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Speaker 4: It vis.
Speaker 5: Nineteen seventy five. Context of tape recording is the interview
Speaker 5: prior to forty two forty four findings of the defendant
Speaker 5: Lynette from in the case of the United States versus
Speaker 5: Lynette from criminal number S seven five four five one.
Speaker 5: Place of interview the Sacramento County Jail. Persons present during
Speaker 5: interview Doctor Richmond, the defendant Lynette From Assistant Federal Defender
Speaker 5: Robert Holly, Federal Defenders Investigator David Kraft. All parties are
Speaker 5: now present. The time is three p forty one pm.
Speaker 6: Competency right now to understand what's going on and to
Speaker 6: be able to work with counsel. And so, if it's
Speaker 6: all right with you, I like to receive the session examination.
Speaker 6: I'll be giving a report to the judge and a
Speaker 6: report to mister Walker of the Public Defender's Office, and
Speaker 6: a copy to you. The crew order specifies it. Each
Speaker 6: of you gets a copedy. So if it's okay, well
Speaker 6: get started, go ahead.
Speaker 3: Do you buy Lynette?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 3: Okay, what's your date of birth?
Speaker 7: Lynette on twenty second, forty eight, what's your means?
Speaker 8: Right now?
Speaker 3: Who do you charge with?
Speaker 8: Lynett attend to the assassination with the president of the Lasts.
Speaker 9: In nineteen seventy five. Lynette from was widely known for
Speaker 9: being a prominent member of Charles Manson's cult or quote
Speaker 9: unquote family. Lynette, who was known by her Manson nickname Squeaky,
Speaker 9: hadn't actually been present at either the murders at Sharon
Speaker 9: Tate's home or at the LaBianca house, but she had
Speaker 9: very openly supported Manson during his murder trial. That meant
Speaker 9: that the public linked her to the homicidal rampage of
Speaker 9: August nineteen sixty nine. The murders actually started on July
Speaker 9: twenty seventh that year with the stabbing murder of Gary Hinman.
Speaker 9: Manson believed Hinman owed him money over a drug deal
Speaker 9: gone wrong, so he had one of his followers, Bobby Bosley,
Speaker 9: kill Hinman. Bossolet wrote political piggies on the wall in
Speaker 9: Hindman's blood. He also drew a pop print. The idea
Speaker 9: was to put suspicion on the Black Panthers, but it
Speaker 9: didn't work. Twelve days later, on August eighth, newspapers reported
Speaker 9: that Bosolet had been arrested for Hinman's murder. A cop
Speaker 9: found him sleeping in Hindman's station wagon, which had been
Speaker 9: reported stolen. In the rear of the vehicle, the cops
Speaker 9: found a bloodstained knife. The night that Bossolet's arrests was reported,
Speaker 9: members of the Manson family brutally murdered the pregnant actress
Speaker 9: Sharon Tate and four others at a house on Los Angeles'
Speaker 9: Clo Drive, in.
Speaker 10: A scene described by one investigator as reminiscent of a
Speaker 10: weird religious rite. Five persons, including actress Sharon Tate, were
Speaker 10: found dead at the home of miss Tate and her husband,
Speaker 10: screen director Roman Polanski.
Speaker 9: The following night, they killed a businessman named Leno LaBianca
Speaker 9: and his wife Rosemary in their home. History is written
Speaker 9: by the victors, and in nineteen seventy five, the victor
Speaker 9: was Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi. In the trial
Speaker 9: and in his mega best selling book Helter Skelter, Bugliosi
Speaker 9: laid out his theory of the crime, Manson told his
Speaker 9: followers that our race war was imminent, and that the
Speaker 9: Beatles song Helter Skelter was about this war.
Speaker 11: Manson told his followers that this would be a blood
Speaker 11: bath in the streets of every American city. Manson foresaw
Speaker 11: that the black man would win this war, but later
Speaker 11: on he said, the black man, because of an experience,
Speaker 11: would simply not be able to handle the reins of power.
Speaker 11: So you'd have to look around at those white people
Speaker 11: who had survived, who had escaped from Helter Skelter. In
Speaker 11: other words, turn all the reigns of power to Charles
Speaker 11: Manson and his family.
