LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23 – “And I took one of the knives and Patricia had a knife, and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady.”

The lady was Rosemary LaBianca, 38, and the convicted-murderess confessing from the witness stand of the Tate-LaBianca murder trial Monday was Leslie Van Houten, 21, former Monrovia High School princess.

Slender, dark-haired “Les” became the third of “Charlie’s girls” to confess to a jury of seven men and five women who must decide whether they live or die for the seven Tate-LaBianca killings.

Like the others — Susan Atkins, 22, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 23 — Miss Van Houten told her story matter-of-factly, without remorse, and like the others, she tried to clear Charles Manson, 36, the bearded guru of the Manson “family.”

No, she said, Manson was not along on the evening of Aug. 9, 1969, when she and five other family members set off from Spahn ranch “just for a drive” that took them to the LaBiancas’ home.

Linda Kasabian, the state’s key witness, drove that night, Miss Van Houten said, as she herself “tripped” on LSD through the “stomach” of the monster city, Los Angeles.

No, the witness said, she does not remember any conversation during the long drive, and no, she never asked where they were going or why they eventually stopped at a house.

That evening, she explained, “it was like we were all running on the same thought.”

Linda and Charles (Tex) Watson got out of the car, and Linda returned and said, “Tex” had decided to stay, Miss Van Houten testified.

Even though she and “Katie” Krenwinkel did not know what was going on in the house. “Les” said they wanted to be with Watson. They walked up a driveway, into an open door and found the lanky Texan standing over a man and a woman, she said.

Leaning forward in the witness box, she demonstrated how Leno LaBianca’s hands were tied behind his back. She said the three stood looking at the couple for a few seconds and the woman looked up and said, “We will give you anything.”

The suspects went with Mrs. LaBianca into the bedroom and were looking in her clothes closet when she cried, “I won’t tell the police. I won’t call the police.”

“While you were looking at her clothes did something happen with respect to a table lamp?” asked her attorney, Maxwell Keith.

“Yes,” the young woman said, “she (Mrs. LaBianca) picked up a great big table and she picked it up and it looked like she was going to throw it.

“And I looked through the corner of my eye and I saw the lamp coming down, so I blocked it.

“I got it away from her, and we fought for a few seconds and I got her on the bed and ripped the pillowcase off the pillow and I put it on her head…”

While she fought with Mrs. LaBianca, “Les” said, her companion, Miss Krenwinkel, returned to the bedroom from the kitchen with “a whole bunch of kitchen utensils.”

She did not hear any noise from the living room where LaBianca was killed, she said, nor does she now remember any conversation with Mrs. LaBianca in the bedroom, except that the victim kept repeating, “I won’t call the police.”

“And it seemed the more she said police, the more panicked I got,” Miss Van Houten continued.

“It is difficult to describe, but what I have seen the police do, they instill a very big paranoia fear inside of me. And the more she would name it, the more I would be frightened that she would and they would come.”

“And what did you do, if anything, by reason of this paranoia fear, as you put it?” Keith asked.

“I asked her to lay still,” Miss Van Houten said. “Then she picked up the lampshade again, and I took one of the knives and Patricia had a knife, and we started stabbing and cutting up the lady.”

Later, she said, she told Manson about what had happened at the LaBiancas, and he did not reprove her because there was “no right or wrong in the discussion.”

“Leslie,” Keith asked, “do you feel sorrow or shame or a sense of guilt at having participated in the death of Mrs. LaBianca?”

“Sorry is only a five-letter word,” she replied.” It can’t bring back anything.”

How does she feel?

“What can I feel,” she said. “It has happened. She is gone. What can I do? What can I feel?”

Keith asked if she ever wished it had not happened. She said that was a “foolish thought” because “you can’t undo something that is done.”

“Could you tell us, how do you feel about it now sitting in the witness box?”

“How I feel!” she said. “I feel like it happened.”

Keith asked his client whether “all the LSD” she had taken had affected her.

“It has changed my way of thinking,” she replied. “I just don’t think any more, that is how it has changed it.”

“When I leave here, I go in a car and I go to a jail, and I sit in jail and I look at what goes on in the jail. And I come back here and I am in the courtroom. I don’t think about it.”

It’s not that she tries not to think about things, the witness explained, rather she just does not think, although her mind is not a blank.

“I don’t have time to think about what I am doing.”

“And has it been that way for a long time, Les?” Keith said.

“Sure.”

Miss Van Houten denied that she knew anything about the five Tate killings on the evening of Aug. 8, 1969.

But, she did implicate herself in another murder — the death of musician Gary Hinman in late July, 1969, a crime for which her former boyfriend, Bobby Beausoleil, was convicted and sentenced to death.

She was present, she said, when Manson severed Hinman’s ear with a sword and was outside the house, having just sent Beausoleil away, when, she said:

“I heard a bunch of weird, strange, strange noises, and when I got into the living room Gary was stabbed and there was some writing on the wall, and Sadie was still — you know — it was a very ugly thing that I saw.”

In another Hall of Justice courtroom Monday, Manson designated Irving A. Kanarek, his attorney in the Tate-LaBianca case, to represent him on the combined Gary Hinman — Donald (Shorty) Shea indictment. Superior Judge Raymond Choate approved the motion.

BY JOHN KENDALL