Now 80 years old, Charles Manson’s hippie exterior has weathered. Once 5-foot-2, the gray-haired mass murder is undoubtedly shorter today. He walks with a cane and smiles with a set of dingy dentures. The X — later turned into a swastika — that he carved into his forehead now fills the creases between his eyebrows.
But such things don’t seem to matter to his dark-haired, doe-eyed 26-year-old girlfriend, who moved to California as a teenager to be near the mastermind behind the 1969 Helter Skelter killings.
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that Manson and Afton Elaine Burton applied for a marriage license Nov. 7. Although a date hasn’t been set, Burton said she and Manson will be married next month in Corcoran State Prison, a male-only facility sandwiched between Bakersfield and Fresno atop a lake now sucked dry by the California heat. Burton said the two will likely be wed in an inmate visiting room inside the prison with no more than 10 guests permitted from the outside.
“Y’all can know that it’s true,” she told the AP. “It’s going to happen.”
“I love him,” she added. “I’m with him. There’s all kinds of things.”
Manson has always been unlucky in love. Between prison sentences, he married a hospital waitress named Rosalie Jean Willis in 1955 and the two had a son, Charles Manson Jr., who committed suicide in the 1990s. A year after she divorced him, he married a prostitute named Leona Rae “Candy” Stevens in 1959 and had a second son. She divorced him as well.
Last year, when Burton told Rolling Stone magazine about their upcoming nuptials, Manson denied it, saying: “That’s a bunch of garbage. You know that, man. That’s trash. We’re just playing that for public consumption.” When asked Monday about his comments, Burton said, “None of that’s true.”
California Department of Corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton confirmed the license had been sent to the prison.
But a marriage between these two would be unconventional at best. Manson, who is serving a life sentence, is not allowed family visits — or conjugal visits — so it’s unclear when, or even if, the marriage could be consummated. Still, Burton said the union will give her access, as his wife, to his most personal information — a way to help her to continue to work on his case.
“There’s certain things next of kind can do,” she told the AP.
Born to a teenage mother with a taste for alcohol, Manson spent his childhood bouncing between juvenile halls and reform schools.
“I’m not a person, have never been a person,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “I am an animal been raised a lifetime in cages.”
Vincent Bugliosi’s New York Times best-seller “Helter Skelter” chronicles Manson’s descent from the career criminal-turned-flower child to the madman who led a small cult called Manson’s “family” to kill seven people. On parole for forgery in the 1960s, Manson hit the hippie scene. He was a wanna-be rock star and ladies’ man. He befriended the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson and he had groupies — which included Mary Brunner, Lynette Fromme (that’s “Squeaky” Fromme who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford,) Sandra Good and Susan Atkins, the last of whom was convicted in Manson’s murder plot.
On Aug. 9, 1969, Manson sent followers from his quasi-commune in California to a mansion in Benedict Canyon, outside Los Angeles, where director Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, lived. He ordered his clan to kill everyone in it “as gruesome as you can” and stage the scene to pin blame on the Black Panthers. They murdered Sharon Tate and four others. The next day, they murdered a married couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
In 1971, the killers were convicted and sentenced to death. Manson was charged with conspiracy to commit the murders and sentenced to death. His term was changed to life in prison during the brief stint in the 1970s when California abolished capital punishment. His next parole hearing is set for 2027. He will be 92.
For the seven years, Burton has been leading a campaign to free him.
She first learned about Manson as a teenager when she read a quote from him: “Air is God, because without air, we do not exist.” She fell for his pro-Earth views known as ATWA (air, trees, water and animals) and started writing letters to him. She saved up a couple grand and, at 19, moved from her home in Illinois to California to be close to him. She seemingly became infatuated with the convicted killer and, possibly, he with her. He gave her the nickname Star. “Star!” he told Rolling Stone. “She’s not a woman. She’s a star in the Milky Way!”
Burton has been fighting for Manson ever since. She runs various low-budget Web sites supporting his cause: Release Charles Manson Now, MansonDirect.com and ATWA, among others.
“I’m crazy,” she told Rolling Stone. “But they don’t know. This is what’s right for me. This is what I was born for.”
If Burton and Manson say “I do,” she will stand across from him, an X on her forehead matching his. It was a mark copied by his co-defendants and followers during the trial in the 1970s.
But who knows what would come of the union. As Manson has said, “Everything is constantly changing, man.”
“I’ve always been pretty truthful with myself, as much as I can be under the circumstances,” Manson told the Rolling Stone. “But I’ll never tell on nobody, not even me, man, so that’s why I ain’t never told nobody what really happened back then. I can’t tell you right now. It wouldn’t work if I did tell you, because it would change by morning. … The mind is a universal thing. Charles Manson and Beethoven.”
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1He8jhj
0 comments:
Post a Comment