MANSONS EARLY LIFE Born to an unmarried 16-year-old named Kathleen Maddox (1918–1973),in the General Hospital, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Manson was first named "no name Maddox". Within weeks, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period after his birth, his mother was married to a laborer named William Manson.. His biological father appears to have been Colonel Walker Scott (May 11, 1910 – December 30, 1954) Charles Manson never really knew his biological father.manson spent seven years at the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C., allude to the possibility that "Colonel Scott" was African-American Manson's mother was allegedly a heavy drinker. According to Manson, she once sold her son for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later.When Manson's mother and her brother were sentenced to five years' imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia. Upon her 1942 parole, Manson's mother retrieved her son and lived with him in a series of run-down hotel rooms.Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana. After 10 months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him. By burgling a grocery store, Manson obtained money that enabled him to rent a room. He committed a string of burglaries of other stores, including one from which he stole a bicycle, but was eventually caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. He escaped after one day, but was recaptured and placed in Boys Town. Four days after his arrival there, he escaped with another boy. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy's uncle. In Utah, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. They had burgled several filling stations along the way. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to Washington, D.C.'s National Training School for Boys. Despite four years of schooling and (later tested at age 21),he was illiterate. A caseworker deemed him aggressively antisocial. MANSONS FAMILY Manson established himself as a guru in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, which during 1967's "Summer of Love", was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Bugliosi noted in his book Helter Skelter that Manson appeared to have borrowed philosophically from the Process Church, whose members worshiped Satan. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison,he soon had the first of his groups of followers, which have been called the Manson Family, most of them female.Upon a staff evaluation of Manson when he entered prison in July 1961 at the U.S. penitentiary in McNeil Island, Washington, Manson entered "Scientologist" as his religion. Manson and eight or nine of his enthusiasts piled into an old school bus they had re-wrought in hippie style, with colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. They roamed as far north as Washington state, then southward through Los Angeles, Mexico, and the southwest. Returning to the Los Angeles area, they lived in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, and Venice—western parts of the city and county.In 1967 Brunner became pregnant by Manson and on April 15, 1968, gave birth to a son she named Valentine Michael (nicknamed "Pooh Bear")in a condemned house in Topanga Canyon and was assisted during the birth by several of the young women from the Family. Brunner (like most members of the group) acquired a number of aliases and nicknames, including: "Marioche", "Och", "Mother Mary", "Mary Manson", "Linda Dee Manson" and "Christine Marie Euchts". MANSONS CRIMES On July 25, 1969, Manson sent sometime Family member Bobby Beausoleil along with Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins to the house of acquaintance Gary Hinman, to persuade him to turn over money Manson thought Hinman had inherited. The three held the uncooperative Hinman hostage for two days, during which Manson showed up with a sword to slash his ear. After that, Beausoleil stabbed Hinman to death, ostensibly on Manson's instruction. Before leaving the Topanga Canyon residence, Beausoleil, or one of the women, used Hinman's blood to write "Political piggy" on the wall and to draw a panther paw, a Black Panther symbol. Tate murders Beausoleil was arrested on August 6, 1969, after he had been caught driving Hinman's car. Police found the murder weapon in the tire well. Two days later, Manson told Family members at Spahn Ranch, "Now is the time for Helter Skelter." On the night of August 8, Manson directed Watson to take Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel to "that house where Melcher used to live" and "totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can. He told the women to do as Watson would instruct them.Krenwinkel was one of the early Family members and one of the hitchhikers who had allegedly been picked up by Dennis Wilson. The current occupants of the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, all of whom were strangers to the Manson followers, were movie actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski and eight and a half months pregnant; her friend and former lover Jay Sebring, a noted hairstylist; Polanski's friend and aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski; and Frykowski's lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. Tate's husband, Polanski, was in London working on a film project; Tate had been visiting with him and had returned to the United States only three weeks earlier. When the murder team arrived at the entrance to the Cielo Drive property, Watson, who had been to the house on at least one other occasion, climbed a