Half a century ago, over two sweltering nights in August of 1969, Charles Manson ordered his followers to murder seven people in and around Los Angeles. The victims included the actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant with director Roman Polanski’s baby; Tate’s friend and former lover, the hairdresser Jay Sebring; coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her lover, Wojtek Frykowski; Steven Parent, a recent high school graduate working summer jobs as a stereo salesman and a delivery person; and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, a married couple who lived several miles from Tate, in the Los Feliz neighborhood.

The Manson murders, and the underlying motives, have grown less comprehensible with time, despite a cottage industry of books and films seeking to distill the meaning of an event often described as the apocalyptic climax of the 1960s—and as the end of hippiedom and of the Utopian counterculture in the United States. Vincent Bugliosi prosecuted the case (and wrote the 1974 bestseller Helter Skelter) on the thesis that Manson and his acolytes subscribed to a patchwork theory of a forthcoming race war that they’d intuited from a Beatles song. More recently, Chaos (2019), by journalists Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, claims that Manson was a government informant, which allowed him to evade punishment for criminal acts he committed in the years and months leading up to the murder spree.

Any account of the Manson murders, including Bugliosi’s, owes a debt to one of the earliest books on the case: The Family (1971), by Ed Sanders, an erstwhile poet, folksinger, and activist. Sanders was, perhaps, an unlikely chronicler of the Manson murders given his self-professed “peacenik” pacificism. But as a poet, he captured the violent rhythms and the profound horror of the murders better than anyone who wrote about the case before or since.

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Around October 20, 1969, Sanders received a copy of an ecology newsletter called Earth Read-Out in the mail. The newsletter reprinted a five-day-old San Francisco Chronicle story describing two police raids on a remote desert ranch in California: “A band of nude and long-haired thieves who ranged over Death Valley in stolen dune buggies” had been rounded up. Sanders read the story with some interest, then put it aside. Six weeks later, when Manson’s picture was plastered across the front pages of newspapers, along with reports of the horrific crimes he’d allegedly orchestrated, Sanders recalled the thieves in the desert.

Sanders, 30 years old at the time, had lived a life and pursued a career only a few degrees of separation from Manson’s. The native Missourian had dropped out of college and moved to New York City in 1958 to study Greek at NYU, where he found kindred spirits among the Beats and the folksingers in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village. He’d been arrested for protesting the proliferation of nuclear submarines and found early fame with Poem from Jail (1963), published by City Lights Books. Then came Fuck You/A Magazine for the Arts, a mimeographed journal that mixed radical politics with work by John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Frank O’Hara, Herbert Huncke, and others.

In 1964, married with a new baby daughter, Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, on New York City’s Lower East Side. Peace Eye was subject to numerous police raids; Sanders was arrested on—and later acquitted of—obscenity charges. Along with the poet Tuli Kupferberg, he founded the Fugs, an underground band that became infamous for its satiric, sometimes scatological lyrics. Sanders wasn’t a hippie per se, but he embraced the hippie ethos.

Ed Sanders performing with his band The Fugs in Amsterdam in 1984. — *Ed Sanders and The Fugs perform at the One World Poetry event in Amsterdam, November 9, 1984. Photo by Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty.*

Manson, five years older than Sanders, was a wannabe artist and an ex-con. He’d spent much of his life in prison by the time he settled permanently in California in 1967; he lived first in and around San Francisco, then farther south, taking up residence at the Spahn Movie Ranch with an ever-changing group of men and women who called him their leader. They found him charismatic, even if the music industry did not. Manson caught the attention of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson (who enjoyed the favors of various Manson Family girls) and record producer Terry Melcher, but dreams of rock stardom went nowhere, fueling grudges that turned murderous, albeit by proxy. (Melcher had once rented 10050 Cielo Drive, Tate and Polanski’s house, although he lived elsewhere on the night of August 8, 1969.)

Reading about Manson in the newspaper, Sanders wondered why “no consistent set of facts seemed to emerge that explained in any depth how a group of young American citizens could develop into a commune of hackers.” (Hackers, as Sanders meant it, referred to physically hacking someone to death, not the digital hacking prevalent today.) He set out to answer this nagging question, first in a magazine article for Esquire (it never ran); then in trial coverage for the Los Angeles Free Press, a radical underground newspaper that relied on unpaid volunteers (Sanders produced 25 articles over the course of a year); and then in the book that eventually became The Family.

“Personal curiosity” about the Manson murders turned Sanders into a de facto investigative journalist. Over the year and a half he spent reporting the book, Sanders obtained and pored over the entire trial transcript (25,000 pages in total), several thousand more pages of newspaper clippings, microfilmed editions of the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle available at the New York Public Library, “maps of murder houses,” autopsy reports, and more “insane data about corpses, rituals, and weirdness.”

