When I lived in New Orleans from late 1994 to the summer of 1995, industrial music and Goth kids inundated the Quarter. Lots of black hair dye, black lace, Doc Martens, and eyeliner everywhere, despite the humidity. Many of the kids traipsed uptown on a pilgrimage to Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails’ Nothing Studios. “He’s got the door! He’s got the Tate door,” they’d say. It was the scuttlebutt around the French Quarter.
Did these kids even know why they were so excited? I doubt any of them were old enough to realize what “the door” really represented. They seemed to have a vague idea that the door came from a house where a gruesome murder took place, and that was the extent of their knowledge.
It was the front door to the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, where Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski, were murdered on Aug 9, 1969. The murderers wrote PIG in Tate’s blood on the doors. Of course, by the time Reznor rented the house, the door looked like any white door with nine small window panes you’d find at Home Depot.
Nine Inch Nails recorded The Downward Spiral at the Tate House, which Reznor rented in 1992 and 1993. He said in one interview that he had no idea it was the Tate house -he just liked the way it looked. That’s hard to believe, given Reznor’s musical and video output at the time. Anyone with even a vague interest in the macabre or gory true crime would surely recognize the address?
When Reznor had a chance meeting with Sharon’s sister, Debra Tate, his story changed. His explanation for why he rented the house? “It was just my interest in American folklore.” The encounter made him have second thoughts about living in the house. However, he allegedly took the front door with him when he left. (The recording studio at 10050 Cielo Drive was sometimes referred to as “Pig” or “Le Pig” Studios.)
Photos of Nothing Studios in New Orleans seem to confirm this rumor. The Tate residence was demolished in 1994 and the address – 10050 Cielo Drive-doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing Studios fell into disrepair until the current owner bought it. The property is now slated for redevelopment.
New Orleans in the mid-90s was a magnet for a new brand of vampires and witchiness. Read The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, Marilyn Manson’s autobiography, to find out a bit more about the unsavory goings-on in New Orleans circa 1996. Anti-Christ Superstar was recorded at Trent’s Nothing Studios in 1996.
“Gave Up” from “Broken” recorded at 10050 Cielo Drive, 1992
I’d avoided looking at most of the Tate-LaBianca autopsy photos for decades, probably because you had to find a book, magazine, or broadcast TV show displaying them in pre-internet days. (It’s easier to ignore photos when they’re in a book than when they’re a click away on the internet.)
I guess didn’t really want to see them, because that’s when the reality hits you. It’ not a bunch of people talking anymore, or some fictionalized version that exists on a movie screen or in your imagination.
The photos are widely available now because of social media and the internet. Yet for all the articles, videos, and social media shares about this case, you rarely hear people mention the hard evidence and the autopsy photos.
You hear about El Coyote, George Spahn, dune buggies in the desert, the conspiracy theories, LSD orgies, and the glamorization of these events.
But when you see the autopsy photos, the endless speculation and all the background characters fade away. These photos are real – not Photoshopped, not part of a reenactment.
You can hear people describe how the victims died on podcasts, or read about it in books or on websites, but the photos tell their own story. Even after hearing about the murders for all these years, I wasn’t prepared to see these all these photos. I felt sick and, like some of the YouTube viewers, “hid in the comment section.” Of course I’d seen a few of the crime scene photos before, including the photos of the door and the refrigerator, but not all of the photos in this video.
The PIG door may or may not be in Trent Reznor’s possession. More on that in a future post.
I was nine years old in August 1969 when the Tate-LaBianca murders were committed, and I have a vague recollection of hearing a radio news story about it at the time. In December ’69, I watched a TV newscast about a “hippie cult” arrested in the desert. I’d always thought of hippies as these colorful, fun-loving figures, and I dressed like a miniature hippie in bright neon-colored clothes, headbands, and Nehru-collared dresses.
But the black and white news clip under this text shows a barren, grey desert, a scary, washed-out hippie girl and talk about murder. It frightened me and the barren desert looked more like Mars than the promised land of California.
In October 1969, the Weathermen (the militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society) organized the Days of Rage, a series of protests in downtown Chicago. They smashed windows and vandalized buildings. I asked my Dad “Are they gonna stay downtown, or are they going to come to our neighborhood?” That was the first time I’d been scared of hippies.
This talk about a hippie cult in California was so far removed from my suburban Chicago home I didn’t feel threatened, just fascinated and scared in a middle-of-the-road kind of way. Then the trial began, and I was hooked. I tuned into the news every night and saved newspaper clippings about the trial. I couldn’t believe the girls in this cult were the same age as some of my babysitters, neighbors, and teachers.
The girls were scary enough, but Charlie, well, I couldn’t even look at him.
