Demonic conman who killed the 1960s DREAM
As Charles Manson dies at 83, how his gang’s depraved murders brought America’s era of peace and love to a grotesque end
LIKE the swastika he carved on his forehead, no other mass killer in modern history has left quite such an indelible mark on America’s soul as Charles Manson. The mastermind of a chillingly ferocious, macabre and apparently random killing spree in Los Angeles nearly 50 years ago, Manson managed to radiate an evil menace even during his decades behind bars.
Aged 83, he died on Sunday of natural causes in a California hospital where he had been taken on a medical trolley surrounded by five prison guards. His passing is unlikely to end the extraordinary mystique that has surrounded a semi-literate habitual criminal and manipulative conman who revelled in his notoriety.
The weekend of violence in August 1969 not only claimed the lives of Hollywood star Sharon Tate and six others, but it also killed off the Sixties as the decade of peace and love.
As the Svengali-like figure who was able to send his harem of drugged-up young women off to murder on little more than the force of his personality and an apocalyptic interpretation of Beatles lyrics, Manson embodied the dark side of the Swinging Sixties.
He and his ‘family’ of followers twisted the decade’s ideals of free love, heavy drug use and anti-establishment resistance against the State to create a hippie death cult of unbelievable viciousness. The resulting trial gripped the world and horrified America, but in many ways it provided an appropriate curtain raiser for the Seventies, a decade of U.S. disillusionment dominated by the Watergate scandal and defeat in Vietnam.
Manson, who continued to spout hatred in prison, remained an enigma to the end.
Was he a paranoid schizophrenic who genuinely believe the demonic madness he spouted, or was it an act, the perverse showmanship of a sociopath who’d always hungered for fame?
He never showed any sign of contrition, and occasional prison mugshots taken over the years since he was jailed in 1971 showed the same wild and piercing dark eyes staring out from under that forbidding swastika he’d etched on his forehead after his conviction.
‘The mark on my head simulates the dead head black stamp of rejection, anti-Church, falling cross, devil sign, death, terror, fear,’ he once explained.
Charles Manson was always a very unlikely messiah. Born to a 16-year-old unmarried and hard- drinking mother, who may have been a prostitute, his official birth documents simply called him ‘No Name Maddox’. By The time he ordered his murder spree aged 32, Manson — just 5ft 2in — had spent more than half his life in prison or other correctional institutions. After his mother was jailed for robbing a service station when he was five, Manson was largely raised by an uncle and aunt in West Virginia.
They dragged him to church each Sunday where, despite hating it, he developed a knack for memorising the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations. It did little good as the compulsive thief and cheque forger spent much of his childhood in juvenile detention centres and — eventually — prisons.
At one reform school, he raped a 14-year-old boy at knifepoint.
Later, Manson had two shortlived marriages, one of them to a prostitute he would pimp out to other men.
Though his start in life could hardly have been less auspicious, he harboured dreams of wealth, fame and power. While in prison as a young man, he embraced Scientology and devoured the works of the self-improvement and leadership expert Dale Carnegie, author of How To Win Friends And Influence People.
He also learned to play the guitar, and became obsessed with the Beatles, vowing to become even more successful than them. After he was released from a second prison stint in 1967 — having violated his probation over a forged cheque — he moved to the capital of hippiedom, the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, in time for the famous ‘Summer of Love’.
The city was full of lost, troubled young women who swamped the area expecting to find a new world of peace and love.
Aware that he had an ability to bend women to his will, Manson preyed on them, attracting a growing entourage of at least 18 female devotees whom he forced to work for him selling drugs and stealing.
A master manipulator, he slept with all of them and won their unswerving trust and loyalty. He’s believed to have fathered at least three children, and possibly four.
With his Jesus-like beard, he became something of a guru, peddling a bizarre creed which was a concoction of Scientology, the Book of Revelations, hippie anti- authoritarianism and the writings of Hitler.
It was complete drivel, yet it drew him a following among some two dozen drug-addled young people who’d fled family issues and were looking for leadership.
By the end of 1967, the group — about a dozen of them, later dubbed the Manson Family — had set off to tour the U.S. on a bus decorated with hippie art. They ended up in Los Angeles, where Manson worked on getting a record deal — farming out his female followers for sex with any man he thought might be useful to him.
Manson even struck up a friendship with the Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. However, it soon became clear that his grandiose dreams of success were not going to be realised.
Fearing his disciples might lose faith in him, he distracted them with his own insane version of an approaching apocalypse.
He changed his name from Maddox to Manson — as in ‘Son of Man’ — implying that he was Christ, and announced that his ‘family’ were reincarnations of Jesus’s disciples.
He then spoke of a cataclysmic race war which would be won by blacks. However, he went on, after exterminating all the whites (except the Family, who would hide in secret caves beneath California’s Death Valley), they would be unable to govern themselves and would be forced to turn to him for salvation.
Manson — who by then had relocated his commune to a rundown ranch in the California desert in preparation for this civil war — ensured his group were more susceptible to his will by doling out daily rations of the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD. He called this apocalypse ‘ Helter Skelter’ after a Beatles song from their 1968 White Album.
The song is actually an innocent ditty about a children’s playground slide, but Manson insisted the Fab Four had somehow read his thoughts had embedded coded messages in the album, which he and his Family would listen to incessantly.
They borrowed the title of another of the album’s songs, Piggies, and used it as the name for their ‘establishment’ enemies.
Manson, a virulent racist who would one day abuse black prison guards even as they gave him his breakfast, wanted to help the Helter Skelter apocalypse come about by carrying out a string of brutal murders of rich white people.
He hoped the killings would be blamed on African- American
radicals in the Black Panther movement. He knew just the house to target — a grand Hollywood home which had once belonged to a successful record producer, who had spurned Manson’s attempts to make it in the record industry. Even though Manson knew the producer had moved away, on August 8, 1969, he dispatched four of his followers — three of them women — to kill whoever was there.
