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

by Peter Chiaramonte

  The Peters were old friends of Jane and her ex, Leslie’s dad, Paul M. Van Houten. Glen said he worked for the Los Angeles Times, which led me to assume that journalism was his connection to Judy—that and their church. They shared a profound faith in the Christian Science religion. Glen and Doris had known Leslie ever since she and her siblings were kids growing up in Monrovia. That is, until she left home as a teen and ran away with a boyfriend to San Francisco. Since I thought Glen held the demeanor of the center-right, military dogma about him, I could imagine how he would have responded to Leslie’s later running off to join up with Manson. Doris Peters, I have forgotten completely. I believe I only met her that once, but I could tell from the very beginning that her husband and I would be at odds soon enough over something.

  Jane Van Houten arrived about twenty minutes after Judy and I got there. My first impressions never changed from the moment she stepped through the front door. I immediately recognized the resemblance to Leslie. Jane was what I would have described as an exceptionally handsome middle-aged woman. She had wavy white hair and an immense smile in her eyes, though her lips were downturned at the edges. If Jane felt the same caution with regards to me as the Peters had, I didn’t notice. I was perfectly taken in by her poise, warmth and charm. Given the way she smiled at me throughout the evening, I was certain that she liked me as much as I found her attractive.

  In the days that followed, I got to meet more of Leslie’s friends and spent some days in court with her brother, David, and sister, Betsy. I also talked on the phone with Leslie as often as possible. Our time was limited, so we still counted a lot on exchanging letters. I wasn’t too surprised to find out I wasn’t the first “pen pal” she’d had since she came clean of Charles Manson. I thought that was long over now. Only a few days after meeting her mom and Glen Peters, a letter from Leslie arrived that read in part:

  “Tomorrow, ‘Pete’ [Glen Peters] will probably come with Mom for a visit. Mama says, by the way, to be sure to tell you ‘hello’ and said to send you her love. She wants you to call her. Pete said on the phone he hadn’t got my letter yet—the one I told you about—but wanted to see me in person. I know one thing we need to discuss is what to do about Frank Andrews and the letters/publishing scene. Max is mad about it too. Tomorrow, I will discuss it with Pete, but then I have a huge hunch that attorneys will be getting into the matter. Talk about exploitation. That Frank Andrews—man! Such a bunch of crooks! A bunch of sneaky no good punks. It should all prove to be quite interesting. I find it ironic how ‘perfect’ this is all supposed to be, when I don’t know a damn thing about it. And how ‘wrong’ anything else I say is. It will straighten out. I need to make a list so I can clue you in on all the happenings.”

  * * *

  Frank Andrews walked out of prison after thirteen years served of an original fifty-five to sixty-seven year sentence. He served hard time for a series of armed robberies and an escape attempt in which he wounded a sheriff’s deputy. Andrews was thirty-seven years old—ten years older than Leslie—when he started to write her in prison. He’d already spent half his lifetime in one kind of jail or another. Sound familiar, Charlie?

  What convinced prison authorities Andrews might deserve a second chance was his dedication to writing, which he demonstrated during his many years inside.

  “At one point, I thought I was to all intents and purposes a dead man,” he wrote, “I never really believed they would release me.”

  He sold his first short story to a journal in 1967 and co-edited an anthology of prison writing, Voices from the Big House, in 1971. Andrews became a leading light from within the dark walls of the New Jersey State Penitentiary. Author Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter was an inmate there as well—a college of writers.

  “The parole board asked me if I might be tempted to go back to crime,” Frank Andrews said at the time Voices was published. “I told them I never made more than a hundred bucks in any job I ever pulled. Now, I can double that by just sitting down at a typewriter for a few hours.”

  Quite a guy, I imagined. Andrews contributed to at least two more prison anthologies that no one ever heard of. However, in one, Prose and Cons, there was a particularly charming story, “Ima Fibbin” written by Leslie Van Houten. Why was I so jealous of Frank Andrews even if Leslie was past it? I thought it might be on account of his being a writer, if not a very good boyfriend.

