Susan Atkins, the follower of Charles Manson and the murderer of the pregnant Sharon Tate, is dead. The news account of her death tells quite a story, going from unimaginable depravity to the Cross:
One night in August 1969, Manson dispatched Atkins and others to a wealthy residential section of Los Angeles, telling them, as they recalled, to “do something witchy.”Indeed. Does this bother you in any way? Do you see that Jesus bore in His body, along with everything else the world has done, the sins of the Manson cult? Do you see this woman as your dear sister in Christ?
They went to the home of Tate and her husband. He was not home, but Tate, who was 8{ months pregnant, and four others were killed. “Pigs” was scrawled on a door in blood.
The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife were found stabbed to death in their home across town. “Helter Skelter” was written in blood on the refrigerator.
“I was stoned, man, stoned on acid,” Atkins testified during the trial’s penalty phase.
“I don’t know how many times I stabbed (Tate) and I don’t know why I stabbed her,” she said. “She kept begging and pleading and begging and pleading and I got sick of listening to it, so I stabbed her.”
She said she felt “no guilt for what I’ve done. It was right then and I still believe it was right.” Asked how it could be right to kill, she replied in a dreamy voice, “How can it not be right when it’s done with love?”
The matronly, gray-haired Atkins who appeared before a parole board in 2000 cut a far different figure than that of the cocky young defendant some 30 years earlier.
“I don’t have to just make amends to the victims and families,” she said softly. “I have to make amends to society. I sinned against God and everything this country stands for.” She said she had found redemption in Christianity.
The last words she spoke in public at the September hearing were to say in unison with her husband: “My God is an amazing God.”
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