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http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/charles-manson-today-the-final-confessions-of-a-psychopath-20131121
He's nearly 80 and his Family is smaller, but darkness still surrounds America's most notorious criminal
He doesn't look how he used to look, of course, all resplendent in buckskin fringe, sometimes sporting an ascot or the Technicolor patchwork vest sewn by his girls, with his suave goatee and his mad Rasputin eyes and his fantastical ability to lunge out of his seat at the judge presiding over his trial, pencil at the ready to jam into the old guy's throat, before being subdued and thereby helping to cement a guilty verdict. Those days are gone. He's 79 years old. He's an old man with a nice head of gray hair but bad hearing, bad lungs, and chipped-and-fractured, prison-dispensed bad dentures. He walks with a cane and lifts it now, in greeting to his visitors, one of whom is a slender, dark-haired woman he calls Star.
Bugliosi 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.
The way Bugliosi saw it, these things were meant to connect the crimes to blacks; the whites would go after the blacks; the blacks would rise up; and the revolution would be joined. He said Manson termed it Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song. It was a loopy, harebrained scenario and one that Bugliosi's fellow law-enforcement types wished he would ditch in favor of something more down-to-earth, like robbery or a drug deal gone sour. But Bug, as Manson calls him, would not be deterred. He gave Kasabian immunity – she apparently was not present when any of the murders took place – and with her as his star witness, he was able to sell Helter Skelter not only to the jury but also to the rest of the country. In 1971, the defendants were all found guilty and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life when the state briefly did away with the death penalty. Atkins died of cancer four years ago, at the age of 61. Krenwinkel, 65, and Van Houten, 64, are in the California Institution for Women in Chino, where they have been model prisoners and continue to hope for parole. Watson, 67, is incarcerated in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He has confessed to perpetrating all the killings in the case, with the girls mostly just stabbing the victims after they were already dead, for what difference that makes. They have all repudiated Manson. And Bugliosi, 79, after a lengthy career both as an attorney and a bestselling author, is now mostly resting at his California home, battling cancer and giving the occasional interview.
"There are thousands of evil, polished con men out there, and we've had more brutal murders than the Manson murders, so why are we still talking about Charles Manson?" Bugliosi says. "He had a quality about him that one thousandth of one percent of people have. An aura. 'Vibes,' the kids called it in the Sixties. Wherever he went, kids gravitated toward him. This is not normal. I mean, I couldn't get someone to go to the local Dairy Queen and get me a milkshake, OK? But this guy, I don't know what it is. How the hell do I know?"
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/charles-manson-the-incredible-story-of-the-most-dangerous-man-alive-19700625
A chilling, deeply investigative look into the terrifying Manson family – including a jailhouse interview with Charlie himself
He's nearly 80 and his Family is smaller, but darkness still surrounds America's most notorious criminal
He doesn't look how he used to look, of course, all resplendent in buckskin fringe, sometimes sporting an ascot or the Technicolor patchwork vest sewn by his girls, with his suave goatee and his mad Rasputin eyes and his fantastical ability to lunge out of his seat at the judge presiding over his trial, pencil at the ready to jam into the old guy's throat, before being subdued and thereby helping to cement a guilty verdict. Those days are gone. He's 79 years old. He's an old man with a nice head of gray hair but bad hearing, bad lungs, and chipped-and-fractured, prison-dispensed bad dentures. He walks with a cane and lifts it now, in greeting to his visitors, one of whom is a slender, dark-haired woman he calls Star.
Bugliosi 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.
The way Bugliosi saw it, these things were meant to connect the crimes to blacks; the whites would go after the blacks; the blacks would rise up; and the revolution would be joined. He said Manson termed it Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song. It was a loopy, harebrained scenario and one that Bugliosi's fellow law-enforcement types wished he would ditch in favor of something more down-to-earth, like robbery or a drug deal gone sour. But Bug, as Manson calls him, would not be deterred. He gave Kasabian immunity – she apparently was not present when any of the murders took place – and with her as his star witness, he was able to sell Helter Skelter not only to the jury but also to the rest of the country. In 1971, the defendants were all found guilty and sentenced to death, which was commuted to life when the state briefly did away with the death penalty. Atkins died of cancer four years ago, at the age of 61. Krenwinkel, 65, and Van Houten, 64, are in the California Institution for Women in Chino, where they have been model prisoners and continue to hope for parole. Watson, 67, is incarcerated in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He has confessed to perpetrating all the killings in the case, with the girls mostly just stabbing the victims after they were already dead, for what difference that makes. They have all repudiated Manson. And Bugliosi, 79, after a lengthy career both as an attorney and a bestselling author, is now mostly resting at his California home, battling cancer and giving the occasional interview.
"There are thousands of evil, polished con men out there, and we've had more brutal murders than the Manson murders, so why are we still talking about Charles Manson?" Bugliosi says. "He had a quality about him that one thousandth of one percent of people have. An aura. 'Vibes,' the kids called it in the Sixties. Wherever he went, kids gravitated toward him. This is not normal. I mean, I couldn't get someone to go to the local Dairy Queen and get me a milkshake, OK? But this guy, I don't know what it is. How the hell do I know?"
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/charles-manson-the-incredible-story-of-the-most-dangerous-man-alive-19700625
A chilling, deeply investigative look into the terrifying Manson family – including a jailhouse interview with Charlie himself
