The Shocking History Of The Notorious Killer
Whether it's his abusive mother or his mind-control program with the CIA, these Charles Manson facts will upend all of your assumptions.
This was the first of several burglaries he committed, before stealing a number of cars and taking them across state lines. As a young man, he also stole mail and forged checks.Bettmann/Getty Images According to a 1971 interview with Manson’s mother, Kathleen Maddox, she was simply a "dumb kid" who had run away from home and gotten pregnant out of wedlock. Some say that Manson said she was a prostitute in order to gain sympathy. Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images According to a memoir by notorious Ma Barker gang member Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, who taught Manson to play when the two were imprisoned together, "little Charlie" was lazy yet had a nice voice and a pleasant personality. Bettmann/Getty Images He took a class based on the popular 1936 self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People, written by Dale Carnegie.Getty Images He thought that some of The Beatles' songs were coded messages about a coming race war he referred to with the phrase "Helter Skelter" (after The Beatles' song of the same name).Rick Browne/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images All the murders that have been linked to Manson were committed by his followers. According to the prosecution at his trial, the murders were carried out based on his commands.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Through his connection with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, Manson received cash and a motorcycle for the rights to his song "Cease To Exist," which the band rewrote as "Never Learn Not To Love." In 1993, Guns N' Roses recorded Manson's "Look At Your Game, Girl," which he used to lure young women into his cult.Albert Foster/Mirrorpix/Getty Images That is, if he wasn't a murderous cult leader. As famed FBI profiler John E. Douglas wrote: "He had been forced to live by his wits his entire life and so had become extremely adept at sizing up the people he met and quickly determining what they could do for him. He would have been excellent in my unit assessing an individual's psychological strengths and weaknesses and strategizing how to get a killer we were hunting."Albert Foster/Mirrorpix/Getty Images Though many claim that Manson had his followers attack the Tate house because he mistakenly believed that former occupant, music producer Terry Melcher, was still living there at the time, witnesses say that's not the case. Talent manager Rudi Altobelli, who also owned the house at 10050 Cielo Drive where the Tate murders took place, recalled Manson dropping by the house before the murders while looking for Melcher and being told that he no longer lived there.Bettmann/Getty Images Tom O'Neill's heavily-reported book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties places Charles Manson at one of the U.S. government facilities used for MKUltra, a secret government program experimenting with mind control on unwitting civilians. "[Dr. Jolly West] was definitely in the same facility at the same time that Manson was there everyday and becoming exactly what the CIA was trying to create," the author said in an interview.Getty Images Unsurprisingly, Manson was well-acclimated to life inside prison. A prison evaluation noted that he was also active in softball, basketball, and croquet, and was a member of the Self-Improvement Group.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images He was taught the religion by convict Lanier Rayner and claimed that he had reached "theta clear" rank. He eventually gave up the religion but later borrowed some of the religion's specific terms, like "cease to exist" and "auditing" in his own cult.Getty Images He had gotten so comfortable inside the confines of prison during his stay at Washington's McNeil Island that he told authorities that prison was his home. He was afraid that he wouldn't be able to adjust to the world outside. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Court papers showed that Manson was married to a Rosalie Jean Willis in 1955 in West Virginia and then later divorced her after he went to prison. In 1959, he married Leona Stevens, who also worked for him as a prostitute in California. They divorced four years later.Public Domain The two were introduced to each other after Wilson accidentally picked up two female members of the Family who were hitchhiking. Soon, the entire Manson Family moved into Wilson's Hollywood home. Corcoran State Prison Manson wrote musician Henry Rollins asking him to produce the album. The latter they made with SST Records but the label only pressed five copies of the record after they received death threats because of the project. Manson kept three of them.Albert Foster/Mirrorpix/Getty Images He told the press that it symbolized him removing himself from society. When his followers carved X's into their foreheads too, he changed his X into a swastika.Getty Images He had his first son, Charles Manson Jr., with his first wife. Then, he had another son with his second wife named Charles Luther Manson. Valentine Manson a.k.a Michael Brunner was birthed by a devoted follower of Manson's named Mary Brunner.Getty Images Having never actually completed school, Manson could barely read and write but scored quite high on IQ tests he took earlier in his life.Bettmann/Getty Images He dismissed his appointed attorney so that he could represent himself in court. He displayed many theatrics during his trial, like orchestrating a bizarre sing-along with his co-defendants and threatening the judge with a pencil. Things got so out of hand that the judge later revoked his permission to represent himself.Getty Images At one point, Manson tried to live a normal life and went to church with his grandmother Nancy Maddox every Sunday. But after having difficulty landing an honest job, he went back to stealing and lying to make a living.Albert Foster/Mirrorpix/Getty Images In order to