Cult ‘leader’ just another creep

For Charles Manson, who enjoyed his infamy like a drug, death came quietly last Sunday and his fame had diminished like his frail, small body. That must have been the hardest thing for Manson, who led a murderous cult in the late 1960s that killed actress Sharon Tate and six others over two nights in Los Angeles in 1969. He and his followers escaped the death penalty when it was struck down in 1972 by the California Supreme Court.

During his trial, Manson’s menacing eyes were described by some observers as “hypnotic,” and he seemed to delight in offering a frightening stare to the cameras. But once he was behind bars, Manson simply became another inmate, albeit one with a measure of notoriety and an appetite for it that others did not possess. His eyes weren’t really hypnotic; they were the dead eyes of a killer and a lunatic. He and his “followers,” typically middle-class kids on the street, kept up some antics behind bars, but the cruelest thing for “Charlie” must have been his fading fame. By the time of his death, it’s safe to say many people had never heard of him, and those who knew him were familiar through books or movies and regarded him with a dismissive disgust.

Manson spent most of his life behind bars, after a hellish childhood that forecast the lifelong criminal he would become. But one who engages in the horrific violence Manson designed and in which he participated deserves not any sympathy, at an end that was appropriately cold and lonely.

This story was originally published November 20, 2017 at 11:23 AM with the headline "Cult ‘leader’ just another creep."