Linda Kasabian, a troubled young drifter who joined Charles Manson’s cult, served as the gang’s lookout and getaway driver during a gruesome Los Angeles murder spree and went on to become the star witness against the killers at trial, died Jan. 21 at a hospital in Tacoma, Wash. She was 73.

A death notice for Kasabian ran this month in the Tacoma News Tribune, which identified her as Linda Chiochios, one of at least two names she used after the Manson trial. The Washington Post obtained a copy of her death certificate from the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, which did not cite a cause.

Kasabian was 20, raising a newborn daughter and reeling from the collapse of her second marriage, when an acquaintance introduced her to Manson in July 1969. He welcomed her into his commune of misfits and drifters, which called itself the Family and coalesced at a ranch outside of Los Angeles, and she found herself captivated by his wild-eyed charisma. Only later, she said, did she realize that he “was definitely the devil.”

As Kasabian told it, she was a reluctant accomplice in the rampage that occurred over two consecutive nights that August. Members of the group fatally shot and stabbed seven people, including 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate, the wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski, who was more than eight months pregnant. Collectively known as the Tate-LaBianca murders, the killings shocked the city with their brutality and apparent randomness, and inspired books, songs and movies including Quentin Tarantino’s “One Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” (2019), in which Maya Hawke played a Kasabian-like figure nicknamed Flowerchild.

To some observers, the murders seemed to herald the end of a countercultural era of peace, love and freewheeling drug use that had thrived in California, and to embody a dark undercurrent that had emerged over the past decade. In the title essay of her 1979 book, “The White Album,” author Joan Didion wrote that for many people in Los Angeles, “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when words of the murders on Cielo Drive” – where Tate was living – “traveled like brushfire through the community.”

“The tension broke that day,” she added. “The paranoia was fulfilled.”

Kasabian did not participate directly in the murders but was present both nights, waiting at the car to take the killers home. She was initially charged with murder, alongside Manson and three of her fellow Family members, but agreed to become a witness for the prosecution, providing testimony that helped send her associates to prison for life.

“She never asked for immunity from prosecution, but we gave it,” Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles prosecutor who won convictions in the case, told Britain’s Observer newspaper in 2009. “She stood in the witness box for 17 or 18 days and never broke down, despite the incredible pressure she was under. I doubt we would have convicted Manson without her.”

At the time of the trial, Kasabian seemed to believe she was almost fated to wind up at the center of a murder case in California, improbable as it seemed for a young woman from New Hampshire who had, as she put it, been trying “to find out who I am and where I’m going.”

She was born Linda Darlene Drouin in Biddeford, Maine, on June 21, 1949. Her parents separated when she was young, and she was raised by her mother in the town of Milford, in southeastern New Hampshire.

At 16, she dropped out of high school and married Robert Peasley. They divorced the next year, and she moved to Miami, where her father worked as a bartender, and later to Boston, where she met her second husband, Robert Kasabian. They settled in the Venice Beach section of Los Angeles and had a daughter, Tonya, amid a tempestuous relationship that included at least two breakups.

Kasabian said that after her husband left her in the summer of 1969, she joined Manson at Spahn Ranch, the Family’s headquarters. Manson mandated group sex and drug use, and he led his followers on a practice called “creepy crawling,” in which they snuck into homes across the city, rearranging furniture and stealing people’s belongings.

The cult leader had spent much of his life in prison, with a rap sheet that included burglaries, robberies and car theft. He had also tried to launch a career in the music industry, mingling with figures including Beach Boys member Dennis Wilson and record producer Terry Melcher before growing bitter and disillusioned.

In the desert around Spahn Ranch, he spoke of an apocalyptic race war called “Helter Skelter,” named after the Beatles song, in which he said Black people would rise up against White people and then turn to the Manson family to lead them. The Tate-LaBianca killings were intended to hasten that conflict, according to prosecutors, with Manson instructing his followers to make it look like the crimes were committed by Black militants.

On the night of Aug. 8, 1969, the cult leader sent Kasabian and three other Family members – Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles “Tex” Watson – to Tate’s home in Benedict Canyon, where Kasabian said she waited outside just after midnight as her companions murdered the home’s occupants. In addition to Tate, whose husband was in London at the time of the killings, the victims included Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hairstylist; Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski; Frykowski’s girlfriend, coffee heir Abigail Folger; and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old visiting the property’s caretaker.

Kasabian said she was shocked by the violence and too afraid to stop it. “I thought about going to a house where there were lights down the road, and then I said, ‘No, don’t do that, because they’ll find me and kill all those people,'” she recalled in an interview for “Manson,” a 2009 docudrama. “So I went down the hill and I got into the car and I just stayed there and waited.”

The next night, she drove Manson and a half-dozen others to a house in the Los Feliz neighborhood, following the cult leader’s instruction. Manson went inside and tied up a grocery store executive, Leno LaBianca, and his wife, Rosemary, who were then killed by other members of the group. As at Tate’s house, messages were left behind in the victims’ blood, including “Death to Pigs” and the misspelled phrase “Healter Skelter.”

The killings went unsolved for months. But that fall, Atkins was jailed on an unrelated murder charge and bragged to cellmates about the Tate-LaBianca killings, tipping off police and leading to the gang’s capture.

Kasabian had fled California days after the LaBianca murders, leaving her daughter behind and making her way to New Hampshire, where she surrendered to state police in December 1969. By then, she was five months pregnant with a son, known as Angel or Andy, who was born while she was in protective custody in Los Angeles.

The murder trial devolved into chaos at times, as Manson threw a punch at his own lawyer, lunged at the judge and appeared in court with an “X” carved into his forehead. Family members such as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who later tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, shouted slogans and chants outside the courthouse, showing support for Manson.

All four of the defendants – including Manson and his associates Atkins, Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten – were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Manson was also convicted of two other killings, and Watson was found guilty in a separate murder trial. All were sentenced to death, but their sentences were reduced to life in prison in 1972 after the death penalty was briefly outlawed in California. Atkins died in 2009, and Manson died in 2017.

Within a few years, Kasabian had moved back to New Hampshire, where she adopted the name Linda Christian, worked as a short-order cook and raised four children while trying to keep a low profile.

She eventually moved to Tacoma, where she worked as an in-home caregiver, according to her death certificate. She declined most interviews, but on the 40th anniversary of the attacks, she spoke with talk-show host Larry King, who disguised her appearance for the show, and gave an interview for “Manson,” the docudrama.

“I have been on a mission of healing and rehabilitation,” she told King. “And I went through a lot of drugs and alcohol and self-destruction and probably could have used some psychological counseling and help 40 years ago but never received it.”

The pain was driven in part by guilt. “I could never accept the fact that I was not punished for my involvement,” she said in the documentary. “I felt then what I feel now, always and forever, that it was a waste of life that had no reason, no rhyme.”

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