The Manson Women and Me

May 1998

I was sitting on a park bench in the small civic center complex of a suburban town outside of L.A. waiting for Leslie’s mother. She would not have wanted me to tell you what suburban town. She barely wanted to tell me which one. Three decades after the murders she was still trying to protect her privacy. When I was first introduced to her at the prison (she was visiting Leslie, I was visiting Pat), she was courteous but cool. This reserve, Leslie explained later, was the result of the brutal way she and her family were treated by the media during the first trial. Despite this, she eventually agreed to meet with me, much to Leslie’s surprise.

The air was moist, the sky a pale gray. The marine layer hangs heavy this time of year, making the late spring close and dreary. But a counterpoint to the gloom was the display of jacarandas. In May, the blossoms of these magnificent trees adorn the L.A. basin with lavender, making so many areas—from the bleakest blocks of South Central to the featureless civic center plaza where I was sitting—look like paradise.

I’d arrived more than a half-hour early. Mrs. Van Houten inspired this kind of punctuality; at least she inspired it in me. When I’d observed her interacting with people in the visiting room, she’d been an erect, well-coifed woman with white hair and sharp blue eyes. She had an air of brisk competence and the sort of authoritative presence teachers once possessed before the 1960s upheaval blurred the dividing line between teachers and students. In her tailored dress and sensible pumps, she’d stood out among the relatives visiting inmates. Most mothers of inmates are too beleaguered—they are often taking care of their grandchildren full-time—to manage anything other than sweats when they visit.

That morning when I was dressing to meet her, I put more thought into my attire than I would ordinarily. Mrs. V. inspired in me, in addition to punctuality, the wish to be perceived as a girl with good breeding. It was the Sabbath. Mrs. V. was a churchgoer. I could hear my own mother’s 1950s admonishment about wearing my Sunday best. I pulled a dress from my closet. Punctuality. Proper attire. The wish to please. My projection? My regression? Or clues as to what kind of mother she was to Leslie growing up?

In preparation for the meeting I’d reread all of Leslie’s psychiatric reports for the preceding three decades. All had attempted, as one prison psychologist put it in 1980, to “bridge the seemingly enormous gap between the high school prom princess and the barefoot participator in murder.” Such attempts inevitably focus on the mother. When it comes to mothers of murderers we want consistency, logic, cause and effect. We want their stories to offer clues to the behavior of their progeny. Clues are there, perhaps, but consistency and logic are scarce.

When Leslie got to prison, clinicians examined her relationship with her parents with a fine-grained lens. Year after year of psychological testing unearthed few causal factors. The most damning observation about her parents was made in 1991, though it had a distinctly 1950s ring to it. After administering the house-tree-person projective test, clinical psychologist Dr. J. J. Ponath concluded: “The placement of the tree is characteristic of a person who has grown up under the influence of a dominant mother and an emotionally unavailable father.”

Depending on which of Leslie’s psychiatric reports you believe and from what year, Mrs. Van Houten was emotionally remote from Leslie, favoring her sons, or an overindulgent mother, spoiling her daughter and preventing her from learning how to defer gratification. Or, if you prefer, she was so strict, so demanding of deferred gratification, of sacrifice and discipline, that it had caused Leslie to rebel in such a disastrous way.

Most evaluators expressed bewilderment that a girl with such bright beginnings had become a murderer. But one, Joel Hochman, stated that he was not surprised. In a 1971 report, he divined homicidal rage from an early age. That rage, he implied, derived from her too-comfortable early years. He described her as a child with poor impulse control and given to temper tantrums, “a spoiled little princess who was unable to suffer frustration and delay gratification.” He was not at all puzzled, he wrote, that this rage was directed at Mrs. LaBianca. “Let me make it clear, Mrs. LaBianca was an object, a blank screen upon which Leslie projected her feelings, much as a patient projects his feelings on an analyst whom he doesn’t know. These feelings were, in fact, feelings she had toward her mother, her father, toward the establishment.”

In 1981, psychologist Ruth Loveys took a different tack. In a letter to the parole board, she described the relationship between Leslie and her mother as having many positive aspects but identified what she saw as significant emotional distance between them, which, in her opinion, led to Leslie’s early feelings of emptiness and inadequacy. Earlier reports had suggested that Leslie could be self-critical as well as believing that she was undeserving. Loveys attributed these tendencies to a mother who “inadvertently instilled in her highly imaginative daughter a very heavy sense of social conscience for less fortunate people along with the subtle message that it was wrong to put oneself first. There was a well-intentioned but inordinately burdensome emphasis placed on such values as sensitivity to others rather than to oneself, on being ladylike at all times, not making waves and later having a role in life that was healing to others. The underlying philosophy of the home was that self-effacement and suffering are the greater goods.”

