The World's Most Evil Gangs (22 page)

‘
C
harles Manson is the greatest advertisement for the death penalty.’ So said Stephen Kay, the long-serving principal prosecutor in California’s most infamous gang massacre. Few who were involved in the case would disagree. For Manson was not only the epitome of sheer evil himself, the messianic madman also had the power to transform others from fresh-faced innocents into blood-lusting murderers.

How this scruffy, unprepossessing fantasist managed to mesmerise his gang of followers to commit sickening acts of brutality is an unsolved mystery. Forty years after the 1969 killing spree by his ‘Devil’s Children’ sect, former Los Angeles District Attorney Kay was still warning: ‘He can cast a spell and that’s how he got other people to do his killing. He had such evil control – and he still has it today.’

Manson himself had long recognised the danger he posed to
the public. Early in his criminal career, he had pleaded with the authorities to be allowed to remain locked up in jail. If only they had granted his wish. For within two years, he had gathered together a cult of impressionable devotees who were willing to kill at his command.

Manson was born illegitimately in 1934 to 16-year-old prostitute Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 12 November 1934, his birth name being recorded as ‘No Name Maddox’. The identity of his father is unknown and his surname derives from one of his mother’s lovers at the time. Manson lived in foster homes but, still in his early teens, he became a juvenile delinquent who spent much time in detention centres. Inexorably, his escalating criminality led to harsher penalties. At the age of 16, he was sentenced to two years at the National Training School for Boys in Washington DC and was not freed until his eighteenth birthday.

In his teens, Manson showed violent sexual tendencies, usually directed towards other men. During one such period at a detention centre, he grabbed a boy from behind and held a razor blade to his throat as he carried out a violent rape. Eventually, with his file marked ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Not to be trusted’, he was transferred to the Federal Reformatory in Virginia.

Soon after his release on parole in 1954, he married Rosalie Jean Willis, a 17-year-old waitress. Despite his previous homosexuality, Rosalie was pregnant when the two travelled to California in a stolen car. Convicted of the theft, Manson was sentenced to three years at the Terminal Island jail in San Pedro. Faithful Rosalie visited him often, sometimes taking along Charles Manson Junior, but then suddenly stopped her visits. Manson discovered she had fallen for someone else and, although paroled in 1958, he was never to see Rosalie or his son
again. In between jail sentences, Manson married again and sired another son: a second Charles Manson Junior. That marriage did not last either.

By the time he was 32, Manson had spent most of his life in prison. So institutionalised was he that, when yet another parole came up, he asked to remain within the four walls he knew as home. He did not feel easy being released into a society that he felt had dealt him a bad hand. But the authorities refused his plea to be a voluntary inmate and in 1967 the criminal menace was once more back on the road, this time heading for San Francisco, centre of the hippy flower-power cult. With a guitar on his back, the drug-taking drifter and aspiring musician mixed with other drop-outs and discovered that he could exercise a strange magnetism over them.

‘He surrounded himself with young and impressionable hangers-on,’ recalled Manson expert Vincent Bugliori, the former prosecutor who would eventually try the evil killer. ‘The kids were literally at his feet, so he started up what he called his “family”. Manson at that point became a maestro, orchestrating what everyone else did. He had this phenomenal ability to gain control over other people and get them to do terrible things.’

This strange mix of misfits – runaway youngsters, homeless bikers and small-time criminals – moved south, settling in run-down Spahn Ranch, a former Wild West movie set outside Los Angeles. Further vulnerable youths were lured into the gang with the promise of free sex and drugs. Among them were impressionable girls who so adored Manson that they willingly gave up stable, middle-class lives to be with him.

One such devotee was 20-year-old Linda Kasabian who, in July 1969, was introduced to the ‘family’ by Manson follower
Catherine Share, known as ‘Gypsy’. Kasabian, who moved to the ranch with her daughter, won the trust of the group when she volunteered to steal $5,000 in cash from her estranged husband. She was then presented to the leader of the commune. ‘Meeting Charles for the first time was very exciting,’ she later recalled. ‘There was a magnetism about him – charisma, charm, power. I felt really safe and protected. We were like his children.’

