LOS ANGELES, Jul. 9 – Sharon Tate’s mother gazes for a moment at nothing in particular, shakes her head slowly and says, “I can’t imagine a man holding a pregnant woman down and stabbing her to death. My mind will not allow me to imagine what she went through.”

Doris Tate stops to mop her eyes. Thirteen years later, 13 years after the savage Tate-LaBianca murders by members of the Charles Manson family, the tears still come, often.

Often, she asks herself how “another human being could put a person through that torture … and they didn’t know her from Adam.”

For three years after her daughter’s stabbing death, Doris Tate says, “I was in shock. I couldn’t even mention Sharon’s death for three years. I’m just now able to get with it.”

Now, more than a decade after the brutal murders the night of Aug. 9, 1969, in the hilltop Benedict Canyon house rented by actress Sharon Tate and her director husband Roman Polanski, Doris Tate has broken her public silence.

She wants to see that justice is done and justice, to her, is ensuring that the five convicted members of the Manson family and other convicted murderers are denied parole.

“I would like to see the whole system changed,” she says. “My work can only be done through the Manson family.”

Her work began this spring when Leslie Van Houten, convicted in 1971 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder in the Tate-LaBianca killings and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences, came up for her fourth parole hearing.

Tate learned, she says, that friends of the Mansons had collected 900 names on petitions urging their release and she told herself, “If they can get 900 names, surely I can get enough people to agree with me they should not be released.”

Doris Tate started her own petition drive, circulating them from her beauty salon in Rolling Hills and through friends of friends. In two weeks, they had collected 10,000 signatures. And, once again, Van Houten was denied parole.

Now, says Tate, the others are coming up again for parole — Patricia Krenwinkel next, then Susan Atkins and Manson and Charles ( Tex) Watson, the man who stabbed Sharon Tate to death.

“I’m going to do everything possible,” she vows, to see that they stay in prison.

She is determined to “keep these people from organizing and getting together a large gang” and killing again. “I’ve had detectives tell me,” she says, “that Manson still runs his gang from inside.”

And she asks, “Why should they be turned loose to do it to someone else’s daughter, someone else’s son?”

For her first public appearance as an advocate Doris Tate has chosen a luncheon meeting put together by Parents of Murdered Children, a self-help and advocacy group formed here a year ago as an off-shoot of an organization founded in 1978 in Cincinnati by the parents of a murdered girl.

Tate is one of two women on the speakers’ panel who share a bond, an awful bond. Both are the mothers of murdered daughters. The other is Iras Skinner, a thin, intense blonde woman, a single parent whose only child, Katherine Lee, 19, was beaten to death in Arcadia the night of Nov. 12. 1980. The case is unsolved.

The other panelists are Detective Paul Thompson, head of homicide, Wilshire Division, LAPD; Pamela Miller, assistant director of the Los Angeles County victim witness assistance program, and George Nicholson, a senior assistant attorney general and Republican candidate for attorney general.

There are about 40 in the audience, most of them families of murder victims, among them Sam and Louise LaCorte, whose daughter, Cathy, was murdered in 1976. The LaCortes have been crusading for the right of next of kin of victims to appear at parole hearings.

Connie Adleman, facilitator for Parents of Murdered Children and a psychiatric nurse with wide experience in victimology, speaks first: “When a parent dies, you have lost the past. When a child dies you have lost the future.”

She speaks of the stages of grief — first, acute with anxiety and depression (Skinner), then long-term reorganization, a need to act (Tate, the LaCortes).

Then, with encouragement from Adleman, Skinner begins to talk about that grief, about her dead daughter.

“She was a pretty ordinary young girl,” she says slowly, “not particularly gifted academically,” a college student in Pasadena, a “bleeding heart” who worked for Greenpeace, for the American Indian movement, for ramps for the handicapped.

That night, Skinner says, Katy “just left home after dinner one evening. She ran out very happily,” on her way to meet a friend for dessert. “And that was the last time I ever saw her.”

