Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders

Summary

In August 1969, members of charismatic leader Charles Manson's countercultural "family" mur­dered some of Hollywood's "beautiful people," most famously Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant at the time. The killers left be­hind evidence intended to implicate Black radi­cals and to trigger an apocalyptic race war. What happened instead was that the gruesome murders placed the entire counterculture under suspicion and then came to mean, in Joan Didion's formulation, the end of the sixties. They have been a cornerstone of the true crime genre ever since.

Drawing on newly released archival material of case transcripts, Love and Terror recasts the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. The book shows how the standard story of the murders came to be told the way it was. In place of this shopworn narrative, Clau­dia Verhoeven presents a kaleidoscopic history at the center of which is a far stranger portrait of Manson, the man who became the ultimate murder mastermind in the American mythos.

Based on years of investigative research, Love and Terror rewrites the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, an event framed by global avant-gardist movements and revolu­tionary violence, and an early sign of our age of spectacle.

This history is confused, tumultuous, and pell-mell; it is carnivalesque; and it is a downward spiral into terror that, however, is simultaneously thrilling and repetitively compulsive, which is why the song's refrain about the repeat experience of going up and down the helter-skelter is also an apt metaphor for the endless retelling of the murders and the never-ending productivity of the Manson industrial complex/culture industry.