For years, the accepted narrative around the Manson murders has been that Charles Manson orchestrated a savage killing spree to spark a race war, supposedly taking inspiration from the Beatles. True crime director Joe Berlinger, however, says that version of events has never fully held together.

Berlinger revisits the case in the three-part Netflix documentary series “Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes,” which includes never-before-heard prison recordings of Manson and members of the notorious “Manson Family.”

In 1969, Manson, a lifelong criminal who drew in vulnerable runaways and people searching for belonging, sent his followers to carry out brutal murders across the Los Angeles area. At trial, prosecutors said the killings were tied to his so-called “Helter Skelter” vision, a plan they alleged was meant to trigger racial chaos.

But Berlinger says the newly surfaced audio points to a different motive. After reviewing the recordings, he believes the murders may have been less about an apocalyptic race war and more about a frantic effort to hide “a series of blunders.”

“This whole idea of starting a race war was a false idea,” Berlinger told News Media. “He certainly believed a race war was coming, or at least that’s what he told his followers to control them. But the murders, in particular the Tate and LaBianca murders, were an attempt to get associate Bobby Beausoleil out of prison. He told his followers, ‘He’s my friend. You guys owe me a favor. Let’s get him out of prison.'”

“The truth is I believe, and others believe, that if they had succeeded in this crazy idea of getting Bobby Beausoleil out of prison, I think Manson would’ve killed him because he was a liability,” said Berlinger. “But listening to those tapes made the story come alive, not these crazy conspiracy theories and myths that turned Charles Manson into the most mythologized figure in the history of true crime.”

Berlinger traces the chain of events that led to the murders to a botched drug deal.

According to the documentary, Manson invited members of the Straight Satans motorcycle club to Spahn Ranch to protect him from the Black Panthers, whom he feared, offering them access to his female followers in exchange.

“[Follower] Tex Watson tried to steal money from a drug dealer named Bernard ‘Lotsapoppa’ Crowe, who wants his money back,” Berlinger explained. “Manson goes out there and doesn’t intend to kill him, but thinks he killed him, a Black Panther.”

According to the documentary, Watson stole Crowe’s money, prompting Crowe to threaten retaliation. Manson later shot Crowe and mistakenly believed he had killed him. Crowe was not a Black Panther.

“He goes back to Spahn Ranch and becomes paranoid that the Black Panthers are going to come after him. He becomes friends with Bobby, tells him to join the family and also to help protect the ranch. Bobby becomes tight with some bikers who were also invited to protect the ranch from the Black Panthers.”

But the motorcycle gang wanted more than just women. The documentary says Beausoleil brought them drugs he obtained from music teacher Gary Hinman. The bikers were unhappy with the quality of the supply, and Beausoleil was pressured to recover their money.

“Bobby tries to get his money back from Gary and can’t get it,” said Berlinger.

According to court records, during the confrontation, Manson arrived at Hinman’s home and slashed Hinman’s face with a sword, cutting him from his left ear toward his chin. Over the course of about three days, Manson’s followers tortured Hinman. Beausoleil later stabbed Hinman to death and wrote the words “Political Piggy” on a wall in Hinman’s blood, along with an animal paw print intended to implicate the Black Panthers.

“Gary Hinman is killed because Manson comes in, wields a sword and then tells Bobby ‘finish the job’ to cover the tracks,” Berlinger said.

Beausoleil was arrested about a week after Hinman’s body was discovered. Berlinger said Beausoleil was driving Hinman’s vehicle and had “the murder weapon stupidly in the stolen car.”

Berlinger said Manson wanted police to believe Hinman’s murder was the work of the Black Panthers to cast suspicion away from Beausoleil. He noted the attempt to free Beausoleil became the catalyst for the murders that followed.

On Aug. 9, 1969, Manson’s followers murdered five people at a Los Angeles home previously rented by music producer Terry Melcher: actress Sharon Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant; coffee heiress Abigail Folger; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring; Polish writer Wojciech Frykowski; and Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate’s caretaker.

Melcher had previously declined to sign Manson to a recording contract.

“The murder is tried to be made to look like it was part of Gary Hinman’s murder,” said Berlinger. “But when Manson picks up the paper the next day, and there’s no information about these two murders being linked, they do another murder. The logic is, ‘We’ve got to make people think that Bobby, who is sitting in prison, is not guilty.’”

“This was all a series of blunders, a bunch of bad, spontaneous decision-making.”

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The next night, wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed and killed in their home across town. The killers scrawled phrases including “Pigs” and the misspelled words “Healter Skelter” in blood at the crime scene.

Manson was arrested in October 1969.

Prosecutors maintained at trial that Manson ordered his followers to kill some of Los Angeles’ rich and famous to trigger a race war, a plan prosecutors said grew in part from his interpretation of the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.”

Manson frequently spoke about an impending race war and interpreted songs on the Beatles’ “White Album” as messages about the coming conflict, according to testimony from his followers. What remains disputed is whether those beliefs motivated the Tate-LaBianca murders or whether, as Berlinger argues, prosecutors elevated them into the central theory of their case.