In one of her appearances before the parole board Leslie said, “In thinking back, I think sometimes maybe I almost had too much going for me and I just started to put myself down.” Loveys interpreted that to mean that the successful life that seemed imminent for her—she was smart, she was pretty, she was charming—was in fact frightening to her because it would mean the loss of her mother’s love and sympathy. Because her mother’s love and sympathy was always directed toward deprived persons, Leslie systematically embarked on a plan to strip herself of all her attributes that would lead to success.

Loveys later expounded on this theory in an undated article on primal therapy in the Denver Primal Journal: “I was absolutely certain of one thing, Leslie had acted out so as to make of her life one long sacrifice and had tragically fulfilled her mother’s early teaching that suffering is noble and purifying,” thus making her a prime candidate for Manson. This made me angry. I did clinical work long enough to know there is no such thing as the kind of certainty she expressed. It’s simply one more example of fitting the patient into the mold of a therapist’s theory of human behavior.

If the situation weren’t so tragic, much of this speculation would be laughable. The mother was too strict or she was too indulgent, her standards were too high or she had none at all. Leslie couldn’t defer gratification or her mother insisted that she always defer it. As I read the reports, I couldn’t help thinking about the decades of blame the mothers of autistic and schizophrenic kids have had to endure. From the refrigerator mother theories to the theory of double-bind communication, mothers were in the perpetual hot seat. The truth is, however, that in all but the most egregious cases of emotional or physical brutality (such as Manson’s childhood), the “science” of causality is far from scientific. Place most families under a metaphorical microscope and pathology will reign.

Joel Hochman’s observation that Mrs. LaBianca was a surrogate for Leslie’s mother, however, did make me think of my brother’s crime. He and my parents had argued heatedly and often about money. They would make it available to him but only with very short strings attached, strings he believed infantilized him. When he dropped out of school, they refused to continue supporting him. When his girlfriend discovered she was pregnant and wanted an abortion, he refused to talk to our parents about it. He told her they were too frugal to help. (I believe this was a ridiculous misreading of my parents’ frugality.) He later said he was forced to do something drastic.

It therefore seems within the realm of possibility that when he was stealing money from that older couple, he was acting out against my parents; there was more than a little anger involved. When he was arrested at the Mexican border he said, “Call my father, he’s a big shot at the IRS.” A shrink wouldn’t have needed to administer a Rorschach test to figure that out. So my problem is not that psychiatric evaluations are without value, my objection is the certainty with which the conclusions are asserted.

At the park, when I saw Mrs. Van Houten get out of her Toyota Camry, I smiled. She was wearing slacks, a blue denim jacket, and a turquoise Mickey Mouse T-shirt. When we shook hands, she looked at my dress and apologized for her informal attire. “I’m taking my granddaughter to the zoo when we’re done.”

I had made her uncomfortable, not the other way around. What else was I wrong about?

We sat opposite each other at a picnic table. There was a young couple with a toddler having a picnic on the lawn. The baby, her legs bowed, her diapers droopy, was clearly new to the business of ambulation. “That baby is adorable,” she said. Was she thinking about Leslie, who’d also been an adorable baby? I have seen photos. The parents hovered anxiously, and when the baby teetered they both rushed to catch her. “I love the way young fathers are so involved with their kids these days,” Mrs. V. said. Was she referring to Mr. Van Houten’s lack of involvement when Leslie was a baby? I was no better than the shrinks. Everything she said to me, even about other families, seemed freighted with meaning.

We discussed many things: the marine layer, the jacarandas, the end-of-an-era death of Frank Sinatra. From there, we somehow slipped into talk of her childhood in Cedar Falls, Iowa. She reminisced about long summer days, walking in the woods, building mud dams on the Cedar River, and unearthing relics from the Mesquaki and Sauk Indians, the first inhabitants of Black Hawk County. As I listened to her describe the hushed solitude of the woods, the chance to daydream, the feeling of endless space and time, I was struck by the similarity between her observations—her dreamy love of nature, of solitude, even of Native American culture—and those of her daughter. In prison Leslie is exposed to only a sliver of the natural world, but she makes the most of it, describing to me the robins who perch outside the window of her cell, the redolence of the rosemary bushes on the prison grounds, the clarity of the sky on those rare smog-free days, and the lessons she’s learned from Native American inmates at Frontera who regularly invite her to their sweat lodge rituals.

