After 52 years in prison, Leslie Van Houten, a member of Charles Manson’s cult, was released today on parole from the California penitentiary where she was being held.

Leslie Van Houten, now 72, was 19 when she was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the 1969 murder of Los Angeles store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife.

Although initially charged, the former member of Manson’s cult was not involved in the infamous “Cielo Drive massacre” in Los Angeles, where Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, three of her friends and an 18-year-old boy were murdered.

Manson was originally sentenced to death, but his sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison because in 1972 the state of California abolished the death penalty.

The notorious criminal died on November 19, 2017, aged 83, in prison.

CHARLES MANSON

The infamous Charles Manson on August 14, 2017, left, and on December 22, 1969, right, leaving a Los Angeles courtroom

Who is Leslie Van Houten?

Van Houten at 14 was the so-called model daughter and student.

She went to church camp every summer, sang in the choir and was the “queen” of the school. But even then, there were signs of instability.

But when her parents divorced, she started smoking marijuana and using other substances, getting pregnant and having an abortion at 17.

Just before he turned 19 he went on a road trip with a friend he had at the time – five months later he ended up at the ranch of a man named Charles Manson and “joined” the “family”.

Leslie then became the youngest member of the sect.

The Manson “doctrine”.

Before the murders, Manson was a singer-songwriter on the fringes of the Los Angeles music industry.

When The Manson Family began, Manson was an unemployed, ex-convict. He had spent years in correctional institutions due to multiple assaults.

Manson believed in what he called “Helter Skelter,” a term he took from the Beatles song of the same name.

Helter Skelter, according to Manson, would be an impending apocalyptic race war, described in his own version of the aforementioned song’s lyrics. By extension, he believed that the killings would hasten the “imminent” war.

His notoriety gathered a following, creating a pop mythology around him. Thus, he became an icon of paranoia, violence and the macabre.

Manson’s followers committed nine murders between July and August 1969. In 1971, he was found guilty of murder and criminal conspiracy in the deaths of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, in a case that caused an uproar in the US.[3]

After his charges and conviction, he recorded some songs, which had some commercial success. There were quite a few musicians, too, who covered them.