When Leslie Van Houten began taking the witness stand in Los Angeles a few weeks ago to give her version of the 1969 LaBianca slayings, I realized how baffled I still was by the senseless “Helter Skelter” killings. Even her testimony that drugs had destroyed her ability to determine right from wrong didn’t end my puzzlement. After all, many other people have used drugs without being spurred to violent and brutal acts.

Van Houten’s retrial for conspiracy and two counts of murder brought to mind my abandoned quest to discover how Charles Manson had persuaded his “family” to act so inhumanly for the sake of an unlikely social revolution. My search resulted in a brief and perplexing correspondence with another Manson cultist, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme, who was convicted of attempting to assassinate President Ford in Sacramento in September, 1975, and is now serving a life sentence in a San Diego federal prison.

Fromme wrote me from prison in April of last year on behalf of Manson, to whom I’d sent a letter in connection with a book I was putting together. Using nonjudgmental terms that I thought might win him over, I’d asked Manson to contribute an essay or do an interview on morality. But apparently he’d been forwarding his mail, unopened, to his “girls” — anyway, that was the impression I got from Squeaky Fromme, who replied with great authority and no little anger:

“You speak in your letter of the ‘absurdities of conventional morality and ethics.’ I would like a brief synopsis of your views. Also, if you can, briefly state the meaning that Christianity and the Cross Thought has had upon the world, the meaning it has today, the effect of pornographic newspapers and magazines upon any culture and any personal experience you care to relate.”

Her suspicion surprised me, since what I’d offered was an open forum “with no editorial comment from me.” I’d assumed that Manson and his “family” would jump at the chance to get across their unedited views, and that they’d respond with a lengthy diatribe. But Fromme seemed to sense a threat in my proposal, and kept pressing me to reveal my “real” motive:

“Why do you want the people to know that Manson has real reasons behind what he does? I’m not saying that he doesn’t. I’m asking why you think he does. What is your concept of heaven? How old are you physically and mentally?

“We have seen many people with many purposes to satisfy themselves. That is natural. But when it is at the expense of others, when it is a lie, and when it involves putting money over life, Sharon (Tate) can tell you how we feel. That’s morality.

“The family could tell the WHOLE STORY that everyone has only hidden from, played around and lied about, if they are given a courtroom in which to put on the defense they were never allowed. At this point, even that might not be a good idea. But Sandra Good, Susan Murphy and myself came to prison for that reason and to just live with our family, wherever they are. All our faith in the world is with that family. As the world falls around you, you will see that nobody knows what to do about it. Now, all can laugh and feel better than this crosscut of Christian young people who have given their lives to say what nobody who professed to love even had the guts to hear.”

She signed her letter, “Under one god, L. Fromme.”

The chilling reference to “Sharon”— murdered so gruesomely by the “family”— would have been sufficient to discourage most pen-pals from further correspondence but, since I suffer from “writer’s greed” (not for money but for interesting subjects), I was determined to give it another try.

Seizing on Fromme’s closing paragraph, I wrote her back that I hadn’t “heard” what she had to say, not because I didn’t have the “guts” but because no one had ever published it — and I was giving her that chance.

Fromme wasn’t convinced of my earnestness.

“I received your letter today,” she replied, “and you didn’t answer much, so what can I say? I don’t know you. You couldn’t help but (interject) your (own) thoughts in a book of your gathering.”

She was specific, however, in responding to an offer I’d made to donate any proceeds from Manson “family” interviews or statements to a legal-defense fund or prison-reform group of her choice.

“No,” she wrote, “the family isn’t counting on lawyers defense funds, or prison reform groups. The money is falling. The old system is falling. Anyone who hangs on to either/and both will go with it. We know a way to fix it. But no one cares to fix it & that is what they will have forever …

“The Universe is w/o emotion in judgment as we have judged in action, not words. Christ is not giving anymore. He already gave all & the blind human beings who use his name allow him to be killed every day in the earth, air and water & in their own children for money. He is much meaner than ‘the Devil.’

“We are tired of dying so some liar can make $ off of a book of his own dead thinking. That’s an honest fact. Everyone who has ever written has lied. Our arms are not open. We know ourselves & our souls & the truth. We don’t need human beings who want only to use us for their own benefit. We don’t ask for ‘converts,’ as you say. If people don’t have the love to see us, that’s their problem — & the world’s.

“I’ll be busy.

“What do you ‘love’ most in the whole world? Whatever it is — it’s dying.”

The ominous ambiguity of her last line persuaded me to discontinue our correspondence. I even began to worry about Fromme having my address — she might, I feared, pass it on to some potentially violent cultist on the outside. So I purposely refrained from publishing our correspondence until I’d moved to a new — and unlisted — address.

But for all my efforts and anxieties, for all Fromme’s denunciations and veiled threats, I’m still mystified over what might have gone through her head when she came within an arm’s length of murdering the U.S. President.

Nor have I any greater inkling of what might have prompted so many “family” members to cruise Los Angeles streets randomly seeking victims whose eyeballs they contemplated pinning to walls as “witchy signs.”

If Fromme’s letters are any indication, most of the mystery about the Manson episode will remain hidden — forever, I fear — behind a rhetoric whose meter is emphatic but whose meaning is obscure.

That’s unfortunate, to say the least, because it’s our inability to understand random violence, more than any real expectation of being assaulted, that makes city nights so fearsome for us all.

By CRAIG BUCK