Split Personalities

The power of the Internet never ceases to amaze me. In particular, the amount of trivia and knowledge to be found on it is stupendous. Recently I decided to look up people on the Net that I always wanted to know more about - Alfred Hitchcock, Steve McQueen, Rasputin, Bruce Lee et al. And from there I would go on to read about more people that these characters were associated with and so on and so forth forming a complex chain of sorts. It's interesting to see where you end up with. Wikipedia has been my source of information so far and I must admit I'm blown away by the quality and depth of information present therein considering its written by anybody and everybody, if you know what I mean.

For example, I was reading up on Steve McQueen, and from there I was led to an article on Shannon Tate a rising American actress who was murdered by members of the Charles Mason Family in the 1969, alongwith five other people at her home. Intrigued by this Charles Mason fella I looked him up on Wikepedia and so came to know about this strangely warped and morbid man who instructed his "followers" to kill for him leading to 35 heinous murders.

More than Mason I was intrigued by the kind of followers he gathered, many of whom were women. When I think that some of the most brutal and heartless murders were commited by the women who adored him, I shudder to think of the kind of hypotic hold he had over them. His theory (read up!) was certainly one of the vaguest, silliest and most unbelievable of sorts, so it mystifies me that anyone would believe it. But people did believe and to such extent that they would kill for him. Crazy!