LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Mass murderer Charles Manson, one of America’s most notorious convicts, was denied parole on Wednesday in his 12th and possibly final bid for release from a California prison, state corrections officials said.
Manson, 77, who has not attended his parole hearings in recent years, was not present for Wednesday’s review of his case by the state Board of Parole Hearings at Corcoran State Prison, where he is serving a life term.
The state Corrections and Rehabilitation Department said Manson would next be eligible for parole in 15 years, when he would be about 92 years old.
He had been denied release on parole 11 times before, most recently in 2007, when the board ruled that he “continues to pose an unreasonable danger to others and may still bring harm to anyone he would come in contact with.”
There was no immediate word on the reasoning behind the board’s latest rejection, which was announced about 2 1/2 hours after the hearing began Wednesday morning at Corcoran, about 175 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
Amid the hippie culture of the 1960s, Manson, a charismatic ex-convict, put together a collection of runaways and outcasts known as the Manson Family. In the summer of 1969 he became one of the 20th century’s most infamous criminals when he directed his mostly young, female followers to murder seven people.
Among the victims was actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was stabbed 16 times by members of the cult in the early morning hours of August 9, 1969.
Four other people also were stabbed or shot to death in Tate’s home that night by the Manson followers, who scrawled the word “Pig” in blood on the front door before leaving.
The following night, Manson’s group stabbed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca to death, using their blood to write “Rise,” “Death to Pigs and “Healter Skelter” – a misspelled reference to the Beatles song “Helter Skelter” – on the walls and refrigerator door.
Manson is serving a life sentence for those seven slayings and the murder of an acquaintance, Gary Hinman, who was stabbed to death in a separate murder in July of 1969.
Manson originally was sentenced to death in 1971 but was spared execution after the California Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. In 1977, his sentence was commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
California later resumed executions but Manson’s life sentence was left intact.
A photograph of Manson released last month shows the balding, gray-bearded killer at age 74, his face still bearing the scar of a swastika he carved into his forehead during his sensational 1970 murder trial.
(Reporting the writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Bill Trott)
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