Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship, Part 1 of 5
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-waters/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_246953.html
by John Waters
FIlm director, author, photographer
August 3, 2009
I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent
people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969
cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would
like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious "Manson
girls" who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads and
laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to
death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago.
Leslie is hardly a "Manson girl" today. Sixty years old, she looks
back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the
night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and
takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it's
time to parole her.
I am guilty, too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey,
smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for
the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer
kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case. I became
obsessed by the Sharon Tate murders from the day I read about them on
the front page of the New York Times in 1969 as I worked behind the
counter of the Provincetown Book Shop. Later, when the cops finally
caught the hippy killers and I actually saw their photos ("Arrest
Weirdo in Tate Murders", screamed the New York Daily News headlines)
I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just
like my friends at the time! Charles "Tex" Watson, a deranged but
handsome preppy "head" who reminded me of Jimmy, the
frat-boy-gone-bad pot-dealer I had the hots for in Catholic high
school, the guy who sold me my first joint. There was Susan Atkins,
a.k.a. Sadie Mae Glutz, devil go-go girl, with an LSD sense of humor
just like Mink Stole's sister Mary (nickname: "Sick") whom I lived
with at the time in Provincetown in a commune in a tree fort. And
look at Patricia Krenwinkle, a.k.a. Katie, a flower-child
earth-mother just like Flo-Ann who squatted with us that wonderful
summer on Cape Cod. And, of course, my favorite, Leslie Van Houten,
a.k.a. Lulu, "the pretty one". The homecoming princess from suburbia
who gave up her title for acid. The all-American girl who went beyond
insanity to unhinged criminal glamour just like Mona, my last
girlfriend, who took LSD and shoplifted and starred in my underground
movies all under my influence. Until, that is, the day she caught me
in bed with a man (who looked kind of like Steve "Clem" Grogan,
another Manson fanatic) and dumped the contents of an entire garbage
can on us as we lay sleeping.
"The Manson Family" were the hippies all our parents were scared we'd
turn into if we didn't stop taking drugs. The "slippies", as Manson
later called his followers, the insane ones who didn't understand the
humor in Yippie Abbie Hoffman's fiery speeches on his college lecture
tours when he told the stoned, revolutionary-for-the-hell-of-it
students to "kill their parents". Yes, Charlie's posse were the real
anarchists who went beyond the radical SDS group's call to "Bring the
War Home". Beyond blowing up their parents' townhouses, draft boards,
even the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Sure, my friends went
to riots every weekend in different cities in the '60s to get laid or
get high, just like kids went to "raves" decades later. But, God,
this was a cultural war, not a real one and the survivors of this
time now realize we were in a "play" revolution, no matter what we
spouted. But the Manson Family! Yikes! Here was the real thing --
"punk" a decade too early. Dare I say it? Yes, the filthiest people alive.
Even before the Manson Family had been caught, "The Dreamlanders", my
gang of actors, took credit for the Tate/La Bianca crimes in a
$5,000-budgeted movie entitled Multiple Maniacs which I wrote,
directed and shot in Baltimore in the fall of 1969. Divine's
character tortures David Lochary's with knowledge of the murders.
"How about Sharon Tate?" she threatens, "How about THAT?!" "I told
you never to mention that again!" David pleads but Divine won't let
it go. "Had yourself a real ball that night, didn't you?!" she
chortles. "Who's Sharon Tate?" Divine's dimwitted but studly teenage
bodyguard character "Ricky" asks. "It doesn't matter, darling,"
Divine coos lecherously, dismissing his nosiness, "go fix yourself a
sandwich."
Later, after Manson was arrested, I drove across the country for the
first time in my life to Los Angeles for the California premiere of
Multiple Maniacs and the next day began attending the insane LSD
media-circus Manson trial which I've never really gotten over. After
Manson and the three girls were convicted of the Tate/ La Bianca
murders and sentenced to death, my rabid following of the subsequent
but much lesser-known Manson-related trials never ceased. I needed to
know more. How had these kids, from backgrounds so similar to mine,
committed in real life the awful crimes against peace and love that
we were acting out for comedy in our films?
In late 1971, still free, second-tiered Manson Family members robbed
the Western Surplus Store in the suburbs of Los Angeles and stole 14
guns (supposedly to break Manson out of jail) and a shoot-out with
the police occurred. All six robbers were arrested. At their trial,
many members of Manson royalty, now awaiting the promised Helter
Skelter end of the world from death row, were called as witnesses by
the robber defendants so they could have a courtroom reunion of
sorts. The nervous trial judge called the proceedings "the biggest
collection of murderers in Los Angeles County at one time". There
were only two court spectators the day I went to a pre-trial hearing;
myself and a lower-echelon Manson groupie with a shaved head and a
fresh X carved in her forehead who was furiously writing what looked
like a thirty-page letter to one of her "brothers". When about
fifteen of the Manson Family were brought into court, hand-cuffed and
chained together, women on one side and men on the other, many with
their heads shaved, the atmosphere was electric with twisted evil
beauty. Not having seen each other in about a year, the cultists
started chanting, jerkily gesturing, and speaking to one another in a
nonsensical language that only the Family could understand. Sexy,
scary, brain-dead, and dangerous, this gang of hippy lunatics gave
new meaning to "folie à famille", group madness and insanity as long
as the same people are together and united. It was an amazing thing
to see in person. Heavily influenced, and actually jealous of their
notoriety, I went back to Baltimore and made Pink Flamingos which I
wrote, directed and dedicated to the "Manson girls", "Sadie, Katie and Les".
Then I went deeper into the Manson flame and started visiting Charles
"Tex" Watson in prison. "What on earth were you thinking?" you may
wonder and today it is a question I have to ask myself. In Los
Angeles I had met his post-conviction girlfriend Lu, a German hippy
girl with an obvious off-kilter sensibility who had come to America
speaking little English and accidentally met some of the still-free
"Manson girls" as the initial trial was taking place. "God, kids sure
are wild in the United States," she told me she remembered thinking,
not understanding how different these hippies were from the American
love-children she had read about back in Munich and hoped to hook up
with when she came to our shores. But Lu would only go so far.
Refusing the demands to shave her skull, she broke away from the
unincarcerated B-list Family members to the relative safety of a
"jailhouse" love affair with "Tex", a convicted killer who was still
clearly out of his mind and had almost no chance of ever being paroled.
Charles "Tex" Watson was perhaps Manson's best piece of work; a
high-school football star who turned hippy and came to L.A. like
millions of other kids to find '60s grooviness. Instead he met Manson
and was turned into a killer zombie in just ten LSD,
Belladonna-drenched months. "Tex" personally stabbed or shot all nine
Tate/La Bianca victims. Lu and I would hitchhike to the California
Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo from either L.A or San Francisco to
visit him and I wrote about our times, rather inappropriately and
with little insight, in my book Shock Value.
At that time, Charles Watson was no longer "Tex", but he was
definitely still coming out of his Manson indoctrination. You could
tell by the toy wooden helicopter he made me in jail, decorated with
words like "Game is Blame", "Tweak", and "Fear". I used it in the
credits of my next movie, Female Trouble, a fictitious biopic of a
woman who is brainwashed into believing "crime is beauty". The film
was also dedicated to Charles "Tex" Watson, and a few critics --
quite correctly, I guess -- were appalled by my flippant disregard
for the terrible aftermath of these crimes. Maybe I had taken too
much acid myself? How could these villainous murders seem so
abstractly "transgressive" to me? Could a movie ever be as
influential as these monstrous crimes?
Was Manson's dress rehearsal for homicide, known as "creepy
crawling", some kind of humorous terrorism that might have been fun?
Breaking silently into middle-class "pigs'" homes with your friends
while you are tripping on LSD and gathering around the sleeping
residents in their beds, not to harm them but to watch them sleep
(the way Warhol did in that movie) and "experiencing the fear"? It
does sound like it could have been a mind-bending adventure. When the
Mansonites went further and moved the furniture around before they
left, just to fuck with the waking homeowners' perception of reality,
was this beautiful or evil? Could the Manson Family's actions also be
some kind of freakish "art"?
