After 46 years in jail, 66-year-old Leslie Van Houten, a former Charles Manson follower who helped kill a wealthy grocer and his wife, has been recommended for parole. Mark Kelly reports. Image: AP

California Governor Gavin Newsom has overruled a parole board’s decision to free Charles Manson follower Leslie Van Houten.

Van Houten, 69, is still a threat, Newsom said, though she has spent nearly half a century behind bars and received reports of good behaviour and testimonials about her rehabilitation.

“While I commend Ms. Van Houten for her efforts at rehabilitation and acknowledge her youth at the time of the crimes, I am concerned about her role in these killings and her potential for future violence,” he wrote in his decision.

Mr Newsom’s decision was the third time a governor has stopped the release of the youngest member of Manson’s murderous cult.

It was the first time Mr Newsom rejected Van Houten’s parole. Former governor Jerry Brown denied her release twice.

Van Houten was 19 when she and other cult members stabbed to death wealthy Los Angeles grocer Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in August 1969. The slayings came the day after other Manson followers, not including Van Houten, killed pregnant actor Sharon Tate and four others in violence that spread fear throughout Los Angeles and riveted the nation.

No one who took part in the Tate-LaBianca murders has been released from prison. Earlier this year, Mr Newsom reversed a parole recommendation to free Manson follower Robert Beausoleil for an unrelated murder. Beausoleil was convicted of killing musician Gary Hinman.

At parole hearings, Van Houten described a troubled childhood that led her to use drugs and hang around with outcasts at school.

Despite her youth at the time of the crime, abuse by Manson and more than four decades of good behaviour, Van Houten’s parole was rejected in 2017 because Mr Brown said she still blamed the cult leader too much for the murders.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge upheld Mr Brown’s decision last year, finding Van Houten posed “an unreasonable risk of danger to society”. An appeals court will decide whether to uphold or reject that ruling by the end of July.

Manson and his followers were sentenced to death in 1971, though those punishments were commuted to life in prison after the California Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972.

Van Houten’s case was overturned on appeal, and she was later convicted and sentenced to seven years to life in prison.

Manson died in 2017 of natural causes at a California hospital while serving a life sentence.