The boy no one wanted
The boy’s mother, Kathleen, committed the robbery with her older brother, Luther, who smashed a bottle over a man’s head at a gas station before the pair stole his car.
While Luther received 10 years in prison, Kathleen received a lighter sentence of half that time. She was imprisoned in the West Virginia state prison in Moundsville, with the boy regularly having to visit her, despite frequently objecting to doing so.
When Kathleen was paroled after three years, the pair moved out of town to Charleston, although by this point, the boy had started skipping classes in school.
Kathleen, now an alcoholic, would go missing for days at a time, leaving the boy with a variety of babysitters was unable to deal with the boy’s issues herself, and instead decided to send him to reform school.
However, reform school didn’t seem to suit the boy, who bounced from one to another, constantly finding himself in trouble. He would later go on to claim in an interview that, at the age of nine, he set one of his schools on fire.
A life of crime begins
At the age of 13, the boy was placed into the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The school, for male delinquents, was run by catholic priests and focused on strict punishments, including beatings with wooden paddles and leather straps for even the most minor misdeeds.
It wasn’t long before the boy fled Gibault.
The first time, he fled back to his mother, only for her to immediately send him straight back. The second time he fled, this time to Indianapolis, he began committing burglaries to support himself, eventually being caught and sent to another juvenile delinquent school in Omaha, Nebraska.
Only four days into his time in Omaha, the boy and a classmate acquired a gun and stole a car, committing two armed robberies on their way to the classmate’s uncle’s house in Peoria, Illinois. The uncle would turn out to be a professional thief, taking the two boys on as apprentices.
Two weeks later, however, the boy was arrested and was linked to two further armed robberies during the following investigation.
A spell at another reform school, the Indiana Boys School, saw the boy endure the most traumatic period of his life up until that point, reportedly being r**ed numerous times by other students as a staff member watched and encouraged the s**ual assault.
The boy would run away from school on 18 occasions. He was eventually arrested in Utah, en route to California, for driving a stolen car across state lines.
A psychiatrist would evaluate the boy as being ‘aggressively anti-social.’
The man who could pull people in
In 1952, the boy was arrested after being discovered r**ing another boy at knifepoint.
While serving time at the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Virginia, he was caught committing ‘eight serious disciplinary offenses, including three homos**ual acts’ towards other inmates.
It would not be long before a transfer to a maximum security reformatory at Chillicothe, Ohio, would take place.
The plan was for the boy, now a man, to remain there until his 21st birthday in November 1955. He would, in fact, be released early, in May 1954, remarkably, following good behavior. He was to go and live with his aunt and uncle in West Virginia.
Less than a year later, however, the man was now married to a hospital waitress and
bound for Los Angeles with his pregnant wife in a stolen car. After being caught with the stolen car, the man had his parole revoked and was sentenced to spend three years at Terminal Island, in LA.
The man’s son was born while he was in prison, and his wife and son would visit him regularly while he was incarcerated. The visits would cease, with the man discovering his wife, Rosalie, had begun living with another man, receiving a decree of divorce in September 1958.
It was around this time that the man began displaying signs of being able to pull people under his influence. An ability that would soon become his calling card as he set out on one of the most disturbing and sickening crime sprees in American history.
Two months after his divorce, he was p**ping out a 16-year-old girl, before marrying a p***titute, who he then moved to New Mexico with, along with another woman, who he also intended to p**p out.
However, his plan to set up a p***titution ring was short lived, as the man was once again arrested, this time for violating The Mann Act – a felony related to interstate transportation of women and girls for the purposes of prostitution – and he was promptly returned to LA to serve a 10-year prison sentence that had previously been suspended, for trying to cash a forged US treasury check.
It was during his time at McNeil Island penitentiary in Washington that the boy in the photo really began to become more and more monstrous.
He engaged in hypnosis with his fellow inmates, including the actor Danny Trejo, who has since talked at length about the hypnosis sessions in interviews. His ability to hypnotize would soon make even more sense once he was released from prison, set to embark on his grisly, unspeakable master plan of murder.
The chilling prophecy that changed everything
The man’s mental state had unraveled by this point, as he began to amass a band of followers, prophesying that The Beatles were speaking directly to him through their songs.
One in particular, ‘Helter Skelter,’ would form the basis of his monstrous masterplan of the same name.
The man told his followers they would reside in a secret underground desert city after an apocalyptic race war, in which the Black population would eviscerate the white population.
A white supremacist, the man claimed that the Black population would not be intelligent enough to survive on their own. This, he claimed, would allow the family to rise from the underground and rule over the Black population on earth.
The fame that never came
Prior to ‘Helter Skelter,’ the man had sought fame and fortune of a very different, less murderous kind.
He had obsessed over becoming a rock and roll star, attempting to make a name for himself on the West Coast of America and its burgeoning music scene. He would even befriend Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson.
No fame or fortune materialized, though. Feeling dejected and rejected, resentment set in, and vengeance was soon to be meted out.