Copyright

Copyright © 2019 by Tom O’Neill

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ISBN 978-0-316-47757-4
LCCN 2018966025

E3-20190516-JV-NF-ORI
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication

Prologue
1. The Crime of the Century
2. An Aura of Danger
3. The Golden Penetrators
4. The Holes in Helter Skelter
5. Amnesia at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office
6. Who Was Reeve Whitson?
7. Neutralizing the Left
8. The Lawyer Swap
9. Manson’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card
10. The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic
11. Mind Control
12. Where Does It All Go?
Epilogue

Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Authors
Notes
For my parents
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

Tap here to learn more.

 PROLOGUE

Vincent Bugliosi was on another tirade.

“Nothing could be worse than accusing a prosecutor of doing what you’re
implying that I did in this case,” he barked at me. “It’s extremely, extremely
defamatory.”
It was a sunny day in February 2006, and we were in the kitchen of his
Pasadena home. The place was cozy, with floral patterns, overstuffed
furniture, and—literally—a white picket fence out front, all belying the
hostility erupting within its walls. Bugliosi wanted to sue me. It would be, he
soon warned, “a hundred-million-dollar libel lawsuit,” and “one of the
biggest lawsuits ever in the true-crime genre.” If I refused to soft-pedal my
reporting on him, I’d be powerless to stop it.
“I think we should view ourselves as adversaries,” he’d tell me later.
Vince—I was on a first-name basis with him, as I guess adversaries must
be—was a master orator, and this was one of his trademark perorations. Our
interview that day dragged on for more than six hours, and he did most of the
talking, holding forth as expertly as he had when he prosecuted the Charles
Manson trial more than thirty-five years before. Seventy-one and in
shirtsleeves, Vince still cut an imposing figure, hectoring me over a Formica
table strewn with legal pads, notes, tape recorders, pens, and a stack of books
—all written by him. Wiry and spry, his eyes a steely blue, he would sit down
only to leap up again and point his finger in my face.
Riffling through the pages of one of his yellow legal pads, he read from
some remarks he’d prepared. “I’m a decent guy, Tom, and I’m going to
educate you a little about just how decent Vince Bugliosi is.”
And so he did—reciting a prewritten “opening statement” that lasted for
forty-five minutes. He insisted on beginning this way. He’d dragooned his
wife, Gail, into serving as a witness for the proceedings, just in case I’d try to
misrepresent him. Essentially, he’d turned his kitchen into a courtroom. And
in a courtroom, he was in his element.
Bugliosi had made his name with the Manson trial, captivating the nation
with stories of murderous hippies, brainwashing, race wars, and acid trips
gone awry. Vince was sure to remind me, early and often, that he’d written
three bestselling books, including Helter Skelter, his account of the Manson
murders and their aftermath, which became the most popular true-crime book
ever. If he seemed a little keyed up that day, well, so was I. My task was to
press him on some of his conduct in the Manson trial. There are big holes in
Helter Skelter: contradictions, omissions, discrepancies with police reports.
The book amounts to an official narrative that few have ever thought to
question. But I’d found troves of documents—many of them unexamined for
decades, and never before reported on—that entangled Vince and a host of
other major players, like Manson’s parole officer, his friends in Hollywood,
the cops and lawyers and researchers and medical professionals surrounding
him. Among many other things, I had evidence in Vince’s own handwriting
that one of his lead witnesses had lied under oath.
I sometimes wonder if Vince could see what a bundle of nerves I was that
day. I’m not a churchgoing person, but I’d gone to church that morning and
said a little prayer. My mom always told me I should pray when I need help,
and that day I needed all the help I could get. I hoped that my interview with
Vince would mark a turning point in my seven years of intensive reporting on
the Manson murders. I’d interviewed more than a thousand people by then.
My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I
was becoming one of “those people”: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist, a
lunatic. I’d let friendships fall away. My family had worried about my sanity.
Manson himself had harangued me from prison. I’d faced multiple threats on
my life. I don’t consider myself credulous, but I’d discovered things I thought
impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixties—things
that reek of duplicity and cover-up, implicating police departments up and
down the state. Plus, the courts. Plus—though I have to take a deep breath
before I let myself say it—the CIA.
If I could get Bugliosi to admit any wrongdoing, or even to let a stray
detail slip, I could finally start to unravel dozens of the other strands of my
reporting. Maybe soon I could get my life back, whatever that might look
like. At the very least, I could know that I’d done all I could to get to the
bottom of this seemingly endless hole.
Sitting in his kitchen, though, and watching the hours wear on as Vince
defended and fortified every point he made, my heart sank. He was
stonewalling me. I could hardly get a word in edgewise.
“It’s a tribute to your research,” he told me. “You found something that I
did not find.” In the closest thing I got to a concession, he said, “Some things
may have gotten past me.” But, he added, “I would never in a trillion years
do what you’re suggesting. Okay? Never. My whole history would be
opposed to that. And number two, Tom, even if I had the thought that you’re
suggesting”—of suborning perjury—“it goes nowhere. It’s preposterous. It’s,
it’s silly… Who cares? It means nothing!”
Who cares? I’ve asked myself that a lot over the years. Was it worth
investing so much of my time and energy in these, some of the most well-
known, worn-out crimes in American history? How did I end up falling into
this, anyway? I remember glancing over at Gail, Vince’s wife, during his
