On the evening of August 8, 1969, at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, on the western edge of Los Angeles, Charles Manson told Linda Kasabian to get a change of clothes, a knife and her driver's license, and to go with Tex and do whatever Tex told her to do. Charles Watson was at the wheel. Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel were in the back. As the car began to move, Manson called it to a stop, walked over and leaned in at the window. "You girls know what I mean," he said, "something witchy." Then he let them go.
That is Kasabian's account, given from the witness stand a year later, believed by the jury and accepted by the appeals court that reviewed the case. Manson did not get in the car. Within a few hours five people were dead at 10050 Cielo Drive. The next night he went as far as a front door in Los Feliz and no farther. He was convicted of nine first-degree murders in all, and the evidence assigned none of the fatal blows to him. What convicted him was proof, built almost entirely from the testimony of his own followers, that the people doing the killing were doing what he wanted done.
Manson is filed in popular memory with the serial killers, but he does not fit the term. The criminologist Scott Bonn, writing in Psychology Today in 2014, pointed out that the defining feature of serial murder is a cooling-off period between killings, and that the Tate and LaBianca murders, on consecutive nights, had none. Bonn classed the two nights as a spree, called the followers "mission killers" sent out to bring about Manson's vision, and concluded that "Manson murdered seven people by proxy." The law reached the same place by a different road. If the jury believed Manson was a conspirator, the California Court of Appeal wrote in 1976, he was "culpable for all of the homicides regardless of who held the knife."
Nor was he quite the man who never laid a hand on anyone. At his second trial, for the murders of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea, witnesses described his own admissions, and two of them put a sword in his hand at Hinman's house.
Charles Milles Manson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 12, 1934. His mother, Kathleen Maddox, was sixteen and unmarried. In a 1937 child-support suit in Boyd County, Kentucky, a "Colonel Scott" was named as his father; the boy never met him. His surname came from his mother's brief marriage to an older man named William Manson. In 1939 she was jailed for robbing a service station, and the boy was sent to live with a religious aunt and uncle. After her parole in 1942 he lived with her again, moving from one rented room to the next. In 1947 a court sent him to the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, and he ran away after ten months.
His record began there. His first conviction, for the burglary of a grocery store, came at twelve. According to the chronology compiled by Douglas Linder for the University of Missouri-Kansas City's Famous Trials project, a spell in juvenile detention ended in escape and two armed robberies, and in 1948 he was sent to the Indiana School for Boys at Plainfield, where he spent most of the next three years and ran away eighteen times. In 1951 he escaped again and drove west in a stolen car, robbing gas stations along the way, until he was caught in Utah. Because he had taken the car across state lines, the case was federal, and he was sent to the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C. A psychiatrist there described him as "slick" but "extremely sensitive." In 1952, after he assaulted another boy while holding a razor to his throat, he was moved to the federal reformatory at Petersburg, Virginia, and then to a more secure one at Chillicothe, Ohio. That assault is the last act of criminal violence on his record before 1969.
Small and slight, he learned to survive by reading people and working them. In January 1955 he married Rosalie Willis, a seventeen-year-old waitress from Wheeling, West Virginia. He parked cars, bused tables and stole cars, and a conviction for auto theft brought probation and then, when he broke its terms, three years in the federal prison at Terminal Island, in Los Angeles harbor. Willis divorced him in 1958 and kept their son, Charles Jr., whom he never saw again. Charles Jr. took his own life in June 1993. Paroled in 1958, Manson worked as a pimp in Southern California. In 1959 a forged Treasury check brought a ten-year suspended sentence. He married a second time, to a young woman named Leona, and fathered another son, Charles Luther Manson; that marriage ended in divorce in April 1963. In 1960 he was indicted under the Mann Act for taking women across state lines for prostitution, arrested in Laredo, Texas, and ordered to serve the suspended ten years.
Most of that sentence was spent at the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island, in Washington state. There he told officials he was a Scientologist, and prison psychiatrists recorded "deep-seated personality problems." There too, according to the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, an aging member of Ma Barker's gang, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, taught him to play guitar. He became fixed on the Beatles and spent his spare hours writing songs. When the term was done he asked to be allowed to stay in prison, the only life he knew. The request was refused.
He was released from Terminal Island on March 21, 1967, at thirty-two, and with permission went north to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the last months of its fame. There, in the words of the appellate court, he became associated with young women who were "runaways, drop outs or otherwise disassociated with conventional society." The Scribner entry describes a man who found that playing a gentle musician could get him food, a bed and companionship, and who built a loose philosophy out of borrowed pieces: the Heinlein novel Stranger in a Strange Land, scraps of Scientology and the Process Church, ecology and LSD, which he learned to use on others. On the Berkeley campus he met Mary Brunner and moved in with her. Near Venice Beach he met Lynette Fromme. He drew in Patricia Krenwinkel, then working as a secretary, who left her job and her last paycheck to follow him. In September 1967 Bruce Davis became the first man to join. He acquired a Volkswagen bus, later traded for a black school bus, filled it with companions and drove up and down the Pacific Coast.
The prison years traveled with him as part of the legend. Kasabian testified that the woman who brought her to the ranch, Catherine Share, known as Gypsy, described "a beautiful man that we had all been waiting for," who "had been in jail for quite a number of years." The judge told the jury to disregard the part about jail.
In 1968 the Beach Boys' drummer Dennis Wilson, who by one account had picked up Krenwinkel hitchhiking, fell in with the group, and for months Manson and his followers lived at Wilson's house. It was there that they met Charles Watson, a former honor student from Copeville, Texas, who had dropped out of college in California and was selling drugs. The friendship produced one tangible result for Manson's music: the Beach Boys recorded one of his songs, "Cease to Exist," on their album 20/20, rewritten and retitled "Never Learn Not to Love," which by one account angered him.
By August 1968 the group had settled at the Spahn Ranch, an old movie-western set owned by George Spahn, who was elderly and nearly blind and let them stay in exchange for work and company. The commune numbered about twenty at its core, most of them young women, some with small children. None were related. They lived in shacks, ate food from trash bins and used stolen credit cards. They called themselves the Family.
