Cult leader Charles Manson dies at 83
Three Family members remain alive in prison
LOS ANGELES: Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader who became the hypnotic-eyed face of evil across America after orchestrating the gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles in 1969, has died after nearly a halfcentury in prison. He was 83.
Manson, whose name to this day is synonymous with unspeakable violence and madness, died at 8.13pm on Sunday (11.13am yesterday, Thai time) of natural causes at a Kern County hospital, according to a California Department of Corrections statement.
Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, reacted to the death by quoting the late Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor who put Manson behind bars. Bugliosi said: “Manson was an evil, sophisticated con man with twisted and warped moral values.”
“Manson’s victims are the ones who should be remembered and mourned on the occasion of his death,’’ Ms Hanisee said.
A petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood, the charismatic, guru-like Manson surrounded himself in the 1960s with runaways and other lost souls and then sent his disciples to butcher some of LA’s rich and famous in what prosecutors said was a bid to trigger a race war.
The slayings horrified the world and, together with the deadly violence that erupted later in 1969 during a Rolling Stones concert at California’s Altamont Speedway, exposed the dangerous, drugged-out underside of the counterculture movement and seemed to mark the death of the era of peace and love.
Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Manson maintained during his tumultuous trial in 1970 that he was innocent and that society itself was guilty.
The Manson Family, as his followers were called, slaughtered five of its victims on Aug 9, 1969, at Tate’s home: the actress, who was eight months pregnant, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish movie director Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker. Tate’s husband, Rosemary’s Baby director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.
The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home across town.
Three months later, a Manson follower was jailed on an unrelated charge and told a cellmate about the bloodbath, leading to the cult leader’s arrest.
In the annals of American crime, Manson became the embodiment of evil, a short, shaggy-haired, bearded figure with a demonic stare and an “X’’ carved into his forehead — later turned into a swastika.
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug 9, 1969,’’ author Joan Didion wrote in her 1979 book The White Album.
After a trial that lasted nearly a year, Manson and three followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Another defendant, Charles “Tex’’ Watson, was convicted later. All were spared execution and given life sentences after California struck down the death penalty in 1972.
Atkins died behind bars in 2009. Krenwinkel, Van Houten and Watson remain in prison.
Another Manson devotee, Lynette “Squeaky’’ Fromme, tried to assassinate US president Gerald Ford in 1975, but her gun jammed. She served 34 years in prison.
Manson was born in Cincinnati on Nov 12, 1934, to a teenager, possibly a prostitute, and was in reform school by the time he was eight. After serving a 10-year sentence for cheque forgery in the 1960s, Manson was said to have pleaded with authorities not to release him because he considered prison home.
“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system,’’ he would later say in a monologue on the witness stand. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.’’
He was set free in San Francisco during the heyday of the hippie movement in the city’s Haight-Ashbury section, and though he was in his mid-30s by then, he began collecting followers — mostly women — who likened him to Jesus Christ. Most were teenagers; many at odds with their parents.
The “family’’ eventually established a commune-like base at the Spahn Ranch, a ramshackle former movie location outside Los Angeles, where Manson manipulated his followers with drugs, supervised orgies and subjected them to bizarre lectures.
He had musical ambitions and befriended rock stars, including Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. He also met Terry Melcher, a music producer who had lived in the same house that Polanski and Tate later rented.
By the summer 1969, Manson had failed to sell his songs, and the rejection was later seen as a trigger for the violence. He complained that Wilson took a Manson song called Cease to Exist, revised it into Never Learn Not to Love and recorded it with the Beach Boys without giving Manson credit.
Manson was obsessed with Beatles music, particularly Piggies and Helter Skelter, a hard-rocking song that he interpreted as forecasting the end of the world. He told his followers that “Helter Skelter is coming down’’ and predicted a race war would destroy the planet.
“Everybody attached themselves to us, whether it was our fault or not,’’ the Beatles’ George Harrison later said of the murders. “It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson.’’
According to testimony, Manson sent his devotees out on the night of Tate’s murder with instructions to “do something witchy’’. The state’s star witness, Linda Kasabian, who was granted immunity, testified that Manson tied up the LaBiancas, then ordered his followers to kill. But Manson insisted: “I have killed no one, and I have ordered no one to be killed.’’
His trial was nearly scuttled when president Richard Nixon said Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly’’. Manson grabbed a newspaper and held up the front-page headline for jurors to read: “Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares.’’ Attorneys demanded a mistrial but were turned down.
From then on, jurors, sequestered at a hotel for 10 months, travelled to and from the courtroom in buses with blackedout windows.
Manson was also later convicted of the slayings of musician Gary Hinman and stuntman Donald “Shorty’’ Shea.
Over the decades, Manson and his followers appeared sporadically at parole hearings, where their bids for freedom were repeatedly rejected. The women suggested they had been rehabilitated, but Manson himself stopped attending, saying prison had become his home.
The killings inspired movies and TV shows, and Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a best-selling book about the murders, Helter Skelter. The macabre shock rocker Marilyn Manson borrowed part of his stage name from the killer.
“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 know the name Charles Manson, and shudder,’’ Wilson wrote.