The fortieth anniversary of the Los Angeles killing spree that put Manson and a half-dozen of his followers in jail would essentially have passed me by, had not Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme been granted parole last week. She will be freed this coming Sunday. The monicker Squeaky, the casual nickname she picked up in her time with the Family when she was pleasuring ranch owner Charles Spahn so the group could live on his property, is one of those scraps of folklore from the dark side that huge numbers of people over a certain age will recognise. Yet while she was a fervent follower of Manson for many years, she was not directly involved in the murders. Her jail sentence came from having pointed a gun at U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975 as part, it seems, of an oddball environmental protest related to chopping down redwood trees. There was no bullet in the chamber when she pulled the trigger, but she has spent more than three decades behind bars, apart from a short excursion when she went on the lam in the 1980s. For many years, she refused her right to ask for parole. She is out now because parole is virtually automatic after thirty years according to the statute under which she was convicted, a term that was only extended because of her escape bid.

She has not said whether she still regards Manson as a friend and teacher, but unlike Tex Watson or Leslie Van Houten, she has not publicly disavowed him.

There is a website devoted to Manson at http://www.atwa.be. It features snippets of his writings, incoherent and rambling yet also detached and, if you have the patience, darkly perceptive. It also has photos of him playing music or smiling, or being led into court. If you didn’t know the history, you’d think he was a kind of tree-hugging Nelson Mandela or Ang San Suu Kyi, jailed solely for his principles. That messy business with the stabbings and shootings isn’t mentioned at all.

And yet I have to admit that the jail sentences in this case have often made me wonder. While attempting to assassinate a president (even an unelected one like Ford) strikes at the very basis of a democracy, a perpetrator spending decades behind bars for a feebly inept attempt at it seems bizarre. (Sara Jane Moore, who also tried to kill Ford for different reasons, spent thirty-two years in jail, but she was trying to kill him). Had Fromme not been a Manson loyalist, I suspect, she would have served less time than she did.

The Manson Family killings have always had aspects that nobody wants to talk much about. Manson himself, perhaps using the Scientology training acquired during one of his early jail sentences, has often expressed the view that the condemnation we all place on him is simply our own malice viewed in the convenient mirror of an outcast. The photos on the ATWA site (the name is an acronym for Air, Trees, Water, Animals) show a handsome man who looked like a thousand other hippies or rock stars: with the beard, I see a passing resemblance to The Doors’ Jim Morrison. But that whole look long-hair-plus-beard was also uncomfortably close to the image of a meek but hirsute Jesus on millions of walls in Christian homes across North America. Charlie adopted or accidentally located the look of an archetype, and appropriating that was, I suggest, subliminally (or even overtly) blasphemous to many believing Christians. As much as his piercing gaze and refusal to concede the virtue of mainstream values, Manson’s look of a wild-eyed prophet provided a key sub-text, and probably does so even more today, when such hairiness is more rarely seen around us.

This is a hard knot to unravel, and at the core of it there is always the hideousness of the killing of Sharon Tate, her almost at-term child, and the others. To argue on behalf of any of Manson’s group is to run into that as the everlasting objection: these people did not do just wickedness, but brutal wickedness. Yet Tex Watson’s rehabilitation (he is an active Christian minister behind bars), or Susan Atkins’ terminal brain cancer surely argue for some concession from the system when four decades have passed since the murders?

Apparently not, even if Atkins, for example, mostly paralysed and dying, could not do any possible harm. Or much else, for that matter. She has a parole hearing this September 2nd, but may die before then.

Justice is an odd, uneasy concept. It is protective for the non-criminal community, and offers a balancing of debts, as well as, less overtly or comfortably, society’s revenge on those who violate its core precepts. Manson’s accomplices, several of them teenagers at the time of the murders, let themselves be led across a line they didn’t see they’d crossed until the momentum of their motion was too great to reverse without outside help. And by then, they had turned on everything outside of Manson’s ill-charmed circle.

Forgiveness is something the relatives of their victims will never offer to this aging group of killers. Yet justice, supposedly, is not just dependent on the relatives of victims. It operates on presumed principles of cold objectivity, which is why mercy is usually seen as its complement. But setting aside the probably irrelevant topic of mercy in this instance, those cold principles say that, while these people deserved to suffer and to dwell on their own vicious folly, society will not exact endless suffering for a finite act or even a finite series of acts, unless, like Manson himself appears, the perpetrators remain dangerous.

The suspicion remains in my mind that any plausible punishment for the killings has been exacted. The punishment for having stepped out of the mainstream into the fringes of the counter-culture is therefore the thing for which these people will remain in jail as they pass into and through their seventh and eighth decades of life.