Helter Skelter!

August 9, 1969 was a normal day in Beverly Hills until it turned into the most famous murder in our history. It occurred at Sharon Tate's house in the thought to be well-secluded hills in California. She was entertaining her friends, Abigail Folger, her boyfriend Voytek Frykowski, Steve Parent, and Jay Sebring, on the night when Charles Manson and the “Manson Family” came to visit.

Winifred Chapman, Sharon Tate’s maid, came to work the next morning around 8 a.m. and found the massacre. Sharon, who was nine months pregnant, attained 16 stab wounds. The first 5 stabs were to her chest and back, which is what killed her. The other 11 wounds just added insult to injury. Her baby died with her. Around her neck was a rope that was attached to the neck of Jay Sebring, who was shot and stabbed 7 times. On the front door was the word “PIG” written in blood. Outside in the lawn, were Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski. Abigail was stabbed a ghastly 28 times, while Frykowski’s head was beat in with 5 big blows. He was also shot and stabbed 51 times! Steve Parent, found in a truck outside in the driveway, was shot 5 times, but not stabbed. He was not supposed to show up that night, so the Manson Family just killed him quickly.

Charles Manson had convinced his followers that he was Jesus Christ and he was going to lead them into a hole in the earth in Death Valley to a new civilization. According to Susan Atkins, who confessed everything, the Manson Family had a big list of celebrities they planned on killing, including Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen and Tom Jones. It was important to select victims that would shock the world, and that’s what they intended to do. She had planned to carve the words "helter skelter" on Elizabeth Taylor's face with a red-hot knife and then gouge her eyes out. Then she would castrate Richard Burton and put his penis along with Elizabeth Taylor's eyes in a bottle and mail it to Eddie Fisher. Sinatra was to be skinned alive, while he listened to his own music. The Family would then make purses out of his skin and sell them in hippie shops. Tom Jones would have his throat slit, but only after being forced to have sex with Susan Atkins.

Why did the Manson Family decide to do this horrendous act? The core of the Manson philosophy was a kind of Armageddon. Charlie preached that the black man was going to rise up and start killing the whites. The black man would win this war, but wouldn't be able to hang onto the power he seized because of innate inferiority, therefore, the Manson Family, would come out from hiding in Death Valley and take over the world. So, how did this big race war philosophy lead them to murder Sharon Tate and her friends? Charles said "The only thing blackie knows is what whitey has told him," he said to one of his followers just before the murders. "I'm going to have to show him how to do it." He wanted the race war to happen now, so he thought this would kick it off.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/manson

Killers: Born or Made?

In today’s society, we are surrounded by violence in the media. Everything from video games to children’s cartoons contains violent images that could be having an effect on our youth. A popular question psychologists and researchers ask is, “Are criminals born, or made?” I believe that social structure shapes human behavior; and this behavior may turn out to be criminal. It is not a reasonable assumption to say that every person who exposes themselves to violent images is going to turn into a killer, but because our youth is impressionable at that age, they are more prone to immolate what they see on television.

Since Darwin’s time, people have been trying to explain why people commit crimes. Researchers believed that DNA and chemical imbalances at birth caused criminal behavior. For example, in the early 1960s, a researcher discovered that men who had a chromosome pattern of “XYY” were much more common in prisons than in the general populations. These men were called “super-males” and were characterized as excessively aggressive, hostile and more prone to unexpected behavior. The most notorious of these hypothetical “super-males” was Richard Speck, the crazy killer of eight nurses in Chicago in 1966. It was believed that Speck possessed an extra “Y” chromosome. Years later, it was discovered that Speck did not have the pattern and the “XYY” theory eventually fell into disrepute almost as fast as it became popular.

Another psychologist, Cesare Lombroso, became convinced that a criminal was an immoral person, a sort of throwback to primitive man who had not developed to the same biological level as the modern, non-criminal man. Lombroso called this inferior being the “born criminal”, a being who was pre-destined for criminal behavior due to his physical configuration. According to Lombroso, the “born criminal” descended from a “degenerate family with frequent cases of insanity, deafness, syphilis, epilepsy and alcoholism among its members.” However, Lombroso’s theories began to unravel when several weaknesses were discovered in his research. Virtually all of Lombroso’s presumptions were based on studies performed only on convicted criminals. He did not use a control group to which he could compare his results. Therefore, his conclusions could not be broadened to include the general population as a whole.

Since most all research saying killers are born has been discredited, the only liable explanation is that killers are created through society and what people are exposed to. Examples of this include the Columbine shooting, whose criminal behavior was linked back to movies and video games the killers watched. The students went on a rampage on April 20, 1999, the 110th anniversary of Adolph Hitler’s birth, in Littleton, Colorado, at the Columbine High School. Wearing long, black trench-coats, the students walked through the hallways shooting at students aimlessly. They shot 38 classmates, killing 13 before they turned the guns on themselves. The event was an almost exact replica of a scene in a popular youth film of the time in which angry students in long, dark coats killed their teachers with shotguns.

Bartol, Crut R. Criminal Behavior. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 1991
Siegel, Larry J. (1998) Criminology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company.