Charles Manson

On the night of August 8, 1969, followers of Charles Manson broke into a house on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles and murdered the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, along with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent. The next night they killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson had not been present at the first killings, but prosecutors showed that he had directed them, and he was convicted of murder and conspiracy.

He was born Charles Milles Maddox on November 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, at 4:40 in the afternoon, the time on his birth certificate. That hour gives him Taurus rising, a sign associated with stubbornness and an outwardly calm manner. His mother, Kathleen Maddox, was sixteen, and he spent much of his childhood with relatives or in reform schools. By his early thirties he had spent more than half his life in juvenile institutions and prisons.

His Sun, Venus and Jupiter are all in Scorpio and all in the seventh house, the house of other people and the bonds formed with them. Scorpio is intense, secretive and drawn to control. Astrologers who have examined the chart have pointed to that cluster as a picture of someone whose power lived entirely in his relationships, and Manson's influence over his followers, many of them young people who had left home, was the center of the case.

He was released from prison in 1967 and went to San Francisco during the Summer of Love, where he began gathering a group that came to be called the Family. They moved to Southern California, eventually settling at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a disused film set north of Los Angeles. Manson used drugs, isolation and a mixture of scripture and pop-music fantasy to control the group.

His Moon is in Aquarius in the tenth house, and Saturn, also in Aquarius, sits in the eleventh, the house of groups and shared ideology. He preached an apocalyptic vision he called "Helter Skelter," taking the name from a Beatles song, in which a race war would leave the Family to rule. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi argued at trial that the killings were meant to start it.

Mars and Neptune lie together in Virgo in the fifth house, and Uranus in Aries is in the twelfth. Manson and three of his followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, were sentenced to death in 1971. The sentences were commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty in 1972.

He spent the rest of his life in California prisons and was denied parole a dozen times. He died on November 19, 2017, at eighty-three. Bugliosi's book about the case, Helter Skelter, became one of the best-selling true crime books ever published, and Sharon Tate's sister Debra spent decades campaigning to keep the killers in prison.