A pop-cultural fixture—in life, in prison, and now in death—mass murderer and master manipulator Charles Manson embodied the evil underbelly of the free-loving 1960s. And from his conviction in 1971 for seven counts of murder, to his death Sunday at age 83, California kept him alive.
In her 1979 collection of essays The White Album, Joan Didion recalls late-’60s Los Angeles, “when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full”—and, of the day after the gruesome Manson murders, “I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
Born in Cincinnati to a hard-drinking teenage mother, a prostitute who went to prison for robbing a gas station when he was 5, he spent a rocky youth shifting among relatives’ homes, reform schools, and juvenile detention centers. He honed a talent for escaping and a penchant for violence, settling into Southern California transience in the 1950s. Failing to find fame as a rock musician, he commanded a different sort of following that included Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson—who briefly hosted Manson’s loose band of acolytes at his Pacific Palisades home.
The Manson family were mainly runaways, young women fallen under his sway. The youngest, Dianne Lake, was just 14 when she met Manson. Living communally out of a derelict Western movie set called Spahn ranch, they stormed the Simi hills by night in makeshift dune buggies and subsisted on scraps from supermarket dumpster dives.
They worshipped Manson as their guru-messiah. He preached a coming race war, based on a paranoid obsession with the Black Panthers and a demonic misreading of the Beatles’ White Album. He spouted a weird mix of Revelations and Scientology and a predictable rejection of the middle-class prosperity by which he seduced followers like Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, who on two nights in August 1969 savagely killed actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, her four friends, and grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, and scrawled cryptic cultish messages—”Pigs” and the infamous misspelling “Healter Skelter”—on their walls in blood.
On trial for commanding the Tate-LaBianca murders, Manson accused the upstanding citizens of the court, “They are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”
The one consistent thread in his ragtag philosophy was a violent disregard for all that binds society: the nuclear family, commerce, law, morality. Neglect bore forth neglect. On a raid of the family’s encampment Child Services picked up feral children that may have been fathered by Manson.
Devoted enough to degrade themselves wholly, murdering strangers at his bidding wasn’t such a stretch for the Manson family. His capture two months later and the subsequent airing of the cult’s terrors on the nightly news spelled out hippiedom’s sinister bend.
Manson’s bizarre satanic soliloquizing and his followers’ flailing devotion guaranteed that the seven-month trial would command national attention. He escaped execution—in 1972, the Supreme Court temporarily outlawed capital punishment—against the wishes of a jury that sentenced Manson and his co-defendants to gas chamber. He outlived prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, later a best-selling true-crime author, who died in 2015 at the age of 80.
California fed, clothed, and confined Manson for the rest of his life. He capitalized on his dark celebrity and cut several albums while living out his locked-up second lifetime. It costs $71,000 per year to keep a prisoner alive in Cali—more, presumably, to keep one hospitalized, as Manson was at the end. But, under the inevitable natural-causes headlines, his hideous legacy freely haunts us forever.
