Manson Family

Gotcha.

But also the Manson family, there's the big MKUltra conspiracy theory around them.

So there would have been some stuff going on in the 60s.

Yeah.

But it's like a two and a half, three star movie, pretty much, given the context.

I'm giving that...

Oh, The Manson was late 90s.

The Manson murders took place in 1969.

He totally shaved his head too, which is another sign.

Some of these guys, when you see some of these hypnoprogrammed killers, they like to shave their head, whether it's like Manson, the Manson family.

There were a couple guys in California who did that.

Mullins was his name.

So whether you're driving in the car, going for a walk, working out, doing chores, or trying to avoid a cult.

I don't know what Charles Manson's cult is called, the brotherhood.

I don't know.

The family.

one of them, but they're brothers, weren't they?

Yeah.

Yeah, in 1968, Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys' drummer, picked up two female Manson followers who were hitchhiking in California.

Wilson eventually introduced Manson to his Hollywood social circle, and then Manson and several of his followers moved into Wilson's house for a period of time.

And this seems to be his attitude towards crime victims across the board.

I know, for example, that Deborah Tate, the sister of Sharon Tate, is a good friend of mine, and the Mansons are not on death row because of the courts, and so therefore they have parole hearings that come up every so often, and the parole boards usually vote to let them out of prison.

Some of them have been let out of prison.

And Ultimately, the governor has the ability to overrule the parole board if he chooses to do so.

And I was just like, what? I didn't get it.

It was a few months later that I picked up the paper one day, and on the front of the paper were the pictures of the Manson family.

And the guy who was in my car that night was Tex Watson.

Needless to say, I've never picked up another hitchhiker, ever.

The events that spider-webbed from that one fateful event would become one of the most notorious pieces of Hollywood history, Hollywood crime, crystallized into a single moment.

The Manson murders, even whispering it in Los Angeles, can still feel like a sin in the wrong neighborhoods.

It was a moment that would forever change America's film capital and, likewise, the very fabric of American consciousness itself.

The murders of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Wojtek Forkowski, Stephen Parent, and the LaBiancas conjures up congealing conspiracy theories even to this day.

Abigail Folger and Wojtek Frykowski, lovers said to be on the rocks, cold and motionless in pools of their own blood.

Each bore dozens of stab wounds, brutality with a degree of hatred that had rarely been seen on such a scale before.

Yes, the Manson murders changed everything, but more than that, they signaled the end of an era.

The spilled blood of Sharon Tate spelled more than just pigs across the hearts of Los Angeles.

But here's the question that has haunted investigators, journalists, and conspiracy theorists for over 50 years.

What if the official story isn't the whole story at all? What if Charles Manson wasn't just a cult leader? What if he was a product of the CIA's most notorious mind control program? What if the Manson family was an experiment that went horribly and terribly wrong? Welcome back to the Deck of Cards.

I'm your host, Uncle Carnage, and today we're pulling that card that represents the darkest side of the 1960s.

The card that connects the Summer of Love to the CIA, the counterculture to the intelligence community, and the hippie cult to the darkest corners of American power.

Today's episode is the Manson family, the origins, the murders, and the MKUltra connection.

Up the deck and don't drink the Kool-Aid or the LSD.

This is the Deck of Cards, and as you know, each week we pull one conspiracy from the pile of cards.

And he also offered them drugs.