Okay, let's get this over with: Bobby Beausoleil was hot.
I mean, 1998 Leonardo DiCaprio, is that you? jfc. Even his name seems too perfect to be true. "Beausoleil" means "beautiful sun" in French.
Beasoleil would always claim he was never really a full on member of The Family, more of an associate, but he was still willing to commit murder for Charlie Manson, which makes you a Family member, if you ask me.
Like Charlie, he had ideas of being a rock star, and wasn't un-talented. He was just too much of a flake to actually commit to something long-term. His first band was a psychedelic instrumental outfit called The Orkustra.
He ditched them to start hanging out with experimental film maker Kenneth Anger, who was immediately infatuated with him and cast him to star in his short film, "Lucifer Rising."
At this point, Anger was a highly respected elder statesman of the American counter-culture. Already a beloved maker of homoerotic and surreal short films that would heavily influence the likes of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and John Waters. While his films made him famous among film weirdos, his scandalous exposé, Hollywood Babylon, brought him mainstream fame.
(on an aside: Hollywood Bablyon is legit one of my top ten all time favorite books. Not because any of it is true. Srsly like 99% of it is untrue, but that's not the point. It's a collection of the Hollywood gossip he heard growing up. The point isn't factual truth, it's the emotional truth of what people were saying. IT'S ART, OKAY?!)
The point of all this being, Anger easily could have gotten Beausoleil the kind of recognition as a counter-cultural artist that he claimed he wanted. Not the mainstream universal adoration that Charlie seemed to want, but to be liked and respected by the cool kids.
In 1967, after filming some of Lucifer Rising, Anger and Beausoleil had some sort of messy falling out, which resulted in Beausoleil being kicked out of Anger's home and the role of Lucifer having to be re-cast.
Bobby was never one to give up on freeloading, however, and moved in with a friend of his, music teacher and part-time drug dealer, Gary Hinman.
Accounts of what Hinman was like as a person are hard to come by, but the one thing that I've found consistently is that he was a very nice guy, perhaps a little too nice. He let members of The Family stay at his place for a while, but never joined The Family because he was a committed Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist and was more interested in completing his PhD in sociology program. Honestly, he sounds like an incredibly lovely person who had a lot to offer the world.
It was also some time in 1968 that Beausoleil, along with future girlfriend and Family member Catherine "Gypsy" Share, would star in the soft-core nudie flick, The Ramrodder, which was filmed at Spahn Ranch. Beausoleil often gets credited as playing "the toothless bandit" but he actually plays an Indian brave with abs.
idk. The whole point of the movie is tiddies, big, jiggly tiddies. It's a fairly standard 1960s soft core, but the Manson connection makes it notable.
After the shooting of Bernard "Lotsapoppa" Crowe, Charlie Manson was convinced that the Black Panthers were out to get him, so he asked the biker group the Straight Satans to stay on the ranch for protection.
The YouTube channel More To The Story With H. Allegra Lansing has a pretty awesome interview series with a former Straight Satan member, which I highly recommend for the Straight Satans in a little context.
Anyway, the relationship between the Satans and the Family was mutually beneficial but deeply distrustful. Charlie saw the Satans as a much-needed source of weapons and protection, whereas the Satans saw him and The Family as a bunch of feckless, smelly hippies who nevertheless could provide them with lots of sex and drugs (and gonorrhea).
*WARNING: The information in this video has not been independently verified.The final installment in our interview series with JD, a former
There are several stories about the motive behind Hinman's murder. One oft-repeated story is that Beausileil acquired some mescaline that Hinman had made and sold it to the Straight Satans, which made them all sick, but the Straight Satan interview strongly repudiates that. The true motive seems to be that Charlie heard a rumor that Hinman had just come into a decent inheritance, and sent Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins to shake him down.
The problem was, the inheritance didn't exist. Nor did the stocks and bonds he was supposed to have, as well. Bobby called Charlie to come sort the situation out. Charlie showed up with some kind of big ass knife and sliced Hinman's face, nearly severing his ear. Thus began a three-day ordeal that would end with Hinman being stabbed to death as he prayed a Buddhist chant. The most they would get out of it was the two pinks slips to Hinman's cars.
Beausoleil wrote on the wall in Hinman's blood "Political Piggy," and made a paw print, a symbol of the Black Panthers. The logic is that if the Panthers were blamed for the murder, it would start Helter Skelter, and also get them off Charlie's back.
On July 31st, Hinman's body was found. One of his cars was missing. On the morning of August 6th, Bobby Beausoleil was asleep in Gary Hinman's fiat on the side of the road outside of San Luis Obispo. A police officer approached him and asked for ID, which he couldn't produce. The officer ran the license plate number back to police HQ, and received word that the car was stolen and connected to a homicide. When the car was searched, the bloody knife that was the murder weapon was found in one of the wheel wells.
At this point, Charlie Manson was in a tailspin. With Beausoleil arrested, he would connect Charlie to the Crowe shooting, which would send him to jail for the rest of his life. Obviously, he had to get Bobby out of prison. So he gathered up Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Linda Kasabian, and told them to do what they needed to do.
Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkle, and Kasabian would all argue that the objective reason for committing the Tate-Labianca murders was to get them connected to the Hinman murder via the messages written in blood, and to have them all blamed on the Black Panthers so that Bobby Beausoleil would be freed from prison. In the meantime, the Black Panthers would start fighting back, and Helter Skelter would finally come down.
I'm going to bring in a little conjecture here. I think at this point, Charlie knew he was fucked. A return to jail was inevitable. He'd tried making a life outside of prison, but he'd only faced rejection and failure. So he was going to get his revenge and make a name for himself doing so. So he knew what he had to do. He knew what he could do. So he gave the order.
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