Manson decided where they slept, what they wore and when they ate, and when they moved. Witnesses testified that he separated the children from their mothers, to free them of their mothers' "ego," and kept the children out of sight because he believed the Black Panthers were watching; that he set the women to stand guard, and that membership meant giving him everything and never disobeying him. One former member, Danny DeCarlo, testified that the women told him "Charlie sees all and knows all." Kasabian was told by the others: "We never question Charlie." Watson later wrote that Atkins enjoyed what the Family called "creepy crawling," slipping into strangers' houses at night, dressed in black, to steal or simply to rearrange the furniture.
What Manson wanted from the outside world was a recording contract. Through Wilson he met the producer Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who had lived in a rented house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. Melcher passed on him. On March 23, 1969, Manson went up the drive looking for him and, by the Famous Trials chronology, was curtly told to leave. Atkins later told the grand jury that Watson chose that house on the night of the murders because it had been Melcher's and he knew the layout. Before August 1969 Manson also knew the home of a man named Harold True on Waverly Drive in Los Feliz, next door to a couple named LaBianca. The appeals court counted his familiarity with both addresses among the evidence against him.
In the evenings Manson talked and the Family listened, or he played guitar and sang. A recurring subject was love and death. "In order to love someone you must be willing to die for them and must be willing to kill them, too," he told Paul Watkins. Another was the Beatles, who he said were speaking to him, and in particular their song "Helter Skelter," from the album released in late 1968 and known as the White Album, which became his name for a coming race war. Black Americans would rise and destroy the white establishment, the "pigs," and the Family would wait it out in a hidden place beneath the desert and emerge afterward to rule.
By the summer of 1969 the prophecy had acquired a timetable and a role for the Family. Dianne Lake testified that Manson told them "we had to be willing to kill pigs to help the black people start revolution Helter Skelter." Watkins described a coming war in which Black people would "come up into the Bel-Air and Beverly Hills District," and a plan for murders there, with words written on the walls in the victims' blood, so that white people would blame Black people and the war would begin. Barbara Hoyt heard Manson say he "would like to show the Blacks how to do it."
That was the prosecution's theory of motive, and the Court of Appeal found it supported: the resemblance between the prophecy and the crime scenes, it held, was strong circumstantial evidence. It has been argued over ever since. A narrower explanation holds that the Cielo Drive killings were staged to resemble the Hinman murder and so cast doubt on the case against Bobby Beausoleil, the Family member already in jail for it. A third is money. Ella Jo Bailey testified that Manson talked about "going out" to raise money for dune buggies so the Family could move to the desert. The Scribner entry adds a fourth: resentment of the celebrity world that had refused his music. The explanations are not mutually exclusive, and the record supports parts of each.
Gary Hinman was thirty-four, a music teacher who lived on Old Topanga Canyon Road. His cousin Charlotte Hood remembered him as a gifted pianist who had played at Carnegie Hall, held more than one college degree and drifted from job to job: "a lost artistic soul," she told People in 2017, and "a very generous soul" who befriended the wrong people. He was a Buddhist. Members of the Family had visited his house several times, and some knew him well. In July 1969, Bailey testified, his name came up at the ranch as a man who owned a house and stocks and bonds. On the night of July 25 Bruce Davis drove Beausoleil, Atkins and Mary Brunner to his door.
The fullest account came from Brunner, who described it under a grant of immunity at Beausoleil's trial. Beausoleil demanded money. Hinman said he had none. Beausoleil beat him with a pistol, and in the struggle a shot went into the kitchen cabinets; a bullet was later recovered from under the sink. Manson and Davis arrived, Manson carrying a sword. After a fight in the living room, Hinman's ear had been cut in two and a cut ran down his cheek. Manson and Davis drove away in Hinman's Fiat station wagon.
The others stayed for two days while Hinman lay hurt. When friends telephoned, Brunner said, Atkins answered in an English accent and said Hinman had gone to Colorado because one of his parents was sick. Jay Hofstadter and Richard Siegel testified that they called the house; Hofstadter said the woman who answered told him Hinman's parents had been in a car accident. Hinman's own family later pieced together that, in those days, he had telephoned his parents begging for money; his cousin came to believe the calls were made for his captors. Beausoleil made Hinman sign over the pink slips to his vehicles. On July 27 Beausoleil stabbed him in the chest. Someone wrote "Political Piggy" on the living room wall in his blood, and there was a drawing nearby that looked like an animal's paw print. His body was found at the house, 964 Old Topanga Canyon Road, on July 31.
Beausoleil's version, given in a 2018 television interview from prison, is that he had gone to recover money over a bad batch of drugs that Hinman had sold him, and that once violence began he felt he had no way out. "Gary was a friend," he said. "He didn't do anything to deserve what happened to him and I am responsible for that." Manson's own version, as Bailey recalled it, was that "Mr. Hinman asked for his prayer beads," that he had left Bobby to finish up, and that all they had got out of it was "the two vehicles and around $27." Two years later, during his own trial, he leaned over to a sheriff's sergeant at the counsel table and said: "Sure, I went to Hinman's house and got the gun and sliced his ear." Hinman deserved to die, he added, because he was selling bad dope; nothing in the trial record supports that claim. Bruce Davis, at a parole hearing decades later, said he held a gun on Hinman while Manson cut his face with the sword.
On August 6 Beausoleil was found asleep in Hinman's Fiat on Highway 101 near San Luis Obispo and arrested; after the car was impounded, a knife was found in the spare tire well. He was in custody from then on.
Two nights after Beausoleil's arrest, the car from Spahn Ranch climbed Benedict Canyon. Five people were on the property at 10050 Cielo Drive that night, and none of them had ever done anything to Charles Manson.
Sharon Tate was twenty-six and about eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. She had grown up in a military family, moving between bases in the United States and Europe, the eldest of three girls; her sisters were Debra and Patti. She won her first beauty contest as a baby and was a high school homecoming queen. While her father was stationed in California she found work in commercials, was signed by the production company Filmways and trained in acting, singing and dancing. Bit parts on television led to films, and her role as Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls (1967) brought her a Golden Globe nomination. She met the director Roman Polanski when he cast her in The Fearless Vampire Killers, and they married in January 1968. That summer of 1969 Polanski was working in Europe, and she was waiting for the baby. On the evening of August 8 she had gone out to dinner at El Coyote, a Mexican restaurant she liked, with three friends who were with her when she died.
Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was born Thomas John Kummer in Alabama and grew up in a middle-class suburb of Detroit with three siblings. After four years in the Navy he changed his name, moved to California and developed a way of cutting men's hair that helped create an industry. His clients included Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., and at Kirk Douglas's urging he designed the haircuts for Spartacus. In 1967 he founded Sebring International to sell hair products and franchise salons; the first franchise had opened in San Francisco three months before he died. He had been Tate's boyfriend before Polanski and remained one of her closest friends. By the accounts later pieced together from the evidence, he was killed trying to protect her and begged the killers to spare her unborn child.
Abigail Folger, twenty-five, was born in California in 1943, the daughter of Peter Folger, chairman of the Folger coffee company, and Inez Mejia. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she grew up in the San Francisco area with a love of art and music; friends called her Gibby. She studied art history at Harvard, worked for a time at a California museum, then moved to New York, where she worked for a publisher and at a bookstore. At a bookstore party in 1968 she met Wojciech Frykowski. They came west together and rented a house in the Hollywood hills, and in Los Angeles she did volunteer social work for the county welfare department in poor neighborhoods. She had invested in Sebring's salons.
Wojciech Frykowski, thirty-two, was born in Poland in 1936 and trained as a chemist but preferred the company of filmmakers. He met Polanski at a school dance where Polanski, working the door, refused to let him in, and the two nearly came to blows; they became lifelong friends, and Frykowski helped finance one of Polanski's early short films. Polanski later wrote that beneath a tough exterior his friend was "good-natured, soft-hearted to the point of sentimentality and utterly loyal." He had been married twice and had a son, Bartek, in Poland. He left Poland in 1967 and hoped to write for the screen. He and Folger had been house-sitting at Cielo Drive while Tate and Polanski were abroad, and they stayed on after Tate came home to keep her company.
Steven Parent, eighteen, lived in El Monte with his parents and three younger siblings. He had graduated from Arroyo High School in June and planned to start at Citrus Junior College in Azusa in the fall. He was fascinated by electronics; his sister Janet later recalled that as a boy he took radios apart to learn how they worked, a habit that got him into trouble before testers found he had a near-genius aptitude for it. That summer he worked two jobs, delivering parts for a plumbing company by day and selling stereos at night. Around 11:45 p.m. he drove up to the guest house to see whether the caretaker, William Garretson, nineteen, a casual acquaintance, wanted to buy a clock radio from him.
Watson climbed a pole and cut the overhead wires, and the four went over the fence. A car was coming down the drive. It was Steven Parent, leaving. "Please don't hurt me I won't say anything," Kasabian heard him say. Watson shot him.
Kasabian was sent back to the car to keep watch. She heard screams, and ran toward the house. A man came out with blood on his face and fell on the lawn. Atkins came out after him. Kasabian begged her to make it stop. "It is too late," Atkins said. Kasabian saw Krenwinkel with a knife, chasing a woman across the grass, and fled to the car. On the drive home, at Watson's direction, she threw the bloody clothing and the knives out of the window. When they got back, Manson was waiting and asked whether any of them felt remorse.
The housekeeper, Winifred Chapman, found the bodies the next morning. Parent was dead in his Rambler near the gate, with five gunshot wounds. Frykowski and Folger lay on the front lawn. In the living room Tate and Sebring were joined by a length of rope. The coroner counted sixteen stab wounds on Tate, twenty-eight on Folger and fifty-one on Frykowski. "Pig" was written in blood on the front door. Jewelry and some money were found on the victims and in the house, which told detectives this had not been a robbery. Pieces of a pistol grip lay near the bodies. They were later fitted to a .22 revolver, the gun used to club Frykowski, and a ranch hand named Juan Flynn testified he had seen Manson fire that gun. Garretson, in the guest house, survived.
The next evening Manson told the group the killings had been too messy and that he would show them how it was done. Kasabian testified that she went "because Charlie asked me and I was afraid to say no." Seven of them set out: Manson, Kasabian driving, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Steve Grogan. For hours they drove through Los Angeles while Manson looked over houses. On Waverly Drive he had Kasabian stop outside Harold True's old house, and said he was going next door.
Leno LaBianca was forty-four, a few days past his birthday. His parents had come from Italy early in the century, and his father, Antonio, built a grocery business in Los Angeles. Leno ran track at Benjamin Franklin High School, where he was nicknamed "Flash," worked for his father after school, studied business administration and served in Europe as a military policeman in the Second World War. His first marriage, to his high school sweetheart, ended in 1955. He took over his father's business and was an executive of the State Wholesale Grocery Company; the family owned a chain of Los Angeles markets. In 1959 he met Rosemary Struthers, and they married in Las Vegas. In November 1968 they bought the house at 3301 Waverly Drive from his mother; his family had owned it since 1940. Investigators later found he had been breeding racehorses and owed large gambling debts, but his wife's wealth could cover them, and the debts were never considered a motive.
Rosemary LaBianca, thirty-eight, is believed to have been born in Mexico around 1929 to American parents who either died or abandoned her. She grew up in an Arizona orphanage until she was adopted, at twelve, by a California family named Harmon. Working as a carhop at a drive-in in the late 1940s, she met her first husband, Frank Struthers; they had two children and divorced in 1958. She had a sharp eye for clothes and a head for business. She turned a Ford truck into a mobile dress shop, then opened a permanent boutique, and through careful investments became a wealthy woman in her own right. In the months before the murders she had an uneasy sense that someone was entering the house while they were out; things were moved, and the dogs were found outside when they had been left in. The Tate killings had frightened her. Early on the morning of August 10 the couple stopped at a newsstand for a paper, and the owner later told police they had talked about the murders.
Leno's daughter Louise was thirteen and living with her mother in Newport Beach. Half a century later she described a father who drove her up from Newport singing sentimental songs, who came to the door with "his friendly, loving smile" and presents, and a stepmother she called "a beautiful soul," who greeted the children with a talking parrot. "Our family was not known; had no fame or celebrity attached," she wrote in 2024. "Why did they single us out? I never could understand."
Manson went into the house alone and came back to say he had tied up a man and a woman. Atkins, in her grand jury account, quoted him: "I have got the people tied up. They are very calm." The night before, he said, Watson had let the victims know they were going to die, and that had caused panic. He sent Watson, Krenwinkel and Van Houten inside with the words "Don't let them know you are going to kill them," and drove off with the others. He took Rosemary LaBianca's wallet and told Kasabian he wanted it found by a Black person who would use the credit cards, so that Black people would be blamed. She hid it in a gas station restroom. Later that night, Kasabian testified, Manson told her to kill an actor she knew, and she deliberately led the others to the wrong apartment.
