Hard to stomach, I know so imagine how he feels.  Apparently MSNBC was enamored with the Baltimore Examiner’s article and with a slight tweak they spread the news far and wide.  The doctor who did the questionable stapling is in court defending his end of the proceedings.

Read on for the original article.

BALTIMORE – A man alleging a Maryland doctor stapled his rectum shut during an operation — causing him to go without defecating for 17 days — took his federal lawsuit to trial Monday in Baltimore.

Ronald Watkins, 64, of West Virginia, is suing Manuel Casiano, a doctor in Frederick County, for allegedly botching a 2004 surgery that left Watkins with permanent bowel problems.

“The reason for suing Dr. Casiano is very simple: His rectum was stapled shut,” said Julia Lodowski, who with attorney Emily Malarkey is representing Watkins and his wife, Brenda.

Lodowski told jurors in U.S. District Court that Watkins now experiences “rectal discharge” and needs to wipe himself between 12 and 15 times a day.

He’s also had to have four “unnecessary surgeries” because of Casiano’s actions, Lodowski said.

The doctor’s attorney, Conrad Varner, said Watkins’ bowels merely became “swollen shut” because of medical problems — not because of stapling.

Varner said Watkins’ habitual smoking — two packs a day — contributed to his bowel problems, because nicotine constricts blood vessels.

Watkins underwent surgery Sept. 8, 2004, for a newly diagnosed rectal tumor, during which Casiano made the mistake, according to his lawsuit against the Foris Surgical Group.

Watkins then complained of increasing rectal pressure, and an inability to pass gas, his lawsuit states.

In a subsequent surgery, Casiano found that Watkins’ rectum was closed because of staples, according to the lawsuit.
“He couldn’t get past the staple line,” Lodowski told jurors.

“How else do we know that his rectum was stapled shut? Most importantly, Dr. Casiano said so.”

A graduate of New York School of Medicine who works at Frederick Memorial Hospital, Casiano has no record of any disciplinary actions, according to the Maryland Board of Physicians.

Watkins’ lawsuit does not seek a specific amount of damages.

The trial is expected to continue for four days.

Hopefully there will be a happy ending.

Technorati Tags: butt, ouch, staple, medical problems

Here’s a guy who claims he is channeling aliens via an energy beam directly to his hairy, slightly repugnant sweaty chest.  The very same chest he then makes an interviewer feel to confirm the alien-beam sweat.

The worst part is, the aliens sound like something out of a 1930′s serial featuring slightly evil aliens with German accents and horrible pronounciation.

As a bonus, the sweaty indivudual being interviewed even includes static as if to signify he’s connecting up with the alien power hour.

Technorati Tags: aliens, sweat, bear-man-chest, sf, fantasy, video, did I mention sweaty chest

Remember in grade school there was this kid who could make fart noises with his armpit? How cool that was? You wanted to be able to do that too, but never seemed to be able to pull it off. And remember how in high school, the same kid was still making fart noises with his armpit? But now you thought it was gross (You never admitted to anyone you still tried to make it work alone in your room).

Have you ever wondered what happened to that guy?

Well, you’ll be happy to know he’s alive and well. And he’s still making fart noises (though he’s since traded armpit farts for hand farts, less rashes I guess).

Meet Gerry (Jerry) Phillips. Gerry calls himself a manualist. A manualist is someone who plays music with their hands and no other instruments.

Sounds easy? Try it.

Gerry has a real talent. He’s got over a hundred videos posted on YouTube. And they are all amazing. He handfarts his way through all sorts of old favorites (Bohemian Raphsody, Killer Queen, Mario Bros. Theme) and makes some songs better than they’ve ever been (Hit Me Baby, One More Time, The Final Countdown).  Here’s Peter Frampton:

I highly suggest you check him out if you’re looking to waste some time, get a good laugh and be totally amazed. Here’s a link to his YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/gunecologist

Technorati Tags: geek, manualist, handfart, music, classic rock, super mario bros.

Maybe Cyber Command wasn’t entirely ill-informed. Think about it; who’s always flying around in starships, fighting interstellar wars? That’s right, the Navy. Who forms the front line of defense against the insectiod alien menace? Always the Marines. If the Air Force is going to remain relevant in the Hollywood version of the 23rd century it has to start thinking about fictitious threats it could potentially defend the country against. Having already been written off by most of the science fiction genre, they had few options left to them: either they could focus on post-apocalyptic radioactive mutants or scary uber-hackers and their spam cannon equipped bot-nets. With the Cold War having so recently ended (in military years), the choice was clear: the Air Force took the red pill.

Technorati Tags: cyber command, united states air force, usaf, hackers, fearmongering, fiction, stupid

Technorati Tags: ditko, comics, spider man, geek, comic books, avenging world, bizarre

They “ewww’ed” and “gross’ed” back and forth while you heard the ‘tap tap tapping’ of web surfing. I was intrigued! I was on a new mission! I HAD to find the mutant pig boy!

My mind raced back to a Seinfeld episode where Kramer came across such a creature in the hospital. A freak of nature that we, the audience, never got to see. Ooooh but times are different now. After speeding home and picking pedestrian pieces out of my grill, I ran inside and warmed up the portal to the wwweird.

This odd looking animal could quite possibly be real if it’s not a hoax and now I can *finally* put my curiosity to rest.

Okay ladies and gentlegeeks, I present:

The monkey faced pig… (no searches came up under human faced pig- but Google primate faced pig or monkey faced pig and voila- satiated curiosity)

Found on Orange:

Curious locals flocked to the home of owner Feng Changlin after news of the piglet spread in Fengzhang village, Xiping township.

“It’s hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it!” Feng told Oriental Today.

He says the piglet looks just like a monkey, with two thin lips, a small nose and two big eyes. Its rear legs are also much longer than its forelegs, causing it to jump instead of walk.

Feng’s wife said the monkey-faced piglet was one of five newborns of a sow which the family had raised for nine years.

“My God, it was so scary. I didn’t known what it was. I was really frightened,” she said.

“But our son likes to play with it, and he stopped us from getting rid of it. He even feeds it milk.”

Neighbours have suggested the couple keep the piglet to see how it looks as it matures.

I can assure this pig that will not be made into pizza toppings… ever.

While certainly looking a bit creepy, a little more digging turned up this site:  www.facelesspeople.com - which a quick whois shows belongs to the Lotus Group, PLC.  You know, those fast sporty cars that made an appearance in that movie Pretty Woman?

The domain was registered on the 13th of June – which leads me to believe that this is some sort of PR stunt which will end with trendy faceless mobs trying to sell you high end cars, and not with trendy faceless aliens attempting to enlighten the poor, faced beings of Earth.  Also, in another close up picture, you can see itty-bitty holes that the faceless folk can use to see.

Technorati Tags: aliens, faceless humans, lotus, pr, stunt, oy

Technorati Tags: trebuchet, human, japanese, cool, extreme sports

Anyone want to join me in applying for a million dollar grant to establish the link between high end gaming rigs and number of frags?

Technorati Tags: monkey business, obvious, stabby, knife wounds, primate dueling

So why the heck is it called Chicken?  Why not a nice name, like nearby Eagle.  Eagle always did better in school, was on the track team and lets face it, Mom liked Eagle better than Chicken.  And why can’t Chicken count?  17?  37?

Back in the 1800′s when Alaska was much heavier as it was full of gold, lots of people went up there to deal with this mineral obesity.   While gold is nice to spend and shiny, its pretty tough on folks trying to eat it.  So the locals turned to the (now state) bird the Ptargna. . . the patarma. . .  the Ptarmigan.  This cute fella right here.

By closely watching the habits of this plucky little birds, the miners were able to track down fresh supplies of grain, fruit and other bits of nature’s bounty thereby assuring that they were the first of Alaska’s sandal wearing, whole food eating vegan hippie residents.  Nah, just kidding.  They ate the little suckers.

