Charles Manson Research Paper Outline

“As any child will tell you, dead is when you are no more. It is just when you are not there. If you weren’t there you would be dead,”- Charles Manson. Charles Manson is a name most all of us have heard before. He and his Family killed six people in the summer of 1969. Charles used his charisma and power over broken girls to kill for him. To truly begin to understand the person that is Charles Manson, it is important to look at his childhood. He was born to Kathleen Maddox, an unmarried fifteen-year-old from Ashland, Kentucky. As a young child, his mother married, finally giving no-name Maddox the infamous last name of Manson. When he was four, his mother and uncle were arrested and he was forced to live with extended family. He struggled,

He had dreams of being a huge musician, even writing songs for the Beach Boys’ and befriending the musician Brian Wilson. Terry Melcher, a friend of Wilson and Manson and a record producer, gave Manson and some of his girls recording time. He was told that he had no talent, which sparked a hatred for the rich and famous in Hollywood. He began to use his charismatic tactics and handsome looks to pick up mostly young, broken girls who felt that their parents didn’t understand. He taught his followers that they were the reincarnation of the original Christians and there was going to be a great race war in which they would survive by living in a hole in the desert that would take them to another land. This would kill the Blacks and those who lived would have no choice but to beg him to be their leader. He was greatly influenced by his grandmother’s “fire and brimstone” church, which also lead to his obsession with the Biblical book of

After his arrest and trial, some of the Family were still influenced by him even giggling and singing in the courtroom. Some even walked in with X’s cut on their foreheads, just as Manson had done. Manson had taken the hippie lifestyle and used it to create mass murder. This began to exploit the hippie name; people began to think that LSD would turn normal people into bloodthirsty killers and news headlines painted hippies as violent and corrupt criminals. These added among other stuff would later help in ending the hippie movement. The deaths reminded celebrities and movie stars that they too can be victims and created panic among the lower classes because of the randomness of the