Helter Skelter (scenario)


The Helter Skelter scenario is a theory put forth by Vincent Bugliosi, lead prosecutor in the Tate–LaBianca murder trial, to explain the series of murders committed by the Manson Family. Bugliosi described his theory at trial and in his book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. According only to Bugliosi’s theory, Charles Manson often spoke to the members of his "family" about "Helter Skelter" in the months leading up to the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in August 1969, an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and whites. This " vision involved reference to music of the Beatles, particularly songs from their 1968 double album The Beatles, and to the New Testament's Book of Revelation. Manson and his followers were convicted of the murders based on the prosecution's theory that they were part of a plan to trigger the Helter Skelter scenario.

Background

had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter. His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968 at Myers Ranch near California's Death Valley. The scenario had Manson as the war's ultimate beneficiary and its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of the Beatles. This would not merely foretell the conflict but would trigger it by instructing "the young love", meaning white American youth, to join the Family, and it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.
Black men would thus be deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. Frightened whites would retaliate with a murderous rampage, and militant blacks would exploit it to provoke a war of near-extermination between racist whites and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks. Then the militant blacks would arise to finish off the few whites who survived; in fact, they would kill off all non-blacks.
In this holocaust, the members of the enlarged Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath Death Valley which they would reach through a hole in the ground. They would be the only remaining whites upon the race war's conclusion, and they would emerge from underground to rule the blacks who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world. At that point, Manson "would scratch fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton and go be a good nigger".
The term "Helter Skelter" was from the Beatles song of the same name, which referred to the British amusement park ride "Helter Skelter", but Manson interpreted it as concerned with the war. The song was on the Beatles' White Album which Manson heard within a month or so of its November 1968 release. Former Manson follower Catherine Share claimed:
When the Beatles' White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn't that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song 'Helter Skelter'—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.

Fulfillment

Manson and his followers began preparing for Helter Skelter in the months before they committed the murders. They worked on songs for the hoped-for album which they anticipated would set off everything, and they prepared vehicles and other items for their escape from the Los Angeles area to Death Valley when the days of violence arrived. They pored over maps to plot a route that would bypass highways and get them to the desert safely. Manson was convinced that the song "Helter Skelter" contained a coded statement of the route that they should follow.
Manson had said that the war would start in the summer of 1969. He told a male Family member in late June of that year, months after he had been frustrated in his efforts to get the album made, that Helter Skelter was "ready to happen". "Blackie never did anything without whitey showin' him how," he said. "It looks like we're gonna have to show blackie how to do it." Manson instructed his followers to carry out the first set of murders on August 8, 1969: "Now is the time for Helter Skelter." They committed the second set of murders the following night, and one of the killers wrote "Healter Skelter" on the refrigerator in blood, along with other references to Beatles songs, particularly "Piggies".

Beatles lyrics, as interpreted by Manson

While in the Death Valley area after the New Year's Eve gathering at which Manson announced Helter Skelter, the Family played over and over the White Album's five following songs:
In his autobiography, Tex Watson tied the prophecy to one more White Album song, "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey", though he changed monkey to monkeys, plural. While on LSD at a party in late March 1969, Watson explained, he and two Manson girls realized they themselves were "the monkeys... just bright-eyed, free little animals, totally uninhibited". As they started "bouncing around the apartment, throwing food against the walls, and laughing hysterically", they were, in their own view, "all love—spontaneous, childlike love". It would seem Watson took the song's "me and my monkey" to signify Manson and the Family, though he does not say it that way; he fails to indicate whether the interpretation was brought to Manson's attention.
Manson himself invoked "Yellow Submarine", a Beatles song that was released in 1966 and that inspired an animated movie of the same title. The movie was released in the United States in November 1968, within a week or so of the White Album. In the first months of 1969, after he had delivered the Helter Skelter prophecy around the New Year's Eve campfire near Death Valley, Manson applied the name "Yellow Submarine" to a canary-yellow, Canoga Park house to which the Family repaired at his instruction. There, as they would prepare for Helter Skelter, they would be "submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world".

Book of Revelation, as interpreted by Manson

CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 9:
CHAPTER 10:
CHAPTER 16:
CHAPTER 21:
CHAPTER 22:

Synthesis

To Manson, the synthesis of Beatles and Bible was hardly to be questioned:
Look at songs: songs sung all over the world by the young love; it ain't nothin' new.... It's written in... Revelation, all about the four angels programming the holocaust...the four angels looking for the fifth angel to lead the people into the pit of fire...right out to Death Valley.... It's all in black and white, in The White Album—white, so there ain't no mistakin' the color....

