“Dad Did a Horrible Thing… but Dad’s been forgiven”
By: H. Allegra Lansing
Tags: Prison, Manson Murders, True Crime, Christianity

Life after murder for Manson Family killer Tex Watson

On September 11th, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson lost his fight against extradition and was flown to Los Angeles. Immediately upon landing in California, Tex refused to eat. He claimed that the guards beat him for his hunger strike, but he kept at it. On September 18th, during the trial for Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, Tex was brought into court so that one of the witnesses, biker Danny DeCarlo, could identify Watson.

Charles Watson during his hunger strike

“Watson had finally been returned to California… after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black refused to grant him a further stay of extradition. Sergeants Sartuchi and Gutierrez, who accompanied Watson on the flight, said he spoke little, mostly staring vacantly into space. He had lost about thirty pounds during his confinement, most of it during the last two months, when it became obvious his return to Los Angeles was imminent.” — Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry ©1974 W.W. Norton & Company

Tex continued his hunger strike, dwindling to 110 pounds. Someone intervened and he was force-fed, by tube. Nearly a year later, on August 24, 1971, he was finally brought to trial. Bugliosi was again lead prosecutor.

“In an obvious attempt to project a college-boy image, Watson dressed very conservatively in court — short hair, shirt and tie, blue blazer, slacks. But he still looked strange. His eyes were glassy, and never seemed to focus. He reacted not at all to the damning testimony of such witnesses as Linda Kasabian, Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, and Dianne Lake. And his mouth was always slightly gaping, giving him the appearance of being mentally retarded. Taking the stand on direct examination by the defense, Tex played the part of Manson’s abject slave. He admitted shooting or stabbing six of the Tate-LaBianca victims but denied stabbing Sharon Tate. Everything which showed either premeditation or deliberation he put on Manson or the girls. My cross-examination so shook Tex that he often forgot he was supposed to be playing the idiot. By the time I’d finished, it was obvious to the jury that he was in complete command of his mental faculties and probably always had been.” — Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry ©1974 W.W. Norton & Company

Watson on his way into court

Eventually, Bugliosi got Watson to admit that he stabbed Sharon. But he was also asked by Leslie’s counsel to tell the truth about her actions — that she stabbed Rosemary LaBianca after Tex killed the woman, only because he ordered her to do so. Watson refused to answer. In prison, he allegedly told a fellow inmate,

“If I brought that kind of attention down on me, I’d never get out. No way am I going to blow my chance to get out just to testify in Leslie Van Houten’s behalf.” — Charles “Chet” Starkey quoted in Headquarters Detective magazine ©March 1978

On October 12th, 1971, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson was convicted for the murders of the LaBianca’s, for Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Stephen Parent. He was sentenced to death and sent to the same place as Charles Manson, San Quentin. That death sentence was overturned just months later, when the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, converting the sentences of Watson and the other convicted members of the Manson Family, to life in prison — with the possibility of parole.

Watson was then moved to the California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo. With little to occupy his time other than his thoughts, he turned to books. One very familiar book, in fact:

“In 1974, the book Helter Skelter arrived at the prison library. As I read about Wilfred Parent going to the morgue to identify his son Steve and returning home, his wife in hysterics, both putting their three kids in bed with them, holding each other and crying themselves to sleep, I broke. I could have turned to a psychiatrist or to drugs with the pain, but the Lord had Christians coming from all directions to reach out to me. They didn’t know what was troubling me, but God did, and He sent them to comfort me.” — Manson’s Right Hand Man by Charles Watson ©2003 Abounding Love Publishers

His need for salvation then drove him to read the Bible.

“I started reading the Bible my mother had sent — sometimes the Psalms, sometimes verses I’d memorized long ago as a child in the Copeville Methodist Church. Often I’d just open the black book at random. I understood very little of what I read, but that didn’t seem to matter. The words washed over me like soothing water; they made me feel at peace. They were the place of stillness in my world of constant light and noise… as I read now, the stories became something more than fairy tales about men in bathrobes. It was nothing I could put words to, hardly even a feeling, far less than belief…Perhaps the name for it was hope.” — Will You Die For Me? by Charles Watson and Chaplain Ray ©1978 Fleming H. Revell

Charles Watson’s faith led him to start a prison ministry, and then to co-author his first book, a memoir about his life with the Manson Family and the murders he committed. The book ended with an explanation that Watson had surrendered to Jesus Christ, whom he believed had redeemed him. A 20-year old Norwegian woman living in San Luis Obispo was impressed with Charles’ story and began writing to him. Watson married that woman, Kristen Svege, in September 1979.

Watson’s wedding day in 1979

According to his website,

“He rejects ‘legalistic Christianity,’ where people are led to believe they can earn their salvation through their own good works, because right-standing with God is possible only through faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. He lives every day reaching out to unbelievers with the grace of God and prays with believers to understand their awesome inheritance obtained through their union with Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.” — Abounding Love Ministries

Watson later told a parole board,

“My children… wanted to know why I was here… I put it to them in a way that a six-year-old could understand, that dad did a horrible thing in the late ’60s and that he’s now suffering the consequences… but daddy’s been forgiven by God, you know, through Christ” — Charles Watson, from his 2016 parole hearing

Yet, he has never admitted his role in the murder of Donald ‘Shorty’ Shea. Watson acknowledges killing the Tate/LaBianca victims but not Shea’s death, and he has alternately blamed Charlie, drugs, and Satan himself, for his motives. It’s probably easier than admitting that Charles Watson is just a bad, bad dude. Remember: Tex had at least three years of being a shitty frat asshole, petty thief, drug dealer and scam artist long before he met Manson.