Speaker 9: These were all things that Manson had in fact talked about,
Speaker 9: and Bugliosi tied them to the murders, making Manton both
Speaker 9: the architect of the crimes and also providing a motive
Speaker 9: for what seemed to be absolutely senseless acts. But were
Speaker 9: they the reason behind the Tate LaBianca murderers or the
Speaker 9: main reason Manton was not at the scene of any
Speaker 9: of the murders. This thinking goes, so Bugliosi had to
Speaker 9: find a way to make him culpable. The Helter Skelter
Speaker 9: theory did that, but the truth might be simpler. The
Speaker 9: Tate and LaBianca murders were committed while Bobby Bousolet was
Speaker 9: in custody. Were they an attempt to take the heat
Speaker 9: off Bosolet to reinforce the clues left by Bassolet at
Speaker 9: Gary Hinman's house that this was the work of the
Speaker 9: Black Panthers. Author Jarret Kobek.
Speaker 4: What seems to be the hardening consensus about the real
Speaker 4: motivation of the subsequent murders was this idea of doing
Speaker 4: copycat murders that then would make it seem like black
Speaker 4: radicals had done Bousolet's murder.
Speaker 9: But that's not what people were thinking in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 9: and maybe the specifics of why these killings were committed
Speaker 9: don't matter much. After Manson and the others were arrested,
Speaker 9: many of his followers slipped away. They hadn't signed up
Speaker 9: for Murdernet, though remained loyal despite the death toll. That's
Speaker 9: what people knew about her in nineteen seventy five. In retrospect,
Speaker 9: the Tate Loabianca murders became one of the symbols of
Speaker 9: the mythic end of the sixties, but the cultural, political,
Speaker 9: and social movements of the nineteen sixties did not end
Speaker 9: in nineteen sixty nine. As we saw last episode, they
Speaker 9: continued well into the seventies. In fact, two assassination attempts
Speaker 9: by radicalized women in September nineteen seventy five might be
Speaker 9: a more apt symbolic end. Two failed attempts on Gerald Ford,
Speaker 9: a man so representative of the Middle American establishment that
Speaker 9: he was chosen to unite and lead the wounded country
Speaker 9: in the wake of Watergate. I'm Toby Ball.
Speaker 12: And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
Speaker 13: It just escalated.
Speaker 8: It was in and it was crazy.
Speaker 13: And then he heard about the Bottomless Pit, and so
Speaker 13: we're looking through the bottomless pit because he thinks this
Speaker 13: war's gonna happen if we need a place the high.
Speaker 12: Episode two. Don't want out and You're Free. The Tate
Speaker 12: LaBianca murders will always define the Manson family, and rightfully so.
Speaker 12: But for Lynette, from those events brought an end to
Speaker 12: a period in which she'd experience a radical alternative to
Speaker 12: her troubled but traditional upbringing. She koremed from classic Middle
Speaker 12: America to a tiny traveling commune led by an ex
Speaker 12: conguru who came to define the furthest extreme of all
Speaker 12: that Middle America felt was wrong with the radical young.
Speaker 12: The meeting that changed the trajectory of Lynette's life occurred,
Speaker 12: in her telling, on a night in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 12: beneath a gazebo on Venice Beach, California. She was, in
Speaker 12: her words, alone and at a standstill. She just dropped
Speaker 12: out of college, was alienated from her father, and her
Speaker 12: future seemed uncertain. Seemingly out of nowhere, Charles Manson appeared.
Speaker 12: Over the course of several years, Lynette wrote a memoir
Speaker 12: of her time with Manson from nineteen sixty seven to
Speaker 12: nineteen sixty nine, titled Reflection spelled with an X. In
Speaker 12: the book, she presents a utopian view of Manson and
Speaker 12: his followers. She is a very unreliable narrator. Still when
Speaker 12: it comes to understanding her actions in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 12: her perceptions of the experience are probably more important than
Speaker 12: what actually happened during her time with Manson. About that
Speaker 12: meeting at the gazebo, she writes names Charlie, he said,
Speaker 12: looking directly in my eyes. In San Francisco, they called
Speaker 12: me the gardener. He appeared both big and small. I
Speaker 12: was enchanted yet flustered and mentally hiding. And then he
Speaker 12: wasn't there at all until I sought him back in
Speaker 12: earnest and he was seated on the wall. I gathered
Speaker 12: the pieces of my mind. Manson seemed to know that
Speaker 12: her father had kicked her out of the house, and
Speaker 12: Lynette responded by telling him about her life that she
Speaker 12: wanted something different. He told her the way out of
Speaker 12: that room is not through the door. She was confused,
Speaker 12: and when he explained further, Lynette noticed his West Virginia twang.
