Helter Skelter

August 9, 1969. A story begins to circulate about murders at a house in the 90210, a Beverly Hills address in the tony Benedict Canyon neighborhood: an heiress and her jet-setter boyfriend, a celebrity hairdresser, an up-and-coming actress, and a teenager in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the tenth, in the Los Feliz neighborhood due east of Cielo Drive: another home invasion and two more killings. The news spreads quickly but not always helpfully or accurately. There are conflicting accounts—most of them pinned on the notion that the more sinister aspects of counterculture Los Angeles have come home to roost. “I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly,” Joan Didion wrote in her 1979 essay, “The White Album,” “And I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised” (Joan Didion, The White Album, p. 42, emphasis

Art · Art history · Counterculture · Misinformation · Mythology · Political science · Shot (pellet · White (mutation · Classics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society