LOS ANGELES – Susan Atkins, a leading member of Charles Manson’s violent cult which carried out brutal murders at his behest in 1969, has died in a California prison, state corrections officials said yesterday. She was 61.
Atkins, imprisoned since 1971 for her part in eight Manson murders, had a brain tumour. State corrections officials this month rejected her request to be freed so she would not have to die in prison.
“Susan passed away peacefully surrounded by friends and loved ones and the incredible staff at the skilled nursing facility at the Central California Womens Facility,” her husband, James Whitehouse, said by e-mail.
“Her last whispered word was ‘Amen’. No one on] the face of the Earth worked as hard as Susan did to right an unrightable wrong,” Mr Whitehouse said.
As part of Manson’s following of hippies, runaways, criminals and misfits, Atkins once said that he could see and hear everything she did. But while in prison she denounced Manson, and in 1974 became a Christian in a conversion inspired by correspondence with another former “Manson family” member.
At a 1993 parole hearing, Atkins described her time with the disturbed man who nicknamed her “Sexy Sadie” by saying: “It is almost impossible to understand insanity and that’s what I was living with – insanity.”
Atkins was 21 years old when the career criminal Manson dispatched her and other followers to the Beverly Hills home of actor Sharon Tate and film director Roman Polanski on August 9th, 1969, with orders to kill.
Polanski was out of town but the heavily pregnant Tate and four friends were brutally stabbed, beaten and shot to death. Atkins later said she stabbed Tate after ignoring her pleas for mercy.
The next night, Atkins and other cult members went to the home of grocery owner Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and killed them. Atkins did not participate in those slayings. The brutality and randomness of the murders stunned the nation. – (Reuters)