Charles Manson

Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is a career criminal who led the so-called Manson Family, a commune or cult that began to form around him in the U.S. city of San Francisco in 1967.^[1][2][3] He was convicted of conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Though there was no evidence Manson personally killed any of the victims, he was found guilty of the murders themselves, through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy.^[4]

Early life

Childhood

First dubbed "no name Maddox," Manson was born to the unmarried Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox.^[5][6][7] Although the record that includes that name indicates his mother was then eighteen, she was more likely sixteen.^[8]

For a period, a while after her son's birth, Kathleen Maddox was married to a William Manson, who is named in the aforementioned record as the boy's father, and whose last name the boy was given; however, Charles Manson's biological father appears to have been a "Colonel Scott" against whom Kathleen Maddox filed a Kentucky bastardy suit resulting in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, Charles never really knew him.^[9][10]

According to one account, young Manson's mother, allegedly a drinker,^[11] once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later.^[12] When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the West Virginia home of an aunt and uncle who were very religious. Upon his mother's 1942 parole, Manson was returned to his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms.^[13]

In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available; the court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, Terre Haute, Indiana. After ten months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.

First crimes

By burgling a grocery store, Manson obtained cash that enabled him to rent a room.^[14] A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was at last caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy's uncle.^[15] Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent to the Indiana School for Boys at age 13. After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951. In Utah, having burgled gas stations all along the way, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Here, testing showed that although his IQ was a respectable 109 (later tested at 121)^[16] and he had had four years of schooling, he was illiterate; a caseworker concluded he was aggressively antisocial.^[17]

First imprisonment

Less than a month before a scheduled February 1952 parole hearing at Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution to which he had been transferred the previous October on a psychiatrist's recommendation,^[18] Manson sodomized a boy while holding a razor blade against his throat.^[19] He was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered "dangerous". In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution.^[20]

About a month after the transfer, Manson became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.^[21]

After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a hospital waitress, whom he supported via smalltime jobs and grand theft auto. Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, he was again charged with a federal crime; after a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years' probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California.^[22]

Charles Manson, Jr., Manson's son by Rosalie, was born while Manson was in prison. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from his wife and mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles; but in March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. After Manson was caught trying to escape by stealing a car less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, five years' probation was added to his sentence; parole was denied.^[23]

Second imprisonment

Manson received five years parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a sixteen-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. Pleading guilty in September 1959 to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, he received a ten-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman with an arrest record for prostitution tearfully told the court she and Manson were in love and would marry if Manson were freed.^[24] After Manson took that same woman and another girl from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution before the year's end, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued and an indictment for violation of the Mann Act was issued in April 1960.^[25] Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June 1960 when one of his girls was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his ten-year sentence.^[26] In July 1961, after a year spent unsuccessfully appealing the revocation of his probation, Manson was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. Although the charge for violation of the Mann Act had been dropped, the attempt to cash the Treasury check was still a federal offense. His September 1961 annual review noted he had a "tremendous drive to call attention to himself," an observation echoed in September, 1964.^[27] In June 1966, Manson was sent, for the second time in his life, to Terminal Island, in preparation for early release. On March 21, 1967, his release day, he had spent less than half of his thirty-two years outside of institutions.^[28] Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested, unsuccessfully, that he be permitted to stay,^[29] a fact touched on in a 1981 television interview:

Tom Snyder: Let's go back to 1967, the time you were winding up serving a term of a number of years, ten years, and written accounts indicate that you told the authorities, "Don't let me out, I can't cope with the outside world". Do you have a recollection of that? And do you --

Manson: You're making a desperate plea out of something, man. There's no desperate plea out of it. I said I can't handle the maniacs outside, let me back in.

Snyder: I didn't use the word desperate; that's your word, Charles.

