Cielo Drive to Corcoran: 14 Places That Trace the Manson Family Murders

Over 2 nights in August 1969, followers of Charles Manson killed 7 people in Los Angeles. Sharon Tate was 26, an actress on the rise, and 8 months pregnant with her first child. Jay Sebring cut the hair of half of Hollywood. Abigail Folger, an heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, spent her days on volunteer social work. Wojciech Frykowski was her boyfriend and an old friend of Roman Polanski. Steven Parent was 18 and had stopped by to visit a caretaker. Leno LaBianca ran his father's grocery chain, and Rosemary LaBianca had built a business of her own out of a converted delivery truck. A music teacher named Gary Hinman had already been killed in Topanga Canyon 2 weeks earlier.

The story has been retold for more than 50 years, almost always through the people. This piece walks it through the places instead: the houses where the Family lived, the homes where they killed, the hillsides where the evidence surfaced, and the courtrooms and prisons where the record was made. 14 places in all. Several are private homes today, and that sets the ground rule for everything below.

Velvet Ropes maps Los Angeles history at street level, and the neighborhoods in this piece, Benedict Canyon, Los Feliz, and Pacific Palisades, run thick with addresses that carry stories. Our celebrity homes map covers those blocks in the present tense. This article covers the 14 places that belong to 1969.

The log cabin on Sunset Boulevard

The Family's road to Cielo Drive runs through Pacific Palisades. Will Rogers built the place in the 1930s as a lodge for his shooting trips, a log-cabin mansion at the end of a long wooded driveway beside what became Will Rogers State Historic Park, with a swimming pool shaped like the state of California. By 1968 the tenant was Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys' drummer.

That spring, Wilson picked up 2 young women hitchhiking and dropped them at the house before a late recording session. He came home to find a small man in his driveway who introduced himself as Charles Manson, and a dozen more people already inside. Wilson, taken with the ex-convict's songs and patter, let them stay. Through much of 1968, roughly 17 members of the Family lived in his spare rooms while Wilson paid for everything; he later put the cost at about $100,000. The stay produced a record: the Beach Boys reworked Manson's song "Cease to Exist" into "Never Learn Not to Love" and released it on a December 1968 single, credited to Dennis Wilson. Manson accepted the changed music and resented the changed lyrics.

Wilson never threw the Family out. He moved to a smaller place, let the lease run down, and left the eviction to the landlord. The introduction that mattered had already been made: through Wilson, Manson met the record producer Terry Melcher, and Melcher's old address would decide where the Family struck a year later. The house still stands, and it kept standing in January 2025 while the Palisades Fire burned through the neighborhoods around it. In the early 2000s the estate spent its summers as a Chabad day camp, the pool by then filled with dirt.

Spahn Ranch, Chatsworth

Evicted from Sunset Boulevard, the Family settled at Spahn Ranch, a movie ranch in the rocks where Chatsworth climbs toward the Santa Susana Pass. George Spahn had bought the property in 1953, and its Western-town sets had served B Westerns and television for decades. By 1968 Spahn was elderly and nearly blind, and he agreed to let the group live there in exchange for chores, help with his horse-rental business, and care; Lynette Fromme became his eyes. The Family was living at the ranch through the murders of August 1969.

Sheriff's deputies raided the ranch on August 16, 1969, a week after the killings, on suspicion of auto theft; the arrests did not hold, and the Family drifted back. A ranch hand named Donald Shea was killed by Family members that same month, and Manson and 2 followers were convicted of his murder in later trials. In September 1970 a wildfire took the movie sets in about an hour. The land is state-owned now, folded into the hills that Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park keeps open between Chatsworth and Simi Valley, where the trails cross a stage road once used by the Butterfield Overland route. You can hike it on any clear morning.

2 rentals: Canoga Park and Venice

In January 1969 Manson moved the group down from the ranch into a rented house on Gresham Street in Canoga Park, painted canary yellow and nicknamed the Yellow Submarine after the Beatles song. He wanted a base closer to Hollywood and a front room big enough to rehearse in. The stay lasted a few months before the Family returned to Spahn.

A beach house on Clubhouse Avenue in Venice, rented by an associate named Mark Ross, put members of the Family up at several points. On November 5, 1969, a young member named John Philip Haught, called Zero, died there of a single gunshot to the head. The Family members present told police he had been playing Russian roulette, their accounts matched, and the death was recorded as a suicide. Doubts about that ruling have trailed the file ever since.

Gary Hinman's house, Topanga Canyon

The first murder came in a hillside house in Topanga Canyon. Gary Hinman was a music teacher and doctoral student who had befriended members of the Family, and Manson believed he had money. On July 25, 1969, Bobby Beausoleil, Susan Atkins, and Mary Brunner went to the house to demand it; Manson came up himself and slashed Hinman's face with a sword before leaving. Beausoleil held Hinman for 3 days, then stabbed him to death on July 27. He was arrested on August 5, asleep in Hinman's car near San Luis Obispo, and was convicted of the murder. He remains in prison; a 2019 parole recommendation was later reversed. Manson was convicted for Hinman's death as well. The house is a private home today.

The house on Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon

Cielo Drive climbs a narrow spur of Benedict Canyon, and the house stood at the top, at the end of a gated drive. It went up in the early 1940s for the French actress Michèle Morgan. Most retellings credit the design to Robert Byrd; the Pacific Coast Architecture Database records the builder John Franklin Wadkins and calls the Byrd attribution uncorroborated. Either way, the result was a low farmhouse-style main house with a guest house behind it, the kind of place Hollywood rented rather than bought.

