tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/charles-manson-34682/articlesCharles Manson – The Conversation2023-10-22T19:00:46Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2074202023-10-22T19:00:46Z2023-10-22T19:00:46Z‘A nightmare B-side to the American dream’: Helter Skelter is the bestselling true crime book of all time – but how true is it?<p>Approaching midnight on August 8, 1969, an old Ford left Spahn Ranch, an abandoned Western movie set outside Los Angeles. The ramshackle commune housed a group of misfits and renegades who would come to be known globally as the Manson family. </p>
<p>There were four people in the car: Charles “Tex” Watson and three women, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda Kasabian. </p>
<p>Nearly all media reports state emphatically that Charles Manson, self-styled leader of the clan, had ordered them to drive to 10050 Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills and murder everyone there “as gruesomely as you can”. But accounts of how and why that night came to pass differ wildly. The stories changed even at trial. </p>
<p>What we do know is that five people were savagely murdered that night. </p>
<p>Steve Parent, a young friend of the caretaker, was shot by Watson four times in the chest and stomach. He was sitting in his car, about to leave. Sharon Tate, pregnant wife of movie director Roman Polanski, was tied up and stabbed 16 times. Watson wrote “PIG” on the front door in her blood. </p>
<p>Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, had been in bed reading when Susan Atkins passed by the room, searching for occupants. She waved. Later, Folger tried to escape via the pool area. She was stabbed 28 times. </p>
<p>Wojciech Frykowski, Folger’s partner and a friend of Polanski’s, fought hard. He was beaten over the head repeatedly with the butt of a gun, shot twice and stabbed 51 times. Celebrity hairdresser <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Sebring">Jay Sebring</a>, who tried to intervene on his former girlfriend Tate’s behalf, was shot and stabbed seven times. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/helter-skelter-9781787461185">First responders described</a> seeing the bodies of Folger and Frykowksi in the garden. “They looked like mannequins that had been dipped in red paint, then tossed haphazardly on the grass.” </p>
<p>On August 10, 1969, the old Ford left Spahn Ranch again. This time Charles Manson was with them. The hunt was on. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca’s house was selected at random. Manson remembered the street in Griffith Park because the crew had partied many times at a house across the way. It seemed poor form to attack that house, so they chose 3301 Waverley Drive instead. </p>
<p>When they went inside, a big dog licked Manson’s hand. Watson carved “War” with a bayonet into Leno’s stomach. Krenwinkle used the victim’s blood to write “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” on walls and “Healter Skelter” (a misspelling of “Helter Skelter”) over the refrigerator. </p>
<p>Manson <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/manson-in-his-own-words/">later told</a> journalist Nuel Emmons that while he’d been inside and had helped tie up Rosemary and Leno, who were both murdered, their compliance meant he couldn’t go through with the killing. “Somehow I just couldn’t make the first move.” </p>
<p>Charles Manson is arguably America’s most infamous murderer of the modern era. Except he didn’t kill any of the people he was convicted of killing. What sank him wasn’t hard evidence of his perpetration. Instead, the pervasive power of male persuasion – his own and that of prosecuting attorney in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial, Vincent Bugliosi – set both his downfall and his mythic rise into motion. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-killers-of-the-flower-moon-true-crime-reveals-the-paradoxes-of-the-past-210283">In Killers of the Flower Moon, true crime reveals the paradoxes of the past</a>
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<h2>‘An uncomfortable experience’</h2>
<p>Re-reading <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/helter-skelter-9781787461185">Helter Skelter</a> (1974), the book Bugliosi co-wrote (with Curt Gentry) about the murders and the trial, has been an uncomfortable experience. And not in the ways I expected. </p>
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<p>Early editions of Helter Skelter – at the time of Bugliosi’s death in 2015, the <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Vincent-Bugliosi/1430868">bestselling true crime title of all time</a> – were subtitled an “Investigation into Motive”. And Bugliosi does spend the better part of 736 excruciatingly detailed pages trying to convince us the prime motivation for the Tate-LaBianca murders was a fantastical end-of-world theory concocted by Manson. </p>
<p>It involved a race war and a portal in the desert where the Family would wait out the war, then emerge triumphant from the bottomless pit as world leaders – even though their official numbers never cracked 100. </p>
<p>Subsequent editions of Helter Skelter were re-badged “The True Story of the Manson Murders”, perhaps because other titles were emerging, making similar claims to ultimate truth – each contradicting the other. </p>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/chaos-9781786090621">Chaos: The Truth Behind the Manson Murders</a> (2019), freelance investigative journalist Tom O’Neill goes after Bugliosi, suggesting he was guilty of suborning perjury relating to the testimony of star witness <a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/2019/05/14/doris-day-son-charles-manson/">Terry Melcher</a>. O'Neill has hard evidence of this. Regarding his own left-field theories Manson was either an informant for the FBI or training assassins for the CIA: not so much. </p>
<p>Then we have <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/manson-in-his-own-words/">Manson in his Own Words: The True Confessions of Charles Manson</a> as told to Nuel Emmons (1988), where Emmons states “the myth of Charles Manson is not likely to survive the impact of his own words”. He was wrong. The myth has survived, because the truth hasn’t been feeding this machine from the beginning. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-clearings-investigation-of-the-family-invites-us-to-ask-whats-the-appeal-and-risk-of-crime-stories-based-on-real-events-206514">The Clearing's investigation of The Family invites us to ask: what's the appeal – and risk – of crime stories based on real events?</a>
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<h2>What’s the truth?</h2>
<p>Who do we believe? The bulldog lawyer who manipulated witnesses and leaned heavily on a far-out theory to get the death sentences he wanted? The well-meaning conspiracy theorist whose paper trails led largely nowhere? Or the delusional rants of a so-called “madman” that are surprisingly lucid? </p>
<p>I don’t think any of these books have the ultimate claim to truth – but the narrative circulating between them matters. Especially when a whole cavalcade of writers, media and filmmakers have been only too happy to participate in the perpetuation of Manson’s demonic mythos. </p>
<p>In 2016, scholars from Lomonosov University in Russia <a href="https://journals.rudn.ru/literary-criticism/article/view/14413#!">examined The New York Times coverage of Manson</a>, from the time of his arrest to his sentencing. They found:</p>
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<p>The New York Times journalists depict Charles Manson as a nationwide celebrity and a mystic monster and endow him with supernatural properties and outstanding abilities. Such depiction has a great influence on the audience’s perception of the killer.</p>
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<p>Bugliosi got in on the act, depicting the Manson clan as Dionysian crazies, with a heavy dose of fire and brimstone thrown in: </p>
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<p>As the ranch hands tried to save the horses, The Manson girls, their faces illuminated by the light of the conflagration, danced and clapped their hands, crying out happily, “Helter Skelter is coming down! Helter Skelter is coming down!”</p>
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<p>He does not attribute this scene to any witness. In the last section of the book, where Bugliosi espouses various personal theories on Manson, he suggests Manson was caught up in a Satanic cult. Again, without evidence. </p>
