As Joan Didion wrote in her 1979 essay collection The White Album, the sixties "ended abruptly” on August 9, 1969, the night the Manson Family committed the brutal and infamous murders of five people at the home of actress Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski. The following night, in Los Feliz, the "family” murdered two more innocent people, chosen randomly. The authorities were stumped; their main suspect, a groundskeeper at the Tate house, was released after passing a polygraph test.

Seven murders in two days was horrible, and without any idea of who did it, the city was on edge: "A Beverly Hills sporting goods store sold 200 firearms in two days. The price of guard dogs rose from $500 to $1,500," according to Los Angeles magazine.

Eventually the world would learn about the Manson Family, a cult in thrall to a man named Charles Manson, living together at the remote and abandoned Spahn movie ranch deep in the Valley. Below we've mapped all those and more important locations in the history of the cult that changed Los Angeles forever.