Role Models

by John Waters

  “Not taking responsibility” is another charge thrown at Leslie each time she comes up for parole. Because she once said she stabbed Mrs. LaBianca 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 LaBianca 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 LaBianca’s nieces and nephews to attend, and their words were devastating. “How many times must we come?!” asked an indignant LaBianca nephew, frustrated at having to appear yet again, given what he thought was Leslie’s ironclad 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 LaBianca 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 LaBianca 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 codefendant Patricia Krenwinkel who plunged it into Mr. LaBianca’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. LaBianca, 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 shame 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 LaBianca 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 LaBianca 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 LaBianca family many times at earlier parole hearings. “I feel great shame and remorse when I think of the LaBianca 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 TV, not on videocassettes bought and sold online 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 LaBianca 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, Debra Tate, sister of Sharon, who is not allowed to testify at Leslie’s hearings 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 LaBianca, 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 LaBianca 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 her hatred of the perpetrators. Leslie must have been encouraged to read the words of the father of the murder victim Myrna 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 schoolgirls 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.”

  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 [being] 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 wisecracked, “I’m sure Leno and Rosemary LaBianca 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 Sequeira, 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 were 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 2007 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 LaBianca 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 sixties, 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 despondent middle-aged codefendant 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 hippie 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 her outside 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 onetime 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 difficult 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 evidently planning some harebrained 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 judg
ment,” 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 1978, imagining “a private and humble life.” And finally, in the nineties, 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.”