She was back to normal now, Keith assured us, returned to a stable and healthy state of mind. Though we were impressed by Keith's sincerity, we were neverthdess skeptical about Leslie's transformation. By now we were completely willing to admit that an individual could snap out of that kind of mental state. But, according to Keith, Leslie hadn't emerged in a sudden moment of renewed awareness. The change had taken place slowly, he observed, over a period of years. From his description, it seemed likely that, not having been determinedly and skillfully deprogrammed, Leslie could still be in some kind of confused, floating state beyond the detection and comprehension of prison officials and psychiatrists. On the other hand, we both knew that if Keith's report of Leslie's re-emergence was accurate, it could not only confirm our thesis of snapping but expand it in a way we had not anticipated. Above all, it would demonstrate that even the most severe forms of information disease can be cured. We also knew that, if Keith was right, as her lawyer he would face a new and almost unfathomably complex legal challenge. Not only were there no precedents in defense of this kind of sudden personality change among traditional insanity contentions, there were no established criteria whatsoever for a jury to use in order to reach a judicious verdict. Before we could begin to offer any interpretation from our perspective, we told Keith, we would have to see and hear for ourselves how Leslie experienced her re-emergence.
The following day Keith accompanied us to L.A.'s Sybil Brand Women's Jail, where Leslie was being held while awaiting her retrial. By agreement with Keith, we promised for legal reasons to refrain from discussing the killings or the events immediately surrounding them.
It took us over two hours to get through Sybil Brand's rigorous security procedures. Finally, after each of us had passed a computerized identity check and a thorough inspection that included fingerprinting, mug shots, frisking, and electronic weapons detection, we were allowed to pass through a series of iron gates, clanging doors, and bulletproof partitions into a hot, rectangular visiting room just large enough to contain a wooden table and four chairs. After a short wait, a uniformed prison guard escorted Leslie Van Houten into the room.
She was wearing a floppy, navy blue sweater over her dark gray prison dress. Her long brown hair was neat and shiny, with bangs curving down to her eyebrows. Although slightly pallid from her years in prison, she looked almost wholesomely attractive. There were tears in her eyes. As we looked on, she greeted Keith warmly, like a close friend and confidant, telling him that she had been taken from her cell into a dim, sweltering holding room and given no information about why she was being detained. For the two hours we were being checked, she had sat in this small, barren room. It was, she explained, typical of the impersonal treatment she had come to know and expect, yet she couldn't help crying every once in a while, she said, over the boredom, isolation, and daily humiliations of prison life.
Keith offered her a cigarette and lit it for her, giving her a moment to relax before we began our interview. He updated Leslie on the latest legal developments in her case; then he introduced the two of us and told her a little about our backgrounds, our project, and the lunchtime conversation we had had the day before. Leslie seemed to grasp our mission immediately. She turned toward us openly. When we told her that we were interested in focusing on her transformation of personality, she said that she would be very interested in talking about it and that she would be happy to cooperate with our questions in any way she could.
It was difficult to match this woman we were observing with the headlines' cold "thrill killer" of nineteen who, when asked at the trial if she were sorry for what she had done, replied blankly, "Sorry is only a five-letter word." At twenty-seven, Leslie seemed sober and thoughtful, in sharp contrast to her sensationalized media image. Her eyes were soft and alive, her smile relaxed, her posture altogether natural. It seemed to us very possible that she had, indeed, broken free of Manson's spell. For the next two hours Leslie talked easily, with full awareness and composure, commenting on the significance or irrelevance to her plight of a number of experiences from her childhood and high school years. She looked back at her deep and continuing relationships with her family, especially her mother who had visited her every Sunday since her conviction. She explained to us with great clarity the paths by which she went into and came out of her nightmare existence in the Manson Family. As we addressed the question of her initial transformation, Leslie recalled the naïveté with which she first became involved with Manson. After our months of interviewing for this book, we found this part of her story extremely familiar.
"I didn't know Charlie had studied Scientology," she said. "I never realized how he manipulated our minds with all his Eastern philosophy about getting us out of the ego and not thinking."
According to Leslie, "the way Charlie did it" was through strict isolation and unrelenting intimidation. "The isolation was the major factor," she said. "We completely severed ourselves from the rest of the world." Then she went on to describe Manson's manner of capitalizing on each Family member's individual weaknesses and needs.
"I was always frightened of not being accepted," she admitted, "even when I was in school. But Charlie played on that; he saw a danger in my humor and outgoingness. He put me down all the time, and I went into a shell. The whole thing just was not me. He'd try to make me feel I was missing something. He said I didn't know what was happening and that I was really stupid."
