LUCIFER RISING

Part 3

So, all his other L.A. contacts exhausted, Manson, decided to contact his fellow apocalyptic angel directly. Hoping to involve him in Helter Skelter, if not a record deal, Manson wrote, phoned and telegrammed Lennon numerous times. 

Finally giving up, the former psychiatric patient sent the Beatle a blood-soaked letter. Elvis and Hendrix were also on his hit list. But, by this time, these two stars, as well as Lennon, were no strangers to death threats.

Elvis, who was in L.A. at the time of the Tate and LaBianca murders, fled with his entourage for Vegas. “It was a serious as a six-car pile-up,” wrote the King’s handler, Lamar Fike. Elvis hadn’t taken such threats too seriously until the JFK assassination. Then he began collecting guns. After the Manson murders, he had assembled an armory at Graceland rivaling Ford Dix, and his employees – the Memphis Mafia – had become his Secret Service.  “Goddammit,” the King told them, “if anybody ever assassinates me, I want you guys to get to him before the police do. I want you to pull his eyes out, rip his throat apart, and kill that son of a bitch!”

As for Lennon, he didn’t become aware of being on Manson’s list until after the cult leader had been taken into custody. When Charlie sent his first Helter Skelter invitation, the Beatle was in Toronto with Yoko doing an 8-day bed in for peace. Weeks later, he was nearly killed in a car accident in Scotland. Then he returned to London for the Abbey Road recording sessions. When the Manson Family slaughtered Tate and the others, he and the Beatles were finishing The End. A month later, he announced that he was leaving the Beatles. 

Lennon’s days with the Fab Four had first begun to sour in 1966 during what he called “The Jesus Christ Tour.” Huge album-burning protests were staged in the U.S. over his remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus Christ.” He received numerous death threats and, before departing for the tour, was told by a psychic that he would be shot.

“I was totally paranoid the whole time,” he later confessed.  “Everywhere we played I was just waiting for something dreadful to happen.” On stage in Memphis, he heard a firecracker go off which he mistook for a gunshot. “My immediate reaction was to check meself to see if I’d been hit,” he recalled. ‘”Fucking hell,’ I thought. ‘At least they haven’t gotten me!’” He was gunned down by a reborn Christian and estranged fan fourteen years later. 

Oddly, Lennon, like Manson, had one thing in common: he had been abandoned as a child by his mother and his father, and the wound had never healed. According to biographer, Geoffrey Giuliano, John had confided to a friend: “After my mother was killed I felt betrayed by all womankind… I’ve always wondered what it would be like to kill a woman, many women! It was only becoming a Beatle that saved me from actually doing it. Can you imagine, a Beatle serial killer?”