Linda Kasabian July 1971 Interview

The July 24, 1971 edition of The Montreal Star, (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) carried an interview with Linda Kasabian. The reporter went through a lot of trouble to find Linda as noted by the editor of the Weekend Magazine, a once a week feature of the newspaper.

Vincent Bugliosi tended to keep a tight rein on Linda, Gypsy Share and Barbara Hoyt by controlling the narrative that they could discuss with reporters. The reporter, Bill Trent, somehow slipped by Bugliosi and Linda's efforts to ward off the press and their questions. To Linda's credit, at least in Bugliosi's eyes, she revealed very little of her time with the Family. She talks briefly about Manson. There is only one incidence of her vaguely alluding to her feelings about the Family. 

The "Old Man" now plots the course of her life

By Bill Trent Weekend Magazine

 "There is internal revolution ahead. Chaos in the world. Then final rebellion..."

Linda Kasabian, speed-freak turned Jesus-freak, is speaking and her words sound harsh in this old, low-beamed 19th century room that once was a chicken house.

But, she claims, Jesus is within her and The Old Man is up there somewhere, plotting the course of her life like an ethereal navigator.

The Old Man is God. Why Old Man? Because He's the oldest being in the universe. She doesn't use the term in a derogatory sense.

"Children will rise against their parents and parents will kill their children..."

It is a warm, sunny day and the windows are open, letting in the sound the birds and the smell of New Hampshire lilacs. She pauses to absorb the sounds and scents.

A "wonderful" woman who lives in the adjoining house has given her the refurbished apartment in the old chicken house. It's a place in the woods off a secondary highway, far, she hopes, from the glare of publicity.

It doesn't bother the woman that her tenant was once charged in connection with one of the most bizarre series of murders in the history of the United States.

On Aug. 9, 1969, movie actress Sharon Tate and Steven Parent, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Voicyk Frokowski were murdered in a weird ritual in the star's Hollywood home. The following night, Los Angeles grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife were murdered in the same way. In all cases, the victims were stabbed repeatedly and in both homes the word "PIG" was written on the walls in blood.

Six people were charged with the murders- and Linda was one of them. The others were a bearded wild-eyed cult leader named Charles Manson, and Charles "Tex" Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie van Houten.

Of the six, Linda was the lucky one. She gave state's evidence and her murder charge was finally dropped. Manson and the three other girls were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. They are now on death row at San Quentin. Watson, first declared insane, awaits trial in Los Angeles.

"There is so much pain and sorrow in the world," Linda says. "How can anybody be happy seeing other people suffer?"

It's hard to believe the words coming from this very pretty girl with the long sandy hair. She sits curled up in an antique chair with the sun on her face. It accents the paleness of the face.

"This kingdom must be destroyed and peace must come..."

Linda is 22 but in her blue jeans and barefooted, she looks almost child-like. And when she talks of Jesus, there is kind of a childish excitement in her voice. Jesus, she says, has come to her and lives inside of her.

She once thought that Charles Manson was the Messiah. She and the other girls charged in the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders lived with him as members of his commune family on an abandoned movie ranch in California's Death Valley.

Some of the things that Manson said out on the desert seemed to Linda to be "pure truth". He generated love and she returned his love. To Linda, it was the second coming of Christ.

She no longer considers Manson to be the Messiah. Christ, she says, will come to the world one day but he won't be a California cult leader. He will be someone beautiful.

"Maybe he will come in a great white cloud. He will be seen by all the people in the world. Then evil will be eliminated from the earth."

Her husband, Bob Kasabian, enters the room. He has black silky hair down to his shoulders. He wears overalls that don't cover the top of his underwear. He wears no shoes. He sits on a chair and strums gently on his guitar.

"Christ will come soon." Linda says. "Perhaps in my lifetime. Certainly in my children's."

She has two children, a three-year old girl names Tonya and a one-year old son, Nathan, whom according to her own evidence in court, may have been fathered by any one of five men, including Charles Manson. She later said she thought Nathan was actually Kasabian's boy. "I saw my husband in my child's face when he was born," she related at the time.

