Where Are Charles Manson’s Children Now? Inside the Lives of the Late Cult Leader’s 3 Known Sons

Charles Manson had a well-known “Manson Family” cult of followers, but his biological family has long flown under the radar.

Before orchestrating the brutal murders of then-pregnant Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca across two nights in August 1969, Manson fathered three sons with three different women — one of whom was one of his first followers.

Manson’s two elder sons, Charles Manson Jr. (who later changed his name to Jay White to distance himself from his father) and Charles Luther Manson (who legally changed his name to Jay Charles Warner), were born about a decade before the slayings that shook Hollywood, while his youngest, Michael Brunner, was born only 14 months before the murders.

Manson — who died at age 83 of natural causes in prison on Nov. 19, 2017 — rarely spoke publicly about his kids, but over the years, details have come to light about familial connections.

Now, the three-part Peacock docuseries Making Manson, which premiered on Nov. 19, features never-before-aired conversations about the late cult leader’s personal life.

Here’s everything to know about Charles Manson’s children: Charles Manson Jr., Charles Luther Manson and Michael Brunner.

Charles Manson Jr.

Charles Manson Jr. — who later legally changed his name to Jay White — was born to Rosalie Jean Willis on April 10, 1956, according to a birth certificate obtained by Los Angeles Magazine.

According to The New York Times, Manson and Willis married in 1955 and eventually divorced. (She later died of lung cancer in 2009.)

Little is known about Mason Jr., who died by suicide at age 40 on June 29, 1993, per CNN.

Manson Jr. has a surviving adult son, Jason Freeman. When Manson died in 2017, a judge ruled that Freeman was Manson’s grandson and awarded him Manson’s body, The Northwest Florida Daily News reported. At the same time, a battle for Manson’s estate began and is still ongoing several years later, according to the Daily Mail.

Freeman, a former kickboxer and cage fighter, told CNN in 2012 that he never knew his father growing up but sympathized with what he may have been going through. “He just couldn’t let it go … He couldn’t live down who his father was,” he said of Manson Jr.’s death.

As for Freeman’s relationship with Manson, the two didn’t meet in person, but Freeman claimed he occasionally spoke to his grandfather on the phone as an adult. (PEOPLE was previously unable to verify Freeman’s claims.)

“From time to time, every now and then, he’d say ‘I love you,’ ” he told The Northwest Florida Daily News. “He’d say it back to me. Maybe a couple times he said it first. It took a while to get to that point though, trust me.”

In 2019, Freeman, who at the time lived in Bradenton, Fla., told The State Journal-Register that he enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, which sees the attempted Manson murders ultimately have a happy ending.

Freeman told PEOPLE in 2017 that his grandfather didn’t order his followers to kill and “his hands are clean.” (Manson did not physically commit the murders during the August 1969 killing spree, but he was found legally responsible for them.)

Charles Luther Manson

Little is known about Manson’s second-born son, Charles Luther Manson. His mother was Leona Rae Musser, known as “Candy Stevens,” The Las Cruces Bulletin reported.

Initially, Musser lied in a court proceeding when Manson was sentenced to 10 years in prison for using a stolen check and said she was pregnant with his child to elicit pity from the judge. She did, in fact, get pregnant several months later, in December 1959, and the pair got married.

Charles Luther was born on Sept. 24, 1960, according to The Las Cruces Bulletin. He never knew his father, whom Leona divorced nearly three years later.

Manson wrote in a letter to his pen pal Michael Channels in 2002, “Leona Manson [Candy Stevens] had a son Charles Manson Jr. in Denver, Colorado. I wondered about him.”

He continued, “We got a blood test and papers but never got married — She just forged the papers and filed divorce and got custody of my son.”

Charles Luther legally changed his name to Jay Charles Warner in 1976 and died in 2007 in Colorado, per The Las Cruces Bulletin.

Michael Brunner

Born Valentine Michael Manson in 1968, Brunner is Manson’s son with Mary Theresa Brunner, who the Los Angeles Times reported was one of the first members of the Manson “family” cult.

The Manson murders took place when Michael was 14 months old. Mary would go on to be charged with Gary Hinman’s murder but received immunity in exchange for testifying against Manson and his followers Susan Atkins and Bobby Beausoleil. However, she participated later in a plan to get Mason out of prison and was ordered to serve time before being paroled in 1977, according to NBC News.

Michael’s maternal grandparents, Elsie and George Brunner, raised him as their own son in Eau Claire, Wis., and officially adopted Michael in 1976. Noting that he was “loved,” Michael said his adoption celebration was like having an “extra birthday” and explained why the Brunners changed his last name.

“I think they wanted to get rid of the Manson name because of school and to make me a little more normal,” Michael told the Los Angeles Times. “So I wasn’t being pestered or bullied or that sort of thing, which didn’t happen much.”

Michael recalled his upbringing as mostly normal and spending most of his time playing sports (he particularly loved skiing, skating and biking). Still, he faced some confusion as a child about his family relationships: Because his grandparents adopted him, his birth mother was legally his sister.

Michael didn’t know or communicate with Mason during his childhood and ignored his birth father’s attempts to contact him from prison. Michael joined the Army when he graduated high school, then worked as a military contractor in Afghanistan, at which point he reached out to his father via email for the first and only time.

Manson replied with a postcard to Michael’s home encouraging his son to write back to him, but Michael never got around to it before Manson died in 2017, explaining, “Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. And I just never did it. And then it was too late.”

Michael told the Los Angeles Times that he didn’t look further into his father’s crimes until after Mason’s death, noting that he doesn’t believe the “Helter Skelter” theory that he led his cult followers to murder as part of a conspiracy to start a race war.

He explained that after discovering Nikolas Schreck’s writing and documentary about the Manson murders, he believed that “[Charles Manson was] a criminal for sure, but not this evil incarnate cartoon character that the media and the courts and now the public have believed in as the scapegoat.”

Today, Michael keeps a low profile. He works in manufacturing, has an adult son and lives with his partner on a 56-acre property in the Midwest, where they grow some of their own crops. According to Los Angeles Daily News, Brunner was legally removed from a list of potential heirs for Manson’s estate in 2018 because he was adopted.