For most of his life, Daniel Arguelles had wondered who his biological father was. The answer, when it finally came, was one he wasn’t sure his own daughter was ready to hear.
Sophia Maddox is a 22-year-old filmmaker in Los Angeles. Her father called with an unsettling update. An Ancestry test had returned a result he couldn’t un-know: Charles Manson was his biological father—which made Manson her grandfather. Maddox did what anyone would do. She Googled his face. The resemblance was immediate, undeniable. “That’s my dad,” she thought.
Arguelles had submitted his DNA to Ancestry in 2015. He didn’t expect the answer to be one of the most notorious names in American history. Years later, the test matched him with Michael Brunner, Manson’s son with his early follower Mary Brunner. Additional testing confirmed the two men were half-brothers. Arguelles, born in 1959, had been conceived during a brief relationship between his mother and Manson—who, at the time, was moving through the world under the alias “Charlie Dear,” according to People.
That revelation became the seed of ‘My Grandfather Charles Manson’, Maddox’s documentary for Hulu. Rather than retread the familiar horror-movie mythology, she went looking for the person underneath it. She sat with former Manson followers and pored over previously unreleased records from his childhood, chasing a quieter question: not what he became, but how he became it.
The records told a bleak story. Manson was born in 1934 and spent much of his childhood cycling through juvenile institutions. By the time he walked out of federal prison in 1967 at 32-years-old, he had spent roughly half his life behind some kind of bars. “He was there for running away from home, stealing a bike or stealing a car,” Maddox said of his early years. “But so many boys, older kids with violent records, were placed there. And what does a kid have to do to survive a place like that?”
None of that undoes what came after. Manson was convicted of orchestrating the 1969 murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others, and he died in prison in 2017 at 83, still serving a life sentence. Maddox has been careful to draw the line between understanding and absolution. “My intention is never to apologize or justify for anybody’s actions,” she said. “I know what my grandfather did.”
The film that grew out of the discovery came at a cost closer to home. The same revelation that inspired the project ultimately fractured Maddox’s relationship with her father. They had a falling out one week before production began. Arguelles, who saw echoes of his own childhood in Manson’s, found the whole thing too painful to be part of.
“I don’t know if he’s seen the film,” Maddox said. “He hasn’t reached out.” For his part, Arguelles has said only that the rift came down to “a difference of opinion on the overall narrative.”
Maddox came out the other side of the project carrying a new name. Somewhere in the process, she chose to take the surname of Manson’s mother, after learning what it meant to her. “My blood name means goodness,” she said. “I’m going to own it. That’s mine. I’m giving it new life.”
