re: #30 Dr Lizardo

The Tate/LaBianca murders are a seminal event in Los Angeles history; from what I’ve read (it happened five days after I was born), it also represented a rather brutal end to what we popularly think of as “the ’60s”. Basically, the end of an era, particularly, the hippie era. Charlie and his nutty followers became the hippies America loved to hate and seems like it was one of the events that helped set the stage for the conservative backlash that began in the mid-1970s.

I was 9 years old, 30 miles inland, and it was HUGE. It was absolutely the most terrifying thing that had ever happened in LA. More than earthquakes, more than wildfires, more than mudslides, more than the Watts riots a few years earlier, more than the Rodney King riots 20-some years later.

And once they found who did it and the trial dragged on… it got scarier and scarier every day.