A Manson follower may be freed 53 years after Helter Skelter murders
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Sharon Tate was dead, and Southern California was in hysterics. Police and media swarmed the actress’s home, where her killers had painted the word “pig” in the pregnant 26-year-old’s own blood. And Tate wasn’t the only victim. She was slain alongside four others: Voitcek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent.
Miles away, Leslie Van Houten watched the news of the murders, rapt. But unlike so many other Californians, Van Houten’s interest wasn’t born of fear.
“She was not horrified or repulsed, but felt left out,” court documents would later allege.
Before she met Charlie — that was what everyone called him then, just Charlie — Van Houten’s life seemed almost typical. She went to church camp every summer and sang in the choir, according to court documents. She was involved with the Camp Fire Girls. She was homecoming queen. But even then, there were signs of instability.
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At 14, when Van Houten’s parents divorced, she began using marijuana, methedrine, mescaline and benzedrine. At 17, her mother pressured her to have an abortion. By 19, she said, she’d taken 150 LSD trips. After traveling up and down the West Coast with a boyfriend for about five months that year, she ended up on the ranch of a man called Charles Manson. At the time, the name was ordinary, innocuous.
Initially, life at Manson’s commune was blissful. His followers were mostly young and female, so Van Houten was a natural fit. And by the time things turned sinister, she was already firmly in step with Manson’s vision: a race war that would snowball into a revolution and end with the Manson “Family” in control.
As police scoured the state in search of the madmen who murdered a young actress in what appeared to be a sadistic ritual, Van Houten waited for members of the Family to return to the ranch. She knew that “Helter Skelter,” the name Manson had bestowed upon the race war, had begun.
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That same day, when Manson asked Van Houten “if she was crazy enough to believe in him and what he was doing” she replied “Yes,” according to court documents.
The grisly crime that would follow landed Van Houten in prison for more than 52 years. Now, at 73 years old, she may be paroled. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has repeatedly blocked efforts for Van Houten’s parole but gave up the fight to keep her in prison on Friday.
Van Houten has rehashed her crime countless times over the years to various courts and parole boards. By her telling, Manson wasn’t pleased with how “messy” the Tate murders had been. The day after those killings, the infamous cult leader told the Family he was going to show them how it was done.
So on Aug. 10, 1969, Manson asked Van Houten to get a change of clothes and get in the car. There were six or seven Family members in the vehicle, she recalled, and they prowled Los Angeles, seemingly at random. After a few false starts on potential victims — a family with children, a preacher — the car pulled up to the home where grocery owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary lived.
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Manson and “Tex” Watson, another Family member, went into the house and tied up the couple. Then Manson left the house — again letting his followers do the dirty work — and ordered Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel to go inside and do whatever Tex said.
Wielding a bayonet, Tex told Van Houten and Krenwinkel to get knives from the kitchen. They took Rosemary to the bedroom, leaving Tex with her husband.
A medical examiner would testify that Rosemary was stabbed 41 times.
Dianne Lake, a member of the Family who was not present for the murder, later said Van Houten claimed that “she had stabbed a woman who was already dead, and that the more she did it the more fun it was.”
In a nod to the warnings from Tate’s house the night before, the words “Death to Pigs” and “Healter Skelter” — a misspelled reference to the Beatles song for which Manson named his invented race war — were found written in the victims’ blood on the walls and refrigerator of the LaBianca home.
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Nearly two years later, a jury convicted Van Houten of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. She was initially sentenced to death, but California abolished the death penalty the next year. Van Houten was resentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
Manson was convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder and one of conspiracy to commit murder. He died in 2017, age 83, after spending decades in prison and being denied parole 12 times.
Van Houten and other Family members have said Manson exploited their vulnerabilities, convincing them that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ and they must follow him.
“I believe that the things that made me weak and lost were ultimately used as manipulations against me in my conversations with Manson and how Manson chose to relate to me,” Van Houten said during a 2020 parole hearing. “I didn't know it at the time.”
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The parole board found that Van Houten has “shown extraordinary rehabilitative efforts, insight, remorse, realistic parole plans, support from family and friends,” and “favorable institutional reports.” Her lawyer told NBC News that Van Houten will be paroled in the next several weeks.
While Gov. Newsom stopped fighting Van Houten’s parole, he isn’t pleased with the board’s resolution.
“The Governor is disappointed by the Court of Appeal’s decision to release Ms. Van Houten but will not pursue further action as efforts to further appeal are unlikely to succeed,” Erin Mellon, spokesperson for the governor’s office, said in a statement.
And he’s not alone in his frustration. Surviving family members of the victims, including Sharon Tate’s sister Debra, have spoken out against the decision.
“I knew that we would get here one day,” Debra Tate said in a May interview with NewsNation. “Unfortunately, it’s appalling to me as a society, we would let predatory killers … even be considered for parole, but that is the law as it stands.”
Tate said she does not believe Van Houten is remorseful, and she will continue to fight against the Manson Family member’s release.
“The California Board wants rehabilitation to work, of course, we all do,” Tate said. “But there’s a certain category of person that is unlikely for that to happen.”
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Source: The Washington Post
