Key figures in Manson case: Cult disciples, rich and famous

LOS ANGELES — It was 50 years ago this week that Charles Manson dispatched a group of disaffected young followers on a two-night killing rampage that terrorized Los Angeles. Members of the Manson “family” arrived at the Hollywood Hills home of Sharon Tate on Aug. 8, 1969, where they stabbed, beat and shot to death the young actress and her friends — celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski. Manson and his followers also killed two others — musician Gary Hinman and Hollywood stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea — in separate, unrelated attacks A look at the key players in a case that remains etched in the American consciousness: ___ THE KILLERS — Charles Manson was a petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood when he reinvented himself in the late 1960s as a guru-philosopher who targeted teenage runaways and other lost souls, particularly attractive young women he used and bartered to others for sex. He sent them out to butcher L.A.'s rich and famous in what prosecutors said was a bid to trigger a race war — an idea they say he got from a twisted reading of the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.” Decades after his conviction, Manson would continue to taunt prosecutors, parole agents and others, sometimes denying any role in the killings and other times boasting of them, as when he told a 2012 parole hearing: “I have put five people in the grave. — Steve “Clem” Grogan, once a ranch hand at the old movie ranch where Manson had located his followers, was sentenced to life in prison for taking part in Shea’s murder.