Is everything we know about the Manson-family murders wrong?

‘Helter Skelter’, written by the man who prosecuted the Manson Family for the Tate-LaBianca murders was the biggest-selling true-crime book in history. But 50 years on, it could be that the accepted story of those murders is all wrong. And the key to it all, says Erik Hedegaard, is the extraordinary story of Bobby Beausoleil, who is still in prison for the murder that may have led to all the other Manson murders

In the dusty, heat-blister town of Vacaville, California, halfway between Sacramento and Oakland, sits the bleak, squat prison that holds a trim, handsome, highly articulate inmate named Bobby Beausoleil, almost 72, who has spent the past 50 years behind bars for murdering a musician friend of his, Gary Hinman, either as part of a drug deal gone bad or as a straight-up robbery, all depending on which version of events you believe.

All of it happened under the dark cloud of another of Beausoleil’s friends, Charlie Manson, the pint-size, so-called hippie-death-cult mastermind ex-con Svengali, who was convicted in 1971 of directing the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders, which left seven people dead and a bunch of his followers behind bars for life, and who died in 2017, much to the dismay of very few.

Beausoleil is in the prison’s visiting room now, hands folded together, fans moving the air around a bit. He wears jeans, a plain, pressed, standard-issue shirt, rimless glasses; he smiles easily, laughs easily, has kind eyes, professes to follow a Buddhist philosophy, seems gentle enough.

Indeed, last January, for the first time since he went to jail in 1969, after 18 previous rejections, the parole board recommended that he be released, based on its finding that he did not pose “an unreasonable risk of danger to society”. It also noted that he “has accepted full responsibility for his actions in killing Mr Hinman.”

Even so, the board did have its concerns, especially given that Beausoleil’s version of the events that led to Hinman’s murder — the motivation for it — has wobbled about over the years and, in fact, does not at all square with the official version that, in brief, on July 25, 1969, Manson sent him to Hinman’s to rob the guy of some rumoured $20,000 inheritance. When no money was forthcoming, he then ordered Beausoleil to kill him, although not before Manson himself showed up on the scene and slashed Hinman across the ear and cheek with a sword.

Beausoleil’s version has the whole thing revolving around a soured drug deal, with Manson ordering no one to do anything. In previous hearings, the discrepancies caused the board to deny Beausoleil parole, figuring his story was basically a way for him to distance himself from Manson and the slaughters that followed, but not this time. It let the long-gone past be long gone, and looked only at the future, based on a 2016 psychological assessment stating that Beausoleil was “statistically low-risk to re-offend in the free community”.

It was then left up to the new governor of California, Gavin Newsom, to decide whether or not to follow the board’s recommendation.

Beausoleil was hopeful: “I like Newsom. He’s kind of ballsy. He talks a lot about reforming the criminal justice system. I’m not planning on hanging out too much longer in here. I’ve pretty much already said all my goodbyes.” And he made plans. Before jail, he’d been a musician of considerable promise. In San Francisco, he fronted a band called the Orkustra that, at one point, played alongside the Grateful Dead, and for a moment, he played rhythm guitar in what would become the seminal psychedelic group, Love.

He was a baby-faced kid who was nicknamed Cupid and wore a top hat around town, carrying himself with enough cool-cat swagger that underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger cast him in a movie project, Lucifer Rising. Like everyone else in those days, he was full-on into being a rebel. But then he drifted south from San Francisco in 1968, met Manson playing music at some roadhouse around LA, thought he was talented, spent time where Manson lived with his gang at Spahn Ranch, had a blast roaring Army-surplus wagons through Death Valley, never considered himself a member of the Manson tribe, just liked hanging around them, laughing, getting high, having sex, playing music, being free.

“Man, it was great,” he says. “That’s what people don’t get. At first, it was just fun. Then again, maybe that’s just what Charlie chose to show me, the happy-go-lucky, lighthearted vagabond musician, when he wasn’t being so