Kasabian was the lookout for the “Manson Family” during the murder of Sharon Tate on August 9, 1969, when the pregnant actress and four other friends were murdered in California.
Linda Kasabian, a member of the infamous “Manson Family” and the prosecution's key witness to cult leader Charles Manson during the murder trials of him and the Family, has died at 73.
Kasabian was the lookout for the “Manson Family” during the murder of Sharon Tate on August 9, 1969, when the pregnant actress and four other friends were murdered in California.
On the day after the Tate murder spree, Kasabian accompanied Manson and other members of the “Family” to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, where the couple was slain, according to The Guardian.
Kasabian never took part in any of the murders but was granted immunity by prosecutors for her testimony, which led to the 1970 conviction of cult leader Charles Manson and several “Family” members.
Manson was sentenced to death for his role in ordering the killings, in addition to the murder of acquaintance Gary Hinman, who was slain in late July 1969.
However, in 1976 the California Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional and Manson was spared execution. He later died in prison in 2017 at the age of 83.
Kasabian had been living in Washington state and had changed her last name to "Chiochios" to protect her identity, The Guardian reported.
No cause was cited on a death certificate from Tacoma-Pierce County, which was obtained by The Washington Post.
Kasabian was a drifter in her younger years and lived in communes and practiced free love like many did in America in the late 1960s, according to The L.A. Times.
In 1969, she traveled to Los Angeles to reconcile with her husband, Bob Kasabian, who was staying at a friend’s trailer in Topanga Canyon, but he wound up leaving her, according to the L.A. Times.
Stranded with her 1-year-old daughter whom she had with Bob, and just 20 years old, she moved to Spahn Ranch in July 1969, an old movie set in Los Angeles where Manson and his followers were living in a commune, according to the L.A. Times.
During her time at the Ranch, she would end up falling in love with Manson, according to the L.A. Times.
That same year, Manson ordered a group of his followers to carry out a series of murders in what criminal prosecutors said was a plan to incite a race war.
“I was like a little blind girl in the forest,” Kasabian said in her testimony Manson’s 1970 trial, “and I took the first path that came to me.”
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