Charles Milles Manson was born in Cincinnati on November 12, 1934, to sixteen-year-old Kathleen Maddox. He spent his childhood in reformatories and his adulthood in prison for car theft, forgery and pimping, and by his early thirties had been confined for roughly half his life. He was released from Terminal Island in March 1967, went to San Francisco in the last months of the Haight-Ashbury summer, and began gathering the mostly young, mostly female following that became known as the Family. By 1968 they were living at the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth on the edge of Los Angeles.
Manson wanted a recording contract. He was introduced to the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, and through him to the producer Terry Melcher, who had until recently rented the house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. Melcher passed on him. What Manson preached to the Family instead was a coming race war he called Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song, from which they would emerge to rule. That motive was the prosecution's case at trial and has been argued over ever since; others hold that the killings were staged to resemble the earlier murder of Gary Hinman and so free the man already in custody for it.
Hinman, a music teacher who had helped members of the Family, was killed at his Topanga house 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, then occupied by the director Roman Polanski's wife. They killed Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, the hairdresser Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who had been visiting the caretaker. The following 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 suspected of talking to police, was killed later in August.
The case was broken not by the murder investigation but by an unrelated raid on Spahn Ranch in October, after which Susan Atkins, in custody, talked to her cellmates. The Tate-LaBianca trial opened in June 1970 with Vincent Bugliosi prosecuting and Kasabian, granted immunity, as the principal witness. On January 25, 1971, Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten were convicted. California prison records list his commitment as seven counts of first-degree murder and one count 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.
Manson did not kill any of the nine. He was convicted under the doctrine of joint responsibility, as the person who directed the killings, and the point matters to how he is classified. He is routinely called a serial killer. He was not one by any working definition, and the forensic psychologist Scott Bonn has used the term proxy murderer for what he was. The distinction takes nothing away from the sentence and does not soften what he did; it describes the mechanism of it accurately.
He was sentenced to death. In 1972 the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in People v. Anderson, and every capital sentence in California was commuted; Manson's was modified to life on February 2, 1977, at a time when the state had no sentence of life without parole. He was denied parole twelve times between 1978 and 2012 and did not attend a hearing after 1997. He was held in the protective housing unit at Corcoran from 1989. He died at a Kern County hospital at 8:13 p.m. on November 19, 2017, at eighty-three. The autopsy recorded cardiac arrest, with respiratory failure and metastatic colon cancer underlying.
The record of the case is unusually available. This archive carries fourteen of its documents verbatim: Vincent Bugliosi’s opening statement of July 24, 1970 and his closing argument of January 15, 1971; the grand jury testimony of December 1969 from Susan Atkins, Winifred Chapman, Danny DeCarlo and Ruth Ann Moorehouse; the trial testimony of Linda Kasabian, Paul Watkins, Virginia Graham and William Garretson; Manson’s own statement to the court on November 19, 1970, made with the jury out of the room; the transcript of Charles Watson’s separate 1971 trial with Terry Melcher’s evidence; and Stephanie Schram’s statement to investigators. They are listed below under Mentioned in the archive.