telephone pole near the gate and cut the phone line.It was now after midnight, August 9, 1969. Backing their car to the bottom of the hill that led up to the place, the group parked there and walked back up to the house. Thinking the gate might be electrified or rigged with an alarm, they climbed a brushy embankment at its right and dropped onto the grounds. Just then, headlights came their way from farther within the angled property. Watson ordered the women to lie in the bushes. He then stepped out and ordered the approaching driver, 18-year-old student and hi-fi enthusiast Steven Parent, to halt. As Watson leveled a 22-caliber revolver at Parent, the frightened youth begged Watson not to hurt him, claiming that he wouldn't say anything. Watson first slashed at Parent with a knife, giving him a defensive slash wound on the palm of his hand (severing tendons and tearing the boy's watch off his wrist), then shot him four times in the chest and abdomen. Watson then ordered the women to help push the car further up the driveway After traversing the front lawn and having Kasabian search for an open window of the main house, Watson cut the screen of a window. Watson told Kasabian to keep watch down by the gate; she walked over to Steven Parent's Rambler and waited. He then removed the screen, entered through the window, and let Atkins and Krenwinkel in through the front door. As Watson whispered to Atkins, Frykowski awoke on the living-room couch; Watson kicked him in the head. When Frykowski asked him who he was and what he was doing there, Watson replied, "I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business." On Watson's direction, Atkins found the house's three other occupants and, with Krenwinkel's help, brought them to the living room. Watson began to tie Tate and Sebring together by their necks with rope he'd brought and slung up over a beam. Sebring's protest – his second – of rough treatment of the pregnant Tate prompted Watson to shoot him. Folger was taken momentarily back to her bedroom for her purse, out of which she gave the intruders $70. After that, Watson stabbed the groaning Sebring seven times.] Frykowski's hands had been bound with a towel. Freeing himself, Frykowski began struggling with Atkins, who stabbed at his legs with the knife with which she had been guarding him. As he fought his way toward and out the front door, onto the porch, Watson joined in against him. Watson struck him over the head with the gun multiple times, stabbed him repeatedly, and shot him twice. Watson broke the gun's right grip in the process. Around this time, Kasabian was drawn up from the driveway by "horrifying sounds". She arrived outside the door. In a vain effort to halt the massacre, she told Atkins falsely that someone was coming. Inside the house, Folger had escaped from Krenwinkel and fled out a bedroom door to the pool area. Folger was pursued to the front lawn by Krenwinkel, who stabbed – and finally, tackled – her. She was dispatched by Watson; her two assailants had stabbed her 28 times. As Frykowski struggled across the lawn, Watson murdered him with a final flurry of stabbing. Frykowski was stabbed a total of 51 times. Back in the house, Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby, and even offered herself as a hostage in an attempt to save the life of her unborn child; her killers would have none of it, as either Atkins, Watson, or both killed Tate, who was stabbed 16 times. Watson later wrote that Tate cried, "Mother ... mother ..." as she was being killed. Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told the women to "leave a sign ... something witchy". Using the towel that had bound Frykowski's hands, Atkins wrote "pig" on the house's front door, in Tate's blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons In initial confessions to cellmates of hers at Sybil Brand Institute, Atkins would say she killed Tate. In later statements to her attorney, to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and before a grand jury, Atkins indicated Tate had been stabbed by Tex Watson.In his 1978 autobiography, Watson said that he stabbed Tate and that Atkins never touched her. Since he was aware that the prosecutor, Bugliosi, and the jury that had tried the other Tate-LaBianca defendants were convinced Atkins had stabbed Tate, he falsely testified that he did not stab her. LaBianca murders The next night, six Family members--Leslie Van Houten, Steve "Clem" Grogan, and the four from the previous night—rode out at Manson's instruction. Displeased by the panic of the victims at Cielo Drive, Manson accompanied the six, "to show [them] how to do it."After a few hours' ride, in which he considered a number of murders and even attempted one of them, Manson gave Kasabian directions that brought the group to 3301 Waverly Drive. This was the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, a dress shop co-owner. Located in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, it was next door to a house at which Manson and Family members had attended a party the previous year. According to Atkins and Kasabian, Manson disappeared up the driveway and returned to say he had tied up the house's occupants. He then sent Watson up with Krenwinkel and Van Houten. In his autobiography, Watson stated that having gone up alone, Manson returned to take him up to the house with him. After Manson pointed out a sleeping man through a window, the two of them entered through the unlocked back door. Watson added at trial, he "went along with" the women's account, which he figured made him "look that much less responsible." As Watson