Katherine Skinner’s body, clothed in jeans and a red sweater, the face and head smashed with a rock, was found 12 hours later in the courtyard of a medical building on West Duarte Road in Arcadia. No motive has been established.

Skinner’s voice breaks as she tells of trying to convince herself through that long night that nothing was wrong, that the friends were simply out cruising — until confronted by the detective: “We think we have her body.”

She tells of how she “alternately screamed and apologized. I wanted to know why. I still want to know why.

“I don’t want revenge. I don’t want anything. I want to know why they did this to my baby. She didn’t even live 20 years. What could she have done?”

Skinner continues, “Her face was destroyed. They were unable to tell what color her eyes were. There were no teeth. Her brains were out … She was destroyed.”

Tears streaming down her face, she says, “I desperately wanted to let go and go with her. I haven’t had the guts.”

Paper towels are passed; only the sniffles break the silence in the room. Skinner apologizes — “I really don’t enjoy wallowing in self-pity” — and then explains, “I’d been a mom for a long time. …”

Moms do things, she muses, like joining band booster clubs. “And I probably would have had a wedding to help get ready for someday, grandchildren to help get ready for someday. But that’s over.”

She still wakes up in the night screaming, she says, convinced for the moment that she has witnessed her daughter’s murder.

“You don’t get over it,” Skinner says, “but it does get better. I feel very sorry for myself. I feel equally sorry for those (parents) in that second stage, waiting for a trial, and for those who still have to face the nightmare that these people might be free again.”

Then, rather quietly, she says, “There’s a terrible feeling of failure if someone kills your kid because you didn’t protect them.” And then she weeps.

When it is Doris Tate’s turn, she turns to Skinner and says, “Her feelings were our feelings. The big question is, what do we do? I feel what we must do is encourage the public to get behind us 100% to try and change the parole laws.

“Why should these people who didn’t even know my daughter come up for parole in seven years, and every year after? Why parole?

“Your case or my case, it’s all the same case. We’ve lost a child.”

“We’ve got some bad news for you.” Those are the words all of these parents heard from the police. They’re almost as tough to say as to hear, Detective Thompson tells this group: “All my men assigned to homicide have children. They always think, ‘God, that could be my kid.’

Pamela Miller is here to tell victims’ families that they can turn to the county for help, that the victim witness assistance program offers both moral and financial support, practical help such as child care during a trial, emergency funds if a survivor is jobless, perhaps just someone to sit with the survivor at the trial and allay the sheer terror of coming face to face with the suspect.

Assistant Atty. Gen. George Nicholson appears to be campaigning; nevertheless, he is saying what this group wants to hear— that he wants first-degree murderers “permanently” incarcerated, that public pressure can make a difference.

“You and I assume the risk that rehabilitation programs will fail,” Nicholson says. “When did you and I vote to assume that risk? We don’t want any such risk.”

He points out that in 1963, the last year the death penalty was enforced in California, there were 656 murders in this state. Between 1963 and 1981, he tells the group, only one man died in the gas chamber but “there have been 33,000 innocent Californians murdered.”

Nicholson charges that the Supreme Court of California is “ignoring you and me and our children” by declaring a moratorium on the death penalty.

(Manson, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, Atkins and Watson all were under death sentences when, in 1976, the state supreme court struck down the death penalty. Richard Johnson, the killer of the LaCorte girl, was sentenced to death on Nov. 29, 1976; one week later the death penalty was struck down. All now are eligible for parole, but not those who have been sentenced to death since capital punishment was reinstated in 1978).

Nicholson wants to see parole denied to “those convicted murderers that were on death row” at the time the penalty was struck down.

It is society’s responsibility, he says, “never to release them.”

And it is time, he says, for society to stop worrying so much about those on death row “and start caring about you” and the uninjured children of this state.

