Charles M. Manson Essay, Research Paper

Charles M. Manson

Allen Azar

Mrs. Kardos

Term Paper

3/13/95

In this world there are cults everywhere. Whether they’re in the US,

China, or maybe next-door there is always one common factor, control. Charles

Manson was a cult leader in southern California during the sixties. Like all

cult leaders Manson had his own small band of followers. His influence was so

great that his followers were willing to kill for him at his smallest whim.

Charles Manson was very paranoid and was under the influnce that there

was to be an upcoming race war. He called this race war ?Helter Skelter?.

Page 1

Charles M. Manson was born in Cincinnati on November 11, 1934. His

mother Kathleen Maddox, a teenage prostitute, his father was a man remembered as

?Colonel Scott.? In order to give her bastard son a name she married William

Manson. He quickly abandoned the both of them. In 1939 Kathleen Maddox was

arrested for robbery and Charles was sent to live with his aunt and grandmother.

Charles remembered his aunt as a harsh disciplinarian and favored is uncle

because he gave him money for the movies and took him on frequent fishing trips.

Only when his uncle became ill did his unfit mother come and reclaim her

unwanted son and moved to Indianapolis.

When Mrs. Manson reclaimed her son she promised that she would take care

of him and provide for his every need. Unfortunately, all these promises were

soon shattered by liquor and men. She frequently neglected Charles by telling

him she would be back in an hour and then not show up for the rest of the night.

Sometimes when her guilt took her over she would give him fifty cents and

another promise; and at other times she just abused him.

When Mrs. Manson got fed up with taking care of Charles she arranged to

have Charles put in a foster home, but arrangements fell through. As a last

resort she sent Charles to Gibault School in Terre Haute. Mrs. Manson couldn’t

keep up the payments and once again Charles was sent back to his mother’s abuse.

At only fourteen Manson rented himself a room and supported himself with odd

jobs and petty theft. His mother turned him into the juvenile authorities.

Once there Manson met Rev. George Powers who had him sent to Boys Town near

Omaha, Nebraska. Charles spent a total of three days in Boys Town before

running away with his new friend Blackie Neilson. They were arrested in Peoria,

Illinois for robbing a grocery store and returned back to Indianapolis. Charles

was then sent to the Indiana Boys School in Plainfield where he ran away another

eighteen times before he was caught and sent to the National Training School for

Boys in Washington D.C.

After his release in 1954 he went to West Virginia and not before long

married Rosalie Jean Willis. She became pregnant and Charles started stealing

cars. By the time the baby was born he was in a Los Angeles jail.

Rosalie moved to California to be near Charles. Her mother-in-law had a

seldom streak of maternal sympathy and came to help care for her grandchild.

In 1958 Charles got out of Prison his wife, child, and mother had left

him alone again. Several arrests for car theft and pimping followed; in 1960,

Charles was given ten years for forging government checks. While he was serving

his ten year sentence at McNeil Island Penitentiary he studied philosophy, took

up guitar, and taught himself sing and compose songs. He was constant probation

violator and was not eligible for parole. He served seven years until his

release in March, 1967.

This long stretch had left its mark. ?If Charlie has any roots in the

penal system,? Said one acquaintance (New York Times Magazine January 4, 1970).

?Inside, you have to be aware of everything, and when he came out,

Charlie was like a cat. Nothing got by Charlie if something happened within a

hundred miles of him, he made sure he knew about it. Every time he came into a

room, he cased it, like an animal. Where were the windows? What was the

quickest way out? He never sat with his back to the door.?

Soon after his release, Manson went off to Haight Ashbury, where the

hippie movement was coming about. At the time the true hippies, the gentle ones

who believed in peace, love, and sharing with others, were like a primitive

tribe suddenly exposed to civilization. As the media spread their story, the

hippies became overwhelmed with teenyboppers, motorcycle gangs, and a wide

variety of the mentally deranged.

Manson’s probation officer remembers he was ?shaken? by the friendliness

of the hippies, but before long Manson learned how to exploit it. A slim man,

about five feet seven inches tall, brown hair and eyes, Manson started to

collect a harem of impressionable girls searching for community of love as

advertised by the media. With a guitar, a pleasant voice, boyish smile, sinuous

mannerisms, and being a smooth talker were Manson’s traits that appealed to his

followers.

Whenever Manson succeeded in making a new recruit the first thing he did

was to deprogram both their ego and their ?hang ups,? about conventional society.

By ?hang ups,? he meant anything he did not like.

?It wasn’t a very difficult process. He was dealing with lonely insecure

people in need of a father figure, people who didn’t have much ego to begin with.

What he did, in effect, was to tear down that ego and substitute himself, thus

gaining enormous control over his followers.?(Roberts pg.31)

Susan Atkins remembers bleakly, ?I never questioned what Charlie said. I just

did it.?

