‍Charles Manson, cult leader and failed folk singer bore a grudge

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‍ON THE morning of August 9, 1969, we woke up to the news of a terrifying bloodbath at the home of a Hollywood starlet that shocked the world — and the Beatles were to blame, claimed the man behind the slaughter.

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‍Blood and flesh covered the walls; victims were stabbed and slashed multiple times and 28-year-old pregnant movie actress Sharon Tate was hung from the ceiling with her stomach cut open. Her husband film director Roman Polanski was away discussing a film deal in Europe.

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‍ The world’s Press followed the story day by day and soon discovered that the killings were far bloodier and satanic than even their first reports. Hollywood stars were cowering in their homes.

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‍ A chilling cult had been ordered by its leader Charles Manson to go to Sharon’s mansion home and kill everyone inside “as gruesomely as they could.”

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‍ Manson and his cult The Family, had not long been kicked out of a palatial house owned by Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson. Wilson opened doors to the music industry for the weird cult leader and they became friends. But the Beach Boy found himself funding Manson’s growing entourage and at the centre of their drugs and prostitution lifestyle.

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‍ After they were kicked out, The Family relocated to an old film set on a rundown ranch in a place they called Death Valley, where Manson became obsessed by the track Helter Skelter on the Beatles’ White Album, released in November 1968, said Time magazine.

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‍ He believed Lennon and McCartney’s innocent lyrics about a children’s playground slide, signified the beginning of a race war between black and white. In his mind it was a message to him.

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‍ It led him to order the killing of Sharon and her white friends to spark a bloodbath between blacks and whites. The Family would then emerge from a hole in the ground to take over government and restore social order. All non-blacks would be killed, a court heard.

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‍ Time magazine finally put together what happened that gruesome night. In the evening, Sharon went to El Coyote Cafe, a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, with Jay Sebring (a celebrity hairstylist) and her ex-boyfriend; Polish actor Wojciech Frykowski, and coffee heiress Abigail Folger.

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‍ The group returned to Sharon’s Cielo Drive home around 10:30 pm. Manson’s brainwashed followers Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian arrived shortly after midnight.

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‍ First, they encountered 18-year-old Steven Parent who had been visiting his friend the estate’s caretaker in the guest house. Watson shot and killed him in his car.

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‍ Then they went into the house and gathered Sharon, Sebring, Frykowski and Folger, in the living room. Sebring was shot and stabbed to death. Folger and Frykowski attempted to flee but were chased down and killed on the front lawn. Frykowski was stabbed more than 50 times.

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‍ Sharon, who was nine months pregnant, and in skimpy nightwear, was the last to die. She was stabbed 16 times, with fatal wounds to her heart and lungs, and was hanged with a rope from a ceiling beam.

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‍ One of her breasts appeared to have been cut off and an X carved across her stomach. Bullets filled the ceilings and blood covered the floors. Before leaving, Atkins wrote “PIG” on the front door in Sharon’s blood.

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‍ The cult leader and his followers were eventually convicted, and an LA court heard that the house was targeted because it had previously been rented by a music producer who had angered failed folk singer Manson by rejecting his songs.

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‍ In court, Manson argued that The Beatles were responsible for the killings. “Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music,” he said. The jury even requested a copy of The White Album to try and make sense of it all. But couldn’t.

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‍ He was sentenced to death, but, following the abolition of capital punishment in California in 1972, his sentences were commuted to life in prison. He died of natural causes in jail in 2017.

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‍ John Lennon later said of Manson: “Well, he’s barmy. He’s like any other Beatles’ fan who reads mysticism!”

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‍The lighthouse at Eilean Mor where keepers vanished into thin air

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‍LIGHTS ARE ON BUT THERE’S NO ONE IN AT MYSTERY LIGHTHOUSE

‍ON Thursday, December 27, 1900, the year the Daily Express was born, the Northants Evening Telegraph published a story that was followed by newspapers across the nation.

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‍ Under the headline ‘Strange affair at a lighthouse – three keepers disappear’ it revealed a mystery that has not been solved even to this day.

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‍ The day before, a small ship, The Hesperus, was making its way to the Flannan Islands in the remote Outer Hebrides and the lighthouse at Eilean Mor, a remote island completely uninhabited apart from three lighthouse keepers. The ship, under Captain James Harvey was carrying Joseph Moore, a replacement keeper.