long, stentorian “opening statement.” She was leaning against the counter
looking exhausted, her eyelids drooping. Eventually, she excused herself to
go upstairs and lie down. She must’ve heard it all a thousand times before,
his scripted lines, his self-aggrandizement. When I’m down on myself, I
imagine everyone feels like Gail did that day. Oh, no, not the Manson
murders, again. We’ve been through this. We’ve processed this. We know
everything there is to know. Don’t drag us back into this story.
I was almost heartened, then, to see that Vince was so anxious. That’s
what kept me going, knowing that I’d gotten under his skin. Why would he
be so committed to stopping this? And if what I’d discovered was really
“nothing,” why had so many of his former colleagues told me otherwise?
Another one of my sources had tipped off Vince about my reporting,
giving him the ludicrous idea that I believed he’d framed Manson. That was
dead wrong. I’ve never been a Manson apologist. I think he was every bit as
evil as the media made him out to be. But it is true that Stephen Kay—
Vince’s coprosecutor on the case, and no friend of his—had been shocked by
the notes I’d found in Vince’s handwriting, telling me they could be enough
to overturn all the verdicts against Manson and the Family. That was never
my goal, though. I just wanted to find out what really happened. “I don’t
know what to believe now,” Kay told me. “If he [Vince] changed this, what
else did he change?”
I wanted to know the same thing, but Vince always found a way to change
the subject. “Where does it go?” he kept asking. “What’s the point?” The
point, as I saw it, was that an act of perjury called the whole motive for the
murders into question. Vince was too busy patronizing me about my motives
to take that into consideration. How could I dare insinuate that he’d done
something wrong? How could I live with myself if I tarnished his sterling
reputation? He liked to bring up “the Man in the Mirror,” as if he, and not
Michael Jackson, had popularized the phrase. “You cannot get away,” Vince
said, “you cannot get away from him!” I tried to steer the conversation back
to Manson, but Vince was having none of it. He wanted to recite some
“testimonials” about his good character, to “read them into the record.”
Both of us had showed up that day with two tape recorders—I was as
scrupulous as he was, and neither of us wanted to risk having an incomplete
account of the conversation. Over and over, whenever the intensity mounted
and Vince had something sensitive to say, he would demand that we go off
the record, meaning each of us had to shut off two machines, sometimes just
for a few seconds, only to turn them all back on again. Often he’d forget one
of his, and I’d have to say, “Vince, you didn’t turn it off.”
Off the record, he’d lash into me again, his eyes piercing under that silver
crescent of hair. “If you do the book and it’s legally defamatory, you have to
realize one thing,” he said. “You have to realize I have no choice. I have to
sue you.”
By the time I left his house, I had a headache from all his shouting, and
the sun had set behind the San Gabriel Mountains. Gail had never bothered to
come downstairs again. Outside, before I got to my car, Vince grabbed my
arm and reminded me that a blurb from him could boost the sales of my book
—and he’d be happy to offer one, provided the manuscript passed muster
with him. “That’s not a quid-pro-quo offer,” he added. But it seemed like one
to me.
Driving away, I felt despondent. I’d just gone toe-to-toe with one of the
most famous prosecutors and true-crime authors in the world. Of course I
hadn’t broken him. I knew I wasn’t alone, either. Other reporters had warned
me that Vince could be ferocious. One of them, Mary Neiswender of the
Long Beach Press Telegram and Independent, told me that Vince had
threatened her back in the eighties, when she was preparing an exposé on
him. He knew where her kids went to school, “and it would be very easy to
plant narcotics in their lockers.” Actually, I didn’t even need other sources—
Vince himself had told me mere minutes before that he had no compunction
about hurting people to “exact justice or get revenge.”
As it turned out, my reprieve was short-lived. I arrived at my home in
Venice Beach to find that he’d already left me a message, wanting to talk
about “a couple of follow-up things.” I called him back and we talked for
another few hours. The next day, we had another phone call—then another,
then another. When he saw that I wouldn’t back down, Vince only grew more
exasperated.
“If you vaguely imply to your readers that I somehow concealed evidence
from the Manson jury,” he told me on the phone, “whether you believe it or
not, the only thing you’re going to be accomplishing is jeopardizing your
financial future and that of your publisher.” Demanding an apology, he
assured me that I was treading “in dangerous waters”: “It’s possible the next
time we see each other I’ll be cross-examining you on the witness stand.”
Fortunately, that never happened. The next time I saw Vince, it was June
2011, and he was striding past me in an auditorium at the Santa Monica
Library, where he was giving a talk. He’d noticed me—his adversary—in the
crowd and paused as he made his way forward.
“Are you Tom O’Neill?”
“Yes. Hi, Vince.”
“Why are you so happy?”
I must’ve been smiling out of nervousness. “I’m happy to see you,” I said.
Studying me a bit, he asked, “Did you do something to your hair?”
“No.”
“It looks different.” He kept walking. And that was it. We never spoke
again. Vince died in 2015. Sometimes I wish he were alive to read what
follows, even if he’d try to sue me over it. I feel foolish for having expected
to get firm answers from him. I replay the scenario in my head, figuring out
where I could’ve caught him in a lie, where I should’ve pressed him harder,
how I might’ve parried his counterattacks. I really thought that, with enough
tenacity, I could get to the truth under all this. Now, most of the people who
had the full story, including Manson himself, have died, and the questions I
had then have continued to consume me for almost twenty years. But I’m
certain of one thing: much of what we accept as fact is fiction.
 1