Eventually 1902 rolled around and they filled the spot to capacity (somewhere between 17 and 37 people?) and had to make it into a town.  They decided on the spot to name it after their favorite foodstuff.  Problem was, no one really knew how to spell  Ptarmigan.  Hell, I can’t spell Ptarmigan and every time you see the word Ptarmigan you can rest assured that it’s a cut/paste from Wikipedia.  Fearing ridicule from the rest of the world, they put between 34 and 74 pairs of eyes to searching for a good name for the place.

When that failed, I’m sure someone half-jokingly said “let’s just call the damned place Chicken and get back to rolling in our gold.”  And that is how Chicken, Alaska came to be a town.

You can visit it today.  In fact, if you’re driving from say. . .  Hell’s Kitchen in New York to Chicken, Alaska – a trip of 4,099 miles, you can use these directions as provided by Google maps.  They’ve got a cafe, a salmon bake and of course, a bar.

Despite my earlier mental picture of the place, the streets ain’t paved with gold.  Or Ptarmigan bones, but rather packed gravel.  And you’ll have to bring your own phones, electricity, internet and bathrooms as Chicken Alaska has none of these things.

Chicken has been thrust squarely into the modern age however, as they have their own website, hosted out side of the town, of course.   Just how squarely into the modern age have they thrusted?  Well, they seem to have landed somewhere between Lynx and the Animated Gif era.  Regardless, I’ve officially added Chicken, Alaska to my list of places I’d like to see before I die.

Technorati Tags: chicken, Alaska, tidbit, factoid, facts, strange, drumsticks

Technorati Tags: aliens, mars, rovers, proof, mars monkeys

Those aren’t your childhood memories?  Well I’ll bet you have the ATF to thank for that!  The Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco Firearms and now, Explosives (ATFE) has launched their kids page!  Enjoy pictures of old time ATF agents and  the POISON that was popular long before guys were growing their hair out and smearing makeup on themselves.

Technorati Tags: atf, kids, firearms, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, wholesome family fun

Charles Manson reaches behind bars and into your iPod with his new album (semi-new, new to me… apparently out since around 2005): “One Mind” via licensing through Creative Commons. I’m in disbelief that he’s able to do this. Notorious for brainwashing- it’s okay for HIM to make music?? I seriously can’t believe he’s allowed *that* kind of freedom.

Manson loose on the internet? That explains SO much. This was found here at LimeWire Music Blog.

Anyway, you’re adults with the freedom to listen or not and then blog away at the analogy of giving a serial killer a loaded gun and pointing to a crowd full of people. This is also the part where I ask those who have kids or are responsible for children, “Are you paying attention to what they’re downloading?”

I did post the YouTube of the music and opted to take it down. This is *not* cool, this is not something I believe should be made available to the public and I imagine a bunch of little emo’s jumping all over this. If you’re unfamiliar with the creepiest man of the latter part of the 20th Century and now the 21st Century, the following is from Wikipedia:

Charles Milles Manson (November 12, 1934) is a convict who led the “Manson Family,” a quasi-commune that arose in the U.S. state of California in the later 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy, he was convicted of the murders themselves.

Manson is forever associated with “Helter Skelter”, the term he took from the Beatles song of that name and construed as a race-based conflict that the crimes were intended to precipitate. This connection with rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an emblem of transgression, rebellion, evil, ghoulishness, bloody violence, homicidal psychosis, and the macabre. Ultimately, the term was used as the title of the book that prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.

At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially; a number of artists have covered his songs in the decades since.

Manson’s death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state’s death penalty. California’s eventual reestablishment of capital punishment did not affect Manson, who is an inmate at Corcoran State Prison.

Early life

Childhood
First known as “no name Maddox,” Manson was born to unmarried, sixteen-year-old Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period, after her son’s birth, Kathleen Maddox was married to a laborer named William Manson, whose last name the boy was given. Charles Manson’s biological father appears to have been a “Colonel Scott”, against whom Maddox filed a bastardy suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, Charles never really knew him.

Young Manson’s mother, allegedly a drinker, once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later. When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the McMechen, West Virginia, home of an aunt and uncle who grew very religious. Upon his mother’s 1942 parole, Manson was retrieved by his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms. He would one day characterize her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole childhood joy.

In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, in Terre Haute, Indiana. After ten months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.
First offenses
By burgling a grocery store, Manson obtained cash that enabled him to rent a room. A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy’s uncle.

Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age thirteen, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise. After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951.

In Utah, having burgled gas stations all along the way, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Despite four years of schooling and an average IQ of 109 (later tested at 121), he was illiterate. A caseworker concluded he was aggressively antisocial.
First imprisonment
Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing at Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution to which he had been transferred the previous October on a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Manson “took a razor blade and held it against another boy’s throat while he sodomized him.” He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered “dangerous.” In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.

After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a hospital waitress, with whom, by his own account, he found genuine, if short-lived, marital happiness, and whom he supported via smalltime jobs and auto theft.

Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle interstate; after a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years’ probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California.

Charles Manson Jr., Manson’s son by Rosalie, was born while Manson was in prison. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from his wife and mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles; but in March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Caught trying to escape by stealing a car less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson was given five years’ probation; his parole was denied.
Second imprisonment
Manson received five years parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a sixteen-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. Pleading guilty in September 1959 to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, he received a ten-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman with an arrest record for prostitution tearfully told the court she and Manson were in love and would marry if Manson were freed. The woman, whose name was Leona and who, as a prostitute, had used the name Candy Stevens, did, in fact, marry Manson before the year’s end, possibly so testimony against him would not be required of her.

After Manson took that same woman and another girl from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution before the year’s end, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued; an April 1960 indictment for violation of the Mann Act followed. Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June, when one of his girls was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his ten-year sentence.

In July 1961, after a year spent unsuccessfully appealing the revocation of his probation, Manson was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. Although the Mann Act charge had been dropped, the attempt to cash the Treasury check was still a federal offense. His September 1961 annual review noted he had a “tremendous drive to call attention to himself,” an observation echoed in September 1964. In the interval, in 1963, Leona was granted a divorce, in the pursuit of which she alleged she and Manson had had a son, Charles Luther.

In June 1966, Manson was sent, for the second time in his life, to Terminal Island, in preparation for early release. By March 21, 1967, his release day, he had spent more than half of his thirty-two years in prisons and other institutions. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested, unsuccessfully, that he be permitted to stay, a fact touched on in a 1981 television interview:

Tom Snyder: Let’s go back to 1967, the time you were winding up serving a term of a number of years, ten years, and written accounts indicate that you told the authorities, “Don’t let me out, I can’t cope with the outside world.” Do you have a recollection of that? And do you –
Manson: You’re making a desperate plea out of something, man. There’s no desperate plea out of it. I said I can’t handle the maniacs outside, let me back in.
Snyder: I didn’t use the word desperate; that’s your word, Charles.
Manson: Yeah, well, your inflection and your voice tones were, uh, implications there.

Rise of the Family
On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in Berkeley. In prison, he had been taught to play steel guitar by 1930s bank robber Alvin Karpis; now, living mostly by panhandling, he soon got to know Mary Brunner, a twenty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate working as an assistant librarian at UC Berkeley. After moving in with her, he overcame her resistance to his bringing other women in to live with them. Before long, they were sharing Brunner’s residence with eighteen other women.

Manson also established himself as a guru in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967′s Summer of Love, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.

Before the summer was out, Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. Hitting the road, they roamed as far north as Washington State, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice — western parts of the city and county.

In an alternative account, which included no mention of the eighteen girls at Brunner’s place, Manson, apparently accompanied by Brunner, acquired Family members during some months of travels that were undertaken, in part, in a Volkswagen van; it was November when the school bus set out from San Francisco with the enlarged group.
Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.
The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring 1968, when, by some accounts, Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he had no such intent, Manson began kissing Wilson’s feet.