When Charles Watson left behind his "Tex" persona for good, found
Jesus Christ, and became saved, he and Lu broke up and I slowly
drifted away from the visiting room. While I understand his need to
find comfort and forgiveness I wasn't a born-again believer and I
sometimes made insanely sacrilegious movies so we now had little in
common. He then got married to a fellow-Christian on the outside,
started a ministry, and through conjugal visits fathered three
children (who have turned out fine), much to the horror of Sharon
Tate's family and the citizens of California. Lu went back to Germany
and had an un-Manson child of her own and we stayed in touch right up
to her sad death from emphysema a few years ago. I remember once
staying in some fancy hotel in Munich on a studio promotional tour
for Cry-Baby where I invited Lu over for a visit, not having seen her
in person for many years. The concierge called up to my room and
said, "We're not sure if it's a man or a woman, but there's somebody
here who claims you told them to come over and we're sure it's a
mistake." "Is her name Lu?" I asked. "Well...yes," he stammered.
"Send her up!" I bellowed. Lu had cut off most of her hair (not sure
if for politics or fashion) and was now obsessed with Sarajevo
refugees and I loved hearing her rant about jumping out of military
helicopters (in her mind?) to spread the word for her new cause.
Charles Watson is, to no one's surprise, still in prison and once or
twice a year we correspond politely and he always sends kind words.
In 1985, ten years or so after Charles Watson and I had last seen one
another, I was doing some journalistic pieces for Rolling Stone and
they asked me to interview Manson. I had little curiosity about a man
who had reminded me of someone you'd move away from in a bar in
Baltimore, and was still much more interested in the followers who
had come to their senses and were now definitely ex-followers. Leslie
Van Houten always seemed the one that could have somehow ended up
making movies with us instead of running with the killer dune-buggy
crowd. She was pretty, out of her mind, rebellious, with
fashion-daring, a good haircut, and a taste for LSD -- just like the
girls in my movies. Instead of being a "good soldier" for Charlie and
participating in the murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, which
she certainly believed was the right thing to do at the time, I wish
she had been with us in Baltimore on location for Pink Flamingos the
day Divine ate dog shit for real (our own cultural Tate/La Bianca).
Maybe she would have enjoyed cinematic anti-social glee and movie
anarchy just as much as a misguided race-war entitled Helter Skelter
designed by a criminal megalomaniac who believed The Beatles were
speaking directly to him. If Leslie had met me instead of Charlie,
could she have gone to the Cannes Film Festival instead of the
California Institute for Women? Actually, I think if Leslie hadn't
met either of us she might have ended up as a studio executive in the
movie business in Los Angeles. A good one, too.
So I pleaded with Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, to let me
interview Leslie, "the only one who has a chance of ever getting
out", the one I could tell from press reports had broken from
Manson's control and was beginning to see that the apocalyptical
scenario Manson had preached was complete bullshit. What a painful,
horrible realization that must have been!
In 1972, Leslie's death sentence (and those of her co-defendants) had
been abolished by the California State Supreme Court and like all
death penalty prisoners at the time, her sentence had been changed to
life in prison. Not life without parole. The two other female
death-penalty cases at the time besides the three "Manson girls",
also murderesses with very serious cases, were paroled eight or nine
years later with little fanfare or outrage.
In 1976, Leslie's original conviction was thrown out due to
"ineffectual counsel" (her original lawyer drowned in the middle of
her trial and was replaced) and she was given a new trial in 1977.
This time, she was all by herself as a defendant in the courtroom.
Remorse had started to creep in soon after she was imprisoned away
from Manson. Locked away forever, Leslie, Susan, and Patricia were of
no further use to Charlie and he dropped them quickly. The outsider
voices of reason from the prison social workers started to seep in
and Leslie began to see the holes in Manson's brainwashing. "When I'd
be questioned," she later told author Karlene Faith for her very
insightful and intelligent but little known book The Long Prison
Journey of Leslie Van Houten, "I'd go blank and become frustrated
like when a machine jams and just sits there making noise. In my head
nothing was functioning. I was trying to understand, breaking down
stiff little slogans that had been drilled into me." When two other
"Manson girls", Mary Brunner and Catherine Shaw, a.k.a. "Gypsy", were
sent to jail and placed with Leslie, Susan and Patricia, Leslie grew
tired of listening to their Manson talk and confided to Patricia that
"I've changed. I'm not into this." "It took three years to
understand" and five or six years of therapy to "take responsibility"
for the terrible crime she had helped commit.
Leslie finally had a good lawyer for her second trial. Taking the
witness stand truthfully for the first time, she tried to explain her
state of mind through the Manson madness and his control techniques.
And the jury listened, too. After about twenty-five days of
deliberation there was a hung jury; seven voted for guilty of
first-degree murder, and five for manslaughter due to her cult
domination and uncertain mental health at the time of the crime.
Refusing to offer a plea bargain, the prosecutor took her to trial
for a third time in 1978 and added a felony robbery motive (clothes,
a wallet and a few coins had been taken from the La Bianca home), a
crime that now couldn't legally be excused by state of mind. But this
time Leslie made bail and was released from prison. She found
employment as a law clerk and lived in the Echo Park area of Los
Angeles. She was free for six months and lived quietly, unnoticed by
the press. When a few of her new neighbors found out who she really
was, after they already thought they knew her, all were "supportive"
and "protective" of her anonymity.
When Leslie's third trial finally began, she came to court every day
on her own. Long gone was the shaved head, and the X on her forehead
was covered by bangs. No more trippy little riot-on-Sunset-Strip,
satin miniskirt outfits either, like the ones she and her female
co-defendants wore to the first trial. This time she was dressed
tastefully and looked lovely, something that obviously didn't sit
well with Stephen Kay, the prosecutor who had inherited all the
Manson-related cases from Vincent Bugliosi. "All dolled up", Mr. Kay
cracked to the press, giving Leslie one of her first, but definitely
not last, opinionated fashion reviews. When she was finally convicted
of first-degree murder at the end of the trial, life imprisonment
suddenly became very real.
Rolling Stone gave me the go-ahead to pursue the Leslie Van Houten
interview so, in 1985, seven years after her final conviction, I
wrote to "The Friends of Leslie", a now-disbanded, loose-knit support
group made up of Leslie's real family (Mom, Dad, brothers, sisters --
all glad to have her back from Manson even if it was in prison) and
her jail-house teachers and counselors who had seen how this teenage
girl had been completely dominated by one of the most notorious
madmen of our time during the 1960s, a decade which may never be
surpassed in misguided revolutionary lunacy. Susan Talbot, one of the
organizers, who met Leslie through classes offered in prison through
Antioch College wrote me back and told me that Leslie was not
interested in being in Rolling Stone or any other magazine at the
time, but recommended I write Leslie to see if there was any rapport.
In other words, Susan (who did know who I was, whereas Leslie did
not) was intrigued and slightly puzzled by my offer of support but
mistrustful of my intentions. Who could blame her?
--
Excerpted from the book Role Models by John Waters, to be published
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010. Role Models is a self- portrait
told through intimate literary profiles of his favorite
personalities; some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some
alarmingly middle of the road.
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Part 2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-waters/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_246996.html
By now I certainly knew that what Leslie had done was anything but
"art". Her participation in the La Bianca murders was a very real
atrocity that she could never make go away like a bad hairdo or a
dose of the hippy-clap. This was no youthful recklessness that today
some baby boomer might turn into a nostalgic tattoo. No, this was
fucking awful. I used to joke that "we've all had bad nights", well,
Leslie really had a horrible one! But of course the La Bianca's night
was much, much worse.
I wrote to Leslie to let her know I sympathized about the terrible
predicament she must be in now that she realized that the ludicrous
truth she once believed in was a complete sham. Leslie was left
holding a bag so terrible that few of us could imagine the weight. I
hoped in some tiny way to help her carry it by imagining it myself.
Leslie wrote back guardedly. She didn't know my films, of course; she
had been on death row when Pink Flamingos had been released and even
I know my trash epics were certainly not shown in prison during those
years. She admitted my letter did not "put her off" as I had worried,
but added she was "not certain of my intentions". "But if you are in
a hurry," she warned, our friendship could never happen.
So I took it slowly. I wrote to her of my frustration in trying to
get the sequel to Pink Flamingos made and she wrote me back about,
what else? Prison. Living in a cell "the size of an average bathroom
with another person". Leslie never complained but called jail "a big
tragedy. All those broken souls desperately seeking a way to leave
themselves." What I soon realized was that Leslie was trying to do
the exact opposite -- seeking a way to get back to who she would have
been if she had never met Manson. I knew that jail-house manners
dictated the prisoner, not the visitor, is allowed to bring up the
crime and if mentioned ("Manson is a pathetic, disgusting, worthless,
old man") you are allowed maybe one or two follow-up questions. When
Leslie finally wrote, "I'd enjoy meeting you", I still hoped to
interview her and hopped on a plane.
