page_title: Helter Skelter (scenario)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Helter Skelter (scenario) / Background
caption_attribution_description: Cover of The Beatles' eponymous album, also known as The White Album.
context_page_description: The Helter Skelter scenario is a theory put forth by Vincent Bugliosi, lead prosecutor in the Tate–LaBianca murder trial, to explain the series of murders committed by the Manson Family. Bugliosi described his theory at trial and in his book Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. According only to Bugliosi’s theory, Charles Manson often spoke to the members of his "family" about "Helter Skelter" in the months leading up to the murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in August 1969, an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and whites. This "chimerical vision involved reference to music of the Beatles, particularly songs from their 1968 double album The Beatles, and to the New Testament's Book of Revelation. Manson and his followers were convicted of the murders based on the prosecution's theory that they were part of a plan to trigger the Helter Skelter scenario.
context_section_description: Charles Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter. His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968 at Myers Ranch near California's Death Valley. The scenario had Manson as the war's ultimate beneficiary and its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of the Beatles. This would not merely foretell the conflict but would trigger it by instructing "the young love", meaning white American youth, to join the Family, and it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.
  Black men would thus be deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. Frightened whites would retaliate with a murderous rampage, and militant blacks would exploit it to provoke a war of near-extermination between racist whites and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks. Then the militant blacks would arise to finish off the few whites who survived; in fact, they would kill off all non-blacks.
  In this holocaust, the members of the enlarged Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city that was underneath Death Valley which they would reach through a hole in the ground. They would be the only remaining whites upon the race war's conclusion, and they would emerge from underground to rule the blacks who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the world. At that point, Manson "would scratch [the black man's] fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton and go be a good nigger".
  The term "Helter Skelter" was from the Beatles song of the same name, which referred to the British amusement park ride "Helter Skelter", but Manson interpreted it as concerned with the war. The song was on the Beatles' White Album which Manson heard within a month or so of its November 1968 release. Former Manson follower Catherine Share claimed:
  When the Beatles' White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn't that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song 'Helter Skelter'—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.
caption: Manson listened to the Beatles' White Album, which includes a track "Helter Skelter"
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