The Crime of the Century

Two Decades Overdue

My life took a sharp left-hand turn on March 21, 1999, the day after my
fortieth birthday—the day all this started. I was in bed with a hangover, as I’d
been after countless birthdays before, and I felt an acute burst of self-
loathing. I was a freelance journalist who hadn’t worked in four months. I’d
fallen into journalism almost by accident. For years I’d driven a horse and
carriage on the night shift at Central Park, and over time, my unsolicited
submissions to magazines like New York had led to bigger and better
assignments. While I was happy, now, to be living in Venice Beach and
making a living as a writer, I missed New York, and mine was still a
precarious existence. My friends had obligations: they’d started families, they
worked long hours in busy offices, they led full lives. Even though my youth
was behind me, I was so untethered that I could sleep into the afternoon—
actually, I couldn’t afford to do much else at that point. I felt like a mess.
When the phone rang, I had to make a real effort just to pick it up.
It was Leslie Van Buskirk, my former editor from Us magazine, now at
Premiere, with an assignment. The thirtieth anniversary of the Manson
murders was coming up, and she wanted a reported piece about the
aftershocks in Hollywood. So many years later, Manson’s name still served
as a kind of shorthand for a very American form of brutal violence, the kind
that erupts seemingly from nowhere and confirms the nation’s darkest fears
about itself. The crimes still held great sway over the public imagination, my
editor said. What was it that made Manson so special? Why had he and the
Family lingered in the cultural conversation when other, even more macabre
murders had faded from memory? Premiere was a film magazine, so my
editor wanted me to talk to Hollywood’s old guard, the generation that had
found itself in disturbing proximity to Manson, and to find out how they felt
with three decades of perspective. It was a loose concept; Leslie trusted me to
find a good direction for it, and to shape it into something unexpected.
I almost said no. I’d never been particularly interested in the Manson
murders. I was ten years old when they happened, growing up in
Philadelphia, and though my brother swears up and down that he remembers
me keeping a scrapbook about the crimes, I can’t recall how they affected me
in the slightest. If anything, I thought I was one of the few people on the
planet who’d never read Helter Skelter. Like an overplayed song or an iconic
movie, Manson held little interest to me precisely because he was ubiquitous.
The murders he’d ordered were often discussed as “the crime of the century,”
and crimes of the century tend to be pretty well picked over.
But I needed the job, and I trusted Leslie’s judgment. We’d worked
together on a number of stories at Us—it was a monthly magazine then, not a
weekly tabloid—and a piece like this, pitch-black, would be a welcome
departure from my routine as an entertainment writer, which called for a lot
of sit-down meetings with movie stars in their cushy Hollywood Hills homes,
where they’d trot out lines about brave career choices and the need for
privacy. That’s not to say the work was without its twists and turns. I’d
gotten in a shouting match with Tom Cruise about Scientology; Gary
Shandling had somehow found a way to abandon me during an interview in
his own home; and I’d pissed off Alec Baldwin, but who hasn’t?
I had some chops, in other words, but not much in the way of
investigative bona fides. For a recent story about an unsolved murder, I’d
chased down some great leads, but because my case was mostly
circumstantial, the magazine sensibly decided to play it safe, and the piece
came out toothless.
This time, I thought, I could do better. In fact, through the fog of my
hangover, I remember thinking: this will be easy. I agreed to file five
thousand words in three months. Afterward, I thought, maybe I could move
back to New York.
Twenty years later, the piece isn’t finished, the magazine no longer exists,
and I’m still in L.A.
“A Picture Puzzle”
Before I interviewed anyone, I read Helter Skelter. I saw what all the fuss
was about: it was a forceful, absorbing book, with disquieting details I’d
never heard before. In their infamy, the murders had always seemed to exist
in a vacuum. And yet, reading Bugliosi’s account, what had seemed flat and
played out was full of intrigue.
I made notes and lists of potential interviews, trying to find an angle that
hadn’t been worked over. Toward the beginning of the book, Bugliosi chides
anyone who believes that solving murders is easy:

In literature a murder scene is often likened to a picture puzzle. If one

is patient and keeps trying, eventually all the pieces will fit into place.
Veteran policemen know otherwise… Even after a solution emerges—
if one does—there will be leftover pieces, evidence that just doesn’t
fit. And some pieces will always be missing.