I have now visited Leslie in the same visiting room in California
Institute for Women in Frontera, California, (without freeway traffic
problems about an hour's drive east of Hollywood) for the last
twenty-four years. The only real change in the cafeteria-style space
is the cheesily cheerful, country-style backdrop you can pose in
front of with your convict friend, and for five dollars get your
Polaroid picture snapped by the in-house prison photographer. The
"green screen" of prison happiness has changed three times in my
years there -- first a yellow-tinged country scene, then a blue
floral motif, and finally a green and blue skyline. When friends look
at the pictures of Leslie and me through the years that I have
privately displayed on my office bulletin board in my Baltimore
house, they often wonder who is the woman with me in front of the
misleadingly generic tableaux? "Is that your sister?" many ask. "High
school reunion?" others assume. When I trust someone enough to tell
the truth they are shocked at "how nice she looks". How "like one of
our friends" she appears.
On our first visit, Leslie, who looked then, and still does, very
much like actress Hilary Swank, explained that she had no interest in
being in Rolling Stone because of what she had done. She was ashamed
of it, not proud, and hoped that one day the terrible notoriety would
fade. Little did either of us know that this wretched infamy would
not only never fade away, it would become stronger through the years
as Manson became the great American tabloid boogeyman.
Leslie and I continued to correspond and I was flattered that she
grew to trust me. After several more visits she wrote in 1987, "I
feel good about you because I do not believe you would harm me. You
make me feel good about myself... I need that... not to feel like a
freak. I'd like to propose that this year we become closer friends.
You inspire me to do something with myself." Leslie inspired me, too.
Inspired me to believe that if you wait long enough and work hard
enough on your damaged psyche you can eventually come out of it with
some kind of self-respect and mental health. I never again asked
Leslie to be interviewed until 2007 and by then she knew I wanted to
write about her recovery, something she could finally feel good about.
Will there ever be a "fair" answer to how Leslie should pay for these
crimes? Can you ever recover from being called "a human mutant" or a
"monster" by the government, especially when you know that they were
right at one time in your life? How can you feel optimistic about
your own rehabilitation when you see yourself reproduced as a
bald-headed dummy with an X carved in your head in Madame Tussaud's
Wax Museum? How do you begin to deal with the pain of the victims'
relatives when the world has turned your former image into a
Halloween costume?
With patience. God knows, Leslie Van Houten has patience. Patience to
not find religious fanaticism that would forgive her instantly and
take away her responsibilities for her actions. Patience to know and
accept that she can't take back the defiant and deluded things she
was programmed to say at her first trial: "Sorry is only a
five-letter word. It can't bring back anything." Or her rantings to
the jury on hearing all the defendants, including herself, being
sentenced to death, "You blind stupid people. Your own children will
turn against you". Or the terrible thoughts she admitted to prison
psychologists at the time, about how she "felt kind of bad" she
didn't get to go the first night (when Sharon Tate, her unborn baby,
and four other victims were brutally murdered). Or how she was
"hoping if we did it again, I would get to go". Or worse. After "Tex"
Watson stabbed both Leno and Rosemary La Bianca he told Leslie to "do
something" and "feeling like a shark" or "a primitive animal, a
wildcat who had just caught a deer" Leslie remembered, she stabbed
Mrs. La Bianca sixteen times with a knife in the lower back.
Decades later, when a parole officer had reviewed eleven different
favorable psychiatric reports, all concluding that Leslie was
suitable for parole and no longer a danger to the community, he
listened to her sadly try to explain her addled thought process at
the time of the murders and her shame for "the girl I was at
nineteen. The best way to show remorse is to be the best person I can
be today". He told her sympathetically but unforgivingly, "You've dug
yourself quite a hole and it's going to take a little time to get out
of it". It sure has.
Can you ever dig your way out of that hole by trying to explain LSD
to a parole board whose members have never taken a trip? Could they
understand Leslie's plea that at the time of the murders "it was a
constant exercise to try and not come down" as she remembered in
Connie Turner's excellent, but as yet unpublished Van Houten book,
Straight Up? "We spoke to each other in the nonsensical space the
drug induces," Leslie struggled to explain. "I became saturated in
acid and had no sense of where those who were not part of the
psychedelic reality came from. I had no perspective or sense that I
was no longer in control of my mind." Could a parole board ever
fathom that Leslie actually believed she was an elf "three inches
high" who would "grow fairy wings" at the time of Helter Skelter as
she remembered to Michael Farquhar in The Washington Post in 1994?
Apparently she was not a lone elf. The Family women "would try to
find elves hiding up in the trees and sitting quietly, so they might
show themselves". Leslie's Dad backs her up, too, remembering in
Connie's book how he visited Leslie "in county jail right after they
had been picked up. Leslie told me she didn't know if she should cut
holes in the back of her blouse to hold her wings or to put little
pockets". Great. What does society do with a killer elf who decades
later is now all better? Who could understand?
I could. I took a lot of LSD myself when I was young. From 1964 to
about 1969, I took acid many, many times and never once had a bad
trip. LSD quickly gave me confidence in my lunacy. "Don't tell young
people that!" my mother always begs; but it's true. I remember
tripping my brains out and dangerously crawling around the roof of
the Marlboro Apartments in Baltimore after an LSD party and suddenly
realizing I could make these crazy movies I had been dreaming up. My
friends and I cemented our relationship with LSD, and became a parody
of a movie studio and together our celluloid madness began to
strengthen and grow. We had a "family", too.
But as nuts and angry as we were, would we have committed the
atrocious crimes of my movies in real life if we hadn't had the
outlet of underground filmmaking? Well, who knows? We certainly never
met one of the most notorious con-men of the century, Charles Manson.
And we were never looking for a spiritual leader the way Leslie was.
I guess I was our gang's leader. My parents never blamed the crowd I
ran with; they knew I was the bad egg. "We're not your puppets!"
David Lochary used to yell at me when I went overboard on directing
or thinking up stunts to film like Divine shooting-up liquid eyeliner
for real. My "family" knew how to say "no" to me. Why couldn't Leslie
do the same in her distorted world?
Could I have gone off the deep end with my cinematic "orders"? I had
planned a raid on the Maryland State Board of Censors where the
actors from Desperate Living would "home invade" the offices, chain
themselves to the furniture, and refuse to leave until the
anticipated cuts from our film were restored. Some of the actors
(including 300-pound Jean Hill) had actually agreed to this photo-op
if I'd pay the bail but luckily I didn't have to test their
dedication to movie cult-madness because right before our Censor
Board screening, Governor Harry Hughes took office and disbanded the
Censor Board on his first days of power. And even though Divine's
character in Female Trouble asks his audience, "Who wants to die for
art?" and then shoots a fan who yells "Yes!" (played by Vincent
Peranio, my long-time friend and production designer), I don't think
any of my movie gang would have killed for cinema.
I never told Leslie this, but off camera I had killed somebody, too.
Accidentally. Completely accidentally. In 1970 Mink Stole and I were
driving up Broadway, a Baltimore thoroughfare that is divided by a
safety island. It was Sunday early afternoon, we were not on drugs or
liquor, and an elderly man, without looking, stepped off the curb
right in front of my car. His body flipped up and landed on the hood
with his face pressed towards mine through the driver side's
windshield. This image so horrified me that I have used it over and
over in my later films (Tab Hunter run over in Polyester, the school
teacher killed by Kathleen Turner in her car in Serial Mom, the
"Fidget" character's near-death as he falls off the drive-in marquee
and lands on his parents' car windshield in Cecil B. Demented). As I
pulled over to the side of the road in shock, the man's body slid off
the hood of my car to the street leaving indentation marks that
reminded me of the "snow angels" you made as a child by lying down in
snow drifts and waving your arms. "He's okay," Mink mumbled in hope.
"No, he isn't," I said realistically as I heard his death rattle. A
crowd gathered around the car and luckily, oh so luckily, a cop
approached and said, "I saw it all happen and it wasn't your fault."
What a miracle. I had long oily hair and was dressed in my usual
thrift-shop-pimp-meets-hillbilly outfit and Mink was still in her
"religious whore" period -- wearing all black clothing with tons of
rosaries around her neck way before Goth. We looked like complete
lunatics. I called my Dad to get our insurance information and he was
immediately nervous -- "Is anybody hurt?" he asked. "...Well, yes...
the man died," I had to admit. "Oh, my God!" I heard my poor father
moan, "Now this!"
But did I feel guilty? Even when I heard the "victim" was the beloved
"peanut man" from the nearby Broadway Market? I didn't know him but
some of my friends did. I felt no guilt because I knew the accident
wasn't my fault but I certainly felt horrified. When my grandmother
called later that night she said, "I'm praying for that man's soul".
