Linda Darlene Kasabian (; June 21, 1949 – January 21, 2023) was an American woman known for being a member of the Manson Family, a cult led by Charles Manson in late-1960searly-1970s California. She was present at both the Tate–LaBianca murders committed by the cult members in 1969, but received legal immunity for her testimony as a key witness in District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's prosecution of Manson and his followers.
Early life
Linda Darlene Drouin was born in Biddeford, Maine, on June 21, 1949, and raised in the New England town of Milford, New Hampshire. Her father, Rosaire Drouin, was a construction worker of French-Canadian ancestry. Her mother, Joyce Taylor, was a homemaker. They struggled financially in a working-class home. Her parents often did not get along, and her father eventually left when she was still a young child. Both of her parents remarried a short time later, and her father moved to Miami, Florida. She was the eldest child, and her mother Joyce has remarked that with so many younger children and stepchildren to care for, she was not able to devote the necessary attention to her teenage daughter. "I didn't have time to listen to her problems. A lot of what has happened to Linda is my fault", she has admitted.
As a child, Kasabian was described by friends, neighbors, and teachers as intelligent, a good student but a "starry-eyed romantic". She was regarded as kind and shy but "forced to grow up too soon". She briefly moved to Miami and tried to reconnect with her father, who was working as a bartender, but they again drifted apart before long.
She then traveled to Boston, remarried, and gave birth to a daughter in 1968. When her second marriage, to Armenian American Robert Kasabian, began to sour, Linda and her baby daughter Tanya returned to New Hampshire to live with her mother. Later, Robert Kasabian contacted Linda and invited her to meet him in Los Angeles. He wanted her to join him and a friend, Charles "Blackbeard" Melton, on a sailing trip to South America. Linda, who was hoping for a reconciliation with Robert, returned to Los Angeles to live with him in Topanga Canyon. Through Melton she met Catherine Share, who told Kasabian about an idyllic ranch outside Los Angeles where a commune of hippies were establishing a "hole in the earth" paradise to escape an anticipated race war which they referred to as "Helter Skelter." To Kasabian, the ranch situation sounded like the Hopi legends that she had read about as a girl, and she was intrigued. In early summer, 1969, she decided against attending a July 4 Malibu "love-in" and instead—daughter Tanya in tow—joined Share and traveled to the Spahn Ranch in the Chatsworth area outside Los Angeles, where she met Charles Manson and soon became a member of his "Family". Watson persuaded Kasabian to steal a sum of money from her ex-husband's friend, Charles Melton.
Kasabian was then introduced to Manson. According to Kasabian, she thought he looked magnificent in his buckskin clothing, and that he seemed to be Christ-like.
Involvement with murders
On August 8, 1969, Kasabian claimed Manson directed her to gather a knife, a change of clothing and her driver's license, then to accompany three other members of the Manson family, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel and do what Watson told her to. They drove to 10050 Cielo Drive. Kasabian stated she saw Watson shoot and kill Steven Parent, a teenager who had come to visit the caretaker, William Garettson. Watson then ordered Kasabian to remain outside the residence, and she stood by the car while Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel entered the house and killed Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and the eight-months pregnant Sharon Tate. Approaching the house from the driveway, Kasabian was met by Frykowski, who was running out the front door. Kasabian said in her testimony, "There was a man just coming out of the door and he had blood all over his face and he was standing by a post, and we looked into each other's eyes for a minute, and I said, 'Oh, God, I am so sorry. Please make it stop.' But then he just fell to the ground into the bushes." Then Watson repeatedly stabbed Frykowski and hit him in the head with a gun butt. Kasabian tried to stop the murderers by claiming that she heard "people coming" onto the Tate property, but Atkins insisted that it was "too late". Kasabian testified that, while in a state of shock, she ran toward the car, started it up, and considered driving away to get help, but then became concerned for her daughter back at the Spahn Ranch.
