In July 1969 Bruce Davis drove the car that took members of Charles Manson's Family to the house of Gary Hinman, a thirty-four-year-old music teacher, in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles County. Hinman was held for days and then killed. At a parole hearing in 2014 Davis said that he had held a gun on Hinman while Manson cut Hinman's face with a sword. The next month the Family killed Donald "Shorty" Shea, thirty-five, a ranch hand and would-be stuntman at Spahn Ranch, the old movie ranch in Chatsworth where they lived. Davis testified in 2014 that he attacked Shea with a knife.
Davis was born in Louisiana on October 5, 1942, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, the younger of two children in a family that moved often after his parents separated. He finished high school, attended college on and off, and drifted west, working in Arizona before reaching Southern California. He spent seven months in Europe and North Africa in 1968 and 1969 as the guest of a group of young women, then returned to join Manson at Spahn Ranch.
He was not charged in the Tate or LaBianca killings of August 1969, although he was with the Family throughout that period. He surrendered to police on December 2, 1970, and in 1972 was convicted of the first-degree murders of Gary Hinman and Donald Shea, together with conspiracy to commit murder and robbery. He was sentenced to death. When the California Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty that year, the sentence became seven years to life. He entered state prison on April 21, 1972.
Two other men were convicted with him. Bobby Beausoleil was convicted of Hinman's murder. Steve Grogan was convicted of Shea's and, in 1977, led investigators to Shea's remains. Grogan was paroled in 1985, the only Family member convicted of murder ever released.
In prison Davis became an evangelical Christian, earned a master's degree and a doctorate in the philosophy of religion, married, fathered a daughter, and worked for years in the chapel at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo. After twenty-three straight one-year parole denials, he told a hearing in 2010, for the first time, that he shared responsibility for the killings even though he had not struck the fatal blows. "He said, 'I was as responsible as everyone there,'" his lawyer, Michael Beckman, said afterward.
That hearing, his twenty-sixth, produced his first grant of parole. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed it, calling the murders especially heinous. Governor Jerry Brown reversed grants in 2013 and 2014, saying Davis was still dodging responsibility and withholding what he knew, and reversed another in 2017. Governor Gavin Newsom reversed a grant in November 2019 and another, from January 2021, on the ground that Davis still lacked a full understanding of how he came to take part in such violence. In all, panels found him suitable for release seven times, and each time a governor overruled them. His lawyers argued throughout that he was among the most rehabilitated prisoners in the state and that he would have been freed years earlier if the case had not carried Manson's name.
By 2023 he was eighty-one and held at San Quentin, a born-again Christian with emphysema who had had one hip replaced and needed the other done; before the second surgery, in September 2021, he came out to the yard for a few hours each day to lead Bible studies. The board itself denied him parole in July 2022, its first denial in more than a decade, finding that he minimized his personal responsibility.
His next hearing was set for January 18, 2024, and it was postponed after commissioners raised two phone interviews he had given to Keith Rovere, a former prison chaplain who hosts a true-crime podcast. Davis wrote to a reporter that he had not heard the podcast and asked: "Does it sound as if I'm glorifying Manson or my crimes?" The board took the case up again on August 8, 2024, with Gary Hinman's cousin and niece and Debra Tate, Sharon Tate's sister, among those attending for the victims, and denied parole for three years. His next hearing was set for August 2027.
He has also been named, by the researcher Howard Davis and on Zodiac discussion boards, as a suspect in the Zodiac killings, on the strength of geography, timing and his refusal to answer questions about other unsolved Los Angeles killings of the 1960s. No physical evidence, handwriting comparison or finding by any law enforcement agency supports the claim, and he has never been charged with anything beyond the Hinman and Shea murders.