Everything about Charles Manson totally explained
Charles Milles Manson (born
November 12,
1934) is an
American criminal who led the "Manson Family," a quasi-
commune that arose in the U.S. state of
California in the later 1960s. He was found guilty of
conspiracy to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders, which members of the group carried out at his instruction. Through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy, he was convicted of the murders themselves.
Manson is associated with "
Helter Skelter", the term he took from the
Beatles song of that name and construed as an
apocalyptic race war that the murders were intended to precipitate. This connection with
rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with
pop culture, in which he became an emblem of insanity, violence, and the
macabre. Ultimately, the term was used as the title of the
book that prosecutor
Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the Manson murders.
At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the
Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with
Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially; artists including
Guns 'N' Roses and
Marilyn Manson have
covered his songs in the decades since.
Manson's
death sentence was automatically reduced to
life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state's death penalty. California's eventual reestablishment of
capital punishment didn't affect Manson, who is an inmate at
Corcoran State Prison.
Early life
Childhood
First known as "no name Maddox," Manson was born to unmarried, 16-year-old Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, in
Cincinnati, Ohio; no more than three weeks after his birth, he was
Charles Milles Maddox.
For a period, after her son's birth, Kathleen Maddox was married to a laborer named William Manson, When his mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a
Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the
McMechen, West Virginia, home of an aunt and uncle. Upon his mother's 1942 parole, Manson was retrieved by his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms.
Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age 13, to the Indiana School for Boys, where, he'd later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise.
Rise of the Family
On his release day, Manson requested and was granted permission to move to
San Francisco, where, with the help of a prison acquaintance, he obtained an apartment in
Berkeley. In prison, he'd been taught to play
steel guitar by 1930s bank robber
Alvin Karpis;
Manson also established himself as a
guru in San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967's "
Summer of Love", was emerging as the signature
hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the
Scientology he'd studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female.
Involvement with Wilson, Melcher, et al.
The events that would culminate in the murders were set in motion in late spring
1968, when, by some accounts,
Dennis Wilson, of
The Beach Boys, picked up two hitchhiking Manson girls and brought them to his
Pacific Palisades house for a few hours. Returning home in the early hours of the following morning from a night recording session, Wilson was greeted in the driveway of his own residence by Manson, who emerged from the house. Uncomfortable, Wilson asked the stranger whether he intended to hurt him. Assuring him he'd no such intent, Manson began kissing Wilson's feet.
Inside the house, Wilson discovered 12 strangers, mostly girls. Wilson would sing and talk with Manson, whose girls were servants to them both.
In the quasi-autobiographical
Manson in His Own Words, the account is that Manson first met Wilson at a friend's San Francisco house where he, Manson, had gone to obtain
marijuana. The Beach Boy supposedly gave Manson his Sunset Boulevard address and invited him to stop by when he'd be in Los Angeles. The evictees joined the rest of the Family there. For a tiny squeal she'd emit when Spahn would pinch her thigh, Fromme, one of the early Family members who had boarded the school bus, Watson had given a lift to Wilson, who had been hitchhiking because his cars had been wrecked. The former, to which the group had initially headed, was owned by the grandmother of a new girl in the Family. The latter was owned by an elderly, local woman to whom Manson presented himself and a male Family member as musicians in need of a place congenial to their work. When the woman agreed to let them stay there if they'd fix up things, Manson honored her with one of the
Beach Boys'
gold records,
While back at Spahn Ranch, no later than December, Manson and Watson visited a Topanga Canyon acquaintance who played them the
Beatles' White Album, then recently released. Despite having been 29 years old and imprisoned when The Beatles first came to America in 1964, Manson was obsessed with the group. At
McNeil, he'd told fellow inmates, including
Alvin Karpis, that he could surpass the group in fame; to the Family, he spoke of the group as "the soul" and "part of 'the hole in the infinite.'" He had emphasized
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, which had taken place on
April 4 1968. Manson called it the
Yellow Submarine, another Beatles reference. There, Family members prepared for the impending apocalypse,
At the
Canoga Park house, while Family members worked on vehicles and pored over maps to prepare for their desert escape, they also worked on songs for their world-changing album. When they were told
Terry Melcher was to come to the house to hear the material, the girls prepared a meal and cleaned the place; but Melcher never arrived. Manson entered, uninvited, upon
10050 Cielo Drive, which he'd known as the residence of
Terry Melcher. the tenants were
Sharon Tate and
Roman Polanski.
