Charles Manson

Manson's mother was sixteen when he was born in Cincinnati, and the marriage covering his birth ended in divorce three years later for what the court called gross neglect of duty. When his mother and her brother were imprisoned for armed robbery in 1939, the five-year-old went to relatives in West Virginia; he later called the weeks after her 1942 parole the happiest of his childhood, before the drinking and truancy resumed. By thirteen he was in reform school. At Indiana Boys School, other boys raped him with a staff member's encouragement, and he escaped eighteen times, developing a defense he called the insane game — screeching and flailing to convince stronger boys he was crazy. Authorities released him in May 1954, after most of his adolescence spent institutionalized.

Released in March 1967 after more than half of his thirty-two years spent in institutions, Manson moved to San Francisco, took LSD, and began preaching a philosophy stitched together from Scientology, the Bible, Dale Carnegie and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, gathering runaways who camped with him at Spahn Ranch outside Los Angeles. He told followers a race war was coming, borrowed the phrase Helter Skelter from the Beatles' White Album to describe it, and on the nights of August 8 and 9, 1969, sent members of the group to two Los Angeles houses. They killed seven people there, including the actress Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant. Manson did not personally kill anyone in either house. He was convicted of murder and conspiracy in January 1971 on the theory that he had ordered it.

The race-war framing that drove his trial came largely from the prosecution and has never fully persuaded historians of the case. Manson had, that same year, failed to break into music — Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys had housed his followers for months and introduced him to the producer Terry Melcher, then cut him off after the group trashed Wilson's cars and left a bullet as a warning. The house at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the Tate murders happened, was Melcher's former address; Manson had gone there himself in March 1969 looking for him. Whether the killings were staged apocalypse or a grudge against a producer who no longer took his calls is still argued by people who have spent careers on the case. What is not argued is that Manson gave the order and never held the knife.

Manson carved an X, later reworked into a swastika, into his forehead during the trial and wore it for the rest of his life. He was denied parole a dozen times over the following decades and remained a subject of documentaries, songs and merchandise that turned his face into a kind of brand, one he occasionally profited from through prison interviews. He died of complications from colon cancer on November 19, 2017, near Corcoran State Prison in California, at eighty-three, still serving nine consecutive life sentences. Sharon Tate's sister Debra spent decades attending his parole hearings to argue against release, and said afterward that his death changed nothing about what he had taken.

Charles Manson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Family other
  The group of followers he assembled in San Francisco and Los Angeles 1967
• Helter Skelter ideology other
  An apocalyptic race-war doctrine borrowed from the Beatles' White Album 1968
• Lie: The Love and Terror Cult album
  Song demos recorded before his arrest, released by followers to fund his defense 1970
• Tate-LaBianca murders other
  Ordered but did not personally carry out; seven victims over two nights 1969

• November 12, 1934 aged 0 Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother
• 1939 aged ~5 His mother is sentenced to prison for armed robbery He was sent to live with relatives in West Virginia.
• 1947 aged ~13 Sent to Gibault School for Boys at thirteen
• May 1954 aged 19 Released from federal custody at nineteen
• March 21, 1967 aged 32 Released from prison and moves to San Francisco He had spent more than half of thirty-two years in institutions.
• August 9, 1969 aged 34 Followers kill five people at 10050 Cielo Drive, including Sharon Tate
• January 25, 1971 aged 36 Convicted of murder and conspiracy
• 1972 aged ~38 Death sentence commuted to life imprisonment California's Supreme Court had ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional.
• November 19, 2017 aged 83 Dies in a hospital near Corcoran State Prison

• Jim Jones 1931–1978
  Peoples Temple founder whose 1978 Jonestown murder-suicide killed over nine hundred followers. led the other 1970s mass-murder cult
• Ted Bundy 1946–1989
  Serial killer whose multi-state murders and televised trial shaped American criminal profiling and true-crime coverage. followed him in the media-driven crime era
• Joan Didion 1934–2021
  Essayist and novelist whose precise prose captured the anxiety and disillusionment of American life. wrote about the murders he ordered
• Hunter S. Thompson 1937–2005
  Pioneer of gonzo journalism whose Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas blurred reportage and literature. chronicled the counterculture's dark turn