As we talked, Leslie confirmed our suspicions regarding the role of LSD in the Manson murders. The drug issue had never been completely settled in the case. Attorneys and expert witnesses on beth sides during the original trial seemed unable to determine whether the Family's frequent use of powerful psychedelics could be blamed for transforming innocent teenagers into a gang of crazed, unfeeling murderers. Even today, almost a decade later, the mind-altering power of LSD still awaits full medical interpretation. Use of the drug has been widely linked to hallucinations and distortions of perception, and there is a great deal of evidence indicating that young people on LSD may become extremely vulnerable to suggestion. Yet, despite the drug's observed physical effects, most researchers agree that if LSD has any pronounced effects on behavior whatsoever, it is not to make the user crazed and murderous but generally passive and nonviolent.
Leslie didn't discount the importance of LSD in the activities and rituals of the Family, but she stressed that like most Family members she had had extensive experience with the drug before she ever came into contact with Manson. She took "really mellow trips" regularly on weekends during her high school years, she told us, and none ever led to violence or violent impulses. A child of California in the sixties, when psychedelics were inseparable from the rest of the smog of the cultural environment, Leslie knew what to expect from the drug.
She did not, however, know what to expect from Manson.
"I felt an immediate affinity with the Family," she said, recalling her attitude in the beginning. "They lived that kind of 'acid reality' everyone was looking for at the time. It wasn't until the last four months that things started getting really weird. Then, out at Spahn's ranch, instead of coming back down after each LSD trip, Charlie would reinforce everything that was going on in the Family. He would make gestures that would take root in our minds. One time he acted out the entire crucifixion, going through contortions of pain and making really ugly faces. Then he would play card tricks, and because he was quick with his hands, we would all think we had seen a miracle performed by a very special person. But he was always so unpredictable. He would play Beatle records over and over, saying to us, 'Can you hear it? They're talking to me!' Then he would read from the Book of Revelation and say that it was calling for us to find a hole in the desert and stay there until the race war was over. To this day, I don't know if he really believed what he was saying, or if everything he did was just to get even with the world."
Listening to Leslie, we began to see clearly how Manson had manipulated his followers during their frequent LSD trips t
ogether by leading intense role-playing sessions and fantasy games for up to eight hours at a time which, as Leslie said, "took root" in their minds. Under Charlie's direction, they played pirates and maidens, cowboys and Indians, devils and witches, in scenes replete with violent and sadistic imagery. When it came time to play Helter Skelter, life in the Family had become a game with no borders on fantasy and reality, an extended "trip" that kept up long after any chemical effects had worn off. Moreover, using the same kinds of techniques employed in many cults, Manson guided and badgered his followers into lasting states of confusion and not thinking that laid them open to every suggestion and command he gave. At all times, and especially during the Family's psychedelic episodes, Charlie's adept wordplay hammered home the final spikes of snapping.
"Being around Charlie during that time was like playing a game of Scrabble," Leslie told us, aptly characterizing Manson's method of inducing madness. "He never labeled anything as exactly like it was. He'd say, 'The question is in the answer,' and 'No sense makes sense' -- things that would make your mind stop functioning. Then it wasn't a matter of questioning when things began to get bad. We'd stopped questioning months before."
Skipping over the period of the killings, we asked Leslie when she first started to feel herself coming out from under Manson's spell.
She thought about it for a moment. "When we were in court, I was still feeling like I was with him," she said slowly, "but toward the end of the trial he started to mess with me. He was playing his same old games, but I was starting to break away. If he said to do something, I'd do it. But my heart wasn't in it anymore."
Leslie's own description of the trial suggested to us that, had the proceedings been conducted differently and the defendants been separated from one another, she might have broken free of Manson sooner.
"I really didn't know I was under his control," she said. "In the courtroom I was only starting to hesitate and feel stupid, but just being locked up in this place was not enough to free me."
Leslie looked back on that first trial with some bitterness. "I know I was on trial for something horrible," she acknowledged, but she seemed to resent the attitude of Bugliosi and others who displayed little interest in finding out what had happened to her mind.
"Bugliosi was always saying it was 'bad blood,' "she told us, "but he never asked us any questions. One second we were Charlie's robots; the next we were completely responsible for what we did. He never looked for answers. He only looked for the conviction."
With so many factors working against her, Leslie's real "coming to," as she called it, didn't begin until after the trial, when the clamor had subsided and she, along with other Family members, was awaiting her execution.
"When they left us on death row, we were in complete isolation," she recalled. "For almost three years, I was only in touch with my parents and family. At first, when I realized how much my family loved me, I felt guilty, terribly guilty, for having hurt my mother. But I hadn't even started thinking about the crime itself. I was still thinking about the revolution that would come."
We asked her if during those years she ever felt herself awaken from her cult state of mind in what some former cult members had described to us as a sudden Aha! experience.
