Not long after Charles Manson’s final phone call to James Buddy Day, the killer died at a Bakersfield, California hospital of natural causes at 8:13 p.m. on November 19, 2017. He had been in the hospital for four days. While Manson’s interview with Day may have been his last, a decade earlier he had made a similar boast about his fame to another researcher.
“I am the most famous person who ever lived,” Manson told professor and criminologist Jack Levin in 2007 during an interview for a book on mass murder. Levine agreed with him, to a point. “That’s only a slight exaggeration,” he told Northeastern Global News. “There are many great people who preceded Manson and were world-renowned but didn’t have the benefit of the mass media like Manson did.” Levin believes there will never be another Manson. “He fit into the anti-establishment environment that prevailed during the 60s and 70s, and those days are gone,” he said. “We could get another killer that influences young people but it wouldn’t look anything like Manson.”
