Leslie van Houten, one of the Manson gang, has been refused parole again after nearly five decades in prison. The California Governor reversed her release, as has happened several times before. She is serving life, commuted from a death sentence, for helping Manson and others to kill the Los Angeles grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, when she was 19 in August 1969. This was the day after the Sharon Tate murders in which van Houten was not involved.
Two others of the Manson gang are also still in prison with Manson and one other having died inside.
Van Houten was born 23 August 1949 5.51 am Los Angeles in a middle class home but took to drugs in her mid teens, at 17 was forced by her mother to have a late term abortion when she got pregnant; and ended up living with Charles Manson in a commune where he doled out copious quantities of LSD.
She has a Sun Saturn in Virgo on her Ascendant; with an intense Moon Pluto in Leo in her 12th and an adventurous Jupiter in Capricorn in her 5th opposition Mars in Cancer. It’s not a particularly brutal chart but she does have a strong self-destructive 16th harmonic chart and a stressed 12H. In numerology 12 ‘warns against being a victim of circumstances, or dragged into other people’s affairs where you will be the one suffering the consequences.’
Her opportunistic, risk-taking Jupiter opposition Mars fell across Manson’s Midheaven opposition Pluto so his power trip would tap into her reckless streak. And when she committed the murders her Solar Arc Uranus was opposition her Jupiter triggering her over-confidence.
Her chart is surprisingly upbeat for someone just turned down for parole. Tr Pluto is on the final conjunction to her Jupiter till after mid this month; with another Jupiter midpoint uptick after mid 2021.
By this time she’ll be so institutionalised it would be challenging in the extreme to move back into the world. But it does seem a stretch to keep her there after all this time.
It is sad how easy it was/is to blame drug use rather than acknowledge the inspiration of inherent racism in the world where Van Houten came of age. The fact is millions of people “experimented” with LSD with plenty using far more than the Manson gang, and yet none of them saw the need to kill people in order to start a race war.
She has a barely Virgo sun intercepted in a “full of itself” Leo 12th. She remains a well-dressed illusion.
We’ve discussed about how hormones might affect brain chemistry on several threads lately, but one thing is sure – teenage alcohol and drug abuse often has devastating effects on subjects’ brains. It especially affects parts of brain involved in judgement, because these develope only at late teen years. I think this might have been very much the case with “Lulu”. She never really had a chance, after spending her late teen years on a trip after another.
Interestingly, after watching “Manson – The Lost Tapes” recently, the youngest member of the cult, Dianne Lake aka Snake seemed a well adjusted adult, in my husband’s words “every accountant in his business”. I’d say she possibly was pulled away early enough to mend the damage done.
Mercy is not a quality easily applied to Manson’s cohorts. These were brutal murders.
She is still paying the price for her involvement. The ramifications to friends and families
whose lives were touched by these crimes echo across time. Parole? Not in my imperfect
world. Peace for her soul, sure, but let her finish her time here remaining where she is.
I would note the traditional association of the 12th house with confinement, both voluntary and involuntary. To me, Sun, Moon and Pluto in the 12th, with Saturn on the Ascendant, is a textbook chart for someone fated to spend most of her life in prison.