Blow by Blow – A Writer’s Process Through the Manson Family Murders

 

56 years. 

Yes, 56 years since the Manson Family slaughtered ten innocent lives.

In 1978, the Manson Family killers came up for parole. I remember being glued to the news. I lived some 1500 miles away from the killers, and in Canada, but I remember being swallowed up by the fear those monsters would be set free. When they were thankfully denied parole, I began researching the Family and the crimes in earnest and have continued to this day.

The fear in me had started so long ago, the morning after the massacre at 10050 Cielo Drive. It was all over the news, ground and aerial shots, reporters gathering outside the gate. Southern California, really the world, was stunned by the details that were coming out of that property way up in Benedict Canyon, where the Beautiful People lived.

I was only 5 years old at the time but had my father’s photographic memory and a raging imagination. Nothing escaped me on those subsequent days. The live on-site reporting, the newspaper photos of the dead, and the adult conversations swirling around me, whispered, of course. Those adults tried their best to shield me from the fear. But a child can feel fear in others. There was nowhere for anyone to hide. And in my little girl imagination I was positive Charlie and Sadie were coming for me, too.

As of August 9, 1969, my little world outlook was never the same. But no one’s outlook was.

We had gone from innocent, carefree days, where no one gave a thought to locked doors or hiding behind imposing gates. The 60s had been daisy chain love. Overnight, my generation swam in a blood bath. The open, loving world had shut down, never to open again.

While others penned the umpteen books that are out there on this case, I kept mum. I grew up. I watched and listened and read and quietly researched through the years.

It wasn’t until the internet fired up that more information could be gleaned by the public, and more learned about the case. In 2008, I attempted to join an online group to discuss the murders. Most groups out there were pro-Charlie, pro-Family. When they discovered I had law enforcement familial ties, I was kicked out of their binary enclaves.

Being rejected has never stopped me, especially by those who are or favor the outlaw life. Rather, it makes me smile and eggs me on, as like it did my father, an RCMP — Royal Canadian Mounted Police — Constable. Outlaws say, “Don’t come in, don’t look here,” and by God, that’s precisely what I and my father would do. The old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, so applies in this case. Back in ‘68/69, if my father had worked for LASO — Los Angeles Sheriff Office — and worked Charlie’s patch at Spahn, he would have stuck to old Charlie and his spaced-out kids like white on rice, observing every action that group would take to have Manson void his parole and go back to where he belonged. Prison. 

And so, in a binary sense, I chose to do the same. I created the 2nd Official Tate-LaBianca Murders Blog — the 1st being a pro-Charlie blog, aligned with those who kicked me to the curb. Yes, my chosen blog title was an online jab. Youbetcha. It would have made my father smile.

TLB2, as it’s known, has always been free. No subscriptions, no fees, no profit at all. It would be my take on what truly happened, by whom, to whom, when, and why, as laid out in firsthand police statements, witness testimonies, lie detector tests, LAPD and LASO case documents, and trial transcripts. You know, those niggling facts that get in the way of an agenda-driven website or a bestselling Tell-All chock-a-block with hype, innuendo, and falsehoods.

So, I investigated and typed my way through TLB2. 300+ posts now reside there. Besides the forensic posts, I wrote on the culture and the times, adding a few fictional works, to give the blog a 360-degree Technicolor feel.

And I watched as others published more books. Some very well done. Many lousy.

People who knew me and knew my vast knowledge in the case always asked, “Why don’t you write a book?” I was asked that for years.

My answer up ’til now had always been, “That would put blood on my hands.” And I meant it. Somehow, I couldn’t mesh the fear I had felt as that little girl, the panic that cloaked my generation in those heart-stopping days, the devastating hurt of the surviving family members, and me writing a book for money.

Years passed. Many. Other than the blog, I kept mum.

And last year, on the 55th anniversary, something in me changed.

I don’t know if the dead nodded their heads in approval or it was me needing to turn the page on my experience. To close the book on my own fear, as it were, and in so doing, offer my final words on the case.

It was as if the time was now, the time was right. The blood, if any, would be ever so slight on my hands, a half century later. I could craft a record on what went down. To fill in the gaps, to answer some questions, to have the last word as my generation ages and passes on the wind.

And so, Blow by Blow — The Manson Family Murders & In-Depth Examinations was born.

Blow by Blow is a re-creation of those terror-filled nights. I fill in the gaps based on learned facts in the case, adding creative license where no information was offered by the killers, in terms of dialogue or actions. It’s set up as a projector of sorts, where the reader isn’t just told about the cases, but re-lives them. To feel the fear, we alive back then felt.

In the second half of the book, The Examinations, I take certain aspects of the crimes and dissect them in their minutia, attempting to offer answers to questions we as outsiders have always had.

