And which medical professional declared her to be a psychopath?
Their actions are self-defining. Having said that, I believe every court ordered psych evaluation has established them to be psychpaths – not that any expertise is required to know that.
Seriously, plenty of people commit cold-blooded murder who aren’t psychopaths. People who think you must be born with no ability to empathize with others to kill are telling themselves a fairytale to make themselves feel better. Ordinary people with ordinary emotions kill all the time. A psychopath is a very specific kind of person.
Cite?
Gotta jump in for a sec - psychopaths aren’t necessarily psychotic, although they certainly can be. Psychotic ususally refers to a significant break with reality; schizophrenia and delusional disorder are psychotic disorders. A psychopath is usually grounded in the same reality the rest of us experience, they just lack any semblance of conscience, guilt or empathy that the rest of us feel. A psychotic can be medicated with antipsychotics, but the only antipsychopathic medication we have is iron supplements, in bar form. Richard Chase was deeply psychotic, Ted Bundy deeply psychopathic. Manson is both.
Van Houten, I don’t know, but I suspect she’s not. She’s had good institutional adjustment; psychopaths usually have a near-pathological inability to stay out of trouble, even in prison (although the women do somewhat better than the men), she’d never been in trouble that we know of before Manson, while most psychopaths begin early and show signs of conduct disorder as a child or teen, and news reports say she’s had “positive psychological reports” - psychopathy is usually the numero uno screening a psychologist will perform when assessing the future dangerousness. A psychopath showing remorse and staying out of trouble is doing an act, a mimic of what they see other people expecting from somebody who feels empathy, and it’s hard to keep that act up indefinitely - eventually the mask slips off. If she’s a psychopath, she must be doing that act extremely well.
I stand corrected on this, though I stand by the claim it doesn’t take a psychopath to commit cold blooded murder.
Actually several parole board appointed psychologists have said they think Van Houten is remorseful and does accept blame for and understand what she did- one did this time- but the parole board has overruled them.
Joran Van Der Sloot seems a textbook psychopath, incidentally. Reading the symptoms and signs he matches them all: lack of remorse, pathological lying, violent as a child, loves attention, elevated sense of self, sense of entitlement, etc.- all there.
I believe that if we are going to parole murderers (and Van Houten, technically, isn’t really even a murderer, having stabbed Mrs. LaBianca only after she was already dead and even then only after being ordered to do so by Tex Watson), then Leslie Van Houten should certainly be paroled. She has done everything a convict could possibly be expected to do in terms of accomplishment and good behavior during the forty years she has spent behind bars. Keeping her in prison makes a mockery of the idea that prisoners should work to rehabilitate themselves, and on a certain level it’s patently unfair given that, like other posters have already said, many other criminals have committed far worse crimes than hers and been paroled after only fifteen or twenty years.
In my opinion politics is the only thing keeping her behind bars: no one wants to be the one who votes to let her out. So they keep on with these ridiculous parole hearings when they have absolutely no intention of releasing her, all the while giving her goals to work toward under the pretense that by doing so she may be paroled by fulfilling them. This is not only patently unfair, but has gone on for so long that she has now pretty much exhausted all the avenues available to her for improvement.
I have felt this way about Van Houten for some time, but as it happens I’ve recently been reading John Waters new book Role Models, and in it he describes just how farcical these hearing have become:
He then goes on to describe a California Supreme Court judge’s view of Van Houten’s situation in front of the parole board:
And following that:
So it’s obvious that Van Houten has conducted herself in an exemplary manner while in prison and that she has fulfilled all that is available to her in terms of rehabilitation. And so now the board is using as an excuse to keep from releasing her the assertion that she has never owned up to what she did and taken responsibility for it, yet according to Waters:
And also:
So clearly she’s done all that she can to rehabilitate and educate herself, and to admit culpability in the horrors that took place that night and to take responsibility for them. For the parole boards to continue this charade that if only Van Houten would do this or that or express remorse or admit guilt is reprehensible in my opinion. Either let her out - as the parole board did in the case of another Manson devotee, Steve Grogan (aka "Scramblehead) sentenced to life in prison for the murder of [Spahn] ranch hand Shorty Shea but paroled after only fourteen years - or man up and tell her flat out that all her efforts to improve and rehabilitate herself have gone for naught and that she ain’t never gonna get out no matter what she does.
Disclaimer: I hope the quoted material above doesn’t violate the rule against overlong use of copyrighted material. I believe the quotes I’ve used to be “fair use” as the quoted material is only a small portion of the overall chapter on Van Houten, which runs to fifty-five pages.
Entirely true - you don’t have to be a psychopath to be a murderer (but it helps ;)).
You don’t have to be a psychopath to be a murderer, but absent any psychosis (and Van Houten is not psychotic) It requires a psychopathic pathology to break into a random stranger’s house, stab her 14 times, then calmly wipe the place of prints, eat food from her fridge and put on her clothes to wear out of the house.
I do not feel sorry for her and she does not deserve to ever get out. I don’t care how many books she reads in prison. I don’t care if she pretends to be sorry. I don’t care if she IS sorry. I don’t care if she turns into Francis of Assisi. She did the crime. She has to do the time.
