LOS ANGELES _ He could have been just another grifter.
When Charles Manson rolled into California from Appalachia in 1955 in a stolen Mercury, his big ambition was to be a pimp.
In prison at Terminal Island for trying to cash a forged $43 check, he talked tradecraft with the veteran pimps inside, dabbled in Scientology and read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," waiting to get out and try what he learned on vulnerable women.
Sprung in 1967, he visited a parolee he knew who happened to be living in Berkeley. If the convict had resided in Fresno or Barstow, Manson might have seen his modest criminal ambitions come to be, and the world at large would never have heard his name.
But Manson landed dead center in the country's countercultural carnival, just a couple months before the Summer of Love. The moment he saw the sidewalk gurus in Haight-Ashbury luring young flocks of believers, he found a new calling, the perfect gig for a conniver desperate for attention.
The ensuing free-for-all of sex, drugs and dumpster-diving lasted less than two years. As Manson's family started to sputter like its converted school bus, he kept it running on a fuel of doomsday prophesies, persuading his followers that an apocalyptic race war called Helter Skelter was coming.
He masterminded a killing rampage to serve his most insectile needs.
He had to get a killer who was likely to snitch on him released from jail, by making it appear as if the real culprit were still at large. And he needed to keep his believers from realizing he was a fraud, by making his own prophesy come true. He orchestrated the murders to look as if they were committed by black militants.
At the murders' wretched motive was a simple con job.
But the fact that he and his family looked like hippies and did lots of LSD gave a new breed of magazine journalists just what they wanted to see _ the dark side to the youth movement they'd helped invent.
Manson became the first of many people and events to end the '60s.
To stay in the limelight, he played the madman role to epic effect.
But he didn't have preternatural brainwashing powers.
He didn't turn California into the Paradise Lost that so many writers had been waiting for.
He didn't even terrify the state in the way a true sadist, Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, would 15 years later.
He was a scab mite who bit at the perfect time and place to be enshrined in Baby Boomer lore.
