



EXCLUSIVE - The smiling killer: Relatives of Charles Manson release previously unseen pictures of the monster as a youth and reveal the true evil that lurked within

Sister and cousin reveal their own terror of Manson as a boy

Mother feared her 'crazy-eyed' son when he was just five years old

Threatened his nine-year-old cousin with a razor-sharp sickle

Has lied about almost every aspect of his childhood and history

Perfected the 'insane game' to avoid trouble as a child and used it again when charged with murder

Eyes ablaze, beard and hair unkempt, a Swastika tattooed on his forehead – the image of Charles Manson seared on the public conscious is recognisably, reassuringly, that of a madman.

But today, four decades after the gruesome murders that made him a household name, a very different version of one of America’s most notorious and troubling killers has emerged.

Seen here for the first time, pictures of Manson obtained by biographer Jeff Guinn and included in his new book, show what the author argues is the true face of the killer.

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Ideal husband: Manson married Rosalie Willis, above, when she was just 15 and he 20. The marriage lasted two years ending Manson's only brief attempt at 'normal' life

Portrait of a killer: Charles Manson, age five, in a never before seen picture taken just before his first day at elementary school. His dimpled cheeks and shy smile conceal the true nature that lurked within

The shy little boy, his scrunched up fist half concealing a dimpled smile as he glances away from the camera.

The proud young groom, beaming and gentle, with his hand on his bride’s as they cut the cake and celebrate their union.

A world away from the ‘Satanic guru’ of popular imagination – and Manson’s own creation – these pictures show the true horror of Manson. The fact that he could so artfully conceal what lurked within.

Guinn’s Manson is a calculating opportunist and arch manipulator who has lied to this day about almost every aspect of his family background.

Arch manipulator: Manson on the day he was sentenced to reformatory school, Boys Town. He convinced a sympathetic judge he was Catholic. But ran away after just four days

The insane game: Manson, above left, in 1986, and right in 1989. A prisoner with no hope of parole and no Family left to control

On August 8, 1969 Manson and his ‘Family’ slaughtered Sharon Tate, the actress wife of Roman Polanski, eight and a half months pregnant, and three of her friends at her home above Beverly Hills. Stephen Parent was a fifth unfortunate victim that night. He had driven to the property to see if caretaker William Garreston wanted to buy his AM/FM Clock radio and had stayed on for a beer at the guest house. Watch more of Jeff Guinn's talk at Strand Books. Self-made man: Manson is taken to Los Angeles City Hall in December 1969 on suspicion of having masterminded the Tate-La Bianca murders four months earlier. He wears deer-skin garments made by female followers

Image of a madman: Manson is led from the Court House in December 1969. He told Family members not to be fooled if he seemed insane - it was an act perfected in his youth when victim became predator

He was shot multiple times when he wound down the window at the electric gate as he left.



Doomed: Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski on their wedding day in London in January 1968. A year and half later and pregnant with their first child she was stabbed to death by Manson's Family

The following night the Family butchered small business owners Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, in their home in Los Angeles.

The violence was so mindless and so brutal and the motivation, when it emerged, so incomprehensible that the myth of Manson and his hippie cult-like Family has stalked common consciousness ever since.

Today serving a life sentence in California Manson, now 78, has always maintained that society gradually turned him into the person he became.

But now his own family’s accounts and the catalogue of crimes Guinn chronicles, tell a very different story.

For the first time, Manson’s sister, Nancy, and cousin JoAnn, have recalled their own experiences of Manson’s penchant for violence and manipulation from the age of five.

And even then, it is revealed, his own mother had grown to fear her ‘crazy-eyed’ son.

With his shy smile, coy pose and neatly slicked back hair, the five-year-old Manson was the image of unsullied innocence.

In truth, according to Guinn, the malevolent nature that exploded in grizzly violence on the nights of 8th and 9th August 1969 lurked within him from the very beginning.

He was a ‘disagreeable child,’ who ‘even at a young age lied about everything and, when he got into trouble for telling fibs or breaking things or any of the other innumerable misdeeds he committed on a daily basis, Charlie always blamed somebody else for his actions. The child was also obsessed with being the centre of attention.’

According to his cousin, JoAnn, whose parents raised Manson in their home in McMechen, West Virginia, for several years, ‘There was never anything happy about him. He never did anything good.’

Heartbreaking plea: Sharon Tate shortly before her marriage to Polanski. She begged her killers to spare her life for the sake of her unborn child

She was one of the many who came to fear Manson and with good cause. The boy was obsessed with knives and guns and when he lost control of his anger his eyes blazed with an intensity that convinced her he was capable of injuring or even killing her.



'There was never anything happy about him. He never did anything good,'

Manson's first cousin JoAnn's view of 'Little Charlie'

On one occasion Charlie, as he was known to his family, came into her room as JoAnn, then nine, was making her bed. He was brandishing a razor sharp sickle he had found in the yard. When he purposely got in her way she asked him to move, ‘Make me,’ he responded.

She pushed him from the room and latched shut its screen door – an act which infuriated Charlie. He slashed the screen with the sickle and, Guinn writes, ‘She was certain he meant to use the blade on her.’

Cut down as they begged for their lives: The four victims killed in Tate and Polanski's house on 9 August 1969. Scriptwriter Wojciech Frykowski, top left, his lover Abigail Folger, top right, Jay Bresling, bottom left, who was a former lover of actress Sharon Tate, bottom right



Seventy years later she recalled: ‘You could whip him all day and he’d still act however he wanted.’

