Charles Manson en juicio: locura Visible

Charles Manson has been in prison for more than four decades. In 1971, he and several of his followers - Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Louise Van Houten - were found guilty in the definition of time murders that horrified not only Los Angeles, where the murders took place in the summer of 1969, but the entire nation. (Manson was sentenced, in essence, as a "conspirator", as he was not present at the killings, but ordered that they be held.)

The ferocity of the killings; the apparent randomness of the violence; and the Manson cult incidida rarity - the chilling rarity, bottomless - an awful, indelible black mark in the 1960's.

But it was during sworn testimony and the trial of Manson and his followers - with the trial itself that serves as a sort of grim circus that lasted nine months, starting from the summer of 1970 to the spring of 1971 - that the nation was capable of measuring how deeply upset "the family" was truly.

Size x on their foreheads. No problem. Do shave their heads to show solidarity with their leader? Fact. Blocking entrances to the courthouse, singing, singing, try the trial - and, by extension, the murders-a trip to the amusement park? For the Manson clan, were all grist for his cheerful psychopathy, death-worshipping.

After all, if Manson, Krenwinkel and the rest were to be tried and convicted (obviously) murder en masse by the "establishment" and "pigs" despised, less their brothers and sisters in the family could do was show the world that in the universe who inhabited, the murderers were not really criminals at all, but instead were revered iconoclastic. Rebels. Heroes.

Here, LIFE.com presents pictures from the end of 1969, when Manson and co-defendants were finally processed and charged with the murders.

All these years later, Manson and his acolytes dead eyes view is still surprising. But while photos like these bear witness, people whose lives were taken - Sharon Tate; Jay Sebring; Wojciech Frykowski; Abigail Folger; Steven Parent; Leno and Rosemary LaBianca - will remain in view, and those who killed them to be remembered not (as some would have) as misguided, deceived, children or as victims, but as men and women who entered the homes of strangers and in a spasm of savagery ended life after life after life.
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