Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Woman Learns Charles Manson Was Her Grandfather After DNA Test

Transcript

Woman Learns Charles Manson Was Her Grandfather After DNA Test · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You know the routine, Right, You're sitting in your kitchen table.
• 0:02
  You open up that brightly colored cardboard box and you
• 0:07
  pull out a little plastic.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Tube, right, the classic spit kit exactly.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: You spit into it, you seal it up, dropping the mail,
• 0:13
  and you wait. And when you do that, there is
• 0:16
  this incredibly specific, almost mundane expectation of what you're going
• 0:21
  to get back.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you think you're going to find out you're I
• 0:23
  don't know, twelve percent Irish, right.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Or maybe you'll discover some weird genetic quirk that explains
• 0:29
  why cilantro tastes like soap to you. Or if you're
• 0:33
  like really looking for a thrill, you might uncover a
• 0:36
  distant third cousin in Ohio who has your great grandmother's
• 0:40
  pastry recipe or something.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Which is how it's marketed to us. Rights package does
• 0:44
  entertainment totally.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: It's this neat, tidy, highly sanitized window into our personal history.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we willingly consume it as a kind of parlor
• 0:52
  trick of modern science. When we send our biological code
• 0:55
  into the mail. We are looking for a connection, absolutely,
• 0:58
  but we want a safe connection.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: We want the fun dinner party story exactly.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: We are shopping for a quirky story we can share
• 1:06
  over drinks because we operate under the assumption that our
• 1:09
  family trees are rooted in you know, solid ordinary soil.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: But what if you get the email, you click the
• 1:15
  link and the algorithm returns a ninety nine point nine
• 1:18
  nine nine eight percent match that connects you directly, like biologically,
• 1:23
  to one of the most notorious figures in American criminal history.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the precise moment the parlor trick completely shatters, right.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: What happens when the dinner party story is that you
• 1:32
  are the direct descendant of a literal, historical monster.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Because the algorithm is really going to get into today.
• 1:39
  It does not care about your emotional wellbeing. It does
• 1:42
  not factor in the social implications of your lineage. It's
• 1:45
  just math, that's all it is. It only cares about
• 1:47
  measuring overlapping segments of genetic code. It is entirely blind
• 1:51
  to historical horror.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the core of today's deep dive.
• 1:55
  We are examining the sources surrounding Sophia Mattics. She has
• 1:59
  a twenty six year old five maker from Los Angeles,
• 2:01
  and in the summer of twenty twenty two, a completely
• 2:04
  routine check of a consumer genetic database completely obliterated her
• 2:09
  reality and her father's reality too. She discovered that her
• 2:12
  grandfather was Charles Manson.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: It is just a staggering revelation to process, and I
• 2:18
  think it's crucial to state our mission right at the
• 2:20
  top here. Definitely, we are not doing a standard true
• 2:23
  crime recounting of the nineteen sixty nine Tate Lebianca murders.
• 2:27
  The horrific facts of those crimes are, you know, thoroughly
• 2:30
  documented in history.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: We all know that story.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Exactly what we are doing today is unpacking a modern
• 2:36
  psychological thriller. We're looking at the mechanics of inherited trauma
• 2:41
  and the absolute collapse of family secrets in the age
• 2:44
  of these consumer genetic.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Databases, because you can't hide anymore.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: You really can't. And it brings up this profound, agonizing
• 2:51
  question of whether we are biologically destined to repeat the
• 2:54
  stories we inherit.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, but wait, the math here is completely throwing me off,
• 2:57
  because if Sophia is twenty six years old in twenty
• 3:00
  twenty two, that means she was born in what the
• 3:02
  late nineties.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: Yep, the late nineties, but the Tate l'bianca.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Murders happened in August of nineteen sixty nine. There is
• 3:08
  a massive temporal gap here. How do we even get
• 3:11
  from point A to point B?
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: It's a fair question, like how does a girl.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: In the twenty twenties connect directly to a crime in
• 3:17
  nineteen sixty nine without anyone in her family knowing about
• 3:21
  it for decades?
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: So to understand the sheer impact of the discovery, we
• 3:25
  really have to explore the decades of silence that preceded it.
• 3:28
  We have to look at the blank space on the
• 3:30
  family tree.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: The origin of this specific mystery begins with Sophia's father,
• 3:35
  Daniel Arguelles. Daniel was born on November first, nineteen fifty nine.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Okay, so a full ten years before the murders.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: Correct. Now, Daniel's mother was a woman named Darlene Large Ponds,
• 3:44
  though she also appears in some records as Darlene large Wit.
