A murderous sociopath is dead. His impact lives on.
MANSON FAMILY VICTIM SHARON TATE BECAME THE FACE OF VICTIMS’ RIGHTS IN THE U. S.
Sharon Tate begged for more time. She was due to give birth to a son in two weeks and pleaded, “Please don’t kill me. I just want to have my baby.” One of Charles Manson’s followers then stabbed the actress 16 times, and with a towel dipped in her blood, wrote “PIG” on her front door.
Fifteen years after her daughter’s death, Doris Tate conjured that futile plea as she sat across from a Manson Family member convicted of killing Tate and four others at the star’s home on Aug. 9, 1969.
“What mercy, sir, did you show my daughter when she was begging for her life?” Doris Tate asked Charles “Tex” Watson during his 1984 parole hearing. “When will I come up for parole? Can you tell me that? Will the seven victims and possibly more walk out of their graves if you get parole?”
The moment was powerful not only because of the words Tate chose, but because of what they represented: The first victim impact statement in California.
Manson, who died Monday, will be remembered for many things: his ability to manipulate, his failed musical aspirations and his capacity for evil.
But his legacy will also include an unintended, positive consequence that has benefited countless people in the decades since Tate’s death. Because of the work her mother began and her sisters continued, victims’ voices carry a weight in the nation’s legal system and none of Manson’s minions, including Watson, have seen freedom.
Doris Tate helped get the Victim’s Rights Bill, which allowed for victim impact statements, passed in California in 1982. All 50 states now allow victims to speak either written or orally at certain phases of the legal process, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime.
“Victim i mpact statements are often the victims’ only opportunity to participate in the criminal justice process or to confront the offenders who have harmed them,” the National Center’s website reads. “Many victims report that making such statements improves their satisfaction with the criminal justice process and helps them recover from the crime.”
Doris Tate wasn’t a natural activist. She spent more than a decade after her oldest daughter’s brutal death devastated by her grief. She came forward publicly only after she learned that one of Mason’s devotees, Leslie Van Houten, had gathered 900 signatures in support of her obtaining parole. Tate, working with the National Enquirer, which printed coupons for people to sign and mail, made sure that didn’t happen. She gathered 350,000 signatures against Houten’s parole.
Sharon Tate was the oldest daughter of Doris and Paul Tate. As an actress, even when she appeared in poorly reviewed films, critics noted how striking she looked. Hollywood embraced her and she counted among her close friends Mia Farrow and Tony Curtis.
She met director Roman Polanski while filming The Fearless Vampire Killers and she married him on Jan. 20, 1968. Later that year, she became pregnant and the two started looking for a larger home. They found one in 10050 Cielo Drive.
Manson knew t he address. He had been there before. Record producer Terry Melcher had lived there, and Manson had hoped Melcher, who had auditioned him, was going to sign him to a record deal. But he didn’t.
“Manson was mad about that,” Michael McGann, a detective at the time, recalled in a Los Angeles Magazine oral history. “It’s no accident he sent his group to Cielo.”
Manson, born to a teenager, possibly a prostitute, in Cincinnati, was every parent’s worst nightmare. By the time he was eight, he was in reform school. He spent years in and out of penal institutions.
“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system,” he said in a monologue on the witness stand. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”
But the short, shaggyhaired man with hypnotic eyes was to become a charismatic figure with a talent for turning middle-class youngsters into mass murderers.
At a former movie ranch outside Los Angeles, he and his devotees — many of them young runaways who likened him to Jesus Christ — lived commune-style, using drugs and taking part in orgies. Children from privileged backgrounds ate garbage from supermarket trash.
“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them; I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up,” he said in a courtroom soliloquy.
Tate was stabbed and hung from a rafter in her living room. Also killed were Abigail Folger, heiress to a coffee fortune; Polish film director Voityck Frykowksi; Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker; and celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, killed by Manson follower Watson, who announced his arrival by saying: “I am the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s work.”
The next night, wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were stabbed to death in their home in another neighbourhood.
Manson was arrested three months later.
Why he ordered the killing of strangers remained a mystery. Prosecutors said Manson wanted to foment a race war, an idea he supposedly got from a twisted reading of the hard-rocking Beatles song Helter Skelter.
Manson’s chaotic trial in 1970 transformed a courtroom into a theatre of the absurd.
He and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, sang and chanted, and Manson at one point launched himself across the counsel table at the judge. Many of his followers camped outside the courthouse, threatening to immolate themselves if he was convicted.
When Manson carved an “X” in his forehead, his codefendants did the same, saying they were “Xed out of society.” He later changed his “X” to a swastika.
He and the three women were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Watson was convicted later. All were spared execution and given life sentences after the California Supreme Courts truck down the death penalty in 1972. “The Manson case, to this day, remains one of the most chilling in crime history,” prominent criminal justice reporter Theo Wilson wrote in her 1998 memoir, Headline Justice: Inside the Courtroom — The Country’s Most Controversial Trials.
“Even people who were not yet born when the murders took place,” Wilson wrote, “know t he name Charles Manson, and shudder.”