Speaker 12: Don't want out and you're free. The want ties you up,
Speaker 12: be where you are. You've got to start someplace. This
Speaker 12: advice reminded her of a poem that she'd written during
Speaker 12: a period of deep depression. She'd been staring at her
Speaker 12: red and gray checked pajamas and imagined herself trapped on
Speaker 12: a gray square again from her memoir, around and around
Speaker 12: its edges. I'd paced like a caged animal, collapsing in
Speaker 12: one corner to gnaw the bare bones of despair. But
Speaker 12: when I'd looked up within this fantasy, my square had
Speaker 12: become a diamond. Changing my perspective had changed my world.
Speaker 12: Manson told her that he had just spent seven and
Speaker 12: a half years in prison, and that he had experienced
Speaker 12: hurt and anger until he found peace with himself. He
Speaker 12: was now traveling to see his mother. Lynette could come
Speaker 12: if she wanted. This is from the psychiatric interview conducted
Speaker 12: with Lynette to determine her competency to defend herself in
Speaker 12: the trial for her failed attempt on Ford. Here she
Speaker 12: talks about her relationship with her parents as she was
Speaker 12: growing up.
Speaker 3: And if you were growing up, how would you generally
Speaker 3: categorize your relationship with them? Smooth? Locky times. Oh, let's
Speaker 3: say up until your teen years. In your preteen years,
Speaker 3: we had a good relationship with both mommy and dad.
Speaker 3: Were you closer to one late the other? No.
Speaker 12: The mixture of the unusual and the conventional that was
Speaker 12: a theme of Lynette's upbringing can be seen in her
Speaker 12: participation in a dance troupe called the Westchester Lariats. Lynette wrote,
Speaker 12: I was ten when I took the first of four
Speaker 12: cross country tours with a troop and a chartered bus
Speaker 12: and without my parents. Nearly every night in a different city,
Speaker 12: we performed a two hour song and dance show in
Speaker 12: theaters and auditoriums, military bases, and outdoor arenas. Her mother
Speaker 12: accompanied her on the first tour after that, though, starting
Speaker 12: when Lynette was eleven, her parents stayed behind. But while
Speaker 12: this seems unusual, the content of the tour was actually
Speaker 12: extremely square.
Speaker 8: This evening, we bring you a musical Tiller to Spring.
Speaker 12: Led by a professor from the University of Southern California,
Speaker 12: the group performed all kinds of dances, square dancing, polka, rumba, samba, Viennese, waltz,
Speaker 12: can can, Charleston, and so on, with.
Speaker 14: Songs like Spring Is Here, April Love, and Springtime in
Speaker 14: the Rockies.
Speaker 12: The Lariats even appeared on The Lawrence Welk Show, which
Speaker 12: is about as square as it gets.
Speaker 14: Now here's your host, Lawrence, Well war'd your girls.
Speaker 12: Here's Lynette again talking about her parents during her psychological interview.
Speaker 3: Could you just very briefly characteria his business, warm, cold, friendly, distant, wild, quiet, passy.
Speaker 3: You know how about Dad?
Speaker 8: I would describe them those passes.
Speaker 3: Mom and Dad both relatively quiet people.
Speaker 8: That's right, Well, they're very afraid.
Speaker 3: Do you know what he was afraid of?
Speaker 8: People have difference to it. Some some people were afraid
Speaker 8: of water. Some people were afraid of other people. They're
Speaker 8: afraid their own image, getting in class the sun. He
Speaker 8: had various fears on.
Speaker 3: Good.
Speaker 12: Lynette's characterization of her father as harboring various fears probably
Speaker 12: stems from the complete dissolution of their relationship in her teens.
Speaker 12: Typical for the times, he was a dominant member of
Speaker 12: the family, his feelings and decisions determined the family's actions.
Speaker 12: Lynette traced the origin of their estrangement to her decision
Speaker 12: at age thirteen to go to the beach with an
Speaker 12: older cousin instead of her family. Apparently, this offended her
Speaker 12: father's notion of Lynette's obligations to the family, and his
Speaker 12: reaction was harsh. In reflection, she writes, from that day
Speaker 12: he forbade my presence in any room of the house
Speaker 12: he occupied, and instructed my mother to refuse me an
Speaker 12: allowance or travel money. He permitted her to set a
Speaker 12: plate for me in the kitchen, but thenceforth ignored any
Speaker 12: other arrangements, effectively blocking me out of his life. Reads
Speaker 12: as a wild overreaction to what seemed like a relatively
Speaker 12: minor transgression, and it must have been traumatic for Lynette,
Speaker 12: who was in her teens, her grades fell, she dropped
Speaker 12: out of the Lariettes and began to drink. But despite
Speaker 12: their failed relationship, Lynette is clear that her father stopped
Speaker 12: short of any kind of violence.
