A group of scum stabbing a pregnant girl 16 times and then hanging the corpse from the rafters and painting pig on the door from her blood is what you consider a "petty crime gang"? Not to mention the other person that escaped the house that they chased down and stabbed to death and another 18 year old they shot in the face.
talk about rewriting history.
Sorry...maybe a poor choice of words to say "petty". More that they were an exceedingly incompetent crime gang. Petty in the sense that they weren't a major crime organization. Think of some wannabe biker gang, without the bikes or the skills or the national organization. Until they graduated to murder, they would have been considered a criminal nuisance group, but not any kid of national threat. But yes, they were violent, Manson for sure, and I didn't mean to call that violence petty.
I've got a few more minutes now, so here's what happened.
Manson definitely attracted a lot of runaway girls around him, and he attracted guys who wanted to lay the girls. He was a pimp...he used the girls to have sex to with people, like the owner of the ranch who let them stay there. He definitely controlled the girls to a large extent, just like a pimp controls his girls...not through psychic mind control. And I don't mean he was a pimp metaphorically, he literally was a pimp by trade before he became a "cult leader".
As a group, they were basically living hand to mouth, committing crimes (some of them petty), panhandling, trying to jump start Manson's music career, and in general they were trying to leach off anyone with money, something that was facilitated by having a lot of young girls around to share. Everyone knows about Dennis Wilson, but there are a lot of rumors about other Hollywood folks who might have partied with Manson girls...a lot of stuff that never came out. (Sure, they went to Polanski's house totally by accident, thinking Terry Melcher still lived there. But Polanski, never, ever had contact with Manson and the girls, right? I mean, what use would Roman Polanski have with a bevy of teen girls? Most definitely, unfortunate misunderstanding).
Anyway, especially as their gravy train was running out and the music career going nowhere (helpful hint...if you're keeping your benefactors on the hook with teen girls, probably not a good idea for them to have v.d.), and because Manson was a career criminal, they were also trying to make scores with guns and drugs and some bigger thefts.
But because Manson was also a supremely crappy criminal, they were pretty much terrible at it, and most of what they did involved ripoffs. As a result, they had failed to really score on any major deals, and had in the process gotten sideways with motorcycle gangs and others. Manson got in a dispute with a drug dealer named Bernard Crowe who they were ripping off, and Manson shot him (he survived). However, Manson (probably mistakenly) thought Crowe was a Black Panther, and so was living in fear of retribution from the Panthers.
A couple months later, they were involved in yet another drug deal gone bad, as a guy named Gary Hinman sold them some mescaline, that they in turn sold to a biker gang. But the mescaline turned out to bad, or fraudulent, and the bikers demanded their money back. A Manson hanger-on called Bobby Beausoliel went back to Hinman to demand their money back, so they could pay back the bikers. Hinman refused, or didn't have the money, and over an extended period of time, trying to get the money out of him Beausoliel and ( and maybe others including maybe Manson) tortured him and eventually killed him.
Manson had the bright idea that he might solve two problems with one stone, and they used Hinman's blood to paint messages on the wall about "pigs" and what not. The muddled thinking was that Hinman's death would be blamed on the Black Panthers, thereby allowing Manson to not only skate on the Hinman murder, but would also bring the cops down on the Panters, ridding him of his Black panther problem.
Who knows, maybe the plan would have worked like clockwork, but Beausoliel was arrested within a couple weeks when the cops found him sleeping in Hinman's stolen car on the side of the highway. Real geniuses, this crew.
So now Beausoliel was in jail, and this was a bit of a problem. Beausoliel was the girls' favorite, not the least of which because he was really the only good looking guy hanging around (other than Manson who many found attractive). The girls wanted him back, and the moron guys were afraid they would start losing the girls.
So the next brilliant step in their plan, probably but not definitively Manson's idea, was that if there were other murders that had the same signatures as the Hinman killing (stabbing, writing on the walls, etc), the cops would realize that Hinman's killer was still on the rampage, sheepishly admit that Beausoliel must be totally innocent, and let him go.
So that's what the Tate-Lobianca murders were...attempts to make it look like the Hinman killer was still at large, free Beausoliel, and ideally throw police onto the Black Panthers.
The problem with this whole scenario from a prosecution perspective is that as the leader of this group, they really couldn't place Manson definitively at any of the crime scenes. He was clearly the "bad" guy, he had corrupted a bunch of young girls, he was a career criminal with a violent history, but he didn't go in the Polanski house at all, and at the LoBianco site, all they had was him possibly tying the victims up. They didn't have him doing any killing at all. All they could do is try to say it was his idea, which would be difficult to prove.
They had to somehow prove that he masterminded, better yet controlled, these people in order to hold him responsible for capital murder. So Bugliosi (thanks to being a grandstanding, self-aggrandizing prick) seized on this cult, Helter Skelter, race war, mind control approach that he knew would get him big time headlines (and maybe make him a best-selling author).
The truth was, this Helter Skelter stuff was just one bit of a myriad of crazy crap Manson was talking about at the ranch, but this was a time when crazy crap was being talked about pretty much throughout society...dorm rooms, book clubs, churches, etc. Bugliosi got a Manson girl to turn state's witness and testify it was their reason for existence, and most of them went along because it was better to look like poor mind-controlled runaways than super crappy violent criminals. And Manson, along with some of his girls on the outside, pretty much played it right into their hands. I think Manson wanted to go back to jail...he'd spent most of his life there already, and might as well go to jail as an American Legend the the spectacular failure he'd always been.
Over the years, as it became more obvious that the other people weren't getting out, which is kind of strange considering that according to the state's case they were victims of mind control (and Patty Hearst didn't even face charges), bits and pieces of the real story started coming out. But nobody cared at that point...the Manson story was legend, Bugliosi had a shining career to protect, it was a dire warning about the danger of hippie types, and nobody really had anything to gain by reevaluating the story.
Now...I'm by no means a Manson apologist...I think he's right where he needed to be. I think he did mastermind the crimes, because the whole Black Panther signature angle doesn't really make sense if he doesn't, and I don't see the girls participating without his encouragement. So I don't think Manson is innocent or any nonsense like that.
But I'm also not a big fan of bullcrap, and the whole Helter Skelter cult thing associated with Manson is pretty much just that. He was just a nasty, incompetent, violent pimp, who Bugliosi turned into an American Boogeyman in the culture wars.
