http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local-beat/40-Years-Ago-Today-52831042.html
Aug 9, 2009
It was 40 years ago today that America's worst fears of the hippie
generation crystallized when Sharon Tate and four others were
slaughtered by Charlie Manson's "family" in her rented Benedict Canyon home.
On Aug. 9, 1969, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay
Sebring, Steven Parent and Tate -- who was 26 years old, eight months
pregnant and married to film director Roman Polanski -- were slain
"to instill fear into the establishment," one of the killers, Susan
Atkins, later told a grand jury.
A day later, Manson's followers struck again -- slashing to death
grocery store chain owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in
their Los Feliz-area home.
The murderers left bloody messages at both crime scenes, including
the title of a Beatles song, "Helter Skelter," in what authorities
believe was an effort to start a race war.
Following a nine-month trial in 1970-71, jurors convicted Manson,
Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel -- and Charles
"Tex" Watson in a separate trial -- of first-degree murder and
recommended they die for their crimes. In 1972, however, the
California Supreme Court invalidated the then-existing statute for
capital punishment, and their sentences were commuted to life in prison.
Manson's brief reign of terror is four decades ago, but it continues
to have a hold on America's psyche.
Sandi Gibbons covered their trial for City News Service. Today, she
is a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's
Office, which prosecuted the case.
What Charlie Manson meant to America was "the death of the hippie
movement," Gibbons told CNS.
The Manson family was "the dark side of the peace, love and
brotherhood movement," she said. "These were still the '60s, with
flower children, love-ins ... peace-loving druggies ... but Manson
was another side altogether. This was murder. This was killing people."
She said that from the moment Manson's family was uncovered at their
commune in Death Valley a couple months after the murders, "people
looked at hippies in a different light."
She added that the commune movement also "started shrinking."
But Gibbons said she never considered Manson a hippie. Rather, she
said, he was simply a "con man."
She said he knew "how to get people to do his bidding through drugs,
spouting a bunch of philosophy to a bunch of drugged-out kids,
promising them a home -- sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. The main thing
was that Charlie was never a hippie."
She noted he had been institutionalized for most of his life since he
was a child and that he discovered the hippies in the late '60s after
he got out of prison in Washington state and "wandered down the coast
to the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco."
She said he played the guitar and gathered a small following, and
that "his visions didn't turn dark until he got rejected in Los
Angeles on the music front."
"The bottom line is that Charlie was a con man, and he's still
conning people," she said. "I was raised in the South, and Charlie to
me was a redneck Southerner who did not like women -- they were
something to use, and he used them well."
Manson has repeatedly been turned down for parole, as have the
so-called Manson women, even when one of them became terminally ill
with brain cancer.
When asked for her personal opinion on whether the women should be
paroled after 40 years, Gibbons said that as a spokeswoman for the
District Attorney's office she couldn't discuss that.
"So far, this office has opposed parole," she said.
Gibbons noted the Manson women were in their mid 20s when they
committed their crimes, and that she wasn't much older at the time.
"I could easily have been them -- but I wasn't," she said.
She said she sat behind Manson during some of the trial, and did not
consider him to be charismatic in the least.
"He was like 5 feet 2 inches, a little redneck Southerner. I did not
find him charismatic, or fascinating or interesting. He was a little creep."
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