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Charles Manson has thrown a long shadow over popular culture, from the true crime genre to pop music and film. For all that the horrific crimes committed by his “Family” brought the façade of the ‘Summer of Love’ crashing to Earth in an orgy of blood and sadism, at heart Manson remained a tawdry, familiar breed of criminal: a pimp.
That was, after all, the conviction that (after years in and out of juvie and then adult prisons, for offences including for raping another boy at knifepoint) sent him to the United States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington, where he made formative prison friendships.
In 1960, Manson was busted on a Mann Act rap: transportation an under-age girl across state lines for prostitution or other immoral purposes and sent to McNeil Island. There, he became friends with the former leader of the Ma Barker gang, Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis. Besides teaching the young jailbird to play guitar (something Manson would later use to ingratiate himself to the LA elite), Karpis taught Manson the finer points of running a stable of girls. Lessons he would come to use in the ‘Family’ days.
Before that, though, Manson had an actual family. A family who also lived under his dark shadow.
Charles Manson Jr. was born in 1956, one year after his father married Rosalie Jean Willis in Ohio. She was 15 years old at the time and working as a waitress in a hospital whereas Manson was already 20 years old.
Already, Manson’s predilection for underage girls was at work, as was his escalating criminality. As Rosalie entered the last months of her pregnancy, her husband wound up on probation, then in prison yet again. After the birth of her son, Charles Manson Jr., Willis filed for divorce and later remarried Jack White. The couple had two more children, Jesse J. and Jed White.
Charles Jr., who never much cared for his jailbird biological father, was horrified when the news of the Manson Family killings broke. He changed his name to Jay White.
But tragedy continued to plague his family. His stepbrother Jed was killed in an accidental shooting while still a pre-teen, in 1971. The shooter was his 11-year-old friend. Fifteen years later, his other stepbrother, Jesse J., died of a drug overdose in Houston. His friend discovered the body in a car around dawn after a long, seemingly fun, night of drinking at a bar.
Perhaps inevitably, tragic, untimely death also came for Jay White, the former Charles Manson Jr.
Jay White committed suicide on June 29, 1993. According to CNN, the motivation was never entirely clear, though a combination of distress over who his father was and a need to distance himself from his own son in an effort to protect him is largely thought to be at the foundation […]
His own child, a kickboxing cage fighter named Jason Freeman, has fortunately managed to process the two generations of trauma that preceded him.
Rather than succumb to the Manson “family curse”, as he called it, Jason Freeman channelled his own frustration with his biological heritage into motivation to succeed.
He recalled one day in an eighth-grade history class when his teacher “was talking about Charles Manson, and I’m looking around like, are there people staring at me?”
“I’m personally, I’m coming out,” he announced in 2012, referring to his effort to neutralize the toxicity of the Manson name.
Freeman, a 6-foot-2 kickboxer, said he was frequently bullied as a child due to his biological connection to the notorious criminal. Forbidden to discuss his grandfather at home or in school, even his grandmother, Rosalie Willis, ordered him never to mention her late former husband.
“He just couldn’t let it go,” said Freeman of his father, Charles Manson Jr. “He couldn’t live it down. He couldn’t live down who his father was.”
Rather than denial, Freeman tried to lance the boil of the Manson name, including by trying to reconnect with his infamous grandfather.
“From time to time, every now and then, he’d say ‘I love you,’” Freeman said of his conversations with Manson. “He’d say it back to me. Maybe a couple times he said it first. It took a while to get to that point though, trust me.”
Jason Freeman engaged in a battle for the rights to his grandfather’s body and estate against his biological uncle, Valentine Michael Manson (later Michael Brunner, born to Mary Brunner). He eventually won the rights to Manson’s body and he had the cult leader cremated and scattered. He hopes to win the rights to his grandfather’s estate so that he can sell his memorabilia for charity.
“I don’t want to be viewed for the actions of my grandfather,” he added. “I don’t want the backlash from society. I walk a different walk.”
As does Michael Brunner. Raised by his grandparents, whom he called “the greatest people on the face of the Earth”, he is said to have torn up every letter his father ever wrote to him.
Mention of Michael Brunner brings up another oddity – perhaps a fortunate one – of Manson’s biological legacy. Despite his legendary sexual voraciousness and an aversion to contraception, Manson is only known to have fathered three children. The third, Charles Luther Manson, born to Manson’s second wife in 1959, changed his name, just as his stepbrothers did. Jay Charles Warner, as he renamed himself, vanished from the public spotlight altogether. It is believed that he died in 2007, two years before his 50th birthday.