• 3:49
  Let's go back to January of nineteen fifty nine.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Setting the scene.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: Right, Darlene is seventeen years old. She is at a
• 3:54
  bus station in Los Angeles, and she has a brief
• 3:56
  encounter with a man she knew only by the name
• 3:58
  Charlie Dear a bus.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty nine. I mean that immediately paints a
• 4:02
  picture of transience, right, people moving through ships, passing in
• 4:06
  the night.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: Precisely, bus stations are inherently vulnerable spaces, especially for a
• 4:11
  seventeen year old girl. And we really have to place
• 4:14
  this specific month into historical.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Context, right because of where Manson was. Yes.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: In January nineteen fifty nine, Charles Manson had just been
• 4:23
  released from a five year sentence at Terminal Island, which
• 4:26
  is a federal prison in Los Angeles. Wow, he was drifting.
• 4:29
  And the family lore, which comes from Darlene's much later confessions,
• 4:33
  describes this encounter as a one night or incredibly short
• 4:37
  lived relationship.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: So it's this fleeting, almost invisible moment in time. Darlene
• 4:42
  moves on. She later marries a man named James Rgellis,
• 4:45
  and young Daniel grows up his entire life believing James
• 4:49
  as his biological.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: Father, which is a complete normal assumption for him to
• 4:52
  make right, But.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: The sources say it isn't until nineteen eighty one, when
• 4:55
  Daniel is a full grown adult, that his mother finally
• 4:58
  tells him the truth. He sits him down and reveals
• 5:01
  that his actual paternity is completely unknown to her.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Just imagine the structural foundation of your entire life dissolving
• 5:07
  in a single conversation.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: I can't even fathom it.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: You are an adult, your identity is seemingly forged in stone,
• 5:14
  and suddenly your mother reveals that the man who raised
• 5:17
  you is not your biological father, and worse, she cannot
• 5:20
  tell you who is.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: It's like the ground falling out from under you.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: That is the exact moment the blank space is officially
• 5:26
  introduced into Daniel's psychological landscape. In clinical terms, a blank
• 5:31
  space like that is never truly empty. What do you mean, Well,
• 5:34
  it functions like a black hole. It exerts a massive
• 5:37
  gravitational pull on a person's identity.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: But the sources suggest the space wasn't entirely blank for Darlene.
• 5:43
  Was it like she actually harbored a suspicion.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: She did, According to the documentary footage and various family accounts.
• 5:49
  By the late nineteen sixties, Darlene had reportedly recognized the
• 5:53
  face of the man arrested for the Tate Leveanca murders
• 5:56
  on television. Oh my god, Yeah, she recognized that the
• 5:59
  man the entire higher world was calling Charles Manson was
• 6:02
  the same drifting ex convict from the bus station. The
• 6:05
  man she knew is Charlie Dear.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, put yourself in her shoes for a second.
• 6:09
  You are sitting in your living room in nineteen sixty nine.
• 6:12
  The entire nation is paralyzed by the gruesome details of
• 6:15
  these murders.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: It was wal to wall coverage exactly.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: The news is just endless coverage of this apocalyptic cult leader.
• 6:22
  And you look at the television, you look at his eyes,
• 6:24
  and you realize, with this sinking dread, that he is
• 6:28
  the father of your ten year old son, who's just
• 6:30
  playing in the next room.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: It's unthinkable.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: What do you even do? Do you go to the police?
• 6:34
  Do you tell your husband?
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: Well, she chose to tell no one. She never publicly
• 6:38
  named him. She actually died in the early twenty twenties.
• 6:42
  Sources very slightly on the exact year, either twenty twenty
• 6:45
  or twenty twenty two, without ever confirming this horrific suspicion
• 6:49
  to her son.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance required to carry that secret for that
• 6:53
  long is almost unimaginable.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: It's a masterclass in compartmentalization.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Or sheer terror. Honestly, very true.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: It is an act of deep self preservation. To attach
• 7:03
  yourself and your young son to the most despised man
• 7:05
  in America would invite absolute social destruction. So she shows silence.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: But silence in a family is never really silent.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: Is it. No, silence within a family system is incredibly loud.
• 7:18
  Children are markably perceptive barometers for hidden tension. Daniel knew
• 7:22
  there was a secret, even if he didn't know the
• 7:24
  specific shape of it.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: So Daniel lives with this void for decades, and Sophia
• 7:29
  grows up with it too. In the documentary, she actually
• 7:31
  talks about hearing bedtime stories as a kid, about this
• 7:34
  longing to meet the man whose name and face were unknown.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: The missing grandfather became a character in their lives.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this persistent ghost in their household. So naturally, like
• 7:43
  millions of other people looking to fill in the gaps
• 7:45
  of their history, Daniel wants answers. So in twenty fifteen,
• 7:49
  he smits a DNA sample to ancestry dot com.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: Which is a very logical modern mechanism for someone seeking
• 7:55
  their biological roots. You cast a net into the digital
• 7:58
  ocean and see what.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Comes back, right, he sends the swab in twenty fifteen,
• 8:02
  But for seven years, nothing, just absolute silence. There's no
• 8:07
  decisive hit, just waiting. I was thinking about this and
• 8:10
  it feels exactly like setting a digital tripwire in the dark.