He was right, and yet I wondered about the “leftover pieces” in this case. In
Bugliosi’s telling, there didn’t seem to be too many. His picture puzzle was
eerily complete.
That sense of certitude contributed to my feeling that the media had
exhausted the murders. The thought of them could exhaust me, too. Bugliosi
describes Manson as “a metaphor for evil,” a stand-in for “the dark and
malignant side of humanity.” When I summoned Manson in my mind, I saw
that evil: the maniacal gleam in his eye, the swastika carved into his forehead.
I saw the story we tell ourselves about the end of the sixties. The souring of
the hippie dream; the death throes of the counterculture; the lurid, Dionysian
undercurrents of Los Angeles, with its confluence of money, sex, and
celebrity.
Because we all know that story, it’s hard to discuss the Manson murders
in a way that captures their grim power. The bare facts, learned and digested
almost by rote, feel evacuated of meaning; the voltage that shot through
America has been reduced to a mild jolt, a series of concise Wikipedia entries
and popular photographs. In the way that historical events do, it all feels
somehow remote, settled.
But it’s critical to let yourself feel that shock, which begins to return as
the details accumulate. This isn’t just history. It’s what Bugliosi called, in his
opening statement at the trial, “a passion for violent death.” Despite the
common conception, the murders are still shrouded in mystery, down to some
of their most basic details. There are at least four versions of what happened,
each with its own account of who stabbed whom with which knives, who said
what, who was standing where. Statements have been exaggerated, recanted,
or modified. Autopsy reports don’t always square with trial testimony; the
killers have not always agreed on who did the killing. Obsessives continue to
litigate the smallest discrepancies in the crime scenes: the handles of
weapons, the locations of blood splatters, the coroner’s official times of
death. Even if you could settle those scores, you’re still left with the big
question—Why did any of this happen at all?

Something to Shock the World

August 8, 1969. The front page of that morning’s Los Angeles Times
described an ordinary day in the city. Central Receiving Hospital had failed
to save the life of a wounded policeman. The legislature had passed a new
budget for schools, and scientists were optimistic that Mars’s south polar cap
could be hospitable to alien life. In London, the Beatles had been
photographed crossing the street outside their studio, a shot that would
become the cover of Abbey Road. Walter Cronkite led the CBS Evening News
with a story about the devaluation of the franc.
The space race was in full swing, and Americans were dreaming,
sometimes with a touch of trepidation, about the science-fictional future. Less
than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-
inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. Conversely, the number one
song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which
imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell
no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It
would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment
than anyone would’ve thought.
Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in
a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand
heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up
mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church
choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often
molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco,
where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family
kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going
downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way
down to the bottom.”
Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to
accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was
Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had
developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that
she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink
heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect
the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.
In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire.
She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married;
the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was
arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid,
and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the
witch.”
And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot
three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his
high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station
and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity
and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got
a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out
to be Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—a chance occurrence that changed
both of their lives forever.
That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe.
None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune
that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch—whose
mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic
backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows—the Family had
assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment
politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement
rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according
to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson,
who had commanded them to take their trip that night.
The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate
lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in
London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in
which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
The drive to Cielo would’ve taken about forty minutes. It was just after
midnight when they arrived. Benedict Canyon was quiet, seemingly worlds
away from the hustle and sprawl of Los Angeles. The house, built in 1942,
had belonged to a French actress, who’d modeled it on the Norman country
estates of her youth. A long, low rambler at the end of a cul-de-sac, invisible
from the street, it sat on three acres of bucolic, isolated land. Nestled against
a hillside on a bluff, it afforded views of Los Angeles glittering to the east
and Bel Air’s fulsome estates unfurling to the west. On a clear day, you could
see straight to the Pacific, ten miles out.
Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here
before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric
gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to
jump over an embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were
carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver. Kasabian
remained on the outskirts, keeping watch. The other three crept up the hill
toward the secluded estate.
At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old
who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio.
He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window
down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and
pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!”
Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left
hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot
Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent
died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the
house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them. It was a rustic home of stone and
wood, its clapboard siding often described, in the many newspaper stories
soon to follow, as tomato red. Beside the long front porch, a winding
flagstone path led past a wishing well with stone doves and squirrels perched
on its lip. There was a pool in the back and a modest guesthouse. The yard
had low hedges, immense pines, and welcoming beds of daisies and
marigolds. A white Dutch door opened into the living room, where a stone
fireplace, beamed ceilings, and a loft with a redwood ladder provided a warm
ambience.
Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a
window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he
went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the
three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-
old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an
American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline
trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland,
he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there
was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a
generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing
over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for
friends, asked, “What time is it?”
Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or
you’re dead.”
Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him.
“Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied,
kicking Frykowski in the head.
In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s
hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house,
looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a
woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to
a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her
boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and
waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed,
talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring,
thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy,
famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as
opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An
intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his
phone number.
On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six
and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her
biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised
she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army
officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was
such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New
York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six
months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas. A film career, she
hoped, would get her noticed for something beyond her good looks. There on
Cielo Drive, at the home she called the “Love House,” Tate was optimistic
about the future. She believed her child would strengthen her marriage to
Polanski, who sometimes demeaned her.
Having reported back to Watson, Susan Atkins retied Frykowski’s hands
with a piece of nylon rope. She went to bring the others into the living room,
returning with Folger at knifepoint, and then with Sebring and Tate. “Come
with me,” she’d told them. “Don’t say a word or you’re dead.”
In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and
whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the
three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in
front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a
long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around
his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s,
throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.
Sebring struggled to his feet and protested—couldn’t this man see that
Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him
twice, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the
fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming
Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson
dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up
again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all
the lights.
 Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”
“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.
Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins,
attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him
constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs
glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying
everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but
Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run
for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the
lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground,
pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again,
with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.
Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her
neck, shot out the front door, too. She was halfway across the front lawn, her
nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up
to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson
joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take
me.”
Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see
Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were
stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh,
bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole,
plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.
Atkins had remained in the house with Tate, who was whimpering, sitting
on the floor—still in only lingerie, and still bound by the neck to the dead
body of her former lover, Sebring. She was the only one still alive. She was
due to give birth to the child, a boy, in two weeks. Watson came back inside
and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her
unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.
“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm
around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel
anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The
pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.
Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood.
It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet
give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood
and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to
“write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.”
Their work was done.