She did the time required by law. If fact, she’s done much more time than most in her situation.
Definitely Yes!!
She should be released, because keeping her in prison is cruel and unusual punishment.
The average murderer only spends about 9 years behind bars.
Leslie is being discriminated against because her murder was so famous and high profile.
Virtually nobody besides the Manson family and Sirhan Sirhan has spent 40 some years in prison for murder - esp in California.
If Leslie had murdered somebody you never heard about, then she would have been released decades ago.
I dont think it is fair to let most murderers go free after 9 years but yet keep Leslie VanHoughton in prison for over 40 years.
Her sentence was life.
But as has been pointed out, a lot of people have done worse crime and served far less time. And I’d guess they’ve been nowhere near as rehabilitated nor had Van Houten’s exemplary record while in prison. I would think it damn near impossible to be in prison for forty years and not commit one single infraction.
Sorry to go back to Waters’ book yet again, but he points out also that:
This is incorrect. He entered the house, handed Watson some rope and left. He did not tie them up.
You know who put a pillow case over Rosemary LaBianca’s head and held her down while Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed her? Leslie Van Houten.
They shouldn’t have gotten out either. I don’t see how the system letting out some psychopathic killers out inappropriately is a justification for letting out more psychopathic killers.
She still hasn’t done enough time. There isn’t enough time. Her victims are dead forever.
Normally I would agree. I’m a pretty strong law and order guy and strong supporter of the death penalty (though I’ve altered my view on the death penalty to exclude those cases where guilt isn’t unquestionable), but like I said, if we as a society are going to try to rehabilitate people and parole them, it should be done on an equitable basis. Believe me, there are thousands of people walking the streets today that I think should have been offed years ago, but Leslie Van Houten has conducted herself virtually perfectly in prison for forty years and done more to rehabilitate herself than anyone else I know of. Thus she, IMO, is more deserving of recognition for her conduct and rehabilitation than anyone else I know of. If we were putting murderers and murderer accomplices in prison and throwing away the key my position would be different. But we don’t. And since we don’t, I don’t believe it’s right to keep someone like her in prison indefinitely for what are obviously political reasons.
The first time she was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life. At her final trial she was sentenced to life, BUT it was not life without the possibility of parole.
Now had that (life without the possibility of parole) been the sentence, I’d have no problem with it, but to dangle the possibility in front of her is, regardless of her crime, cruel and unusual punishment. (Foreseeing a question, I’ll say that torturing Charles Manson on the rack, regardless of how unsympathetic he is and the near complete absence of tears that would be shed, would also be cruel and unusual punishment.) They should either release her or say flat out “You are going to die in prison, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it” (in which case she could appeal) but under the present laws there is, LITERALLY, nothing more she can do, yet she keeps being denied.
Susan Atkins died in prison. I had wondered if once one of the murderers had died behind bars if LVH would have a better chance. Fugate was released long after Starkweather was executed, Leopold long after Loeb died while attempting a prison rape, and others involved in infamous crimes tend to get released once blood atonement is made. I suppose Clem Grogan was released because he wasn’t part of “those” Manson murders (Shorty who?). There were men at Jonestown who killed others attempting escape who not only have been released but had- strangely enough- some of the survivors speak for them as character witnesses. It will be interesting to know whether the deaths of Watson and Manson would let Atkins and Krenwinkel have more of a chance, since Manson was the ringleader and Watson the most bloody handed of the surviving murderers.
Unfortunately Manson has an extraordinary constitution for a runt who’s abused every drug there is and survived being poisoning, third degree burns (by a Hare Krishna no less- who else can scratch “got set on fire by a Hare Krishna” off their bucket list?) and numerous beatings yet he’s still evidently going strong at 75. They ought to study his resilience. Watson ironically is probably less well known than Van Houten.
Van Der Sloot does totally seem a classic case, yeah. Not only does trying to sell info to a dead murder victim’s family and essentially blaming the other victim for getting murdered by him absolutely reek of a stone cold lack of human empathy, but he shows all the other signs as well. Interviewers said he changed his story five or six times, but that was just the big version of events; within each version he changed his story 20 or 30 times, flowing effortlessly to a new lie every time he’s confronted, even when it made no sense to do so.
Slight correction here. Van Houten was out on bail for six months prior to her third trial in 1978. During that time she worked as a law clerk and lived quietly in Echo Park without drawing attention to herself, and, once her third trial began, came to court everyday on her own. Plus she has standing offers of employment and housing from people who’ve become close to her while in prison.
Dio: a few comments on statements you have made.
You’ve kept using the term “psychopathic” and its brethren, despite everyone else pointing out to you that there is no diagnosis of psychopathy. Don’t practice psychology without a license. 
As you know, our justice system (any justice system, really) does not sharply distinguish between acting and ordering others to act. Hence, hiring a hitman isn’t better than doing the deed yourself.
This is a case of the fundamental attribution error. Quick summary: when judging others, we humans tend to underestimate the effect of the situation on a person’s acts (often drastically). Read about it. Take the readings to heart. It matters.