He made more than 20 trips to the Spahn Movie Ranch and several overnighters to Inyo County and Death Valley. He corresponded with sources throughout the US and Europe and conducted many more telephone and in-person interviews, including with members of occult groups. Sanders characterized these people as spiritually wounded: “drinkers of dog blood, the video-bugger crowd, people who hang rotting goats’ heads up in their kitchens, people who rent corpses for their Bel Air parties, victimizers of every persuasion.”

Ultimately, all the “data” Sanders gathered—with help from L.A.-based private investigator Larry Larsen, who chased down additional sources and leads—had to be turned into a coherent narrative, one that Sanders hoped would show young people “the techniques a guru or so-called leader might use to entrap them in a web of submission so that they can keep a constant vigil against it.”

To write such a narrative, Sanders stripped away almost all literary flourish, save for compound words of his own making, such as acidassin, or punctuation markers such as “oo-ee-oo.” His material was gruesome, so he thought it best to present facts and speculations as plainly as possible. Yet The Family isn’t entirely without unconventional flourish. Sanders fused the poetic techniques he’d honed throughout the 1960s to his unabashed horror at the crimes and at the moral and psychopathic rot within the Manson family.

He describes Manson as “the smug muscular boy from Copeville” who’d trapped his disciples “in his own phoneless hamburger universe.” Linda Kasabian, a Manson girl who later became a star prosecution witness, is described as kneeling by a dark fence, “deep in flower-power.” A murderer chases his victim out the door in “a red dog chop blitz,” while “the amphetamine-crazed acidassin licked the blood from her fingers.” Elsewhere, Sanders mimics the abrupt and staccato cadence of murder: “[Tex] stabbed her several times in the left breast through the brassiere. Screams. Stabs. Aorta. Death.” When the spree on Cielo Drive was finished, the culprits spent, Sanders wrote, “It was over. Over for five sparks of the universe, butchered by some new form of programmed zombie-spore.” He concludes in a deadpan tone reminiscent of 1950s paperback pulp fiction:

Up Benedict Canyon Drive drove the creepy-crawlie four, fresh from battle, changing their clothes as the car drove up the hill. Linda steered for Tex as he slimed out of his wet black velour and jeans. They talked excitedly. It was hot.

It was difficult to be plain when delving into conspiracy and cults. The Family doesn’t quite dive off the deep end of wild speculation, but it is clear, nearly 50 years later, how much Sanders struggles to stay on top of the main narrative about Manson and his followers. Sanders follows the trail and sees connections to three “death-trip” groups: the Kirke Order of Dog Blood (“an obscure occult group of forty or so”), the Solar Lodge of the Ordo Temple Orientis, and the group that caused the most trouble for Sanders, the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

The Process Church was a group, or a cult, started in London in 1966. Its founders, the husband-and-wife team of Robert de Grimston Moor and Mary Ann MacClean (both later simply “DeGrimston”), met as Scientologists, and their beliefs perhaps proved too weird for the L. Ron Hubbard–centered crowd. (The Process Church believed in four divinities and taught a millennialist eschatology, among other practices.) Sanders spends a chapter of The Family trying to prove a link between the Process Church and Manson, relying on “trusty informants” and much hearsay. One unsubstantiated anecdote concerns Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, allegedly attending a drug-fueled party hosted by the group at Sharon Tate’s home weeks before Kennedy was killed at the Ambassador Hotel. The Process Church nearly proved to be The Family’s undoing.

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E. P. Dutton & Company, Sanders’s publisher, had planned a sizable publicity campaign for The Family leading up to the book’s fall 1971 release. Newspaper ads trumpeted its 50,000-copy first printing, its selection for the Saturday Review book club, and its alternate selection choice by the Literary Guild. Esquire, which had passed on Sanders’s original piece, ran a book excerpt in its November 1971 issue under the title “Charlie and the Devil.”

Reviews were mixed. The Detroit Free Press judged the book “a tremendous job of reportage,” and the Camden Courier-Post called it “as fascinating and as lifeless as a police blotter account of a crime.” Anatole Broyard, writing for the New York Times, concluded that Sanders “may have written this book as a form of penance, a purification rite, [and] anyone prurient enough to read The Family deserves to suffer right along with him.”

The publication of The Family did not sit well with members of the Process Church. The same month as the book’s scheduled release, the group filed suit against Sanders and his publisher, charging that two chapters chiefly devoted to the Process Church were “false and defamatory.” A man identified only as minister of the Church, Father John, told the Associated Press that the chapters, which alleged the group “participated in things like blood sacrifices, kidnapping, murder, incitement to violence, drugs and sex orgies,” did not have “the slightest foundation in fact.” Father John added, “We have never had any connection with Manson, or his people, prior to his arrest and conviction.” The Process Church sought a permanent injunction to stop further publication of The Family as well as $1.5 million in damages. The church also sued Esquire for a further $1.25 million.