Inside the house, Wilson discovered twelve strangers, mostly girls. Over the next few months, as their number doubled, the Family members who had made themselves part of Wilson’s Sunset Boulevard household cost him approximately $100,000. This included a large medical bill for treatment of their gonorrhea and $21,000 for the accidental destruction of an uninsured car of his they borrowed. Wilson would sing and talk with Manson, whose girls were servants to them both.

Wilson paid for studio time to record songs written and performed by Manson, and he introduced Manson to acquaintances of his with roles in the entertainment business. These included Gregg Jakobson, Terry Melcher, and Rudi Altobelli, the last of whom owned a house he would soon rent to actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Jakobson, who was impressed by “the whole Charlie Manson package” of artist/lifestylist/philosopher, also paid to record Manson material.[22][23]

In the quasi-autobiographical Manson in His Own Words, the account is that Manson first met Wilson at a friend’s San Francisco house where he, Manson, had gone to obtain marijuana. The Beach Boy supposedly gave Manson his Sunset Boulevard address and invited him to stop by when he would be in Los Angeles.
Spahn Ranch
By August 1968, when Wilson had his manager clear the Family members from his house, Manson had established a base for the group at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, not far from Topanga Canyon.[24][25] The evictees joined the rest of the Family there.

Located in (or near) Chatsworth, the ranch had once been a location for the shooting of Western films; then, with its old movie sets run down, it was primarily doing business in horseback rides. While Family members did helpful work around the place, Manson kept the nearly-blind, octogenarian owner, George Spahn, on his side by having Lynette Fromme act as Spahn’s eyes and, along with other girls, attend to Spahn sexually.[26][27] For a tiny squeal she would emit when Spahn would pinch her thigh, Fromme, one of the early Family members who had boarded the school bus, won from Spahn the nickname “Squeaky.”

The Family was soon joined at Spahn Ranch by Charles Watson, who had met Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house. A small-town Texan who had quit college and moved to California,[28] Watson had given a lift to Wilson, who had been hitchhiking because his cars had been wrecked.[24] Watson’s drawl earned him, too, a George Spahn nickname, “Tex.”[25]
Helter Skelter
Main article: Helter Skelter (Manson scenario)
In the first days of November 1968, Manson established the Family at alternate headquarters in Death Valley’s environs, where they occupied two unused or little-used ranches, Myers and Barker.[23][29] The former, to which the group had initially headed, was owned by the grandmother of a new girl in the Family. The latter was owned by an elderly, local woman to whom Manson presented himself and a male Family member as musicians in need of a place congenial to their work. When the woman agreed to let them stay there if they’d fix up things, Manson honored her with one of the Beach Boys’ gold records,[29] several of which he’d been given by Dennis Wilson.

While back at Spahn Ranch, no later than December, Manson and Tex Watson visited a Topanga Canyon acquaintance who played them the Beatles’ White Album, then recently released.[23] Despite having been twenty-nine years old and imprisoned when The Beatles first came to America in 1964, Manson had been all but obsessed with the group. At McNeil, he had told fellow inmates, including Alvin Karpis, that he could surpass the group in fame; to the Family, he spoke of the group as “the soul” and “part of ‘the hole in the infinite.’”

For some time, too, Manson had been saying that racial tension between blacks and whites was growing and that blacks would soon rise up in rebellion in America’s cities.[35] He had emphasized Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, which had taken place on April 4, 1968.[29] On a bitter cold New Year’s Eve at Myers Ranch, the Family members, gathered outside around a large fire, listened as Manson explained that the social turmoil he had been predicting had also been predicted by The Beatles. The White Album songs, he declared, told it all, although in code. In fact, he maintained (or would soon maintain), the album was directed at the Family itself, an elect group that was being instructed to preserve the worthy from the impending disaster.[35]

In early January 1969, the Family escaped the desert’s cold by establishing yet another base, at a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park, not far from the Spahn Ranch. Because this locale would allow the Family to remain “submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world,”[36][37] Manson called it the Yellow Submarine, another Beatles reference. There, the group prepared for the impending apocalypse, which, around the campfire, Manson had termed “Helter Skelter,” after the White Album song of that name.

By February, Manson’s vision was complete. The Family would create an album whose songs, as subtle as those of The Beatles, would trigger the predicted chaos. Ghastly murders of whites by blacks would be met with retaliation, and a split between racist and non-racist whites would yield whites’ self-annihilation. Blacks’ triumph, as it were, would merely precede their being ruled by the Family, which would ride out the conflict in “the bottomless pit” — a secret city beneath Death Valley.[38] At the Canoga Park house, while Family members worked on vehicles and pored over maps to prepare for their desert escape, they also worked on songs for their world-changing album. When they were told Terry Melcher was to come to the house to hear the material, the girls prepared a meal and cleaned the place; but Melcher never arrived.
Encounter with Tate
On March 23, 1969,[39] Manson entered uninvited upon 10050 Cielo Drive, which he had known as the residence of Terry Melcher. This was Rudi Altobelli’s property, where Melcher was no longer the tenant; as of that February,[40] the tenants were Tate and Polanski.

Manson was met by Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and Tate friend, who was there to photograph Tate in advance of her departure for Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted.[39]

When Manson told Hatami he was looking for someone whose name Hatami did not recognize, Hatami informed him the place was the Polanski residence. Hatami advised him to try “the back alley,” by which he meant the path to the guest house, beyond the main house.[39]

Concerned over the stranger on the property, Hatami was now down on the front walk, to confront Manson. When Tate appeared behind Hatami, in the house’s front door, and asked who was calling, Hatami said a man was looking for someone. Hatami and Tate maintained their positions while Manson, without a word, went back to the guest house, returned a minute or two later, and left.[39]

That evening, Manson returned to the property and again went back to the guest house, where, presuming to enter the enclosed porch, he spoke with Rudi Altobelli, who was just coming out of the shower. Although Manson asked for Melcher, Altobelli felt Manson had come looking for him,[41] as is consistent with prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s later discovery that Manson had apparently been to the place on earlier occasions since Melcher’s departure from it.[39][42]

Speaking through the inner screen door, Altobelli told Manson that Melcher had moved to Malibu; he lied that he did not know Melcher’s new address. In response to a question from Manson, Altobelli said he himself was in the entertainment business, although, having met Manson the previous year, at Dennis Wilson’s home, he was sure Manson already knew that. At Wilson’s, Altobelli had complimented Manson lukewarmly on some of his musical recordings that Wilson had been playing.[39]

When Altobelli informed Manson he was going out of the country the next day, Manson said he’d like to speak with him upon his return; Altobelli lied that he would be gone for more than a year. In response to a direct question from Altobelli, Manson explained that he had been directed to the guest house by the persons in the main house; Altobelli expressed the wish that Manson not disturb his tenants.[39]

Manson left. As Altobelli flew with Tate to Rome the next day, Tate asked him whether “that creepy-looking guy” had gone back to the guest house the day before.[39]
Family crimes

Crowe shooting; Hinman murder
By June, Manson was telling the Family they might have to show blacks how to start Helter Skelter.[36][43][44] When Manson tasked Tex Watson to obtain money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black drug dealer named Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe; Crowe responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered on July 1, 1969, by shooting Crowe at his Hollywood apartment.[45][46][26][47]

Manson’s mistaken belief that he had killed Crowe was seemingly confirmed by a news report of the discovery of the dumped body of a Black Panther in Los Angeles. Although Crowe was not a member of the Black Panthers, Manson, concluding he had been, expected retaliation from the group. He turned Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards.[45][48] “If we’d needed any more proof that Helter Skelter was coming down very soon, this was it,” Tex Watson would later write. “[B]lackie was trying to get at the chosen ones.”[45]

