Patricia Krenwinkel, convicted of seven murders as one of the most notorious members of the Manson family, was granted parole this week and, barring a move by the full state parole board and governor, will see freedom some 56 years after imprisonment.
Krenwinkel was granted parole on a preliminary basis Tuesday at her 18th hearing to gauge her suitability for parole, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “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,” officials with the department said in a statement.
It is the third time the inmate, now 78, has been approved for parole over the course of her time in prison. On each of those occasions, the governor’s office exercised its authority to prevent her release. The parole decision will become final after 120 days, as long as it is cleared by the parole board’s legal office, and then it is sent to the governor, who has 30 days to decide whether to reverse the parole decision.
In October 2025, Newsom reversed the decision, noting Krenwinkel’s efforts to improve herself in prison but saying her personal growth was outweighed by the potential danger she posed to the public.
Prosecutors with the Los Angeles district attorney’s office said they would encourage the governor’s office to keep Krenwinkel behind bars. She did not appear at Tuesday’s hearing. She is being held at the California Institution for Women in Corona. She is eligible under the state’s elderly inmate parole program and because she was young at the time of the deadly killing spree.
Krenwinkel was convicted in 1971, along with other members of the so-called Manson family, for the killings of seven-months-pregnant actor Sharon Tate, Thomas Jay Sebring, Abigail Ann Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Earl Parent, as well as the slayings of grocery executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, the following day. She was sentenced to death, but that sentence was commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole after the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in 1972.
Krenwinkel, along with other Manson followers, broke into the Benedict Canyon home of Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski. Tate and four others were stabbed and shot during the attacks.
The high-profile trial of the Manson family made Manson and several of his followers some of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century. Krenwinkel testified that she chased Abigail Folger, heiress to the coffee company, before stabbing her more than two dozen times. She also testified that she used blood to write on the wall of the home “Death to pigs.”
Along with co-defendants Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten, Krenwinkel at one point showed up to court with an X carved on her forehead, as Manson had also done.
Debra Tate, Sharon Tate’s sister, has been an outspoken advocate for keeping Krenwinkel and other former followers of Manson behind bars.
“Society cannot allow this serial killer who committed such horrible, gruesome, random killings back out,” she wrote in the online petition, which has garnered more than 100,000 signatures since it was created in 2016.
Former members of the Manson family, now elderly state prison inmates, have faced several parole hearings that have resulted in outright denials.
Other former Manson followers, including Charles Denton “Tex” Watson and Robert Kenneth Beausoleil, remain in prison. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins and Bruce Davis died in custody.
In 2023, Leslie Van Houten was granted parole and released after holding what many described as an exemplary record for decades behind bars. Newsom had denied a previous decision granting parole to Van Houten but was overruled by an appellate court.
Newsom has previously reversed the parole board’s decision granting parole to Krenwinkel, stating that the 77-year-old convict 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.”
Krenwinkel was young at the time of the killings, 21. Although she did not appear on Tuesday, at a prior hearing her attorney noted she had been abused by Manson, or someone else, at the time.
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