"I know I did something that is unforgiveable, but I can create a world where I make amends," Van Houten said. "I'm trying to be someone who lives a life for healing rather than destruction."
"He could never have done what he did without people like me"
[I was] "like a pebble falling in a pond which affected so many people."
"Mr. and Mrs. La Bianca died the worst possible deaths a human being can," she said. "It affected their families. It affected the community of Los Angeles, which lived in fear. And it destroyed the peace movement going on at the time, and tainted everything from 1969 on."
Parole board commissioner Jeffrey Ferguson asked her, "You felt left out and you wanted to be included the next time, is that correct?"
"Yes," Van Houten said, adding that another of the women tried with Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, had been like a sister to her and she knew that Krenwinkel had participated in the first round of killing.
"She had crossed the line in her commitment to the race war and I wanted to cross the line, too. ... It was something that had to be done," she said.
FROM the LA Times:
"I twisted myself to the point where I thought this had to be done and I participated".
Asked if she would have done the same had children been involved, she answered, "I can't say I wouldn't have done that. I'd like to say I wouldn't, but I don't know."
Asked to explain her actions, she said, "I feel that at that point I had really lost my humanity and I can't know how far I would have gone. I had no regard for life and no measurement of my limitations."
19 comments:
Just read this at another link. It sounds like Leslie spoke at length at this hearing basically saying what she should have said years ago, something that is sure to be in her favor. No decision yet but we will probably know by the end of the day today.
All due respect to a great researcher BUT lol
I read all of the parole hearing transcripts and there is nothing new here...
Every time she gives her statement she tries to include something she missed the time before...
she has been perfecting that statement for years- it should be smooth by now...
and she speaks at length these days with her closing statement- she stopped talking about the offense and answering questions a few hearings ago- please let me know if she was willing to do that this time...
I know we all desperately want new news to throw back and forth- nobody more than me.
But the Tex Tapes - LULU getting paroled- we are reaching for straws methinks....
But If I am wrong- then somebody gets some new DVD's to watch...
:)
I am feeling bold after the Gov shot Bruce Down for all the reasons I wrote in my open letter post...
If LULU gets votes today or the Tex Tapes reveal any significant info about a murder that he wasnt charged with already...
my Manson Stash goes to the site to be given away as seen fit...
otherwise I go 3-0 and retire from the prediction business for this year :)
LULU gets enough votes today...
Of course she has to mention the race war thing even though she knows its total bs.
Maybe or maybe not Max...
I could do a pretty impressive post quoting all the Family members who talk about this aspect of charlies preaching. While it PROBABLY is not the motive- it also very much could have been something he was preaching consistently- and who is to know for sure how each and every young person there interpreted it???
I have read so many pages an pages about LULU and her essays and her transcripts and the books about her and her testimony...
Leslie Van Houten was dumb as a rock. she was young and drugged- but I could play you some interviews with her and some transcripts and you listen and just say wow...
She really might have bought it.
I absolutely don't rule that out with this one.
I have written posts and comments after comments about how naive she was regarding parole- for example...
Some of them really did think Helter Skelter was a factor- I have no doubt of it
but was that why Tex and Katie went absolutely berserk?
and how could they have been capable of the carnage they caused??
I still don't know.
The "race war" has always been interpreted as black vs white likely in part due to our historical involvement in slavery. However, maybe the Family felt the entire world was involved in race conflict: for instance, My Lai, the Detroit riots, Honduran Banana growers, and on and on.
The races blending so they were no longer distinguishable was seen as a bad thing by the Family. As "environmentalists," they felt that each race was its own little subspecies that should be conserved and not be tampered with.
This is of course both philosophically and biologically flawed reasoning. For example, intermarriage is the only sure way to guarantee genetic hardiness.
Since the Family saw rich, exploitative white "establishment" people as the cause of all the turmoil in 1969, themselves as the saviors, and each race being worthy of conservation, we might therefore want to interpret Leslie's mention of the "race war" a little bit more broadly.
Just a thought.
Did she say anything else about it?
Just told that testimony hasn't even finished yet
Yeh, this is a long one. Can't be easy on anyone there.
Doubt it's gonna be a quick deliberation either
Yea Leslie may have bought into the Helter Skelter trip at that time. But 44 years later... She knows what was and what wasn't.
I should preface that previous post by saying, for those of you who don't know, the entire prison system has always been a lot like the Internet. Information flows A LOT faster than it does on the outside.
