No sinner escapes the wrath of the gods!

(09-25) 05:20 PDT CHOWCHILLA, MADERA COUNTY — Susan Atkins, the Charles Manson follower and convicted murderer who lost her last chance at parole this month, died Thursday at the women’s prison in Chowchilla (Madera County), state corrections officials said.

She was 61 and had been suffering from brain cancer.

Ms. Atkins was convicted of seven murders committed in the summer of 1969, including the stabbing of actress Sharon Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant.

The bodies of Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring were discovered Aug. 9, 1969, in the home Tate shared with her husband, film director Roman Polanski. He was not at home at the time of the slayings.

Ms. Atkins admitted she had stabbed Tate to death as Tate begged for her life and that of her unborn son. Ms. Atkins said she and other cult followers acted on orders from Manson and were on LSD.

She was sentenced to death, but her sentence was changed to life imprisonment when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty in 1972. The death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Between 1976 and this year, Ms. Atkins was denied parole 13 times. The state parole board rejected her final bid on Sept. 2, after Ms. Atkins had undergone a cancer-related leg amputation.

Parole Commissioner Tim O’Hara said that he and the other commissioner who presided over the hearing, Jan Enloe, based their decision on the “atrocious nature” of the 1969 killings and said that Ms. Atkins never fully understood the magnitude of her crimes.

It is a joyous day indeed when justice, long denied by liberals to the uneasy spirits of Atkins’ victims, finally came for a woman who Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi described as a heartless bloodthirsty robot:

With the death of Manson follower Susan Atkins, the man who prosecuted her for first-degree murder said Friday that one of his lasting images was that of a “heartless, bloodthirsty robot.”

Vincent Bugliosi, however, said that image has become more ambiguous with the passage of time.

Atkins, who died Friday, played a central role in the 1969 slayings of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in a two-night rampage in the Los Angeles area. She later said she killed Tate even as the woman pleaded for mercy.

[…]

Atkins had given conflicting statements around the time of her trial, Bugliosi said. Still another version is found in the book by Charles “Tex” Watson, the main killer in both the Tate and LaBianca murders.

Watson said that Atkins boasted about killing Tate and her unborn baby to get attention but that Atkins actually held her down while he stabbed her.

“It was my hand that struck out over and over until the cries of ‘mother, mother’ stopped,” Watson wrote.

Atkins told two cellmates after her arrest for the murder of Manson family associate Gary Hinman that she stabbed Tate telling her, “Look, bitch, I don’t have any mercy for you.” She repeated the claim to Bugliosi the night before he called her before a grand jury.

Atkins likely didn’t kill Tate, instead holding her down while Tex Watkins killed her which is just as bad. She should have been electrocuted in the 70s but was allowed to stain the earth with her evil for decades. Now she is being punished for her actions, and the spirits of the dead she helped butcher rest a little easier. Bugliosi wrote the definitive work on the Manson cult, Helter Skelter, which describes their depravity in detail, if you can stomach it.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.