For the 1969 home killings of Los Feliz grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, Leslie Van Houten was sentenced to 53 years in jail.

The youngest of Charles Manson’s former followers, Leslie Van Houten, was released from prison on Tuesday after serving 53 years.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Van Houten was “released to parole supervision” on July 11.

Van Houten, 73, will, in accordance with the CDCR, “have a three-year maximum parole term with a parole discharge review occurring after one year.”

Along with other members of the Manson “family,” Van Houten was found guilty of the gruesome 1969 murders of Los Angeles grocery store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.

Before being released, Van Houten was incarcerated at the California Institution for Women in Corona.

Rich Pfeiffer, an attorney for Van Houten, said, “I feel relieved.

Tuesday morning saw the release of Van Houten, who was then sent to a secure transitional institution.

According to Pfeiffer, she won’t likely remain at the facility for a while because “she is so ready” to go on her own, he tells PEOPLE. Her work in prison gave her some computer abilities. She is a master’s degree holder. She’s really intelligent. She has a lot of family and friend support. She’ll manage perfectly fine.

He claims that she has a variety of housing possibilities. “She’s been given somewhere to stay at people’s houses. She has received job offers.

She is excellent at assisting individuals in self-rehabilitation, he claims. She worked as a prison tutor and assisted other inmates in obtaining their college degrees.

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, declared last week that he would not appeal a California appellate court’s decision to give her parole. In the past, Newsom has opposed her being given release.

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“Governor Newsom reversed Ms. Van Houten’s parole grant three times since taking office and defended against her challenges of those decisions in court,” said Erin Mellon, a spokesman for the governor’s office, in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. The Court of Appeal’s decision to release Ms. Van Houten disappointed the Governor, but he or she decided against taking any more action because a successful appeal was unlikely.

Seven people were killed by Manson and his followers over the course of a two-day rampage in August 1969, including the 26-year-old actress Sharon Tate.

Manson’s plan to incite a race war, which he called “Helter Skelter” in reference to the Beatles song, included the murders. They were particularly gruesome: Roman Polanski’s wife Tate, who was pregnant, was discovered inside her exclusive Los Angeles residence in the canyons above Hollywood and Beverly Hills with a “X” carved into her stomach and 16 knife wounds.

Abigail Folger, a coffee heiress, Voytek Frykowski, a writer, and Steven Parent, an 18-year-old delivery boy, were all killed as well. The following day, their bodies were found.

Owner of the grocery business LaBianca and his wife Rosemary were discovered dead in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, less than 48 hours later. An ivory-handled carving fork protruded from the word “war” that was etched into his stomach. Pigs’ blood was used to write “Death to Pigs” on the wall of the living room.

An era in Los Angeles history came to be defined by the brutal Tate-LaBianca murders. After being found guilty in 1971, Manson and his adherents were handed life sentences instead of the death penalty, which California temporarily outlawed. In the killings of the LaBiancas, 19-year-old Van Houten was found guilty of two charges of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder.

The former homecoming queen revealed during a previous parole hearing that her parents’ divorce when she was 14 led her to start hanging out with a gang of misfits and experimenting with marijuana and LSD.

When she was 17, she fled with a boyfriend, wound up in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the’summer of love,’ and became pregnant, according to the AP.

According to her counsel, the fetus was placed in a coffee can and buried in her backyard after she was compelled to have an abortion.

Van Houten claimed that she later encountered Manson at Spahn Ranch, a hippy community west of Los Angeles, through a friend.

On August 9, 1969, the LaBiancas were brutally murdered, as Van Houten acknowledged. She claimed to have assisted in Rosemary’s detention that fateful evening as Charles “Tex” Watson stabbed her. Watson then commanded her to “do something,” handed her a knife, and she stabbed Rosemary roughly 14 times in the back.

At her 22nd parole hearing in 2020, she was given the green light, but Newsom overturned the decision.

According to the CDCR, Van Houten appealed the ruling, and the California Second District Court of Appeal reversed it on May 30, 2023.

Since 2016, Van Houten has requested parole five times, but the governor’s office has denied him each time.

According to Pfeiffer, “She just wants to go to work and live a normal life like everyone else.”