<p>Even today, media reports can’t help conjuring the resident evil of Manson and rolling around in the clickbait – but reading Helter Skelter, you don’t come away feeling convinced. </p>
<p>What you begin to see is that this was not a firestorm of Satanic maniacs, or a highly organised covert rebellion, but a sad conflation of time, circumstance and thwarted ambition – a mishmash of alternative beliefs, agitation, drug abuse and sexual manipulation, the insecurity of “runaways, dropouts, kicked-outs, and fantasy seekers”, who according to Manson were “all in need of a friend and a direction in life”. </p>
<p>It is too easy to suggest Manson was evil without understanding the whole <em>mise-en-scène</em>, which was defined by the times. These young people (many underage) were operating under a maelstrom of influences – not least, high-octane levels of LSD – which did not get adequate or informed coverage in the trial. </p>
<p>In a telling passage from his book with Emmons, Manson explains the state Tex Watson (often cited in the media as the most brutal of the Manson killers) was in when Manson asked him to assist the women in “their” plans. </p>
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<p>I found Tex […] stoned in the back of the house. When I walked in, he was sitting on an old couch, his head bobbing and his hands tapping his legs in time to some music that no one else could hear except Tex […] I knew Tex was wiped out, but I also knew he could function well on one of his trips. Tex had a good retention of what he said and did until he reached a state of complete unconsciousness.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/have-i-just-joined-another-cult-daniella-grew-up-in-the-family-then-joined-the-army-where-she-experienced-toxic-control-again-196385">‘Have I just joined another cult?’: Daniella grew up in The Family, then joined the army – where she experienced toxic control, again</a>
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<h2>A creature of captivity</h2>
<p>Manson spent much of his first 25 years in captivity: in and out of schools for juvenile delinquents, and prisons. And while he was inside, he learnt about mechanisms of control from jailers and studied good spin from the best ad men: preachers, the whack spec-fic of Scientology, the deep seductive pulse of rock ‘n’ roll. </p>
<p>Manson was an opportunist who nested in the philosophies of others. A rat in a cage, dreaming of the day he could oversee the lever. He thought this would happen via his music, but “things turned out bloody and bad”.</p>
<p>Manson’s greatest weapons weren’t the occult, or some kind of voodoo-inspired mind control. He wielded drugs and sex in such a way he made everyone think the ideas he planted were their own. </p>
<p>When he got out of prison in 1967, he was, by his own admission, pretty lousy in the sack. It was one of the reasons he said he made such a bad pimp. That all changed. He was blown away by the countercultural sixties fervour and combined his prison education with a deliberately cultivated ability to give runaway women what they wanted. Manson gave good head. </p>
<p>By the summer of ‘69, Manson was living a “fantasy come true” – not <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f06QZCVUHg">the Bryan Adams version</a>, but the free-love version – crisscrossing the country and picking up women in his van. The van was procured, he says, after he manipulated a well-meaning pastor into giving him his piano. The van gave him the means and a man of God set him on his way. </p>
<p>Initially, Manson had no other motivations than sleeping with as many woman as he could. But he cottoned on pretty quickly to the power an all-female entourage gave him, dropping in on his ex-con mates to clock the effect. Manson’s bus full of half-naked woman gave him currency. </p>
<p>And no one can deny the sway – the heavy-circulation images of barefoot young women outside the courthouse, crude Xs branded into their foreheads with hot knives, calling him the messiah. Young women groomed and raped and toyed with so often, they must have thought – so it goes. This is love. </p>
<p>Manson would tell the vulnerable to call him Daddy and the followers to call him Jesus. And for the freer-thinkers: call me anything you want. He dosed his entourage on acid, while partaking only slightly himself. And Spahn Ranch, an enclave of westerns past, was perfect for manipulating the minds of renegade young women and appealing to the outlaw gene of lost young men. </p>
<p>Even the big, strapping cowboys who got out of Manson’s orbit after they tired of sleeping with his girls were afraid, they told detectives, of how sometimes they could still feel his vibrations. </p>
<p>But Manson wasn’t the devil or Jesus, though many believed he was. What those cowboys were feeling wasn’t supernatural. It was the ricochet of their own complicity. The Jesus trip, Helter Skelter: the guy who could, according to Bugliosi, stop watches and clocks. For Manson, just another rant, another role. In Manson in his Own Words, he tells Emmons how reality and fantasy began to conflate at Spahn Ranch. </p>
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<p>Living in Movieland’s make-believe, we began to play act […] if only for the hour or two we spent pretending the cameras were focused on us […] if one of the guys, including myself, had a desire to come on as King Richard, Pancho Villa, Lucifer, Elvis the Pelvis, or Jesus Christ (which may have been my favourite role) everyone joined the cast. Pretending occupied our time and our minds and aided by some dope, the play-acting became so real that sometimes long after the scenes were over, the feeling of really having been that person lingered so strong it became real life.</p>
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<h2>Revenge of a wannabe rock star</h2>
<p>The Tate-LaBianca murders weren’t the most horrific crimes America had ever seen. But because they happened in Hollywood – and the deaths involved the rich and famous – they were the ones we heard about. Helter Skelter was just a story though. The real motivations were personal.</p>
<p>Manson wanted to be a rock star – and when that dream was denied him, the downward spiral began. It’s hard to reconcile, but these senseless murders were not related to some satanic evil let loose. They were the desperate gestures of a reject. </p>
<p>Manson outlines to Emmons how in the early days, he would hassle bartenders to let him play his music. And when he wasn’t happy, he’d hold the bar hostage, saying his mates were gonna rob the place, but he had convinced them he could make more money playing instead. </p>
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<p>Now if some of you bastards don’t put a few dollars into this empty hat, so that I ain’t a liar, I don’t know how long I can keep my two partners from walking through those doors with their shotguns. </p>
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<p>Threats, manipulation and someone else’s dirty work. Those honky-tonk extortions were a prelude. He was a man rendered so powerless, he got to the point where getting his drugged-up band of followers to run a red streaky line across the evidence of other people’s success, in their own blood, was the ultimate act of defiance. </p>
<p>Helter Skelter was revenge. Even if they misspelled it. When Manson couldn’t become as big as the Beatles, he released a nightmare B-side to the American dream. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/religious-lies-conmen-and-coercive-control-how-cults-corrupt-our-desire-for-love-and-connection-185385">Religious lies, conmen and coercive control: how cults corrupt our desire for love and connection</a>
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<h2>Did the women get a fair trial?</h2>
<p>From what we know now about trauma, coercion and sexual and mental abuse associated with cults, much of Bugliosi’s assessment of the Manson women on trial appears insensitive and more like a witch hunt. And the defence for all of them, such as it was, is not worth mentioning. </p>
<p>By Manson’s own admission, he “knew what the mice were doing on Spahn Ranch”. He routinely denied women food, drugged them, prostituted them, manipulated their thoughts and feelings, and subsequently reduced their capacity for independent thinking and self-determination. </p>
<p>Again and again, the Manson women are described as dead-eyed, vacant and compliant. And when they did show some resistance, they were vilified. The rhetoric Bugliosi and the media directed at the Manson women is difficult to read without bristling. Bugliosi wrote:</p>
