Sophia Maddox was 22 when her father called her on the phone. It was no ordinary conversation: Daniel Arguelles had just discovered, thanks to an Ancestry.com test, that he was Charles Manson’s biological son. She, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, heard the news and burst into tears, unable to fully process it.
It had all begun in 2015, when Arguelles submitted his DNA out of simple curiosity. It took the platform seven years to connect him with a half-brother, Michael Brunner, and that is how the truth emerged: he was directly descended from the man who orchestrated the murders of Sharon Tate and six other people in 1969. Manson died in prison in 2017, never knowing that he had a granddaughter.
Maddox turned that discovery into the Hulu documentary “My Grandfather Charles Manson”, in which she herself appears as co-director. But making it came at a high cost: she is now estranged from her father, who went so far as to say that he regretted ever calling her his daughter. Meanwhile, she legally adopted her grandmother’s surname to leave behind a name she never chose to bear.