Manson was met by Shahrokh Hatami, a photographer and Tate friend, who was there to photograph Tate in advance of her departure for
Rome the next day. Having seen Manson through a window as Manson approached the main house, Hatami had gone onto the front porch to ask him what he wanted. as is consistent with prosecutor
Vincent Bugliosi's later discovery that Manson had apparently been to the place on earlier occasions since Melcher's departure from it.
Speaking through the inner screen door, Altobelli told Manson that Melcher had moved to
Malibu; he lied that he didn't know Melcher's new address. In response to a question from Manson, Altobelli said he himself was in the entertainment business, although, having met Manson the previous year, at Dennis Wilson's home, he was sure Manson already knew that. At Wilson's, Altobelli had complimented Manson lukewarmly on some of his musical recordings that Wilson had been playing.
By June, Manson was telling the Family they might have to show blacks how to start "Helter Skelter". When Manson tasked Watson with obtaining money supposedly intended to help the Family prepare for the conflict, Watson defrauded a black
drug dealer named Bernard "Lotsapoppa" Crowe. Crowe responded with a threat to wipe out everyone at Spahn Ranch. Manson countered on
July 1,
1969, by shooting Crowe at his
Hollywood apartment.
Manson's mistaken belief that he'd killed Crowe was seemingly confirmed by a news report of the discovery of the dumped body of a
Black Panther in Los Angeles. Although Crowe wasn't a member of the Black Panthers, Manson, concluding he'd been, expected retaliation from the group. He turned Spahn Ranch into a defensive camp, with night patrols of armed guards. "If we'd needed any more proof that Helter Skelter was coming down very soon, this was it," Tex Watson would later write. "[B]lackie was trying to get at the chosen ones." The three held the uncooperative Hinman hostage for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. After that, Beausoleil stabbed him to death, ostensibly on Manson’s instruction. Before leaving the Topanga Canyon residence, Beausoleil, or one of the girls, used Hinman’s blood to write "Political piggy" on the wall and to draw a panther paw, a Black Panther symbol.
In magazine interviews of 1981 and 1998-99, Beausoleil would say he went to Hinman’s to recover money paid to Hinman for drugs that had supposedly been bad; he added that Brunner and Atkins, unaware of his intent, went along idly, merely to visit Hinman. On the other hand, Atkins, in her 1977 autobiography, wrote that Manson directly told Beausoleil, Brunner, and her to go to Hinman’s and get the supposed inheritance — $21,000. She said Manson had told her privately, two days earlier, that, if she wanted to "do something important," she could kill Hinman and get his money. He told the girls to do as Watson would instruct them.
When the four arrived at the entrance to the
Cielo Drive property, Watson, who'd been to the house on Manson's orders, climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line. It was now around midnight and into
August 9,
1969.
Backing their car down to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, they parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm, After cutting the screen of an open window of the main house, Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate. brought them to the living room. The three were Tate, eight and a half months
pregnant; her friend and former lover
Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; and Frykowski’s lover
Abigail Folger, heiress to the
Folger coffee fortune.
Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with rope he'd brought and slung up over a beam. Sebring's protest — his second — of rough treatment of Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. After Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, which proved to hold about $70, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.
LaBianca murders
The next night, six Family members — the four from the Tate murders as well as
Leslie Van Houten and Steve "Clem" Grogan — rode out at Manson’s instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, "to show [them] how to do it." After a few hours’ ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them, Located in the
Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, the LaBianca home was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year.
According to Atkins and Kasabian, Manson returned, after disappearing up the driveway, to say he'd tied up the house's occupants; he then sent Watson up with Krenwinkel and Van Houten. At trial, Van Houten would claim, uncertainly, that Rosemary LaBianca was dead by the time she stabbed her. Evidence showed that many of Mrs. LaBianca's forty-one total stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem.