I honestly replied, "Can't you ask God why he picked my car to walk
out in front of?"
If any deaths result from a car accident, you have to go to court no
matter whose fault it was. As my "manslaughter" trial began my
parents sat next to me in support, worried that, because of my hair
and my already notorious cinematic reputation, I'd get convicted. It
was a great relief to see that the deceased had no survivors or at
least they didn't come to trial. The whole hearing was over in three
minutes after the cop testified to seeing the unfortunate man just
walk into oncoming traffic without looking. This awful experience
will never leave me but it hardly qualifies me as a murderer. I can't
begin to imagine what Leslie feels today when it was her fault. All I
could do was try to warn future jaywalkers of the dangers with
dialogue in my movies. Patricia Hearst, playing a school crossing
guard, tells Johnny Depp as he exits school in Cry-Baby, "Look right.
Look left. Then walk!"
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Part 3
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-waters/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_247025.html
Attorney Paul Fitzgerald, after many years' involvement defending the
Manson women at various trials, said to The Los Angeles Times, "If
Leslie Van Houten had never existed, the La Biancas still would be
dead." But Leslie won't let herself off that easily. "I blame
myself," she answered. "I'm part of what made him [Manson] a leader.
If he didn't have followers, he wouldn't be a leader," and she later
told Karlene Faith, "A follower is as responsible [as a leader] for
allowing a leader to lead them foully."
As much as the sex angle was built up in the press, the truth was
surprising to some. Leslie slept with Manson "maybe three times," she
testified in court, and only "in the first month" she was with the
group. Leslie would never admit this but she had better taste in
Manson men. Bobby Beausoleil, a.k.a. "Cupid", was the most
traditionally handsome of Charlie's boys and had starred in Kenneth
Anger's movie Lucifer Rising and was Leslie's first boyfriend inside
the Family. Even Charlie was a little in love with Bobby, and Leslie
remembers being shocked at seeing Bobby orally service Charlie during
one of their group sex evenings. "I didn't 'sleep with the devil,'"
Leslie told Karlene Faith, "I slept with an ex-con who had an
extensive record of pimping and abusing women. But I didn't know
that." "The ranch," she remembers to Connie Turner, "was set up and
run the same way as a stable of hookers although none of us realized
it at the time."
"Are you crazy enough to believe in me?" Charlie asked Leslie and
after months of LSD trips, isolation in the desert, and hours and
hours of his continuous insane political rantings, Leslie, like most
of the other "girl" converts, was. "'Bow like sheep,' Manson would
order us," Leslie remembered in 1983. "We wore Bowie knives on belts
around our waists and were only [dressed] in our underwear, I think,
unless it got cold," she told Connie Turner. "We'd sit around on our
feet and grunt...we were seeing how long we could go without drinking
water...I was carrying a twenty-pound backpack filled with rice. We
were building roads from nowhere to nowhere by moving rocks
around...it was hard." Susan Atkins, Leslie's co-defendant, said in
one of her parole hearings that they "were three young women clearly
not in our right minds who lived in slavish obedience to a madman."
Catherine Share, an early Manson Family member who finally managed to
break free after serving time for the gun robbery, remembers Manson
"just stealing everyone's soul." "Thinking is stinking," he used to
say. And while Gypsy never killed for Charlie she understood the
state of mind of the ones who did. "The killers couldn't even form a
thought," she sadly remembered from her own experience. "Tex"
Watson's psychological-reports doctor stated that "Tex" "had
confusion as to who or what he was. Sometimes he 'felt like a
monkey.' He actually believed that the victims were imaginary
people." "Tex" told the shrink that he looked in the mirror at the
Tate house, trying to figure out who he was. "I wasn't anyone," he
remembered, "I wasn't Charles Watson, I was an animal. The end of the
world was then. I was the living death..."
Seeing Leslie today in the visiting room, it's hard to imagine her
with this past. The X on her forehead has almost faded away and she
looks like an upscale intelligent woman I would definitely come
across in my life in New York or Los Angeles. She could be seated
next to you at any dinner party of professional people and it would
never dawn on you that this woman has been in prison for four
decades. She even went to the Oscars with a female friend in 1978
when she was out on bail and nobody recognized her! "But what did you
talk about to the people you met that night?" I wondered, knowing she
had been released from death row not that long before, not exactly a
center of industry screenings or "For Your Consideration" Oscar
campaigns. "If someone brought up one of the nominees," she shrugged,
"I'd just say 'No, I missed that one' or 'I was away when that was playing.'"
Leslie and I have gotten older together in that visiting room and
I've seen the prison rules constantly change. I used to be able to
buy her three packs of cigarettes to take back to her cell but now
it's illegal to smoke anywhere in jail in California. What used to
feel so old-school-Women Behind Bars-cigarettes-as-money is gone
forever. Now I get to buy her three cans of Pepsi! Stylistically,
it's just not the same thing. Worse yet, about five years ago
suddenly none of the women in Leslie's jail were allowed to use any
kind of hair coloring.
Overnight the entire prison population aged ten years in appearance
and on my first visit since the ban, I knew something was wrong but
it took me several minutes to realize that everybody had two inch
gray roots. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment!
Leslie and I have shared good times and bad times. And yes, Leslie
does have good times. She's taught illiterate women to read in prison
classes, she's stitched a portion of the AIDS quilt, made bedding for
the homeless, recorded books on tape for the blind. She has clerked
for the administrators, the nurses, the associate warden, the head of
education, the kitchen, and the priest. And it's not that she jumps
from job to job -- rules restrict inmates from working longer than
two years in the same position. She can be lighthearted, too. She
even sang "Santa Baby" at the prison Christmas show one year.
Yet somehow Leslie continues to live through the bad times without
despair and inspires others to do the same. When Divine died suddenly
in1988, Leslie was one of the first to console me by letter. "I'm so
sad and wish I could be closer for you. I know you loved him and
enjoyed in the success of his life and helped him through his hard
times... I am sorry I will not get to know him."
She counseled me on a personal level, too. After a relationship of
mine ended, Leslie was a good shoulder to lean on and I hope I've
given her good advice, too, when she's had crushes from prison on men
in the outside world. I've met two of her longest-lasting roommates:
Becky the bank-robber whom I adored and is now free, and another
inmate I called "Little Miss Manslaughter" because she was so bubbly
and was an actual fan of my movies before she was sentenced.
Since no cable TV is available in jail, Leslie has seen few of my
movies but did finally get to see my version of Hairspray and it was
nice to get her good review. "I loved it," she wrote to me, "I was
really into the public dances and all that. I lived to go to the
Harmony Ballroom in Anaheim. I bought my shoes by how well they slid
on the wood floor. I'm telling you it was my life!" It was her life.
From Mashed Potatoes to Manson's Monster Mash in just a few short
years. Luckily for her, Leslie still has a sense of humor. She even
joked about my role in Hairspray as an evil psychiatrist who uses a
ridiculous optical medical tool to hypnotize a teenage white girl
into never dating black boys. "I never had one of those spinning
wheels flashed in front of my face," Leslie admitted after decades of
therapy, "Do you think it would help?"
I've always secretly wondered if Leslie ever felt "cool" when she was
with the Manson gang and I finally got up the nerve to ask. She
looked at me in confusion. "Cool? We had no concept by then of any
such possible word!" she answered. And now the "celebrity" was even
more unfathomable. "There's nothing sadder than to be asked for an
autograph because of infamy," she once wrote to me, "I've had to
explain I'm not proud of what I have done or why they [people] are
aware of me. It's an awful feeling. The 'unwilling star'" And when
her autograph or letters are sold on murder memorabilia sites it
makes her feel worse because someone she has written to has betrayed
her, and she's not sure who -- "So creepy. All disgusting and distasteful."
We've always discussed current events, how paralyzed she was with
sadness over the Waco tragedy and how similar David Koresh was to
Manson -- even more so than Jim Jones. Or how she understands the
mind-set of kamikaze suicide bombers because this is how she was
trained by Manson to feel and act once. And when the riots broke out
in L.A. in 1992, after the Rodney King beating, an event Manson
loyalists likened to Helter Skelter finally happening for real,
Leslie was so far away from the Manson ideology that the comparison
never even occurred to her. "This has been a really emotional time
for me," she wrote that week, "First there was the first execution in
nearly half a century in California," (Robert Alton Harris who was
strapped into the gas chamber for thirteen minutes, released due to
appeals, and then put back in the same day and executed) "and then
the days L.A. went mad. I sat watching on TV images usually seen in
other countries. John, it was so frightening -- to think of what is
supposed to be safe as totally out of control."
