They managed to borrow a car and ran away to the Haight-Ashbury. This adventure only lasted a week. They had no money, no place to live, and they knew no one. Sobered, Leslie returned home to face her parents; though they were no longer married, they presented her with a united front. Sometime during the recriminations, the family talks, the beginning of a new plan for Leslie to get her life back on track, she discovered that she was pregnant. The news was traumatic. “I was really upset. I was crying. I reached for my mother. I wanted her to hold me.”
What happened next, Leslie recalls, was a pivotal moment in their relationship. “My mother recoiled. She physically withdrew from me and said, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The look on her face reflected how contaminated she thought I was.”
Her mother arranged an abortion and this, too, was traumatic. As a result of all this anguish, she and Bobby decided they were through with drugs. They got involved with a group called the Self-Realization Network, a semi-religious, philosophical organization whose members acquire discipline through Yoga and meditation. Bobby would be a monk, Leslie a nun. Both required abstention from sex and drugs, which is perhaps why she was able to complete high school during this period.
The discipline finally proved to be too much for her, and though it meant breaking up with Bobby, who was still a disciple, she left the fellowship. At home, the tension between Leslie and her mother continued to intensify, so she moved in with her father and his wife in their Manhattan Beach duplex. They gave her the lower unit and a car, and she took a secretarial course at Sawyer Business School. She learned shorthand by day and took drugs at night.
Meanwhile, her brother Paul, after reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac, took off for parts unknown on his motorcycle. Inspired by his example, Leslie and a friend drove to San Francisco in the friend’s VW Bug, eventually ending up, once again, in Haight-Ashbury.
She called her mother. “ ‘Good-bye, Mom. I’m never coming back.’ ” She believed that her mother’s reaction to her pregnancy justified cutting her out of her life.
chapter twenty-six
A GOOD SOLDIER
When I was a young girl, the movie that had the most enduring influence on me was The Bridge on the River Kwai—one scene in particular. It takes place in World War II and our soldiers are in a Southeast Asian jungle fighting the Japanese. A young American soldier comes face-to-face with a young Japanese soldier. It was kill or be killed. For an instant, they both freeze—two fresh-faced, young men, boys really, with no desire to kill each other—and then a shot rings out and the young Japanese soldier drops. An older American soldier witnessing the scene has killed him. When the young man falls to the ground, his wallet falls out of his pocket and opens. We see a photo of his wife and young children. The scene is too “on the nose” for my taste now, but at the time I believed, I wanted to believe, that all soldiers in all wars had initial flashes in which they connected to each other’s humanity.
Leslie’s participation in the murders of Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca has been likened to a soldier’s slavish obedience to a despotic leader, at least among her supporters. The good soldier following orders is a frequent explanation for people committing heinous crimes against their fellow human beings, and it’s usually offered to diminish culpability.
In May 2000, Christie Webb, Leslie’s lawyer at the time, commissioned Dr. Margaret Singer—the now-deceased psychologist and expert on cults and thought reform—and her associate Dr. Patrick O’Reilly to interview Leslie and report their findings to the parole board. Singer compared Leslie to a young, peaceful, and inexperienced soldier who may hesitate when first confronted with the need to do his duty (in this case killing), but ultimately does it, even after a lifetime of being told that killing is wrong.
Singer didn’t make up the soldier analogy. Leslie did think of herself as a soldier for Manson. In 1996 she told the parole board, “I was disappointed that I hadn’t been selected to go the first night. The day after the first murders, Manson met me on the boardwalk (part of the old movie set at Spahn Ranch) and asked if I believed in him enough to kill. And I said, ‘Yes.’ I wanted to do it for Manson or for Manson’s approval. To let him know I was a good soldier and to let him know I was willing to lay my life on the line for him.”
I do, however, take issue with Singer’s claim that Leslie killed in spite of her initial deep resistance to killing. My belief as a young girl watching The Bridge on the River Kwai was, as it turns out, not entirely naive. Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of combat soldiers have the kind of strong resistance to killing that Singer cites in her report, and in spite of specific training to overcome that resistance, most of them never do.
In his critically acclaimed book, On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman asserts that in WWII only one out of five U.S. soldiers actually fired at the enemy. Most men, including combatants, find it very difficult to kill and, he claims, within most men their intense resistance to killing is so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it. According to Grossman, this resistance to killing is the result of a powerful combination of instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, and social factors. “It is there, it is strong, and it gives us cause to believe that there may just be hope for mankind after all.”
Even military people killing from a remote location thousands of miles away are not immune and many suffer from PTSD. “I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the dead,” Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator, said in an interview on KNPR in Nevada in 2015. “I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself.”
