SAN LUIS OBISPO, Jun. 18 — Sitting at a picnic table under a clear noonday sky, it is difficult to look into the wide and innocent eyes of Charles (Tex) Watson and fully comprehend that he brutally murdered seven strangers.

At 32, Watson’s finely cut boyish features just barely have begun to thicken. It is almost impossible to look at the tall, slender young man as he professes born-again Christian love in an easy Texas drawl and imagine him, his blue eyes turned to ice, coldly butchering the Tate-LaBianca victims while they screamed for mercy.

But that is exactly what Watson did in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, as Charles Manson’s executioner.

Originally sentenced in 1971 to die in the gas chamber for the murders, Watson was given life in prison when California’s death penalty law was declared unconstitutional.

Now, as an inmate of the medium security California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, Watson has published a book detailing his role in the seven murders and his subsequent religious conversion in prison.

All royalties from the book are to go to the International Prison Ministry, which plans to distribute 200,000 paperback copies to prisoners as inspirational material.

The book may or may not be inspirational. It certainly is no “Crime and Punishment” either in style or content. And Watson, for his part, seems to be no Raskolnikov, Dostoevski’s tormented and soul-wrenched murderer.

Watson, on the contrary, appears detached. He seemed disconnected somehow from the murders and from any emotional involvement with them as he sat talking to a reporter at a table outside the prison building.

“I look back,” he responded, when asked about his feelings, “and I say, ‘Wow, was that really me back there?’ Why should I be Charles Watson? Why should I be Charles (Tex) Watson, the murderer?”

Watson does not say he turned to God because of a soul tormented by seven murders. In fact, he was fairly content with life in prison for the first few years, and felt only a vague dissatisfaction.

“I was happy with my life,” he recalled. “I was happy making toys for my friends and for their children. But … my life just seemed to lack something and I didn’t know what that something was.”

Curiously, Watson says he felt no remorse until he found God and then God provided the antidote for the pain of that remorse.

“At the time of the killings,” he said, “I didn’t have no feelings about myself. I didn’t have no feelings about other people … I was willing to die for Charlie ( Manson), I was willing to die, period. So nobody else’s life meant anything to me ..

“I didn’t have any remorse at the time of the crime for what I did. And I think only until I really asked God to come into my life through the person of Jesus Christ … did I begin to feel remorse and really shed tears and cry for what I did and how I messed up other people’s lives and my life, too

“And the only thing that gives me any peace, the only thing, is having God in my life and knowing I have been washed clean from all this.”

Finding God in prison was not Watson’s first religious conversion.

He once followed Manson with the same abandon that he now follows Christ. And, though he now believes Manson was possessed by the devil, he, at one time, thought the cult leader was Jesus.

The force of Manson’s personality, combined with the heavy use of hallucinogenic drugs, somehow seems to have had an “ego death” effect on Watson, similar to an intense religious experience.

“Over a period of time,” Watson told The Times, “living with Charlie and living with the Family, we became submissive to one another through hallucinogenic drugs and through his constant teaching and brainwashing. We gave ourselves completely to Charlie Manson, all of us did. We gave ourselves completely to one another.

In December, 1969, after Watson was taken into custody in Texas, he told his attorney, Bill Boyd, about the murders in tape-recorded interviews and, at the same time, referred to the ego death phenomenon that is sometimes associated with heavy use of LSD.

Chaplain Ray Hoekstra of the International Prison Ministry obtained the tape recordings when the ministry paid Boyd $48,000 for the rights to Watson’s book. Boyd had gained the book rights in exchange for representing Watson during more than eight months of legal wranglings over extradition to California.

In one of the recorded interviews, a portion of which Hoekstra made available to The Times, Boyd asks Watson:

“When was the discussion of any specific murder or killing or anything first brought up?”

“I believe it was around in June, April or June (of 1969), something like that,” Watson replies. “We were taking a lot of acid. Real heavy acid that really gets you up and you’re electronical, kind of like. And it doesn’t make any difference if you walk out. It couldn’t make any difference.

“You’re just so high that you wouldn’t have any feeling if somebody just took a knife and stabbed the person next to you. It wouldn’t make any difference. Your fear is completely gone. You’ve already experienced fear to the fullest so there’s nothing else to experience. After you experience it to the fullest, you experience death to the fullest.”

Watson’s voice on the tape drones on in a dead monotone as he tells Boyd that on the night of Aug. 8, 1969, Manson ordered him and fellow cultists Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to drive to the Benedict Canyon home of actress Sharon Tate and murder everyone there.