While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote "Rise" and "Death to pigs" on the walls and "Healter [sic] Skelter" on the refrigerator door, all in blood. She gave Leno LaBianca fourteen puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach; she also planted a steak knife in his throat.
Justice system
Investigation
On
August 10,
1969 — while the Tate
autopsies were under way and the LaBianca bodies were yet to be discovered — detectives of the
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which had jurisdiction in the Hinman case, informed
LAPD detectives assigned to the Tate case of the bloody writing at the Hinman house. They even mentioned that the Hinman suspect, Beausoleil, was associated with a group of
hippies led by "a guy named Charlie." The Tate team, thinking the Tate murders a consequence of a drug transaction, ignored the information.
On
August 12,
1969, the LAPD told the press it had ruled out any connection between the Tate and LaBianca homicides.
By the end of August, when virtually all leads had gone nowhere, a report by the LaBianca detectives, generally younger than the Tate team, noted a possible connection between the bloody writings at the LaBianca house and "the singing group the Beatles’ most recent album."
Breakthrough
In mid-October, the LaBianca team, still working separately from the Tate team, checked with the sheriff’s office about possible similar crimes and learned of the Hinman case. They also learned that the Hinman detectives had spoken with Beausoleil’s girlfriend, Kitty Lutesinger, who had been arrested a few days earlier with members of "the Manson Family." A joint force of
National Park rangers and officers from the
California Highway Patrol and the
Inyo County Sheriff’s Office —
federal,
state, and
county personnel — had raided both the Myers and Barker ranches after following clues unwittingly left when Family members burned an
earthmover owned by
Death Valley National Monument. The raiders had found stolen dune buggies and other vehicles and had arrested two dozen persons, including Manson. A Highway Patrol officer found Manson hiding in a cabinet beneath Barker's bathroom sink.
A month after they, too, had spoken with Lutesinger, the LaBianca detectives made contact with members of a motorcycle gang she'd told them Manson had tried to enlist as his bodyguards while the Family was at Spahn Ranch. was augmented by evidence recovered by the public. On September 1, 1969, the distinctive .22-caliber Hi Standard "Buntline Special"
revolver Watson used on
Parent,
Sebring, and
Frykowski had been found and given to the police by a ten-year-old who lived near the Tate residence. In mid-December, when the
Los Angeles Times published a crime account based on information Susan Atkins had given her attorney, the boy's father made several phone calls which finally prompted LAPD to connect the gun with the murders. Acting on that same newspaper account, a local
ABC television crew quickly located and recovered the bloody clothing discarded by the Tate killers. Discarded knives used at the Tate residence were never recovered, despite a search by some of the same crewmen and, months later still, by LAPD.
Trial
At the trial, which began
June 15,
1970, A deal not to seek the death penalty against Atkins had been withdrawn when she, Atkins, repudiated the grand jury testimony on which the
indictments had been secured.
Because of his conduct, including violations of a
gag order and submission of "outlandish" and "nonsensical"
pretrial motions, Manson's reluctantly-granted permission to
act as his own attorney had been withdrawn by the court before the trial’s start. On Friday, July 24, the first day of testimony, Manson appeared in court with an X carved into his forehead and issued a statement that he was "considered inadequate and incompetent to speak or defend [him]self" — and had "X'd [him]self from [theestablishment's] world." Over the following weekend, the female defendants duplicated the mark on their own foreheads, as, within another day or so, most Family members did, too.
The prosecution placed the triggering of "Helter Skelter" as the main motive. The crime scenes' bloody
White Album references —
pig,
rise,
helter skelter — were correlated with testimony about Manson predictions that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of "pigs" on walls in victims’ blood. Testimony that Manson had said "now is the time for Helter Skelter" was supplemented with Kasabian’s testimony that, on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson considered discarding Rosemary LaBianca's wallet on the street of a black neighborhood. On his direction, Kasabian had hidden it in the women's rest room of a service station near a black area. When the group established itself in vigil on the sidewalk, each hard-core member wore a sheathed hunting knife that, being in plain view, was being carried legally. Each was identifiable by the X on his or her forehead.
