The jury still is out in the retrial of former Manson family member Leslie Van Houten, charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder in the slayings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca on Aug. 10, 1969.

The state Court of Appeal last August ordered a second trial for Miss Van Houten because her case was not separated from that of codefendants Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles Manson when her attorney, Ronald Hughes, disappeared.

The ’60s. Haight-Ashbury. Flower children. Hippies. Pot. LSD. Tuning in. Turning on. Dropping out. The Beatles. The Beach Boys. Guitars. Vans. Communes. Gurus. Mysticism.

It all seems like yesterday’s news.

The breakup of the family. The sexual revolution. The turn against organized religion. Against the establishment. Race riots. The war in Vietnam. Alienation. Runaways. The counterculture.

And beyond that, beyond the pale, the Manson family. And the fact that on the nights of Aug. 9 and 10, 1969, some of the Manson family took a drive through the monster, by which they meant Los Angeles, looking for people to kill, and found and killed Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, Voityck Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. And terrorized everybody.

It was all here, now, in the courtroom of the ’70s as Leslie Van Houten was tried again for her part in the homicides. It is a courtroom where the impact of psychology on the law hovers over all the testimony.

A “concatenation of events,” one defense witness, Dr. Lester Grinspoon, called it — a linked chain “of people, places and drugs which conspired to take this vulnerable girl and left her enmeshed in a system of delusional beliefs.”

The concatenation of the ’60s which the Manson family experienced was chaotic. It was all coming down, Charles Manson said, and would converge in what he called Helter Skelter — a word used to describe disorderly confusion since Elizabethan times. Manson took the word from a Beatles song and applied it to his own squirrelly metaphor for an Armageddon between blacks and whites in America.

The blacks were supposed to start the war. When that did not happen in the manner Manson envisioned — the cities of America burning down in the summers of the late ’60s notwithstanding — Manson told his followers he would “have to show blackie how to do it.”

Finally, that weekend in August, 1969, he told them, “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”

It all came down – on him, on his followers Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinke! and Leslie Van Houten … and on their victims.

It seems surreal. And very long ago. Removed. No one seems more removed from those events of 1969 than Leslie Van Houten herself. She is a slim, pretty, well dressed young woman with silky brown hair and bangs which cover the X she carved in her forehead during the 1971 trial. She smiles warmly at friends and relatives, hesitantly at strangers whose eyes she meets.

During breaks she teases her lawyer — Maxwell Keith — about his perpetually unkempt hair, kids and flirts a little with the bailiff and clerk, talking about the races at Santa Anita one day, the food at Frontera another, showing them snap-shots, saying “This is when I was vice-president (at Monrovia High School) … This is my brother Paul. He’s so cute … Oh, yeah, I was a ballerina.”

Whenever there is any kidding she laughs, wrinkles her face, joins in. The strongest impression she gives is that she wants to be in on the joke; she wants to be one of them; she wants out.

When court is in session, she listens to testimony intensely, often leaning over her yellow legal pad making notes or doodling. She seems full of anticipation and animated, her manner changing during the more serious moments.

When she testifies, she is pale, drawn and speaks with a low, strained voice, as if her throat is tight. She fights back tears when describing how she tried to avoid mutilating the dead bodies. Manson had instructed them to do something “witchy.”

In the final week, when the closing statements are made, her good cheer is all but gone. She enters looking tense, sits immobile, her body turned toward the wall, frustrating the court artists who could not possibly get a look at her.

Few spectators have come to watch the drama. It is almost as if people have forgotten this particular American tragedy.

The action at the courthouse is down the hall at the Skyhorse-Mohawk trial where two members of the American Indian Movement are accused of murdering a taxi driver two-and-a-half years ago in Ventura County. There is usually a crowd at that end of the hall, including many native Americans in Indian gear. The courtroom is larger and crowded, and the trial proceeds behind bulletproof glass.

During a recess, one young white woman, wearing fringed buckskin and looking spaced, walks to the benches outside the Van Houten trial, sits, rolls her eyes and says, “What do they talk about in there?”

