• Ex-Manson Follower Freed After 14-Year Murder Term

Ex-Manson Follower Freed After 14-Year Murder Term

LOS ANGELES, May 9 – A former Charles Manson follower was paroled and is working as a house painter after serving 14 years in prison for fatally stabbing a Hollywood stuntman.

Steve “Clem” Grogran, 34, was released Nov. 19 from the California Medical Center at Vacaville and has been living in the San Fernando Valley with his family, state prison officials said Wednesday.

Grogan was convicted of murdering Donald “Shorty” Shea at the Spahn Movie Ranch near Chatsworth in 1969. Authorities said Manson had ordered the murder because he believed Shea was a police informant.

Charles “Tex” Watson, another Manson disciple, was turned down for the sixth time Wednesday in his attempt to be paroled from a life term in prison.

A three-member Board of Prison Terms panel noted Watson’s “heinous, atrocious and cruel” murders of actress Sharon Tate and her friends Jay Sebring, Voityck Frykowski and Abigail Folger. Steven Parent, a friend of the caretaker, also was killed.

The next day, grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were slain in their Los Feliz area home in Los Angeles by Manson followers.

Grogan was never implicated in the Tate-LaBianca killings, which occurred about two weeks before Shea was slain.

He works as a part-time house painter in the San Fernando Valley, said Marshall Lundsberg, a Department of Corrections parole administrator.

Lundsberg would not disclose precisely where Grogan is living, except to say it is not in the Chatsworth area, where Shea was killed and buried Aug. 27, 1969.

A one-time drug user, Grogran has visited his parole agent weekly and has passed drug tests, Landsberg said. His parole will be up in three years.

Grogan was 18 years old when Shea was slain and 20 when a Los Angeles County jury recommended that he die in a gas chamber. His sentence was reduced by a judge in 1971 to life in prison, making him eligible for a parole hearing in December 1977.

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