The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  It’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that talk of the murders is threaded throughout the site and the title of his latest memoir is Manson’s Right-Hand Man Speaks Out! And in bold letters on newer editions of his previous memoir, Will You Die For Me? is Once Ready to Die for Manson Now Living a New Life for Christ. From what I can tell, he isn’t receiving money and I assume it would be illegal for him to do so. There’s no obvious way to donate, though there is an address should someone want to contact him.

  Ostensibly, the purpose of the website is to spread the word about Jesus Christ and to reach out in the spirit of love and forgiveness, but it seems to me that he, like Catherine Share, also uses the murders as a platform for public recognition. And why not? They both have a story to tell. I’m not suggesting they be prevented from doing so, but I do think it’s significant that neither Pat nor Leslie has done anything this self-serving.

  chapter thirty-eight

  EVERY FACET OF HER MOTHERING

  1998

  Leslie’s next parole hearing took place a week after I last saw Mrs. Van Houten. At the hearing, Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay could barely contain his excitement: he’d found something new he could use against Leslie. In her most recent psychiatric report there was a reference to how thin she’d become. “She has a history of anorexia,” Kay told the panel. “Everyone knows anorexia is anger turned inward. What if she gets out and that anger is turned outward again? We can’t take that chance.”

  Also, he had unearthed Mr. LaBianca’s first wife. Though they were divorced long before Mr. LaBianca and the second Mrs. LaBianca were murdered, Kay had arranged for her to speak on behalf of the couple. She appeared before the board to say that Mr. LaBianca was a very nice man and to argue against Leslie’s release.

  The board, once again, refused to grant Leslie a parole date, but this time the panel did ask that she return in one year instead of two. This seemed to be an acknowledgment that they were running out of reasons to keep her incarcerated. Even so, members of the board serve at the pleasure of the governor, and no governor of any political stripe is going to win votes by releasing one of the Manson group no matter how justified it may be under the law, under the policies that guide release or under a reasonable interpretation of justice.

  When I called Mrs. Van Houten later that week to confirm our next meeting, I asked how she was feeling—she had complained of a cold the last time we talked on the phone.

  “I’m not going to discuss that on the telephone,” she said. I was puzzled, actually not puzzled, stunned by her tone. She was so snappish, you’d think I’d asked her something as personal as “female” troubles.

  We met a few days later for lunch at an outdoor Mexican restaurant. The Los Angeles County Health Department had recently started assigning letter grades to restaurants, reflecting how compliant they were with health department rules. There was a “B” prominently displayed in the window. We talked about how to interpret the grade. According to recent news reports, restaurant owners had been paying inspectors under the table for high letter grades.

  “Does that mean their standards are only above average or that they didn’t pay enough?” she said, laughing. “Do I dare order a chile relleno?”

  After we ordered I asked about her snappishness on the phone.

  “I had made up my mind that if you were going to be blunt enough to ask me about Leslie’s parole hearing on the phone, I would be blunt enough to tell you I didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.” When I explained that I was merely asking if she’d recovered from her cold, she blushed and apologized. I believed, however, that I’d gotten a glimpse of her formidable nature. After all, would it be so terrible to ask her about a parole hearing on the phone? It was clear that she had firmly etched in her mind the dopey television reporter who sticks a microphone in the victim’s face and chirps, “How do you feel about your whole family dying in this car wreck?” I knew she had many scars. I remembered Leslie talking about how brutal the media had been to her family during the trial.

  Once we’d straightened that out, I did ask her about the parole hearing. “The whole thing is so unfair. Leslie is thin but so is her dad. It’s in the family. Steve Kay will find anything to hold against her. Anything.”

  I asked Mrs. Van Houten how she and Leslie had repaired their relationship after her incarceration. She described it as a long, arduous journey.

  When Leslie was first arrested she gave an alias—Lucy Sankston—and after her actual identity was revealed she did everything she could to renounce her family. Mrs. Van Houten was not so easily renounced but finding a way to connect was not easy. Leslie was so weirdly out of touch with reality, Mrs. V felt as though she was visiting a mental patient. As a way to reorient her to her past she decided the first task would be to reintroduce her to the Van Houten family. She brought boxes of family photos and asked Leslie to help her put them in albums. And while they did this together, it was natural to talk about the images—who was in them and what they were doing. “I’d say, ‘Leslie, do you remember what we were doing there? Where were we? Wasn’t that a picnic?’ ” And this stimulated extended conversations about each family member and memories Leslie had about her childhood.

  Mrs. Van Houten brought needlepoint, something they had done together when Leslie was younger. Later, when they were able to have overnight family visits, she brought literature for them to read together. They read Eudora Welty. They read Faulkner. “I tried to build on what we had and could have together that was less threatening.”

  Very slowly she began to see changes.

  Leslie had told me in an earlier conversation that she never would have survived prison without her mother. “She made a decision to reclaim me as a daughter. I remember at one point I said to her, ‘Why don’t you forget about me? It would be so much easier for you and perfectly understandable.’ My mother said, ‘I’m not made of that kind of stuff.’ ”

  In spite of those assurances to Leslie, Mrs. Van Houten told me that in the beginning she wasn’t actually sure of what kind of stuff she was made. She struggled mightily with the knowledge of what Leslie had done. I asked her if she had ever discussed the murders with Leslie. She shook her head.