Speaker 15: I never said that she was physically abused by her father.
Speaker 15: I laid out the possibility that could have happened. I mean,
Speaker 15: I said people thought that, but she was very insistent
Speaker 15: that that never happened. There was no physical abuse. There
Speaker 15: was emotional abuse, but nothing physical, she said. I'm Jess
Speaker 15: Braven and I wrote a book called Squeaky, The Life
Speaker 15: and Times of Lynette Alice Frommy or from as it's
Speaker 15: more commonly pronounced.
Speaker 12: Even with the rocky home life, Lynette managed to make
Speaker 12: a positive impression in her high school.
Speaker 15: She was considered very talented in high school. She certainly
Speaker 15: was not isolated. She had many connections. She was in
Speaker 15: a play with Phil Hartman, who went on to be
Speaker 15: on Saturday Night Live. They were friends. He gave me
Speaker 15: an interview about her and had very fond memories of
Speaker 15: her being very talented and funny. Her English teachers and
Speaker 15: everyone they imagined really great things for her.
Speaker 3: When you were in high school, what kind of grades
Speaker 3: did you get.
Speaker 8: During the former parer. Heart schooling years did great. The
Speaker 8: latter part of high school I became dis interesting.
Speaker 3: Didn't you have any particular run ins with teacher's principles?
Speaker 10: No?
Speaker 3: How did you get along with the other kids?
Speaker 8: Fine?
Speaker 12: In nineteen sixty six, the from family moved from Redondo
Speaker 12: Beach Inland to Torrance, California. Lynette had been living at
Speaker 12: different people's houses, escaping from the damage relationship with her
Speaker 12: father and the dysfunction in her home and Torrance, though
Speaker 12: she returned to live with her family before finally leaving
Speaker 12: for good. She took classes at Alchemino College, but was
Speaker 12: disappointed in the experience. From her psychiatric interview.
Speaker 8: I was also just outside the schools. I wasn't roning
Speaker 8: into the person has to be wilpen to learn.
Speaker 3: Ye that it was a time for you to do that.
Speaker 3: The paper or newsweek or somebody haven't. I don't remember
Speaker 3: where it was. You've been written about in many different publications.
Speaker 6: They said something about your having a handsome kind of
Speaker 6: a major clash when you were sixteen or something and
Speaker 6: getting fooded.
Speaker 5: Out of the hole.
Speaker 8: I know they like them times like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what did happen? What were the circumstances of your
Speaker 3: leaving home.
Speaker 8: How adore you?
Speaker 6: And when I left, I was at Okay and you
Speaker 6: were leaving because somebody said get out, we don't want
Speaker 6: you around, or something like that.
Speaker 14: Oh, my father and I had a discussion and we
Speaker 14: didn't agree.
Speaker 8: It was about something, probably very minor. I don't even
Speaker 8: remember the super.
Speaker 12: In Reflections, Lynette says that she and her father clash
Speaker 12: over something minor, in her words, a word or definition. Then,
Speaker 12: she writes, suddenly enraged, he pointed to the door and yelled,
Speaker 12: you get out of this house and never come back.
Speaker 12: I cried, stuffing a big purse full of books and
Speaker 12: makeup and miscellaneous junk. I called my college boyfriend to
Speaker 12: pick me up, but he said he was too drunk
Speaker 12: to drive and suggested I hitchhike. She walked to the
Speaker 12: nearest freeway on ramp and thumb a ride on the
Speaker 12: other end of that ride. Charles Manson After the break, like.
Speaker 14: Most young people during the late sixties, we did a
Speaker 14: lot of traveling around.
Speaker 8: We did a lot of meeting people. We will not
Speaker 8: she evenistic or solely autumn to be out only for pleasure.
Speaker 16: We were concerned about what was going on what people
Speaker 16: were thinking.
Speaker 8: I don't know how people were being treated.
Speaker 12: After meeting Charles Manson at gazebo in Venice Beach, Lynette
Speaker 12: joined him in a small group of followers as they
Speaker 12: drove around California and the Southwest. These were the early
Speaker 12: days of the family, before they settled at two ranches
Speaker 12: near Los Angeles, and before Manson's philosophy grew stranger and stranger.