There are questions from the audience for the panel. Louise LaCorte addresses Detective Thompson: “I perceive a lot of unrest in the police department,” she says, a frustration that justice is not being done.

“I think there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the judicial system,” he acknowledges. And it is his opinion, he adds, that “it’s better to see 10 convicted murderers die in the gas chamber than to see one innocent victim die in the streets.”

There is applause.

Thompson continues, “I think it’s hard to understand how anyone could be convicted of murder and then be out on the streets.”

When most of the people have left, Louise LaCorte comes up and she and Doris Tate embrace. Tate says, “I love you too.”

They are united both in their loss and in their cause. Sam and Louise LaCorte are expected to be first to use Proposition 8, passed by the voters in June, a victims’ rights bill that includes a stipulation that next of kin of victims be notified of parole hearings and permitted to appear and make statements.

(Their daughter’s killer, Richard Johnson, is awaiting a hearing date, his first. He would be eligible for parole in 1983. The LaCortes have gathered more than 24,000 signatures in opposition ).

But Tate is the one most of the media have come to photograph, to record. If they are hoping for sensationalism, they are to be disappointed. Doris Tate does not talk publicly about the details of her daughter’s murder. She talks only about justice. She wants people to get involved, to write to the Board of Prison Terms ( Raymond Brown, chairman, 545 Downtown Plaza, Suite 200, Sacramento 95814), to speak out against parole for convicted murderers.

Although she favors the death penalty, viewing it as “a deterrent to crime,” she adds, “We’re not the judges. A jury of 12 people will make that decision for me.”

And revenge is not her motive. Tate, a Roman Catholic, says, “I’m sure He’ll have something for them. In the meanwhile we have to do our work right here.”

Later, when the mikes have been taken away, she talks a little more freely. What are her emotions today toward the Manson family? “They don’t exist,”

The Tate-LaBianca murders were grisly killings and Sharon Tate, 26, one of the seven victims, a beautiful actress who had risen to stardom in “Valley of the Dolls”, was brutally murdered. Her body, stabbed 16 times, was found in the living room of the murder house.

A bloodied nylon cord was around her neck; apparently she had been hung with the cord from a ceiling beam. She was eight months pregnant and her child, a boy, also died.

Susan Atkins would tell later how she held Tate’s arms behind her and sneered as Tate begged for her life, pleading, “I don’t want to die. I just want to have my baby.” On the front door “Pig” was written in Sharon Tate’s blood.

The guilty verdict for four of the killers — Manson, the mastermind; Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten, was handed down by the jury on Jan. 25, 1971. All were found guilty of murder and conspiracy to murder in the five deaths at the Polanski house and/or in the killings the following day of wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in their Los Feliz house. Tate did not attend the trial. (Charles Tex Watson, who had to be extradited from Texas, was tried later and convicted).

“The verdict was handed down on our ( wedding) anniversary,” Tate mentions, “like a gift.” Tate and her husband, Paul, a retired Army officer, were married Jan. 25, 1942. Sharon Tate was born Jan. 24, 1943, in Dallas, “at the back door of where Tex Watson was born,” Tate adds.

Their lives were shattered. Col. Tate retired from the service, “to pick up the chase,” she says. Doris Tate, a Texan, took their two younger daughters to Houston for a while. “We didn’t know who did it,” she says. “If they wanted to kill one, they could kill another.” Even today, she will not talk about them, “for fear of some kook.”

For a while, she says, it was a matter of lust hanging in there and going on. I had to continue on for the other children (then 15 and 9).

“When I got to the point where I couldn’t stand it, I flipped open the Bible. Through my religion I learned you go directly to your God. That’s where the answers come from.”

Repeatedly, she turned to the book of Proverbs, 24:17-18. There she found these words which, she says, “released my wrath”: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth; Lest the Lord see it, and it displease Him, and He turn away his wrath from him.”

“The scripture,” she says, “was the only thing that did pull me through. I knew it was someone else they were going to have to deal with.

