Terror in the Canyon

Mayhem, Madness and Murder in the Summer of '69

By: Scott Weiss

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

On Sunday, August 10, 1969, the film actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski, and four others, including hair stylist to the stars Jay Sebring, were found brutally murdered at the home Tate shared with her husband in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles.

That same night, a grocery supermarket chain owner and his wife met a similar fate in their home in Los Feliz, a residential neighborhood in the greater Hollywood area. Initially, there was no clear connection between these murders and the ones the night before, other than the sheer randomness and horror of both.

News reporters from all corners of the world tracked the "Tate-LaBianca" murder case, desperate for any bit of information to appease their increasingly curious audiences. Tight-lipped investigators offered very little in the way of updates, prompting speculation from a growing number of conspiracy theorists, all with their own idea of exactly who committed the crimes, and why.

TERROR IN THE CANYON: Mayhem, Madness and Murder documents the Helter Skelter murders and the media frenzy that followed using archival stories and images from the Valley Times and Hollywood Citizen Reporter, newspapers that served the greater Los Angeles area until they ceased publication in 1970. This is a first-hand account of events as they happened in real time, culminating in the prosecution of Charles Manson and members of his nomadic family.