He should at least have known Milhouse Van Houten from The Simpsons. On the other hand, he may have figured that if they insisted on spelling Milhous(e) with an E, who knows what liberties they may have taken with Van Houten.
On a 60 Minutes/20/20-type show a few years back, the guest Indian (Iranian? Egyptian?) archaeologist said something about the PAT-in-a on the old object, so the American interviewer asked a question about the pa-TEE-na and the archaeologist answered about the PAT-in-a and, etc. Each kept trying to gently teach the other. It was nice to see.
Just saw this. Looks like Squeaky Fromme is due to be paroled Aug. 16. I hope they keep a close eye on her as I don’t think she’s nearly as trustworthy as Van Houten. According to the article she was still a Manson groupie in 1987, when she escaped from prison in what she says was an attempt to be closer to Manson.
Milhouse may have been named for her, in fact. But I can’t find a direct source for that, so I’m not as sure of it as I had been. In any case the anchor should have just checked up on the pronunciation, it’s part of the his job and there’s no need to make assumptions about it.
I just love John Waters and have been fascinated by these articles. Weirdly enough, I was never a huge fan of his more transgressive films, but I have always thought he was the neatest person.
Well sure, that’s what I was assuming. But I wouldn’t expect official confirmation, any more than I would for his first name, as it is rather in bad taste. Agreed that the anchor should have checked beforehand and failing that to have picked up on Waters’ cue.
If [del]Bellatrix Lestrange[/del] Squeaky Fromme’s release ends up with her cutting up and winding up back in prison (which wouldn’t surprise me as she’s always come across as completely unrepentant in her Manson loyalties) I wonder if it will be used against the others. For that matter if her release is completely uneventful I wonder if it will be used in their favor. (Clem Grogan’s release and probation was completely uneventful and unlike Fromme he was convicted of murder, but it wasn’t one of those murders.)
I think everyone would agree that if Leslie Van Houten had been in on the killing of a frycook and his wife- hell, for that matter if she’d just been in in on the killing of a wealthy grocer and his heiress wife like the LaBiancas that had not associated with the Sharon Tate et al killings- she’d have probably been paroled already. From there it splits into two questions: is this because the notoriety of the case makes an unfair disadvantage for her, or is it because our criminal justice system is too lenient in non famous cases, and I honestly can’t decide on an answer. What are your thoughts?
Sorry to hijack this thread again but I see that I’m not the only one who thinks that Harry Potter character is an awful lot like a Manson Girl. Maybe J.K. Rowling has as much of interest in Charles Manson as Waters does.
My thoughts are that people shouldn’t be punished as murderers unless they either committed the murder themselves or deliberately set the wheels in motion to cause it. Then with regard to those convicted of murder itself, I strongly favor the death penalty…and without twenty years of appeals.
In the case of Van Houten, where she was more or less forced to stab Rosemary LaBianca by Charles Watson and the wounds were, according to the M.E. (IIRC), post-mortem, I’d have approved of paroling Van Houten long ago. The others should have long since been executed (I also think it’s bullshit when the death penalty is declared unconstitutional and murderers’ sentences get commuted, but when the death penalty gets reinstated their death sentences don’t get reinstated.)
Anyway, I remember reading a year or two ago that that entire episode and the so-called race war and everything else was nothing but an elaborate ruse to get Bobby Beausoleil out of jail. Manson was very fond of/admired Bobby Beausoleil (as you are probably aware, Van Houten says she thinks Manson wanted her around to keep Beausoleil around) and thought if he had crimes committed similar to what Beausoleil was accused of the cops would think Beausoleil was innocent and let him go. (I don’t remember exactly what it was the authorities thought Beausoleil did, and since time is short I won’t look it up, but Wiki probably has pretty good info. Either that or Beausoleil’s own friend/girlfriend-operated website, which, come to think of it, is where I believe I read it in the first place.)
They’ve confirmed the source for the name Milhouse many times. It’s not bad taste to make fun of Nixon. I don’t remember if they discuss Leslie Van Houten on any of the episode commentaries but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had come up.
I’m not very familiar with the entire Manson Family history, although I read a few Wikipedia entries after this thread started. (And it’s disgusting to see the anniversary stories on the news. What a tawdry waste of time.) The issue of the post-mortem stabbings isn’t clear, and in Van Houten’s own words to Waters, it really doesn’t matter much. But I think he’s made a convincing case that she has changed and that if she were any other killer she would probably be out of jail. As far as that goes she deserves to get out.
I had a friend in college (not particularly close one but one of those I was always finding myself sharing classes with and at the occasional party with) who was a fairly close relative of Patricia Krenwinkel. IIRC her father was Patricia’s first cousin and Patricia actually fled to this girl’s grandmother’s house when she was eluding the police. The grandmother (Krenwinkel’s aunt) totally believed her claim that she was innocent because she was, after all, a good southern Catholic girl (once removed- she was born and reared in California but her parent was an Alabama Catholic from a family with centuries old roots in Mobile).
This girl was a sort of proto-Goth- she dressed about like Death from Sandman except she dyed her hair bright red instead of black. She later switched her major from history to art to nobody’s surprise. She was very intelligent and we talked about her relative a couple of times; she had loved to shock people with the connection and because she knew nothing mortified her family (especially the gullible grandmother) more. She even wrote to Krenwinkel a few times.
In a moment perhaps inspired by the “Jesse James killed my pa” episode of BRADY BUNCH, some member of the family aquired unedited and unobscured crime scene photos (now available all over the Internet, though I’ve no idea how he came by them). She said that seeing those made it less of a family scandal and more of an “Oh holy fuck!” moment, and she stopped bragging.
It’s amazing when you think how many stories like this there probably are- people caught in the 8th concentric ring of ripples from the actual horror. You can only imagine what Krenwinkel or Van Houten’s immediate family had to endure (and how many times they wished "why couldn’t our name have been Smith or Jackson instead of this name that people have only ever heard of because of the murders).
Tosches wrote the BEST book on Jerry Lee Lewis- HELLFIRE, and that’s all I know of him. Bougas is a documentary filmmaker who did SPEAK OF THE DEVIL with Anton LaVey and DEATH SCENES 1 & 2. DS2 shows the crime photos, as does John Gilmore in one of his Manson books.
