Linda Kasabian

Linda at trial, summer 1970

Linda Darlene Drouin was born on June 21, 1949 in Biddeford, Maine. While she was still young her parents divorced and her mother remarried. Linda never got along with her stepfather and perhaps her unhappy home life was what led her to drift as a teenager the small town of Milford, New Hampshire. She dropped out of high school and married at 16; soon that marriage was over and she married again to a young man by the name of Robert Kasabian. The two of them delved further and further into the "hippie" lifestyle, dropping acid and visiting communes around the country. Their daughter Tonya was born in Los Angeles in March of 1968.

A rift in their relationship soon caused young Linda to start wandering again. She was in Topanga Canyon, visiting an old friend, when she ran into Catherine Share, a Manson follower who told her about Charlie, saying that he was the man she had been waiting for. On July 4, 1969, Linda and Tonya came with Gypsy to the ranch, where she met Manson and immediately became a loyal member of the Family, even following them on "creepy-crawl" missions in which they would break into people's houses and steal things.

On the evening of August 8, 1969, Linda has said that she believed the group was going on another "creepy-crawl" when she piled into an old Ford with associates Charles Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. She was in for quite the surprise when the group pulled up at 10050 Cielo Drive. She watched in horror as five innocent people were savagely slaughtered, and was along for another murder mission the second night. She didn't have killing in her nature, though, and purposely sabotaged a Family murder attempt on a man who had picked up Linda and Sandra Good hitchhiking days before.

The experiences of those two horrific nights made Linda decide that she had to escape the Family at any cost. When Charlie asked her to deliver a message to partner-in-crime Robert Beausoleil in the LA County Jail, she instead drove towards Taos, New Mexico, where her husband was living with another woman. When he was unable to help her, she returned to LA to pick up Tonya, who had been left in foster care after a police raid on the Spahn Ranch on August 16. From there mother and daughter hitchhiked first to Florida and then back home to New Hampshire.

When a warrant was issued for her arrest in December of 1969, Linda immediately turned herself in to Concord authorities. From the beginning it was very apparent that not still under Charlie's spell, as were her female codefendants. When approached by prosecutor Bugliosi to turn state's witness against the Family, the heavily pregant Linda readily agreed. Her testimony matched all of the physical evidence in the case and was perhaps the single most important factor in the defendants being found guilty. Linda received immunity from prosecution in return for testifying.

While it is obvious that Linda was not cut of the same cloth as the other Manson girls, her life in later years has, unfortunately, not gone that well. Long since divorced from Robert Kasabian, Linda suffers from health problems and, a few years ago, she and her daughter were both busted for possession of drugs. She is now on probation and living in Washington State.

Here are a couple more Linda pics:

Another trial pic- summer 1970

At Leslie Van Houten's retrial, 1977