No Journey's End: My Tragic Romance with Ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten

by Peter Chiaramonte

  When Hinman tried to grab the gun from Susan Atkins’s hand, it went off without hitting anyone. But, for even making the attempt to free himself, Beausoleil lit into Hinman and issued him a terrible beating. Gary still insisted he didn’t have any money to give them so they tied him to a chair and cuffed him. When he continued to resist, the whole gang took turns hammering him in the face until he eventually turned over the titles and keys to his Volkswagen and Fiat. Hinman signed them away all right, but threatened to call the police once the invaders finally left him alone. A frustrated Bobby Beausoleil telephoned Charlie back at the ranch. Manson came over with cult member Bruce Davis and brought with him a razor-sharp sword.

  Manson knew if Hinman were to tell the police about all the drug and car theft dealings he had with the Straight Satans, it might lead them to investigate the shooting of Bernard Crowe, aka ‘Lotsapoppa,’ whom Manson shot and presumed he had killed only weeks before over another drug deal gone sour. Charlie had sent Tex Watson to promise suspected Black Panther associate Lotsapoppa twenty-five kilos of marijuana. They kept the $2,500 they were fronted but never delivered the pot. Crowe told them if he didn’t get his weed or his money back, he was coming up to Spahn Ranch with some pipe-wielding brothers to kill the whole Family. That’s when Charlie shot him.

  Crowe survived the gunshot and never involved the police, so nobody knew—certainly not Manson, who had boasted to Family members that he’d offed a Black Panther. He hoped it would serve as a warning to others. He also worried it may have marked him for dead with the Panthers. So, in exchange for unlimited party favors with any of the girls, the Straight Satans furnished Manson with bayonets, machetes, handguns, shotguns, rifles and ammo—not a lot, but plenty enough to create havoc. That’s where Charlie got the sword he would use to scare Gary Hinman.

  Charlie threatened that if Hinman didn’t cough up all the money and shut up about the police, he was going to cut him to pieces. Hinman warned again that he would go to the cops if they didn’t leave him alone. So Charlie took his sword and struck a five-inch gash across Gary’s face that nearly sliced off his left ear. The man’s face was a bloody mess. Gary was crying and the girls were screaming and pleading with him to put an end to his own suffering. Just give them the money and be done with it.

  Gary refused. Manson ordered Susan and Mary to sew up Hinman’s wounds and clean up the blood. Bobby stood watch. Charlie told him to keep putting on the heat. After Manson and Davis split from the scene (Charlie stole Hinman’s Volkswagen presumably to give to the Satans as compensation for the thousand bucks they’d paid for the drugs.), Atkins and Brunner stitched up Gary’s ear with a sewing needle and dental floss. Charlie left instructions for Bobby to keep up the torture and pain until Hinman succumbed.

  The torment finally ended, but not abruptly, on Sunday, July 27th, after Bobby called Charlie one last time to say the torture tactic still wasn’t working.

  Over the phone, Manson told Beausoleil to kill Gary Hinman, adding, “He knows too much.”

  Hinman would not be the last person Charlie Manson condemned for that reason.

  Hinman was stabbed five times in the chest. One or two of the wounds penetrated the sac surrounding his heart. He bled to death but not very quickly. His trio of tormentors watched for hours as he slipped into a coma, but Hinman’s lungs stubbornly continued to go on breathing, soaked as they were in his own blood. Bobby and each of the girls finally took turns smothering him with a pillow until his heart stopped beating. Once they were certain he was dead, they used his blood to write “POLITICAL PIGGY” on the wall. Bobby drew the insignia of a paw print with claws, assuming it would lead dimwitted authorities to suspect black militants were involved with the murder. Those were Manson’s instructions.

