Also see this this.
There have been several "fake news" reports that Charles Mason died. I think this report is the real news.
Charles Manson, one of nation's most infamous mass killers, dead at 83
Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY Published 10:55 p.m. MT Nov. 19, 2017 | Updated 8:19 a.m. MT Nov. 20, 2017
Charles Manson, wild-eyed leader of a cult "family" who killed seven people in a bloody rampage in Los Angeles that shocked the nation in 1969, died of natural causes Sunday, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Manson, 83, had struggled with gastrointestinal problems and been shuttled back and forth to hospitals in recent years. He had been serving multiple life sentences at California's Corcoran State Prison.
The ghastly "Tate-LaBianca killings" — a murderous blend of 60s sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll — were carried out over two nights in upscale Los Angeles neighborhoods. Manson did not actually participate in the killings, but directed them.
Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson case and later wrote a bestselling book, Helter Skelter, about the killings, said in 2009 that the "very name 'Manson' has become a metaphor for evil," The Los Angeles Times reported.
"He has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, and for whatever reason, there is a side of human nature that is fascinated by pure, unalloyed evil," he said.
Among the victims butchered on Manson's orders on the first night of carnage, Aug. 8, 1969, were actress Sharon Tate, 26, the pregnant wife of movie director Roman Polanski, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, 25, celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring, 35, writer Wojciech Frykowski, 32, and Steven Parent, a teenager visiting the house in Benedict Canyon, above Sunset Blvd.
The Manson "family" killers, including protege Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, shot their victims and stabbed them more than 100 times. Before leaving, they wrote the word "pig" in blood on the front door.
Manson, in comments to his followers, dubbed the rampage "Helter Skelter," after the Beatles song of the same name, and said he wanted the murders to start to a race war by leaving clues pointing to black killers.
The house previously belonged to Terry Melcher, a TV and record producer who once declined to sign Manson, an aspiring musician-songwriter, to a contract. Although Melcher no longer lived at the house in late summer 1969, Manson sent his cult followers to the location to kill anyone there.
On the second night, two other "family" members, Leslie Van Houten and Steve "Clem" Grogan, accompanied the original band of killers to the Los Feliz neighborhood in L.A. There they stabbed to death Leno LaBianca, a wealthy supermarket executive, and his wife, Rosemary.
Charles Manson through the years
Manson, then 34, had been unhappy with the "messy" operation at the Tate house and gave precise instructions for the second killings, instructing his followers to bind the couple with lamp cords and cover their heads with pillowcases before stabbing them repeatedly.
Manson and the five members of his “family” were convicted in 1971 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. They were all sentenced to death. The verdicts were commuted to life when the death penalty was briefly outlawed the following year.
Another member of the cult, Linda Kasabian, had driven the killers to the LaBianca house because she was the only person with a valid driver's license, according to The Los Angeles Times. She received immunity for testifying against the group.
Bugliosi, the prosecutor, said the Manson "family" — which operated out of an abandoned ranch in the Mojave Desert— was likely responsible for as many as 35 killings in and around Los Angeles.
In the trial, Bugliosi denounced Manson as the “dictatorial maharajah of a tribe of bootlicking slaves.”
During the seven-month trial, Manson continued to hold sway over his cult members, both in the courtroom and outside the building. Some of the young defendants giggled and sang during the proceedings. At one point, Manson arrived in court with an "x" carved in his forehead. His "family" followed suit the next day.
Charles Manson, a cult leader whose crimes loom large in the American psyche, died in the early hours of Monday, the Associated Press confirmed. He was 83. Time
In testimony at his trial, Manson denied the charges and described himself as a chameleon-like character: "Charlie never projects himself ... People see in Charlie their own reflection ... Linda Kasabian testified against me because she saw me as the father she never liked ... I do what love tells me."
Jeff Guinn, author of The Life and Times of Charles Manson said his two-year research into Manson's background, including interviews with his relatives, debunks any notion of Manson as mystical or magical figure.
"He's a gifted psychopath who's a talented liar who's lied about just about everything," he told USA TODAY in 2013.
