We chatted about cold cases and then about the mutual friends we had seen that night, and then there was a lull in the conversation.
“So . . . you’ve spent time with Leslie.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve gotten to know her pretty well.”
I couldn’t think of anything more to say. Apparently, neither could he. Another silence.
Before I realized it, I was enveloped by some sort of altered state. Perhaps it was the romantic lighting that created a dreamy atmosphere. The soft light erased the harshness in Steve’s face and relaxed his bearing. He looked like the affable, sweet boy I’d known in high school. Or maybe it was the music. The Four Preps had just finished singing “26 Miles” (“Twenty-six miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me”), a song about love and hope, and now they were singing “Big Man” (“You were a big man yesterday, but boy, you ought to see me now”), a song about regret.
I felt expansive and sentimental and in that moment I believed anything was possible.
“Steve,” I said, “I have an idea.”
He said nothing. He simply stared at me, waiting. I was waiting, too—waiting for the idea to fully hatch. I thought about how Steve Hodel had described Steve Kay: “a stand-up guy.” And I thought about how every once in a while 60 Minutes has a segment on a district attorney who, years after prosecuting a criminal, advocates for him or her, either because of new evidence pointing to the individual’s innocence or because of a dramatic transformation.
“Now that you don’t have any official role,” I said, “you could get to know Leslie. You wouldn’t have to tell anyone. You could just go and visit.” I knew Leslie well enough to know that she wouldn’t exploit such a visit for her own gain. I truly believed that.
“Why in the world would I want to do that?” he said. The soft lighting wasn’t soft enough to disguise the look of horror on his face.
“If nothing else, wouldn’t it be interesting? In all these years you’ve only talked to her in front of the parole panel. It’s adversarial. . . you can’t get to know someone that way.” I reminded him that he once said that of the three women, Leslie was the one he thought could someday be released.
“That was before she married that guy. It showed how bad her judgment is.”
“Steve, that was in 1981.” I swept my arm across the aging crowd in the ballroom—the paunches, the gray hair, the wrinkles. “Don’t you think we’ve all changed in the past thirty years?”
He smiled, a tight and not particularly friendly smile. I realized that approach would never work. He was suspicious of change. He views all of Leslie’s progress as one long manipulation; the more people in the outside world, no matter how distinguished, who vouch for her, the more entrenched his opposition. In Steve’s world, it’s all a ruse, a veneer.
As I searched my brain to come up with another argument, he pulled out what he considered his heaviest artillery. “You have to remember,” he said, “they wanted to start a race war.”
I don’t know if my mouth flew open, but I was surprised enough that it might have. The obsessive, nonsensical fixation of this remark astonished me. Not because I hadn’t heard it before. I had. But not for a few years so I had assumed he’d dropped that argument. For decades he’d been quoted as saying that he would never let up on these people because they wanted to destroy society in a race war and have hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered. But somehow, I thought that his fury about Leslie’s short, bad marriage, which seemed to intensify every decade, had supplanted it.
Steve is a nice guy, a decent person, a smart man, but there’s lunacy to this. The race war was part of Manson’s delusional system, a psychosis one psychiatrist at the first trial characterized as a folie a famille because it engulfed the whole group. Remember the grand plan? They would leave a wallet from the LaBianca house in a gas station in a black neighborhood, the blacks would be blamed for the murder of the LaBiancas, and years and years of repressed rage would explode and result in a massive race war. The Manson group would escape the bedlam by driving their dune buggies into the hole in the earth in Death Valley to wait it out. A golden rope would lower them, dune buggies and all, into the bottomless pit, a kind of Shangri-la where none of them would age. They would wait out the race war in this paradise and then re-emerge after the troubles were over. The blacks, now victorious, would immediately see them as allies, and because Manson believed that blacks were inferior and incapable of governing, they would enlist him and his band of loonies, with their superior knowledge and wisdom, to lead the country. The Family would move from Shangri-la to the White House.
My expression must have communicated my incredulity.
“Sure, it might have been unrealistic,” he said, “but that doesn’t matter. What counts is that they wanted to.”
In Steve’s static world consistency is the premier virtue, and from that vantage point, Manson is the one worthy of trust. The first time he said this to me, I thought he was kidding because he had a smile on his face. But then he said it again. This time he wasn’t smiling, but I got the feeling that he was pleased by the surprise on my face. Like the race war argument, this was a position he had held for a very long time. I came across a May 14, 1989, article in the Los Angeles Times where, in talking about the three women and Tex, Steve explained to the reporter why, of all of the former members of the Manson Family, it was Charles Manson who earned his respect.
“Charlie has changed so little over the years,” Steve said to me with, though faint, an unmistakable look of fondness on his face. “He’s basically the same old Charlie.”
