On Sunday night, Charles Manson died at the age of 83.
Manson was the leader of the murderous Manson family cult which came to prominence in the late 1960’s. His followers murdered nine people between July and August 1969, including Sharon Tate, the pregnant actress who was the wife of film director Roman Polanski. In 1971 Manson was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people, and also received first-degree murder convictions for two other deaths. Manson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when California invalidated the state’s death penalty statute in 1972.
Asserting that a race war, which he called “Helter Skelter” after the song by The Beatles, was imminent, Manson, who was a white supremacist, believed the murders would provoke the race war.
Born in 1934, Manson committed a string of burglaries as a teenager. When he was on the verge of turning 17, on a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Manson was transferred to Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum-security institution, then transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered “dangerous.” He was paroled in 1954, but in jail again between 1956 and 1958.
Manson was sentenced to jail for ten years in 1960 for violating probation. After being released from prison on March 21, 1967, Manson moved into an apartment in Berkeley, California, where he met Mary Brunner, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Soon, 18 other women were living with them, establishing the Manson Family. He convinced his followers he was Jesus Christ, even saying his name very slowly as “Charles Willis Manson,” implying “Charles’ Will Is Man’s Son” meant the same as the Son of Man.
In late spring 1968, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys discovered Manson and at least 11 other people in his Pacific Palisades house. Later, Manson established a base for the group at Spahn’s Movie Ranch, where the Family settled in as the women seduced the nearly blind, 80-year-old owner, George Spahn.
In late July 1969, Manson sent Family member Bobby Beausoleil with Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins to take money from an acquaintance, Gary Hinman, which he had inherited. Two days later, Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death, ostensibly on Manson’s instruction. Atkins wrote eight years later that Manson had told her privately, two days earlier, that, if she wanted to “do something important,” she could kill Hinman and get his money.
On August 9, 1969, Manson directed Tex Watson to take Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patrica Krenwinkel to record producer Terry Melcher’s former home and murder everyone there; Melcher had initially expressed tepid support for Manson’s music, but had cooled off. But Melcher and girlfriend Candice Bergen had moved out. The house was leased by film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate. The Manson Family group murdered five people: Tate, who was eight months pregnant, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Stephen Parent.
The very next night, six Family members, plus the four from the previous night, went to a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, where supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner, were then murdered.