  Since the Panthers’ threat he imagined had weighed heavily on Manson lately, and ever since he shot Lotsapoppa, he wanted detectives to think the Black militants had butchered Hinman over some awful drug deal gone wrong. Thus began both the real and the fake Helter Skelter. This was not a real revolution at all but rather the scam Charlie Manson used to get others to do his rancorous bidding. It was all about vengeance, paranoid delusions and money, despite what Bugliosi might have led us to think. All that shit about Helter Skelter as a race war was just a ruse.

  When they hadn’t heard from him for a week, Gary’s friends went up to his house in Topanga and the first thing they noticed were the bustling torrents of insects flying in and out of the windows. Both cars were gone. Inside, they discovered the walls and floors splashed with blood and imprinted with gory inscriptions. What was left of Mr. Hinman’s corpse was shrouded in blankets of champing maggots. The whole house was thick with whirling storm clouds of red-eyed flesh flies buzzing around, like squadrons of evil jet fighters.

  As ingenious and cunning as Manson and Beausoleil thought their plan was to mislead police into suspecting the Panthers may have seemed at the time, the cops didn’t buy it. Beausoleil was headed north on the run in Hinman’s Fiat when the car broke down. Highway patrolmen ran a check of the vehicle’s registration and were notified that an APB had been issued in connection with a murder. When they searched the car, police found a bloody knife in the tire well, which tests revealed had Hinman’s blood on it. They arrested and charged this criminal mastermind with cold-blooded murder.

  Naturally, Charlie was worried that Bobby would cough him up to the cops. So he assured him that he had a foolproof plan for getting him off. That’s what led to the “copycat” murders at the homes of Tate and the LaBiancas, making it look like whomever killed Hinman was still out there cutting up white people’s bodies and leaving their ritual insignia on the walls in their victims’ blood.

  Bobby Beausoleil was tried for the murder of Gary Hinman in November of 1969, and, remarkably, that trial ended in a hung jury. That was odd. But that just goes to show how far a pretty face can get you in Hollywood, particularly since the dunce left a bloody fingerprint at the crime scene. However, during his retrial in 1970—in return for testifying to Beausoleil’s and Atkins’s torture and killing of Hinman—Mary Brunner was granted complete immunity for her role in aiding and abetting his murder. This time the jury found Beausoleil guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to the death chamber. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison along with all the other Manson Family members who were later convicted in 1971.

  There were, in fact, nine victims in the Manson mass murders all told over a period of four weeks (from July 27th to August 26th, 1969): Gary Hinman, Stephen Parent, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Sharon Tate Polanski, Leno LaBianca, Rosemary LaBianca and Donald ‘Shorty’ Shea.

  * * *

  Leslie’s retrial was well underway in the spring. Sometimes news in the LA Times was delayed in getting to me, as were so many of Leslie’s letters. I read how Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, who assisted Vincent Bugliosi during the first trial, was now in charge of her second prosecution. Leslie said she could see right from the start that Kay thought it all right to play dirty. In his eyes, she was still a “Manson girl” after all.

  For instance, Kay requested that testimony she had given in the penalty phase of the first trial be read again to the new jury. Maxwell Keith objected, saying his client’s earlier testimony in 1971 was deliberately “false and misleading.” It had been established by then that Leslie was coerced into “a pathetic attempt to exonerate Manson and immolate herself,” Keith protested.

  I could imagine Kay smirking, but he stuck to his guns.

  Leslie testified she lied on the stand because that’s what Manson told her to do. At one point, she said Charlie leaned over the counsel table and told her to say she’d been at Gary Hinman’s house the day he was murdered. Manson told her to get the story straight from Susan Atkins. But now, (in 1977) she said the reason she lied six years before about what really happened at the LaBiancas was to h
elp Charlie and Tex get off, because Manson had impressed upon her and the others for over a year how essential it was for him to be free to serve as Man’s son, our savior. If that isn’t crazy, what is? The real comic-tragedy to that part of this farce was that she ever believed him. Manson’s tactics were the same ones that terrorists and the CIA use: drugs, isolation and deep hypnosis—the trifecta of mind control.

