Aug. 23 – Everybody talks about the kids who run off to join the hippies, but nobody thinks much about the anguish of the parents they leave behind.

Linda Kasabian is my daughter.

She ran away from home five years ago when she was 16 and, for the first time in my life, I knew how painful a broken heart can be.

It was all the more painful for me because of the sense of guilt I felt, and still feel.

A lot of what has happened to Linda is my fault and, in a way, this makes her story my story, too.

It is not an easy story for me to tell but, if you have a little girl of your own, I hope you will read every word of it.

I hope every mother in New England will read it because they may find in it a message I wish someone had given me when Linda was a teenager.

I got the message — too late.

Like all teenagers, Linda had problems but, when she came to me to talk about them, I didn’t give her much time, I had five younger children to raise.

I know now I should have made the time to listen to her, advise her and try to help her. I thought she could work things out for herself, but she couldn’t.

This whole bitter experience has taught me that, if you don’t make time for a girl like Linda, she will look for, and find, someone else who will.

Linda found that someone in a boy she dropped out of high school to marry. A few months later she was a teenage divorcee — and more mixed up than ever.

Then she went away for the first time, searching for something that, somehow, I had been unable to give.

Or unwilling to give.

She was gone for a month. I thought she had gone to New York to find a job, but found out later she had never left town.

This seems impossible because Milford is just a small New Hampshire town where most people know everybody else.

But Linda was hidden away, with a group of other teenagers, in a hippie pad that nobody in town, including the police, even knew existed.

Nobody knows who the other teenagers were because none of them was unlucky enough to go the whole route and become a central figure in a sensational murder case.

Linda went that route.

Now she is important to a lot of people because of her role as the state’s star witness in the Tate-LeBianca murder trial in California.

But she has always been, and always will be important to me because I am her mother and, though I have not always understood her, I love her very deeply. That first Christmas away from home — the one Linda spent in the Milford hippie pad — was painful for me I found out later how painful it had been for her, too.

She told me that she had stolen up to the house late at night on Christmas Eve to peek through the living room window at the decorations and the gifts under the tree.

I was sitting in a chair, wondering and worrying about her, and she was just outside the window, looking in at me and the rest of the family. Both of us were crying.

I tell you all this only because it shows how two people who love each other can be so close to each other, and yet so far apart.

She wanted to come in, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The people she loved were all there, but the understanding, or whatever teenagers yearn for, was back in the hippie pad.

So Linda went back.

Linda was back some a couple of days after Christmas and I tried hard to tie her down because I was beginning to realize she was slipping away from me.

I tried too hard.

She is a very independent girl. She had worked from the time she was 13, first as a baby sitter, and later as an aide in a nursing home.

These jobs reflected Linda’s deep feeling for people, especially people who were very young or very old. She was a good girl at heart, and would do anything for anyone.

There are many examples to illustrate Linda’s deep capacity for human feeling.

Her stepbrother, Tommy, who is only 12, is going to have a kidney transplant within the next few months.

Linda was under indictment in California when she heard about it and, despite all her own troubles, she offered to supply the kidney.

She will be unable to do so, though, because tests done at the jail indicated the has the wrong blood type.

This house in the country that Linda wants to buy eventually is going to be a big house, if she ever finds it.

It will have to be big because she wants it, not only for herself and her children, but to provide a haven for unwed mothers and other girls who have problems.

She wants these girls to benefit from her own unhappy experience. She wants to offer solutions that rule out drugs, and all the other things that brought her to the brink of ruin.

And she loves animals, too. In fact, she could not bear to see any living thing hurt or molested. As a child she would avoid stepping on ants because she felt it would be cruel to crush the life out of them.

And she wouldn’t let me kill a fly in the house. She would wave the fly to an open door and safety.

This is what made so ironic and, to me, incredible, her subsequent involvement in a bloody mass murder. But I am getting ahead of my story.

Linda had come home from the hippie pad in Milford and, with typical independence, got herself a job in a local factory. She wanted to make it on her own.

But job or no job, she was still just a little girl to me, in spite of her brief marriage and divorce.

I tried to protect her by regulating her life. I told her what to eat, what to wear, what friends she could have and what time to come home.

It was just one argument after another and, before I knew it, we had drifted even farther apart.

So Linda took off.

This time, it was to Miami and a visit with her father, Rosaire Drouin, whom I had divorced some years earlier.

I thought the trip might do her good. She was still emotionally crushed by the shattering crisis triggered by her broken marriage.

Divorce is never good or pleasant, but when a girl is only 16 it can really inflict deep scars because she is, after all, only a child, really.

She went to Miami, but apparently saw very little of her father after she was there awhile.

Linda got herself a job as a switch-hoard operator in a resort hotel and, for the first time in her life, was exposed to wealth and all that goes with it.