On August 10 Rosemary LaBianca's son, Frank Struthers, came home and found his stepfather dead in the living room, his hands tied with a leather thong and the word "War" scratched on his stomach. Rosemary was in the bedroom, a pillowcase over her head. The coroner counted forty-one stab wounds on her. On the walls were "Death to the Pigs" and "Rise," and on the refrigerator door, misspelled, "Healter Skelter." Witnesses later testified that Manson habitually wore leather thongs, and thongs were found in his clothing when he was arrested.
Donald Jerome Shea, born in Massachusetts in 1933, had come to California hoping for work in pictures. Despite the nickname, he stood more than six feet tall. He wrangled horses and did odd jobs at Spahn and took occasional stunt and acting work. A motion picture role had been discussed for him, with a start date that kept slipping, finally to September 15, 1969. His prize possessions were a matched pair of Colt .45s in an attaché case lettered "Reverend Donald Shea," which he pawned when he was broke and always redeemed. He had married a woman named Magdalene; on August 16, 1969, the day she last saw him, they had decided to separate.
That summer a developer, Frank Retz, was buying part of the ranch and wanted the Family gone. He raised the idea of a guard with George Spahn, and Spahn told him to hire Shea. About a week before August 16, Manson threw a knife at Shea that stuck in a door directly in front of where he was walking. On August 16 sheriff's deputies raided the ranch over stolen vehicles and arrested Manson and most of the Family. Released within days, Manson told the group that Shea was an informer behind the raid.
Late in August Shea asked Ruby Pearl, who had known him for years, whether he could stay at her home. He was very nervous. She had only a shed to offer, and he did not want it. As she left, she saw Manson, Watson, Grogan and Davis approach him at the ranch. She never saw or heard from him again. That night Barbara Hoyt heard screams from the creek and recognized Shea's voice. Afterward Hoyt overheard Manson tell DeCarlo that Shea had "committed suicide, with a little help from us," and ask whether lye or lime would get rid of a body. She recalled him describing how Shea asked, "Why, Charlie, why?" At the desert ranches in September, Brooks Poston heard Manson explain that Shea had been talking to the police, and that "Clem had to cut his head off"; Paul Watkins gave similar testimony. When Shea's wife telephoned the ranch, a young woman twice told her he had gone to San Francisco. Shea's car turned up on a street in Chatsworth on December 9, 1969, the keys under the seat and his footlocker in the trunk with Davis's fingerprint on it. DeCarlo had redeemed the Colts from a pawnshop and sold them. A sheriff's sergeant testified to inquiries at jails, hospitals, utilities and employers, and no one had heard from Shea. Manson was convicted without a body. In 1977 Grogan told authorities where Shea was buried, and an autopsy found multiple stab and chop wounds.
For weeks the two murder investigations went nowhere, and they went nowhere separately. The Los Angeles Police Department assigned the Tate and LaBianca cases to different teams. At Cielo Drive detectives arrested William Garretson, the young caretaker found alive in the guest house, who said he had heard nothing; he was questioned and released. Drugs found in the house sent the Tate team after theories of a deal gone wrong. The LaBianca team worked on the idea of a robbery. Garretson went home to Ohio soon after and seldom spoke of the night again; he died in 2016.
The physical evidence was mishandled from the start. On September 1, 1969, a ten-year-old boy named Steven Weiss was fixing a sprinkler on the slope behind his family's house in Sherman Oaks, on a hillside above Beverly Glen Boulevard, when he found a .22 revolver under a bush, its grip broken and two live rounds still in it. His father called the police. The officer who came picked the gun up barehanded and booked it into evidence at the Van Nuys station, three miles from Cielo Drive, and no one connected it to the murders. In December, Bernard Weiss read a newspaper story about the search for the weapon and called Van Nuys, where he was told it had probably been destroyed. It had not. Detectives found it in the station's basement on December 16. Steven Weiss, who testified at eleven that the officer "put two hands all over the gun," never received any of the reward money.
The break came by way of the sheriff's department and a desert vandalism case. On October 15 the LaBianca detectives asked the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office whether it had any murders that resembled theirs. The deputies told them about Gary Hinman: a man stabbed at home, a political word on the wall in blood, and a suspect, Beausoleil, who had been living at the Spahn Ranch with a man named Manson.
By then the Family had gone. After the August raid Manson moved his people about two hundred miles northeast to the Barker Ranch, a remote homestead in the Panamint Mountains near what was then Death Valley National Monument. In mid-September someone set fire to a park maintenance crew's road loader near the Racetrack Playa. Dick Powell, a twenty-seven-year-old ranger with no formal police training, followed the trail of stolen vehicles and dune buggies hidden in the brush. In the second week of October rangers, Highway Patrol officers and Inyo County deputies raided the ranch over two days and arrested twenty-six people on suspicion of arson, vandalism and car theft. On October 12 a patrolman found Manson hiding under the bathroom sink. Asked his name, he said, "Charles Manson." He was booked for grand theft auto and held in the county jail at Independence. Nobody there knew yet whom they had.
Two young women had been trying to leave the Family when officers found them. One, seventeen-year-old Kitty Lutesinger, was Beausoleil's girlfriend, and she told investigators she had heard that Susan Atkins was involved in the Hinman killing. Atkins was questioned, booked on suspicion of murder and taken to the Sybil Brand Institute, the county women's jail in Los Angeles.
She talked. On November 6, in a dormitory at Sybil Brand, she told Virginia Graham, held for a parole violation, that the police were on the wrong track about the murders in Benedict Canyon, and when Graham asked who had done them, Atkins answered, "Well, you are looking at her." She described the house, the victims and the night in detail, Graham testified, with "absolutely no remorse." She also told Graham of a list of celebrities the Family meant to kill, among them Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Tom Jones; that list rests on her word alone. She told another inmate, Ronnie Howard, much the same story. A third inmate, Roseanne Walker, heard her remark, during a news broadcast about the murders, "That ain't the way it went down." On November 17 Howard, taken out of the jail for a court appearance, telephoned the LAPD. Two officers interviewed her that evening and came away convinced, because Atkins had told her details known only to the police and the killers.
