chapter thirty-one
“LESLIE IS MY DAUGHTER”
May 1998
Mrs. Van Houten and I met again at the same suburban park. It was a Saturday and there were many more people, but we managed to find an empty bench. This time we were both dressed in casual clothes and the jacaranda were still in bloom, giving the park a lavender cast. We didn’t have much time—when she’d arrived Mrs. V. told me she had plans to babysit for her granddaughter, whom she had to pick up in a half-hour.
I wanted to ask her about the final phone call that Leslie made to her from Haight-Ashbury, but I didn’t want to pounce abruptly with a question about what had to be a painful memory. I should have raised a neutral topic, such as the jacaranda or the weather, but for some reason, in blurting mode, what popped out of my mouth was the Unabomber. I mentioned that Ted Kaczynski had just been sentenced to eight life terms.
“I heard about that,” she said. “Talk about a family’s anguish. That poor mother. That poor brother.” We talked about how unfair it was that after the brother went to the FBI and they were able to crack the case, the only thing he asked in return was that the federal prosecutor would not go for the death penalty, and then the prosecutor went for the death penalty anyway. That decision was reversed when he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. The U.S. government doesn’t like to kill people who are crazy.
When we finally got back to her family, I told her that Leslie had described running away to Haight-Ashbury, twice. I waited to see if she would talk about the abortion since that seemed to be such a critical issue for Leslie. What she did talk about was the “good-bye forever” phone call Leslie made when she arrived in the Haight-Ashbury for the second time.
“We hung up on each other. I was angry.”
She didn’t hear from Leslie for weeks after that phone call, and then some kids in the neighborhood told her that she was living with a group in Chatsworth, northwest of L.A. No one mentioned Charles Manson, but that’s who they were talking about. When they described the group’s nomadic existence, Mrs. Van Houten was convinced Leslie could never survive that kind of life. “It sounded like total chaos.”
Leslie’s brother Paul, who was by this time home from his Kerouac adventure, drove up to Chatsworth to try to find her. The longer she was away, the more convinced Mrs. Van Houten was that she was dead. (I remembered how horrible it was for my mother when she was convinced that my brother was dead and, for a minute, I thought of mentioning it and then reminded myself that I was there to talk about her family, not mine.)
And then in June 1969, two months before the murders, Mrs. Van Houten received a call from the Reseda police, who said they had Leslie. “I can’t remember what she’d been arrested for . . . it was something minor, like shoplifting.” The police asked if she would come and get her.
“When I picked her up, she was filthy and her clothes were ragged. We got in the car and I looked at her and said, ‘Leslie, you smell bad.’ ”
Mrs. Van Houten shifted her weight on the bench and took a deep breath. “Leslie looked at me.” There was a flicker of pain in her eyes. “She said, ‘Mom, I smell like Leslie.’
“I can’t tell you how many times I dissected that exchange over the years. I can still see Leslie’s face when I said it. She was still such a child and I was rejecting that child.”
The atmosphere had been chilly between them. They said very little to each other either on the drive home from Reseda or in the days following. “I was still cross with her and she didn’t have much to say to me.” Leslie did talk to her adopted younger sister Betsy, whom she told that her life on the ranch with Manson was wonderful. She also said something that alarmed her mother when Betsy relayed it. She said the dogs at the ranch talked to her. But Mrs. Van Houten held back her questions. She thought it was best to allow time for both of them to calm down before she tried to sort it out. She wanted Leslie to have a chance to bathe, sleep, and eat nutritious meals. As it turned out, there would be no time for more questions. A few days later, when she came home from work, Leslie was gone. Two months later, the Tate-LaBianca murders were headlines.
“When news of the murders and the suspects—a hippie and his band of gypsies—hit the newspaper, I told friends that I was worried that Leslie was involved. My friends said, ‘Oh Jane, you know how many runaways there are? Thousands of parents are thinking the same thing.’ ”
But one of her neighbors who worked at the L.A. Times found out that Leslie had been arrested and booked at Sybil Brand, the women’s jail in downtown L.A.
Mrs. Van Houten said the only thing that saved her sanity was her job and the support she got from her co-workers, the other members of the teaching team. “They provided me with a protective shell. Sometimes it was all too much for me and I’d excuse myself and go into the cloak room and cry, but their compassion and solidarity got me through it.”
She told me about a day at the peak of the media frenzy when the teaching team was meeting with an outside consultant. When he was introduced to Mrs. Van Houten, he said, laughing, “No relation to Leslie Van Houten, I presume.” There was a collective gasp and no one knew what to say.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, breaking the silence, “Leslie is my daughter.”
When Mrs. Van Houten was recalling this incident to me, her voice faltered as she said “my daughter” and she stopped talking to compose herself. “After I said that there was silence again. As I recall we all just sat there. No one could think of anything to say. What was there to say?”
At that moment, I couldn’t think of anything to say, either. Her portrayal of the scene was so vivid, I felt as though I’d been in that meeting with her. I felt the flush of her embarrassment. Platitudes popped into my mind, some version of “that must have been so hard for you.” I noticed that a tiny jacaranda blossom had landed in her hair. I pinched it off with my fingers and showed it to her, surprising both of us with the intimacy of the gesture. She smiled but she also blushed and stood to go.
“Maybe we can have lunch someday,” she said, and was off.