Girl Member Of Weird Cult Returned To Face 5 Counts
Wed At 16, Divorced At 17
December 4, 1969
By John Kendall
Times Staff Writer
Linda Darlene Kassabian, 20, a member of the Charles Miles Manson "Family" of
hippies, was returned here Wednesday night to face five counts of murder in the
slaying of actress Sharon Tate and four others August 9.
She arrived at international airport at 8:22 PM, ducking her face into the
collar of a camels hair coat as she was ushered to police, waiting to go to
Sybil Brand Institute for women to await arraignment on the murder charges.
The small, blue-eyed blond-mother of an eighteen-month-old daughter and five
months pregnant - was charged, along with Charles D. Watson and Patricia
Krenwinkel in a complaint issued Monday.
At first it was thought the young woman might had sought sanctuary in a New
Mexico convent, but friends arranged for her to surrender to New Hampshire State
Police Tuesday.
She waived extradition proceedings on a fugitive warrant the same day and was
taken into custody in Concord, New Hampshire, Wednesday by Los Angeles Police
Department sergeants Joan Simpson and Sidney Knuckles.
She had spent the previous week before her arrest in Milford, a small
manufacturing town 20 miles south of Concord where her mother and stepfather
live.
"I don't care if the whole world comes down - I'm not talking," she told
newsmen before leaving Milford.
Whatever the future might hold for the young woman, her mother, Mrs. Jake
Byrd is convinced her daughter did not kill anyone.
"I know my daughter," she said. "She was never violent. She loved children.
There's no hate in her at all. She was searching, searching for love."
Love led to early unhappiness for Linda as a high school student in Milford.
She wed a Robert Peasley and quit school at 16. They lived together three months
and were divorced when she was 17.
"Something went wrong with their marriage," said Arlene Sullivan, 16, a
neighbor who has known Linda, born Linda Darlene Drouin, for 13 years.
Mrs. Sullivan described Linda as "withdrawn but likable." Another neighbor,
Mrs. Robert Pelchat, said the young woman was "shy, bashful," who "just grew up
too fast."
After her divorce, Linda moved to Boston where her mother said she married
Bob Kasabian, a "hippie-type," and moved to California.
In three brief letters, Mrs. Byrd said, their daughter tried to "build it up
that she was leading a normal life." But, she said, Kasabian and Linda lived for
a time in a hippie pad at Lake Tahoe.
"He did not want her anymore," Mrs. Byrd said, and Linda left.
What happened next in her life is a mystery to relatives.
How did she meet Charles Manson, the man who ruled the roving band of
hippies?
Her father, Rosaire Drouin, a bartender in a Miami Florida Skid Row bar, said
Linda showed up there about November 1 and left shortly after Thanksgiving.
"What can I say," he told a Miami Herald reporter. "She was not a bad girl
and she was not a good girl.
"She was pretty happy. No, I wouldn't say she was depressed or unhappy or
anything like that. She was happy as hell. In fact, I kept looking through her
luggage to see if she had drugs. I wondered if she was high."
