LOS ANGELES, May 17 – Prosecutor Stephen Kay plans to wind up his case against Leslie Van Houten today in the retrial of the former Charles Manson follower for the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

On Monday, Kay completed the reading of approximately 250 pages of Miss Van Houten’s testimony from her first trial to the six-woman, six-man jury hearing her second trial in the courtroom of Superior Judge Edward Hinz Jr.

One of the highlights of that testimony came in an exchange between Miss Van Houten and Dep. Dist. Atty. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor in the first trial.

When Bugliosi asked her why she had repeatedly stabbed Mrs. LaBianca, she replied, ‘Because I was obsessed with that knife … once it began going in, it kept going in and in and in.”

At another point in the testimony read Monday, Bugliosi asked her, “Did you ever shed any tears for Rosemary LaBianca?” She answered, “Not that I can remember.”

Even when her own attorney, Maxwell Keith, asked during the first trial if she was sorry about the stabbing, Miss Van Houten responded. “Sorry is only a five-letter word.”

However, she recently told The Times in an interview that she now realizes she “did a horrible thing” and that she “still has nightmares” about the killings.

It became clear Monday that the jurors will have to try to sort out the truth from two different versions of why the LaBiancas were killed in the early morning hours of Aug. 10, 1969 — the night after the Manson “family” killed actress Sharon Tate and four others at her Benedict Canyon estate.

Miss Van Houten is not charged with the Tate estate slayings.

She is expected to take the witness stand on her own behalf and tell the jury that she lied in the first trial to save Manson and that she did so at his direction.

She already has done that in a hearing held last week with the jurors out of the courtroom during an unsuccessful attempt to keep Kay from putting her testimony at the 1971 proceeding into evidence before the current jury.

Defense attorney Keith unsuccessfully tried to convince Judge Hinz that the original version she gave six years ago was not free and voluntary because she was under the domination of Manson at the time.

It took nearly five hours for Kay to read her 1971 testimony into the record.

Throughout, she readily admitted her role in the LaBianca slayings but insisted she and other Manson “girls” decided without Manson’s orders to commit “copycat killings.”

The purpose of the killings, according to Miss Van Houten’s 1971 testimony, was to help free another Manson family member, Bobby Beausoleil, who had been arrested for the murder of Malibu musician Gary Hinman in his Topanga Canyon home.

Miss Van Houten’s testimony then, joined in by codefendants Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, was that if police saw similar murders committed they would think they had the “wrong man” (Beausoleil) in jail for the Hinman slaying.

In the Tate-LaBianca slayings, messages were written on the walls in blood. They were similar to those that had been scrawled at Hinman’s residence.

Miss Van Houten plans in the second trial to present her new version of why the LaBiancas died, conceding that the prosecution was correct in its theory that Manson ordered the killings in an effort to trigger “Helter-Skelter,” the term he applied to a race war he predicted would occur in the aftermath of the murders.

Kay said he plans to conclude the prosecution’s case today by calling the two police officers who discovered the five persons slain at the Tate estate.

Although Miss Van Houten is not charged with those slayings, Hinz has ruled that certain testimony about the Tate murders can be put into evidence in connection with the murder conspiracy count filed against her.