By the summer of 1969, Manson had gathered a hard core of 25 devotees with more than 60 other ‘associates’. In his
drug-befuddled
state, he became obsessed with The Beatles’
White Album
, which he believed was directed at him. ‘In every single song on the album, he felt that they were singing about us,’ Catherine ‘Gypsy’ Share later recalled. ‘He thought that The Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years – a forthcoming racial cataclysm.’

Manson ordered his followers to prepare for an imminent race war that he dubbed ‘Helter Skelter’, his ultimate mission named after the title of a track on
The White Album
. He told them that the songs contained hidden messages that had meaning only for him. Songs such as ‘Revolution 9’ were especially prophetic for the ‘family’: they believed it all led to another battle of Armageddon, Manson’s term for a planned race war in which American Blacks would reign supreme over the Whites. Only Manson and those who chose to stay with him would be spared the mass racial slaughter. Chosen Blacks, spouted Manson, would become part of the ‘family’, numbering no less than 144,000. They would become his ‘Chosen People’. He had taken the term from The Bible, referring to the 12 Tribes of Israel, each numbering 12,000. Together, he said, they would take over the world. And The Beatles, Manson proclaimed, would be his
‘spokesmen’. Manson told his disciples that nothing could be achieved unless he had utterly devoted followers, who alone could change the world. They would strike out at the white Establishment; they would kill.

A parallel mission of Manson at the time was to achieve his ambition of becoming a star by using a tenuous connection with a member of the Beach Boys group, Dennis Wilson. The dream was shattered, however, when Wilson’s associate, record producer Terry Melcher, son of film star Doris Day, failed to offer him a contract. This brought together two lines of thought in the mind of the deranged Manson. He decided to launch an attack on Melcher’s Los Angeles home.

According to Vincent Bugliori, the house came to symbolise the entertainment establishment that had rejected him. ‘Manson wanted to start Helter Skelter by murdering white people and framing the black man for it,’ said Bugliori. With mounting paranoia, he began arming his followers. ‘It wasn’t peace and love anymore,’ recalled Catherine Share, ‘it was almost like an army.’

Helter Skelter got underway on a hot August night in 1969 when Manson allotted his murderous mission to Linda Kasabian and three other followers: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson. He ordered them to drive to Melcher’s home, in an isolated area between Beverly Hills and the San Fernando Valley, and launch a vicious attack on the occupants. Manson had not adequately researched his ‘war’ strategy, however. Melcher was no longer at the bungalow-style property, which was being rented by film director Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife Sharon Tate, who had recently returned there to have her baby after working in London. Polanski was still in Europe directing his latest film.

Unaware of this, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Kasabian and Watson entered the grounds of 10050 Cielo Drive, Benedict Canyon, shortly before dawn on 9 August, to begin a horrific slaughter. Sharon Tate and a group of friends were partying at the mansion when the self-styled ‘Angels of Death’ stealthily made their way towards the house. Linda Kasabian acted as lookout while the other three, wielding knives and uttering frenzied war cries, set upon the partygoers. Within a couple of hours, they had completed their grisly task and, in an explosion of
mind-numbing
violence, five innocent people had been butchered.

No one will ever know the extent of the terror and suffering the victims endured before the gang smeared the mansion walls with bizarre messages in the victims’ blood. The scene police later encountered showed evidence of unbelievable brutality. The body of Steven Parent, the 18-year-old guest of the house’s caretaker, was discovered slumped in his car in the driveway. Parent had encountered the raiders as he drove from the house. They had flagged him down and then shot him four times.

Their next find was the body of Abigail Folger, heiress to a coffee fortune, lying on the lawn. She had been cut to pieces as she tried to flee. Inside the house – which had the word ‘Pigs’ scrawled in blood on the door – they found the body of Hollywood hair stylist Jay Sebring. He had been stabbed, and then finished off with a gunshot. Polish film director Voytek Frykowski had been battered with a club by Watson, while repeating the mantra: ‘I am the Devil come to do the Devil’s work’. Frykowski had then been finished off by Atkins, who stabbed him six times with a knife.