I've tried to be her "agent" in the world of Hollywood. She agonized
with me whether to co-operate and be interviewed for the TV news
magazine show Turning Point but after meeting Diane Sawyer, Leslie
agreed this news correspondent was "a class act". After seeing the
completed show, Leslie admits she "had been treated better than I
ever have." When the distressing news came in 2003 that CBS was
remaking Helter Skelter again as a new TV movie, I called the
director John Gray, whom I didn't know, at his home. Probably
wondering why I was calling, or worse yet, thinking I was happy about
the news, he took my call and listened quietly as I begged him to
realize what a terrible unfair effect this project would have on
Leslie's parole chances, how she was ashamed and horrified about the
crimes, how further notoriety on the case would only please Manson
and hurt the privacy of victims' families. I think my call may have
worked a little because when I saw the finished project, Leslie's
character was minimal and her part in the crime was truthfully shown
to have been ordered by a vengeful Manson. A year or two later, my
hunch was proven correct. In Los Angeles, in a restaurant to meet my
agent and five minutes early, I was shown to my table alone and the
waitress approached me with an odd expression. "Can I ask you
something personal?" she shyly requested. "Sure," I replied,
realizing she recognized me but never expecting what was coming next,
"Are you the head of that 'Friends of Leslie' organization?" "No,
there is no 'head' and that group has been disbanded officially, but
there are many people who support her parole chances," I answered.
"Because I played Leslie in the newest Helter Skelter," she revealed.
Only in L.A.! Her name was Catherine Wadkins and I suddenly felt bad
realizing I might have contributed to making an actress' part
smaller. "Yes, you did," she confided after I told her the story of
my call to her director, which she already knew about. "That's okay,"
Catherine smiled. "I think Leslie should get out and I tried to play
the part in a way to show how brainwashed she was."
Leslie never asked me for money or material goods over the years.
I've sent her books I loved and together we've discussed James Purdy,
Mary McGarry Morris, Michael Cunningham, and Anne Tyler novels. After
maybe one too many of my intense choices, Leslie started requesting
her own titles, many of which had to do with the history and plight
of the Native American Indian and I was happy to oblige. The only
reading material I sent her that was rejected by the mailroom was,
oddly enough, an issue of Paper Magazine that contained a fashion
shoot that must have contained a little too much nudity. Once I
offered to buy Leslie a TV for her cell but she declined. My kind of gal.
I was lucky enough to meet some of Leslie's friends on the outside,
too. She has a support group that is tireless and relentless. "I like
that several people close to me are also now friends of yours,"
Leslie wrote me after years of visiting. The most dedicated is Linda
Grippi, a friend of Leslie's since high school who began visiting her
not long after she was convicted and has never stopped. Linda is
practically a nun in the religion of Leslie's rehabilitation and the
firmest believer that Leslie should be paroled. Linda has dedicated
her life to the cause of Leslie's freedom. She is a kind but
convincing, level-headed pit bull who goes after anyone who believes
otherwise with a reasoned defense. If Linda could testify at Leslie's
parole hearing as "support" the way the victims' families can, I
think Leslie might have already received a release date.
But Leslie meeting my friends was more problematic because of the
East Coast locations and the strict rules about visiting high profile
prisoners like her. I am afraid I have betrayed Leslie, too. A long
time ago she mentioned to me that she "hoped I never 'used' our
friendship or her plight for freedom" as dinner party conversation in
my travels around the world. And I am embarrassed to admit, in my
enthusiasm for her rehabilitation and my pride in our friendship, I
have. Leslie Van Houten is quite a name to drop and famous people are
eager to hear her story. When we were filming Cry-Baby, Johnny Depp
heard my pleas concerning Leslie's parole and offered to visit her.
Leslie, like everyone else in the world, had great respect for Johnny
Depp and was moved that he, as my buddy, cared about her case. But we
must have been nuts! Can you imagine the press if they found out?
Think of the headlines -- "Johnny Depp joins Manson Family". Luckily
for all of us, Johnny's visiting form was turned down because of an
"impending assault charge", probably a hot-headed reaction to paparazzi.
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Part 4
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-waters/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_247113.html
Initially both my mother and Leslie's were nervous about our
friendship. "Does the Manson Family have to have our address?" my
mother moaned when I once had a letter sent there. And in 1998,
Leslie commented to The Baltimore Sun in a long profile of me that
she "found it ironic" that her mother and supporters initially "were
concerned" for Leslie, as "if knowing him could somehow hurt my
reputation." But over the years our mothers softened and grew used to
the idea. Leslie's mother went to see Pecker and my mother
needle-pointed me a pillow that says "Leslie". As our parents got
older and poor health struck, Leslie and I commiserated on how lucky
we were to have parents who had lived long enough so we both could
make peace with them over our notorious pasts. "None of this" was her
parents' fault, Leslie told a parole board. And when Mrs. Van Houten
died in 2005, Leslie wrote her friends a great tribute admitting it
was "very hard for me not to be there for her at this terrible time
(of her illness) just to fix her hair, read to her, just be near her.
As it is, I cherish all the qualities of her that are alive in me.
She lived a good life. She was a world-traveler, helped in unionizing
the L.A. teachers, she was part of the Mothers Marching Against
Vietnam and was very proud of that. Mama liked Hillary Clinton and
wrote her support letters. So I share with you, my friends, the life
of Jane Louise Edwards Van Houten. A woman who was a good mother who
I loved dearly. We worked our way over very hard times and came
through with sincere tenderness. She was pleased you were my friend.
Take a moment to say, 'Hear, hear,' for a life that was well-lived."
But, yes, I know the La Bianca kids don't have a mother around
anymore partly because of my friend Leslie. No matter how patient
Leslie or her supporters are, we know this terrible fact will never
change. But when, if ever, will there have been enough punishment?
Vincent Bugliosi, the original and fairest Manson Family prosecutor
and author of Helter Skelter, originally predicted in his book that
the "girls" would serve "fifteen to twenty years" and called Leslie
"the least committed to Manson", but later told The National
Enquirer, "I want Leslie Van Houten to remain in prison for the rest
of her life." He once admitted to Larry King after hearing Leslie
speak on the show, "I was impressed by her. In defense of her I can
say this, she seems to be a model prisoner and everyone seems to say
she is very remorseful for the murders." But Stephen Kay, who
prosecuted Leslie in her later trials and has argued against her
parole many times since, seems even more confused on how much time
she should serve. Admitting "I've always said she [Leslie] was the
smartest and maybe the most normal of them all," he also commented in
The Los Angeles Times, in 1980, that he didn't feel Leslie Van Houten
should be locked up forever but it was "too soon to release her now."
He would rather "wait until she was at least forty years old."
Sixteen years after that, a Court TV reporter asked him, "Will you
always fight Leslie Van Houten's parole?" And he answered, "Always is
a long time. I'm not saying she will never be suitable for parole,
I've not said 'never.'" But when the old National Enquirer comes
around he encourages their readers to send in coupons against her
release and claims, "Leslie Van Houten should never be let out."
The Parole Board can be equally confusing when it comes to sending
signals to Leslie about a possible release. After eighteen parole
hearings, some members praised her -- "You've come a long way,"
"You're closer [than] you might realize" -- while denying her a date
always citing "the enormity of the crime," the only thing she can
never change. It is painful to watch Leslie sit there year after
year, her face lined in sorrow in long Warholian close-ups on Court
TV as she listens to the same gruesome details of her crime that they
read into the record at every hearing. No matter how much progress
she's made, how good the psychiatric reports, she is forced to
re-describe or come up with new details of that terrible night or be
accused of "not opening up" to her part in the crime and then is
punished as the prosecutor takes her honest memory of the insane
Manson reasoning and uses it against her in future hearings. As
Christie Webb, Leslie's last parole defense attorney, so succinctly
put it in 2004, "Deputy D.A. has proved that Leslie Van Houten was a
danger in 1971 and, yes, she was. She was when she was with the
Manson cult. She tried to explain her relationship to Manson -- how
she would die for him, how she would kill for him. She tried to
explain that and told that to psychiatrists in 1970 and 1971 when she
was still under the influence of cult indoctrination and then it's
used it against her 38 years later."
In 2002 a California Supreme Court judge realized that a rejection of
[her] parole was made "without any explanation of reason" and ordered
the parole board to get back to him in ninety days to show "some
evidence" of why Leslie should not be released and what she must do
to rehabilitate herself. In November of that same year Judge Bob Krug
said of the parole board's finding, "I cannot find any indication
where Miss Van Houten has done anything wrong in prison. They can't
keep using the crime forever and ever. That turns her sentence into
life without parole. If I was Ms. Van Houten I wouldn't have a clue
what to do at the next hearing."