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<p>Writing of Susan Atkins, Los Angeles Times crime reporter Dave Smith expressed something I had long felt: “Watching her behaviour – bold and actressy in court, cute and mincing when making eye-play with someone, a little haunted when no one pays attention – I get the feeling that one day she might start screaming and simply never stop.”</p>
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<p>I am not a Manson Family apologist, but I don’t think these young women got a fair trial. Cults have long traded in flesh, particularly of women and children. And nearly all of them are run by men. </p>
<p>Manson might never have had the numbers of a Keith Ranieri (leader of the NXIVM cult, which had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/nxivm-timeline.html#:%7E:text">around 18,000 followers</a>) or a Warren Jeffs (whose Mormon polygamist sect <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/31/us/fundamentalist-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-fast-facts/index.html">Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/21/fundamentalist-church-of-latter-day-saints-missing-children">is estimated to have</a> 10,000 members). But Manson, too, used women’s bodies as bait, providing his harem for the unlimited use of the Hollywood elite. </p>
<p>How can a law system adequately unpick what happened in a world where women were passed around like popcorn? The Manson women might have believed they were liberated from establishment shackles, but compound life had heavy 1950s overtones. They did all the cooking, child-rearing and cleaning, scavenging, petty theft and bin-diving, and they passed themselves around to whoever Manson wanted to influence, for free. And ultimately, they murdered for him. </p>
<p>As he <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/manson-in-his-own-words/">told Emmons</a>:</p>
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<p>I can’t deny making some of the suggestions that led to the events of that night. Nor can I deny that I was the one person who could have prevented that car from leaving Spahn Ranch. But – so goes the feeling of power when coupled with hatred.</p>
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<p>Bugliosi argued hard for the death penalty – not just for Mason and Watson, but for all the women. There was no death row for women in California at the time, so when Leslie Van Houten, 19, Patricia Krenwinkel, 20, and Susan Atkins, 21, were sentenced to death, a special wing had to be constructed to house them. One year later, the death penalty in California was repealed and their sentences were commuted to life. </p>
<p>In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi wrote, </p>
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<p>With regard to Leslie Van Houten, who of the three girls was least committed to Manson, yet still murdered for him, I fear that she may grow harder and tougher; I have very little hope for her eventual rehabilitation […] </p>
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<p>In this respect, Bugliosi was wrong. In July 2023, Leslie Van Houten was released on parole after 53 years. Her attorney, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/11/leslie-van-houten-released-prison-charles-manson">Nancy Tetreault, told The Guardian</a>, “I’ve never had a client who has dedicated herself to reform like she has.”</p>
<p>“I believed that he was Jesus Christ […] I bought into it lock, stock and barrel,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/leslie-van-houten-charles-manson-parole.html#:%7E:text=Leslie%20Van%20Houten%2C%20a%20former,prison%2C%20according%20to%20her%20lawyer">Van Houten said</a>. Asked in 2021 <a href="https://www.earhustlesq.com/episodes/2021/6/9/home-for-me-is-really-a-memory#:%7E:text=Leslie%20has%20served%20more%20time,deemed%20her%20fit%20for%20release">by the Earhustle podcast</a> what she expected her life to be like if she was ever released, she said: “I don’t know the world out there anymore. My plan would be for simplicity.”</p>
<p>Evil is a biblical term. A word that stands in for the monstrous things people do to each other: man-made acts, things not of the sky or the cauldron, but of the world. As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “there is no evil in individuals but there is in groups”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207420/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Breen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Helter Skelter was the first and most famous book claiming to tell the ‘truth’ about the 1969 Manson murders. Sally Breen explores the myths and conflicting truths that have emerged over nearly 50 years.Sally Breen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/879922017-12-01T00:41:36Z2017-12-01T00:41:36ZCharles Manson and the perversion of the American dream<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196404/original/file-20171126-21805-ao52xg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Charles Manson leaves a Los Angeles courtroom in March 1970.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Californi-/296e3fb8237b4c4c8d9987cf367d284a/94/0">George Brich/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Charles Manson died in November 2017, his name carried weight even among those who weren’t alive when he committed his crimes.</p>
<p>For decades, Manson was the symbol of evil, a real-life boogeyman who loomed as the American conception of wickedness incarnate. His death ended 48 years of imprisonment for a series of murders in August 1969, some of which he committed, most of which he ordered.</p>
<p>But his death also reminds us of Manson’s obsessive longing to make a name for himself. As I was researching <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Had-Ocean-Mayhem-Angeles/dp/1613734913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509465732&sr=8-1&keywords=everybody+had+an+ocean">my book on Los Angeles in the 1960s</a>, I was struck by how fame – more than art, more than religion, more than money – motivated Manson as he careened from prison, to musician, to murder. In his way, he was an early adopter of something that permeates American culture today.</p>
<h2>Becoming something out of nothing</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=Manson+in+His+Own+Words">According to Charles Manson</a>, when he was a boy, his family didn’t pay him much attention: His mother, a prostitute and small-time thief, once traded him for a pitcher of beer. </p>
<p>Manson was jailed for the first time at 13, for burglary. By the time he was in his early 30s, he’d already spent half his life behind bars.</p>
<p>As he was being released from California’s Terminal Island prison in 1967, he panicked and asked the jailer not to turn him out into the world. The guard laughed, but Manson was serious. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Had-Ocean-Mayhem-Angeles/dp/1613734913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509465732&sr=8-1&keywords=everybody+had+an+ocean">Prison was the only real home he’d known</a>.</p>
<p>When the lifelong con man hit the streets, much had changed since 1960, the year he had last tasted freedom. It was the <a href="http://www.the60sofficialsite.com/Summer_of_Love.html">Summer of Love</a>, and Manson drifted to San Francisco, the epicenter of America’s cultural revolution. </p>
<p>There he found docile flower children – easy marks, even for an inept crook. He adopted the hirsute look of the tribe, recycled some of the Scientology babble he’d picked up in the joint and started building a “family” of followers drunk on his flattery. He preyed on lost and damaged young women – wounded birds – and made them think they were beautiful, as long as they followed him.</p>
<p>He sought fame. He deserved fame, he reasoned, and he needed to make the world notice him. Music would be his vehicle: He knew a few chords and could reasonably mimic the peace, love and flowers ethos in his lyrics. </p>
<p>“His followers had no idea that Charlie was obsessed with becoming famous,” biographer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/books/review/manson-a-biography-by-jeff-guinn.html">Jeff Guinn</a> wrote. “He told them that his goal, his mission, really, was to teach the world a better way to live through his songs.”</p>
