1971: Charles Manson Sentenced to Death

On this day the infamous Charles Manson and three of his associates were sentenced to death by a court in California. 

They committed multiple murders, including the killing of a famous actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski, who was in the ninth month of pregnancy. Manson and his associates made the so-called Manson Family, a kind of a cult that emerged as a mixture of hippie culture and sectarian extremism.

Although they were called a “family”, they were in fact not related. Manson was the leader of the group, a guru of sorts, and he believed that an apocalyptic war between blacks and whites is approaching. He took his prophecies from Beatles songs, especially the White Album released in 1968. That war Manson called “Helter Skelter”, which is the name of one of the songs on that album.

Agreeing to Manson’s instructions, members of his “family” committed violent murders that he believed were the beginning of the “Helter Skelter” war. Although Manson and his associates were sentenced to death on this day, the following year the death penalty was abolished in California, so their verdicts were automatically commuted to life imprisonment. Charles Manson still lives in Corcoran Prison in central California, and is currently 80 years old.