When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn

Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly. “I was
gone,” Atkins later recalled. “It was like I was dead. I could not think about
anything. It was almost as if I passed out, blacked out… My head was blank.
There was nothing in me. It was like I had given it all.”
At 10050 Cielo Drive was a scene of such callous, barbarous devastation
that it shook something loose in the national psyche. August 8, 1969, and
August 9, 1969, suddenly seemed to describe different realities. Media
accounts were quick to infer something more sordid than ordinary homicide,
something occult. One paper called the murders a “blood orgy”; others
reported “ritualistic slayings” and “overtones of a weird religious rite.” The
facts were unavailable or misreported. Maybe drugs were involved, maybe
they weren’t; maybe Sebring had been wearing the black hood of a Satanist,
maybe he hadn’t. The big picture was one of supernatural ruin. An officer at
the scene said the bodies looked like mannequins dipped in red paint.
Another said, “It’s like a battlefield up there.” Pools of blood had soaked into
the carpets. According to Time magazine, stray bullets were lodged in the
ceiling.
In Roman Polanski, whose films were arrantly, even proudly occultist, the
public found someone onto whom it could project its fatalism. A popular
press account said that, mere minutes before he learned of the murders,
Polanski, at a party in London, had been discussing a friend’s death. “Eeny
meeny miney mo,” he said, “who will be the next to go?” With that, the
phone rang, and he was summoned to hear that his wife and friends had been
brutally murdered.

It wasn’t over. The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened,
with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan,
a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-
Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from Orange County who’d
played the sousaphone in junior high.
 And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.
The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more
victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and
its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly
Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived
there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife.
Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he
spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the
couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in
the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and
moving their furniture around lately—and, like the whole city, she was
spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was
apparently able to walk right in the front door, and he tied up the couple by
himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway,
where they were waiting in the car.
Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This
time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another
person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill
everyone. They had only buck knives.
They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-
six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving
fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife
protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many
inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic]
Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator—misspelling the Beatles song “Helter
Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s
blood.

