and there he met and married a 17-year-old waitress. They had a son before moving to California. The marriage ended in divorce in 1958. In 1960 Manson was imprisoned for 10 years for a variety of offenses including procuring, fraud, and theft. He remained in prison until 1967. He was terrified of the outside world, and he gravitated toward Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, then an area where the hippie community was centered. The atmosphere of free love and drug use was something Manson adapted to thoroughly, and he soon set up a commune where he was the indisputable leader. His first followers were Mary Brunner and Lunette Fromme, soon joined by Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel. This was the beginning of the Manson Family (184-198).
While in prison, Manson had learned to play the guitar, and after his release he was obsessed with the idea of breaking into the field of pop music. He and the family moved to Los Angeles to pursue this idea, and he had limited success, including (by his account) selling two songs to the Beach Boys and recording a few songs in a studio on his own. A man named Richard Kaplan gave Manson a ranch behind the better-known Spahn ranch, and the family moved there (Wilson, 1990, 497-499). Manson was reviewed many times in prison, and there is a body of analytical reports on him produced from that period. One report stated that he had a numb e of fanatical interests. Several of these are known, though they were not indicated in the prison report. The guitar was one, and he had also joined Scientology while in prison, though he would later tire of it as he did so many things in his life. He also became obsessed with the Beatles, and one of the reasons for this was the jealousy they engendered in him (197).
Manson had an incredible power over the members of the Family. He had decided to be "bigger than the Beatles" and bought a Volkswagen buds to take the Family on a tour of the southern st...