A California parole panel has recommended freedom for Patricia Krenwinkel after 56 years behind bars, leaving Gov. Gavin Newsom to decide whether one of Charles Manson’s convicted killers walks free.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Tuesday that a state panel granted Patricia Krenwinkel parole on a preliminary basis. The 78-year-old inmate, once Charles Manson’s girlfriend and a core member of his so-called Family, has spent roughly 56 years locked up for her role in the 1969 Los Angeles killings of seven people.
That recommendation is not the final word. Under California rules, the proposed grant becomes final only after review by the Board of Parole Hearings and the governor. Newsom will have 30 days to reverse the decision once the parole board’s legal office clears it, a choice that will test whether the state puts victims’ families ahead of another bid for release by a Manson follower.
Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office prosecutors said they will again urge the governor’s office to keep Krenwinkel at the California Institution for Women. Newsom blocked her release last year. The same governor now faces another high-profile call on a case that still defines public memory of random, ritualized murder in California.
Krenwinkel was 19 when she joined Manson’s group. On August 8, 1969, the Family struck the Los Angeles home tied to actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant and married to director Roman Polanski. Tate and several friends were killed. Among the dead were coffee heiress Abigail Folger, hairstylist Jay Sebring, aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski, and teenager Steven Parent, who had been visiting an acquaintance at the estate’s guesthouse.
Krenwinkel later testified that she chased Folger and stabbed her more than two dozen times. She also admitted using victims’ blood to scrawl political messages such as “Death to Pigs” on the walls. The next night, Manson and his followers killed wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. A 2016 petition by Sharon Tate’s sister Debra Tate stated that Krenwinkel carved “WAR” into Leno LaBianca’s belly and that the act was her own idea, not a direct order from Manson.
Daily Mail reporting laid out the same core record: conviction for seven murders, an original death sentence later reduced to life after the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the death penalty then in force, and decades of incarceration as California’s longest-serving female inmate.
In 1971, Krenwinkel appeared in court with co-defendants Leslie Van Houten and Susan Atkins, each with an X carved into her forehead. Atkins and Manson later died in custody, as did associate Bruce Davis. Charles “Tex” Watson and Bobby Beausoleil remain behind bars.
When Newsom previously denied Krenwinkel parole, he said she had “not developed sufficient insight into the causative factors of her crime and her triggers for antisocial thinking and conduct in the context of maladaptive relationships.” That finding is the public standard he set. Prosecutors want him to hold it again.
The governor’s record on related cases is already tangled. An appellate court overruled his earlier denial of parole for Leslie Van Houten, another Manson follower, three years before this latest Krenwinkel recommendation. Newsom has also spent recent months managing national political exposure, from hedging on a 2028 presidential bid to public fights that keep him in the headlines while California crime and punishment decisions land on his desk.
California officials describe the process in plain terms. The corrections department stated the limit on any single panel vote:
"All grants of parole are proposed decisions and become final only after a thorough and comprehensive review by the Board of Parole Hearings and the Governor,"
If Newsom reverses this grant, another parole hearing would be scheduled within 18 months. If he does not, Krenwinkel could leave prison after more than half a century.
Debra Tate has fought repeated parole efforts. In her 2016 Change.org petition she wrote that Krenwinkel “has admitted that was not a direct order from Charles Manson or anyone else, it was her own idea.” She added:
"For years, this woman laughed about the murders in court and showed absolutely no remorse at all,"
And she drew the line for release:
"Society cannot allow this serial killer who committed such horrible, gruesome, random killings back out."
Those are the words of a sister who still lives with the murders. Newsom himself has acknowledged the lasting harm. In a prior statement tied to a Van Houten decision, he said, “More than 50 years after the Manson cult committed these brutal killings, the victims’ families still feel the impact.” That impact has not expired because a panel stamped a preliminary grant.
Political context around the governor only sharpens the stakes. Newsom has declined clear lines inside his own party’s left flank, a posture tracked when he refused to separate Democrats from the DSA, while crime-and-punishment fights remain a live liability for any national run.
Krenwinkel’s attorney, Keith Wattley of UnCommon Law, cast the panel’s move as proof the system can reward long-term change. He said:
"Over the decades since, Pat has worked to understand how she became capable of causing such profound harm and to take responsibility for the consequences of her actions,"
Wattley went further, arguing parole decisions are “increasingly compromised by politics” and that the board’s finding offers “a glimmer of hope” grounded in evidence. He closed with a direct demand: “Now, the governor must respect these decisions and allow Pat to come home.” The same lawyers contend Manson “exploited that vulnerability through manipulation, drugs and psychological abuse” when Krenwinkel was young. Therapy and group counseling, they say, have filled the years since.
None of that erases the trial record already public: the chase, the repeated stabbing of Folger, the blood writing, the second-night LaBianca murders, and the courtroom spectacle of carved foreheads. Original sentences were death. The 1972 high-court shift turned them into life terms. Life still meant life for victims’ relatives who never got a second chance.
Newsom’s broader posture keeps drawing scrutiny beyond Sacramento. He has escalated personal media fights even as 2028 jockeying heats up, and he faces separate pressure on disclosures while federal probes and tax-return deadlines hang over his office. A parole file this famous will not be read in isolation from that record of priorities.
The machinery is now clear. A panel proposed parole. The board and governor still review it. Prosecutors will push to keep Krenwinkel confined. Debra Tate’s petition language remains the blunt case against release. Wattley’s office remains the blunt case for it. Newsom already found insufficient insight once. The clock for another reversal runs 30 days after legal-office clearance.
National Democratic primary numbers have moved too. Polling has shown Kamala Harris surging past Newsom in early 2028 surveys, raising the cost of any decision that looks soft on a Manson murder case while he courts voters outside California.
Krenwinkel is 78. The people she helped butcher never reached old age. California’s parole system has handed the governor a binary choice: stand by the families who still oppose release, or green-light freedom for a woman who once wrote “Death to Pigs” in a victim’s blood.
Law-and-order is not a slogan when the file still lists seven names. It is the minimum the state owes the dead.
