Manson family killer Bruce Davis granted parole

A California parole board has once again issued a grant of parole for convicted Manson family killer Bruce Davis.

Gov. Jerry Brown now has 150 days to decide whether Davis, 71, should go free. Last year, Brown concluded Davis still posed a threat to society and blocked his release.

Davis, 26 at the time of the killings, was convicted and imprisoned in 1972 for his role in the murders of two men, ranch hand Donald “Shorty” Shea, who also worked as a Hollywood stuntman, and aspiring musician Gary Hinman.

Details of Shea’s killing have always remained murky, muddied more by Davis’ recent account that the ranch hand was taken to a different location and killed not the night that prosecutors claimed, but the following morning.

Davis was not implicated in the 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others in a Benedict Canyon home, nor of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Hinman was held captive for days, tortured and then killed in July 1969 as part of an extortion plot at the outset of the infamous Manson family murder spree.

Shea’s August 1969 fatal stabbing and beheading took place after, in August or September 1969, because Manson believed he was a police informant.