Significance of crime scene/morgue photos

What is the significance of posting crime scene/morgue photos of the Tate/LaBianca victims? Do you think it is disrespectful to post such photos on blogs, websites & forums, or is it necessary for people that continue to study these cases? Some people have asked "why study a case that was solved over 40 years ago?" Was it truly solved? Do we really know what happened? I started thinking about this in great detail, and came to the conclusion that these awful, morbid, sickening photos MUST exist for several reasons, and morbid curiosity is not one of them.  If anything, the reason these photos are on the Internet for the world to see is so people don't forget the brutality of these murders. Also, matching up evidence seen in the crime scene photos with witness/perpetrator accounts can help researchers have a better understanding of the sequence of events. What do you think, dear readers? Should the crime scene/morgue photos be on the Internet, or should they be taken down? We'd love to hear your opinions on the matter!

Lower Topanga Slideshows

If you've ever been to the Snake Pit you'll recognize some of this...

Life Magazine March 1987

Q. What was the Manson Family?
A. The D.A. put the word "family" on it to make me a leader and bring me into the conspiracy. They've never really been my family or my followers.  We were together in a dream, man.

Q. You stay in touch?
A. I know everything they're thinking.  They won't think nothing in the next 20 years I don't know.  I answer their letters before they write them.  If you got all of those people, and you put them in this room, everything would be just like it was.  We'd sit around and sing.  The family circle can never be broken. We're still together.  There's no taking us apart.

Q. How did this group get started?
A. I get out of the penitentiary - a man can understand this- and I haven't been with a broad in a long time.  So I meet a broad on a street corner.  She's real young.  So I ask if she could stay with this other broad (Mary Brunner).  So we meet another chick didn't have no place to stay.  That was Squeaky (Fromme).  Then we meet Patty (Krenwinkel)- and Patty's got a credit card!  So we're just going to have a little vacation trip, so we get a bus.  We're just tripping.  And Susie (Atkins) wants to freeload, see?  So I look up and I'm sitting on a beach with 12 girls.  They're lighting my cigarettes, spoiling me, and actually it's a pretty nice little trip I've got going.

Q. Why did it go bad?
A. The troubles came when the guys came.  Every guy that came had troubles.  And everybody that comes in that circle, I gotta go though all their changes.

Q. The troubles weren't your fault?
A.  I'm not saying I didn't influence- I did influence.  But no more than I've been influenced.  It's hard to explain 20 years of a running psychotic episode.  It has no logic, no good, no evil; it all runs in insanity.  You put 30 people in a circle, and you've got a vortex of everybody's thought and will, and it reflects off into one head, and that head goes off into madness.  I was stuck in a psychotic episode.

Q.  Are you psychotic?
A.  I can go in and out of it.

Q.  Do you ever heard from these people now, like Squeaky?
A.  She's in the joint doing life.

Q.  Do you write her?
A.  Back and forth. She's me.

Q.  Do you hear from Sandra Good, who was jailed for writing death threats to corporate executives?
A.  Yeah. She got out.

Q.  She's the one in Vermont?
A.  She's your blue socks.

Q.  How about Mary Brunner?
A.  Mary Snitch.

Q.  Is she in jail?
A.  No, she snitched. When she had (my) baby, I held the baby up and I held a knife on it and I said, "if the cops come and say, 'Tell, or we'll kill this baby,' what are you going to do?"  She said, "I won't tell. I won't tell."

Q.  Is Susan Atkins, who boasted of the killings, still in jail?
A.  If they let her out tomorrow, she's still going to be in jail.  She's imprisoned herself.  She's playing Jesus for parole.  They say, "If you accept Jesus as your savior, we'll let you out."  So she says, "O.K."  I got nothing against Susie.  I love her.  But I wouldn't want her around me.

Q.  Do you regret that those people are not free and happy today?
A.  Don't you realize what those people have done for you people?  What do you think would have happened if the Manson family hadn't did what they did?  You seen the Vietnam war stop, didn't you?

Q.  Because of what you did?
A.  No.  Because of what those kids did.  You forgot?  It was the peak of the revolution. (Singing)  "You say you want a revolution...."

Q.  Are you saying that the murders were a political act?
A.  Why was people killed?  There was $250,000 worth of gold coins laying by the dead body, by LaBianca.  Why didn't they pick it up?  You think we weren't in the peace movement?

Q.  Are you at peace with yourself?
A.  Sure.  How do you think I've survived all this madness?  By not having a mother and father.

Q.  You think your early suffering absolved you from later deeds?
A.  Yeah, yeah.  Later deeds?  I've done nothing I'm ashamed of.  Nothing I couldn't face God with.  I wouldn't kill a bug.

Q.  But you'd kill a person?
A.  I'd probably kill all of them if I could - is that what you've been waiting to hear?  Hey, time and circumstance made me into this Manson guy.  Satan.  Society wanted to buy this evil, mass murderer-devil-fiend.  I'm nobody.  I'm the last hobo in line.  Give me a bottle of wine and put me on a train.

Q.  You said you live in darkness.
A.  I do.  It's away from the light.  I don't fit in the world that you guys live in, so I live over here in the shadows of it.

Ella Jo Bailey

Ella Today

Ella 1969 (used with permission cielodrive.com)

Marilyn Manson

Thanks to William Marshall for the find.

Michele Morgan

Michele Morgan, a French film actress, who was a leading lady for three decades, commissioned the house at 10050 Cielo Dr. We were introduced to Michele Morgan by AustinAnn in THIS POST.

During WWII. Upon the invasion of France in 1940 by the Germans, Morgan left for the United States and Hollywood where she was contracted to RKO Pictures. Her career there proved rather disappointing, apart from Joan of Paris opposite Paul Henreid in 1942, Higher and Higher opposite Frank Sinatra in 1943. She was tested and strongly considered for the female lead in Casablanca but RKO would not release her for the amount of money that Warner Bros. offered. Morgan did work for Warners in Passage to Marseille opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1944. Nothing major came her way.

Michele Morgan still lives and is 93 years of age. She has six grandchildren and ten great grand grandchildren.


George E. Smith's videos have been featured on this blog before. He has been a collector on Sharon Tate and Cielo Drive since 1972. He has  also taken many photos of the Cielo Drive property since 1975.

September 1975 President Ford Just Couldn't Catch A Break

We all know about the two well publicized assassination attempts on President Ford's life in September 1975.  Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore made national headlines for months, then and in the intervening years.  Did you know that there were two other assassination scares for Ford that month?  I am not certain what prompted all of these attempted attacks on Ford, the Vietnam war had been declared over in April 1975.

Squeaky's arrest on September 5, 1975 kicked off the public's knowledge of the attempts.  Fromme was duly tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.  She was granted parole July 2008 but had to serve a little extra time for her 1987 prison escape.  On August 14, 2009 she was released on parole.

Coincidently there had been another assassination planned on the very same day as Squeaky's attempt.  Gary Steven DeSure, 32, and Preston Michael Mayo, 24, were arrested Aug. 26, 1975 in Santa Barbara CA for stealing a television from a motel.  The day after that arrest DeSure told investigating officers about the assassination plot.  DeSure was an escaped patient from a Warm Springs MT mental hospital.  He had been committed there due to threats made against the President during a court appearance for forgery and credit card theft the previous year.

DeSure and Mayo's plans were to place a bomb in the sewer system near where the President was to speak.  When the bomb went off and every one was distracted Mayo would fire the kill shot at the President.  On March 1, 1976 DeSure and Mayo were sentenced in federal court.  DeSure was given a five year sentence and a recommendation of psychiatric help.  Mayo was given a six year sentence to be served at the federal prison in Lompoc CA.

On September 22, 1975 along came Sara Jane Moore, who in front of the St.Francis Hotel in San Francisco actually fired off a shot at President Ford.  She, too, was duly tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.  Like Squeaky, Sara also chalked up one prison escape.  Sara and another woman, Marlene Martino, escaped from Alderson Federal Prison the evening of February 5, 1979.  They were captured while hitchhiking a few hours after the escape.

On December 31, 2007 Sara Jane Moore was released from prison on parole.  She was 77 years old.

The assassination attempt of DeSure and Mayo did merit a couple of newspaper stories and it's probably not entirely foreign to the hard core Manson researchers.   This next story, however, did not generate any newspaper stories that I could find.  I was looking through declassified documents at the National Archives website when I found it. 

This document says that the release of Charles Manson from prison was the purpose for the assassination of not only Ford but also Emperor Hirohito who, along with his wife, was visiting in the United States and scheduled to attend a state dinner with President and Mrs. Ford on October 2, 1975.  The information was gathered by Canadian authorities on September 30, 1975 and disseminated to US authorities the next day.

A Slice of Charles Manson Cheese, Please!



Well, Charlie, that is something that just might happen, especially if that grilled cheese sammy was made with this cheese! 

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See? Head, hands and feet...

Haunting Charles Manson Trailer

Claire Watkins Wins Dylan Thomas Award

It has been a treat to follow Claire Vaye Watkins become a respected author who has been honored by her peers over the past year.  In March of this year Claire won the $10,000 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and the $20,000 Story Prize Award.  Well, she has done it again!  On November 7 Claire bested six others, in the eyes of the judges, to win the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize and $48,000.  Not bad for a girl from the desert whose father, Paul Watkins, was touted in the press as a major player in the "Manson Family".

Judges said she was an "exceptional" writer and described her collection Battleborn as "infectious".

The California-born 29-year-old was one of seven writers aged under 30 shortlisted for the prize.

The prize, based in Thomas's birthplace of Swansea, is one of the largest literary cash awards in the world.

Read the whole story-  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-24855534