The murders committed by the "Clan Manson" that terrorized the USA

August 1969 not only spawned Woodstock, the highlight of the "peace and love" hippie. That month also saw a series of monstrous murders in a house in California, which showed another counterculture: the satanic counterculture of the clan of Charles Manson.

It is difficult to think of murders that traumatized the United States more than those that took place in the luxurious home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski, who was absent on the night of the events.

All the elements of the most absolute horror were found by the Los Angeles police when he arrived at the place where five friends had just been massacred: blood everywhere, a mock hanging, a modus operandi that seemed to correspond to a diabolical ritual, the absence of obvious mobile ...

To the apparent brutality of the assassins was added the symbolism of beauty and innocence sacrificed, embodied in 26-year-old Sharon Tate and eight and a half months pregnant when she received 16 stab wounds.

"In my whole life I never saw anything like it," says Sergeant Stanley Klorman, quoted in an AFP dispatch on August 9, 1969.

In another dispatch, the agency reported that the two murdered women were wearing "little clothes," Sharon Tate wearing a "tiny nightgown," and the three male victims were wearing "clothes similar to those worn by hippies."

Around her neck, Sharon Tate had a white nylon rope attached to a beam and at the other end was tied to the neck of Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairdresser who accompanied the blonde star. They shot and stabbed him to death and disfigured his face. His head was covered with a hood.

• "PIG" -

Other sordid details later emerged from 10050 Cielo Drive, the address of Tate and Polanski's residence in the Bel Air neighborhood, originally built by French star Michèle Morgan.

The word "PIG" - "PIG" - was written with blood on the door. A word that was also written, this time in the plural but always with blood, in a house in another district of Los Angeles where a couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, was savagely murdered the following night.

The investigation and the lengthy trial in 1970 allowed us to reconstruct the facts, which have disturbed much of public opinion for almost half a century.

Charles Manson, who died at 83 on Sunday at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield, California, while serving his sentence, was the instigator of these two nights of atrocities committed by his followers, over which exerted an almost hypnotic control.

From his ranch in the Valley of Death, the psychopath and guru announced a race to the apocalypse he called "Helter Skelter", from the name of a song by the Beatles.

• The end of an idealism -

The goal of this bloody event was to set off a war that would lead Manson to exercise power over blacks, a race he considered inferior.

For many Americans, their terrible crimes revealed the dark side of a culture of depraved "sex, drugs and rock", that of group sex, the demand for laxity and attacks on all established rules.

As for Charles Manson, whose magnetic gaze was amplified by his abundant beard and hair, he has generated fascination as well as rejection.

"The family", as the sect created by him was called, has inspired rock songs, multiple tribute websites, an opera, t-shirts and even the stage name of the leader of the metal band Marilyn Manson.

But for the prosecutor of his trial, Vincent Bugliosi, Manson was a simple "evil and complicated swindler".

In any case, the murders fomented by the "guru" contributed to the end of a naive idealism that marked the 1960s. As a testimony, the sales of individual weapons experienced an outbreak in California after those barbarous acts.