"Unreasonable risk to the community" is another reason used to turn
down Leslie year after year. "I don't want anyone to wake up and find
Leslie Van Houten is the next door neighbor," Stephen Kay argued in
1986, conveniently forgetting that Leslie had had next door neighbors
when she lived peacefully on parole between her second and third
trial. An even more persuasive argument against this reasoning was
the successful parole and release of Steve "Clem" Grogan a.k.a.
"Scramblehead", one of the most brainwashed men in the Manson Family.
Grogan was convicted (along with two other defendants) in a separate
trial for the murder of ranch hand Shorty Shea, because Charlie
thought Shea was a snitch. Sentenced to life in prison but released
after serving fourteen years (maybe because there was at least a
reason for this type of murder that someone could understand), Mr.
Grogan commented to the parole board, ""I still haven't gotten over
the emotional part... the atrocity I did." Grogan, who was certainly
as committed to Manson's lunatic cause as Leslie was at the time of
the crimes, has never been heard from by the law since. Away from
Manson, he got his life back together, found employment, and now
lives lawfully and quietly out of the eyes of the press, crime
historians, or Manson groupies. Contrary to what Charlie preached,
sometimes sense does make sense.
"Not taking responsibility" is another charge thrown at Leslie each
time she comes up for parole. Because she once said she stabbed Mrs.
La Bianca after she was already dead, the D.A. always brings up the
fact that Leslie doesn't "come clean" to details of her involvement.
But Leslie has already stated that "earlier in my incarceration, in
my sobriety, in my coming to terms with what I had done, I used to
find a lot of relief in thinking she was dead. But really honestly
looking at it, it is of no consequence whether she was or not. The
action was reprehensible." "Each day I wake up," she told the board,
"I know why I'm waking up where I am." "I feel a great responsibility
for what I did to the world," she sadly stated at a 1991 hearing, "I
carry this crime with me as if I was the only one," she said in 2000.
"Each act we did in that house, I take responsibility for," she
testified in 2004, adding, "I can't...place the blame on someone
else. It was me."
Naturally, the victims' families' words and anger are incredibly
strong and hard to argue against. What they say can actually never be
wrong. If Leslie had killed my mother, could I forgive her? For many
years the La Bianca children did not come to Leslie's parole
hearings. "You may have wondered why I haven't attended," wrote
Leno's oldest son in 2004, "let me tell you why. When confronted with
the nightmare at the time, I decided to put my faith in the legal
system. I tended to my wounds privately, knowing that if I let my
parents' death define me the rest of my life, then those who killed
them would have gotten me, too." But when it looked like Leslie had a
real chance at parole in 2000, Stephen Kay encouraged La Bianca's
nieces and nephews to attend and their words were devastating. "How
many times must we come!?" asked an indignant La Bianca nephew,
frustrated at having to appear yet again, given what he thought was
Leslie's iron-clad life sentence. Seeing the family testify on TV, I
kept thinking how they didn't want to have to be there. How they had
to take off work. Drive to the prison. Pay for gas. Buy an outfit
they knew they'd be photographed in. How painful an ordeal this
intrusion on their attempt to come to terms with their tragedy. "We
lost our privacy and suffered untold depression, frustration, anxiety
and financial ruin," a La Bianca relative testified, calling the
hearing a "sacrilege to Leno's memory that the family has to be
confronted with parole hearings of these individuals." A resentful La
Bianca niece continued, "I don't personally support execution but I
feel life in prison is an adequate punishment for what was done."
Sometimes the family's words were so terrible they could have come
from a horror movie: "The house was a family sanctuary... one of the
murder weapons used was the carving fork that was used for our
holiday festivities. I saw, as a youngster, my grandfather Leno and
my father use these instruments of joy that were turned into tools of
torture and death. We are stained for life." It doesn't matter that
Leslie herself never touched this fork; it was her co-defendant
Patricia Krenwinkle who plunged it into Mr. La Bianca's neck after
"Tex" had already stabbed him to death. But what awful details to
keep straight! Who cares who did what? Leslie knew they weren't going
trick-or-treating when they went into that house. And she has to pay
for everything that happened. Every single gruesome detail.
Even I am sometimes still horrified. To me, almost more
incomprehensible than the murders is the fact that my friend Leslie,
after stabbing Mrs. La Bianca, changed into her clothes before
hitching back to the Spahn ranch. "How could you!?" I once asked
Leslie, who looked back at me stricken with disgust and humiliation.
"I know," she mumbled, "Tex made me change my clothes and I told him
I didn't have to." "Did you actually pick out one of her outfits?" I
whispered, horrified to imagine fashion decisions in the time of such
bloodshed. "No," she gasped as she lowered her eyes in horror that I
would even think of such a thing, "I just grabbed the first thing I
found!" What a terrible, terrible question to have to answer!
At the parole hearing, a La Bianca niece testified she was outraged
to have "never heard from Leslie Van Houten, not by phone, email or
letter. She should apologize to me," she added with anger. But Leslie
wasn't even aware of these nieces and nephews until they came to
parole hearings decades after the crimes. She knew about "two
children" but not cousins. Leslie had earlier told a parole member
that she had wrestled with writing a letter of apology because she
thought "how I would feel if it had been my own mother and father --
not sure I would have wanted the perpetrator to have contacted me."
In 1994 Leslie told The Washington Post that she had written dozens
of apologies and never mailed them because they would amount to a
request for a favor.
When the La Bianca nieces and nephews first appeared at Leslie's
hearing, Leslie said, "I am relieved that family members came
forward...it's really hard to live with the murders when no one was
there. It was incomplete dealing with it." And she had apologized to
the unseen La Bianca family many times at earlier parole hearings. "I
feel great shame and remorse when I think of the La Bianca children
and their family today...when I think back on the night of August
10th, all I think about is the horror these two very innocent human
beings were subjected to. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
Leslie has agreed to meet with the victims' relatives, but only if
there is no tape of the meeting to be exploited by the media. "If the
family works with the Institute I certainly would welcome a chance to
apologize to them in a personal way." In other words, not on Court
TV, not on videocassettes bought and sold on line on Manson groupie
websites and not for the whole world to see. "A virtuoso
performance," a commentator blurted on TV after seeing footage of
Leslie baring her soul at a parole hearing. And this is exactly the
kind of "entertainment" value she is trying to avoid.
"She cannot repay," a La Bianca nephew told the Board before turning
to Leslie and saying, "Therefore accept your punishment and pray for
the good Lord's forgiveness in the hereafter." Worse yet, Patty Tate,
sister of Sharon, who is not allowed to testify at Leslie's hearing
because Leslie is not convicted of the Tate murders but is allowed to
be there in "victim support," told the news media outside the hearing
her feelings about all the convicted Manson Family members. "I have
no animosity," she reasoned, "I want these people to flourish within
the confines of these [prison] walls. I want them to be productive
and have lives within the confines of these walls right here."
Yet, forgiveness can seem insane, too. Susan Le Barge, the born-again
Christian daughter of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, outraged her
family and Sharon Tate's mother by appearing at Charles "Tex"
Watson's 1990 parole hearing and testifying that the man who stabbed
to death both her mother and father should be released. "I believe
twenty-one years of imprisonment and his having to live with the
memory of what he did is punishment enough," she told a startled and
disbelieving board. "It's my belief Charles could live in society
peacefully and should be given a parole date," she concluded as "Tex"
Watson sat there seemingly stunned.
Knowing the schism Susan Le Barge's testimony must have caused with
the La Bianca family, Leslie never tried to hop on board this almost
ludicrously forgiving bandwagon but I'm sure she felt some relief to
hear one of the victims' family trying to get past their hatred of
her. Leslie must have been encouraged to read the words of the father
of murder victim Myra Opshal, who was killed in a bank robbery
committed by the Patty Hearst-kidnapping Symbionese Liberation Army.
When one of its members, Kathleen Soliah, was about to be released on
bail for taking part in this crime, he was angry but expressed hope,
according to The Los Angeles Times, "that Soliah can emerge from jail
to offer society some productive years. I hope she [Soliah] has
learned something from this," he continued, "and can go out and be a
good citizen and contribute to the community where she lives. And
she'll have some life left to live."
