Charles Manson

Charles Manson Net Worth 2025: Earnings & Career

Charles Manson, infamous for his role as the leader of the Manson Family, was a complex figure with a career spanning criminal activities and music. This article explores his biography, career, and net worth, providing insights into his life and the ongoing legal battles over his estate.

Personal Profile About Charles Manson

Age, Biography, and Wiki

Charles Milles Manson, born on November 12, 1934, was an American criminal, cult leader, and musician. He gained notoriety in the late 1960s for leading the Manson Family, a group responsible for several brutal murders, including those of actress Sharon Tate and others. Manson died on November 19, 2017, at the age of 83 while serving a life sentence.

Occupation Environmentalist
Date of Birth 12 November 1934
Age 90 Years
Birth Place Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
Horoscope Scorpio
Country U.S
Date of death 19 November, 2017
Died Place Bakersfield, California, U.S.

Height, Weight & Measurements

There is no specific information available about Charles Manson's height or weight in the provided search results.

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Weight
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Hair Color

Dating & Relationship Status

Manson had several relationships throughout his life, including with Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins, both of whom were part of the Manson Family. He also fathered a child through rape in 1967, according to his son's claims. In 2014, Manson nearly married Afton Elaine Burton, but the marriage did not occur.

Manson's Ohio birth certificate simply lists his name as "Manson." His biological father appears to have been Colonel Walker Henderson Scott, Sr. of Catlettsburg, Kentucky, against whom Maddox filed a paternity suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Scott worked intermittently in local mills, and had a local reputation as a con artist. He allowed Maddox to believe that he was an army colonel, although "Colonel" was merely his given name. When Maddox told Scott that she was pregnant, he informed her that he had been called away on army business; after several months she realized he had no intention of returning. Manson never knew his biological father.

In August 1934, before Manson's birth, Maddox married William Eugene Manson (1909–1961), a laborer at a dry cleaning business. Maddox often went on drinking sprees with her brother Luther Elbert Maddox (1916–1950), leaving Charles with babysitters. Maddox and her husband divorced on April 30, 1937, after William alleged "gross neglect of duty" by Maddox. Charles retained William's last name of Manson. On August 1, 1939, Kathleen and Luther were arrested for assault and robbery, and sentenced to five and ten years of imprisonment, respectively.

Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia. His mother was paroled in 1942. Manson later characterized the first weeks after she returned from prison as the happiest time in his life. Weeks after her release, Manson's family moved to Charleston, West Virginia, where he continually played truant and his mother spent her evenings drinking. She was arrested for grand larceny, but not convicted. The family later moved to Indianapolis, where Maddox met alcoholic Lewis Woodson Cavender Jr. (1916–1979) through Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and married him in August 1943.

Manson fled home to his mother and spent Christmas 1947 at his aunt and uncle's house in West Virginia. However, his mother returned him to Gibault. Ten months later, he ran away to Indianapolis. It was there, in 1948, Manson committed his first documented crime by robbing a grocery store, at first to simply find something to eat. However, Manson found a cigar box containing just over a hundred dollars, which he used to rent a room on Indianapolis' Skid Row and to buy food.

In January 1955, Manson married a hospital waitress named Rosalie "Rosie" Jean Willis (January 28, 1939 – August 21, 2009). Around October, about three months after he and his pregnant wife arrived in Los Angeles in a car he had stolen in Ohio, Manson was again charged with a federal crime for taking the vehicle across state lines. After a psychiatric evaluation, he was given five years' probation. Manson's failure to appear at a Los Angeles hearing on an identical charge filed in Florida resulted in his March 1956 arrest in Indianapolis. His probation was revoked, and he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment at Terminal Island in Los Angeles.

While Manson was in prison, Rosalie gave birth to their son, Charles Manson Jr. (April 10, 1956 – June 29, 1993). During his first year at Terminal Island, Manson received visits from Rosalie and his mother, who were now living together in Los Angeles. In March 1957, when the visits from his wife ceased, his mother informed him Rosalie was living with another man. Less than two weeks before a scheduled parole hearing, Manson tried to escape by stealing a car. He was given five years' probation and his parole was denied.

