So I agree with the person who wrote in and said the Manson killers should never be let out of jail.
Those type of people are not like us. They’re inhuman and don’t belong in society.

Al, I value your particular perspective … I would only argue that I think Manson’s followers were all too human, all too controlable, all too weak and desiring to be led, to be told there is a plan, to be told what to do and provided with the tools with which to get the job done. I think they represent us at our worst; they are symbols of the ultimate failure of our values and wishes for peace. But they were kids. All over the world, even to this day, kids have been pressed into the service of the most horrific deeds imaginable.

This was in so many ways a class battle, with natural born Have Not Charles Manson (whose biological father, like Sharon Tate’s, was a career soldier) waging his own war against the Haves. He didn’t know who was living in the Cielo House, he just knew they had more than he did. It’s just one tragic kink in the wiring of this tragedy, this outrage, that Manson’s “family” was composed in large part by ex-homecoming queens and star pupils and athletes, kids who had every opportunity to excel and prosper, as Sharon Tate did, but got lost along the way.

I do agree with you, though, that they should never be allowed out of prison. I grieve for the innocence they lost or threw away and I’m glad some of them have become model prisoners. But the society in which they became whole human beings is prison society. That’s where they have lived for most of their lives, that’s where they found themselves and that is where they belong. Forever.

Interesting post by Ken, who lived in Berkeley at the time. I find it so hard to believe that radicals living there would actually embrace Manson and his ilk!! Moral relativism at its best, I guess.

I read Tess of the D’Ubervilles, by Thomas Hardy, a couple of years ago, then sought out Roman Polanski’s movie version. Beautiful film, faithful to the novel, but at the film’s opening run of credits, were the simple words, “For Sharon”. I cried.

I’m all too aware of the deaths of Bryan and Kathryn Harvey and their two daughters, Stella and Ruby. I read the horrible facts of the case not long after they happened and I’ve lived with these people in my heart ever since. There re nights when I go to bed and think of them, and then I don’t sleep; I often think of Stella and Ruby while watching my own children play. This story is such the inverse of the Tate-La Bianca situation, though, because here the killers didn’t even have a scrap of mad reasoning urging them on. They wound up taking so little from the Harvey home that the police didn’t initially even consider robbery to have been a motive.

Some wonderful responses here, about which I’m very surprised and exceedingly grateful.

This article was deeply moving and reminds me of the first time I found out about a celebrities brutal death. It was Bob Crane and I don’t remember how old I was but I sure remember the horrifying feeling I got thinking that this man that I loved so much on television died that way. It was one of the first rites of passage into adulthood I had.