On Mary Bell, The Famous Child Killer

This is perhaps the most fascinating case I've ever heard of. Mary Flora Bell was the youngest convicted murderer in history. She was only ten years old when she and her best friend, Norma Bell (no relation) murdered 3-year-old Brian Howe in 1968, 275 miles north of London, in Scotswood.

Brian's older sister, Pat, grew worried when she couldn't find her little brother, who always played close to the house. Mary and Norma offered to help her look for the toddler, all the while knowing exactly where he was. During their search, Mary pointed to a pile of large concrete blocks, suggesting he could be there. Pat insisted her little brother never played there, and their search continued. However, Brian's body was there. At about 11 pm, the Newcastle police found his body. He had been strangled to death, a large "M" carved into his stomach; he had puncture wounds on his thighs and his genitals had been partially skinned. A pair of scissors lay nearby, along with a razor blade. The police remarked that his wounds appeared to be terrifyingly playful.

Mary and Norma stood out the most to the police investigating the murder. Mary was very evasive, and Norma seemed excited by the murder, smiling during her questioning as though it was a joke.

Brian Howe was buried on August 7, 1968. The lead detective on the case, Detective Dobson, was at the funeral, which was held at the Howe's home. When the coffin was brought outside, he saw Mary standing in front of the house, laughing and rubbing her hands together. This seemed rather suspicious and disconcerting behavior to the detective, he thought that perhaps the mysterious death of 3-year-old Martin Brown just a few weeks earlier could also have been murder, and so both Norma and Mary were brought in for interrogation.

Norma had been questioned once before the funeral, and she claimed that Mary had told her that she killed Brian, and led her to the body. At that time, she stated that Mary described the murder to her, saying she squeezed his neck and pushed his lungs up, and that she had enjoyed it. When they questioned Mary about this, she was quite evasive, and lied very well. When told there was reason to believe that she was on the blocks with Norma, due to the statement from a neighboring man claiming he had yelled at some children playing over there to get away, and saw the two girls leave, Mary simply said "he must have had very good eyesight". The detective asked her why that was, ready to catch her in a lie. She said "because he was... clever to see me when I wasn't there". Afterwards, she refused to make any more statements, claiming that Norma was a liar and always tried to get her into trouble. She was permitted to leave, but after her behavior at the funeral and additional testimony from Norma, she was brought back in.

At this point, she admitted to being present when Brian died, but implicated Norma as the one responsible for his death. She told them that she had "helped" Pat search for her brother and pointed her in the direction of his body because she wanted her to "have a shock". There was some truth to her statement, but it was, for the most part, an attempt to blame Norma for the murder.

Martin Brown's death was then investigated as a homicide. Though, even before his death, other children had been hurt by Mary.

On May 11, 1968, a 3-year-old cousin of Mary's was found behind some empty sheds near a pub, bleeding from the head. He was, of course, found by Norma and Mary. According to the girls, he had "fallen" off of a ledge. Mary later admitted to pushing him off.

A day later, 3 girls playing by the nursery were attacked by Mary, with Norma standing nearby. One girl said that Mary had put her hands around her neck and squeezed hard, then took her hands off and did the same to another of the girls, Susan. The police were called, and Norma stated that Mary walked over to the girls and asked, "what happens if you choke someone? Do they die?" then Mary began choking her until she went purple. Norma said she then ran off and left Mary, and that she had stopped being friends with her. According to the official report on May 15, the girls had been warned as to their future conduct. Ten days later, Martin was killed. He was found on the ground floor of a condemned house with an open bottle of aspirin nearby. There were no signs of assault, and the death was ruled as accidental.

Mary and Norma's behavior was disturbing to the Brown family over the next couple of weeks. They would ask his aunt prying questions, such as, "do you miss Martin? Do you cry for him?" Martin's mother, June, was also bothered by the girls. One day, she heard a knock at the door, and opened it to find Mary standing there. She asked if she could see Martin, and June told her she was sorry, but Martin was dead. Mary replied, grinning, "oh, I know he's dead. I wanted to see him in his coffin". June, speechless, slammed the door on her.

The day after Mary's eleventh birthday, during which she had tried to strangle Norma's little sister and was stopped by their father, the teachers at the Day Nursery had arrived to find that the school had been broken into. They discovered four very disturbing notes on the floor. They read as follows:

"I murder so that I may come back."

"fuch of we murder watch out Fanny and Faggot."

