Putting aside the leap of faith required to believe that Manson could turn his followers into robotic killing machines, Bugliosi’s theory was riddled with loose ends, and one of the prosecutor’s clumsiest contrivances concerned Terry Melcher.Īccording to the official account, the location of the Tate murders was chosen to send a decisive and terrifying message to Melcher, the former resident of 10050 Cielo Drive, where the killings took place, and the man who famously auditioned and then rejected Charles Manson for a record deal. While few would question the guilt of the participants, Bugliosi’s motive was attacked almost immediately in the fringe literature about the crimes, and it’s easy to see why. This has been the story for 50 years, repeated in innumerable books and movies, including 1976’s ratings-busting TV miniseries.Įxcept it hasn’t been the story. The motive established in a hysterical 1970 trial, reinforced for the ages in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 bestseller Helter Skelter, held that the murders were ordered by a hypnotic cult leader called Charles Manson, carried out by his “Family” of stray, LSD–addled hippie children to trigger a race war he believed was predicted by the Beatles’ White Album. The next day, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered in their Los Feliz home with the same appalling savagery. This isn’t quite news to anyone with a sincere interest in the events of that hot, mad summer in ’69 when a so-called hippie murder death cult slaughtered starlet Sharon Tate and her friends Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger, along with another luckless visitor to their luxury Benedict Canyon residence, Steven Parent.
Terry Melcher was one of the key figures in the Manson Family saga, and his entire story-a new book argues-was bullshit.
0 kommentar(er)