settle his Family at the abandoned lot without charge, Manson had his female followers take turns in having sex with ranch owner George Spahn and helping with chores in exchange for living there.Bettmann/Getty Images According to Maddox's account, she had wanted to wait for her mother to see the newborn baby before naming him. Bettmann/Getty Images After his first wife left him for a trucker and took their son while he was in prison, Manson attempted to escape by stealing a car but was caught trying to cut the chain-link fence.Albert Foster/Mirrorpix/Getty Images Manson served out his life sentence locked away in the Protective Housing Unit (PHU) of California's Corcoran State Prison. The facility is so secret that nobody knows which famous inmates are indeed held there.Mirrorpix/Getty Images After Manson was charged with the Family murders, Lewis later quipped that younger Manson "didn’t chop no heads off. He was very nice with me."Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Manson took the last name of his stepfather, William Eugene Manson. His biological father was a local laborer named Colonel Walker Henderson Scott. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Getty Images Responding to a barren waitress who jokingly said she would buy little Manson if she could, his alcoholic mother said, "A pitcher of beer and he's yours," then left him there after finishing her drink.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images A group of boys at a strict reform school he attended picked on him and two of them actually raped him. But Manson got his revenge after he beat the first boy bloody and framed the other for the beating. Later, his first chance at parole was quashed after he was caught raping another inmate.UPI One of Manson's lawyers, Ronald Hughes, was discovered dead after he had been missing for some time. The timing of the murder following Hughes' dropping Manson as a client to defend one of the female defendants led police to believe it was another hit by Manson followers though nothing was ever proven.Bettmann/Getty Images His body was eventually given to his grandson, Jason Freeman, who planned to have his notorious grandfather cremated.Watford/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
Charles Manson Facts That Reveal The Man Behind The Monster View GalleryA half-century after the Tate-LaBianca murders shocked a nation, Charles Manson remains one of the most chilling figures in American crime history. The Manson Murders have long since gone down in history as some of the most disturbing killings of all time, with Manson himself viewed as one of the most disturbing figures in all of American crime lore.
But the intense spotlight on Manson over the decades has only blurred the lines between man and myth, leaving us to wonder what was fact and what was fiction? However, the Charles Manson facts above and below will begin to clear things up and shed some light on this terrifying yet fascinating man.
Charles Manson Facts: A Rough, Unusual Upbringing
Bettmann/Getty ImagesCharles Manson as a boy. 1947.
Charles Milles Manson was born on November 12, 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio as the illegitimate son of Kathleen Maddox and a local laborer named Colonel Walker Henderson Scott. He would later acquire the name Manson from his stepfather William Eugene Manson, who had wed his mother shortly before his birth.
The marriage was short-lived, with the senior Manson citing Maddox's drinking and "gross neglect of duty" as reasons for the divorce. Manson indeed grew up in an unstable environment as his mother continued to drink and steal.
When he was five years old, his mother and his uncle were arrested for committing a fake hold-up using a bottle of ketchup that they pretended was a gun. They got away with a car and $27 before local police caught up to them. After his mother and uncle went to prison, Manson was taken in by his aunt Glenna and her husband, Bill.
According to Manson's cousin Jo Ann, as a child he could be both charming and tyrannical, constantly lying, stealing, and sometimes even displaying signs of violent behavior (she claims he attempted to attack her with a sickle on multiple occasions). Other times, however, he would pick up an instrument and belt out beautiful hymns.
Nevertheless, by age 12, Manson committed his first notable, known crime: stealing money from a grocery store. This was the first of several burglaries he committed, later stealing many cars and carrying them across state lines, a federal crime that he first carried out at 16. Meanwhile, he also stole mail, forged checks, and pimped out women he dated, like Leona "Candy" Stevens, who he ultimately married (his second wife after Rosalie Jean Willis).
Getty ImagesCharles Manson leaves court after deferring a plea on the Tate-LaBianca murders.
Eventually, after a string of such crimes, Manson served several years in prison in California for violating parole after trying to cash a forged government check in 1959. Interestingly, being locked up gave Manson a certain sense of stability and belonging that he never had on the outside.
Among all the other prison activities and clubs that he was part of during his stint, he also learned how to play the guitar. Thus began his obsession with music.
He started listening to The Beatles and quickly became obsessed with them. He even believed his musical talent could make him bigger than The Beatles, if only he had a shot — which is precisely what he sought when he finally got out in 1967.
The Manson Family
Getty ImagesCharles Manson did a lot of things while in prison, including learn how to play the guitar.
In 1968, the year after Manson was released from prison, he set up shop in California and began building what would ultimately be seen as his cult, the Manson Family. By all accounts, his unusual charm and penchant for persuasive if unhinged speechifying helped attract young loners, runaways, and the like into his orbit.
As Manson once so poetically put it to a friend in prison, "I am a very positive force... I collect negatives."