On July 25, 1969, Manson sent sometime Family member Bobby Beausoleil along with Mary Brunner and Family member Susan Atkins to the house of acquaintance Gary Hinman, to persuade him to turn over money Manson thought Hinman had inherited.[49][45][50] The three held the uncooperative Hinman hostage for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. After that, Beausoleil stabbed him to death, ostensibly on Manson’s instruction. Before leaving the Topanga Canyon residence, Beausoleil, or one of the girls, used Hinman’s blood to write “Political piggy” on the wall and to draw a panther paw, a Black Panther symbol.[46][26][51]

In magazine interviews of 1981 and 1998-99,[52][53] Beausoleil would say he went to Hinman’s to recover money paid to Hinman for drugs that had supposedly been bad; he added that Brunner and Atkins, unaware of his intent, went along idly, merely to visit Hinman. On the other hand, Atkins, in her 1977 autobiography, wrote that Manson directly told Beausoleil, Brunner, and her to go to Hinman’s and get the supposed inheritance — $21,000. She said Manson had told her privately, two days earlier, that, if she wanted to “do something important,” she could kill Hinman and get his money.[50]
Tate murders
When Beausoleil was arrested on August 6, 1969, after he had been caught driving Hinman’s car, police found the murder weapon in the tire well.[40] Two days later, Manson told Family members at Spahn Ranch, “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”[54][55][45]

On the night of August 8, Manson directed Tex Watson to take Family members Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel — one of the hitchhikers allegedly picked up by Dennis Wilson — to “that house where Melcher used to live” and “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can.”[56][57] He told the girls to do as Tex would instruct them.[54][58]

When the four arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who’d been to the house, on Family business,[23] climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into August 9, 1969.

Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm,[58] they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Telling the girls to lie in the bushes, Watson stepped out, gave a command to halt, and shot to death eighteen-year-old Steven Parent, the driver of the approaching car.[56][59] After cutting the screen of an open window of the main house, Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate.[56][58][54] He removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door.[58]

As Watson whispered to Atkins, Roman Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; Watson kicked him in the head.[56] When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, Watson replied, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”[58][56]

On Watson’s direction, Atkins found the house’s three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel’s help,[58][60] brought them to the living room. The three were Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant; her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; and Frykowski’s lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.[40] Polanski, Tate’s husband, was in London, England, at work on a film project.[61]

As Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together, by their necks, with rope he’d brought and slung up over a beam, Sebring’s protest — his second — of rough treatment of Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, which proved to hold about seventy dollars, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.[40][56]

Frykowski, whose hands had been bound with a towel, freed himself and began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him.[56] As Frykowski fought his way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson, who joined in against him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times (breaking the gun’s right grip in the process), stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice.[56] Around this time, Kasabian, drawn up from the driveway by “horrifying sounds,” arrived outside the door and, in a vain effort to halt the massacre, told Atkins falsely that someone was coming.[54][56]

Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area.[62][63] Pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed and, finally, tackled her, she was dispatched by Watson; her two assailants stabbed her a total of twenty-eight times.[56][40] As Frykowski struggled across the lawn, Watson finished him as well, with furious stabbing that brought his total stab wounds to fifty-one.[56][54][40]

Back in the house, Atkins, Watson, or both killed Tate, who was stabbed a total of sixteen times.[40] Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby; she cried, “Mother… mother…” — until she was dead.[56]

Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the girls to “leave a sign… something witchy”;[56] now, using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, Atkins wrote “pig” on the house’s front door, in Tate’s blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.[56][64][58]

In initial confessions, to cellmates of hers at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins would say she killed Tate.[64] In later statements — to her attorney, to Vincent Bugliosi, and before a grand jury — she would indicate Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson.[58] In his 1978 autobiography, Watson himself would say that he stabbed Tate and that Atkins did not.[56] Since he was aware that prosecutor Bugliosi and the jury that had tried the other Tate-LaBianca defendants were convinced Atkins had stabbed Tate, he falsely testified he did not stab her.
LaBianca murders
The next night, six Family members — the four from from the Tate murders as well as Leslie Van Houten and Steve “Clem” Grogan — rode out at Manson’s instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, “to show [them] how to do it.”[58][54] After a few hours’ ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them,[54] Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive, home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner.[59] Located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, the LaBianca home was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.[58][68]

After walking up the driveway and looking in a window, Manson took Watson with him through the unlocked back door. This would be reported in Watson’s autobiography, although Atkins and Kasabian had told prosecutors Manson went up to the house alone, returned to say he had tied up the house’s occupants, and sent Watson up with Krenwinkel and Van Houten.[58][54] Watson explained that, at trial, he “went along with” the women’s account, which he figured made him “look that much less responsible.”

Rousing the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint, Manson had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary LaBianca was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Manson’s instructions to cover the couple’s heads with pillowcases, which he bound in place with lamp cords. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instructions that the couple be killed.[58][54]

Before leaving Spahn Ranch, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night’s weapons.[54] Now, sending the girls from the kitchen to the bedroom, to which Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet, the first thrust going into the man’s throat.

Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew Watson there to discover Mrs. LaBianca keeping the girls at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. Subduing her with several stabs of the bayonet, Watson returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of twelve times. After Watson was done, he carved “WAR” on the man’s exposed abdomen, as he would state in his autobiography. Atkins, who did not enter the LaBianca house, told prosecutors she believed Krenwinkel had carved the word.[58]

Returning to the bedroom, where Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary LaBianca with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen, Watson — heeding Manson’s instruction to make sure each of the girls played a part — told Van Houten to stab her too. She did, on the exposed buttocks and elsewhere.[68][60][62] At trial, Van Houten would claim, uncertainly,[69] that Rosemary LaBianca was dead by the time she stabbed her. Evidence showed that many of Mrs. LaBianca’s forty-one total stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem.[70]

While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote “Rise” and “Death to pigs” on the walls and “Healter [sic] Skelter” on the refrigerator door, all in blood. She gave Leno LaBianca fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach; she also planted a steak knife in his throat.[58][54]

Hoping for a double crime, Manson had gone on to direct Kasabian to drive to the Venice home of an actor acquaintance of hers, another “piggy.” Depositing the second trio of Family members at the man’s apartment building, he drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home.[58][54] Kasabian thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. As the group abandoned the murder plan and left, Susan Atkins defecated in the stairwell.[71]
Justice system

Investigation and arrest
On August 10, 1969 — while the Tate autopsies were under way and the LaBianca bodies were yet to be discovered — detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction in the Hinman case, informed LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate case of the bloody writing at the Hinman house. They even mentioned that the Hinman suspect, Beausoleil, was associated with a group of hippies led by “a guy named Charlie.” The Tate team, thinking the Tate murders a consequence of a drug transaction, ignored the information.[40]

Parent, the shooting victim in the Tate driveway, was determined to have been an acquaintance of William Garretson, a young man hired by Rudi Altobelli to take care of the property while Altobelli himself was away.[40] As the killers arrived, Parent had been leaving Cielo Drive, after a visit to Garretson.[40] Held briefly as a Tate suspect, Garretson, who lived in the guest house and told police he had neither seen nor heard anything on the murder night, was released on August 11, 1969, after undergoing a polygraph examination that indicated he had not been involved in the crimes.[40] Not for decades would he publicly state he had, in fact, witnessed a portion of the murders, as the examination suggested. (See “Aftermath,” below.)[72]

On August 12, 1969, LAPD told the press it had ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca homicides. On August 16, the sheriff’s office raided Spahn Ranch and arrested Manson and twenty-five others, as “suspects in a major auto theft ring” that had been stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies. Weapons were seized, but because the warrant had been misdated the group was released a few days later.[73]

By the end of August, when virtually all leads had gone nowhere, a report by the LaBianca detectives, generally younger than the Tate team, noted a possible connection between the bloody writings at the LaBianca house and “the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album.”[74]