• 8:13
  You set it, you probably check your email obsessively for
• 8:15
  a few weeks, maybe a few months, but eventually life
• 8:18
  just goes on.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: You forget about it entirely.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: You completely forget you even set the trap. And then
• 8:24
  seven years later, in twenty twenty two, that tripwire violently
• 8:28
  snaps shut and.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: The capture is undeniable.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: The system flags a match, and the match is with
• 8:33
  a man named Michael Brunner. Now, for those familiar with
• 8:36
  Manson history, Michael Brunner was born Valentine Michael Manson in
• 8:40
  nineteen sixty eight.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: Yes, his mother was Mary Brunner.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Right, one of the earliest and most devoted members of
• 8:45
  the Manson family. So Daniel gets this hit, and the
• 8:48
  genetic analysis indicates a ninety nine point nine ninety nine
• 8:52
  nine eight percent probability that Daniel Rgwell's and Michael Brunner
• 8:55
  share the same biological father.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: We really need to pause on that number, because the
• 9:00
  science here is critical to understand. Ninety nine point nine
• 9:03
  nine nine nine eight percent.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: It's absurdly high.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: It is. When consumer DNA companies analyze your saliva, they
• 9:10
  are looking at autosomal DNA and they measure the length
• 9:13
  of shared genetic segments in a unit called centi morgans.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Okay, set of morgans.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: Right, So if you share a distant cousin, you might
• 9:20
  share twenty or thirty centi morgans, which leaves room for
• 9:23
  interpretation or distant historical overlap. But a half uncle, a
• 9:27
  half uncle, or a half sibling shares somewhere between eight
• 9:30
  hundred and fifty and thirteen hundred cent of morgans.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Wow, that's huge.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: It is a massive, undeniable chunk of identical code. That
• 9:40
  ninety nine point nine percent figure isn't a statistical guess,
• 9:44
  it is a mathematical certainty based on how human DNA recombines, which.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Goes back to what you were saying earlier. The algorithm
• 9:51
  doesn't pause to consider the emotional blast radius of connecting
• 9:54
  a suburban father to a.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: Cult leader exactly. The technology strips away all the mythology,
• 10:00
  all the true crime lore, and distills the horror down
• 10:03
  to cold and disputable biology.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: It's so chilling. You spend your entire life desperate for
• 10:08
  an answer, desperate to fill in that blank space. You
• 10:11
  convince yourself that finding out the truth will bring you peace.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: But it doesn't always work out that way right.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Sometimes the answer is infinitely darker than the not knowing.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: In clinical psychology, living with an unknown origin creates a
• 10:22
  very unique vulnerability. We construct our identities through narrative.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Like the stories we tell ourselves.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: Yes, we tell ourselves, I am this kind of person
• 10:31
  because I come from these kinds of people. When half
• 10:35
  of that equation is missing, individuals often romanticize the unknown.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Oh sure, you imagine their royalty or.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Something, or a lost war hero or a tragic romance,
• 10:44
  or simply just an ordinary decent person. So to have
• 10:48
  that blank space suddenly populated by an avatar of pure
• 10:52
  cultural evil, it doesn't just fill the space.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: It ruins it.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: It corrupts the entire tree. It forces a retroactive reevaluation
• 11:00
  of every personality, trait, every temper flare, every dark thought you've.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Ever had, which brings us to the immediate aftermath. Daniel
• 11:08
  gets this truth, He has the answer, but he's a father.
• 11:11
  He has a daughter in her early twenties whom he
• 11:13
  is incredibly close to.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: The burden shifts to how to share it.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how do you sit down with your kid and say, hey,
• 11:19
  you know that missing grandfather we've been searching for is
• 11:21
  Charles Manson.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: M You don't say it easily, and according to the sources,
• 11:25
  Daniel couldn't say it immediately. He actually delayed telling Sophia
• 11:28
  for approximately two months.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but two months. I really have to push
• 11:32
  back on this because I cannot wrap my head around
• 11:35
  that decision.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: It's a very common reaction to have from the outside,
• 11:38
  but it.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Feels like a massive betrayal. You look your daughter in
• 11:41
  the eye every single day, knowing her grandfather's Charles Manson,
• 11:45
  knowing her entire biological reality has shifted, and you just
• 11:49
  say nothing. Was he trying to protect her? Or was
• 11:52
  he just being cowardly?
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: Like I said, it is incredibly easy to judge from
• 11:57
  the outside, but we really have to look at the
• 11:59
  neurology of tr Okay.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Lay it on me.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: When a person receives news of that magnitude, the nervous
• 12:05
  system often enters an absolute freeze state. Daniel had just
• 12:10
  lost the narrative of his.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: Own life, so he just shut down.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: Essentially. Yes. The psychological term for this is genealogical bewilderment.
