0:00 On the night of August eighth, nineteen sixty-nine, the air in Benedict Canyon was still and heavy, thick with the scent of jasmine and the hum of cicadas.0:12 Inside the house at the end of Cielo Drive, a yellow ranch-style home tucked into the hillside, five people were settling in for the evening.0:23 One of them, the actress Sharon Tate, was eight and a half months pregnant.0:29 Nobody in the house knew this was the last time they'd all be in it together.0:35 Last week, we talked about the night the dream died in Brentwood, the one that unraveled around O.J.0:43 Simpson.0:44 But twenty-five years before that night on Rockingham, just a few miles away, another California dream—a different, wilder, more psychedelic one—was about to be murdered in its bed.0:58 To understand what happened on that canyon road, you have to understand the world that created it.1:06 The late nineteen sixties weren't just a time.1:09 They were a rupture.1:11 A generation had decided that the rules of their parents no longer applied.1:17 They were searching for something else.1:20 A new way to live, a new way to love, a new god.1:24 And in the deserts outside Los Angeles, a failed musician and lifelong convict named Charles Manson was offering all three.1:33 He wasn't what you'd picture as a leader.1:37 He was small, with wild, intense eyes.1:40 But he had a gift.1:41 He knew how to listen.1:43 He knew how to find the cracks in a person's soul and pour himself into them.1:49 He found runaways, drifters, middle-class kids who felt lost in their own lives.1:55 He brought them to a dilapidated movie set called Spahn Ranch.2:00 And there, he built a world.2:02 He gave them a purpose.2:04 He gave them a family.2:06 He gave them a name—the Manson Family.2:09 But it came at a price.2:11 He took their money.2:12 He took their identities.2:14 He broke them down with a steady diet of LSD, scripture, and his own rambling philosophy.2:21 He isolated them from the outside world until his voice was the only one they heard.2:28 It was a classic cult playbook.2:30 Love-bombing, control, isolation.2:33 He told them they were the chosen ones, the real free spirits in a world of robotic slaves he called "pigs." And they believed him.2:43 They had to.2:44 By then, they had nothing else.2:47 Now, here is the thread that turns a commune of lost souls into a death squad.2:53 It was a song.2:54 Or rather, an entire album.2:56 The Beatles' White Album.2:58 Manson heard something in it that no one else did.3:02 He didn't hear music.3:04 He heard prophecy.3:05 He believed the album was a coded message, sent directly to him, foretelling an apocalyptic race war.3:13 He called it "Helter Skelter," after one of the tracks.3:18 He preached that soon, Black America would rise up and slaughter the white establishment.3:25 But they would be unable to govern themselves afterward.3:29 And they would need a leader.3:31 They would turn to the one group that had survived, hidden away in a secret city beneath Death Valley.3:39 They would turn to the Family.3:42 They would turn to him.3:44 The only problem was...3:46 the war wasn't starting.3:47 So he decided he had to give it a little push.3:51 He would commit a series of gruesome, shocking murders in the wealthy, white neighborhoods of Los Angeles.3:59 And he would pin them on Black revolutionaries.4:03 He would, in his words, "show the pigs how to do it." This is the part that’s so hard to grasp.4:11 The violence wasn't random.4:13 It was tactical.4:14 It was theatre.4:15 The victims weren't chosen because of who they were, but because of what they represented.4:22 They were symbols of the world Manson wanted to burn down.4:27 On that August night, he gathered four of his most devoted followers.4:32 Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian.4:38 He gave them his orders.4:40 Go to the house that used to belong to Terry Melcher—a record producer who had rejected Manson's music—and "totally destroy everyone in it, as gruesome as you can." The house on Cielo Drive.4:55 Melcher didn't live there anymore.4:57 But it didn't matter.4:59 The address was the target.5:01 The symbol.5:02 Inside were Sharon Tate, waiting for her husband, the director Roman Polanski, to return from Europe.5:10 Her friends Jay Sebring, a famous men's hairstylist; Abigail Folger, the coffee heiress; and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski.5:20 As the killers approached, they encountered an eighteen-year-old boy named Steven Parent, who was just leaving after visiting the property's caretaker.5:32 He was the first to die.5:34 What followed inside the house was not just murder.5:38 It was a ritual.5:39 It was a performance of the chaos Manson had preached.5:43 The victims were bound, tormented.5:46 The word "PIG" was scrawled on the front door in Sharon Tate's blood.5:52 The goal wasn't just to kill.5:54 It was to terrorize.5:55 To leave a message so horrific it would ignite a city.6:00 The next night, Manson went with them.6:03 He was angry the first murders hadn't been chaotic enough.6:07 He chose a house at random.6:10 The home of a supermarket executive named Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.6:16 Manson went in first, tied them up, and then left his followers to finish the job.6:22 They did.6:23 And again, they left words scrawled in blood on the walls.6:28 "DEATH TO PIGS." "HELTER SKELTER." For months, Los Angeles lived in fear.6:33 The city was gripped by a paranoia that felt bottomless.6:38 If a pregnant movie star could be slaughtered in her own home, then NO ONE was safe.6:44 Gun sales soared.6:46 People installed new locks, bought guard dogs.6:49 The open, trusting spirit of the sixties evaporated overnight.6:54 It was replaced by something cold.6:57 Something fearful.6:58 The police were baffled.7:00 They saw no motive, no connection between the Tate and LaBianca murders.7:06 The break in the case came from the last place anyone expected.7:11 Susan Atkins, arrested on an unrelated charge, started bragging to a cellmate about her involvement.7:19 That boast unraveled everything.7:21 The trial that followed was a circus.7:24 Manson and his followers, mostly the women, giggled and sang and shouted their devotion to Charlie.7:32 Manson carved an X, later a swastika, into his forehead.7:37 His followers did the same.7:39 They showed no remorse.7:41 They seemed to exist in a completely different reality.7:45 A reality where murder was an act of love.7:48 An act of revolution.7:50 And this is what the Manson case truly reveals.7:54 It's not just a story about a deranged cult leader.7:58 It's a story about belief.8:00 It's about how desperately we want something, or someone, to give us answers.8:06 How a charismatic voice can sound like a prophet's if you're lost enough in the wilderness.8:13 The murders didn't just end lives.8:16 They ended an era.8:17 The dream of the sixties—of peace, love, and a gentle revolution—died in those houses.8:24 It was replaced by the terrifying knowledge that the darkness wasn't just "out there," in the establishment or the war.8:33 It could be sitting right next to you, smiling, with a knife hidden behind its back.8:40 It showed us that the search for total freedom can, in the wrong hands, become the most terrifying kind of prison.8:49 So what does this all set up?8:51 The Manson story doesn't just fade into history.8:55 It becomes a modern myth.8:57 It becomes the blueprint for our fear of cults, a permanent warning about the power of charisma when it's untethered from morality.9:08 Every time you hear about a magnetic leader promising utopia, a part of your brain will remember a dusty ranch, a Beatles album, and words scrawled in blood on a wall.9:21 The story of the Family proves that the most dangerous monsters are the ones who convince you they've come to set you free.
