crimesandkillers:

Early life of Charles Manson

Born to an unmarried 16-year-old named Kathleen Maddox, in Cincinnati General Hospital, Ohio, Manson was first dubbed “no name Maddox.” Within weeks, he was Charles Milles Maddox. For a period after his birth, his mother was married to a laborer named William Manson, whose last name the boy was given. The boy’s biological father appears to have been a “Colonel Scott”, against whom Kathleen Maddox filed a bastardy suit that resulted in an agreed judgment in 1937. Possibly, the boy never really knew him.

Several statements in Manson’s 1951 case file from the seven months he would later spend at the National Training School for Boys in Washington, D.C., allude to the possibility that “Colonel Scott” was African American. These include the first two sentences of his family background section, which read: “Father: unknown. He is alleged to have been a colored cook by the name of Scott, with whom the boy’s mother had been promiscuous at the time of pregnancy.” When asked about these official records by attorney Vincent Bugliosi in 1971, Manson emphatically denied that his biological father had African American ancestry.

In the quasi-autobiography, Manson in His Own Words, Colonel Scott is said to have been “a young drugstore cowboy … a transient laborer working on a nearby dam project.” It is not clear what “nearby” means. The description is in a paragraph that indicates Kathleen Maddox gave birth to Manson “while living in Cincinnati,” after she had run away from her own home, in Ashland, Kentucky.

Manson’s mother was allegedly a heavy drinker. According to a family member, she once sold her son for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him some days later. When Manson’s mother and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia, service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the home of an aunt and uncle in McMechen, West Virginia. Upon her 1942 parole, Kathleen retrieved her son and lived with him in run-down hotel rooms. Manson himself later characterized her physical embrace of him on the day she returned from prison as his sole happy childhood memory.

In 1947, Kathleen Maddox tried to have her son placed in a foster home but failed because no such home was available. The court placed Manson in Gibault School for Boys, in Terre Haute, Indiana. After 10 months, he fled from there to his mother, who rejected him.

(via psychosadism)