Dr. Singer’s explanation for Leslie’s willingness to overcome her resistance to kill was Manson’s shrewd methods. He employed “an absolutely horrendous process of thought reform” that destroyed Leslie’s self-confidence, alienated her completely from her past life, suppressed her critical thinking skills, and taught her that he was a divine being whose directives were those of God.
Singer believes that both LSD and marijuana played an important part in Manson’s gaining control. The role drugs may have played in the commission of these crimes was discussed extensively at the time of the trial. There’s no evidence that any of the killers were on LSD on the night of the murders, but they all had taken it during the previous months. In her report, Singer wrote that much more is now known about the cumulative effects of LSD and marijuana. “Marijuana can induce stupor, which makes it prohibitively difficult to think clearly. With heavy usage, and the Manson cult members were heavy users, there is frequently a splitting of consciousness and a marked decrease in short-term memory.” She goes on to list other symptoms: “spatial and temporal distortion and depersonalization; passivity; apathy; loss of inhibitions; increase in fantasy ideation; toxic psychosis; perceptual distortion; bewilderment; illusions; and disorientation.”
Singer maintains that Manson used hallucinogens to heighten belief in him as Jesus Christ. “While his followers were under the influence of LSD, Charles Manson tore down their personal values and replaced these values with his own perverse worldview. He hammered away at the evils of the outside world and preached his visions of doom and subservience.” At one point, according to Leslie, Manson directed the group to reenact the crucifixion of Christ while they were on LSD.
“How do you turn your back on Christ when he’s telling you that something needs to be done?” Singer wrote. “Leslie said she felt morally obligated for the good of mankind to hang around and see this through.”
But in her report, Singer also asserts that Leslie was conflicted about what Manson was ordering her to do. “A part of Leslie Van Houten did not want to obey Manson when confronted with a directive that she had known was wrong even though she had been indoctrinated into believing that she was prepared.”
There are two problems with Singer’s characterization of Leslie’s behavior that night—at least two. By her own admission, at the time, there wasn’t any part of her that believed what she did was wro
ng. “After the murders, when I was watching the reports about them on TV, I didn’t understand the horror of it,” she told the parole board in 1996. “I remember feeling sad that the world had put itself into a position where these kinds of things would happen, but I didn’t understand the idea of personal responsibility. If I heard something like that on the news today I would be devastated. But at that time I wasn’t able to connect to the personal tragedy of it.”
The only thing she was upset about was that Manson hadn’t chosen her to go to the blood bath the first night at the Tate house.
Leslie may have wanted to be a good soldier for Manson, but unlike most soldiers she had no feelings for her victims. She did not have the natural inner resistance to killing that Grossman describes in his book. Neither Leslie nor Pat had it. It was the complete absence of that resistance that makes their behavior so extraordinary (and a missed opportunity for Dr. Singer to explain when she was evaluating Leslie). While the report details the process by which she was seduced by Manson, we’re left with no explanation of how it was possible to completely and absolutely erase all human compassion for Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca.
This question would not be of interest to me if I believed that these women were “human monsters”—the way Bugliosi characterized them at the first trial and Steve Kay echoed in subsequent parole hearings. But after getting to know them, I believe they had the requisite equipment to be compassionate human beings before they became entangled with Manson.
To counter the many times the district attorney’s office has contended that Leslie’s psychiatric status continues to pose a threat to society, Singer details the reasons Leslie does not meet the criteria for a psychiatric disorder. She has minimal violence potential; she is able to form her own objective judgments of people independently; she is not repressing hostility or anger; she sees her cognitive abilities favorably and does not meet the criteria for an eating disorder. Other than finding that she has addictive potential that she monitors and controls by participating in 12-step programs, she is an intelligent, emotionally well-adjusted person, with no known pathology.
In spite of the district attorney’s explanation for Leslie’s criminal behavior, there is no evidence that she harbored inborn pathology, was “a monster without a heart and soul,” then or ever. If she’d been a psychopath in 1969 she would have been one in 2001 when Singer evaluated her. And she’d be one now. Something else was wrong with her. Very, very wrong.
2001
NIKKI MEREDITH: Dr. Singer, I’ve read your report on Leslie Van Houten. I understand the process you describe but there’s one thing I don’t understand.
DR. SINGER: What’s that?
NM: I understand your explanation of the process by which Manson took control of Leslie’s psyche, but this was a woman who committed brutal murders. She not only inflicted pain, she witnessed it in the most intimate way possible. She not only didn’t have any feeling about it when it took place, she didn’t feel even a twinge of empathy for her victims for another five years. Can you explain what psychological mechanism would be responsible for suppressing empathy to that degree and for that long?
Long pause.
DR. SINGER: My daughter is a surgeon . . . she has to cut into people daily and in order to do that, she has to be detached, that is, suppress her empathy, while she’s operating.