In mid-October, the LaBianca team, still working separately from the Tate team, checked with the sheriff’s office about possible similar crimes and learned of the Hinman case. They also learned that the Hinman detectives had spoken with Beausoleil’s girlfriend, Kitty Lutesinger, who had been arrested a few days earlier with members of “the Manson Family.”[49]

The arrests had taken place at the desert ranches, to which the Family had moved and where, unknown to authorities, its members had been in the midst of a search for a hole in the ground — access to the Bottomless Pit.[39][75] A joint force of National Park rangers and officers from the California Highway Patrol and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office — federal, state, and county personnel — had raided both the Myers and Barker ranches after following clues unwittingly left when Family members burned an earthmover owned by Death Valley National Monument.[76][77][78] The raiders had found stolen dune buggies and other vehicles and had arrested two dozen persons, including Manson. A Highway Patrol officer found Manson hiding in a cabinet beneath Barker’s bathroom sink.[49][76]

A month after they, too, had spoken with Lutesinger, the LaBianca detectives made contact with members of a motorcycle gang she’d told them Manson had tried to enlist as his bodyguards while the Family was at Spahn Ranch.[49] While the gang members were providing information that suggested a link between Manson and the murders,[64][26] a dormitory mate of Susan Atkins succeeded in informing LAPD of the Family’s involvement in the crimes.[26] One of those arrested at Barker, Atkins had been booked for the Hinman murder after she’d confirmed to the sheriff’s detectives that she’d been involved in it, as Lutesinger had said.[49] Transferred to Sybil Brand Institute, a detention center in Los Angeles, she had begun talking to bunkmates Ronnie Howard and Virginia Graham, to whom she gave chilling accounts of the events in which she had been involved.[46]

On December 1, 1969, acting on the information from these sources, LAPD announced warrants for the arrest of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in the Tate case; the suspects’ involvement in the LaBianca murders was noted. Manson and Atkins, already in custody, were not mentioned; the connection between the LaBianca case and Van Houten, who was also among those arrested near Death Valley, had not yet been recognized.[76][58]

Watson and Krenwinkel, too, were already under arrest, authorities in Texas and Alabama having picked them up on notice from LAPD. On December 2, in New Hampshire, Kasabian voluntarily surrendered to authorities.

Before long, physical evidence such as Krenwinkel’s and Watson’s fingerprints, which had been collected by LAPD at Cielo Drive,[79] was augmented by evidence recovered by the public. On September 1, 1969, the distinctive .22-caliber Hi Standard “Buntline Special” revolver Watson used on Parent, Sebring, and Frykowski had been found and given to the police by a ten-year-old who lived near the Tate residence. In mid-December, when the Los Angeles Times published a crime account based on information Susan Atkins had given her attorney,[81] the boy’s father made several phone calls which finally prompted LAPD to connect the gun with the murders.[82] Acting on that same newspaper account, a local ABC television crew quickly located and recovered the bloody clothing discarded by the Tate killers.[83] Discarded knives used at the Tate residence were never recovered, despite a search by some of the same crewmen and, months later still, by LAPD.[84]
Conviction and sentencing
At the trial, which began June 15, 1970,[60] the prosecution’s main witness was Kasabian, who, along with Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, had been charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy. Not having participated in the killings, she was granted immunity in exchange for testimony that detailed the nights of crimes.[22][85] A deal not to seek the death penalty against Atkins had been withdrawn when she, Atkins, repudiated the grand jury testimony on which the indictments had been secured.[86]

Because of his conduct, including violations of a gag order and submission of “outlandish” and “nonsensical” pretrial motions, Manson’s reluctantly-granted permission to act as his own attorney had been withdrawn by the court before the trial’s start.[87] On Friday, July 24, the first day of testimony, Manson appeared in court with an X carved into his forehead and issued a statement that he was “considered inadequate and incompetent to speak or defend [him]self” — and had “X’d [him]self from [the establishment's] world.”[88][89] Over the following weekend, the female defendants duplicated the mark on their own foreheads, as, within another day or so, most Family members did, too.[90]

The prosecution placed the triggering of Helter Skelter as the main motive.[91] The crime scenes’ bloody White Album references — pig, rise, helter skelter — were correlated with testimony about Manson predictions that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of “pigs” on walls in victims’ blood.[36][92] Testimony that Manson had said “now is the time for Helter Skelter” was supplemented with Kasabian’s testimony that, on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson considered discarding Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet on the street of a black neighborhood.Having obtained the wallet in the LaBianca house, he “wanted a black person to pick it up and use the credit cards so that the people, the establishment, would think it was some sort of an organized group that killed these people.”[93] On his direction, Kasabian had hidden it in the women’s rest room of a service station near a black area.”I want to show blackie how to do it,” Manson had said as the Family members had driven along after the departure from the LaBianca house.

During the trial, Family members haunted the entrances and corridors of the courthouse and were denied access to the courtroom itself only by being subpoenaed as prospective prosecution witnesses. When the group established itself in vigil on the sidewalk, each hard-core member wore a sheathed hunting knife that, being in plain view, was being carried legally. Each was identifiable by the X on his or her forehead.

Some Family members attempted to dissuade witnesses from testifying. Prosecution witnesses Paul Watkins and Juan Flynn were both threatened; Watkins was badly burned in a suspicious fire in his van. Former Family member Barbara Hoyt, who had overheard Susan Atkins describing the Tate murders to Family member Ruth Ann Moorehouse, agreed to accompany the latter to Hawaii. There, Moorehouse allegedly gave her a hamburger spiked with several doses of LSD. Found sprawled on a Honolulu curb in a drugged semi-stupor, Hoyt was taken to the hospital, where she did her best to identify herself as a witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. Before the incident, Hoyt had been a reluctant witness; after the attempt to silence her, her reticence disappeared.

On August 4, despite precautions taken by the court, Manson flashed the jury a Los Angeles Times front page whose headline was “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares,” a reference to a statement made the previous day when U.S. President Richard Nixon had decried what he saw as the media’s glamorization of Manson. Voir dired by Judge Charles Older, the jurors contended that the headline had not influenced them. The next day, the female defendants stood up and said in unison that, in light of the President’s remark, there was no point in going on with the trial. On October 5, denied the court’s permission to question a prosecution witness whom the defense attorneys had declined to cross-examine, Manson leaped over the defense table and attempted to attack the judge. Wrestled to the ground by bailiffs, he was removed from the courtroom with the female defendants, who’d subsequently risen and begun chanting in Latin. Thereafter, Older allegedly began wearing a revolver under his robes.

As the body of the trial concluded and with the closing arguments impending, attorney Ronald Hughes, who had been representing Leslie Van Houten, disappeared during a weekend trip. When Maxwell Keith was appointed to represent Van Houten in Hughes’s absence, a delay of more than two weeks was required to permit Keith to familiarize himself with the voluminous trial transcripts. No sooner had the trial resumed, just before Christmas, than disruptions of the prosecution’s closing argument by the defendants led Older to ban the four defendants from the courtroom for the remainder of the guilt phase. Older said that it had become obvious that the defendants were acting in collusion with each other and were simply putting on a performance.

On January 25, 1971, guilty verdicts were returned against Manson, Krenwinkel and Atkins on the seven counts of murder and the one of conspiracy; Van Houten was convicted on two counts of murder and one of conspiracy. In the trial’s guilt phase, the defendants had shocked the court by resting without calling a single witness. Lawyers for the women had been unwilling to let Manson engineer a defense in which their clients would testify and take all guilt upon themselves. Not far into the penalty phase, the jurors got a glimpse of the defense Manson had had in mind. Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten testified the murders had been conceived as “copycat” versions of the Hinman murder, for which Atkins now took credit. The killings, they said, were intended to draw suspicion away from Bobby Beausoleil, by resembling the crime for which he had been jailed. This plan had supposedly been the work of, and carried out under the guidance of, not Manson, but someone allegedly in love with Beausoleil — Linda Kasabian. Among the narrative’s weak points was Atkins’s inability to explain why, as she was maintaining, she had written “political piggy” at the Hinman house in the first place.

