The Manson family vs. the West family

Thurston Moore on Snub TV - "Punk rock is Sharon Tate's dead baby" or somesuch nonsense.

HOUSTON - The Charles Manson follower convicted of attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford is set to be released from a federal prison in Texas later this month after serving more than 30 years behind bars.

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme was a 26-year-old disciple of the cult murderer Manson when she aimed a semiautomatic .45- caliber pistol at Ford in September 1975 in Sacramento, Calif. Secret Service agents grabbed her and Ford was unhurt.

Fromme, now 60, is scheduled to be released on parole from the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth on Aug. 16, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the court-appointed attorney who represented her at trial.

Fromme, who got a life term, became the first person sentenced under a special federal law covering assaults on U.S. presidents, a statute enacted after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Ford was walking to the California State Capitol from his hotel when Fromme pushed through the crowd, drew the pistol from a holster on her thigh and pointed it at the president as he shook hands with well-wishers. She was restrained by Secret Service agents who wrested the gun away from her and led the president to safety.

Less than two weeks later, another would-be assassin, Sara Jane Moore, fired at Ford in San Francisco but missed.

It was unclear why Fromme was at Carswell, a facility that specializes in providing medical and mental health services to female offenders. A spokeswoman for the bureau of prisons did not immediately return a phone call Wednesday seeking comment.

"I knew some day she would be released," said John Virga, the Sacramento attorney who handled her trial.

Fromme served time in at least two other facilities before Carswell.

She escaped from a female prison in Alderson, W.Va., on Dec. 23, 1987, and was recaptured about two miles away on Christmas Day after a massive search. She was sentenced to an additional 15 months in prison for the escape.

Fromme had said she escaped from prison to be closer to Manson.

Yeesh.

i saw a manson interview in the 90s where he was shown some recent footage of the imprisoned manson family girls and he said, 'ew, they got old' and then he laughed horribly.

Maybe Waters has a touch of ESP. This week, in excerpts from an upcoming book, he calls for parole for another "Manson girl." As he writes in the first of several dispatches for Huffington Post: "I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious "Manson girls" who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a "Manson girl" today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it's time to parole her."

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/2009/08/lynette_squeaky_fromme_of_mans.html

John Waters has a new book coming out?!

yeah he was on NPR about this last night. I expected to hate what he said, because the whole romanticizing-dangerous-pop-icons thing is fine as far as it goes but I thought "you know, it's one thing to think she looks cool on a t-shirt [nb this is a pretty arguable point], but another to argue for her parole." but then I heard what he had to say and it wasn't icon-worship at all - it was sober, fair reasoning about whether justice and/or the public good is served by keeping Van Houten in prison.

they should release susan atikins; what she did was awful, but she has brain cancer and doesn't even know what's going on. it can't be cheap to have her in prison.

The thing is, the families of the victims get distressed when people show too much sympathy for these monsters, these people get very much attention. I cannot say I blame the families.

I can say I blame morons like you who use the word "monster" so freely.

http://www.celebagents.co.uk/images/pics/erichall1.jpg

u s steel, yesterday

Whatever happened to and who cares etc

FREE AT LAST!
http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2009/08/05/image5217504x.jpg

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-squeaky-fromme15-2009aug15,0,7496498.story

http://odio.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/charles-manson-family-members.jpg

Wish it had stayed like this moment forever.

Everyone looks so healthy!

Everyone looks so creepy! Although I like Squeaky's Albanian look.

"The cast of Jesus Christ Superstar relaxes after turning in their 100th performance."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm9cjrwBIdM

Wonder what Linda Kasabian thinks of the band named after her. I see her really digging their psychadelic rock vibes but I fear she may accuse them of ripping off the Stone Roses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-fJGxTfeqI

castingtherunes (8 hours ago) Show Hide 0 Marked as spam Reply

She's hott and she's a little charmer. I think I have a new girlfriend. Squeaky Fromme.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/no-compassionate-release-for-manson-follower/?hp

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26388459-401,00.html

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v483/catalinamack/mansonson.jpg

“He sends me weird stuff and always signs it with his swastika,” Mr Roberts said.

ugh, daaaaaaaad

Despite his adoptive father telling him “nothing good” would come of discovering who his real parents were, Mr Roberts used a social services agency to locate his mother, Terry.