<p>He brought his “family” of damaged goods to Los Angeles and sent his women to find people who could help him in his quest. While hitchhiking one day, a couple of the girls found an easy mark: the big-hearted, generous and sex-obsessed drummer for the Beach Boys, <a href="http://www.williammckeen.com/an-excerpt-from-everybody-had-an-ocean/">Dennis Wilson</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Had-Ocean-Mayhem-Angeles/dp/1613734913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509465732&sr=8-1&keywords=everybody+had+an+ocean">He picked them up</a>, took them home for milk, cookies and sex, then left for a recording session. When Dennis returned home in the middle of the night, the girls were still there, along with Charles Manson and 15 other young women, all mostly nude. For a sex junkie like Dennis, it was paradise. He bragged about his nubile roommates to his rock star pals, and by the end of 1968, Britain’s Record Mirror <a href="http://www.smileysmile.net/uncanny/index.php/dennis-wilson-i-live-with-17-girls">published a profile</a> titled “Dennis Wilson: I Live With 17 Girls.”</p>
<h2>Grasping at coattails</h2>
<p>Manson saw Dennis – and his Beach Boy brothers Brian and Carl – as his entrée to the music business and international fame. Although the group’s star was dimming by the late ‘60s – they were no longer the hip boy band they had once been – it was at least a foot in the music industry’s door. Through his time as Dennis Wilson’s roommate, Manson had gotten to know record producer Terry Melcher, Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, Neil Young and Frank Zappa. </p>
<p>Convinced he would make Manson – whom he called the Wizard – into a star, Dennis urged his brothers to record the fledgling singer at the Beach Boys studio in Brian Wilson’s home. Wherever Manson went, of course, his “family” followed. Marilyn Wilson, married to Brian at the time, had the bathrooms fumigated after every session, fearing the filthy girls were spreading disease. (And they were, though not the kind that showed up on toilet seats. Dennis ended up footing, for the Manson women, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beach-boys-a-california-saga-part-ii-19711111">what was jokingly referred to</a> as the largest gonorrhea bill in history.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/196559/original/file-20171127-2004-h174uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=626&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Beach Boys pictured in November 1966. Clockwise from left: Dennis Wilson, Alan Jardine, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love and Carl Wilson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-International-News-Ente-/6cebe0432e3243d999c5f65a92f1aa08/8/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After Dennis’s efforts bore no fruit, Manson glommed onto Melcher, who had produced the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Melcher and Wilson introduced Manson to Los Angeles’s music society, largely through lavish parties at the estate on Cielo Drive that Melcher shared with actress Candace Bergen. At Cass Elliot’s parties, Manson played whirling dervish on the dance floor, entertaining all with his spastic monkey moves. </p>
<p>When Neil Young heard Manson <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpx4ODP35VQ&list=PLj2l6Lgg-kToX1vJaO881hGiUmqSzJ9n_">sing his compositions</a> during a drop-in at Dennis Wilson’s house, he called Mo Ostin, president of Warner-Reprise Records, to urge the boss to give the guy a listen. Young warned him that Manson was a little out there and spewed songs more than sang him. But still, Young insisted there was something there.</p>
<p>And there was. Manson’s voice was good enough that he had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/style/charles-manson-annoying-hipster.html">a reasonable expectation of getting a recording contract</a>. His original compositions were good enough to be recorded: The Beach Boys adapted one of his songs into something called “Never Learn Not to Love,” which they performed on the supremely wholesome “Mike Douglas Show.” </p>
<p>Manson’s lyrics, unfortunately, were mostly gibberish, bad enough to justify Ostin’s rejection and for Melcher to tell Manson he couldn’t get him the record contract he so desperately wanted.</p>
<p>But it was too late to stop now. He had drunk from the trough of fame. He mingled with rock stars and thought he was entitled to be one. </p>
<h2>Manson’s American dream</h2>
<p>The American dream used to be described thus: Come to America with nothing and, with the great freedoms and opportunity offered by the country, exit life with prosperity. It has also been described as simply the ideal of freedom – of living in a free and robust society, with nothing to impede people but an open road.</p>
<p>At some point, this changed. In the post-war world of abundant leisure and instant gratification, an ethos of opportunity, hard work and the gradual accumulation of wealth fell away, replaced by a longing for instant fame and fortune. Perhaps it was a result of the conspicuous wealth so visible on the new medium of television. Maybe these new celebrities burned so much brighter because their images slipped through the cathode ray into millions of American homes, turning the house into the new movie theater. </p>
<p>Either way, for millions today, the American dream is simply <a href="https://theconversation.com/inspired-by-kim-kardashian-a-feverish-legion-of-followers-struggle-to-achieve-online-fame-51534">the delirious pursuit of fame</a>. Ask a schoolchild what he wants and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/yalda-t-uhls/kids-want-fame_b_1201935.html">many will say to be famous</a> – by any means necessary. </p>
<p>Charles Manson was an early avatar for this new concept of the American dream. He sought fame at any cost. He tried to achieve celebrity through music and, when he didn’t reach that goal, he turned to crime. Sure, he would spend 61 of his 83 years in prison. But the cameras rolled, the papers were printed, the books were sold. No one would ever forget his name.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1969, actress Sharon Tate and some houseguests were living in a <a href="http://cielodrive.com/10050-cielo-drive.php">Cielo Drive</a> home recently vacated by Terry Melcher and Candace Bergen. Manson didn’t send his murderous family for Melcher and Bergen – he knew they had moved. Instead, he wanted to frighten Melcher and other members of the rock’n’roll elite. The following night’s murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca was likewise intended to breed hysteria. It worked.</p>
<p>Manson achieved his goal, becoming so famous that his name replaced those of his victims. The crimes became known as the Manson murders.</p>
<p>Look to the media today to see Manson’s ideological descendants, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/fashion/jake-paul-team-10-youtube.html">thirsting for fame</a>. Some don’t just risk humiliation, they court it. Remember the early rounds of “American Idol” with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d5eP0wWLQY">jarringly dreadful performances</a> giving the reprehensible “singers” their 15 seconds of fame? </p>
<p>Other, more deadly offspring, could be the boys who shoot up schools and coffee shops and prayer-group meetings. They might be dead, they might have left a trail of destruction in their wake and they aren’t mourned. But like Manson, they are remembered. That’s certainly more than most failed con men can claim.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Manson did end up achieving his goal. Perhaps the best way to honor his victims is to forget his name.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87992/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William McKeen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Desperate to achieve fame by any means necessary, Manson was ahead of his time: Today, the delirious pursuit of fame has gone mainstream.William McKeen, Professor and Chair, Department of Journalism, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/879812017-11-22T20:09:05Z2017-11-22T20:09:05ZWho will bury Charles Manson?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195931/original/file-20171122-6035-1qdnthm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A tangle of rules govern what to do when a California inmate dies.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Charles Manson, the wild-eyed cult leader <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/how-beatles-inspired-charles-manson-commit-his-1969-murders-716938">who claimed inspiration</a> for an apocalyptic race war from the Beatles’ “White Album,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/obituaries/charles-manson-dead.html">died</a> in Kern County, California, on Nov. 19 at the age of 83. </p>
<p>Journalist Joan Didion wrote that for many of her friends in Los Angeles, “the 60s ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969,” the day of the <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/charles-manson-dead-at-83-w458873">Tate-LaBianca murders</a>, in which Manson and his “family” killed seven people, including pregnant actor Sharon Tate.</p>
