It was amazing the respect these girls had for Charlie. They just lived and breathed by him.
Once when we were working on the Christ story, he demonstrated the submission thing. He turned to Lynne and said, “Lynne, come here and kiss my feet”; and she got down on her knees and kissed his feet and sat down. And then he said, “Now I will kiss yours,” and he did. There was never any explanation or questioning. They just did it.
—Charles Manson’s record producer Gary Stromberg to Rolling Stone, 1970
Fifty years ago this week, the Manson family murders shocked Hollywood, announced the final death of the utopian dreams of the 1960s, and gave birth to the mythology of the Manson girls.
They are nearly always called the Manson girls, all of them, from the teenagers to the grown women. They were followers of Charles Manson who lived with him on his ranch and who, on his orders, committed brutal and bloody murders, and they are central to our cultural fascination with Manson himself.
