We’re now on the 40th anniversary of the first murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family,” in their attempt to start an apocalyptic race war in which they hoped to rise from the chaos and rule the world.
After the murders and before the trial, family member and murderess Susan Atkins sold her grand jury testimony to the British media, and the Los Angeles Times purchased the rights from that company to run the article in the United States. The Times printed it in December 1969. The day after the printing, three reporters from KABC Channel 7 in L.A. decide to re-trace the steps along the roads that Aktins said that she and the family members took after one of the murders, in the allotment of time equivalent to what Aktins said the family members did in the car, namely, to change out of the clothes they were in when they did the murders and into new clothes. After they did that, they stopped at the first wide enough shoulder in the road and dumped their murdering clothes into the ravine. The KABC reporters followed these same steps, and found not only the wide shoulder, but the clothes were in plain sight a little bit down the escarpment, not all the way down at the bottom. The LAPD recovered the clothes, and they were a key part of the body of evidence that was successful in prosecuting the Manson gang.
One of the three KABC reporters was Al Wiman, who, as you know, was St. Louis’s health reporter from the 1980s on two a few years ago on Channel 4 and then Channel 5.
The 1976 movie Helter Skelter, which was mostly true to live, shows the KABC re-tracking and the find of the bloody clothes. However, it does not mention the real life names of any of the three reporters, nor does it give the characters who played them any fictional names.
As an aside, it was perfectly obvious that Charles Manson was about six beers short of a six pack. What proves it is that all his crimes in the Helter Skelter serial was based on his notion that blacks were all of a sudden going to rise up and commit extremely atrocious crimes against whites, thus provoking a race war that blacks would win. At that point, though, the blacks realized that they had this whole big world to rule but no skill, so Manson’s theory is that they would seek out and find that there was a “family” of white people that had hidden in Death Valley to survive the brouhaha, and their being white means they would be the only people on Earth left with the skill to rule the world. Manson never thought about the obvious flaw (among many others) of his plans — If the blacks were so smart and organized to “rise up,” all of a sudden, then what would they need with Charlie Manson and his vagabounds? Why would all their intelligence and organization that they used to commit a holocaust against whites all of a sudden go away when they succeeded? If these blacks hated whites that much, why wouldn’t they finish the job by smoking out Charlie and Company?
Also what kinda surprises me is that the Manson gang was, and still is, considered to be proto-white supremacists, and Manson himself was pro-Hitler who once said that “Hitler was a tuned-in guy who wanted to level the karma of the Jews.” Manson’s paranoia came from the Beatles song Helter Skelter on the White Album, and from other songs on that album, and also various paranoid and fatuous comparisons to Beatles members mannerisms and the Book of Revelation. What amazes me is that the media didn’t take out after the Beatles, and that the ADL (there was no SPLC in those days) didn’t accuse the Beatles of distributing anti-Semitic extremist hate music. I suppose that John Lennon’s liberalism gave them cover, but had it been someone like Charlie Daniels or Lynyrd Skynyrd that supported George Wallace, the media/ADL would have went bonkers.
UPDATE: Actually, today (August 8) is the 40 years to the day of the first set of murders (Tate) that Charles Manson participated in along with his “family.” However, it was not the first murder done at the hands of family members; just a few weeks before Tate, family members Bobby Bousollet (sp?), Susan Atkins and one other woman stabbed Gary Hinman to death over a matter of money, and the three tried to frame Black Panthers by using Hinman’s blood to draw graffiti. That means that Manson must have promulgated the Helter Skelter scenario sometime before then and long before the Tate murders. Some time before that, Manson smoked a black drug dealer over a matter of money. I’m sure Manson might have tried to exploit that one as well.
