Some songs about murder arrive from the expected quarter: the blues, the folk ballad, the heavy-metal album sleeve. The more revealing ones come from artists whose names never suggested violence at all, a California harmony group, an Irish new wave band, a Manchester guitar act, a soft-spoken songwriter from Michigan and the most celebrated rock singer in America. Each of them pointed a song at a real case. Each did it in a different way, and the songs have outlived the headlines that prompted them.
The strangest of them is not about a killing at all. It was written by a man who would later be convicted of nine.
In April 1968 Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys' 23-year-old drummer, picked up two young women hitchhiking. They told him about a guru called Charlie. When Wilson came home from a late recording session at about three the next morning, according to Peter Carlson’s account in American History magazine, there was a battered school bus outside his rented house in Los Angeles, and within hours he had met Charles Manson. Gold Radio’s history of the episode names the hitchhikers as Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey and places the pick-up in Malibu. Manson’s followers stayed at Wilson’s house for most of that summer. Wilson called Manson "the Wizard," paid for their food and their transport, and later put his losses at about $100,000, much of it in wrecked cars and doctors' bills. In the end he moved out rather than try to evict a man he had come to fear.
What Manson wanted was a recording contract. Wilson introduced him to the producer Terry Melcher, who declined to sign him. Wilson also took one of Manson’s songs, "Cease to Exist," to his own band. Manson had agreed to part with it on condition that it stay as he wrote it, American Songwriter reported; the Beach Boys recorded it in September 1968, by Gold Radio’s account, and changed the words, the arrangement and the title. As "Never Learn Not to Love," it appeared in December 1968 as the B-side of the single "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" and again on 20/20, which uDiscover Music dates to February 10, 1969. The label credited Dennis Wilson alone.
The band’s own memories of the deal do not agree. Mike Love, who met Manson through his cousin and walked out of a dinner at Wilson’s house, told an ABC interviewer in 2017 that he had believed Dennis wrote the song and learned only later where it came from. Wilson said in 1971 that Manson had wanted money instead of a credit and had received about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods; the band also gave him cash and a motorcycle. The engineer Stephen Desper later argued that Manson had brought only a basic sketch of chords and melody, that Brian and Carl Wilson built the vocal arrangement, and that the studio time the band spent on the song was fair exchange for what the Family had taken from Dennis. Manson, by all these accounts, was angered by the changes. The songwriter Van Dyke Parks later described Manson threatening Wilson with a bullet, a story he said he had heard secondhand.
On the nights of August 8 and 9, 1969, members of the Family killed seven people at two houses in Los Angeles, Sharon Tate among them. In two trials Manson was convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder, seven for those two nights and two for the deaths of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea; the California Court of Appeal upheld both sets of verdicts in 1976 and 1977. His death sentence became life imprisonment after California abolished the death penalty in 1972. He died in prison on November 19, 2017, at 83. Wilson drowned at Marina del Rey in 1983; Love said the guilt of that friendship was a burden he carried for the rest of his life. Manson’s own version of "Cease to Exist" was released on his album Lie in March 1970.
On the morning of Monday, January 29, 1979, sixteen-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on an elementary school in the San Carlos district of San Diego. The principal, Burton Wragg, 53, and the custodian, Mike Suchar, 56, were shot and killed. Nine others were wounded, among them a police officer who answered the call. Asked by a reporter why she had done it, Spencer said that she did not like Mondays and that this livened up the day.
The remark crossed the Atlantic on a news wire. Bob Geldof, the Boomtown Rats' singer, was at a radio interview in Atlanta with the band’s keyboard player, Johnnie Fingers, when the story came through on a telex machine beside him. "I read it as it came out," he said later. Thinking about it on the way back to the hotel, he began a song. "It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it," Geldof told the writer Steve Clarke, and he insisted that the song "wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy." The band were playing it on their American tour within a month. Released as a single in the summer of 1979, "I Don’t Like Mondays" went to number one in Britain and stayed there for four weeks, the band’s second chart-topper, IrishCentral reported.
The case behind it was a single morning, not a series. Spencer pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and to assault with a deadly weapon, and on April 4, 1980, she was sentenced to concurrent terms of 25 years to life. She became eligible for parole in 1993. Parole was refused that year and again in 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2022, and for a sixth time on February 21, 2025, after strong objection from San Diego County prosecutors. She was 62 at that hearing. As of February 2025, the district attorney’s office said, she would next be eligible in 2028.
