• Linda Kasabian Sticks To Tate Story

Linda Kasabian Sticks To Tate Story

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 25 – Linda Kasabian was shouted at by two of the defendants at the Tate murder trial yesterday when she stuck to her story that Charles Manson had ordered the killings.

Manson’s lawyer had Mrs. Kasabian brought back from New Hampshire and put back on the stand in the hope of breaking her story, but she never faltered.

When the afternoon session began, Irving Kanarek again tried to make her admit that she had not told the truth. When she calmly denied it, Susan Atkins suddenly yelled out:

“You only got off by putting in on Manson. Admit it.”

“Why don’t you tell your part?” Patricia Krenwinkel called out.

The witness turned and faced the defendants.

“I have,” she said. “Why don’t you tell your part.”

Then turning directly to Manson, she said, “Why don’t you tell your part? The whole thing is insane.”

Kanarek asked her what she meant.

“I’ve never been touched by anything like this before, and it’s hard to relate after being out for a while,” Mrs. Kasabian said.

“To be here again strange, like a dream.”

Pale but composed, Mrs. Kasabian stuck to her account and said, in effect, that the three women defendants had lied in the “confessions” they made over the last two weeks on the stand in an apparent attempt to save Manson from the gas chamber.

Mrs. Kasabian was shielded by deputies and deputy district attorneys as Miss Atkins, Miss Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten filed past her.

The three other women testified Manson had known nothing about perpetrating the Tate-LaBianca murders, claiming the slayings had been, “copycat” murders intended to “sidetrack” the police and free “family” member Robert Beausoleil, in jail for another killing.

They said Mrs. Kasabian had suggested the “copycat” plan.

Mrs. Kasabian said yesterday, she never had talked with anyone about freeing Beausoleil. She admitted she had had sexual relations with Beausoleil at the Spahn Ranch and thought of him as a “brother.”

“Were you unhappy about his being arrested?” Kanarek asked.

“I don’t recall my feelings about his arrest,” she said.

Mrs. Kasabian said she had been living for six months with her husband and two children near Milford, N.H., and that it has been, a “happy” time.

Kanarek appeared to become infuriated by her calm responses and at one time he began shouting that she was lying. He was cut off sharply by Superior Court Judge Charles H. Older.

Kanarek asked her if she had been in fear of her life during the time she testified in July and August.

“Yes, I was afraid,” she said.

“In what way were you afraid?”

“There are a lot of freaked out people out there and I was walking the streets. Sometimes I thought someone might want to kill me.”

She said she had been particularly fearful after she was granted immunity by the state and freed from jail.

“Did anyone attempt to kill you since you’ve been living in New Hampshire?”

“No.”

Kanarek spent 10 days cross-examining Mrs. Kasabian last summer, but yesterday he questioned her for only 25 minutes on direct examination. He asked that the trial be moved to the Tate residence and when Older refusal, Kanarek said the judge was “foreclosing me.”

But after brief questioning by Miss Van Houten’s lawyer, was back on his feet again hammering away at the witness.

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