“Almost Dead Inside”

The bloodshed, in its primitive defiance—a pregnant star slaughtered, a man
perforated with kitchen utensils—confirmed a sense of rupture in America.
The decade’s subversive spirit had come on with too much fervor. Some
reckoning was bound to come, or so it seemed in retrospect; the latent
violence couldn’t contain itself forever.
 The nation was immured in these events: in the motive, the manhunt, and
then, in 1970, the sensational nine-and-a-half-month-long trial. But Manson
and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months. With the
suspects unknown and at large, rumors proliferated and the tension reached a
fever pitch. For a while, the police maintained that the two sets of murders
were unrelated; the LaBiancas were victims of a copycat attack. Even
Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood was only a few years old, fell into the
speculative fervor, appearing on The Tonight Show to provide a “fantasy”
explanation of the murders. He blamed them on one person, with the motive a
fit of rage and a heaping portion of paranoia.
As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of
LAPD detectives—one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca—failed to
share information, believing the crimes unconnected. As they lost valuable
time pursuing false leads, doubt and ridicule followed them in the press. For
almost four months, the police would say that they had no real idea who had
committed some of the most appalling murders in the history of the country.
Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring
up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended
abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was
fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt.
It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the
police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first
glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp
of sixties idealism.
At LAPD headquarters, the chief of police, Edward M. Davis, stepped up
to an array of fifteen microphones and announced to a stunned crowd of two
hundred reporters that the case was solved. Warrants were out for Charles
Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian. More people would be
named pending grand jury indictments. Davis added, to everyone’s
astonishment, that the Tate and LaBianca murders were connected. The
suspects may have been responsible for a series of other unsolved homicides,
too.
He didn’t name Manson or Susan Atkins that day because they were
already in custody. In mid-October, Manson, with a welter of his followers,
had been apprehended on auto-theft charges at the Barker Ranch, a hideaway
in forbidding Death Valley; its seclusion surpassed even that of the Spahn
Ranch. Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder—that of
Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson—and was being held at the Sybil
Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged
to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks
broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d
been staring at for nearly four months.
Journalists dug into the story. Images and mug shots of Manson and the
Family were emblazoned on front pages and TV screens around the world.
The cognitive dissonance was intense. These weren’t the faces of hardened
criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower
children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-
haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-
dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.
They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing
monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in
roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor-bright
buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts. They believed that
hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth
naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.
In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on
theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad,
and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and
part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with
itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with
contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals—even the snakes and
spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared—it was fine to kill
people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was
tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex
Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced,
because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.
Where had these beliefs come from? The murderers had been raised and
educated in solid, conventional American communities, but no one wanted to
claim them. The Family, with its starry-eyed communalism, sexual frankness,
and veneration of LSD, offered a screen onto which anyone could project his
insecurities about the era’s politics and pressures. The promise of the hippie
movement had been in its willingness to forgo cherished institutions in favor
of the new and untested. After the Tate murders, it seemed that hippies and
freaks were more than a risible sideshow: they could really undermine the
status quo. Their promiscuity had always earned a lot of finger wagging from
concerned moralists, while others had looked on with thinly veiled envy.
Parents were worried that their kids would drop out, become hippies, and
never get decent jobs. Everywhere, kids were hitchhiking. The consensus
from the straight world was that hippies were mostly harmless—but you
didn’t want to be one. While there had been isolated incidents of violence
attributed to hippies, none of it was as horrific, premeditated, and systematic
as the murders committed by Manson’s Family. And so much about the
crimes was mired in uncertainty, from the motive to the body count. By some
estimates, over that four-month period in 1969, as many as thirty-three people
may have been killed simply because one man ordered it. This was something
altogether different.
On December 12, with the nation still reeling from the indictments, a
piece in Time magazine drew specious parallels between hippies and
violence. In the movement’s “invitation to freedom,” the magazine warned,
“criminals and psychotics” blossomed as easily as innocents and pacifists did.
But how, Time asked, could “children who had dropped out for the sake of
kindness and caring, love and beauty, be enjoined to kill”? Dr. Lewis
Yablonsky, a sociologist who’d written a book called The Hippie Trip,
argued that many hippies were “lonely, alienated people”:

Even when they act as if they love, they can be totally devoid of true
compassion. That is the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly…
Many hippies are socially almost dead inside. Some require massive
emotions to feel anything at all. They need bizarre, intensive acts to
feel alive—sexual acts, acts of violence, nudity, every kind of
Dionysian thrill.

“The Mechanical Boy”