Tex and his wife were permitted conjugal visits in the early years of their marriage, allowing Mrs. Watson to conceive four children (the eldest, a daughter, was born in 1989). Conjugal visits were a particularly sore subject with Doris Tate. She emerged from her years-long freefall into depression following the deaths of her daughter and unborn grandson, to become an outspoken victims’ rights activist.

Doris showed up to parole hearings and demanded justice for her family and the families of other Manson Family victims. She also successfully lobbied the Governor’s office to rescind conjugal rights for those serving life for murder.

In 1986, Suzan LaBerge, daughter of Rosemary LaBianca, anonymously wrote to Watson. She’d had a nervous breakdown after the murders of her parents. Now married with children, she credited her recovery to Christ — she, too, was born-again. After corresponding secretly for a year, Suzan visited Tex at the California Men’s Colony, near San Luis Obispo. It didn’t take long for her to become convinced of Watson’s remorse, whereby she told him who she really was. Suzan vowed to help his parole efforts. She informed the parole board in 1990 that,

“During our visit, I shared the forgiveness I felt toward him and I felt very certain that Charles was deeply remorseful for what he had done.” — Suzan LaBerge, quoted in “The Long, Chilling Shadow of Manson” by Richard C. Paddock, © August 06, 1994 Los Angeles Times

When Doris Tate saw Suzan show up at Watson’s parole hearing and defend the sonofabitch, she tore into her. Doris reportedly walked out of that hearing and in the parking lot, within the hearing of several witnesses, yelled to LaBerge, “You are one STUPID SHIT!”

Doris Tate holds a photograph of her daughter Sharon, murdered by Charles Watson

Charles Watson’s behavior in prison continues to be self-serving and manipulative. He and his wife ran a decades-long scam for state benefits (feeding his children at the expense of California taxpayers), making erroneous fiduciary claims on tax returns, and running a prison ministry that isolated Watson from the brunt of what should be his life-in-prison experience.

Manson may have manipulated and controlled the women who killed on his behalf, but Tex Watson was never under Charlie’s spell or his control. If Charles ‘Tex’ Watson said he was the Devil at Cielo Drive, it’s because he wanted to be the Devil. What he did, he did of his own free will.

In 1993, Watson was transferred from the Men’s Colony to Mule Creek State Prison, in Ione, California near Sacramento. Officials at the Men’s Colony were upset at the way that Watson had commandeered the warden’s office for his personal ministry. In the early 90’s while at Mule Creek, psychiatric reports for Watson deemed him ‘a walking time bomb’ and claimed he had a lot of repressed hostility and was still a threat to society.

A recent mugshot of Watson

In 2013, the public learned that the LAPD had obtained audio tapes of Watson describing his crimes to his attorney ahead of his 1971 trial. The tapes were confiscated during bankruptcy proceedings for Watson’s former attorney, Bill Boyd. Boyd died in 2009 and the tapes were held at his Fort Worth law firm. When the firm went bankrupt in 2012, the tapes were acquired by the trustee. The LAPD’s Homicide Division appealed to the court to gain access to those tapes.

In April 2013, a U.S. District judge ruled in the LAPD’s favor. The tapes were flown to California, where they were transcribed. Eventually, the associated Press broke the story. The LAPD were quoted but refused to comment on what was said in the recordings.

After the article came out, the LAPD called Sharon Tate’s sister, Debra, and Jay Sebring’s nephew, Anthony DiMaria. They told Tate and DiMaria about the existence of the tapes and said they wanted to share what was recorded on them. But at a closed door meeting at LAPD headquarters, Tate and DiMaria were informed that nothing relevant was on the recordings. Nothing implicating the Manson Family in other murders or told a different story than the one Watson had told for the past four-plus decades. Nor would the victims’ families be permitted to hear the tapes.

But at the end of that meeting, Debra told the DDA that she might file a Public Records Act request, and that’s when the LAPD dropped a bomb:

“There was, in fact, something new on the tapes, they were told, something that might ‘jeopardize’ the convictions of several Family members… they finally conceded that Watson ‘minimized the involvement’ of the women in the murders.” — “The Tale of the Manson Tapes” by Tom O’Neill ©September 2014 Medium.com

Debra Tate never filed that record request, but in the fall of 2013, the AP and Los Angeles Times both did and were denied. The reason given was that the tapes are exempt from disclosure, because they were part of some ongoing investigation. We have no idea what that might mean.

This author has no way of knowing what is on those recordings, or why attorneys for Leslie Van Houten were also unsuccessful in gaining access to the tapes on behalf of their client. It is unclear what they think might be in those recordings. But there’s been speculation that Watson might have talked about just how much the women were under Manson’s control — which could weigh favorably upon Van Houten’s chances of parole. Yet, the attempt by her legal team to obtain those recordings only impeded her parole process — the 2016 board complained that if she were really remorseful, she wouldn’t still be trying to ‘blame’ Manson or anyone else.

In 2003, Kristen Watson divorced her husband (she left him for a man she met at church). She had homeschooled their children, to protect them from the public. Kristen continues to live in California, now remarried. Their kids are grown, and little is known about them. They are of college age, and at least one has served time in the U.S. military.

When asked about his future plans, Charles Watson has stated that he wants to move to Texas and become a televangelist. His prison ministry still exists although he has no formal office anymore. Today, the Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego where he has served since 2017 has assigned Tex a more appropriate role as a janitor.

It’s a damn good deal for a man that brutally slaughtered several innocent human beings and still hasn’t told the whole truth.

Charles Watson’s next parole hearing is scheduled for 2021.