Many of his followers were young, white, middle-class, educated women, many of which felt either bored with or isolated from their real families. Thus the Manson Family was born.
His followers later claimed that they hung on Manson's every word and did whatever he told them to do. He ordered the women to perform household chores, coaxed them to perform sexual acts on each other, and took them dumpster diving as a way to scrounge for food. One of his first followers out of prison was a woman named Mary Brunner. She would later give birth to a baby boy named after his father, Charles Luther Manson.
Often, he would give sermons to his group to talk about an impending race war between whites and blacks that he believed would soon erupt. He told them that there would be bloodshed between the races while their "family" would go into hiding underground until the war ended.
Later, he told them, their clan would emerge as saviors to the Black race that had won the war. Manson named his deranged prophecy after the Beatles song, Helter Skelter.
Meanwhile, his powers of persuasion and musical talent got him a shot with some of Hollywood's music industry insiders, including Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys. The nomadic cult even moved into Wilson's home on Sunset Boulevard for several months and cost Wilson about $100,000 worth of food, medical bills, and repairs resulting from property damage.
Manson also asked Wilson for money — while crashing his car, taking his possessions (including a Beach Boys gold record), and persuading him to take the Family to doctors in Beverly Hills. They partied, did drugs (primarily LSD) and had sex without a care in the world while staying at Wilson's.
Despite all of this, Wilson still liked Charles Manson and tried to get people, including record producer Terry Melcher, interested in Manson's music. Although nobody doubted that he had talent, Manson (a diagnosed schizophrenic) was far too mentally unstable to forge any sort of professional connections in the industry that could allow him to build a sustainable career.
He once even pulled out a knife after Melcher's team tried to train him in the studio and gave him unwelcome feedback on his music. But even if he couldn't make it in the music business under his own name, his compositions did find their way into the spotlight. Wilson took Manson's "Cease To Exist" and redid the lyrics to create the Beach Boys song "Never Learn Not To Love."
When Wilson ultimately died in a drunken drowning accident in 1983, Manson believed it was karma: "Dennis Wilson was killed by my shadow because he took my music and changed the words from my soul."
According to Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecuting attorney on the Manson murder case, Manson's obsession with music and lack of success in the industry contributed to the 1969 murders that made him infamous. Manson reportedly became obsessed with the rich and the insiders who'd scorned him, calling them "pigs," and deciding that they needed to suffer and die.
Charles Manson Facts: The Tate-LaBianca Murders
Vernon Merritt III/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty ImagesCharles Manson was eventually convicted on seven counts of murder and sentenced to death (later commuted to life in prison).
In August 1969, Manson reportedly summoned his followers and announced that it was time for Helter Skelter to begin. He sent som of his most trusted devotees — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Linda Kasabian, and Charles "Tex" Watson — to both commit homicides against Hollywood's wealthy elite and try to frame black men for the crimes, thus initiating the race war Manson believed was coming.
Fittingly, the first place Manson sent hid killing posse, according to the prosecution, was a mansion in Benedict Canyon at 10050 Cielo Drive, where Manson believed Melcher had been living (though other evidence suggests that Manson already knew that Melcher had moved out).
When the Family got there on the night of August 8, they beat, brutalized, stabbed, and shot everyone on the premises, killing actress Sharon Tate, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and writer Wojciech Frykowski. A fifth occupant, 18-year-old Steven Parent, who was not even supposed to be there and was only visiting the property's caretaker was also killed by the Manson Family.
After she finished cutting up Tate's lifeless, pregnant body, Atkins took some of Tate's blood and scribbled "PIGS" on the house's front door, a reference that was supposed to lead police to the Black Panthers.
The group perpetrated another set of murders the next night, allegedly upon a request from Manson again. This time, Family member Leslie Van Houten joined in and helped the others to kill Los Angeles business owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca inside their home.
Afterward, in a move similar to that of the previous night, the Family wrote "DEATH TO PIGS" in blood on the wall. The group also added another message that read "HEALTER SKELTER," a misspelling of Manson's race war rallying cry.
After four months, the cops finally linked the murders back to the Manson Family, who had been living at a place called Spahn Ranch outside of Los Angeles. Atkins, who had been thrown in jail on a separate case, had told other inmates that she killed Sharon Tate. That confession, eventually combined with damning testimony from Watson and Kasabian, brought the Manson Family down.
In the end, Manson was convicted as the brainwashing leader of the group, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment after California abandoned capital punishment soon after.
Charles Manson would spend the remainder of his life since behind bars before dying in prison on November 19, 2017 at age 83.
Discover some of the most interesting aspects of the rest of his story in the gallery of Charles Manson facts above.
After discovering these Charles Manson facts, experience some of the most outrageous Charles Manson quotes. Then, read all about infamous Manson Family member "Squeaky" Fromme.
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