<p>While the cultural impact of Charles Manson’s life and horrific actions will not soon be forgotten, the pressing concern right now is how we’ll choose to acknowledge his death. More specifically, what will happen to his remains?</p>
<p>It’s a question that often comes up when a notorious criminal dies. Osama bin Laden, for example, was buried at sea, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/02/bin.laden.burial.at.sea/index.html">reportedly in part</a> so that a grave wouldn’t become a shrine for terrorists. </p>
<p>It turns out, however, that the answer is more complicated that it would appear at first glance, particularly when the death happens in a prison in California. I study funeral and cemetery law and also happen to be a licensed funeral director in California, yet I’m still surprised by the inconsistency in the state’s law governing death. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195935/original/file-20171122-6039-152rlhb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The body of actress Sharon Tate is taken from her rented house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Aug. 9, 1969. Tate, who was eight months pregnant, was among those found murdered by Manson and his followers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>When a person dies in California</h2>
<p>When a person dies in California – regardless of where he or she lived – the state’s <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=HSC&division=7.&title=&part=1.&chapter=3.&article=">health and safety code</a> determines who has “the right to control the disposition of the remains of a deceased person, the location and conditions of interment and arrangements for funeral goods and services to be provided.” </p>
<p><a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=HSC&division=7.&title=&part=1.&chapter=3.&article=">California law</a> grants that right to the following persons, in order of priority: a person appointed by the decedent, spouse, adult children, parents, adult siblings and other adults in the “next degrees of kinship.” </p>
<p>If a family member steps up, then the expense of the funeral and burial or cremation will be paid for by the decedent’s estate, if he or she left property. If the decedent died without property, then the family member bears the cost or could apply for an indigent assistance program like the one <a href="http://www.kernsheriff.com/documents/coroner/County_Cremation.pdf">offered in Kern County</a>, where Manson died.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195936/original/file-20171122-6016-1kbg04q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">It’s possible that Manson’s body will end up on a hard, cold slab in a medical school.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Martha Irvine</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Calling all cadavers</h2>
<p>When a person dies in the state without any assets, which is almost certainly true of Manson, another law kicks in. </p>
<p>In those case, the <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=HSC&division=7.&title=&part=1.&chapter=4.&article=">state has the right</a> to send them to a medical school, chiropractic school or a mortuary science program to be used for scientific or educational purposes.</p>
<p>The majority of states have <a href="https://wfulawpolicyjournaldotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/culler_invisible_dead.pdf">statutes similar to this one</a>. When medical schools <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4582158/">began using cadavers</a> to teach future doctors in the 1700s, they had difficulty obtaining a sufficient supply of dead bodies from willing donors. As a result, grave robbery became a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html">significant problem</a> in both the United States and Europe. Medical students were often tasked with obtaining cadavers on their own and would dig up fresh graves. </p>
<p>In response, the states began creating statutes in the mid-1800s that gave bodies that would otherwise be buried at public expense to medical schools. The idea was that supplying cadavers legally would destroy the incentive to commit grave robbery. That turned out to be correct, but as a result most states still have laws like the one in California, which can come as a shock. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=334&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195937/original/file-20171122-6039-1cj2an4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When inmates like those at Corcoran State Prison die, conflicting laws kick in that govern what happens to their remains.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Ben Margot</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>When inmates die</h2>
<p>Manson died in a hospital while in the custody of the California Department of Corrections. A couple of specific laws apply to inmate deaths, and surprisingly those laws contradict each other and the general rules.</p>
<p>A Department of Corrections regulation states that every inmate <a href="https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/I009B5F10F2BD11E3AD09E1D84304E27A?viewType=FullText&originationContext=documenttoc&transitionType=CategoryPageItem&contextData=(sc.Default)">must annually identify</a> his or her next of kin on a form called “Notification in Case of Inmate Death.” </p>
<p>Assuming that Manson had one or more living family members and identified them on the notification form, then the department must attempt to notify the listed individual(s) in person, if practical, and, if not, by telephone and offer “consolation.” After 10 days, a body is deemed “<a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=5061.&lawCode=PEN">unclaimed</a>.”</p>
<p>The rule, however, is inconsistent with the law regarding the rights of the next of kin to make decisions about disposition because it suggests that only the kin named on the notification form has rights.</p>
<p>The Department of Corrections has not indicated whether Manson actually completed this form or who his next of kin may be. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/obituaries/charles-manson-dead.html">According to The New York Times</a>, Manson was married twice. Both marriages ended in divorce. He was believed to have fathered at least two children, but The New York Times describes the subject of his descendants as one “which rumor and urban legend have long coalesced.” </p>
<p>The New York Daily News reported that the only self-identified descendant of Manson is 41-year-old <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/charles-manson-grandson-hopes-give-proper-burial-article-1.3647218">Jason Freeman</a>, the son of Charles Manson Jr., who committed suicide in 1993. Freeman <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/charles-manson-grandson-hopes-give-proper-burial-article-1.3647218">told the newspaper</a> that he was “going to move towards having a proper burial.”</p>
<p>It’s not clear, however, whether Manson, who had never met Freeman in person, listed him on his notification form. They reportedly had some telephone contact. </p>
<p>If Manson’s remains are not claimed by Freeman or another family member, then what will happen to his body? Although California law and the Department of Corrections regulation state that it should be made available for scientific study, <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=PEN&division=&title=7.&part=3.&chapter=2.&article=">a different California statute</a> requires unclaimed inmate remains to be buried or cremated.</p>
<p>Because of all this inconsistency, it’s unclear whether the law intended to give the family members of deceased inmates fewer rights than everyone else.</p>
<h2>Anonymous grave or anatomy lab</h2>
<p>Manson’s remains were last known to be in the possession of the Kern County coroner, according to <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-charles-manson-body-20171120-story.html">the Los Angeles Times</a>. </p>
<p>Even if Freeman was named in Manson’s notification form and claims him in a timely manner, he may still encounter some difficulty in obtaining a typical funeral and burial for his notorious grandfather. </p>