As he describes the shooting and stabbing slaughter of five victims Watson’s voice on the tape remains emotionless. His tone is almost disinterested as he tells of murdering Miss Tate, who was eight months pregnant. “I went back inside,” he says on the tape recording, “and she was the only one … left that was alive, the Tate girl. She was pleading to me and pleading to me and pleading to me, but I didn’t even have any moment of hesitation. I took a knife and just slit a big slit right across her face, you know.

“It was just all lighting up to me,” he continues, “just like a big acid trip, just all these colors and everything. And I just kept cutting her and carving on the body and started stabbing her in the chest from here up.”

“How many times did you stab her?” asks Boyd.

“I’d say maybe 15 cuts and stabs,” is the matter-of-fact reply.

“Was she hollering?” asks Boyd.

“Yes, she was,” answers Watson. “She was crying and saying, ‘Oh mother, oh mother, oh mother.’ ”

“Did she ever plead for her baby or anything like that, like they ( news media) were saying?” asks Boyd.

“Yes,” replies Watson. “She said, ‘Just let my baby live. You can kill me, but just let me have the baby.’ ”

The night after the Tate murders, Watson killed two more strangers at Manson’s direction. He stabbed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca to death in the couple’s Los Feliz district home.

Seven years after the interviews with Boyd, Watson again described the details of the murders, this time to Chaplain Hoekstra, who also tape recorded the statements.

By the time of the December, 1976, interviews with the chaplain, Watson had become a born-again Christian, and Hoekstra said he was remorseful at last when he spoke of the murders.

“He was very full of remorse, very tearful,” Hoekstra told The Times. “Some of the time when he was telling it to me, his eyes would be rivers of tears.”

However, a tape recording provided to The Times by Hoekstra shows that the “rivers of tears” had little effect on his voice as, once more, he narrates his tale of horror with no evident emotion.

The tone of Watson’s voice is conversational as he tells Hoekstra of murdering Leno LaBianca:

“Then I walked over to him and put the bayonet that I had in my hand up to his throat and jammed it though the throat. And he said, ‘Don’t stab me anymore, I’m dead, I’m dead.’ And I pulled it out and continued to stab him until he fell off the couch.”

It is almost impossible to connect that act with the nice-looking young man sitting across the table at the California Men’s Colony.

“Of course, I would like to be paroled,” he said in response to a question. “But I realize that I have a crime to pay for and, in the eyes of society, the way you pay for a crime is to do time. And I’m doing time. I’m not knocking it, that I’m doing time, because I feel like I owe it.”

How much time does he owe?

“I want what God wants in my life,” replied Watson, who is assistant pastor of the prison’s Protestant chapel.

“It’s hard to put a thing on a crime and say, ‘Hey, you do so much for this crime and so much for that crime, because there’s a lot of guys in here on real lightweight crimes that you’re going to let out by saying, ‘You’re going to do two years,’ and they’re going to go out and they’re going to be back in within a week. You’re letting people out that aren’t rehabilitated.”

Watson insists that he is rehabilitated through Christ and would work for the International Prison Ministry, helping other inmates find God, if he were paroled.

Pressed on whether it would be a just penalty if he never were paroled, Watson paused and then replied:

“It would be just if I’d have got the gas chamber, to tell you the truth.” He paused again and continued, “There’s no way that I can pay for these crimes. I think that’s where we’re at. There’s no way I can pay for them.”

Why, he was asked, did Manson become more notorious as a mass murderer when it was Watson who killed all seven Tate-LaBianca victims?

“Right,” he replied, “I was actually the executioner.” But, though he insists he blames no one but himself, he added, “If it hadn’t been for Manson, there wouldn’t have been any of the crimes committed. This is why he gets all the heat.”

Is it possible, he was asked, that Watson might have committed murder without Manson to instruct him?

“No,” he insisted, “I didn’t have killing on my mind. I didn’t want to kill anyone. All I wanted to do was please Charlie … If he had said, ‘Jump off a building,’ I would have jumped off a building. But I wouldn’t have initiated anything on my own…

“It got to a point,” Watson continued, “where I was totally doing what he wanted me to do. It’s just like when you begin to mature in Christ. When you begin to mature in the things of God — when you’re a Christian — you begin to walk as God wants you to walk … Not comparing Charles Manson to God by any means …

But, Watson was asked, is he not now approaching life in the name of Christ in the same way that he did in the name of Manson?

“I’d have to say yes,” Watson replied. “But today as a Christian, God asks us … ‘Will you lay down your natural, evil, sinful ways, and will you take up my life through the person of Jesus Christ and walk the way I want you to walk?’ …

“And I say, ‘Yes.’ I’m willing to go all the way with God now, just as I was willing to go all the way with Charlie Manson at one time.”

By JOHN HURST