She confirmed Mr Roberts was adopted and told him his birth name was Lawrence Alexander but would not reveal the last name.

Eventually Terry relented and revealed that Mr Roberts' father was Manson, who she claims raped her in 1967 after she had succumbed to his manic charisma.

"She even said, 'You look just like him', Mr Roberts said recalling the shocking revelation.

Oh man that would be the worst thing to hear right after that! "You got made when I was raped by CHarles Manson...and you look just like him, honey." ;_;

yeah it sucks too that if i walked by that guy on the street i would think "hey lol that guy looks like charles manson." he must get that a lot.

After all the "peaceful dude" talk, this

"If I did talk to Charlie on the phone, I would say, 'I truly understand what it's like to be you, more than anyone could ever imagine on so many levels,'” Mr Roberts said.

struck me as a little weird.

dude's secretly thrilled to have an excuse for past and future drama

The man who married Susan Atkins. (fascinating article. worth checking out)

Charles Manson had a cellphone? California prisons fight inmate cellphone proliferation

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prison-cellphones-20101203,0,1731644.story

Who is (was?) the West Family? Was this some popular TV show circa 2002?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_West

Yeah but not like you mean

http://ringtonetrue.com/downloadmp3ringtone/Beatles/Helter_Skelter.html

Okay--I do remember that story after all.

imagne charlie with a nextel chirp

http://www.releasecharlesmansonnow.blogspot.com/

Notorious killer Charles Manson was denied parole today after a California parole board noted that he recently bragged to a prison psychologist, "I am a very dangerous man."

http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/ap_charles_manson_dm_120405_wg.jpg

have felt for ages that the continued imprisonment of manson is a v weird & wrong thing

why would he want to be free? prison is his home.

Why is it weird and wrong for Charlie to be locked up?

he probly wouldn't kill anybody now, throw the dice i say

from what i can tell, he hasn't been a real threat to anyone for ages. he's just a crazy old man, imprisoned more than anything (it seems to me) for the general "sins" of the 1960s, fear of messianic hippie terror. should have been put in a proper mental hospital ages ago. has anyone ever served more hard time without having actually/directly killed anyone, or committed treason?

no one's ever served time for committing treason

really? i don't mean just in the US.

oh I dunno about other countries

manson family vs. danson family

http://www.bittenandbound.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Ted-Danson-and-Mary-Steenburgen-with-their-blended-family.jpg

vs. the Hanson family.

http://www.hansonplace.blogger.com.br/00248.jpg

Phil, I also read that way too young

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1Fxoub89XFM/SSOCnRQJfHI/AAAAAAAAAEc/SpuBHquVOw4/s320/sanders.jpg

Yeah, I think I read H/S when I was 12 or 13

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown has about a month to decide whether to release a former follower of notorious killer Charles Manson from prison.

Bruce Davis, 70, has been behind bars since 1970, convicted with Manson of the murder of a musician and a stuntman. He was not involved in the Manson family's infamous 1969 slayings of Sharon Tate and four others in a Benedict Canyon home.

Davis is incarcerated at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he has a clean record and is active in prison ministries, his lawyer told the parole officials. A prisons panel first granted him parole in 2010, citing his record and his completion of rehabilitation programs.

Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision. Davis won a legal challenge to the reversal but lost last year on appeal.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey has urged Brown not to release Davis. In a three-page letter to the governor Jan. 24, she described Davis as Manson's "right-hand man" and said he poses an "unreasonable risk of danger to society."

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1410809.1374971616!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/image-1-1410809.jpg

New Manson book out. Far more information on his early pre-Manson Family life. From the NY Times review:

On the evidence of “Manson,” a lot of the mystical aura surrounding Mr. Manson was less real than imagined by a terrified populace and titillated press corps. But Mr. Guinn doesn’t buy any cultist mumbo-jumbo. The cover of “Manson” pointedly features a photo of its subject not as Crazy Charlie, as he sometimes called himself, but as a smiling, suit-wearing, precocious little crook in his pimply years.