<p>After Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers believed to have committed the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, was killed by police, his uncle managed to locate a funeral home willing to handle the remains – amid picketing by the families of his victims – but had a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/tanya-d-marsh/burying-tamerlan-tsarnaev_b_3215892.html">very difficult time finding a cemetery</a> willing to bury the remains. Eventually, Tsarnaev’s remains were removed from Massachusetts in the middle of the night and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tsarnaev-burial-saga_b_3249151.html">interred in a Muslim cemetery</a> in Virginia.</p>
<p>So what does this all mean for Charles Manson? If Freeman can claim possession of the body, it’ll be up to him to find a funeral home willing to handle the mass murderer’s remains and potentially a graveyard or crematory willing to take them. If no other kin comes to light, an anonymous box of Manson’s remains may find a home at the communal crypt at <a href="http://www.bakersfield.com/news/county-pays-burial-costs-for-people-who-can-t-afford/article_36026592-ad33-5cb2-9e89-8186f9cac16d.html">Union Cemetery in Bakersfield</a>. </p>
<p>Alternatively, it’s very possible that medical students in California may find a familiar-looking cadaver in gross anatomy lab next semester.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87981/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tanya D. Marsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If no one claims the remains of cult leader and killer Charles Manson, it’s unclear what will happen to his body. Will it find an anonymous California grave or face dissection in an anatomy lab?Tanya D. Marsh, Professor of Law, Wake Forest UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/709612017-11-20T17:04:43Z2017-11-20T17:04:43ZHow cult leader Charles Manson was able to manipulate his ‘family’ to commit murder<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151986/original/image-20170106-18647-1rpkwes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C8%2C958%2C977&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Charles Manson: cult leader extraordinaire.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/billstrain/5391890373/sizes/l">mrbill78636/flickr.com</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Charles Manson, who <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42016704">died</a> on November 19 aged 83, was a cult leader par excellence. Back in his heyday, he recruited a devoted set of followers to his “family”, some of whom went on to murder people for him and whose tragic story has inspired numerous books, films and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2071645/">TV programmes</a>. But what did people see in Manson and how did he manage to manipulate and control people so successfully and with such terrible consequences?</p>
<p>It is said that “love is in the eye of the beholder” and there’s no better example of this than the love and devotion that intelligent and well-educated people have for cult leaders who portray themselves as the next messiah but who look to the rest of the world like deceitful and abusive sociopaths. </p>
<p>Of course people do not see an advert for an “abusive and murderous cult” or “how to end your life in trafficked drudgery” but instead are told about an inspired and charismatic leader whose vision and purpose can transform their lives for the better and the whole of humanity with it. So people go along to meet this extraordinary person full of hope and optimism – after all their friend or the persuasive man or woman who told them you all those great things about the guy can’t be totally wrong, surely? </p>
<p>This is what psychologists call <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Optimism_Bias.html?id=5o2SzNJOW-MC&redir_esc=y">optimism bias</a> which indicates that we are wired to “look on the bright side” and in the case of people recruited into cults this is also because of what they have been promised and what they then hope and expect to find. </p>
<p>So Manson may have looked sinister to you or I – but we were not expecting a visionary messiah with a promised, powerful message and followers who look just like us. For those who were and choose to believe in this wonderful, life-affirming opportunity, the search for salvation in bondage to the cult leader had begun.</p>
<h2>A messiah figure</h2>
<p>The key to Manson’s control, as with all cult leaders, was to ensure that followers not only saw him as an all-powerful, messiah-like figure, but that followers see themselves as members of a superior elite that has the answer to the world’s problems – even if that means killing the rest of the world along the way. Manson persuaded his followers to commit murders to trigger <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-manson-california-20500123-story.html">“Helter Skelter”</a> where there would be a “race war” which would elevate him to world leadership. He espoused a rambling, incoherent apocalyptic world view that was nevertheless completing captivating for his followers.</p>
<p>Over time the Manson-type cult leader becomes a dominant part of the follower’s identity and their self-esteem. The whole reason for their existence and survival is completely tied up with the leader and the cult. Manson became the core and central part of his followers’ lives – he provided a “family” and fulflled their basic needs. His “family members” acted to further that critical part of themselves that was bound up with him – and with terrible results.</p>
<p>Normal critical thinking and morals go out of the window. This explains why cult followers themselves can do terrible things or witness barbaric acts and do nothing to stop them. If you act against Manson you are acting against yourself and all that you’ve invested in him. After all there’s no going back, is there? This means there is no limit in practice – even if that means murder as in the case of some of the Manson cult members. </p>
<p>These terrible crimes were the ultimate act of loyalty and reinforcement of the cult identity for the followers – like suicide bombers this probably felt like the best thing they could have possibly done at the time. But the Manson followers were living in an altered state of consciousness and existence – aided also by drugs – and where the normal rules of society just didn’t apply in the cosy “family” that Manson had constructed.</p>
<h2>The lesson of the Manson ‘family’</h2>
<p>Many of the Manson followers went to prison for their crimes, and some felt <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-charles-manson-murders-where-they-are-now-snap-htmlstory.html">tremendous guilt</a> later about their actions. But what is really frightening is how it is all too easy to be duped and sucked into believing that your life is dependent on an amazing leader with such wonderful insights who in reality is a murderous psychopath. Followers forget who they really are, their other interests, family and friends and do terrible things for the cause and leader they love. </p>
<p>The lessons from the Manson “family” are a warning to us all: question everything, think critically and don’t believe that any single person has all the answers. Be wary of charisma and charm and people who are devoted to a messiah-like leader because while it is great to believe in big beautiful ideas it can also be the road to cult slavery and servitude. </p>
<p>Manson’s lasting legacy is hopefully that people will increasingly see through such cult leaders quicker and avoid them more easily than the followers who devoted their lives and murdered others to prove themselves as true devotees.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70961/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Linda Dubrow-Marshall is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Cultic Studies Association and co-founded the Re-Entry Therapy, Information and Referral Network (RETIRN) UK which offers advice and counselling to individuals and families affected by harmful groups or relationships (<a href="http://www.retirn.com">www.retirn.com</a>). Linda is a registered accredited counsellor/psychotherapist with the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy and a registered counselling and clinical psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rod Dubrow-Marshall received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for the recent Social Science Festival event "Coercive Persuasion in the Era of Fake News". He is Visiting Fellow in the Criminal Justice Hub in the Directorate of Social Sciences. He is a member of the board of directors of the International Cultic Studies Association and is co-editor of the International Journal of Cultic Studies (<a href="http://www.icsahome.com">www.icsahome.com</a>). Rod also co-founded the Re-Entry Therapy, Information and Referral Network (RETIRN) UK which offers advice and counselling to individuals and families affected by harmful groups or relationships (<a href="http://www.retirn.com">www.retirn.com</a>).</span></em></p>Charles Manson, who has died aged 83, was a cult leader par excellence.Linda Dubrow-Marshall, Lecturer in Applied Psychology, University of SalfordRod Dubrow-Marshall, Professor of Social Psychology and Visiting Fellow, Criminal Justice Hub, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/708872017-11-20T13:28:24Z2017-11-20T13:28:24ZCharles Manson: death of America’s 1960s bogeyman<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195407/original/file-20171120-18574-1fzu580.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>So, Charles Manson <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/20/charles-manson-dead-cult-leader-sharon-tate">has died, aged 83</a>, of “natural causes”. The con-man, musician and erstwhile cult leader, who came to embody mainstream American fears of the 1960s counterculture “gone wrong”, had an easier death at Kern County hospital in California than any of the seven people whose murders he orchestrated in August 1969.</p>