• 12:18
  It's this profound disorientation that occurs when a person's biological
• 12:22
  lineage is fundamentally disrupted.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Genealogical bewilderment. That's a powerful phrase.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: It is. It can cause a loss of identity, severe anxiety,
• 12:30
  and a feeling of being completely unmoored from reality. So
• 12:33
  he was paralyzed, completely paralyzed. For those two months, Daniel
• 12:37
  was entirely alone in this new, terrifying universe. Protection and
• 12:42
  paralysis are often two sides of the exact same coin
• 12:45
  in trauma responses. Wow, because to speak the words out
• 12:48
  loud to Sophia would be to make it real. It
• 12:51
  would spread the contagion of this knowledge to the person
• 12:53
  he loved most in the world. He was likely desperately
• 12:57
  trying to figure out how to frame a truth that
• 12:59
  is inherently unframeable, And.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: When he finally does tell her, the setting he chooses,
• 13:05
  or maybe the setting where he just couldn't hold it
• 13:07
  in anymore, is so bizarre. He breaks the news to
• 13:10
  her in the car while they're driving to get a
• 13:12
  COVID test.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: The juxtaposition of the mundane and the catastrophic.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Exactly a totally ordinary car ride. You're gonna get a
• 13:19
  nasal swab for a pandemic, just running a completely tedious errand,
• 13:23
  and suddenly the universe drops a nuclear bomb on your identity.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: And the car is such a confined space too.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: You can't run away, you can't walk into the other room.
• 13:30
  You're trapped in that passenger seat, physically strapped in while
• 13:34
  your reality just dissolves around you.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: The sources note that her reaction was immediate and visceral.
• 13:39
  She was devastated, completely dumb struck, and reduced to sobbing naturally,
• 13:44
  and Daniel is holding her, insisting repeatedly we are nothing
• 13:48
  like him.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: There is a quote from Sophia in the documentary that
• 13:51
  just gutted me. In the immediate aftermath, she says, I
• 13:55
  come from a murderer, who the F word would accept me.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: Notice what she does not ask in that moment, You
• 14:01
  mean she doesn't ask what did he do? She already
• 14:04
  knows what Charles Manson did. The culture has ensured we
• 14:07
  all know. She asks, who would accept me?
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: Oh? Wow?
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that is the absolute crux of the inherited trauma dilemma.
• 14:15
  Her immediate instinctual fear is that the guilt, the taint,
• 14:19
  the social ostracization of the grandfather is biologically transmitted to
• 14:24
  the granddaughter. It is a fear of genetic contagion.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: She feels physically stained by it, like it's on her.
• 14:29
  Exactly so, Sophia is in her early twenties. Her identity
• 14:32
  has just been hijacked, and her immediate coping mechanism is
• 14:36
  fascinating to me. She instinctively turns on a camera.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: Right she starts filming.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: She starts filming her own raw reactions, her own grief,
• 14:44
  and this deeply personal footage is what eventually evolves into
• 14:47
  the July twenty twenty six Hulu and Disney Plus documentary
• 14:51
  My Grandfather Charles Manson, which she co directed with Alexandra Orton.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: It's a very modern response to crisis, But why.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Grab a camera in the middle of the panic attack?
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: Us Turning the lens on oneself in a moment of
• 15:02
  acute crisis is a powerful mechanism for reclaiming control.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Or reclaiming control.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, when your biological identity has just been overwritten by
• 15:12
  an algorithm, you are rendered entirely powerless. You didn't choose
• 15:15
  this DNA, but by picking up a camera, you instantly
• 15:18
  become the director.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Oh that makes so much sense.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: You are framing the narrative. You are dictating what the
• 15:24
  viewer sees, where the focus lies, and how the story
• 15:27
  is paced.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: It's a way of saying, like, if my life is
• 15:29
  going to be a true crime story, I refuse to
• 15:32
  be a passive victim in it. I'm going to be
• 15:34
  the one telling it.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Precisely, externalizing the trauma creates necessary distance. If the horror
• 15:40
  is captured on the camera, it becomes an object to
• 15:42
  be studied and manipulated, rather than an emotion that is
• 15:45
  actively consuming you.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: So it's a buffer between her and the panic.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: Right. She states in the sources that she started filming
• 15:51
  because she just didn't know how else to cope with
• 15:53
  the news. The camera functioned as a psychological survival tool
• 15:57
  long before it was ever conceived as a documentary for Hulu.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Okay, so the initial shockwave hits, the camera is rolling,
• 16:04
  but once that first blinding wave of panic subsides, you
• 16:09
  have to face the long dark shadow of the reality.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: The dust settles and you're left with the facts.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Right, the inevitable question arises, what exactly did I inherit
• 16:19
  from this man? Which brings us straight into the nature
• 16:22