“[Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi] had to come up with a legal theory to convict a guy who actually didn’t do the killings,” Berlinger said. “Manson wasn’t even there when the Tate-LaBianca killings took place. So how do you convict somebody who wasn’t there? Well, you come up with this organizing principle that he convinced his followers that a race war was coming, and he was trying to make that race war happen. It was a brilliant legal theory, but it’s a false story.”

“The Manson murders are much more tragic, but much more banal than this idea of some crazy cult trying to start a race war,” Berlinger continued.

“This was a drug deal gone bad, trying to cover up Gary Hinman’s killing by doing another murder the next day to make it look like a copycat murder, which were the Tate murders. And when that murder didn’t hit newspapers like a Black Panther murder, they did the LaBianca murders. It’s a series of blunders by people who were trying to cover their tracks, not this grand scheme of ‘Helter Skelter.'”

Bugliosi worked with writer Curt Gentry on a book about the case. Published in 1974, “Helter Skelter” became the bestselling true crime book of all time.

Manson and three followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were found guilty and later sentenced to death. Charles “Tex” Watson was tried separately and convicted later. Their death sentences were reduced to life in prison after the California Supreme Court invalidated the state’s death penalty in 1972.

Atkins died in prison in 2009. Van Houten was released on parole in 2023. Krenwinkel and Watson remain in prison.

Manson died at a California hospital in 2017 while serving a life sentence. He was 83.

Berlinger maintained Manson’s reputation as an evil mastermind was fueled more by myth than reality.

“He wasn’t killing or ordering people to kill to get some kind of satisfaction,” Berlinger said. “He was covering up a series of blunders and just getting deeper and deeper into a hole. The best way to honor the victims is to be truthful about what happened.”

The mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case was never going to be hard to understand. For many people, the idea that a mother could intentionally kill her own children is almost impossible to absorb.

The instinctive reaction is to search for an explanation rooted in madness. She must have been insane, the thinking goes. What else could it be?

For most observers, contemplating any alternative is simply too horrifying.

That appeared to be the central calculation behind the defense strategy: argue that Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity, that an 18-minute psychotic episode led her to strangle her three children before she jumped from a window, and that this was the only explanation jurors could reasonably accept.

After all, the defense seemed to ask, how could anyone commit an act so brutal unless something in the mind had catastrophically broken?

Perhaps that’s why 11 of the 12 jurors were in favor of an acquittal — while the lone holdout, a man, refused to be bullied from his conclusion.

Cue the progressive feminist brigade declaring misogyny.

Not so. You can be a woman who believes that postpartum depression and psychosis are real, that much of what women suffer is understudied and misunderstood by the medical establishment, that the overprescription of medication can be thoughtless and dangerous — as I do — and still not believe Lindsay Clancy.

It’s as old as humanity. Before Christianity, infanticide was a common practice, considered practical. Medea, of Greek mythology, murdered her children to punish her unfaithful husband. Sethe, of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, murdered her baby.

It has ever been with us.

Lindsay’s ex-husband Patrick, father of all three children and now remarried, cannot conceive that she is truly responsible for murdering their kids.

But his own mother apparently can.

In a 2024 profile of Patrick in The New Yorker, his mother, Sue, told the magazine: ‘Lindsay has to pay for what she did.’

Yes. Even those who believe that she had a psychotic break should be able to agree on that. Otherwise — why punish anyone, for anything, if we can all claim temporary madness?

If Lindsay Clancy truly slaughtered her small children in a fit of psychosis — a voice commanding her to kill, she claims — how is she able to live with herself, let alone argue that she should be set free?

The subtext of her defense fits all too perfectly in our post-moral culture: No matter the depravity, consider the perpetrator a victim, too.

Lindsay, her lawyer argued, was at the whims of a medical establishment that overprescribed her. The prosecution countered that Lindsay, a labor and delivery nurse, doctor-shopped for months.

Her defenders say she has already suffered for her sins: She’s in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Isn’t that punishment enough?

Lindsay, her lawyer argued, tried to get help. In fact, after Patrick took her to the ER on New Year’s Eve, 2022, she was transferred to the famed McLean psychiatric hospital in Boston.

But, as Patrick told The New Yorker, when he went to visit her ‘there were people there who were clearly, like, nuts… Lindsay seemed to have it together.’

He also said she texted him from McLean, saying, ‘I don’t belong here.’

Weeks later, on January 24, 2023, she killed their children.

Some of the specifics to follow are gruesome, but they are important to detail, as much of the mainstream media has opted not to publish or broadcast them.

On the morning of the murders, Lindsay took daughter Cora, age 5, to the pediatrician. She did not disclose to Cora’s doctor that she, as the mother, was in distress.

After that, she sent pictures of the children, playing in the snow, to her mother and to Patrick.

At 4.48pm, Lindsay called the local CVS to see if they had Pedia-Lax. The store manager who answered the phone said that Lindsay spoke clearly and cogently — no slurring, no disjointed thoughts.

At 4.53pm, Lindsay texted Patrick, who was in his home office in the basement, about getting takeout for dinner: ‘I didn’t cook anything,’ she wrote. ‘It’s been a long day.’

