After the Sharon Tate murder, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), it wasn’t over:
The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened, with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from the suburbs of Los Angeles who’d played the sousaphone in junior high.
And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.
The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife. Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately — and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in through an unlocked side door, and he tied up the couple by himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway, where they were waiting in the car.
Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill everyone. They had only buck knives.
They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator — misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.
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But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months.
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As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of LAPD detectives — one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca — failed to share information, believing the crimes unconnected.
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Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.
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[Susan] Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder — that of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson — and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.
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These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.
They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor — bright buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts.
They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.
In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals — even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared — it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.