Patricia Krenwinkel enters the superior court in Los Angeles for an arraignment in February 1970. Krenwinkel,
who is serving a life sentence for her role in the 1969 Manson murders, has been recommended for parole for a second
time.
George Brich/AP
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George Brich/AP
A panel of the California Board of Parole Hearings has again recommended parole for former Charles Manson follower and convicted killer
Patricia Krenwinkel. Krenwinkel was found suitable for parole for the second time in three years on Friday.
But it’s not a done deal: The board’s legal division has up to 120 days to finalize the decision, at which point the governor
has 30 days to review and potentially reverse it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office declined to comment.
Newsom overturned the board’s 2022 parole recommendation, writing that Krenwinkel still posed “an unreasonable risk of danger to public safety.”
“While Ms. Krenwinkel has matured in prison and engaged in commendable rehabilitative efforts, her efforts have not sufficiently reduced
her risk for future dangerousness,” Newsom wrote in his report, saying she had “not developed sufficient insight into the causative factors of her crime.”
Krenwinkel was 21 when she participated in the August 1969 murders of seven people — including actress Sharon Tate, who was eight-and-a-half
months pregnant — at Manson’s direction. The cult leader tasked members of his so-called family with the killings in the hopes of inciting
an apocalyptic race war, after which he would take control of society.
On trial, Krenwinkel admitted her role in the Tate-LaBianca murders,
which targeted two Los Angeles households over the course of two nights. She confessed to chasing 25-year-old coffee heiress Abigail Folger
with a knife and stabbing her 28 times at Tate’s house on Cielo Drive, then helping kill grocery store executive Leno LaBianca and his wife
Rosemary the following night.
Krenwinkel said she stabbed Leno LaBianca with a fork and used the couple’s blood to scrawl “death to pigs” on the wall.
Krenwinkel was convicted on seven counts of first-degree murder and — alongside Manson and several other cult members — sentenced to death in
1971. The following year, after California briefly outlawed
the death penalty, their sentences were commuted to life with the possibility of parole.
Krenwinkel has been denied parole 14 times since then. Now 77, she is the longest-serving woman in California prison.
Keith Wattley, Krenwinkel’s parole attorney, said in a statement shared with NPR that “no matter how serious and disturbing the facts of the
crime, if a person gets a parole-eligible sentence, our laws require that they be released once they are no longer dangerous.”
“After 56 ½ years of incarceration with no rule violations, with substantial change in who she is, and with the last nine psychological
evaluators over the past 40 years agreeing that Pat is no longer a risk, it’s time to make the possibility of parole a reality,” he added,
calling on Newsom to support the recommendation.
Manson died in 2017 while serving nine life sentences. One of his followers, Susan Atkins, died of brain
cancer in prison in 2009. Another, Leslie Van Houten, walked free in July
2023 after spending over five decades in custody.
The state parole board had recommended Van Houten for parole five times starting in 2016, but Newsom and his predecessor both reversed those
decisions, most recently in 2022. Later that year, a state appeals court separately granted Van Houten’s petition for writ of habeas corpus,
and Newsom declined to challenge the case — paving the way for her eventual freedom.