  versus nurture debate.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: And you really cannot discuss what Sophia might have inherited
• 16:26
  without first examining what Manson himself inherited.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: Let's delve into that context then, Yeah, because while we
• 16:32
  all know the mythology of Charles Manson, the biological reality
• 16:35
  of his origins is often glossed over.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: I feel like it definitely is. People prefer the monster
• 16:40
  myth to the human reality.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: Well. Charles Manson was born in nineteen thirty four to
• 16:44
  a sixteen year old mother named Kathleen Maddox. His early
• 16:47
  life was characterized by extreme instability, profound abandonment, and early criminality.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: He was in and out of the system constantly.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: Right bouncing between reform schools, repeatedly incarcerated. He spent a
• 16:59
  massive portion of his youth institutionalized.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: And that background of severe instability is critical to understanding
• 17:05
  the generational transmission we are dissecting here.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: Because by the mid sixties he drifts into the counterculture
• 17:12
  scenes of San Francisco and Los Angeles and he uses
• 17:15
  those institutional survival skills to manipulate and gather a group
• 17:20
  of disenfranchised, mostly young men.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: And women, the foundation of the Manson family.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they live communally, consume heavy amounts of psychedelics, and
• 17:29
  he elevates himself into this charismatic, messianic leader. He begins
• 17:33
  preaching helter Skelter, which was this apocalyptic vision he cobbled
• 17:37
  together from Beatles lyrics and deeply racist conspiracy theories, predicting
• 17:41
  an imminent race war.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: And then in August of nineteen sixty nine, he weaponized
• 17:46
  that influence. He did under his specific direction, his followers
• 17:49
  murdered seven people over two consecutive nights in Los Angeles.
• 17:54
  The victims at the Colo Drive residence included Sharon Tate,
• 17:57
  who is eight and a half months pregnant, JC Bring,
• 18:00
  Abigail Folger, wichuk Erkowski, and Stephen parent and then the
• 18:05
  next night the following night, they murdered Leno and Rosemary
• 18:07
  la Bianca. The extreme brutality, the violence, the messages written
• 18:11
  in the victim's blood on the walls, It fundamentally traumatized
• 18:15
  the American psyche.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: It really ended the idealistic era of the nineteen sixties. Overnight.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: It did. Manson was convicted in nineteen seventy one and
• 18:22
  died in prison in twenty seventeen at the age of
• 18:24
  eighty three.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: So that is the ghost haunting Sophia's DNA. And prior
• 18:29
  to this consumer DNA revelation, public knowledge of Manson's lineage
• 18:33
  had primarily centered on his three known sons.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about them because their stores are tragic.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There was Charles Manson Junior, who later changed his
• 18:40
  name to Jay White in an attempt to escape the legacy. Tragically,
• 18:44
  he died by suicide in.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Nineteen ninety three, a terrible outcome.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Then there was Charles Luther Manson, who reportedly died in
• 18:50
  two thousand and seven. And then there was Michael Bronner,
• 18:52
  the half uncle who triggered Daniel's DNA match.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: When you lay out that lineage, what becomes immediately apparent
• 18:59
  is the profound, compounding suffering embedded within it.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's bleak.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: Look at the multigenerational cascade. You start with Kathleen Maddox,
• 19:08
  a teenager struggling with legal troubles and intense instability. You
• 19:12
  trace that forward to Charles Manson's deeply institutionalized violent youth.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: And then it just keeps going exactly.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: You trace that to the next generation. One son who
• 19:22
  dies by suicide, another who changes his name and vanishes
• 19:25
  into obscurity, another who is raised in deliberate isolation.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: And then you look at Daniel R. Gwell's living his
• 19:32
  entire life with the dull inch of an absent father.
• 19:35
  And finally Sophia plunged into an identity crisis in her twenties.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: It is a domino effect of trauma.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: I was trying to articulate how this feels for the listener,
• 19:44
  and it's kind of like inheriting an old, dilapidated house.
• 19:47
  I like that analogy, right, Like, you don't literally inherit
• 19:50
  the ghosts. There is no biological phantom of Charles Manson
• 19:53
  living in Sophia's blood. But you do inherit the faulty wiring, yes,
• 19:58
  the environment. You inherit the cracked foundoundation, the leaky roof,
• 20:01
  the structural rot and you're standing in the middle of
• 20:04
  this house realizing, Wow, the man who built this foundation
• 20:09
  was a monster. But I'm the one standing here in
• 20:12
  the dark. When lights go out, it's up to me
• 20:14
  to rewire it.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: That analogy perfectly encapsulates the scientific and psychological consensus presented
• 20:20
  in Sophia's documentary. The film actually includes real therapy sessions
• 20:25
  that tackle this biological fear head on.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And what do they conclude.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: The scientific consensus is definitive. There is no murder gene.
