Murders Manson And His Family example essay topic

What more could someone say about Charles Manson? Every time someone hears his name, they probably associate his name with evil. How could someone be so cold, heartless, and cowardly? He is the most demented person that people have heard of. The murders he had his followers commit are horrible. Although Manson is murderer who has had no less than people killed by his followers, we can not blame it on him.

He was not the one who exactly committed the crimes himself. He did not put a gun to their heads and tell them to follow him. They chose to do that on their own free will. People can also blame his parents also. He never knew his family because they were always in jail and he did not live with them.

He lived with his foster parents and relatives. Charles Manson was known as one of the most sinister and evil criminals in American history. He was born on November 12, 1963, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Manson's childhood was one of no parents and many trips to jail. He spent part of his childhood in jail because his mother was arrested for armed robbery.

She was sixteen at this time and Manson had just been born (Manson NP). The young Manson lived with relatives and in foster homes, but began getting into various kinds of trouble early on and was sent to a number of reformatories (Manson NP). After he was released in 1955, he got married and moved to California. When he got to California, he was arrested on auto theft charges because the car he and his wife traveled in was stolen. While he was imprisoned in California, his wife left him, taking their son, Charles Manson Jr., with her. "Records show that he married again and had a second son, Charles Luther Manson, before divorcing his second wife in 1963" (Manson NP).

In 1967 at the age of 32 Charles Manson was released from prison for the last time. He said, "Oh, no, I can't go outside... I couldn't adjust to that world". Those words proved to be true. After being released, Manson moved to the San Francisco area.

There he collected his followers or "family" as everyone else would say. Now Manson is the leader of a psychotic family, and was the organizer of one of the most horrific mass murders in American history. Charles Manson is best known for the murder of Sharon Tate. Actually it would be more accurate to say Charles Manson and his "family" murdered Sharon Tate, actress and wife of director Roman Polanski (Bardsley NP). The victims of the Manson family included Sharon Tate and her unborn baby Paul Richard Polanski, as well as her guests that evening, Abigail Folger, and her boyfriend Voy tek Frykowski, and an internationally known hair stylist Jay Sebring (Fillmer NP). The day after those murders Manson and his family killed Leno and Rosemary La Bianca.

Before either of these murders took place part of the family murdered Gary Hinman. A man named Donald Shea was also killed. The Manson Family also eventually killed defense attorney for one of the Manson Family members, Ronald Hughes, during the course of the trial (Fillmer NP). The killing of Sauron Tate was horrible because she was eight months pregnant.

Sharon Tate was an actress born on January 24, 1943 in Dallas Texas. She started out acting in television shows such as Beverly Hillbillies, and in bit parts in movies, like The Americanization of Emily in 1964 and The Sandpiper in 1965 (Tate NP). She landed her first major acting role in 1965 appearing in Eye of the Devil, starring David Niven and Deborah Kerr (Tate NP). During the filming of the movie, she met her soon to be husband, Roman Polanski. The couple began a romantic relationship, and were married in January 1968. All of this came to a halt when she was found dead.

It was August 9, 1969 when it all happened. The 26-year-old was brutally murdered in her home, along with three house guests and a teenage delivery boy, by Charles Manson and the "Manson family". Some bodies were found across estate, but Sharon Tate, was hung and laid dead on the living room floor. Graffiti found written in blood at the murder scene said, "Death to Pigs".

She was eight months pregnant. Her husband was away in Europe working on a film (Bardsley NP). After the last murder, Manson and his followers, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel went through a ten month trial. This trial got all the attention of the public.

Although Manson was not physically present at the murders and his devotees attempted to assume full responsibility, he was seen as the "malevolent power who directed their actions". Below is the direct testimony of Charles Manson. "There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified. I never went to school, so I never g rowed up to read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid, and I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don't understand.

You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad, and even killers, your children are. You made your children what they are. These children that come at you with knives. they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them.

I just tried to help them stand up. Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked out, that did not want to go to Juvenile Hall. So I did the best I could and I took them up on my garbage dump and I told them this: that in love there is no wrong. I told them that anything they do for their brothers and sisters is good if they do it with a good thought... I was working at cleaning up my house, something that Nixon should have been doing. He should have been on the side of the road, picking up his children, but he wasn't.

He was in the White House, sending them off to war. I don't understand you, but I do not try. I don't try to judge nobody. I know that the only person I can judge is me. But I know this: that in your hearts and your own souls, you are as much responsible for the Vietnam war as I am for killing these people. I can't judge any of you.

I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in. I can't dislike you, but I will say this to you: you haven't got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me... but I am only what lives inside each and everyone of you. My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system.

I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. I have ate out of your garbage cans to stay out of jail. I have wore your second-hand clothes... I have done my best to get along in your world and now you want to kill me, and I look at you, and then I say to myself, You want to kill me? Ha!

I'm already dead, have been all my life. I've spent twenty-three years in tombs that you built. Sometimes I think about giving it back to you; sometimes I think about just jumping on you and letting you shoot me. If I could, I would jerk this microphone off and beat your brains out with it, because that is what you deserve, that is what you deserve. If I could get angry at you, I would try to kill everyone of you. If that's guilt, I accept it.

These children, everything they done, they done for the love of their brother. If I showed them that I would do anything for my brother -- including giving my life for my brother on the battlefield -- and then they pick up their banner, and they go off and do what they do, that is not my responsibility. I don't tell people what to do. These children were finding themselves. What they did, if they did whatever they did, is up to them.

They will have to explain that to you. It's all your fear. You look for something to project it on, and you pick out a little old scroungy nobody that eats out of a garbage can, and that nobody wants, that was kicked out of the penitentiary, that has been dragged through every hellhole that you can think of, and you drag him and put him in a courtroom. You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago.

You killed me years ago". When he was asked by the judge if he had anything else to say, Manson told him, "I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed. I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am. Some called him Christ, Manson said. In prison his name was a number. Some now want a sadistic fiend, and so they see him as that.

So be it. Guilty. Not guilty. They are only words. You can do anything you want with me, but you cannot touch me because I am only my love. If you put me in the penitentiary, that means nothing because you kicked me out of the last one.

I didn't ask to get released. I liked it in there because I like myself". ("Testimony of Manson" NP). The testimony goes on to another three pages, but given above is the first two pages of his testimony.