Leslie Van Houten was little more than a child when – at just 19 years old – she carried out Charles Manson’s order to stab to death Los Angeles grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, in their Californian home in Los Feliz. It was August of ’69.
She who carried out that order resulting from the mind of a man obsessed with sex and satanic murders ended up in prison knowing she had to stay there for life. And instead in fifteen days, after 53 years behind bars, she will be free again. The news that California Governor Gavin Newsom will no longer oppose her release went around the world in a few hours.
The woman who is now 73 years old with long white hair and glasses, did not participate in the massacre of Cielo Drive, when the sect exterminated Sharon Tate and her guests, but her image nevertheless embodied that of absolute Evil. That terror that paralyzed Hollywood in the 1960s due to a series of murders so heinous that they will end up in a chapter of “Once upon a time in Hollywood” by Quentin Tarantino. In those years Leslie Van Houten felt invincible.
The girl sank the knife into the chest of the poor spouses as Manson had asked her, the sacred head of the Family, a bunch of crazy criminals who had decided to leave behind a long trail of blood. In July they had killed a music teacher, then they would have massacred a man, Donald Shea, guilty of marrying a black woman. Watson stabbed Leno, then unleashed his fury on his wife, along with Van Houten and another girl, Patricia Krenwinkel. In all, they stabbed the woman forty-one times. On the belly of her husband they carved the word “War”.
The massacre of Cielo Drive
The day before the LaBianca massacre, Manson’s adepts carried out what will go down in history as the Cielo Drive massacre. It was the night between 8 and 9 August 1969. Four members of the Family entered the house at 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, where there had been a party hosted by young actress Sharon Tate, 26, recently married to director Roman Polanski. 22-caliber revolvers, kitchen knives and a nylon rope, the adepts killed the actress, eight and a half months pregnant, along with three friends and an 18-year-old boy who was leaving the caretaker’s house. Polanski was in London.
The Penalties of Manson and Leslie
After the massacre, the family members stopped to eat in the house, taking what was in the refrigerator. Then they showered, went out, and hitchhiked home. Arrested shortly after, they were all sentenced to death, but capital punishment was abolished the following year, in ’72. Watson, who is 77, was serving a life sentence, but now comes his release. Manson, arrested two months later, died in 2017 in prison. He was 83 years old.