As a young woman, Linda Kasabian falls into the clutches of the Manson family and witnesses the horrific murders on Cielo Drive in the summer of 1969. Thanks to their testimony, Manson and his accomplices can be convicted. Now Kasabian, who has been plagued with guilt all her life, is dying.
More than 50 years after the murders of Charles Manson's notorious cult, one of those involved has died. According to The Washington Post, Linda Kasabian died at the age of 73 in a Tacoma hospital. Her death certificate gave her name as Linda Chiochios.
She had come to Charles Manson's commune at the age of 20 with her one-year-old daughter and was pregnant again to escape from an unhappy family home. According to her later testimonies, she fell in love with Manson and followed his strict guidelines of not caring for her daughter and participating in robberies of mansions in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air.
On August 9, 1969, she drove the group to Sharon Tate's rented home in Los Angeles, where members of the Manson family brutally stabbed to death film director Roman Polanski's eight-month-pregnant wife and three other people. She was in the car while she was doing it. The following night, Kasabian accompanied Manson and other cult members to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, who were also murdered.
Kasabian, who was not involved in the murders herself, was granted immunity by prosecutors for testifying as a key witness at the 1970 Los Angeles trial against Manson and four of his supporters. During her 18 days on the stand, she also had to fend off numerous attacks from the defense team and Manson, who questioned her credibility, such as raising the issue of her LSD use. Manson also made multiple gestures threatening to cut her throat.
Manson was sentenced to death for the Manson family murders and for the murder of his acquaintance Gary Hinman. He was spared execution when the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 1976. He died in prison in 2017 at the age of 83. The four accused women were also convicted. They all remained loyal to Manson, whom they worshiped as "Jesus Christ."
In the months leading up to the murders, ex-con Manson had gathered a group of runaways and outcasts and established a makeshift commune on a ranch northwest of Los Angeles. In the summer of 1969, according to prosecutors, Manson ordered his mostly young followers to murder seven people. Prosecutors believe this was part of a plot to incite a race war.
In 2009, Vincent Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor in the Manson case, said, "If there was ever a key witness for the prosecution, it was Linda Kasabian. Without her testimony... it would have been extremely difficult for me to convict Manson and his co-defendants ."
After the trials, Kasabian went into hiding and changed her name several times, but was unable to completely hide from the public eye. In a 2009 documentary, she said she thinks about the murders every day and cannot accept "that I was not punished for my part in this tragedy". It was a senseless waste of life.