"The Old Man has been watching me all along," she says. "He charted my course. He put me on the drug route and let me make my own decisions about things. But it was all part of a divine plan."

She speaks with disturbing matter-of-factness. What happened and what is ahead is all a matter of pre-ordainment.

"Drugs, free love, the whole hippie bit... You see I had to make the entire hippie trip."

A condition of our interview is that I won't ask her to discuss her past, particularly where it concerns the trial.

But in the quiet of the room, she reminisces without any prodding from me.

"We lived in an old slum apartment in Biddeford, Maine. Our first house was on a hill near a grocery store. There was a Catholic parochial school there and I used to go through their garbage cans and pick out roses they had thrown out..."

Linda's father at the time was a construction worker named Rosaire Drouin, whose parents had gone to Maine from Quebec.

"My mother and father fought a lot. My first recollection of childhood was sitting on a couch crying... My father finally left the house for good after we had moved to New Hampshire. My mother insisted he buy me some shoes before he left and he refused. But as he went out he slipped some pennies into my hand..."

She remembers her father driving around to the house to see her later. He aways had another woman in the car and Linda instinctively hated her.

"My mother and I grew close... She'd fix my banana curls and dress me in a pinafore and take me around showing me off to everybody...

"My father used to beat her on the behind as she stooped over the washing machine... But my stepfather was worse. Hiis name was Byrd and he had children of his own and he was always telling my mother how much better his kids were...

"I screamed at my stepfather one day, I said, "You hate me don't you?' He said, "Yeah, I hate you all right.' And I flipped. I just flipped..."

Linda remembers getting shipped off, during family arguments, to grandparents who lived in the country and kept horses.

"I always loved animals but I grew to like them more than people. I still do. Animals accept you as you are. They don't care what you've done before... They take you at face value, as you are right now...

"I talked to my grandparents' horses and I still talk to horses... It's not really talking. Do you know what I mean? It's communicating. You can communicate a lot without using words...

"I had this thing about all animals. I wanted to free all the dogs I saw chained up. I wanted to open up the cages at the zoo...

I kiss dogs. Did you know that dogs have the cleanest, most antiseptic mouths of any animals?

"In a sense, I suppose, I made love to animals..."

Linda recalls her school days with mixed feelings. She completed her elementary education and took a year of high school in Milford, the quiet little New Hampshire town in which she grew up. She was cheer leader in sixth grade and became her school's best athlete.

"We used to go down to the river and strip. There were boys and girls and we'd all roll around in the sand and feed the ducks and have a ball...

"But there was this kid, Larry, with the big bug eyes... He liked me and I guessed I like him, too. But we wouldn't let him come down to the river with us and this made him mad and one day he went to our teacher and then there was trouble...

"Then one day a girl I knew called me a dirty little river girl... But the boys liked me. Maybe because they thought of me as a river girl... None of those boys ever made it with me, though, and that damaged their egos..."

She remembers her disenchantment with the church:

"They told me God was a king. They told me about hellfire and damnation. The nuns told me after communion the non-Catholics went to hell. And I rebelled..."

At 16, she left her Milford home and went to Miami where she took her first drug.

"I was with this boy and we ran out of cigarettes and he gave me some marijuana... I didn't know what it was. But I liked the sensation. It was like walking on air. I wanted more..."

Linda travelled a lot after that- Boston, New York, California, Arizona, New Mexico. And she tried most of the drugs.

"I took acid one night in Boston. It wasn't a good trip...But one day in New York I got some fantastic acid. It wasn't the ordinary stuff you get. This was some pure pharmaceutical stuff...

"We were in this small apartment. The Rolling Stones were blaring away on the turntable. All of a sudden everyone was quiet. No one talked. And there was this marvelous silent kind of communication. I could feel it there in the room. It was like when I talked to horses. It's hard to describe unless you've had the experience..."

In 1967, Linda married Bob Kasabian and went west looking for a farm. They didn't find the farm but they came across a guru who moved in with them. It was the beginning of an experience.