  Leslie’s trial continued through April and sometimes letters from her would arrive two and three at a time. I wrote her back almost every other day with as many questions as I had news. She wanted to know when I was planning to travel to LA to meet her. Now that was a thought. I would have more than a month off before grad school started that summer—assuming I was admitted. I had my fingers crossed on both of those fronts.

  She wrote quite a lot about her old friends from high school—certainly more than she did about the many lawyers and journalists who presently crowded their way in to see her. She had nice things to say about her attorney, Max, and a famous psychiatrist from Harvard named Lester Grinspoon. She also gave me the names and numbers of those to call when I got to LA and told me to be sure I got in touch with her best friend, Linda Grippi. I took down all her contact information.

  I also wrote Leslie back about the ongoing dramas at teacher’s college, late night hockey fights and the quarrel between philosophy and poetry ever since Plato. I mentioned that thinking more deeply about her life was like seeing parts of myself in a mirror. (Remember what Zeus said to Narcissus? ‘Watch yourself.’) As well, I described how my friends Gabrielle and Jean had recently discovered each other and how unbothered I was about all of that now.

  With nothing to hide, I wrote with regard to my dreams and my fears, and tried to impress her with the books I was reading, the films I was seeing and the poems I was rehearsing. I shared intuitions I thought she would like and appreciate from her own perspective. For instance, in one letter I combined my interest in Hesse’s novel Siddhartha with my take on Bergman’s film Scenes From a Marriage. I was all over the map. I even went so far as to boldly quote the beginning and end of my favorite Mark Strand sonnet, “Courtship.”

  During the first weeks of April, the tail end of winter had bitten back hard with a blizzard. I didn’t mind. I knew winter would be over soon, and I’d be back in the open more often. On morning runs, it felt good to breathe the sour-sweet scent of snowmelt still caught in the evergreen branches. There was a good luck new moon still rising on Wednesday, April 20th when I got the news from the registrar’s office at OISE. I’d been accepted into the Master of Arts program in the history and philosophy of higher education. Woo hoo! I could begin in the summer.

  The first person with whom I wanted to share this newsflash was Leslie. So, on my way to Hart House that morning to tell Andy, I stopped in the campus Bookroom to shop for some new stationary.

  After training, I was anxious to get back home and write Leslie a long letter, which I signed off by saying, “I’m coming to see you next month! Please tell your friend Linda I’ll call when I get there. You know I’m a fool for you, girl.” Then, I taped a tiny magazine photo of Marlon Brando from The Fugitive Kind to the outside of the envelope.

  Throughout the spring, I kept up my steady routines at both school and at play. I handed in essays and competed in competitive tournament hockey. Jean, Gabe and I got together more often as time went on. Sometimes, Karen or Buck and that new girlfriend of his (I’ve long since forgotten her name) tagged along for a movie and pizza afterwards. One Friday night late in April, we had all planned to go to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. Then, Jean called to say that he and Gabe couldn’t make it, so I arranged instead to go with Karen and her new boyfriend.

  Richard was a tall, strapping Aryan whom Karen met at a party at Upper Canada College, a prestigious private school for the rich and exceedingly privileged, where he taught science and math.

  Just as we were cooling down from the workout, Karen and Richard showed up and met me inside the stadium. They waited while I showered and dressed. The film was playing just down the street at the Varsity theater. After the movie, we went back to the sparsely crowded basement enclave of the Arbor Room in Hart House for coffee and pastries. At first, we were all talking at once about the death of Nicholson’s character at the end of the movie.

  Karen asked, “Was it Locke or Robertson who was killed at the hotel? I guess it was Locke, so why my confusion?”

  Personally, I thought this was a provocative question. But Richard scoffed. He was quick to change the subject back to the more technical aspects of Antonioni’s famous tracking shot at the end of the film.

