I remember being in the 9th grade, sitting the back of Mrs. Howard’s math class at Riverdale Junior High School. I was a teacher’s aide and spent almost as much time doing nothing as doing something. My desk, as it was, sat beside a bookcase that had just one or two books on it (it being a math class, after all) one of which had a black cover with the title in bewitched looking red letters. I did not know at the time those two words had come from a Beatles song: Helter Skelter.
The first time I picked up the book, I went straight for the picture section and noted the photos of bloody words on the wall, the “white out” figures of the bodies, the Manson family in court and the maniacal hippie prophet, Charles Manson. I had no idea who Abigail Folger or Sharon Tate were, just that something out of control had happened. The stark words inside the cover, “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you,” scared it out of me without even reading the book.
Today and Monday mark forty years since the Manson murders. That seems almost unfathomable to me; how could it have been so long ago? Manson will soon be 75 years old; a frail, wrinkled, but still crazed, old man. Some of his followers, the co-perpetrators, remain in jail as well, while some of the “family members” who did not participate in the murders have lived their lives attempting to outwit the shadow of the gruesome killings four decades ago.
A generation of kids were marked, many by fear, but all in memory of a California night that shattered our ideas of safety, family and the future. All these years later, I hurt for the families whose names became infamous by being the victims of an unspeakable tragedy. I’m thankful for the two or three “family members” who have received Christ and exhibited genuine repentance in prison. I’m supremely thankful for a Savior whose sacrificial death is sufficient to cover the sins of even the most heinous of criminals, including those attached to this vile chapter of our nation’s history, so long as they repent and believe the gospel. And for a gospel that, in and of itself, is the power of God unto salvation.
