Charles Manson was convicted of nine first-degree murders and he killed none of them. He was not in the house on Cielo Drive. He drove to the LaBianca house the following night, tied the couple up and left before they died. He was in custody when Gary Hinman was killed. He was convicted as the man who directed it, under the doctrine of joint responsibility, and that is the whole legal architecture of the case.
The nine are Gary Hinman, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca and Donald "Shorty" Shea.
Charles Milles Manson was born in Cincinnati on November 12, 1934 to a sixteen-year-old named Kathleen Maddox. He spent his childhood in reformatories and his adult life in prison for car theft, forgery and pimping, and by his early thirties he had been confined for roughly half the time he had been alive. He was released from Terminal Island in March 1967, went to San Francisco for the last months of the Haight-Ashbury summer, and began collecting the mostly young, mostly female following that became known as the Family. By 1968 they were at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, on the western edge of Los Angeles.
What he wanted was a recording contract. He met the Beach Boys' drummer Dennis Wilson, and through him the producer Terry Melcher, who had recently moved out of a rented house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. Melcher passed on him.
What he preached to the Family was a coming race war he called Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song, out of which they would emerge to rule. That was the prosecution's theory of motive at trial and it has been argued over ever since. The competing account is narrower and more practical: that the Cielo Drive killings were staged to resemble the Hinman murder and so cast doubt on the case against the man already in custody for it.
Gary Hinman was a music teacher who had helped members of the Family. He was killed at his house in Topanga on July 25, 1969 by Bobby Beausoleil, with Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner present.
On the night of August 8 Manson sent Charles Watson, Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of the director Roman Polanski, was living while he worked in Europe. They killed Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant; the hairdresser Jay Sebring; Wojciech Frykowski; the coffee heiress Abigail Folger; and Steven Parent, who was eighteen and had been visiting the caretaker in the guest house and had the misfortune to be leaving.
The next night Manson went with them to the house of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Feliz, tied the couple up, and left. Watson, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten killed them. Donald Shea, a ranch hand at Spahn who was suspected of talking to the police, was killed later in August.
The case was not broken by the murder investigation. It was broken by an unrelated raid on the Spahn Ranch in October over stolen cars, after which Susan Atkins, in custody on the Hinman killing, talked to her cellmates.
The Tate-LaBianca trial opened in June 1970. Vincent Bugliosi prosecuted and Linda Kasabian, granted immunity, was the principal witness. On January 25, 1971 Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten were convicted. He was admitted to state prison on April 22, 1971 on seven counts of first-degree murder and one of conspiracy to commit murder. On December 13, 1971, in a separate trial, he was convicted of the first-degree murders of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea.
He is routinely called a serial killer and he was not one by any working definition. The forensic psychologist Scott Bonn has used the term proxy murderer. The distinction takes nothing off the sentence and softens nothing about what he did; it describes the mechanism accurately, and the mechanism is why he was the one who never went near most of the bodies.
He was sentenced to death, and the sentence lasted five years on paper and was never going to be carried out. In February 1972 the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in People v. Anderson and every capital sentence in California fell with it. The Los Angeles Superior Court vacated his, and it was formally modified to life on February 2, 1977. California had no sentence of life without parole at the time, so life meant life with the possibility of parole.
That is the reason he spent four decades attending parole hearings. He was denied twelve times between November 16, 1978 and April 11, 2012. At the first he sang. The last one he actually attended was in March 1997, and he was not eligible for another until 2027. In the 1980s another prisoner set him on fire, which left injuries he could have used to argue for release on medical grounds, and he never did.
He was held in the Protective Housing Unit at Corcoran from 1989, having previously been at San Quentin, the California Medical Facility, Folsom and Pelican Bay. He died at a Kern County hospital at 8:13 in the evening on November 19, 2017, aged eighty-three. The cause was cardiac arrest, with respiratory failure and metastatic colon cancer underlying.
The people who did the killing have served longer in every practical sense. Susan Atkins died of cancer in prison in 2009. Leslie Van Houten had her conviction overturned in 1976, was tried twice more, and walked out on parole in July 2023 after fifty-three years, when an appeals court overruled Governor Gavin Newsom's reversal and he chose not to take it further. Patricia Krenwinkel, the longest-serving woman in the California system, was recommended for parole in May 2022 and again in May 2025, and Newsom reversed both, the second time in October 2025, commending her college degrees and clean record but finding that she still lacked insight and posed an unreasonable danger; she remains at the California Institution for Women in Corona. Bruce Davis has been before the board thirty-four times and recommended seven. Charles Watson, a prison minister, has been denied eighteen times. Bobby Beausoleil was recommended for release in 2019 after eighteen denials, Newsom reversed it, and the courts upheld the reversal. In a 2025 Netflix documentary, Chaos: The Manson Murders, Beausoleil argued that the killings were more about keeping followers in line than any grand design, and that Manson had been no mastermind.
Manson never was. He was the only one of them with nothing to gain from persuading a parole board of anything, and he behaved accordingly for forty years.