"we did murder Martain Brown Fuck of you Bastard."

"you are micey Becurse we murdered Martain Go Brown you Bete look out THERE are Murders about By FANNYAND and auld Faggot you Screws."

Police filed the notes away as a sick joke, and Mary would later admit to writing them "for a giggle".

A few days later, a boy at the nursery had witnessed Mary attack Norma, and had only laughed when he heard her scream "I am a murderer!" Mary was known to be a show-off, and so the boy did not take her seriously.

The two girls were finally taken away and charged with the murders. The trial only lasted nine days, and the court ruled Norma not guilty on both counts of Manslaughter, and Mary was found guilty due to Diminished Responsibility, meaning that she was not entirely aware of her actions due to psychopathalogical tendencies. She would be incarcerated for an indeterminate amount of time.

Norma was later sentenced to three years of probation on breaking and entering charges, and was placed under psychiatric evaluation.

No one was sure where to place Mary. Prison was not a suitable choice for an eleven-year-old, and she certainly could not be placed at a home for troubled children, so she was placed in an all-boys facility.

During her psychiatric evaluations, it became apparent that her mother was probably the element that drove her to become a young sociopath. In fact, the first thing she said after Mary's birth was, "get that thing away from me!" Had I been the obstetrician delivering Mary, I would have taken her away right then and had her adopted to a family that wanted a child. Sadly, such is not the case, and Mary was subjected to a very painful childhood as a result.

Betty (her mother) was a prostitute, and constantly trying to get rid of Mary, leaving her with relatives only to come back weeks later and reclaim her. They never wanted to let Mary go back with her mother, but there was really nothing they could do. When Mary was still a baby, Betty brought her into an adoption agency and left her with a woman who had just been denied the right to adopt as she was moving away to Australia. Betty's sister had followed her and soon found the woman to whom Mary had been given, and who had already bought new dresses for the infant.

When Mary was just two years old, she was refusing to bond with others, and was already displaying a cold and detached demeanor. She never cried when she got hurt, and she would violently lash out at others, including an uncle whose nose she broke when she smashed it with a toy.

Some of the worst abuse she suffered were a series of drug overdoses, starting when she was just one year old, most likely administered by her mother. How else would an infant ingest so many foul-tasting pills? At the age of three, she and her little brother were found eating some blue pills mixed in with some candy their aunt had brought for them. After this, her sister offered to adopt Mary, but Betty refused and broke off all contact with her family.

In another overdose case, Mary had eaten several iron pills. She lost consciousness and her stomach had to be pumped. These overdoses probably played a huge role in Mary's sociopathology, as drug overdoses in a developing child can cause serious brain damage, which is a common trait among most serial killers.

These near-death experiences were undoubtedly all orchestrated by Betty. This behavior is indicative of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, which means that a mother derives satisfaction from the sympathy she receives when something terrible happens to her child. Most women suffering from this disorder wind up killing their children, and some have even killed all of their children.

The absolute worst abuse Mary was subjected to was her mother's use of her as a "sexual prop" for her johns.

Mary was released from prison in 1980 at the age of 23. She miraculously reformed from a sociopathic child killer into a loving mother. Her daughter was born in 1984, and she was not aware that her mother was the famous Mary Bell until she was a teenager. She did not resent her mother for what she had done, and was only happy to know the truth. Today, they have been granted anonymity, and their whereabouts are unknown. I hope they have both escaped public scrutiny and are both living happy, quiet lives. Mary deserves nothing less for what she endured as an infant.

I don't blame her for what she did to those toddlers, and neither should you. Had she been raised in a more loving home, she never would have done such a thing. She was incarcerated at the appropriate time, as she probably wouldn't have broken the murderous habit had she not been caught at such a young age. Mary's life is a horror story with a happy ending, and that makes me smile, just a little.

Enough with the Guy-Liner Already!!

Rock n’ roll was once the music with a message: the message of freedom, of love, of happiness, of unashamed and unabashed personal enlightenment. Sadly, the message has disappeared from rock as we know it, leaving those of us who still listen to bands like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin to wonder if the message will ever return; if true rock n’ roll will ever be saved, or if we will be forced to watch our beloved genre die a slow and painful death.

