Helter Skelter: The Truth Ain't All That's Out There

The broad fear of "stranger danger" that has characterized American law and society since the late 1960s  and the populist punitiveness that goes with it have many origins.  Some of them are undoubtedly historical.  The gated community may trace its DNA to the experience of European settlement of the continent in the face of often fierce resistance by Native Americans.  Our love affair with discretion wielding, heavily armed police may begin in the slave patrols.  But there is also something distinctly contemporary about this fear.   Violence by strangers against innocent and arbitrary victims was on the rise in the 60s and perhaps more importantly, was reinforced by a series of media spectacles of violence including the assassinations, riots, and mass murders between 1963 and 1968.  Indeed, one might almost say that this contemporary image of the stranger lurking outside our safe suburban homes has a face, and a birthday.  The face is that of convicted mass murderer Charles Manson and August 9th will mark the 40th anniversary of the morning when five bodies, four of them horribly stabbed, were discovered at the Benedict Canyon house rented by film stars Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.  The July 2009 issue of Los Angeles Magazine includes an "oral history" of the Manson murders by Steve Oney which includes many reminders of why that horrific episode may have so much staying power in our penal imaginary.

• While many initially blamed the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends as some bizarre dark side of Hollywood life, the murders the following night of two more ordinary upper middle class Angelenos, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, soon reframed the pattern as one of random risk to seemingly safe and secure people. 
• The violence of the murders, and the fact that prosecution witnesses would later describe loud screaming and pleading by the victims underscored a fear that is distinctive to the large suburban house which has been deliberately distanced from pedestrians and neighbors. While Americans were fleeing the city to escape crime they associated with the disordered and dangerous residents of the urban core, the Tate-LaBianca murders would epitomize the opposite fear; in suburbia, like space, no one can hear you scream.
• Whatever may be said of the racialization of crime fear, Manson was a white (racist) drifter with a considerable history in the penal system, and his cohorts were all white middle class youth   who Manson collected in settings like San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district.  According to the prosecution, his prime motivation for the murders was to launch a race war from out of the chaos of which he would apparently emerge as the prime leader (a future Manson believed was prophesied by the Beatle's song "Helter Skelter ").
• The crimes unified opinion in the state's most influential city behind the successful capture and prosecution of the Manson "family."  An LA jury handed death sentences not only to Manson and "Tex" Watson, but to three young white female defendants as well.  Less than a year later, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in People v. Anderson, 6 Cal. 3d 628 (Cal. 1972).  The decision, which preceded the US Supreme Court's Furman decision by some months, set off a negative backlash that helped reshape California state politics for a generation.  The leaders of the movement to restore the death penalty in the state and the coaltion of law enforcement agencies and politicians the movement created, became the backbone of California's commitment not only to the death penalty, but to mass incarceration on a broad scale (See the forthcoming dissertation of Michael Campbell, UC Irvine's Criminology, Law & Society program).