Linda Kasabian - Witness For The Prosecution

Witness For The Prosecution

Susan Atkins was arrested along with the rest of the remaining "family" members following a raid on the Spahn Ranch in October for car theft. The police had no idea that they were also rounding up the murderers in the Tate and LaBianca cases. The investigations of these were already in progress, along with the intensive news media coverage of the murders. Atkins gave the critical break in the search for the murderers when she told her fellow cellmates, including a woman named Ronnie Howard, about the crimes. Howard and others from Los Angeles County women's jail told the criminal authorities what they had learned from Atkins. In early December 1969, Manson, Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins, Van Houten, and Kasabian were indicted by a grand jury for the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Originally, Atkins had been offered a reduced sentence (life imprisonment instead of the death penalty) for her testimony, since she was the first defendant to be arrested, and she had agreed to tell her story at the grand jury hearings. However, Atkins relinquished this chance when she resumed her allegiance to Manson and repudiated all her incriminating statements. Next, the prosecutors turned to Kasabian, who had voluntarily turned herself in to New Hampshire authorities and returned to California. Kasabian was offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for turning state's evidence.

There have been reports that Kasabian wanted to tell her story to the prosecutors, with or without any kind of deal, to "get it out of my head", as chief prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi described it, but that her attorney, Gary Fleischman, insisted that she remain silent until the district attorney made an offer of immunity. Kasabian, who was then pregnant with her second child, agreed to the immunity offer.

The immunity agreement was seen at the time as a somewhat controversial option for the prosecution for a number of reasons. Some wanted her to be fully prosecuted for the crimes. However, though Kasabian had been an accomplice to the murders (their driver and lookout) and she had not prevented the crimes or contacted the police or the sheriff afterwards, she had not entered either residence and had not physically participated in any of the murders. She had been described as reluctant and extremely upset during the events of both nights, even challenging Manson ("I'm not you, Charlie. I can't kill anyone"), and she was the only member of the group to express remorse and sympathy for the victims. When brought back to the Tate residence to help reconstruct the crime there, Kasabian reportedly suffered an emotional breakdown. The prosecution was relieved to withdraw the deal from Atkins, whose behavior and statements reportedly seemed especially depraved.

Taking the witness stand, Kasabian was the chief witness for the prosecution, and she tearfully recounted the murders in vivid detail. She related to the trial jury all that she had seen and heard during her stay with the "family" and during the commission of the murders. Her testimony was considered to be the most dramatic segment of the very long trial, and it received an unprecedented amount of news media coverage. During the trial, the unjailed members of the Manson "family" led a campaign of intimidation against Kasabian in an effort to prevent her from testifying. The actual defendants in the crime constantly disrupted her testimony with a blizzard of dramatic courtroom theatrics. Manson would run a finger across his throat, glaring at Kasabian as she testified, an act he would repeat during the testimony of other prosecution witnesses.

Susan Atkins also repeatedly whispered to Linda across the courtroom "You're killing us!", to which Kasabian responded, "I am not killing you, you have killed yourselves". Manson notoriously interrupted Kasabian's testimony by holding up a copy of the Los Angeles Times newspaper to the jury with the headline "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares" referring to President Richard Nixon's statements to the press about the pre-verdict trial. He apparently hoped that this stunt would result in a mistrial, which the defense argued for, but lost. Judge Charles H. Older refused to allow the defendants to legally benefit from the antics.

For the majority of her 18 days of testimony, the defense attorneys tried unsuccessfully to discredit Kasabian by bringing into account her extensive use of LSD and by attempting to perforate her story. Kasabian did not break under the intensive cross-examination, and her testimony matched all of the physical evidence that had been presented, in addition to being supported by the subsequent prosecution witnesses.

During Kasabian's cross-examination, Manson's defense lawyer Irving Kanarek showed her large color crime-scene photographs of the Tate murders. Kasabian's emotional reaction was in stark contrast to the other "family" members. Manson and Krenwinkel's defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald would later assert that Kanarek's tactic — meant to discredit Kasabian — was a grave error that completely backfired, and further it exonerated the state's primary witness. Composing herself enough to look up from the color photo of the dead, bloodied Sharon Tate, Kasabian shot a look across the courtroom to the defendants. "How could you do that?", she stated. The female defendants laughed. Manson's defense attorney Kanarek asked Kasabian how she could be so certain, considering her LSD use, that she had not participated in the gruesome act. "Because I don't have that kind of thing in me, to do something so animalistic," she replied.

Although the Charles Manson gang's murder trial lasted nine months, with testimony from numerous witnesses (including several other former "family" members), Kasabian's testimony, more than anything else, led to the convictions of Manson, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten.