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 during the summer of 1969, died Sunday after
nearly a half-century in prison. He was 83.
Before his dead, Manson was in a Bakersfield, California hospital and his condition was unclear, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing Kern County Sheriff’s lieutenant Bill Smallwood.
Manson, whose name to this day is synonymous with
unspeakable violence and madness, died at 8:13 p.m. 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."
"Today, Manson's victims are the ones who should be remembered and mourned on the occasion of his death," Hanisee said.
California Corrections spokeswoman Vicky Waters said
an autopsy will be performed but what comes after that is unclear.
Prison officials previously said Manson had no known next of kin and
state law says that if no relative or legal representative surfaces
within 10 days, then it's up to the department to determine whether the
body is cremated or buried.
It's not known if Manson requested funeral services
of any sort. It's also unclear what happens to his property, which is
said to include artwork and at least two guitars. State law says the
department must maintain his property for up to a year in anticipation
there might be legal battles over who can make a legitimate claim to it.
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 L.A.'s rich and famous in what prosecutors
said was a bid to trigger a race war — an idea he got from a twisted
reading of the Beatles song "Helter Skelter."
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.
"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.
Linda Deutsch, the longtime courts reporter
for The Associated Press who covered the Manson case, said he "left a
legacy of evil and hate and murder."
"He was able to take young people who were
impressionable and convince them he had the answer to everything and he
turned them into killers," she said. "It was beyond anything we had ever
seen before in this country."
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 8½ 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.
The killers scrawled such phrases as "Pigs" and "Healter Skelter" (sic) in blood at the crime scenes.
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'' — later turned into a swastika — carved
into his forehead.
"Many people I know in Los Angeles believe
that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 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 the California Supreme
Court 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 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 8. After serving a 10-year sentence for check 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 came from good homes but were 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, who wrote
"Piggies," 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, traveled to and from the courtroom in buses with
blacked-out windows so they could not read the headlines on newsstands.
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 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," Wilson wrote, "know the name Charles Manson, and shudder."
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