Manson received five years' parole in September 1958, the same year in which Rosalie received a decree of divorce. By November, he was pimping a 16-year-old girl and receiving additional support from a girl with wealthy parents. In September 1959, he pleaded guilty to a charge of attempting to cash a forged U.S. Treasury check, which he claimed to have stolen from a mailbox; the latter charge was later dropped. He received a ten-year suspended sentence and probation after a young woman named Leona Rae "Candy" Stevens, who had an arrest record for prostitution, made a "tearful plea" before the court that she and Manson were "deeply in love . . . and would marry if Charlie were freed". Before the year's end, Stevens did marry Manson. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who later secured Manson's murder conviction, believed the marriage may have been so she could not be required to testify against Manson.

Manson spent a year trying unsuccessfully to appeal the revocation of his probation. In July 1961, he was transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. There, he took guitar lessons from Barker–Karpis gang leader Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, and obtained from another inmate the contact information of Phil Kaufman, a producer at Universal Studios in Hollywood. Among Manson's fellow prisoners during this time was future actor Danny Trejo, with the two participating in several hypnosis sessions together. Manson's mother moved to Washington State to be closer to him during his McNeil Island incarceration, working nearby as a waitress.

In 1967, Brunner became pregnant by Manson. On April 15, 1968, she gave birth to their son, whom she named Valentine Michael, in a condemned house where they were living in Topanga Canyon. She was assisted by several of the young women from the fledgling Family. Brunner, like most members of the group, acquired a number of aliases and nicknames, including: "Marioche", "Och", "Mother Mary", "Mary Manson", "Linda Dee Manson" and "Christine Marie Euchts".

Parents
Husband Rosalie Willis (m. 1955-1958) Leona Stevens (m. 1959-1963)
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Children

Net Worth and Salary

At the time of his death, Charles Manson's net worth was estimated to be around $400,000. However, his estate is now valued between several hundred thousand dollars and $1 million, primarily due to items like guitars, artwork, and original songs. Manson was not legally permitted to profit from his crimes or image after his conviction in 1971.

Career, Business, and Investments

Manson's career was marked by both his criminal activities as the leader of the Manson Family and his musical endeavors. He was associated with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and had several original songs recorded by notable bands. Despite being unable to profit from his image or music directly, Manson allegedly earned money through the sale of paintings, TV shirts, photos, and interviews, although these claims are based on statements from his estranged son.

Before the murders, Manson had spent more than half of his life in correctional institutions. While gathering his cult following, he was a singer-songwriter on the fringe of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly through a chance association with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, who introduced Manson to record producer Terry Melcher. In 1968, the Beach Boys recorded Manson's song "Cease to Exist", renamed "Never Learn Not to Love" as a single B-side, but Manson was uncredited. Afterward, he attempted to secure a record contract through Melcher, but was unsuccessful.

For a time, Manson had a job delivering messages for Western Union in an attempt to live honestly. However, he quickly began to supplement his wages through theft. He was eventually caught, and in 1949 a sympathetic judge sent him to Boys Town, a juvenile facility in Omaha, Nebraska. After four days at Boys Town, he and fellow student Blackie Nielson obtained a gun and stole a car. They used it to commit two armed robberies on their way to the home of Nielson's uncle in Peoria, Illinois. Nielson's uncle was a professional thief, and when the boys arrived he allegedly took them on as apprentices. Manson was arrested two weeks later during a nighttime raid on a Peoria store. In the investigation that followed, he was linked to his two earlier armed robberies. He was sent to the Indiana Boys School, a strict reform school outside of Plainfield, Indiana.

Manson received permission from Roger Smith to move from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury District. He first took LSD and would use it frequently during his time there. David Smith, who had studied the effects of LSD and amphetamines in rodents, wrote that the change in Manson's personality during this time "was the most abrupt Roger Smith had observed in his entire professional career." Manson also read the book Stranger in a Strange Land, a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. Inspired by the burgeoning free love philosophy in Haight–Ashbury during the Summer of Love, Manson began preaching his own philosophy based on a mixture of Stranger in a Strange Land, the Bible, Scientology, Dale Carnegie and the Beatles, which quickly earned him a following. He may have also borrowed some of his philosophy from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, whose members believed Satan would become reconciled to Jesus and they would come together at the end of the world to judge humanity.

