MANSON, CHARLES 1934-

Mass murderer

A Scene of Bloody Horror

At about 8 A.M. on Saturday morning, 9 August 1969, housekeeper Winifred Chapman arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, the rental residence of film director Roman Polanski in a fashionable Los Angeles neighbor-hood near Beverly Hills. What she found that morning aroused the horrified interest of the nation. Five people lay dead in and around the blood-spattered house. The victims included Polanski's young wife, actress Sharon Tate, who was eight-and-one-half-months pregnant; Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; Abigail Folger, daughter of the chairman of the board of A. J. Folger Coffee Company; Folger's Polish boyfriend, Voytek Frykowski; and Steven Parent, a young man who had stopped by to sell some clock radios. The victims had been beaten and stabbed dozens of times, and the word PIG was written in blood on the front door. There seemed to be no motive. No money or valuables were taken, and none of the victims had been sexually assaulted. The gruesome scene baffled the police.

Deadly Reprise

Later that weekend the mystery deepened. On Sunday night the bodies of Leno LaBianca, the middle-aged president of a chain of grocery stores, and his wife Rosemary were found in their home about five miles east of Beverly Hills. They had been dead almost twenty hours. Both had been beaten and repeatedly stabbed. Again there were words written in the blood of the victims—DEATH TO PIGS, RISE, and HEALTER SKELTER.

A Break in the Case

Initially police had believed that the caretaker at the Tate residence had committed the murders there. But he had passed a lie-detector test and was in police custody when the second murders took place. After two months the police still had no suspects in either case. Breaks eventually came from two sources. One was from the members of a motorcycle gang. The other was from a prisoner in a Los Angeles jail. The prisoner told of strange conversations she had had with a fellow inmate, a young woman who was being held in connection with yet another murder involving a stabbing and a message left in the victim's blood. Both sources pointed to a man who was already being held on car-theft charges, Charles Manson.

A Career Felon

Charles Manson was born on 12 November 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old girl. Manson's early years were un-stable. He never knew his father. His mother was in jail for armed robbery during part of his childhood, and the boy found himself shifted among relatives, foster homes, and, finally, reformatories. His education ended in the seventh grade. In 1955, less than a year after his release from a federal reformatory in Ohio where he had been held for interstate transport of a stolen vehicle, he married a waitress, and they moved to California—in a stolen car. Manson could not give up his criminal life-style. While he was in prison on auto theft charges in California, his wife divorced him, and with their child, Charles Manson, Jr., moved permanently out of his life. In the following years Manson was in and out of prison on charges ranging from forging U.S. Treasury checks to pimping. In 1959 Manson was again married, according to prison records, but was divorced in 1963. The records indicate there was a child from this second marriage, named Charles Luther Manson. One thing that set Manson apart from other career felons was his tendency to commit federal crimes, which carry longer prison terms than state offenses. He also had a temporary enthusiasm for the Church of Scientology and developed an interest in music, particularly that of the Beatles. On his release from prison in 1967, Manson was thirty-two years old, and he had spent seventeen of those years in institutions, mostly prisons.

Bizarre Motive

Manson settled in the San Francisco area after his release. He gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district, where he accumulated an increasing number of young followers, mostly female, who came to comprise the "Manson Family." Near the end of 1967, Manson and his "family" left San Francisco, traveling through the western United States in an old schoolbus. Over a year later they arrived in the Los Angeles area, where they eventually established themselves at a former movie ranch northwest of the city. Manson wrote and recorded songs while he and his followers lived a life of leisure interrupted by occasional auto thefts and other crimes. Manson established complete control over his followers, using a combination of violence, intimidation, sex, and his powerful charisma. He preached to them his philosophy, predicting a race war in which blacks would eventually overcome whites. Manson felt that the Beatles' music, especially their The Beat/es, known as the White Album (1969), both foretold and encouraged this apocalypse. Manson believed that the song "Heiter Skelter" dealt specifically with the coming race war. While the war raged, Manson said that he and his followers would hide out in the desert. After it was over, he preached, they would be called upon to lead society by the victorious blacks. The Tate and LaBianca murders were carried out with the specific intention of horrifying the nation by creating the impression that blacks had been the perpetrators, thus starting the war Manson had predicted.

Sensational Trial

Proving this motive was the key to the prosecution's case in the trial, which began on 24 July 1970. It was the longest murder trial up to that time in American history, lasting nine and one-half months. The prosecution relied mostly on testimony from Manson family members who had agreed to talk in exchange for leniency, but there was also a small but important collection of physical evidence, including the pistol used in the Tate murders. Manson and three of his followers who had committed the murders were found guilty and sentenced to death. A fifth defendant, Charles ("Tex") Watson was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. In 1972 the California Supreme Court found that the death penalty violated the state constitution, and all individuals on death row had their sentences converted to life in prison. In fact Manson and the other four murderers would eventually be eligible to apply for parole. Later the state of California reinstituted the death penalty, but because Manson and his followers were convicted under the prior law, their life sentences were unaffected.

Manson, Charles (1934– ) US cult leader. In 1967, he established a commune based on free love and complete subservience to him. In 1969 members of the cult committed a series of brutal murders, including that of Roman Polanski's wife Sharon Tate (1943–69). Manson and his accomplices were sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.