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break seemed to arrive when a couple of the girls hitchhiking one day were picked up by Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and went back to his place. Soon after, the entire Family, as the group was now calling itself, had moved into Wilson’s mansion and was costing him a fortune. To Manson’s delight, however, Wilson paid for studio time for him to record some of the songs he had written and he provided introductions to producers and music industry people. The Beach Boys even recorded a Manson song, Cease to Exist , changing the words to the less dramatic Cease to Resist and renaming it Never Learn Not to Love . Nothing came of it all, however, and when Wilson had tired of them, he threw then out. They moved to a couple of ranches in the desert where Manson began to develop his crazed philosophy. He prophesied a racial war that would be called Helter Skelter, after a track on the Beatles’ recently released White Album . Manson and the Family would seek shelter in a bottomless pit in Death Valley and when it was all over, the Family, by this time enlarged to 144,000 members, would emerge to rule the world.
    In the meantime, they killed their first victim, Gary Hinman, a musician. Manson wanted him to hear some of his songs, but also learned that Hinman had recently inherited a large sum of money. Susan Atkins and Bobby Beausoleil were sent to steal the money, but ended up holding Hinman hostage for two days. When they could not find the money, they stabbed him to death. Atkins dipped her finger in the dead man’s blood and scrawled ‘political piggie’ on the wall. A short while later, Beausoleil was arrested after a fingerprint was discovered at the murder scene. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but, loyal to the end, implicated neither Manson nor Atkins.
    Manson moved his attention to successful music producer Terry Melcher, son of the movie star, Doris Day. When Melcher refused to have anything to do with the weird little hippie guru, Manson was furious. He decided on revenge with an act that would also show the blacks how it was done.
    On 8 August, he ordered Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins and Linda Kasabian to go to Cielo Drive and ‘totally destroy everyone in it as gruesome as you can.’ What he did not know was that Melcher had by this time moved out and the house was now being rented by film director, Roman Polanski and his pregnant actress wife, Sharon Tate.
    When they arrived at the secluded house, they cut the phone lines and climbed over the wall into the grounds. Seeing a car’s headlights approaching, the girls ducked into some bushes. Watson pulled out a gun, approached the car and shot dead its driver, eighteen-year-old Stephen Parent, who had been visiting William Garretson, a caretaker living in the nearby guesthouse on the property. Watson turned back to the house and cut a hole in a screen at an open window. He instructed Kasabian to go to the gate to look out for anyone coming while he, Atkins and Krenwinkel climbed in through the window.
    Wojciech Fryokwski, a friend of Polanski, awoke on the couch in the living room to the large figure of Tex Watson looming over him. ‘I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business,’ Watson hissed at him. The other occupants of the house were wakened and brought in – Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, America’s top men’s hair stylist and twenty-five-year-old Abigail Folger, heiress to a coffee fortune.
    Watson tied Tate’s and Sebring’s necks together and threw the other end of the rope over a roof beam. It was done in such a way that they would choke if they tried to escape. Folger offered them money, thinking they were robbers. She went to get her purse and they took the seventy dollars she had in it. Of course, they were not robbers, they were killers and the killing started when Watson plunged his knife into Folger a number of times. Frykowski, having desperately worked his hands free from the towel they had used to