How Charles Manson Came to Lead One of the World's Most Dangerous Cults
Today we will talk about serial killing again, but this show is different because our protagonist
wasn't the person who committed the murders.
He was behind them, though, as the leader of a cult called The Manson Family.
Some cults, although sometimes regarded by authorities as suspect, go about their days
in peace.
Others are not so benign.
Have you ever seen photos of the Jonestown Massacre?
This cult committed the mass suicide of 909 cult members – including 200 children – who
killed themselves in 1978 by drinking a cocktail of cyanide, valium and Kool-Aid.
What about Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo and its leader Shoko Asahara, who was behind
the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that led to 12 people dying?
Today we'll look at one cult only, in this episode of the Infographics Show, Horrific
American Cult Leader - Charles Manson.'
The word cult comes from the Latin, “cultus” which means to worship, cultivate, promote
growth.
Cult leaders to some extent nurture and promote the growth of seedlings, hoping they will
grow into flowers, or in some cases, weeds.
As you can see in one of the Manson interviews available online, he had a way of nurturing.
“When I stand up on the mountain and say do it!
It gets done,” he growls like the maniac he is.
He also once said about his flock, “These children that come at you with knives, they
are your children.
You taught them.
I didn't teach them.
I just tried to help them stand up.”
But let's start with some life history and how a child evolved into a wicked man, and
later we'll discuss the blood-spotted marks he left on this planet.
As Manson recalls in interviews, he was what he calls a “street child.”
That's maybe over the top, but not by much.
Mr. Manson came into this world on November 12, 1934, and his full name was Charles Milles
Maddox.
Prior to that, though, on his birth certificate it read, “no-name Maddox.”
He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Kathleen Maddox, who was just 16 at the time.
She was one of America's lost children, leaving home at 15 to try and fend for herself.
It's not known why she ran away, but some reports say it was because of her very strict
religious upbringing, which as you know from our other serial killer videos it isn't
always about Christian ethics and church fares, but sometimes more related to oppressive religious
tyranny.
Anyhow, the young girl fled her family.
Was Kathleen a prostitute, an alcoholic, in and out of jail?
Did she once try to sell her unwanted bastard child for beer?
Well, this is what Manson writes in the start of his book about his life called “Manson:
In his own words.”
He writes that his mom was at a restaurant and the waitress made a comment about the
cute baby and said she wished she had one of her own, to which Kathleen replied, “'A
pitcher of beer and he's yours.”
Charles writes in the book, “The waitress set up the beer, Mom stuck around long enough
to finish it off and left the place without me.
Several days later my uncle had to search the town for the waitress and take me home.”
So, there you go, another nasty character whose youth was full of woe.
It seems his mother was a wretched person, but who knows what background she came from
and the trials and tribulations she may have faced in her own youth.
Violence begets violence, which could be the epitaph for most serial killers.
Manson has said that his mother was no teenage whore, rather she just wanted freedom just
as kids did 30 years later in the 60s.
Moving on, Kathleen met a person called William Manson.
It seems they married and Charles took the name, but the relationship didn't last long
and Kathleen was single again.
Charles spent much of his younger years being passed around.
When Charlie was 5 his mother tried to rob a guy, but she was arrested after the failed
attempt.
Charles then went to live with Aunt Glenna and Uncle Bill Thomas, as well as his first
cousin Jo Ann Thomas.
Three years later and Kathleen was out of jail.
She took back her son and it seems the two spent years moving around America, often living
in cheap motels.
Biographies tell us that by this time young Charles was already a petty criminal and he
wasn't keen on school.
So, when he reached 12 his mother sent him to a Catholic School for bad kids.
Charles promptly ran away from the school for delinquents.
It was a mess, the family, with both son and mum mirroring their contempt for the law.
We can't even list the number of crimes Charles committed when he was young as there
are so many, from stealing cars to running an underground casino.
When he was 18 he was caught raping a boy at knife point, and for that he was sent to
Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia.
There he offended again, with three offenses related to homosexuality.
He got out, got married, had a child.
His wife filed for divorce a year later, the same year Charles started pimping out a 16-year
old girl.
It seems he had a thing for pimping, and making the girls fall in love with him.
In spite of that ragged old age look you might have seen, he was quite a good-looking young
man, said to be very charming.
He married again, this time a prostitute called Leona “Candy” Stevens.
She also soon divorced him, right after he was imprisoned again.
Inside it's said he fell in love with two things: Scientology and music.
He learned to play guitar well and wrote lots of original songs, thinking he might one day
become a musician.
That dream would not come true.
Well, it almost did, but he didn't exactly outshine his beloved The Beatles.
Instead he formed a cult and had people murdered.
When released in 1967 he headed to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the mecca of hippy America
where merry pranksters ruled and Tim Leary devoted himself to sermons about LSD.
Turn on, Tune In, Drop out.
Manson was pretty good at dropping out already.
He'd dropped out of society and was about to tunnel his way to hell with a string of
ardent female followers digging in his slipstream.
The first gal to fall for this outlaw was a UC Berkeley librarian called Mary Brunner.
She apparently became obsessed with charming Charlie and then quit her job in a place that
years later would be full of books with her name in them.
She helped enlist Lynette Fromme into the family, now just a triumvirate but later this
little cult led by a man playing guitar and making prophecies would grow into quite the
gang.
He would during this time make a song with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, which only
helped him gain more power as a musical guru.
More followers would join, and many of them moved to Spahn Ranch in California.
It was there he had a third son with Mary.
Incidentally, that son, now called Michael Brunner, is currently in a legal fight over
Manson's estate.
In fact, lots of people are involved in that fight.
The only person not to get involved that was close to Charles was the son he had with his
prostitute wife, Candy.
Reports say Charles Luther isn't interested in the cash.
