Without Terry Melcher, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), there would have been no murders at 10050 Cielo Drive:
He was the clearest link between Manson and the Hollywood elite. A music-industry bigwig, he’d promised Manson a record deal only to renege on it. The official story was that Manson, reeling from the rejection, wanted to “instill fear” in Melcher — so he chose Melcher’s old house on Cielo Drive as the site for the first night of murders. He knew that Melcher didn’t live there anymore. He just wanted to give the guy a good scare.
[…]
Melcher testified that he’d met Manson exactly three times, the last of which was around May 20, 1969, more than two months before the murders. After Manson’s arrest, Melcher became so frightened of the Family that Bugliosi had to give him a tranquilizer to relax him before he testified. “Ten, fifteen years after the murders I’d speak to him and he was still convinced that the Manson Family was after him that night,” Bugliosi had told me.
If Manson had wanted to kill Melcher, he could have. He had Melcher’s new address in Malibu. Gregg Jakobson, a musician and a friend of the Beach Boys, had testified at the trial that Manson called him before the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass.”
“Yes, why?” Jakobson answered.
“Well, he doesn’t anymore,” Manson said. The Family had “creepy-crawled” Melcher’s Malibu home — that’s what they called it when they dressed up in black and sneaked around rich people’s places — and stolen the spyglass. When Melcher himself testified, he confirmed that he’d noticed it missing around “late July or early August.” Candice Bergen, his girlfriend, had noted the disappearance, too.
Something about this gave me a flash of A Clockwork Orange (1971).
A Clockwork Orange (1971) is, of course, the story of an aspirational band of piratical perverts being cruelly suppressed by the evil chthonian longhouse.