Patrick agreed.

‘Okie dokie,’ she texted back.

Okie dokie. Does that sound like a woman on the verge of strangling her three children to death?

‘Check the menu when you can,’ she texted Patrick. Calm. Cool. Casual.

At 5.10pm, Lindsay called ThreeV, a local restaurant, to order risotto and a Mediterranean power bowl. Earlier in the day, she had used Apple Maps to check how long it would take to drive there.

At 5.32pm, Patrick can be seen on surveillance video entering the local CVS for the Pedia-Lax, and he calls his wife at home.

‘It sounded like she was busy,’ Patrick said.

She was busy. Medical examiners determined Patrick’s call fell right in the middle of the 45-minute window in which Lindsay killed the children.

Note what Patrick didn’t say: She was hysterical. She was talking gibberish. The kids were making noise in the background.

No: She sounded busy — as if, one could surmise, she had been interrupted and was eager to get back to what she had been doing.

At 5.37pm, Patrick left CVS.

At 5.54pm, he picked up their takeout order from ThreeV.

Patrick returned home at 6.09pm and immediately noticed how silent the house was. He found Lindsay outside, on the ground, having slashed herself and jumped from their second-floor bedroom.

He asked her what she had done. Patrick testified that Lindsay replied: ‘I tried to kill myself.’

Not: ‘I killed the kids.’

Not: ‘Call 911 for the kids.’

And to be clear: She took the children down to the basement, one at a time, returning upstairs for the next child once one was dead, in descending order of strength.

Dawson, her 3-year-old son — who, in a 2021 Facebook post, she called ‘the most difficult human I have ever encountered’ — was first, seemingly because he was the strongest.

Lindsay, who in days prior to the killings had Googled, ‘Can you treat a sociopath,’ took an exercise band and strangled her toddler son to death.

She then went to get Cora, her 5-year-old, and brought her to the basement.

Cora, too, was strangled to death, by her mother, with an exercise band.

Baby Callan, 8 months old, was next.

And like his sister and brother, he was found with an exercise band around his neck. But Callan was still alive when first responders arrived.

Strangulation takes a long time. Were the bands a distancing mechanism, so she didn’t have to lay her hands on her children’s necks?

All three children were found face down, presumably so she didn’t have to look them in the eyes. So she didn’t have to see their abject terror as their own mother killed them.

Callan died in the hospital three days later.

When Lindsay herself woke up, some of her first questions were about whether she had a lawyer and if her legs were broken — not about her children.

According to Dr Sejal Shah, a female psychiatrist who evaluated Lindsay multiple times in the hospital, Lindsay told her she had not suffered delusions or hallucinations on the day of the killings.

Shah, in her trial testimony, described Lindsay as ‘goal-oriented’ and as having ‘organized’ thoughts just days later.

Lindsay spent much of this trial looking impassive, putting her head down only when confronted with graphic autopsy testimony.

‘I can’t do this,’ she said, covering her face, her shoulders heaving.

But she has lots of things she’d like to do when this is all over: She’d like to become an advocate for postpartum issues and enter a wheelchair marathon, as revealed at trial.

If she cared, she would be prostrating herself before the court, insisting that no matter her mental state, she isn’t worthy of mercy.

A major pop performer had an unexpectedly painful moment in front of thousands of concertgoers — and the awkward fall was captured on video.

Alex Warren was onstage at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on Friday night for his Finding Family on the Road world tour when his attempt to make his way down from the stands went badly wrong.

Wearing a blue shirt with cream trousers, the singer jumped onto recording gear set up in a side tunnel and initially stuck the landing — before losing his balance and toppling over moments later.

Rather than pretend the concert mishap never happened, Warren leaned into the viral-worthy moment and posted the funny clip to his Instagram account.

He paired the video with a cheeky caption: “They told me to break a leg before the show.”

Fans also joined in the ridicule.

“Ok, bubble wrap added to the dressing room rider,” one person commented.

“Should’ve gotten up to the camera and said ‘pls buy my new album,’” joked a second.

“You can’t park there,” quipped a third.

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The clip received 346,000 likes and 2,600-plus comments.

It comes as footage of a cringe-worthy interaction between Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev and red carpet officials has gone viral on social media.

The vision from the Venice Film Festival appears to show the 37-year-old star being approached by a man dressed in black while posing for photos on opening night.

He is seen gesturing to the side, which leaves Dobrev looking confused, but she continues to twirl her Armani Privé dress for the cameras until a second man in a suit approaches and also appears to usher her to the side.

Dobrev is seen pulling a face before sweeping off the red carpet.

The awkward moment appears to have taken place at the premiere of Guy Pearce and Claire Foy’s new film Ink on Wednesday evening, but only started gaining traction on social media on Friday.

Neither Dobrev or the Venice Film Festival have commented.

Users on social media speculated over whether the officials may have been trying to escort Dobrev off or if they were just trying to keep things moving.

Many described their actions as “rude” and “unnecessary.”

Dobrev also attended a star-studded dinner hosted by Armani Beauty the following evening.