EPILOGUE
Spring/Summer of 2016
On April 14, 2016, a panel of the California Parole board recommended parole for Leslie Van Houten. Before that, she had been denied parole nineteen times. Near the end of the five-hour hearing, Commissioner Ali Zarrinnam cited her decades of favorable psychological evaluations and her exemplary prison record. He said they had looked for even a single indication to demonstrate evidence of current dangerousness. “After these forty-six years . . . there just isn’t one anymore.” He told Leslie she deserved to be released. She was sixty-six. She’d been in prison since she was nineteen.
Word of the parole panel’s decision quickly spread throughout the prison. As Leslie, in a stunned state, left the hearing room to walk back to her unit, the inmates she walked past in the yard stopped what they were doing and started to applaud. The younger women knew her as a mentor; the older women knew her as a friend. They all knew how hard she had worked on herself and how much, year after year, she had given to their community.
The decision was a shock to both sides of the Leslie divide, but the journey wasn’t over. The ruling had yet to be reviewed by the parole board’s legal team and, if upheld by that body, then forwarded to Governor Jerry Brown, who would either affirm or reject the recommendation.
The battle lines were drawn.
Leslie’s allies—her lawyer, friends, and family—were optimistic. Her best friend since childhood said she believed, truly believed, that the governor would do the right thing. “For the first time in more than forty years, I’m not worried about her. I know she’s going to be released.” A self-proclaimed “friend of Leslie” established a Facebook page devoted to gaining support for her parole.
The other side was fired up and immediately launched an effort to reverse the recommendation. Debra Tate, Sharon Tate’s youngest sister, though she had no connection to the LaBianca killings, led the charge to keep Leslie behind bars, by launching a change.org petition. To the anti-Leslie forces, rehabilitation is beside the point. “Maybe Leslie Van Houten has been a model prisoner,” Cory LaBianca, Mr. LaBianca’s daughter told reporters, “but you know what? We still suffer our loss. My father will never be paroled. My stepmother will never get her life back.”
Jackie Lacey, the L.A. district attorney, wouldn’t even concede that Leslie is rehabilitated. In an open letter to the governor she claimed
that Leslie is a threat to public safety because she continues to maintain “a disturbingly distorted view of Charles Manson.” When I first read the letter, her accusations were so extreme and off base, I wondered if she had the wrong file. Her conclusions were shockingly inaccurate and had no bearing on any psychological evaluation or report that had been done on Leslie during the past four decades. Lacey declared that Leslie “clearly lacks insight, genuine remorse, and an understanding of the magnitude of her crimes.” The woman she described was unrecognizable to anyone who knew Leslie.
It was difficult to predict what Jerry Brown would do. When I worked for California Public Radio in the late 1970s, I covered his campaign for re-election. (He served two four-year terms starting in 1975 and was re-elected in 2011. He’s now serving his fourth term, which will end in 2018.) On two campaign swings through the state I traveled on the press bus with him, and there was ample opportunity to talk to him about a range of issues. He was unapologetically in favor of punishment as a guiding principle. He saw no reason to spend money on rehabilitation because he said there was no evidence that it worked.
I also knew this from a personal angle. My brother had applied to him for a pardon. When he was interviewing criminal lawyers to represent him, they all said, to a person, that it was a hopeless endeavor: Brown was a more strident law-and-order governor than Ronald Reagan. But since that time he’d served two terms as mayor of Oakland, a city with a large African American population, and he saw firsthand how the punitive approach was ruining lives and destroying communities. There was reason to believe Brown would be sympathetic to Leslie’s release.
On July 22, 2016, three and a half months after the parole board’s decision, Brown overturned the recommendation. While he acknowledged the progress Leslie has made, he declared that she posed an unreasonable danger to society “because it remains unclear how she had transformed herself from a smart, driven young woman to ‘a member of one of the most notorious cults in history and an eager participant in the cold-blooded and gory murder of innocent victims.’ ”
Within days of Brown’s decision, Leslie’s attorney, Richard Pfeiffer, filed a writ of habeas corpus in San Bernardino Superior Court. In October 2016 Superior Court Judge William C. Ryan issued an eighteen-page ruling upholding Brown’s reversal, claiming that there is “some evidence” that Leslie still presents an unreasonable threat to society and adding that he respected Brown’s broad discretion in such decisions.
Leslie’s parole decision came at a critical turning point in the state’s criminal justice system. From a political angle, there is no one more central to this than Jerry Brown and no inmate more central to the issues of rehabilitation and parole than Leslie Van Houten.
In 1976 Brown signed into law the Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act, which greatly reduced opportunities for parole, and stated directly that the purpose of imprisonment is punishment. The result has been catastrophic, not only for California but, because the state led the way legislatively for the whole country. We’ve lost a couple of generations of young people who lived large portions of their lives behind bars where they didn’t receive necessary education, adequate vocational training, or effective therapeutic intervention.
Brown, who now acknowledges the problem, is determined to reverse the damage. He sponsored the Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016, which appeared on the state’s November ballot and passed. The bill reinstates rehabilitation as a goal for the prison system and will vastly expand parole opportunities, shifting power to make parole decisions away from prosecutors and back to parole boards.
