LOS ANGELES, May 6 – Former Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten testified Thursday she took LSD during the Tate-LaBianca murder trial and said she gave false testimony in that trial on Manson’s orders.

Taking the stand for the first time in her retrial on the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Miss Van Houten said the hallucinogenic “acid” was smuggled in to her while she was in Sybil Brand Institute for Women, but she did not say by whom.

In answer to questions from her attorney, Maxwell Keith, she said she had been taking LSD since she was 15, “pretty much weekly, not inside the jail though.”

In jail, she said, she took the drug “about once a month.”

Keith called Miss Van Houten to testify after Dep. Dist. Atty. Stephen Kay requested that testimony she had given in the penalty phase of the first trial he read to jurors in the retrial.

Keith objected, saying parts of the earlier testimony were “false and misleading, and the district attorney knows it.” He said his client had been coerced by Manson into “a pathetic attempt to exonerate Manson and immolate herself.”

Superior Judge Edward A. Hinz Jr. granted Kay’s request that the testimony, or part of it, be read to jurors, then opened a hearing outside the presence of the jurors to determine the voluntariness of that testimony.

On the witness stand, Miss Van Houten said she knew the regular use of LSD while she was a Manson “family” member affected her mind and that “acid” contributed to “a loss of reality” and the hold that Manson had on his followers.

“Looking back,” she said, “I know he (Manson) used the acid and the acid trips (for the group living at the Spahn ranch near Chatsworth) to help encourage us to lose our own identities.

“I had been taking acid since I was 15,” she said. “I didn’t stop in Sybil Brand. I stopped when I got to prison (after her murder conviction along with Manson and other followers).

In answer to questions from Keith, she said she lied on the stand in 1971 because Manson told her to.

Asked if she had testified then of her own free will, she answered, “no.” Then asked if she now thought she was rational at that time, she said, “No, I don’t feel I was rational.”

“Then why did you tell these falsehoods?” Keith asked her.

“Because Charlie told me to,” she said. Miss Van Houten told of Manson leaning over the counsel table during the trial and telling her to testify that she had been at the Hinman house when Gary Hinman was killed, ordering her to “get the facts from Sadie (another family member).”

She also told of a family member visiting her in jail and holding up a legal size sheet of paper with instructions of how to testify.

The reason she did it, she said, was to try to “help the guys (Manson and follower Tex Watson ) out,” but mainly to try to free Manson “because he said it was important for him to be free.”

Asked if she is “free of Charlie today,” she said, “I know I am.”

The defense contention in this second trial is that Miss Van Houten was under Manson’s domination at the time she became involved in the LaBianca murders.

The hearing will continue Monday morning.

By DOROTHY TOWNSEND