20 Vintage Photos That Will Give You An Unseen Look At The Infamous Charles Manson
Charles Manson was many things during his life: Petty criminal, hippie, musician, and eventual cult leader who was culpable in a series of shocking murders.
Along the way, he became one of the most infamous people of the 20th century. Even after his death in 2017, it’s still hard to come to terms with what he did.
He had a difficult upbringing.
Charles Milles Maddox was born to a 15-year-old mother in Cincinnati in 1934, and he eventually took on the surname of his stepfather.
After his mother was imprisoned in 1939, the young Manson was placed in the care of family members. He quickly established a reputation as a troublemaker and was sent to reform school at the age of 13. Just days after this photo was taken, he ran away.
He became a prolific petty criminal.
Manson’s adolescent and young adult life was full of petty crimes, for offences ranging from car theft to armed robberies to pimping.
In and out of prison for much of the 1950s and early ’60s, Manson was released from prison in 1967 and emerged in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco at the height of the Summer of Love.
He quickly built a “family.”
The counterculture movement valued the concept of “free love,” and the charismatic Manson quickly built up a following of young hippies during his time in San Francisco.
The first member of the “Manson Family” was library assistant Mary Brunner, followed soon after by teenage runaway Squeaky Fromme. The group soon grew, and Manson preached an off-kilter ideology based on free love, various substances, music, and racism.
The Family got involved with one of the Beach Boys.
By 1968, the Manson Family had moved to Los Angeles. It was in that year that Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson picked up two female hitchhikers, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Ella Jo Bailey, bringing them back to his mansion.
As it turned out, both women were members of Manson’s family. Other members soon moved into Wilson’s house, an arrangement that the Beach Boy initially enjoyed — but eventually came to fear.
Manson came close to a record deal.
Thanks to his involvement with Dennis Wilson, Manson met successful record producer Terry Melcher, and the trio recorded several songs in Brian Wilson’s home studio.
One of Manson’s original compositions, in fact, was recorded by the Beach Boys. Manson’s version was called “Cease to Exist,” but the Beach Boys version, “Never Learn Not to Love,” was released as a single B-side, with sole songwriting credit given to Wilson.
Manson and his followers moved to Spahn Ranch.
After they overstayed their welcome with Wilson, Manson’s family moved to Spahn Ranch, a dilapidated old movie set in the Simi Hills. The ranch’s only resident, 80-year-old George Spahn, was happy to receive help — not to mention attention from female members of the Manson family.
During his time at Spahn Ranch, Manson became increasingly erratic and paranoid, preaching paranoid doomsday belief. The family mostly supported their lifestyle through petty crime.
Things escalated to murder.
Family member Charles “Tex” Watson shot a dealer named Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, in July of 1969. Crowe survived the shooting, but Manson and his followers erroneously believed that Crowe had not only died, but was a member of the Black Panthers, who would soon hunt them down.
Later that same month, music teacher Gary Hinman was murdered by members of the Manson family in another deal gone wrong. At this point, Manson’s paranoia had hit its peak.
On August 8, 1969, they received instructions from Manson.
Watson, along with family members Susan “Sadie” Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian, were instructed by Manson to travel to 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon — Terry Melcher’s old address — and “totally destroy” everyone in it.
The convoluted reason for the attack had to do with Manson’s bigoted doomsday prophecies, in which he believed that framing the Black Panthers for gruesome murders would bring about the end of days.
The group entered the property and committed a vicious attack.
They first killed 19-year-old Steven Parent, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, simply picking up an item from the house’s caretaker.
Inside the house were four occupants: Sharon Tate, the actress and pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, along with hairstylist Jay Sebring, Polanski’s friend Wolciech Frykowski, and Frykowski’s girlfriend, Folger’s coffee heiress Abigail Folger.
It was a horrific scene.
Manson family members brutally killed Parent, Sebring, Frykowski, Folger, Tate, and Tate’s unborn child in a horrific knife attack.
Crime scene investigators discovered the following day that the group had written the word “Pig” on the front door in Tate’s blood. This was apparently a misguided attempt to pin the crime on the Black Panthers.
The following night, they killed again.
On August 9th, the four killers from the previous night plus Leslie Van Houten, Steve “Clem” Grogan and Manson himself travelled to 3301 Waverly Drive in Los Feliz to kill again.
Inside, the group killed the home’s occupants, Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. The attack was similar to the previous night, and was once again completely unprovoked and particularly brutal.
They were connected to even more murders.
Later that same month, Manson family members Bruce Davis, Tex Watson, and Steve Grogan murdered stuntman and Spahn ranch employee Donald “Shorty” Shea.
A slew of other murders and disappearances have been connected to the Manson family, but Shea’s murder is the final murder they’ve definitively been attached to.
In December of 1969, the walls came down.
The Tate and LaBianca murders had shocked Los Angeles, but for months, there was little to no progress on the case. That changed when family member Susan Atkins confessed to the killings to her cellmates while she was in jail for an unrelated crime.
The LAPD quickly issued warrants for Watson, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian, and started gathering evidence for trial.
The trial was a spectacle.
Four members of the family faced charges, including Manson, who was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder. Early in the trial, it became clear that Manson was committed to making a spectacle of the proceedings.
Manson became known for a number of stunts, including leaping over the defense table in an attempt to attack the presiding judge.
He still held full sway over his supporters.
If there was any doubt as to Manson’s cult leader status, suspicions were confirmed by the fact that members of the Manson family who weren’t on trial would come to the courthouse every day to support Manson.
When Manson shaved his head, his followers did the same. When he carved an X into his forehead using a razor, family members followed in kind.
Manson was convicted and sent to prison.
It was likely the most chilling trial that many Americans had ever heard of at the time, and it ended as most people had predicted: With guilty verdicts against the accused.
Manson was sent to state prison in 1971, and later had more murder convictions added to his record for the deaths of Hinman and Shea. While he was initially sentenced to death, California’s death penalty was ruled unconstitutional.
Manson still maintained a high profile.
Even though he’d remain in prison for the remainder of his life, Manson still had a way to make headlines.
He still had many followers both inside and outside of prison. In 1975, Manson devotees Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (pictured) and Sandra Good made international news when they attempted to kill U.S. President Gerald Ford. The attempt was unsuccessful, and both women were sent to prison.
He gave several jailhouse interviews.
Manson was interviewed in turn by Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose, Geraldo Rivera, and Nikolas Schreck.
While he was given a platform to share his views, almost everything that came out of Manson’s mouth was garbled nonsense, much in line with the cult leader pronouncements he’d been issuing since the 1960s.
He never left the public eye.
Owing to bad behavior and his celebrity status, prison officials eventually banned any further interviews of Charles Manson.
Still, even without a public voice, the public continued to be fascinated by the aging inmate. As late as the 2010s, a new generation of the Manson family was known to exist — and in 2014, Manson got engaged to 26-year-old Afton “Star” Burton.
He died in 2017.
While incarcerated at Corcoran Prison in northern California, the 83-year-old Manson developed gastrointestinal bleeding in 2017. Later that day, he died in hospital.
After his death, a number of claimants attempted to claim his body and personal effects. After a court battle, Manson’s grandson Jason Freeman was awarded Manson’s estate.
