In 1972, the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional by both the Supreme Court of California and the US Supreme Court. As a result, the death sentences for Manson and his codefendants were commuted to life with possible parole.
Bruce Davis, who was convicted of two counts of murder and of conspiracy to commit murder and robbery two months after the California ruling, was sentenced to life in prison.
Four years later, Leslie Van Houten’s conviction was thrown out by the Second District Court of Appeal of California, which ordered a retrial.
Van Houten had successfully argued in her appeal that she’d been denied effective assistance of counsel when Maxwell Keith was appointed to replace Ronald Hughes, with only a week to prepare his closing argument after also missing the entire guilt phase of the trial.
During her retrial, which began in March 1977, Keith presented a defense of diminished capacity based on mental illness induced by Manson, the peculiar Family communal organization, and Van Houten’s chronic, prolonged hallucinogenic drug use.
But after deliberating for twenty-five days, the jury announced it was hopelessly deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial on August 6.
Van Houten was allowed to be released on bail until she could be tried again. Taking the LaBianca family’s feelings into account, she asked to stay in prison until after the Christmas holidays so as not to cause them any more suffering. Released on December 27, she remained free for seven and a half months.
In the end, Van Houten’s third trial resulted in the same guilty verdicts as the first. Ordering the counts of murder and conspiracy to run concurrently, the judge sentenced her to life, with eight years credit for time served. She was returned to prison on August 17, 1978.
Steve “Clem” Grogan was labeled by many as mentally challenged. The day that Judge Kolts reduced his sentence to life for the murder of Shorty Shea, he called Grogan “too stupid and hopped up on drugs to know what his role was other than to carry out his assignments.”
But Grogan was smart enough to contact authorities and tell them where Shorty’s remains were buried as his parole eligibility date approached. As such, he is the only Manson murder codefendant to be granted parole and actually released from prison.
His change of heart came slowly, as time passed and he befriended Lieutenant Cecil Chandler, a watch commander at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy.
Grogan had been in prison for a couple of years when a teenage girl started writing to him. Once she turned eighteen she came in person, and after eighteen months of visits they got engaged. Grogan had come to trust Chandler enough to invite him to the ceremony in December 1975.
It wasn’t long before Grogan’s wife began getting threatening calls from Lynette Fromme and Sandy Good in Sacramento, saying she wasn’t good enough for him and they were going to kill her.
After Grogan was stabbed by another inmate in 1976, he asked Lieutenant Chandler for a heart-to-heart. “I’ve been thinking about my crime,” he said. “I would like to talk to you about it.”
Chandler got clearance to develop a personal relationship with Grogan, and after a few conversations, the inmate admitted responsibility in Shorty’s murder. He confessed specifics in a conference call with his wife and father, then Chandler contacted the LASD, the LAPD, and the DA’s office on Grogan’s behalf, offering to help locate Shorty’s body.
Grogan spent all night drawing a map from memory for the search team, which Chandler flew down to assist. But after a hectic day of digging in sand piles, flying over the area with a helicopter, and taking photos and video to show Grogan, the effort proved unsuccessful.
Still unsure if Grogan was making up the story to escape or get a nice field trip, the search team asked Chandler if they should risk releasing Grogan to help them find the body.
“Are you willing to take a chance?” they asked.
“I’ll take a chance for Grogan,” Chandler replied.
So, in December 1977, they transported the inmate more than three hundred miles to Spahn Ranch so he could point them to the right spot. Over the years, however, the landscape had changed due to rainstorms and mudslides. When they still couldn’t find the remains, they put him in jail overnight to try again the next day.
Grogan made one final attempt on December 15, and this time the team unearthed Shorty’s skeletal remains at the side of an embankment, 150 feet off Santa Susana Pass Road and one mile west of Topanga Boulevard.
Contrary to the killers’ exaggerated boasts, Shorty’s skeleton was intact except for a missing left hand, which was likely caused by an animal post-mortem. That said, his skull had been crushed, as if he’d been hit in the back of the head, and his chest bones and ribs showed evidence of multiple stab and chop wounds, as Grogan had described.
