About Me
Born to the unwed Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati General Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio, Charles Manson was first known as "no name Maddox."No more than three weeks after his birth, he was Charles Milles Maddox.Although the record that includes that name indicates his mother was then eighteen, she was more likely sixteen.William Manson, named in the aforementioned record as Manson's father, was merely one in a line of men with whom his mother lived, though she went on to marry him at least long enough for her son to acquire his last name. Charles Manson's biological father appears to have been a "Colonel Scott," against whom Kathleen Maddox won an "agreed judgment" in a Kentucky bastardy suit; Manson seems never to have known him.According to a story supposedly transmitted by Manson himself, his mother, a heavy drinker and promiscuous, if not a prostitute, once sold him for a pitcher of beer to a childless waitress, from whom his uncle retrieved him a few days later. When she and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a service station in 1939, Manson was placed in the West Virginia home of an aunt and uncle who were very religious. Upon his mother's 1942 parole, Manson was returned to his mother and lived with her in run-down hotel rooms.A 1947 effort by Maddox to have her son placed in a foster home met without success when the court found no such home available; Manson was placed instead in Gibault School for Boys, Terre Haute, Indiana. After ten months, he fled from the place to his mother, who rejected him. This left him faced, not for the last time in his life, with the problem of securing a place to reside even though he had no money. He solved this by burglarizing a grocery store for cash that enabled him to rent a room.A string of burglaries of other stores, from one of which he stole a bicycle, ended when he was at last caught in the act and sent to an Indianapolis juvenile center. His escape after one day led to his recapture and his placement in Boys Town, from which he escaped with another boy four days after his arrival. The pair committed two armed robberies on their way to the home of the other boy's uncle.Caught during the second of two subsequent break-ins of grocery stores, Manson was sent to the Indiana School for Boys at age 13. After many failed tries, he escaped with two other boys in 1951. In Utah, having burglarized gas stations all along the way, the trio were caught driving to California in cars they had stolen. For the federal crime of taking a stolen car across a state line, Manson was sent to the Washington, D.C., National Training School for Boys. Here, testing showed that although his IQ was a respectable 109 (later tested at 121) and he had had four years of schooling, he was illiterate; a caseworker concluded he was aggressively antisocial.