I've said it before...most people in prison know more about what's going on in the "real world" than the people living in it. There's no shortage of truth in the prisons. Out here truth has become an endangered species - nearing extinction.
Do priests believe what the pope preaches? This should be a relatively easy question to answer, or at least as easy as Leslie believing Helter Skelter or not. Yet there are priests who are arrested for molesting boys…. Hmmm. So perhaps they believe in the Holy Scripture, but figure they can absolve themselves right after the act. Or they’re young and confused. Or…. They were attracted to the vocation because of the lofty social status and access to boys, because…. they just wanted to get their rocks off. I suppose it could be any of those potential solutions along with many others, but they obviously aren’t pure in their ethos, nor their ‘explanations’.
Leslie claims that she did believe the race wars were imminent and she was actually going to trigger them via the La Bianca murders. Again I have to apply a teeny weenie bit of critical thought here, in order to keep the wheels from spinning off the wagon, before it goes over the cliffs of low logic. IF (HUGE IF) again that’s IF the Helter Skelter theory was truly embraced by the minions of Manson, THEN why the mayhem and torture?
I’m the Devil and I’m here to do the Devil’s business, or you’re gonna die bitch, are but a few of the well repeated utterances which are totally superfluous and transparent to triggering a race war. How precisely would that diction have translated into the crime scene? It wouldn’t and didn’t. Terrifying and tormenting those victims did nothing for Helter Skelter, and NEVER would have. By deduction and reason anyone can see that the pre-mortem attacks and diction were utterly unnecessary and of high risk.
If I were psycho enough to genuinely believe a preordained race war was about to begin, and some people needed to be killed to get things going, I would have PLANNED things differently. Why not knock out the victims with some chloroform, then dispatch them and display their bodies a la ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to get the message of Helter Skelter across? It would be somewhat more humane and lack the abject horror those people went through while being shot or stabbed (over 100 times?). Or was that what truly attracted Leslie to that task? For such an unwilling participant in the murders, she was sure singing among the loudest during the trail. For all the young and confused talk, Helter Skelter, and other often played rationalizations, I think Leslie just…. wanted to get her sadistic rocks off via torture and murder.
Understandable, but what does that have to do with the law?
Whether or not she got her rocks off her participation was minimal compared to that of mass-murderer Tex.
I'm currently investigating a case in which the 2 defendants were found guilty of 2nd degree murder in a trial where the facts made it very clear the murder was premeditated. The judge knew this to be true and he threw the maximum at 'em. They both did about 20 years and are now free.
The only reason Leslie isn't free is because her name is forever linked to arguably the most infamous crime in American history.
Bobby should've been out a long time ago. How was it that he was convicted of 1st degree murder? He was at Hinman's house for THREE DAYS before he killed him. How is that considered premeditation? Bobby went there to get the money Gary owed for the bad batch of MDA. Gary wouldn't budge. Bobby pleaded with him. Gary wouldn't budge. Things SLOWLY escalated to the point where Gary was killed. They were friends. Bobby didn't go there to kill him.
Manson is another story. He admits going to the LaBianca's before they were killed. That makes him an accomplice to 1st degree murder. So be it. BUT he became known as the great mastermind behind ALL the murders. Hence his Hitler-like status among infamous criminals. If the law were to be abided by, he too would've been out a long time ago.
If the case weren't as famous as it is, chances are they'd all be out by now - minus Tex and Krenwinkle.
Re Bobby.
Premeditation does not require a certain time frame to occur. iirc Bobby has said that once Gary was seriously cut and threatening to go to the police - then it became apparent that he had to be killed. Bobby decided to take Gary's life so that Bobby might avoid prosecution. Textbook premeditation imho.
That could easily be argued.
The point is Gary's murder was much different from TLB. With TLB they went there knowing what they were gonna do. There was no hanging around for days seeing people's ears up, etc.
It's an appalling injustice that because a crime is sensational, it gets so much worse punishment. Everyone is harmed when justice is twisted this way. Stephen Kay's involvement over the years was disgusting. He could hardly contain his joy at having his face on TV.
Surely there is some way Leslie can appeal to the Supreme Court. This is atrocious. What is the point of parole and rehabilitation if someone can be denied, when so old, after so much therapy, so much work..it's over 20 years since they told her :"parole is nearer than you think".
It's just disgraceful. The other women who were on Death Row with her were transferred to the general population, and released naturally, after ten years or so. Leslie has served 44 years for stabbing a dead woman while in a state of helpless terror ("like a wet rag…I pushed her towards Mrs LaBianca…she was one scared girl" said Tex).
She "wanted to go" and this has been one of the myriad excuses to keep her. Leslie has explained that seeing yourself as a killer and actually doing it is totally different. Well, that's exactly what one of the My Lai killers explained. You think you can do it, but when it becomes real…getting past the first killing starts all the others. Both Tex and Pat had made that rite of passage. Leslie did not. She never killed anyone and she would have run from the scene if she could. As it was, her brain shut down: "I have no sound memory of Mrs LaBianca dying". As a woman screamed out her life in a room behind her, Leslie could not hear it. Afterwards, she became hysterical, going round the house cleaning stuff they hadn't even touched, stuff in drawers.
The problem is, Leslie cannot explain any of this, because if she tries, they'll accuse her of 'not taking responsibility". So she has to claim to have more responsibility than she actually has and then of course, she is cursed as a heartless killer.
And the excuses they come up with! The best was for Pat: "If you aren't remorseful, no parole and requesting parole means you aren't remorseful". I have seen where Leslie's perfect prison record was used against her: it showed too great a tendency to obey, therefore she'd find another Manson if released. Or because some man has fallen in love and tried to break her out, this is her fault too.
Poor old Bruce! They want "more details" about Shorty and Hinman? But he hasn't any. So since he has nothing to say, he can be accused of holding back and be kept inside.
And speaking of My Lai, that case went down in the same week .Lietenant Calley herded the people together in a ditch and machine-gunned them. When a three year old boy crawled to the top of the heap of dead, Calley swung him up by the leg, shot him and flung him back down. He was allowed to serve his sentence at home and pardoned by Nixon: the greatest understanding of the pressures the killers had been under, the reasons they snapped and went mad, was shown to them and they were relieved of responsibility for what they had done.
Of course, they were soldiers. Of course, they'd only killed some brown people, little gooks and dinks and not a lovely golden-haired movie star, radiantly pregnant. (If it hadn't been Sharon Tate, if it had been a black star, Hattie MacDaniel or Butterfly McQueen, would Leslie have done 44 years?)
They were living in a strange isolated world, Vietnam, Spahn Ranch, those killers, very different from their upbringing, living on the ground, surviving as best they could, in an environment very hostile that kept attacking them without warning and in countless ways, til they felt the only safety was in their group and everything outside could not be trusted. Their leader, Medina, Manson, was like a gang leader, not a father to them, leading by the example of brutality and unpredictability, teaching them to be hard and not fear death, to really kill/to act out killing. He was breaking down their parents training and instilling his own simple killer's beliefs. The men, the girls, revered him. He was so sure of himself. His second, Calley, Watson, was less sure, and less charismatic, and not worshipped but keen to emulate.
After many attacks by booby traps, by police harassment and brutality, the people were on edge and in a state of rage. There was nobody at all to tell them from the outside, that there is another world outside this constant talk of violence and killing and you dont have to dehumanize your enemy into dinks and gooks (or pigs).
And these young men were very young. They were the same age as Manson's killers, doubtless with the same issues with their families. They lacked serious connection to their parents and they rejected their parents values.
The one man who didnt join in the killing, Michael Bernhardt, is noticeable for the strong men in his life, who fathered him and gave him a moral compass that shook sometimes but didnt fail. Even he, though, spoke about how, when everyone else is following a style of behaviour, you come to doubt yourself and wonder if you are naive. Bernhardt saw atrocities from the start of his tour, but nobody seemed to care. He began to wonder if by his horror, he was out of step and he said "It is hard to keep to your values" when everyone else has discarded them.
So how does a 19 year old girl, a girl, not a boy, girls were raised to be dependent and to put their future in a man's hands (even give up their own names one day), how does she keep to her values when she is essentially in Vietnam?
Farflung: the "diction" is the kind of thing people do to work themselves into a state where they can kill, to act hard and to terrify their enemy.
Susan, also, was such a wreckage of a person. No Manson family member was as unloved as this. That was the main thing in her mind, to have some attention, real love, friendship: it obsessed her.
So anything said by Susan has to be filtered through this. She wanted to look hard and tough and get a good grade from Tex. Unable to kill Frykowski, bad mark. So she put Sharon in a headlock, guarded her and said those awful words and held her arms so Tex "wouldn't see I couldn't kill her".
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