"Sometimes," she said, "I could fed myself on the verge of that kind of experience. But I always ran from those moments because, at the time, my mind really fought that more than anything."
It was during her years on death row, however, that Leslie did in fact snap out of her altered state, not in one overwhelming moment but in what appeared to be a series of partial deprogrammings effected inadvertently by a prison psychiatrist and another condemned prisoner. Neither of them possessed any intimate knowledge of deprogramming, but both simply talked straight to Leslie, showing their genuine care and concern and, in the process, helping her to start thinking for herself.
"Slowly," said Leslie, "without realizing it, the prison psychiatrist got me to start questioning things in myself again. Another woman on death row helped me even more. I'd be talking to her, and she would say, 'That doesn't make any sense. Explain yourself.' And I knew I couldn't. I thought, 'If I'm not making any sense, then maybe there's something wrong with what I'm saying.' "
Through these informal confrontations, Leslie actually pulled herself up by her own mental bootstraps, yet she recalled the very real pain she experienced trying to break her mind free in this manner. As we listened to her and watched her, we were aware of the resemblance between Leslie's plight and that of so many other cult members we had interviewed.
"When I'd be questioned and not have any answers," she said, "I'd go blank and become frustrated, like when a machine jams and just sits there making noise. In my head, nothing was functioning. More than anything, I was trying to understand, breaking down stiff little slogans that had been drilled into me every day for months."
Eventually, the breakthrough came, and the spark that set it off was California's abolishment of the death penalty. For Leslie, the hope of leaving prison alive spurred her on to active thought.
"When they abolished the death penalty," she said, "the director of corrections brought the three of us together and said it was up to us to prove we could handle it. For me, that made all the difference in the world, when I saw that they were going to give me the responsibility for my future."
With death row no longer in existence, Leslie and the other two women were held in a special security unit constructed for them at the prison. It was during this time, isolated from the other prisoners, Leslie said, that she regained full control over her thought processes.
"In the long run I'm glad I spent so much time in isolation," she said, "because it gave me a chance to get to know myself again. I continued to receive letters from other women in the Family, but when it came time to write and talk to them, I realized that there was no relating at all. I was seeing them in their absurdity."
Like other newly deprogrammed individuals, however, Leslie had the most trouble confronting her fellow Family members, who were not making the same progress she was. Now back in Sybil Brand while her former sisters remained at Frontera, Leslie admitted to being proud of the progress she had made.
"I don't mean to be bragging," she said, "but out of everyone, I'm probably the only one who has done well."
Since her re-emergence Leslie has concentrated her efforts on becoming an active participant in prison life, serving as editor of the prison newspaper and devoting much of her time to reading and writing in an effort to prepare herself for release or parole -- whenever that should come.
"I hope that after I'm out for a while," she said, trying not to sound overconfident, "once I'm used to being out there again, I can do something, not as a big cause but just to bring to light some of the things that can happen to young people. That's one thing that never came out in the trial."
Hearing her speak, we had to agree with Keith that Leslie's newfound stability appeared to be genuine. But was it really? Could it be, as a future jury or parole board might suspect, that she was simply pulling a clever con to win sympathy and approval? We weighed the evidence before us and, after our numerous interviews with former cult members, felt confident that Leslie displayed the vital signs of full recovery. We noted her poised, natural appearance, her interest and attention as we spoke, and the clarity of her understanding and expression regarding her most personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences. As our interview ended and the guard came to escort her back to her cell, Leslie's departing words suggested to us that she had not only regained control of her mind but that she had already embarked on a new and meaningful course of action.
"My coming to was slow," she emphasized, "but I've made every step on my own, and I'll never lose it. I have a complete drive to make it. I'm going to make sense out of it all, and I know I'm going to be heard."
On August 6, 1977, a California Superior Court judge declared a mistrial in Leslie Van Houten's second murder trial when the jury reported that
it was hopelessly deadlocked after twenty-five days of deliberation. Five of the twelve jury members voted to accept Maxwell Keith's argument that Leslie suffered from diminished mental capacity at the time she went along on the LaBianca murder mission, but no unanimous verdict could be reached. A third trial began as this book went to press.
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In the years between Leslie's first and second trials, the American public and another jury were confronted with another startling example of the sudden transformation of a young woman into a hardened criminal. On February 4, 1974, nineteen-year-old Patricia Campbell Hearst, granddaughter of legendary publisher William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped at gunpoint from her apartment near the University of California at Berkeley and taken captive by a group of revolutionaries who identified themsalves as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA was a political cult, not a religious one, yet its leader, a charismatic figure named Donald DeFreeze who called himself Field Marshal Cinque, was regarded as a prophet by his followers and commanded total reverence and obedience.
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