If that’s my biological mother, who’s my biological father? George and Elsie never lied to him, Brunner said, but he was never good with names, would forget who his father was, would ask and ask and ask. Still, he said, he knew that the woman who called every Sunday from a California prison where she was serving time for armed robbery was his mother -which eventually led to questions, he said. Because of the adoption, Mary was legally his sister his aunts and uncles were his cousins. Brunner called his grandparents Mom and Dad. “You know, so I wasn’t being pestered or bullied or that sort of thing, which didn’t happen much.”īut his small-town Wisconsin childhood was fraught with complications. “I think they wanted to get rid of the Manson name because of school and to make me a little more normal,” he said. It was like having an “extra birthday,” he said. When his adoption was official in 1976, Brunner’s grandparents threw a party. They “gave me what I needed to survive and thrive, and pushed me through school and pushed me through sports and made sure that I was doing the right thing,” Brunner said in a wide-ranging interview in early July. George and Elsie Brunner eventually adopted the boy, gave him their name and raised him as their son. LaBianca, thereby causing the white community to turn against the black man and ultimately lead to a civil war between blacks and whites, a war Manson foresaw the black man winning.”īy the time Manson and his crew had been convicted and sentenced to death, “Pooh Bear” was living with his maternal grandparents in Eau Claire, Wis. That motive, he said at the time, “was to ignite ‘Helter Skelter,’ in other words, start the black-white revolution by making it look like the black people had murdered the five Tate victims and Mr. Bugliosi described Manson as a “dictatorial leader” whose followers were “slavishly obedient to him,” and called Manson’s principal motive “almost as bizarre as the murders themselves.” In his opening statement to the jury in the nine-month trial, chief prosecutor Vincent T. The next night, “family” members slaughtered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their Los Feliz home and desecrated their corpses. Four others - Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski and Steven Parent - died that night at the hands of Manson’s followers. She was 8½ months pregnant and had begged to save her unborn son. Watson had a gun.Įarly the next morning, actress Sharon Tate was dead, stabbed 16 times and trussed to a beam in her living room. That was the night Charles Manson dispatched Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to a house on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon. County’s Sybil Brand Institute for Women, having just been arrested for using stolen credit cards. His mother was behind bars, locked up in L.A. 8, 1969, Brunner - born Valentine Michael Manson, aka Sunstone Hawk or Pooh Bear - was 14 months old. I mean, this isn’t something that you run around and brag about.” “I’m still not looking for any kind of celebrity. “I guess I’m here now for, just for posterity, let people know where I’m standing now,” Brunner says. When you have decided it is time to set the record straight. When the man who shares your nose and your grin persuaded his disciples to commit nine gruesome murders in what prosecutors argued was an effort to incite a race war on orders imagined to be encoded in the Beatles’ “White Album,” a scenario they referred to as “Helter Skelter.” Very little is easy when you’re the only son of America’s most famous cult leader and Mary Theresa Brunner, the first member recruited into the Manson “family,” as his followers were known.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |