A woman sentenced to life for joining Charles Manson’s killing spree in 1969 was denied parole for the fourth time in four years.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom reversed the parole on Friday after a panel recommended parole for 71-year-old Leslie Van Houten in July. His decision marks the fourth time a governor has blocked her release.
“Given the extreme nature of the crime in which she was involved, I do not believe she has sufficiently demonstrated that she has come to terms with the totality of the factors that led her to participate in the vicious Manson Family killings,” Newsom wrote in his decision.
Van Houten is jailed at the California Institute for Women in Corona after she was convicted for a pair of 1969 murders and conspiracy to kill five others.
Rich Pfeiffer, Van Houten’s attorney, said they will appeal the governor’s decision, The Associated Press reported.
“This reversal will demonstrate to the courts that there is no way Newsom will let her out,” he said. “So they have to enforce the law or it will never be enforced.”
At the time of the crime, Van Houten was 19 and was among several others who joined Manson’s murderous cult. She was sentenced to life for helping Manson and others kill a married couple in Los Angeles, Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, in August 1969.
Van Houten, who has so served nearly five decades in prison, participated in the murder of the couple, who were stabbed to death and their blood smeared on the walls of their home.
One day earlier, Manson sent a handful of his young, mostly female followers to the palatial hilltop estate of actress Sharon Tate with orders to kill everyone there.
The 26-year-old actress and four friends were bludgeoned, shot, and stabbed scores of times. Their blood was used to scrawl the words “Pigs” and “Helter Skelter” on the walls.
Tate, the wife of director Roman Polanski, was 8 and a half months pregnant, and her killers later testified that she pleaded in her last moments for her unborn baby’s life.
Others killed were coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, and Wojciech Frykowski, an aspiring screenwriter and friend of Polanski, who was out of town.
Van Houten was initially sentenced to death in 1971 but that penalty was overturned one year later. She was sentenced to life in prison following a 1978 guilty verdict.
At a parole hearing in 2017, Van Houten talked about her devastating childhood when her parents divorced when she was 14. How she started using drugs and running away with a boyfriend at the age of 17. She later met Manson while traveling along the coast.
Manson died in 2017 of natural causes at a California hospital while serving a life sentence. He was 83.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