Manson: Yeah, well, your inflection and your voice tones were, uh, implications there.^[30]

Rise of the Family

On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in Berkeley. In prison, he had been taught to play guitar by 1930s bank robber Alvin Karpis;^[31][32] now, living mostly by panhandling, he soon got to know one Mary Brunner, a twenty-three-year-old University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate working as an assistant librarian at UC Berkeley. After moving in with her, he overcame her resistance to his bringing other women in to live with them. Before long, they were sharing Brunner's residence with eighteen other women.^[33]

Manson also established himself as a guru in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury which, during 1967's Summer of Love, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included at least some of the Scientology he had studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.^[34]

Before the summer was out, Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. Hitting the road, they roamed as far north as Washington State, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice — western parts of the city and county.^[35]

By an alternate account, which includes no mention of the eighteen girls at Brunner’s place, Manson, apparently accompanied by Brunner, acquired Family members during some months of travels that were undertaken in part in a Volkswagen van; it was November when the school bus, maybe acquired in Sacramento, set out from San Francisco with the enlarged group.^[36]

Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.

The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring 1968, when Dennis Wilson, of The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he had no such intent, Manson began kissing Wilson's feet. Inside the house, Wilson discovered twelve strangers, mostly girls.^[37] Over the next few months, as their number doubled, the Family members who had made themselves part of Wilson's Sunset Boulevard household cost him approximately $100,000. This included a large medical bill for treatment of their gonorrhea and $21,000 for the accidental destruction of an uninsured car of his they borrowed.^[38] Wilson would sing and talk with Manson, whose girls were servants to them both.^[39] Wilson paid for studio time to record songs written and performed by Manson; he introduced Manson to acquaintances of his with roles in the entertainment business. These included Gregg Jakobson, Terry Melcher, and Rudi Altobelli.^[40] Jakobson, who was impressed by "the whole Charlie Manson package" of artist/lifestylist/philosopher, also paid to record Manson material.^[41][42][43]

Spahn Ranch

By August 1968, when Wilson had his manager clear the Family members from his house, Manson had established a base for the group at Spahn's Movie Ranch, near Topanga Canyon.^[44][45] The evictees joined the rest of the Family there.^[46]

Located in (or near) Chatsworth, the ranch had once been a location for the shooting of Western films; then, with its old movie sets run down, it was primarily doing business in horseback rides. While Family members did helpful work around the place, Manson kept the nearly-blind, octogenarian owner, George Spahn, on his side by having Lynette Fromme act as Spahn's eyes and attend to Spahn sexually, along with other girls.^[47][48] For a tiny squeal she would emit when Spahn would pinch her thigh, Fromme, one of the early Family members who had boarded the school bus in San Francisco,^[49] won from Spahn the nickname Squeaky.^[50]

The Family was soon joined at Spahn by Charles Watson, who had met Manson at Dennis Wilson's house. A small-town Texan who had quit college and moved to California,^[51] Watson had given a lift to Wilson, hitchhiking because his cars had been wrecked.^[52] Watson's drawl earned him, too, a George Spahn nickname, Tex.^[53]

Helter Skelter

Main article: Helter Skelter (Manson scenario)

In the first days of November 1968, Manson established the Family at alternate headquarters in Death Valley's environs, where they occupied two unused (or little-used) ranches, Myers and Barker.^[54][55] The former, to which the group had initially headed, was owned by the grandmother of a new girl in the Family; the latter was owned by an elderly, local woman to whom Manson presented himself and a male Family member as musicians in need of a place congenial to their work. When the woman agreed to let them stay there if they'd fix up things, Manson honored her with one of the Beach Boys' gold records,^[56] several of which he'd been given by Dennis Wilson.^[57] Before the end of December, while back at Spahn, Manson and Tex Watson visited a Topanga Canyon acquaintance who played for them The Beatles' White Album, then recently released.^[58] Although Manson was twenty-nine years old and imprisoned when The Beatles first came to America in 1964, he had been all but obsessed with the group. At McNeil, he had told fellow inmates, including Alvin Karpis, that he could surpass the group in fame;^[59][60] to the Family, he spoke of the group as "the soul" and "part of 'the hole in the infinite.'"^[61] Manson had also been telling Family members that racial tension between blacks and whites was growing and that blacks would soon rise up in rebellion in America's cities.^[62][63] He had emphasized Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, which had taken place in April 1968.^[64] On a bitter cold New Year's Eve at Myers Ranch, the Family members, gathered outside around a large fire, listened as Manson explained that the social turmoil he had been predicting had also been predicted by The Beatles.^[65] The White Album songs, he declared, told it all, although in code; in fact, he maintained, the album was directed at the Family itself, an elect group that was being instructed to preserve the worthy from the impending disaster.^[66][67] In early January 1969, the Family escaped Death Valley's cold by establishing yet another base, at a canary-yellow home in Canoga Park, not far from Spahn. Because this locale would allow the Family to remain "submerged beneath the awareness of the outside world," Manson called it the Yellow Submarine, another Beatles reference. There, they prepared for the impending apocalypse, which, around the campfire, Manson had termed "Helter Skelter," after the White Album song of that name. By February, Manson's vision was complete. The Family would create an album whose songs, as subtle as those of The Beatles, would trigger the predicted chaos. Ghastly murders of whites by blacks would be met with retaliation, and a split between racist and non-racist whites would yield whites' self-annihilation. Blacks' triumph, as it were, would merely precede their being ruled by the Family, which would ride out the conflict in "the bottomless pit" — a secret city beneath Death Valley.^[68] At the Canoga Park house, while Family members worked on vehicles and pored over maps to prepare for their desert escape, they also worked on songs for their world-changing album. When they were told Terry Melcher was to come to the house to hear the songs, the girls prepared a meal and cleaned the place; but Melcher never arrived.

