Consider the criminal history of Bobby Beausoleil, 67, the latest follower of Charles Manson to come up for an automatic parole hearing.
Among the lesser-known members of the murderous so-called Manson Family, Mr. Beausoleil was a Manson henchman who fled Los Angeles after the 1969 murders of musician Gary Hinman and movie stuntman Donald (Shorty) Shea. Caught near San Luis Obispo and jailed, he could not participate in the group’s notorious slayings of actress Sharon Tate and grocer Leno LaBianca a few days later.
Which Way?
Mr. Beausoleil was up for a routine, periodic parole hearing late this winter, with Gov. Brown yet to decide his fate. As it did with fellow Manson acolyte Bruce Davis last year, there was every likelihood the state Parole Board would order him released on the basis of advanced age and good behavior while in prison.
The Manson cases raise the question of whether some crimes are sufficiently heinous to merit a special classification, one amounting to locking them up and throwing away the key without ever holding parole hearings like those given Mr. Davis, Mr. Beausoleil and Mr. Manson himself every few years.
The question takes on urgency because this will likely be the last time the fate of either Mr. Beausoleil or Mr. Davis will be decided by Mr. Brown, who likely will be the last California governor with any personal recall of the horror of their crimes and the wave of fear and panic they spawned across wide parts of the state. The current front-runner to succeed Mr. Brown, for example, is Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor and a former San Francisco mayor who was two years old when Manson & Co. spread the chopped body parts of Messrs. Hinman and Shea across the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth.
What About Impact?
It’s an open question whether an old crime story like this would have the same impact on him that Mr. Brown’s memories do on his actions. Mr. Brown lived in Los Angeles at the time.
The Hinman and Shea murders marked the beginning of the Manson Family’s campaign of killings. Years after he was convicted, Mr. Beausoleil said he went to Mr. Hinman’s residence in the Santa Monica Mountains with two “Manson girls,” one of them Susan Denise Atkins, who would die in prison after being convicted in the Tate-LaBianca slayings.
His alleged mission: To recover money previously paid to Mr. Hinman for mescaline which later had been sold to the Straight Satans motorcycle gang, operating in the Los Angeles area.
The bikers demanded their money back when they discovered the drug was flawed. Mr. Beausoleil said Mr. Manson ordered him to hold Mr. Hinman at gunpoint until he arrived and began trying to extort money from Mr. Hinman by cutting his ear off with a sword, among other tactics. Eventually, Mr. Beausoleil told authorities, Mr. Manson told him to kill Mr. Hinman and he did, Mr. Davis also being convicted in the murder. They scrawled “Political Piggy” on a wall with Mr. Hinman’s blood, hoping to make police believe the slaying was done by political radicals. The scene presaged what Ms. Atkins and others wrote on the walls at the gruesome LaBianca murder scene.
Eventually, Mr. Hinman was chopped up along with Mr. Shea, who Mr. Manson allegedly feared would turn him in to Los Angeles police. Parts of their bodies were found on the Spahn Ranch, the scene of many early Western movies.
Few relatives of the victims survive today. A Hinman cousin living in Denver regularly opposes parole for anyone who participated in his murder. The same for Ms. Tate’s sister Debra, her lone surviving family member.
Few doubt that Mr. Beausoleil, Mr. Manson and others in their grisly crew deserved the death sentences they first received, later changed to life in prison.
In his message denying parole last year to Mr. Davis, Gov. Brown clumsily but accurately opined that “in rare circumstances, a murder is so heinous that it provides evidence of current dangerousness by itself.” That is also true for Mr. Beausoleil, whose role in Mr. Hinman’s death was larger than Mr. Davis’s.
A few other killers could fit the same category, like Richard Ramirez, the recently deceased Night Stalker whose crime spree terrorized both the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.
People like these, as Mr. Brown implied, should never be freed. So it’s high time legislators create a new category of convict beyond the reach of parole, taking their eventual fate away from politicians who might not even remember them and their misdeeds.
Mr. Elias may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