Some Family members attempted to dissuade witnesses from testifying. Prosecution witnesses
Paul Watkins and Juan Flynn were both threatened; Watkins was badly burned in a suspicious fire in his van. Former Family member Barbara Hoyt, who had overheard
Susan Atkins describing the Tate murders to Family member Ruth Ann Moorehouse, agreed to accompany the latter to
Hawaii. There, Moorehouse allegedly gave her a hamburger spiked with several doses of
LSD. Found sprawled on a
Honolulu curb in a drugged semi-stupor, Hoyt was taken to the hospital, where she did her best to identify herself as a witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial. Before the incident, Hoyt had been a reluctant witness; after the attempt to silence her, her reticence disappeared.
On August 4, despite precautions taken by the court, Manson flashed the jury a
Los Angeles Times front page whose headline was "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares," a reference to a statement made the previous day when U.S. President
Richard Nixon had decried what he saw as the media's glamorization of Manson.
Voir dired by Judge
Charles Older, the jurors contended that the headline hadn't influenced them. The next day, the female defendants stood up and said in unison that, in light of Nixon's remark, there was no point in going on with the trial. On October 5, denied the court's permission to question a prosecution witness whom the defense attorneys had declined to
cross-examine, Manson leaped over the defense table and attempted to attack the judge. Wrestled to the ground by bailiffs, he was removed from the courtroom with the female defendants, who had subsequently risen and begun chanting in
Latin. The next day, Manson himself was permitted to testify; but because his statements would possibly violate the
California Supreme Court’s decision in
People v. Aranda by implicating his co-defendants, the jury was removed from the courtroom. Speaking for more than an hour, Manson said, among other things, that "the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment." He said, "Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music." "To be honest with you," Manson also stated, "I don’t recall ever saying 'Get a knife and a change of clothes and go do what Tex says.'"
As the body of the trial concluded and with the closing arguments impending, attorney
Ronald Hughes, who had been representing Leslie Van Houten, disappeared during a weekend trip. When Maxwell Keith was appointed to represent Van Houten in Hughes' absence, a delay of more than two weeks was required to permit Keith to familiarize himself with the voluminous trial transcripts.
Penalty phase
On
January 25,
1971, guilty verdicts were returned against Manson, Krenwinkel and Atkins on the seven counts of murder and the one of conspiracy; Van Houten was convicted on two counts of murder and one of conspiracy. Not far into the trial's
penalty phase, the jurors saw, at last, the defense that Manson (in the prosecution's view) had planned to present. Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten testified the murders had been conceived as "copycat" versions of the Hinman murder, for which Atkins now took credit. The killings, they said, were intended to draw suspicion away from Bobby Beausoleil, by resembling the crime for which he'd been jailed. This plan had supposedly been the work of, and carried out under the guidance of, not Manson, but someone allegedly in love with Beausoleil —
Linda Kasabian. In what the prosecution regarded as belated recognition on their part that imitation of Manson only proved his domination, the female defendants refrained from shaving their heads until the jurors retired to weigh the state's request for the
death penalty.
The effort to exonerate Manson via the "copycat" scenario failed; on
March 29 1971, the jury returned verdicts of death against all four defendants on all counts. On
April 19 1971, Judge Older sentenced the four to death.
On the day the verdicts recommending the
death penalty were returned, news came that the badly-decomposed body of Ronald Hughes had been found wedged between two boulders in
Ventura County. It was rumored, although never proven, that Hughes was murdered by the Family, possibly because he'd stood up to Manson and refused to allow Van Houten to take the stand and absolve Manson of the crimes. Though he might have perished in flooding, a Family member allegedly said Hughes was "the first of the retaliation murders."
Aftermath
Protracted proceedings to
extradite Watson from his native Texas, where he'd resettled a month before his arrest, resulted in his being tried separately. The trial commenced in August 1971; by October, he, too, had been found guilty on seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy. He, too, was sentenced to death.