To his girls Charles Manson was a ?beautiful man? who ?loved us all

totally.? Many outsiders found him to be a relentless recruiter who came on

strong with every girl he met, a cynic who treated his harem like possessions

and seldom showed any real affection to them. A close friend explained, ?In

away he was very frank and truthful, but in away he was very treacherous with

words, but there was no meaning behind them.? Dr. David Smith founder and

director of the free clinic in Haight Ashbury, thought that these two sides of

Charles Manson were not contradictory:

To take an example, if you get to know any paranoid schizophrenics it

won’t puzzle you at all. The schizophrenic usually believes in a mystical

system in which he is right, and he can plan in the most calculating and cunning

way possible. He himself does not really know he is a con man, or whether he

really does love the girls. He vacillates between one emotion and the other,

one of the characteristics of a schizoid personality is the inability to sustain

one emotion. It doesn’t confuse me that he would be able to convey sincere

emotion and carry on in a very plotting way. Of course, he would hide the

cunning side as much as possible from those he wanted to involve in his system.

When the girls came into the group their biggest conflict was the idea

of sex on demand. Charles could be very brutal when necessary, any girl that

stayed with him accepted the idea of having sex with him or anyone else on

demand. He preached that women should be submissive to men; this idea was put

into one of the Beach Boys songs. Charles titled it ?Cease and Resist,? and

although the Beach Boys changed it to ?Never Learn Not To Love,? they kept the

lyric ?Submission is a gift, give it to your lover.?

As Haight Ashbury was being taken over by drug pushers, psychotics, and

rapists, Charles packed his crew in to an old converted school bus and headed

south in the spring of 1968. The group of fourteen consisting of nine girls and

five boys were arrested near Oxnard for sleeping nude in a field; the mother of

a newborn infant was arrested and charged with child endangerment. But the

charges were dropped when they agreed with authorities to leave Ventura county.

Once in Los Angeles the crew stayed in Topanga Canyon, which, originally

was a haven for hippies, which, like Haight Ashbury, had been overrun with

panhandlers. For a while they stayed with Gary Hinman, a musician. Then one of

the girls met Dennis Wilson, a member of the Beach Boys singing group. He

invited the entire family to stay in his luxurious home in Pacific Palisades.

Manson attempted several times to pursued Wilson to join with the family.

Wilson never gave in and after several attempts Manson and his family left the

house.

They finally settled at Spahn Ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains.

Spahn Ranch was an old movie set, just north of the San Fernando Valley. The

owner of the Ranch, eighty five year old George Spahn, was blind and feeble and

allowed the family to stay with him. George Spahn soon grew desperately afraid

of Manson, he only allowed them to stay because he enjoyed the attention he got

from the girls who cooked and cleaned for him. The Family stayed at the Ranch

for an entire year before they left because the deputy sheriffs had staged

several raids looking for stolen vehicles. It was then that the family headed

off to the dessert where they made their last home until their arrests.

While living in the desert Manson’s fears of the Black race grew

substantially. Manson was an avid believer in the law of karma, an eastern

religious idea that all events come in cycles and have previous causes. Manson

was convinced that the black man would revolt and oppress the white man in the

way that the whites had previously oppressed the blacks. He believed that this

revolt would lead into an all out race war that he called Helter Skelter.

Manson was under the impression that after the race war happened that only he,

his family, and anyone else that escaped to the desert would survive.

Believing this, Manson turned his home in the desert into a fortress.

Guns appeared at the ranch, and the men would frequently take target practice.

Guards were posted. Escape routes to the desert were plotted. Caches of

gasoline and other necessities were buried all over the Death Valley area.

Manson was pro-race war. So much so that he preached it and attempted

several times to provoked it. Manson tried to provoke Helter Skelter by having

his family carry out several murders and then make it look as if people of the

Black race had committed the crime. The people he killed ranged in the upper-

class and some famous. His most famous victims were Sharon Tate, a movie star,

and her husband Roman Polanski. Other victims included Leno and Rosemary

LaBianca, Abigail Folger and her fianc? Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Gary

Hinman, Steven Parent, and Donald Shea.

Manson’s victims were savagely mudered. The killers used guns, knives,

forks, and blunt objects. With their victim’s blood they wrote on the walls, ?

Death to pigs.? When the police found Abigail Folger, her white dress appeared

red after being stabbed twenty-three times. And when they found Leno LaBianca a

fork was sticking out of his chest.

On August 16, 1969, during a police raid, Charles Manson and his family

were arrested for murder. The trial soon followed. Leading the prosecution

was

Babitz, Eve. ?The Manson Murders.? Esquire. August 1994.

Bugliosi,Vincent. Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders.

W.W. Norton & Company Inc. New York. C.1974.

Roberts, Steven V. ?Charlie Manson: One Man’s Family.? New York Times

Magazine, January 4, 1970.

Sanders, Ed. The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack

Battalion. E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc. New York. 1971.

?The Manson Women: Inside the Murders.? Turning Point. Interviewer Diane

Sawyer.ABC, New York. November 9, 1994.

Unknown. ?The Power of a Cult.? Glamour. January, 1995: 160-183.

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