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

by Peter Chiaramonte

  * * *

  Jury selection finally got underway sometime in February. For Leslie, the process wasn’t as meticulous as it was agonizing. Some citizens begged off jury duty for perfectly understandable reasons. Financial hardship is always a fair one to choose, since, in our bank-managed system, it almost always applies. Few working people can afford to serve on such a lengthy case for months at a time away from their jobs. Besides a lot of romantic odds and ends, here’s how Leslie described her time seated in court during this phase of the process.

  Hi Hon!

  So now it’s just three more weeks and you’ll be here. It’s harder to write decent letters. I know you think the phone is a drag. But I think we both need to hear ‘I love you’ more often. I know I do. It’s important to me. Don’t you still love me?

  It’s such a drag that I’m back here in this scene again. What a waste of everyone’s time. I feel my life draining away while lawyers argue about nothing but nothing. Tonight I go to ballet. I need a good stretch. I missed last week because I was at the Malones’. This is good exercise in preparation for natural childbirth. I need to keep it up and not miss too many more chances to go.

  I dig my judge. So far I dig him a lot. The more I watch and listen to him the more I do. I’m feeling positive right now. I just hope my instincts are true. I know I’ve been wrong before. I hope what I’m feeling is some sort of momentum, and not the Earth about to break loose and swallow me up.

  I’m in court and it’s dragging on. Losing more jurors all the time…already on the second batch and I’ve lost two and got lots more to go. It always makes me feel so weird to hear complete strangers say how much they hate me. I sure will be glad when it’s over. Sitting here and listening to lawyers nose around in the worst parts of people’s lives. Their game is about determining if other people’s prejudices match their own. It’s such a pathetic process. One thing I would never want to be is a lawyer. Yucko.

  Lunch is over now and all I had was a hamburger. Pretty gross. Back to the same ol’ stuff. I lost five out of this batch. They didn’t seem all that nifty. A lot of them just said straight out they wanted a conviction. No ifs, ands, or buts. It’s a reflex reaction. Sometimes I think these people are as programmed as I was.

  I’m really anxious for you to come soon so we can talk and discuss things. There are so many things to talk about. There’s a lot of pressure here, believe me. It’s not easy. It’s still a lot like being in prison. Just getting to court is a chore. I’m anxious to stop all this running back and forth. I hope we can spend some laidback time—you know—just the two of us talking and hanging out. Being alone in each other’s arms.

  Some lady just said she doesn’t “quite” want to hang me, because I should have “the benefit of a reasonable doubt.” Boy she was a creep. Super creep—GOODBYE!! Now a guy says his wife is upset and freaked out by perceived threats of harassment. He says he doesn’t want to sit on my jury because it’s going to drive him and his wife nuts! Seems like that ship left the dock a long time ago. Goodbye Mr. Nuts. On to the next one. The same old routine. They must have looked at a hundred people today. Just about all of them had to be excused. I don’t think any of them wanted to be here anymore than I do. I’m not looking forward to this ordeal. Aren’t you glad you don’t have to be here to witness this yourself…? This whole thing is making me grumpy. I’ll be talking to you about it tonight.

  Come hold me tight tonight in my dreams…? I want to kiss you!

  * * *

  All throughout February, either Les or I would telephone the other on a Friday or a Saturday night. I often tape-recorded our calls with a Radio Shack pick-up wired into my Sanyo cassette.

  One Saturday night, Leslie called from Santa Barbara, where she and Linda Grippi had gone for a break from their various trials and tribulations.

  “What are you up to, mister?” Leslie asked.

  “Reading the final act of Othello,” I said. “What about you?”

  “Talkin’ to Linda...reading brochures about UCSB and the city of Santa Barbara. Would you rather live in the city or near the campus in Isla Vista? I think we should check out both scenes. Which do you think would be the most likely to have room enough for the garden I want?”

  “I’m sure you’ll know when you see it,” I said. “Take your time and keep looking ’til it finds you. It’s kinda like falling in love. How long are you guys planning to stay before heading back to LA?”

  “Leaving SB tomorrow. I’m coming back this way soon again with the Malones. Oh, oh! I just noticed something I want to tell you. It says here the married student housing is separate from everything else. Nope. No room for a garden there. There’s a place to get lumber for bookcases and stuff...and a needlework place where I can get all the things that I’ll need. It says non-resident tuition is six hundred thirty-five dollars per credit. Does that mean you too? Doesn’t that change when we’re married?”

  “Everything changes when we’re married,” I said, pausing to think that one over.

  “Hey Les, did I hear you say something last time...right at the end...maybe I didn’t hear it right. Did you say Manson’s been sending you letters?”

  “I got two letters, yeah. He knows that I’m out, which is why he probably sent them. Oh god, I’ll type them up and send you copies. Maybe you can make better sense of it than me or Max. Manson’s mind is a creepy jumble. You’ll see. Tell me if you think he’s threatening to kill me or somethin’?”

  “Have them Xeroxed.”

  “Can’t. They’re in pencil...and messy. Max needs the originals to stay here in the office. But I’ll type in the things he misspells. Sometimes he does that on purpose.”

