Sophia Maddox was a 22-year-old actress in Los Angeles when her father called in 2022 to tell her he had identified his biological father, and that the answer was Charles Manson.
The call came seven years after Daniel Arguelles, Maddox's father, submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry.com. The 2015 test matched him with Michael Brunner, a confirmed biological son of Manson. Further DNA testing established that Arguelles and Brunner were half-brothers, making Arguelles one of Manson's four biological sons and Maddox the convicted cult leader's granddaughter. Maddox has now turned that discovery into a Hulu documentary, "My Grandfather Charles Manson," which chronicles her effort to understand a bloodline she never asked for.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Maddox described the moment her father broke the news. He warned her the truth was dark, and he wasn't sure she was ready for it.
"He told me he thinks he found out who his father is, and if it's true, it's really dark."
Maddox said her father had never introduced her to anything sinister, so she pressed him to say it plainly. Her first guess was Ted Bundy. Arguelles told her to think bigger, to think of "the biggest movie you know and the biggest director you know." She thought of Quentin Tarantino's 2019 film "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," which reimagined the 1969 Manson Family murders with Brad Pitt in a leading role. Then the name landed.
"And then I realized who it was: Charles Manson."
She called it "a really devastating day."
Arguelles, born in 1959, had long suspected that the man who raised him was not his biological father. At age 21, he confronted his mother, Darlene Arguelles, about his paternity. Darlene had a brief relationship with Manson, who at the time used the alias "Charlie Dear." But it wasn't until Arguelles submitted his DNA to Ancestry.com in 2015 that the genetic connection was confirmed through the match with Brunner.
Manson was born Charles Milles Maddox in 1934 to a teenage mother, Kathleen Maddox. His biological father was absent. Kathleen married William Manson, who gave the boy his surname, but the marriage fell apart. Kathleen went to prison for her role in a robbery, and young Charles bounced between relatives and juvenile institutions. He was sent to Indiana Boys School, where he later said he was beaten and sexually assaulted. By the time he walked out of federal prison in 1967 at age 32, he had spent roughly half his life locked up.
Maddox examined previously unreleased records about that childhood for the documentary. What she found shook her. She told Fox News Digital that Manson had been imprisoned alongside juveniles convicted of violent crimes, while he himself was locked up for running away from home and petty theft.
"I was shocked to read that he was imprisoned with kids who had murdered people. And he was there for running away from home, stealing a bike or stealing a car. 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? It breaks my heart."
A juvenile justice expert featured in the documentary told Maddox that Manson's experience at Indiana Boys School "was not singular" and "not exceptional." That was how boys in those institutions "learned their lessons in survival," the expert said.
None of that excuses what came next. After his 1967 release, Manson surrounded himself with runaways and drifters and built the cult known as the Manson Family. On the night of August 9, 1969, his followers invaded the Los Angeles home of actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, and murdered her along with four others: coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate's caretaker. Tate's husband, director Roman Polanski, was out of the country. The following night, followers stabbed grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary to death in their home. Seven people dead across two nights.
The Manson murders remain among the most scrutinized crimes in American history, with questions about the full scope of culpability still surfacing decades later.
Manson and three followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, were convicted after a trial that lasted nearly a year and sentenced to death. Charles "Tex" Watson was convicted and sentenced in a separate trial. In 1972, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty, and all five sentences were commuted to life in prison.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Manson maintained that he was innocent and that society itself was guilty. He died in 2017 at age 83, still serving his life sentence. Atkins died of cancer in prison in 2009 at age 61. Van Houten was released on parole in 2023. Krenwinkel and Watson remain behind bars.
In a 1981 prison interview shown in the documentary, Manson offered a line that could serve as his own epitaph, though, as Fox News Digital noted, it was unclear exactly whom he was addressing:
"You've got to catch it on your own, boy. The train's hard. The road's rough."
Sophia Maddox was careful to draw a line between her grandfather's crimes and her own family. She said she and her father had no criminal records and grew up as artists. Arguelles had worked as an actor and model in Hollywood, photographed by the legendary Richard Avedon. But learning the Manson connection forced her to confront a question strangers now ask openly.
"Of course, when you learn that someone like Manson is your grandfather, it's normal to wonder, 'Am I that too?' People have asked me, 'Were you afraid that you inherited evil, that you were evil?' But my dad and I are very normal, hardworking people."
She also acknowledged the parallels between her father's childhood and Manson's. Arguelles endured abuse as a child in a reform school and at the hands of his own parents, Maddox said. She saw a through-line, a cycle of institutional failure and personal damage, but refused to let it become an excuse.
"My intention is never to apologize or justify for anybody's actions. I know what my grandfather did."
High-profile criminal cases have a way of producing new revelations long after the original events. Just as new evidence has surfaced decades after the Tupac Shakur murder, the Manson story continues to generate fresh disclosures, this time from within the killer's own bloodline.
Maddox said her father encouraged her to make the documentary. But one week before production started, the two had a falling out. She described the rift carefully, saying Arguelles had "shared similar experiences in childhood" as Manson and that the process of revisiting all of it became too much for him.
"I don't know if he's seen the film. He hasn't reached out. So, I'm just sitting back and respecting his wishes until he reaches back out."
Arguelles, for his part, offered a brief statement to Fox News Digital: "I still support Sophia, and I'm very proud of her. I believe the falling out between us came from a difference of opinion on the overall narrative. That's really all I can say at this point."
Maddox said she has since connected with two other relatives and described those encounters as "very lovely." She added that she is "not the only person looking for answers."
During the documentary's production, Maddox also reached out to relatives of Manson's victims and sat down with Dianne Lake, a former Manson Family member who was just 14 when she joined his inner circle. Maddox called the filmmaking process "cathartic."
"I'm a filmmaker before I found out who my grandfather is. And my life got uprooted from this. I had something to say at that moment, and I couldn't bottle it up."
One of the documentary's quieter revelations is Sophia's decision to change her legal surname. She and her father had long searched for a last name that felt right. During the year or two she spent investigating her family history, she looked up "Maddox", Manson's birth surname, taken from his mother Kathleen, and found that it means "goodness."
"My blood name means goodness. I'm going to own it. That's mine. I'm giving it new life."
"My Grandfather Charles Manson" is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
A name doesn't have to carry the sins of the man who bore it first. Whether Sophia Maddox can make that case to a public still haunted by 1969 is another matter, but at least she's making it with facts, not apologies.
