HUNTER: Evil cult leader Charles Manson's chilling Canadian connections

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It would be difficult to put together a more bizarre triumvirate than evil cult killer Charles Manson’s bizarre Canadian connections.

There’s the wide-eyed teenage ingenue whose father was a fire-and-brimstone preacher, later seduced by Manson, the Toronto-born biker gang leader and the elderly gangster who was the last man named Public Enemy Number One.

I’m currently writing a book entitled, “Inside the Mind of Charles Manson.” Research uncovered these nuggets (always use primary sources, kids!).

Manson was the California cult leader who, in August 1969, unleashed his followers in a Hollywood bloodbath. Nine people, including actress Sharon Tate and coffee heiress Abigail Folger, were butchered. The tiny terror’s Family members had unleashed “Helter Skelter,” Manson’s precursor to the apocalypse.

Aside from devout Mansonphiles, few people have likely heard of Straight Satans’ biker boss Danny DeCarlo or the Svengali’s 15-year-old sexual playmate, Ruth Ann Moorehouse. Alvin Karpis? He’s an entirely different matter.

Karpis was born in Montreal in 1909 and was a notorious bank robber. His criminal career propelled him into the stratosphere of Depression-era desperadoes as the brains behind the Barker-Karpis Gang. His partners in crime were the Barker brothers, hillbilly hoodlums from the Ozarks.

Intelligent with a photographic memory, when he was finally nabbed in New Orleans in 1936, Karpis was sent to Alcatraz. He served 25 years on The Rock, the longest of anyone.

In 1962, he was transferred to McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington, where his cellmate was a kid he called “Little Charlie.”

“This kid approaches me to request music lessons. He wants to learn the guitar and become a music star,” Karpis said in his posthumous 1980 biography. “‘Little Charlie’ is so lazy and shiftless, I doubt if he’ll put in the time required to learn. The youngster has been in institutions all of his life  — first orphanages, then reformatories, and finally federal prison. He has a pleasant voice and a pleasing personality, although he’s unusually meek and mild for a convict.”

Days after Manson was arrested in December 1969, the late, much-lamented Montreal Star newspaper caught up with Karpis in his hometown, where he’d been deported. He never pegged the cult leader as a killer, just a greasy petty crook.

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“Manson had a native slyness about him,” Karpis told the Star. “He was a meek and mild-mannered sort of fella who was easily likable. Music was his whole life. But I saw nothing but a string of penitentiaries in his future.”

Ruth Ann Moorehouse was born in Toronto, the daughter of a devout preacher who moved to California in search of a new flock. She was just 16 years old when she met Manson — and had sex with him for the first time, joining The Family at Spahn Ranch. Her preacher dad wanted to kill Manson, but instead became a follower.

Ruth Ann did not take part in the grisly slayings but was often seen outside the courthouse with her head shaved and an “X” carved into her forehead. And then she got the call to ice a Family member who was going to testify against their Svengali.

The young woman went to Hawaii in 1970 with Manson girl Barbara Hoyt. Two would make the journey; the plan for Hoyt was a one-way trip. Moorehouse dosed Hoyt’s cheeseburger with 10 hits of acid. Hoyt survived and testified. And then Moorehouse was in the wind.

Danny DeCarlo, born June 20, 1944, in Toronto, became an American citizen after serving four years in the U.S. Coast Guard. His initial interactions with Manson were strictly monetary as treasurer of a long-defunct outlaw biker gang called the Straight Satans. Manson wanted guns.

The biker later admitted that among the attractions of Manson’s company was the steady supply of drugs and pretty girls who were always up for sex. DeCarlo had earlier been arrested attempting to smuggle marijuana across the border with Mexico.

For Manson, having the burly bikers as allies would come in handy when Helter Skelter was unleashed. The rest of DeCarlo’s gang didn’t much like Charles Manson. Once his brother bikers showed up at Spahn Ranch and threatened to rape and kill everyone if Danny didn’t return to Venice with them.

Manson offered his own life to end the tense standoff.

DeCarlo was at the ranch a week after the horror show that was the Tate-Labianca murders. Somewhere along the line, after hearing of the callous murder of ranchhand Shorty Shea at the hands of The Family, DeCarlo took the hint.

He flipped on the cult leader.

“Charlie would sit down there and run this thing down to them about tearing society apart, things like that, and they (DeCarlo’s biker brothers) thought he was nuts and figured they was brainwashing me and they came up there to get me and they were going to take him and wad him up in a rubber ball,” the biker said in 1970.

In the days before the massacre, DeCarlo revealed that Manson masqueraded as the Devil.

“He said he was the devil, and that the devil was on the loose,” DeCarlo testified.

The biker later returned to Canada with fellow Manson follower Sherry Ann Cooper. They married. Had a kid. Divorced.

DeCarlo was reportedly alive and well as of 2023.

Manson caught the night train to hell in 2017.

Remember, kids, primary sources.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun