On December 29, 1969, Leslie Van Houten, who'd been charged with the LaBianca murders, was interviewed at Sybil Brand Institute.[35] The interviewer was Marvin Part, who'd been appointed her attorney of record on December 19 of that year.
Van Houten said the following:
- "You're only waiting for this moment to arise" and then "Have you seen the little piggies" ... Helter Skelter and it's "when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide then I turn around and go for a ride" and "It's coming down fast, helter skelter" ...
- "... and then when we were reading the Bible it said about the four-headed locusts and it just described the Beatles so perfectly."
- Lawyer: You say Revolutions 9. Do you read anything, any title in the Bible that you thought might have been the Beatles song Revolution 9?
- "Yeah, we looked up Revelation in the New Testament ... and it talked about a four-headed locust that would have hair of women and mouths of lions and faces of men and a shield of protective armor, and we thought it was like their guitars, because their album when we would listen ... on acid would say so much more ...."
- Lawyer: Did you believe that the Beatles were the four-headed locusts and ... prophets?
- [Hard to hear:] "Uh-huh. I believed it. ... [I]n and out of the album they've got parts of the revelations in the Bible throughout it. ... I believed that they were."
- "... and in one part, if you listen on another track, it sounds like they're saying 'Charlie.'"
- "... all kinds of things that made it seem real to us, to connect the Beatles with us ..."
- "... we started seeing that we were in this position, because we knew that we were part of the revelations in the Bible ..."
- "... the chosen white people, would go down into the center of the earth and stay there for about fifty years and then ... something was going to happen and we were going to come back up and this was when the earth would be all black."
- "... there would be no more white people on the earth . They would all be wiped out completely."
Later, Van Houten speaks as follows:
- "... and the next night [after the Tate murders] ... well, I was feeling bad, to tell you the truth, 'cause [Patricia Krenwinkel] was my best friend, and to think that she was strong enough in her believing [to kill], I wanted to, too, because I wanted to be just like [Krenwinkel]."
- "So I was feeling kind of bad, 'cause I didn't get to go, and I was sure hoping that if they [?] did it again that I could go."
- Lawyer: Now why in the world would you want to go out and kill somebody?
- "'Cause it had to be done. It had to be done just in order for the whole thing to be completed. So the whole world's karma would be completed, we had to do this ...."
In the penalty phase of the trial, Van Houten testified as follows:
- ... I had a court-appointed attorney by the name of Marvin Part. He had a lot of different thoughts, which were all his own, on how to get me off. He said he was going to make some tape recordings, and he told me the gist of what he wanted me to say. And I said it.
Interviewed in 1977, by Barbara Walters, Van Houten said the following:
- ... and at the time, it was supposed to help people. ... The crimes, they were supposed to start a revolution that would clean the souls of everyone. And see, what Charlie would do is he would speak about people's souls and not their persons; and because we weren't tuned in enough, we couldn't see what he was talking about, so we would just have to take his word for it.
- And that's what he said, that next summer there would be this big revolution and that the chosen people would live in a hole in the middle of the desert, and then after the crimes we went out and looked for the hole.
