Convicted mass murderer Charles Manson has been removed from prison and hospitalized. Manson was transported to hospital on Tuesday from Corcoran State Prison in California for an undisclosed illness, TMZ reports.
The 82-year-old is being treated at a hospital in Bakersfield, which is just over an hour away from the prison.
A source told the LA Times Manson was seriously ill.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation would not comment on whether he had been hospitalized given inmate security but said Manson was ‘alive’.
The prison has medical facilities to treat inmates requiring urgent or emergency care as well as in-patient hospital stays.
‘In general, inmates are sent to outside hospitals if they need surgical services, emergency care, or diagnostic services of an acute nature,’ said Joyce Hayhoe, a spokeswoman for the federal receiver who controls prison medical care.
‘These services are not provided in state prison facilities.’
Manson has been behind bars for more than four decades after being put away for the series of murders in 1969.
He was convicted of leading a cult in which disaffected young people living in a commune followed his orders and were ultimately turned into killers.
Manson and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Leslie Van Houten, were convicted of murder and sentenced to death for killings at two gruesome scenes in the summer of 1969.
All were spared execution when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling temporarily banned the death penalty in 1972.
Another defendant, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, was convicted later.
They brutally murdered director Roman Polanski’s actress wife, Sharon Tate, and six others in Los Angeles over two nights.
He had ordered his family members to slaughter Tate, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and three of her friends at her home above Beverly Hills.
Stephen Parent was a fifth unfortunate victim that night. He had driven to the property to see if caretaker William Garreston wanted to buy his AM/FM Clock radio, and had stayed on for a beer at the guest house.
He was shot multiple times when he wound down the window at the electric gate as he left.
The following night the Family butchered small business owners Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, in their home in Los Angeles.
The murders were carried out in upscale, mostly white neighborhoods of Los Angeles in order to blame the crimes on African Americans, in the hope of sparking what he termed a ‘Helter Skelter’ race war.
The violence was so mindless and so brutal that the infamy of Manson and his hippie cult-like Family has grown with time.
Manson has always maintained that society gradually turned him into the person he became.
Manson, who was not actually present but ordered the killings, applied for parole in 2012 but was denied release and is not eligible to apply again until 2027.
He was granted permission in 2014 to wed then 26-year-old Afton Elaine Burton, described in US media as a slender brunette, who had been visiting him in prison.
But the 90-day license expired without the ceremony going ahead.
It emerged last year that Burton, who calls herself ‘Star’, reportedly only suggested matrimony to get legal ownership of his remains as part of a bizarre plot to put his corpse on display after he died.
Manson was married twice before he was jailed, first to Rosalie Jean Willis from 1955 to 1958, and later to Candy Stevens between 1959 and 1963.
The Daily Mail
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