St. Louis Post-Dispatch Pat Gauen column: Pat examines the death penalty

Jun 26, 2008 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- ZZHUI | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- There was a book, Bud Kendall said, that I needed to read. Because Bud said it, I took it to heart.

I got to know Wesley "Bud" Kendall in the 1970s, when he was a tough Madison County deputy sheriff on a rough beat. He had the State Park Place area in a rowdy era when the brothels and gambling joints along Collinsville Road were winding down. There were problems back at headquarters, too.

Sheriff John Maeras was under a federal microscope that would leave him convicted in a corruption case. On FBI bugs, plotters were heard referring to Bud, a former Marine of the honest persuasion, as "Gung Ho." They did not want Gung Ho to find out about the payoffs and kickbacks from prostitutes and tow truck operators.

Like me, they knew Bud had a keen sense of right and wrong, the fortitude to enforce it and the heart to make it fair.

As things heated up, Bud worried about reprisals for helping the feds. I visited his home in Collinsville one night to find that he was carrying a sidearm and was never more than a couple steps from a rifle or shotgun.

Through all of this, Bud had time to read, although his choice of topics didn't seem very relaxing. He recommended "Helter Skelter," the definitive book on the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and others in Los Angeles by the Charles Manson "family."

So spellbound was I that on a visit west, I arranged an interview with Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of the killers and co-author of the book. He was unflinching in the view that those people did not deserve the good fortune of death-sentence commutations that courts had given all of California's condemned.

I ended up with a lifelong interest in a very strange case.

Manson was a two-bit crook with an almost magic lure for college-age social dropouts of the "flower child" era, some of them young women fleeing dysfunctional homes.

He told his commune that the Beatles were sending messages in the music of the "White Album," and that the song "Helter Skelter" (for a British amusement park ride) was code for an impending black-white U.S. race war. He planned for his crew to hide in the desert, sit out the battle and then emerge to rule the world.

Got that?

But the war wasn't happening fast enough, so Manson sent out teams on two successive nights to commit savage killings of affluent whites, figuring blacks would be blamed and the fuse lit.

Did I mention that Manson and his people used a lot of drugs?

Especially strange was the fact that at Tate's home (where she, three friends and a hapless passer-by were slain) and on the next night (when restaurateur Leno LaBianca and his wife were killed in their house) the extraordinary, brutal crimes were committed mainly by women.

They are all 60 now, more or less. And still in prison. I've seen TV interviews with Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Susan Atkins. All seemed to develop into mature, repentant adults who can barely believe what they did under the influence of drugs and Manson.

They have been model prisoners. But should they ever be freed?

I had pondered that even before a new issue popped into the recent news. Atkins, who had personally stabbed the pregnant Tate, is dying of brain cancer and subject of a request for a mercy parole to die in the care of family.

It is hard to imagine that after almost four decades, she or any of these women still poses a threat. Maybe not accomplice Charles 'Tex" Watson either, although I know less about him. Manson remains scarier than ever.

Many people would recoil at their release, especially given the notoriety of the slayings. One young, crime-savvy colleague put it to me bluntly: "Their victims didn't get to die with their loved ones."

The subject challenges my feelings about the death penalty. Maybe yours too. I would have shed no tears over these people's executions 35 years ago. But I also accept that their circumstances have changed. So should we give all convicted killers the opportunity to live and perhaps be remade?

Wife Karen crossed paths with Atkins once, years ago in a prison ministry program (as companions whispered, "Do you know who she is?"). Karen found her to be pleasant, centered and serene. "If we believe in such a thing as rehabilitation," Karen told me, "this is rehabilitation."

There's one guy in particular I would like to ask about it, but he's been gone for years. I'm certain that Gung Ho would have eagerly pulled the switch on those savage girls. I wonder if he would find mercy for those sorry women.

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