Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

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, Child of Satan, Child of God (written with Bob Slosser), she recounts an evening in late September 1974 when, alone in her cell, she softly but solemnly uttered the words that she wanted to be forgiven for her ghastly crimes. “Suddenly,” she writes, “there in my thoughts was a door. It had a handle. I took hold of it, and pulled.” When the door opened, she says, a flood of brilliant light poured over her. In the center was an even brighter light, which she knew was Jesus. “He spoke to me—literally, plainly, in my nine-by-eleven prison cell. ‘Susan, I am really here. I’m coming in your heart to stay. Right now you are being born again…You are now a child of God. You are washed clean and your sins have all been forgiven.’” Atkins goes on to say that that night, for the first time in many years, she “slept soundly, free of nightmares—unafraid and warm.” On the last page of her book, she writes that she believes “the Lord will one day release me from this place [Frontera] and give me a ministry to people of all kinds, but especially those who are as twisted and lost as I was from my earliest teen years.”

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 s. At the time of the marriage he claimed to be worth “999 million dollars plus, and seven times that in foreign countries,” and he said he planned to build a $12 million solar home near the Frontera prison so he could be close to his bride. Per news reports, Laisure appeared for the wedding in the prison chapel “resplendent and bespangled in diamond rings, diamond clips, a huge gold belt-buckle, sunglasses, cigar, Western-style hat and an orange leisure suit.” Atop his rust-colored Cadillac in the prison parking lot outside was an unfurled Lone Star flag of the state of Texas.

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.”