It’s almost impossible to believe that the innocent boy in this photo grew up to become one of history’s biggest monsters.
The boy, pictured here as a fresh-faced 15-year-old, is now known as one of the most sadistic criminals the world has ever seen.
From the very beginning, however, he was surrounded by crime.
Born to a 16-year-old mother on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the boy soon found himself in the care of his aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia, at the age of four after his mother was arrested for assault and robbery and sentenced to five years in prison.
The boy no one wanted
The boy’s mother, Kathleen, committed the robbery with her older brother, Luther, who smashed a bottle over a man’s head at a gas station before the pair stole his car.
While Luther received 10 years in prison, Kathleen received a lighter sentence of half that time. She was imprisoned in the West Virginia state prison in Moundsville, with the boy regularly having to visit her, despite frequently objecting to doing so.
When Kathleen was paroled after three years, the pair moved out of town to Charleston, although by this point, the boy had started skipping classes in school.
Kathleen, now an alcoholic, would go missing for days at a time, leaving the boy with a variety of babysitters was unable to deal with the boy’s issues herself, and instead decided to send him to reform school.
However, reform school didn’t seem to suit the boy, who bounced from one to another, constantly finding himself in trouble. He would later go on to claim in an interview that, at the age of nine, he set one of his schools on fire.
A life of crime begins
At the age of 13, the boy was placed into the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The school, for male delinquents, was run by catholic priests and focused on strict punishments, including beatings with wooden paddles and leather straps for even the most minor misdeeds.
It wasn’t long before the boy fled Gibault.
The first time, he fled back to his mother, only for her to immediately send him straight back. The second time he fled, this time to Indianapolis, he began committing burglaries to support himself, eventually being caught and sent to another juvenile delinquent school in Omaha, Nebraska.
Only four days into his time in Omaha, the boy and a classmate acquired a gun and stole a car, committing two armed robberies on their way to the classmate’s uncle’s house in Peoria, Illinois. The uncle would turn out to be a professional thief, taking the two boys on as apprentices.
Two weeks later, however, the boy was arrested and was linked to two further armed robberies during the following investigation.
A spell at another reform school, the Indiana Boys School, saw the boy endure the most traumatic period of his life up until that point, reportedly being r**ed numerous times by other students as a staff member watched and encouraged the s**ual assault.
The boy would run away from school on 18 occasions. He was eventually arrested in Utah, en route to California, for driving a stolen car across state lines.
A psychiatrist would evaluate the boy as being ‘aggressively anti-social.’
The man who could pull people in
In 1952, the boy was arrested after being discovered r**ing another boy at knifepoint.
While serving time at the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia, he was caught committing ‘eight serious disciplinary offenses, including three homos**ual acts’ towards other inmates.
It would not be long before a transfer to a maximum security reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, would take place.
The plan was for the boy, now a man, to remain there until his 21st birthday in November 1955. He would, in fact, be released early, in May 1954, remarkably, following good behavior. He was to go and live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia.
Less than a year later, however, the man was now married to a hospital waitress and
bound for Los Angeles with his pregnant wife in a stolen car. After being caught with the stolen car, the man had his parole revoked and was sentenced to spend three years at Terminal Island, in LA.
The man’s son was born while he was in prison, and his wife and son would visit him regularly while he was incarcerated. The visits would cease, with the man discovering his wife, Rosalie, had begun living with another man, receiving a decree of divorce in September 1958.
It was around this time that the man began displaying signs of being able to pull people under his influence. An ability that would soon become his calling card as he set out on one of the most disturbing and sickening crime sprees in American history.
Two months after his divorce, he was p**ping out a 16-year-old girl, before marrying a p***titute, who he then moved to New Mexico with, along with another woman, who he also intended to p**p out.
However, his plan to set up a p***titution ring was short lived, as the man was once again arrested, this time for violating The Mann Act – a felony related to interstate transportation of women and girls for the purposes of prostitution – and he was promptly returned to LA to serve a 10-year prison sentence that had previously been suspended, for trying to cash a forged US treasury check.
