Susan Atkins
Susan Atkins is 60 years old, and she’s dying of brain cancer. But she won’t get to spend her last weeks or months with loving family and friends, and a group of people in California are glad.
You see, Susan Atkins was one of those young, foolish women who helped Charles Manson kill actress Sharon Tate and several other people back in 1969. Remember “Helter Skelter”? If you’re at least of a certain age — say, Susan’s age — you will. Manson was probably — IS probably — one of the most evil men who ever lived, and he sucked in a number of those young, idealistic people to his web. All have been in prison in California since their conviction of the Tate-LaBianca murders, as they came to be called.
Susan Atkins’s attorneys applied for a mercy release for the dying convict so that she could at least spend her last days at home. The California Board of Parole turned the motion down unanimously.
Members of the victims’ families, who attended the board’s hearing, expressed satisfaction and relief at Atkins’s being sentenced to die in a prison hospital. Since it’s highly unlikely that a terminally ill 60-year-old would come out of prison and kill someone else in her last days, one can only conclude that the families have decided to never forgive or forget any of their losses. They want Atkins to suffer to her last dying minute — not just from her illness, but also from being denied the right to die in her own bed, surrounded by whatever family she has left.
Meanwhile, a European-based group called the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced recently that it believes it is closing in on Aribert Heim, alias “Dr. Death,” the only prominent ex-Nazi war criminal still supposedly alive, and at large.
One can understand the SWC’s eagerness to catch Heim and bring him to “justice.” After all, we can’t have these dangerous 94-year-olds running around loose, now can we?
Heim is alleged to have murdered hundreds of prisoners at Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was camp doctor, during World War II. If that’s true, naturally it’s a heinous crime. Nobody with good sense will deny that. But at 94, how much longer has he got before the Grim Reaper comes for him, anyway?
Heim isn’t the only “dangerous” ex-Nazi at large — just the most prominent. John Demjanjuk, age 88, a former SS guard at Treblinka, is fighting a U.S. government order deporting him. He lived in this country for many years. Sandor Kepiro, 93, a Hungarian gendarmerie captain, reportedly is living in Budapest, and denies committing murders he’s accused of. Milivoj Asner, 95, a police chief in Croatia, is accused of other atrocities, and is believed to be living in that country. And Soeren Kam, 86, a Dane, is a former Waffen SS officer who is accused of the murder of a Danish banker in 1943.
There you have it folks — the rapidly dwindling excuse for existence of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Sure hope they don’t have to shoot it out with any of these desperate, dangerous war criminals if they finally locate them!
The point I’m trying to make both with the news item about Susan Atkins, and the continuing saga of the accused war criminals who are about to die of old age, is: Whatever happened to mercy? Isn’t 39 years in prison enough to satisfy the families of Atkins’ victims, when she is dying of cancer and no longer dangerous to anyone?
What would it prove if the Simon Wiesenthal investigators captured every one of these aged men who are probably at death’s door already? If you say, “They haven’t paid for their crimes!” I’ll answer you, “If you had had to run and hide and look over your shoulder every day for 63 years, wouldn’t you feel like you’d paid a lot?” Not all prisons have bars, you know. Some exist in the mind and conscience of a person. The fact that these old men have managed to elude capture for well over half a century indicates that there are probably other people who believe in their innocence and have helped them.
And I’m not taking a position on their guilt or innocence — just on the need, at some point, to say, “Enough.” If you believe at all in heaven and hell, or Karma, or whatever you want to call it, then you have to believe that if these men are guilty as charged, rest assured they’ll pay for it, in the next life if not this one.
We should all recall the words of Portia to Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” when he asks what government compels him to show any mercy to a man who owes him money:
“The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the
Gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.
It is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives,
And him that takes.”
Old Corporal <corporalko@yahoo.com>
Is mercy out of fashion?, – Saturday, July 19, 2008 at 18:56:41 (EDT)
