Charles
Manson obituary
Cult leader
and convicted killer responsible for the Sharon Tate murders in 1969
Christopher
Reed
Monday 20
November 2017 06.20 GMT Last modified on Monday 20 November 2017 07.09 GMT
The
American criminal Charles Manson, who has died aged 83, was responsible for one
of the most infamous mass murders of the 20th century, yet the head of the
notorious “Family” cult was never convicted of killing anyone personally.
It was
partly this, and the bloody nature of the slaughter in Los Angeles on
successive nights in the summer of 1969, that led to his name achieving a wider
standing – though he had a following of only a dozen pseudo-hippies at the time
of the murders. Nearly fifty years after the horrific events, he retains a
morbid fascination for many.
Prisoner No
B-33920 was originally sentenced to death for the murders of the actor Sharon
Tate, the wife of the film director Roman Polanski and eight months pregnant at
the time; the coffee heiress Abigail Folger; Polanski’s friend Wojciech
Frykowski; Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairdresser; and Steven Parent, who had the
misfortune to pass through the grounds of the Polanski mansion in Benedict
Canyon, Los Angeles, on 9 August 1969.
The night
after what became known as “the Tate murders”, the deaths of a wealthy couple,
Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, were added to the Family’s toll. A month before,
the body of an LA drug dealer and musician, Gary Hinman, had been discovered.
LA panicked.
The
killings, and the wall scrawlings in blood of “Death to pigs”, and the
misspelled “Healter Skealter” – Manson’s song title borrowed from the Beatles
in which he described the apocalyptic racial war he wanted to create – produced
lurid headlines. Guns sold out in Beverly Hills and security firms trebled
their business.
The Manson
murders occurred in a late 1960s atmosphere of social upheaval, and stirred up
moral panic. Neil Armstrong may have landed on the moon, but on Earth the then
US president, Richard Nixon, saw the period as one in which “drugs, crime,
campus revolution, racial discord and draft resistance” challenged the very
basis of “civilisation’s continuity”.
Although at
the time of Manson’s trial hippy culture and its attendant drugs were blamed,
it was Manson’s failed musical career that seemed to be one key to the
killings. In California in the early 60s he had befriended the Beach Boys’
drummer, Dennis Wilson, and the group had retitled a song by Manson, Cease to
Exist, as Never Learn Not to Love on their 20/20 album. But Manson, who had
been living on Wilson’s ranch until the musician threw him out, had received no
recognition for the song.
He had also
been rejected in 1968 by a record producer who had originally occupied the
Benedict Canyon house. Manson either did not know or did not care who lived
there by August the following year.
Three
months after the killings Manson was arrested with his cult: five middle-class
young women and two men. Although it was these followers who had committed the
brutalities, it was Manson who had ordered the killings, and, at the LaBianca
home, had tied up the couple before leaving his followers to their butchery.
The ensuing
long trial was equally bizarre. Manson and the women carved Xs on their
foreheads and, sitting with their backs to the bench, insulted the judge. Once
Manson, who converted his sign to a swastika, lunged at the bench. One of the
defending lawyers, Ronald Hughes, disappeared mid-trial during a 10-day court
recess and his body was found on the day the women were due to be sentenced.
The prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, made a fortune with his bestselling book on
the case, Helter Skelter (1974). Newspaper articles continued for decades.
In a
further trial, Family members were also found guilty of the murders of Hinman
and Donald Shea, a stuntman and hired hand at the Family ranch who was killed
at the end of August 1969, but whose body was not recovered for another eight
years.
Manson and
the group were sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment
when California’s supreme court abolished the death penalty in 1972. Three
years later one of Manson’s followers, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, was given a
life sentence following an assassination attempt on the then president, Gerald
Ford. She was released in 2009.
In the 90s
the rock group Guns N’ Roses recorded a Manson song, Look at Your Game, Girl.
It seemed Manson might become rich from the royalties, but Frykowski’s son,
Bartek, sued successfully for the payments as reparation for the death of his
father, who was stabbed 51 times.
Although
some found Manson charismatic, others saw little to impress. His rambling
conversation, bizarre references and non sequiturs revealed his inauspicious
beginnings. Born to Kathleen Maddox when she was 16 in Cincinnati, Ohio, he was
initially called “no name Maddox”, but after a few weeks was named Charles
Milles.
