By ROBERT JABLON and JOHN ROGERS
LOS ANGELES – In 1969, Charles Manson dispatched a group of disaffected young followers on a two-night killing rampage that terrorized Los Angeles. The killings remain etched in the American consciousness.
On Tuesday, Leslie Van Houten was released after spending more than 50 years in prison for two of those murders. She’s the only one of Manson’s followers who participated in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders to go free.
Members of the Manson “family” arrived at the Hollywood Hills home of Sharon Tate on Aug. 8, 1969, where they stabbed, beat and shot to death the young actress and her friends — celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and aspiring screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski. As they made their way to the house, they encountered a teenager, Steven Parent, who had been visiting an acquaintance at the estate’s guesthouse, and shot him to death.
RELATED: Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten released from prison after 53 years
The next night, Manson led a handful of followers, including Van Houten, to the home of wealthy grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. Manson tied up the couple and left the others to kill them.
Manson and his followers also killed two others — musician Gary Hinman and Hollywood stuntman Donald “Shorty” Shea — in separate, unrelated attacks
In the decades since, some of Manson’s followers have died while others remain behind bars.
THE KILLERS
— Charles Manson was a petty criminal who had been in and out of jail since childhood when he reinvented himself in the late 1960s as a guru-philosopher. He targeted teenage runaways and other lost souls, particularly attractive young women he used and bartered to others for sex.
He sent them out to butcher LA’s rich and famous in what prosecutors said was a bid to trigger a race war — an idea they say he got from a twisted reading of the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.”
Decades after…
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