In a 1971 trial that took place after his Tate-LaBianca convictions, Manson was found guilty of the murders of Gary Hinman and Donald "Shorty" Shea and was given a
life sentence. Shea, a Spahn Ranch stuntman and horse wrangler, had been killed approximately ten days after the
August 16,
1969, sheriff's raid on the ranch. Manson, who suspected that Shea helped set up the raid, had apparently believed Shea was trying to get Spahn to run the Family off the ranch. Manson was annoyed, too, that the white Shea had married a black woman; and it's possible Shea knew about the Tate-LaBianca killings. In separate trials, Family members Bruce Davis and Steve "Clem" Grogan were also found guilty of Shea's murder.
Before the conclusion of Manson's Tate-LaBianca trial, a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times tracked down Manson's mother, remarried and living in the
Pacific Northwest. The former Kathleen Maddox claimed that, in childhood, her son had known no neglect; he'd even been "pampered by all the women who surrounded him." The attempt took place in
Sacramento, to which she and Manson follower
Sandra Good had moved to be near Manson while he was incarcerated at
Folsom State Prison. A subsequent search of the apartment shared by Fromme, Good, and a Family recruit turned up evidence that, coupled with later actions on the part of Good, resulted in Good's conviction for conspiring to send threatening communications through the United States mail and transmitting death threats by way of interstate commerce. (The threats that were involved were against corporate executives and US government officials and had to do with supposed environmental dereliction on their part.)
In the 1980s, Manson gave three notable interviews. The first, recorded at
California Medical Facility and aired
June 13,
1981, was by
Tom Snyder for
NBC's
The Tomorrow Show. The second, recorded at
San Quentin Prison and aired
March 7,
1986, was by
Charlie Rose for
CBS News Nightwatch; it won the national news
Emmy Award for "Best Interview" in 1987. The last, with
Geraldo Rivera in 1988, was part of that journalist's prime-time special on
Satanism.
On
September 25,
1984, while imprisoned at the
California Medical Facility at
Vacaville, Manson was severely burned by a fellow inmate who poured paint thinner on him and set him alight. The other prisoner, Jan Holmstrom, explained that Manson had objected to his
Hare Krishna chants and had verbally threatened him. Despite suffering second- and third-degree burns over 20 percent of his body, Manson recovered from his injuries.
In
December 1987, Fromme, serving a life sentence for the assassination attempt, escaped briefly from
Alderson Federal Prison Camp in
West Virginia. She was trying to reach Manson, whom she'd heard had
testicular cancer; she was apprehended within days. In August 1971, after Manson's trial and sentencing, Share had participated in a violent California retail-store robbery, the object of which was the acquisition of weapons to help free Manson.
In a 1998-9 interview in
Seconds magazine,
Bobby Beausoleil rejected the view that Manson ordered him to kill Gary Hinman. The LAPD officer who conducted the examination had concluded Garretson was "clean" on participation in the crimes but "muddy" as to his having heard anything.
Recent developments
On
September 5,
2007,
MSNBC aired
The Mind of Manson, a complete version of a 1987 interview at California’s
San Quentin State Prison. The footage of the "unshackled, unapologetic, and unruly" Manson had been considered "so unbelievable" that only seven minutes of it had originally been broadcast on
The Today Show, for which it had been recorded.
In a
January 2008 segment of the
Discovery Channel’s
Most Evil, Barbara Hoyt said that the impression that she'd accompanied Ruth Ann Moorehouse to Hawaii just to avoid testifying at Manson's trial was erroneous. Hoyt said she'd cooperated with the Family because she was "trying to keep them from killing my family." She stated that, at the time of the trial, she was "constantly being threatened: 'Your family’s gonna die. [Themurders] could be repeated at your house.'"
On
March 15,
2008,
Associated Press reported that
forensic investigators had conducted a search for human remains at Barker Ranch the previous month. Following up on longstanding rumors that the Family had killed hitchhikers and runaways who had come into its orbit during its time at Barker, the investigators identified "two likely clandestine grave sites... and one additional site that merits further investigation." Though they recommended digging,
CNN reported on March 28 that the
Inyo County Sheriff, who questioned the methods they employed with search dogs, had ordered additional tests before any excavation. On May 9, after a delay caused by damage to test equipment, the sheriff announced that test results had been inconclusive and that "exploratory excavation" would begin on May 20. In the meantime, Tex Watson had commented publicly that "no one was killed" at the desert camp during the month-and-a-half he was there, after the Tate-LaBianca murders. On May 21, after two days of work, the sheriff brought the search to an end; four potential gravesites had been dug up and had been found to hold no human remains.