  The assassination takes place off screen. First, the camera’s point of view backs out of the room in which Nicholson’s character is alone, alive at first, lying in bed. As the camera turns out into the dusty parking lot outside, we hear a car arrive, and a crew of thugs rush into the hotel. Later, we hear doors slam, and the car drives away. Then, a full minute or more later, the camera travels back into the room again. We see the girl, played by Maria Schneider, rush in. She identifies the tepid deceased to police as David Robertson. Then, Locke’s wife, Rachel, arrives looking for her husband, David. Viewing the corpse on the bed, she says she never knew the man lying there dead as a doornail.

  “In a way, they were both right,” I said at last. “David Locke had become the passenger in another man’s life.”

  Karen asked Richard, “How do you think the director got his camera through those bars in the windows?”

  She offhandedly ignored the point I was trying to explore. I couldn’t care less about such mechanical matters as camerawork. What interested me was the director’s making sense of the human desire to adopt a new identity when the old one is no longer working. That’s what this film was about.

  I tried steering the conversation back to the thoughts I was having about how a complete break from the past in this way inevitably leads to self-destruction. Or does it? To myself, I thought maybe that’s what happened to Leslie when she ran off from home. I didn’t say it aloud since no one was listening. Karen was too into Dick, and Dick was too into himself. Fair enough—I knew how he felt.

  So, eventually, we got to talk about other matters—things such as teaching (of course), graduate school (yeah, sure) and the Olympics. I eventually steered the conversation around to a discussion of Antonioni’s other films, such as Blow Up and L’Avventura.

  Finally, I maneuvered Karen into asking me, “Peter, do tell us...What have you heard lately from your pen pal in prison?”

  Before I could answer, she gave Richard a précis of my faint involvement with Leslie Van Houten. I could see he was not favorably awestruck with either one of us, Leslie or me.

  “I’d rather speak for myself,” I bristled at Karen.

  But before I did, I could see Richard reacting with some irritation. I returned him the favor.

  “Sounds to me like you’re the type who’s obsessed with celebrity murder,” he finally remarked.

  I could tell he was holding something back.

  “Think whatever you care to,” is all I said for the moment.

  I gathered up our empty coffee cups, plates and wrappers, and carried the trays back to the counter. Karen and Richard had their jackets on when I got back to the table. No need to have a sign posted.

  “So we’re calling it a night, are we? Good,” I said, letting them get ahead.

  When I started out of the Arbor Room, Karen and Dick were standing outside in front of the door still trying to decide something. So I asked them which way they were headed. Karen affirmed they were taking the subway to Richard’s, so I suggested we walk that way together.

  By the time we reached the museum, Richard brought up the subject of Leslie again.

  “Tell me, Peter. You don’t honestly t
hink Van Houten stands one chance in hell of ever getting out of prison, do you? God, I hope not. If you do, you must be a fool.”

  I paused and shot him a look before I responded.

  “Even a verdict of second-degree murder would improve her chances of getting out sooner than never,” I said. “After all the money and billable time that’s been spent to convict her, I think it’s time we paid some attention to Leslie’s side of the story, that’s all, then decide when she should be let out, not beforehand. Who’s being foolish?”

  Richard asked, “Does anyone even care anymore? I think this entire Manson saga is best forgotten once and for all.”

  I was reminded that everyone is entitled to an uninformed opinion. Even him—even me—so I let it go.

  “I’m sorry, Peter. I don’t get it,” Karen intervened. “Why would anyone let a sick fuck like Manson use them like that? My God. After all, what a madman. Was this girl crazy?”

  “Temporarily, I think so. I also think the real reason Leslie was willing to go along that night, and Manson knew that she would, was out of loyalty to her best friend, Patricia Krenwinkel. If Pat was strong enough to kill for a cause they both thought was real and noble enough to believe in, I’m sure Leslie wanted to prove to Charlie that she was just as fearless as Pat. These kids were idealists before Manson met them.”