Mr. Guinn’s main thesis is that Charlie Manson was a lifelong social predator: “There was nothing mystical or heroic about Charlie — he was an opportunistic sociopath.” And in 1967, when he walked out of prison at 32 and began trolling for acolytes in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the culture of national upheaval “made it possible for him to bloom in full, malignant flower.”

Among the sources for Mr. Guinn’s account are Mr. Manson’s sister and his first cousin, whose anonymity he takes care to preserve. He has even found a schoolmate to describe the abusive teacher who treated Charlie harshly in the first grade. By that point, he had already seen his willful teenage mother sent to prison for her role in a robbery (the assault weapon: a ketchup bottle); she had singled out the victim, she said, because he “had too much money for one man.” Were the seeds of the Manson Family’s savage Tate-LaBianca murders sown this early? Mr. Guinn thinks so. His punchy style renders the mother’s first crime as “an impetuous decision that would affect — and cost — lives over the next three-quarters of a century.”

His mother’s first conviction steered her young son toward a string of reform schools and prisons, places that shaped his education. He listened to pimps explain how to control women. He read the brand-new teachings of Scientology. And, in the kind of touch that keeps “Manson” steadily surprising, Mr. Guinn points straight to a link between Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” to Mr. Manson’s methods of persuasion. Among one of Mr. Carnegie’s lesser-known statements: “Everything you or I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.” Mr. Manson clearly took that and “Begin in a friendly way” to heart.

manson is an abusive sociopath, which alone is not illegal, but, yeah, if you prove that you can manifest that pathology in a way that ends with innocent people being horribly slaughtered then you should be isolated from society forever. he gets 3 hots and a cot and slavering fanpeople for the rest of his days, plus interviews. if a free man he would probably be waving a cardboard sign under a bridge at this point. as mentioned already, he's managed to make his last name more notorious and ruined than anyone besides genocidal dictators. he def knows how to charm. i hate prisons but would not feel a twinge if he died there.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/is-charles-manson-getting-married-20131120

Rolling Stone again, long piece on Manson today:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/charles-manson-today-the-final-confessions-of-a-psychopath-20131121

Didn't realize until I came across it in a store last week that Ed Sanders put out a book on Sharon Tate last year.

the best thing that could happen to that narcissist is if everybody stopped paying attention to him

Him and Trump, of course. Re the ending of 2013 piece reposted on Stone, saw recently that the marriage license has expired.

something about the reporter in that rs piece turned me off

As that Rolling Stone article proves, Charlie's not even that interesting to read about. The continuing fascination with him is based on his status as an icon of evil, based on the legend built up by his prosecutor during the trial, not because he says or does stuff worth paying attention to. He touches the reporter on the nose unexpectedly and plays up his rep as a dangerous killer. He eagerly eats a candy bar. He talks wistfully about having sex with many young women almost half a century ago. In other words, he's a lot like any other long time inmate.

yeah exactly

he's not *actually* interesting at all

Still haven't read the RS piece, but as Jeff Guinn frames him in the book pictured above, I think Manson can be very interesting to read about. Trump: when I read the RS subheading, "He's nearly 80 and his Family is smaller, but darkness still surrounds America's most notorious criminal," the darkness part made me think of Trump's concession speech! (There seems to be no end to Trump's family, though.)

I was downtown today with no book and time to kill, so I bought Ed Sanders' Sharon Tate book.

weeeell given that i've read most of what there is to read on manson you could say i find him interesting.

it just bugs me that that that article affords him far too much thrall when so much of him is base, mundane & manipulative.

i liked that guinn approached him in a mundane, ordinary light. he's like a violent resentful PT Barnum who just wants to get over on any and every weak person who crosses paths with him.

Low-grade con man, no argument. I guess what I find so interesting myself--and I think it's there in Guinn's book, at least implicitly--is that his particular con was so perfectly suited to the time and the place that he accidentally found himself thrust into when he was released from prison roundabout 1964.

(Which doesn't explain why people like "Star" gravitate towards him today, although there's a different dynamic there--no less perverse--involving celebrity and such.)

yeah he has popularity working for him now, which he for sure didnt have back then. which i guess is where the interest lies. reeling in wilson & melcher, as well as the girls & tex et al through sheer manipulation

Trump's concession speech!

Freudian slip, wishful thinking, something like that.

thread title takes on a whole new meaning in the kanye/kim era

...or does it?

*steeples fingers, raises one eyebrow*

Is anyone watching the NBC series Aquarius, with David Duchovny, which is about an LAPD detective investigating Manson (and other things) in the months before the murders? It's pretty watchable, though it does try to cover too many bases, I think.

thread title takes on a whole new meaning in the kanye/kim era

lol I assumed this was who it was about before I saw the thread date

have no idea who this other "West" family is

it's pretty grim reading, to say the least

yr a dad Shakey. do not read about the other West family.

Sound advice.

The West family were more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than Manson.

I'm capable of sort of understanding how something like the Manson Family happens - drugs, impressionability, cult mindset, etc.. The West family, I just can't wrap my head around.

I'm reading this Sharon Tate biography, and something that had never occurred to me until tonight: how close I was geographically and on a timeline to the murders. We took a family trip to Disneyland in July of '69 (I was seven). I know we saw a baseball game at Anaheim Stadium, and I'm pretty sure Reggie Jackson (visiting) hit a home run. I checked the game logs, and that would mean the game was either July 19 or 20. The murders were August 9.

http://la.curbed.com/maps/mapping-13-key-locations-in-the-1969-manson-family-murders

Spahn Ranch is about 60 miles from the Disneyland area. I don't know how many days before and after the game we were there, but about an hour away they were planning and preparing for some awful stuff. (I guess I was just too young to hear anything about what happened when we got back to Toronto...I don't recollect knowing anything about the story until I started high school a few years later.)

that's gotta be an eerie feeling...

Big news!

BREAKING: Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten granted parole by California board.

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 6, 2017

Had missed she was granted it last year and Jerry Brown reversed it. Wonder if it'll happen again?

damn

I doubt Jerry's changed his mind

Brown's reversed Bruce Davis's parole four times.

just finished The Life and Times of Charles Manson

def feels pretty definitive
the whole story is just so unreal
the most telling detail for me was the one thing he always returned to, after having taken a course in prison, was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

^ ding

yeah that made so many aspects of his behaviour click together

About 30 pages into Jeffrey Melnick's Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. Same idea as Dead Elvis and Unshackled: The Dustbin of Donald Trump: Manson is everywhere.

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-5wx3mh9/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/237/1931/denied_stamp_180604__66005.1528149761.gif?c=2
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/03/us/leslie-van-houten-manson-family-parole/index.html

"I'm gonna run for president one day and I'll be damned if I give them any ammo against me!"

Are we including the Kardashians?

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten walked out of a California prison Tuesday after serving more than 50 years of a life sentence for her participation in two infamous murders.

Van Houten “was released to parole supervision,” the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.

Is she the only one to gain release?

nevermind, I see that Squeaky walked years ago

Missed this...I think she's the first directly responsible for the murders.

interesting article from a few years back about the ongoing rehabilitation of Van Houten, Kremwinkle & Atkins on behalf of a feminist coalition at the Santa Cruz prison project

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/keeping-faith-with-the-manson-women

i carry this info about her rehabilitation alongside the brutality of the LaBianca murders & I don’t really know where I land on it exactly

but i think prison is fucked & people deserve a second chance which also sounds naive of me idk

Not sure how I feel either, other than surprised--I thought the Tate family was vigilant (and convincing) about no one ever getting parole.

yeah - I think Sharon’s sister Debra was even representing on behalf of the LaBiancas. So I dunno.

I’d be interested to read what about this appeal turned things around.

I just finished another Mad Men rewatch last night. Everyone remembers Meredith's great line to Harry about the Manson Brothers, but I'd forgotten Don's follow-up as he pulls in to the office: "Are they coming in?"