This is Where the Story Ends
I think a lot of parents were concerned that it could have been their children.
—Leslie Van Houten at her 1977 parole hearing.
Leslie Van Houten has returned to our world. She was banished from it at only 19, for crimes that still induce nightmares. After more than 20 attempts at parole, she’s a free woman—albeit one who has never used a credit card owned an iPhone, or navigated the internet. This alien being will turn 74 in a halfway house on August 23. The midcentury America she attacked is a fading memory. The civilization she must navigate after 53 years in prison does not know what to make of her.
In whatever time she has left, what will she make of it?
Charles Manson took his last unrepentant breath in 2017. Manson myth-making never dies, but after decades of sensational books, films, and television, it may be ebbing. Old Charlie’s psychopathic antics just don't enthrall us the way they once did.
It’s possible Quentin Tarantino exorcised Helter Skelter by rewriting the tale in his 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In that version, the innocents survive, the baddies are gruesomely punished, and the rest of us finally get to move on.
But this is reality: Van Houten is the first person convicted in the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders to be released. She may be the last. Patricia Krenwinkle and Tex Watson are declining behind bars. Feral Susan Atkins was domesticated by evangelical Christianity and died in 2009. The new parolee is no longer a homicidal nymph, but an old woman, silver-haired and weathered.
Thanks to a juggernaut of pop culture, Van Houten will forever be a manic pixie murderess. Accounts of her life always begin in suburban sunshine, where she sang in the choir and was a homecoming queen. It’s part of the legend—a fable of an All-American girl who descended into hell.
The truth falls short of that. Manson was a lowlife pimp. He groomed strung-out runaways for his own ends. His family was composed of lost souls and hustlers, anchored to one another by addiction and unplanned pregnancies. They bought into Charlie’s apocalyptic visions, but they weren’t possessed by demons. They were addled dumpster divers plagued by STDs.
This became folklore because, for a moment, Los Angeles was an entirely heedless place. A 13-year-old could hitchhike from Malibu to Hollywood. Drugs and sex could be scored by almost anybody. Bikers and hippies crashed in the homes of the famous. The son of Doris Day, the daughter of Angela Lansbury, and a member of the Beach Boys all crossed paths with a maniac. Underneath flower power prattle was the dark truth of a city that remains a paranoid, violent, and rapacious devourer of youth.
The Manson Girls were part of an endless conveyor belt of California seekers who found themselves in terrible company. They weren’t just like the kids next door; Most were deeply troubled long before they met Charlie. Van Houten began using drugs at 14 and was constantly tripping on LSD a year later. After running away at 17, she became pregnant and says her mother forced her to have an illegal abortion, burying the fetus in the backyard.
Hers was never a storybook life.
“The main reason for my running away was because of the amount and my participation in dropping acid,” she told a parole board in 1977. “At the beginning I could still live, going to school and more or less live within the structure of society, but the more I dropped acid the harder it was to relate to different people other than the people that were dropping acid and so slowly, all of the hippies were migrating to areas where they felt comfortable with one another.”
Like a lot of vulnerable young women floating through the counterculture, Van Houten could not survive without a protector. She sheltered in communes, began a relationship with Bobby Beausoleil (later convicted of murder), and followed another family member, Catherine Share, to Manson’s group. She has told this tale many times in her quest for parole. That careful, poised, and moving testimony is available on YouTube.
What we now call grooming is an intricate process. It didn’t work on Linda Kasabian, who became the Tate-LaBianca prosecution’s star witness. It didn’t take with several other family members, who ran off when Charlie became increasingly deranged. But Van Houten was one of the true believers. “The violence in us,” she later put it, “was nurtured and brought forth.”
It found expression because Manson was an expert manipulator of the disturbed. His followers lived in an isolated, hallucinogenic haze. They didn’t wear watches, erased their birthdays, and dropped old names. Van Houten was on the periphery of a delusional inner circle. “It was so wonderful,” said Manson diehard Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, “that it scared us.”
Van Houten did not take part in the Benedict Canyon murders of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent that began on August 8, 1969. But she was eager to join family members on August 10, when they invaded the Los Feliz home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. She first held Rosemary LaBianca as she was stabbed. Later, she stabbed LaBianca herself, at least 14 times.
