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<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) &#8212; The seven grisly murders carried out by Charles Manson&#8217;s disciples during the summer of 1969 did more than turn the hippie cult leader into the leering face of evil on front pages across America.</p><p>To many, the bloodbath exposed the scary underside of the counterculture movement and seemed to mark the end of the peace-and-love era that burst upon the country just two years earlier during San Francisco&#8217;s Summer of Love.</p><p>&#8220;The &#8216;Summer of Love&#8217; was more a media event than anything else,&#8221; Todd Gitlin, one of the nation&#8217;s foremost historians of the 1960s, told The Associated Press in an email Wednesday. &#8220;But if hippie paradise was a myth, it was a myth that a lot of people believed in. Manson damaged it gravely.&#8221;</p><p>On Wednesday, Manson, now a grizzled, shuffling 82-year-old, lay hospitalized with an undisclosed illness after being taken from California&#8217;s Corcoran State Prison, where he was serving a life sentence, according to news reports that correction officials would not confirm, citing privacy laws.</p><p>His reappearance in the news conjured a turbulent period in U.S. history when the country seemed to be coming apart at the seams.</p><p>A petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood, Manson reinvented himself during the Summer of Love as a long-haired, Christ-like guru spouting Bible verses and Beatles lyrics.</p><p>After attracting a few dozen followers from San Francisco&#8217;s Haight-Ashbury district, many of them young women, runaways or other lost souls, he took them to an old movie ranch on the edge of Los Angeles that he transformed into a commune of sex, drugs and music.</p><p>On Aug. 9 and 10, 1969, he sent some of his devotees out on a murderous mission to two of Los Angeles&#8217; wealthiest neighborhoods, where they killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate, several of her society friends and others. Most of the victims, including coffee heiress Abigail Folger, were stabbed.</p><p>Tate&#8217;s husband, Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.</p><p>Authorities would learn that Manson had hoped the killings would touch off a race war. He had apparently gotten the idea from a twisted reading of the hard-rocking Beatles song &#8220;Helter Skelter.&#8221;</p><p>The slayings shocked the country with their savagery. Messages like &#8220;Pigs&#8221; and a misspelled &#8220;Healter Skelter&#8221; were scrawled in the victims&#8217; blood on their walls and doors, and the city was paralyzed in fear. Residents of Los Angeles&#8217; nearby Laurel Canyon neighborhood, then a haven for musicians, began locking their doors.</p><p>The youngest member of the original Manson Family, Leslie Van Houten, a teenage runaway and former homecoming princess from a Los Angeles suburb, said he had brainwashed her and others with sex, LSD, constant readings from the Bible, repeated playings of the Beatles&#8217; &#8220;White Album&#8221; and rambling lectures about triggering a revolution.</p><p>Like other surviving followers who took part in the killings, Van Houten is serving a life sentence for murder. A parole board recommended her release last year but was overruled by Gov. Jerry Brown.</p><p>Another Manson Family member, Lynette &#8220;Squeaky&#8221; Fromme, was never charged in the so-called Tate-La Bianca murders but went to prison later for trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975. Fromme, whose gun didn&#8217;t fire, was paroled in 2009 after 34 years behind bars.</p><p>After Manson and his followers were caught, the nation got a front-page look at his piercing, demonic stare and the Nazi swastika he carved into his forehead during his trial.</p><p>The killings &#8212; along with a deadly stabbing in December 1969 at a free concert headlined by the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco &#8212; contributed to the sense that the era of peace and love that seemed to reach a high point at Woodstock in the summer of 1969 was over, the dream turned into a nightmare.</p><p>But in her book &#8220;The White Album,&#8221; writer Joan Didion indicated people living in Los Angeles at that time shouldn&#8217;t have been that surprised.</p><p>&#8220;This mystical flirtation with the idea of &#8216;sin&#8217; &#8212; this sense that it was possible to go &#8216;too far,&#8217; and that many people were doing it &#8212; was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in.&#8221;</p><p>During a 2013 Rolling Stone interview, Manson had seemingly lost none of his attitude &#8212; &#8220;If I can touch you, I can kill you,&#8221; he told reporter Erik Hedegaard &#8212; but did not appear to be aging well.</p><p>&#8220;He&#8217;s an old man with a nice head of gray hair but bad hearing, bad lungs, and chipped-and-fractured, prison-dispensed bad dentures,&#8221; Hedegaard wrote, adding that Manson shuffled when he walked and used a cane.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">In this 1986 file photo, Charles Manson is seen in court. Amid reports that Charles Manson has been taken from his California prison cell to a hospital, a state corrections official would confirm only that the 82-year-old killer and cult leader was still alive. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017 that Manson had been hospitalized. (AP Photo/File) </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/web1_AP17004366021203.jpg</photo0><caption0>In this 1986 file photo, Charles Manson is seen in court. Amid reports that Charles Manson has been taken from his California prison cell to a hospital, a state corrections official would confirm only that the 82-year-old killer and cult leader was still alive. Both TMZ and the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2017 that Manson had been hospitalized. (AP Photo/File) </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By John Rogers and Scott Smith</p><p>Associated Press</p></bylineMeta></div>

Charles Manson’s cult left 7 dead and killed a dream, too