NM: I don’t think that’s analogous. For one thing, the patient is anesthetized so the surgeon is not witnessing suffering. And even in the old days when surgeons had only whiskey to numb the pain and consequently they observed suffering, they knew that what they were doing, in the long run, would alleviate suffering. I fail to see the similarity.
DR. SINGER: Obviously, I disagree. In both situations, we’re talking about detachment.
Yes, we are talking about detachment in physicians and the issue has been studied. Dr. Singer has science on her side, but only partially, in my opinion. An experiment by Jean Decety and colleagues at the University of Chicago examined the basis of pain empathy in physicians. Physicians who practiced acupuncture underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching videos of needles being inserted into another person’s hands, feet, and areas around their mouth as well as videos of the same areas being touched by a cotton bud. Compared to controls, the physicians showed significantly less response in brain regions involved in empathy for pain. In addition, the physicians showed significantly greater activation of areas involved in executive control, self-regulation, and thinking about the mental states of others. The physicians appeared to show less empathy and more of a higher-level cognitive response.
While the study may point to the ability of surgeons to suppress empathy to some degree, I’m not yet willing to agree with Singer that it’s analogous to the empathy suppression that Leslie experienced. Furthermore, I have a problem with the design of the experiment. Acupuncture is not particularly painful and doctors who administer it know that. I won’t be satisfied that this is a measure of the empathy gap among surgeons until either the photos are different or the fMRI is hooked up while the doctor is performing surgery.
chapter twenty-seven
SEARCHING FOR A CESSNA
October 1958
On a warm fall day in my first year at Hollywood High, a month or so into the semester, my father picked me up from school right after lunch. The night before, he’d told me he needed my help with a case he was working on . . . did I mind missing my last classes?
He needed my help? This was puzzling. My father was an IRS special agent whose caseload consisted primarily of the so-called L.A. Jewish mafia, Mickey Cohen and friends. How could he need my help? He explained that he was looking for a Cessna airplane that was probably parked at one of the general aviation airports in the L.A. area. The airplane was owned by a guy who owed the government thousands of dollars (I assume millions in today’s dollars). The goal was to take possession of it—one of the ways the government got what it was owed.
In fact, the car my father was driving that day, the company car as it were, was a late-model Thunderbird. When they seized expensive cars in those days, they didn’t auction them off, they used them for IRS business. My father, who skewed tweedy and looked more like an academic than a special agent for anything, never looked quite right driving Thunderbirds, Coupe de Villes, or Corvettes, the crop of cars they had seized that year. He said the practice saved money. Maybe so but it must have been a public relations problem because I’m pretty sure they stopped doing it by the time my father retired in 1966.
He needed my help, he said, because he was in a hurry. If the guy got wind of the IRS search, he’d hide the plane. “If you come with me we can cover twice the territory in half the time.” I remained puzzled. Surely they had staff to enlist. Maybe he thought I wanted to go into law enforcement when I finished school. I had recently asked if he would come to career day at the school to talk about his work. Whatever the reason, there was nothing about his proposal I didn’t like. My dad was a G-man; I’d be a G-man’s assistant! I just hoped the kids filing out of class that day saw me riding down Highland Avenue with my father in a red Thunderbird convertible.
For a long time, I thought it was weird that my father, who was a revolutionary at heart, a Trotskyite with a small t, worked for the government. It was only later that it made sense to me. My father believed in publically funded services and institutions—quality schools, government-supported medical care, sturdy, well-funded safety nets—and hence, he believed that people should pay taxes. He was at a high enough pay grade to entitle him to go after the big tax evaders, not waiters or hairdressers who failed to report tips.
The IRS might not have agreed that his Marxist principles were consistent with government work (this was, after all, the era of red baiting, blacklisting, and loyalty oaths), but he once told me he wasn’t a joiner so was never a member of any organization that Uncle Sam deemed seditious. Besides, he detested the American Communist Party, a group he referred to as Stalinists, and
blamed Communists for various crimes and misdemeanors, from union busting in the United States to the defeat of the Republicans who’d fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
We took Olympic Boulevard through the heart of the still-inchoate Century City, cutting over to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport before Olympic reached the beach. When we got out of the car, he showed me a color photo of the Cessna, a red and white airplane with the wings on top. I had never taken much notice of small airplanes before. This one was beautiful. I was already loving the detective work.
“I guess we need to split up,” I said, remembering his reason for wanting me along. “We can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot that I only have one photo so we’ll have to stick together.” Fishy.
We walked down the first aisle. I had always been a little afraid of airplanes, but lined up that day they looked innocent, safe, tethered like big docile land animals. In the second row, there was a guy polishing the wing of a biplane the color of a yellow rain slicker, the kind I’d seen in World War II movies. My father introduced himself to the man and showed him the photo. The guy whistled. “That’s a beauty.”
“Have you seen it here?”
“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I would have remembered it.”
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