Charles Manson Trivia: 50 unknown facts about the famous criminal!

Charles Manson is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family. Let’ s see some interesting facts and trivia about him!

1.He was born on November 12, 1934.

2. For a period after his birth, his mother was married to a laborer named William Eugene Manson (May 2, 1909 – April 15, 1961), whose last name the boy was given.

3. His biological father appears to have been Colonel Walker Scott (May 11, 1910 – December 30, 1954) against whom Kathleen Maddox filed a paternity suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937.

4. Possibly, Manson never knew his biological father.

5. Several statements in Manson’s 1953 case file from the seven months he would later spend at the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C., allude to the possibility that “Colonel Scott” was black.

6. There is much about Manson’s early life that is in dispute because of the varying stories he has offered to interviewers, many of which were untrue.

7. Manson’s mother was allegedly a heavy drinker.

8. According to Manson, she once sold her son for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later.

9. When Manson’s mother and her brother were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939 by brandishing a ketchup bottle, Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia.

10. Upon her 1942 parole, Manson’s mother retrieved her son and lived with him in a series of run-down hotel rooms. Manson himself later characterized her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole happy childhood memory.

11. In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available.

12. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana.

13. After 10 months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.

14. By burglarizing a liquor store, Manson obtained money that enabled him to rent a room.

15. He committed a string of burglaries of other stores, including one from which he stole a bicycle, but was eventually caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. He escaped after one day, but was recaptured and placed in Boys Town. Four days after his arrival there, he escaped with another boy. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy’s uncle.

16. Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent, at age 13, to the Indiana Boys School, where, he would later claim, he was brutalized sexually and otherwise.

17. After many failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in 1951.

18. In Utah, the three were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. They had robbed several filling stations along the way. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to Washington, D.C.’s National Training School for Boys.

19. Despite four years of schooling and an I.Q. of 109 (later tested at age 21), he was illiterate. A caseworker deemed him aggressively antisocial.

20. In October 1951, on a psychiatrist’s recommendation, Manson was transferred to Natural Bridge Honor Camp, a minimum security institution. Manson was transferred to the Federal Reformatory, Petersburg, Virginia, where he was considered “dangerous.”

21. In September 1952, a number of other serious disciplinary offenses resulted in his transfer to the Federal Reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, a more secure institution.

22. About a month after the transfer, he became almost a model resident. Good work habits and a rise in his educational level from the lower fourth to the upper seventh grade won him a May 1954 parole.

23. After temporarily honoring a parole condition that he live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia, Manson moved in with his mother in that same state. In January 1955, he married a hospital waitress named Rosalie Jean Willis, with whom, by his own account, he found genuine, if short-lived, marital happiness. He supported their marriage through small-time jobs and auto theft.

24. Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle across state lines. After a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years’ probation. His subsequent failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked; he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment at Terminal Island, San Pedro, California.

25. While Manson was in prison, Rosalie gave birth to their son Charles Manson, Jr. During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from Rosalie and his mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles. In March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson tried to escape by stealing a car. He was subsequently given five years probation, and his parole was denied.

26. Manson received five years’ parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a 16-year-old girl and was receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. In September 1959, he pleaded guilty to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check.

27. The woman’s name was Leona; as a prostitute, she had used the name Candy Stevens. After Manson took her and another woman from California to New Mexico for purposes of prostitution, he was held and questioned for violation of the Mann Act. Though he was released, he evidently suspected, rightly, that the investigation had not ended. When he disappeared, in violation of his probation, a bench warrant was issued; an April 1960 indictment for violation of the Mann Act followed.[2]:137–146 Arrested in Laredo, Texas, in June, when one of the women was arrested for prostitution, Manson was returned to Los Angeles. For violation of his probation on the check-cashing charge, he was ordered to serve his 10-year sentence.

28. In June 1966, Manson was sent, for the second time in his life, to Terminal Island, in preparation for early release. By March 21, 1967, his release day, he had spent more than half of his 32 years in prisons and other institutions.

29. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested permission to stay, a fact touched on in a 1981 television interview with Tom Snyder.