And this Charles Milles Manson, whose face was suddenly everywhere—was
he not the epitome of the Dionysian thrill seeker? A thirty-five-year-old ex-
con, roughly half his life whiled away in federal institutions, had ensnared the
lives and minds of his followers, mainly young women. Numbering variously
between two to three dozen, the majority of the Family members had been
under Manson’s influence for less than two years, some not even close to
that. Yet all of them would do anything Manson asked, without question,
including slaughtering complete strangers. He had cultivated extreme
compliance.
Manson was an unlikely candidate for a charismatic leader. Born in
Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a father he never met, he’d
known little but privation and suffering. Few would be naturally inclined to
look up to him, and in the most literal sense, not many could: he was only
five foot six.
Manson spent his earliest years in neglect. When he was still an infant, his
mother would leave him to go on benders with her brother, during one of
which the pair decided to rob a guy who looked wealthy. Within hours,
they’d been arrested, and Manson’s mother was imprisoned for several years.
He was eight when she was released, and they spent the next months with a
succession of unreliable men in seamy locales, his mom racking up another
arrest for grand larceny. Eventually, she pursued a traveling salesman in
Indianapolis, marrying him in 1943 and trying to cut back on her drinking.
Manson, not yet nine, was already a truant, known to steal from local shops.
His mother looked for a foster home for him. Instead, he was made a ward of
the state and sent to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic-run school for
delinquents in Terre Haute, Indiana. He ran away. His mother took him back.
The separation must have weighed on him, at least to go by his acolyte
Watson, who later wrote that Manson had “a special hatred for women as
mothers… This probably had something to do with his feelings about his own
mother, though he never talked about her… The closest he came to breaking
his silence was in some of his song lyrics: ‘I am a mechanical boy, I am my
mother’s boy.’”
The “mechanical boy” made short work of the Gibault School. Ten
months in, he ran away again, turning to burglary to keep himself afloat. His
crimes soon landed him in a correctional facility in Omaha, Nebraska. He ran
away from there, too, and started breaking into grocery stores. At age
thirteen, Manson was sent to the Indiana Boys School, a tougher institution,
where he claimed the other boys raped him. He learned to feign lunacy to
keep them at bay. And he kept running away: eighteen times in three years.
 In February 1951, when he was sixteen, Manson broke out again, this time
with a pair of other boys. They drove a stolen car across state lines—a federal
offense. When a roadblock in Utah brought their escapade to an end, Manson
was sent to the National Training School for Boys, in Washington, D.C. Thus
began a long stint in the federal reformatory system. From there, Manson
went to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where he was caught raping a boy at
knifepoint; to a federal reformatory in Virginia, where he racked up similar
offenses; and to a reformatory in Ohio, where a run of good behavior earned
him an early release in 1954, though caseworkers had taken frequent note of
his antisocial behavior and psychic trauma.
In less than a year’s time he had a wife, and a baby on the way. He took
on various service jobs, but he couldn’t give up stealing cars, several of
which he drove, again, across state lines. Those crimes, plus his failure to
attend a hearing related to one of them, netted him a three-year sentence to
Terminal Island, a federal prison in San Pedro, California. By the time he got
out, in 1958, his wife had filed for divorce, and he turned to pimping to make
a living. The following May, he was arrested yet again, this time for forging a
government check for $37.50. This got him another ten-year sentence, but the
judge, moved by the plea of a woman who said she was in love with him and
wanted to marry him, suspended the sentence right away, letting him go free.
Manson kept pimping, stealing cars, and scheming people out of their
money. The FBI was surveilling him, hoping to bust him for violating the
Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of prostitutes across state lines.
They were never able to bring the charge, but when Manson disappeared to
Mexico with another prostitute, he was found in violation of his probation,
and the ten-year sentence he’d received earlier was brought into effect. The
same judge who’d granted him probation now decreed: “If there ever was a
man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for probation, he is it.”
Stuck in prison for the long haul, Manson took up the guitar and dabbled
in Scientology. The staff noted his gift for charismatic storytelling and his
enduring “personality problems.” He made no secret of his musical
aspirations. From behind bars, he observed, with great interest and envy, the
meteoric rise of the Beatles.
When he was released at age thirty-two, he’d spent more than half his life
in the care of the state. He preferred life in prison, he said, so much so that he
asked if he could simply remain inside. “He has no plans for release,” one
report said, “as he says he has nowhere to go.”