The Process Church settled with Sanders and Dutton in March 1972. According to the Chicago Tribune, the settlement required the publisher to “recall and reprint all hardbound and paperback copies of the book to delete any mention of the church.” The group then withdrew its suit against Esquire after the magazine agreed to publish a statement that the portions of The Family referencing the Process Church “were not substantiated.” Avon’s 1972 paperback edition deleted all references to the group outright.

But the legal battles did not end there. The Process Church, having originated in England, decided to sue Sanders there as well because the libel laws were stricter—and perhaps more favorable to the group. When the case proceeded to trial, however, Sanders proved victorious, and the Process Church was forced to pay the UK publisher’s legal fees. Still, The Family was not reprinted anywhere for more than 30 years. The reissued 2002 edition contained five updated chapters (largely excising material related to the Process Church) as well as a new afterword from Sanders that detailed the legal wrangling.

By then, the Process Church was long broken up, and Robert and Mary Ann DeGrimston were divorced. He remarried and, it was rumored, went on to work as an executive for a telecommunications company. (I was not able to corroborate this.) She and other former group members spun off into nonprofit animal welfare as the Best Friends Animal Society. Mary Ann died in 2005; Robert, well into his 80s now, is apparently still alive.

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Sanders hardly rested, let alone rested on his laurels, after the publication of The Family. He plunged into writing Tales of Beatnik Glory (1975), a four-volume fictional picaresque; later works included verse biographies of Anton Chekhov and Allen Ginsberg, many more poems (including my own favorite, the 1991 epic “Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side”), and the memoir Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (2011).

He also published a manifesto, Investigative Poetry (1976), that grew out of a lecture he delivered at the Counterculture Festival in Montreal. The 40-page essay describes the importance of historical research in landmark poems such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson.” Sanders notes that these poems could not exist without the underlying source material, be it Eliot’s own understanding of history or Williams’s deep roots in, and love of, Paterson, New Jersey. Sanders argues that this “history-poesy” approach can, and must, be extended to the second half of the 20th century and beyond. (Sanders himself used this approach as recently as last year with Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy, a hybrid of poetry and graphic art.) Writing of “total data” and “morality lists or data grids” feels particularly prescient, heralding the ways in which the internet changed how people communicate, gather information, and conduct research.

“You have to think of different arrays of sequencing information,” Sanders told Poetry Daily, adding, “You have to make an apt choice, or an artistic choice, or an aesthetic choice about what you put in—and what you leave out. It’s an art form when to say no. Especially in investigative poetry, it’s a mission.”

What Sanders describes in Investigative Poetry could be retrofitted to describe The Family, even though that book was proper nonfiction, not a poem. The Family is as much an aesthetic artifact as a feat of reportage; few other true crime books, save for Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005) and The Red Parts (2010), linked books about the long-unsolved murder of her aunt, put such distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic, poetic language in service of deep research and era-defining ambition.

The book was not Sanders’s final word on the subject. He revisited the case in Sharon Tate: A Life (2015), a more graphic and haphazard account of what Sanders had chronicled more than four decades earlier as “testimony...for evil among humans.” In late July of this year, he wrote about the enduring fascination of the murders for the New York Times, and described what first intrigued him about the case: “[T]he allure of the Tate-LaBianca murders seemed obvious: It had famous rock ’n’ roll stars like Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who briefly housed the so-called Manson family; it had the appeal of the Wild West; it had the bass drum of the 1960s, with its sexual liberation, its love of the outdoors, its ferocity and its open use of drugs. It had the hunger for stardom and renown; it had religions of all kinds; it had warfare and hometown slaughter; and it had it all in a huge panorama of sex, drugs and violent transgression.” He cited Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, which is inspired by the murders, as the latest proof that America’s Manson obsession is alive and well.

Indeed, 50 years on, there is more media related to the Tate-LaBianca murders and to the Manson Family than could ever be consumed. Some works—Emma Cline’s novel The Girls (2016), Karina Longworth’s 2015 podcast series Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Mary Harron’s recent film Charlie Says (adapted loosely from The Family)—stand out for their storytelling or literary merit. Most others devolve into gory schlock, unreadable or unwatchable. None carry the fulsome spark of The Family. The book is an unforgettable fusion of journalism and poetic prose that still holds up precisely because it has no use for category, for genre, or for being anything other than its own unique, obsessive self. The Manson case was unfathomable and strange; only a poet could give shape to the horror, whatever it meant.