They do talk about the gruesome details of the Tate-LaBianca slayings. And they do talk about murder — about malice aforethought, premeditation, mature and meaningful deliberation, weighing of considerations, diminished mental capacity. That kind of talk, however, has not set the tone of the trial.

In his opening statement before Judge Edward A. Hinz Jr., the prosecutor, Stephen Kay, one of the attorneys at the original trial, contended that the evidence would show “that Leslie Van Houten has always done what Leslie Van Houten wanted to do, be it for good or evil that she was not operating under any diminished mental capacity but she was operating with a diminished heart and a diminished soul.”

The counsel for the defense, Keith, contended she had a “severe and debilitating mental impairment … that in no way could she conduct herself in accordance with the laws of this state and our society … Leslie was sick … Leslie was psychotic from drugs, Manson and many, many factors that will be discussed in this case.”

It is the discussion of “many, many factors” which has set the tone of the trial. That and the interpretation psychiatrists give to them.

The details of Leslie Van Houten’s life are catalogued again and again. She was daddy’s girl; a homecoming princess in high school; a bright girl with an IQ of 121 placing her in the top 5% of the nation; active in school government.

Her parents divorced; she experimented a little with sex and drugs; she became seriously involved with her boyfriend, Bobby Mackey, and they went towards the counterculture together. They smoked pot, took LSD, lost interest in school. She got pregnant and her mother arranged an abortion.

She followed Mackey through his interest in Oriental philosophies and got interested herself. They both joined the Self-Realization Fellowship, quit drugs and sex, and studied meditation. She tried to become a Buddhist nun.

She and Bobby Mackey parted; she left the Fellowship, went to Sawyer Business College, studied to be a legal secretary and lived with her father in Manhattan Beach. And drifted back to the friends she was most comfortable with. Before long, she called her mother from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to say she was dropping out. Within months she had a new family — the Manson family.

The talk has been more of dune buggies than murder weapons, of kids roaming up and down the coast for months at a time in vans, and in the Manson family’s “big, black bus”; of communal life on a defunct movie set — Spahn’s Movie Ranch — where there were campfires, guitar music and singing, where people fed the horses and cleaned the barn, embroidered, made love, smoked pot, dropped acid and took fanciful “Magical Mystery Tours” where they assumed the roles of other people in other times. And there was talk of Death Valley, where the family would “walk around, climb the hills, eat figs and smoke marijuana,” as Diane Lake, a former family member testified.

There was talk of kids who were “in search of the great white guru … someone who had some understanding of what life was like,” which is how Brooks Poston testified he happened to join Charles Manson.

And talk of how it all went wrong. How the family, as Gregg Jakobson, a music producer who knew them, testified, changed “from a nice, dusty, kickback, take-it-as-it-comes (group)” in 1968 to, by the spring of 1969, “a desperate, uptight, scrambling” group of people.

The endless rap of Charles Manson has been intoned by Keith and Kay and their witnesses until it seemed like a litany, all could recite — the death of the ego, there is no right, there is no wrong, there are no rules, there is no death. Fear is where it’s at. Die in order to live. Give up the ego and be as one.

There is talk of LSD and its effects. One spectator whispers, “Sometimes it seems like it’s LSD that’s on trial.” The psychiatrists who testified, five for the defense and one for the prosecution, describe its effects, especially on adolescents whose identities have not been formed, and of the importance which setting, the environment, has on the drug’s influence. They testified how a person can become suggestible under its influence — open to new values and beliefs, and the rejection of old ones.

The Manson family members testified how it was used in the family as a group to further some of the family’s goals toward ego death and oneness with each other.

Paul Watkins described the group LSD experience: They were “to make love in a harmonious way, to where we would climax together and be one. We were striving for this experience which, incidentally, never happened … Imagine 15-20 people with their clothes off trying to be amorous. Invariably someone would start crying, scream in pain, get up and stumble around. The project had to be abandoned out of pure stress.”

With that kind of testimony, and the inevitable laughter it often provokes, it is perhaps unavoidable that the mood in the courtroom is, more often than not, laid back. That and the passage of time.

Two lives are gone and a person’s future is at stake. Still no one, not the judge, lawyers, jury, Leslie Van Houten, press or spectators are immune to the elements of irony and black humor which keep surfacing in the absurd case.

