HELTER SKELTER HORROR

8/9/1969 - Shortly after midnight, twenty-three-year-old Manson Family member Charles "Tex" Watson tells aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski, "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business!"  Executioner to his victim, it is as true a statement as true can be.

                                         
                                                            Watson

One of the bloodiest, and most blood chilling nights, to ever take place in Southern California, begins when thirty-four-year-old maniac Charles Milles Manson (a 5'2" half-pint career criminal who is caught stealing for the first time at the age of nine, before graduating to armed robbery by the time he turns thirteen), sends a group of young whack-jobs that follow his addled leadership, to an address he knows in Beverly Hills, 10050 Cielo Drive, hoping to get revenge for his failed music career and perhaps start a new civil war between the black and white citizens of the United States (a madness he calls Helter Skelter, taking the title for his insane idea from a Beatles' song from their White Album, he expects to be the leader of the new America that will spring from the chaos he creates).  

                                   
                                                            Manson
                              
                                                    Destination - Death

Watson, Susan Atkins (21), Linda Kasabian (20), and Patricia Krenwinkel (21) are given their marching orders ... destroy everyone they find at the home (the former residence of Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son, a music producer Mansion believes has betrayed him), and do it in as gruesome a manner as is possible (leave something "witchy" behind Manson tells his team).  To terrible effect, they will do as they are told!

                 
                                     Atkins                                               Kasabian
                                                
                                          Krenwinkel

Very wrong place at the wrong time, their first victim is Steven Parent (18), a student who has the misfortune of visiting a friend (William Garretson, caretaker for the estate) who is living in the property's guest house on the night of the rampage.  Attacking the teenager as he is in the process of leaving the property in his Rambler at the Main Gate, Watson attains his first kill of the evening, slashing the youth with knife, then shooting him four times in the chest and stomach with a .22-caliber revolver.  The group then creeps up to the main house, breaks in, and takes hostage the people they find sleeping inside.

                                               
                                                            Parent

Found inside the home are the wife of director Roman Polanski, eight and half months pregnant movie actress Sharon Tate (26), internationally known hairstylist Jay Sebring (35), Polanski friend Frykowski (32), and Frykowski's girlfriend, the heiress to a coffee fortune, Abigail Folger (25).

            
                            Tate                                            Sebring & Tate - 1966
             
                          Frykowski                                              Folger

In the butchery that ensues, Frykowski and Folger attempt to escape and go down fighting.  Frykowski is killed by Atkins and Watson on a porch outside the house, stabbed in the legs, hit over the head with Watson's pistol, shot twice, and then stabbed some more ... a grand total of fifty-one times.  Folger gets to the front lawn in her failed flight for life, murdered by Krenwinkel and Watson in another stabbing overkill, her's a death of twenty-eight knife wounds (Kasabian has been told to stand watch at the Main Gate).  Sebring and Tate never make it out of the house.  The first to go, Sebring is shot and stabbed by Watson seven times.  Tate, pleading for the life of her unborn baby, is killed by Watson and Atkins, stabbed to death a grisly sixteen times.  Murders complete, before leaving, the killers write "Pig" on the front door of the house ... in blood.

                 
                                                         Crime Scene
                                 

Eventually all the participants in the killings, including Manson, will be brought to justice, the case broken when Atkins runs her mouth about her part in the deaths to her bunkmates, Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham, while under custody at the Sybil Brand Institute detention center in Los Angeles.  Found guilty and sentenced to death, the killers escape appointments in the California gas chamber when the Supreme Court of the state stupidly abolishes the death penalty in 1972 (having killed no one, Kasabian escapes by turning against her friends by becoming a witness for the prosecution).  Atkins will die of a brain tumor at the Cenral Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California, at the age of sixty-one.  The others, Watson, Manson, and Krenwinkel remain behind bars, still serving their life sentences while they await their coming eternities of damnation.

                
                                                Members of the Manson Family

MADNESS IN TEXAS

8/1/1966 - After weeks of hearing voices and having strange thoughts he doesn't understand, twenty-five-year-old Engineering student and former Marine, Charles Joseph Whitman, once the youngest Eagle Scout in America, puts the plan he has to end his many pains into effect ... climbing to the top of the Main Building Tower of the University of Texas at Austin with a footlocker filled with weapons and ammunition, he begins shooting anyone his guns can target.

                               
                                                          Whitman

Familiar with guns and knives since boyhood from hunting expeditions with his father around Lake Worth, Florida, Whitman's rampage begins shortly after midnight with a visit to his mother's apartment.  So she won't suffer and embarrassment from his coming actions, the madman renders the woman who gave him birth unconscious, then stabs her through the heart.  Murder #1, before he is done there will be 16 more.  Murder #2 is also a family member, this time his wife of four years, twenty-three-year-old Kathleen Francis Leissner, a teach at Lanier High School, stabbed four times in the heart as she is sleeping in the couple's bed.

