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
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.”