"I recognize Manson as an intelligent man," Guinn said. "He's uneducated but he's not stupid, but from his childhood he's been a violent con artist; that has never changed. But I do not consider him in any way insane. Which makes what he did even more horrifying."
In prison, Manson was denied parole 12 times. At one hearing, the parole board commissioner said Manson, who turned the mark on his forehead into a swastika, had amassed more than 100 serious disciplinary violations, including threatening a police officer, possession of weapons and possession of a cellphone.
In 2014, Manson obtained a marriage license to wed Afton Elaine Burton, a 26-year-old fan. But the license later expired without the pair marrying.
Manson, then named Charles Milles Maddox, was born in Cincinnati in 1934 to a single, 16-year-old girl involved in petty crime and prostitution, according to Biography.
In a lengthy interview with Tom Snyder more than 35 years ago, Manson recounted spending most of his early years in jail and reform schools.
"I never thought I was normal, never tried to be normal," he said. At the schools, he said he had to "lay down and get my ass whipped until I couldn't walk."
Manson recalled a dysfunctional childhood in which his mother once hit a man with a bottle, then grabbed her son and fled for Indiana. A drifter in and out of jail and reform school for crimes such as theft and check forgery, Manson eventually made his way to the West Coast where he served 10 years in Washington state prison for pimping and passing stolen checks.
After his release, he drifted south to California, attracting scores of followers, mostly dropouts and misfits on the streets of San Francisco. He eventually settled down with a hard-core group of followers, mostly young girls, at a deserted ranch in the San Fernando Valley where he held court with a mix of drugs, group sex and homegrown prophecies, portraying himself as Jesus Christ.
Over the years, Manson fathered at least two sons, including Charles Milles Manson, Jr., who killed himself with a shotgun on a desolate road in Colorado in 1993, CNN reported. The younger Manson son, Jason Freeman, who changed his name to avoid the "family curse" of being named Manson, said he believed his brother "couldn't live down who his father was."
Charles Manson 'a pathetic, cowardly con man' who should be remembered for that alone. Reactions to his death
By ALENE TCHEKMEDYIAN
NOV 19, 2017 | 11:20 PM
As news of Charles Manson’s death spread late Sunday, many on social media said his death should be a time to remember and mourn his victims.
Michele Hanisee, president of the Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys, said in a statement that the prosecutor who put Manson behind bars "provided the most accurate summation: '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. The sister of actress Sharon Tate, one of his victims, got a call from a prison official Sunday evening to notify her of Manson's death, People magazine reported.
"I said a prayer for his soul," Debra Tate told People.
On Twitter, Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O'Farrell called Manson “a pathetic, cowardly con man” who should be remembered for that alone.
"The lives he & his followers cut mercilessly short are deserving of having their stories told," O'Farrell said.
Manson and members of his "family" of followers were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate and six other people during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area in August 1969.
Prosecutors said Manson and his followers were trying to incite a race war he dubbed "Helter Skelter," taken from the Beatles song of the same name.
Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, was 8 1/2 months pregnant when she was killed at her hilltop home in Benedict Canyon on Aug. 9, 1969. Four others were stabbed and shot to death the same night: Jay Sebring, 35; Voytek Frykowski, 32; Abigail Folger, 25, a coffee heiress; and Steven Parent, 18, a friend of Tate's caretaker. The word "pig" was written on the front door in blood.
The next night, Manson rode with his followers to the Los Feliz home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, then left three members to kill the couple.
Manson initially was sentenced to death. But a 1972 ruling by the California Supreme Court found the state's death penalty law at the time unconstitutional, and his sentence was changed to life in prison with the possibility of parole. He was denied parole 12 times.
Charles Manson, wild-eyed cult leader whose slayings horrified the nation, dies at 83
Charles Manson, who masterminded a string of bizarre murders in Los Angeles in 1969 that both horrified and fascinated the nation and signified to many the symbolic end of the 1960s and the idealism and naiveté the decade represented, has died. He was 83.
