Leslie van Houten, a member of the notorious Manson Family murder cult, has been released on parole after serving more than fifty years in prison.
The Manson Family, led by Charles Manson, carried out a number of gruesome murders and other crimes in the 1960s in California. Their most notorious murder was that of Sharon Tate, a rising film star and the wife of film director, Roman Polanski. Tate had been pregnant at the time.
It has been speculated that the gang committed the crimes in an attempt to start a race war in the United States.
Van Houten was arrested in 1969 and put on trial. While she was not found guilty of assisting in the murder of Tate, she was found guilty of killing two other people during the gang’s murder spree.
She was initially sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Van Houten, now aged 73, was paroled this week, after having had release denied to her nearly 25 times.
Van Houten was described as a model prisoner who had undergone years of therapy and was no longer the person she was when arrested.
Image: Van Houten arriving at the courthouse for her trial in the late 1960s, John Malmin, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons