This is an LA Times Studios podcast.

Welcome to Crimes of the Times. I'm Christopher Gafford. Today on our show, we're shifting to the conversation format, which we expect to be doing now and then.

This is the first of a two-part conversation with Stephen Kay, the former Los Angeles County Deputy District

Attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson and his killer disciples. Kay is one of the last living links

to a case that has generated a shelfload of books and mountains of think pieces. First, some basic

background.

On August 9, 1969,

Charles Manson sent a team of his loyal disciples to the home of the actress Sharon Tate

in the hills above Los Angeles.

The Manson soldiers murdered Tate,

who was 26 years old and eight months pregnant,

and four others at her house on Ciello Drive.

A newspaper headline called it a blood orgy, and much of Hollywood suddenly felt terrifyingly

vulnerable. Adding to the weirdness and a lot of crazed speculation, Sharon Tate's husband,

Roman Polansky, was famous for directing Rosemary's Baby, a horror movie about a satanic cult and a woman pregnant with the devil's baby.

The day after the Sialo Drive killings, the Manson clan broke into a lost felon's home and murdered a couple who had not been famous, Lino Labyanka, who owned a chain of grocery stores, and his wife,

Rosemary. Police found messages scrawled in blood around the house, death to pigs, and helter-skelter.

These are the seven murders most commonly associated with Charles Manson, though there were others,

possibly many others.

Manson was a career criminal with uncommon charisma, a ragged outlaw Messiah with an apocalyptic

outlook who oversaw a small nomadic cult that came to be known as the family, mostly young

women whom he plied with endless doses of acid and used to lure men into his orbit.

...