Charles Manson gets a new mugshot just months after health scare

A new mugshot of the notorious Charles Manson has been released, showing the former cult leader looking visibly older.

The photo, released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, was taken in Corcoran State Prison on Monday (14 August) and updates his previous mugshot from 2014.

It shows a now-bald Manson with a beard and still sporting his infamous forehead swastika tattoo.

The 82-year-old, who is serving multiple life sentences, looked healthy and appears to have fully recovered after being hospitalised in January.

He was reportedly treated for intestinal bleeding for a week before being taken back to prison.

Manson has been behind bars for more than four decades after being jailed for orchestrating a series of murders in August 1969, including that of pregnant actress Sharon Tate.

He was initially sentenced to death, but after California temporarily scrapped the death sentence in 1972, the sentence was reduced to life in prison.

A petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood, Manson's killing spree came after he reinvented himself during the so-called Summer of Love as a long-haired, Christ-like guru spouting Bible verses and Beatles lyrics.

After attracting a few dozen followers from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district – many of them young women and runaways – he took them to an old ranch on the edge of Los Angeles that he transformed into a commune of sex, drugs and music.

On 9 and 10 August, 1969, he sent some of his devotees out on a murderous mission to two of Los Angeles' wealthiest neighborhoods, where they killed pregnant actress Tate, several of her society friends and others. Most of the victims, including coffee heiress Abigail Folger, were stabbed.

Tate's husband, Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.

Authorities would learn that Manson had hoped the killings would touch off a race war. He had apparently gotten the idea from a twisted reading of the hard-rocking Beatles song "Helter Skelter."

Manson and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, were convicted of the murders.