  * * *

  I picked Jane Van Houten up at home on Sefton Avenue at 8:00 a.m. We drove out to Sybil Brand to visit Les in Gil’s Alfa Romeo. I left the top up to keep the wind out of her hair. Right from the start, Jane took to calling me “Honey,” which I adored. When I dropped her back at home in Monterey Park, this time she said to pull into the alley. She made me brunch while I washed and waxed Gil’s car in her garage. I stayed all day and night talking to Jane about Leslie, her childhood and how some dreams come true while others fall apart. After Mexican food with Les’s adopted sister Betsy and next-door neighbor Georgie Calhoun, I spent the night in Jane’s guest room. The wallpaper in there was made of bamboo and the carpet was thick and warm.

  The next morning, Gil’s wife, Terri, dropped him off at Jane’s to pick up his car. He let me drive the Spider one last time back to Silver Lake, where I traded the Alfa for Judy’s respectable Datsun 240-Z. She was away on assignment. After that, I went for a run. I started west on Effie Street then swung right on Griffith Park all the way to Hyperion Avenue. Another right past the Rowena Reservoir and then left on to Waverly Drive as far as the end of the driveway to number 3301. There it was.

  Things were very quiet and still. I must have stood there for a very long time. I never told anyone about it. Not even Leslie. No reason to really. What could I say that she didn’t already know? What was once a peaceful space a family called home was now the vacant site of a catastrophe. It felt to me as though I stood at the end of the road where a bomb had gone off and left nothing but ruins. It was a slow walk back to Micheltorena. I was thinking the whole time about Rosemary LaBianca. After a prolonged and icy-cold shower, I pre-cooked peppers, onions and tomato sauce for dinner before driving out to LAX to pick Judy up. On the way home we stopped for wine, cheese and oysters to put on the crackers. She asked me why I was looking so glum. When we stepped into the condo, Judy’s sister Jennifer told me there had been a phone call for me while I was away.

  “Someone named Martin Bijaux wants you to call him. His number’s beside the phone. He said it was urgent.”

  When I called, Martin picked up right away and told me he had tragic news from back home.

  * * *

  Buck Buchanan had been instantly killed in a car crash. He and another friend of ours were on their way north from Kingston to Ottawa when they were struck head on by an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer. The truck driver survived the collision but Tiit Romet, who was asleep in the back seat of Jim’s car, woke up in the hospital a day later. He had a concussion and a broken arm. Tricia and I both had a good cry when I told her. I also thought about Jim on and off for a few days as a way to adjust to the loss of a good friend.

  This caused me to reflect on the twisted fate of our being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the consequences of having the forces of physics conspire against you in such a brutal and sudden way. I thought of how easily it could have been me that got into the car that night with Buck and Tiit after the track meet at Queen’s University. Just as it could have been me that got into ranch hand Johnny Swartz’s yellow Ford at Spahn Ranch right before midnight on Friday, August 8th 1969, the night before the bloodbath at LaBiancas’—the night Manson’s Helter Skelter really got started.

  Kids like Leslie and I had to leave home and strike out on the road with a taste for adventure. The summer of ’69 that Leslie spent on Spahn Ranch with the Manson Family, I spent a very brief time at the Satan’s Choice motorcycle club’s farmhouse and headquarters in Agincourt, On
tario. I stumbled in there one day with some girls I’d met who knew a few of the bikers and invited me along for a “field day” of races, jousting and a huge drunken orgy, if we hung around until dawn. I was tripping at a mighty clip on mescaline when this “leader of the pack”—who appeared to me as the reincarnation of Che Guevara—started rapping about my maybe joining his band of rebels. I could have effortlessly stayed a few more weekends just to see how the set and setting collided.

