Charles Manson Was Never a Lunatic
by Jeff Guinn, author of Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson
In May 2011, I met Leslie Van Houten, the former Manson Family member serving a life sentence in the California Institution for Women for her role in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders in August, 1969. At one point, I asked Leslie what she would want the world to know about her former leader Charles Manson.
“Everyone always asks how any of us could follow somebody who’s so obviously crazy,” she said. “I get so frustrated; they won’t believe me when I tell them that he never acted crazy around us. He just did that with outsiders.”
In fact, Leslie says, during the forty-four years since his arrest and subsequent conviction for Tate-LaBianca, Manson has successfully put one over on the rest of the world. After he led his followers from Los Angeles out to Death Valley after the Tate-LaBianca slayings, he called everyone together to make an announcement.
“Charlie told us then that if he was ever arrested, he would put on his ‘Crazy Charlie’ act until he convinced the police that he was insane and not responsible for what he might have done,” Leslie remembers. “He told us that while he was sure he could fool everyone else, we needed to remember it was just an act. And it was. He was never crazy at all.”
That may be the fact in my book Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson that shocks readers most of all. As we follow Charles Manson through childhood and all the way up to the bloody nights of murder, we see over and over again just how coldly calculating he was. Greed, insatiable lust for fame and a lifelong penchant for violence had everything to do with Manson’s crimes, but never insanity. Everything he did, and everything he led his followers to do, was planned in the most calculating way.
Charles Manson is not, and never was, a lunatic. But he maybe one of the most gifted actors in modern history.
Jeff Guinn is the author of Manson, The Last Gunfight, and Go Down Together, which was a finalist for an Edgar Award.
