A Comparison
There are many parallels between Charles Manson’s killing spree and the murders in Aspen. Manson’s followers brutally murdered five people. Six people died at the house in Aspen. Sharon Tate, an ethereally-beautiful actress, was at the beginning of her career, as was Brienne Cross. Human blood was painted on the wall of Sharon Tate’s house. Blood was painted on the wall of the bedroom where Tanya Williams and Justin Balough slept, then died.
Both murders, it appears, had ties to racism.
Tanya Williams and Justin Balough were an inter-racial couple. Two eights, a symbol used by the Aryan Nation, was painted with their blood on the wall above their lifeless bodies.
Charles Manson was a drifter, songwriter, and common criminal who had big ideas. He wanted to kill high-profile people—movie stars, the movers and shakers of the industry—in order to touch off a race war. He was convinced the “black man” would take over the world, but they’d need someone smart to run it for them, and that’s where Manson would step in. So he started a cult around his own, hypnotic personality. To his ragtag followers—mostly young and female—he was as mesmerizing as a cobra. And as dangerous. But he didn’t do the dirty work, you notice. He sent those young women out to kill people, and their first victims were Sharon Tate and her guests for the evening: Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger (heiress to the Folger Coffee fortune), Jay Sebring (I will never, ever look at the Chrysler Sebring without visualizing those bloody murders. And I’m not sure that’s the image Chrysler would like to project). Their first victim that night was a caretaker for the property, a young man named Steven Parent.
It was an orgy of blood. Those evil women tortured their victims. They tried to slice the baby out of poor Sharon Tate, and wrote “PIG” on the front door with her blood.
So yes, the parallels are there. The Tate murders were a model for the Aspen Murders. It was the template, the blueprint, the inspiration.
Like so many people, I watched television footage of Ray Arquette being led in chains from the courthouse in Aspen. And even though he was on the screen for only a few minutes, I could see the madness in his eyes. When I saw Ray Arquette’s eyes, I realized, if one person had managed to get lesser beings to do his bidding, someone like Ray Arquette could do it, too. He is so much like Manson. He’s so much like Jim Jones, the “religious leader” in Jonestown, Guyana, who got more than nine hundred people to drink cyanide-laced Kool Aid. Like David Koresh, and his followers, who burned in Waco. Like that weird group in the purple robes right here in California, who killed themselves because they thought by doing so they would hitch a ride on a comet.
There are always followers. The weak follow. Maybe Donny Lee Odell was one of the weak ones.
But I will tell you this: there’s no doubt in my mind–if they really did kill those people– that Ray Arquette was the leader.
—Leigh Woods
THE SHOP is a work of fiction, a political thriller by M.J. Hawk.
People, places, and events portrayed on whokilledbriennecross.com
and associated Web sites are drawn from THE SHOP.
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