No Journey's End: My Tragic Romance with Ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten
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The parole boards continue to insist, regardless of the law they espouse to protect and obey, that the reason they can’t give her a firm date for release is because of “the enormity of the crime.”
As Leslie’s good friend, filmmaker and writer John Waters has said, “It’s the only thing she can never change.”
No matter how much progress she’s made or how good the psychiatric and conduct reports are, there’s nothing she can do to change things.
In 1982, I received a letter from Martin Bijaux telling me that Leslie had fallen in love with a convict named Bill Syvin, who had begun corresponding with her while he was in jail. (Martin always was the bearer of such good tidings, wasn’t he?) Evidently, Mr. Syvin was serving time on a grand theft auto rap and drug-related charges when he started writing letters to Leslie. Once released from prison, Syvin arranged to visit her in CIW at Frontera. The couple was married in a private ceremony at the prison and granted conjugal visits, of course. Leslie once described the arrangements to me as “like in a trailer park.”
Syvin was later arrested and charged for possession of a stolen Chevy Corvette. A search of his residence also uncovered sets of stolen California Department of Corrections women’s uniforms—like those worn by the female guards at Frontera. When Leslie found out about Syvin’s wild scheme to arrange her escape, she immediately filed for divorce and never heard from him again.
On June 4th, 2002, Superior Court Judge Bob Krug issued an order requiring the parole board to provide evidence that shows why Leslie Van Houten should not be paroled. Judge Krug directed the board to explain what she must do to secure her release. The judge stated that a sentence of life without parole was unauthorized by law.
“I cannot find any indication where Ms. Van Houten has done anything wrong in prison. They can’t keep using the crime forever and ever. That turns her sentence into life without parole.”
Therefore, he ordered that, according to the California penal code, the parole board had a legal obligation to sanction her parole unless a case could be made that public safety remained in jeopardy.
Subsequently, the Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed Krug’s decision in 2004 and ruled that he applied the wrong standard. Krug had claimed the parole board denied Leslie freedom based solely on the nature of the crimes themselves, without weighing Leslie’s exemplary record of rehabilitation in prison. But, then, Governor Gray Davis further announced he would not sign the release papers into law, regardless of whether the parole board (under pressure from the court) so ordered or not.
In 2005, I was sorry to hear from Martin Bijaux that’s Leslie’s mother, Jane, had died in her sleep. Les’s former attorney, Maxwell S. Keith, died in 2012, the same year as Leslie’s father, Paul. Co-conspirator Susan Atkins died in prison in 2009 from brain cancer. And, to date, all the others convicted in the Tate and LaBianca murders—Leslie, Charles Manson, Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel—continue to serve life sentences in California state prisons.
Patrick Sequira, the assistant district attorney who took over lobbying against Leslie’s parole after Stephen Kay’s retirement, has argued there’s something suspicious about Leslie going back to college behind bars to get her master’s degree in philosophy. In front of the parole board, he inveighed against the classes Leslie was taking: “Democracy in Education,” “Origins of Intelligence in Children” and “The Theory of Justice.”
“Clearly,” Mr. Sequira protested, “the inmate has a fascination with philosophy just as she had a fascination with the concepts that the Manson Family embraced. If there was true educational intent in changing oneself, you’d think it would be beyond studying philosophy.”
How she could stand all that crap from people at the shallow end of the social gene pool, amazed me.
On June 6th, 2013, the day after Leslie Van Houten’s twentieth parole hearing, I was having brunch near the University of Toronto with Coach Andy Higgins. We met at the Mercurio L’espresso Bar on Bloor Street West near the corner of St. George, less than a hundred meters from the new U of T track at Varsity Stadium. I’d been across the street all morning doing library research at OISE. That’s where I was when I heard that Leslie’s parole had been denied for the twentieth time. She is, after all, the youngest woman in the history of California to have been sentenced to the gas chamber, at age twenty-one. She has served longer in prison than any Nazi war criminal not sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Tribunals—which ended in 1949, the year that Leslie was born.
Andy asked if I was still writing a memoir about Leslie and the time we spent together. I said that indeed I had kept daily diaries and all of her letters. I did, after all—and largely thanks to Leslie—get my Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of California. I’ve been a full-time professor and subsequently kicked in and out of some of what are arguably the best—and worst—universities coast-to-coast in Canada, the United States, Europe and as far east as Bangkok, Thailand. And yes, I remain proud to say that I’m a socialization that never took. I never put my roots down anywhere, not even home—wherever that is.
One of the things that Andy and I discussed that day was Leslie’s prospects for ever being free again. I couldn’t answer. I told him what I’d read by Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch, quoting Leslie the day before as saying, “I know I did something that is unforgiveable, but I can create a world where I make amends. I’m trying to be someone who lives a life for healing rather than destruction.”
After years of psychiatric treatment and intense self-examination, Leslie said she realizes that what she did was “like a pebble falling in a pond which affected so many people.”
It’s like Nietzsche’s moral philosophy of the eternal return: I lived those moments with Leslie exactly as I would live them again and again for all time. Whatever regrets I may have about my jealous eruptions and other mistakes that I made, none of that would have mattered if we’d had the chance then to go on. Her going back to prison was beyond our control. But, for the longest time, I was convinced—given the strength of our bond and commitment to one another—we could have worked it out. I kept up the fantasy that we would have gone on to resolve these wrangles and grown sounder together, but that was all just wishful thinking on my part.
Leslie’s next parole hearing is scheduled for the summer of 2018. She will be about to turn sixty-nine years old by then—and she will already have served all but six months in jail since she was a quite beautiful twenty year old. She was, in fact, the most credulous, adoring woman I have ever known, and I will always miss her.