Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten could be freed in about two weeks after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, announced he will not ask the state supreme court to reverse her parole. The move paves the way for Van Houten’s release after spending more than 50 years in a southern California prison for two murders in 1969.
The governor’s office said an appeal against a parole ruling by a California appeals court was unlikely – the court only accepts reviews in about 3% of cases petitioned – to succeed and that Newsom was disappointed. The governor had previously rejected parole for Van Houten but on 30 May an appellate court overturned that decision.
Newsom’s predecessors have made the same decision as him each time a parole board deemed that Van Houten was fit to be let out of prison. Van Houten has been recommended for parole five times since 2016.
“More than 50 years after the Manson cult committed these brutal offenses, the victims’ families still feel the impact, as do all Californians,” a spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian. “The governor is disappointed by the court of appeals’ decision to release Ms Van Houten but will not pursue further action as efforts to further appeal are unlikely to succeed.”
Van Houten’s attorney, Nancy Tetreault, said she would be paroled in weeks, NBC News reported. “She’s thrilled and she’s overwhelmed,” Tetreault told the outlet. “She’s just grateful that people are recognizing that she’s not the same person that she was when she committed the murders.”
Van Houten, now 72, is serving a life sentence for helping Manson and other followers kill Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife, Rosemary, in 1969. Van Houten was 19 at the time.
In the most recent parole denial, Newsom said that Van Houten still posed a danger to society. In rejecting her parole, he said she offered an inconsistent and inadequate explanation for her involvement with Manson at the time of the killings.
The second district court of appeal in Los Angeles ruled 2-1 to reverse Newsom’s decision, writing there is “no evidence to support the governor’s conclusions” about Van Houten’s fitness for parole.
The judges took issue with Newsom’s claim that Van Houten did not adequately explain how she fell under Manson’s influence. At her parole hearings, she discussed at length how her parents’ divorce, her drug and alcohol abuse, and a forced illegal abortion led her down a path that left her vulnerable to him.
They also argued against Newsom’s suggestion that her past violent acts were a cause for future concern were she to be released.
“Van Houten has shown extraordinary rehabilitative efforts, insight, remorse, realistic parole plans, support from family and friends, favorable institutional reports, and, at the time of the governor’s decision, had received four successive grants of parole,” the judges wrote in the May decision.
The dissenting judge argued that there was some evidence Van Houten lacked insight into the heinous killings, and agreed with Newsom that her petition to be released should be denied.
Leslie grew up in Altadena, 15 miles (24km) outside of Los Angeles. In a 2017 parole hearing she described a difficult childhood that included her parents’ divorce, using drugs at age 14 and running off to San Francisco for the “Summer of Love” with her boyfriend. She met Manson at a commune in northern California in 1968. The next year, she and several other Manson followers followed the wealthy grocers home and stabbed them to death.