''Abbey Road'' epilogue

Abbey Road was released in the United Kingdom in late September 1969 after the murders. By that time, most of the Family was at the group's camp in the Death Valley area searching for the Bottomless Pit. Three Family members arrived at the camp around October 1 with an advance copy of the album, which the group played on a battery-operated machine.
Law officers raided the desert redoubts in the second week of October and found the Family with stolen vehicles, and they arrested Manson and several others. By mid-November, Manson had become a suspect in the Tate-LaBianca murders, but Family members made their way back to Spahn Ranch after being released from jail. The LAPD confiscated a door on November 25, 1969 on which someone had written "Helter Scelter is coming down fast." A photograph shows that the confiscated door was also inscribed with "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — ALL GOOD CHILDREN ". This children's rhyme is heard in "You Never Give Me Your Money" on Abbey Road. In October 1970, the prosecution offered testimony about the door during Manson's trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, but only the "Helter Skelter" inscription seems to have been noted.
Tex Watson had left the desert camp and gone on to separate himself from the Family, but he bought a cassette recording of Abbey Road and played it continuously while walking for miles across the desert to rejoin the Family; he was hoping to see what The Beatles might have to tell him. He turned back at the last moment, and an old prospector informed him that the arrests had taken place. Watson returned to Texas where he was arrested for the Tate-LaBianca murders a month later.
Three people were attacked on the beach near Santa Barbara, California in late July 1970 while Manson was on trial, two of them fatally. One of the Manson girls spoke of this incident as "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", an Abbey Road song that plainly is about homicidal madness.

Timeline

1967

Manson entranced youths of the 1960s, and he and his Family initially represented a peaceful, harmonious, and loving revolution to strive for a better world. Manson had exactly the type of love that Tex Watson needed, and Manson was able to create murderers through his loving façade in his plan to start a race war.
Watson was with Manson when he first heard the White Album, and he took part in the Tate murders and the LaBianca murders. He is the only killer to participate directly in every one of the seven homicides, and he was the sole killer of at least three of the victims. He told other Family members, "It seemed like I had to do everything." He separated himself from the Family when he and Manson first heard the White Album, and he did not rejoin until the following March 1969. By that time, Manson's prophecy had captured the group's imagination, but Watson took a while to grasp its details.

Although I got it in bits and pieces, some from the women and some from Manson himself, it turned out to be a remarkably complicated yet consistent thing that he had discovered and developed in the three months we'd been apart. … It was exciting, amazing stuff Charlie was teaching, and we'd sit around him for hours as he told us about the land of milk and honey we'd find underneath the desert and enjoy while the world above us was soaked in blood.

Manson's testimony

Manson was permitted to testify at his 1970 trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, after the defendants' attorneys had attempted to rest their cases, without calling a single witness. The jury was removed from the courtroom lest he violate the California Supreme Court's decision in People v. Aranda by implicating his co-defendants. He spoke for over an hour. As for Helter Skelter, he said the following:
It means confusion, literally. It doesn't mean any war with anyone. It doesn't mean that some people are going to kill other people…. Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast. If you can't see the confusion coming down around you fast, you can call it what you wish.

Manson has dismissed the Helter Skelter conspiracy as an invention by the trial prosecutor to tie him to the murders.
Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things? Is that a conspiracy? The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb, and blind to even listen to the music.… It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says "Rise," it says "Kill." Why blame it on me? I didn't write the music. … As far as lining up someone for some kind of helter skelter trip, you know, that's the District Attorney's motive. That's the only thing he could find for a motive to throw up on top of all that confusion he had. There was no such thing in my mind as helter skelter.

Primary sources

More detail about Helter Skelter is found in the following:
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As has been noted, Bugliosi led the prosecution in the Tate-LaBianca trials; at the time of the trials, he was a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney. Charles Watson is the above-mentioned Family member who took part in the murders. Watkins was an above-mentioned Family member who was not involved in the murders.
See also the trial testimony of Gregg Jakobson, who met Manson at the home of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson in May or early summer of 1968 and who arranged a recording session for Manson in August of that year. Jakobson indicated that Manson and he had talked about Manson's "philosophy on life" in various settings "innumerable times" – "Maybe 100."

Footnotes