Other threads tightened at the same time. A biker named Al Springer, a member of the Straight Satans motorcycle club, told LAPD detectives that a day or two after the LaBianca murders Manson had bragged about "knocking off five" people and writing on a refrigerator in blood. Springer led them to another club member, Danny DeCarlo, who had spent months at the ranch. DeCarlo implicated Manson in the death of Shorty Shea, said he would be afraid to testify, and described Manson's favorite gun, which had gone missing the weekend of the murders. He drew it. The drawing matched the revolver whose grip had been found in pieces on the floor at Cielo Drive. He also described a kind of rope kept at the ranch that matched the rope found around Tate and Sebring.
On December 1, 1969, Los Angeles authorities announced that the case was solved, and the deputies in Inyo County learned that the suspects had been in their jail for weeks. Warrants went out. Watson was arrested at home in McKinney, Texas, Krenwinkel in Mobile, Alabama, where she was staying with relatives, and Kasabian surrendered in Concord, New Hampshire. The physical evidence fell into place behind them. A print on the front door at Cielo Drive was matched to Watson, and one on the inside of a French door in Tate's bedroom to Krenwinkel. Rosemary LaBianca's wallet was found in the gas station restroom where Kasabian had left it. A television crew retracing the killers' likely route found the bloody clothing on a hillside. Blood on one garment was human type B, matching Folger, Frykowski and Parent, and hair on another was similar to Atkins's. Bullets recovered at Spahn Ranch were traced to the Weiss revolver.
Vincent Bugliosi, a thirty-five-year-old deputy district attorney who had won all but one of 104 felony jury trials, was assigned the case on November 18. He worked alongside the detectives, searching both ranches and interviewing witnesses himself. Atkins's lawyer, Richard Caballero, negotiated an agreement: if she testified against the others, the district attorney would not seek the death penalty against her. On December 5, 1969, she told the story to a Los Angeles grand jury. Shown a photograph of Steven Parent, she called him "the thing I saw in the car," and corrected herself only when Bugliosi asked whether she meant a human being. The grand jury deliberated for about twenty minutes and indicted Manson, Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, Kasabian and Van Houten for murder. On December 19, 1969, a Highway Patrol officer, David Steuber, tape-recorded an interview with Juan Flynn, who described Manson telling him he was doing the killings. The tape was later played in court to support Flynn's credibility.
Manson asked to act as his own lawyer, saying that "there is no person in the world who could represent" him, and Judge William Keene, after a competency review, let him. He used the privilege to demand copies of every document in the case, freedom to travel and the home addresses of every prosecution witness. In March 1970, when he asked that the prosecutors be jailed under the same conditions as he was, Keene revoked it, and Manson shouted, "There is no God in this courtroom!" He went through two appointed lawyers, Charles Hollopeter and then Ronald Hughes, filed an affidavit of prejudice against Keene, and drew Judge Charles Older, fifty-two, a decorated fighter pilot in the Second World War who had been on the bench three years. Two weeks before trial he asked Older to replace Hughes with Irving Kanarek, a lawyer known for burying trials in objections. Manson himself said Kanarek might be "the worst attorney I could take." Older, finding no legal ground to refuse, agreed.
Atkins did not keep her bargain. Messages passed between Manson and the women through visiting Family members, and after she met Manson in jail she withdrew, fired Caballero and said her grand jury story had been invented. Her new lawyer, Daye Shinn, had visited Manson in jail dozens of times. The prosecution withdrew its promise and turned to Kasabian, whose lawyer, Gary Fleischman, had offered her cooperation from the beginning. Family members warned Fleischman that "if Linda testifies, thirty people are going to do something about it." She testified anyway. Watson fought extradition from Texas for nine months, and the others went to trial without him.
The Tate-LaBianca trial opened in June 1970 with jury selection, with Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten as defendants. Older, angered when an account of a conference in his chambers appeared in the press, barred the lawyers and witnesses from discussing the case outside court; the order later cost the second prosecutor, Aaron Stovitz, his place on the team, and Bugliosi tried the case with Donald Musich and Stephen Kay. Testimony began on July 24. That morning Manson appeared with an X on his forehead, by one account a sign that he had X'd himself out of a world he considered unfit to judge him. The three women soon did the same.
Kasabian began testifying on July 27, 1970, and stayed on the stand for eighteen days under a promise of immunity, which was reported granted on August 10. Kanarek objected nine times during the prosecution's opening statement and, by the press's count, more than two hundred times in the first days before reporters stopped counting. He cross-examined Kasabian for seven days, asked her at one point to describe "trip number twenty-three," and at another objected that she was not competent to testify because she was insane. Older held him in contempt four times during the trial and twice sent him to the county jail overnight. While Kasabian testified, a detective watched Manson draw his index finger across the bottom of his chin while looking at her.
In early August, while she was still under cross-examination, President Richard Nixon told reporters in Denver that Manson was "guilty, directly or indirectly of eight murders." The White House said it had not meant to prejudice the trial. The next day Manson stood and held up a newspaper headline, "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares," so the jurors could see it. Older questioned each juror, was satisfied they could remain fair, denied a mistrial and sent Shinn, who had left the paper within Manson's reach, to jail for three nights. Kasabian admitted using LSD about fifty times since 1965. The appeals court, reviewing the record six years later, found that "in 18 days of examination Kasabian testified clearly and comprehensibly."
The prosecution called more than the star witness. DeCarlo spoke of Manson's talk of a race war. Hoyt described overhearing Atkins. Flynn told the jury that Manson had held a knife to his throat and said, "don't you know I'm the one who's doing all of these killings?" Virginia Graham repeated what Atkins had told her at Sybil Brand, her testimony limited, under the rule in People v. Aranda, to Atkins alone. On September 4 Steven Weiss, now a sixth grader, testified for about half an hour about the gun in his yard, and drew a smile from Manson. On October 5 Manson, refused permission to cross-examine a detective, lunged toward the bench with a pencil in his hand, shouting that someone should cut off the judge's head, while the women chanted. Bailiffs wrestled him down.