• 20:33
  Evil is not biologically transmitted in a deterministic way. A
• 20:37
  person does not inherit a biological mandate to orchestrate harm, but.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: The trauma is transmitted.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: Yes, through the mechanisms of environment. And as modern science
• 20:46
  is increasingly exploring epigenetics.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Epigenetics break that down for us real quick.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: Sure. Epigenetics is the study of how behaviors and environment
• 20:54
  can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.
• 20:57
  Extreme stress, like the kind experience by Kathleen Max or
• 21:00
  the heavy silence endured by Darlene, can actually alter gene
• 21:04
  expression in subsequent generations.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: So it changes your DNA not exactly.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: It doesn't change the underlying DNA code itself, but it
• 21:11
  changes how the body reads a DNA sequence. It can
• 21:14
  create a hyperreactive nervous system, a predisposition to anxiety, or
• 21:19
  a heightened stress response. Oh wow, So you combine that
• 21:22
  physiological baseline with the environmental modeling of emotional absence, and
• 21:26
  you have a very clear path for trauma to travel
• 21:29
  down the family tree.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: So Sophia actually took a very radical step to address
• 21:32
  this lineage. She changed her surname.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: She did.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: She changed it from Arguays to Mattox. And remember Maddox
• 21:39
  was Charles Manson's birth name through his mother, Kathleen.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: This is a fascinating choice.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: When I first saw that in the sources, I was
• 21:45
  totally baffled. I mean, why on earth was you adopt
• 21:48
  a name so closely tied to him? But looking closer,
• 21:51
  it is this fiercely deliberate act of editorializing her own life.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: It is an act of profound psychological reauthoring.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: By legally claiming the name, she is actively leapfrogging Charles Manson.
• 22:03
  She is reaching back past the monster, back to the mother, to.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Kathleen, reclaiming the roots. Yes, yeah, she.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: Is acknowledging the deeply flawed, struggling humanity of our biological lineage,
• 22:15
  the teenage pregnancy, the poverty, the instability, while vehemently refusing
• 22:20
  to take on the mythical branded evil of the name Manson.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: She is essentially saying I am forced to accept my biology,
• 22:28
  but I absolutely reject your mythology exactly. There's a quote
• 22:32
  from her that perfectly sums up this entire endeavor. She says,
• 22:35
  I just had to find out what I had to break.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: You cannot dismantle a bomb if you refuse to look
• 22:40
  at how it is wired. That's good for Sophia. Dragging
• 22:43
  this dark truth into the light was the only way
• 22:46
  she could identify the faulty wiring in her own family's history,
• 22:50
  the subtle mental health struggles, the patterns of absence or anxiety.
• 22:54
  She can now trace those threads back to their origin point.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: And once you see the pattern, you can consciously choose
• 22:59
  to be differently. You can actually break the cycle.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: That's the hope.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Yes, But here's the brutal irony of this entire situation.
• 23:06
  Sophia's quest to break the cycle to rewire that old
• 23:09
  house didn't immediately lead to healing. In fact, the investigation,
• 23:14
  the constant presence of the cameras it began to tear
• 23:18
  her family apart.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: We often operate under the naive assumption that the truth
• 23:21
  will automatically set us free.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: We really do.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: We assume that uncovering a buried family secret will lead
• 23:26
  to catharsis, healing and reconciliation. But the reality, especially with
• 23:31
  trauma of this magnitude, is that the truth is highly destabilizing.
• 23:36
  It is a wrecking ball.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: Let's examine Daniel and Sophia's relationship before all this. Historically,
• 23:41
  the sources make it clear they had an incredibly tight,
• 23:44
  loving bond.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: They were very close.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: The documentary utilizes archival home video footage showing Daniel as
• 23:50
  a deeply devoted father. He was the guy with the
• 23:52
  cam court right, filming every second of her childhood. The
• 23:56
  film describes Sophia as the good girl growing up and
• 23:59
  her father's work. They were deeply tethered to one another.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: He was a father who clearly made his daughter the
• 24:05
  absolute center of his universe. It is actually very common
• 24:09
  for individuals who grew up with an absent parent to
• 24:12
  overcompensate by being hyper present for their own children.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: But the production of this documentary caused severe friction. As
• 24:19
  Sophia started digging deeper into the Manson lore, and as
• 24:23
  the cameras kept rolling in their faces, Daniel grew increasingly strained.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: It was too much pressure.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, The sources indicate that these tensions eventually escalated into
• 24:33
  a heated on camera confrontation, and the fallout was catastrophic.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: It's really sad.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: As of late July twenty twenty six, Sophia and Daniel
• 24:42
  are currently estranged. She has stated she hopes for a reconciliation.
• 24:46
  She wants him to feel seen and understood, but right
• 24:49
  now the communication is just severed.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: It is a devastating outcome, but psychologically it is not
• 24:54
  entirely surprising.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: Why not?
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: Well, it forces us to examine how two different people
• 24:57
  can process the exact same genetic revel in fundamentally incompatible ways.