It was Leslie’s bad luck that at the very moment Brown was gaining support for his initiative, the decision about her parole landed on his desk. If her crime had not been so notorious, she could have been an exemplar of his goals: a prisoner rewarded for good behavior, for taking an active role in her rehabilitation, for taking advantage of educational opportunities. Done, done, and done.
At the end of July, about a week after Brown reversed the parole board’s decision, I visited Leslie at Frontera. She said she understood the governor’s dilemma. She knew it would have been difficult for him to be associated with the release of a member of the Manson Family while trying to gain support for the bill.
“He was in a tough spot,” she said. “Opponents of his initiative would use my release against him.”
She said she was in agreement with what he was trying to accomplish. Over the years she has witnessed so many young women come to Frontera with no education, no skills, and no hope of acquiring either while they serve extraordinarily long sentences. Many of them are young mothers with young children. “They don’t have a chance and neither do their kids.
“This initiative needs to pass. It’s important. And I know it would have been harder to pass if I was in any way associated with it.
“Of course I’m torn,” she said. She looked at me with a bittersweet smile. “I’m torn between my desire to get out of prison after more than forty-five years and what I know is best for the community.”
Meanwhile, the saga continues. In December 2016, the California Supreme Court denied a petition that Leslie’s attorney, Rich Pfeiffer, had filed seeking a review of her case. In the petition, Pfeiffer contended that the governor did not focus on Van Houten’s “current dangerousness” but instead focused on “a crime committed by a youthful offender almost 47 years ago, and a factor that can never change regardless of any amount of rehabilitation that is accomplished.” He asserted that the governor did not have evidence to support his finding that Leslie remains an unreasonable risk to public safety.
After the Court ruled, Pfeiffer announced that he’s not giving up.
In their response, attorneys from the California Attorney General’s office countered that the governor “properly considered the aggravated nature of Van Houten’s crimes” to assess her “current dangerousness,” and that the governor’s findings are “reasonably supported by ample evidence in the record.”
Furthermore, according to the attorney general’s office, “Van Houten eagerly carried out some of the most infamous crimes in history with her fellow Manson Family members and she continues to downplay her participation in the murders.”
Once again, Leslie appeared before the parole board on September 6, 2017.
Fall 2017
On September 6, 2017, Leslie appeared at her twenty-first parole hearing. The predictable parade of folks opposing her release showed up: LaBianca family members, Debra Tate, representing Louis Smaldino, the LaBianca’s nephew (though he also attended and testified), and Deputy D.A. Donna Lebowitz. For the second time in a little over a year, their objections didn’t prevail. In spite of their claims that Leslie was not rehabilitated, that she was still a danger to society, that she was a “narcissist who doesn’t care about anyone but herself,” the parole panel, once again, chose to believe the testimony of people who actually know her—prison staff who had worked with her, professors who had taught her, psychiatric professionals who had evaluated her, and friends who had known her for decades. The consensus of those people was that she was not a danger to society and had the character and experience to be an asset to the community.
Presiding Commissioner Brian Roberts and Deputy Commissioner Dale Pomerantz said that in addition to Leslie’s stellar disciplinary record, they were influenced by her accomplishments, pointing out that she had earned her bachelor’s degree as well as a master’s degree in counseling, had been certified as a counselor, and had headed numerous programs to help inmates.
“You’ve been a facilitator, you’ve been a tutor, and you’ve been giving back for quite a number of years,” Roberts said to Leslie. Taking into account her entire time of incarceration, they concluded that she no longer poses an “unreasonable risk of danger or a threat to public safety.”
Before closing, however, Roberts sounded a cautionary note. He told Leslie that parole officials had heard from “tens of thousands” of people who didn’t want her
released, and he warned her that living in society “will not be easy.”
“So, with that,” he said, “we’d like to wish you good luck.”
After their recommendation on September 6, the Board of Parole Hearings had 120 days to review the panel’s decision, and Governor Jerry Brown had 30 days after that to confirm, reverse, or modify the decision.
“If he rejects it, we’ll go back to court,” Van Houten’s attorney, Rich Pfeiffer, told Vice News. “I’m not going away, and she’s going home.”
As of this writing, the governor has not made his decision.
Charles Manson, 1969.
Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo.
The house at Barker Ranch.
William Girard/Alamy Stock Photo.
Leslie Van Houten leaving the courthouse in 1978 after her third trial.
AP Photo/Nick Ut.
Leslie Van Houten at age 53, pleading her case to the parole board in 2002.
Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo.
Patricia Krenwinkel, March 3, 1970, as she entered the Los Angeles Superior Court for arraignment on murder charges.
Zuma Press, Inc./Press/Alamy Stock Photo.
Patricia Krenwinkel, 63, appearing before the parole board in January 2011.
AP Photo/Reed Saxon.
During the August 1970 trial, and for years afterward, Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel buttressed each other with Manson’s pathological ideology.
The Manson Women and Me Page 31