Charles Manson’s son wrestles with father’s legacy
The soft-spoken man with the crooked smile and bright blue eyes wants to change the way the world thinks about his father.
He says his dad has been misunderstood for half a century. Unfairly blamed. Wrongly vilified. The man is 51. His name is Michael Brunner.
His father was Charles Manson.
“I would say 95 percent of the public looks at Charlie as this mass-murdering dog, and it’s really, obviously, just not true,” Brunner says. “He didn’t necessarily kill.”
Brunner stops. He is very nervous. He has spoken publicly about his notorious bloodline just once before, and that was 26 years ago. He is out of practice and deeply conflicted. He has guarded his privacy for decades. But now, loyalty to a biological father he has never known wins out.
“Can we start again?” he asks.
He continues. Then pauses. Whispers. “I thought this was going to be so easy.”
Very little is easy when you’re the only son of America’s most famous cult leader and Mary Theresa Brunner, the first member recruited into the Manson “family,” as his followers were known.
When the man who shares your nose and your grin persuaded his disciples to commit nine gruesome murders in what prosecutors argued was an effort to incite a race war on orders imagined to be encoded in the Beatles’ White Album, a scenario they referred to as “Helter Skelter.”
When you have decided it is time to set the record straight.
“I guess I’m here now for, just for posterity, (to) let people know where I’m standing now,” Brunner says. “I’m still not looking for any kind of celebrity. I mean, this isn’t something that you run around and brag about.”
On Aug. 8, 1969, Brunner – born Valentine Michael Manson, aka Sunstone Hawk or Pooh Bear – was 14 months old. His mother was behind bars, locked up in L.A. County’s Sybil Brand Institute for Women, having just been arrested for using stolen credit cards.
That was the night Charles Manson dispatched Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to a house on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. Each had a change of clothes. All but Krenwinkel wielded a knife. Watson had a gun.
Early the next morning, actress Sharon Tate was dead, stabbed 16 times and hung from a beam in her living room. She was 8{ months pregnant and had begged to save her unborn son. Four others – Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski and Steven Parent – died that night at the hands of Manson’s followers. The next night, “family” members slaughtered Leno and Rosemary Labianca in their Los Feliz home and desecrated their corpses.
In his opening statement to the jury in the nine-month trial, chief prosecutor Vincent T. Bugliosi described Manson as a “dictatorial leader” whose followers were “slavishly obedient to him,” and called Manson’s principal motive “almost as bizarre as the murders themselves.”
That motive, he said at the time, “was to ignite Helter Skelter, in other words, start the blackwhite revolution by making it look like the black people had murdered the five Tate victims and Mr. and Mrs. La Bianca, thereby causing the white community to turn against the black man and ultimately lead to a civil war between blacks and whites, a war Manson foresaw the black man winning.”
By the time Manson and his crew had been convicted and sentenced to death, “Pooh Bear” was living with his maternal grandparents in Eau Claire, Wis. George and Elsie Brunner eventually adopted the boy, gave him their name and raised him as their son.
They “gave me what I needed to survive and thrive, and pushed me through school and pushed me through sports and made sure that I was doing the right thing,” Brunner said in a wideranging interview in early July. “I have been loved.”
When his adoption was official in 1976, Brunner’s grandparents threw a party. The neighbors came. Everyone brought gifts. It was like having an “extra birthday,” he said.
“I think they wanted to get rid of the Manson name because of school and to make me a little more normal,” he said. “You know, so I wasn’t being pestered or bullied or that sort of thing, which didn’t happen much.”
But his small-town Wisconsin childhood was fraught with complications. Brunner called his grandparents Mom and Dad. Because of the adoption, Mary was legally his sister; his aunts and uncles were his cousins. Still, he said, he knew that the woman who called every Sunday from a California prison where she was serving time for armed robbery was his mother.
Which eventually lead to questions, he said. If that’s my biological mother, who’s my biological father? George and Elsie never lied to him, Brunner said, but he was never good with names, would forget who is father was, would ask and ask and ask.
“‘What’s my father’s name again?’ ‘Charles Manson.’ And then I’d ask them to tell me about him,” Brunner recounted. “‘Oh, he’s a crazy guy.’ ... I don’t think they lied. They told me what I needed to hear and what they needed to say.”