Encounter with Tate

On March 23 1969,^[69] Manson called, uninvited, on 10050 Cielo Drive, which he had known as the residence of Terry Melcher.^[70] By that time Melcher was no longer residing there; since that February,^[71] the tenants had been actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski.

Manson was addressed by Shahrokh Hatami, a professional photographer who was a friend of Tate and was there to photograph her in advance of her departure for Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted.^[72]

When Manson told Hatami he was looking for someone whose name Hatami didn't recognize — maybe Melcher — Hatami informed him the place was the Polanski residence; he advised him to try "the back alley," by which he meant the path to the guest house, beyond the main house.^[73]

By this time, Hatami, concerned that a stranger had entered upon the property, was down on the front walk, to confront Manson. When Tate appeared behind Hatami, in the house's front door, and asked "Who is it?", he told her a man was looking for someone. Hatami and Tate maintained their positions while Manson, without a word, went back to the guest house, returned a minute or two later, and left.^[74]

That evening, Manson reentered the property and again went back to the guest house, where, presuming to enter the enclosed porch, he spoke with Rudi Altobelli, who was just coming out of the shower. Altobelli, owner of the property, was the lessor to Melcher and then to the Polanskis.^[75]

Possibly, Manson was aware of Melcher's departure from the place and had actually come in search of Altobelli, ^[76] but he asked Altobelli for Melcher. Altobelli said Melcher had moved to Malibu. Altobelli also said, falsely, that he did not know Melcher's new address. In response to a question from Manson, Altobelli said he himself was in the entertainment business, although he was sure Manson already knew that. Altobelli had met Manson the previous year at Dennis Wilson's home, where Wilson had been playing some Manson musical recordings on which Altobelli had then complimented Manson lukewarmly.^[77]

When Altobelli informed Manson he was going out of the country the next day, Manson said he'd like to speak with him upon his return, but Altobelli lied that he would be gone for more than a year. In response to a direct question from Altobelli, Manson explained that he had been directed to the guest house by the persons in the main house; here Altobelli expressed the wish that Manson not disturb his tenants.^[78]

Manson left. As Altobelli flew with Tate to Rome the next day, Tate asked him whether "that creepy-looking guy" had gone back to the guest house the day before.^[79]

Hinman murder

At Spahn Ranch, in June, Manson told a male Family member Helter Skelter was "ready to happen." Remarking that "blackie never did anything without whitey showin' him how," he said, "[I]t looks like we're gonna have to show blackie how to do it."^[80] On July 27, the murders that would be notorious were heralded, when Family member Bobby Beausoleil stabbed to death Family acquaintance Gary Hinman in a dispute over money. Before Beausoleil killed him on Manson's instruction, Hinman had been held by Beausoleil, Mary Brunner, and Susan Atkins at his Topanga Canyon residence for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. Before leaving the house, Beausoleil wrote "Political piggy" on the wall, in Hinman's blood.^[81] On August 6, Beausoleil was arrested after he was caught driving Hinman's car, whose tire well held the murder weapon.^[82] On August 8, Manson told Family members at Spahn Ranch, "Now is the time for Helter Skelter."^[83][84][85]

Tate murders

On the night of August 8, 1969, Manson directed Tex Watson to take Family members Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel (one of the hitchhikers picked up by Dennis Wilson)^[86] to "that house where Melcher used to live" and "totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can."^[87][88] He told the girls to do as Tex would instruct them.^[89]

When the four arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who'd been to the house, on Family business,^[90] climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into August 9.

Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked it there and walked back up. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm,^[91] they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Telling the girls to lie in the bushes, Watson stepped out with a command to halt and shot to death Steven Parent, eighteen-year-old driver of the approaching car.^[92][93] After Watson had prepared their entry to the main house by cutting the screen of an open window, through which he could slip to let the others in through the door, he told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate.^[94][95] He proceeded to get himself and the other two girls into the house.

"I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s business",^[96] Watson told Polanski's friend Wojciech Frykowski,^[97] who was awakened from his sleep on the living-room couch as Watson whispered to Atkins. This was after he kicked him in the head.^[98] On Watson’s direction, Atkins found and, with Krenwinkel's help,^[99] brought to the living room the house’s three other occupants — Tate, eight and a half months pregnant;^[100] her once-lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist;^[101] and Frykowski’s lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune.^[102][103] As Watson began to tie the necks of Tate and Sebring together with rope he'd brought and slung up over a beam, Sebring’s act of chivalry, his second in protesting rough treatment of Tate, prompted Watson to shoot him. After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, which proved to hold about seventy dollars, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.^[104]

Frykowski, whose hands had been bound with a towel, got free and began struggling with Atkins, who had been guarding him. As he fought his way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson, who joined in against him, struck him over the head with the gun multiple times, stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice.^[105] Around this time, Kasabian, drawn up from the driveway by the victims’ screams, arrived outside the door and, in a vain effort to halt the goings-on, lied to Atkins that someone was coming.^[106]

Inside the house, Folger had got away from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area.^[107] Pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed and, finally, tackled her, she was finished off by Watson’s knife, her stab wounds totaling twenty-eight.^[108] As Frykowski struggled across the lawn, he, too, was dispatched with Watson’s stabs, which, added to ones he’d received from Watson and Atkins earlier, brought his stab wounds to fifty-one.^[109] Back in the house, Tate, who pleaded for her own life and that of the child she was carrying, was stabbed to death by Atkins, Watson, or both,^[110] her wounds totaling sixteen.^[111]

As the four Family members had been heading out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the girls to "leave a sign… something witchy." Using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, Atkins wrote "pig" on the house’s front door, in Tate's blood.

As they rode home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which, along with their weapons, they ditched in the hills.^[112][113]

LaBianca murders

The next night, six Family members, including the four from night one, rode out at Manson’s instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, "to show [them] how to do it."^[114][115] After a few hours’ ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them,^[116][117] Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive, home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, dress shop co-owner.^[118] Located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, this was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.^[119] After going up the driveway and looking in a window, Manson took Watson with him through the unlocked back door.^[120] Rousing the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint, Manson had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Manson’s instructions to cover the couple’s heads with pillowcases, which he bound in place with lamp cord. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instruction that the couple be killed.^[121] Before leaving Spahn, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night's weapons;^[122] now, sending the girls from the kitchen to the bedroom, to which Rosemary had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno with a chrome-plated bayonet, the first thrust going into the man's throat. Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew him there to discover Rosemary was keeping the girls at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. Striking her down with several stabs of the bayonet, he returned to the living room and stabbed Leno the balance of a dozen times. After he was done, he carved “WAR” on the man’s exposed stomach.^[123] Returning to the bedroom where Krenwinkel was stabbing Rosemary with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen, Watson, following Manson’s instruction to make sure each of the girls played a part, told Van Houten to stab her too.^[124] She did on the exposed buttocks and elsewhere, possibly post-mortem^[125], to bring the total number of stab wounds to forty-one. While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote "Rise" and "Death to pigs" on the walls; she wrote "HeaLter [sic] SkeLter" on the refrigerator door. All the script was in blood. Krenwinkel gave the vanquished Leno fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach; she planted a steak knife in his throat.^[126][127] Hoping for a double crime, Manson had gone on to direct Kasabian to drive to the Venice home of an actor acquaintance of hers, another "piggy." Depositing the second trio of Family members at the man's apartment building, he drove back to Spahn, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home.^[128] Kasabian thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. Before the group left, in abandonment of the murder plan, Susan Atkins defecated in the stairwell.^[129]

