0:00 Before he was a killer, Charles Manson was a failed musician.0:05 He even lived for a time with Dennis Wilson, the drummer for The Beach Boys, who saw in him a strange, raw talent.0:14 Wilson tried to get him a record deal.0:17 It never happened.0:19 And that rejection would curdle into something else entirely.0:24 Picture Spahn Ranch, 1969.0:26 It’s a dilapidated movie set baking in the California sun.0:31 Dust devils dance between rundown Western facades.0:35 And in the middle of it all, a group of young people sit at the feet of a man with a guitar.0:43 They are runaways.0:44 Drifters.0:45 Kids from good homes who felt like they didn’t belong anywhere.0:50 Until here.0:51 Until him.0:52 Charles Manson didn't just give them shelter.0:56 He gave them an identity.0:58 He broke them down with LSD and endless, rambling sermons.1:03 He isolated them from their pasts until his voice was the only one they heard.1:09 He told them a race war was coming—an apocalypse he called "Helter Skelter." And he told them that they, his chosen family, would trigger it.1:21 They would show the world how to do it.1:24 He had a target in mind.1:26 A producer who had slighted him, Terry Melcher, used to live at 10050 Cielo Drive.1:33 Melcher had moved out.1:35 But Manson didn't care who was there now.1:39 On a hot August night, he gathered four of his most devoted followers.1:44 He didn't go with them.1:46 He never did.1:47 He just gave the order.1:49 "Go to that house," he told them, "and totally destroy everyone in it...1:55 as gruesome as you can." The murders of Sharon Tate and her friends didn't start a war.2:03 They ended a dream.2:04 The peace-and-love idealism of the nineteen-sixties died that night, replaced by a new kind of fear.2:13 The fear that the smiling hippie on the street corner wasn't looking for peace, but for victims.2:21 At the trial, the Manson girls sang and giggled, their foreheads carved with X’s in solidarity with their leader.2:30 They were no longer lost kids looking for a home.2:34 They were permanent, walking symbols of a utopia that had twisted into a slaughterhouse.