  I had been lucky though, far more fortunate than Leslie had been. Mentors like high school Principal Jackson Tovell and Olympic athletics Coach Andy Higgins pulled me out of those traps and gave me a richer environment in which to develop. Disillusioned by my sour family life and braved for adventure, I might have stumbled into such powerful diseases of exposure as Charlie Manson.

  I asked myself, what if Manson had imbued me with the same deceits as the others? I tried to imagine if I’d been in Tex Watson’s shoes. We had both played football and been track stars in high school, though we held nothing else in common. Since he had been one of Leslie’s boyfriends when she sought protection from some of the bikers, I’d be sure to ask her about him. All I recalled from what I’d read so far was that he grew up in Copeville, Texas, dropped out of high school and ran off to Los Angeles. One day, he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. The guy with his thumb out was none other than Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, whose Ferrari was in the shop. Wilson took Watson back to his house on Sunset Boulevard. When they got there, Dennis introduced Tex to Charles Manson and a slew of half-naked girls tripping on acid.

  False promotions aside for the moment, Manson’s main theories in practice were derived from years of post-graduate studies in prisons of every sort. Therefore, he’d had advanced tutorials in pimping, guns, drugs, knives, racism, fascism, violence, different ways to rob banks and how to survive in the desert. Charlie also befriended Alvin ‘Creepy’ Karpis, a former member of Ma Barker’s “Bloody Barkers’ Gang”—one of the most notorious and formidable criminal gangs in American history. Manson met Karpis, who was sentenced to life for the murder of a sheriff in Missouri, after he was transferred to McNeil Island State Penitentiary in Washington, where Manson was serving time for solicitation and stealing.

  Karpis taught Charles Manson to play the steel guitar. Creepy said later that he didn’t think his protégée was a very good musician. But Charlie was fervent to the point of obsession. He began scribbling songs and started singing, believing that when he got out of prison he could become a famous rock music legend.

  “Bigger than Elvis or The Beatles,” he imagined.

  Manson asked Alvin to put him in touch with his contacts in the Las Vegas casinos.

  Karpis remarked, “Charlie had a thing for the desert.”

  Other concentrations Manson studied in prison, besides The Beatles and the Bible, were L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. These books taught him a lot and gave him plenty to play with. For example, one of Dale Carnegie’s basic tenets was to “Let the other fellow feel that the idea is his.” That way, for instance, Charlie was able to get Tex to do something to get their brother, Bobby Beausoleil, off for having killed Hinman. Because Manson told him, Hinman was a snitch that was going to go to the cops and turn the whole Family in. Gary was a traitor, he said, just like Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson. Now something had to be done, right? Maybe copycat murders to lead police to believing the real killers were still out there roaming free? Now there’s an idea.

  So Charlie asked Tex whom he thought they might get to lead the others on such a mission and which targets seemed right. Was there some place secluded where they could slaughter some rich pigs and not be detected? How about somewhere like the house Terry Melcher used to live in? After all, Tex knew the way there and the layout. He’d been there before when Charlie went looking for Terry. This would sure send that lying deserter a message.

  * * *

  August 8th, 1969, at Spahn Movie Ranch began like so many others, as far as the girls were concerned anyway. Their job was to look after the men, cooking and cleaning up the mess, then taking care of the kids and the gardens—all except Susan Atkins. She spent the day snorting grams of powdered methamphetamine with Tex Watson, who had been tripping as well for days on regular, hard hits of acid.

  In the evening, less than twenty miles away, Sharon Tate and her houseguests Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski met for dinner at the El Coyote restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. Coincidently, Voytek had been on a forty-eight hour drug binge himself. Same sorts of stuff. Everybody in LA was on one kind of junk or another. However much you took of what over how many days, months and hours was relative.

  Still well before midnight, Manson took Watson aside and spoke to him about how to make these killings look like the work of the same people they wanted police to suspect for the killing of Hinman. From Watson’s point of view, it was his own idea to pick some place private—somewhere there were sure to be rich and famous people. That would serve to ignite the race war Charlie’d promised his Family. What a great idea, Tex. Atta boy, way to go, Manson told him.

