Murder, Love & Redemption

Editor's note: This story was a finalist for a Western Publishing Association 2011 Maggie Award for best interview or profile.

In 1985, long after the crimes that would bind her forever to Charles Manson, Susan Atkins received a letter in the prison mail.A young man named James Whitehouse had read her autobiography and wanted guidance. He was lost. He was frightened. He was partying too hard, hanging out with bad people. In her book, she wrote that she had found God and conquered her demons. How did she do it? How could he?

“He wrote to me and offered friendship,” the convicted murderer told parole officials years later, “and I was at a place emotionally where I thought maybe I could offer friendship back.”

The decision to correspond hadn’t been easy, she said. In the 14 years since her conviction, both as one of the despised Manson girls and a legend among born-again inmates, Atkins received more than her share of mail from crackpots. Occasionally, the exchanges turned disastrously romantic. One writer had to be barred from the prison; another, to whom she was briefly married, turned out to be a con man.

Now here was this confused 22-year-old wanting advice from her, a 37-year-old convict.

“I don’t remember what I told her,” Whitehouse recalls one recent afternoon, sitting on the porch of a San Juan Capistrano mobile home that doubles as his law office. “But I do remember what I prayed before I sent the letter. I said, ‘God, if this isn’t a good idea, then don’t let her get it.’ Later, she told me she hadn’t written back to anyone in about five years.”

What happened after he mailed that letter is a complicated tale. It’s a crime story, of course, framed by one of the most notorious murder sprees in California history. But it’s also an account of an uphill struggle against an increasingly stern and powerful justice system. And a love story. And a tragedy.

When Whitehouse tells it, though, it sounds improbably like a story of redemption, and not necessarily of the infamous prisoner who became his wife. For in the epilogue to one of the darkest tales ever to haunt the nation, Whitehouse—now a Harvard-educated attorney—found the courage to rewrite the story of his own life.

“When I was in junior high, I played the trumpet,” Whitehouse says. “I was going to go to West Point. Or to Stanford, and play in the Stanford band.”

He laughs. A tall, graying, thin-faced man who has worn his hair long since his late teens, the 46-year-old Whitehouse seems more Ted Nugent than John Philip Sousa. Yet there he is, in his 1979 yearbook, in the Hillsdale High School band in San Mateo, where former classmates recall him as brainy and shy.

The change came at 16: His father, an engineer, moved the family to Ohio, and the teenaged Whitehouse defiantly shut down. “He was already getting to that angry-young-man phase, but Cleveland was the last straw,” recalls his sister, Virginia Seals, a 44-year-old Santa Cruz landscaper and accounting student.

The day after graduation, Whitehouse says, he rushed from Ohio back to the Bay Area and moved in with old buddies, playing bass in a rock band and ditching classes at community college: “We were headlining shows on Friday and Saturday nights. In some of the worst clubs, but still, headlining.”

And doing a lot of drugs.

“See,” he says, “what happens is: You start partying. It costs money. And then you can’t get it and eventually you say, ‘The heck with this, I’m going to buy a lot so I don’t have to keep going back to some guy.’ And then you end up with a lot in your house, and you realize that other people can kick in your door and take it. Because it’s illegal, you can’t go to the police and complain about it. So eventually you buy guns. And all my guns were legal, and they were all registered and I never took them out of the house, but …”

He was 6 feet tall and so strung out that his weight had dropped to 113 pounds by the time he was 20. “For my 21st birthday,” he says, “my dad gave me money to get a will done.”

About that time, Whitehouse says, he picked up Vincent Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter,” the Manson case history beloved by defiant adolescents everywhere. “Someone said, ‘Oh, read this. This is scary,’ ” he remembers. And it did disturb him. He was a 6-year-old living 400 miles from Los Angeles when Manson, a deranged ex-con humiliated by his failure as a musician, dispatched his “family” of runaways and lost souls to commit the bloodbaths in 1969 that made him famous.

In Southern California, of course, the case became legend: Brainwashed and acting on Manson’s instructions, his followers slaughtered nine people, including actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, and wrote epithets at the crime scenes in the victims’ blood.

But by the mid-’80s, it was just a bad memory. The 15th anniversary of the crimes came and went and the TV movie of “Helter Skelter” was in reruns. One day while reading a magazine, Whitehouse says, he noticed a Q&A in which Manson was ranting that “Sadie lied” about something. Intrigued, he went looking for the autobiography of the Manson girl who had been given that alias.

The book was not what he expected. At the trials, Atkins had been “the scariest Manson girl,” as one prosecutor put it, bragging to her cellmates that she had not only stabbed Tate but, they claimed, tasted the actress’s blood. Then she switched sides to become the first family member to testify against Manson. Under oath, she claimed she never stabbed anyone—she had only written the word “pig” in blood with a towel at one of the crime scenes and held Tate while another family member, Charles “Tex” Watson, murdered her.

