Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders

In August 1969, members of charismatic leader Charles Manson's countercultural "family" murdered some of Hollywood's "beautiful people," most famously Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant at the time.The killers left behind evidence intended to implicate Black radicals and to trigger an apocalyptic race war.What happened instead was that the gruesome murders placed the entire counterculture un-der suspicion and then came to mean, in Joan Didion's formulation, the end of the sixties.They have been a cornerstone of the true crime genre ever since. Drawing on newly released archival material of case transcripts, Love and Terror recasts the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship.The book shows how the standard story of the murders came to be told the way it was.In place of this shopworn narrative, Claudia Verhoeven presents a kaleidoscopic history at the center of which is a far stranger portrait of Manson, the man who became the ultimate murder mastermind in