Before she supposedly 'hesitantly stabbed'...Leslie Van Houten put a pillowcase over Rosemary LaBianca's head and secured it with a cord around Rosemary's neck ...the electrical cord to a heavy lamp....with her desperate victim trying to swing that lamp back at her.... And let's say she really was dead, or as Lvh has said "I felt she was" ....who stabs a dead woman sixteen times? Is that not desecration...? Desecration of the remains of a woman you anchored in place with a pillow case over her head, fought with, and then called in a mad man to hack up, ensuring her death? So...she's been in for forty some years it's time to let her go? What about Leno?..she knew he was there, knew he was being killed. She walked right past him. Alive and dead. She placed no value on the lives of Rosemary and Leno, no horror at the terror Rosemary endured on hearing her husband being butchered in the living room. And those sixteen stab wounds to "the lower back" ...the more she did it, the easier it got....according to Leslie herself.
Leslie Van Houten entered a private home knowing full well they were there to kill. She knew her companions had slaughtered people the night before, and wanted to go this time...wanted to prove herself, and when asked "why?" several parole hearings back, her own recollection was "because I thought it needed to be done." And after she entered the house, she helped herself to knives in the kitchen.
And when the slaughter was done, she stepped over the dead woman, went thru her closet for clothes, carefully wiped down fingerprints, took a little snack from the kitchen, played with the dog, hung out in the bushes, flirted with a stranger who gave her lift etc etc
The door hasn't been opened yet. I remember a few parole hearings back,...the board seemingly sympathetic to her situation, and then the facts of the home invasion and vicious slaughter of two people came out in all its monstrous detail, and they were absolutely horrified.
The door that appeared to be opening was slammed shut real fast. And for many years afterward...because of the vicious "callous disregard" for human life. People argued back and forth that the only real criteria for denial was whether she was still a danger. Not true.
She looks terrible, and obviously has had her teeth replaced with poorly fitting dentures. If the dentures were a proper fit, maybe she wouldn't look so pathetic and decrepit. But whatever, she's getting dental treatment, as she should.
Whether Leslie Van houten's parole recommendation is upheld or not, my heart aches for Leno's sweet daughter, Corey. She speaks as a loving daughter to her father, and, always, with very warm regard for her stepmother, Rosemary. They suffered unspeakably...and not from hesitant acts of a timid little hippie girl, but deliberate acts of a nineteen year old adult woman intent on proving herself capable of murder.
~ Marliese