Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

Good represented herself at her trial, was convicted on all five counts (Murphy on only the conspiracy count), and asked that she be sentenced to the maximum of twenty-five years. The judge gave her fifteen. William Shubb, her appointed “advisory counsel” during the trial and now a U.S. Federal District Court judge in Sacramento, says that if she had been agreeable he is certain a plea could have been negotiated wherein her sentence would have been much less severe.

All of Manson’s co-defendants in the Tate-LaBianca murders are, like Manson, still behind bars serving their life sentences.

Charles “Tex” Watson, Manson’s chief lieutenant at the murder scenes and the principal killer of the Tate-LaBianca victims, has renounced Manson and is presently at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California. He was transferred there in April of 1993 from the California Men’s Colony (CMC) in San Luis Obispo, where he had been incarcerated since September 1972. At CMC in 1975, Watson, through the ministry of Raymond Hoekstra (a legendary prison evangelist known as “Chaplain Ray”), became a born-again Christian. As a student chaplain and associate administrator of the Protestant chapel at CMC, Watson baptized, led Bible-study groups, and preached to the inmate congregation. In 1980, Watson founded Abounding Love Ministries (ALMS), a California nonprofit corporation which he and his Norwegian wife, Kristin, run. The two married in 1979 and have three children. Ordained as a minister in 1983, Watson receives donations to his ministry of approximately $1,500 per month from people on a national mailing list to whom he sends religious cassette tapes and a Christian newsletter.

Watson’s 1978 book, Will You Die for Me?, which he wrote with Chaplain Ray, chronicles his life with Manson, the murders, and his ultimate conversion to Christianity. Speaking of Manson, to whom he writes, “I had given myself totally,” he says he served the power of death and destruction “through one diabolical man who wanted to be God.” Believing that Manson “was—perhaps still is—possessed” by the devil, he says Manson’s only interest “had been death, but Jesus promised life.”

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.”