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Charles Manson, the fiery-eyed cult master whose lemming-like followers staged a bloody two-night murder rampage in Los Angeles in 1969 that gripped the city with fear and shocked the nation, died on Sunday at a hospital in Kern County, California. He was 83.


(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)






 

A spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed the death by email, saying he died of natural causes. Manson, who was serving a life sentence at California State Prison in Corcoran, California, had had health problems in recent years and was hospitalized in January for gastrointestinal bleeding, according to news reports.

10 disturbing facts you didn’t know about Charles Manson:

1. At a former movie ranch outside Los Angeles, he and his devotees — many of them young runaways who likened him to Jesus Christ — lived commune-style, using drugs and taking part in orgies. Children from privileged backgrounds ate garbage from supermarket trash.

2. Manson’s childhood was a blueprint for a life of crime. He was born in Cincinnati on Nov. 12, 1934, to a teenager, possibly a prostitute.

3. When he was 5, his mother went to prison for armed robbery.

Manson’s infamous quote:

“My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system,” he said in a monologue on the witness stand. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you.”

4. By the time he was 8, he was in reform school. He spent years in and out of penal institutions.

5. Manson’s chaotic trial in 1970 transformed a courtroom into a theatre of the absurd. He and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, sang and chanted, and Manson at one point launched himself across the counsel table at the judge. Many of his followers camped outside the courthouse, threatening to immolate themselves if he was convicted.

6. When Manson carved an “X” in his forehead, his co-defendants did the same, saying they were “Xed out of society.” He later changed his “X” to a swastika.

7. At a 2012 parole hearing Manson boycotted, he was quoted as telling a prison psychiatrist: “I’m special. I’m not like the average inmate. … I have put five people in the grave. I am a very dangerous man.” The parole board decided he should stay behind bars for at least 15 more years.

8. The killings inspired movies and TV shows, and Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote a best-selling book about the murders, “Helter Skelter.” Manson’s face has appeared on T-shirts.

9. The macabre shock rocker Marilyn Manson borrowed part of his stage name from the killer.

10. The slayings – known collectively as the Tate-LaBianca murders – led to the arrest and conviction of Manson and four of his followers in 1971. All were sentenced to death in the California gas chamber, but the sentences were reduced to life in 1972 when the state Supreme Court abolished the death penalty.

“The Manson case, to this day, remains one of the most chilling in crime history,” prominent criminal justice reporter Theo Wilson wrote in her 1998 memoir, “Headline Justice: Inside the Courtroom — The Country’s Most Controversial Trials.”

“Even people who were not yet born when the murders took place,” Wilson wrote, “know the name Charles Manson, and shudder.”

Twitter has its say:

And then we stumbled across these tweets…

– Originally published in The Washington Post

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