LOS ANGELES (AP) – A California panel recommended Thursday that Charles Manson’s follower Leslie Van Houten be released on parole after serving nearly five decades in prison.
After a hearing at the women’s prison in Chino, California, commissioners of the Board of Parole Hearings found for the fourth time that Van Houten was fit to be released, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
After a 120-day review process, his case will again go to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who could deny parole, although that measure could be challenged in court.
Newsom blocked his release once and his predecessor Jerry Brown did it twice.
“As with any recommendation of parole adequacy, when the case reaches the Governor’s Office, it will be carefully reviewed for its merits,” Vicky Waters, newsom’s press secretary, said in a statement.
Van Houten, 70, is serving life in prison for helping Manson and others kill Los Angeles grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in August 1969.
Van Houten was 19 years old when she and other members of the cult fatally stabbed the LaBiancas, cut Leno LaBianca’s body, and smeared the couple’s blood on the walls.
The murders came the day after other Manson supporters, not including Van Houten, killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four other people.
Details of the parole hearing were not immediately released, but Van Houten’s attorney Rich Pfeiffer said in an email that “it went very well.”
Pfeiffer said he expects Newsom to reverse the decision again, “but the courts will have a harder time denying a court order than in the past.”
In May, an appeals court denied Pfeiffer’s request to release Van Houten on bail or his own recognition. Her motion argued that her age put her at high risk of contracting COVID-19 and noted that another prisoner in her housing unit had been infected.
At his 2017 parole hearing, Van Houten described a troubled childhood. She said she was devastated when her parents divorced when she was 14 years old. Soon after, she said, she began spending time with her school outcast and using drugs. When she was 17, she and her boyfriend fled to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district during the city’s summer of love.
She was traveling down the California coast when acquaintances brought her to Manson. He was locked in an abandoned movie ranch outside Los Angeles, where he had recruited what he called a “family” to survive, what he insisted would be a racial war that would launch by committing a series of random and horrifying murders.
Manson died in 2017 of natural causes in a California hospital while serving a life sentence.