“I just left my revenge with the Lord. He led the way. He took care of me.”

She does not feel that her God somehow let her down. “God had nothing to do with this,” she says. “It was the devil. Those people have given their souls to hell.”

Doris Tate doesn’t think in terms of revenge. “Those people are going to be taken care of,” she says. “As ‘born-again’ Christians (as Atkins and Watson profess to be) they should know they’ll be made to atone for their sins.”

The Tate killings were a senseless slaughter, motivated apparently by Charles Manson’s obsession with touching off a “Helter Skelter” race war. Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Voityck Frykowski, both of whom were house guests that night at the Tate home; Steven Parent, a teenage visitor, and hair stylist and one-time Tate fiance Jay Sebring were random victims.

But the killers will never be put to death. Having served at least seven years of life sentences, each will continue to be eligible for a parole hearing annually.

Charles Manson has had four parole hearings, the first in 1978. He is serving time in the men’s prison at Vacaville. In denying him parole, the parole board has termed him “an unreasonable risk to the public” and has pointed to his “atrocious, reprehensible and repugnant” crimes. He will be eligible for another hearing in November.

Charles (Tex) Watson has had three parole hearings and is scheduled for another in October. He is serving time at California Men’s Colony, San Luis Obispo, where he is assistant prison chaplain. In denying parole, the board has cited Watson’s high potential for violence.

Susan Atkins is at the California Institute for Women, Frontera. She is expected to have another hearing in September.

Patricia Krenwinkel is scheduled for her fifth parole hearing next month. In denying her in the past, the board noted her “extremely callous disregard for human suffering.” It was Krenwinkel who stabbed Abigail Folger 28 times, wrote on the walls of the LaBiancas’ house with their blood, then ate food from their refrigerator.

Leslie Van Houten had her fourth parole hearing in April. At that time, the board postponed her next hearing until 1985. (A law that took effect in January stipulates that, at the discretion of the parole board, anyone guilty of more than one homicide can be denied a hearing for three years).

“If these other people are denied parole at their next hearings,” a spokesman for the board said this week, “they will probably also be denied for three years.” Van Houten is thought by some law enforcement officials to have the best chance for rehabilitation.

But Tate, the La Cortes and others don’t want three-year waits for parole; they want their children’s killers in prison for the rest of their lives.

“If you’re going to have a deterrent to crime,” Tate says, “you’re not going to have it by turning them loose.”

Because her name is Tate, there are constant reminders. She says, “People always ask, ‘Are you Sharon Tate’s mother?’ I just say, ‘Yes, I am.’ They expect something out of me but they’re not going to get it.”

Doris Tate, a warm woman who speaks with a little Texas twang, reflects on the killings and says, “I lost my grandchild, too. It was a double loss.”

But she has stopped asking why. Whereas once she was consumed with the idea of asking Tex Watson that, she now says, “That’s very stupid because he can’t tell me why. The man can’t answer my question. He didn’t know my daughter from another person on the street.”

Nor does she spend time thinking about what might have been, about the super stardom that had been predicted for Sharon Tate, about where Sharon Tate might be today, at 39.

“I was never the stage mother,” she says. “It was enough that she was my child. To me she was eternally 26.”

Doris Tate is on good terms with Roman Polanski, the controversial and trouble-plagued film director to whom Sharon Tate had been married for 19 months at the time of her murder.

( Polanski, who was in London the night of the killings, learned the news from his business manager, William Tennant, who was called off the tennis court to identify the bodies.)

Together, Polanski and Tate had been celebrating the success of his film, “Rosemary’s Baby,” a short time before. She had been planning a birthday party for Polanski, who was going to turn 36 that Aug. 18.

Doris Tate guides the conversation back to her cause.

“Can you imagine that bunch getting out on the streets again?” she asks. “Can you imagine your son being influenced by them?

“If these people are paroled, does my daughter come back to me? Does the punishment fit the crime? No, it does not.”

By BEVERLY BEYETTE