Politics
Netflix Doc Claims Manson Killed Seven People To Hide A Bad Drug Deal
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
LOS ANGELES, CA, A new Netflix docuseries directed by Joe Berlinger is advancing the argument that one of the most elaborately theorized crimes in American history, the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, was not orchestrated to ignite a civilization-ending race war but to settle a debt arising from a narcotics transaction that went sideways.
The implications are significant. Prosecutors, journalists, true-crime authors, film directors, sociology professors, and at least three generations of people who thought they understood something important about the darkness inside the American dream may need to update their priors.
The motive that has been taught in criminology courses, cited in cultural histories, and used to explain the death of the 1960s was, if the new tapes are accurate, essentially a bookkeeping problem.
"Helter Skelter" was the name given to Manson's supposed master plan, drawn from a Beatles track, to trigger a race war in which the Family would hide underground, emerge victorious, and rule what remained. District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi sold this theory to a jury in 1970 and then sold it to the reading public in a book that moved seven million copies. It is a remarkable theory. It is cinematic. It has texture and mythology and the satisfying shape of a villain with a real vision.
A drug deal gone bad does not have that shape. A drug deal gone bad is a Tuesday.
Sources familiar with the new documentary describe tape recordings in which figures connected to the Family suggest the Cielo Drive property was targeted because of a prior transaction involving its previous tenant, not because Sharon Tate or her guests represented any symbolic target in a grand racial apocalypse. They were, in this version, in the wrong house at the wrong time because someone owed someone money for something that should not have been sold in the first place.
Dennis Hopper said something like this publicly in 1969 and was largely ignored, possibly because "charismatic cult leader engineering the end of civilization" is a more satisfying explanation than "charismatic cult leader panicking about a receivable."
Bugliosi, who died in 2015 and is unavailable for comment, built his entire prosecutorial legacy and subsequent literary career on the race-war thesis. Scholars have noted that Bugliosi was also a gifted narrator who understood that juries, like readers, prefer a story with a theme.
A spokesperson for the streaming service described the documentary as "an unflinching re-examination of the evidence through a contemporary lens that asks audiences to sit with the discomfort of not knowing."
That sentence was provided in lieu of a factual statement.
Regular people reached for comment had complicated reactions.
"I wrote my entire senior thesis on Helter Skelter as a symptom of post-utopian American psychosis," said one Los Angeles woman who asked not to be named. "If it was just about drugs I'm going to need a minute."
A man in Encino who described himself as a serious student of the case said he was not ready to abandon the race-war theory because, and he was direct about this, it was a better story and he had already told it at many dinner parties.
This is, ultimately, the central problem. The race-war theory is load-bearing. It holds up a significant portion of the cultural architecture built around the year 1969, the death of the counterculture, the price of utopia, the monster that idealism makes room for. Remove it and several books, two television series, one Quentin Tarantino film, and an unknowable number of podcast episodes become slightly less resonant.
The alternative is that seven people died because a deal fell apart and someone decided the cleanest solution was to make sure no one who knew about it could talk.
Which is not a theory. It is just a crime.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.foxnews.com/us/charles-manson-helter-skelter-motive-myth-new-tapes-reveal-sparked-sharon-tate-murders