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‍ But as it reached the landing platform, Captain Harvey was surprised not to see anyone waiting for their arrival. He blew his horn and sent up a warning flare to attract attention.

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‍ There was no response.

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‍ So, Moore rowed ashore and climbed up the long and steep set of stairs that led up to the lighthouse.

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‍ As he climbed, he felt a deep sense of foreboding come over him. Once at the lighthouse, he noticed something was immediately wrong; the door to the staircase was unlocked which broke lighthouse rules.

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‍ And in the entrance hall two of the three oilskin coats were missing. He continued into the kitchen area where he found half eaten food on three plates and an overturned chair, almost as if someone had jumped from their seat in a hurry.

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‍ To add to this strange scene, the kitchen clock had stopped. Moore continued to search the rest of the lighthouse, even to the top of the tower where the light was on, but found no sign of the keepers.

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‍ He went back to the ship and informed the captain who ordered a search of the island for the missing men. No-one was found.

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‍ Harvey sent a telegram to the Northern Lighthouse Board headquarters in Edinburgh: “A dreadful accident has happened at Flannan’s. The three keepers have disappeared from the island. No sign of life is found.

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‍ “Fired a rocket but no response. Poor fellows they must been blown over the cliffs or drowned trying to secure a crane or something like that.

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‍ “I have left men on the island to keep the light burning until you make other arrangements.”

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‍ A few days later, Robert Muirhead, the board’s superintendent departed for the island to investigate the disappearances.

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‍ Muirhead discovered that the last entries in the logbook were unusual. On December 12, Thomas Marshall, the second assistant, wrote of ‘severe winds the likes of which I have never seen in 20 years.’

‍ He also noticed that James Ducat, the principal keeper, had been ‘very quiet’ and that the third assistant, William McArthur, had been crying.

‍ Even stranger is that there were no reported storms in the area on those days and the sea was calm.

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‍ The final log entry was made on the December 15. It simply read ‘Storm ended, sea calm. God is over all’.

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‍DID YOU KNOW THAT …

‍From New York Magazine, 1979.

‍NELSON Rockefeller, former President of the US and heir to the Rockefeller family fortune died of a heart attack, aged 70, while having intercourse with his 25-year-old secretary Megan Marshak in his Manhattan town house. “He thought he was coming, but he was going,” the New York magazine cheekily reported. Some accounts of his death differ, but his hasty cremation left the exact story uncertain.

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‍ANGRY REPORTER WHO BROUGHT

‍DOWN ROCKEFELLER’S OIL EMPIRE

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‍“THIS MAN is a living mummy with small, steady, expressionless eyes and a money-grabbing thief!”

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‍ These were the words of investigative reporter Ida Tarbell, pictured, in 1902, writing about the world’s richest man J.D.Rockefeller.

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‍ For five years, Ida, born on the oil frontier of western Pennsylvania in 1857, conducted a steady, painstaking investigation into his life, studying court testimonies, government reports, and private records. It led to the Government breaking up Rockefeller’s oil empire.

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‍ The gutsy journalist depicted Rockefeller as “a deceptive, lying thief who monopolised the oil trade” with his company Standard Oil. No one got in his way.

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‍ She wrote: “One of Mr. Rockefeller’s most impressive characteristics is patience. There never was a more patient man, or one who could dare to do more while he waited.

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‍ “He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded.

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‍ “And nothing was too small: the corner grocery in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipeline. Nothing, for little things grow.”

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‍ Ida’s feature: ‘The History of the Standard Oil Company’ meticulously documented how Rockefeller, the most successful man in the world, used illegal, underhanded, and ruthless tactics to create a monopoly of everything to do with oil.

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‍It was serialised in 19 parts in McClure’s Magazine, a prominent American illustrated monthly, that featured influential exposes on political corruption and corporate power. Ida’s article became a landmark work of the journalism that became known as “muckraking.”

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‍Her probe inspired many other journalists to write about trusts and large businesses that forced through monopolies in all industries. Her detailed story was written to avenge her father who lost his business after being crushed by the dirty tricks of Rockefeller’s empire when she was 15. The irony was that the final break-up of Standard Oil made even more money for Rockefeller.

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‍ In 1922, The New York Times named her one of the Twelve Greatest American Women. Rockefeller called her: “That misguided woman!” She died of pneumonia in Bridgeport, Connecticut in January 1944 aged 86.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍16 March 2026