The death of Charles Manson, leader of a murderous cult of outcasts who killed nine people in Southern California in 1969, has revived talk of his place in popular culture infamy.
It also has reminded some that Manson has an Illinois connection.
Manson, who died on Sunday at age 83, spent a few days or perhaps weeks in downstate Peoria in March 1949. He was charged with burglarizing a grocery store and breaking into a car dealership.
Now a debate is brewing over what to do with the only tangible remnants of Manson’s legacy in Peoria — three letters he wrote in 1992 to a local newspaper columnist exploring Manson’s Peoria connection.
“I don’t know if there’s any reason for me to hold onto these things,” Peoria Journal Star columnist Phil Luciano said a day after Manson’s death. “It just seems a little weird. Now that he’s dead, I don’t have any use for them.”
Manson was a career criminal who, after parole, landed in San Francisco in 1967 and later in Los Angeles. He was trying to fashion himself as a singer-songwriter and formulated a charismatic mix of philosophies to recruit drifters — many of whom were young women — into the collection that became known as the Manson family.
Using the women as bait, he was able to associate with prominent figures in Southern California’s music scene, including the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson.
Two women and one man in Manson’s group butchered five people in the Hollywood Hills home where actress Sharon Tate resided with her husband, director Roman Polanski, who was in Europe at the time. The next night, Manson followers murdered a Los Angeles couple in their home.
Influenced in part by his twisted interpretation of the Beatles’ song, “Helter Skelter,” Manson hoped the murders would spark a race war, authorities have maintained. Although he was not present for all seven murders, Manson and others in his group were convicted in 1971 and condemned to death. Those sentences were reduced to life.
Twenty years after that conviction, Luciano came across a mention of Manson’s Peoria stint while paging through a “Psycho Killers” comic book series that had been sent to the Journal Star. Curious, Luciano found information in newspaper archives but no police record of Manson’s time in the central Illinois city.
In 1992, he wrote to Manson, who responded in what Luciano described as three rambling but unremarkable letters. Some of his writings were clear; others were impossible to understand, Luciano said.
Manson did recall his Peoria days, saying he ran from Boys Town, stole a car in Lincoln, Neb., and traveled to Idaho before returning to the Midwest.
“I stole a hearse, (a) meat wagon, (and) ran with a kid,” he wrote. “Went to the Peoria housing projects, where his uncle ran the numbers out of Chicago.”
He talked about tossing a safe off a bridge over the railroad tracks and doing “a lot of underworld stuff. That town’s always been good to me,” Manson wrote. “Yeah, I did a lot of growing up in that town — fast growing up. … It may sound foolish, but that town has always been sweet for some reason.”
He acknowledged getting caught and sent to Indiana for reform school, but said he returned to Peoria.
Manson even tried to persuade Luciano to get him access to a phone in those pre-cellphone days. “If I had a phone we could do a lot of good,” Manson said. Luciano declined.
Following Manson’s death, Luciano wrote a column in Tuesday’s Journal Star with the headline, “Should I burn my letters from Charles Manson?” It sparked dozens of comments on social media and in emails to the veteran columnist. A local history Facebook page of the Peoria Public Library also posted the column and received waves of responses.
Some have urged Luciano to sell the letters. Known as “murderabilia,” they might bring $200 each, but Luciano is not interested in making money off Manson. Some readers have suggested selling the letters and contributing the money to a charity, specifically one that helps murder victims’ families. Some have called on Luciano to burn them.
“If you sell them,” one commentator wrote, “make sure whoever buys them ends up on a watch list.”
Right now, Luciano said, he’s leaning toward donating them to Peoria’s public library or another institution.
Like many in Peoria, the library is unsure about the letters. Christopher Farris, who runs the library’s local history Facebook page, said he appreciates the historical value of the letters, but “there’s not a clear-cut answer here.”
He spoke with the library’s director, who said the library will decide what to do if Luciano formally offers the letters.
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