Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

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 $200,000 bail bond paid for by friends and relatives, and lived for a while with a former writer from the Christian Science Monitor who was writing a book about Van Houten. The book reached the first draft level, but was never published.

Van Houten had a short-lived marriage to a man named Bill Cywin in the early ’80s. Though not connected to any misbehavior or complicity on her part, during the brief marriage Cywin was found to be in possession of a female prison guard’s uniform.

Through correspondence courses, Van Houten acquired a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature. She also writes short stories, one of which was included in an anthology of prison literature, and at one time edited the prison newspaper. She is part of a small inmate group that sews quilts for the homeless. Van Houten says she “takes offense to the fact that Manson doesn’t own up” to his responsibility for the murders. “I take responsibility for my part, and part of my responsibility was helping to create him. Being a follower does not excuse.” Van Houten is presently doing secretarial work at the prison.

Patricia Krenwinkel received a Bachelor of Science degree through correspondence while at Frontera and has also completed a course in vocational data processing. Krenwinkel has never married. The most athletic of the three Manson girls, she plays on the prison softball team and presently is a “camp trainer” in the inmate firefighter’s program, training those under her to meet a physical fitness standard they must have in order to fight fires. Both she and Van Houten serve as counselors in a program in which young people with drug abuse problems are brought to the prison.

In 1988, while stating her deep remorse for the murders, Krenwinkel nonetheless told her prison psychiatrist that Abigail Folger, the person she murdered on the night of the Tate murders, “could have been something more than she was, a drug abuser.” At her 1993 parole hearing, Krenwinkel, crying and her voice cracking, told the board: “No matter what I do, I cannot change one minute of my life. There’s nothing I can do outside of being dead to pay for this. And I know that’s what you wish, but I cannot take my own life.” In the 1994 ABC special, she said that every day “I wake up and know that I’m a destroyer of the most precious thing, which is life, and living with that is the most difficult thing of all.” But, she adds, “that’s what I deserve—to wake up every morning and know that.” Responding to Manson’s claim he did not order the murders, she said, “Charlie is absolutely lying. There wasn’t one thing done—that was even allowed to be done—without his express permission.” She is very concerned about young people who write her and “seem to think that what we did was all right. There is nothing, nothing that we did that is all right. If there is anything I can say to these children, it’s that he [Manson] is not the man to follow.”