Then Atkins reversed herself again, the result of threats by Manson against her and her then-year-old baby, she explained later. (The child, fathered by a drifter during a trip to Phoenix with another family member, was taken by the state and given up for adoption after her conviction.)

At her 1971 sentencing, Atkins claimed she did stab Tate, sneering at her pleas for mercy. By that time, however, her story was contradicted by so much other testimony that it wasn’t clear whether Atkins really knew what part she played in the murders. In any case, the disgusted public no longer much cared whether she was a cold-blooded killer or a hapless accessory. Atkins was sentenced to death.

A year after she was sent to death row, the California Supreme Court briefly rendered the death penalty invalid. All death sentences automatically were commuted to life imprisonment. Under the law at the time of the murders, that technically meant seven years to life because sentences of life without parole didn’t exist in California. So Atkins not only escaped death; she won a shot at release.

According to her memoir, “Child of Satan, Child of God,” this set the stage in 1974 for a life-altering spiritual rebirth. The claim raised the usual jailhouse-memoir doubts. Inmates who want parole stand to gain from sympathetic portrayals. And Atkins’ co-author, Bob Slosser, was an evangelist who went on, after the book’s release, to launch the news department of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Whitehouse had his own epiphanies.

“I was eating dinner one day in the living room with a gun on my lap,” he recalls. “And I realized that people don’t just wake up one morning and decide to run amok. People … make a bad choice, and something goes wrong, and then they make another bad choice, and eventually they end up in a situation where there are no longer any right answers.”

Contacting a Manson girl was extreme, he concedes, but “at that age, everything seems dramatic.” And Atkins had written that she wanted to minister to young people who felt lost. Whitehouse was scarcely speaking to his family and had no friends outside his lifestyle. “I told her that I was living with a bunch of people and … I wanted to get my life cleaned up, that I was 22 years old and the oldest person in the entire place, and that it was hard holding it all together. And she encouraged me to get out of there.”

For the next year, he says, they wrote monthly. “When you’re drowning, you don’t pay attention to who’s throwing you a life preserver.”

He moved to North Hollywood to start a new band, playing speed-metal clubs in the San Fernando Valley. (“We actually opened once for Megadeth,” he says.) Now a little more than an hour from the women’s prison in Frontera, he visited Atkins. The more he saw, he says, the more he liked. Even surrounded by guards, she had a reassuring serenity that was—dare he think it?—attractive. (“Susan had a way of letting you know God made you absolutely perfect, just the way you are,” says his sister.)

And unlike others in his life, Atkins didn’t judge or lecture. “Instead of saying, ‘You ought to … ,’ she’d just let me talk and wait for me to say something that made sense,” Whitehouse says. “And then she’d say, ‘I think you’re right.’ Or, ‘I think what you said before; I think that was right.’ Which made me feel like she wasn’t telling me stuff, but that I was coming up with it myself.”

In early 1987, his band was caught up in a drug sweep. Though he wasn’t charged, he says, he spent two days in jail. Sobered, he accepted an invitation from his grandmother in San Juan Capistrano: If he returned to school, he could live in the guest room of her trailer.

“I enrolled at Golden West [College], and, after a semester there, I surprised myself and got a 3.75 average,” he says. He decided three things:

He was smart.

He wanted to go to college.

And he was in love with Susan Atkins.

“I had to ask her four times to marry me,” he says. “The first time I asked she said, ‘What?’ And the second time, she said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ The third time she said, ‘What will your parents think?’ And the fourth time she said, ‘Yes.’ ”

They were married Dec. 7, 1987, in the prison administration building. The groom wore a dark-blue suit; the bride wore white. “Susan waited until a certain pastor she liked came in,” recalled Whitehouse. “He kept calling me John.”

Besides the obvious obstacles, she now was pushing 40 and he was just 24. Whitehouse says he didn’t tell his parents until three months before the wedding.

“They were hugely concerned,” says his sister. “Dad’s first reaction was: Nobody can change that much—you can’t do something that horrible and then change into a wonderful person.” Her own feelings were mixed: Her father had a point, but her brother was like a new man.

“I think my dad said something like, ‘I don’t want to hear about it,’ ” Whitehouse says. But his mother’s sister met Atkins and interceded. Whitehouse’s father died in 2000; his mother, now in her 70s, declined to comment for this story. Though it didn’t happen in time for the prison to clear them to attend the wedding, Whitehouse and his sister say both parents grew to love their daughter-in-law.