Patricia Krenwinkel, who helped kill seven people as part of the murderous “Manson family” cult, is up for parole for a third time.
The 78-year-old was preliminarily granted parole on Tuesday, her 18th suitability hearing, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records.
Now California Gov. Gavin Newsom has five months to decide whether to reverse the 78-year-old inmate’s latest bid for freedom as he did the previous two. He has also rejected parole recommendations for other Manson followers. California and Oklahoma are the only two states that grant governors veto power over parole decisions.
Krenwinkel was 21 in 1969 when she helped murder pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her friends Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent, followed the next night by another couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Convicted in 1971 and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, she is now the longest-serving female inmate in California history.
Krenwinkel was one of a band of followers in Manson’s thrall who, at his bidding, broke into the home where Tate, seven months pregnant, was entertaining friends at the home she shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski. At her 2016 parole hearing, Krenwinkel described repeatedly stabbing 26-year-old coffee heiress Folger. The next night, she stabbed grocer Leno LaBianca in the abdomen with a fork, then wrote messages on the wall with his blood.
Manson, who died in prison in 2017, ruled his acolytes with psychological and physical abuse.
Advocates say Krenwinkel is no longer a danger to society and should be let go. She has undergone rehabilitation, therapy, group counseling, gotten a college degree and trained disability-service dogs, her longtime attorney, Keith Wattley, said in a statement to The Guardian.
She has thoroughly confronted “who she was, what she did, and the devastating harm she caused,” he said. “She fully accepts responsibility for her actions, everything she contributed to, and every life she destroyed in 1969. Pat does not excuse or minimize that harm.”
Before her first parole approval, Krenwinkel had been denied 14 times. She was finally recommended for parole in May 2022, after new laws went into effect requiring the panel to consider the young age at which she committed the crimes. The board also studied whether she could be considered a victim of intimate-partner battery, known colloquially as “battered wife syndrome,” when she carried out Manson’s instructions. But Newsom didn’t buy it.
“Beyond the brutal murders she committed, she played a leadership role in the cult, and an enforcer of Mr. Manson’s tyranny,” Newsom said in reversing her first parole approval, in 2022. “She forced the other women in the cult to obey Mr. Manson, and prevented them from escaping when they tried to leave.”
He had similar words in reversing the parole decision in 2025 on grounds that she “currently poses an unreasonable danger to society if released from prison at this time” because she still lacked insight into her actions, The Guardian reported.