Jeff Melnick
speaker
118 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jeff Melnick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The line that always gets quoted is that Charlie tells one of the women of the family to do something witchy. And so there's clearly this aspect to the first night of crime, especially, that's about leaving evidence that will freak out observers, that will just undo people.
Yeah. So, you know, the members of the family come in, you know, and folks love to quote, you know, the the lines that particularly Tex Watson said, which is always I'm always a little suspicious of because the only person people who could have reported that are members of the family themselves because everyone else dies.
And so this is clearly part of a mythology they want to promote that, you know. they walk in, you know, Sharon Tate says, what, who are you? What are you doing here? And, you know, Texas, I'm the devil. I'm here to do the devil's work, you know? And it's like, it's like, you didn't need to wait for Quentin Tarantino all those years later.
It was like already a film script, you know, how much Charlie scripted it. We don't know, but like, there's clearly this effort to make a performance and it's this horrifying, tragic, terrible performance. Like they kill this ready to deliver a baby woman. And then her, Her compatriots, the young guy lived back in the carriage house, had a friend who was coming to visit. They kill in the driveway.
You also hang them from the ceiling. I mean, it's really bizarre. No, it's hard. I mean, this is horror movie stuff. One of the things I thought about a lot when I was doing the research is how much the murders actually... influenced actual horror movies of the 1970s. Yeah. You know, home invasion movies and cutting out babies.
You know, I mean, you know, it's just they're writing a script and it's a horrifying script and they do this terrible thing. They kill all these people and head back to the ranch.
I mean, the race war, it's wild that Bugliosi sold, you know, this idea of, you know, that this marginal hippie cult was going to start a race war because two things. First of all, the United States is actively at war in Vietnam, you know, war against Asian people. Like you can call that a race war.
And a few years earlier in LA, there had been a major riot or rebellion, as some people want to call it in Watts, when police officers killed a black motorist who had not done anything wrong. And there's a dispute, right? So like, if you want to talk about racial violence in the United States, in LA, committed by the United States or in LA, there's plenty of race war going on.
It's not Charlie Manson doing it. Sure. Right. Or even if it was, he's not going to affect that kind of change. That's it. That's even better. Like he, maybe he had that motivation. He's not gonna be able to do anything about it. Sure.
It's this very arcane reality that existed in Southern California at the time is that there's the LAPD, but then there's the county sheriff. And they're doing kind of parallel investigations but not talking to each other. And at some point, somebody kind of realizes that they're looking at the same guy. And they realize that he's also connected to the Tate-LaBianca murders.
There's a wallet that got left in a gas station toilet. The details are all really arcane. And somebody finally rides in and puts it together. And so by December— They have this idea that Charlie's the one who's responsible for the whole deal.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question, you know, and, and it, it kind of bedevils the prosecution. Cause it's like, what do you even charge him with? You know, like remote control murder is not like a crime. So it's like conspiracy stuff that he, you know, he ultimately gets jacked up on. And, and it's, I mean, it's a great question. He's not a murderer. I mean, it's,
I mean, Charlie, there's like there's plenty of evidence that he was physically abusive to women in the family, but he's not he's not a shoot him up. You know, there's an earlier murder of Gary Hinman a few weeks before the tape murders that we jumped over. Who's this grad student drug dealer who the family was involved with? And like Charlie showed up at that house and seemed to have.
done some of the actual violence. But Charlie's a director. I mean, Charlie's a, you know, he's not a get his hands messy kind of guy, right? He's a, you know, write the script and tell people what their roles are in the script. And that's very much what happened. He's a manipulator. He's a manipulator, yeah.
Big guy.
And this one is even harder to get a beat on because it's not it doesn't fit exactly, you know, in the narrative, you know, of Charlie's resentment about the music business or, you know, about kind of street culture versus free culture. Like they end up at the house.
Of Rosemary and Lino LaBianca, who are just these middle class, you know, I mean, they're pretty well off, but it's still to my mind. And if you if you've got a different take, I'd love to hear it. Like, it's still not exactly clear how they ended up there randomly, as far as I know. Right. It seems pretty randomly. Maybe they thought somebody else lived there.
There's all kinds of conflicting testimony about this, but, but be that as it may, they end up, you know, in this home in a much different kind of neighborhood, also a nice, nice neighborhood, but not that kind of hill fancy. These are like solidly up the middle.
I love the way you set that up because it's like, these are marginal people. Yeah. These are not like, I mean, we're so used to like heist movies and like George Clooney in a nice suit. We have all these kind of mythologized image of the bad guys, you know, whether it's outlaws from old Western movies or, you know, gangsters from our more recent stuff.
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