He was definitely known as the foremost man killer in the West; however there's controversy about virtually every killing that he was known to have been involved in.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It wasn't until two or three years ago that I actually learned that in the end he actually did kill someone. But that was a choice that he faced: to kill or be killed.
Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.
Rather, like the anarchists of the last century, he didn't care if he was killed or not. They just wanted to be known. We found no trace of any conspiracy.
There are biographies, I looked at a lot of photographs of him, I heard his voice over and over and over again. You get in there and get to know the man by all of those pieces of information.
People call him a terrorist, but you can use language to do many things and say many things about people, but John Brown was a hero.
Wild Bill was anything but a quarrelsome man yet I have personal knowledge of at least half a dozen men whom he had at various times killed.
You look at the descriptions of Whitey by law enforcement during his early years, and they sum him up pretty well. He was the same guy 40 years later; he just had $40 million more, and had committed 40 more murders.
If anyone should be executed, it should be Charles Manson. Do I go around during the daytime, 'Geez, I'm upset that he's alive'? No, I don't even think about him. I don't think about this case.
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.