people on a national mailing list to whom he sends religious cassette tapes and a Christian newsletter.
Watson’s 1978 book,
A rather startling admission by Watson to his prison psychiatrist was revealed at his last parole hearing in May of 1990. (Watson elected to waive his January 1993 parole hearing, stipulating to his unsuitability for parole.) The psychiatrist wrote that it had only been “during the last three years of one-on-one therapy that [Watson had] begun to truly experience a sense of deep remorse, both for the crime victims and for the families of the crime victims.” When a troubled parole board member asked Watson what, then, had he been feeling the previous eighteen years, Watson responded: “Well, it’s not that I haven’t experienced that before, but there’s been things happening in my life over the last few years that have really brought it home more so.” Watson explained that ever since he became a Christian in 1975 it’s been “great to know that I have been forgiven by God for what I’ve done. But I think sometimes we can hide behind that, and the last three years I’ve had the opportunity to really see myself in a new light in the sense that I’ve opened myself up to really look at the crime through other people’s eyes other than just my own.”
Watson’s belated epiphany was brought about in large part, he informed the board, by a somewhat incongruous relationship with Suzanne LaBerge (formerly Suzanne Struthers), Rosemary LaBianca’s daughter from a relationship before she met Leno. The thrice married and divorced Suzanne, who was twenty-one years old at the time of the murders, began visiting Watson at CMC in 1987. She appeared at the 1990 parole hearing and actually made an impassioned plea for the release of her mother’s killer, telling the board Watson had atoned for his terrible crimes, had overcome his past by turning to Christ, and no longer was a threat to society.
In a June 5, 1994, letter to me, Watson wrote: “With my deepest remorse, I apologize to the people of the world for my part in making Manson what he has become. To the many victims, my heart is full of sorrow for my actions…. If anyone should have received the death penalty for their crimes, it was me. I believe that God and his grace gave me a second chance, having a different plan for my life…. I have no great ambitions, other than allowing the Lord to use me as a testimony, urging others to Christ.”
While at CMC, Watson completed courses in vocational data processing and office machine repair. His current work assignment at Mule Creek is “tier tender,” i.e., keeping clean one of the two tiers in the building where he is housed. A prison spokesperson at Mule Creek advises that since Watson’s incarceration for the Tate-LaBianca murders he has received “one disciplinary infraction, of a minor nature, in 1973. He continues to program without incident.”
Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, like Watson, have each renounced Manson and expressed remorse for the killings. All are still at the California Institution for Women at Frontera. One of only three prisons for women in the state, Frontera has been described by one wag as “a college campus with barbed wire around it.” Each of the three Manson girls lives in a cottage-like housing unit (two inmates to a unit) at the attractive, well-manicured institution. All three girls have been reviewed for parole consideration, and denied, ten times thus far. It is the common consensus that if any of them are ever released, Van Houten will be the first one, primarily because unlike Atkins and Krenwinkel, she was only involved in the LaBianca, not the Tate murders. Additionally, a well-organized group, “Friends of Leslie,” consisting of hundreds of supporters, regularly urge her release to the parole board.
According to a prison spokesperson, “the institutional behavior [of the girls] is viewed as good.” (Krenwinkel, in fact, has not received one disciplinary write-up in twenty-three years, called “unusual” by a member of the parole board.) Their current custody level is medium security, they are each in the general prison population, and reportedly Krenwinkel and Van Houten are closer to each other socially than either one is to Atkins.
The most well-known of the girls, Susan “Sexy Sadie” Atkins, converted to Christianity even before Watson. Through the intercession in early 1974 of former Family member Bruce Davis, in prison at Folsom for the Hinman- Shea murders, Susan began to contemplate a Christian life. Davis, who had become a born-again Christian, wrote many letters to her, offering guidance and recommending Christian literature, including the New Testament, for her to read. In her 1977 book,
She now denies stabbing Sharon Tate, adding, however, that her moral culpability is still the same because she was there and “did nothing to stop it.” When she was asked by a reporter in the mid-’80s if she would be willing to say she was sorry to Sharon Tate’s mother for her involvement in Sharon’s murder, she replied: “There are no words to describe what I feel. ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me,’ those words are so overused and inadequate for what I feel.”
Atkins married one Donald Lee Laisure, a fifty-two-year-old Texan, in September of 1981. Laisure spells his last name with a dollar sign for the
Although Susan had corresponded with Laisure for several years, there were two small details she regrettably had not learned about him. His wealth was nonexistent. Perhaps more importantly, Laisure had the troubling habit of getting married about as often as Paris changes skirt lengths. Susan was his thirty-sixth bride. Three months later she told Laisure, who had had conjugal visits with her in the Prison Family Living Unit Apartments, to “go back to Texas,” concluding the marriage was “a drastic mistake.” Laisure filed for divorce the following year. In 1987, Susan remarried. Her husband, fifteen years her junior, attends law school in Southern California. She describes this marriage as “the first healthy and successful relationship I’ve ever had in my life.”
In a long, typewritten letter to me on May 11, 1994, Atkins wrote: “Twenty-five years ago you tried three girls between the ages of twenty and twenty-two years old, and one thirty-five-year-old ex-con. Now, twenty-five years later, there are three women about the age of forty-five, all of whom have exemplary prison records, have taken advantage of the educational programs to earn college degrees, have contributed to every charity organization and program available, and have expressed remorse, shame, and regret for their parts in this hideous crime…and you have one sixty-year-old ex-con who shows up at his parole board hearings with a swastika carved on his forehead. I think that says it all.”
Though Atkins is very critical of Manson, she has said she still prays for him, “that Charlie will turn to Christ.” Atkins has obtained, through correspondence, an Associate of Arts degree (two years), graduating with a 3.5 grade point average. She also has completed a course in vocational data processing, and is presently taking paralegal classes. Her current work assignment at Frontera is that of a sewing operator in the Prison Industries program.
In 1976, Leslie Van Houten’s conviction for the two LaBianca murders was reversed and sent back for a new trial by the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, on the ground that Judge Charles Older had erred in not granting her motion for a mistrial when her attorney, Ronald Hughes, vanished near the end of the trial. After a hung jury in the first retrial, she was finally reconvicted of the two murders in 1978. As opposed to the guilt phase of her original trial back in 1970–71, in her two retrials Van Houten readily admitted to the jury her full participation in the LaBianca homicides. Her defense was diminished mental capacity based on mental illness induced, in part, by the chronic, prolonged use of hallucinogenic drugs. For a few months before her last trial she was released on a
