It was in a jail cell that former Manson family cult member Leslie Van Houten finally found freedom.
Or so she said, grinning, in a video interview recorded six years after she was sentenced to death for her part in the 1969 murders of Californian supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, the day after the infamous killing of actress Sharon Tate and four friends by other cult members.
"That was the biggest struggle, that I could think independently. Because living at the ranch, we were taught never to think independently — it always had to be what others would think, or not to question anything," she told the interviewer in 1977.
"And when I realised that I could, it was like a whole new world was opened up."
Van Houten entered prison as a fresh-faced 19-year-old, a crude "X" etched into her forehead the only visible evidence of her devotion to notorious cult leader Charles Manson.
This week the now 73-year-old walked free after more than half a century behind bars.
"I was relieved that it [the death penalty] was abolished, but I also knew that abolishing the death penalty gave me a huge responsibility to atone," Van Houten told a podcast in 2021. "To learn to live with what I had done, and a lifetime of living with the murders."
But as Van Houten embarks on a new chapter as a free woman, after spending her entire adult life locked up, the spectre of Manson and the teenage girls who killed for him — after digesting a poisonous cocktail of brainwashing, manipulation and LSD — lives on in the American psyche.
The 'family'
Three young women wearing identical blue shift dresses walk side-by-side into court, almost mistakeable for children. Their hair hangs down their shoulders and they giggle for the news cameras, the embodiment of the hippie ideal of the '60s — at least on the surface.
Their school-girl appearance belies the seriousness of the crimes that brought them there. Van Houten admitted to stabbing Rosemary LaBianca more than a dozen times. Her co-accused, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, were also implicated in the five murders at the mansion Tate shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski. They were both 21 at the time.
In court, the three young women showed little remorse and downplayed Manson's involvement. Asked whether she was sorry for her actions, Van Houten replied: "That's only a five-letter word, it can't bring anyone back."
The world wondered, how could three young women end up partaking in such brutal, inexplicable killings?
Van Houten was raised in Los Angeles, where she enjoyed a typical early '60s, suburban childhood. Things took a turn when her parents divorced during her teen years, and she began taking LSD. At 17, she got pregnant and her mother forced her to have an abortion. Scarred by the experience, Van Houten dropped out of school and began hitchhiking around California.
"I was trying to make it on my own in San Francisco, and I wasn't able to," she said. That's when friends invited her to visit a sprawling ranch north of Los Angeles.
"People came by and said 'come with us', and it was kinda a 'live for today and we'll deal with tomorrow when it gets here' situation, so I went ahead and went with them."
The ranch in question was an old Western movie set where Manson, a former convict and aspiring music star, had set up as a sort of guru. Among his followers — who would later be known as "the family" — were young women, many of them homeless, who were searching for something to believe in.
"He had a very Svengali, charismatic appeal," said Dr Janja Lalich, a leading international expert on cults. "He would look in your eyes and he would draw you in."
Former defence attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who later wrote the book Helter Skelter about the murders, investigation and trials, went further.
"He had a quality about him that one-thousandth of 1 per cent of people have — an aura," he told Rolling Stone magazine. "Vibes, the kids called it in the '60s. Wherever he went, kids gravitated toward him."
Van Houten arrived at the Spahn Ranch in 1968. She described Manson as a "very dominant person", who more than anything else "was the only one who any of us ever felt [knew] what he was doing".
The followers would take LSD multiple times a week and during the trips Manson would reportedly deliver bible readings and rambling sermons about a coming race war, which he called Helter Skelter, against a soundtrack of the Beatles' White Album which had inspired the name.
Isolated from mainstream society, and primed with regular doses of LSD, Van Houten said she fell entirely under Manson's spell.
"He said that next summer there would be a big revolution and that the chosen people would live in a hole in the middle of the desert," she said.
"After the crimes, we went out and looked for the hole."
The end of innocence
On August 8, 1969, Manson issued his directive. Followers Charles "Tex" Watson, who acted as Manson's assistant, Atkins, Kernwinkel and Susan Kasabian were told to make their way to the home on Cielo Drive and kill whoever was inside. (Kasabian acted as a lookout and avoided prison time after agreeing to testify for the prosecution.)
Along with Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, four others were murdered; Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent and Jay Sebring. The word "pig" was scrawled on the walls in the victim's blood.
The following day Van Houten joined the group at the LaBianca home. She later confessed to holding Rosemary LaBianca down with a pillowcase over her head while others stabbed her, before taking the knife herself.
Like in the earlier attack, the couple's blood was smeared over the walls with the message: "Death to pigs".
The two crimes — which together became known as the Tate-LaBianca murders — shocked America out of the peace and love mindset that had come to symbolise much of the decade.
“Everyone went crazy for a moment," gossip columnist Rona Barrett told the LA Times. "I think it changed everyone’s feelings about protecting themselves, and especially those who had important names and had made some success."
Manson died in prison of natural causes in 2017. Atkins died in prison in 2009, shortly after she was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Only two people charged over the murders remain behind bars: Krenwinkel, who is currently the longest-serving female inmate in California after her parole approval was overturned last year and Watson who is not eligible for another parole hearing until 2026.
Even after half a century, the murders continue to loom larger than nearly all that have come later, perhaps because of their timing, their enigmatic mastermind, their randomness, their brutality, their celebrity victims, or more likely a combination of all of the above.
Countless books and films have been produced inspired by the cult, including Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — a fictional comedy-drama layered over the historical reality of the murders.
"Manson had a streak of pure evil," journalist Linda Deutsch told the LA Times on the 50th anniversary of the murders. "It persists now that he’s dead ... It’s as if the curse has not disappeared, it hangs over everyone who was ever involved with him.”
Living with the memory of Manson
Van Houten believes she has been rehabilitated for decades, a view shared by appellate court judges who spoke of the "decades of therapy, self-help programming and reflection" she had undergone over 50 years.
"I’ve never had a client who has dedicated herself to reform like she has," her lawyer Nancy Tetreault told the Guardian this week.
"She fell under the influence of Charles Manson and participated in these horrible murders … and she worked really hard to get past that cult indoctrination and to understand it and take responsibility."
While incarcerated Van Houten worked on the prison newspaper, as a tutor and earned a master's degree in humanities, according to the LA Times.
"The greatest affirmation I ever had was when the [parole] board finally found me suitable. That was an outside affirmation," she said in 2021. "It came with the recognition that I am not my past."
Since 2016, California's parole board ruled on five separate occasions that Van Houten was suitable for release, but at each turn, that decision was vetoed by the Governor's office. Earlier this year, a state appeals court overruled the veto.
In the lead-up to Van Houten's release, Leno LaBianca's daughter told the Associated Press that the family were "heartbroken because we're once again reminded of all the years that we have not had my father and my stepmother with us".
"My children and my grandchildren never got an opportunity to get to know either of them, which has been a huge void for my family," Cory LaBianca, 75, said.
Van Houten is currently staying in a transitional housing facility, where she will have to learn how to live in a world that would have been unimaginable when she entered prison 53 years ago. Despite being in her 70s, she'll have to learn how to use smartphones and ATM cards.
Asked in 2021 what she expected her life to be like if she was ever released, she said: "I don't know the world out there anymore. My plan would be for simplicity."