Charles Manson, portrait of a mass murderer at 77
THE state of his hair may have changed over the decades he has spent behind bars, but the chilling stare and swastika tattoo remain.
This is mass killer Charles Manson in his latest prison mugshot, released by the California prison authorities a week before his twelfth parole hearing.
It shows Manson, 77, with an unkempt beard and flowing grey hair. The last photos of him, released three years ago, revealed him with a shaven head and trimmed beard.
The tattoo on these mugshots appears to differ from that in pictures from the 1970s.
Manson has been in prison since he was convicted of seven murders carried out by his cult followers in 1969 in Los Angeles. The victims included Sharon Tate, the pregnant actress wife of movie director Roman Polanski. Prosecutors said Manson and his drug-fuelled followers, called the Family, were trying to start a race war.
A parole board refused his last bid for release in 2007, saying he continued to ‘pose an unreasonable danger to others and may bring harm to anyone he would come in contact with’.
He didn’t help his case by refusing to take part in the hearing – or in an accompanying psychological evaluation. Prosecutors say he has never expressed remorse and has not been a model inmate in state prison in Corcoran. In recent years, he was punished for threatening a guard and, last October, for possessing a weapon in the form of a sharpened pen.
The Tate family have published a book about the killings which they say was intended to convince authorities he must never be freed.
Last year he broke a 20-year public silence with an interview on the 40th anniversary of the Tate murders. He described himself as a ‘bad man who shoots people’.
Spouting the sort of mumbo jumbo that he gave in interviews in the 1980s, he said: ‘You have to accept yourself as God. You have to realise you’re just the Devil just as much as you’re God, that you’re everything and you’re nothing at all.’