Bob CollinsThere are worse ways to start a Monday than learning Charles Manson is dead.
The cult leader was a waste of good carbon who spread nothing but misery during his 83 years on the planet. It’s unseemly to speak ill of the dead, of course, but Manson is an exception.
So is Debra Tate’s reaction to the murderer’s death last evening.
Sharon Tate’s sister said a prayer and stuck a flower on the cross for Manson in her home, a simple act that shames those of us who might rather dance, the New York Daily News says.
“I’ve processed through all of my hate for him. Hate isn’t health. It won’t bring my sister back,” Tate said. “One could say I’ve forgiven him, but there’s a difference between forgiving and forgetting.”
She says she’s more concerned about his followers than Manson himself. They’re the ones who plunged knives into her pregnant sister.
“I sit across from these monsters many times a year, and I know very clearly they’re still capable of heinous acts. For that reason, I’ve dedicated myself to seeing they stay right where they are until they draw their last breath,” Tate said. “So they can’t hurt anyone else.”
“I feel totally that I’m a guardian of the world at large, guarding others from feeling the same kind of pain and grief that these perpetrators inflicted on us,” she says.
Leslie Van Houten, now 68, was granted a parole in September. She’s the one who scribbled “pigs” and other epithets using the victims’ blood.
All of the “family” members convicted of murder were sentenced to death, but were spared when the California Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972.
“If the penalty was put into effect then the case would have been done in the 1970s. There’s never really any closure,” the man who prosecuted the Manson family tells The Daily Beast.
