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Flattery, fear and sex lured his girls into The following article is based on reporting done in California by LIFE Correspondents John Frook, John Fried, Judy Favard, Colin Leinster and Jack Fincher, and Dale Witiner in Chicago. LIFE stringers Robin Lloyd in Texas, Matt Heron in Alabuma and China Boston also supplied material. by PAUL O’NEIL jong-haired, bearded litthe Charlie Man- son so disturbed the American millions last when he was charged with sending four Altman in week docile girls and a hairy male acolyte off to slaughter strangers in two Los Angeles houses Jast August—that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes scemed suddenly to have played only secondary roles in the final brutal mo- ments of their own lives. The Los Angeles kill- ings struck innumerable Americans as an in- explicable controversion of everything the wanted to believe about the soziety and their children—and made Charlie Manson seem to be the very encupsulation of truth about re- volt and violence by the young. What failure of the human condition could produce a Charlie Manson? What possible as- pects of such a creature's example could in- duce sweet-faced young women and a polite Texas college boy to acts of such numbing cru- elty—-even though they might have abandoned the social and political precepts of their elders like so many other beaded and bell-bottomed mother’s children of 1969? Some of the an- swers seemed simple enough if one weighed Charlie Manson on the ancient scales of hu- man venality. He attracted and controlled his women through flattery, fear and sexual at- tention and by loftily granting them a sort of sisterhood of exploitation—methods used by every pimp in history. He sensed something old as tribal blood ritual which most of us deny in ourselves—that humans can feel enormous fulfillment and enormous relief in the act of killing other humans if some medicine man applauds and condones the deed, But Charlie was able to attune his time-encrusted con- cepts of villainy to the childish yearnings of his hippie converts—to their weaknesses, their catchwords, their fragmentary sense of religion and their enchantment with drugs and idleness—and to immerse them in his own ego and in idiotic visions of apocalypse. It is hard not to wince while considering Charlie Manson's childhood. He was born to a teen-age prostitute in Cincinnati on Nov, 12, 1934 and was raised until he was [1 by an aunt and uncle in Charleston, W. Va. His life there- after was one of rejection and delinquency. His mother farmed him out to homes and schools until he was taken, as a delinquent of 14, to the last and most permanent of them, the In- diana Boys’ School. He “ran” —as juvenile au- thorities term escape—repeatedly and stole cars and committed burglaries during his pe- riods of freedom. He was released from pris- on when he was 20 and went back to West Virginia an accomplished car thief, He mar- ricd a local girl, Rosalie Jean Willis. Rosalie became pregnant and gave birth to a boy. But Manson had already left for Los Angeles in a stolen car and soon found himself behind bars at Terminal Island. He posed as “producer™ when he got out again, ingratiated himself with teen-age girls and moonlighied as an occasion- al procurer. McNeil Island’s federal peniten- tiary took Charlie in after that because he cashed some stolen U.S. Treasury checks. He CONTINUED In 1968 Manson photographed three of the girls in his ‘command vehicle,” an armor-plated dune buggy with fur rugs that camouflaged a gun mount 8 1 era a -_