Release Again
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5559158/manson_girl_leslie_van_houten_up_for.html
July 06, 2010
by: JON C. HOPWOOD
Follower of Charles Manson Convicted of Murdering Two in Tate-LaBianca Killings
Leslie Van Houten, who became infamous as a member of the "Manson
Family," a group of misfits who congregated around convicted
mass-murder mastermind Charles Manson, went before a parole board for
the 19th time on July 6, 2010. The 60-year-old, who was convicted of
murdering Rosemary LaBianca, the wife of Manson Family victim Leno
LaBianca, the day after other members of the Manson Family brutally
slew movie star Sharon Tate and four others, has been imprisoned for
most of the past 40 years.
The parole board turned her down after a three-hour hearing in which
relatives of LaBianca and Manson Family victim Sharon Tate spoke out
against her release.
"Miss Van Houten is a murdering terrorist," LaBianca family member
Louis Smaldino told the parole board, "and her character does not change."
Parole Board Chair Robert Doyle explained that Van Houten was
unsuitable for parole because she had yet to develop a complete
understanding of her crime and her motivation to commit murder. Doyle
said, "She does not look at herself to see what made her capable of
this activity."
Both Doyle and parole board member Carol Bentley explained that the
atrocious and heinous nature of their murders were a factor in
denying her parole.
Van Houten will be eligible for parole again in three years.
Beginnings
Leslie Van Houten, a two-time high school homecoming "princess," was
born in into a middle class family in Altadena, California on August
23, 1949. She had one older brother and two adopted younger siblings.
After her parents were divorced in 1963, her mother had custody of
the children.
The teenage Leslie began smoking pot and taking L.S.D. She ran away
with a boyfriend to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, but
returned home to finish high school.
Van Houten claimed in a previous parole board that she had taken
dozens of acid trips with her teenage boyfriend during this period as
part a legal gambit to establish diminished capacity due to her
intake of hallucinogenic drugs. However, her ex-boyfriend, testifying
at the same hearing, said they only took LSD half a dozen times.
She got herself knocked up when she was 17-years-old. Van Houten's
mother forced her to have an abortion against her will, creating a
great deal of resentment and anger, Leslie told the parole board
during another hearing. A psychiatrist testified that Leslie was a
"spoiled princess" who could not stand getting what she wanted.
After graduating from high school in 1967, she attended Sawyer
Business College to became a legal secretary, staying with her father
Paul and her stepmother. Reportedly, she had a spiritual bent and
considered becoming a nun with the Self-Realization Fellowship. An
inquiry to the Fellowship got her the reply that they could always
use secretaries. Thus, she decided to go to secretarial school, a
decision made with input from her father.
Her spirituality was to be her undoing.
Manson Family
Leslie Van Houten says she left home as her stepmother was resentful
of the close relationship she had with her father Paul. She met up
with Manson confederate Bobby Beausoleil in San Francisco in the
summer of 1968. It was through Beausoleil (himself to become a
convicted murderer in the near future) that she made contact with
Charles Manson and The Family, some of whose members claimed he was a
Christ-like figure.
She was brought into Manson's orbit when Beausoleil took her to meet
the guru of the group Manson called "The Garbage People," cast-offs
from society, like himself. When she arrived at the ranch, she was
smitten with their lifestyle, which included a vast intake of
hallucinogens. (Van Houten claimed to be a heavy-user of L.S.D.)
She was quite taken by Charles Manson, the man, and subsequently
joined The Family in September 1968. She moved in with them at the
Spahn Ranch, an abandoned movie location in the desert that was
located in the Chatsworth district of Los Angeles.
Manson, on his part, ignored Van Houten as he considered her Bobby
Beausoleil's girlfriend and thus Bobby's "property." There is
speculation that the separation of Van Houten from her father at a
vulnerable age for girls (early teens) when they need a father figure
made her look for one in Charlie.
That Charles Manson ignored her gave her a strong desire to attract
his attention. The women in the Manson Family were highly
competitive. She decided, in the wake of the massacre at Sharon
Tate's house, that she would prove herself through premeditated
murder. Van Houten apparently was angry that she had not been
recruited to participate in the slaughter at Tate's rented Benedict
Canyon estate at 10050 Cielo Drive.
She found out about the first Manson massacre from news reports on
the morning. When it was time to recruit for the next mission that
night, Leslie made it apparent that she was available. Charlie picked
her as one of his assassins.
Murder
The Sharon Tate massacre, spearheaded by Charles "Tex "Watson,
occurred in the wee small hours of the morning of August 9, 1969.
Later that night, Charles Manson allegedly drove with Tex, Leslie Van
Houten, Steve Grogan, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda
Kasabian (the wheel-woman that night who would later turn state's
evidence against The Family) to the house of supermarket executive
Leno LaBianca in Los Feliz. Manson Family members had already cased it.
According to trial testimony, Manson broke into the house with
Watson, then went back outside and ordered Van Houten and Krenwinkel
to join Tex inside the La Bianca residence. Charlie then drove off
with the remaining Family members for another rendezvous with
premeditated murder that didn't come off.
Leno LaBianca was tied up in the living room where he was mercilessly
butchered by Tex Watson. Simultaneously, Van Houten and Krenwinkel,
who had gone into the kitchen and acquired knives, tied Rosemary
LaBianca up in the bedroom with the electrical cord of a bedside
table lamp after Van Houten had put a pillowcase over her head.
