Hollywood star Sharon Tate and several friends were stabbed to death by unknown intruders on August 8th of 1969. The following night, grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were killed in identical manner. Messages in the victims’ blood were written on the walls in both instances, but the LAPD didn’t link the cases at first, believing the LaBianca slayings to be an unrelated “copycat” crime. In time, the killers in both cases were identified as members of a Death family commune centered around career outlaw Charles Manson. With the recent release of Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme from imprisonment for allegedly attempting to slay Gerald Ford (the gun wasn’t loaded, and Fromme has always stated her innocence), they’re back in the news.
Ed Sanders’ The Family is a jaded hippie's diagnosis. Sanders is better known as the founder of “avant-folk” group, The Fugs, and as a poet. For all its homespun innovation (Sanders has the habit of inserting the words “oo ee oo” when relating anything ostensibly creepy), his book is a more factual account of the events leading up to the murders than prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, nevertheless still the most popular book about the Tate-LaBianca murders. As an insider of the hipster scenes of LA and SF, in both of which Manson spent time, Sanders relates that he Family was one of several ragtag groups, including the Process, a splinter group of Scientology with whom Manson was apparently in some way connected. Ed Sanders had first-hand knowledge of LA occultism in the 1960's and answers many questions left unresolved in Helter Skelter.
The Manson File, edited by Anton Szandor LaVey’s son in law, Nikolas Schreck, is the most authentic overview of Manson’s outlook currently available. His worldview seems to have been equal parts malevolent and sensible. For example he seems to have had a deeply-rooted concern for the environment and ecology long before such a view became popular or even acceptable. At the same time, he believes Hitler was Christ, and that Nazis were just trying to "bring order to the world". The Manson File also delves more deeply into the particulars of his occult orientation, which are only hinted at in Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, and barely skimmed in Sanders’ The Family. Charles Manson apparently experienced witchcraft and psychic phenomena on a regular basis, believing himself to be possessed at times by the spirit of 16th century Italian heretic Giordano Bruno. Also freaky is its revelation of Manson’s extensive contacts with celebrities of the period, including Elvis, Peter Sellers and Yule Brunner, (not just The Beach Boys), suggesting that the Tate killing s may have had something to do with an underground porn ring involving these luminaries. Especially interesting for the curious.
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