In my opinion, rock n’ roll was the fuel of free thinkers during the mid to late-twentieth century. As musicians were unafraid to voice their true thoughts and feelings, so were the masses that their music appealed to. When one person can come out and say (or sing, as it were) what we’ve all been thinking, suddenly everyone else can as well. That was, and still should be, the magic of rock. However, as of late, what we refer to as “rock” is a bunch of cookie-cutter, test-tube quadruplets with the same terrible hair cut, whining about how they want to kill themselves because… they’re lonely and miserable with all the money they’ve been handed playing the same three chords over and over and spouting redundant nonsense with a mildly capable voice? Please, spare us.

Truly talented bands and musicians are, unfortunately, very few and far between these days; a good percentage of them haven’t even been heard of, and a good percentage of those bands will never be heard of, simply because they aren’t “mainstream”. Honestly, “mainstream rock” is a joke. Wasn’t the entire point of rock at its inception to go against the grain and “stick it to the man”, as Jack Black so succinctly put it? If so, how did we end up with pop divas and emo rock? Where did we go wrong? How did we go from Black Sabbath to the Jonas Brothers, or Janis Joplin to Britney Spears? And where in the bloody hell did techno come from? The last surviving rockers have valid questions, and we want answers.

Once upon a time, The Beatles ruled the world of music. It was a happier time for rock n’ roll, with absolute and utter perfection dripping from every note played and every word sung, and a true message being projected through beautifully poetic lyrics, telling us all to think for ourselves and embrace the love in our lives, regardless of where that love comes from. The Beatles paved the way for many other great musicians, such as The Doors, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, etc., and there was no shortage of spectacular music for the next two decades.

The Doors were more than happy to come right out and tell us to experiment with psychedelics in order to cleanse our own doors of perception, to better see that life is about living, as opposed to merely existing. Three classically trained musicians and a true poet planting this message in our minds was certainly the only way many people would understand the true meaning of life as Jim Morrison saw it.

With the 60’s giving birth to the 70’s came Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC, among others, and we were taken to the next level of rock n’ roll, where bands really showed their nuts. AC/DC in particular had the balls to put out albums like Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, with lyrics so shocking to most people at the time that it couldn’t even be released in America until 1981, the year after Bon Scott’s death. But did they care? No! Because it was about the music, about writing the way they wanted to write, not kissing ass in an attempt to appeal to the record companies. They couldn’t have cared less, and that’s rock n’ roll. Meanwhile, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath are effectively rocking with full orchestras, telling us to escape the brainwashed minds and pollution that we are all subjected to on a greater level year after year. It was, and still is, music worth listening to. However, people have always been afraid of those that think freely, because it’s different – it’s not the way we’ve been taught to think. Perhaps we have those weak-willed individuals to thank for all the atrocious pop music being pumped into the media over the last fifteen or twenty years.

Regardless of the objections from fearful non-believers, rock continued to thrive. The 80’s was the era of terrible dance music, spandex, and permed hair as far as the eye could see, but rock refused to die. Rather, it put up a hell of a fight with bands like Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Megadeth. And of course, we still had Pink Floyd and AC/DC releasing albums, keeping their fans and faithful rock n’ roll junkies satisfied through this somewhat bleak decade.

However bleak the 80’s may have seemed at the time, the 90’s proved to be the darkest of times for rock n’ roll. For reasons unbeknownst to anybody with musical taste, pop divas and boy bands started taking over the scene, infecting our screens and radios with this abomination they decided to call “music”. This particular variety of “music” was put out simply to appeal to teenaged girls because, let’s face it, they’re the ones most likely to sit and watch MTV all day, waiting to see their favorite music video, which they’ve probably already seen three hundred times anyway. My point is, everyone became way too involved with making the most money in the shortest time possible, taking from us the spectacular bands that continued making music year after year and leaving us with groups that fell apart after two or three years.

What I’m trying to say here is, we need a change; we need more musicians with talent. I know for a fact that people with musical taste still exist, and they, like myself, still listen to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, and are disappointed day after day because the only great bands worth seeing live anymore are the ones that have been around for twenty or forty years, and more disappointed still because many of the most influential musicians of the 60’s and 70’s are long since dead, and we will never again have the opportunity to see them perform.