• 25:03
  Daniel and Sophia are staring at the exact same truth,
• 25:06
  but their vantage points are entirely different.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Break that down for me, how so.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: Think about Daniel's position. He is the direct sun. He
• 25:13
  carried the burden of the blank space inside his own
• 25:16
  psyche his entire life. The revelation was a direct violation
• 25:20
  of his lived identity.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: He lived it right.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: Uncovering this truth is a heavy, deeply private grief for him.
• 25:27
  He likely needed to retreat to internalize the shock, to
• 25:31
  protect whatever was left of his unmored identity.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: And Sophia is a generation removed she didn't grow up
• 25:36
  carrying the blank space in the same direct, painful way. Yeah,
• 25:40
  for her, it is a puzzle to be solved.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: Precisely, for Sophia, it is a mystery to be investigated, documented,
• 25:46
  and actively combated. Her instinct is to drag the monster
• 25:49
  out from under the bed and shine a stadium spotlight
• 25:52
  on it, just to strip it of its power. Daniel
• 25:55
  needed the shadows to survive the shock. Sophia needed the
• 25:58
  glare of the camera.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: They needed opposite that they.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Required opposite environments to heal, and that divergence ultimately fractured
• 26:04
  their relationship.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: The DNA tests solved the sixty year old mystery, but
• 26:08
  the fallout costs Daniel his relationship with the one person
• 26:11
  he loved most in the world. It really makes you
• 26:14
  wonder if the truth is always worth the price of admission.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: It's a heavy question.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: And in the middle of this tragic father daughter estrangement,
• 26:22
  a completely unexpected figure steps in to support Sophia.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: Michael Brenner, the half uncle, the man whose DNA submission
• 26:30
  inadvertently triggered the match in the first place.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Yes, Michael Brenner becomes this vital pillar of support for her.
• 26:37
  The sources. Note they have phone calls, he sends her books,
• 26:40
  He encourages her as she processes all this dark material, which.
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: Is incredible when you think about it, and if you look.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: At Michael's life trajectory, it is incredibly eliminating. He was
• 26:50
  raised by his maternal grandparents in the Midwest, geographically and
• 26:53
  culturally thousands of miles away from the Manson family legacy
• 26:57
  in California.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: They gave him a totally different environ.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they actively sought to give him a quiet, normal,
• 27:02
  structured childhood.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: And because of that, Michael Brunner serves as a living,
• 27:06
  breathing proof of concept for Sophia. He models the undeniable
• 27:10
  fact that you can possess this specific DNA and still
• 27:15
  choose to live a quiet, moral, ordinary life. He proves
• 27:19
  that your destiny is not written in your genes.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: He's living proof exactly.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: His support for Sophia is profound because he is quite
• 27:27
  literally one of the only people on earth who truly
• 27:30
  understands the specific genetic gravity of what she is carrying.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: But Michael's involvement and Sophia's decision to make this documentary
• 27:37
  points us toward a massive ethical dilemma By producing this
• 27:41
  project for Hulu and Disney Plus, Sophia didn't just solve
• 27:44
  a private family mystery, she broadcast it to the global public.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: And that decision has drawn significant criticism, a lot of
• 27:51
  criticism the ethics of the unwanted legacy. It is a
• 27:54
  fiercely debated topic in documentary filmmaking and the true crime space.
• 27:58
  When you discover you are biologically linked to a high
• 28:01
  profile perpetrator, what are the moral boundaries of telling that story?
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: Well, critics have been very vocal about this. They argue
• 28:08
  that the documentary could be perceived as clout seeking or
• 28:11
  capitalizing on a tragic lineage just for personal gain.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: It's a common critique of the genre.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: They worry that any media focusing on Manson, even from
• 28:19
  a critical perspective, is just further mythologizing him, giving him
• 28:24
  exactly what he always craved, internal cultural relevance.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Which he absolutely did crave.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: And most pressingly, there is the deep concern about re
• 28:33
  traumatizing the families of the victims.
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: Which is an incredibly valid concern. We have to remember
• 28:38
  the families of the victims murdered in August nineteen sixty
• 28:41
  nine have had to endure over half a century of
• 28:43
  pop culture turning their personal agonizing tragedy into cheap entertainment
• 28:48
  is awful. Every time a new movie or documentary is released,
• 28:52
  they're forced to relive the worst days of their lives.
• 28:55
  Society continually grapples with how to balance a victims' families
• 28:59
  right now to peace against a descendant's right to uncover
• 29:02
  and process their own complex history.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: Sophia defends the project, though, and her defense is rooted
• 29:08
  in her specific approach. She argues that the film centers
• 29:11
  strictly on her interior experience.
