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The 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others, orchestrated by the wild-eyed cult leader Charles Manson, marked the end of the flower child era of the sixties and ushered in a dark, disturbing reality in the Hollywood Hills.
The brutal killings carried out across two nights in the swanky Los Angeles neighborhoods fed media outlets’ appetites for seven months and have since become easy fodder for true crime retellings, from Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to the newly released documentary “Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes,” directed by Joe Berlinger.
“It’s a horrifying story about a mastermind manipulating other people to do their evil bidding, where these people at the time of the crime, because of drug use and his influence, were remorseless,” Berlinger tells USA TODAY. “It was Hollywood’s worst nightmare.”
In the three-part docuseries (now streaming on Netflix), Berlinger challenges claims that Manson’s motives behind the killings weren’t to start a race war. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi swayed the jury and the general public into believing that Manson had an obsession with The Beatles’ “White Album” and had concocted a race war he called “Helter Skelter,” named after The Beatles’ song. Bugliosi argued that Manson commanded his family members to murder affluent white people, under the guise of the Black Panthers, an elaborate story that would later be portrayed in Bugliosi’s best-selling novel “Helter Skelter.”
The Aug. 8, 1969, victims included Tate, the pregnant wife of movie director Roman Polanski; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring; writer Wojciech Frykowski; and teenager Steven Parent. Supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed and killed the following night.
Through the help of new and old audio tapes and Manson family members, Berlinger argues that the murderous rampage began with a botched drug deal by a man named Bobby Beausoleil. He says in the doc that Manson invited biker gang “Straight Satans” to his ranch to provide female companions and protection from the Black Panthers. Beausoleil became friends with the bikers and bought them drugs from Gary Hinman. When the motorcycle crew was unhappy with the drugs, Hinman and Beausoleil got into a confrontation. Berlinger then believes Manson sliced Hinman’s face with a sword, and Beausoleil stabbed him to death, smearing the words “Political Piggy” and a Black Panther paw print in blood on the wall. And when Beausoleil got arrested, he became a liability to Manson, Berlinger says.
“It’s actually just a series of blunders and bad planning by petty criminals,” Berlinger says. “And that’s the story we’re telling here.”
Below, Berlinger talks to USA TODAY about “The Charles Manson Tapes,” what draws him to serial killer stories and the motivation behind Manson’s killing.
Question: What draws you to these kinds of stories, particularly around serial killers?
Joe Berlinger: I’m just fascinated [by] why people go off the rails. I had an abusive father. He wasn’t that nice to me. His father beat him up; my father beat me up. I guess psychologically, I wonder why, deep down, people do terrible things despite their upbringing. So I think I have a personal connection there.
Some might argue that when you tell a story from Charles Manson’s perspective, it’s insensitive to the victim or the victim’s family. How do you strike a balance?
I see and recognize the argument that by telling the story of a killer, it might not be something that the victims want. But I have turned down projects, or I’ve terminated projects, where the victims say, ‘No, no, we don’t want you to tell that story.’ So for all of these shows, I generally get victim approval and victim involvement in the show. Manson is an old enough story that that doesn’t apply.
How do the unreleased tapes in “Conversations with a Killer” push the needle forward?
We’re not the first ones, but I think this is going to be the high-profile version of the story in which we poke holes in the Helter Skelter idea. A lot of our unreleased tapes demonstrate that that was not the case. The motives were much more banal. It was a series of blunders by a guy who was hustling other people. A drug deal gone bad gets Bobby Beausoleil in prison.
Why do you believe Charles Manson thought Bobby Beausoleil was a liability?
Bobby Beausoleil was a threat to him being in prison because he could [identify] him in the Gary Hinman murder. So they went out and they did a murder and did the “piggy” and the Black Panther paw print to make it seem like it was connected to the Hinman murder. And then the next day, when the newspapers talked about the Tate murders without any mention of the Black Panthers, he was frustrated and they went out and did another murder.
So essentially, you’re saying Manson’s former family members have said the actual reason behind these killings was not Vincent Bugliosi’s argument but to get Bobby Beausoleil out of jail?
To this day, the most popular true crime book ever published is still “Helter Skelter.” And so this false story has been imprinted in the cultural consciousness. I wanted to tell what I thought was the accurate story. We’re giving this guy too much credit, that yes, he ranted and raved about a coming race war. Yes, he was racist. But the motivations for the murders were an unplanned series of blunders designed to correct mistakes that were made.
What do you hope to leave viewers with?
It was very important to do an effective investigation and tell the story that I think is the truthful story by listening to the family members who all say the same thing: This was not Helter Skelter, and this was an attempt to get Bobby Beausoleil out of prison so he would do no damage to Manson. And one blunder led to the next. Sometimes evil is very banal and there’s not an elaborate reason, and yet this has become one of the most mythologized stories in the history of true crime. I wanted to poke a hole in that and just talk about what really happened.