Boiled down, Blow by Blow is my book on closing the book on these crimes.

~~~

Time has passed. 56 years is a long time.

There have been people who have been born, lived, died, in that time.

Today on the whole, Manson and his Family are considered by the younger generations to be freaks from the Hippie era, and little more. A blip, a tear in society’s fabric, long since mended.

And maybe they’re right. But those were who were alive back then and felt the fear, lived through the panic that any hippie could be a Charles Manson knife-wielding Slippie… well, it’s a psychic tear that leaves a scar.

In crafting Blow by Blow, I wandered down Memory Lane and Google mapped the principal locales to see how time has shaped them. It turns out, the Present has done a pretty good job at burying the Past.

Barker Ranch — (top) Recondito, (bottom) Craig Baker

Barker Ranch — As most know, the ranch house is now a ruin, thanks to a suspicious fire in 2009. Charlie’s bus was towed out decades ago. The land has been allowed to return to its natural state, shooing evil ghosts with those final flames.

Spahn Ranch (top) Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, (bottom) Google Maps 2025

Spahn Ranch — Today from Santa Susanna Pass Road, you can’t see into the land which once held those dilapidated movie sets. Scrub bushes have grown monstrous in the half-century, whether via Mother Nature or egged on by a nearby church who owns the property. It’s anyone’s guess.

3301 Waverly Drive (top) Bettmann/Bettmann Archive, (bottom) Google Maps 2025

3301 Waverly Drive, the LaBianca Home — New owners, I believe at least twice removed, have done their level best to hide the house from photograph seekers, videographers, and tourist gawkers. Who can blame them? The only things left are the lantern pedestals on either side of the drive to let you know you’re standing where blood once flowed.

10050 Cielo Drive (l) CBS Newscast 1969, (r) Google Maps 2025

And 10050 Cielo Drive — the Tate Home — Talk about a Hollywoodesque facelift surgically applied to this property. About the only real object left is the telephone pole I’ve circled in red, the one Tex Watson climbed to cut the four wires on that fateful night.

On purpose, by accident, or by Mother Nature knowing best, the Manson Family murder stains — those awful moments in those unfortunate locales — are disappearing from view. That generation, my generation, is slowly disappearing, too, as all generations do.

In publishing Blow by Blow, I feel like I’m the last one to turn out the lights and lock the doors on this chapter in man’s inhumanity to man. Maybe it’s fitting. I was born in 1964, the last year of the Baby Boomer gen. Maybe the last one in is the last one out.

And maybe those of us who were alive and lived through those earth-shattering times need to close the book and move on.

It’s funny. I can replay the 1973 documentary, Manson, produced by Robert Hendrickson and Lawrence Merrick, and feel the fear I felt then, rocketing back as visceral and suffocating as it was all those years ago. Some hurts, some trauma, I guess, never truly die.

Charles Manson and his Family were North America’s first domestic terrorists. With their human slaughter of innocents, they crossed a line, one from which society could never return. With Buntline, bayonet, and Buck knife wounds, the damage went deep. Physical to those ten poor souls, psychological to the rest of us. As a pebble smacks water, as ripples roll to shore, so did those murders hit all of us. The daisy chain generation was forced into holding dead blooms.

Below is a street corner shot of LA’s Hall of Justice, where the Manson Family trials took place. Every day during the trials, devoted Family members would sit vigil at the corner of West Temple and North Broadway, singing, praising, and defending Manson and the killers.

By 1972, most of Charlie’s members had ebbed away. After the guilty verdicts and the death penalties given to the killers, most of Charlie’s lost kids figured out Manson and the Family had never been about love, and they slowly walked away, licking their psychic wounds.

Hall of Justice, Temple & Broadway (top) Sandra, Lynette, Manson movie clip (1973), (bottom) same pedestal today, Google Maps 2025

All but Charlie’s two most devoted girls, Sandra Good, aka Blue, aka Blue Collins and Lynette Fromme, aka Red, aka Squeaky.

From 1969 to today, those two refuse to admit they got lost and devoted themselves to a killing machine. I assume they cannot admit said, for their psyches would crumble if they did. They had invested all of themselves into Charlie. Without him and his ideology, they were dust to the wind. It’s through Lynette and Sandra and that street corner I sense a residual haunting, felt by those of us who remember and know where to look.

Today, that pedestal outside the Hall of Justice remains, but doubtful most who walk by it now know its significance. Or if they do, they no longer care.

To me, evil still hovers there, as it lingers ever so slightly at the locales. I would not want to touch or sit on that pedestal or sit on the sidewalk where the Family members camped. Or walk along Waverly Drive and touch the LaBianca lantern pedestals or touch the Cielo Drive telephone pole, or tread on the sand and sagebrush up at Barker or through the scrub and and boulders at Spahn. Some things are better left undisturbed.

Lynette, Sandra (top) Manson movie clip (1973), (bottom) (l) Lynette Briefly News, (r) Sandra Boston Globe

As of this writing, Lynette supposedly lives in New York State. Sandra’s whereabouts are unknown, somewhere along the eastern seaboard or in the Midwest. Wherever those to may breathe air, they are thousands of miles away from the carnage they still defend. Ill assume they planned it that way.

For me, for others like me, who lived through that carnage, some vibes are still too strong, too breath-taking, too horrific, even now.

Yes, I’ve closed the book on this part of my life by creating a book. It’s a physical object I can read and literally close its cover and shelve, never to be touched or read again.

But some things are not as easy to bury. The song Paul Watkins and Brooks Poston sing in the movie Manson 1973 (Watkins and Poston, former Family members, never hurt or killed anyone, and escaped in time) still rings in my ears. Maybe it was a love song to them. But to me, it’s a haunting melody that re-ignites the fear. The fear never dies. It merely lays dormant in me.

The daisy was the icon of the 60s, representing love, purity, and joy. Daisy chains were our crowns.

Until the summer of ’69.

Then the daisies died.

And dead things you cannot bring back to life no matter how you try.

~~~

Blow by Blow, by BJ Thompson.

Available at Amazon, e-book and paperback.