Investigation and arrest

On August 10 — while the Tate autopsies were under way and the LaBianca bodies were yet to be discovered — detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which had jurisdiction in the Hinman case, informed LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate case of the bloody writing at the Hinman house; they even mentioned that the Hinman suspect, Beausoleil, was associated with a group of hippies led by “a guy named Charlie.” The Tate team, thinking the Tate murders a consequence of a drug transaction, ignored the information.^[130]

Parent, the shooting victim in the Tate driveway, was determined to have been an acquaintance of William Garretson, a youngster hired by Rudi Altobelli to take care of the property while Altobelli himself was away;^[131] at the time of the killers' arrival, he had been leaving Cielo Drive, after a visit to Garretson.^[132] Held briefly as a Tate suspect, Garretson, who lived in the guest house and told police he had neither seen nor heard anything on the murder night, was released on August 11.^[133]

On August 12, LAPD told the press it had ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca homicides.^[134] On August 16, the sheriff’s office raided Spahn Ranch and arrested Manson and twenty-five others, “suspects in a major auto theft ring” that had been stealing Volkswagens and converting them into dune buggies. Weapons were seized, but because the warrant had been misdated the group was released a few days later.^[135]

By the end of August, when virtually all leads had gone nowhere, a report by the LaBianca detectives, generally younger than the Tate team, noted a possible connection between the bloody writings at the LaBianca house and “the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album.” ^[136]

In mid-October, the LaBianca team, still working separately from the Tate team, checked with the sheriff’s office about possible similar crimes and learned of the Hinman case. They also learned that the Hinman detectives had now spoken with Beausoleil’s girlfriend (Kitty Lutesinger), who had been arrested a few days earlier with members of “the Manson Family.”^[137]

The arrests had taken place at the desert ranches, to which the Family had moved and where, unknown to authorities, its members had been in the midst of a search for a hole in the ground — access to the Bottomless Pit.^[138][139] Known to authorities was that someone had set fire to a piece of earthmoving equipment in the area.^[140][141] Raiding the Myers and Barker ranches, authorities had found stolen dune buggies and other vehicles and had arrested two dozen persons, including Manson. Manson was found hiding in a cabinet beneath a bathroom sink at Barker.^[142]

A month after speaking with Beausoleil's girlfriend themselves, the LaBianca detectives made contact with members of a motorcycle gang that she had told them Manson had tried to enlist as his bodyguard while the Family was at Spahn.^[143] While the gang members were providing information that was suggesting a link between Manson and the murders,^[144] a dormitory mate of Susan Atkins succeeded in informing LAPD of the Family’s involvement in the crimes.^[145] One of those arrested at Barker, Atkins had been booked for the Hinman murder after she’d confirmed to the sheriff’s detectives that she’d been involved in it, as Beausoleil’s girlfriend had told them.^[146] Transferred to a detention center in Los Angeles, she had begun talking to two women she bunked with.^[147]

On December 1 1969, having acted on the information from these sources, LAPD announced warrants for the arrest of Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian in the Tate case; the suspects' involvement in the LaBianca murders was noted. Manson and Atkins, already in custody, were not mentioned; the connection between the LaBianca case and Van Houten, who was also among those arrested near Death Valley, had not yet been recognized.^[148]

Watson and Krenwinkel, too, were already under arrest, authorities in Texas and Alabama having picked them up on notice from LAPD.^[149] On December 2, in New Hampshire, Kasabian turned herself in.^[150]