Moving on again, Charles became a spiritual guru by now and was by all accounts convincing.
It's said at one point the cult had as many as 100 members.
We can't of course get into all those people, but some of them would become murderers.
Manson thought the Beatles song “Helter Skelter” on their White Album was about
an apocalyptic race war.
He once said, “These kids listen to this music and pick up the message.
It's subliminal.”
Manson believed the song was related to the Book of Revelations and the four horsemen
of the Apocalypse.
The writer of the song, Paul McCartney, later said he just wanted to write a really loud
and raucous song, something heavy, like what ‘The Who' did.
Speaking of Manson, he also later said, “He interpreted the whole thing … and arrived
at having to go out and kill everyone….
It was frightening, because you don't write songs for those reasons.”
Maybe Manson had a point, though, even the sweet-sounding song “Rocky Racoon” from
that album is all about murder and redemption through the bible.
The Beatles were obviously skeptical of gun-loving, bible-bashing America, though.
But the race war didn't happen, so The Manson family had a plan.
They would write songs that would subliminally start this war, pitting blacks against whites.
According to the University of Virginia, Manson believed tensions would mount and whites would
fight against blacks.
The blacks would end victorious, and Manson and his gang would then emerge from their
hideout in Death Valley and begin to rule over the blacks.
It sounds crazy, but they were taking a lot of drugs.
Anyone who has taken a lot of psychedelics knows they have the power to free the mind,
help you embrace eternal love, but demons might also get released.
It seems Charles had a lot of these demons.
But they needed a better way to get Armageddon started, so they thought they would give it
a little push.
According to one of Manson's main followers, a man called Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson
said they would have to ignite this war and start it themselves.
That meant killing white people.
Manson ordered his followers to murder everyone at 10050 Cielo Drive, north of Beverly Hills.
This became known as the Tate Murders.
Tex Watson was there, along with three women from the Manson family: Susan Atkins, Linda
Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel.
The house was the former residence of record producer Terry Melcher, someone Manson did
not like as he had rebuffed Manson when he had tried to get a record contract with him.
According to reports Manson had told them to “totally destroy everyone… as gruesome
as you can.”
‘Everyone' that night was actress Sharon Tate and her three friends – a writer, a
celebrity hair stylist and a coffee heiress.
An 18-year old boy was also murdered as he was leaving the house.
He was just a friend of the gardener.
Tate was eight and a half months pregnant with director Roman Polanski's child.
Polanski was in Europe at the time, making a film.
Time magazine reports that the killings were so brutal they shocked the police.
Tate was found tied to another man.
Both had been slashed repeatedly, with Tate even missing a breast.
Bullet holes covered the house, blood was everywhere.
On Tate's extended stomach, where a fetus lie beneath, someone had carved an X into
her flesh.
As you can imagine this shocked Hollywood and the world.
These were big names and that was a rich neighborhood.
It's even more twisted as perhaps Polanski's biggest film was Rosemary's Baby – a story
about a demonic child released about a year before the murders.
So how did the police eventually catch Manson?
A group from the Manson family had prior to the Tate murders killed Buddhist musician
Gary Hinman.
They tortured him first for two days.
Manson himself taking part.
One report states, “Manson sliced and diced what was left of Hinman, badly cutting his
ear–a wound that one of the girls sewed up with dental floss.”
It's not clear what they wanted, but they didn't get it.
In the end they just killed him, apparently the girls did the final touch.
Some people say that the murder was drug-related, but others disagree.
It's a very controversial story, with some people like writer Truman Capote saying the
only reason the Manson family went on the ensuing murder spree was so police would think
the killers were still at large, that in fact it had nothing to do with Helter skelter.
The reason they wanted police to think that is because a Manson family member, musician
Bobby Beausoleil, had been arrested for the murder.
He was actually there, but the family wanted cops to think it was someone else.
That's one theory, anyway.
A day after the Tate murders Manson and members of his family went out looking for more white
victims.
They found a supermarket executive, Leno LaBianca, who was with his wife Rosemary.
Both were woken up in the middle of the night and then tied up by the intruders.
Tex stabbed the man numerous times with a bayonet, and then he or one of the girls used
a knife to write “WAR” in his stomach.
Cult member Patricia Krenwinkel then stuck a fork in his stomach and a steak knife in
his neck.
After that the girls all wrote the words "death to pigs", "rise" and "helter skelter" with
the man's blood on the wall and refrigerator.
Rosemary was stabbed 41 times by Tex and the girls, apparently after Manson had said they
all must have a go.
Rosemary was dead well before the 41st thrust of the knife.
We don't have time to go into all the details, but it wasn't hard for police to connect
the murders to the cult.
At the time police said they had arrested members of a “mystical, semi-religious hippie
drug-and-murder cult led by a bearded, demonic Mahdi able to dispatch his zombie-like followers.”
This didn't do much for the so-called “scene” or the drug LSD, which the government was
happy to demonize lest half of America start acting like Hunter S. Thompson and decrying
the rat race.
On March 29, 1971, Manson and cult members Krenwinkel, Atkins and Van Houten all received
the death penalty.
Tex got the same soon after.
In 1972 the death penalty was abolished in the state of California, so all the sentences
were commuted to life in prison.
Manson died from cardiac arrest, related to colon cancer, on November 19, 2017.
He was 83.
Other members have died, and some are still in prison.
Did Charles ever feel bad about what happened?
Well, he once said this, “Remorse for what?
You people have done everything in the world to me.
Doesn't that give me equal right?”.
That doesnt sound like remorse
to us.
So what do you think of this psychopath, and to what do you attribute his rise as a cult
leader?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to watch our other video called – What Really Happened In Waco, Texas?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to like, share and subscribe, and as
ever, see you next time.
