Crime Stories of the Century
The awful acts of the past 100 years forced America to look at itself in the mirror
Police still had no suspects two months later when a woman in a Los Angeles jail boasted to a cellmate about her "family's" murderous ways. It pointed cops to a man in custody for car theft: Charles Manson.
Manson was the illegitimate son of a 16-year-old girl. He bounced around from relatives to foster homes to reform schools, robbing at gunpoint by age 13. He married twice, divorced twice, and had at least two children. By the time he was released from a federal prison in Washington State in 1967 for forging government checks, he had spent 17 of his 32 years in institutions. He moved to the counterculture capital, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where he began recruiting his "family" of mostly young women from well-off but troubled families. The wild-eyed Manson used sex to control his flock, who followed him like sheep. Eventually, he took his "family" to live on an old movie set in the mountains north of Los Angeles. A twisted motive for the Tate-LaBianca murders emerged: to leave the impression that blacks had committed them, thus igniting a race war that Manson believed would destroy the country, paving the way for his "family" to take over. He took his cues from what he believed were hidden messages in Beatles' songs, notably "Helter Skelter."
After a nine-month trial, Manson and three of his acolytes were convicted; a fifth would be convicted later. All were sentenced to death, but their sentences were commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court tossed out capital punishment in 1972. Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted the Manson case, says it still resonates because it's so "incredibly far out. . . . If this were fiction you would throw it away after 10 pages. " Yet the truth is inescapable. As Bugliosi admits: "Manson has become a metaphor for evil."
THE 1970S
A killer called 'Son of Sam'
He was a stocky, cherubic-faced postal clerk who seemed like just another harmless, goofy guy. Yet he terrorized New York City for more than a year, killing six young people and wounding seven with a .44-caliber Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. When police finally arrested him on Aug. 10, 1977, David Berkowitz was unfazed. "Well, you've got me," he shrugged. And with that, the "Son of Sam" siege that had petrified normally jaded New Yorkers was over.
Berkowitz was the epitome of a phenomenon that became all too familiar in the edgy, uneasy '70s: serial killers. Besides the 24-year-old Berkowitz, there was Ted Bundy, the suave and handsome onetime law student from Washington State, who crisscrossed the country charming, then murdering an estimated 36 to more than 100 young women, including several in a Chi Omega sorority in Florida. There was John Wayne Gacy, the burly contractor who performed as a clown at children's parties and sexually abused, then killed 33 young men and boys, burying most of them in the crawlspace under his tidy, yellow brick house in a Chicago suburb. And there was the "Hillside Strangler" in California, who turned out to be two cousins, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, who lured women into their cars by pretending to be undercover cops--and then strangled at least 10 of them.
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