Terry Melcher, Doris Day's son and a producer for the Byrds, lived there with Candice Bergen until January 1969. Manson had chased a record deal through Melcher and had been up that driveway. Melcher moved out, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate signed on in February 1969, and when Manson sent 4 followers up the hill on the night of August 9, 1969, the prosecution argued, he was choosing an address he knew, not the people inside it.

Tate, Sebring, Folger, and Frykowski were killed in and around the house; Parent, leaving after a visit to the caretaker William Garretson in the guest house, was shot in his car in the driveway. Garretson, the only person on the property left alive, was arrested that morning and cleared within days. Polanski was in London.

The house outlived its tenants by 25 years. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails rented it in the early 1990s and recorded most of The Downward Spiral in a studio he named Le Pig, after the word the killers had left on the front door. A run-in with Patti Tate, Sharon's sister, ended his peace with the arrangement; he moved out in December 1993 and took the front door with him to his New Orleans studio. The owner had the house demolished in 1994, a larger Mediterranean-style house was finished on the lot in 1996, and the street was renumbered.

Drive Cielo Drive today and nothing announces the past: different house, different number. A later owner of Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium on Bundy Drive ran the same play for the same reason, a story we told in our article on the O.J. Simpson houses.

The LaBianca house, Waverly Drive, Los Feliz

Antonio LaBianca, who built the Gateway grocery business after emigrating from Italy, bought a house on Waverly Drive in Los Feliz in 1940, on a wide ridgeline lot above Griffith Park. His son Leno grew up in it, took over the company, and moved back into his childhood home in 1968 with his wife Rosemary and her son Frank. Rosemary had come out of an Arizona orphanage, turned an old Gateway Markets truck into a mobile dress shop called Boutique Carriage, and invested well enough to hold a fortune of her own.

In the summer of 1969 the couple told friends the house no longer felt right. "Someone is coming in our house while we're away," Rosemary told a friend. "Things have been gone through and the dogs are outside the house when they should be inside."

Manson knew the street; he had been to parties at a house next door in 1968. On the night of August 10, 1969, he picked it for the second night of killings, tied the couple up himself, and left Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten to murder them. Words were written at the scene, among them a misspelled "Healter Skelter" on the refrigerator door, and that phrase handed the prosecution its theory and Vincent Bugliosi the title of his book.

The house is still a house, modest and single-story, and it has changed hands like any other, with one loud exception. Weeks before the murders' 50th anniversary in 2019, it went on the market at $1.98M, and Ghost Adventures host Zak Bagans bought it for close to the ask, with a film project in mind that never came to fruition. He sold it in 2021 at a small loss. The street number on the door today is not the one in the 1969 records; like Cielo Drive, the address was changed somewhere along the way.

2 hillsides where the evidence surfaced

Weeks after the murders, a 10-year-old named Steve Weiss found a .22 revolver on the slope behind his family's home off Longview Valley Road in Sherman Oaks, thrown from a car window as the killers drove out of the hills. He had learned from television not to handle a gun, told his father, and watched a patrol officer do the handling anyway. The revolver was booked at the Van Nuys station and sat there for months. Only in December 1969, after a jailhouse account of the crimes reached the newspapers, did his father's phone calls push the LAPD to match it to the Tate murders.

Journalists beat the police to the killers' clothes. A KABC television crew drove the likely escape route down Benedict Canyon, stopped where the road ran without a guardrail, and pulled a bundle of dark clothing off the slope below. Vincent Bugliosi introduced it at trial.

Barker Ranch and the Death Valley raids

By mid-September 1969 the Family had moved to Barker Ranch, a stone cabin up Goler Wash in the Panamint Range on the edge of Death Valley, with the Myers Ranch, a homestead tied to the grandparents of Family member Catherine Gillies, around the corner. The law came up the wash for property crimes, not murder: burned park equipment and a trail of stolen vehicles. Park rangers, highway patrolmen, and Inyo County deputies raided the ranch over 2 days in October 1969 and arrested 26 people on suspicion of arson, vandalism, and auto theft. In the October 12 raid, a patrolman found a small man folded into the cabinet under a sink. Asked his name, he answered, "Charles Manson."

The prisoners went down the wash to Independence, the Inyo County seat, where Manson sat in the county jail and made his first court appearances while Los Angeles assembled its murder charges. Barker Ranch sits inside Death Valley National Park today, reachable by a rough 4-wheel-drive route, and a 2009 fire took much of the cabin.

The Hall of Justice and Corcoran

The trial ran on the 8th floor of the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles, before Judge Charles Older, from jury selection in June 1970 to the verdicts of January 25, 1971: guilty of first-degree murder for Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. Death sentences followed on March 29, 1971. Charles Watson was convicted in a separate trial later that year. In 1972 the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty, and every sentence became life. At more than 9 months, the proceedings were the longest and costliest American criminal trial to that point.

The building has its own record. Opened in 1925 with courtrooms, the coroner's office, and jail floors that held Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, the Hall of Justice was closed by Northridge earthquake damage in 1994 and brought back 2 decades later by a $233M restoration; the sheriff's department is headquartered there now. Manson himself ended at California State Prison, Corcoran, in the Central Valley, housed in its Protective Housing Unit from 1989 on. He died of natural causes at a Kern County hospital on November 19, 2017, at 83.

Spahn Ranch is a trailhead now. Goler Wash is backcountry. The Hall of Justice holds county offices, and Corcoran holds other prisoners. The houses are homes again. We map the geography because it is real and it is Los Angeles.