Charlie Manson and his cult of killers (part 2)             

The nineteen sixties was an era where subculture flourished and there was nowhere else that was better for teenagers to be in than California where the hippies flocked for the warm weather and drugs. Most of them flocked to San Francisco. It was in that city that Charlie Mason settled for a while and began creating his cult of hippies who were each total losers. They were;

Bobby Beausoleil

In the early 1960s, Bobby Beausoleil moved to Los Angeles to pursue a music career and started a band there called Grass Roots, which later changed its name to Love. Beausoleil soon moved to San Francisco and played with a few different bands until the late 1960s. While there, he met filmmaker Kenneth Anger and began composing music for Anger's film Lucifer Rising.

After a falling out with Anger in 1967, Beausoleil moved back to Los Angeles, where he acted in a soft-porn movie shot on the Spahn Ranch with Manson follower Catherine Share, also known as Gypsy. He began living with Manson associate Gary Hinman and soon met Charles Manson himself, who was impressed with Beausoleil's musical abilities.

Catherine Share 

Catherine Share was born in Paris, France, on December 10^th , 1942. Her parents were part of an anti-Nazi underground movement, and killed themselves in an act of defiance against the Nazis. She was adopted at the age of 8, and her new family moved to Hollywood, California.

When Share was 16, her adoptive mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer, killed herself and her adoptive father abandoned her when he remarried.

She entered college, but soon dropped out and embraced the hippie counterculture movement, spending her time smoking marijuana and taking LSD.

In 1967, she met Bobby Beausoleil, on the set of a soft-porn film being shot at the Spahn Ranch. Beausoleil introduced her to Manson, and Share found in him someone who had answers to all her questions and saw him like as a Christlike figure who could take away all of the emotional pain that Share had been accumulating. Manson, who gave everyone on the ranch a nickname, dubbed Share as Gypsy.

Catherine Share became so enamored with Manson and his message that she became a recruiter for the family, bringing both Linda Kasabian and Leslie Van Houten  into the fold.

Linda Kasabian

Linda Kasabian was born on June 21, 1949, in Biddeford, Maine. Kasabian moved to Los Angeles in 1968, and through Catherine Gypsy Share, she met Charles Manson on July 4^th 1969. At that time, Kasabian was a pregnant, two-time divorcee and the mother of an infant daughter.  When Linda Kasabian was a 20-year-old hippie with her baby daughter, she met Charles Manson. She moved to his desert ranch with her daughter in July 1969.

At first, Kasabian found Manson's message to be peaceful, but within her first month at the ranch, his tone changed to one of violence and paranoia, focusing on what Manson called Helter Skelter—the inevitable race war that he foresaw and hoped to create.

Leslie Van Houten

Leslie Van Houten was born in Altadena, California, on August 23, 1949. The second child in a middle-class family, she was outgoing and athletic in her youth and in high school she became homecoming princess. 

However, during that time in her life, she began experimenting with drugs such as marijuana, hashish and LSD, which she took on a progressively more regular basis. At one point during here teens, she also ran away briefly with her boyfriend to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which was the hub of the counterculture at that time.

In was in the summer of 1968, that Van Houten met Bobby Beausoleil and Catherine Gypsy Share, and began traveling with them. Soon after they met, Share began telling Van Houten about a man named Charles Manson, whom she described as Christlike and having the answers to all of their questions.

                                 

By the fall of that year, 19-year-old Van Houten, who was the youngest member of Manson’s Family and who were all living with Manson at the Spahn Ranch on the outskirts of Los Angeles County.  However, in 1969, Manson's message of peace changed to one of revolution and violence. 

Mary Brunner

At age 21, Mary Brunner moved to Los Angeles to take a job in the library at the University of California, Berkeley. While walking her dog one day, she met Charles Manson and the two became good friends and, eventually, lovers. Manson moved into Brunner's apartment for a while, but they soon took to the road in Manson's Volkswagen van, traveling around California while Manson was gathered followers.