Speaker 14: And we found dozens of young people out in the streets.
Speaker 14: Some of them were taking care of themselves blind, others
Speaker 14: of them were being abused by Henny. Number of people
Speaker 14: being found out that they could just swoop into San
Speaker 14: Francisco and picked people up. And it was my feeling, too.
Speaker 8: Off of these people are place to stay.
Speaker 12: Manson proved to be very adept at recruiting followers among
Speaker 12: this population.
Speaker 7: At its very basic level, it was a form of trafficking.
Speaker 13: And I didn't realize it then, of course, but I'm
Speaker 13: sure he saw me that I was a valuable commodity.
Speaker 7: I'm Deborah Herman, author and indie publisher, and I was
Speaker 7: fortunate enough to collaborate with Diane Lake, formerly known as Snake,
Speaker 7: who was the youngest member of the Manson family cult.
Speaker 13: I'm Diane Lake, former member of the family, and I'm
Speaker 13: now going to be seventy.
Speaker 7: Which I can't believe. When we first connected with one
Speaker 7: another to do this book, Diane had kept her secret
Speaker 7: for how many years forty seven? Pretty much nobody, her
Speaker 7: children didn't even know. Manson did things so much on
Speaker 7: instinct of how to survive, based on a lifetime of
Speaker 7: being in penalage.
Speaker 13: Today and this was a whole new I mean, he
Speaker 13: came out of jail. He'd had lessons on how to
Speaker 13: be a pimp, a successful pimp, because he'd been out
Speaker 13: before and tried it and failed. He'd gotten more lessons.
Speaker 13: But he came out in the middle of the lommer
Speaker 13: e the summer of love, you know, where it's like
Speaker 13: free love and free secks and free drives. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 13: I'm sure that he was just like.
Speaker 12: Wow, think about this. Manson started his second prison stent
Speaker 12: in nineteen sixty Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president, the
Speaker 12: civil rights movement had not yet begun. In earnest there
Speaker 12: was only Middle America. He was released in May of
Speaker 12: nineteen sixty seven, straight into the strangeness of the psychedelic sixties.
Speaker 12: The number one song was the Beatles Penny Lane. Timothy
Speaker 12: Leary had just participated in a public debate with a
Speaker 12: professor from MIT about the use of LSD. Manson traveled
Speaker 12: up to San Francisco at the peak of hate Ashbury.
Speaker 12: The radical Young hadn't existed when he'd entered prison in
Speaker 12: nineteen sixty. Now he was in their midst. It might
Speaker 12: as well have been a different planet.
Speaker 17: Imagine the hate Ashbury District as a lion peering through
Speaker 17: a tambourine with intense, dark golden eyes.
Speaker 12: This is from a KPIX television documentary on the Hate
Speaker 12: which aired on January first, nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 17: With a cross hanging down from the tambourine and mushrooms
Speaker 17: and roses growing below it, and the lion peering through
Speaker 17: the tambourine with intense dark golden eyes. And think of
Speaker 17: it as being an image disappearing, peering, coming back, retracting itself,
Speaker 17: manifesting itself, being beautiful, and it is all perfect. This
Speaker 17: is really it, and it is all perfect. This is
Speaker 17: really it, and it.
Speaker 7: Is all perfect.
Speaker 12: Manson was known as the Gardener in San Francisco because
Speaker 12: the skills that he had used as a pimp proved
Speaker 12: effective with the vulnerable population of young people, mostly women
Speaker 12: in the hate, who he could bring under his influence.
Speaker 12: He considered this tending to the Flower children.
Speaker 14: Young people would come to our house and say can
Speaker 14: I stay here?
Speaker 8: And would say you could stay here, but you know,
Speaker 8: you're going to have to be quiet.
Speaker 16: You're going to have to respect the place and you
Speaker 16: and if you just want attention from your parents, and
Speaker 16: if you're going to take drugs and you can't be
Speaker 16: here as we don't do that.
Speaker 12: This is clearly Lynette twisting the truth to the court
Speaker 12: appointed psychiatrist, trying to make herself look as law abiding
Speaker 12: as possible. The Manson family definitely took drugs. Manson used
Speaker 12: LSD in particular to control his followers. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 12: the Manson family more or less settled in the undeveloped
Speaker 12: areas outside Los Angeles.