  Then, point blank he asked him, “Will you die for me?”

  An easily misperceived tribute to someone like Tex, who so desperately sought Manson’s approval.

  Take three girls with you, Manson told Tex. Susan Atkins was a good bet since she’d been with Beausoleil and Brunner when they killed Hinman. He should also take Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian. Charlie told him, after he’d killed everyone at the house, to be sure and leave the same sort of bloody writing. He told him what equipment to take with him: an extra change of dark clothes, wire cutters, a length of rope, a military bayonet and Charlie’s .22 caliber revolver.

  Then, Manson took each of the girls aside to give them specific instructions. He told them to bring along a change of clothes and their buck knives. Patricia Krenwinkel said at this point she didn’t know for certain what was going to occur. But Susan Atkins did, which explains why Manson told Susan to “Do something witchy,” same as the last time. To each of the other girls he simply commanded, “Go with Tex and do exactly what he tells you to.”

  The Polanskis’ elegant ranch-style house at the end of Cielo Drive sat on its own shelf of land in the Santa Monica Mountains. To get to there from Chatsworth, Tex would have driven past UCLA along West Sunset Boulevard and wound his way up Benedict Canyon. Despite having been there before, Tex got lost a few times before he could find the right cul-de-sac to turn in on. He was still tripping on acid and clobbered on speed. Riding along in the backseat on the way into LA, Pat said she had the feeling she was being entwined in the entrails of some monstrous beast.

  In those days, Cielo Drive was little more than a narrow dirt road that dead-ended at the gates to what was, until recently, the home of actress Candice Bergen and music producer Terry Melcher. Melcher was the son of a famous Hollywood film star, Doris Day. With the gates locked at midnight, you wouldn’t be able to see far enough up the driveway to where the house was, because it sat so far back in the hillside.

  When Watson saw the closed wrought-iron gates blocking the entrance, he thought they might be electrified. No matter. He knew what to do. First, he shimmied up the pole by the gates and used the bolt cutters he brought to sever the phone lines. Then, he and the girls climbed the embankment that bypassed the fences and gates. All of a sudden, they saw car lights approaching from the direction of the house and crouched down to hide in the brush alongside the driveway. An unlucky eighteen year old, Steven Parent, who had been visiting his friend Bill Garretson in the guesthouse, was driving the car.

  Just as Parent slowed to the gate, Watson jumped out from the bushes and yelled, “Halt!”

  Then, he thrust the revolver inside the open window.

  Seeing the g
un pointed at his face, Parent pleaded, “Please don’t hurt me. I won’t say anything.”

  With his arm up defensively to guard himself, Tex slashed him with his knife on the forearm before pulling the trigger four times. The bullets tore through young Mr. Parent’s arm and face. After turning the engine and lights off, Tex pushed the car to the side of the drive and told the girls to follow him up to the house. As each of the girls passed by the open door of Parent’s car they could see the young man bleeding to death from the head. He was already unconscious. Now, they were getting an inkling of what was about to happen.

  At night, the Christmas lights that former tenant Candice Bergen had strung along the split-rail fence in front of the house glowed under a heavy darkness. When the attackers reached the house, Tex sent the girls around back to look for an unlocked door or window. Nothing so far. Then, he told Linda to go back down the drive and watch out for anything unexpected. Tex used his bayonet to cut the screen on the window to the room that was intended to be the Polanskis’ nursery. It was being readied for the arrival of Sharon and Roman’s son, Paul Richard. The baby was due in less than a month.

  Once inside the house, Tex opened the front door to let Susan and Pat into the premises. In the living room were high-beam ceilings and a loft above. Everywhere, piles of books and film scripts lay strewn about. In front of the stone fireplace, passed out on the sofa, was Roman’s Polish friend, Voytek Frykowski.