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Charles Manson, yes, that Charles Manson just got a license to marry a 26-year-old woman who regularly visits him in prison.
The literal cult surrounding the mass murderer has always been baffling, but it seems that despite being 80 years old, serving a life sentence in Corcoran State Prison and all those heinous murders that landed him there in the first place, Manson is still charming the young ladies. Or at least one young lady. The report about the marriage license is thin on details so far and it comes from an Associated Press story that's about the size of a tweet:
If we had to guess, it sounds like Manson plans to head down the aisle—if they have an aisle in prison—with a woman named Star, who was profiled by Rolling Stone last year and is kind of a dead-ringer for Manson follower Susan Atkins. Here's the couple's story:
In 2007, Star moved to Corcoran to be near Charlie, who she visits each Saturday and Sunday for up to five hours a day. "Yeah, well, people can think I'm crazy," she likes to say. "But they don't know. This is what's right for me. This is what I was born for." She grew up near St. Louis, where her deeply religious family feared she'd lost her way ("I was smoking marijuana, eating mushrooms, not wanted to go to church every Sunday," she explains), so they locked her in her room for much of her high school years. A friend passed her some of Manson's environmental writing, and she started corresponding with him. When she was 19, she took the $2,000 she'd saved up working in a retirement home kitchen and hopped a train to Corcoran. Manson named her Star. She recently cut an X onto her forehead.
Star told the magazine last year that the two planned to get married even though lifers in California don't get conjugal visits: "When that will be, we don't know. But I take it very seriously. Charlie is my husband. Charlie told me to tell you this. We haven't told anybody about that."
At the time, Manson said that he did not take it very seriously: "That's a bunch of garbage. You know that, man. That's trash. We're just playing that for public consumption."
UPDATE 3:44 p.m.: The Los Angeles Times has more details: Star's legal name, according to the license, is Afton Elaine Burton. The couple applied for a marriage license Nov. 7. And the Times reiterates the fact that overnight visits are not allowed.
Related:
Photo: Charles Manson at Age 77, A Week Before His Next Parole Hearing
Where are Manson's Children Now?