To keep Grogan safe in prison and also to protect his family, who lived near the burial site, the authorities simply told the media that they’d found the body with the help of an “informant.”
By Grogan’s first parole hearing in 1978, he’d already helped the authorities find Shorty’s remains, and he was looking at the Manson Family in hindsight.
Grogan was twenty when he’d entered the prison system in December 1971. Although he and Manson were at the state prison system’s mental health facility in Vacaville at the same time, Grogan had tried to keep his distance from his former guru.
“I was young then, stupid, and I’ve really got no cleanup for what I did. It was wrong,” he told the board. “. . . I’ve learned. Experience is the best teacher. There’s nothing that I can see that would ever coerce me or persuade me to do anything that I don’t want to do.”
Prison psychiatrists had initially diagnosed Grogan with aspects of schizophrenia, but those diagnoses receded as he recovered from the drug damage. By 1976, most doctors reported seeing no identifiable “personality problems” and a below-average potential for violence.
Still, the board denied his first parole request, noting that it had taken him nine years to volunteer to help find Shorty’s remains. They also cited one doctor’s persistent and troubling diagnosis of “schizophrenia, chronic undifferentiated type.”
At his hearing three years later, Grogan reassured the board that he wouldn’t decompensate, get hooked up with another charismatic figure, or slip back into distorted thinking and values.
“I’ve seen Manson for what he really is,” he said. “The romanticism is out of the game. I’m not sixteen years old anymore, and I can see what— I’ve seen the whole scope of all the charismatic people that have and I—that’s not going to happen again.”
This time the commissioners agreed, deciding that Grogan had matured enough to deserve parole.
After two progress hearings in 1984 and 1985, the board approved his plan to work as a sign painter and graphic artist, with side jobs as a musician and house painter, and he was released to the San Fernando Valley in the middle of the night on November 18, 1985.
As a parole condition, the thirty-four-year-old father of two was forbidden to have contact with Family members. He must have complied because he was discharged from parole on April 13, 1988.
Today, Grogan sometimes goes by the alias Adam Gabriel—his two sons’ first names. He apparently divorced his first wife, because he has gotten remarried to a psychologist who evaluates criminal defendants for legal sanity and competency to stand trial. Still a musician, he has played in various bands in Contra Costa County.
In the years after the murder trials, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sandy Good remained close, and both kept in regular contact with Charles Manson.
Focusing more now on protecting the environment from evil corporate overlords, Manson came up with a religious construct for his remaining followers. He called it the Order of the Rainbow.
Charlie had given each woman in his inner circle a name corresponding to a color while they were all still active and loyal Family members, but this was the first time they became public. He called Lynette “Red” for her red hair and her task, to protect the redwoods. Sandy was “Blue” for her blue eyes and her assignment, to fight for clean air, water, and the ocean in particular. Katie had been yellow, Leslie green, Sadie violet, Brenda gold, and Cappy silver.
Red and Blue, two of the few longtime Family members who weren’t in prison, were directed to continue Charlie’s militant eco-terrorist philosophy and activities, like the tractor-loader fire in Death Valley.
The duo lived in an attic apartment in Sacramento and were often photographed together, Sandy in a blue head-covering robe, tied at the waist, and Lynette in a red hooded poncho with jeans. They told the media they were celibate nuns, waiting for their lord, Charles Manson.
“He expects people to be cleaning the Earth,” Red said when they were photographed on July 8, 1975.
The two women were also photographed chained together, holding up one forefinger to communicate Charlie’s message, “One, us, me,” which Blue said also signified “an alternative to anarchy” or “a broken peace sign.”
But they were largely on their own, because most of the other Family members had distanced themselves from Charlie, the Family, and them too. They did, however, manage to recruit a third roommate to join their crusade: Susan Murphy, who also wore a hooded robe and described herself as a “sister of Manson’s church.”
