• Linda Kasabian Describes Sex Orgy, Manson’s Power

Linda Kasabian Describes Sex Orgy, Manson’s Power

LOS ANGELES, Jul. 28 – “If you’re willing to be killed, you should be willing to kill.”

Quoting hippie cultist Charles Manson, the chief prosecution witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder case today detailed the power the leader of the Manson “family” had over his followers.

Linda Kasabian, laughing nervously as she spoke, told of sex orgies and unquestioned obedience at the Spahn Ranch, the home of Manson’s “family,” from where the prosecutors claim the cultist directed his followers to kill.

As courtroom tempers flared, Mrs. Kasabian told her first meeting with Manson after her acceptance into the family July 4, 1969.

“He made love to me and we had a slight conversation,” she testified in Los Angeles Superior Court as her attorneys hovered nearby.

“He said I had a father hangup which impressed me very much because no one ever said that to me – I had no father and I hated my stepfather.”

Quoting Manson’s often unintelligible sayings, the pale Massachusetts native claimed she heard him talk of killing once.

“Charlie said everything was all right – nothing was wrong. He used to say ‘no sense makes sense.’

“He also said that if you are willing to be killed, you could kill.”

The girl told of one of many parties at the ranch in which a young girl played an important part.

“One particular girl, I don’t remember her name, was fairly young, maybe 16. She was shy and withdrawn. And she was lying in the middle of the floor.

“Charlie took her clothes off and started making love to her. She resisted and finally bit him on the shoulder and he hit her in the face.

“Charlie told Bobby Beausoleil (convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of Gary Hinman) to make love to her. Then he told everyone to kiss her and make love to her and they did.”

No one touched the girl, Mrs. Kasabian said, until Manson told them to do so.

“Then Charlie told everyone to make love to everybody and we all shed our clothes and laid down on the floor. It didn’t matter who was next to you – a man or a woman. We all made love together – we were all one.”

Mrs. Kasabian, whose responses brought three motions for a new trial, all rejected, claimed that Manson had told the 20 or so girls in his “family” at the Spahn ranch to make love to all male visitors.

“Charlie told us to make love to them and try to get them to join the family. And if they wouldn’t, not to pay any attention to them – not to make love to them.”

The girl described life at the Spahn ranch as one of both work and play.

“The girls did everything and anything there was to do. We served the men, took care of the children, cooked and sewed, but always were on service for the men.”

The men, she said, worked mostly on dune buggies, but Charlie, she pointed out, seldom worked.

Mrs. Kasabian first took the stand Monday amid defense attorney’s shouts of “she’s insane…incompetent.”

Childlike in pigtails and a dirndl-type dress, Mrs. Kasabian told in staccato testimony, interrupted by objections from defense attorneys and conferences at the bench, how she became a member of the “family.”

Her first interruption came as she walked into the courtroom to the shouts of Manson’s attorney Irving Kanarek that she was not competent to take the stand. She stopped in her tracks, her eyes widened and she turned to look for her two attorneys, Gary Fieischman and Ronald Goldman, who immediately jumped to her side, as prosecuting attorneys shouted back at Kanarek.

“This is unbelievable conduct,” Dep. Dist. Atty. Vincent Bugliosi yelled jumping to his feet. “I ask the court to find him (Kanarek) in contempt…this is gross incompetence…”

Bugliosi stormed to the bench for a lengthy conference out of earshot of the jury. The witness was escorted to a chair farthest away from Manson and immediately surrounded by deputies and attorneys.

Thus surrounded, the 21-year-old mother of two was oblivious to the stares and smiles of Manson and his three co-defendants — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.

Her face paled by several months in jail, the girl told of her marriage to Robert Kasabian in September 1967 in Lawrence, Mass., and her separation from him in April 1969. A reconciliation, she said, in June of 1969, failed because her husband “was not ready to accept me and the child — accept his responsibility.”

Her husband, who had been sitting in a front row of the courtroom with a friend before being ejected because he has been subpoenaed as a witness, had smiled at her encouragingly before she took the stand.

Mrs. Kasabian, whose two children, Tanya, 2, and Angel, 4 months, are in her mother’s care, said she first heard of Charles Manson from one of the “family” members — Catherine “Gypsy” Share.

“She told me there was a beautiful man that we’d all been waiting for — that he’d been in jail for a number of years,” the girl testified.

It was with this encouragement, she said, that she went to live at the Spahn Ranch in Chatsworth, meeting Manson the next day.

“He was up in back of the ranch working on a dune buggy — Brenda and Snake were with him.

“He asked me why I had come and I told him my husband had rejected me and I told him Gypsy had said I was welcome at the ranch.

“He felt my legs,” she said smiling, “and seemed to think they were OK. So we stayed in a cave at the back of the ranch. The next night — or maybe it was the night after — I saw him again, inside the cave.

“We lived together,” the girl admitted, “as one family — as a mother, father and children, only all as one, and Charlie was the head.”

The “family,” the girl testified, consisted of about 20 persons — mostly girls, with others coming in and out. Some slept in the saloon on the movie set, others slept in shacks behind the saloon, some in a trailer nearby, and two girls slept in the home of George Spahn, the 81-year-old owner of the movie ranch.

Mrs. Kasabian admitted she was aware of the immunity granted her for her testimony. However, she said, there was another reason for her testimony:”

“I strongly believe in the truth and feel the truth should be spoken.”

By MARY NEISWENDER

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