Most likely Leslie would be inspired by the forgiveness the Amish
community showed the gunman who insanely shot to death five school
girls and severely wounded five more before killing himself in a
one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania. A year later a local historian
gave a speech on the anniversary of this horrible event called "Why
the Amish Forgave a Killer." "The Amish community believes
forgiveness is about giving up," he said, "giving up your right to
revenge. And giving up feelings of resentment, bitterness and hatred,
replacing them with compassion toward the offender and treating the
offender as a human being."
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Part 5
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-waters/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_247142.html
Could Leslie's expression of remorse remain "superficial," as was
charged in her 2003 parole hearing? She has been saying she's sorry
for so long and with such eloquence, it is hard to imagine these
suspicions could be founded. "I was raised to be a decent human
being," Leslie has pled, "I turned into a monster and I'm very
ashamed." "If I had known what the word 'sorry' really meant, I
wouldn't have made light of it the way I did [at her first trial],"
she has admitted. "There have been times," she sadly remarks, "when
I'm eating a meal and feel guilty I'm eating a meal." "I have spent
these years going back to a decent human being," she confessed, "I
find it very difficult to live with myself a great deal of the time.
If you look at my file, there's no violence. No violence. That one
night. That one night has just tormented me. I am not a person that
corrects problems through violence. I don't confront. And it has been
really, really difficult to live with. And I hope that the family
understands...I know that you loved them and I know they were
wonderful people. They didn't deserve it and you didn't deserve it.
Not a bit of it. All I can tell you is that I'm so sorry. I'm sorry."
Through the years the district attorneys have been very effective at
keeping Leslie incarcerated. They can be brutal. When one
psychiatrist talked of Leslie being "charming", Stephen Kay correctly
wise-cracked, "I'm sure Leno and Rosemary La Bianca didn't think she
was so charming." But recently, the D.A.'s arguments for not granting
Leslie parole seem almost desperate. One of the very few mixed
psychiatric reports once stated that Leslie "possesses a degree of
verbal acumen that is very convincing. The obvious question is
whether this represents real change in reconstructing your
personality or someone who is so smooth in their manipulation that
they are barely perceptible.... Under the control of evil, she did
excel; now under the control of what could be called society's rules
and regulations, she has excelled. She has attempted to please
authority no matter if it is good or bad." In other words: Damned if
you do, damned if you don't.
Patrick Sequira, the new D.A. who took over arguing against Leslie's
parole after Stephen Kay's retirement even contended at her last
hearing that something seemed suspicious about Leslie going back to
college behind bars to get her master's degree in philosophy. He
described Antioch University, the struggling college that offered
these courses, as a "hotbed of radicalization" and then went on to
rail against the classes she would be taking, "Theory of Justice,"
"Problems of Men," "Democracy in Education," "Origins of Intelligence
in Children," as if this curriculum was somehow connected to Leslie's
future criminality. "Clearly the inmate has a fascination with
philosophy just as she had a fascination with the concepts that the
Manson Family embraced," he told the Parole Board accusingly. "If
there was true educational intent in changing oneself," he went on to
lecture a dumbfounded Leslie who kept her head held high, "you'd
think it would be beyond studying philosophy."
The Parole Board's advice to Leslie at the end of each denial was
sometimes perplexing. "We look forward to seeing you in two years,"
one parole board member told her, as if her hearings were some sort
of positive anniversary. In 2002, one board member encouraged her to
"continue with classes" but then admitted that there were no more
classes for her to attend. When Leslie was denied that year and told
by the board she needed more counseling in prison she replied
politely, "I would like to say there is no more therapy available to
me. So you just recommended something to me that they don't offer.
But I'll do what I can. That's all I can do." At the end of her '07
hearing Leslie was advised that "this being prison, the panel
understands that sometimes programs are not as available as we'd all
like. Therefore we commend to you that -- independent reading is
available to you -- that you can read books that you believe are
appropriate for you, speak to your particular situation. Prepare a
short report, two or three paragraphs indicating an understanding of
what you've read and how it applies to your particular situation."
Thirty-six years in prison and she is now sentenced to book reports!
A flummoxed Leslie asked politely, "...Do I send you these...these
reports on the books?" "Yes" they said, "you do."
"Remember she is only one dose away from doing something like this
again," warns a La Bianca relative. While one can understand his
frustration, it seems very unlikely that Leslie, after three decades
of successful therapy and NA and AA meetings, would have the
slightest desire for one more LSD trip. Does Manson have to die
before Leslie can ever be paroled? "Suppose Manson told her to kill
again?" people who have not followed Leslie's progress sometimes ask.
As if. She has had no voluntary contact with Manson for over
thirty-five years and if any concerned citizen who asks this question
had ever seen Manson on TV recently, they would know better. A
repellent old man with an unappealing pot belly and teeth rapidly
becoming similar to Edith Massey's, he would have a hard time leading
any cult today, believe me. He looks more like a homeless fool who
forgot to take his meds. "It's coming down fast!" was a good
recruiting line in the '60s but interrupting a 1987 Today Show
interview and telling the female host, "I gotta take a shit, will you
excuse me?" won't exactly get him many new followers. Manson is "just
a creep," Leslie told a Parole Board in 1996.
How right she was. Manson watched on camera his middle-aged
despondent co-defendant Patricia Krenwinkel (who thought the first
trial was a "play") tell Diane Sawyer, "Every day I wake up and I
know that I am a destroyer of the most precious thing there is --
life." His gentlemanly response? "She got old on me," he snorted.
What a reward for the hippy girl who stupidly gave up her life for
him when she was nineteen years old. A girl convicted of seven
murders for the man she believed was God, a woman so defeated now
that she doesn't even ask outside her friends or family to write
letters of support to the Parole Board because she "doesn't believe a
date will be given." What a tribute to the one time flower-child who
is described now by Karlene Faith as "a good-hearted woman who
suffers the anguished burden of interminable guilt." How kind Manson
is to his now horrified ex-follower who told a Parole Board in 1993,
"it is very different to live with the fact that I could do something
so horrible because that is not who I am, not what I believe in. On a
day-to-day basis it is a terribly difficult thing to live with
because I feel terrible. But no matter what I do, I can't change it,"
she sobbed. "I am paying for this as best as I can. There is nothing
more I can do outside of being dead," she cried as the board members
watched her nervously, "and I know this is what you wish, but I can't
take my life. I'm sorry..." she mumbled looking down in complete defeat.
"What happens when the next con man comes along?" is a frequent
argument by Stephen Kay against Leslie's release. One would think
after all Leslie has been through she would be on guard, but one bad
judgment she made in 1981 is still used aggressively against her at
every parole hearing. Lonely, and facing a lifetime in prison she
began corresponding with Bill Cywin, a fellow convict, and when he
was released he began to visit her and she eventually married him in
a small prison ceremony and was allowed to have conjugal visits,
something that must have seemed like a godsend to a young woman in
jail forever. Completely unbeknownst to Leslie, her husband was
planning some hair-brained prison break for her and a prison matron's
uniform was discovered by the police in his apartment. Leslie
immediately cut off all contact with him, divorced him, and never saw
or heard from him again. Not one of her prosecutors ever tried to say
she was in on this plan in any way and they admitted they knew she
was innocent of any knowledge of her husband's attempt. But they
never let her forget it. Her "bad judgment," her supposed "continued
desire to be with 'bad men'" is constantly brought up at every parole
hearing to prove she is unsuitable. "Who hasn't had a bad boyfriend?"
I wish her lawyer would ask the board.
Am I, too, a "bad man" in Leslie's life? The one year the Parole
Board read my name as a supporter and it was broadcast on TV, I
watched for Stephen Kay to somehow bring up my notoriety and use it
against Leslie. Will they take this chapter of my book and use
certain sentences out of context to hurt her chances? I told Leslie
of my fears but she urged me to stay firmly in her corner, pointing
out I had taught in prisons, had been successfully making my movies
for forty years and could help her find employment if she were ever
released. "I have stable relationships," Leslie tried to explain to
the board in 1996, "Often relationships are measured in
man/woman/marriage/romance. As a forty-six year old woman, I feel my
most important and cherished relationships are my friends."
What would Leslie Van Houten do if she did get paroled? She has many
offers of employment and housing and a large support group of friends
and family could usher her quietly back into society. "She'll never
get out," some friends of mine have always said, and in the 1970s
Leslie probably agreed. "I try to figure out how do I live out the
rest of my life in here and be able to say it wasn't a wasted life,"
she has wondered in the past; but later, "naturally mourning my own
life that has never been," Leslie began daring to hope. "If I am ever
paroled I want to be anonymous and live a life as quietly as I can."
She said much the same in '78 imagining "a private and humble life."