The skills exhibited by Manson in childhood were, Guinn states, all criminal.



Stephen Parent, 22, the fifth victim on 9 August 1969. He was shot in the face, chest and abdomen as he tried to leave

He lied, he stole cars, and he robbed cash registers and storerooms. And he bounced through the reformatory school system from the age of 12 and on into adult prisons.

Manson has always claimed he was the son of a teenage prostitute who never knew his father.



Guinn’s account of Manson’s childhood, though far from idyllic, is very different.

His mother Kathleen was just 15 when she had him, flattered and seduced by an older man who swiftly abandoned her.

In later years the man was compelled to visit his toddler son on several occasions as Kathleen pursued him through the courts.



Kathleen, originally from Kentucky, was living in Ashland, Ohio, when Manson was born.



By then she had managed to find a man willing to marry her and become her son’s father and give him his name.



In fact William Manson may well have believed Charlie to be his, at least at first.

The marriage lasted only a couple of years.

Sixteen-year-old Kathleen was more interested in dancing and drinking than nursing her child or looking after her husband.



There is no denying that Manson’s early life was unlikely to stand him in good stead for a happy and productive future.

Morning after: Police guard the home where Tate and her friends were murdered as investigators begin the grizzly task of recovering the bodies on 10 August 1969

Removing the victims: Homicide detectives remove Sharon Tate's body from the scene of her murder. Manson draped an American flag on a sofa next to her body in a deliberately theatrical act

When he was four his mother was sentenced to five years in jail for her part in a brutal but botched robbery.

But it is equally clear that when offered any choice as to which path to take Manson invariably opted for the wrong one.

Leno and Rosemary La Bianca: Manson's Family's final victims on their second night of mindless killing in August 1969

On trial: Family members Susan Denise Atkins, front left, and Patricia Krenwinkel, front right, in March 1970. Both took part in the vicious killings but were, as Patricia claimed, 'mentally gone' at the time

Guinn reveals him to have been a life-long predator who perfected the ‘insane game’ that he used to such effect in later years during his years bouncing through America’s reformatory schooling system.

' We were little kitty cats who were mentally gone'

Family member Patricia Krenwinkel, Manson's third disciple, on her role in the brutal killings

As undersized boy he was a target for sexual abuse and beatings from older boys.

He found his best defence was to convince them he was crazy. He did just that with screeches, facial tics, flapping arms and twitches.



A brief marriage to 15-year-old Rosalie Willis when he was 20 seemed an attempt on Manson’s part to fit in and conform. But things quickly headed south. He was back in jail and Rosalie, by then mother to their son, left him.

Years later he told his ‘Family’ that if he was caught he would play the madman but they weren’t to be fooled.

Public face: Manson meets the press during a break in his trial in 1969. He was happy to espouse his philosophies and drink up the fame that his murderous spree had finally brought him

Little wonder if many were quick to accept that Manson was, indeed, simply mad. His crimes and the cult he had created - dominating his mainly female followers until they were, according to former Family member Pat Krenwinkle, ‘little kitty cats who were mentally gone’ - defied all reason.

But there was, according to Guinn, an awful logic to them, all driven by the fury of a delusional man snubbed by a society who failed to see his genius.

Terry Melcher, 27, the music producer son of Doris Day whom Manson wooed in hopes of getting a record contract. His snub enraged the 'guru'

Manson ordered the first killings to save associate Bob Beausoleil from a murder rap. And he seized upon this as an opportunity to spark ‘Helter Skelter,’ the apocalyptic race war the self-styled prophet insisted was on its way.

Beausoleil was in jail charged with the brutal killing of music teacher Gary Hinman, the result of a drug deal gone wrong. Manson reasoned that copycat killings would convince cops they had the wrong man, with the true killers still at large.

Words written in the victims’ blood at the crime scenes – ‘Rise’ and ‘Political Piggy’ – and prints of their hands dipped in blood were supposed to point to Black Panther involvement.

The victims themselves were chosen on the flimsiest of premises. Tate and Polanski had the misfortune to live in a home on Manson’s radar as the former home of music producer Terry Melcher, whose disinterest in Manson’s music had crushed his dreams of recording fame.

He reasoned it was likely to still be occupied by someone high profile enough for their murders to bring the press attention he sought.

When reports failed to mention the Black Panthers, Manson - unhappy with his Family’s performance - demanded another night of murder, one that he would oversee himself.



Corcoran Prison, California: Manson is serving a life sentence here with no hope of parole. His last attempt in 2007, was the 11th to be denied

The La Biancas lived next door to a house at which Manson and the ‘Family’ had once partied. It was that random and merciless.

Jeff Guinn's revealing biography, Manson: The Life And Times Of Charles Manson is out now

But the control that Manson exerted over his ‘followers’ was not, as he and his legend would have it, anything supernatural, extraordinary or spiritual.

It was the cheap tricks of a pimp by any other name combined with the ‘secrets’ of one of the most successful books of the time, How To Win Friends And Influence People.

While he preached ‘Free Love’ Manson picked his girls carefully – ones from troubled families, ideally with father issues, plain girls he could seduce by telling them they were beautiful.

He fed them a potent mixture of lies and LSD and erased any objections they might have had to his outlandish requests, just as any abuser silences his victim’s complaints: beating them one moment and making love to them the next.

Manson was never ‘all about Love.’ He was always ‘all about Fear.’



He was, according to Quinn, a two-bit crook who adopted the rhetoric of the era to answer his own personal lusts for fame and power – whatever the means, whatever the cost.