She was just a wide-eyed girl from the country, turned loose suddenly in a winter playground that offered new associations and a new way of life.

Just to show you how young and naive she was, I guess I should include the business of the diet pills.

Linda weighed 140 pounds when she went to Florida. You wouldn’t believe it to look at her now because she’s a slim trim 107. But she weighed 140 then.

So she began taking diet pills to improve her looks in a place where looks are important, I guess. She thought if she took three pills at a time, instead of just one, she’d lose weight three times as fast.

I think exposure to life in Miami was a turning point in what became a long, bitter experience for Linda. I think it was in Florida that she might have gotten hung up on drugs. I know the diet pills she was taking had a certain narcotic content. I think she might have smoked marijuana before going to Florida.

All I know is that she was down there less than a year and underwent an unbelievable change. She left Milford as a plump teenager and came back as an attractive, sophisticated young woman.

Her whole life style had changed. She had long hair, wore mod clothes — the whole bit.

More importantly, her interests had changed. She began drawing me out on such subjects as drugs. I had a feeling she was on drugs, but she never said she was.

Then it was another job, this time in a Nashua factory, but it didn’t last long. Two weeks, as I remember it. She couldn’t take Milford after Miami. All she wanted was enough money to run off to Boston.

She made the drug scene in a big way in Boston. She got herself arrested in a narcotics raid on a hippie pad and I went down there to be with her in court.

The hippie pad was in the South End and I saw it when I went with her, after her court appearance, to pick up her things before taking her home.

That’s when I met Bob Kasabian for the first time. Linda hadn’t married him, but he was there. I can remember him apologizing for the dirty dishes in the sink.

But I didn’t like him. He didn’t appeal to me in any way, and I don’t know what Linda saw in him. I just couldn’t feel comfortable in his presence.

Maybe he could listen to Linda the way I should have listened to her. Maybe he was another “somebody else” that girls like Linda turn to when their mothers seem unable or unwilling to understand.

When we got back to Milford, though, I made the mistake of telling Linda I didn’t want her to see Bob Kasabian under any conditions.

There I was, calling the tune again, for a very independent girl who didn’t like the music I was making.

Perhaps because I forbade her to see Bob, or perhaps because she wanted to see him anyway, she began to meet him secretly. He came to Milford often.

I had seen Bob Kasabian and the South End hippie pad and the way of life of the flower people.

It was apparent to me then that Linda was irrevocably committed to the hippie movement.

I should have known she was the kind of person who might be attracted to this. She had always been deeply religious. She loved animals, people, nature. She possessed all the esthetic instincts these people share.

And I felt guiltier than ever because I had come to realize that, however unintentionally, I had pushed her to the kind of life that promises contentment for sensitive people, but gives them, in the end, only grief.

Linda called to tell me she and Bob were going to be married and, in a way, I was almost relieved. I guess I found comfort in the feeling she would now be cared for by someone she trusted.

The offer of marriage by Bob was, in itself, reassuring because to me it meant he loved her and would be good to her, no matter what my feelings.

They got married and went off to Venice, Calif., but Linda began corresponding with me often. They even came east for a Christmas visit. In a way, I was closer to Linda than I had ever been before.

I even allowed myself to dream that they would find so much happiness with each other that they would forget the hippie life and settle down like any young couple. You know what I mean — a job, a home, kids.

Linda wanted it, this way, I know. I think she was getting fed up with a kind of life that she could put up with only for so long, without a break.

Whenever she needed that break, she came home to me and she was always welcome. Each succeeding brief separation made it more apparent that she was tired of the whole business.

But Bob would call on the telephone and propose a trip to Mexico or South America or some other exotic place, and Linda would go for the line every time.

She would fly back to California, only to be told that Bob had changed his mind. The last time this happened, Bob told her he was going on a trip to South America, but leaving her in California.

By this time, Linda had little Tonya (who is now two) and was pregnant with another child, Angel (Andy), born five months ago in Los Angeles.

If the marriage did nothing else, it gave life to two beautiful children. Tonya is a little blonde doll who has been with me since last December, when Linda surrendered to face seven murder indictments.

When Andy was born, I flew out to California to pick him up and bring him to New Hampshire. Linda was in jail, and they don’t allow babies in jail.

But getting back to Kasabian and the last time he enticed Linda out to California with a promise he never intended to keep — this was the emotional crusher.

Linda felt thoroughly rejected, as she had so often before, and she turned again to life in hippie communes. She was a setup for Charlie Manson and his cultist movement.

I read about the Tate-LaBianca murders in the newspapers and, like everyone else, I was horrified.

I do not believe, and I shall never believe, that Linda was anything more than a witness to this horror. She was on drugs and did other things of which neither of us is proud. But she is incapable of violence.