The next night, Manson, Leslie Van Houten, and Clem Grogan joined the quartet because, according to Kasabian, Manson felt the deed the night before had been performed sloppily. They drove to the LaBianca residence. Inside, Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. When asked why she went out with the group again, knowing this time that murders would occur, Kasabian claimed that when Manson asked her to go with them she was "afraid to say no." Kasabian, who was then pregnant with her second child, agreed to the immunity offer.
Kasabian had been an accomplice to the murders (their driver and lookout), and had not prevented the crimes or contacted the police or the sheriff afterwards. At the same time she had not entered either residence, nor was she thought to have physically participated in any of the murders. She had been described as reluctant and extremely upset during the events of both nights, Manson notoriously interrupted Kasabian's testimony by holding up a copy of the Los Angeles Times newspaper to the jury with the headline "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares" referring to President Richard Nixon's statements to the press about the pre-verdict trial. He apparently hoped that this stunt would result in a mistrial, which the defense argued for but lost. Composing herself enough to look up from the color photo of the dead, bloodied Sharon Tate, Kasabian shot a look across the courtroom to the defendants. "How could you do that?" she asked. The female defendants laughed. Manson's defense attorney Kanarek asked Kasabian how she could be so certain, considering her LSD use, that she had not participated in the gruesome act. "Because I don't have that kind of thing in me, to do something so animalistic", she replied. Susan Atkins (in 1977), and particularly Tex Watson, who in 1978 described those allegations as "patently ridiculous."
Life after trial
The news media coverage of the Manson trial had made Linda Kasabian a well-known figure by the time the sentences had been handed down, with opinions about her ranging from sympathetic to hostile. Kasabian shortly returned to New Hampshire with her husband and her children, seeking to escape the glare of the media and raise her children quietly. She lived on a commune of hippies for a time and later worked as a cook. Kasabian was called back to Los Angeles County several times after the first trial: she was a witness against Tex Watson in his separate trial in 1971 and also against Leslie Van Houten in her two retrials in 1977.
Kasabian was later detained for numerous traffic violations until an automobile accident left her partially disabled. Though she had severed all of her ties with the Manson family, the Secret Service kept her under surveillance for a time after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, another former Manson associate, attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975. Kasabian was the target of scorn from the few remaining Family members. This program was broadcast in the UK on August 10, 2009, and also in the United States on September 7, 2009, and again on July 20, 2013, on the History Channel. In this interview, Kasabian recounts her four weeks spent with the Manson family.
In a September 2, 2009, live interview on CNN's Larry King Live, Kasabian recounted her memories of the murders at Sharon Tate's home. To help her maintain her now-quiet life, Kasabian wore a disguise provided by the program. She told Larry King during the interview that after the trial she had been in need of, but had never obtained, "psychological counseling" and that during the previous 12 years, she had been "on a path of healing and rehabilitation". When asked about the degree of remorse she felt for her participation in the crimes, Kasabian said she felt as though she took on all the guilt that "no one else [who was involved in the crimes] felt guilt for."
From the late 1980s, Kasabian lived in the Tacoma, Washington area, using the last name "Chiochios". In a 2016 Rolling Stone article on the current status of Manson Family members still living, it was said she had been "living in near-poverty". In his 2016 book Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders, author Greg King recounted an October 1996 police raid by the Tacoma, Washington police department where Kasabian and her daughter, Quanu, had been arrested after "rock cocaine and a large bundle of cash in a dresser drawer" were discovered along with a semi-automatic handgun and ammunition. According to King, Kasabian's daughter was tried and found guilty of possession of controlled substances and sentenced to serve time in a Washington state prison.
Kasabian died in Tacoma on January 21, 2023, at the age of 73.
References
Bibliography
- King, Greg. Sharon Tate and The Manson Murders. Barricade Books. Fort Lee NJ, 2000. .
- Paul Watkins with Guillermo Soledad. My Life with Charles Manson. Bantam, 1979. .
- Watson, Charles as told to Ray Hoekstra. Will You Die for Me? Cross Roads Publications, 1978. Chapter 13. .