Because Kasabian was an accomplice, the law required independent corroboration against each defendant. Against Manson it was the Helter Skelter sermons, the revolver, his knowledge of both houses, the leather thongs and what he had said to Flynn. Against Krenwinkel there was her fingerprint in Tate's bedroom; she had refused, on her lawyer's advice, to give a handwriting sample, and the jury was allowed to weigh that refusal.
The prosecution rested on November 16. Three days later the defense announced that it rested too, without calling a witness. The women then insisted on testifying, over their lawyers' objections, apparently to take the blame themselves, and refused when the judge ruled they would first be heard outside the jury's presence. Manson offered to testify as well, against his lawyer's advice. On November 20 he spoke for more than an hour, with the jury out of the room. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children," he said. "You taught them. I didn't teach them." He said he had stayed a child in prison while the world grew up, called the prison system his father, and told the court, "I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed." Bugliosi asked whether he would repeat it all before the jury. He said he had already relieved the pressure he felt, and as he passed the defense table he told the women they did not have to testify now. They did not.
During the Thanksgiving recess Van Houten's lawyer, Ronald Hughes, went camping in a remote area near Sespe Hot Springs and did not come back. Hughes, thirty-five, who had never tried a case before this one, had tried to separate his client's defense from Manson's by arguing that she had been under his control. His body was found months later in a remote wash in the Los Padres National Forest. No one was ever charged. The Famous Trials account reports that at least two Family members later described his death as a retaliation killing ordered by Manson; that claim has never been proved. The trial was delayed for two weeks so that Van Houten's new lawyer, Maxwell Keith, could prepare. In closing, Bugliosi told the jury that Manson had "sent out from the fires of hell at Spahn Ranch three heartless, bloodthirsty robots and, unfortunately for him, one human being, the hippie girl Linda Kasabian." Kanarek's summation ran seven days; Older called it not an argument but a filibuster. He argued that the women had killed out of love for Watson, not for Manson.
On January 25, 1971, all four were convicted on every count. In the penalty phase before the same jury, Atkins testified that she had stabbed Sharon Tate herself and had been "stoned on acid," contradicting her grand jury account that Watson had done it while she held Tate's arms, and she blamed Kasabian rather than Manson for planning the killings. Krenwinkel and Van Houten admitted their parts and denied that Manson had directed them. On March 29 the jury returned death sentences. As the first sentence was pronounced Atkins told the court, "Better lock your doors and watch your own kids," and Older had the defendants removed. He formally sentenced Manson to death on April 19, 1971, and Manson was sent to death row at San Quentin. At Manson's request Bugliosi spoke with him for an hour and a half after the sentencing; Manson told him he had no hard feelings.
Watson, tried separately in 1971, was convicted of the same seven murders and also sentenced to death. In August 1976 the Court of Appeal affirmed the judgments against Manson, Atkins and Krenwinkel. It rejected his complaints about the grand jury, the jury panel, Kasabian's immunity and the photographs, and held that the X on the defendants' foreheads was harm they had done themselves. Van Houten's conviction was set aside that year, largely because of Hughes's disappearance; her second trial in 1977 ended in a mistrial, and a third ended in her conviction. A Los Angeles reporter, William Farr, who refused to name the lawyers who had leaked Atkins's jailhouse story to him, spent forty-six days in jail for contempt before an appeals court freed him in 1976; California later widened its shield law to cover former reporters.
Manson was tried alone for the murders of Hinman and Shea in 1971. Jury selection took twenty-four days and the trial forty-three; the transcript runs to 11,118 pages. He asked to represent himself and was refused; the judge told him, "You don't have the capacity to waive counsel." He was removed from the courtroom repeatedly and went on shouting through the open door of the holding cell until it was closed. On July 14, outside the jury's presence, he announced: "I enter a plea of guilty. I chopped his head off." The court did not accept it, because his lawyer would not join the plea. On August 10, while Al Springer was on the stand and the lawyers were at the bench, he leaned toward Sergeant Paul Whiteley at the counsel table and made his remark about slicing Hinman's ear; another officer overheard, and the trial court found the statement voluntary. Brunner, called by the prosecution, now said her account at Beausoleil's trial had been a lie told to win immunity, and her earlier testimony was admitted anyway. During a two-week recess a group of his followers allegedly robbed a gun store in Hawthorne, planning to take the judge and prosecutor hostage to free him; seven jurors or alternates said they had seen or heard something about it.
The jury began deliberating on October 21 and returned its verdicts on November 2, 1971: guilty of the murders of Hinman and Shea and of conspiracy, with life sentences. He was formally received at state prison on the new commitment on December 13. On appeal in 1977 the court affirmed, observing that "neither case was a close case." On his claim that he had been wrongly denied the right to defend himself, it noted that he had been disruptive enough to forfeit it and that, left to himself, he would simply have pleaded guilty. Beausoleil, Davis and Grogan were convicted at their own trials.
Manson entered state prison on April 22, 1971, under sentence of death. On February 18, 1972, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in People v. Anderson, and every death sentence in California fell with it. His was formally modified to life on February 2, 1977. California had no sentence of life without parole for these crimes in 1969, so life meant life with the possibility of parole. As the legal scholar Hadar Aviram told HISTORY, "In the '70s, it was quite normal for someone convicted of murder to get out after 10, 15 years." California adopted life without parole and a new death penalty in 1978, the year of Manson's first parole hearing, but the new laws could not be applied to crimes committed before they were passed.
He was moved to Folsom in 1972 and, in 1976, to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where he spent most of the next nine years. On September 25, 1984, in the hobby shop at Vacaville, another prisoner, Jan Holmstrom, threw paint thinner on him and set him alight. Other inmates put out the flames. Manson suffered second- and third-degree burns to his scalp, face and hands. Holmstrom, a Hare Krishna devotee, told guards Manson had threatened him over his religion. In 1985 Manson was returned to San Quentin. In a 1988 television interview with Geraldo Rivera he threatened to kill as many people as he could. In 1989 he was moved to the protective housing unit at Corcoran State Prison, which holds inmates who would be in danger among the general population, and the corrections department lists Pelican Bay among the prisons that also held him. Corcoran was where he spent his last decades.
Because his sentence carried the possibility of parole, he went to parole hearings for four decades, though by HISTORY's account he never treated them seriously. He was denied twelve times between November 16, 1978, and April 11, 2012. He refused to appear at some, including those of 1982 and 1989.