There is good-natured bantering between Keith and Kay, men of enormously different physical appearance and courtroom styles.

Keith is an older man who has the perpetual look of Peck’s Bad Boy. He wears baggy suits, pants uncreased, coats buttoned. He is laconic, mischievous at times, relaxed, low-keyed. He sounds like no one so much as Jack Nicholson. He often examines witnesses while sitting down, once with his foot stuck into his open brief case.

He and Kay have had some angry exchanges and serious disputes. Still they often kid in court. Kay looks amused at Keith’s humor, and out in the hallway, Kay is “Stevie” to Keith.

Kay is a younger man, bandbox neat in well-cut, well-fitting three-piece suits. His facial expression seldom changes. He always looks wide awake and in a good mood. His smile is just a little more of the same. He has a nasal voice which becomes wearing after a while, and a methodical way of questioning. He wears away at a witness with phrases like “by the way … isn’t it true” again and again.

Kay is often sarcastic, and it does not seem natural to him. He describes Leslie Van Houten as coming to the courtroom “all dolled up,” and tells the jury that if her testimony that she had “kind of weighed out” for a day or two whether or not she could kill for the family didn’t satisfy the legal definition of “weighing and considering,” then “the moon is made of blue cheese.”

If the jury believes her version of why she wiped off the fingerprints, he says, “I’ll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge after the trial.”

His most dramatic moment is during the closing statements when he passes photographs of all seven Tate-LaBianca victims around to the jury, first giving them a “live” photo and then one as each victim was found dead.

The courtroom has never been so silent, and he breaks it to repeat a statement Miss Van Houten made when examined in 1969: “So I was feeling kind of bad I didn’t get to go (to the Tate house) and I was sure hoping if we did it again, I’d get to go.”

He acknowledges the presence of Jane Van Houten, Leslie’s mother, in the courtroom, saying, “Miss Van Houten has a nice mother. I don’t doubt that. She appears to be a nice lady — sitting dutifully there. Susan and Frankie (Rosemary LaBianca’s children) don’t have a nice mother. They have a dead mother because of Miss Van Houten.”

The debate about human behavior is all around us, and the more impact psychology has on society, the more confusing it gets. How do we reconcile the concepts of free will and outside influence as they inform the acts of one human being? How do we even identify them? What do we do with individual responsibility, culpability, guilt? Ultimately, it leads to the courtroom question, “Can anybody in his or her right mind commit first-degree murder?”

Kay tells the jury, in exasperation, “If psychiatrists made decisions in criminal cases, I’d be out of a job. Psychiatrists would all say nobody would commit a crime unless mentally ill” …. “We may as well close down the prisons and turn them into hotels. That’s why it’s your decision and not the psychiatrists’.”

To Kay, the Manson family members were not normal, all-American people, he says, but they were legally in touch with reality regardless of their belief in Helter Skelter. There are lots of groups with far out beliefs, he warns, and “once we start letting these people decide they can put their standards above society’s standards … ”

Keith had described Leslie Van Houten, in her mental state, as a good soldier carrying out her orders. In driving home his refutation of that Kay almost shouts out his rhetorical question, “Was Sirhan Sirhan doing his duty as a good Arab killing Bobby Kennedy … ” That is as far as he got before Keith approached the bench, saying it was getting very inflammatory.

The jury is faced with an enormous double burden. The court has ordered them to judge the case on the merits of evidence presented in the course of the trial and on that alone. Leslie Van Houten is to be judged as an individual.

Kay said to the jury, “To call them the LaBianca manslaughters would be a travesty of justice. It would be a message. ‘You can get away with murder.'”

The jury cannot help but be plagued with the forbidden thought Kay prodded them with: “When you go into that jury room, you’re not going to be alone. Society will be watching that jury room, you’re not going to be alone. Society will be watching you.”

Keith was furious when he heard that. The judge had to contradict Kay and instruct the jury again of its obligation to judge it based solely on the evidence presented in court, “regardless of what society as a whole thinks of this case.”

It is possible to do that, but it is a tall order. It is, one observer said, like being told, “Don’t think about a pink elephant.”

By KATHLEEN HENDRIX