Linda Kasabian
| Linda Kasabian | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Linda Darlene Drouin June 21, 1949 Biddeford, Maine, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Linda Darlene Drouin, Linda Christian, are known ones |
| Known for | Association with the Manson Family and as a prosecution witness in the Tate-LaBianca murder trial |
Linda Kasabian (born Linda Darlene Drouin; June 21, 1949) is a former member of Charles Manson's "Family". She was the key witness in District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi's prosecution of Manson and his followers for the Tate-LaBianca murders.
Linda Darlene Drouin was born in Biddeford, Maine and raised in the New England town of Milford, New Hampshire. Her father, Rosaire Drouin, was a construction worker of French Canadian ancestry and her mother, Joyce Taylor, was a homemaker, and they struggled financially in a working class home. Her parents often didn't get along and her father abandoned the family when she was still a young child. Both of her parents remarried a short time later and her father moved to Miami, Florida. She was the eldest child, and her mother Joyce has remarked that with so many younger children and stepchildren to care for, she was not able to devote the necessary attention to her teenage daughter. "I didn't have time to listen to her problems. A lot of what has happened to Linda is my fault."
Linda was described by friends, neighbors, and teachers as intelligent, a good student, but a "starry-eyed romantic". She was known as kind and shy but "forced to grow up too soon". She dropped out of high school and ran away from home at the age of sixteen due to increasing problems with her stepfather, Jake Byrd, who she claimed mistreated her and her mother. Linda headed to the western states, "looking for God". At the age of 16, she married Robert Peasley, but divorced a short time later. She briefly moved to Miami and tried to reconnect with her father, who was tending bar, but they drifted apart before long. She then traveled to Boston and remarried, and gave birth to a daughter in 1968. When her second marriage, to Armenian American Robert Kasabian, began to sour, Linda and her baby daughter Tanya returned to New Hampshire to live with Linda's mother. Later, Robert Kasabian contacted Linda and invited her to meet him in Los Angeles. He wanted her to join him and a friend, Charles "Blackbeard" Melton, on a sailing trip to South America. Linda, who was hoping for a reconciliation, returned to Los Angeles to live with Robert in the Los Angeles hippie hangouts of Topanga Canyon.
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