The Editors of TIME-LIFE - Killer Cults: Inside the Mind of Charles Manson and Other Cult Leaders

KILLER CULTS

Inside the Mind of Charles Manson and Other Cult Leaders

KILLERS CULTS

TIME INC. BOOKS

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SPECIAL THANKS Brad Beatson, Brett Finkelstein, Melissa Frankenberry, Kristina Jutzi, Simon Keeble, Seniqua Koger, Kate Roncinske

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EDITORIAL PRODUCTION David Sloan

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e-ISBN 978-1-54784-236-0

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Contents

CAUGHT IN THE GLARE Cameramen filmed the scene as Charles Manson was brought into the Los Angeles city jail under suspicion of masterminding a string of murders in August 1969.

CHAPTER 1

During the summer of 1969, Charles Manson sent his followers out from their commune in the Los Angeles area to bludgeon and stab to death nine people at four locations.

CHAPTER 2

Rev. Jim Jones founded what was supposed to be a utopia in Guyana. When it began to fall apart, he led more than 900 followers in a mass suicide.

CHAPTER 3

David Koreshs spiritual group looked to him for interpretation of Scripture and armed themselves in preparation for the end of days. Their clash with federal agents left 84 dead, many of them children.

CHAPTER 4

Convinced their souls would be given new, better bodies by aliens arriving with the Hale-Bopp comet, the followers of Marshall Applewhite committed suicide together.

CHAPTER 5

Shoko Asahara became known as the Prophet of Poison, but before he committed acts of domestic terror using sarin, he recruited followers from his yoga and new-age retreats.

The Manson Family

Charles Manson was evil but also deeply magnetic. Who was he? And who were the followers who were willing to do his biddingto brutal and murderous ends?

ANGUISHED MOMENT The body of actress Sharon Tate was removed from her rented house on Cielo Drive.

CHARLES MANSON / THE MANSON FAMILY

The Demon of Death Valley

In December 1969, LIFE became the first national magazine to run a cover story on cult leader Charles Manson, his family and the gruesome murders they committed.

BY PAUL ONEIL

ANOTHER NAME During the time Manson led his Family, most people who knew him called him Charlie, though as a child in McMechen, W. Va., he went by Charles.

Long-haired, bearded little Charlie Manson so disturbed America when he was charged in October 1969 with sending four girls and a male acolyte to slaughter strangers in Los Angeles that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes seemed to have played only secondary roles in the final moments of their own lives. The Los Angeles killings struck millions across the country as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their childrenand made Charlie Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.

What failure of the human condition could produce a Charlie Manson? What possible aspect of such a creatures example could induce sweet-faced young women and a polite Texas college boy to acts of such numbing crueltyeven though they might have abandoned the social and political precepts of their elders like so many other beaded and bell-bottomed mothers children of 1969? Some of the answers seemed simple enough if one weighed Charlie Manson on the ancient scales of human venality. He attracted and controlled his women through flattery, fear and sexual attention and by loftily granting them a sort of sisterhood of exploitationmethods used by every pimp in history. He sensed something old as a tribal blood ritual which most of us deny in ourselvesthat humans can feel enormous fulfillment and enormous relief in the act of killing other humans if some medicine man applauds and condones the deed. But Charlie was able to attune his time-encrusted concepts of villainy to the childish yearnings of his hippie convertsto their weaknesses, their catchwords, their fragmentary sense of religion and their enchantment with drugs and idlenessand to immerse them in his own ego and in idiotic versions of apocalypse.

EARLY OFFENDER

It is hard not to wince while considering Charlie Mansons childhood. He was born to a teenage prostitute in Cincinnati on Nov. 12, 1934, and was raised until he was 11 by an aunt and uncle in West Virginia. His life thereafter was one of rejection and delinquency. His mother farmed him out to homes and schools until he was taken, as a delinquent of 14, to the last and most permanent of them, the Indiana Boys School. He ranas juvenile authorities term escaperepeatedly and stole cars and committed burglaries during his periods of freedom. He was released from prison when he was 20 and went back to West Virginia an accomplished car thief. He married a local girl, Rosalie Jean Willis. Rosalie became pregnant and gave birth to a boy. But Manson had already left for Los Angeles in a stolen car and soon found himself behind bars at Terminal Island.

He posed as producer when he got out again, ingratiated himself with teenage girls and moonlighted as an occasional procurer. McNeil Islands federal penitentiary took Manson in after that because he cashed some stolen U.S. Treasury checks. He had never gone farther than the seventh grade; now he read the Bible and tracts on the quasi-religion Scientology, decided that the Book of Revelation had predicted the Beatles, learned to play the guitar and assumed he could compose music. One of his lyrics consisted solely of the words You know, you know, you know He left prison in March 1967, ready to give new meaning to the old saw: a little learning is a dangerous thing.