It was during his time at McNeil Island penitentiary in Washington that the boy in the photo really began to become more and more monstrous.
He engaged in hypnosis with his fellow inmates, including the actor Danny Trejo, who has since talked at length about the hypnosis sessions in interviews. His ability to hypnotize would soon make even more sense once he was released from prison, set to embark on his grisly, unspeakable master plan of murder.
The chilling prophecy that changed everything
The man’s mental state had unraveled by this point, as he began to amass a band of followers, prophesying that The Beatles were speaking directly to him through their songs.
One in particular, ‘Helter Skelter,’ would form the basis of his monstrous masterplan of the same name.
The man told his followers they would reside in a secret underground desert city after an apocalyptic race war, in which the Black population would eviscerate the white population.
A white supremacist, the man claimed that the Black population would not be intelligent enough to survive on their own. This, he claimed, would allow the family to rise from the underground and rule over the Black population on earth.
The fame that never came
Prior to ‘Helter Skelter,’ the man had sought fame and fortune of a very different, less murderous kind.
He had obsessed over becoming a rock and roll star, attempting to make a name for himself on the West Coast of America and its burgeoning music scene. He would even befriend Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson.
No fame or fortune materialized, though. Feeling dejected and rejected, resentment set in, and vengeance was soon to be meted out.
Ideas turn deadly
That boy in the photo was now a man leading what he called his ‘family.’ He had taken in panhandlers, teenage runaways, and other social outcasts and impressionable young people who he believed would be easy to manipulate.
In August 1969, the man and his family put the first part of his maniacal plan into play, when they carried out the butchering of famous actress Sharon Tate, then the wife of director Roman Polanski.
Having established himself as a guru in the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco throughout the Summer of Love in 1969, the man proved he was in fact void of love and was in fact pure evil, ordering his family to savagely murder the pregnant Tate.
One of the man’s followers, Tex Watson, claimed the man told him and fellow family member Linda Kasabian to ‘totally destroy everyone’ in Tate’s house and to make the murders ‘as gruesome as you can.’
Seven people, including Tate’s unborn baby, were murdered that night, shot and stabbed multiple times, with Tate’s blood used to scrawl the word ‘PIGGY’ on the wall.
A name that became synonymous with evil
The boy in the photo had become the devil incarnate, ordering some of the most gut-churning murders in American history. His name is now synonymous with evil, known the world over: Charles Manson.
Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor at Manson’s trial, would perfectly sum up Manson’s legacy by stating: ‘The very name Manson has become a metaphor for evil – and evil has its allure.’
A haunting legacy that will last forever
The Tate murders, and the LaBianca murders the following night, which claimed the lives of two further victims – supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary – have remained a sickening part of pop culture for almost 60 years.
Manson was imprisoned for life in April 1971, originally being given the death sentence, although his sentence was then changed to life after California’s death sentences were ruled unconstitutional in 1972.
As well as his convictions for his role in the Tate and Bianca massacres, he was convicted of first-degree murder for the death of musician Gary Hinman in July of 1969, as well as the first-degree murder of Donald Shea in August of the same year.
Applying for parole on 12 occasions, Manson remained in prison for the rest of his life, eventually dying in 2017 at the age of 83 following a cardiac arrest brought on by colon cancer, per CDCR.
Often seen as a Messianic figure by his followers, Manson proved to have a stranglehold on pop culture for decades after the massacres.
Marilyn Manson took his stage name from Manson, while even the getaway driver Linda Kasabian’s name was taken by the British rock band Kasabian.
Manson has fascinated people for over 50 years, with countless books and documentaries being produced about him.
He has been interviewed countless times by major international news channels, drawing constant attention for everything he said, as well as other controversial and appalling statements like the swastika he had tattooed onto his forehead.
While he may have finally attained the fame he always aspired towards, Manson would never be known as a rock star or celebrity as he wished. He became the personification of pure evil. A world away from the 15-year-old boy in the photo.
