THE COURT “It appears to me, Mr. Shinn, that you are not paying the slightest attention to the publicity order, and you haven’t been for some time. I have felt, in my own mind, for a long, long time, that the leak—and there is a leak—is you.”
Maxwell Keith very reluctantly called his client, Leslie Van Houten, to the stand. After taking her through her background, Keith asked to approach the bench. He told Older that his client was going to involve herself in the Hinman murder. He had discussed this with her for “hours and hours” but to no avail.
Once she began reciting her tale, the transparency of her fictions became obvious. According to Leslie, Mary Brunner was never at the Hinman residence, while both Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil left before the actual killing took place. It was Sadie, she said, who killed Gary.
Though implicating herself in the Hinman murder, at least by her presence, Leslie did try to provide some mitigating circumstances for her involvement in the LaBianca murders. She claimed she knew nothing about the Tate murders and that when she went along the next night she had no idea where they were going or what they were going to do. The murder of Rosemary LaBianca was made to seem almost like self-defense. Only after Rosemary swung at her with the lamp did she “take one of the knives and Patricia had a knife, and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady.”
Q. “Up to that time, did you have any intention of hurting anybody?”
A. “No.”
Q. “Did you stab her after she appeared to be dead, Les?”
A. “I don’t know if it was before or after she was dead, but I stabbed her…I don’t know if she was dead. She was lying there on the floor.”
Q. “Had you stabbed her at all before you saw her lying on the floor?”
A. “I don’t remember.”
Leslie’s forgetting such things was almost as improbable as her claim that she hadn’t mentioned the murders to Manson until they were in the desert.
Very carefully, Keith tried to establish that Leslie had remorse for her acts.
Q. “Leslie, do you feel sorrow or shame or a sense of guilt for having participated in the death of Mrs. LaBianca?”
A. [Pause]
Q. “Let me go one by one. Do you feel sorrowful about it; sorry; unhappy?”
You could almost feel the chill in the courtroom when Leslie answered: “Sorry is only a five-letter word. It can’t bring back anything.”
Q. “I am trying, Leslie, to discover how you feel about it.”
A. “What can I feel? It has happened. She is gone.”
Q. “Do you wish that it hadn’t happened?”
A. “I never wish anything to be done over another way. That is a foolish thought. It never will happen that way. You can’t undo something that is done.”
Q. “Do you feel as if you wanted to cry for what happened?”
A. “Cry? For her death? If I cry for death, it is for death itself. She is not the only person who has died.”
Q. “Do you think about it from time to time?”
A. “Only when I am in the courtroom.”
Through most of the trial Leslie Van Houten had maintained her innocent-little-girl act. She’d dropped it now, the jury seeing for the first time how cold and unfeeling she really was.
Another aspect of her real nature surfaced when Kanarek examined her. Angry and impatient at some of his questions, she snapped back hostile, sarcastic replies. With each spurt of venom, you could see the jurors drawing back, looking at her as if anew. Whatever sympathy she may have generated earlier was gone now. Even McBride no longer met her eyes.
Leslie Van Houten had been found guilty of two homicides. I felt she deserved the death penalty for her very willing participation in those acts. But I didn’t want the jury to vote death on the basis of a crime she didn’t even commit. I told her attorney, Maxwell Keith, that I was willing to stipulate that Leslie was not at the Hinman residence. “I mean, the jury is apt to think she was, and hold it against your client, and I don’t think that is right.”
Also, during cross-examination I asked: “Did you tell anyone—prior to your testimony on the witness stand —that it was you who was along with Sadie and Bobby Beausoleil at Gary Hinman’s house?”
A. “I told Patricia about it.”
Q. “Actually it was Mary Brunner who was inside the residence, not you, isn’t that correct?”
A. “That is what you say.”
Although I was attempting to exonerate Leslie of any complicity in the Gary Hinman murder, I did the opposite when it came to the murder of Rosemary LaBianca. By the time I’d finished my cross-examination on this, Leslie had admitted that Rosemary might still have been alive when she stabbed her; and that she not only stabbed her in the buttocks and possibly the neck, but “I could have done a couple on the back.” (As I’d later remind the jury, many of the back wounds were not post-mortem, while one, which severed Rosemary LaBianca’s spine, would have been in and of itself fatal.)
As with Sadie and Katie, I emphasized the improbabilities in her copycat tale. For example, though she had testified that she was “hopelessly in love” with Bobby Beausoleil, and became aware that these murders had been committed in an attempt to free him, I brought out that she hadn’t even offered to testify in either of his trials, when her story, had it been true, could have resulted in his release.
At this point I decided to go on a fishing expedition. Though I had no definite knowledge that this was so, I strongly suspected that Leslie had told her first attorney, Marvin Part, the true story of these murders. I did know that Part had recorded her story and, though I never heard the tape, I recalled Part almost begging the judge to listen to it.
BUGLIOSI “Isn’t it true, Leslie, that before the trial started you told someone that Charles Manson ordered these murders?”
A. “I had a court-appointed attorney, Marvin Part, who was insistent on the fact that I was—”
Keith interrupted her, objecting that we were getting into the area of privileged communications. I noted to Judge Older that Leslie herself had mentioned Part by name and that she had the right to waive the privilege. Kanarek also objected, well aware of what I was hoping to bring out.
VAN HOUTEN “Mr. Kanarek, will you shut up so I can answer his question?…I had a court-appointed attorney by the name of Marvin Part. He had a lot of different thoughts, which were all his own, on how to get me off. He said he was going to make some tape recordings, and he told me the gist of what he wanted me to say. And I said it.”
Q. “What did you tell Mr. Part?”
A. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
I asked her if she told Part that Manson had ordered these murders.
A. “Sure I told him that.”
Did she tell Part that Manson was along the second night, and that when they stopped on Waverly Drive, Manson got out and entered the LaBianca house?
After a number of evasive replies, Leslie angrily answered: “Sure I told him that!”
THE COURT “We will take our recess at this time—”
VAN HOUTEN “Mr. Bugliosi, you are an evil man!”
Each of the Family witnesses denied that Manson hated blacks. But in the light of what I’d recently learned, several put it in a very curious way. When Fitzgerald asked Squeaky: “Did he love the black man or did he hate him?” she had replied: “He loved them. He is his father—the black man is Charlie’s father.” Gypsy had testified: “First of all, Charlie spent nearly all of his life in jail. So he got to know the black people very,
