Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath

manson 2Bugliosi laid it out like this: On March 21st, 1967, after serving six years for violating parole on a $37 check-forgery conviction, penny-ante career criminal Charles Milles Manson, age 32, stepped out from behind prison walls into the groovy, peace-and-love world of San Francisco. It was the Summer of Love. He’d never seen such a thing before, free love, free food, lots of hugging, pot and acid, girls, so many girls, many of them lost girls just looking for someone to tell them they’d been found. Charlie was their man. He played the guitar, he had the mystique of the ex-con, he had a good you-can-be-free metaphysical rap. The girls flocked to his side, starting with librarian Mary Brunner, followed by pixie-cute Lynette Fromme, soon dubbed Squeaky, oversexed Susan Atkins and trust-funder Sandra Good. This was the beginning of what the prosecutor would later call “the Family.” This was also the beginning of the end for Manson.

They eventually dropped down to L.A. More than anything, according to Bugliosi, Manson wanted to be a rock star. He made friends with the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, who thought he had potential, and big-shot record producer Terry Melcher. He was going places. Everybody was banging everybody else. So much fun, so loving. It really was, except when, as some of the girls later testified, Charlie would knock one of them around. They lived at Spahn Ranch, a sometime Hollywood backdrop for Westerns where Charlie let it be known he might be Jesus, and everyone treated him as such, which has led to the belief that he had some kind of super-duper hypnotic Svengali-on-blotter hold over the people there. And for a while it was all good. Kids who’d never really had a home before now had one. You’ve never seen so many smiling faces. But something changed in 1969. The Beatles had recently released the White Album, and Manson developed a sudden and complex attachment to the song “Helter Skelter.” He divined in it a coming apocalyptic war between blacks and whites, during which he and his gang would live in the desert, underground, in a magical land of milk and honey, and after which the blacks, who had won the war, would beg him to come be their leader, because they could not lead themselves.

In Bugliosi’s account, Manson got tired of waiting for the war to start, so on August 9th, 1969, he decided to kick-start it by sending former star high school athlete Tex Watson, former Catholic-college student Patricia Krenwinkel, former church-choir singer Susan Atkins and a recent arrival named Linda Kasabian to a house some rich people were living in on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles – a house that Melcher had once rented – with the order to “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can.” They were to leave “witchy” signs and portents behind that would make it look like the work of Black Panthers. There was no saying no. Or at least no one did say no.

“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson announced upon entering the home. Roughly 25 minutes and 102 stab wounds later, it was all over, at least for that night.

Among the butchered were pregnant actress Sharon Tate, 26, wife of director Roman Polanski; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; screenwriter Voytek Frykowski, 32; and Folger’s-coffee-fortune heiress Abigail Folger, 25. And then the next night, the killers did it again, again under Charlie’s direction, with former high school homecoming queen Leslie Van Houten added to the group, tacking on 67 more stab wounds to the total and slaughtering a seemingly random couple, grocery-store-chain owner Leno LaBianca, 44, and his wife, Rosemary, 38, as they lounged at home. In both cases, they also left words like “pig” and “death to pigs” scrawled in blood on walls, a door and a refrigerator.

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