Charles Manson’s feared ‘mystique’ was just a bloody, evil con job

When brutal Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975 with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands, Rich Aregood, Philadelphia Daily News pundit famed for pithy commentary, offered this three-sentence editorial epitaph:

“They say only the good die young. Generalissimo Franco was 82. Seems about right.”

Charles Manson was born in the Great Depression to a teenage mother in Cincinnati, reportedly a heavy drinker and possibly a prostitute. He was a car thief by 9, a reform school inmate at 12. By the time he was loosed on the naively idealistic Sixties youth culture at 32, he had spent half his life in correctional institutions.

The myth of Manson’s hypnotic, messianic power to draw people into his orbit and turn them into murderous automatons was almost certainly fed by the polyglot mysticism of the era — but it’s a myth nonetheless.

Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson and several members of his “Family” for the senseless and unspeakably savage murders that made him infamous, probably explained it best in “Helter Skelter,” the nonfiction account he and co-author Curt Gentry published about the crimes and aftermath. During Manson’s time as a guitar-playing “hippie” guru of Haight-Ashbury, hundreds, maybe thousands of people drifted into and out of contact with him. Most probably ignored him, Bugliosi hypothesized, or soon moved on, dismissing his bizarre “philosophy” as either nuts or just confused counterculture babble, maybe drug fueled, maybe just delusional.

But Manson had a prison-honed con man’s gift for pushing the buttons of the dysfunctional, disillusioned and dispossessed. His assemblage of cultists wasn’t mystery or mysticism, but calculated selectivity. His con was a youth-targeted mix of pseudo-evangelical psychobabble flavored with sex, drugs, Scientology, the Bible, distorted Beatles lyrics, Nazism (Manson told one follower, Bugliosi wrote, that Hitler was “a tuned-in guy who leveled the karma of the Jews”) and whatever else might manipulate his blood-lusty misfits’ malleable minds — all overshadowed with fear, and reinforced by their “Christlike” leader, or at his orders, with violence.

Whether Manson actually believed the paranoid scenario of a coming apocalyptic race war that seven innocent people were butchered to incite, or merely drummed that motive into his conscience-dead followers’ minds — a soulless sociopath who sent people to kill on his orders just because he could — we’ll probably never know.

Beyond the overt horror of the murders themselves — the seven “Helter Skelter” killings, other “Family”-related deaths that were uncovered in the investigation, and some that might never be known — there is the human wreckage this humanoid mutant left in his wake. Almost a half-century later, people who fell into his orbit but didn’t let themselves be turned into monsters are living with scars that will never heal.

There’s also the perverse reality that Manson, like other evil figures, achieved infamy and notoriety, when what he most deserved (once he escaped a date with the gas chamber) was anonymity and irrelevance.

Charles Manson died Sunday at 83. Seems about right.

This story was originally published November 20, 2017 at 5:38 PM with the headline "Charles Manson’s feared ‘mystique’ was just a bloody, evil con job."