Cue the wedding bells and chill the Champagne. Charles Manson is getting married.
Afton Elaine Burton is the 80-year-old mass murderer's fiancee, as Daily RFT reported a year ago. Burton, a 26-year-old Susan Atkins look-alike who now goes by the name Star, grew up 40 miles north of St. Louis in Bunker Hill, Illinois, where her parents and two brothers still live.
The killer couple hasn't set a date yet, but Kings County has issued them a marriage license, according to the Associated Press. A prison wedding coordinator is organizing the ceremony, which will be in an inmate visiting room at California's Corcoran State Prison. The couple is allowed to invite ten non-inmate guests.
"Ya'll can know that it's true. It's going to happen," Burton tells theAP, later adding, "I love him. I'm with him."See also: Charles Manson's Fiancee is From St. Louis
Rolling Stone announced the couple's engagement last year, though when the magazine interviewed Manson, he didn't seem ready to take on a new ball and chain.
"Oh, that," he told Rolling Stone about the wedding. "That's a bunch of garbage. You know that, man. That's trash. We're just playing that for public consumption."
On Monday, Burton brushed aside Manson's comments. "None of that is true," she told the AP.
Burton says the couple will marry next month, and might have married sooner if Manson hadn't gotten into some trouble at the prison recently. According to the AP, Manson had three violations in February for possession of a weapon, threatening staff and refusal to provide a urine sample.
As a life prisoner with no parole date, Manson doesn't get conjugal visits, even after he has tied the knot. But Burton, who moved to California from Illinois in 2007 so she could regularly visit Manson, says marrying means she'll have access to information on his case that isn't available to non-relatives.
"There's certain things next of kin can do," she told the AP without elaborating.
Burton may be marrying Manson, but he's still not welcome in her childhood home in Bunker Hill, Illinois, says her father, Phil Burton.
"We've never ever, ever told our daughter that Charles Manson would be welcomed in this home," Phil tells the Daily Mail. "The reason it's not been said is that it's not worth saying. He's never going to be in this home. He's never going to be in anybody's home. He's never getting out of that box, and I don't believe he wants to. He is home."
When she's not visiting Manson in jail for up to five hours a day, Burton runs several websites advocating his release and his environmental and spiritual philosophies. Here's her first webcam video, posted in 2011, where she explains how the media lied about her now-fiance:
"People can think I'm crazy," she told Rolling Stone last year. "But they don't know. This is what's right for me. This is what I was born for."
Follow Lindsay Toler on Twitter at @StLouisLindsay. E-mail the author at [email protected].