Kathleen
married William Manson, a labourer, and Charles took his surname. His
biological father was Colonel Walker Scott, against whom Kathleen won a
paternity suit in 1937, but Charles never knew him. Brought up by foster
parents and institutions, Charles was soon involved in crime – as a conman,
pimp, forger and thief. At 13 years old he was convicted of armed robbery, and
at 17 of raping a fellow inmate. By the time he was 32, he had spent 17 years
behind bars and would later say: “Policemen raised me, convicts raised me,
administrators raised me.”
In 1967 he
travelled to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, then in its early
days as a hippy haven. There he smoked cannabis, ingested LSD and began to seek
a female following, particularly among middle-class young women seeking
rebellion against their “bourgeois” backgrounds. He also gathered a succession
of minor film actors, Texan drifters and outlaw bikers and moved his “Family”
to an abandoned holding north of Los Angeles, where they would collect and sort
supermarket rubbish, then to a dusty ranch on the edge of Death Valley. The
scene was set for the slaughters in LA.
After
almost a lifetime in prisons, including 11 years in solitary, Manson had only a
tenuous grip on reality, and spent his time plucking his guitar at his final
institution, Corcoran state prison, 170 miles north of Los Angeles. In 2009 he
reportedly attempted to contact the music producer Phil Spector, who is
incarcerated at a facility in the same city, in order to make music with him,
according to Spector’s wife, Rachelle – an assertion later disputed by
California’s department of corrections. “It was creepy,” Rachelle said at the
time. “Phillip didn’t respond.”
But the
producer and Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins did, admitting in 2010 that
Manson had contacted him in the 80s asking for help mixing an album of acoustic
pop songs. Rollins agreed, finishing a never-released record called Completion.
In 2012
Manson’s final request for parole was denied. Manson did not appear at the
hearing but was quoted as having said to one of his prison psychologists: “I’m
special. I’m not like the average inmate. I have spent my life in prison. I
have put five people in the grave. I am a very dangerous man.”
His son by
his first wife, Rosalie (nee Willis), Charles Manson Jr, killed himself in
1993. Manson’s brief second marriage, to Leona “Candy” Stevens, produced a son,
Charles Luther, and he had another son, Valentine, by Mary Brunner, the first
member of the Family. In November 2015 Manson applied for a licence to marry
Afton Elaine Burton, a 26-year-old follower, but the marriage did not take
place.
• Charles
Milles Manson, cult leader and convicted murderer, born 12 November 1934; died
19 November 2017
Charles
Manson Dies at 83
By Dave
McNary @Variety_DMcNary Dave McNary
Dave McNary
Charles
Manson Dies at 83
Charles
Manson, the notorious leader of the Manson Family cult that murdered actress
Sharon Tate and six others in 1969, died Sunday in a Bakersfield, Calif.,
hospital. He was 83.
The California
Department of Corrections released a statement reading, “Inmate Charles Manson,
83, died of natural causes at 8:13 p.m. on Sunday, November 19, 2017, at a Kern
County hospital.”
Manson
returned to the hospital in mid-November after being hospitalized in January.
He was transferred out of Corcoran State Prison, where he had been serving nine
life sentences. He had been denied parole 12 times.
The
shocking murders brought the carefree hippie era of the late 1960s to a dark
end, with Manson and his followers becoming infamous cultural figures. Though
he didn’t commit the Tate and LaBianca murders himself, the Corrections
Department said “On December 13, 1971, Manson received a first-degree murder
conviction from Los Angeles County for the July 25, 1969, death of Gary Hinman
and another first-degree murder conviction for the August 1969 death of Donald
Shea.”
Though the
murders took place nearly 50 years ago, they continued to have a hold over the
popular imagination. Quentin Tarantino agreed with Sony Pictures on Nov. 17 to
develop his 1969-based movie project that has the events surrounding Manson as
a background. The current season of “American Horror Story” portrayed the
Manson family in the “Charles (Manson) in Charge” episode.
A career
criminal from an impoverished and abusive background, Manson was first
incarcerated in 1951 and by age 32 had spent half of his life behind bars.