Conviction and sentencing

At the trial, which began June 15 1970,^[151] the prosecution's main witness was Kasabian, who, along with Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, had been charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy.^[152] Not having participated in the killings, she was granted immunity in exchange for testimony that detailed the nights of crimes.^[153] The prosecution placed the triggering of Helter Skelter as the main motive.^[154] The crime scenes' bloody White Album references — pig, rise, helter skelter — were correlated with testimony about Manson predictions that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of “pigs” on walls in victims’ blood.^[155] Testimony as to Manson's having declared "now is the time for Helter Skelter" was supplemented with Kasabian’s testimony that, on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson considered discarding on the street a wallet (Rosemary's) he obtained in the LaBianca house;^[156] he "wanted a black person to pick it up and use the credit cards so that the people, the establishment, would think it was some sort of an organized group that killed these people." “I want to show blackie how to do it,” Manson had said as the Family members had driven along after the departure from the LaBianca house.^[157] The defendants, acting in concert with each other, frequently disrupted the courtroom proceedings by shouting at the judge and witnesses. The defendants were frequently removed from the courtroom for this behavior. On October 5, 1970, Manson, denied by the court permission to question a prosecution witness whom the defense attorneys had declined to cross-examine, leaped over the defense table in what might have been the hope of stabbing Judge Charles Older with a pencil. Thereafter, Older allegedly began wearing a revolver under his robes;^[158] just before Christmas, while the prosecution was into its closing arguments, he decided the defendants would not be permitted in the courtroom for the remainder of the trial's guilt phase.^[159] On January 25 1971, guilty verdicts were returned against the defendants on all counts. This included the three counts against Van Houten, who had been charged with the two LaBianca murders and conspiracy to commit them.^[160] In the guilt phase of the trial, the defendants had shocked the court by resting without calling a single witness: the lawyers for the women had been unwilling to let Manson engineer a defense in which their clients would testify and take all guilt upon themselves.^[161] In the penalty phase, the jurors got a glimpse of the defense Manson had had in mind. Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten testified that the murders had been conceived as “copycat” versions of the Hinman murder, for which Atkins now took credit. The murders, they explained, had been intended to draw police suspicion away from the imprisoned Bobby Beausoleil, by resembling the crime with which he had been charged. This plan had supposedly been the work of, and carried out under the guidance of, not Manson, but someone allegedly in love with Beausoleil — Linda Kasabian.^[162] The narrative had weak points, including Atkins's inability to explain why, as she was maintaining, she had written "political piggy" at the Hinman house in the first place.^[163] It did not persuade the jury, which, on March 29, 1971, returned verdicts recommending all four defendants receive the death penalty.^[164] In between the body of the trial and the closing arguments, Ronald Hughes, who had been representing Leslie van Houten, had disappeared, unreturned from a weekend trip. He had been one of the attorneys who had stood up to Manson and refused to let his client testify. On the day the verdicts recommending the death penalty were returned, his badly decomposed body was found wedged between two boulders in Ventura County.^[165]

Aftermath

Protracted extradition of Tex Watson from his native Texas,^[166][167] where he had resettled a month before his arrest,^[168] resulted in his being tried separately. The trial commenced in August 1971; by October, he, too, had been found guilty on seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy. He, too, was sentenced to death.^[169]

In February 1972, the five convicts' death sentences were automatically reduced to life in prison by California v. Anderson 64 Cal.2d 633, 414 P.2d 366, (Cal. 1972), in which the Supreme Court of California abolished the death penalty in that state.^[170]

In a trial whose guilt phase appears to have extended from August to November 1971,^[171] Manson was found guilty of the murders of Gary Hinman and Spahn Ranch horse wrangler or stuntman Donald "Shorty" Shea, the latter having been killed approximately ten days after the August 16, 1969, sheriff's raid on the ranch. Manson participated in the Shea murder, of which, in separate trials, two Family members were also found guilty; he was sentenced to life imprisonment.^{[172][173][174]} (Manson had apparently been of the view that Shea was trying to get George Spahn to run the Family off the ranch. He was also annoyed the white Shea had married a black woman; and he seems, too, to have suspected that Shea had helped set up the August 16 raid. In addition, Shea possibly knew about the Tate-LaBianca killings.)^[175][176]

