Now Playing
Fifty Years Inside: Watson, Krenwinkel, and the Parole Question
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel have been denied parole again and again across five decades — but the Manson family murders case forces a question American justice has never fully resolved. When, if ever, does rehabilitation outweigh what someone did?
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Two of the people who killed for Charles Manson are still alive. Still in prison.
To understand where Watson and Krenwinkel are now, you need to understand what they did and who they were before Manson found them. Patricia Krenwinkel was twenty-one years old in August of nineteen sixty-nine.
On the night of August eighth into the ninth, nineteen sixty-nine, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel went to ten zero five zero Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. Sharon Tate was there.
Vincent Bugliosi prosecuted the case. The trial ran for nearly ten months and became the most expensive criminal proceeding in American history up to that point.
Susan Atkins died in prison in two thousand nine after eighteen parole denials. She never got out.
Krenwinkel's case has its own particular weight. She's been in prison longer than any other woman in California history.
You can't discuss these parole hearings honestly without discussing the victims' families, particularly Sharon Tate's sister, Debra Tate. Debra Tate has attended parole hearings for years.
There's a pattern worth naming clearly. Watson and Krenwinkel have both demonstrated institutional rehabilitation in ways that would likely result in parole for someone convicted of a different crime.
Set aside the politics for a moment. The question underneath all of this is one the justice system hasn't fully answered anywhere: what is imprisonment for?
Nineteen sixty-nine is usually framed as the year the sixties ended. The Summer of Love was already two years gone.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.