Crazed: Manson described himself as a 'bad man who shoots people' in a rambling phone interview from his Californian jail cell

UK Daily Mail

By Daily Mail Reporter

Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his conviction for the gruesome Sharon Tate murders - to speak out about global warming.

The infamous killer, who started championing environmental causes from behind bars, bemoaned the 'bad things' being done to environment in a rambling phone interview from his Californian jail cell.

'Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things to the atmosphere.

'If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against the problem...' he added, trailing off.

Manson, who described himself to his interviewer as a 'bad man who shoots people', brainwashed members of a commune known as The Family into butchering eight people including film director Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate in July and August 1969.

Speaking to Vanity Fair Spain magazine of the killing spree he led his crazed disciples on, the 76-year-old said: 'I live in the underworld. I don’t tell people what to do. They know what to do.

'If they don’t know what to do they don’t come around me because I’m very mean, I’m very mean.'

Murdered: Manson brainwashed members of a commune known as The Family into butchering eight people, including film director Roman Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate

Tragic: Actress Sharon Tate, pictured here at London Airport, was murdered in August 1969

Interspersing English with Spanish, he added: 'I’m very mal hombre, nasty.

'I’m in the bullring. I run in the bullring with the heart of the world.'

'I don’t play. I shoot people.

'I’m too bad. I’m a mean guy. I’m an outlaw. I’m a criminal. I’m everything bad.'

Manson, currently being held at California’s Corcoran State Prison, spouted the trademark mumbo jumbo that characterised previous interviews he gave in the 1980s to US TV channels.

Scene of horror: The L.A. home of Sharon Tate where she and a friend, hair stylist Jay Sebring, were found slain

Evil: Manson in 1970 during his trial

The last interview aired with the killer in September 2007 - dubbed The Mind of Manson - was a full version of the 1987 interview he gave US cable news channel MSNBC at Califonia’s San Quentin State Prison.

He told Vanity Fair Spain magazine: 'You have to accept yourself as God. You have to realise you’re just the Devil just as much as you’re God, that you’re everything and you’re nothing at all.

'Europe is the United States just as much as the United States is America and America is Europe.'

Manson, whose new lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano recently asked Barack Obama to set him free, also had harsh words for the US President.

Describing him as a 'slave of Wall Street', Manson said: 'I think Obama is an idiot for doing what he’s doing. They’re playing with him.'

Other than Manson, Mr Di Stefano's client list has included defending Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, as well as Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic during his war crimes hearings.

Manson's death sentence for his involvement in the Tate/LaBianca murders was commuted to life in prison when California abolished the death penalty.

Since then he has attracted a number of followers because of his infamy, but also because of his perceived environmental conscience.

He is a founder of ATWA (which both stands for Air Trees Water Animals and All The Way Alive). It's typically manic mission statement warns of the destruction of the planet from pollution.

Another ATWA founder, Lynette Fromme,  was jailed for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford with an unloaded gun in 1975. The claimed she did so 'for the redwoods'. 

On the environment, Manson said: 'Sooner or later the will of God will prevail over all of you. And I was condemned as the will of God.'

'We are all martyrs. Love is a martyr... I am a martyr. But I am also a victim. And I'm a performer. And a dam. I'm both. I am everything. I am nothing.'