Manson’s Last Remains Claimed By Grandson

On 19 November 2017, notorious mastermind Charles Manson died of natural causes at a hospital in Bakersfield, California. Manson was known for being the head of the Manson Family cult in the late 1960s, who are “thought to have carried out some 35 killings, but most of them were never tried because of lack of evidence or the perpetrators were already sentenced to life for the Tate/Labianca killings,” Biography.com said.

Born 12 November 1934 as Charles Milles Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Kathleen Maddox, a sixteen-year-old girl who was an alcoholic and prostitute and who “married William Manson, but the marriage ended quickly and Charles was placed in a boys school,” Biography.com said.

He started off his criminal career with petty crime, first beginning to spend time in prison in 1951. He was incarcerated for various offenses, such as pimping, stealing/forging government checks, driving a stolen car across the border, etc., and according to an interview with Vincent Bugliosi with History.com, he “could find nothing in his background that would indicate he’d turn into this terrible mass murderer.”

On 9 August 1969, Manson sent members Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian to kill actress Sharon Tate (who was eight months pregnant), coffee bean heiress Abigail Folger, writer Wojciech Frykowski, celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring, and 18-year-old caretaker Steven Parent, who was staying in Tate’s guest home at the time.

Sebring was shot and kicked to death after trying to defend Tate.  Frykowski and Folger tried to escape but were caught and stabbed to death. Tate begged for her unborn child’s life, but according to Biography.com, Atkins said in response, “Look, I have no mercy for you. You’re going to die, so get used to it,” before stabbing her to death in the stomach and then writing the word ‘pig’ in the actress’ blood on the front door.

The following day, according to Biography.com,  Manson sent Krenwinkel, Watson, and Leslie Van Houten to the LaBiancas, and they were murdered in a similar fashion. The Manson family was arrested the same year, the trial beginning in 1970 and ending in 1971, when Manson was sentenced to death, but the California Supreme Court changed his sentence to life when they voided all death sentences in 1972.

On 12 March 2018, four months after Manson’s death, a Kern County, California judge ruled that MMA fighter Jason L. Freeman (also known as Charles Manson III, according to sherdog.com), was the “surviving competent adult next of kin,” the New York Times said.

In an interview with the New York Times in January, Freeman said, if he was given Manson’s remains, he would invite some of  his grandfather’s friends in his inner circle to a private service and cremate him.

“I’d like to grab ahold of my grandfather’s name and have a little more control over it. Everybody’s had a free-for-all for the past 50 years,” Freeman said.