So what’s the point of this diatribe, you ask? To open people up to the idea that music can once again be great. Don’t get me wrong, I have respect for those bands that make the music that I and many others do not care for, as they had a dream, and followed it, and now are living it. They are proof that believing in yourself is the most important trait. But I, as well as many other rock enthusiasts, am truly disappointed at the shortage of inspirational and soulful music that once filled the radio waves with an abundance of hope and love. We can save rock n’ roll, I know it for a fact. I’ve heard many talented yet unheard-of musicians in the last few months alone. They are out there; we just have to be intent on listening. We have to believe in them, and we have to make it clear that we the rockers want them heard! I refuse to believe that rock has died, and if we all ask for it, we will get true rock n’ roll back.

Regarding Martha Moxley and Michael Skakel

At around 11:30 pm on October 30, 1975, in Belle Haven of Greenwich, Connecticut, Martha Moxley was bludgeoned maliciously with a six-iron golf club, breaking it into 4 pieces, the handle being driven through her neck, which was the blow that actually killed her. Oddly enough, the handle was overlooked, and they reported it as missing, even though it was sticking out of her neck when the police arrived. She was found the next day by a friend in her own yard, hidden beneath a large tree with her pants pulled to her ankles. She had not been sexually assaulted, so this was probably done to humiliate her, even in death. For 22 years, the case remained a classic "whodunit", and possibly the most famous of them in American history.

When the police arrived, they had no idea how to handle a crime scene of this magnitude. There was a dog licking at the blood on Martha's body, and the crime scene photographer was ordered not to take any pictures of the body, which is standard procedure at the scene of a homicide. Right from the beginning, it was shotty police work. Although the very rare Tony Penna golf club used to murder Martha had matched a set found in the Skakel home (with the six-iron missing...), they first suspected that she had been murdered by a drifter who had found the club, beat her to death, and then fled after the attack. Of course, this assumption was entirely wrong. It was really more based on a hope that they could link it to someone outside of the incredibly wealthy community, so far removed from the likes of murder that no one believed one of their neighbors could possibly be capable of something so gruesome. However, this proved to be nothing more than a waste of time. The Greenwich Police Department wasted a lot of time while working this case.

Everyone in Martha's block but the Skakel's were suspects, and there is a very simple explanation for this: The Skakel's were of American royalty - they were Kennedy's by marriage. Michael and Thomas Skakel were both questioned briefly, and Michael was ruled out entirely as a suspect as he stated he had been out with his brothers and cousin and hadn't returned home until 11:30, at which time he went to bed, and Martha was believed to have died at about 9:30, an assumption based on dogs barking and raised voices heard by Martha's mother, Dorothy. But because Thomas Skakel's alibi was unclear, and because they had matched the broken club to the set in the Skakel home, they brought him in for a polygraph, which was inconclusive. Then six days later, he took another and passed. That was pretty much it for any of the Skakel's being suspects. So everyone else who had even spoken to Martha was taken in and questioned; a man who had installed drapes in the Moxley's home, a young man who had given Martha a ride home from school on one or two occasions, a neighborhood landscaper... even someone who had just taken a stroll on the night of the murder. Ed Hammond was one such suspect. He was Martha's next door neighbor, a 26-year-old grad student who still lived with his mother and was known to be something of a drinker. He was just a little odd, a bit of a loner, and because of that he suffered months of harassment from the police until, finally, he passed a polygraph test and was left alone.

The next to jump to the top of the suspect list was Ken Littleton, a 23-year-old tutor who had just started at the Skakel home on the afternoon of the murder. He had never even seen Martha, was not even aware of her existence, until they came asking questions. Like Ed, Ken also suffered months of harassment, even after quitting as the Skakel's tutor and moving to Nantucket to obtain a teaching position when he had been fired from the Brunswick Academy. Eventually, he was also let go from the Nantucket school when investigators kept showing up to ask questions. He was finally left alone when they couldn't link him with any of the evidence found at the crime scene. After another failed job in Florida followed by a failed marriage, he moved to Australia and was not heard from again. I hope for his sake that the scrutiny he faced from all the harassment has left him behind, and that he has a happy and relaxed life in Australia today. He deserves nothing less for what he was put through.

Over the next few months, police once again grew suspicious of Thomas. Neighbors had stated that he was known to have an erratic temper. At the age of four, he had fallen from a moving car and landed on his head, suffering a linear fracture to both sides of his skull. This injury resulted in some major emotional and mental problems. He had a violent temper, and was given to fits of rage. Not only that, but his story changed yet again. At first, he had told police that he and Martha had said goodnight at around 9:30, and he went inside to do homework. Tommy was a poor student, and it is highly unlikely that he would have retired early to finish an essay the night before a 3-day weekend. When questioned again, he said that he and Martha had fooled around outside for a while, and then said goodnight at closer to 10 pm. This was also a lie, but investigators wouldn't know that for several years.

