Charles Manson Case File: The Family, the Murders, the Trial and the Myth

A Los Angeles jury convicted Manson of the seven Tate–LaBianca murders and conspiracy on January 25, 1971. On December 13, 1971, a second jury convicted him of the murders of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea.⁵²⁴ Those nine are the whole of his murder record.

The criminal record names separate people for separate acts. Manson’s command role matters, but so do the actions of Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, Robert Beausoleil, Bruce Davis, Steve Grogan and others.¹⁴ Linda Kasabian, charged in the same indictment, testified for the prosecution under a grant of immunity.¹

Manson was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 12, 1934, to a 16-year-old mother, and spent much of his youth and early adulthood in juvenile institutions, reform school and federal custody.³ His record before the Family included car theft, parole violations and, by his own later account, pimping learned from older inmates at Terminal Island.³ He was released from federal prison in March 1967, having spent a large share of his life under institutional control.⁵³

In the spring of 1968 Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson picked up two hitchhiking Family members. They introduced him to Manson, and the Family lived for a time at Wilson’s house in Pacific Palisades.³ Wilson introduced Manson to people in the Los Angeles music business, among them the producer Terry Melcher. The Beach Boys later recorded a reworked version of Manson’s song “Cease to Exist” as “Never Learn Not to Love.”³

Melcher, Doris Day’s son, had rented 10050 Cielo Drive with Candice Bergen. He considered signing Manson but passed.¹⁴³ He testified at the 1970 trial that he had rejected Manson after an audition.¹⁵ The house was a place Manson knew, even though Melcher no longer lived there when Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski rented it.¹¹⁴ Watson later testified that Manson told him to go “up to where Terry Melcher used to live” and “kill everybody in the house as gruesome as I could.”³

The trial evidence preserved Manson’s prediction of a coming racial upheaval, which he called “Helter Skelter.” In it Black people would rise up and kill the “Pigs,” the white establishment. Manson would lead the Family to safety in “a bottomless pit located in Death Valley,” and they would emerge to take control of the world.¹ Barbara Hoyt testified that between April and September 1969 Manson spoke of it often, saying it “was coming down fast” and that he “would like to show the Blacks how to do it.”¹ The prosecution argued that the murders of wealthy white victims were staged to start that war. On the first murder night, Kasabian testified, Manson told her: “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”¹

Helter Skelter is part of the trial record, but it shouldn’t erase other pressures: Manson’s musical rejection, the money dispute with Gary Hinman, the fear that Shea was talking to authorities, personal domination, opportunism and the group’s escalating violence.⁴⁹¹⁴ A prosecution theory can be legally sufficient without becoming the only psychological explanation.

In May and June 1969, Manson talked to followers about “going out” to get money for dune buggies so the group could live in the desert. In July, Ella Jo Bailey testified, names of possible sources were discussed, among them Gary Hinman, because he owned a house and stocks and bonds.⁴ On July 26, by the governor’s summary of the record, Bruce Davis drove Beausoleil, Atkins and Mary Brunner to Hinman’s house at 964 Old Topanga Canyon Road. Beausoleil carried a sheathed knife; Davis had a 9-millimetre gun.⁶⁴

The three called Manson from the house to say Hinman “was not cooperating.” Manson and Davis drove there, and Manson cut Hinman’s face open with a sword, from his left ear down to his chin. Manson and Davis left in Hinman’s car. Brunner, Atkins and Beausoleil stayed for two more days while Hinman lay bleeding, until Beausoleil stabbed him in the chest and smothered him with a pillow.⁶ Using Hinman’s blood, the group wrote “political piggy” and drew an animal paw print on the walls; Beausoleil later went back to wipe off the paw print.⁶⁴ Manson told the man he gave Hinman’s microbus to say, if questioned, that he got it from a Gary Hinman who “was supposed to be a Black Panther.”⁴

The record contains Manson’s admissions. Bailey said he described the sword cut the next morning. A witness named Al Springer said Manson told him he had “whacked a guy’s ear off.” And on Aug. 10, 1971, during his own trial, Manson leaned over at the counsel table to Sgt. Paul Whiteley and said, by Whiteley’s testimony: “Sure, I went to Hinman’s house and got the gun and sliced his ear. I don’t deny that. … Hinman deserved to die.”⁴ The Court of Appeal held that Manson, by his own admissions, “struck Hinman with a sword in aid of the robbery”; that Beausoleil struck the fatal blow did not relieve him of responsibility.⁴