Speaker 13: We came back, lived different places in Tipanga Canyon. Then
Speaker 13: we found the Spawn Ranch and it was like an
Speaker 13: old movie set up in the hills of Los Angeles
Speaker 13: in the San Fernando Valley. George was the blind owner
Speaker 13: and he loved the place. But George didn't really know
Speaker 13: everything that was going on, and Squeaky was in charge
Speaker 13: of kind of taking care of George and making him happy.
Speaker 12: George Spawn, the owner of Spawn Ranch, gave Lynette the
Speaker 12: nickname Squeaky because of the pitch of her voice. As
Speaker 12: Diane said, Lynette had the job of keeping Spawn content.
Speaker 12: This reportedly included keeping him sexually satisfied. This utilitarian relationship
Speaker 12: with a much older man would be echoed years later
Speaker 12: in Sacramento. In her psychiatric interview and in reflections, Lynette
Speaker 12: made her best case for the Manson family lifestyle. And
Speaker 12: there must have been attractions in order for people to
Speaker 12: join and then stay.
Speaker 13: Yes, bad things happened there, but I don't The overriding
Speaker 13: thing was the beauty of the whole area.
Speaker 12: The arrangement in a general sense was not unusual for
Speaker 12: the time.
Speaker 7: That's funny, how.
Speaker 13: She where did you come back?
Speaker 5: Then?
Speaker 13: There were lots of communes, there were lots of guru varieties,
Speaker 13: you know, and he kind of pawned himself off as
Speaker 13: this wise philosopher, you know, through his music, rather than
Speaker 13: your city.
Speaker 12: Here's Lynette again from her psychiatric interview. Remember that she
Speaker 12: is trying to put herself in the best possible light.
Speaker 12: She may not be completely candid.
Speaker 3: Here we've got a branch, kind of a foster home lovel.
Speaker 8: Well.
Speaker 14: We weren't telling these people anything, these young people, we
Speaker 14: just offered them our land.
Speaker 8: I believe it's healthy for anyone to live in the words.
Speaker 7: I don't.
Speaker 8: I wouldn't send a kid to the to the streets.
Speaker 8: So we had this land available and let them live
Speaker 8: on it.
Speaker 14: We did not have sex orgies and drug orgies, or
Speaker 14: cult meetings, or hanging Christ in effigy or contending Charlie
Speaker 14: was Christ, or anything of that nature.
Speaker 8: This all comes out of Papa's imagination. We were actually
Speaker 8: very healthy.
Speaker 14: We found out that by giving to each other and
Speaker 14: supporting each other and building each other up, and realizing
Speaker 14: that there is a joy in giving, there was a
Speaker 14: purpose in being able to serve each other, we found
Speaker 14: great satisfaction.
Speaker 7: They were this group of hippies, and they loved each other,
Speaker 7: and they were living from They were manifesting everything they needed.
Speaker 7: They would go dumpster diving for food or people would
Speaker 7: give them things. And Charlie was always saying that he
Speaker 7: was what did he call it? He was postulating for things.
Speaker 7: And then somehow they would happen until my horse is
Speaker 7: down down.
Speaker 12: But beneath the idyllic surface there were darker currents now.
Speaker 7: Of course, he may have been scheming, and he may
Speaker 7: have been bargaining, or people need to remember he had
Speaker 7: learned to be a pimp, so he may have actually
Speaker 7: been trading some of the women for some of the
Speaker 7: things that they all needed.
Speaker 12: This is soft peddling, a practice that has been documented
Speaker 12: where at least some of the girls were expected to
Speaker 12: have sex with visitors to the ranch whom Manson wanted
Speaker 12: to curry favor with. Venereal disease was reportedly rampant on
Speaker 12: the ranch.
Speaker 7: You know, you've got several sides to what was happening,
Speaker 7: but the side he was presenting to the women was
Speaker 7: one of a guru and a musician and their lover.
Speaker 13: And he just had this uncanny ability to read people
Speaker 13: and then use it, you know, for.
Speaker 8: His survival or his forward movement.
Speaker 12: Manson, like so many male gurus, structured the group around
Speaker 12: his sexual relations with his female followers.
Speaker 13: We were like sisters, like you know, the sister wives,
Speaker 13: because we were all having sex with him and sometimes
Speaker 13: with each other with him. It was like a family.
Speaker 13: I mean, you've got to feed twenty people every night.
Speaker 13: We did the cook the cleaning, learned Charlie songs and
Speaker 13: sang them. We played music, and we smoked marijuana, and
Speaker 13: we got high on LSD, you know, probably once a week.