30. In the 1980s, Manson gave four notable interviews. The first, recorded at California Medical Facility and aired June 13, 1981, was by Tom Snyder for NBC’s The Tomorrow Show. The second, recorded at San Quentin Prison and aired March 7, 1986, was by Charlie Rose for CBS News Nightwatch; it won the national news Emmy Award for “Best Interview” in 1987. The third, with Geraldo Rivera in 1988, was part of that journalist’s prime-time special on Satanism. At least as early as the Snyder interview, Manson’s forehead bore a swastika, in the spot where the X carved during his trial had been.

31. In 1989, Nikolas Schreck conducted an interview of Manson, cutting the interview up for material in his documentary Charles Manson Superstar. Schreck concluded that Manson was not insane, but merely acting that way out of frustration.

32. On September 25, 1984, while imprisoned at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, Manson was severely burned by a fellow inmate who poured paint thinner on him and set him alight. The other prisoner, Jan Holmstrom, explained that Manson had objected to his Hare Krishna chants and had verbally threatened him. Despite suffering second- and third-degree burns on over 20 percent of his body, Manson recovered from his injuries.

33. In June 1997, Manson was found to have been trafficking in drugs by a prison disciplinary committee.

34. In a 1998–99 interview in Seconds magazine, Bobby Beausoleil rejected the view that Manson ordered him to kill Gary Hinman. He stated Manson did come to Hinman’s house and slash Hinman with a sword. In a 1981 interview with Oui magazine, he denied this.

35. On November 17, 2014, it was announced that Manson was engaged to 26-year-old Afton Elaine “Star” Burton while still in prison, and had obtained a marriage license on November 7.

36. Burton had been visiting Manson in prison for at least nine years, and maintained several websites that claimed his innocence.[40] The wedding license expired on February 5, 2015, without a marriage ceremony taking place.

37. It was later reported that, according to journalist Daniel Simone, the wedding was cancelled after it was discovered that Burton only wanted to marry Manson so she and a friend Craig “Gray Wolf” Hammond could use his corpse as a tourist attraction after he dies.

38. According to Simone, Manson believes he will never die, and may just be using the possibility of marriage as a way to encourage Burton and Hammond to continue visiting him and bringing him gifts.

39. On January 4, 2017, it was reported that Manson left prison and was hospitalized for a serious illness [

40. Several of Manson’s songs, including “I’m Scratching Peace Symbols on Your Tombstone” (a.k.a. “First They Made Me Sleep in the Closet”), “Garbage Dump”, and “I Can’t Remember When”, are featured in the soundtrack of the 1976 TV-movie Helter Skelter, where they are performed by Steve Railsback, who portrays Manson.

41. According to a popular urban legend, Manson unsuccessfully auditioned for the Monkees in late 1965; this is refuted by the fact that Manson was still incarcerated at McNeil Island at that time

42. Beginning in January 1970, Manson was embraced by the underground newspapers Los Angeles Free Press and Tuesday’s Child, with the latter proclaiming him “Man of the Year”.

43. In June 1970, he was the subject of a Rolling Stone cover story, “Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive”.

44. Manson has been a presence in fashion, graphics,music, and movies, as well as on television and the stage. In an afterword composed for the 1994 edition of the non-fiction book Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi quoted a BBC employee’s assertion that a “neo-Manson cult” existing then in Europe was represented by, among other things, approximately 70 rock bands playing songs by Manson and “songs in support of him”.

45. Manson has even influenced the names of musical performers such as Kasabian, Spahn Ranch, and Marilyn Manson, the last a stage name assembled from “Charles Manson” and “Marilyn Monroe”.

46. The story of the Family’s activities inspired John Moran’s opera The Manson Family and Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins, the latter of which has Lynette Fromme as a character.

47. The tale has been the subject of several movies such as the 1984 film Manson Family Movies,including two television dramatizations of Helter Skelter. In the South Park episode “Merry Christmas, Charlie Manson”, Manson is a comical character whose inmate number is 06660, an apparent reference to 666, the Biblical “number of the beast”.

48. The 2002 novel The Dead Circus by John Kaye includes the activities of the Manson Family as a major plot point.

49. In 2015, NBC premiered the crime drama Aquarius, with Gethin Anthony playing Manson.

50. The series was set in 1967 and included storylines inspired by actual events involving Manson.