In 1992, 17 years later, Michael Skakel finally surfaced as a major suspect. He maintained that he had been out with his brothers and cousin until 11:30, but instead of going to bed, he had gone window-peeping. He was particularly fond of a neighbor lady (whose name was never mentioned) who would walk around in the nude, but Michael claimed she disappointed him this night by sleeping on a sofa in her nightgown. He then stated he went to Martha's house and climbed a tree by her window. He threw pebbles at it to get her attention, and when no one came, he went home, arriving and climbing in his own window at about 12:30 am. They found his story strange, and became more and more suspicious of him. Why would be climb in his own window? The Skakel's gardener, Franz Wittine, told police that after the murders, Michael's siblings were wary around him - treating him as if he knew something, like they should be careful around him so as not to set him off. Other neighbors had stated that they noticed Michael's obsession with killing small animals, a very disturbing trait which is usually indicative of a killer in the making.

When Mark Fuhrman traveled to Greenwich in 1997 to write his book, "Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?", he came to the conclusion that Martha and Tommy had not said goodnight at 9:30 or 9:50 as Tommy had stated, but they had gone into the house to make out and fool around until about 11:30. When Martha left, Michael had just arrived home and saw his brother and Martha kissing each other goodnight. Michael, upon seeing this, became enraged. Once again, his older brother had stolen something he wanted, and he was just drunk enough to decide he would take his revenge on Martha. He followed her out with the six-iron golf club, and beat her to death in a fit of rage on her own property.

In the years following the murder, Michael was charged with a DUI and sent to a rehabilitation center/reform school for wealthy teens. He bounced around to different reform schools, always trying to run away and always being shuffled back by his father. It was at these reform schools that several of his fellow students heard Michael talking about the Moxley case, saying he was being shuffled around to all these different schools so the police wouldn't track him down. He is also claimed to have said that he did something bad in 1975 and the police were involved. A few students said he told them these things directly, and others stated that they merely overheard him saying these things.

In 2002, Michael Skakel was convicted of Martha's murder and sentenced to 20 years - life. He will be eligible for parole in 2013.

Here's what I have to say about it: Michael Skakel is a walking tragedy. Always picked on by his older siblings, his mother dying when he was just about twelve years old, and almost no adult supervision through his adolescent years bred an incredibly angry and unstable teenager. He is guilty of a one-time crime of passion, fueled by jealousy and rage, alcohol surely playing an important role that night. If I had to guess as to why Tommy gave false statements regarding that night, I would say it's because he knew what Michael had done (I think the entire family knew), and he was told by his father not to give Michael up. They were rich, so they could bury this family tragedy with their money. I can think of no other reason why Tommy would lie about what had happened that night. Most teen-aged boys would be proud to admit that they had been fooling around with a pretty girl for a couple of hours. But Martha's leaving at 11:30 made it obvious that Michael was the one responsible, so he had to change his story to make police believe an outsider had committed the crime. Rushton Skakel (their father) invited the police in for a quick search that Halloween, but refused them a thorough search of the grounds. He must have known something was up, if not exactly what was up, but didn't want to dirty the family name with a murder charge. That's my opinion, and that's partly what fascinates me so much about this case, aside from the fact that it was 28 years before anyone was convicted of the crime. I remember hearing about the Martha Moxley murder in 1995 or so, and I was baffled. How in the hell was no one convicted yet? Even then, at the tender age of 10, I could have told you it was one of the Skakel brothers, I just wasn't sure which one it was. Money was surely the element which made this such a long and drawn-out investigation. But justice was served in the end, and Martha's family can find peace in finally having some resolution.

On Charles Manson

Charles Manson is not only one of my many fascinations, he is also my obsession. Some women love Charlie because they find themselves attracted to his manipulative genius; some women simply love sociopathic and sadistic men, as is quite evident when you think of how many fell in love with Ted Bundy while he awaited execution, knowing full-well the number of young girls he savagely raped, bludgeoned to death, and raped again over a period of weeks until their bodies were too decomposed to sexually violate any further. And some women are simply dime-store psychologists, eager to learn what drives a human being to such sociopathic and sadistic tendencies. I am the latter, brimming with questions and athirst for answers.