Hinman’s body was found on July 31, badly decomposed. Beausoleil’s fingerprint was on a door frame inside. On Aug. 6, 1969, a highway patrolman found him driving Hinman’s Fiat station wagon on Highway 101 near San Luis Obispo and arrested him; a knife was in the spare-tire well.⁴ Two days later came Cielo Drive. Atkins was later jailed in the Hinman case, and it was there, in the fall of 1969, that she talked.⁵¹

Kasabian testified that on the evening of Aug. 8 Manson told her to get a change of clothes, a knife and her driver’s licence, and to “go with Tex and to do what Tex told [her] to do.” As the car was leaving he leaned in and told the women: “You girls know what I mean, something witchy.”¹ Watson drove straight to 10050 Cielo Drive, got out and appeared to cut some overhead wires.¹

As a car came toward the gate, Watson stepped out with a gun. The driver, Steven Parent, said: “Please don’t hurt me I won’t say anything.” Watson shot him.¹ Watson sent Kasabian to look for open doors or windows at the back, then told her to go back and stand lookout. Within minutes she heard screams and the words “No, please, no.” She ran to the house and saw a man, covered in blood, come out the door and fall; when he got up, Watson stabbed him and clubbed him. She saw Krenwinkel, knife in hand, chasing a woman.¹ On the way back, the three changed clothes and Kasabian threw the bloody clothing and knives from the car. At the ranch Manson asked if they felt any remorse. They said no.¹

Winifred Chapman, the cook and housekeeper, had left at 4 or 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 8. She returned the next day and the police found Parent in his Rambler near the entry gate, Frykowski and Folger on the front lawn, and Tate and Sebring in the living room, connected by a piece of rope, a towel wrapped around Sebring’s neck and over his face. “Pig” was written in blood on the front door. Nothing had been taken: jewellery and money were found on the victims and in the house.¹

Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi testified at the penalty phase that he believed Atkins had stabbed Tate, even though he knew she would deny it. The Court of Appeal’s comment: “Bugliosi’s opinion on the subject is just that.”¹ His later book argued for a secondary motive, quoting Atkins as saying the house was picked “to instill fear into Terry Melcher.”³ Both are the prosecutor’s account, not court findings.

The next evening Manson gathered Atkins, Watson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, Steve Grogan and Kasabian. The killings of the night before had been “too messy,” he said, and he would show them how to do it. As they got in the car he handed Kasabian a leather thong. With Kasabian driving and Manson directing, they drove around for hours while Manson checked out possible targets.¹⁷

Manson had Kasabian stop on Waverly Drive in front of a house she recognized as Harold True’s, a man some of the Family knew. When she objected, Manson said he was going next door, to the LaBianca house. He returned a few minutes later and said he had tied up a man and a woman. Then he told Van Houten, Krenwinkel and Watson: “Don’t let them know you are going to kill them.”¹ Inside, by the later appellate summaries, Watson told the two women to take Rosemary LaBianca into the bedroom and kill her. Van Houten put a pillowcase over her head and wrapped a lamp cord around her neck; Krenwinkel stabbed her; Van Houten called Watson, who stabbed her eight times with a bayonet; then Van Houten stabbed her between 14 and 16 times.¹¹⁷ Van Houten wiped away fingerprints while Krenwinkel wrote in blood on the walls.⁷

Manson gave Kasabian Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet to dispose of so that “a black person” would find it and use the cards, in the hope that Black people would be blamed. Kasabian hid it in a gas-station restroom.¹ At the beach Manson gave her a pocket knife and told her to kill an actor she had met; she testified that she deliberately led Atkins and Grogan to the wrong apartment door. Manson had told Van Houten and Watson to hitchhike back to the ranch, and Krenwinkel to go to the Waterfall camp.¹

On Aug. 10, Rosemary LaBianca’s 16-year-old son, Frank Struthers, came home from a holiday and found his stepfather’s body. Police found Leno LaBianca in the living room and Rosemary in the bedroom. “Death to the Pigs” was written in blood on a living-room wall, “Rise” over a door, and “Healter Skelter” on the refrigerator. Apart from her wallet, nothing appeared to be missing.¹

Donald Jerome “Shorty” Shea was a handyman who lived most of the time at the Spahn Ranch. He wanted to be an actor and stuntman, and he owned a matched pair of Colt .45s he swore he would never sell. Frank Retz, who was buying the ranch, wanted the Family off the property and had talked about hiring Shea as a guard. About a week before Aug. 16, Manson threw a knife at Shea that stuck in a door in front of him.⁴

Deputies raided the ranch on Aug. 16, 1969, and arrested Manson. After his release, Barbara Hoyt testified, he said Shea was responsible for the raid.⁴ Ruby Pearl, who had known Shea 15 years, saw Manson, Watson, Grogan and Davis get out of a car and close in on him. She drove away and never saw him again. Late one night in the latter part of August, Hoyt heard screams from down by the creek and recognized Shea’s voice.⁴ The next day she overheard Manson tell DeCarlo: “Shorty committed suicide, with a little help from us.”⁴

Shea’s body wasn’t found before the 1971 trial. The case rested on Manson’s admissions to Hoyt, Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins, and on physical traces: Shea’s car, found on Dec. 9, 1969, on a street in Chatsworth with his footlocker in the trunk bearing Davis’s fingerprint; the Colt .45s, pawned and sold by DeCarlo; and his suitcase and briefcase, found under brush in Goler Wash in February 1970.⁴ The jury convicted after 24 days of jury selection and 43 trial days. The Court of Appeal affirmed in 1977: “Production of the body is not a condition precedent to the prosecution for murder.”⁴

Manson had boasted that Shea was cut into “nine pieces,” and witnesses quoted him as saying Grogan cut off his head.⁴ When sheriff’s investigators recovered skeletal remains in December 1977 from a shallow grave below the old ranch, near Santa Susana Pass Road, the skeleton was reported to be complete and intact. Sgt. Bill Gleason said the decapitation stories “were told by Manson family members to strike fear and keep others (potential witnesses) from talking.”¹⁰ Grogan, convicted of the murder, had disclosed where the body was, and was paroled in 1985.⁵³

Both murder nights began and ended at the Spahn Ranch. On the first, Watson drove directly to Cielo Drive. On the second, Manson directed Kasabian on a long, apparently random route before stopping on Waverly Drive, then sent the car on to a gas station and the beach.¹ The 1976 opinion treats Manson’s familiarity with both houses as corroboration: he knew Cielo Drive and Harold True’s house before August 1969.¹

After Shea’s killing, most of the Family left the ranch for the Barker and Myers ranches in the desert, travelling by Ballarat and Goler Wash.⁴ That is where rangers, highway patrolmen and deputies arrested them in October 1969, on suspicion of arson, vandalism and car theft, about 250 miles from Los Angeles.¹⁶

In mid-September 1969 a new park-service loader was set on fire in Death Valley. Rangers, highway patrolmen and deputies traced it to the Barker Ranch and, in two days of raids in October, arrested 26 people on suspicion of arson, vandalism and grand theft auto. On Oct. 12 a patrolman found Manson hiding under a bathroom sink. The name meant nothing to the officers.¹⁶

Atkins, already charged in the Hinman murder, was held at the Sybil Brand Institute. In November 1969 she described the Tate murders to two fellow inmates, Virginia Graham Castro and Roni Howard, who told law enforcement.¹⁵ She recounted details of the Tate scene that, in the police’s judgment, only the killers could have known.¹³ Those statements were the bridge from an already-known Family member to the unsolved August killings.

Words written in the victims’ blood and the obvious overkill at both houses suggested a connection, but the investigation didn’t immediately join the cases. When police announced in December 1969 that the Tate case was solved, the LaBianca killings were still being described as possible “copycat” killings.¹³ The case eventually depended on connecting scene evidence to people around the Spahn Ranch.¹

Kasabian’s testimony supplied a first-person account of the murder nights. She began testifying on July 27, 1970, after being offered immunity; the written order came on Aug. 10, after her direct examination.¹ Other insiders, among them Danny DeCarlo, Paul Watkins, Barbara Hoyt, Dianne Lake and Juan Flynn, described Manson’s statements, the Helter Skelter rhetoric, his orders and the group’s hierarchy.¹

The prosecution tied together physical evidence, firearms, vehicles, witness accounts and the group’s movements: the Buntline revolver, found by a boy on Sept. 1, 1969, whose broken grip matched pieces at Cielo Drive; a bundle of dark clothing found on a hillside near Benedict Canyon, with type B human blood and a hair similar to Atkins’s; and Krenwinkel’s fingerprint inside the house.¹ Manson’s liability didn’t depend on proving that his hands held every weapon.