Rosemary LaBianca fought back after she heard the screams of her
husband as he was being stabbed to death. She tried to hit Van Houten
with the lamp, who deflected the blow and then held her victim down
while Krenwinkel stabbed her. Krenwinkel inflicted only a flesh wound
on Rosemary's clavicle, a glancing blow that bent the blade of the
intended instrument of death. Van Houten then hailed Watson, whom she
knew to be a seasoned and merciless killer at this point.
Tex entered the bedroom while Krenwinkle left it and Van Houten stood
guard in the doorway.
After stabbing Rosemary LaBianca, Tex commanded that Van Houten to
engage in the carnage, telling her to "Do something" to prove her
mettle. Van Houten stabbed their victim 16 times in the lower back
and buttocks. Some of the wounds likely were inflicted after Rosemary
LaBianaca was dead, according to the coroner's report.
Van Houten has testified at various parole hearings that she believed
LaBianca was dead when she stabbed her, but at other times, confessed
she didn't know or wasn't sure. In all, Rosemary LaBianca was stabbed 41 times.
The bloody Tex Watson took a shower in the LaBianca's bathroom after
the mruders. After carefully removing fingerprints from the rooms,
Van Houten put on Rosemary LaBianca's clothes and took some food from
the refrigerator. Krenwinkle wrote "Rise " and "Death to Pigs" on the
inside walls of the house and "Helter Skealter" [SIC] on the
refrigerator Leno LaBianca's blood. All were references from songs on
The Beatles's White Album.
As the pièce de résistance to their horrific act, Krenwinkle took a
two-tined carving fork from the kitchen and stabbed his lifeless body
with it seven times, leaving it stuck it in his stomach. She also
stuck a steak knife in his throat.
Before exiting the house, Krenwinkle reportedly told Van Houten and
Tex something along the lines, "This will freak out their children
when they come to Sunday dinner tomorrow."
Trial of the Century
Police raided the Spahn Ranch on August 16, 1969 and arrested Manson
Family members on suspicion of auto theft. After being let go, the
Family was busted again on similar charges in October. One member of
the Garbage People implicated Susan Atkins in the Gary Hinman
killing, and she was booked for murder. While in stir, Atkins spilled
her guts about the Tate-LaBianca murders to a jail house informant
and the jig was up.
Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel were arrested in
California. The police put out arrest warrants for Tex Watson and
Linda Kasabian. Tex was busted in Texas while Kasabian turned herself
in in New Hampshire.
Van Houten, Atkins and Krenwinkle were tried along with Charles
Manson for the Tate-LaBianca murders in one of the "Trials of the
Century" that take the media by storm every decade. Linda Kasabian,
who had turned state's evidence for a promise of immunity from
prosecution, was the star witness.
Tex Watson, who was fighting extradition to California, was not a
part of the trial, which allowed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to focus
on Manson as the "master mind" of the "Helter Skelter" plot. (If
Bugliosi is to be believed, the murders were part of an insane scheme
to incite a race war that would leave Charles Manson king of the world.)
Many observers originally thought that Leslie Van Houten might get a
lesser sentence as she was the youngest (and prettiest) of the Manson
girls and (apparently) was not as fanatically committed to Manson as
was Atkins and Krenwinkle. However, she proved to be a terrible
defendant, and before the trial was over, she had lost her defense
attorney, who likely had been murdered by other members of The Family.
Not only was Van Houten uncooperative, she joined Atkins and
Krenwinkle in being disruptive throughout the long trial. That she
was prone to giggling jags during testimony revealing details of the
murders damned her in the eyes of the jury.
On March 29, 1971, Leslie Van Houten was found guilty along with
Charles Manson the two other Manson Girls and sentenced to death.
Their death sentences were commuted to life in prison (which carried
with it the possibility of parole) when the California Supreme Court
struck down the death penalty in 1972.
Retrial & Parole
Leslie Van Houten's appeal for a retrial due to the fact she was not
adequately represented at the original trial was granted. She was
retried in 1977, but the jury could not agree on her guilt or
innocence. After the hung jury, she went free on bond, but was found
guilty in yet another trial and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Eighteen times she has been before the parole board, and 18 times her
request for parole was denied. A 2002 appeal of her 2000 parole board
rejection gave her hope for a time, after her case came in front of a
sympathetic judge. However, Judge Bob Krug's order for a new parole
hearing was overturned by a higher court.
Leslie Van Houten is incarcerated at the California Institution for
Women in Chino, along with Patricia Krenwinkel. Fellow inmate Susan
Atkins died there earlier this year, after being denied a
compassionate release despite suffering a fatal illness.
While in prison, Van Houten married an ex-convict in 1981 whom she
later divorced. Apparently, he was planning to break her out of
prison in 1983. Van Houten denied that she had any inkling of what he
was up to, and claimed she ceased talking to him after his arrest.
Other than that, she has caused no disciplinary problems at all in
her time in stir. She has been described as a model prisoner by her supporters.
In prison, she works as a college tutor and is matriculating in a
master's degree program in the humanities.
According to movie director John Waters, a self-described "fan" of
Leslie Van Houten (he dedicated his 1972 movie Pink Flamingos to the
Manson Girls and his 1974 film Female Trouble to Tex Watson), Leslie
Van Houten should be released from prison as she was only
19-years-old and belonged to the mind-control cult of Charles Manson
when she committed two murders. Waters, who has corresponded with
Leslie for years, claims she has remorse for the killings and taken
full responsibility for her actions. He claims she has matured in
prison and undergone remarkable psychological growth.
Van Houten's father, Paul, has claimed that his daughter reformation
and penitence for her crimes is "unbelievable." ABC News quoted Paul
Van Houten saying, "I'll guarantee you there are people on the
outside who haven't done as well."
She has at least three more years before she can prove that again to
a parole board.
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