Considered one of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century, Manson died at a Kern County Hospital at 8:13 p.m Sunday of natural causes, according to Vicky Waters, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Manson did not commit the murders himself; instead he persuaded a group of his followers to carry out the killings. The crimes received frenzied news coverage, because so many lurid and sensational elements coalesced at the time — Hollywood celebrity, cult behavior, group sex, drugs and savage murders that concluded with the killers scrawling words with their victims’ blood.
Los Angeles residents were terrified by the crimes. Before the killers were apprehended, gun sales and guard dog purchases skyrocketed and locksmiths had weeks-long waiting lists. Numerous off-duty police officers were hired to guard homes in affluent neighborhoods and security firms tripled in size.
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Manson was an unlikely figure to evolve into the personification of evil. A few inches over 5 feet, he was a petty criminal and small-time hustler. And his followers — dubbed the Manson family — bore little resemblance to the stereotypical image of hardened killers. Most of them were young men and women in their early 20s, middle-class white kids, hippies and runaways who fell under the charismatic sway of Manson.
Manson and four of his followers — Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles “Tex” Watson — were convicted of murdering actress Sharon Tate, the wife of movie director Roman Polanski, in their Bel-Air home on Aug. 9, 1969, along with four others.
Watson had been a high school football star. Krenwinkel a former Sunday school teacher. Van Houten a homecoming princess from Monrovia. And Atkins once sang in her church choir. Linda Kasabian, a pregnant 20-year-old with a baby daughter, who said she was asked to go along that night because she was the only one with a valid driver’s license, testified against the others in return for immunity from prosecution. Atkins died in 2009 in prison; the others remain incarcerated.
Tate, 26, who was eight months pregnant, pleaded with her killers to spare the life of her unborn baby. Atkins replied, “Woman, I have no mercy for you.” Tate was stabbed 16 times. “PIG” was written in her blood on the front door.
The next night they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their Los Feliz home. Manson picked the house at random, tied up the couple and then left the killings to the others. They cut “WAR” in Leno LaBianca’s flesh and left a carving fork in his stomach and a knife in his throat. Using the LaBiancas’ blood, they scrawled on the wall and refrigerator in blood “DEATH TO PIGS” and “HEALTER SKELTER,” the misspelled title of a Beatles song. Before leaving, they helped themselves to some watermelon in the refrigerator, leaving behind the rinds.
“People were so terrified because these seemed to be murders without a motive,” said lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who died in 2015. “They weren’t robberies or burglaries. It was so random. If you’re not safe in your home, where are you safe? And these murders were particularly brutal. On the two nights there were 169 stab wounds.”
The 9½-month trial — the longest in U.S. history at the time — was as bizarre as the crimes.
A group of young female followers with shaved heads gathered outside the courthouse and conducted a 24-hour vigil for Manson. One morning Manson entered the court room with an X carved into his forehead and his followers soon did the same. During the trial, Manson jumped over his attorney’s table and made a dash for the bench. While the bailiffs were dragging him out of the courtroom, Manson shouted to Judge Charles H. Older, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should chop off your head!” The judge began packing a .38-caliber revolver under his robe. Van Houten’s attorney, Ronald Hughes, disappeared during the trial and was later found dead. Prosecutors suspected he was another Manson victim.
Manson became a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure.
— Vincent Bugliosi, lead prosecutor
Bugliosi argued during the trial that Manson orchestrated the murders as part of a plan to spark a race war that he called Helter Skelter. Blacks would win the war even though, according to Manson, they were inferior to whites. Then he and his followers would survive by living underground near Death Valley and would eventually take over power. In a later trial, Manson was convicted in the slayings of musician Gary Hinman and Donald “Shorty” Shea, who worked at the San Fernando Valley ranch where the family lived for a time.
In 1972, the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when the state Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Since then Manson and his followers have been eligible for parole hearings. Only one of those convicted in the nine murders — Steve Grogan, who was involved in the Shea shooting — has been paroled. Atkins died in 2009 while incarcerated in Chowchilla.
Manson — who had spent more than half of his life in prison before the conviction — was housed at Corcoran State Prison since 1989. He broke prison rules dozens of times for violations including possessing cellular phones and a hacksaw blade, throwing hot coffee at a staff member, spitting in a guard’s face, fighting, refusing to obey orders and trying to flood a tier in his cellblock. Long ago, he turned the X on his forehead into a swastika. He was denied parole 12 times and had numerous disciplinary violations. His last parole hearing was in 2012, which he declined to attend.
