MEMBER OF CULT WHO TESTIFIED AGAINST CHARLES MANSON IN 1970
Linda Kasabian, who stood lookout while other members of the Charles Manson family engaged in two nights of murder in 1969 and then, after an immunity deal, became a pivotal prosecution witness in the trials that put Manson and four of his other followers in prison, died Jan. 21 in Tacoma, Wash. She was 73.
A notice in The News Tribune of Tacoma recorded her death. It gave no cause. For the most part, Kasabian had tried to keep a low profile since the killings and had gone by several names. At her death she was using the name Linda Chiochios.
Kasabian had recently turned 20 in July 1969 when she left her husband, Robert Kasabian, and went to live on the Spahn Ranch, an old movie set in Los Angeles where Manson and his followers were camped out.
“When I left, I was searching for love and freedom,” she said in a 2009 television documentary about the case, one of the few times she spoke publicly about it. “I was searching for God.”
What she found was a commune where drugs and sex were plentiful and where Manson, a habitual criminal and frustrated musician, held a psychological grip on his followers. Manson harbored hateful ideas about Black people and sought to set off a race war, leading him to send Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Watson out on a murderous mission. In the early hours of Aug. 9, 1969, Kasabian waited at the car while the others killed five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski.
The next night, this time with Manson along, a group went to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson tied the couple up and left with Kasabian; several of his followers then stabbed the LaBiancas to death.
The killings, which were among the most sensational crimes of the era and, to many, signaled the end of the peace-and-love 1960s, went unsolved for months, but investigators eventually zeroed in on the Manson family. Atkins, who died in 2009, provided the crucial grand jury testimony that led to indictments; but she then changed her mind and declined to testify at Manson’s trial, which began with jury selection in June 1970 and opening arguments in mid-July. That was fine with Vincent Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor, who after the deal had been struck for Atkins’ grand jury testimony learned that Kasabian was also willing to testify.
“Given a choice between Susan and Linda as the star witness for the prosecution, I much preferred Linda: She hadn’t killed anyone,” Bugliosi wrote in “Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders” (1974, written with Curt Gentry), his bestselling account of the case. “But in the rush to get the case to the grand jury, we’d made the deal with Susan and, like it or not, we were stuck with it. Unless Susan
bolted.”
Once “Susan bolted,” the prosecution gave Kasabian conditional immunity — it would be revoked if she did not testify fully and truthfully — and she became the centerpiece of the trial of Manson and the three women. (She was later important in the case against Watson, who was tried separately.)
That trial was a wild affair that lasted months. Kasabian testified for 17 days, withstanding badgering by defense lawyers and sometimes by Manson.
“Though the defense had been given a 20-page summary of all my interviews with her, as well as copies of all her letters to me,” Bugliosi, who died in 2015, wrote in “Helter Skelter,” “not once had she been impeached with a prior inconsistent statement. I was very proud of her.”
In a 2009 interview on “Larry King Live,” where he appeared alongside Kasabian (her image obscured to protect her privacy), Bugliosi left no doubt that she had put Manson behind bars.
“If there ever was a star witness for the prosecution, it was Linda Kasabian,” he said. “Without her testimony, Larry, it would have been extremely difficult for me to convict Manson and his codefendants.
“We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude towards Linda,” he added, “because if Manson had gotten out, there’s no question he would have continued to kill. He would have killed as many people as he could have.”
In addition to detailing the events of the murder nights, Kasabian helped the prosecution establish that she and the others were under Manson’s direct influence.
“He just had something, you know, that could hold you,” she testified at one point.
“It seemed that the girls worshipped him,” she added, “just would die to do anything for him.”
Bugliosi said that while others in the Manson family were remorseless killers, he believed that Kasabian did not have a violent streak and had been brought along on the nights of the killings only because, unlike most or all of the others, she had a driver’s license.
Linda Darlene Drouin was born June 21, 1949, in Biddeford, Maine, and grew up in New Hampshire. By the time she found her way to the Spahn Ranch, she had been
married and divorced once and had married Robert Kasabian. She brought her daughter, who was not yet 2, to the ranch with her.
After the killings, Kasabian left the commune and went back to New Hampshire. When Manson and others, including Kasabian, were indicted in the murders in late 1969, she waived extradition and, according to Bugliosi’s book, “was anxious to tell what she knew,” but her lawyer held out for a deal.