And finally, in the '90s her lawyers began fighting against the
perception that she had been sentenced to life without parole,
because she was not. "The fact that she should realistically be
considered [for parole]" her defense lawyer at the time, Dan Mrotek,
argued to the board, "is not due to the fact she has done something
exceptional in this institution -- it is due to how your regulations
are written. So we do not want just your subjective opinion about
what should happen to her. We want justice in terms of the fair
application of your regulations." Fifteen positive psychiatric
reports have been read into the record over the years and her lawyers
could not understand why the Board could not hear their message. "It
is my opinion," a doctor in Leslie's jail wrote, "that she [Leslie]
has continued this self-improvement, not as a motivation to parole
but as a genuine interest in bettering herself. It is my opinion that
the inmate would not be dangerous if she was released to the community."
In 1996 Leslie started to fight back, too, by arguing she should be
paroled "because there is a system that says I can earn it. I have
taken seriously what I have done. I have redesigned my life where I
am a conscientious and caring individual. I am now who I would have
been if I had not gone into a drug/Manson lifestyle." At her last
hearing she could not be more honest. Still "deeply ashamed," Leslie
ignored the rule against looking at the victim's families and begged
the La Bianca survivors, "I ask that I be shown the mercy I didn't
give...and that is not easy in this [parole board] room but I'm going
to ask for it. I am who I say I am."
Leslie Van Houten has served more time than any Nazi war criminal who
was not sentenced to death at Nuremberg. She has served more time
that any of the Nazi defendants who were sentenced to life in prison
except for Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, who died in his fortieth
year in prison (the exact amount of time Leslie has now served).
She's served more time than Lt. William Calley who was originally
sentenced to life in prison for the My Lai massacre of hundreds of
Vietnamese civilians. She has served longer than the surviving female
member of the Baader Meinhoff Gang, a German terrorist group who
murdered thirty-four people for left-wing "politics" and
"revolution." This group began with the student protest movement in
1968, the same year Charles Manson was recruiting his hippy army of
LSD soldiers. Brigitte Mahnhaupt was convicted of nine political
murders and sentenced to five life sentences, but served just
twenty-four years. Another member, Irmgard Molle, convicted of a 1972
bomb attack in Heidelberg that killed three American soldiers, was
released in 1994 after serving twenty-four years. Courts ruled that
"the decision for probation was reached based on the determination
that no security risks exist today." And none of these radicals even
said they were sorry!
But how sorry is sorry enough? Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and
armaments minister, and one of the few Nazi defendants to take
responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even though he denied knowing of
the Holocaust, struggled with this question. When Gitta Sereny
interviewed him for her amazing book Albert Speer; His Battle with
Truth, after he had been released after serving all twenty years of
his sentence in Spandau prison, she asked the same kind of question
about responsibility for the crime that the parole board asks Leslie.
While Leslie participated in a much tinier version of a fascist
regime, there are definite similarities in the issue of degrees of
guilt. Was there something "inherently evil" inside Leslie, as
Stephen Kay has charged? Was there a "lack of morality" underneath
Speer's initial attraction to "the cause," wondered Ms. Sereny? "If I
just answer that question with a 'yes,'" a free Speer honestly
responded after decades of reflection, "it would be too simple. For
of course now I think it was immoral. But what does that mean?
Nothing. How can it help our understanding of these terms which is
what you and I are trying to do here, I presume, for me to say, 'Yes,
yes mea culpa.' Yes, of course, mea culpa, but the whole point is
that I didn't feel this and why didn't I? Was it Hitler, only Hitler,
because of whom I didn't understand? Or was it a deficiency in me? Or
was it both?"
"How can a man admit more and go on living?" Gitta Sereny asked
Speer, probing how deeply he could go inside himself to take in the
full weight of his repression of the horror of Hitler's regime. The
same incredulous response the prosecutors continue to have over the
fact that Leslie knew there had been five killings the night before,
yet chose to go along for the next night of mayhem knowing full well
what would happen. "You knew all this," Ms. Sereny challenged Speer
about Nazi slave labor, "yet you stayed, not only stayed but worked,
planned with, and supported. How can you explain? How can you
justify? How can you stand living with yourself?" His answers could
have been Leslie's. "You cannot understand. You simply cannot
understand what it is to live in a dictatorship and you can't
understand the game of danger but above all you can't understand the
fear on which the whole thing is based." Leslie, too, has struggled
to explain to a parole board in 2004 how her life was hijacked onto
such a horrific track. "It didn't start out that way. It started off
like a commune. And then the more he [Manson] measured how much we
believed in him, the violence would become more acute until at the
end it was very prevalent." "I wanted to leave," she remembered in
sadness and frustration, "and I told him I was going to leave. And he
took me to the edge of a cliff and he told me I may as well jump off
because if I left I would die. Now, you know when you say something
like this years and years and years later, and it seems so small. But
at the time I believed him. I believed if I left him, the very same
thing that happened to Leno and Rosemary La Bianca would happen to
me. And now I carry the responsibility for that. .."
While Speer admits, "The intensity of the crime precludes any attempt
at self-justification," he stated wearily something I don't think
Leslie feels and, as much as I understand his statement, I don't
think she ever will. "I awake with it," Speer says of his guilt,
"spend my day with it and dream it. But my reply -- I know it -- has
long been routine. I can no longer answer with emotion and people
resent this."
One wonders if the Manson Family today were all in one room would
there be an evil spectacle of hippy-devil-anarchy like I saw in that
courtroom in 1977 or a group of broken, sad, disillusioned ex-con
baby boomers? "These children that came at you with knives", as
Charlie once called his followers, are now senior citizens begging
forgiveness. The other Manson girls are unrecognizable from the early
famous newsreel footage that is still played ad nauseam every time a
mention of the crime comes up. Susan Atkins, before having a brain
tumor and one of her legs amputated in prison (the other is
paralyzed), wore a hearing-aid and could have been mistaken for a
suburban dental technician. Patricia Krenwinkle looks like an elderly
high school history teacher. The men, many bald now for real, have a
sadness and embarrassment about them. How humiliating to have been
taken for a ride by such an obvious con-man as Charlie. All the
repentant Family members cling to the hope they will be forgiven or
-- even better -- forgotten. Albert Speer wondered with Rudolph Hess
as they served their long sentence in Spandau Prison whether, if
released, they would meet "and have a good bottle of wine and perhaps
find it in us to laugh about some of the memories of Spandau."
Rudolph Hess answered much in the same way as I believe Leslie would.
"If we were ever all out, none of us would ever see each other again
and most certainly we would not laugh."
There is an amazing press photo that was taken by Peter Phun for The
Desert Enterprise, a newspaper in Palm Springs, which shows a
beautiful but haunted Leslie Van Houten being walked before the press
in 2002 on her way to a hopeful court hearing to overturn the board's
rejection of her parole. Leslie is humiliated to still be handcuffed
and chained after forty years of non-violence and she is sad that the
press is still there to give the Manson brand another jolt of
publicity. For security reasons the cops have made her wear her
waist-length hair down, not in the dignified bun she usually wears.
You can tell Leslie fears it will look "witchy," as Charlie used to
order. She is embarrassed by the attention but firmly proud of who
she has become. Leslie looks absolutely stunning in her clear-headed
maturity. This is the woman I am friends with today.
But one of her prison guards looks over at her in the picture in an
almost cartoonish fear -- he still sees her as a dangerous "Manson
girl" and one can imagine the excited story he can now tell his wife
and kids over dinner that night. Leslie will never be able to
overcome this notoriety. But if that same prison guard knew her the
way I know her, he wouldn't be afraid anymore. He might even ask her
to baby-sit his kids. Her crime was a long, long time ago and she has
paid her dues to society. I hope Leslie Van Houten can be given a
second chance. The best gift I can give her is a promise that she
doesn't ever have to see me again once she is released. "I'm not
trying to get away with anything," Leslie has told anyone who would
listen. And she's not. She's really not.
--
Excerpted from the book Role Models by John Waters, to be published
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010.
.
3 comments:
Interesting perspective from Waters. I know he has worked with prisoners for many years. I think he's star-struck by Van Houten, though.
Along with the rest of the Manson gang, I think Van Houten should be permitted to leave prison.
In her coffin.
many people were hippies and used drugs, it takes a real special creature to stab and murder someone. these people were already given a reprieve---the day their death sentence was commuted to life-- if she is no longer a danger--great- but her life should be spent in prison-that is called justice.
I admit she turned her life around while in prison and has done many positive things.. but she was sentenced to death and got lucky with life in prison. If she was originally sentenced to death, why should she ever be able to get out?
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