On September 5, 1975, Lynette Fromme took action to further the Manson cause by strapping to her leg a Colt .45-caliber automatic that she pointed at President Gerald Ford in Slate Capital Park in Sacramento. The Secret Service agents who wrestled her to the ground before she could fire it later learned that the magazine was loaded, but had no shell in the chamber.
She never intended to kill the president, she said, claiming to have purposely ejected the bullet onto her apartment floor before leaving for the park. She said she simply wanted to make a statement and relay a message from Manson about saving the redwood trees.
Allowed to represent herself at trial, Fromme was found guilty of attempting to assassinate the president. During her sentencing hearing on December 18, she pulled out an apple, hidden in her sleeve, and threw it. Although she hit the prosecutor above the right eye, she said the judge had been her intended target. Sentenced to life in prison, she was dragged from the courtroom, screaming. She would be eligible for parole in fifteen years.
With her partner in crime behind bars, Sandy Good was one of the—if not the only—remaining core Family members on the outside who continued working, at least publicly, on Manson’s behalf.
In March 1976, Good was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison for conspiracy to mail death threats to 171 corporate executives she’d accused of polluting the environment. She was convicted of threatening to harm them and their wives in the name of the International People’s Court of Retribution as well as making telephone threats to a newspaper and four radio stations.
At trial, Good refused to put up a defense, saying she wanted to go straight to prison to be with Fromme and the other Family members.
“I cannot bear to be outside [in] your society,” she told Judge MacBride at her sentencing. “I want to be inside with my family.”
Susan Murphy, also convicted of sending death threats to corporate executives, received a five-year sentence.
In mid-August, Murphy and inmate Diane Ellis, who was serving eight years for bank robbery, escaped from Terminal Island in LA by overpowering a female guard and taking off in her car. They were captured nine days later in Portland, Oregon.
Good began her sentence at Terminal Island, where Manson had spent his first federal term. She was supposed to be released ten years into her sentence, in March 1985, but she refused to accept the parole conditions that she stay away from Manson and other Family members. Good said she also didn’t want to be freed while other members were still in prison, nor did she want to be released to a halfway house in New Jersey, which she described as “a toxic dump.”
Instead, she was released that December to Vermont, where she lived under an assumed name until her true identity was revealed.
Lynette Fromme started her time at the federal prison in San Diego, but was transferred to a facility in Alderson, West Virginia, after hitting an inmate with a hammer. She was on good behavior there for eight and a half years, although she skipped her parole hearing in 1985, figuring they wouldn’t let her out so soon.
Two years later, she escaped from a medium security area and made her way into the rugged, snowy mountains, in the height of winter.
Prison officials knew that she’d been communicating with Manson by mail, but they couldn’t determine whether she’d had outside help. She was captured on foot two miles from the prison a day and a half later, wearing a thick jacket, a cap, and two pairs of soaking wet pants.
From there, she was transferred to facilities in Kentucky and Florida before landing in a maximum-security unit in the Federal Medical Facility in Carswell, Texas. She was released in August 2009, after serving thirty-four years behind bars.
As soon as Sandy Good was off parole, she returned to California. Even though she wasn’t allowed to visit Manson, she still wanted to be close to him. By then he’d been moved to Corcoran, so she settled in Hanford, about twenty-three miles away.
Good picked up her environmental activism where she’d left off, but now did it online. In 1996, she created a website aimed at freeing Manson, changing his image, and disseminating his ideas. It was called Access Manson or ATWA—an acronym for Air, Trees, Water, Animals—and represented Manson’s mantra for protecting the environment: “ATWA is your survival on earth. It’s a revolution against pollution. ATWA is ATWAR with pollution.”
Archived today as a “historical document” on mansonblog.com, the website stated it was dedicated “to begin to lift the shroud of lies and distortions that have been used for thirty years by self serving individuals, the mass media, and certain California state departments and offices to cover the reality that is Charles Manson.”
In 1997, Good’s life partner, George Stimson, established ATWA in Hanford as a non-profit corporation. It was suspended several years later.