And Charles Manson, who wasn’t in the house on Cielo Drive that night, is eventually tried and charged with several accounts of first-degree murder.

He made them do it.

And they’re counted as his kills.

Now take a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. A smart kid. Bilingual kid. Dissatisfied kid. Directionless kid. And show him this atrocity. Let him watch all the videos of Manson. Let him read all the newspaper and magazine articles. Let the idea fester in his sharp but wicked mind.

Manson almost had it right. He had an idea. He had people who believed in him. And he had the other people, the ones who made his way of life into a cult. And he could notch up all those kills without ever having to physically harm anyone himself.

But the notoriety was his endgame. He wanted to be known. He wanted to be famous. And that shit is easy. Blow up a school. Cut up some prostitutes. Drive into a crowd of peaceful protestors.

Manson got what he wanted. But take that nineteen-year-old undergraduate with his ideals and thrust him into a decade of counter-cultural revolution. Make sure that his endgame is to help the world, help as many people as he can. Spark his imagination with a Manson, a Kemper, a Bundy.

Now wait.

Because he is going to do this by killing as many people as he possibly can.

PART TWO

KILLER

70

You can feel it. When somebody jumps off a building and hits the floor, you can feel it.

It’s the noise. You don’t expect the noise.

You think it’ll be a splat. But it’s not. You throw a bin liner filled with yoghurt off the roof of a car park, you get a splat. That’s the sound. But you don’t feel it. A human body: eight pints of blood, a skull, a brain, 206 bones, a heart, intestines, that’s a thud. It reverberates through the ground and you feel that in your own chest.

Maybe it’s the weight of life.

The burden of existence.

A bag full of yoghurt doesn’t have that.

And there’s that idea that you die before you even hit the ground. The notion that fear of your imminent death causes shock or a heart attack or asphyxiation. There’s no time for that with a 213-foot drop off the top of Tower Bridge. The thing that kills you is decelerating so abruptly as you hit the floor. You weigh more by the time you connect with the concrete. Your cells can rupture. Your aorta can disconnect from your heart. It won’t take long until your brain is starved of oxygen.