Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
OK, so most of us are obsessed with true crime. But what happens when the true criminals want to change and reinvent their lives—and we somehow won’t let them?
Leslie Van Houten was released from prison on parole, July 12, in 2023, serving over 5 decades for the brutal Manson family murder of Leno and Rosemary Labianca in Los Angeles in 1969. No one thought she’d ever get out—but she just did, the single Manson family member to do so. And many people aren’t happy.
The murder was committed when she was a teen, just 19, and on an acid trip. Unrepentant and under Charlie Manson’s spell, she certainly deserved prison for her heinous crime. But once inside, she went into therapy, flooded with shame, guilt and remorse, and she became determined to better herself. By all accounts she was a model prisoner, and the older she became, the less of a threat to outside society she became. Yet she was denied parole 16 times.So why is everyone seeming to deny her a future? And why can’t we envision any kind of happy ever after for her? There are no second acts in American life, Fitzgerald famously said, but I kept thinking, he’s wrong. He has to be wrong.