In April 1968, Brunner gave birth to Manson's son, Valentine Michael, who received the nickname Pooh Bear. Allegedly, Manson and some women from his burgeoning Family delivered the baby, and Manson cut the umbilical cord with his teeth. After stints in Venice and San Francisco (where they lived with Squeaky Fromme), Manson, Brunner, her baby Poor Bear and the rest of the family moved to the secluded Spahn Ranch.

 

Susan Denise Atkins

This woman was born on May 7^th , 1948, in San Gabriel, California. She was the second of three children born to alcoholic parents, and grew up in Northern California. After she dropped out of high school to support herself (her mother died when Atkins was 15 and her father abandoned the family), Atkins moved on her own to San Francisco.

In early 1967, while she was staying with friends, Susan Atkins met Charles Manson, and by summer she was on a road trip with Manson and his group. Atkins settled with the Manson Family at their Southern California ranch, where she gave birth to a son, whom Manson named Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz Previously, he dubbed Atkins as Sadie Mae Glutz. I hope her son changed his name when he grew older.

Steve Grogan

Steve Grogan dropped out of high school before moving onto the Spahn Ranch with Charles Manson and his followers in the late 1960s. There, he was considered to be either of below average intelligence or pretending to be, but his mental shortcomings earned him the nickname Scramblehead.

Patricia Krenwinkel

This woman was born on December 3^rd, 1947 in Los Angeles, California, Her parents divorced when she was 17. After graduation from high school, she moved from California to Alabama to live with her mother. She attended a Catholic college for one semester before moving to Manhattan Beach, California, to live with her step-sister, Charlene, a heroin addict.

Krenwinkel met Charles Manson soon after at a nearby house, where he was visiting along with Mary Brunner and Lynette Fromme, better known as Squeaky Fromme. Manson was playing a guitar and immediately captivated Krenwinkel, who slept with him that night. Krenwinkel had always had low self-esteem, and Manson manipulated her, telling her she was beautiful and pulling her into his sphere of influence.

Krenwinkel dropped everything and left her life behind to go on a lengthy tour of the United States with Manson and his followers, embracing the counterculture and taking LSD hundreds of times. It was while his followers were on LSD that Manson (who may or may not have been taking the drug) established his firm grip over his minions, posing as a Christlike figure to be worshipped.

By the spring of 1969, Krenwinkel and Manson’s followers were fully enthralled with Manson so they moved in with him to secluded ranch in the California desert, where Manson's increasingly bizarre visions of a race war were propelling his every move.

Lynette Squeaky Fromme

This woman was born as Lynette Alice Fromme in Santa Monica, California on October 22, 1948. Fromme was a child performer, touring with a dance troupe around the age of ten. After high school, Fromme moved to Venice Beach, where she met Charles Manson. She was instantly captivated by Manson, as were all members of his Family and before long Manson invited her to join him in traveling the country, which she did.

When they returned, Fromme moved into the Spahn Ranch with Manson and his followers, taking care of 80-year-old George Spahn, who nicknamed her Squeaky because of the sound she made when he would touch her.

Charles Tex Watson

As a teenager, Charles Tex Watson led his church youth group and regularly attended the Sunday night services. In high school, Watson was an honor-roll student and respected athlete. During his third year at North Texas State University, he visited a friend in California and decided to move there, which he did in 1967. Once in Los Angeles, he enrolled at Cal State but quickly dropped out as he was caught up quickly in the freedom of the hippie counterculture movement.

One night, Watson stopped to pick up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Wilson invited Watson back to his mansion, which was filled with people hanging out, listening to music, and doing drugs. Before long, Watson had moved into Wilson`s house and met Charles Manson, who was a regular visitor. Wilson eventually kicked everyone out, and Watson moved out to Manson's desert ranch, where he proceeded to fall under Manson's spell.

What these followers of Manson didn`t know for sure was that he was a real nut case and was going to direct them to commit the murders of seven persons in the very near future.