Murderous Charles Manson follower could be released as she's recommended for parole

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

A Charles Manson follower who helped kill pregnant actress Sharon Tate could be freed from prison after being recommended parole following 55 years behind bars.
Patricia Krenwinkel, 77, has been recommended for release by California authorities and may get a chance at freedom.
California's longest-serving female inmate has been locked up since she was 22 for her part in the 1969 Manson family murders.
Krenwinkel was sentenced to death in 1971 after being convicted on seven counts of first-degree murder, but her sentence was changed to life when the state's death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in 1972.
This comes just a few years after Governor Gavin Newsom rejected a previous parole recommendation in 2022, saying she posed too great a risk to public safety.
But the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said it intends to oppose her parole once again.
In a statement to CBS 8, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said: 'The Parole Board commissioners will give special consideration to the elder parole factors as Ms. Krenwinkel is over 50 and has served 20 years in custody.
'But that in and of itself does not make her automatically appropriate for a grant. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office opposed parole the last time it attended a parole hearing for Ms. Krenwinkel in 2016 and 2017, where she received a five-year denial. The office intends to oppose parole again.'
Krenwinkel met Manson when she was 19 and left everything behind to pursue a romantic relationship with him.
She was living with her older sister when she met Manson, then age 33, at a party during a time when she said she was feeling lost and alone.
'He seemed a bit bigger than life,' she testified in May 2022, and she started feeling 'that somehow his take on the world was the right, was the right one.'
She said she left with him for what she thought would be a relationship with 'the new man in my life' who unlike others told her he loved her and that she was beautiful.
Manson 'had answers that I wanted to hear ... that I might be loved, that I might have the kind of affection that I was looking forward to in my life,' she said.
Instead, she said Manson abused her and others physically and emotionally while requiring that they trust him without question, testimony that led the parole panel to conclude that Krenwinkel was a victim of intimate partner battery at the time.
Krenwinkel was convicted in the slayings of pregnant actor Sharon Tate and four other people in August 1969.
Krenwinkel joined Susan Atkins and Charles 'Tex' Watson in the murder at director Roman Polanski's Benedict Canyon home.
Charles Manson followers, from left: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, shown walking to court to appear for their roles in the 1969 cult killings of seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in Los Angeles on August 20, 1970
The victims included Tate's unborn child, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring and Steven Parent.
The next night, she killed Leno LaBianca by stabbing him in the stomach with a carving fork they used at Thanksgiving. She wrote 'Death to Pigs' on the wall with his blood.
She also helped kill his wife Rosemary in a double murder prosecutors say was an attempt by Manson to start a race war.
In a 2016 parole hearing, she claimed Manson physically and emotionally abused her and trafficked her to others for sex.
Her case will now go before California's Board of Parole Hearings and the governor for final approval in a process that could take up to five months.
In 2022, Newsom blocked the parole of Krenwinkel, more than five decades after she scrawled 'Helter Skelter' on a wall using the blood of one of their victims.
Krenwinkel and other followers of the cult leader terrorized the state in the late 1960s, committing crimes that Newsom said 'were among the most fear-inducing in California's history.'
Charles Manson was the leader of a group of cultists who engaged in a frenzy of killing in the summer of 1969, culminating in the murder of the actress Sharon Tate and her unborn child. He died of natural causes not long after this photo was taken
A two-member parole panel in May 2022 recommended that Krenwinkel be released, after she previously had been denied parole 14 times.
Newsom has previously rejected parole recommendations for other followers of Manson, who died in prison in 2017.