Midway through the penalty phase, Manson shaved his head and trimmed his beard to a fork; he told the press, “I am the Devil, and the Devil always has a bald head.” In what the prosecution regarded as belated recognition on their part that imitation of Manson only proved his domination, the female defendants refrained from shaving their heads until the jurors retired to weigh the state’s request for the death penalty.

The effort to exonerate Manson via the “copycat” scenario failed; on March 29, 1971, the jury returned verdicts of death against all four defendants on all counts. On April 19, 1971, Judge Older sentenced the four to death.

On the day the verdicts recommending the death penalty were returned, news came that the badly-decomposed body of Ronald Hughes had been found wedged between two boulders in Ventura County. It was rumored, although never proven, that Hughes was murdered by the Family, possibly because he had stood up to Manson and refused to allow Leslie Van Houten to take the stand and absolve Manson of the crimes. A Family member allegedly said Hughes was “the first of the retaliation murders.”

Aftermath
Protracted proceedings to extradite Tex Watson from his native Texas, where he had resettled a month before his arrest, resulted in his being tried separately. The trial commenced in August 1971; by October, he, too, had been found guilty on seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy. He, too, was sentenced to death.

In February 1972, the death sentences of all five parties were automatically reduced to life in prison by California v. Anderson 64 Cal.2d 633, 414 P.2d 366, (Cal. 1972), in which the Supreme Court of California abolished the death penalty in that state.

In a 1971 trial that took place after his Tate-LaBianca convictions, Manson was found guilty of the murders of Gary Hinman and Donald “Shorty” Shea and was given a life sentence. Shea, a Spahn Ranch stuntman and horse wrangler, had been killed approximately ten days after the August 16, 1969, sheriff’s raid on the ranch. Manson, who suspected that Shea helped set up the raid, had apparently believed Shea was trying to get George Spahn to run the Family off the ranch. Manson was annoyed, too, that the white Shea had married a black woman; and it’s possible Shea knew about the Tate-LaBianca killings. In separate trials, Family members Bruce Davis and Steve “Clem” Grogan were also found guilty of Shea’s murder.

Before the conclusion of Manson’s Tate-LaBianca trial, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times tracked down Manson’s mother, remarried and living in the Pacific Northwest. The former Kathleen Maddox claimed that, in childhood, her son had known no neglect; he had even been “pampered by all the women who surrounded him.”

On September 5, 1975, Squeaky Fromme attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, to which she and Manson follower Sandra Good had moved to be near Manson while he was incarcerated at Folsom State Prison. A subsequent search of the apartment shared by Fromme, Good, and a Family recruit turned up evidence that, coupled with later actions on the part of Good, resulted in Good’s conviction for conspiring to send threatening communications through the United States mail and transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce. (The threats that were involved were against corporate executives and US government officials and had to do with supposed environmental dereliction on their part.)

1977 marked the resolution of a longstanding Family mystery — the precise location of the remains of Shorty Shea and whether, as had been claimed, Shea had been dismembered and buried in several places. Contacting the prosecutor in his case, Steve Grogan told him that Shea’s corpse had been buried in one piece; he drew a map that pinpointed the location of the body, which was recovered. Of those convicted of Manson-ordered murders, Grogan would become, in 1985, the first to be paroled — and, as of 2007, the only one.

In the 1980s, Manson gave three notable interviews. The first, recorded at California Medical Facility and aired June 13, 1981, was by Tom Snyder for NBC’s The Tomorrow Show. The second, recorded at San Quentin Prison and aired March 7, 1986, was by Charlie Rose for CBS News Nightwatch; it won the national news Emmy Award for “Best Interview” in 1987. The last, with Geraldo Rivera in 1988, was part of that journalist’s prime-time special on Satanism.

On September 25, 1984, while imprisoned at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, Manson was severely burned by a fellow inmate who poured paint thinner on him and set him alight. The other prisoner, Jan Holmstrom, explained that Manson had objected to his Hare Krishna chants and had verbally threatened him. Despite suffering second- and third-degree burns over 20 percent of his body, Manson recovered from his injuries.

In December 1987, Fromme, serving a life sentence for the assassination attempt, escaped briefly from Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. She was trying to reach Manson, whom she had heard had cancer; she was apprehended within days.

In a 1994 conversation with Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Catherine Share, a one-time Manson-follower, stated that her testimony in the penalty phase of Manson’s trial had been a fabrication intended to save Manson from the gas chamber and had been given on Manson’s explicit direction.[118] Share’s testimony had introduced the copycat-motive story, which the testimony of the three female defendants echoed and according to which the Tate-LaBianca murders had been the idea of Linda Kasabian. In a 1997 segment of the tabloid television program Hard Copy, Share implied that her testimony had been given under a Manson threat of physical harm. In August 1971, after Manson’s trial and sentencing, Share had participated in a violent California retail-store robbery, the object of which was the acquisition of weapons to help free Manson.

In January 1996, a Manson web site was established by latter-day Manson follower George Stimson, who was helped by Sandra Good. Good had been released from prison in 1985, after serving ten years of her fifteen-year sentence for the death threats.

In a 1998-9 interview in Seconds magazine, Bobby Beausoleil rejected the view that Manson ordered him to kill Gary Hinman. He stated Manson did come to Hinman’s house and slash Hinman with a sword. In a 1981 interview with Oui magazine, he denied this. Beausoleil stated that when he read about the Tate murders in the newspaper, “I wasn’t even sure at that point — really, I had no idea who had done it until Manson’s group were actually arrested for it. It had only crossed my mind and I had a premonition, perhaps. There was some little tickle in my mind that the killings might be connected with them….” In the Oui magazine interview, he had stated, “When [the Tate-LaBianca murders] happened, I knew who had done it. I was fairly certain.”

William Garretson, once the young caretaker at Cielo Drive, indicated in a program broadcast in July 1999 on E!, that he had, in fact, seen and heard a portion of the Tate murders from his location in the property’s guest house. This comported with the unofficial results of the polygraph examination that had been given to Garretson on August 10, 1969, and that had effectively eliminated him as a suspect. The LAPD officer who conducted the examination had concluded Garretson was “clean” on participation in the crimes but “muddy” as to his having heard anything. Garretson did not explain why he had withheld his knowledge of the events.

On September 5, 2007, MSNBC aired The Mind of Manson, a complete version of a 1987 interview at California’s San Quentin State Prison. The footage of the “unshackled, unapologetic, and unruly” Manson had been considered “so unbelievable” that only seven minutes of it had originally been broadcast on The Today Show, for which it had been recorded.

In a January 2008 segment of the Discovery Channel’s Most Evil, Barbara Hoyt said that the impression that she had accompanied Ruth Ann Moorehouse to Hawaii just to avoid testifying at the trial of Manson and the women was erroneous. Hoyt said she had cooperated with the Family because she was “trying to keep them from killing my family.” She stated that, at the time of the trial, she was “constantly being threatened: ‘Your family’s gonna die. [The murders] could be repeated at your house.’”

On March 15, 2008, Associated Press reported that forensic investigators had conducted a search for human remains at Barker Ranch the previous month. Following up on longstanding rumors that the Family had killed hitchhikers and runaways who had come into its orbit during its time at Barker, the investigators identified “two likely clandestine grave sites… and one additional site that merits further investigation.” Though they recommended digging, CNN reported on March 28 that the Inyo County Sheriff, who questioned the methods they employed with search dogs, had ordered additional tests before any excavation. Results were to be released to the public, probably in late April.