An aspiring
musician who first learned to play guitar in prison, Manson began gathering
followers in San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967. In the short time
between his 1967 prison release and his imprisonment in 1969, Manson skirted
the fringes of show business, even briefly finding himself working with one of
the top rock and roll bands in America, the Beach Boys.
He became
intertwined with Hollywood in 1968, when he and more than a dozen of his
followers lived at the Sunset Boulevard home of Dennis Wilson of the Beach
Boys. Manson crossed paths with several entertainment business figures,
including actors and film producers intrigued by his charismatic hold on his
followers and his counterculture beliefs.
Manson
recorded several songs and was introduced by Wilson to other show business
acquaintances, including music producer Terry Melcher, the only son of Doris
Day. One of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” was reworked by the Beach Boys as
“Never Learn Not To Love,” and eventually released by the band with the writing
credit attributed to Dennis Wilson.
The band’s
changes to his song reportedly angered Manson, who allegedly threatened Dennis
Wilson with murder.
In 1968,
Manson and his followers were evicted from Dennis Wilson’s home and Manson
relocated his group to Spahn Movie Ranch, near Chatsworth, Calif. The locale
was rich with film and TV history, and films such as King Vidor’s “Duel in the
Sun” and popular TV shows such as “Bonanza” and “Zorro” had filmed there.
From their
Spahn Movie Ranch base, Manson launched a killing spree in 1969 with the goal
of a sparking a race war he called “Helter Skelter,” based on his
interpretation of a song from the Beatles’ “White Album.”
On Aug. 9,
1969, he directed his followers to kill the 26-year-old Tate — who was pregnant
and married to director Roman Polanski — and four others at the home she was
renting in the Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles.
Polanski
was out of the country at the time of the Cielo Drive killings. The other
victims were celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring, 35; Voytek Frykowski, 32;
coffee heiress Abigail Folger, 25; and Steven Parent, 18, a friend of Tate’s
caretaker. The word “Pig” was written on the front door in blood.
On the
following night, Manson and his followers killed Leno LaBianca and his wife,
Rosemary, at their home in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles. “Death to
Pigs” and “Healter Skelter” were scrawled in blood at the crime scene.
Manson and
more than 20 of his followers were arrested at ranches in the California desert
in the following months. He and three followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia
Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were found guilty in a trial and sentenced
to death in 1971. The death sentences were commuted to life in prison in 1972
when the death penalty was abolished in California. Van Houten was granted
parole in September but her release must still be approved by Governor Jerry
Brown.
Manson has
been the subject of dozens of books and articles. Some, like musician-writer Ed
Sanders’ 1971 tome “The Family,” have been investigative and rich in details of
the cultural moment of the murders, but many have been simply cut and paste
jobs published to satiate the public’s curiosity about the notorious killer.
The story
of the trial was re-told in the 1976 TV film, “Helter Skelter,” based on the
1974 book by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Steve Railsback
portrayed Manson. The book was adapted for a second TV movie in 2004, directed
by John Gray and starring Jeremy Davies as Manson.
The events
surrounding the murders were explored in numerous other movies and TV shows
including NBC series “Aquarius,” indie film “Manson Family Vacation” and on
“South Park.”
In 2013,
James Franco announced he would play hairdresser Sebring in “Beautiful People,”
though the film was never put into production.
Over the
decades, pop culture references to Manson and his murderous clan have abounded,
from the name of goth rocker Marilyn Manson to the alt-rock band Kasabian,
named after one of his followers, Linda Kasabian.
Manson’s
impact was also seen with numerous Manson Family mentions in acclaimed novelist
Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 bestseller set in ‘70s Los Angeles, “Inherent Vice,” while
Joan Didion’s “White Album” includes an examination of the impact of Manson as
well as an interview with Kasabian.
Manson
again made headlines in 2015 when his fiancee at the time, Afton Elaine Burton,
AKA “Star,” 53 years his junior, was reported to be planning their nuptials in
order to secure a claim to his corpse, which she hoped to exploit as a
commercial public display piece.
Since the
murder convictions, Manson has been imprisoned at San Quentin; the California
Medical Facility in Vacaville, Folsom, and at Corcoran.
Steve
Gaydos contributed to this report.
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