Approaching midnight on August 8, 1969, an old Ford left Spahn Ranch, an abandoned Western movie set outside Los Angeles. The ramshackle commune housed a group of misfits and renegades who would come to be known globally as the Manson family.
There were four people in the car: Charles “Tex” Watson and three women, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda Kasabian.
Nearly all media reports state emphatically that Charles Manson, self-styled leader of the clan, had ordered them to drive to 10050 Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder everyone there “as gruesomely as you can”. But accounts of how and why that night came to pass differ wildly. The stories changed even at trial.