The transcript of his eighth hearing, at Corcoran on April 21, 1992, which the Famous Trials project publishes in full, shows what the hearings were like. Manson told the panel he was nervous and not used to being around so many people. He disputed the official account of the crimes, said he had tied no one up and had never been at the scene of a killing, and argued that the law could hold him only seventeen or eighteen years on those terms. "Everyone says that I was the leader of those people," he said, "but I was actually the follower of the children." He admitted cutting Hinman's ear "in a fight over some money." The panel noted about sixty serious disciplinary reports since 1971, nine of them since his last hearing, many for threatening staff, and an unfavorable psychiatric report. Stephen Kay, who as a deputy district attorney attended more than forty parole hearings for Manson and his co-defendants, told the panel that Manson had once said he wanted to be paroled to Death Valley to live with the spiders and snakes, or else to outer space, and that the board had received more than 352,000 letters, cards and petitions asking that none of the five be released. The panel found him unsuitable and ruled that he need not be heard again for five years.
The last hearing he attended was on March 27, 1997, and it was broadcast on Court TV. He accepted the denial calmly. "I'm not saying that I wasn't involved," he told the panel. "I'm saying that I did not break man's law nor did I break God's law." He did not attend again. Barbara Hoyt, the former Family member whose testimony had helped convict him and who went on to become a registered nurse, and Debra Tate, Sharon's younger sister, wrote and spoke against his release for years. After the 2012 denial he was not eligible again until 2027.
He kept a following of sorts. In 2014 he obtained a license to marry Afton Elaine Burton, a twenty-six-year-old woman who called herself Star, who had left her home in Illinois and spent about nine years living near the prison and running websites that proclaimed his innocence. A wedding was planned for the Corcoran visiting room. It never took place, and the license expired in February 2015.
He died at a hospital in Bakersfield, in Kern County, at 8:13 p.m. on November 19, 2017, aged eighty-three, of heart failure brought on by colon cancer that had spread. His body stayed in the county morgue for nearly four months under a false name, known to only two employees, to keep photographs of it out of the tabloids.
Three claimants went to court over the body. Michael Channels, a pen pal who had become a regular visitor and a collector and trader of Manson memorabilia, filed a will dated 2002 that named him executor and sole beneficiary. Michael Brunner, Mary Brunner's son, whose birth certificate named Manson as his father, sought the body with the support of Matthew Lentz, who also claimed to be Manson's son and was named in a 2017 will sent to another collector, Ben Gurecki. Jason Freeman, a former mixed martial arts fighter from Florida, said he was the son of Charles Manson Jr. On March 12, 2018, Kern County Superior Court Commissioner Alisa Knight ruled for Freeman. She found the Channels will suspect because Channels was both a witness and the sole beneficiary, found the Lentz will improperly executed, and held that Brunner and Lentz had lost any claim as heirs when they were adopted. Freeman, she found, was "the surviving competent adult next of kin." Later that month about twenty people, including former followers, attended a service in Porterville, California. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered on a hillside.
The estate, which might include rights to his songs and his image, went on to a longer fight in Los Angeles Superior Court among Freeman, Channels and Nancy Claassen of Spokane, Washington, who said she was Manson's half sister. A judge ordered Freeman to take a DNA test in 2019; an appeals court reversed that order in 2021. In June 2022 Judge Ruben Garcia ruled that Freeman was potentially an heir, but only if it could be proved that Charles Manson Jr. was in fact Manson's son, a question he left to be litigated. A final resolution was not reported.
Susan Atkins died of brain cancer in a prison hospital in Chowchilla on September 24, 2009, aged sixty-one, three weeks after her twelfth parole denial; the parole board had refused her request for compassionate release the year before. Steve Grogan, whose directions led to Shea's remains, was paroled in 1985. Lynette Fromme, never implicated in the murders, was imprisoned for pointing a pistol at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento on September 5, 1975, and released in 2009. Linda Kasabian, born Linda Darlene Drouin in Biddeford, Maine, drove the car and became the prosecution's key witness. She was never tried. She lived quietly in New Hampshire and later in Tacoma, Washington, made only a handful of public appearances, and in a 2009 interview with Larry King said she was "on a path of healing and rehabilitation." She died in Tacoma on January 21, 2023, aged seventy-three, under another name she had taken to protect her identity.
Leslie Van Houten was recommended for parole five times beginning in 2016, and two governors reversed each recommendation. In May 2023 a state appeals court ordered her release, calling Governor Gavin Newsom's refusal "unsupported intuition," and Newsom chose not to appeal. She walked out of the California Institution for Women on July 11, 2023, after about fifty-three years.
Patricia Krenwinkel was recommended for parole in May 2022 and again in May 2025, and Newsom reversed both. In October 2025 he wrote that she "lacks the requisite insight she needs to be safely released," while crediting her "efforts to improve herself in prison" and "an excellent disciplinary history." Charles Watson, who founded a prison ministry and married while in custody, was denied parole for the eighteenth time in October 2021, with his next hearing set five years later. Bruce Davis, who has said, "I wanted to be Charlie's favorite guy," has been recommended for parole repeatedly; governors blocked the recommendation for the sixth time in 2019, when Newsom wrote that Davis had not shown a "comprehensive understanding of how he came to participate in such extreme violence," and Newsom reversed another grant in 2021. In 2024 a hearing was postponed after the parole board learned he had given interviews to a true-crime podcast. Bobby Beausoleil was recommended for parole in January 2019 and again in January 2025; Newsom reversed both, the second on May 2, 2025, and a panel denied him again in July 2026.
For the families the case never closed, because the parole system kept reopening it. Sharon Tate's mother, Doris, became the leading voice for crime victims in California and was instrumental in a 1982 law that lets victims' families speak about their loss at sentencing and at parole hearings. When she died, her daughters Patti and Debra carried on; Patti died of breast cancer in 2000, and Debra, the last surviving member of the immediate family, kept going to hearings for the killers and runs a crime victims' group. At hearings she came to know Barbara Hoyt, who had been seventeen in the summer of 1969, the same age as Debra. "We are completely linked by this event whether we want to be or not," Hoyt told the Associated Press in 2012. Roman Polanski has said it took him years to recover from the loss of his wife and their unborn son.
