Linda Kasabian, Who Testified Against Charles Manson, Dies at 73

[sheridan]

Linda Kasabian, who stood lookout while other members of the Charles
Manson family engaged in two nights of murder in 1969 and then, after an
immunity deal, became a pivotal prosecution witness in the trials that put
Mr. Manson and four of his other followers in prison, died on Jan. 21 in
Tacoma, Wash. She was 73.

A notice in The News Tribune of Tacoma recorded her death. It gave no
cause. For the most part Ms. Kasabian had tried to keep a low profile
since the killings and had gone under several names. At her death she was
using the name Linda Chiochios.

Ms. Kasabian had recently turned 20 in July 1969 when she left her
husband, Robert Kasabian, and went to live on the Spahn Ranch, an old
movie set in Los Angeles where Mr. Manson and his followers were camped
out.

“When I left, I was searching for love and freedom,” she said in a 2009
television documentary about the case, one of the few times she spoke
publicly about it. “I was searching for God.”

What she found was a commune where drugs and sex were plentiful and where
Mr. Manson, a habitual criminal and frustrated musician, held a
psychological grip on his followers. Mr. Manson harbored hateful ideas
about Black people and sought to set off a race war, leading him to send
Ms. Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson out on
a murderous mission. In the early hours of Aug. 9, 1969, Ms. Kasabian
waited at the car while the others killed five people, including the
actress Sharon Tate, the wife of the director Roman Polanski.

The next night, this time with Mr. Manson along, a group went to the home
of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Mr. Manson tied the couple up and left with
Ms. Kasabian; several of his followers then stabbed the LaBiancas to
death.

The killings, which were among the most sensational crimes of the era and,
to many, signaled the end of the peace-and-love 1960s, went unsolved for
months, but investigators eventually zeroed in on the Manson family. Ms.
Atkins, who died in 2009, provided the crucial grand jury testimony that
led to indictments; but she then changed her mind and declined to testify
at Mr. Manson’s trial, which began with jury selection in June 1970 and
opening arguments in mid-July. That was fine with Vincent Bugliosi, the
lead prosecutor, who after the deal had been struck for Ms. Atkins’s grand
jury testimony learned that Ms. Kasabian was also willing to testify.

“Given a choice between Susan and Linda as the star witness for the
prosecution, I much preferred Linda: She hadn’t killed anyone,” Mr.
Bugliosi wrote in “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders”
(1974, written with Curt Gentry), his best-selling account of the case.
“But in the rush to get the case to the grand jury, we’d made the deal
with Susan and, like it or not, we were stuck with it. Unless Susan
bolted.”

Once “Susan bolted,” the prosecution gave Ms. Kasabian conditional
immunity — it would be revoked if she did not testify fully and truthfully
— and she became the centerpiece of the trial of Mr. Manson and the three
women. (She was later important in the case against Mr. Watson, who was
tried separately.)

That trial was a wild affair that lasted months. Ms. Kasabian testified
for 17 days, withstanding badgering by the defense lawyers and sometimes
by Mr. Manson himself.

“Though the defense had been given a 20-page summary of all my interviews
with her, as well as copies of all her letters to me,” Mr. Bugliosi, who
died in 2015, wrote in “Helter Skelter,” “not once had she been impeached
with a prior inconsistent statement. I was very proud of her.”

In a 2009 interview on “Larry King Live,” where he appeared alongside Ms.
Kasabian (her image obscured to protect her privacy), Mr. Bugliosi left no
doubt that she had put Mr. Manson behind bars.

“If there ever was a star witness for the prosecution, it was Linda
Kasabian,” he said. “Without her testimony, Larry, it would have been
extremely difficult for me to convict Manson and his co-defendants.

“We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude towards Linda,” he added,
“because if Manson had gotten out, there’s no question he would have
continued to kill. He would have killed as many people as he could have.”

In addition to detailing the events of the murder nights, Ms. Kasabian
helped the prosecution establish that she and the others were under Mr.
Manson’s direct influence.

“He just had something, you know, that could hold you,” she testified at
one point.

“It seemed that the girls worshiped him,” she added, “just would die to do
anything for him.”

Mr. Bugliosi said that while others in the Manson family were remorseless
killers, he believed that Ms. Kasabian did not have a violent streak and
had been brought along on the nights of the killings only because, unlike
most or all of the others, she had a driver’s license.

In his book, Mr. Bugliosi recalled his summation to the jury: “Charles
Manson, the Mephistophelean guru who raped and bastardized the minds of
all those who gave themselves so totally to him, sent out from the fires
of hell at Spahn Ranch three heartless, bloodthirsty robots, and —
unfortunately for him — one human being, the little hippie girl Linda
Kasabian.”

Ms. Kasabian had detractors who said she had avoided punishment for her
role in the murders, had not fled from the Manson family when she could
have, and had left her young daughter in the care of others at the Spahn
Ranch for periods even after the killings. She said her decisions had been
influenced by fear of Mr. Manson and the general distrust of the police
that was common in the counterculture of the day.

She told Mr. King that since the trial she had been “trying to live a
normal life, which is really hard to do.”

“I’ve been on a mission of healing and rehabilitation,” she said. “I went
through a lot of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction and probably could
have used some psychological counseling and help 40 years ago.”

Mr. Manson, who died in 2017, and the other defendants remained defiant
and unremorseful during the trial and afterward. Ms. Kasabian, though, was
of a different mind-set.

“I felt as though I carried the guilt that nobody else had guilt for,” she
told Mr. King.

Linda Darlene Drouin was born on June 21, 1949, in Biddeford, Maine, and
grew up in New Hampshire. By the time she found her way to the Spahn
Ranch, she had been married and divorced once and had married Mr.
Kasabian. She brought her daughter, who was not yet 2, to the ranch with
her.

After the killings, Ms. Kasabian left the commune and went back to New
Hampshire. When Mr. Manson and others, including Ms. Kasabian, were
indicted in the murders in late 1969, she waived extradition and,
according to Mr. Bugliosi’s book, “was anxious to tell what she knew,” but
her lawyer held out for a deal.

Information on Ms. Kasabian’s survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Kasabian’s story had some curious peripheral elements attached to it.
The British rock band Kasabian named itself after her. And Joan Didion,
the acclaimed writer, was a sartorial footnote at the trial. Ms. Didion,
in her essay collection “The White Album” (1979), wrote that, shortly
before the trial, she had interviewed Ms. Kasabian, who asked her to pick
out a dress for her to wear on her first day of testimony.

“‘Size 9 petite,’ her instructions read,” Ms. Didion wrote, though she
didn’t describe the dress she eventually bought. “‘Mini but not extremely
mini. In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold. Or: a Mexican-style
peasant dress, smocked or embroidered.’”

<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/us/linda-kasabian-dead.html>