“I Am a Refection of You”…Mundane Murders…

While Dan is off writing furiously on Chapter Three of “Déjà Vu” , I thought I’d climb back out from under my rock, you know, the one that can be found in the cave in which I live, to give you a vague blow-by-blow on how each day begins for MsBurb.

Now, I could say I start my mornings…but who’s kidding who? I don’t have mornings, I have afternoons…which flow into wee hours of the next morning…my days begin when most of you civil people want to end yours.
And if you’ve been following MsBurb at all, each day is kinda divided into two chemicals – Hot Drugs (aka Coffee) and Cold Drugs (aka Booze) – and where one ends, the other begins. But at the start of my day, coffee reigns supreme, but somehow, when others add flavoured creamers to theirs for zest, mine just doesn’t go down smoothly without a daily pinch of MURDER.
Yeah, I’m not proud. My preference has always been autopsy reports but hey, crime scene photos or evidence documents will do in a pinch too.
And far before Manson had re-entered my consciousness, my daily routine involved assessing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. My personal goal: to read ALL 26 volumes of the Warren Commission and failing by my sudden demise, moving on to the Church, Rockefeller and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (better known as HSCA)commissions while I was at it.
Yeah, I know, MsBurb needs a life. Too late for that, it seems.
Two-thirds my way through that literary Mt. Everest, and, of course, assessing along the way, the dozens of conspiracy theories which have long since dogged this murder, I discovered a phenomenon which seems to plague high profile murder cases…the need to fit the motive and the perp to the level of his victim.
If the victim was bigger than Life, then so should be the crime and the criminal.
But sadly, Life doesn’t always fit the version of how we think it should be, and more often than not, the crime and the criminal are very baseline creatures, committed baseline acts that just happen to be on a well above-board human being.
To affix a more loftier reason why such a lofty person was assailed, the loss of that life becomes a wee bit more palatable to take.
And so, forty-seven years later, you can still find Conspiracy Theorists pounding virtual Forum tables, as if JFK were gunned down yesterday, ardently over-confident that a major killing complex was behind the destruction of this iconic President. When actually, if one one takes a page-by-page account of the facts in the case, barring, of course, the average American citizen’s ill-educated assumption that there was a conspiracy to kill, one finds that to the exclusion of all else, Lee Harvey Oswald really did in fact just get to a gun first and shoot the 35th President of the United States.
Why did I digress and force-feed you a condensed version of a Presidential Whodunit Story?
Because this same phenomenon is also at work with how Manson sympathizers view Charlie and the Hinman/TLB/She murders eight years after JFK.
The victims were sensational, some bigger than Life. The convicted perpetrators even more sensational and Charlie as big as one can get in life. So it must follow then, that what is considered the established reasoning behind the killings, and the killers themselves, has to be something other than what is known.

• Terry Melcher knew more than what he said.
• Charlie wasn’t in town on the nights of the murders.
• Voytek’s drug dealing got the Tate victims all killed.
• Leno’s gambling and financial dalliances with the Mob did them in.
• The Family were paid Hit men guided by a bigger Force who was really pulling all the strings.

And the list of scenarios goes on and on, as long as there are bytes on blogs as yet un-used.
And let’s not forget the umpteen “Tell-All” books published over the decades, prevalent in both the JFK and Manson murders, that will swear this faction or that motive was really at the heart of the killings; yet, when you go in search at the back of these books for a corroborating end-note or bibliography reference, you always come up short, or the reference, if given, leads you nowhere.
I, personally, have no financial or ulterior motive in backing one scenario over another, either in the JFK case or TLB. If I have a Master, it is to the facts in both, and if someone could show me even one teeny, weenie piece of corroborative information that would conclusively lead me to think that either Oswald or Manson were innocent of their crimes, I would gladly want that piece, as I’d now be the most famous North American on the face of the planet!
But, to date, beyond partisan rumours, innuendo and empty accusations, I have nothing that leads me to change my view that both Oz and The Soul are exactly where they should be in all this inflated history – a spec of dysfunctional dust, that when fame wasn’t attainable in the normal sense, infamy was the next best recourse, as come Hell or High Water, Lee Harvey and Charles Milles were going down in History, one way or another.
Once I delved back into the Manson murders, I realized, just having completed my foray into Oswald, how similar these two men were, despite the separate worlds in which they lived;

• Both had loveless, unattached Mothers.
• Both has no family/domestic security.
• Both had very bright IQs but were unable to stay in school and focus beyond a lower grade education.
• Both lashed out at women, to vex their frustration on men of power in society.
• Both were physically diminutive and suffered a fair amount of peer pressure and bullying because of said, which only fuelled their already firm grasp that the world was indeed out to “get” them.
• Both had an inability to keep a steady job, always seeing themselves in loftier positions of power that their lack of formal education would have ever allowed.
• Both were arrogant to a fault and challenged authority at every turn.
• Both had allusions of grandeur and had to, all all costs, fulfill what they saw as their rightful place in history, even if others had to be sacrificed in achieving that goal.
• Both destroyed the futures of prominent people and tangentially affected North American society at large, taking citizens one step further away from innocence and two steps closer to fearing the unknown.
• Both men have ardent supporters, to this very day, that everything that is considered fact in these cases, just cannot be. Both CT (Conspiracy Theory) camps refusing to accept the bold face truth but unable in forty plus years to provide evidence to support the contrary.
• Both men handled their captures with the coolness of a cucumber and the arrogance that no matter what they did or said, society was to blame and therefore could never really punish them for it.

As we outsiders sit and ponder what next move Manson sycophants will execute in their un-ending goal of freeing their Saviour, just remember Lee Harvey Oswald and the mountains of evidence that support his culpability. There is no difference in the Manson case, and murder, even murder of people larger than Life, is still just murder, a bestial, baseline reactionary attempt at usurping power from those who have it, over to those who do not, the end result – damage and destruction in Murder Most Mundane.