The LaBianca family opposed every release. Louise LaBianca's cousin Lou Smaldino spoke for them at parole hearings for years. Louise LaBianca stayed silent for decades, raised a family and taught young children, and then, as Van Houten's case moved toward release in 2023, wrote that she felt like a fourteen-year-old again, doing homework while her mother argued with the television newscasters and said, "Leno didn't deserve this fate. He was a good man." After Van Houten went free, Louise wrote that the battle for her had always been "trying to accept the unacceptable; to believe the unbelievable; and, hardest yet, to forgive the unforgivable." Gary Hinman's cousin, speaking after Manson's death, said simply that the family wished Hinman were remembered for his life and not as a victim: "I am sorry he didn't get to enjoy a full life."
The case produced a shelf of books. Ed Sanders published The Family in 1971. Bugliosi, with Curt Gentry, wrote Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974), the prosecution's account and the version that fixed the race-war motive in public memory. Atkins and Watson each wrote memoirs of their conversions in prison, Child of Satan, Child of God (1977) and Will You Die for Me? (1978). Manson told his own story to Nuel Emmons in Manson in His Own Words (1986). The house at 10050 Cielo Drive was torn down in 1994. In 2019 Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, starring Brad Pitt as a fictional stuntman, returned to Spahn Ranch and the summer of 1969 and gave the night of August 8 an invented ending.
Several questions remain open. The motive is still argued. Whether the Family killed more people than the nine for whom convictions were obtained has never been shown; Atkins bragged in jail of murders the police would never solve, and no evidence has ever established them. Ronald Hughes's death is unexplained.
In 2025 Netflix released Chaos: The Manson Murders, directed by Errol Morris and built on the journalist Tom O'Neill's book. O'Neill's book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, argues that what the public was told is not what happened. The film explores claims that CIA mind-control research, LSD experiments or FBI interest in the counterculture lay somewhere behind the Family, and points to connections between Manson, his San Francisco parole officer and a clinic linked to drug research during the 1967 Summer of Love. It also includes a telephone interview with Bobby Beausoleil from prison, challenging the account Bugliosi gave the jury. A reviewer noted that Morris at times catches O'Neill backing away from his larger claims. These ideas are speculation. None has been tested in a court, and the film presents them as questions rather than findings.
Whether Manson was a mastermind or a manipulator who found damaged people at the right moment is the argument that keeps the case alive, and the court records do not settle it. What they do settle is narrower and heavier. A man who wanted a recording contract and a hiding place in the desert sent people he controlled into houses he knew, and nine people died: a music teacher who had played Carnegie Hall, a pregnant actress, a hairstylist who had built a business from nothing, a writer far from home, a young woman who had done volunteer work in the city's poorest neighborhoods, a teenager who loved electronics and was leaving a friend's place, a grocer who sang to his daughter on long drives, a woman who had grown up in an orphanage and built a business from a converted truck, and a ranch hand who kept pawning his guns for less than they were worth so he could always buy them back.
November 12, 1934: Charles Milles Manson born in Cincinnati to Kathleen Maddox, sixteen.
1939: His mother jailed for robbery; he goes to live with relatives.
1947: Sent to the Gibault School for Boys, Terre Haute, Indiana; runs away after ten months.
1948 to 1951: Indiana School for Boys, Plainfield; eighteen escapes.
1951 to 1952: Federal custody after driving a stolen car across state lines; Washington, D.C., then Petersburg, Virginia, and Chillicothe, Ohio.
January 1955: Marries Rosalie Willis.
1956 to 1958: Terminal Island for auto theft and probation violation.
1960 to 1967: Federal sentence for check forgery and Mann Act charges, mostly at McNeil Island.
March 21, 1967: Released from Terminal Island; goes to San Francisco.
1968: The group lives with Dennis Wilson; settles at Spahn Ranch in August.
March 23, 1969: Manson goes to 10050 Cielo Drive looking for Terry Melcher.
July 25 to 27, 1969: Gary Hinman held and killed in Topanga Canyon; body found July 31.
August 6, 1969: Bobby Beausoleil arrested in Hinman's car.
August 8 to 9, 1969: Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent killed at Cielo Drive.
August 10, 1969: Leno and Rosemary LaBianca killed on Waverly Drive.
August 16, 1969: Sheriff's raid on Spahn Ranch.
Late August 1969: Donald "Shorty" Shea killed at Spahn Ranch.
September 1, 1969: Steven Weiss finds the .22 revolver in Sherman Oaks.
October 10 to 12, 1969: Barker Ranch raids; Manson arrested October 12.
October 15, 1969: LAPD LaBianca detectives learn of the Hinman case from the sheriff.
November 6 and 17, 1969: Atkins confides in Virginia Graham; Ronnie Howard calls the LAPD.
December 1, 1969: LAPD announces the case is solved.
December 5, 1969: Atkins testifies to the grand jury; indictments follow.
December 16, 1969: The revolver is recovered from the Van Nuys station.
June 1970: Tate-LaBianca trial opens; testimony begins July 24.
July 27 to August 1970: Kasabian testifies for eighteen days.
Early August 1970: President Nixon's remark on Manson's guilt.
November 20, 1970: Manson's statement to the court, outside the jury's presence.
Late November 1970: Ronald Hughes disappears.
January 25, 1971: Guilty verdicts on all counts.
March 29, 1971: Jury returns death sentences; Manson formally sentenced April 19.
April 22, 1971: Received at state prison.
November 2, 1971: Convicted of the Hinman and Shea murders.
February 18, 1972: People v. Anderson voids California death sentences.
August 13, 1976: Court of Appeal affirms the Tate-LaBianca convictions.
February 2, 1977: Sentence formally modified to life; June 23, 1977, Hinman-Shea convictions affirmed.
1977: Steve Grogan leads authorities to Shea's remains.
November 16, 1978: First parole hearing.
September 25, 1984: Set on fire by another inmate at Vacaville.
1989: Moved to Corcoran State Prison.
March 27, 1997: Last parole hearing he attends.
April 11, 2012: Twelfth and final parole denial.
February 2015: Marriage license expires unused.
November 19, 2017: Dies in Bakersfield, aged eighty-three.
March 12, 2018: Grandson Jason Freeman awarded the body.
July 11, 2023: Leslie Van Houten released on parole.
2025: Netflix releases Chaos: The Manson Murders.