Manson, Charles (1934-2017), was an American cult leader and convicted murderer. He led a cult known as “The Family” in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Manson was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of nine people.
Manson is sometimes called a serial killer. However, a serial killer murders two or more victims in separate events. Manson did not personally murder any of the people he was convicted of killing. The homicides were carried out by members of his “family.”
Charles Milles Maddox was born on Nov. 12, 1934, in Cincinnati to 16-year-old Kathleen Maddox. He took the name Manson from a man to whom his mother was later briefly married. Manson’s childhood was filled with abuse, abandonment, and crime. By the time he was 30, he had spent approximately half his life in reform schools, jails, and prisons.
In 1967, after being released from prison, Manson drifted to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The district was a center for hippies , a counterculture movement that rejected the customs and traditions of society. Manson aspired to be a singer-songwriter. He also began speaking to some of the young people about his own philosophy. He soon had a number of followers. The group moved to an abandoned movie set in the foothills of Southern California in 1968. Although several unexplained deaths occurred around Manson and his group, the incidents were not investigated.
On Aug. 9, 1969, however, the American film actress Sharon Tate and four other people were murdered in the Los Angeles home Tate shared with her husband, the Polish film director Roman Polanski . The brutal stabbings of the Hollywood celebrities, including the pregnant Tate, shocked the public. The next night, businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were murdered in their Los Angeles home. Manson was charged with the murders at the Tate and LaBianca homes after one of his cult members, Susan Atkins, was jailed on an unrelated charge. Atkins bragged to a fellow inmate about her involvement in the homicides. Manson stated that he ordered his group to commit the murders to start a race war between blacks and whites. He called the race war Helter Skelter, after the title of a song by the British rock group the Beatles . Manson believed the song contained coded information for him and that after the race war, he would rule the world.
In 1970, Manson and several of his cult members were tried for murder. They were found guilty and sentenced to death in 1971. Their death sentences were commuted (reduced) to life imprisonment in 1972, when the California Supreme Court declared the state’s death penalty unconstitutional. In 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the leader of Manson’s group in his absence, tried to assassinate United States President Gerald Ford . Fromme was sentenced to life in prison. She was released on parole in 2009. Manson died in prison on Nov. 19, 2017.
See also Polanski, Roman ; Psychopathy .