These are ugly, incontrovertible facts, seared into collective memory. Van Houten says LSD stole her rationality. At the time of the killings, she believed that there was no such thing as death. “I wanted to do what Manson had asked us to do,” she said. “I believed he was someone very special and extraordinary.”
But that terrible night, when she heard Leno LaBianca being murdered, things changed. Rosemary LaBianca called out to her husband: “I remember her screaming for him. I remember thinking—I don’t feel right saying this because of the people that love Mrs. LaBianca—but I remember thinking to myself how much she loved him, that that was her thought. Her concern for him.”
She fled the room when Watson attacked Rosemary LaBianca, but he ordered her to participate, which she did, stabbing what she believed to be a corpse. The group hid in some brush until the sun rose, then hitchhiked back to the family’s redoubt at Spahn Ranch. Van Houten was wearing Rosemary LaBianca’s clothes. It's not surprising she has only shards of memory from those events. She was a badly traumatized teenager.
“Being a follower is no excuse,” she said many years later. It cannot be. The LaBiancas were the victims.
At her first trial, Van Houten was totally unhinged. She, Krenwinkle, and Atkins were glassy-eyed maenads—defiant, giggling, singing, willing to do anything to please Charlie. Back then, she was adamant that she committed the crimes of her own free will and ran through defense attorneys who tried to shift blame onto Manson. One, Ronald Hughes, is believed to have been murdered in retaliation.
A court psychiatrist called Van Houten “a psychologically loaded gun which went off as a consequence of the complex intermeshing of highly unlikely and bizarre circumstances."
Sentencing is as much an act of societal vengeance as much as it is about the administration of justice. In the early 1970s, California was spinning out of control, and the Manson Girls seemed to be harbingers of more awful things to come. The state responded forcefully.
It might be different now. The young women in Manson’s thrall were unstable, abused, trafficked, and fried by drugs. Those factors would be given some consideration had the crimes been committed today.
But their offenses were uniquely unsettling. For decades, denying parole to Manson family members has been automatic. Showing any leniency to the killers was a non-starter. At the same time, a victims’ rights movement led first by Sharon Tate’s mother Doris, and then the actress’s sisters became a powerful influence on criminal justice legislation.
“The most that I, or any person touched by violence, can hope for is acceptance of the pain,” said Doris Tate, who died in 1992. “But, if …I can help transform Sharon’s legacy from murder victim to a symbol for victims’ rights, I will have accomplished what I set out to do.”
That activism was intertwined with Van Houten’s long quest for parole. When Doris Tate learned of a petition pushing for her release in the 1970s, she gathered more than 350,000 signatures to block it. And so it went, for years.
The LaBianca family also opposed parole efforts. “My children and my grandchildren never got an opportunity to get to know either of them,” Leno LaBianca’s daughter Cory, 75, said of father and stepmother upon hearing of Van Houten’s release. She described herself as “heartbroken.”
Van Houten has spent decades expressing remorse and performing small acts of contrition. While incarcerated, she earned college and graduate degrees, edited the prison paper, and tutored inmates. She underwent therapy and psychiatric evaluations. Her conduct card is pristine. She long ago liberated herself from the notion that Manson was the Messiah come to spark an apocalyptic race war.
That can never be enough for the victims’ loved ones. Van Houten availed herself of rehabilitation and appears to be a rare success story. Still, she was not sent away to heal, she was doomed to rot. She was the youngest woman ever sentenced to death in California, but the state Supreme Court invalidated capital punishment in 1972 (it was later reinstated). That Van Houten survived to be given a second chance is due to twists of fate and procedure.
What happened in August of 1969 destroyed Leslie Van Houten’s life and many others. She cannot change it and will bear the shame to the end of her days. She need not die in prison to pay a heavy price. It has been levied.
Let her go, out of our nightmares and into obscurity. Grant everyone maimed by those terrible nights a measure of peace. Helter Skelter and the wild-eyed girls of 1969—it’s all over. There is no bogeyman. There are only broken and aging people, burdened by consequences. They live with bad choices made a lifetime ago that turned youth, beauty, and promise to dust.
