Maybe It's Time We Gave This Manson Family Killer a Break [View all]

[Jilly_in_VA]

Caroline Leavitt

OK, so most of us are obsessed with true crime. But what happens when the true criminals want to change and reinvent their lives—and we somehow won’t let them?

Leslie Van Houten was released from prison on parole, on July 12, 2023, after serving more than five decades for the brutal Manson family murder of Leno and Rosemary Labianca in Los Angeles in 1969. No one thought she’d ever get out—but she just did, the only Manson family member to do so. And many people aren’t happy.

The murder was committed when she was a teen, just 19, and on an acid trip. Unrepentant and under Charlie Manson’s spell, she certainly deserved prison for her heinous crime. But once inside, she went into therapy, flooded with shame, guilt and remorse, and she became determined to better herself. By all accounts she was a model prisoner, and the older she became, the less of a threat to outside society she became. Yet she was denied parole 16 times.So why is everyone seeming to deny her a future? And why can’t we envision any kind of happy ever after for her? There are no second acts in American life, Fitzgerald famously said, but I kept thinking, he’s wrong. He has to be wrong.

Years back, the Manson story obsessed me into writing a novel set against the brutal murders and trial, Cruel Beautiful World, and that’s when I realized, deep in research, that the Manson girls’ part in all of this was hypnotizing us because they were such sweet-faced young girls besotted in love, even if it was with a maniac. They not only betrayed society, but they also betrayed our notions of what young girls should do and be. The fact that they were female made it even more sensational.

Some former criminals have brilliant afterlives, but still, like a stain, the idea of non-acceptance lingers. A few years ago, a close friend introduced me to a woman friend of hers. “Everyone loves her,” she said. I quickly did, too, but it wasn’t until six months later that I was told her real name—and her real fame, which I promised never to reveal. When she was 15, she had viciously murdered a friend’s mother. She served her time, she was filled with remorse, and when she was let out, she reinvented herself, with a new name, a new profession, and a huge desire to give back to society. When she did tell people the truth, she lost friends, she lost jobs, she lost potential romances. When do I get to be forgiven? she kept asking. When does it get to end?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/maybe-its-time-we-gave-this-manson-family-killer-a-break

Unfortunately the American "justice" system is based on revenge, not rehabilitation. That's why so many people still hate her and Cyntoia Brown and others, who were just kids when they did what they did and had time to repent and rehabilitate.