By the start of the 1980s Bruce Springsteen had just topped the charts with The River and filled arenas with the E Street Band. The album that followed was made alone, in a bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey, on a four-track cassette recorder, with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. The songs were meant as demos for the band. When attempts to improve them in the studio kept making them worse, he released the tapes as they were. Nebraska came out on Columbia on September 30, 1982.
Its starting point was a film. At a rented lake house, flicking through television channels, Springsteen came across Terrence Malick’s Badlands, a fictionalized retelling of the Starkweather case, and afterward telephoned a reporter who had covered the original story; they talked for about half an hour, Rolling Stone reported in a piece tied to CBS Sunday Morning. The title song tells the story of Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, told plainly over a few acoustic chords. Springsteen has said that if he had to choose one album to represent him fifty years on, it would be this one.
The case itself began in Lincoln two months before the killings most people remember. On December 1, 1957, Robert Colvert, a 21-year-old service station attendant, was killed in Lancaster County. On January 21, 1958, Fugate’s mother, Velda Bartlett, 36, her stepfather, Marion Bartlett, 57, and her half-sister, Betty Jean, who was two and a half, were killed. Over the next eight days seven more people died: August Meyer, 70, at Bennet; Robert Jensen, 17, and Carol King, 16, near Bennet; the Lincoln businessman C. Lauer Ward, 48, his wife, Clara, 46, and their housekeeper, Lillian Fencl, 51; and, on January 29, Merle Collison, 37, a shoe salesman from Great Falls, Montana, near Douglas, Wyoming. Starkweather and Fugate were captured near Douglas the same day.
Starkweather claimed involvement in eleven killings, but he was tried for only one. In May 1958 a Lancaster County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Robert Jensen, and of murder in the course of a robbery, and fixed the penalty at death. After repeated appeals and five execution dates he was electrocuted on June 25, 1959. Fugate was tried that autumn, convicted on November 21, 1958, as his accomplice in the Jensen murder, and sentenced to life. She maintained that she had been his hostage. The Nebraska Pardon Board reduced her sentence in 1973; she was paroled from the women’s reformatory in York on June 8, 1976, and moved to Michigan. In February 2020, at 76 and under the name Caril Ann Clair, she asked the board for a pardon, telling it that the belief that she had joined the killings willingly was too much to bear. The board, made up of Governor Pete Ricketts, Attorney General Doug Peterson and Secretary of State Bob Evnen, refused, 3 to 0, as it had refused her in 1996. A granddaughter of the Wards said she had found no evidence of Fugate’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; a relative of Carol King said he was glad of the decision.
The Smiths' first album, released in February 1984, closes with "Suffer Little Children," one of the first songs Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote together. It is a quiet piece, mostly voice and Marr’s guitar, and it addresses the children killed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley around Manchester between 1963 and 1965, naming three of them. Morrissey was seven when the couple were arrested and tried. He told The Face in 1985 that the crimes had dominated the talk of the community he grew up in, and that as a child he had known he could have been a victim. "Veiling the Moors Murders is wrong," he told Spin the following year. "We must bring it to the fore."
The five dead were Pauline Reade, 16, who disappeared in July 1963; John Kilbride, 12, of Ashton-under-Lyne, that November; Keith Bennett, 12, in June 1964; Lesley Ann Downey, 10, taken on Boxing Day 1964; and Edward Evans, 17, killed in October 1965. Four of them were buried on Saddleworth Moor. At Chester Assizes in May 1966 Brady was convicted of murdering John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans; Hindley was convicted of murdering Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and of harbouring Brady knowing that he had murdered John Kilbride. Both were sentenced to life. In 1987 they admitted their part in the deaths of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett; neither was ever tried for them. Hindley lost her last challenge to a whole-life tariff in the House of Lords in March 2000 and died in custody in November 2002. Brady died at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside in May 2017, of natural causes, an inquest found. Keith Bennett has not been found. A police search of the moor in 2022 ended without finding him.
