“I FELT I COULD CONQUER THE WORLD.”
Charlie Manson had been falling through—and taking advantage of—cracks in the system his entire life. His grandmother, Nancy Maddox, was a devout Nazarene who raised four children as a young widow in Ashland, Kentucky. Despite Nancy’s efforts to raise her kids right, her fifteen-year-old daughter Kathleen rebelled, falling in love with twenty-four-year-old Colonel Walker Scott. Colonel, which was a family name, was by various descriptions a laborer working on a local dam project, a man working cons with his older brother, Darwin, or possibly both.
Although he came from a good Baptist family in the nearby town of Catlettsburg, Colonel got Kathleen pregnant, then “didn’t stick around long enough to watch the belly rise,” as Charlie put it in his autobiography.
Nancy sent her pregnant daughter to give birth in Cincinnati, about two hours from Ashland, where Kathleen went looking for a man to give her unborn baby a name. She set her sights on William Manson, who worked at a dry cleaner’s there, and they were married on August 21, 1934, just across the Ohio River in Campbell County, Kentucky.
Even though the date on their marriage license predates Charlie’s birthday on November 12, 1934, by four months, he spent his life claiming the more colorful story that he was born an illegitimate bastard child, saying, “I was an outlaw from birth.”
The marriage didn’t last long, but even as William Manson was filing for divorce Kathleen was already making other financial arrangements.
Eleven days before William’s divorce petition was granted in April 1937, citing Kathleen’s “gross neglect of duty,” she won a judgment—for a lump sum of twenty-five dollars, plus five dollars a month—in a bastardy lawsuit against Charlie’s biological father. But Kathleen had to return to court to try to garnish Colonel’s wages for back support payments.
As an adult, Charlie often told tales about Kathleen’s failures as a parent, one of which has become quite well-known: Charlie was sitting in her lap in a café one afternoon when the waitress joked that she had no children of her own and would buy Kathleen’s son from her for a good price.
“A pitcher of beer and he’s yours,” Kathleen replied.
The waitress brought Kathleen a batch of suds, which she downed before walking out, leaving her toddler behind. Charlie’s uncle had to search for the waitress for several days before he could locate her and bring the boy home.
Criminal behavior was also a family trait. Charlie’s paternal uncle Darwin Scott went to federal prison twice, but incarceration struck Charlie even closer to home. When Charlie was four, Kathleen and her roommate picked up a stranger, Frank Martin, in a beer parlor in North Charleston, West Virginia. As he paid for their drinks, they saw a stack of bills in his wallet and called Kathleen’s brother, Luther, with a scheme.
The young women took Frank dancing at several bars, where they casually met up with Luther, as if he were a stranger. Proposing to continue the festivities, Luther and Kathleen asked Frank to drive them home to get some belongings. But before they left the last tavern, Luther surreptitiously pocketed a large ketchup bottle filled with salt.
As Frank was driving through an isolated area in his Packard convertible, Luther had him pull over, then smacked him in the head with the bottle. Luther grabbed Frank’s wallet and the twenty-seven dollars inside it, leaving the poor man in a ditch, and driving away in his car.
After tracking down the stolen convertible, police arrested the threesome several days later. Kathleen confessed, but Luther refused to snitch on his partners. Nonetheless, he and Kathleen were convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to five years at Moundsville State Prison.
Charlie’s first acquaintance with correctional institutions came when he visited his mother at Moundsville. Kathleen told him that while she was assigned to clean the area near death row, she unexpectedly witnessed a hanging as she hid in a broom closet. That story stuck with him, taking on a particular resonance when he was sent to death row himself at San Quentin State Prison in 1971.
While Kathleen was in prison, Charlie stayed with his grandmother in Ashland. But after only a few weeks, she sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, closer to his mother in Moundsville.
When Charlie came home crying after his first day of school, his uncle Bill made him put on his cousin’s dress the next morning, and sent him on his way. “The other kids teased me so much I went into a rage and started fighting everyone,” Manson wrote in his autobiography. “I took my lumps and shed a little blood, but in that school I became the fightin’est little bastard they ever saw.”
His uncle didn’t make him wear a dress again.
After Kathleen was paroled in 1942, she and eight-year-old Charlie moved from state to state. As she continued to run into trouble with the law, Charlie landed in a few foster homes.
Kathleen didn’t earn much as a cocktail waitress, but she managed to get him a guitar and singing lessons. She stopped the lessons, she said later, when she felt he was becoming “overconfident” and “conceited” about his abilities as he sang solos with the church choir.
While his mother dated a series of men, Charlie let it be known by skipping school and running away that he didn’t like these “uncles” hanging around. In 1947, when Charlie was thirteen, she went before a judge to claim that she couldn’t afford to provide her son with a good home. The judge made the teenager a ward of the court and shipped him off to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic school in Terre Haute, Indiana.
For the next ten months, Charlie was miserable. Not only did he miss his mother, but he also claimed he was whipped with leather straps and paddles for repeatedly wetting the bed. Impatient to see Kathleen, who rarely visited him, he ran away to go see her, thinking she’d be thrilled. Instead, she shipped him straight back.
Until the day he was released at nineteen, Charlie repeatedly ran away from every single facility in which he was placed.
“You’ve got a juvenile, you lock him up in juvenile hall,” he said, looking back years later. “He don’t know anything. He’s got no parents and he’s got nobody telling him the truth, everybody is lying to him. So the only thing he can do is run away, so that’s all I did . . . And every time I ran away, they just got me and put me in a harder place to get away.”
One time he took off from Gibault, he made it all the way to Indianapolis, 160 miles away, where he survived by stealing food, cash, and a bicycle, which landed him back in court. At a hearing attended by his mother and a priest, Charlie convinced the judge to send him to the famous Father Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska.