After graduating from high school, Mrs. Van Houten attended Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, now called the University of Northern Iowa. She got a job teaching in a small school in a tiny town—Dumont, Iowa. As was the custom for such teachers in rural America in the 1940s, she lived with a local family but she often ate dinner at the Home Café, which is where she met Paul Van Houten in 1942. He had just come home from five years in the Army. Events went quickly after that. They got married and then he was sent overseas to fight in World War II. He was stationed in Italy and after that Africa. During the war, Mrs. Van Houten taught at a teacher’s college.

When the war was over, the Van Houtens were part of a massive influx of Midwesterners into California. Many of the immigrants were GIs who had tasted the fruits of the state—the weather, the beaches, the jobs, the wide open spaces, and, literally, the fruit from the miles of orange groves—on their way to the Pacific theater or when they were stationed in California. This continuous wave created the vast metropolis that is now L.A.

Mr. Van Houten established a well-paying career as a car auctioneer, and with the help of the GI Bill they bought a house for $10,500 in Mayflower Village—the first subdivision in Monrovia. To outsiders, the town is indistinguishable from scores of other suburban tracts in the San Gabriel Valley, but the town, which calls itself “The All-American City,” takes pride in its stalwart character and commitment to tradition. Two of its former residents have achieved national attention: writer Upton Sinclair, who lived there in the 1930s, and three decades later, Leslie Van Houten. Sinclair is mentioned in the city’s 1986 Centennial Review; Leslie Van Houten is not.

Monrovia in the 1950s was “relaxed and nifty,” according to the recollections of longtime resident Mary Lou in a nostalgic piece in the Monrovia News Post the year of the centennial. “The second big war had ceased a few years before, Eisenhower was President, and the economy was on the way up.”

“Van had survived the war. Life was wonderful,” Mrs. V. told me. “We were living an Ozzie and Harriet existence.”

In 1947, the couple had a son, Paul; Leslie was born in 1949. The house was only one thousand square feet, but it grew along with the family. They remodeled the kitchen, built another bedroom, and then added a swimming pool. Mrs. V. remembers planting raspberry bushes in the front yard.

The Van Houtens were an enterprising couple. They helped to establish a Presbyterian church in their community, part of the religious revival that swept over the United States after the war, and to build a new school. Once the school was established, they started the PTA. Their community engagement was in full throttle.

After the Korean War, the couple started to hear through their church about what Mrs. Van Houten described as “the mess” the 8th Army had left in Korea. She said it was Mr. Van Houten’s idea to adopt one or two of the mixed-race kids abandoned by American soldiers. When Leslie was seven years old, they adopted two who were among the first wave of Korean children coming to the United States.

When Mrs. V. talked about her two adopted kids, I mentioned that I’d read in the court transcript that one of the psychological experts claimed that even as a little girl, Leslie had exhibited an explosive nature, testifying that she’d had tantrums and one time hit her adopted sister with a shoe.

“Of course there was competition between them,” she said, shaking her head and clearly exasperated. “Of course there was sibling rivalry, but whoever said Leslie had tantrums was lying. The problem wasn’t tantrums, the problem was that Leslie didn’t want to fight back. Her sister would sometimes hit her and she’d just keep taking it. Finally, I told her she had to stand up for herself. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘Mom, I can’t.’

“I have no idea where they get that stuff. Leslie was simply delightful. She was the sweetest, cutest kid—a kid who required no discipline. It was her way to try and understand. It was her way to try and avoid conflict, to try and work things out.”

In 1963, the year that John Kennedy was killed, Leslie’s parents filed for divorce. While Mrs. Van Houten was attending PTA meetings, her husband found another woman, a woman who was younger, richer, and unencumbered by children. I only know this, however, because Leslie told me. Her mother said simply, “Van departed.” I started to ask more but she looked away, which I took as a signal that the topic was not up for discussion. It was clear that thirty years later the wound had not completely healed. At first I was struck by the fact that the ancient divorce seemed as emotionally charged for her as her daughter’s involvement in the murders, and then I realized that, in her mind, the two were intimately connected. It seemed clear that she blamed the divorce for Leslie’s eventual attachment to Manson.

After her husband left, Mrs. Van Houten went back to school, taking classes in special education so she could resume her teaching career. Though she was devastated by the divorce, she loved her new career. She was eventually hired to be part of a groundbreaking program funded by War on Poverty monies. The kids who were brought in from all over the city were high-risk, underachieving, and from the poorest families.

“It was a team approach and we used innovative techniques,” she said, her eyes bright with enthusiasm. “And you know what? It worked. We made a difference.” She explained that the education department did pre-tests and post-tests that demonstrated how much the kids improved as a result of the program. “It was a thrilling time of my life. I woke up every day excited about going to work.”

She loved her new career though she did worry about not being home for her kids after school. But in those first years after the divorce, Leslie seemed to be the same smart, energetic little girl she’d always been. And then she wasn’t.