When the album appeared, the killings of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett had not yet been attributed to the couple, so the song names only the three in the trial. That was enough. Local papers reported that the families were upset, and the Boots and Woolworths chains took the album and a single off their shelves, KEXP recounted. Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, Ann West, wrote to the band’s label, Rough Trade. Morrissey answered her, they met, and they became friends; he kept in touch with her until her death in 1999. Years later he said she had lived her whole life amid what he called media rubbish and injustice.
Sufjan Stevens was the least likely of all these artists to take on a serial killer. Illinois, the second album in his announced plan to record one for every state, came out on the Asthmatic Kitty label on July 4, 2005, crowded with the history of the state. In the middle of it sits "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.," a hushed song about the Chicago-area contractor whose murders were uncovered in December 1978.
Gacy was arrested in Des Plaines on December 21, 1978, ten days after Robert Piest, a fifteen-year-old pharmacy worker, disappeared after going to talk to him about a construction job. In March 1980 a Cook County jury convicted him of thirty-three murders committed between 1972 and 1978. Most of the dead were young men and teenage boys, the youngest of them fourteen. He received the death penalty on twelve counts and natural life on the rest, and the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the verdicts in 1984. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. In October 2021 the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced another identification made through DNA; at that point five of the dead had still not been named.
Stevens’s song does not dramatize any of this. Reviewing Illinois for PopMatters in June 2005, Michael Metivier noted how easily such a subject could slide into the trite or seem to excuse the man, and wrote that the song avoids both: it carries the weight of the crimes without a sermon, the singer’s voice cracking upward into falsetto as the material bears down on him. The last verse turns the light inward, on the singer’s own capacity for wrongdoing, a move Stereogum’s twentieth-anniversary essay on the album read as Stevens grappling with his own sin.
Set side by side, the five records take five different routes to the same ground. Springsteen told the Starkweather story without comment and left the judgment to the listener. Geldof turned a teenager’s flippant answer into a British number one. Morrissey spoke to the dead children by name, and found that their families heard him. Stevens wrote his song about Gacy and ended it on himself. The Beach Boys did not set out to write about a murderer at all; they bought a song from a man who wanted to be a pop star, rewrote it, signed it with another name, and released it eight months before the man’s followers went into two houses in Los Angeles.
• December 1, 1957: Robert Colvert is killed near Lincoln, Nebraska.
• January 21 to 29, 1958: Ten more people are killed in Lancaster County, Nebraska, and near Douglas, Wyoming; Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate are captured near Douglas on January 29.
• May 23, 1958: Starkweather is convicted of the murder of Robert Jensen and sentenced to death.
• November 21, 1958: Fugate is convicted of murder as his accomplice; she is sentenced to life.
• June 25, 1959: Starkweather is executed.
• July 1963 to October 1965: Five children and teenagers are killed around Manchester; Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are arrested in October 1965.
• May 1966: Brady is convicted of three murders and Hindley of two murders and of harbouring Brady, at Chester Assizes.
• April 1968: Dennis Wilson meets Charles Manson.
• September 1968: The Beach Boys record Manson’s "Cease to Exist" as "Never Learn Not to Love."
• December 1968: The song is released as the B-side of "Bluebirds Over the Mountain."
• February 10, 1969: 20/20 is released.
• August 8 and 9, 1969: Seven people are killed at two houses in Los Angeles by members of the Manson Family.
• 1971: Manson is convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder in two trials.
• June 8, 1976: Fugate is paroled.
• December 21, 1978: John Wayne Gacy is arrested in Des Plaines, Illinois.
• January 29, 1979: Two men are killed and nine people wounded in a shooting at an elementary school in San Diego.
• Summer 1979: "I Don’t Like Mondays" spends four weeks at number one in Britain.
• March 1980: Gacy is convicted of thirty-three murders.
• April 4, 1980: Brenda Spencer is sentenced to 25 years to life.
• September 30, 1982: Nebraska is released.
• February 1984: The Smiths is released, closing with "Suffer Little Children."
• 1987: Brady and Hindley admit the killings of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy is executed.
• November 15, 2002: Hindley dies in custody.
• July 4, 2005: Illinois is released.
• May 2017: Brady dies at Ashworth Hospital.
• November 19, 2017: Manson dies in prison.
• February 18, 2020: The Nebraska Pardon Board refuses Fugate’s request for a pardon.
• October 2022: A police search of Saddleworth Moor ends without finding Keith Bennett.
• February 21, 2025: Spencer is denied parole for the sixth time.