<p>Manson has been largely out of the public view since his conviction for the Tate-LaBianca killings in January 1971 alongside several members of his “family” – but there has been little diminution of his grisly fame. Earlier this year it was announced that Quentin Tarantino <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/12/quentin-tarantino-to-make-manson-murders-film">is making a film about the Manson murders</a>. Big names such as Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt are among those said to be lining up for parts. </p>
<p>There remains something strange about the attention that Manson generated in life and now in death. It’s a level of interest which far exceeds matters of public record. As such, it’s difficult to know what to say by way of response to the news of his passing – or even what to say for the purposes of a tentative obituary. Difficult, because it’s hard to know precisely who (or what) the name Charles Manson is being used to describe.</p>
<p>Manson, born Charles Milles Maddox in 1934, spent most of his life behind bars. Before convening the cult-like group “The Family” in 1967, he had convictions for car theft and robbery. But it was towards the end of 1969 that he really came to public attention. He was arrested and put on trial for his role as the mastermind of a total of nine murders, including those of the actress Sharon Tate and four friends, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca over the course of the weekend of August 8-9 1969. In March 1971 he was given the death penalty which was later commuted to commuted to life imprisonment.</p>
<p>According to testimony at his trial and that of his followers, Manson was not actually directly responsible for wielding a murder weapon at either of the two crime scenes (although there’s plenty to suggest he was <a href="https://capote.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/truman-capote-interviews-bobby-beausoleil-san-quentin-1973/">involved in other murders</a> at around the same time). But the court found he had masterminded and ordered the Tate-LaBianca killings, made all the more horrific by the fact that actress Tate had been pregnant at the time of her murder.</p>
<h2>Different kind of celebrity</h2>
<p>Whether you like it or not, from his conviction to his death, Manson was a celebrity. He became a celebrity when he made the cover of Life magazine in December 1969 and Rolling Stone in June 1970 – and subsequent novels, films, recordings, interviews, t-shirts and comic books have sought alternately to shore up this status and to demythologise it.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/195409/original/file-20171120-18547-144h2dk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Life magazine, December 1969.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon.com</span></span>
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<p>This Manson culture industry (which shows no signs of slowing down) has kept his name in public circulation for nearly half a century. It’s this material which invariably forms the basis of the analysis whenever Manson’s life and “career” is considered. What becomes visible is something of a schizoid split in which the name Charles Manson gains two points of reference. </p>
<p>There’s “Charles Manson” which effectively describes the life of Charles Milles Maddox, criminal – and then there’s “Charles Manson”, the potent symbol of evil, the name which in the words of one of his recent biographers has become a “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z5RqZqqBb44C&pg=PT14&lpg=PT14&dq=manson+metaphor+for+unspeakable+horror&source=bl&ots=W1avg5r91X&sig=UIjRZFvKUbQnOnLGWBjSUl6v6pA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilrLPElcPXAhXsKMAKHZyADowQ6AEINDAF#v=onepage&q=manson%20metaphor%20for%20unspeakable%20horror&f=false">metaphor for unspeakable horror</a>”. </p>
<p>An early example of the latter came from the writer Wayne McGuire in 1970. Writing in his column for Fusion magazine, “An Aquarian Journal”, he speculated that at “some point in the future”, Manson would “metamorphose into a major American folk hero”. The comment was later used as the epigraph for <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13222282-the-manson-file">The Manson File</a>, a collection of Manson-related writings first published by Amok Press in 1988. The prediction was fully realised in 1997 with the inclusion of Manson in James Parks’ collection, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199864.Cultural_Icons">Cultural Icons</a>. Here, nestling between Lata Mangeshkar, Mao Tse Tung and Robert Mapplethorpe, Manson was identified as an “American Murderer” who “channelled his peculiar cocktail of black magic, drugs, sex and rock n roll into homicidal mania”. It is this “peculiar cocktail” that underpins Manson’s symbolic status.</p>
<p>What gives his crimes – and his name – a notoriety in excess of that held by the likes of <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/albert-de-salvo-17169632">the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo</a> and the unknown “<a href="https://www.biography.com/people/zodiac-killer-236027">Zodiac Killer</a>”, who terrorised Northern California in 1968 and 1969, is that they simultaneously interact with a matrix of other powerful symbols that carry a greater cultural resonance than the breaking of a law, however severe. </p>
<h2>Hollywood meets the crazies</h2>
<p>Tate’s murder brought into collision two heavily mediated zones: <a href="http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/5/26/charles-mansons-hollywood-part-1-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-the-manson-murders">Hollywood and the counterculture</a>. Manson’s interest in The Beatles and use of their song title “Helter Skelter” as a blood-drenched slogan further intensified this disturbing elision of murder and popular culture. As with The Rolling Stones’ <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/6690506/The-Rolling-Stones-at-Altamont-the-day-the-music-died.html">concert at the Altamont Speedway</a> in December 1969 – at which a member of the audience was murdered by a Hells Angel – the Manson murders, once filtered through media sensitive to their range of connections, become emblems for the “end” or even “death” of the 1960s.</p>
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<p>Whether viewed as catalyst or symptom, they are events that stand in for explanations of economic shift, geopolitical crisis and social inequality which describe the decade’s apparent decline into death, violence and what <a href="https://obscenedesserts.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/craziness-good-and-bad-hunter-s.html">Hunter S. Thompson called “bad craziness”</a>. </p>
<p>If anything it was the Tate-LaBianca murders that carry the metaphorical currency, while the name “Manson” now probably signifies something else. It’s a name to conjure with. “Manson” brings to mind the shadow-side of the 1960s: the <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--decivilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext">incipient violence</a> that lay beneath the counterculture’s day-glo optimism and the lost potential of a decade’s calls for peace and pacifism. When viewed from the vantage point of seeing the long, strange and violent life laid out, it refers also to someone who understood and was able to exploit the potency of the popular culture around him. </p>
