Brutal Manson died in jail, as all such crazed killers should

The man who orchestrated the murders of seven people in California in 1969 was manipulative and violent and a calculating killer.

Such people are mercifully rare, so it is easy to read too much into their significance, but it has fairly been said that Manson reflected the dark under belly of the counterculture.

In fact, he represented some of the worst excesses of the modern age.

He led a cult and, as the worst cults do, preyed on troubled and vulnerable people.

His gang operated in a drug-fuelled environment, that illustrated the perils of narcotics.

And he was intelligent and cunning and so particularly dangerous.

Even many opponents of the death penalty would have been relieved if Manson and four of his adherents had been executed, as was their fate until the California Supreme Court suspended all use of capital punishment in that state.

Happily, though, life meant life for the repulsive Manson.

He had been in prison almost 50 years when he died.

In some of America’s more liberal states, murderers can be free within 20 years of being sentenced, as is the norm across Europe.

The worst high-profile killers like Manson and Ian Brady are typically not freed because there would be public uproar.

But we need to foster a culture in which all premeditated murderers are detained for actual life terms, even the low-profile people who calculatingly killed one person.

One of the only reassuring aspects of the Manson horror story is that justice was done.