Media Alert: Tonight on the History Channel (9 P.M. EST) Linda Kasabian tells the story of the nine months leading up to the Manson murders. Kasabian stood guard outside Sharon Tate’s home while Manson and his followers committed mass murder. She became a witness for Vincent Bugliosi, the chief prosecutor in the case, and was granted immunity. It’s forty freakin’ years later. What the hell does she look like? And what can she possibly say? I’ve always wondered what Kasabian was thinking/doing as she waited in the car. Did she listen to the radio? Whistle?
I’m sure I was obsessed with the Manson murders in part because they happened on my birthday, August 9. It was 1969, the summer of Woodstock (I got a button with a guitar and a dove design), Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and the Brady Bunch premiered. I was nine years old, wearing mix and match Danskins, glued to the tv.
Five years later, Bugliosi published his account of the murders and trial in Helter Skelter. This set off a feeding frenzy; I read The Godfather, Serpico, The Valachi Papers, and my favorite of all time, In Cold Blood. I’m not sure what attracted me, at fifteen, to these gruesome stories. I suspect it had something to do with trying to contemplate what I had decided was a godless world, where random violence rained down on innocent people. There was something sexual about it, too, though I didn’t know that then. Prurient and thrilling.These, too, were the first books I read that I could call page-turners. And that’s when I got hooked, in earnest, to reading.
Filed under: Books, The End of the World as We Know It |
Betsy Lerner 
Awesome, thanks for the alert — I love Joan Didion’s portrait of Linda Kasabian in “The White Album,” how she goes to I. Magnin in Beverly Hills to buy a dress for LK to wear during her first day on the witness stand (“Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible”).
I would be 10 in 10 days, equally fascinated in a morbid sort of way. Helter Skelter was disturbing – I couldn’t put it down. Same with In Cold Blood, which I read when I was the age of Nancy Clutter. I devoured true crime books after that – Prescription: Murder is one that stayed with me.
I’ll hazard a guess you know all about Buffalo Springfield. I turned 50 a couple of weeks ago, and am suddenly feeling like an antique. I always said I’d grow old gracefully, but this is turning out to be a lie.
“In Cold Blood” is one of the best reads I’ve had. It was within the last few years, after the movie came out of course. I was six years behind you, Betsy. So the movie about the Manson murders came out, or at least was finally on TV, around the time I was 8 or 9. Yikes. One of the scariest things I ever came across as a youngster. Awful memory. Thanks a lot….
I read Cold Blood in college and it still freaked me out. But again, there was this literary aspect that held my attention and wouldn’t let me put it down.
I picked up Helter Skelter at a garage sale when I was 12 and like you, I devoured it. I shopped exclusively in the true crime section of bookstores for a couple of years after that. I write about this reading phase in a chapter of my memoir. My dad was a gravedigger, so we were always surrounded by death, but Helter Skelter represented my move from fairy tales to the grim reality of my father’s life. I became obsessed with these stories because I was trying to get my head around the fact that any of us could be struck down at any moment, that the young and innocent do die, that no one is protected from death.