California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Patricia Krenwinkel, who was convicted in a notorious 1969 murder spree, is still too much of a public safety risk to be freed.
California’s governor blocked parole for Charles Manson follower Patricia Krenwinkel on Friday, more than five decades after she scrawled “Helter Skelter” on a wall using the blood of one of the Manson family victims.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Krenwinkel, 74, is still too much of a public safety risk to be freed.
“Ms. Krenwinkel fully accepted Mr. Manson’s racist, apocalyptical ideologies,” Newsom said. “Ms. Krenwinkel was not only a victim of Mr. Manson’s abuse. She was also a significant contributor to the violence and tragedy that became the Manson Family’s legacy.”
A two-member parole panel for the first time in May recommended that Krenwinkel be released after she had been denied parole 14 times. Newsom has rejected parole recommendations for other followers of Manson, who died in prison in 2017.
She 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.”
She was convicted in the slayings of pregnant actor Sharon Tate and four other people in 1969. She helped kill grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, the next night in what prosecutors say was an attempt by Manson to start a race war.
Newsom agreed that Krenwinkel has been well-behaved in prison, that she has completed many rehabilitation and education programs and that she has “demonstrated effusive remorse.” But he concluded that “her efforts have not sufficiently reduced her risk for future dangerousness.”
She still does not have sufficient insight into what caused her to commit the crimes or her “triggers for antisocial thinking and conduct” during bad relationships, Newsom said.
“Beyond the brutal murders she committed, she played a leadership role in the cult, and an enforcer of Mr. Manson’s tyranny. She forced the other women in the cult to obey Mr. Manson, and prevented them from escaping when they tried to leave,” he said.