  “I learned a long time ago not to ask a question I couldn’t bear to hear the answer to,” she said. “I had to try and commit myself to reclaiming Leslie as my daughter . . . to do that I had to develop tunnel vision. I had to block out the images of the murders and focus on what it would take to bring Leslie back to the land of the living.”

  Before my first meeting with her mother, I had asked Leslie if she had any advice for me. She was quiet for a while. “Don’t ask her why it happened,” she said, referring to the murders, “she doesn’t know.” Not knowing, however, did not shield her from the where-did-I-go-wrong question familiar to all mothers whose children’s lives take a tragic turn. Over the years, she’d examined every facet of her mothering, no matter how minute, held it up to the light, turned it over and over again. Every question asked, every answer given. Every limit imposed or not imposed. Every lesson taught or not taught.

  When Leslie was a little girl, she believed in elves. Would a good mother have discouraged that belief? Did that fantasy set her up for Manson’s craziness? What about the family’s religious practices? What about their religious teachings? “I wanted the kids to know about the Jewish religion so when we had dinner at Passover we set a place at the table for Elijah. Did that set her up to be predisposed to magical thinking? Was I too restrictive? Maybe I should have let her have a Barbie doll.” (When Barbie dolls came out in 1959, Leslie was ten and her mother thought the dolls were too sexualized for a young girl.) Leslie wanted to attend modeling school. Her mother said no. “It seemed like such a shallow career. But . . . maybe I should have let her. Was I too critical generally?”

  Mother and daughter have come a long way since their nasty parting on the phone when Leslie called from the Haight. Mrs. Van Houten expressed great admir
ation for how hard Leslie’s worked, not only on herself—her therapy, her education—but also on projects that benefit other people. She said the many hours they were able to spend together on overnight family visits in the trailer cemented their closeness. They talked, they cooked, they read together. “In addition to our Southern period when we read Faulkner and Welty, we had our Russian period when we read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.”

  In the very early days of family visits, Mrs. Van Houten was so determined to do everything she could to reintegrate Leslie into the family, she agreed to include Mr. Van Houten in an overnight visit. For a brief time, they were a family again—cooking, talking, playing cards and board games. She told me the visit had gone well and served its purpose, but she didn’t elaborate. I found the thought of the three of them living under the same roof for the first time since he abandoned the family touching and, given how much acrimony there had been, a testament to how much they both loved their daughter.

  One day in the visiting room, I was talking to Pat when Mrs. Van Houten walked over to say hello to me. She was courteous but seemed cool to Pat. The next time I saw her I asked her about it. “I have wanted to distance myself. Even more, I’ve wanted Leslie to keep her distance.” This had a familiar ring to it. Though Mrs. Van Houten said her purpose in keeping Susan and Pat at a distance was so that other people would believe that Leslie wasn’t like them, I wondered if it was a version of the way I had wanted to keep Susan and Tex at a distance.

  August 1998

  Mrs. Van Houten and I met at a Starbucks close to her home. We talked about movies—I had just seen Shakespeare in Love so I mentioned Gwyneth Paltrow and we talked about language, Shakespeare, beauty. We talked about the recent U.S. Embassy bombings in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. We talked about religious zealotry, suicide bombers, mind control.

  We sparked each other. We’d go from one topic to another, each of us interested in what the other had to say. These are also the kinds of conversations I have with Leslie. There is much similarity between them. They both read a lot, they are both alert to the hopeful signs in the world as well as to the tragic state of so much of the planet. They are both lively and, each in her own way, participating fully in life. Somehow we got on to the topic of Hugh C. Thompson, a hero of both of ours. He was a U.S. Army helicopter pilot who, in 1968 during the Vietnam war, had, along with his crew, risked his life to stop the My Lai massacre in which a group of U.S. Army soldiers deliberately murdered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians—women, old people, babies. In March 1998, thirty years after the fact, he and his gunner were awarded the Soldier’s Medal.

  I asked her whether she thought the kind of character displayed by Hugh Thompson is inborn. She said she didn’t know whether it was inborn, but she didn’t believe you could teach it. I realized that we had veered into Leslie territory. One of the questions I had pondered more than once: What did Hugh Thompson have that Leslie didn’t? And why would I compare them? In my mind, the commonality in the two situations—the massacre at My Lai versus the slaughter of the LaBiancas—is the issue of following orders. I believe that the Leslie I know now is someone whose character and humanity would force her to override an order to hurt someone no matter what the situation.

  Over the course of hours and days, Mrs. Van Houten and I talked of many things existential and spiritual. She was a woman approaching eighty who was still in search of answers; in fact, she was still in search of questions. She said that over the years her religious beliefs had changed. “I’m completely turned off to the idea of retribution now. To me, God is love. I’m rereading The Sound and the Fury, and when Benji’s mother says, ‘What did I do that God would present me with this?’ I want to scream, ‘It was a horrible coincidence! God didn’t do it to you!’ ”

  And then in a very soft voice she added, “The truth is that I am also guilty of asking ‘why?’ There’s still so much I don’t know. So much I don’t understand.”

