Linda Kasabian

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Linda Darlene Kasabian (born Drouin; June 21, 1949) is a former member of Charles Manson's "Family".

She was the key witness in District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's prosecution of Manson and his followers for the Tate murders in 1969.

Early life

Linda Darlene Drouin was born on June 21, 1949 in Biddeford, Maine, and raised in the New England town of Milford, New Hampshire. Her father, Rosaire Drouin, was a construction worker of French-Canadian ancestry. Her mother, Joyce Taylor, was a homemaker. They struggled financially in a working-class home. Her parents often did not get along, and her father eventually left when she was still a young child. Both of her parents remarried a short time later, and her father moved to Miami, Florida. She was the eldest child, and her mother Joyce has remarked that with so many younger children and stepchildren to care for, she was not able to devote the necessary attention to her teenage daughter. "I didn't have time to listen to her problems. A lot of what has happened to Linda is my fault," she has admitted.

As a child, Kasabian was described by friends, neighbors, and teachers as intelligent, a good student, but a "starry-eyed romantic". She was regarded as kind and shy, but "forced to grow up too soon". She dropped out of high school and ran away from home at the age of sixteen due to conflict with her stepfather, Jake Byrd, whom she claimed mistreated both her and her mother. Kasabian traveled to the west coast, "looking for God". At the age of 16, she married Robert Peasley, but divorced a short time later. She briefly moved to Miami and tried to reconnect with her father, who was working as a bartender, but they again drifted apart before long. She then traveled to Boston and remarried, and gave birth to a daughter in 1968. When her second marriage, to Robert Kasabian, began to sour, Linda and her baby daughter Tanya returned to New Hampshire to live with her mother. Later, Robert Kasabian contacted Linda and invited her to meet him in Los Angeles. He wanted her to join him and a friend, Charles "Blackbeard" Melton, on a sailing trip to South America. Linda, who was hoping for a reconciliation with Robert, returned to Los Angeles to live with him in Topanga Canyon.

Life after trial

The news media coverage of the Manson trial had made Linda Kasabian a well-known figure by the time the sentences had been handed down, with opinions about her ranging from sympathetic to hostile. Kasabian shortly returned to New Hampshire with her husband and her children, seeking to escape the glare of the media, and to raise her children quietly. She lived on a hippie commune for a time and later worked as a cook. Kasabian was called back to Los Angeles County several times after the first trial: she was a witness against Tex Watson in his separate trial in 1971, and also against Leslie Van Houten in her two retrials in 1977.

Kasabian was later detained for numerous traffic violations, until an automobile accident left her partially disabled. Though she had severed all of her ties with the Manson "family", the Secret Service kept her under surveillance for a time after former Manson associate Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Kasabian was the target of scorn from the few remaining Manson "family" members.

Over the years, Kasabian has avoided and refused most news media attention. She appeared only once between 1969 and 2008, for an interview with the syndicated American television program A Current Affair in 1988.

Later, Cineflix, a production company in the United Kingdom and Canada, produced a docu-drama called Manson, in which Kasabian appears, telling her story in complete detail for the first time. This program was broadcast in the UK on August 10, 2009, and also in the United States on September 7, 2009 and again on July 20, 2013, on the History Channel. In this interview, Kasabian recounts her four weeks spent with the Manson "family".

In a September 2, 2009 live interview on CNN's Larry King Live, Kasabian recounted her memories of the murders at Sharon Tate's home. To help her maintain her now-quiet life, Kasabian wore a disguise provided by the program. She told Larry King during the interview that after the trial she had been in need of, but had never obtained, "psychological counseling", and that during the previous 12 years, she had been "on a path of healing and rehabilitation." When asked about the degree of remorse she felt for her participation in the crimes, Kasabian said she felt as though she took on all the guilt that "no one else [who was involved in the crimes] felt guilt for".

Since the late 1980s, Kasabian has been living in the Tacoma, Washington area and using the last name "Chiochios". In a 2016 Rolling Stone article on the current status of Manson Family members still living, it was said she had been "living in near poverty". In his 2016 book Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders, author Greg King recounted an October 1996 police raid by the Tacoma, Washington police department where Kasabian and her daughter, Tanya, had been arrested after discovering "rock cocaine and a large bundle of cash in a dresser drawer" along with a semi-automatic handgun and ammunition. According to King, Kasabian's daughter was tried and found guilty of possession of controlled substances and sentenced to serve time in a Washington state prison.

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