Manson appeared in court with an X carved into his forehead, and followers outside did the same.³⁵ On Aug. 4, 1970, he held up to the jury a newspaper with the banner “MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES”; the next day his co-defendants chanted, “Why don’t you convict us the president says we’re guilty.” The court noted that this “belies the sincerity” of their complaints about publicity.¹ At one point Manson jumped over the counsel table and made a dash for the bench; Judge Charles H. Older began carrying a .38-calibre revolver under his robe.³

Ronald Hughes had represented Van Houten since July 17, 1970. On Monday, Nov. 30, after both sides had rested, he failed to appear. On Dec. 3 Maxwell Keith was appointed over Van Houten’s objection, with the transcript already over 18,000 pages.¹ In 1976 the Court of Appeal’s majority held that Keith, who “neither saw nor heard any witness during the guilt phase,” couldn’t effectively argue the credibility of witnesses, and reversed her conviction. Presiding Justice Wood dissented on that point.¹

The Court of Appeal found the evidence against all four defendants sufficient, and rejected their publicity, venue and jury claims; “a jury sequestered from June 15, 1970, to January 15, 1971 … would not be expected to protract deliberation if it harbored a bias for conviction.” What it couldn’t accept was that Van Houten’s closing argument was made by a lawyer who had seen none of the guilt-phase witnesses, after her own lawyer vanished.¹ When the California Supreme Court denied review on Dec. 9, 1976, three justices would have granted the People’s petition as to Van Houten.¹

Manson arrived in state prison on Apr. 22, 1971. Because California had no sentence of life without parole at the time, he became eligible for parole hearings, and was denied 12 times between Nov. 16, 1978 and Apr. 11, 2012. He last attended a hearing on Mar. 27, 1997. He was housed at San Quentin, Folsom, Pelican Bay and the California Medical Facility before Corcoran, where he lived from 1989.² He was cited for breaking prison rules more than 100 times.³ He died on Nov. 19, 2017. His next parole eligibility would have been in 2027.²

The board has held 17 hearings for Krenwinkel since 1977. It found her unsuitable 14 times, she stipulated to unsuitability in 2002, and it found her suitable in May 2022. The governor reversed that grant in October 2022, a superior court upheld the reversal on Jan. 17, 2024, and the ruling was affirmed on appeal. At a May 30, 2025 hearing, at which she exercised her right not to testify, the board again found her suitable. On Oct. 13, 2025, Gov. Newsom reversed it, citing the evaluating psychologist’s finding of “a tendency to externalize blame.” She was 77 and had served more than 55 years.⁶

The board found Van Houten suitable in 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020, and again in November 2021. Governors reversed every grant.⁷⁵ On May 30, 2023, the Court of Appeal held that no evidence supported the governor’s finding that she remained currently dangerous, and vacated the 2020 reversal; Presiding Justice Rothschild dissented.⁷ She was released on parole on July 11, 2023.⁵ The decision concerned parole risk; it didn’t revise her convictions.

Robert Beausoleil, 21 at the time of the crime and 77 in 2025, was granted parole in January 2019 and again on Jan. 7, 2025; the governor reversed both, the second on May 2, 2025.⁶ Watson was denied parole for the 18th time on Oct. 15, 2021. Bruce Davis was granted parole by the board in 2019, and on June 18, 2021 Gov. Newsom blocked his release, by CNN’s count the seventh time a governor had done so.⁵ Steve Grogan was paroled in 1985, and Susan Atkins died in custody at Chowchilla in 2009.⁵³

Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris Tate, became a victims’ rights advocate and helped collect more than 350,000 signatures opposing parole for Manson and his followers. After her death in 1992, her daughter Patti Tate appeared at the hearings. Prosecutor Stephen Kay attended 60 parole hearings before retiring in 2005.³

Manson’s image became a commodity: shirts, album covers, films, documentaries, memorabilia and endless “most evil” rankings. He turned the X carved on his forehead during the trial into a swastika.³ That commercial afterlife makes the man who gave the orders seem more important than the people who died, or than the followers who carried out the killings. Former prosecutor Stephen Kay said young people drawn to Manson’s mystique “don’t know what he’s really about, what he really did.”³

The FBI’s public Vault holds a four-part file on Manson, filed under “Violent Crime.”²⁰ It is a federal file, not the state trial record; the convictions rest on the California proceedings.