Linda Kasabian, was born and raised in 1950’s New England. Like many of her generation, she went on to become part of the counterculture hippie movement of the later half of the 1960s. By the summer of 1969, she was 20 years old and a young mother, with a husband who had practically abandoned them to sail around the world.
Linda was adaptable though, and open to new experiences. So when a friend of hers mentioned a veritable flower child utopia setting up shop in the wilds of California, she grabbed the kid and brought her along. Little did she know this one decision could affect not just the trajectory of her life, but the lives of many others.
The idyllic commune that Linda moved into was Spahn Ranch, a former western movie set that was owned by an aging man, and run by none other than Charles Manson. It was here that Manson and his followers would coerce Linda to join them in their murder spree that would ultimately kick off the Satanic Panic that gripped the US in the decades to come.
The Manson Family murders are often considered the hard stopping point for the peace and love era that was the 1960s. Linda may have joined them on the misadventures, but she also refused to actively participate. Certainly, she’s guilty of being an accessory to murder, but without her willingness to go against the grain of her “family” and testify against them for their crimes, some have suggested that they might not have been sentenced as firmly as they were for their heinous crimes.
So what was it that made Linda Kasabian different from the others? Maybe we’ll find out on today’s episode of Idiopathic..
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