Dianne Lake, or Snake, as Charles Manson nicknamed her, was the youngest member of the Manson family. Her testimony, along with Linda Kasabian’s, put Manson, Atkins, Watson,Van Houten, and Krenwrinkel in jail. (“Snake” (Sydney Sweeney) was the girl who kept a lookout on Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) during the Spahn Ranch scene in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.)
Lake’s memoir of her time in the Manson cult, Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties, was first published in October 2017. Manson died a month later.
The book is a riveting first-hand account of what it was like to be an innocent young teen thrown into a world of unhinged adult hippies. Unfortunately, Lake’s own parents started her on the road to Spahn Ranch.
Lake was born in Minnesota to a seemingly normal middle-class family, and had a younger brother and sister. Trouble lurked under the suburban facade. Lake was molested by her grandfather as a pre-teen.
Then the family’s lifestyle changed abruptly when her Dad became a hippie artist. He eventually convinced his wife to turn on and drop out, too, and soon Mom, Dad and the kids were living in a bread truck an on their way to California.
Lake attended the 1967 “Be-In” at Griffith Park with her parents. Her parents initiated her first experiences with pot and LSD. They also talked to her about birth control when she was barely a teen. Her parents met Charles Manson in separate incidents as they traveled in the drug-infused hippie culture of Southern California.
Eventually, Lake became unofficially “emancipated” and ended up living at Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm. He kicked her out because she was underage and having sex. Lake’s hippie-era experiences with men (even before Charlie) make you wonder if free love was just an excuse for creepy guys to sleep with naive young girls
One thing led to another, and soon she met Charlie at a party when she lived with a married couple. Soon, Charlie’s girls took her under their wing, and she traveled with them in their infamous school bus with blacked-out windows.
In May 1968, the bus rolled into Spahn Ranch. The girls took care of the ranch’s elderly owner, George Spahn, in exchange for free rent. Squeaky (played by Dakota Fanning in OUATIH), was Spahn’s “girlfriend” and kept him occupied while the Family dropped acid, engaged in petty theft, and had orgies.
Among other places, the family hung out next door to Rosemary and Leno LaBianca’s house; that’s one of the reasons family chose the LaBiancas as victims. Harold True, the next door neighbor, was an associate of Manson’s, and later become a witness for prosecution at the trial. In one particularly uncomfortable passage in the book, Lake recalls how Manson flew into a rage and pulled her hair when she refused to sleep with True. She finally relented to avoid getting hit. Charlie promised to give her “zuzus” (his word for candy) after the encounter.
Manson’s quick slide from hippie cult leader into murder cult leader started when he met Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Dennis picked up two of the Manson girls as they hitchhiked. A few of the girls lived with Wilson for awhile, and Manson became friends with him. Manson even recorded at Brian Wilson’s house. Lake and a few other girls provided background vocals.
Eventually, Wilson became tired of their antics and abandoned the house. Manson’s friendship with Wilson lead to an ill-fated meeting with music producer Terry Melcher. When Melcher gave him the brush-off, Charlie vowed revenge and targeted Melcher’s house at 10050 Cielo Drive. Melcher had already moved out long before August 8, 1969, the night of the Tate murders.
Dianne Lake at the Manson trial. Photo via Cielodrive.com.
Around this time, the “Helter Skelter” race war idea took hold. The scene at Spahn Ranch veered from hippie LSD fests to survival training and killing lessons. Charlie also found a hiding place underneath the desert where the family could burrow during the supposed race war. The race war was an actual Charlie idea (sorry, conspiracy theorists). However, in an interview shortly before his death, Manson revealed the idea germinated due to a drug deal gone bad.
Hell broke loose even before the Tate-LaBianca murders when the girls broke into people’s homes, including the LaBiancas, on creepy crawlies. These ransacking missions were intended to train the girls for more violent crimes.
One day, Leslie returned to the ranch and asked Lake to help her burn a purse and a credit card. Lake had no idea the items belonged to Rosemary LaBianca.
Watson drove Lake to a location even deeper in the desert. The police picked her up for vagrancy, and a kind-hearted policeman and his wife took her in for a few days. Unfortunately, her freedom didn’t last long and she found herself back with the Family at a new home, Barker Ranch.
At Barker Ranch, Lake listened in horror as Sadie and Patty proudly confessed to the killings. Charlie, Bruce M. Davis, Tex, and Clem killed stuntman Shorty Shea. Lake looked for ways to escape and even thought about suicide.
Lake wouldn’t have to escape – a few weeks later, police raided the ranch and took the family into custody. Lake entered a psychiatric program and a doctor labeled her as a schizophrenic.
Audio transcripts of Lake talking to detectives after the family was captured show that she did have some grasp on reality, even after her arrest. She had managed to keep her humanity, unlike the girls in Charlie’s inner circle. After being held for psychiatric evaluation, and testifying against the Family, she started a new life.