Parole hearings
A footnote to the conclusion of
California v. Anderson, the 1972 decision that neutralized California's then-current death sentences, stated:
» "[A]ny prisoner now under a sentence of death ... may file a petition for writ of
habeas corpus in the superior court inviting that court to modify its judgment to provide for the appropriate alternative punishment of life imprisonment or life imprisonment without possibility of parole specified by statute for the crime for which he was sentenced to death."
This made Manson eligible to apply for parole after seven years’ incarceration. Accordingly, his first parole hearing took place in 1978. On
May 23 2007, he was denied parole for the eleventh time.
Manson won't be eligible for parole again until 2012. He is an inmate in the Protective Housing Unit at
Corcoran State Prison in
Corcoran, California, where his inmate number in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is B33920.
Manson and culture
Recordings
On
March 6 1970, the day the court vacated Manson's status as his own attorney, This included "Cease to Exist," a Manson composition the Beach Boys had recorded with modified lyrics and the title "
Never Learn Not to Love." Over the next couple of months, only about 300 of the album's two thousand copies sold.
Since that time, there have been several releases of Manson recordings — music and speech.
The Family Jams includes two
compact discs of Manson's songs recorded by the Family in 1970, after Manson and the others had been arrested. Guitar and lead vocals are supplied by Steve Grogan;
One Mind, an album of music, poetry, and speech new at the time of its release, in
April 2005,
American
rock band
Guns N’ Roses recorded Manson's "
Look at Your Game, Girl," included as an unlisted thirteenth track on their 1993 album
"The Spaghetti Incident?" "My Monkey," which appears on
Portrait of an American Family by
Marilyn Manson (no relation, as is explained below), includes the lyrics "I had a little monkey/I sent him to the country and I fed him on gingerbread/Along came a choo-choo/Knocked my monkey cuckoo/And now my monkey’s dead." These are from Manson’s "Mechanical Man," which is heard on .
Several of Manson's songs, including
"I'm Scratching Peace Symbols on Your Tombstone" (a.k.a. "First They Made Me Sleep in the Closet"),, and
"I Can't Remember When", are featured in the soundtrack of the 1976
TV-movie Helter Skelter, where they're performed by
Steve Railsback, who plays Manson.
Cultural reverberation
Within months of the Tate-LaBianca arrests, Manson was embraced by
underground newspapers of the
1960s counterculture from which the Family had emerged. When a
Rolling Stone writer visited the Los Angeles
District Attorney’s office for a June 1970 cover story, he was shocked by a photograph of the bloody "Healter [
sic] Skelter" that would bind Manson to
popular culture.
Manson has been a presence in fashion, graphics, music, and movies, as well as on television and the stage. In an afterword composed for the 1994 edition of the non-fiction
Helter Skelter, prosecutor
Vincent Bugliosi quoted a
BBC employee's assertion that a "neo-Manson cult" existing then in
Europe was represented by, among other things, approximately 70 rock bands playing songs by Manson and "songs in support of him." "Sadie Mae Glutz" was the name by which Susan Atkins was known within the Family;
Manson has even influenced the names of musical performers such as
Spahn Ranch and
Marilyn Manson, the latter a
stage name assembled from "Charles Manson" and "
Marilyn Monroe." The story of the Family's activities inspired
John Moran’s opera
The Manson Family and
Stephen Sondheim’s musical
Assassins, the latter of which has Lynette Fromme as a character. The tale has been the subject of several movies, including two television
dramatizations of
Helter Skelter. In the
South Park episode
Merry Christmas Charlie Manson, Manson is a comic character whose inmate number is 06660, an apparent reference to 666, the Biblical "
number of the beast."
Documentaries
Further Information
Get more info on 'Charles Manson'.
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