Linda Kasabian
Manson Family follower whose evidence was crucial in convicting other members of murder
LINDA KASABIAN, who has died aged 73, was the star prosecution witness against Charles Manson, the California cult leader whose followers murdered seven people in 1969, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate; she was granted immunity from prosecution in return for testimony that Vincent Bugliosi, lead prosecutor, claimed was instrumental in convicting Manson and four others.
Linda Kasabian was already a consumer of hallucinogenic drugs when, having just turned 20, she ran away from her husband and their child in July 1969 to join Manson’s wandering tribe. He sexually initiated her into his hippy “family” before ordering the 23 people present to remove their clothes and engage in sexual acts.
The orgies took place on the Spahn Ranch near Los Angeles where, in exchange for housekeeping chores and sex with the land’s owner, they lived rent-free on an abandoned film set once used for filming westerns including The Lone Ranger.
She recalled being in thrall to Manson, and within a few days they had made love in a cave close to the ranch. “I thought I was communicating with Jesus Christ himself,” she recalled. “He had deep, penetrating eyes, and a warm smile, and his name was Charles Manson, the man the world was to know as ‘Satan’ … Manson spoke of pure truth and I listened. He generated love and I returned his love.”
Their cocktail of drugs and sex continued, but matters soon took a darker turn. During a walk on the beach Manson slipped a knife into her hand. “I was to lead a group to the home of a piggy I knew [piggy being a derogatory term for anyone the hippies hated],” she said. “I was to slit the actor’s throat.”
When she led the group to the wrong house, Manson’s followers demanded to know why. “The answer was simple. I didn’t want to kill anyone. I couldn’t kill anyone,” she insisted.
Linda Kasabian, her blonde hair in pigtails, spent 18 days giving evidence during Manson’s trial, describing how he told her: “If you are willing to be killed, you should be willing to kill.” In a soft, almost shy voice, she described practice runs known as “creepy crawls” that involved breaking into homes in Los Angeles as their owners slept.
Her role in the two nights of slaughter was to act as look-out. On several occasions she broke down while describing the murder of Sharon Tate, whose film-director husband Roman Polanski had been in London.
She told of arriving with three others at the actress’s luxurious home at 10050 Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, and the telephone wires being cut. When another car arrived she saw Charles “Tex” Watson, a fellow member of the Manson “family”, shoot the driver four times in the head.
As Linda Kasabian, the only member of the cult with a driving licence, sat in the car, the others disappeared into the house. A few minutes later the screaming started. Soon a man came running out, his face covered in blood, the Polish film producer Voytek Frykowski. “We looked into each other’s eyes and I said, ‘My God, I’m sorry,’” she recalled.
Asked why she did not scream as she watched Frykowski being stabbed and clubbed to death by Tex Watson, she replied: “I screamed in my heart.” When defence lawyers demanded why two days later she went on the second murder mission without protesting, she told them: “I was saying ‘no’ with my eyes.”
The following night a supermarket executive, Leno Labianca, and his wife Rosemary were murdered by Family members who were driven to their house in the Los Feliz neighbourhood by Linda Kasabian.
During the trial Manson did his best to put her off her stride, staring hard at her across the court room and drawing his finger across his throat in a slitting gesture. The defence tried to pick holes in her story by focusing on her drug use and shambolic lifestyle, but the jury convicted Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins. Watson, whom Linda Kasabian had slept with on her first night with the cult, was convicted in a later trial.
They were sentenced to death, but were spared when the California Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the death penalty was unconstitutional. Atkins died in jail in 2009 and Manson died in 2017; the other two remain incarcerated. Meanwhile, Linda Kasabian may have been granted immunity from prosecution, but she was never granted immunity from the curiosity of an outraged society.
Linda Darlene Drouin was born in Biddeford, Maine, on June 21 1949, the daughter of Rosaire Drouin, a construction worker, and his wife Joyce (née Taylor). To their daughter they seemed permanently at war. “I can still see my mother stooping over the washing machine and my father whacking her across the ass,” she said.
The family moved to Milford, New Hampshire, but her parents separated and her mother’s attention was increasingly focused on her younger children. She later blamed herself for her daughter’s involvement in the Manson cult. “A lot of what has happened to Linda is my fault, and in a way this makes her story my story, too,” she said.
Two months after her 16th birthday Linda dropped out of Milford High School to marry Robert Peasley, but they divorced a few months later. She was soon running the length of the hippy route, from Los Angeles to New York, looking for God and living in crash pads or communes.
“After marijuana and acids came speed pills, diet pills and morning glory seeds,” she recalled of her diet of mind-altering substances. “With the right dose of the right drug I could lie in bed and watch a colour fantasy as if it were a movie on a screen.”
In Boston she met and married Bob Kasabian, a fellow “hippy type”. They drifted through Washington, Arizona and New Mexico, eventually settling on a commune at Lake Tahoe in California. It was a volatile relationship.
When he left for a sailing trip to South America she connected with Manson’s hippies, drawn by their “hole in the earth” paradise being created to escape a forthcoming race war known as “Helter Skelter”, the name of a song by The Beatles, whom Manson regarded as prophets.
After the killings Linda Kasabian hitchhiked to Florida, where her father was living. He gave her the money to fly home to her mother in New Hampshire for Thanksgiving. She turned herself in on December 2 and was charged with seven counts of murder. When Susan Atkins reneged on her agreement to be a prosecution witness, Linda Kasabian took her place.
Later she was reconciled with Bob Kasabian, and they moved to a rural area of New Hampshire, though their marriage was dissolved in 1974. She moved around the country and went by several other names, including Linda Christian. Latterly she was known as Linda Chiochios.
She had regular run-ins with the law and from time to time was dragged back into the spotlight by historians chronicling the Manson story. In the late 1990s a British rock band “thought her name was cool” and named themselves Kasabian. In Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the character named Flowerchild, played by Maya Hawke, was based on her.
In 2009 she appeared in disguise on Larry King Live. “I have been on a mission of healing and rehabilitation,” she said. “And I went through a lot of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction and probably could have used some psychological counselling and help 40 years ago but never received it.”
Linda Kasabian had four children.