Forty years ago now, Charles Manson and his “family” committed outrageous murders in the Los Angeles, California area. Manson was subsequently sentenced to death by a jury of his peers yet during a short period when California abolished the death penalty in 1972, the decision was commuted to life imprisonment. Four decades on, the deranged psyche of this beswastikad psycho killer continues to fascinate us through pop culture. With plenty of charisma and considering the simple bizarreness of his crimes, he may very well pass on to urban myth along with the great criminals of history.
Manson’s childhood was fraught with petty crime. Before reaching the age at which he could legally be sent to prison, he had already been summoned to court for various home invasions as well as armed robberies of gas stations and grocery stores. He would go on to aggravate his situation through violent behaviour in prison (holding a razorblade to an inmate’s neck while sodomizing him) and through sheer stupidity (stealing a car and crossing state lines making it a federal offense).
By age 32, Manson was to be released from a state institution, his home of 16 years on and off, a prospect that was not too appealing to the ruthless man. In a bought of historical irony, Manson actually petitioned to remain in jail but was refused. The state officials believed it was time for him to begin anew with a reformed outlook on society.
Despite his illiteracy, Manson seems to have picked up a few marbles of cunning while incarcerated because the majority of his crimes for the next two years would almost all be accomplished by proxy and not directly by his own hands.
Family First
Fancying himself an artist, Manson began gathering an entourage of groupies and devoted followers with his revolutionary music. You see, he was a modern-day Karl Marx, Elvis and Martin Luther King all rolled into one. Charles Manson sung of an impending race war between racist whites and the disgruntled black population. One night, the blacks were going to rise up and begin their revolution in what Manson called “Helter Skelter”. Our deranged protagonist thus aimed to hide his followers in a California commune to avoid the massacre and then to emerge as a ruling class of the emancipated Negroes. As the enlightened, prescient and tolerant “family” would say, they were hiding because “Blackie was trying to get at the chosen ones”.
Impatience taking over, Manson was no longer content in awaiting the apocalypse of racial tension. Instead, he sent out his fellow chosen ones to provoke Helter-Skelter. At this point, we must look past this facade of seemingly dogmatic objectives and see this family for what it really was: a band of deranged criminals with a God complex. This is a much better explanation for why rich individuals were singled out, barbarously attacked at their home and then robbed. Manson first sent a few family members to the home of Gary Hinman, a passing acquaintance. Hinman was repeatedly stabbed, his car and what little money he had was stolen and finally the family left bloody messages and the Black Panther mark on the walls. This was presumably to implicate the Black community but in the end, the population was confused, the Black Panthers denied any wrongdoing and the brutal murder definitely looked like a simple home invasion in search of loot.
Attempt number 2 was also done at the behest yet in the absence of Charles Manson. The rich target was actually filmaker Roman Polanski but he was off in London at the time for a shoot. The five people present in Polanski’s home would nonetheless fall victim to the family and to the “wrong place, wrong time” principle. A driver, some friends including the heiress to the Folger’s coffee fortune and Polanski’s girlfriend, Shoron Tate who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time drew the irk of the mislead revolutionaries. Once again the family were only able to pilfer a meagre 70$ from the affair as they stabbed the five victims nearly 100 times. The blood of the pregnant Tate was then used as ink to draw the word “Pig” on the front door, still a vivid image today. We still don’t really know what this was all supposed to accomplish and subsequent trials showed us that the family didn’t really either.
Finally, Manson participated in the third attempt to allegedly bring about the apocalypse. He led the group to the home of wealthy executive Leno LaBianca. Manson was not ecstatic about the messiness of the previous operations and wanted to directly guide his flock to the proper ways of murder and revolution. Unfortunately, Manson did not want to inculpate himself and left. Once again, the family enjoyed an overzealous stabfest, carved “War’ in LaBianca’s chest and wrote “Rise” on the wall. They could at least have faxed the black community about what they were supposed to do because these cryptic messages never did lead to Helter-Skelter; it led to the police investigating three murder scenes and to suspect a commune of crazy people out in the desert.
So it was that this disorganised yet savage rampage had only served to kill innocent people and to send all those involved to jail forever. Manson went on to admit everything, to tattoo a Nazi symbol on his forehead and to unmistakably look crazy whenever a camera was around. To the carnivalesque nature of the crimes we add geniuses like Marilyn Manson and Guns n’ Roses whom popularised the killer’s mediocre songs. This recipe has made for an unforgettable psycho killer on this 40th anniversary of his incarceration.
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