LITTLE ROCK — Susan Atkins, the teenage runaway who joined Charles Manson's cult "family" and helped carry out eight killings in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, has died. She was 61.
Atkins, who had been suffering from brain cancer, diedThursday night in prison, The Associated Press reported, citing Terry Thornton, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections.
Her cancer caused paralysis and the loss of one leg. She was denied parole on Sept. 2.
The California Board of Parole had also rejected previous bids based on her claims of remorse, renunciation of Manson and conversion to Christianity.
Atkins became one of the most notorious members of the Manson cult for participating in - and once saying she personally carried out - the stabbing murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate.
Manson, who is serving a life sentence, invited Atkins to join what became known as his "family" in 1967. She was given the name Sadie Mae Glutz and came to view Manson as Jesus Christ. At Manson's behest, she took part in a July 1969 robbery that ended in the murder of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson.
Prosecutors said Manson's goal was to hasten what he saw as an inevitable race war and to emerge as leader of the post-apocalyptic world. Atkins helped carry out the killings that Manson hoped would trigger the war.
On Aug. 9, 1969, Atkins and three other Manson followers broke into the rented home that Tate, who was eight months pregnant, shared with her husband, film director Roman Polanski. Polanski was in London at the time.
Tate and four others on the property were fatally stabbed or shot. Atkins testified in 1971 that, high on LSD, she stabbed Tate: "She kept begging and pleading and begging and pleading, so I stopped it."
The night after the Tate murders, Manson followers murdered two more people, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
In front of a grand jury, Atkins confessed her role and implicated Manson and his followers. She later recanted, but the prosecution proceeded.
In 1971, a jury in Los Angeles convicted Manson, Atkins and two other women in the murders, then voted to send them to die in California's gas chamber. Atkins yelled out, "It's going to come down hard. Lock your doors. Protect your kids." She was later convicted for her role in a killing that took place weeks before the Tate-LaBianca murders.
A 1972 decision by the California Supreme Court invalidating all death sentences automatically commuted the sentences to life in prison.
Manson and the other two co-defendants, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, remain behind bars. So does Charles "Tex" Watson, who did most of the killing in the Tate-LaBianca murders and was tried separately.
Atkins served 38 years of a life sentence, which made her the longest-serving prisoner among women currently held in the state's penitentiaries, said Thornton. That distinction now falls to Krenwinkel.
Susan Denise Atkins was born May 7, 1948, in San Gabriel, Calif., and grew up in San Jose. A teenager when her mother died of cancer, Atkins had a son whom Manson named Zezozoze Zadfrack Glutz. Police took the child when they raided the group's ranch house in 1969. He was put up for adoption.
Atkins married twice while in prison. Her second husband, James W. Whitehouse, is a lawyer who represented her at her final parole hearings.
Information for this article was contributed by Elaine Woo and Andrew Blankstein of the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 09/26/2009