Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten, a former homecoming princess who at 19 helped carry out the shocking killings of a wealthy Los Angeles couple at the direction of the violent and manipulative cult leader, walked out of a California prison Tuesday after serving more than 50 years of a life sentence.
Van Houten, now 73, “was released to parole supervision,” the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.
Van Houten was sentenced to death in 1971 for helping Manson’s group carry out the killings of Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife, Rosemary. Her sentence was later commuted to life in prison when the California Supreme Court overturned the state’s death penalty law in 1972. Voters and state lawmakers eventually reinstated the death penalty, but it did not apply retroactively.
Van Houten, who will likely be on parole for about three years, hopes to get a job as soon as possible, Tetreault said. She earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in counseling while in prison and worked as a tutor for other incarcerated people. They also disputed Newsom’s suggestion that her past violent acts were a cause for future concern were she to be released.
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