Speaker 13: It's not like anybody really had a job. So we
Speaker 13: had to learn how to take care of ourselves, finding
Speaker 13: housing that was free and panhandled for money. I mean
Speaker 13: that it was basically survival. So however you could eke
Speaker 13: out an existence. That's what we did. And then we
Speaker 13: you know, we moved to the spawn ranch, found that
Speaker 13: and ended up moving to the back house.
Speaker 12: The change in a single year from Lynette's conventional life
Speaker 12: to this new existence at the impoverished margins of society
Speaker 12: must have been disorienting, but she embraced it.
Speaker 13: So those girls they continued, I think to be part
Speaker 13: of the inner circle, especially Lynette. I always felt like
Speaker 13: Lynette was kind of his right hand woman.
Speaker 12: Lynette's education was especially helpful to Manson.
Speaker 13: She was smart, and then I don't think he read well.
Speaker 13: I think he might have even been on the spectrum
Speaker 13: of autism because he had incredible auditory recall, but he
Speaker 13: could not and he hadn't really been to school. He'd
Speaker 13: always been you know, the bad boy at school and
Speaker 13: reform school in prison, and so Lynette did all any
Speaker 13: reading to him. I think that he and Lynette were
Speaker 13: closer than any of the girls, and she was.
Speaker 7: Also very, very dedicated to him.
Speaker 12: And as often happens, the relative isolation and lack of
Speaker 12: restraints led Manson to increasingly unhinged theories.
Speaker 13: But he got kind of frenzied. And I remember one
Speaker 13: time at the ranch on the saloon, he'd gotten all
Speaker 13: these like forest service maps and he taped them all together,
Speaker 13: and he was looking for a pathway to the desert
Speaker 13: because we had got introduced to Barker Ranch through one
Speaker 13: of the girls that joined the family.
Speaker 12: The Manson family lived at two ranches, starting in nineteen
Speaker 12: sixty eight and continuing after the nineteen sixty nine murders
Speaker 12: into the early seventies. In addition to Spawn Ranch and
Speaker 12: Laurel Canyon, they also lived at the far more remote
Speaker 12: Barker Ranch in Death Valley.
Speaker 13: He was looking for a path from there up to
Speaker 13: Barker Ranch, or you know that part of the Death
Speaker 13: Valley on these you know, topographical forestry maps, and he
Speaker 13: just there was this frenzy to get money and supplies gas.
Speaker 13: He talked about digging a huge trench and then hijacking
Speaker 13: a gas tanker and burying it so that we would
Speaker 13: have like, you know, lots of gas.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so that he could be independent.
Speaker 13: But it just it just escalated.
Speaker 8: It was in and it was crazy.
Speaker 13: And then he heard about the bottomless pit, and so
Speaker 13: we're looking for the bottomless pit because he thinks this
Speaker 13: war is going to happen and we need a place
Speaker 13: to hide, and you know that the winner's not going
Speaker 13: to be able to rule.
Speaker 12: The entrance to this bottomless pit was supposed to be
Speaker 12: somewhere in the desert. In his book Helter Skelter, Vincent
Speaker 12: Bugliosi quotes Manson as saying about this pit.
Speaker 2: Every tuned in tribe of people that's ever lived has
Speaker 2: escaped the destruction of their race by going underground, literally,
Speaker 2: And they're all living in a golden city where there's
Speaker 2: a river that runs through it of milk and honey,
Speaker 2: and a tree that bears twelve kinds of fruit.
Speaker 12: You get the picture. All of this that Diane just
Speaker 12: talked about. The money, the gas, the trench, the pit
Speaker 12: were connected to Manson's theory about the helter Skelter race war.
Speaker 12: He believed that the war would be won by blacks,
Speaker 12: but that they would for some reason look to Manson
Speaker 12: to lead them.
Speaker 13: And so then they're going to come and ask the family,
Speaker 13: you know, to I guess, repopulate the world and rule.
Speaker 13: It just made it makes me crazy to even say it,
Speaker 13: but that's what I heard from him.
Speaker 12: And then there were the strange and unnerving, creepy Crawley missions.
Speaker 13: I never was asked to do that, but it was like,
Speaker 13: you know, they'd dressed in black, and they'd go and
Speaker 13: sneak into people's houses and move the furniture and eat
Speaker 13: some food. And as far as I know, they weren't
Speaker 13: stealing anything. But I don't know.