  “I’d love to see how his mind works. That tiny scat of a man. What threats does he...?”

  “I wasn’t upset. But then Pat sent me one that sounded just like his...”

  “Pat Krenwinkel? What’s that about?”

  “Charlie’s just tryin’ to stir things up and get some attention. That’s what I think it’s about...getting Pat to get to me. The rest is beyond me.

  “He says that I’m lost, of course. In the second letter...I’ll send you both...he sort of starts tryin’ to talk to me. He’s sort of trying to make sense. Mostly they’re…you know...shit. Calling me names. He’s basically saying how fucked up I am as a person.

  “You know what ticked me off was the way he misspells my name on the envelope, ‘L-E-S-S,’ right? Well, I can accept that coming from him...knowing his game now as I do. So he’s saying I’m less of a person does not bother me. Nothing he says even matters to me. But when Pat did it...that hurt. Because I know damn good and well that her name isn’t ‘P-A-T-T,’ ya know? So I got kinda pissed off at that.”

  “Maybe this was all Charlie’s doing? You can’t blame her if he’s deluding himself into believing he’s still in control.”

  “I just wrote her a real nice letter and told her, ‘Do what you do, Pat. Just remember, I know you. And I’m just fearful that you’ll forget that I know you and that you’ve known me.’ I told her I had a funny feeling that ‘you’re going to start seeing me through other people’s eyes.’ Just like the strangers I see looking at me at the courthouse.”

  * * *

  After Valentine’s Day, I’d started teaching Shakespeare’s Othello to two senior classes. Shouldn’t say, “teaching” exactly. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that. What I did was begin by asking the students what, after nearly four years of high school, they could tell me about (1) Elizabethan theater, (2) the life of Shakespeare and (3) the source of the plot. What a yawn. To make matters worse, I assigned some of them parts from Act 1, Scene 1 without further ado. Not a very original start.

  When students read through the scene, their characters all sounded like detached and discarnate answering machines. I don’t know what I expected. Probably
something more akin to poor players strutting and fretting on a Venice street at night, rather than stuttering and shivering mechanical voices echoing in a cold and dark portable classroom. I was a scholar, an athlete, an artist! No gentleman, mind you. But, nonetheless, this was hell to pay for the promises made to the woman I loved. Of all the terrible jobs I’ve ever had, this was the absolute worst ever.

  I described—all but the last part—of this unpleasant event to Nadine and Sondra. We routinely took our “spare” periods in the staff room together. We were the only ones seated in that vinyl and Steelcase décor who were not smoking or playing cards. Acting out the part of the boy, I had playing the villain, Iago, in my last class. I mimicked his lines in response to Desdemona’s father’s asking him who he was.

  “Our Iago replied, ‘I am the one, sir, that comes to t-t-tell you, your daughter and the Moor are now m-m-making the beast with two blacks…’ The entire class erupted in laughter.

  “The thing is,” I carried on, “for a moment, that actually gave the class some energy that had been missing. But I wasn’t able to sustain the momentum. Soon, we were back to droning and moaning our way through to the end.”

  “There has to be a better way to go about teaching Shakespeare,” Nadine said. “I would have thought a fight scene involving an armed gang of thugs was something the class could get into.”

  “They acted like they were stuck underwater,” I moaned.

  Sondra suggested, “The first thing you need to do is help them determine the play’s basic premise. Have you read Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares?”

  “Nope, I haven’t,” I said, “but I connect it with Marlon Brando, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. ‘Method acting’? What do I know?”

  “That’s right,” Sondra said, “The Actor’s Studio...the method of personifying a character by drawing on the emotional memory of meaningful moments. The premise of the play is the answer to ‘what does it prove?’ Macbeth, for example, proves that ‘ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction.’ You see what I mean?”

  “That’s one way to teach it,” Nadine pointed out.

  Turning back to Sondra, I said. “Sounds good to me if you say so. But what about the Moor of Venice?” I asked her, turning my palms up with a shrug.

  “Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love,” Sondra suggested. “At least according to Lajos Egri.”

  “Who? Lajos Eg-ri? Do I put him on my reading list also?”

  I was beginning to think there might actually be something useful for me to get out of going to high school.

  * * *

  A twelve by nine inch envelope from Max Keith’s office arrived in my mail. In it were two typewritten copies of the letters Charles Manson sent to Leslie from prison. On the cover page, Leslie wrote: “Lots of bad typing. I’m still pretty rusty. There are some words he kept misspelling, so I retyped them the way that he wrote them. It all sounds so shallow and voodoo-ie now. Notice how he tries to play off so many angles. Laying on guilt. It’s the same kinds of junk he used all the time. It’s hard to believe his words once meant everything to me.”

  What follows is an abridged version of Manson’s letters to Leslie. The originals are twice as long, but mostly repetitive gibberish. Manson called Leslie “Green” on account of her love for flowers and gardens. The rest of Charlie’s Crayola rainbow-pack legend of nicknames refer to “Red” for Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (Manson’s acting head of the Family in his absence, who was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975); Susan Atkins, who was often called “Violet”; Patricia Krenwinkel was sometimes referred to as “Yellow”; and Sandra Good (who Prosecutor Stephen Kay once dated in high school) was called “Blue” for reasons I never heard.