Doris Tate, Sharon’s mother, became a victims’ rights advocate after the murders and helped collect more than 350,000 signatures on petitions opposing parole for Manson and his followers. After her death in 1992, her daughter Patti Tate appeared at Manson family hearings opposing parole.
More than 40 years after the mass murders, Manson — whose wild-eyed stare was immortalized on a Life magazine cover — remains a figure of fascination, a homicidal anti-hero for a new generation. Rock groups have played songs that he wrote. Merchants peddle T-shirts bearing Manson’s likeness, as well as belt buckles, caps, necklaces, rosaries and cigarette lighters. Manson memorabilia is sold on the Internet.
“Manson became a metaphor for evil, and evil has its allure,” said Bugliosi, who wrote — with Curt Gentry — the bestselling nonfiction book “Helter Skelter” about the case. “People found him so fascinating because unlike other mass murderers who did the killings themselves or participated with others, Manson got people to kill for him.”
Manson received in prison an average of four fan letters a day, said Stephen Kay, who helped prosecute the case. When he turned 80, Manson and a 27-year-old fan obtained a marriage license. But it expired before the paperwork was completed.
There’s these young people today who are intrigued by his mystique ... But they don’t know what he’s really about, what he really did.
— Stephen Kay, helped prosecute the case Kay said he attended 60 parole hearings to argue against Manson family members’ release before retiring from the district attorney’s office in 2005. Manson, Kay said, evolved into the focal point of satanic worship in the U.S.
“At one parole hearing outside San Quentin in the late 1980s, there were about 40 satanic worshipers dressed in black outside the prison chanting for his release,” Kay said. “Then there’s these young people today who are intrigued by his mystique since he’s America’s most famous criminal. But they don’t know what he’s really about, what he really did.”
Manson has been portrayed as the dark prince of the counterculture, the sinister consequences of a permissive era. The man and his crimes, however, are more a product of parental neglect, a failed foster care system and barbaric juvenile justice institutions.
Charles Manson was born Nov. 12, 1934, to an impoverished 16-year-old single mother named Kathleen Maddox. “No Name Maddox” appeared on the Cincinnati hospital’s birth certificate because the father had not been identified. His mother later was briefly married to a man who provided his stepson with a last name.
Shortly after Manson was born, Kathleen would tell relatives she had to run off for an hour or two, leave her son, and then return days or weeks later. When Manson was 5, his mother and her brother robbed a West Virginia service station and knocked the attendant unconscious with a Coke bottle. They were sentenced to five years in state prison. Manson was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. The happiest day of his life, he has said, was when his mother was released from prison. The feeling did not last long. He spent the next few years in tow, as his mother embarked on a journey through the Midwest, staying at a series of seedy hotel rooms and drinking heavily.
“By the time I was 12 I’d missed a lot of school, seen a few juvenile homes and no longer believed all my mom’s lovers were ‘uncles,’ ” he said in “Manson in His Own Words,” as told to Nuel Emmons. “One night I was awakened by the sound of [my mother and her current boyfriend] arguing. The words I remember most were his: ‘I’m telling you, I’m moving on. You and I could make it just fine, but I can’t stand that sneaky kid of yours.’ ”
His mother then attempted to place him in foster care, but no home was available, so the court sent Manson to a facility for troubled boys in Indiana. After 10 months he ran away and returned to his mother, but she told him she didn’t want him. He ran off again, broke into a grocery store for enough cash to rent a room. After a series of burglaries, armed robberies, arrests and escapes from juvenile institutions, he was sent to a reform school in Indiana.
Manson was only 13, a small, slight, unhappy boy. He was frequently beaten with a strap by the staff and, shortly after he arrived, he was gang-raped by several older boys, he wrote. After a guard discovered the assault, he told Manson, “You, Manson, go wash your face and stop all your crying.”
