Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath

In a sense, Bugliosi had no choice. You can’t prosecute a collective psychotic episode. You’ve got to boil it down to a single dominant face and a single dominant motive. But, according to Manson and others associated with the Family, lots of crazy things were happening right then in the summer of 1969: big possible paranoia after Charlie killed Lotsapoppa (or so he thought), big possible paranoia over brother Bobby manson 3in jail, LSD in the air, guns in the ground, nasty drug deals, dire money needs, Strategic Air Command flying atomic bombs overhead, the Weathermen flying to Cuba to learn how to revolution, the thrumming background noise of the Black Panthers, stolen cars in the weeds, underage girls in the swimming hole, big acid-happy dinners with everyone gathered round, Charlie speaking in metaphors, riddles and paradoxes, unreal figments perhaps being taken too literally, Charlie scared someone’s going to rat him out about Lotsapoppa, brains going round and round, big ideas coming out of the big collective mind, mass psychosis, and a different motive for every person there. And to the degree that this is true, Manson might fairly be considered an innocent man, just as he says he is, or, if guilty, then only as guilty as everyone else there; or, if guilty, then maybe absolutely guilty, his fear of someone snitching on him about the Lotsapoppa shooting perhaps leading him to want to bind everyone to him, by turning them into killers, too; or maybe Charlie had nothing to do with anything and it was all Watson’s doing, revolving around a drug deal, which is what some people believe.

And maybe his version of that psychotic moment is all Charlie wanted to say to the jury. He knew he was done for. He knew it the minute he saw Aktins with the blood-dripping knife after the Tate murders. It was inevitable, and maybe even bittersweet, because he would be going home. “Too much freedom is detrimental to the soul,” he says. “I should not have been out there. It was too fast for me.”

Manson always says time means nothing to him, that “in the hallways of always . . . I live a thousand years in a second, man,” so, taking him at his word, today is the day in 1934 when he was born, to a 16-year-old girl in Cincinnati. He never had a dad he knew, and the only mom he knew was an irresponsible drunk. He was raised in juvenile halls and reform schools, and was given an adult education by inmates in prison, although not a very good one. He turned out to be a terrible criminal, an inept pimp, a lousy car thief, a ham-fisted burglar, a guy who got busted every time he broke the law. Before the murders, it was all quite pathetic and laughable, really, and if you throw that at Manson today, even he, after a moment of considered silence, will say, “OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, I’ll give you that one.” And then he’ll say, “But I’m not a person, have never been a person. I am an animal been raised a lifetime in cages.” So much so that the child’s game of thumb wrestling, he has never heard of it. “What’s that?” he says, blinking. And that’s his early history, all of it you need to know. You can imagine the rest of it. Just think the worst. Barely two decades of his long life spent as a free man.

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