Notorious murderer Charles Manson, 80, is probably relieved that his jailhouse marriage license expired last week. According to the author of an upcoming book, the inmate’s fiancée, Afton Elaine “Star” Burton, 26, only wanted to marry him so that she could display his dead corpse as a tourist attraction after his death.
Journalist Daniel Simone, author of the upcoming The Retrial of Charles Manson, told the New York Post that Burton wanted access to Manson’s corpse so that she could display it in public in a glass enclosure after his death, in a kind of “bizarre California version of Lenin’s tomb.”
“He finally realized that he’s been played for a fool,” Simone told the Post of Manson, who was set to marry Burton after the pair secured a marriage license last year. The wedding had to be scrapped after the 90-day marriage license expired before the couple could tie the knot.
However, Simone tells the paper that Manson had another, perfectly sensible reason for turning Burton down.
“He feels he will never die,” Simone said. “Therefore, he feels it’s a stupid idea to begin with.”
According to the Associated Press, Burton left her home in Illinois and moved to Central California to be near California State Prison, Corcoran, where Manson is incarcerated.
Manson and several of his “family” members were convicted in 1971 for the brutal murders of seven people, including Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, and married couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
Manson was at first sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole when California tossed out the death penalty in 1972.
Manson was denied parole for the twelfth time in April 2012. He will next be eligible in 2027, when he will be 92 years old.