  Green

  ...You gave yourself to something and gave faith beyond your earth brain understanding. That is something still. As each one has fell down, become divided, lost faith etc. and Love understands the falling down and loss of faith, but a love that’s bigger for other things sees beyond life, death or in and out games. Yes you got a life to live but its not your own... You wanted to stop the war etc. and you did and got what you wanted. But I was in a bigger circle than you seen…

  Much more than I didn’t have time to explain to you… Did you believe Linda Kasabian’s story… Each that breaks their own circle with me broke their own circle because I was only a servant to the truth and in others thoughts I had less will in it than a child. Only people I cut or shot or beat were for the circle I seen as my own. Had you been for your circle…

  I was and am so far out in space universe that I was already borned in the thought you Pat and sue brought to the court room. Judge older was about 2 years old and I let him set up on the bench because I loved the world. Don’t be surprised if you see me setting in the court room on your 3rd or 4th trial if you can get off by then or if on the day you get out the dead woman comes to meet you...The change will come one way or the other…

  What happened to all your hippie friends who wanted you to stop the war. How far did they go with you. Jane Folda etc. and the likes...As you have pulled and let others pull form the real reasons why things came down the way they did… I wanted to save the damn thing. We did it. We saved a world we can’t live in but don’t worry no one else will ever be that crzy again.

  So the earth’s water will be red mud and air not fit for your dogs and don’t come to me for no front game...I won’t ever do nothing for none of you ever-----Red and Blue will never give up and I will never give up we are locked into forever life it or not...I don’t see how you can get off on me when its me who been with each one will always be… Red and Blue, Yellow, Tex, and Bob, Bruce etc. All who been in worse cells and did harder time than you…

  Your tiral has been a joke up and down the hall ways. I get the news days behind for I’m so deep in the hole no T.V. or radio and the papr I do get is a Hearst S.F. papr and it is pure B.S. I get a few clippings days behind and you didn’t bother to see where your Red and Blue was at. Huh you gave all to athought and after death decided to change your mind. What about the struggles the rest of us been going through that you haven’t even seen in your rest home. Bobby’s face ain’t good looking no more from base ball bats and Steve been downed and Mary’s lies fell on us hard and the side of my face has been pushed in. Did you want world fixed over night. Weren’t we moving fast enough for you. Girl you gave your life to all of us and we haven’t fell down on that. And what of the 100’s of kids in prisons all over the country that came in behind yous. They haven’t stopped and won’t stop until the job is done. I’ve been 30 years on a job and the little time you;ve done is a little gift to a big world...Are you gonna dupit off on someone else to get out or keep on wht the rest of us...Keep yur faith woman.

  LETTER #2:

  Before you came to the ranch did anyone ever tell you the turht, or care for you and your Green etc...Your lawyer comes to court drunk and phonie Christians work for phonie jews selling the bloods sacrifices of their children. What happens to all your Jerry Rubins, Abbie Hoffman’s Jane Fondas...wanting to stop wars but only if it could make them some money. Your sould and brains were sold to the dollar bill brain before you were born. I showed you how to redeem your sould and how to save your world and al it did was cost me mine… You seen my good side and you seen my under will—now look at the other side of yourself. I stand right outside your courtroom in your thought…

  Any for you to play me off as a fool is only your own concern and know you this—as all water goes to the ocean (sea) rain drops in millions there is still only one water—I am that water and without me there is no Green so you keep giving your head to the lawyer and watch Green on her own cross. I could of and would have helped but but I guess you would rather keep your head on some other space project. So be it dust bowl…

  I w
on’t push you. Red’s ka chamber will do that for you are locked in your own circle for as a woman locked what she thought was man, she locked herself in the money madness. You were neo-woman and should of kept up on our own thought…

  In my own thought I’m the smartest person in the world for I am now your water and time for survival on earth is short. We didn’t blow earth up but what good is it without water. Water is life and as all water is one so is water.....Also when you open up the gas chamber again that gives everyone a gaschamber for everyone… Does your lawyer still hate me because he didn’t understand his daughter. Are you playing me as the willian they would be in their sex hang ups. If you play in likes they play in you must as much in the night of your cell you can’t hide from me for I’m your alone and you are alone…

  …I think you should look at your family again before Red’s ka chamber gets to Green’s re chamber ‘cause if you don’t you may not see any green left for it to rain on. Once a thought is set and locked to the universe only I can reset it for I never told you all I was doing because I trust myself only. your brain would not of understood it nor could you cope with it… I wish you get your wish and you could get out in Red’s ka chamber. I see not break in the circle and your corss boss is in the middle.

  P.S. The world you left in 1969 went on to somewhere else and its gone. The world Red left is running in her now ducks snakes snitches rat on and other hells that others have created with their lack of faith. I still hold faith in you alive or dead but look at what you are doing to Green and how nice lady bird took your tree and gave it to her fears. Why didn’t you wrote? Did you think there was an end to giving yourself for a cause—all is forever always—there ain’t no divorce in death life or in between...