Paul Watkins (Manson Family)

Paul Alan Watkins (January 25, 1950 – August 3, 1990) was a member of Charles Manson’s "Family." In the period leading up to Manson’s trial for the Tate-LaBianca murders, Watkins provided the prosecution with information that clarified the Helter Skelter motive.

By his own account, Paul Watkins lived "a pretty standard middle-class American upbringing," the exceptions being, in his own view, a religious orientation and early years spent in Sidon, Lebanon, where his father worked on a pipeline.

The move to Lebanon took place when Watkins was an infant. After four years in Lebanon, the Watkins family moved to Beaumont, Texas, and then to Thousand Oaks, California. When Watkins was a child, he enjoyed attending church and hiking in the oak groves near his home.

During his adolescence, Watkins became a Bible student and was active in youth organizations and church camps. At age 13, he became involved in evangelicalism, at first because he enjoyed the music and singing. By the time he enrolled in high school, his musical interests had become a "passion"; his religious interests had "waned."

Watkins dropped out of high school during his senior year, in which school officials distressed by his use of psychedelic drugs terminated his stint as student-body president, a position he held in every grade from first through eleventh. Having come to find his studies less interesting than music and marijuana, he became, as he would later write, "a fugitive flower child in search of enlightenment and truth." In the same December 1967 week in which he was put on probation after an arrest for marijuana possession, two friends of his were returned dead from the Vietnam War.

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