Aging Manson Family Members Long For Freedom-Mason Family Victims Longed For Life
Aging Manson Family Members Long For Freedom-Mason Family Victims Longed For Life. Neither party got what they longed for.
It’s been 40 years behind bars and the Manson Family members, Susan Atkins, Charles “Tex” Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten have repeatedly been described as model prisoners who have accepted responsibility for their crimes.
Susan Atkins is terminally ill, Tex Watson is an ordained minister. They and other members of Charles Manson’s Family. Still, it is a case of too little too late, too many lives where lost.
Parole boards continue to reject their bids for release, and a debate rages over whether the four should ever be freed.
Susan Adkins has been denied 17 times and is California’s longest serving female inmate. July of 2008, she requested a “compassionate release” (because she has terminal brain cancer) from the California Board of Parole Hearings. The board unanimously denied her compassionate release request.
Recent hype over Manson Family rekindled public interest in slayings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in a two night rampage that terrorized the city of Los Angeles, California, back in August of 1969.
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was horrible and they did unthinkable things to all that they tortured, mutilated and killed. My opinion is that they all have lived 40 years longer then any of their victims.
Susan Atkins’ 18th parole suitability hearing is scheduled for May 28th, 2009. Atkins is now 60, is paralyzed over 85 percent of her body and cannot sit up in bed or even be moved into a wheelchair. “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord.
Originally the Manson Family members were sentenced to death, only to have their sentences commuted to life in prison when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down death penalty laws in 1972, establishing a four year moratorium on all executions and California jumped right on that band wagon.
Susan Atkins openly and willing admitted that she held Tate down as she pleaded for mercy, and stabbed the eight-months-pregnant woman 16 times. Back in 1993 at a parole board hearing, Atkins confessed that Tate “asked me to let her baby live … I told her, I didn’t have any mercy on her.”
So, why should we have any on her now?
Adkins wasn’t finished…after stabbing Sharon Tate and her baby to death, she then scrawled the word “pig” in blood on the door of the home Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. Not only Sharon Tate was killed but 3 house guests were also slain, and a teenager who was visiting the home’s caretaker, in his cottage out back, making it a horrific crime scene.
Sharon Tates’ sister, Debra Tate, Los Angeles County prosecutors and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, all opposed the release. The former prosecutor who won her conviction, Vincent Bugliosi was the only one who agreed with her early release.
Debra Tate, in an e-mail to CNN News stated that “she does not believe any Manson family member convicted of murder should ever be set free. The slayings of the victims, including some that may have not been discovered, were ’so vicious, so inhumane, so depraved,’ that there is no turning back.”
“The ‘Manson Family’ murderers are sociopaths, and from that, they can never be rehabilitated. They should all stay right where they are, in prison, until they die. There will never be true justice for my sister Sharon and the other victims of the ‘Manson Family.’ Keeping the murderers in prison is the least we, as a society who values justice, can do,”stated Tate.
Patricia Krenwinkel, known as Katie within the Manson Family, killed coffee heiress Abigail Folger at the Tate home and, the following night, stabbed Rosemary LaBianca and carved the word “War” on her husband Leno LaBianca’s abdomen.
Krenwinkel, 61, remained faithful to Manson throughout her trial and into the first few years of her incarceration, but later even she tried to turn her life around.
Krenwinkel is a model inmate at the California Institution for Women and is involved in the Prison Pups Program, which helps train puppies to be service dogs. This program does get her out of the four walls. The program has trained more than 100 dogs, Krenwinkel has trained seven dogs.
Krenwinkel next parole hearing will be sometime before December of 2009.
Leslie Van Houten was convicted in the raid at the LaBianca home, where she helped hold Rosemary LaBianca down as the woman was stabbed to death. She was 19 when this horrible act took place.
“The autopsy reports have shown that it was Tex that wielded the fatal wounds, but I contributed, and I attempted to hold her down for Pat [Krenwinkel],” Van Houten said in a 2002 appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” “I called to Tex because we couldn’t kill her. You know, it’s…morally, I feel as though I did.”
Her conviction was overturned in 1976, on the grounds that a judge erred in not granting a mistrial after the disappearance of her attorney, Ronald Hughes, who later was found dead and thought to have been killed by the Mason Family.
In Leslie Van Houten’s first retrial, the jury was unable to reach a verdict and she was released on bond for a few months. Her third trial, in 1978, she was convicted of first degree murder.
Known as Lulu within the Manson family, Leslie Van Houten was a former high school homecoming queen. She is serving her life sentence at the California Institution for Women at Frontera, the same facility as Patricia Krenwinkel and, until last year, Susan Atkins (moved because of illness).
Like Krenwinkel, Van Houten is involved in prison programs and is a mentor to other inmates in the facility’s college program, Patterson said. She is also a model inmate…once again, too little to late.
During Van Houtens’ 2002 CNN appearance, Van Houten called Manson “an opportunist of the cruelest, most vicious kind.” But she was quick to emphasize that she accepts blame for her role in the crime.
Like the other Mason Family members, Van Houten, 59, has repeatedly been turned down for parole. She is widely seen as the best candidate for parole. But her next parole hearing probably will not be until 2010.
“Tex” Watsons’ participation in the Manson murders is “a part of history that he deeply regrets.”
Too late “Tex” and too little remorse.
Watson converted to Christianity in 1975, several years after he was incarcerated, and became an ordained minister in 1983. Too bad he wasn’t a Christian when he was in the Manson Family.
In a 2004 radio interview, Watson says of Mason, “He was manipulative, but I take full responsibility for my ignorance, lack of identity, emptiness and choices in life, which left me prey to his deceptive plan. My actions were my own.”
“Tex” Watson activity in these heinous crimes was that he stabbed five people, including Sharon Tate and her baby, to death and then fatally shot two others. After the Tate murders, Watson reportedly told Manson, “Boy, it sure was helter skelter.”
Tex Watson, now 63, was not tried along with the others in the slayings. A month and a half after the two-night crime spree, he fled to Texas, like the rat that he was.
Watson had been denied parole 13 times as of November 2006. His next parole hearing is scheduled for November of 2009.
For the full story on “Aging Manson Family Members Long For Freedom-Mason Family Victims Longed For Life,” go to CNN News. Don’t forget to read Susan Atkins Parole Hearing.
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