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: It's about her, not him exactly.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: It is an exploration of an identity crisis, not a
• 29:18
  glorification of the crimes. Furthermore, she sought out primary sources
• 29:22
  to ground it. She actually interviewed former Manson family member
• 29:26
  Lynette Squeaky from for the documentary.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Wow Squeaky from Yeah.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Sophia claims she did this to form her own opinions
• 29:32
  based on direct, primary encounters, rather than just relying on
• 29:36
  the media's historical framing.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: It is a razor thin tightrope to walk creatively and
• 29:41
  ethically totally. The dramatic engine of the film relies entirely
• 29:45
  on the tension between wanting to understand the biological reality
• 29:48
  of a relative while fiercely refusing to excuse or minimize
• 29:52
  what that relative did.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: And the source's note she does not soft pedal the
• 29:56
  nineteen sixty nine murders at all. The film opens with
• 29:59
  her lunt explicit acknowledgment that she comes from a murderer,
• 30:03
  and it returns repeatedly to the devastating human cost of
• 30:05
  those crimes.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: It doesn't shy away from the horror, right, but.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: The broader cultural issue here goes far beyond Sophia Maattics
• 30:11
  or Charles Manson. This is about the profound reality of
• 30:15
  consumer DNA testing in the modern world.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: Millions of people are willingly extracting their genetic code and
• 30:21
  uploading it to private, corporate.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: Servers, just giving it away.
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: Yes, and when you make that choice, you are making
• 30:27
  a decision that permanently strips away genetic privacy, not just
• 30:30
  for yourself, but for your ancestors and your descendants.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: That is so true.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: A DNA profile uploaded today can lie dormant and surface
• 30:38
  matches decades from now.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: It is exposing affairs, secret adoptions, hidden families, sperm donor origins.
• 30:45
  I mean, you name it. The commercial model of ancestry
• 30:48
  testing encourages us to spit in the tube with a smile,
• 30:51
  but it rarely warns users that the results possess the
• 30:54
  power to completely dismantle their existing family structure.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: And that leads to a huge moral question. If you
• 31:00
  find out you are related to a historical monster, do
• 31:03
  you owe the public and accounting of that discovery? Weakly no,
• 31:06
  right legally no, but morally it remains ambiguous. Sophia was
• 31:11
  not alive in nineteen sixty nine. Her father was a
• 31:13
  child who didn't even know his own paternity. Guilt is
• 31:16
  absolutely not hereditary, so she owes nothing. However, once you
• 31:20
  choose to broadcast that connection on a massive streaming platform,
• 31:24
  you invite public scrutiny. You are asking the public to
• 31:27
  consume your trauma, which inherently means the public gets to
• 31:30
  have an opinion on how you present it.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: It's a messy, intensely complicated reality. Let's try to pull
• 31:35
  all these threads together.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: Good idea.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: If we look at the immense journey we've mapped out today,
• 31:40
  it begins with a vulnerable seventeen year old girl having
• 31:44
  a brief transient encounter at a Los Angeles bus station
• 31:47
  in nineteen fifty nine.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: Just a fleeting moment.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: That encounter sleeps in terrified silence for decades. It wakes
• 31:53
  up with a simple DNA swab in twenty fifteen, it
• 31:56
  explodes into devastating revelation in twenty twenty two, and it
• 32:01
  immortalizes itself in a documentary in twenty twenty six.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: It is a profound illustration of how biology can forcefully
• 32:07
  reveal our hidden connections, but it is ultimately our individual
• 32:10
  choices that dictate their meaning. So true, the algorithm changed
• 32:13
  the private history of Daniel and Sophia, and it changed
• 32:16
  the public story they chose to tell, but it did
• 32:18
  not change the immutable facts of nineteen sixty nine.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: It just threw a grenade into the present. And for
• 32:24
  you listening, I want you to really sit with this
• 32:27
  for a moment. Millions of us have handed over our
• 32:30
  genetic code. We assume our family trees are sturdy, We
• 32:34
  assume the roots go down into solid, boring dirt.
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: Most people do.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: But Sophia Maddix's story is terrifying proof that those roots
• 32:42
  can lead literally anywhere. They can tangle with history in
• 32:46
  ways we can't even begin to predict.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: Every time someone drops that little cardboard box into the mail,
• 32:52
  they are potentially rewriting their own identity overnight, which.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: Leaves me with a final lingering thought, fee to chew on.
• 32:59
  Think about the tube you spit into. Think about the
• 33:01
  algorithm silently running in the background of our lives, constantly
• 33:05
  cross referencing our biology, always running. If a simple saliva
• 33:08
  swab can instantly expose a sixty year old secret, tying
• 33:12
  an ordinary, loving, suburban family to a historical monster, is
• 33:16
  the very concept of a family secret officially extinct?
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: It might be.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: And if we're entering an era where we can no
• 33:22
  longer hide our histories in the dark, are we finally
• 33:25
  ready to forgive ourselves for the sins of our ancestors?
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: That may be the defining moral question of the genetic age.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: The blank space on the family tree has been filled,
• 33:34
  But what you do with the information, well, it's entirely
• 33:37
  up to you.