Vincent Bugliosi - Helter Skelter

Though Squeaky and Sandra were not allowed to visit or even correspond with Manson, a prison spokesman at the time said that the two of them would come to the prison about once a month “to inquire about how Manson was doing.” A friend of Squeaky and Sandra told Time magazine that the girls believed Manson’s imprisonment was part of a grand design, “that he would rise again some day, like Christ. They spend all their time preparing themselves for the day he rises.”

The Manson Family’s hatred of former President Nixon stems, of course, from Nixon’s headline-capturing declaration during the trial that he believed Manson to be guilty. In author Ed Sander’s best-selling book, The Family , he quotes a Manson therapist at Vacaville as saying Manson believed his own personal hex on Nixon had caused him to fall.

Manson’s personal medical records being confidential, the California Department of Corrections said they cannot confirm whether Manson in fact had, or presently has, the cancer.

Guns N’ Roses wasn’t the first rock group to record a Manson song. With minor changes in the lyrics (e.g., “exist” was changed to “resist,” “brother” to “lover”), Manson’s composition “Cease to Exist” was recorded by the Beach Boys and released on the B side of Bluebirds over the Mountain on December 8, 1968, under the new title “Never Learn Not to Love.” The single never got past number 61 on the charts, but both sides of the 45 rpm were included in 20/20, the Beach Boys’ last album with Capitol Records the following year. Although the Beach Boys never credited Manson as being the composer, Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, and Gregg Jakobson each confirmed to me it was Manson’s song, and in the 1986 biography of the Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys , author Steven Gaines acknowledges this.

Mike Rubin, a New York City writer who has been tracking the rock music scene in America for years, says that in addition to Guns N’ Roses, he knows of at least five other rock groups who have either recorded a song of Manson’s or a Manson tribute song within the past decade.

In early January of 1994, the industrial hard rock group Nine Inch Nails recorded their most recent album, Downward Spiral , at the former Tate residence. Trent Reznor, lead singer and songwriter for the band, says that although he called the jerry-built studio constructed for the recording of the album “Le Pig,” and although there are songs on the album like “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs” with confrontational lyrics (the word “pig” was printed in blood by the killers on the front door of the Tate residence and the words “death to pigs” on the living room wall of the LaBianca residence), this was all a coincidence—that the realtor through whom he leased the home failed to tell him it had been the scene of the Tate murders. The “Le Pig” studio was also used by a hard rock group called Marilyn Manson in which lead singer Mr. Manson recorded the vocals for its soon-to-be-released album Portrait of an American Family .