The hearing made it into the newspaper, which described him as a “dead end kid” who was getting another chance to make good.
“I think I could be happy working around cows and horses,” Charlie innocently told the judge, as he smiled and shook the man’s hand. “I like animals.”
But after only four days at Boys Town, Charlie escaped with another boy, stealing and crashing a car. They were ultimately captured in Indianapolis, where they did robberies for the other boy’s uncle.
Back in court, the next judge had no choice but to send Charlie to a more secure facility, the Indiana School for Boys in Plainfield, Indiana, where his escape attempts only increased in number.
Small for his age, Charlie was not even five feet tall and weighed less than sixty-five pounds, which made him a prime target of older bullies. He claimed that he was repeatedly abused and beaten by guards, and was also gagged and brutally raped by teams of boys at the encouragement of one particularly sadomasochistic guard, who compounded Charlie’s anal injuries by manually assaulting him with a handful of chewing tobacco juice mixed with wet, fermented grass feed from the dairy.
But Charlie was a fighter. He got his revenge on two of his young rapists by clubbing one of them in the head while he slept, and framing the other one for the crime by leaving the weapon—a foot-long metal window crank-opener—in his bed. After word got around, no one tried to rape Charlie again.
At sixteen, Charlie got more ambitious. This time, he and two older boys, one of whom had already killed a man during a hold-up, drove a stolen 1950 Studebaker across four state lines, violating the federal Dyer Act before being captured in Utah, heading for California.
Sent to the even higher security National Training School for Boys in Washington DC, Charlie asked to be transferred to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp. After undergoing psychotherapy for three months, he got his wish in October 1951 and came up for early release.
But as his parole hearing approached, he held a razor to a boy’s throat, sodomized him, and lost his chance for parole. He later claimed that the “victim” was a gay and willing partner who agreed to have sex with Charlie as long as he could pretend that Charlie had forced him if anyone found out.
“We got caught,” Charlie wrote in his autobiography. “I was not only listed as a homosexual, but one with assaultive tendencies.”
After this incident, Charlie felt he had nothing to lose, so he had relations with another boy, and this time admitted it was rape.
His attitude changed, however, after he was transferred to two federal reformatories in Petersburg, Virginia, and Chillicothe, Ohio, where his behavior and study habits improved. Although he still had trouble reading, he raised his education from a third-grade to a seventh-grade level.
Charlie was nineteen when he was finally released from the juvenile institutions on May 8, 1954, returning to live with his aunt and uncle in McMechen, where he obediently attended Nazarene church services with his grandmother.
Pursuing unpopular odd jobs that wouldn’t require revealing his criminal past, he pulled weeds and pumped gas, and also shoveled manure and fed horses at the then-Wheeling Downs racetrack. After being locked away for many years, he still felt like the same small child he was when he’d left.
In a marked contrast to the counterculture leader he would grow into, the young Charles Manson gave the quiet, conventional life a try, marrying the first girl with whom he ever had sex.
He met Rosalie “Rosie” Jean Willis, an Irish cafeteria waitress with nice skin, in a card room as he was trying to turn his paltry wages into a small fortune.
As they fell in love, he later wrote, “A huge void was being filled. For the first time in my life, I felt I could conquer the world.”
Charlie was twenty when he married fifteen-year-old Rosalie in Marshall County, West Virginia, on January 17, 1955. For many years afterward, Charlie would say that Rosie was the only woman he ever truly loved, and the only person he ever really cared about.
But the honeymoon didn’t last long. The young couple didn’t have much money, and neither of them had a proper education, so Charlie fell back on the only income-bearing avocation he’d ever learned: taking stolen cars across state lines, again violating the federal Dyer Act.
In July, he and Rosalie headed to Los Angeles in a Mercury sedan he’d stolen in Bridgeport, Ohio. His wife, a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia, had always wanted to see California.
When Charlie was arrested two months later, he admitted that he’d actually stolen four or five other cars as well, pleading guilty in a hearing before US District Court judge Harry Westover that October.
In the first of many times in the coming decades, Charlie’s mental competency was questioned in court as his probation officer and federal prosecutor said he “may be presently insane or otherwise so mentally incompetent as to be unable to understand the proceedings against him or properly to assist in his own defense . . . [and] unable to distinguish between right and wrong.”
After being examined by a psychiatrist, Dr. Edwin McNiel, Charlie was described as “quiet, pleasant and cooperative.” He exaggerated his mother’s criminal record, saying she’d been in prison several times. Claiming that he’d been locked up for being mean to her, he admitted to engaging in homosexual relations since he was fourteen, and even to physically abusing his now pregnant wife.
“She has been the best wife a guy could want,” Charlie said. “I didn’t realize how good she was until I got in here. I beat her at times. She writes to me all the time. She is going to have a baby.”
McNiel concluded that Charlie was sane, but had “an unstable personality” and an “unfortunate background” of unhealthy environmental influences. But noting that Charlie felt he had “developed a new understanding of his own problems and why he always wanted to run away,” and had “asked for a chance to try to get along in the community,” McNiel made a hopeful recommendation to the judge to consider probation with “careful supervision.”
Judge Westover responded by giving Charlie a five-year suspended sentence with five years’ probation, and released him on November 7, 1955.
But the die was cast. Launching another lifelong behavioral pattern, Charlie gave in to an apparent compulsion to break the law, and most likely an unconscious desire to return to the familiar safety of a locked facility, which he expressed repeatedly in subsequent years. So he hit the road and headed out of state without getting permission, violating his parole and missing several court hearings.
Arrested in Chicago on a slew of warrants in March, he was sent back to Los Angeles. Judge Westover still gave him a break, however, modifying his five-year suspended sentence to only a three-year prison term.