Speaker 12: In retrospect, this may have been conditioning Manson getting his
Speaker 12: followers used to committing weird and transgressive acts at his whim,
Speaker 12: a prelude to the murders that would follow.
Speaker 13: He'd always been talking about the Black White race war,
Speaker 13: kind of like you know, apocalyptic moment in time that
Speaker 13: he'd been hearing about in the jail, and then when
Speaker 13: the Beatles White Album came out, that's when it got
Speaker 13: coined as Helter Skelter, he really thought the Beatles were
Speaker 13: sending him a message about Helter Skelter.
Speaker 9: Helter Skelter is a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney.
Speaker 9: Mostly nonsense lyrics, rockets, instrumentation and screamed vocals.
Speaker 3: All is coming down in the past, but don't want
Speaker 3: to break you.
Speaker 9: The phrase helter skelter means chaos, but also a tall
Speaker 9: spiral slide found at English fairgrounds.
Speaker 11: Tell Me, tell Me, tell me the answers it maybe
Speaker 11: be in love, but you make no dances.
Speaker 3: You goward Aileen to kill with.
Speaker 7: Skills.
Speaker 9: District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's theory of the murders wasn't constructed
Speaker 9: of whole cloth. Charlie preached that the song Helter Skelter
Speaker 9: was a coded message about his race war prophecy. The
Speaker 9: violence of the music pointed to something as well. To
Speaker 9: people looking for signs the Bliss of nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 9: and Penny Lane had been supplanted by the Disorder of
Speaker 9: nineteen sixty eight. Helter Skelter his followers felt that Charlie
Speaker 9: believed it, and maybe he did. The song has become
Speaker 9: associated with Manson largely because of Bugliosi's book of the
Speaker 9: same name in the subsequent movie. In October, two months
Speaker 9: after the Tate LaBianca murders, the arrests came. First. Charlie
Speaker 9: was picked up for leading an auto theft ring. He
Speaker 9: was found hiding in a cabinet beneath the bathroom sink.
Speaker 9: He was kept incarcerated on the new murder charges and
Speaker 9: was never again outside the penal system. His absence left
Speaker 9: a void in the Manson family. Author Jess Braven, you.
Speaker 15: Know, the Manson family didn't have bylaws. You know, it
Speaker 15: was not a formally organized institution. And when Manson, who
Speaker 15: was complete paramount, absolute leader of the group, was removed
Speaker 15: by being arrested, there was no succession plan. Lynette essentially
Speaker 15: emerged as the you know, recognized leader of the group
Speaker 15: for a few reasons, that Charlie trusted her, that she
Speaker 15: was known as someone who kept things running during what
Speaker 15: would pass for more normal times for that commune, and
Speaker 15: then that the news media recognized her or put her
Speaker 15: on TV or put her in the newspapers because she
Speaker 15: was fairly facile at dealing with the press.
Speaker 9: Here, for instance, is Lynette being interviewed by NBC news.
Speaker 8: Good person, a very good person.
Speaker 11: Was he out there all the time?
Speaker 7: I don't even know you know who took.
Speaker 12: Off over now that beer?
Speaker 10: Was anybody stealing anything out there?
Speaker 14: Let's see everyone in a ball and a daughter? Do
Speaker 14: you know all we want to do is do.
Speaker 9: And again? Talking with kse cr Sacramento's NBC station, what about.
Speaker 7: People running around naked out there?
Speaker 14: Well, I took up my clothes whenever I gas Champ.
Speaker 10: It was hot.
Speaker 9: But with Manson's arrest and the exodus of many of
Speaker 9: his followers, things changed for those who.
Speaker 15: Remained without Manson there, You know what is it? It
Speaker 15: becomes a sort of cult surrounding the idea of Manson
Speaker 15: more than Manson himself.
Speaker 9: And Lynette was the most prominent of those that remained.
Speaker 9: This new reality would lead her to a new phase
Speaker 9: of her life, one marked by her continued devotion to
Speaker 9: Manson and by violence. Next time on Rip.
Speaker 1: Current Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball
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Speaker 17: And it is a perfect. This is really it and
Speaker 17: it is all perfect. This is really it and it
Speaker 17: is all perfect. This is really it and it is
Speaker 17: all perfect. This is really it and it is all perfect.
Speaker 17: This is really it and it is all perfect. This
Speaker 17: is really it and it is all perfect. This is
Speaker 17: really it and it is all perfect. This is really it.