I knew from the beginning that Linda would be given immunity. Everybody told me she would spend time in prison and that I should be prepared for the worst.

But I never gave up on Linda as a human being. I never lost faith in her capacity for being a good person who, though she hurt herself badly, could never hurt anyone else.

I am very proud of Linda for having the courage to do what she had to do as a prosecution witness in the California trial.

My hope is now that others will give her a chance to find the happiness that has always eluded her.

Linda is determined to make a new and happy life for herself and her children, if others will let her.

She told me since coming home that she is going to go to court to change the names of her children, so that neither Tonya nor Andy will be scarred in the future by her unhappy past.

She wants to spare the children, just as she has tried to spare me and other members of her family all through this nightmare.

Memory takes me back now to last November, when I got a call from Linda asking whether she could come home for Thanksgiving. I was delighted, as usual, to have her come. I never refused her.

Linda must have been tortured inside, but she never said a word to me about the California happenings.

She spent the holiday with the family and then surprised us by saying she wasn’t going to run off again.

Linda stayed over until Monday morning, then told us she was going to take an apartment and get a job in Nashua. She wanted her own place for herself and Tonya, she said.

I know now that what she really wanted was to spare me and the rest of the family the embarrassment of her being arrested from our home. She knew the arrest was coming, but said nothing.

My first knowledge of Linda’s awesome predicament was when I picked up a morning paper that said she was wanted in connection with the Tate-LaBianca case.

I tucked the story under my coat, as if hiding it time would somehow undo the story that had jumped up from the front page and hit me like a sledgehammer.

I drove to her Nashua apartment, went in and held the paper out, wordlessly.

“I know, Mum,” she said calmly. “I heard it on the radio last night. I haven’t slept at all.”

For a long moment, we just looked at each other, trying to say things with our eyes. Then we embraced and both of us broke down in a complete emotional explosion.

After that, Linda seemed relieved. She talked very rationally of the necessity for surrendering to police. I didn’t know what to do or what to tell her.

So we got into my car and drove aimlessly through the streets of Nashua. I took her home to Milford and left her there, then went to see Police Chief Duane Rockwell.

Chief Rockwell hadn’t seen the morning paper. He took one look at it, then looked up at me. He said nothing for a minute or so, but I could see the sympathy in his eyes.

“You go home and tell Linda to stay there,” he said softly. “I’m going to call the state police.”

I don’t know yet what made me do it, but I asked if they could send an unmarked car to pick up Linda. She had mentioned her fear of embarrassing the family.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. A few minutes later, Chief Rockwell called to say two state police detectives would be arriving shortly — in an unmarked car.

“They’ll just toot the horn,” he said, “and Linda can come out to meet them.”

A little while later, a black car drove up to the house and a horn tooted and Linda got up from the chair in which she had been sitting with Tonya in her arms.

She walked toward me, bending over to kiss the child as she came and, as she did so, a tear trickled down from her cheek into the baby’s face.

Then she placed Tonya in my arms and, in the same motion, kissed me and said she had to go.

If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget what Linda said to me then. Her hand was on the door knob when she turned to look at me.

“Mum,” she said, “all I ever wanted was what you’ve got – a husband, love, a home and children.”

Then she was gone.

I begin to wonder all over again what life would have been like for Linda — if only I had taken the time to listen all those times she came to me.

If you have a daughter of your own, you don’t have to agree with everything she says. But listen to her, as long and as often as she wants you to listen to her. I learned the hard way that girls like Linda have a lot to say.

Hours after the state police had come to take Linda away, I got a call from Concord, 35 miles away. Linda was being taken to Logan Airport for her return to California, a matron told me. She wanted to see little Tonya just once more.

A church parking lot in Bedford, about 14 miles east of Milford, was suggested as a convenient rendezvous. I took Tonya from her crib, bundled her tip in blankets, and set out for the painful meeting.

Linda broke down completely when I leaned into the police cruiser to put Tonya in her arms for what might have been the last time ever. She held the child briefly, kissed her tenderly, then handed her back to me.

“Mum,” Linda said through the mist of her tears, “some day the world is going to know the truth.”

Then the cruiser pulled away in what was for Linda and me the saddest moment either of us had ever known. I wept all the way home.

Linda is home now with Tonya and Andy to make a new life in the old country home she hopes to buy with profits from a book she intends to write in collaboration with Joan Didion, a California author.

For the time being, though, she will be staying with us in Milford. Then it could be elsewhere in New Hampshire, even Maine or Vermont, for that house she wants to open up to other girls who need help.

My wish for Linda, no matter what she does or where she goes, is happiness because, until now, she has known so little of it. Others may cry tomorrow. We cried yesterday.

By JOYCE BYRD