Meet Kathleen Maddox: The Teenaged Runaway Who Gave Birth To Charles Manson
Kathleen Maddox in 1971, then remarried as Kathleen Bower.Infamous cult leader Charles Mansons mom Kathleen Maddox remains a relatively obscure name especially when considering the enduring notoriety of her son. Unraveling her story is complicated by the fact that her story often hinges conjecture or contradiction. As she retreated even further from the public after Mansons conviction, the silence left room for the media to write her narrative themselves.Seeing as Maddox was considered the mother of a monster, these narratives were usually unflattering. She was labeled an alcoholic and a prostitute and was said to have sold Manson for a pint of beer.Separating the fact from the fiction isnt going to be an easy task, but there is one underlying theme in each of these claims: that Maddoxs inept parenting was somehow responsible for Mansons instability.Kathleen Maddox: A 1930s Wild ChildAda Kathleen Maddox was born on January 11, 1918, in Kentucky. She was known to family and friends by her middle name, Kathleen, and was the youngest of five. Her father was a railroad conductor and she led a comfortable, working-class lifestyle in a highly religious household.This was unfortunate for the free-spirited Maddox, who was known to sneak out and to party against her familys wishes with her older brother, Luther Maddox. I guess I had a tendency to be a little wild, the way kids will, she admitted in a 1971 interview.Extended family members have reported that Maddox eventually became a runaway from her home in Ashland, Kentucky and that she found work as a prostitute. She was 15 years old when she gave birth in 1934 at Cincinnati General Hospital to her son Charles Manson. According to that same interview Maddox gave in 1971, however, she never was a prostitute, but she had been a dumb kid who gave birth out of wedlock.Her religious mother allegedly sent her off to Cincinnati herself to have the baby. It was there that she met William Manson and married him in 1934, six months pregnant, to give her child a proper name.Records from that same year show that the official name given to her child on his birth certificate was in fact No Name Maddox. But Maddox defended this decision and insisted that she had wanted to wait until her mother could meet her in Cincinnati so that she could name the child.I figured Id already hurt her pretty had, so I wanted to let her name the baby, you see. So she named him after my father. Weeks later, that child was renamed Charles Miller Manson.According to case files reports, Maddoxs relationship with William Manson didnt last long and he was out of Charles young life before Charles could develop any memories of the man whose family name he took. They divorced a year later and Maddox moved back home to Kentucky with her mother.Meanwhile, Charles Mansons biological father was not entirely out of the picture. Colonel Walker Scott, whom Maddox had met one of those nights she snuck out of her mothers home, was apparently quite active in young Mansons life before his death by cancer in 1954.Bettmann/Getty ImagesCharles Manson at age 14.All that stuff you read about Charles not knowing who his father was, thats not so. Scott used to come and pick up Charles and take him home for weekends with his own child. He just loved him, Maddox reported.But Manson didnt seem altogether unaware of who his mother really was, at least in his later years. In his book Manson in His Own Words, Manson wrote of his mother, Other writers have portrayed Mom as a teenage whore. Because she happened to be the mother of Charles Manson, she is downgraded. I prefer to think of her as a flower child in the 30s, thirty years ahead of her times.He added that her reasons for leaving home were no different than the kids he knew in the 1960s, who chose to be homeless over catering to the demands of parents who only viewed things as they believed they should be viewed. But Maddox did maintain a wild side and one that often found her getting into legal trouble and being separated from her son. She was taken into custody for hitchhiking at 16 and left Manson at home with her parents to go down to West Virginia when he was four. Two years later, Maddox and her brother Luther were arrested for the clumsy robbery of a gas station using a broken ketchup bottle.In The Absence Of A MotherWhile Charles Mansons mom was in jail, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, and when Maddox was released from prison after three years later, she and Manson lived across a variety of hotel rooms for several years.According to a 2013 biography of Charles Manson by author Jeff Guinn, once Maddox was out of jail her son had already become a petty criminal, stealing and skipping school. Unable to control his bad behavior, Maddox sent him to a Catholic school for delinquents when he was 12 years old.Bettmann / Getty ImagesA young Charles Manson in a suit and tie.Manson both successfully and unsuccessfully escaped these reformatories for years until his final break in 1951, during which he stole a car and robbed a gas station, and was eventually sent to a maximum security prison.The reformatories clearly didnt make a difference. In 1955 Manson, who had finally earned his freedom the legal way, married his first wife, 15-year-old Rosalie Jean Willis, with whom he had a son named Charles Manson Jr., but two years later was sent to federal prison after stealing a car in violation of his probation.Manson was incarcerated at a prison in Washington state after he and his young wife had driven the stolen car to their new life in California. Maddox reportedly moved to California as well to be closer to him and his young wife and new son while he was serving his time. Maddox and Willis reportedly lived together for a time.Years After The ViolenceThe rest of Kathleen Maddoxs life is shrouded in even more mystery than her early years.In a 1971 interview, the same year Manson was convicted of first-degree murder for his involvement in the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders of 1969, Maddox said that she was five years into her third marriage with husbands Gale Bower. She had a nine-year-old daughter and lived a quiet life with few friends.Though her unstable lifestyle often takes the brunt of the blame for the violence Manson developed, Maddox, for her part, claimed just the opposite. I think that made him over-confident. He never had to take a fall, not till he was a grown man. Everything just was handed to him, I admit. Kathleen Maddox died on July 31, 1973, at age 55 in Spokane, Washington. She is buried at Fairmount Memorial Park. Charles Manson died 44 years later in prison at the age of 83. When people think of the Manson Family, they naturally think of the murderous cult led by Charles Manson and the death of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski. But once upon a time, he was no-name Maddox and his family was his biological mother, Kathleen Maddox.If you found this article interesting, check out where the Manson Family members are now. Then, take a look at Spahn Ranch, the deserted film set on which Manson and his family squatted in isolation. Finally, read up on Manson Family victim Abigail Folger and answer the question of who did Charles Manson actually kill.The post Meet Kathleen Maddox: The Teenaged Runaway Who Gave Birth To Charles Manson appeared first on All That's Interesting.
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