This is ZEITCRIMES. Today's episode is about The Manson Murders. What they were, who committed them, who ordered them, why, and what they meant — for the counterculture, for Los Angeles, for America, and for our continuing struggle to understand the relationship between charisma, ideology, and the willingness to commit violence in the name of a cause.

This episode is about that transformation. It is about what Charles Manson was and how he built the Family. It is about the specific people who were murdered and the specific people who murdered them. It is about the investigation, the trial that produced one of the longest and most extraordinary legal proceedings in California history, and the political and sociological ramifications of an event that did not merely shock America but fundamentally altered how the country understood the 1960s,  ...