Technorati Tags: Charles Manson, Not Marilyn Mason, Psycho Rock, The End is Near

Okay, it’s really a cloud, but given our tendency to take abstract patterns and glom them into something relatively familiar – we get the Starship Enterprise. It’s nice to know that while we fumble about with space flight and much, much slower than light travel that the boys and girls from Starfleet are keeping Mars safe. (Click the picture for a larger version)

While I’ve never been a huge Star Trek fan myself, the show did do a lot for me in a round about way by getting lots of other folks thinking about spaceflight, science fiction and what have you. It certainly helped birth several generations of scientists, authors and creative media types. I think it’s only right to pay some respect to the old ship and somehow fitting that the MGS should have come up with this photo.

The photo was captured by Mars Global Surveyor on March 27, 2001 as it was performing a slewing maneuver (an “off-nadir spacecraft reorientation”). The camera captured both the surface of Mars (bottom part of the image) and black space at the top of the image; features appear distorted because of the motion of the spacecraft. During the maneuver Mars Global Surveyor happened to catch some high clouds silhouetted against space. Humans have a propensity to see faces and other meaningful shapes in randomly occuring natural patterns, a phenomenon known as pareidolia.

Thanks to the Planetary Society.

Technorati Tags: star trek, enterprise, mars, surveyor, klingons, spaceflight, boldly going

Technorati Tags: hedgehog, chewing, carrot, funny, animals

Go to Google Maps.

Enter these coordinates:

48.825183,2.1985795

Click “Satellite” so you can see the terrain.

Zoom all the way in.

Now explain the reasoning behind this to me.

He’s been taught by private tutors since the second grade because he would constantly correct his teachers.  What to do with a once-martian boy who vividly remembers piloting his own spacecraft to visit Earth and hang out with Lemurians?

Sure, some kids have overactive imaginations (sharpens Occams’ razor) but what if you’re a literal boy genius with a vivid imagination?  You can skip on over to Pravda for the story, or read it here after the jump (into hyperspace).

A boy named Boris Kipriyanovich, or Boriska, lives in the town of Zhirinovsk of Russia’s Volgograd region. He was born on January 11, 1996. Since he was four he used to visit a well-known anomalous zone, commonly referred to as Medvedetskaya Gryada – a mountain near the town. It seems that the boy needed to visit the zone regularly to fulfill his needs in energy.

Boriska’s parents, nice, educated and hospitable people, are worried about their son’s fascinating talents. They do not know how others will perceive Boriska when he grows up. The say that they would be happy to consult an expert to know how to raise their wunderkind.

Being a doctor, his mother could not help but notice that the baby boy could hold his head already in 15 days after his birth. He uttered the first word ‘baba’ when he was four months old and started to pronounce simple words soon afterwards. At one year and a half he had no difficulties in reading newspaper headlines. At age of two years he started drawing and leaned how to paint six months later. When he turned two, he started going to a local kindergarten. Tutors immediately noticed the unusual boy, his uncommon quickwittedness, language skills and unique memory.

However, his parents witnessed that Boriska acquired knowledge not only from the outer world, but through mysterious channels as well. They saw him reading unknown information from somewhere.

“No one has ever taught him,” Boriska’s mother said. “Sometimes he would sit in a lotus position and start telling us detailed facts about Mars, planetary systems and other civilizations, which really puzzled us,” the woman said.

How may a little boy know such things? Space became the permanent theme of his stories when the boy turned two years old. Once he said that he used to live on Mars himself. He says that the planet is inhabited now too, although it lost its atmosphere after a mammoth catastrophe. The Martians live in underground cities, Boriska says.

The boy also says that, he used to fly to Earth for research purposes when he was a Martian. Moreover, he piloted a spaceship himself. It took place in the time of the Lemurian civilization. He speaks about the fall of Lemuria as if it occurred yesterday. He says that Lemurians died because they ceased to develop themselves spiritually and broke the unity of their planet.

When his mother brought him a book entitled “Whom We Are Originated From” by Ernest Muldashev, he got very excited about it. He spent a long time looking through the sketches of Lemurians, pictures of Tibetan pagodas, and then he told his parents of Lemurians and their culture for several hours non-stop. As he was talking, his mother noticed that Lemurians lived 70,000 years ago and they were nine meters tall… “How can you remember all this?” the woman asked her son. “Yes, I remember and nobody has told me that, I saw it,” Boriska replied.

In Muldashev’s second book “In Search of the City of Gods” he looked through pictures for a long time and recollected a lot about pyramids and shrines. Then he claimed that people would not find ancient knowledge under the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The knowledge will be found under another pyramid, which has not been discovered yet. “The human life will change when the Sphinx is opened, it has an opening mechanism somewhere behind the ear, I do not remember exactly,” he said.

Boriska is one of so-called indigo children. They start to appear on Earth as a token of the forthcoming grand transformation of the planet.

The boy says that the displacement of Earth’s poles will cause two catastrophes: in 2009 and 2013. Only a few people will survive, he said.

“No, I have no fear of death, for we live eternally. There was a catastrophe on Mars where I lived. People like us still live there. There was a nuclear war between them. Everything burnt down. Only some of them survived. They built shelters and created new weapons. All materials changed. Martians mostly breathe carbon dioxide. If they flew to our planet now, they would have to spend all the time standing next to pipes and breathing in fumes,” Boriska said.

“If you are from Mars, do you need carbon dioxide?”

“If I am in this body, I breathe oxygen. But you know, it causes aging.”

Specialists asked the boy why man-made spacecraft often crash as they approach Mars. “Martians transmit special signals to destroy stations containing harmful radiation,” Boriska replied.

The boy has deep knowledge of space and its dimensions. He is also aware of the structure of interplanetary UFOs. He talks about that like an expert, draws UFOs on slates and explains the way they work. Here is one of his stories: “It has six layers. The upper layer of solid metal accounts for 25 percent, the second layer of rubber – 30 percent, the third layer of metal – 30 percent, and the last layer with magnetic properties – 4 percent. If we give energy to the magnetic layer, spaceships will be able to fly across the Universe.”

Boriska has a lot of difficulties with school. After an interview he was taken to the second grade, but soon they tried to get rid of him. He constantly interrupts teachers and says that they are wrong… now the boy has classes with a private tutor.

Translated by Julia Bulygina
Pravda.ru

Technorati Tags: ufo, mars, sphinx, boy genius, strange, imagination, aliens

Anyway, here’s the vid.

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It probably didn’t hurt that she resided in Portsmouth, the home of the Royal Navy. I mean, what’s more likely, that she heard about it from a Navy bloke, or that she conjured up the spiritual remains of some poor sailor?

Is this a case of the state using whatever law is applicable to punish someone for revealing war secrets or just aimless persecution of a practitioner of the dark arts or the not so dark arts.  Or the downright new age arts.  Anyhow, a group of self stylized mediums and perhaps a few larges and smalls have banded together to demand that the British Government offer a pardon to all those convicted of witchcraft since 1735.  Thanks to the BBC for the full story.

It is thought some 4,000 people, mainly women, were prosecuted and often put to death for witchcraft.

The last Witchcraft Act conviction was in 1944 when Scottish medium Helen Duncan was imprisoned for allegedly disclosing World War II secrets.

She told a seance a warship had sunk before the news had been released.

The witchcraft petition came from a group of self-styled “mediums” called Full Moon Investigators.

Seance ‘visitation’

The group said many of today’s occupations such as herbalism, alternative therapies and midwifery had their roots in the same traditions as the women burnt to death in previous centuries as “witches”.

They want the state to apologise and grant those convicted a pardon.

This includes Mrs Duncan, who was born in Callander, Perthshire, who they said in particular deserves a pardon.

She was convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and spent nine months in Holloway prison in London.

It was claimed that she endangered the war effort by using her powers as a spiritualist or medium to reveal the fact, kept secret, that the ship the HMS Barham had been sunk.

When HMS Barham was sunk by a German U-boat in November 1941, Mrs Duncan lived in Portsmouth, the home of the Royal Navy.