Charlie is a person of great interest to me because he was able to coerce a legion of followers into believing he was God, not only winning their undying devotion, but breaking them into submission in the most literal sense of the word. His "family" not only readily accepted, but whole-heartedly believed everything he told them, from his belief that The Beatles were speaking to him through their music, to his crazy idea that there would be a great race war - Helter Skelter - which would force them to live in the bottomless pit under a body of water in the Mojave desert until the black man was ready to have whitey on top again; and when that happened, since all the other whites would be dead, Charlie and his followers would rule the world. Anyone reading this knows as well as I do that this is a most preposterous idea, and yet he convinced many people that it was absolute truth. What fascinates me is how he was able to do this.

All in all, Charlie only had between 2 and 5 truly devoted male followers at any given time, and, as they have stated, Charlie wanted them around to keep the girls there, as Charlie was not exactly a well-endowed man. Other men, mostly bikers, would come and go because they had the opportunity to have sex with any of the girls at any time they chose, but those of them that weren't scared away by the VD they contracted from the girls saw how dangerously crazy Charlie was and stopped coming back. I can only assume that his last 2 devoted male followers undoubtedly had murder in their hearts. The girls, on the other hand, were easier for Charlie to manipulate. He always chose girls that were drifting, running away from home, and dealing with "daddy issues". He would have one-on-one time with each of them, sitting them at a table across from him, telling them to mirror every move he made. This helped to break them down, and invariably made it easier for him to control them over time. It was a way for him to insert himself into the minds of these girls, so they literally would not make a move without first considering what Charlie would think, and whether or not he would approve. During these one-on-one visits, he would also help them to deal with their issues of inadequacy and inferiority, all the while making damn sure they knew that they were inferior to him.

After the mimicking and therapy sessions, he would preach on and on about loss of ego, which is a beautiful thing when done the right way, but by removing ego from these girls, it was even simpler to mold them into his little slaves. His idea of ridding them of ego was to deprogram and reprogram them to think as he thought and believe what he wanted them to believe. They would readily cook for him, clean for him, dumpster dive for food, and steal money to give to him. They were under the impression that it was all in the name of love, and maybe to them it was, but Charlie always made it very clear that he believed women to be nothing more than man's soulless servants, good for nothing more than sex and household chores.

As a group, he manipulated them into mindless killers by cutting them off from the rest of the world and playing "cowboy and Indian" games where they would play-kill one another. All the world's a stage, right? By doing this, he eventually disassociated them from reality, making it possible for them to actually stab someone to death as if it were nothing more than a game, with no feelings about it whatsoever. No regrets, no sympathy toward their victims, even as they stabbed a pregnant woman sixteen times. Another of Charlie's tactics, and probably the most influential, was to dose everyone with LSD and reenact the crucifixion. I don't care who you are, that would be a powerful thing to witness under the influence of acid. Not only that, but he would orchestrate large orgies while everyone was frying, telling them who they were to have sex with, and always tried, and failed, to bring everyone to orgasm simultaneously. This was another way to rid them of ego. He could tell any of them to perform oral sex on another in front of the entire group and new visitors, and they would do it without question. He probably could have told any one of them to defecate in front of a crowd and they would have happily done so.

For a man of nothing more than reform school education and seventeen years of incarceration in his background, this was a pretty big accomplishment. I know of many incredibly well-educated and intelligent people that certainly do not have the kind of power and influence it requires to establish a cult following. But Charlie did so with the greatest of ease. His followers could not question him, because to them, Charlie was love. Charlie was father. Charlie was God. He was in such complete control that he could tell his most loyal followers to kill for him, and they would do it without a second thought. And they did. It is speculated that the Manson family was responsible for some 35 murders, though only eight of them have been proven. Who knows how many skeletal remains one might find buried deep beneath the earth surrounding the old Spahn Ranch....

And one must remember, Charlie never killed anyone, at least as far as we can prove. He threatened several people at knife-point, as Charlie was turned on by fear, but he never took another human's physical life; he only robbed them of their ability to think for themselves, and convinced them to take the lives of "political piggies". Charlie was a terrifying person not because he committed heinous crimes, such as Richard Speck or Andrei Chikatilo, but because he makes you see the monster inside yourself, brooding deep beneath the surface. If he could coerce once-harmless choir girls into brutally killing eight innocent people, imagine what you might be capable of with the right influence....