A Kern County official is asking that a petition filed in Los Angeles County by the grandson of Charles Manson to obtain his grandfather’s remains be transferred or dismissed so that the issue can be decided in the Kern County courts.
Documents filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court by Kern County Deputy County Counsel Bryan Walters state his office has filed a petition for instructions regarding Manson’s remains and that a hearing is scheduled Jan. 31 in Superior Court in Bakersfield. Meanwhile, a hearing is set this Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court on Manson grandson Jason Freeman’s petition to obtain the body.
“The Kern County Superior Court is the appropriate venue to obtain a court order directing the Kern County coroner as to which of the competing claims prevails concerning the right to control the disposition of the remains of (Manson),” Walters’ court papers state.
Freeman is competing with former Manson pen pal Michael Channels for control of Manson’s remains. Channels says Manson’s 2002 will, filed in Kern County in November, names him the executor of Manson’s estate and gives him control of what to do with the convicted killer’s remains.
“I have made arrangements for the payment of the disposition of the remains,” Channels says in a sworn statement filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court.
But Freeman maintains Manson died without a will and that any such document anyone claims to possess is a forgery.
Manson, who spent nearly 50 years behind bars and was denied parole a dozen times, died Nov. 19 at age 83 at Bakersfield Mercy Hospital of heart failure triggered by colon cancer that had spread to other areas of his body.
Manson and members of his outcast “family” of followers were convicted of killing actress Sharon Tate — who was eight months pregnant — and six other people during a bloody rampage in the Los Angeles area in August 1969. Prosecutors said he and his followers were trying to incite a race war he dubbed “Helter Skelter,” taken from the Beatles song of the same name.
The Manson clan also stabbed to death grocery magnate Leno La Bianca and his wife Rosemary La Bianca the night after the Tate murders.
Manson was convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of Tate, the La Biancas, and four other people at the Tate residence — coffee heiress Abigail Ann Folger, photographer Wojciech Frykowski, hairdresser Jay Sebring and Steven Earl Parent, shot and killed in his car on his way to visit an acquaintance who lived in a separate rented guest house on the Tate property.
Manson and followers Charles “Tex” Watson, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and the late Susan Atkins all were convicted and sentenced to state prisons in 1971. Manson also was convicted in December of that year of first-degree murder for the July 25, 1969, death of Gary Hinman and the August 1969 death of Donald Shea.
He and the others originally were sentenced to death, but a 1972 state Supreme Court decision caused all capital sentences in California to be commuted to life in prison. There was no life-without-parole sentence at the time.
–City News Service