Victims forgotten as Manson family killer goes free

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Those who want to see the abolition of capital punishment, and more liberal parole guidelines, claim such a change would create a more civilized society. Perhaps, but a more civilized society remembers and respects its murder victims. Moreover, certain crimes are so heinous that the perpetrators should never be released from prison. If they are, it ultimately bespeaks contempt for the law. That's why the case of Leslie Van Houten should resonate.

Denied parole at least 20 times since 1971, Van Houten is now free after spending 53 years in a California prison. Gov. Gavin Newsom did not challenge the parole. For those not yet born or who have forgotten, on Aug. 10, 1969, 19-year-old Van Houten accompanied Charles Manson and four other members of the so-called Manson family on a home invasion of the randomly selected house of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in a tony section of Los Angeles.

Once inside, Manson lieutenant Tex Watson stabbed Leno LaBianca to death and handed the knife to Van Houten. She stabbed Rosemary LaBianca more than a dozen more times. The next morning, Rosemary LaBianca's teenage son discovered her husband's body — knife stuck in his neck, carving fork protruding from his stomach and the word "war" carved into his skin.

Van Houten had been inspired when several of the same Manson family members committed the infamous Sharon Tate murders the previous evening. They savagely killed the actress, who was eight months pregnant, and four houseguests. Van Houten was not present, but when the killers returned home and gleefully described the grisly murders, she felt excluded and wanted in on the next murder spree.

The Tate-LaBianca murders generated a frisson of fear across Southern California, shattering the world's image of California as a land of communal bliss. As Van Houten later said, "My crime affected the nation. It brought an end to a time period in the '60s. It impacted other people in other countries, and it continues to."

When they were eventually captured, Van Houten and the other girls pointedly showed no remorse. They demonstrated their solidarity with Manson by carving an "X" in their foreheads. Throughout their trials, they laughed and sneered, while Manson family members not on trial created a circuslike atmosphere.

In 1971, Van Houten was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder. She received the death penalty, the youngest woman ever condemned to die in California. Shortly afterward, California abolished the death penalty. After two more trials — she obtained a new trial because her lawyer died mysteriously during the first trial — she was finally convicted and sentenced to seven years to life in prison — with the possibility of parole.

Van Houten took advantage of marriage privileges and conjugal visits then allowed by the California prison system. She married a male inmate, but they divorced after two months. Watson, in prison for life, married a woman from the outside, and the couple had four children together, all conceived during conjugal visits. That's four more children than Sharon Tate was allowed to have.

From a legal standpoint, Van Houten has met all the standards for parole. She has been the typical "model prisoner" with college degrees (always a go-to for parole boards). She checked all the boxes: teacher, active in substance abuse programs, energetic volunteer.

A teacher who worked with Van Houten in prison, Angela Cardinale, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "It was difficult to reconcile the woman in front of me with the crimes she had committed," Cardinale said. "Leslie is a good person who did a bad thing."

How does one distinguish a good person who once did a bad thing — a really bad thing, she might have added — from a bad person who now does good things?

Those are the legal arguments, but beyond that, what do we owe the forgotten victims? The investigators, attorneys and judges originally involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders — those with firsthand knowledge — are either dead or very old. The victims have become distant memories, mere factual abstractions in the current bloodless legal arguments by lawyers in front of judges, most of whom were small children or not yet born at the time of the murders. When the LaBiancas were murdered, Van Houten's attorney was a young schoolgirl; Newsom was not quite 2 years old.

Time is long and human memory short, especially where murder is concerned. The pattern is familiar: Years pass and then decades, and murder victims are eventually forgotten by most people except their families. The victims are gradually replaced in the public consciousness by their murderers, who, if they live long enough, can morph into sympathetic figures resembling harmless, elderly victims themselves.

The most recent photographs from her final parole hearing show a grandmotherly Van Houten, who doesn't look like she could hurt a fly. Gray hair neatly tied in a bun, she is a far cry from the wild-haired young woman who once laughed in the courtroom over her victims' suffering. The contemptuous "X" carved in her forehead, prominent as late as 1999 in a television interview, is no longer visible.

Probably a quite effective makeup job.

Cory Franklin is a retired intensive care physician. This first appeared in the Chicago Tribune.