They found the beautiful actress Sharon Tate, who was more than eight months pregnant. Her husband, film director Roman Polanski, was away in London, but she had three house guests with her that evening. They included Abigail Folger, a coffee heiress, and Jay Sebring, a hairdresser to the stars.
They were all stabbed and shot to death, even after Tate begged them to spare the life of her unborn child. Another man, who was visiting the house’s caretaker, was also murdered.
Tate was left curled in a foetal position as if to protect her baby. She and Jay Sebring, an ex-boyfriend, were connected by a rope hung over a rafter and looped around their necks.
Those involved in the killings later said they were heavily under the influence of LSD at the time.
Following Manson’s instructions to leave a ‘witchy’ sign that might implicate the Black Panthers, one of his female assassins wrote ‘Pig’ in Tate’s blood on the front door.
The murders became national news the following day after the Polanskis’ housekeeper discovered the bodies that morning.
There’s no evidence the police ever suspected the Black Panthers, instead concluding it had been a drug deal that went wrong.
They initially arrested the house’s 19- year- old caretaker, William Garretson, refusing to believe he had not heard anything from a nearby guesthouse.
A wave of terror quickly swept the city, but Manson wasn’t satisfied they had created enough havoc.
vowing to ‘show them how to do it’, he decreed that another murder spree must be carried out — and that this time he would be involved. So it was that he accompanied a ten- strong group of followers, who set out the following night to the other side of Los Angeles, and the home of a randomly chosen wealthy couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianco.
After Manson tied them up and left, they, too, were frenziedly stabbed to death. Their murderers wrote ‘Kill the Pigs’ in blood on a wall, and even carved ‘War’ on Leno LaBianco’s torso.
even despite such shared characteristics as the ‘pig’ references in blood, police initially ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca killings.
It wasn’t until the end of August that the detectives investigating the LaBianca killings noted in a report the connection between the bloody writings on their walls and ‘the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album’. In the months it took them to arrest the Manson Family, Los Angeles descended into fearful mayhem.
Gun sales soared in Beverly Hills, off-duty police were hired to patrol homes and the price of guard dogs jumped sevenfold.
Fearing that they were the main targets, celebrities went into panic mode.
Frank Sinatra reportedly went into hiding, Steve McQueen — a friend of Sebring — started carrying a gun in his car and Mia Farrow missed Tate’s funeral, fearing she might be next. POLICE investigators spent months looking fruitlessly for a lead while the gang decided to go to ground. In fact, it’s possible they could never have solved these appalling crimes.
But then a member of the Family, who had in the meantime been sent to prison for a separate murder, blabbed about her involvement in the killings to her cellmates. They promptly told prison officials.
The 1970 trial of Manson and three female members of his gang was a global sensation, providing a bleak end to a decade that had started so idealistically as the U.S. recovered from the privations of post- war life and started to enjoy the newfound wealth that grew through the Fifties and into the Sixties.
Americans simply could not understand — and were repulsed and frightened by — what it was that had possessed young women from good families to break into people’s homes at night, dressed in black and armed with knives, and so cold-bloodedly slaughter
complete strangers. Prosecutors were helped enormously by the fact that Linda Kasabian, a Family member present on both murderous nights — but who insisted she didn’t participate in the killings — became their star witness.
Yet even in court, Manson — who denied all responsibility for the murders — was able to stage-manage events in order to keep the spotlight on him.
When he carved an X on to his forehead (to symbolise his detachment — being ‘crossed off’ — from established society), his three co-defendants immediately did the same.
Manson also lunged at the judge with a pencil outside the courthouse, and a small group of chanting Family members staged a vigil.
As the trial unfolded, America became gripped in the way that it would many years later by every twist of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The court heard how the Family had planned to kill a string of A-list celebrities, including Tom Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra.
They dreamed up a plan to skin Sinatra alive and make his hide into purses which they would sell on Hollywood Boulevard. It was like the outrageous plot of a lowbudget horror film.
In the end, Manson was convicted of nine counts of murder (including two men who were killed separately) and sentenced to death. However, California ended capital punishment a year later, at which point his sentence was commuted to life.
In prison, where Manson played guitar, and made little models of scorpions and spiders out of threads from his socks, he continued to exploit his notoriety.
He broke prison rules more than 100 times, and was charged with assault, repeated possession of a weapon, setting his mattress ablaze and trying to cause a flood. Officials said he made voodoo dolls of people and stuck pins in them. Manson in turn was the target of several attacks from fellow prisoners, one of whom dowsed him with paint thinner before setting him on fire.
Manson’s applications for parole were turned down 12 times. None of his jailed followers have yet been able to win their freedom, either, despite renouncing their loyalty to him. MANSON has never shown an ounce of remorse. ‘Maybe I should have killed four, five hundred people, then I would have felt better,’ he once said. The sheer wickedness of the man didn’t prevent him from attracting new followers when he was in jail. One of them, Afton Burton, started writing to him in 2007 when she was 17.
She moved close to his prison so she could visit him — and was allowed to exchange a single kiss at the beginning and end of every visit. She later announced she had become engaged to Manson, then 80, but called off the wedding after admitting a marriage was hopelessly unrealistic.
More than 30 biographies have been written about Manson, who has also inspired TV shows, pop songs and even performers to name themselves after him. As Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor at his trial, observed: ‘The very name Manson has become a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure.’
But Manson also ensured that few can now remember the Summer of Love without thinking of the Summer of Hate it spawned.
It was a pivotal moment in the cultural history of America, when the vision of the sun-kissed West Coast, where people wore a flower in their hair, was shattered by a darkness that spread its tentacles far and wide