  Because I knew how much pain she’d suffered and the dignified way she’d coped, and because I knew how hard she’d struggled to lead a life of consequence in spite of everything, and because I knew how seriously she took questions, when she looked at me with those clear blue eyes and said, “God is a puzzle to me now,” it broke my heart.

  chapter thirty-nine

  A LETHAL CONVERGENCE

  As hard as I tried, I could not find a single clue—a smoking gun—to explain why these women had been willing to sacrifice their humanity to Charles Manson. I’m not saying there was nothing in any of the backgrounds of these people, the members of the so-called Manson Family, that contributed to their vulnerability—Leslie’s absent father, the teasing Pat suffered as a kid and her father’s rejection of her sister, Catherine Share losing her mother and emotionally abandoned by her father, Susan Atkins’s grim childhood—but I don’t think the explanation is to be found with their families. You have to give the psychologists and psychiatrists credit for trying, but, unlike Manson’s history, there just isn’t enough there. As I’ve said, take any ordinary family and apply close enough scrutiny and you will find enough pathology to fill volumes.

  My family was such a family. There were few answers to the questions my parents asked over and over. Like Leslie, my brother was a bright, attractive kid, who, again like Leslie, started fooling around with drugs as a teenager. There was no divorce but there are clues that his birth might not have been entirely welcomed by my father, who, as a young man, had planned to be a Jesuit priest. That changed when he met my mother, but they waited ten years before having children. By his own admission, he wasn’t ready to be a father even then.

  After my brother was arrested, my father scrupulously reviewed what kind of parent he’d been. An incident haunted him: he was buying my six-year-old brother an ice cream cone and, because my father liked chocolate and assumed all kids liked chocolate, he ordered them both chocolate ice cream cones. When he handed my brother his cone, the little boy looked at it and said, “I don’t like chocolate. I wanted strawberry.” My father grabbed the cone, walked to the trash can, dumped it, and walked out of the store. I’m not proposing that my brother robbed an elderly couple because of that incident, but it did say a lot about my father’s thin skin. Why would the feelings of an adult man be hurt because his kid wanted strawberry?

  Unlike Pat and Leslie, post-crime, my brother’s situation was, to use a shop-worn expression, a perfect storm of positive forces converging. Neither of his victims died and his years in prison were as good as it gets. He was in an elite program, a minimum-security prison on the grounds of the maximum-security prison. The inmates fought fires every day and had group therapy every evening. He was only in prison for three years and probably would have gotten out sooner except the parole board was convinced that he had money stashed away. They couldn’t believe that he had burned through his share of $100,000 in just a few months.

  After he was paroled, he got his undergraduate degree, then his PhD, and eventually became a tenured professor at a university. In other words, he became the person my parents had wanted him to become in the first place.

  I’m not suggesting that his situation was strictly parallel to Leslie’s. He didn’t kill anyone. And that is not a small difference. But for me, the hardest part of my brother’s crime was his apparent indifference to the terror the couple must have felt as they were being tied up. Like Leslie, he was young, but he wasn’t a teenager. He was a young adult. Like Leslie, he’d been raised with good values by educated parents who agonized about the best course of action when he ran into trouble. And as was the case with Leslie, by the time he planned to enter that house to rob that old couple, it was too late. At that point, my parents had no influence on him.

  So, no single factor for the kids attracted to Manson but most certainly contributing ones. Divorce is painful and disrupting for kids; drugs are destructive; social upheaval was the order of the day. All of
those elements converged in a lethal and tragic way. In their case, it was a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances that led those women to Manson. But after concluding that, and after getting to know Leslie and Pat, I remained perplexed. At the risk of tedium I will repeat: these two women not only caused horrible suffering, very intimate suffering, they felt nothing, nothing about it. Natural human empathy for their victims did not surface for five years. How could that be? Even after years of knowing them, I didn’t feel any closer to understanding that.

  chapter forty

  “YOU COULDN’ T FIND A NICER GROUP OF PEOPLE”

  1969

  While I had trouble with Bugliosi’s original characterization of the women as soulless monsters, I did have to acknowledge that killing someone so intimately and feeling nothing came pretty close to a definition of soulless. Certainly it was an example of a total lack of empathy. When I first got to know Pat and Leslie, I assumed that while they were with Manson and later, still under his influence, the empathy dial wasn’t turned down; it was turned off. But as I listened to them describe their lives with him, it was clear that the situation had been more complicated.

  They had compassion and concern for each other and they had intense sympathy for Manson. When he talked about his childhood, they wept for the little boy who was abandoned and abused. When he talked about his life in institutions, they got angry and blamed society. Manson was an expert at selecting young people who were longing for an intense group connection, and he was skilled at reinforcing the bond that kept them together. It’s no accident that it was called the Family. In fact, it may be that the empathy they felt for each other, particularly for Charlie, made them so dangerous.