                                  
                                             Tyke with toys
                               
                                                              Mom
             
                                                        Wife

Relatives taken care of, Whitman completes a suicide note and then starts gathering the supplies he will need for his mission of mayhem.  He first rents a dolly, then drives to a local hardware store and purchases a Universal M-1 carbine, two ammunition magazines, and eight boxes of ammo, explaining to the cashier that he is going "wild hog hunting."  Next stop is Chuck's Gun Shop where four more carbine magazines and six additional boxes of ammo are procured.  Then he is off to Sears to buy a Sears Model 60 12-gauge, semi-automatic shotgun.  Purchases complete, he returns to his home, saws down the barrel of the shotgun, and loads his supplies into the footlocker he acquired during his stint in the Marines ... a Remington 700 6mm bolt-action hunting rifle, the shotgun, a .35-caliber pump rifle, the carbine, a 9mm Luger pistol, a Galesi-Brescia .25-caliber pistol, a Smith & Wesson M19 .357 Magnum revolver, and over 700 rounds of ammunition go in, along with other items he might need for a long day on the campus, necessities like food, coffee, Dexedrine, Excedrin, ear plugs, water, binoculars, a machete, and toilet paper.  By 11:35 a.m. Whitman is at the University of Texas, using false identification to get a 40-minute parking permit to deliver equipment to the Main Building.


                                                                       The Tower

Making his way to the 27th floor by elevator, Whitman takes his first campus victim, 51-year-old receptionist Edna Townsley, rifle butt clubbed and then shot in the head.  Next his wrath is turned on a family trying to visit the observation deck on the 28th floor of the building ... hitting 16-year-old and 18-year-old brothers, Mark and Mike Gabour, their mother Mary Gabour, and their aunt, 56-year-old Marguerite Lamport with multiple rounds from the sawed-off shotgun.  Finally free of distractions, Whitman then barricades the stairway to the observation deck, readies his Remington, and looks through the rifle's scope.  He is 231 feet above the campus when he begins firing at 11:48 a.m.

                   
                                                                  Gunsmoke

A sharpshooter while with the Marines, Whitman spends the next hour circling the observation deck and sniping away at a multitude of lunchtime targets, hitting students, teachers, citizens, emergency personnel, and law enforcement officers ... anything that moves and doesn't keep out of sight, killing 15 people and seriously wounding another 32.  Whitman's campus dead are:

Edna Townsley, 51
Marguerite Lamport, 56
Mark Gabour, 16
Claire Wilson, 18 ... she survives, but the baby she is carrying is lost
Thomas Eckman, 18 ... struck trying to help his fiance, Wilson
Dr. Robert Boyer, 33
Thomas Ashton, 22
Karen Griffith, 17

                                            
                                                             Griffith

Thomas Karr, 24 ... returning home after completing an exam
Billy Speed, 22 ... one of the first police officers to arrive on the scene
Harry Walchuk, 38 ... a doctoral candidate and father of six
Paul Sonntag, 18 ... a student hit while hiding with his friend, Claudia Rutt, behind a construction barricade
Claudia Rutt, 18
Roy Schmidt, 29 ... an electrical repairman that unsuccessfully tries to hide behind a car
David Gunby, 58 ... hit in the back, he will die from the lingering effects of his wound in 2001

And there would have been more if not for the efforts of three police officers (Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez, Houston McCoy, and Jerry Day) and a civilian (40-year-old Allen Crum) that decide enough is enough and make their way up to the observation deck and to bring fatal retribution to the merciless sniper.
                                     
                            
                            Pinned down - note body beside the hedge
      
                                                            Victim Removal
                                  
                                         Crum, Martinez, McCoy, Day - L to R

Crum, armed with a borrowed rifle, and Day with his service pistol, circle north, while the pistol armed Martinez and shotgun toting McCoy, circle south in the opposite direction.  Intending to surprise Whitman from two directions at the same time, the plan falls about when Crum accidentally discharges his rifle, alerting the sniper, but also drawing his attention aware from the other team on the observation deck.  Jumping around a corner, from a distance of 50 feet away, Martinez empties his .38 at Whitman ... and not the sharpshooter the sniper is, misses with all six rounds.  Luckily though for the officer, his partner McCoy does not miss with the two 00-buckshot rounds he fires from his shotgun.  Down, twitching the last seconds of his life away as he bleeds out on the deck, Whitman is hit in the head, neck, and left side.  Just to be sure though, irate at the events of the day and his poor marksmanship, Martinez grabs the shotgun from McCoy, walks up to Whitman, and puts another round of buckshot into the killer's upper left arm, then ending the day of madness, he leaves the tower repeating over and over, "I got him."

                                             
                                                             Finis Charlie
                                               
                                                                8/1/1966

Seemingly an All-American Boy ... Eagle Scout, Marine, an intellect with an IQ of 138 ... people are shocked, stunned , and horrified by the carnage that takes place in Austin, and as is their want, the country demands answers.  And terrifyingly so, one is that maybe anyone could become a Whitman ... body turned over to the coroner, Whitman receives the autopsy his farewell note requested, during which it is discovered that he has a brain tumor in his head the size of a pecan.  The source of the madness?  No one can say for sure, but to this day it remains a topic of discussion and debate.

                          
                                                                      Charles

Considered the Crime-of-the-Century at the time, there will sadly be many more mass murders for America to endure in the decades that follow.