<p>There’s very little to celebrate here, but maybe there’s something to learn about what it means to be a celebrity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70887/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Riley has previously received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for research into the writers of the Beat Generation. </span></em></p>The murderous cult leader’s notoriety has not diminished over four decades in a US jail.James Riley, Fellow and College Lecturer in English, Girton College, Cambridge, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/571012016-04-14T10:05:53Z2016-04-14T10:05:53ZHow cult leaders like Charles Manson exploit a basic psychological need<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/195527/original/file-20171120-18581-mhi530.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Charles Manson, pictured during his trial.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-United-/40a48f70e4f1465d857138a6cdc06461/9/1">AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Charles Manson, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/obituaries/charles-manson-dead.html">who died</a> Nov. 19, famously attracted a coterie of men and women to do his bidding, which included committing a string of murders in the late-1960s.</p>
<p>Manson is undoubtedly a fascinating figure with a complicated life story. But as someone who studies human cognition, I’m more interested in the members of the Manson “family” like Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, and how they become drawn to leaders of cult-like organizations in the first place.</p>
<h2>The illusion of comfort</h2>
<p>Emotional comfort is central to the allure of cults.</p>
<p>California Institute of Technology psychologist Jon-Patrik Pedersen, in attempting to explain why people are drawn to cults, <a href="https://counseling.caltech.edu/general/InfoandResources/cults">has argued</a> that the human longing for comfort leads us to seek out people or things that can soothe our fears and anxieties. </p>
<p>In and of itself, the urge to quiet internal demons is not a negative trait. I’d argue that, to the contrary, it’s an effective adaptation that allows us to cope with the stressors, big and small, that bombard us on a regular basis. </p>
<p>However, cult leaders meet this need by making promises that are virtually unattainable – and not typically found anywhere else in society. This, according Pedersen, could include “complete financial security, constant peace of mind, perfect health, and eternal life.”</p>
<p>Beyond exploiting human desire for emotional comfort, cult leaders don’t always have the best intentions when it comes to the mental health of their followers. </p>
<p>Psychiatrist Mark Banschick <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201305/what-awful-marriages-cults-have-in-common">has pointed out</a> that cult leaders employ mind and behavioral control techniques that are focused on severing followers’ connections to the outside world. </p>
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<span class="caption">Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Linda Kasabian leave court after being arraigned in 1969. The three members of the Manson family had been charged with murder.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Californ-/181b4b3d32fc405e814e21e7d84d0482/7/1">AP Photo</a></span>
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<p>These methods can actually deepen members’ existing emotional insecurities, while encouraging them to become completely reliant on their cult for all their physical and emotional needs. </p>
<p>Physical and psychological isolation can result, which actually exacerbate many of the problems, like anxiety and depression, that attract people to the cult in the first place.</p>
<p>The anxiety and depression can become so overwhelming and feel so insurmountable that the followers feel trapped.</p>
<p>It’s a vicious cycle that can lead to truly tragic consequences, such as the well-documented <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/jonestown">1978 Jonestown Massacre</a>, when over 900 people died in a mass murder-suicide carried out under the supervision of cult leader Jim Jones. Then there were the <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/heavens-gate-cult-members-found-dead">Heaven’s Gate suicides</a> in 1997, when 39 individuals, including cult leader Marshall Applewhite, willingly overdosed on phenobarbital and vodka in the hope of being transported to an alleged alien spaceship flying behind the (real) Hale-Bopp comet.</p>
<h2>The case for reason</h2>
<p>So just how can one face his or her fears, but avoid the potential danger of cult-like groups? </p>
<p>In a word: rationality. </p>
<p>Seeking reason-based solutions for emotion-focused conditions is by no means a new concept. Unfortunately, rationality is not as intuitively appealing as remedies that simply exploit sentimental cravings. </p>
<p>Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 text “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_an_Illusion">The Future of an Illusion</a>,” argued that religion was a mere mental trick constructed to comfort believers and help them overcome insecurities – even though their acceptance of dogma was irrational. While Freud’s position was focused on mainstream faiths, his highlighting of the emotional comfort central to them is analogous to the role that this element plays in cults.</p>
<p>His solution? Replace religion (or, in the present case, cults) with rational guides for living that deal with problems directly. Are you anxious about your appearance? Eat healthy and exercise regularly. Stressed about relationship problems? Talk directly to your partner in a clear and honest manner to arrive at mutually agreed-upon resolutions. </p>
<p>One could certainly argue that Freud, by highlighting religion’s negative elements, was ignoring the potential <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/12/why-religion-matters-even-more-the-impact-of-religious-practice-on-social-stability">positive outcomes correlated with spirituality</a> such as stable relationships, moral grounding and life satisfaction. </p>
<p>But there is no denying that emotions can cloud judgment and result in poor decisions.</p>
<p>For example, Gerd Gigerenzer, a German psychologist who studies decision-making, illustrated the very real consequences of favoring an emotional response over a more data-driven one. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8656531_Dread_Risk_September_11_and_Fatal_Traffic_Accidents">In his 2004 analysis</a> of highway fatalities in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, he pointed out how people became afraid of flying in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Many who still needed to travel ended up driving instead of flying in order to reach their destinations. </p>
<p>However, this influx of cars on the road led to approximately 350 more people dying in automobile accidents from October to December of 2001. As Gigerenzer noted, these deaths could likely have been avoided “if the public were better informed about psychological reactions to catastrophic events.”</p>
<p>It’s not easy to simply “use reason over emotion.” The fact that cults <a href="http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/most-shocking/10-of-the-most-dangerous-religious-cults/?view=all">continue to exist</a> – and that people continue to play the lottery despite the minuscule chance of winning, or insist on subjecting themselves to unproven cancer treatments such as urine therapy – is a testament to the potency of emotions as behavioral motivators. </p>
<p>Furthermore, this should not be taken as a directive to surrender our emotions, which can enhance human experiences in many ways.</p>
<p>But it’s important to be vigilant, and recognize the value of approaching decisions using logic, especially when emotion-driven choices can lead to negative, life-altering outcomes. </p>
<p>Just ask Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles Watson and Leslie Van Houten, who ended up spending decades in prison for committing murder at Manson’s behest.</p>
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<p><em>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on April 14, 2016.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/57101/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lou Manza does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What makes cults so attractive to their followers?Lou Manza, Professor and Department Chair of Psychology, Lebanon Valley CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.