Mass killer and cult leader Charles Manson dies aged 83

Charles Manson, the cult leader who sent followers known as the "Manson Family" out to commit gruesome murders, shattering the peace-and-love ethos of the 1960s hippie era in California, has died. He was 83.

Manson, whose name to this day is synonymous with unspeakable violence and madness, died of natural causes at Kern County hospital, according to a California Department of Corrections statement.

Serving a life term for orchestrating one of the most notorious crimes in US history, Manson had been imprisoned for more than 45 years at California State Prison, Corcoran.
In the 1960s, Manson, an ex-convict, assembled a group of runaways and outcasts known as the "Manson Family."

In the summer of 1969, he directed his mostly young, female followers to murder seven people in what prosecutors said was part of a plan to incite a race war.
Among the victims was actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski. She was stabbed 16 times by cult members.

"The very name Manson has become a metaphor for evil," the late Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson, told the Los Angeles Times in 1994

A career criminal and con artist, Manson had reinvented himself during the Summer of Love as a Christ-like figure who attracted young people to a commune he established at an old, abandoned movie ranch on the edge of Los Angeles.

Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, Manson maintained during his tumultuous trial in 1970 that he was innocent and that society itself was guilty.

"These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them; I didn't teach them. I just tried to help them stand up," he said in a courtroom soliloquy.

One of his youngest followers was Leslie Van Houten.

"To tell you the truth, the older I get the harder it is to deal with all of this, to know what I did, how it happened,"she told a parole panel in September.

The panel has recommended she be released, but Gov. Jerry Brown could reject that recommendation as he did once before. No Manson Family member convicted of murder has ever been freed.

Van Houten, now 68, explained how Manson used sex, drugs, repeated playings of the Beatles' "White Album" and readings from the Bible to persuade his young followers that they could launch a race war between blacks and whites by killing people, then hide in the desert until it was over.

He was particularly fascinated by the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter," which he saw as predicting the coming race war, although its lyrics mainly seem to reference a childhood playground slide of that name.

The Manson Family slaughtered five of its victims on August 9, 1969, at Tate's home: the actress, who was 8½ months pregnant, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish movie director Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate's caretaker. Tate's husband, "Rosemary's Baby" director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.

The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home across town.

The killers scrawled such phrases as "Pigs" and "Healter Skelter" (sic) in blood at the crime scenes. The brutality of the killings stunned the nation.

"There was a lot of fear," Bugliosi, author of the chilling book about the murders, "Helter Skelter," told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. "The words printed in blood made it especially frightening for the Hollywood crowd."

Three months later, a Manson follower was jailed on an unrelated charge and told a cellmate about the bloodbath, leading to the cult leader's arrest.

In the annals of American crime, Manson became the embodiment of evil, a short, shaggy-haired, bearded figure with a demonic stare and an "X" - later turned into a swastika - carved into his forehead.

"Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969," author Joan Didion wrote in her 1979 book "The White Album."

After a trial that lasted nearly a year, Manson and three followers - Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten - were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Another defendant, Charles "Tex" Watson, was convicted later. All were spared execution and given life sentences after the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972.

Atkins died behind bars in 2009. Krenwinkel, Van Houten and Watson remain in prison.

Another Manson devotee, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, but her gun jammed. She served 34 years in prison.