During his three years in reform school, he ran away 18 times. By the time he was 18 he had been transformed from prey into predator. He was convicted of holding a razor blade to the throat of another boy and raping him. When he was finally released from reform school, he wasn’t out for long. He was arrested for stealing cars and violating parole and, at the age of 22, was sentenced to his first term at an adult prison: three years at the Terminal Island federal penitentiary. Older inmates taught him how to be a pimp, and during a few brief interludes between prison sentences he had turned a few girls out on the street.
Manson’s music and his quasi-spiritual rap, which later had impressed followers, were forged during his stays in prisons during the next decade. At McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, he met Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, the sole survivor of the Ma Barker gang, who taught him how to play steel guitar. He read science fiction and books on Eastern religion books and learned about Scientology from a bank robber. On a prison form, he listed his religion as “Scientologist.”
Manson was married twice before he was sentenced to the Terminal Island federal prison and had a son with each wife.
In 1967, he was scheduled to be released from Terminal Island with no friends or family on the outside who wanted to see him, no trade and no prospects for a job.
“I told the officer who was signing me out, ‘You know what, man, I don’t want to leave!,’” Manson wrote. “‘I don’t have a home out there! Why don’t you just take me back inside.’ The officer laughed and thought I was kidding. ‘I’m serious, man! I mean it, I don’t want to leave!’ My plea was ignored.”
He hitchhiked to Berkeley during the Summer of Love, a time when the Bay Area was a mecca for young, idealistic hippies. They were easy prey for a street-smart conman like Manson. He soon put to use everything he had learned in prison. He played guitar on the street to attract women, intrigued them with his metaphysical monologues and, like the pimp he once was, manipulated and exploited young women and used them to attract male followers.
The followers took copious amounts of LSD, but Manson always abstained or took a much smaller dose and then orchestrated orgies in order, he claimed, to break down sexual taboos. The family survived by petty crimes and raiding supermarket dumpsters. Before the Summer of Love was over, Manson had eight followers, most of them women. They piled into an old school bus and roamed the West Coast before ending up in Los Angeles. In the spring of 1968, two female Manson family members who were hitchhiking were picked up by Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. They introduced him to Manson and the family briefly lived with Wilson at his Pacific Palisades home. Wilson introduced Manson to Terry Melcher, a record producer who was Doris Day’s son, and Manson played a few of the songs he wrote. Melcher had considered signing him, but eventually passed, embittering Manson. The family eventually moved to the Spahn Ranch, a little-used 500-acre property in the Santa Susana Mountains above Chatsworth.
In August 1969, Manson handed Watson a gun and a knife. “He said for me to take the gun and knife and go up to where Terry Melcher used to live,” Watson testified. “He said to kill everybody in the house as gruesome as I could. I believe he said something about movie stars living there.”
There was a secondary motive for the Tate murders, Bugliosi wrote in “Helter Skelter”: “As Susan Atkins put it ... ‘The reason Charlie picked that house was to instill fear into Terry Melcher because Terry had given us his word on a few things and never came through with them.’ But this was obviously not the primary motive, since ... Manson knew that Melcher was no longer living at the [house].”
Along with Tate, they killed Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairdresser; Voytek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski; Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s girlfriend and the heir to the Folger coffee fortune; and Steven Parent, 18, who was visiting the resident of the guest house and was just leaving the property.
The next night Manson led followers to a Los Feliz neighborhood he was familiar with, picked a house at random and tied up the LaBiancas with leather thongs. After Manson took off, the couple was murdered.
“Many people I know in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote in “The White Album,” “believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug 9, 1969, at the exact moment when the word of the murders ... traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.... The paranoia was fulfilled.”
More than 40 years later, the notoriety of Charles Manson and the murders he plotted endures.
“Most homicides and trials get a lot of attention and then fade,” Bugliosi said. “Maniacs who kill to satisfy their urges do not resonate. Manson was different. As misguided as the murders were, he claimed that they were political and revolutionary, that he was trying to change the social order, not merely satisfy a homicidal urge. That appeals to the crazies on the fringes of society.”
Manson was nonchalant after he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to San Quentin’s Death Row. He told prosecutors they were simply sending him home.
“Prison is my home,” he once said in an interview, “the only home I ever had.”
Corwin is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer.