colorado’s San Luis Valley between August and November 2020. He was 29. He had changed his plea after withdrawing an earlier plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and he admitted 13 counts in all, five of first-degree murder, with tampering with a deceased human body, assaults and second-degree kidnapping. The victims were Selena Esquibel, 19, of Alamosa; Xavier Zeven Garcia, of Saguache County; Myron Robert Martinez, of Del Norte; Shayla Jenna Hammel, Martinez’s girlfriend; and Korina Arroyo, of Monte Vista, who had been due to testify against him at a trial.
CBS Colorado called him a small-town gang leader who used the name "Psycho," assisted by his brother and three loyal gang members, and reported that prosecutors alleged his brother Julius Baroz killed one of the victims at his direction. The case began in Conejos County on November 10, 2020, with a search connected to stolen vehicles and equipment. He was arrested on November 19, 2020, in Gallup, New Mexico. District Judge Michael Gonzales sentenced him in Alamosa to five consecutive life terms, with further sentences on the other counts, in May 2024. On May 10, 2024, a Pueblo County court gave him the maximum 12 years for assaults on two detention deputies and another inmate in jail, to run on top of the life terms.
Edward Spreitzer was a young man in Chicago, working for Robin Gecht, when in November 1982 he told detectives and a Cook County prosecutor that he had helped abduct and kill women over the previous year and a half. He named Gecht as the man who led those outings and Andrew Kokoraleis as a partner. Over three statements he described crimes beginning with the May 1981 murder of Linda Sutton, 26, and ending with the October 1982 killing of Rafael Tirado.
Newspapers and television came to call the four men linked in these cases, Spreitzer, Gecht and the brothers Andrew and Thomas Kokoraleis, the "Ripper Crew." Police and press attributed as many as 18 to 20 deaths of women to the group, and some outlets have described it as a satanic gang. Those totals are attributions only. No court held any of the four men responsible for that many deaths, and the ritual claims came from statements that two of the men later disavowed. The Illinois Supreme Court noted in 1988 that prosecutors at Spreitzer’s sentencing hearing had agreed not to raise devil worship, and held a question on the subject to be misconduct.
What the courts did find was narrower. In April 1984 Spreitzer pleaded guilty in Cook County to the murders of Shui Mak, Rose Beck Davis, Sandra Delaware and Rafael Tirado. On March 4, 1986, a DuPage County judge convicted him of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Linda Sutton, and a jury sentenced him to death. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence in 1988 and reduced the 60-year kidnapping term to 30. Federal appeals judges later summarized his record as five murder convictions and admitted involvement in four other killings, among them the death of Lorraine Borowski, 21, of Elmhurst, for which Andrew Kokoraleis was convicted. By Spreitzer’s own account, he was not the group’s leader: Gecht was. Robin Gecht was never convicted of murder.
Spreitzer’s mitigation evidence at sentencing described a shy, slow child who repeated kindergarten; a psychologist put his IQ at 76. Federal courts took his case through habeas review, granted relief on the sentence in 1996, reversed in 1997 and dismissed the petition in 2000. Governor George Ryan commuted every Illinois death sentence in January 2003, and Spreitzer has been serving a life term since. Thomas Kokoraleis was released from prison in March 2019.
Leadership never settled the question of guilt in the same way twice. In California it was enough that the people holding the weapons did what the man at the center wanted. In Japan the court looked past the hands that did the work to the person who ordered them to do it, and in Australia a gang leader’s life sentence was one thing and his fight over deportation another. Where the leader was dead or never convicted, as with Constanzo and Gecht, the legal record belongs to the followers, and the careful phrases, attributed, named by followers, reported, are the only honest ones.
The loose labels attached to these groups, cult, gang, family, Ripper Crew, narcosatanicos, were mostly the press’s. What the courts supplied was narrower and more exact: convictions for nine murders, eleven, twenty-one, five and six, and a range of sentences from death to life without parole.
• March 21, 1967: Manson released from Terminal Island and goes to San Francisco, where he begins gathering followers.
• July and August 1969: Killings in Los Angeles County for which Manson is later convicted; he is arrested October 12.
• 1971: Manson sentenced to death after two trials (January and November).
• 1972: California Supreme Court decides People v. Anderson; Davis convicted in March.
• 1973: McCafferty’s group kills three people in New South Wales.
• April 26, 1974: McCafferty sentenced to life for murder.
• February 2, 1977: Manson’s death sentence modified to life.
• May 1981 to October 1982: Killings attributed to Spreitzer and his associates in the Chicago area.
• November 1982: Spreitzer’s statements to Chicago detectives.
• March 23, 1988: Illinois Supreme Court affirms Spreitzer’s death sentence.
• April 1989: Deaths near Matamoros come to light; followers name Constanzo.
• May 6, 1989: Constanzo dies in Mexico City.
• August 1992 to May 1999: Bunting’s group kills in South Australia.
• May 1994: Constanzo’s followers sentenced in Mexico to 62 and 67 years.
• December 21, 1995: Federal Court of Australia rules for McCafferty.
• January 2003: Governor Ryan commutes Spreitzer’s death sentence.
• September 8, 2003: Bunting convicted of 11 murders; life without non-parole period set October 29.
• May 24, 2005: Bunting’s appeal dismissed.
• September 28, 2005: Matsunaga sentenced to death.
• July 2007: Suprunyuk and two classmates arrested in Dnipropetrovsk.
• February 11, 2009: Suprunyuk sentenced to life.
• December 12, 2011: Japan’s Supreme Court rejects Matsunaga’s appeal.
• November 19, 2017: Manson dies in prison.
• November 19, 2020: Baroz arrested in Gallup, New Mexico.
• February 2024: Baroz pleads guilty to five murders; sentenced to five life terms on May 3.