Indeed, the good die young: Before I went to bed last night, I had read the news that infamous criminal Charles Manson, 83, had died of natural causes after having suffered from a variety of illnesses in recent months. Of course, the media are all over this like flies to shit this morning giving their take on Manson's life and crimes. He and his so-called "family" were considered the dark side of the 1960s, the opposite of the free love and all that other shit of the hippies. As we all know, this "family" was involved in committing one or rather two of the most infamous crimes of the twentieth century. Over a period of two nights, Manson's "family" (I put that in quotes because I never bought into prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's theory of the motive for the crimes, but in his defense he needed to get a conviction) was responsible for seven brutal murders and linked to a couple more murders prior to the events of August 1969.
Manson never really had a chance in life--he was one of these people who was doomed to wind up in prison and never adapt to the outside world. Indeed, he spent practically his entire life in institutions. While he had a couple of marriages and divorces, he never could stay out of prison. Every single time he committed a crime he got caught. The one thing he had that he might have been able to make a mark on was in the area of music. During one of his rare times out of prison, in the late 1960s, he developed contacts in the music industry, thanks to his relationship with Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day and prominent in the music field. It didn't hurt that by this time he had found himself with several young women who were as misunderstood and considered misfits like he was, and people like Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson befriended him in order to screw around with the young women, most of whom were in their teens while Manson was in his mid-thirties.
Manson played the guitar a bit and composed some songs, but he and his band of misfits, which did include a few men as well, got more into sex and especially drugs. As Manson recalled in his "as-told-to" book with Nuel Emmons (who knew Manson, having once served prison time at the same time as him, but years before the killings), Manson in His Own Words, it was the drugs more than anything that started the series of events culminating in the tragedies of early August of 1969. The murders, according to Manson, were orginally designed to get another member of the "family," Bobby Beausoleil, out of jail by committing a crime and smearing all kinds of anti-police slogans in blood on the doors to try and get police to think the crimes were racially motivated. Beausoleil, for the record, is still serving time in prison for the murder of Gary Hinman.
The first group of victims was murdered at the rental house formerly occupied by Melcher and then-girlfriend Candace Bergen. It was picked totally at random. Manson, who was not present at the killings, was certainly an accessory before and after the fact as he was the one who "ordered" the killings. The murders were horrifying. The first-night victims included actress Sharon Tate, who was not all that well known to the public at the time except as the second wife of director Roman Polanski (and eight-and-a-half months pregnant) while at the same time popular with the Hollywood crowd, her close friend and former fiance hair stylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her significant other Wojciech Frykowski, and wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time victim Steve Parent, who was shot outside the Tate residence. The killers were higher than a kite when they committed the crimes, which were especially brutal. However, Tate and her friends weren't the only victims. The next evening the Manson bunch, including Manson himself, went to the LaBianca house, rose Leno and Rosemary LaBianca from their beds, and they, too, were brutally murdered. Manson didn't technically kill anybody there, but he was involved, and that was reason enough for him to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The Manson book, while some may claim Manson was just making shit up to make himself look good, was pretty consistent in what Manson had said happened from the time he was arrested. It was also consistent from what others like "family" members Susan Atkins and Tex Watson had said until they wanted to get a lighter prison sentence in exchange for implicating Manson. I never personally believed the Bugliosi-Helter Skelter-cult nonsense from the time I first heard of Manson's arrest when I was around 14-15 years of age. It always smacked of bullshit, but Bugliosi needed a conviction and knew he had the right people who were involved in the crimes. However, the motive was elusive to him. Most of that Helter Skelter bullshit was pushed by killers and "family" members Atkins and Watson in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, but of course they didn't get it. The reason I felt the "cult" explanation was bullshit is because not only was Manson not present for the Tate killings to have any kind of "hold" on the murderers, though he did show up at the residence after the murders, but Spahn Ranch, where the group lived, was some distance away from Cielo Drive where the killings took place. All Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkle, and anybody else involved had to do was turn around and go back and not carry out the crimes. Alternatively, they simply could have driven away from Spahn Ranch, never to return and live halfway normal lives and the victims would still be alive today or had normal lifespans. The murderers killed not because they were forced to but because they WANTED to, plus they were high on drugs. Nobody in the world has that kind of psychological power to order killings when that person is nowhere to be found. The book by Emmons and Manson was totally believable, and I highly recommend it. Manson had little use for Atkins and Watson, especially for their religious piety in prison, and naturally he had little use for Bugliosi.
However, the book is not very well known. Most people are familiar with Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, the book that put him on the map as a writer of true crime and other books of a legal nature and helped him basically retire from the legal profession. However, the book as well as the prosecution's case were pretty far fetched when it came to motive and always were. Observers, taking the book at face value, proclaimed Manson and his "family" were symbols of 1960s debauchery and evil, which followed him and the gang throughout their lives. He played right along with the image, complete with swastikas etched on his face, wild-looking eyes, and unruly hair. Journalists like Geraldo Rivera reveled in exploiting Manson's image.
As we know, the "family" was arrested in late 1969. The media had a field day covering the trial, which went on for months and months, ala O.J. Simpson, and was dubbed "The Trial of the Century," a description used by the media every now and then when it wanted to increase newspaper circulation or television ratings. Manson and several others were convicted and sentenced to death, but since the USSC had put a stop to executions temporarily, their sentences were commuted to life sentences. To date not one of them who was involved in the killings was ever released from prison, though Leslie van Houten was recently recommended for parole. I doubt Governor Jerry Brown will risk the wrath of the public and have her released after more than 45 years in prison.
A snip:
The Tate-LaBianca killings and the seven-month trial that followed were the subjects of fevered news coverage. To a frightened, mesmerized public, the murders, with their undercurrents of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and Satanism, seemed the depraved logical extension of the anti-establishment, do-your-own-thing ethos that helped define the ’60s.
Since then, the Manson family has occupied a dark, persistent place in American culture — and American commerce. It has inspired, among other things, pop songs, an opera, films, a host of internet fan sites, T-shirts, children’s wear and half the stage name of the rock musician Marilyn Manson.
This sums it up what Manson was all about, at least in the eyes of the media. If it bore little resemblance to the actual person, then so be it.
A bit of his criminal history pre-Tate/LaBianca:
Mr. Manson apparently never knew his biological father. His mother briefly married another man, William Manson, and gave her young son the name Charles Milles Manson.
Kathleen often disappeared for long periods — when Charles was 5, for instance, she was sent to prison for robbing a gas station — leaving him to bounce among relatives in Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. She was paroled when Charles was 8 and took him back, but kept him for only a few years.
From the age of 12 on, Charles was placed in a string of reform schools. At one institution, he held a razor to a boy’s throat and raped him.
Escaping often, he committed burglaries, auto thefts and armed robberies, landing in between juvenile detention centers and eventually federal reformatories. He was paroled from the last one at 19, in May 1954.
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