related it, Manson roused the sleeping Leno LaBianca from the couch at gunpoint and had Watson bind his hands with a leather thong. After Rosemary was brought briefly into the living room from the bedroom, Watson followed Manson's instructions to cover the couple's heads with pillowcases. He bound these in place with lamp cords. Manson left, sending Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten into the house with instructions that the couple be killed. Before leaving Spahn Ranch, Watson had complained to Manson of the inadequacy of the previous night's weapons. Now, sending the women from the kitchen to the bedroom, to which Rosemary LaBianca had been returned, he went to the living room and began stabbing Leno LaBianca with a chrome-plated bayonet. The first thrust went into the man's throat. Sounds of a scuffle in the bedroom drew Watson there to discover Mrs. LaBianca keeping the women at bay by swinging the lamp tied to her neck. After subduing her with several stabs of the bayonet, he returned to the living room and resumed attacking Leno, whom he stabbed a total of 12 times with the bayonet. When he had finished, Watson carved "WAR" on the man's exposed abdomen. He stated this in his autobiography. In an unclear portion of her eventual grand jury testimony, Atkins, who did not enter the LaBianca house, said she believed Krenwinkel had carved the word. In a ghost-written newspaper account based on a statement she had made earlier to her attorney, she said Watson carved it. Returning to the bedroom, Watson found Krenwinkel stabbing Rosemary LaBianca with a knife from the LaBianca kitchen. Heeding Manson's instruction to make sure each of the women played a part, Watson told Van Houten to stab Mrs. LaBianca too. She did, stabbing her approximately 16 times in the back and the exposed buttocks. At trial, Van Houten would claim, uncertainly that Rosemary LaBianca was dead when she stabbed her. Evidence showed that many of Mrs. LaBianca's 41 stab wounds had, in fact, been inflicted post-mortem. While Watson cleaned off the bayonet and showered, Krenwinkel wrote "Rise" and "Death to pigs" on the walls and "Healter Skelter" on the refrigerator door, all in LaBianca blood. She gave Leno LaBianca 14 puncture wounds with an ivory-handled, two-tined carving fork, which she left jutting out of his stomach. She also planted a steak knife in his throat. Meanwhile, hoping for a double crime, Manson had gone on to direct Kasabian to drive to the Venice home of an actor acquaintance of hers, another "piggy". Depositing the second trio of Family members at the man's apartment building, he drove back to Spahn Ranch, leaving them and the LaBianca killers to hitchhike home. Kasabian thwarted this murder by deliberately knocking on the wrong apartment door and waking a stranger. As the group abandoned the murder plan and left, Susan Atkins defecated in the stairwell. The trial began June 15, 1970. The prosecution's main witness was Kasabian, who, along with Manson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel, had been charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy.Since Kasabian, by all accounts, had not participated in the killings, she was granted immunity in exchange for testimony that detailed the nights of the crimes. Originally, a deal had been made with Atkins in which the prosecution agreed not to seek the death penalty against her in exchange for her grand jury testimony on which the indictments were secured; once Atkins repudiated that testimony, the deal was withdrawn. Because Van Houten had only participated in the LaBianca killings, she was charged with two counts of murder and one of conspiracy. Originally, Judge William Keene had reluctantly granted Manson permission to act as his own attorney. Because of Manson's conduct, including violations of a gag order and submission of "outlandish" and "nonsensical" pretrial motions, the permission was withdrawn before the trial's start.Manson filed an affidavit of prejudice against Keene, who was replaced by Judge On Friday, July 24, the first day of testimony, Manson appeared in court with an X carved into his forehead. He issued a statement that he was "considered inadequate and incompetent to speak or defend [him]self" – and had "X'd [him]self from [the establishment's] world."Over the following weekend, the female defendants duplicated the mark on their own foreheads, as did most Family members within another day or so. (Years later, Manson carved the X into a swastika) The prosecution argued the triggering of "Helter Skelter" was Manson's main motive. The crime scene's bloody White Album references (pig, rise, helter skelter) were correlated with testimony about Manson predictions that the murders blacks would commit at the outset of Helter Skelter would involve the writing of "pigs" on walls in victims' blood Testimony that Manson had said "now is the time for Helter Skelter" was supplemented with Kasabian's testimony that, on the night of the LaBianca murders, Manson considered discarding Rosemary LaBianca's wallet on the street of a black neighborhood. Having obtained the wallet in the LaBianca house, he "wanted a black person to pick it up and use the credit cards so that the people, the establishment, would think it was some sort of an organized group that killed these people." On his direction, Kasabian had hidden it in the women's restroom of a service station near a black area. "I want to show blackie how to do it," Manson had said as the Family members had driven along after the departure from the LaBianca house.
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