Charles Manson
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934, as Charles Milles Maddox) was leader of what came to be known as the Manson Family, a cult-like hippie commune that began to form around him in San Francisco in 1967. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit the 1969 Los Angeles Tate-LaBianca murders, which members of the commune carried out at his instruction. Though there was no evidence Manson personally killed any of the victims, he was also found guilty of the murders themselves, through the joint-responsibility rule of conspiracy.
Manson is forever associated with Helter Skelter, an imagined racial cataclysm that he told his followers was impending and that the crimes were intended to precipitate. This conception's connection with rock music linked him, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he has become a symbol of transgression, rebelliousness, wickedness, ghoulishness, bloody violence, homicidal psychosis, and the macabre.
At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of minor and major offenses. In the subsequent period before the murders, he situated himself on the periphery of the Los Angeles music industry, through a chance association with Dennis Wilson. After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written by Manson and performed by him or members of the Family were released commercially; many artists have covered his songs in the decades since.
Manson's original death sentence was automatically commuted to life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California eliminated the death penalty in that state.
