On cross-examination I brought out one. Fort said: “It was my feeling [after examining Leslie Van Houten] that Mr. Manson’s influence played a very significant role in the commission of the murders.”
Another very crucial point came out on cross. To negate the defense’s new argument that the girls were on LSD during the murders, and therefore less responsible for their acts, I asked Fort: “Isn’t it true, Doctor, that people under the influence of LSD do not tend to be violent?”
A. “That is true.”
Still attacking the prosecution’s theory of Manson’s domination, Kanarek asked Fort: “Now, do you know of any cases where someone has—I mean, other than in the Frankenstein type of picture—do you know where someone has sat down and programmed people to go out, let’s say, and commit armed robberies, burglaries, assaults? Do you know of any such instances?”
A. “Yes. In one sense, that is what we do when we program soldiers in a war…The Army uses a peer group technique and the patriotic ideals that are instilled in citizens of a particular country to bring about this pattern of behavior.”
Dr. Fort was typical of many persons who, though opposed to capital punishment in principle, felt that these murders were so savage and senseless, so totally lacking in mitigating circumstances, that justice demanded that these persons be sentenced to death. I learned this in a conversation with him in the hall outside court, in which he stated that he was extremely unhappy that he had been called to testify for the defense in this case. Greatly concerned about the stain the Manson Family had cast on all young people, Dr. Fort offered to testify for the prosecution when I brought Charles “Tex” Watson to trial, an offer which I later accepted.
It was in just such a hallway interview that I discovered how potentially damaging to the defense their next witness could be. Learning that Keith intended to call Dr. Joel Simon Hochman during the afternoon session, I cut my lunch hour short so I could spend a half hour interviewing the psychiatrist.
To my amazement, I learned that Maxwell Keith hadn’t even interviewed his own witness. He was calling him to the stand “cold.” Had he talked to him for just five minutes, Keith would never have called Hochman. For the doctor, who
In his testimony and the psychiatric report he wrote following the examination, Dr. Hochman called Leslie Van Houten “a spoiled little princess” who was unable “to suffer frustration and delay of gratification.” From childhood on, she’d had extreme difficulties with impulse control. When she didn’t get her way, she went into rages, for example beating her adopted sister with a shoe.
“From a position of over-all perspective,” Hochman noted, “it is quite clear that Leslie Van Houten was a psychologically loaded gun which went off as a consequence of the complex intermeshing of highly unlikely and bizarre circumstances.”
Hochman confirmed something I had long suspected. Of the three female defendants, Leslie Van Houten was the least committed to Charles Manson. “She listened to [Manson’s] talk of philosophy, but it wasn’t her trip.” Nor could she “get that in to Charlie sexually, and that bothered her a lot. ‘I couldn’t get it on with Charlie like I could with Bobby,’ she said…” According to Hochman, Leslie was obsessed with beauty. “Bobby was beautiful, Charles was not, physically. Charles was short. That is something that always turned me off.”
Yet she killed at his command.
Keith asked Hochman: “Doctor, did you ask her whether or not Mr. Manson, during her association with him, had any influence over her in her thought process and in her conduct and activity?”
A. “She denies it. But I don’t buy that.”
Q. “Why don’t you buy that?”
A. “Well, I don’t understand why she would stay on the scene that long if there was nothing there for her, on some unconscious basis.”
As I’d observe in my final argument, many came to Spahn Ranch but only a few stayed; those who did, did so because they found the black-hearted medicine Manson was peddling very palatable.
According to Hochman, in talking to him Leslie professed “a kind of primitive Christianity, love for the world, acceptance of all things. And I asked her, ‘Well, professing that, how can it be you would murder someone?’ She said, ‘Well that was something inside of me too.’”
Maxwell Keith should have stopped right there. Instead, he asked Hochman: “How do you interpret that?”
A. “I think it’s rather realistic. I think that in reality it
Nor did Keith leave it at that. He now asked: “When you say a rage was there, what do you mean by that?”
A. “In my opinion it would take a rage, an emotional reaction to kill someone. I think it is unquestionable that that feeling was inside of her.”
Q. “Bearing in mind that she had never seen or heard of Mrs. LaBianca, in your opinion there was some hate in her when this occurred?”
A. “Well, I think it would make it easier for her not to know Mrs. LaBianca…It is hard to kill someone that you have good feelings towards. I don’t think there was anything specific about Mrs. LaBianca.
“Let me make myself clear: Mrs. LaBianca was an object, a blank screen upon which Leslie projected her feelings, much as a patient projects his feeling on an analyst whom he doesn’t know…feelings towards her mother, her father, toward the establishment…
“I think she was a very angry girl for a long time, a very alienated girl for a long time, and the anger and rage was associated with that.”
Hochman was articulating one of the main points of my final summation: namely, that Leslie, Sadie, Katie, and Tex had a hostility and rage within them that pre-existed Charles Manson. They were different from Linda Kasabian, Paul Watkins, Brooks Poston, Juan Flynn, and T. J. When Manson asked them to kill for him, each said no.
Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten said yes.
So there had to be something special about these people that caused them to kill. Some kind of inner flaw. Apart from Charlie.
Though he had badly damaged his own case, Keith had tried to put the hat on Manson. Fitzgerald, in his examination of Hochman, did just the opposite. He sought to minimize the importance of Manson’s influence over Leslie. Asking Hochman what Manson’s influence actually was, he received this reply: “His ideas, his presence, the role he played in his relationship to her, served to reinforce a lot of her feelings and attitudes. It served to reinforce and give her a way of continuing her general social alienation, her alienation from the establishment.”
Q. “So, really, all you are saying is that (A) Manson could possibly have had some influence, and (B), if he did have some influence, it would only contribute to the lowering of her restraints on her impulsiveness, is that correct?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “So any influence Manson had on Leslie Van Houten, in terms of your professional opinion, is tenuous at best, is that correct?”[83]
A. “Let me give you another example that may make it clearer… Suppose someone comes in and says, ‘Let’s eat the whole apple pie.’ Obviously your temptation is stimulated by the suggestion, but your final decision on whether or not to eat the whole pie or just one piece comes out of you. So the other person is influential, but is not a final arbiter or decider of that situation…
“Someone can tell you to shoot someone, but your decision to do that comes from inside you.”
Kanarek, when his turn came, picked up the scent. “And so you are telling us then, in layman’s language, that when someone takes a knife and stabs, the decision to do that is a personal decision?”
A. “In the ultimate analysis it is.”
Q. “It is a personal decision of the person who does the stabbing?”
A. “Yes.”