The most sickening sight was the pathetic body of Sharon Tate. The 26-year-old actress had begged to be spared for the sake of the child she was carrying, due in just a month’s time.
Her pleas for mercy had been greeted with derision and she suffered 16 stab wounds, killing both her and her unborn baby boy. A nylon rope was knotted around her neck and slung over a ceiling beam and the other end tied around the hooded head of Sebring.

Despite the gory proof that there was no limit to the powers he wielded over his followers, Manson was displeased with the night’s events at the Tate residence. He felt he had not achieved his aim to spark a race war. There was more bloody work to be done, and this time he wanted to be in on the action himself.

The night after the slaughter, the four Tate murderers were again summoned, along with Steve Grogan and Leslie Van Houten, a former college queen and youngest member of the cult. Linda Kasabian was dispatched to murder an actor friend of hers – a plan that she thwarted by knocking on the wrong door. The others cruised the better neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in search of potential victims before settling on the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, who owned a small chain of supermarkets. Manson burst into the couple’s Waverly Drive mansion, tied them up and left them to the mercy of three of his cult slaves: Watson, Krenwinkel and Van Houten.

A sword, knives and forks were used in the barbaric slaying. Police found a fork protruding from Leno LaBianca’s body, with the word ‘War’ carved into his stomach. He had been stabbed 26 times and symbolically hanged, with a bloodstained pillowcase used as a hood. A cord around his throat was attached to a heavy lamp and his hands were tied behind his back with a leather thong. Rosemary’s nightdress had been pushed over her head and her back and buttocks were covered in stab wounds. She too was hooded by a pillowcase and had been hanged by a wire attached to a lamp. The word ‘war’ had
been cut into her abdomen. On the walls, written in blood, were the words ‘Death to the Pigs’ and ‘Rise’. The killers had misspelt ‘Healter Skelter’ on the fridge door.

Los Angeles police did not initially connect the two raids, and it was only the arrest of Susan Atkins in another investigation that brought the cult members to justice. She was picked up in connection with the slaying of musician and drug dealer Gary Hinman at his Topanga Canyon home ten days before the mass murders. He had been tortured to death and his blood used to scrawl the words ‘Political Piggy’ on a wall. Police were also investigating the disappearance of another man, Donald ‘Shorty’ Shea, a part-time movie stuntman who had mysteriously vanished from Spahn Ranch.

In custody, Susan Atkins was still ‘high’ on the experience of the headline-making, but still unaccounted for, butchery on Cielo Drive. She bragged about her role, sickening cellmates with her claims of drinking Sharon Tate’s blood. ‘I was there,’ she boasted. ‘We did it! It felt so good the first time I stabbed her. When she screamed at me, it did something to me, sent a rush through me, and I stabbed her again. I just kept stabbing her until she stopped screaming. It was like a sexual release, especially when you see the blood. It’s better than a climax.’

In December 1969, the ‘family’ were rounded up and the incredible story of messianic Manson and his so-called ‘witchlets’ was flashed around the world. Charles Manson, the short, scraggy ex-con who had spent more than half his life behind bars, was charged with nine murders: the Tate and LaBianca massacres and two other slayings. But he was suspected of orchestrating as many as 25 other killings from his desert ranch. Suddenly Manson became the most talked-about criminal in the annals of Californian law enforcement.

At his sensational trial, Manson cut a terrifying figure as he spoke of his weird band of disciples. He said: ‘These children who come at you with knives, they are your children. I didn’t teach them. You did. I just tried to help them stand up. You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad and even killers your children are. You made your children what they are. I am only what lives inside each and every one of you.’

On 29 March 1971, guilty verdicts were returned on all counts against the Manson gang. Looking at the jury who had convicted her, Susan Atkins warned them to lock their doors and to watch their children. The hearing had taken 38 weeks and was then the longest criminal trial in American history. It cost $1.25 million and 31,176 pages of transcript were taken. Sentencing them, Judge Charles Older said: ‘It is my considered judgment that not only is the death penalty appropriate but it is almost compelled by the circumstances.’ The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 when California’s death penalty was banned by the courts as being ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.