Charlie's little zombie?

Charles Foley

Los Angeles Of the many ghosts haunting the American Dream, that of Charles Manson is surely the most persistent. Californians would like to expunge his memory from the collective subconscious: but no, here he is again, sliding back with lop-sided grin, an incubus, a visitant from the dark side of the social revolution that overtook America in the 'sixties.

It is a costly preoccupation. US taxpayers must add a further $285,000 (168,000) to the million-dollar bill they have already paid for various 'Manson Family' trials. The latest series of hearings revolve around Leslie Van Houten, a Manson-trained murderess who bitterly regrets her role in the Family's various 1969 pogroms in which some thirty-five people are thought to have died. Although not physically present at the recent proceedings, 'Charlie' was the dominating spirit at Miss Van Houten's re-trial, which ended without a verdict: after twenty-five days of deliberation, a jury of seven women and five men found itself 'hopelessly deadlocked', and a mistrial was declared.

It was more than the most expensive trial recorded in Californian leg41 annals (the runner-up being the circa $1 million spent to convict Sirhan Sirhan of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy); it was also a case Which will have far-reaching effects on the US judicial system. Re-trying Miss Van Houten has raised some crucial questions, among them the influence of psychiatry on criminal jurisprudence; the impact of current social mores on courtroom proceedings; and the responsibility of an individual for his actions.

'Society is watching you,' Mr Stephen Kay, the prosecutor, warned the jury: to return a verdict of manslaughter on the grounds that Van Houten was under the sway of Manson-Svengali and his plastic baggie of LSD capsules would be a travesty of justice. 'It would be telling people they can get away with murder'. Not so, said Judge Edward Hinz: the jury must base its verdict solely on evidence presented in court, 'whatever society at large may think'. 'It was,' said a juror later, 'rather like telling Damocles not to think about the sword.'

Leslie Van Houten, now twenty-seven, admits that on 10 August 1969, she took part in the random murder of a wealthy, middle-aged Los Angeles couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, on Manson's orders. Mrs LaBianca suffered thirty-one stab wounds (several contributed by Van Houten), one of which severed her spinal cord. Her husband was propped up in a chair, dead, with a carving fork projecting from his stomach, the word 'WAR' scratched on his skin, and 'DEATH TO PIGS' daubed in his blood on a wall.

The jury looked at photographs of the scene and listened to statements made by Van Houten in 1969. Sample: 'I was feeling bad that I didn't get to go Ito the house where Sharon Tate, wife of film director 'Roman Polanski, and three others were slain], and I was sure hoping that if we did it again, I'd get to go.' At her second trial, Van Houten added, 'I felt like a shark, like a primitive animal, some kind of wildcat that caught a deer.'

But the jury could not find her guilty of first-degree murder. Miss Van Houten gasped, then smiled as she heard that five jurors had voted for manslaughter. They believed, apparently, such defence witnesses as Dr Keith Ditman, a University of California expert on LSD, who argued that the young woman was mentally ill at the time of the murders.

She had, explained Dr Ditman, 'a chronic drug-induced brain-syndrome with a marked alteration of the function of her brain.' She swallowed whole Manson's rubbishy talk of starting a race war by killing whites and throwing the blame on blacks. She became sodden with ideas fed to her under the influence of drugs. 'She believed Manson was a deity.'

Today, Van Houten professes to be, and looks like, a new human being. The weird child who carved an X in her forehead during trial number one and fiercely defended her guru's name now says she is 'deeply ashamed' of what happened. 'I try not to hate Manson because that would be invest ing an emotion in him. I did that once before.'

She is slender and pretty. Brown hair falls in a bang over her forehead to conceal the scar left by the carved X. She smiled freely in court at her mother, Jane, and family friends. She seemed the clever, normal girl (an IQ of 121, placing her among the country's top 10 per cent) her lawyer and parents claim she was before she tuned out and dropped into the drug culture and Charles Manson's cult in 1969.

The re-trial came about because her earlier conviction was overturned by an appellate court on grounds that her case should have been separated from the rest when her attorney met a mysterious death, some said at the hands of Manson cultists. But often the hearings seemed not to be about Van Houten at all: it was, rather, LSD and the whole 'counter-cultural' odyssey that was being judged. Six psychiatrists and several ex-members of the 'Family' testified.

Their common theme was the way in which 'acid' opened up the mind and made people, especially adolescents, highly susceptible to suggestion. Manson, the glib, prison-wise enemy of society, made it his tool in achieving revenge on a world that had rejected him. Sex was another weapon. Manson used the orgy, with his smattering of psycho-religious knowledge, as a passage towards what he called 'ego-death', a 'oneness with each other', which was no more than obedience to his will. So Van Houten, the argument ran, was a victim too: she suffered from 'diminished capacity': she was Charlie's little zombie.

But the nagging question of individual responsibility remains. Others just as young saw through Manson at times when he was being elevated to a symbolic, romantic — even heroic — role. Some freed themselves from his admitted power after a long struggle. A few are still his devotees — among them Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme, now serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Ford.

Prosecutor Kay shook his head in dismay on learning the number of jurors who voted for a manslaughter verdict. 'The facts show it was first degree murder,' he said. 'But emotion won over facts.' Some women jurors expressed sympathy for Van Houten: one revealed that she had dreamed her daughter was in jail for the same crime.

Van Houten has been ordered t6 undergo yet another costly trial with a new jury and judge. And Manson? He will become eligible for parole next year, although no one believes he will get it. In one sense, his freedom or captivity is irrelevant: he is already at large. Professional psychologists report that (along with Richard Nixon!) he is the commonest figure in the• anxiety dreams of patients. Amateur psychologist Norman Mailer explains it thus: 'The horror Manson inspires, at bottom, I think, is that there's something in everybody's heart that secretly leaps up at the thought of him doing all that killing. He is the robber bridegroom of American dream life.'