"Bob thinks he's the first hippie to come out of his home town, Lawrence, Massachusetts. I think I was the first person who turned on in Milford... Anyway, the guru taught us how to sit and meditate. I started to get into myself. I began thinking of God. It was the opening of the door to the kingdom for me..."

Then things went wrong between Linda and Bob and they separated. Later he suggested a reunion and a trip to South America. Linda met him in California only to find he had changed his mind. There was another argument and another split. Then Linda ran into a girl with a tremendous idea. She knew a ranch in the desert where people could really communicate. It was run by a man named Manson.

There are no reminders of California in the Kasabians’ New Hampshire house. She never wants to see California again. But on the wall, there is a picture of a woman with some sheep. She is a Navajo. Linda clipped the picture out of the National Geographic magazine when she was in jail and pinned it to the wall of her cell.

“I’m still up-tight,” she says. “I blow up sometimes…”

She has blown up a number of times with newspaper reporters. She dislikes the press because she thinks it gave her a bad time during the trial.

But I have asked her if she has a message for young people on drugs, or contemplating going on thm, and she thinks the request is a valid one.

“Drug are a death trip… Mentally, physically and spiritually, they are destructive. I know. I’ve done the trip.”

Bob interrupts. “Don’t take the drug route,” he says, “Be A Jesus-freak.”

Linda suddenly remembers something:

“There was this beautiful little filly named Amber. She used to come across that meadow and sit in my lap and that was better than any acid trip I ever took…”

“We talk a lot about freedom,” Bob says. “Well, if freedom means being able to smoke hash in front of a cop, it’s not worth too much.”

“Freedom is a union with that man,” Linda says. She points to a picture of Jesus above the mattress that serves as their bed.

“She was a speed-freak,” Bob says.

“If I had taken it much longer, I would have been destroyed,” Linda cuts in.

She quit speed (amphetamines) when she first became pregnant. She takes no drugs at all now, she says, and would like to quit ordinary cigarettes, too.

“She won’t take a contraceptive either,” Bob says.

“The Pill is a form of murder,” she says. She pauses. “Abortion is murder, too. We follow the rhythm system- but do you know why? We don’t use it to avoid procreating. We use it to have children…”

Linda’s dog, half-shepherd, half-husky, runs in and licks everyone. Her name is Hopi, after the Arizona Indians with whom the Kasabians once lived.

“You can’t fool a dog or a child,” she says. “They can always spot a phony.”

Hopi brings a new turn to the conversation.

“There has been so much hypocrisy,” Linda says. “You see, the kids listened to people like John Lennon and their followers. The kids believed so much, you see…”

Bob plays softly on the guitar. Linda doesn’t talk now about Lennon. She speaks of anonymous people behind the scenes, the promoters she calls them.

They talk of peace and love and flowers and it was hypocrisy… They spoke of love- and prepared for violence…”

Bob interrupts: “They wanted to revolt against the system. But they wanted to set up another political system that was as bad.”

Later we go down the dark stairs of the one-time chicken house and into the big garden. Linda motions for quiet. In the distance there is the sound of running water. There is a dam nearby. Suddenly, I realize how remote you can be in New Hampshire.

“They chased us out of Marlborough,” Bob says. “Not exactly chased. But they found our shack in the woods and condemned the place.”

“They may chase us out of here,” Linda says. “But we’re set for that if the time comes.”

She shows me the pickup truck she and her husband bought. He does handyman jobs in the area. That truck got Linda back in the news briefly. She failed to have the vehicle inspected and was hauled into court and fined $15. The newspapers, of course, picked up the item.

Linda collects lilacs in the garden and Bob gets water from the spring. He pours some into paper cups and it is ice cold.

“What we really want is a log cabin way off somewhere, away from everything,” she says as I prepare to leave. “One that we made ourselves. And we want a big meadow where the animals can run free. We’d have sheep and shear the wool. And chickens for eggs. And I’d have a spinning wheel and loom som I could make my own clothes…

“And someday, when the Old Man thinks I’m ready, He’ll call. And I’ll know a oneness with Him and the universe.”