Helter Skelter (Manson)
Helter Skelter (Engl.) Is called in German as much as helter-skelter and is associated with the murders of the family Manson especially in the United States to a winged word become.
origin
Charles Manson himself used it to describe his apocalyptic visions of the imminent beginning of a racial war prophesied for 1969 , a chaotic final battle at the end of times, during which the blacks and the "pigs" (the rich) were to be wiped out. Manson took the term from the song of the same name by the band The Beatles , which he believed to be the four angels of the Apocalypse . In the British English of the Beatles, "Helter Skelter" actually refers to a very long and high spiral slide that was found in amusement parks at that time, but this meaning was probably not known to the American Manson. Therefore, the singer and front man of the rock band U2 , Bono , said in their live version of Helter Skelter that Charles Manson stole the song from the Beatles; U2 would now steal it back (album Rattle and Hum , 1988).
Manson believed that he was ready for battle and had his "family members" murdered members of Hollywood high society, including Roman Polanski's wife , actress Sharon Tate , star hairdresser Jay Sebring and the entrepreneurial couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca . He then tried to hold the blacks responsible for the murders in order to persuade the whites to lynch again. Manson wanted to trigger a violent and bloody confrontation that should have escalated to a race war of apocalyptic proportions. At one of the places where the murders took place, the words Healter Skelter, mistakenly misspelled in blood, were found on the refrigerator.
Charles Manson was arrested and sentenced to death shortly after the murders. When California abolished the death penalty in 1972, its sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was held in California State Prison Corcoran in Corcoran , California until his death on November 19, 2017 .
The 1976 TV movie Helter Skelter - Night of the Long Knives describes the crimes of Charles Manson and his followers based on the novel of the same name, followed in 2004 by the two- parter Helter Skelter .
literature
- Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry Helter Skelter - Charles Manson's Mordrausch , Riva Verlag, Munich 2010 ISBN 978-3-86883-057-6 .