During a seance, it was claimed that the spirit of a sailor from the stricken ship appeared.

The vessel was only officially declared lost several months later.

Technorati Tags: newt, witch, witchcraft, 1735, pardons, government, odd, medium, ghosts, wwii

Technorati Tags: lost, loster, jack, sparrow, video, parody

We all know about Abell 1835 IR1916 (not pictured above). That galaxy that just happens to be the furthest and thus oldest galaxy ever seen by Hubble. It’s just about 13.25 million light years away – far even compared to driving through Texas, and this galaxy’s been around for about 97% of the time the Universe has existed.

What makes this galaxy so special is that it was built to order or at least modified to order. That’s what the India Daily would have us believe, anyway.

The galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916 is located about 13,230 million light-years away. Hence, it is seen at a time when the Universe was merely 470 million years young, that is, barely 3 percent of its current age.

Scientists are finding extraterrestrial influence in this galaxy. It seems the galaxy was engineered and fit into place by artificial forces. This is the furthest galaxy ever discovered. Therefore it is also the earliest galaxy that we can view through gravitational lenses.

Some 13.7 billion years ago, after the big bang, the Universe plunged into darkness. Neither stars nor quasars had yet been formed which could illuminate the vast space. The Universe was a cold and opaque place. Some thing went wrong, according to some scientists. Intervention was needed by the Type IV civilization that created the big bang in their massive inter-universe particle colliders. The big bang created a black hole in the hyperspace – our universe with three spatial dimensions and a forward moving single time dimension. According to scientists this was the start of ‘dark ages’ that was eventually corrected through the intervention of the Type IV civilization.

The galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916 is part of the “Cosmic Renaissance” that was artificially engineered by the Type IV civilization.

Technorati Tags: et, lgm, pan galactic gargleblaster, space, science, ish, technology, aliens, hubble, galaxy

This is the Giant Snakehead – a fish with a nasty gleam in it’s cold fishy eyes and the intent to leap at your throat. Sure, it looks mean, not like those friendly tuna or dolphins you find in cans at the grocery store but really, what’s there to worry about? Well for starters, LOOK AT THE TEETH! As if a Clint Eastwood glint wasn’t enough in a fish, these teeth belong to a dinosaur, not a fish. But wait, it gets better. These things can stroll out of the water and mosey around for up to four days. AND THEY EAT PEOPLE! Or at least, someone said they eat people and I read it on the internet so it must be true.

It gets worse though. These fish are normally found in and around Asia. Recently a specimen was caught in Leeds England though. LEEDS! Do you know what this means, to catch an air breathing, walking, man eating fish several thousand miles away from it’s normal habitat? No? Well lets go to the map:

I’ve added in a few custom graphics here to make this a bit clearer. See that bloody red circle in the lower right? That’s where old Clint normally spawns, lives, eats it’s share of humans and dies. Now look at the red speckled trail of blood leading across several countries, through France, across the channel and to England (highlighted by a red circle I turned into a sun in a fit of creative energy)! The red dots symbolize outbreaks of fear and paranoia, or possibly nice restaurants . It must have been a bloodbath! Why hasn’t CNN or FOX picked up on this trail of fishy carnage?

The Sun ran a report yesterday of this find with the catchy headline Psycho predator is Sid Fishious. Apparently there was widespread panic among anglers and conservationists. An unnamed agency known only as the Environment Agency was quoted as saying “Oh s***”. They’ve been practicing pronouncing several asterisks lined up for years now and finally got a chance to use it.

Andy, the dude who caught the fish, went on record as saying ” It had a gob full of razor-sharp teeth. To be honest it looked terrifying.” Off record he probably said something like “I plan on frying it up with some butter and mushy peas.”

These fish can grow up to 3 feet long, weigh in at as much as 44lbs., enjoy swimming in warm water, moonlit strolls on the beach and devouring babies stolen from their cribs in the dead of night. England – beware!

Technorati Tags: snakehead, vicious, viscous, animals, invasive, eat your face and steal your baby, jaws, science

In a stunning announcement made on Pravda and accepted by the international scientific community like a fart in church – some folks over in Russia have declared that they’ve made contact with the other side. Apparently voices were heard on the radio giving information about two plane crashes.

From Pravda.ru – Sesnational news from the spirit-world came just the day 2 planes crashed in Russia. While Federal Security Service staff was clearing away the wreckage in the places of the accident in Rostov and Tula regions, the scientists of Saint Petersburg already knew that was an act of terrorism. They got interested strange sounds heard in the ultra short waves that are free from radio signal. When the scientists scrolled down the record, they were astounded. It said: That was a terrorist”.

That was a sensation. The words were replayed on “Saint Petersburg Radio” air. Non-believers finally realized that the other world really exists.

A University of Radio technique professor Artem Mikheev got interested in this question. He found “Russian Instrumental Transcommunication” – an organization aimed to cooperate with the nether world.

Such attempts were undertaken from ancient times. Shamans and oracles got in trance to hear voices from other planets. Then came spiritists with the attempts to read notes from the other world my means of rolling a saucer. They both found out that sometimes spirits could reveal secret information about people and places and even anticipate events.

Vyachelsav Mesherakov, an expert on the history of spiritualism, claims that some magicians even managed to revive people’s dead relatives for a short time. These ghosts behaved like zombie, although looked like themselves while alive. Spiritualism’s opponents, however, claimed pictures of these zombies fake.

From the invention of radio on free from broadcasting range strange voices started to appear in the background. In 1949 Marcelo Becky, Italian, started to record them, and it turned out that these voices can be answered.

Inspired by the experience of foreign scientists, Artem Mikheev started his own experiments in 2002. Ghosts’ answers came to Artem even when the microphones were off.

Mr. Mikheev says that on the day of the planes crash he was establishing connection with the other world. They didn’t know what the cause of the tragedy was, so they turned to the strange voices for an answer. The answer was a quick messy record. Artem slowed the speed down 2,5 times, and heard somebody saying: “That was a terrorist”. Several days later this information was officially confirmed.

Artem Mikheev is convinced that life after death exists. During one of the spiritual operations Artem asked if people and animals have the same size after death, the voice said, “You resemble waves”.

(Picture courtesy of a CC licensed flickr image.)

Technorati Tags: afterlife, ghosts, russia, radio, spooky stuff

The partially destroyed watermark claims this originated at mooningduck.com so that’s where the credit will go.

Enjoy!

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Thanks also to willitblend.com – possibly one of the best marketing schemes ever.

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Yes, you too can look like you’re slowly working your way to being a pirate wannabe with this 6×18 optical zoom attachement for your iPhone. Because the iPhone is all things, including your new camera. As an added bonus, you can slip it into your pocket and appear like a dirty creep to any woman or child within a thirty foot radius!

Who wouldn’t want to spend $14.77 for this add on?

Technorati Tags: whackjob, iphone, accessories, zoooooooooom, yes that’s a lens in my pocket

Technorati Tags: ufo, video, geese, honk honk

I found a very brief article in the Daily Mail (UK) with these photos and little else. (Click the photos to enlarge). Actually, it’s one photo snapped by one of the Mars rovers and two magnifications.

Well I’m not so sure it’s time to load up the troops and hit the ground on the red planet, this picture when blown up a bit is interesting to look at.

Now that we get a bit closer, it’s easy to see where the mind can put a human-like figure into this image. Is it an ambulatory alien cruising about the surface of the red planet? I think it’s doubtful. I do think it’s very interesting however how the mind interprets images like this. Similar to seeing faces in stucco walls, or clouds shaped like rabbits, it’s easy for us to jump to the conclusion that the Yeti has jumped planets for a more reclusive location.

Is it a rock? Some shadows? The model for the face on Mars? What do you think?

Technorati Tags: mars, space, science, rovers, life on mars, aliens, et, shadows and rocks, the truth is out there