Before the conclusion of Manson's trial for the Tate and LaBianca murders, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times tracked down Manson's mother, remarried and living in the Pacific Northwest. The once Kathleen Maddox indicated that, in childhood, her son had known no neglect; he had even been "pampered by all the women who surrounded him."^[177][178]

On September 5 1975, Squeaky Fromme attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, to which she and Manson follower Sandra Good had moved to be near Manson while he was incarcerated at Folsom State Prison. A subsequent search of the apartment shared by Fromme, Good, and a Family recruit turned up evidence that, coupled with later actions on the part of Good, resulted in Good's conviction for conspiring to send threatening communications through the United States mail and transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce. (The threats that were involved were against corporate executives and US government officials and had to do with supposed environmental dereliction on their part.)^[179]

In his 1978 autobiography (as told to Ray Hoekstra), Charles Watson stated that he stabbed Sharon Tate and that Susan Atkins did not.^[180]

In the 1980s, Manson gave three notable interviews. The first, recorded at California Medical Facility and aired June 13, 1981, was by Tom Snyder for NBC's The Tomorrow Show; the second, recorded at San Quentin Prison and aired March 7, 1986, was by Charlie Rose for CBS News Nightwatch. Rose's interview won the national news Emmy Award for "Best Interview" in 1987.^[181] The last, with Geraldo Rivera in 1988, was part of that journalist's sensationalist prime-time special on Satanism, and, though appealing to a large popular audience, did not garner the critical acclaim of the Rose piece.

In December 1987, Fromme, serving a life sentence for the assassination attempt, escaped briefly from Alderson Federal Prison Camp. She was trying to reach Manson, whom she had heard had cancer; she was apprehended within days.^[182]

In a 1994 conversation with Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, once-Manson-follower Catherine Share stated that her testimony in the penalty phase of Manson’s trial was a fabrication intended to save Manson from the gas chamber and was given on Manson’s explicit direction.^[183] Share’s testimony had introduced the copycat-motive story, which the testimony of the three female defendants echoed and according to which the Tate-LaBianca murders had been the idea of Linda Kasabian.^[184] In a 1997 segment of the tabloid television program Hard Copy, Share seemed to indicate her testimony had been given under a Manson threat of physical harm.^[185]

In January 1996, a Manson web site whose status is difficult to determine was established by latter-day Manson follower George Stimson, who was helped by Sandra Good. The latter had been released from prison in 1985, after she had served two-thirds of her fifteen-year sentence for the death threats.^[186][187]

In a 1998-9 interview in Seconds magazine, Bobby Beausoleil rejected the view that Manson ordered him to kill Gary Hinman.^[188] He stated Manson did come to Hinman's house and slash Hinman with a sword; in a 1981 interview with Oui magazine, he denied this. Beausoleil stated that when he read about the Tate murders in the newspaper, "I wasn't even sure at that point — really, I had no idea who had done it until Manson's group were actually arrested for it. It had only crossed my mind and I had a premonition, perhaps. There was some little tickle in my mind that the killings might be connected with them...." In the Oui magazine interview, he had stated, "When [the Tate-LaBianca murders] happened, I knew who had done it. I was fairly certain."^[189]

In a program broadcast in July 1999 on E!, William Garretson, once the young caretaker at Cielo Drive, indicated he had, in fact, seen and heard a portion of the Tate murders from his location in the property’s guest house. This comported with the unofficial results of a polygraph examination that had been given to Garretson on August 10, 1969, and that had effectively eliminated him as a suspect.^[190] The LAPD officer who conducted the examination had concluded Garretson was "clean" on participation in the crimes but "muddy" as to his having heard anything.^[191] The E! show included no direct statement from Garretson why he had withheld his knowledge of the events.^[192]

In 1987, NBC interviewed the unshackled and unapologetic Manson. This stirred up controversy within NBC News, and the footage was never aired. Finally, in 2007, the interview was played for the first time on NBC's Today Show on September 5, but NBC chose to show only 7 minutes. MSNBC showed "The Mind of Manson," more from the 1987 interview the same night.

