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tie him up, tried to make a break for the door, but Watson caught him and hit him on the head a number of times with his gun. He then fired two bullets into him. At this point, Linda Kasabian appeared, trying to bring a halt to proceedings, she later said, by shouting that someone was coming.
    Folger, bleeding but still on her feet, ran to the pool area where Krenwinkel cornered her, stabbing her repeatedly, along with Watson. Frykowski, trying to crawl across the lawn, was also stabbed by Watson and was later found to have fifty-one stab wounds. Meanwhile, in the house, Sharon Tate was pleading for her life and that of her unborn baby. Shouting at her coldly that she didn’t care about her or her baby, Atkins stabbed her sixteen times. Manson had asked them to leave a sign when they left. Atkins grabbed a towel and wrote the word ‘pig’ on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood.
    The following night it was the turn of Leno LaBianca, a supermarket executive, and his wife, Rosemary. This time, Manson went himself, ‘to show them how to do it’. Manson broke in and woke the sleeping couple, tying them up and covering their heads with pillow cases. He left at this point, instructing Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten to go into the house and kill the couple. Watson began stabbing Leno with a chrome-plated bayonet, but in the bedroom, Rosemary was putting up a fight. Watson stabbed her, however, and she fell. Returning to the living room, he carved ‘war’ on Leno’s stomach. In the bedroom, Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary with a kitchen knife and Watson ordered Van Houten to stab her, too. Rosemary LaBianca was stabbed a total of forty-one times.
    Using the couple’s blood, Krenwinkel wrote ‘Rise’ and ‘Death to pigs’ on the walls and misspelled ‘Healther Skelter’ on the refrigerator door. She stabbed Leno a further fourteen times, even though he was already dead, leaving a carving fork sticking out of his stomach. Before she left, she stuck a steak knife in his neck.
    The LAPD were baffled by the killings and critically failed to make any connection between the death of Sharon Tate and her celebrity friends and a hard-working couple. The Tate killings had been attributed to a drug deal gone awry. Neither was any connection made with the murder of Gary Hinman, despite the writing on the wall at all three murder scenes.
    When Helter Skelter failed to materialise, the Family began to drift apart. Susan Atkins went back to prostitution to earn money and was eventually arrested. While incarcerated, however, she boasted to another prisoner about the Family and the killings. The prisoner told the police and on 15 October, police raided the ranch on which the Family were living, arresting more than twenty of them, including Charles Manson whose longest period of freedom in many years was at an end.
    Linda Kasabian was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony against the others but it was one of the strangest trials in American legal history. The girls and Manson played jokes throughout, even all arriving in court with their heads shaved at one point. When Manson carved a cross into his forehead, the girls all copied him. In an act of perverse defiance, that cross would later be fashioned into a swastika.
    Throughout the proceedings the girls maintained that Charlie was innocent, but it made little difference to the outcome. When the verdict was announced on 25 January 1971, Manson, Krenwinkel and Atkins were found guilty on seven counts of murder and Leslie Van Houten on two counts. Sentenced to death, their sentences were commuted to life when the US Supreme Court declared execution unconstitutional in 1972. Tex Watson was also given a life sentence in a separate trial.
    On 23 May 2007, Corcoran State Prison inmate number B33920 was denied parole for the eleventh time. Charles Manson had made his first application in 1978 and will again be able to make an application in 2012. Manson has been at Corcoran since