Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes
Andy Warhol
10030 CIELO DRIVE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
There was blood everywhere.
Deep red pools of it. Bright splashes. Droplets here and there.
The room, the house, was filled with that vile, coppery odour.
The whole place smelled of death.
And she knew
These people, whoever or whatever they were, had come into her house with the express purpose of murdering them: herself and her guests.
They had entered the house with ease.
Four women, one man.
And within they had found two men and two women.
The three others were dead now.
She alone remained alive. But only until
The intruders had brought pain and death with them.
Knives . . . guns . . . ropes.
Death.
She was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant. She didn’t want to die. All she wanted to do was have her baby: her perfect, unborn child. She pleaded with them to let her live. Pleaded with the women in particular. Trying to appeal to some semblance of maternal feeling that might be hidden beneath their blood-drenched clothes and drug-blanked expressions.
But there would be no reprieve.
They had come with a purpose decreed by their leader, and that purpose was about to reach its conclusion.
‘
One of the woman had told her that already.
‘
Sweet Jesus, why did death have to come at all? But not this way.
If there was a God, she prayed for him to intervene.
Prayed for him to save her and her unborn baby.
Her perfect child. Her legacy. Her love . . .
One of them held her arms tightly behind her back.
Another of the women held her legs.
She tried to struggle free as she saw the man approaching with the knife.
She screamed.
For herself.
For her child.
He struck, and the blade sheared through her left breast.
He stabbed again.
And again.
And again.
She was beginning to lose consciousness.
Stabbing . . . sixteen times.
Death.
8 August 1969
Look down on me, you will see a fool. Look up at me, you will see your Lord. Look straight at me, you will see yourself.
Charles Manson
You’re coming home, there’s blood on the walls. When Charlie and the Family make house calls . . .
Ozzy Osbourne
Looks like Warhol wasn’t wrong,
fame fifteen minutes long.
Everyone’s using, everybody’s making the sale.
Queensryche
I wanna be somebody, be somebody too.
I wanna be somebody, be somebody soon.
W.A.S.P
1
HER CHILD WAS dead.
That one thought had forced itself into Hailey Gibson’s mind, and stuck there like a needle pushed under a fingernail.
No matter how hard she tried to tell herself that it could not be, that agonizing, tortuous idea remained. And, as the seconds passed, so did the conviction. A malignant, cancerous thought that gnawed at her reason.
Hailey spun round, looking to her right and left . . . behind her . . . in front of her. Her eyes constantly searching the mass of shoppers for any sign of her little daughter.
She shook her head, as if to silence the voice inside her own mind.
She and Becky had entered the HMV store only moments earlier.
Becky had been close by her side. Like any other five-year-old, smiling, laughing, dancing a little jig to the music that blasted from the shop’s sound system.
Like any other five-year-old.
It was busy inside the store, as usual. A group of youths was gathered around one part of the ‘Rock and Pop’ section, laughing loudly, comparing possible purchases. Elsewhere, others had been scanning the rack of calendars displayed, two boys no older than fourteen taking their time over a
Becky herself had wandered a short way towards them, her eye probably caught by one calendar devoted to