Recordings by Charles Manson

Main article: Recordings by Charles Manson

On March 6 1970, to help finance his defense, Manson released an album entitled Lie: The Love & Terror Cult. Put out on the 'Awareness' label originally, followed by ESP Records, it included "Cease to Exist", which, as "Never Learn Not to Love", had been recorded by the Beach Boys. Several recordings by Manson have been released since. In 1993, American hard rock band Guns N' Roses included Manson's song "Look at Your Game, Girl" on their cover album "The Spaghetti Incident?". Though Guns N' Roses' lead singer Axl Rose has said recently that he would remove the track, Manson's song remains on the album as of 2007. The song "My Monkey" by Marilyn Manson, found on "Portrait of an American Family" released 1994, contains a piece of text from Charles Manson's "Mechanical Man". The lyrics are credited simply to "Manson". The album was originally named The Manson Family Album.

Charles Manson in popular culture

As early as June 1970, when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine,^[193] Manson was connected to pop culture, in which his presence is enduring.^[194] The Rolling Stone story framed the vexed and similarly-enduring question of the Family's relationship to the 1960s counterculture in which it emerged: "Is Manson a hippie or isn't he?"^[195] This was only the beginning of what would be a lasting influence on many areas of popular culture from music to television. Many songs, such as Neil Young's "Revolution Blues" off of his On the Beach, have been written about Manson. His own songs have been covered by other bands, such as an unadvertised cover of the Charles Manson song "Look at Your Game Girl" on the Guns N' Roses collection of punk and rock covers entitled "The Spaghetti Incident?". He has even influenced band and musician names such as American shock rock musician Marilyn Manson's stage name.^[196] Numerous television episodes and movies have been made which either tell Manson's story or involve him as a character, often for comedic value as in an episode of South Park entitled 'Merry Christmas Charlie Manson'.

Parole hearings

On May 23, 2007, Manson was denied parole for the eleventh time.^[197] He will not be eligible again for parole until 2012. He is presently an inmate in the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California, inmate #B33920.

Further reading

Books

• Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry (Norton, 1974; Arrow books, 1992 edition, ISBN 0-09-997500-9; W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, ISBN 0-393-32223-8)
• Manson in His Own Words by Charles Manson (note that Manson denies authorship), as told to Nuel Emmons (Grove Press, 1988, ISBN 0-8021-3024-0)
• The Manson File by Nikolas Schreck (Amok Press, 1988, ISBN 0-941693-04-X)
• The Family by Ed Sanders (Thunder's Mouth Press rev update edition, 2002, ISBN 1-56025-396-7)
• The Charles Manson Murder Trial: A Headline Court Case by Michael J. Pellowski (Enslow Publishers, 2004, ISBN 0-7660-2167-X)
• by Tommy Udo (Sanctuary Records, 2002, ISBN 1-86074-388-9)
• Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars by Edward George, Dary Matera (St. Martin's Press, 1999, ISBN 0-312-20970-3)
• Will you die for me? by Charles Watson (F. H. Revell, 1978, ISBN 0-8007-0912-8)
• The Garbage People by John Gilmore (Omega Press, 1971)
• My Life with Charles Manson, by Paul Watkins with Guillermo Soledad, Bantam, 1979 ISBN 0-553-12788-8.
• by John Gilmore, (Amok Books, 2000, ISBN 1-878923-13-7)
• 5 to Die by Jerry LeBlanc & Ivor Davis, Holloway House Publishing, 1971, ISBN 0-87067-306-8
• , by Curt Rowlett, Chapter 10, Charles Manson, Son of Sam and the Process Church of the Final Judgment: Exploring the Alleged Connections. 2006. Lulu Press. ISBN 1-4116-6083-8.

Films

• Manson documentary directed by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick (1973)
• Charles Manson Superstar documentary directed by Nikolas Schreck (Music Video Distribu, DVD Release Date: 2002)
• The Manson Massacre directed by Kentucky Jones (1972)
• Helter Skelter directed by Tom Gries (1976; Director's Cut: 2004, Warner Home Video)
• The Book of Manson directed by Raymond Pettibon (1989)
• The Manson Family directed by Jim Van Bebber (2003)
• Manson Family Movies written, directed, produced by John Aes-Nihil (2003)
• Live Freaky! Die Freaky! directed by John Roecker (2003)
• Cold Blood Canyon inspired by the Manson murders, directed by Alec Tuckman (2007)

References