You Must Remember Manson · Karina Longworth

E12: The Manson Family on Trial

November 20, 2017·52 min·4 clips

John Waters dedicated Pink Flamingos to the Manson girls, writing: 'the Manson family looked just like my friends at the time.'

1. You Must Remember This, hosted by Karina Longworth, concludes its 'Charles Manson's Hollywood' series with a full account of the Manson murder trial and its aftermath. 2. Longworth is the sole narrator; she wrote and edited this final episode, drawing on sources including John Waters's book Role Models and Joan Didion's essay collection The White Album. 3. The episode's central argument is that Manson transformed the trial into a media performance that finally delivered the celebrity he had long sought, while Bugliosi's Helter Skelter theory shaped how the murders would be culturally understood for decades. 4. The trial consumed national press attention for eighteen months, with coverage matching or eclipsing the Kent State shootings and the gradual US withdrawal from Cambodia and Vietnam. 5. Star witness Susan Atkins initially agreed to testify in exchange for immunity from the death penalty across all three murder cases, but Bugliosi grew worried when she told him that jailed Manson could 'see and hear everything they were doing at that moment in that room.' 6. Atkins gave grand jury testimony so graphic that at least one juror physically gagged, but later reversed course under pressure from still-free Manson girls, firing her attorney and refusing to testify against Charlie. 7. With Atkins unavailable, the prosecution offered full immunity to Linda Kasabian, who was nine months pregnant, and Kasabian became the trial's central witness, testifying for 17 days while Manson made throat-slitting gestures at her from the defense table. 8. Manson ran the courtroom as theater: he insisted on self-representing, convinced his co-defendants to fire attorneys, led crucifixion-pose protests, got the original judge removed, and on the first day of real proceedings appeared with a bloody X carved into his forehead with a printed statement for spectators reading 'I have X'd myself from your world.' 9. President Richard Nixon, speaking in Denver mid-trial, called Manson guilty and 'a rather glamorous figure to the young people,' prompting Charlie to brandish a newspaper headline reading 'Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares' in open court and the three female defendants to stand and ask the judge 'why go on with the trial?' 10. Defense attorney Ronald Hughes, whom Manson had hired specifically because 'he would be easy to overpower,' disappeared during a recess and was found floating in a stream with his body badly decomposed; his death was ruled accidental, but 'not many people believed it.' 11. Joan Didion visited Linda Kasabian in jail 'many nights' during the summer of 1970, bought the dress Kasabian wore to testify—a size 9 petite, 'many but not extremely many, in velvet if possible, emerald green or gold'—and later wrote about the experience in the title essay of The White Album. 12. Dennis Hopper sat in the courtroom with Jack Nicholson, who took notes apparently intending to base a screenplay on the proceedings; Hopper then spent two hours alone with Manson in jail, where Manson told him he had been a fan since a 1962 TV episode in which Hopper played a man who killed his father. 13. John Waters attended the trial in 1970 and a 1971 hearing for secondary family members, describing the family's courtroom presence as 'electric with twisted evil beauty'; he returned to Baltimore and made Pink Flamingos, which he dedicated to 'the Manson girls, Sadie, Katie, and Les.' 14. During the sentencing phase, Bernard 'Lotsa Papa' Crowe—whom Manson believed he had murdered—testified against him, revealing he had survived with Manson's bullet still lodged in his spine and had pretended to be dead when Charlie left his house. 15. All four defendants—Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten—were sentenced to death on March 26, 1971; Tex Watson received the same sentence in August; all were commuted to life in prison in 1972 when California abolished capital punishment. 16. Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book Helter Skelter became a major bestseller and 'reignited Charlie's stardom'; Squeaky Fromme pointed a Colt .45 at President Gerald Ford in Sacramento in 1975 while wearing a red nun's habit and was sentenced to life in prison. 17. Leslie Van Houten's conviction was overturned in 1976 after courts ruled that Hughes's disappearance had deprived her of adequate counsel; during a six-month bail period she lived in Echo Park and worked in a law office, but a third trial resulted in another life sentence. 18. The episode is solo narration, combining trial chronology with literary digression, weaving Didion and Waters passages directly into the account in Longworth's measured academic style. 19. The episode will most reward listeners who have followed the full series and are interested in how the trial transformed the murders into a cultural landmark for late-1960s Hollywood. 20. Listeners seeking a forensic legal analysis or a procedural breakdown of prosecution strategy will find the episode weighted toward cultural resonance over courtroom detail.

As heard by us

A dense, vivid trial chapter where Manson's courtroom spectacle spills into politics, writing, and Hollywood memory.

The finale of You Must Remember Manson turns to the central murder trial, with Vincent Bugliosi prosecuting Charlie, Susan, Pat, and Leslie for the seven murders committed on August 8 and 9, 1969.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for the final chapter of Charles Manson's Hollywood, where the Central Manson murder trial becomes a nation-consuming spectacle.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from You Must Remember Manson