Social Network

Charles Manson did not have an active social network presence, as he spent most of his life in prison. His notorious status has led to a lasting impact on popular culture, with references in films like "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" and mentions by artists such as Marilyn Manson.

Less than a month after his 1967 release, Manson moved to Berkeley from Los Angeles, which could have been a probation violation. Instead, after calling the San Francisco probation office upon his arrival, he was transferred to the supervision of criminology doctoral researcher and federal probation officer Roger Smith. Until the spring of 1968, Smith worked at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which Manson and his family came to frequent. Roger Smith, as well as the HAFMC's founder David Smith, received funding from the National Institutes of Health, and reportedly the CIA, to study the effects of drugs like LSD and methamphetamine on the counterculture movement in San Francisco's Haight–Ashbury District. The patients at the HAFMC became subjects of their research, including Manson and his expanding group of mostly female followers, who came to see Roger Smith regularly.

Education

The search results do not provide specific information about Charles Manson's educational background.

In conclusion, Charles Manson's life was a mix of darkness and creativity, leaving behind a legacy that continues to fascinate and horrify. His net worth at the time of his death was relatively modest, but his estate's value has grown due to the enduring interest in his life and crimes.

Charles Milles Manson (Maddox; November 12, 1934 – November 19, 2017) was an American criminal, cult leader, and musician who led the Manson Family, a cult based in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some cult members committed a series of at least nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. In 1971, Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people, including the film actress Sharon Tate. The prosecution contended that, while Manson never directly ordered the murders, his ideology constituted an overt act of conspiracy.

In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Manson stated that when he was aged 9, he set his school on fire. He also got repeatedly in trouble for truancy and petty theft. Although there was a lack of foster home placements, in 1947, at the age of 13, Manson was placed in the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, a school for male delinquents run by Catholic priests. Gibault was a strict school, where punishment for even the smallest infraction included beatings with either a wooden paddle or a leather strap. Manson ran away from Gibault and slept in the woods, under bridges and wherever else he could find shelter.

At the Indiana Boys School, other students allegedly raped Manson with the encouragement of a staff member, and he was repeatedly beaten. He ran away from the school eighteen times. Manson developed a self-defense technique he later called the "insane game", in which he would screech, grimace and wave his arms to convince stronger aggressors that he was insane. After a number of failed attempts, he escaped with two other boys in February 1951. The three escapees robbed filling stations while attempting to drive to California in stolen cars until they were arrested in Utah. For the federal crime of driving a stolen car across state lines, Manson was sent to Washington, D.C.'s National Training School for Boys. On arrival he was given aptitude tests which determined that he was illiterate but had an above-average IQ of 109. His case worker deemed him aggressively antisocial.

Manson began studying Scientology while incarcerated with the help of fellow inmate Lanier Rayner, and in July 1961 listed Scientology as his religion. A September 1961 prison report argues that Manson "appears to have developed a certain amount of insight into his problems through his study of this discipline". Another prison report in August 1966 stated that Manson was no longer an advocate of Scientology. Upon his release in 1967, Manson traveled to Los Angeles where he reportedly "met local Scientologists and attended several parties for movie stars". Manson completed 150 hours of auditing. His "right hand man", Bruce Davis, worked at the Church of Scientology headquarters in London from November 1968 to April 1969.

Shortly after relocating to San Francisco, Manson became acquainted with Mary Brunner, a 23-year-old graduate of University of Wisconsin–Madison. Brunner was working as a library assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, and Manson, until that point making his living by panhandling, moved in with her. Manson then met teenaged runaway Lynette Fromme, later nicknamed "Squeaky", and convinced her to live with him and Brunner. According to a second-hand account, Manson overcame Brunner's initial resistance to him bringing other women in to live with them. Before long, they were sharing Brunner's residence with eighteen other women. Manson targeted individuals for manipulation who were emotionally insecure and social outcasts.

Sometime around 1967, Manson began using the alias "Charles Willis Manson". Before the end of summer, he and some of his followers began traveling in an old school bus they had adapted, putting colored rugs and pillows in place of the many seats they had removed. They eventually settled in the Los Angeles areas of Topanga Canyon, Malibu and Venice along the coast.

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