The face of evil 40 years on: Prison releases new photo of mass killer Charles Manson

The hair may be thinning, but his gaze still chills the bones - as does the swastika carved crudely into his forehead.
This is Charles Manson, 40 years after he committed seven gruesome murders which shocked America.
The photograph was released yesterday by Corcoran State Prison in California, where the 74-year-old lives separated from the other inmates for his own protection.

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Face of evil: Charles Manson's eyes are watery as he stares in to the camera in this new image taken yesterday - but the swastika carved into his forehead is a permanent sign of his cruelty

In 1984, one covered him with paint thinner and set light to him. It took years for him to recover from his burns.
California's prisons photograph inmates every few years for their records. Manson's is requested by the media every time, such is the fascination with his murders and bizarre behaviour.
He is said to have received more mail than any other prisoner, up to 60,000 letters a year at its high point.
Many of them are requests to join his followers, his Family commune or even marriage proposals from women across America.
Manson's killing spree began on August 8, 1969, when four of his followers murdered Sharon Tate - pregnant wife of the film director Roman Polanski - and three of her friends in Los Angeles.
The next night, Manson ordered his followers to kill a supermarket executive, Leno Labianca, and his wife, Rosemary.
Manson, who carved an X into his head during his trial (it later morphed into the swastika), was originally sentenced to death in 1971.
That was changed to life when California briefly abolished the death penalty.
Manson founded an infamous hippy commune in California in the late 1960s that became known as the 'Manson Family'.
When the so-called Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed ex-convict, who had spent half his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offences.
Prosecutors said that Manson and his followers were trying to incite a race war that he believed was prophesied in the Beatles' song Helter Skelter.

Manson pictured during his trial in Los Angeles in1970

Tate was eight months' pregnant when she was killed at her hilltop home on August 9, 1969.
Four others were either stabbed or shot to death alongside her: celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, 35; actor and Polanski associate Voytek Frykowski, 32, and his girlfriend the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, 25; and Steven Parent, 18, a friend of Tate's caretaker.
The word Pig was written on the front door in blood. The next night, Manson took his followers to the Los Feliz home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, then left three of them to kill the couple.
In the period before the murders, he was a distant fringe member of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly via a chance association with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.

Sharon Tate was stabbed to death by acolytes of cult leader Charles Manson

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Crazed: Manson jokes with newsmen during his trial

After Manson was charged with the crimes, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially.
Artists including Guns N' Roses and  Marilyn Manson have covered his songs in the decades since.
Manson's death sentence was automatically reduced to life imprisonment when a decision by the Supreme Court of California temporarily eliminated the state's death penalty in 1972.

Hateful hippy: In 1969 Manson was a leader of a hippy commune, right, but by 1971 he was a hate figure headed for jail, left

California's eventual reestablishment of capital punishment did not affect Manson.
The image was released to the Los Angeles Times because the newspaper requested a copy the next time it was taken.
Manson's co-defendants - Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles 'Tex' Watson - were convicted with him.
Manson has made 11 failed bids for parole since 1978, the last in 2007, when he was ordered to continue serving life sentences.
His next parole hearing is scheduled for 2012.