Lake reconciled with her parents, got married, had two children, and a career as a special education teacher.
Lake received a phone call from a detective in 2008 about a cadaver dog that had found the scent of a dead body at Barker Ranch. The detective warned her that her name would come up once the media got wind of the results. Her husband knew about her past, but she had kept it a secret from her children. Now that a new media blitz was imminent, she told her now college-age children.
Her son slept with baseball bat in his bed for a few weeks after she told him about her time with the Family.
Most of the post-Sanders and Bugliosi books written about the Manson followers are quick, sensationalized re-tellings, or self-serving tales of redemption (Atkins, Tex Watson). I haven’t read Squeaky’s book, but after looking at the cover and some of the oddly written Amazon reader reviews, I think I’ll pass on it.
Lake’s book is intelligently written, coherent, and honest. Lake admits, that, for a time, she felt comfortable with Charlie and the girls. They took over the role her missing hippie parents could no longer fulfill – they made her feel loved.
What’s especially disturbing is how matter-of-factly she writes about the sex and drug use she experienced as a young teen. You temporarily forget she’s recalling things that happened when she was 14 through 16. When it does hit you, it’s chilling and stomach-turning.
A Member of the Family gives you a view of the events leading up to one of the most brutal and bizarre crimes of the 20th century, and its immediate aftermath (arrests, trial), but very little about the crimes themselves.
The Tate-LaBianca murders have been covered extensively for half a century in every way possible. A Member of the Family gives readers a look at what life was like for the youngest (and probably most naive) teen member of the cult without putting the primary focus on the murders themselves.
“Don’t go to the house down the street. The lady will lock you in the basement.”
When I was about six or seven, a few of the other kids on my block would take me aside and whisper this rumor to me. They never pointed out the exact house or the exact lady in question.
Years later, I sat at the kitchen table with my college roommate. We were talking about methods of self-pleasure, when she said, “There was a girl who used a Coke bottle to masturbate.” She looked disgusted and wrinkled her nose.
It was only when I got older that I realized my roommate and my grade-school classmates were unknowingly referring to the Sylvia Likens case. One of the most infamous true crime cases of the 20th Century, the torture murder was the basis for the film An American Crime and the best-seller The Girl Next Door.
How did these rumors get started? There wasn’t as much media coverage back then, just a little when the crime was first committed, maybe a newspaper or magazine article here and there after the trial and initial shock ended.
Somehow the facts got twisted just enough that, eventually, rumors made their way to our older brothers and sisters and then got watered down for grade school kids.
Without the internet or cable TV, we only had broadcast news and newspapers to inform us about crime, and even then the news didn’t report much. Some outlets hid news of arrests, burglaries, drug addiction, and assault, even murder, especially in the suburbs or small towns. Rich and upper-middle class families, police, and local newspapers could hide details in those days. In the late 1980s and 1990s, it became harder to hide or omit details with the advent of the non-stop news cycle
The rumors I heard as a kid made me wonder if hearing about heinous crimes affected people differently in the 1960s and 1970s than now. With the constant bombardment on the internet about every bizarre crime in the world, a lot of people have become blase about even the weirdest crimes.
What We Can Learn from True Crime Books and Documentaries
Our podcast focuses on true crimes of the 20th Century. Most of the episodes will involve murder cases, although a few will be about other crimes. We’ll also have book and movie reviews and interviews with true crime experts and psychologists. True crime is one of the most popular documentary and non-fiction genres, and there are many reasons we’re so intrigued by it.
The Ted Bundy documentary on Netflix was riveting because it begged the question: are are serial killers evil, or were their actions the results of extreme mental illness? (The mental illness advocate appeared near the end of the documentary.) I have read social media posts where people say there’s no such thing as evil, just extreme mental illness. I disagree, but the subject does merit more discussion.
Lonely, socially awkward boys from all socioeconomic groups become obsessed with pornography, have strange upbringings, may be adopted or not know their birth father – but most of them don’t became serial killers. Murderers have siblings who are absolutely normal and sweet. What makes one sibling homicidal while others are normal, despite being brought up in the same household and with similar genes?
So what is the reason some people became serial killers? Do they decide not to fight homicidal urges even though they are sane or does a genetic code override their sanity?
Will today’s advanced prescription drugs for mental illness be able to control people with a predisposition toward depression, suicide and violent acts? The track record for these drugs isn’t promising, according to some lesser-known websites and researchers, as many young school shooters took psychotropic drugs. Mainstream outlets and magazines insist the drugs have nothing to do with school shootings.
Understanding the psychological underpinnings of such crimes may or may not stop them from happening, but it can make people more aware of potential criminals and dangerous situations.
20th Century Murder: A True Crime Blog and Podcast 