She was 19-years-old Leslie van Houten when she joined the Manson Family and she still didn’t know she was in for a life in prison.
That attractive and smiling teenager, with youth intact on her skin, today is a 73-year-old woman with gray hair and the wrinkles that the passage of time has chiseled on her face.
This is how he appeared in public for the last time in his most recent appearance before the prison board. She was wearing prisoner’s butane overalls and was handcuffed and chained at the ankles, surrounded by police officers and officials.
After more than half a century behind bars for abominable crimes, he is today in the process of recovering his smile, dressing in civilian clothes, having his chains removed and returning to the streets. He has never been closer to that dream.
Van Houten, who was part of the doomsday cult led by Charles Manson, is entitled to parole, a California appeals court has ruled.
This decision, which does not imply automatic freedom, reverses the order of Governor Gavin Newson to deny that possibility, once the board recommended the new status in 2020. But the governor, to whom the final grace corresponded, considered that she represented “an unreasonable danger to society if he was released from prison.”
That was the fifth time the California prison commission had recommended his release since 2016, and each time Newson or his predecessor, Jerry Brown, refused to sign.
“There is no evidence to support the governor’s conclusion,” a Los Angeles court replied this week.
Manson, the image of white supremacist evil, was trumpeting a race war. In August 1969, his followers entered the home of actress Sharon Tate and director Roman Polanski (he was in Europe) and killed the (pregnant) hostess and four guests.
Van Houten did not participate. He did the next day in the massacre of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. Manson drove them there in his vehicle. His faithful stabbed the marriage with cruelty. Van Houten participated directly in the murder of Rosemary, whom he strangled with a cable while another punched her, and she herself did it on 14 occasions. She then used her blood to write messages on the wall. On Leno’s stomach they carved the word “war.”
His misdeeds marked an era. They were sentenced to death in 1971. But the state’s abolition of the death penalty left their punishment at life imprisonment.
Governor Newson has ten days to appeal the appeal decision. In case of doing so, the period in which the prison would be maintained, there are many possibilities that the Supreme Court will ratify the release decision. Should the governor let the deadline run, Van Houten would just have to get through a little red tape.
In their resolution, the judges highlighted that this woman has been an exemplary inmate (“the best record in a California prison”), who has earned a Master’s Degree in Humanities in prison and has participated in mental health programs.
“I am sorry,” she said in her last appearance and explained, without making an excuse, that the leader was “like Jesus Christ” for the group. Charles Manson died in prison of natural causes in 2017.