“Bloodthirsty Robots”
Reading early press accounts of Manson and the Family, I found it hard to
separate hyperbole from veracity. Manson was often made out as an artful
seeker—“an evil Pied Piper,” as one paper put it, with reserves of obscure
power. About a week after the Family’s arrests, a photograph of a wild-eyed
Charles Manson, looking for all the world like a modern-day Rasputin,
appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Inside the issue, the “Manson
women,” many of them barely teenagers, posed with babies slung over their
slender shoulders. They spoke of their love and undying support for
“Charlie,” whom they deemed the second coming of Christ and Satan in one.
The media had already started to label the Family “a nomadic band of
hippies” and a “pseudo-religious cult”; the New York Times, striking a
dramatic note, claimed that they “lived a life of indolence, free sex, midnight
motorcycle races and blind obedience to a mysterious guru inflamed with his
power to control their minds and bodies.”
The underground press, though, had a swell of sympathy for Manson.
People thought he was innocent, that his status as a left-leaning communard
had been overblown. Tuesday’s Child, an L.A. counterculture paper geared
toward occultists, named Manson their “man of the year.” Some didn’t even
care if he was behind the murders. Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather
Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their
own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The
Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”
I watched the first television footage of Manson. Cameras followed as
bailiffs led him to a pretrial hearing, shackled, stooped, and glaring. I saw
few traces of his fabled charisma, but I understood how his unsocialized air
of pseudomysticism and jailhouse aggression seemed authentic. Manson
brought a rollicking exhibition of controlled insanity whenever he appeared
before the bench. He quarreled with the judge, arguing that he should be
allowed to represent himself. The “girls,” for their part, mimicked their
leader’s behavior, publicly battling the judge and their court-appointed
defense attorneys at every opportunity and refusing to obey even the most
fundamental rules of courtroom decorum.
That Manson had been apprehended in Death Valley—as abyssal a place
as any in the United States—made him all the more transfixing. Reporters
played up the Rasputin comparison, emphasizing his desert-wanderer
sorcery. He was a “bearded, demonic Mahdi,” wrote one journalist, who led
“a mystical, semi-religious hippie drug-and-murder cult.” Another described
him as a “bushy-haired, wild-bearded little man with piercing brown eyes,”
with the Family “a hippie-type roving band.” Manson’s malevolence was
seemingly inexplicable. Even in the doodles that he left behind on a
courtroom legal pad, psychiatrists saw “a psyche torn asunder by powerful
thrusts of aggression, guilt, and hostility.”
Beneath this spectacle, I could glimpse the public’s truer, more profound
interest in the case, the same puzzle that would consume me: How and why
had these people devolved into criminals? And, more pointedly, could it
happen to any average American child—could anyone go “too far”?
The trial started in July 1970. The jury was sequestered at the Ambassador
Hotel, where, two years earlier, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. The
Superior Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles became the center of a media
circus unlike any the nation had ever seen. The six defendants—Charles
Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Steve
Grogan, and Linda Kasabian—received the kind of scrutiny known only to
the most famous celebrities in the world. (Tex Watson was tried separately
from the other Family members; he’d fled to Texas and had to be extradited
to California.)
Vincent Bugliosi became the public face of the state, and Manson’s de
facto foil. Though you’d never know it to look at them, the two were the
same age—Manson was actually Bugliosi’s senior by three months. Both
were thirty-five when the trial began. But Bugliosi, with his three-piece suits
and his receding hairline, was the very picture of the straight world, with its
authority and moral gravity; sometimes he looked old enough to be Manson’s
dad.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi claims an aversion to “the stereotyped image of
the prosecutor” as “a right-wing, law-and-order type intent on winning
convictions at any cost.” But that’s exactly how he came across. In file
photographs he’s often haloed in microphones, his solemn pronouncements
helping the world make sense of the senseless. Journalists lauded his “even-
toned arguments.”
With his opening statement, Bugliosi, no less colorful a character than
Manson, made what was already a sensational case even more so. The motive
he presented for the murders was spellbindingly bizarre. In Bugliosi’s telling,
it crossed racism with apocalyptic, biblical rhetoric, all of it set to a melody
by the Beatles—“the English musical recording group,” as he primly referred
to them:

Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they
were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter
Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man
rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire
white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen
followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to
the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived
from Revelation 9.

Nothing like this had ever been heard in a courtroom. People kill one another
for all kinds of reasons, but they’re usually personal, not metaphysical.
Seldom had threads like these—racism, rock music, the end times—been
woven together in a single, lethal philosophy. When Paul Watkins, a former
Family member, took the stand to elaborate on Helter Skelter, the details
were even more jarring. Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted
away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.”
From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun
and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.”
Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would
multiply into 144,000 people.
As insane and illogical as it sounded, Bugliosi explained, Manson’s
followers subscribed to his prophecy of Armageddon as if it’d been delivered
from the Holy Mount. They were willing to kill for him to make it a reality.
But none of this explained why Manson had chosen the Tate and
LaBianca homes as his targets. Manson had known the former tenant at the
Tate house, Terry Melcher, a record producer and the son of Doris Day.
Melcher had flirted with the idea of recording Manson, who had dreams of
rock stardom, but he decided against it. Sometime in the spring before the
murders, Manson had gone looking for Melcher at the house, hoping to
change his mind, but a friend of the new tenants told him that Melcher had
moved out. Manson didn’t like the guy’s brusque attitude. Consequently, the
house on Cielo Drive came to represent the “establishment” that had rejected
him. When he ordered the killings, he wanted to “instill fear in Terry
Melcher,” Susan Atkins had said, sending a clear signal to the stars and
executives who’d snubbed him. As for the LaBianca house: Manson had once
stayed in the place next door. That house was no longer occupied, but it was
no matter. The neighbors, Manson decided, would suffice as targets, because
they, too, no matter who they were, symbolized the establishment he sought
to overthrow with Helter Skelter.
The trial was the longest and most expensive in U.S. history at the time. It
wasn’t as straightforward as it might seem, because Manson himself hadn’t
actually murdered anyone. He hadn’t set foot in the Tate home at all, and
though he’d entered the LaBianca home, he left before his followers killed
the couple. That meant Manson could be convicted of first-degree murder
only through a charge of conspiracy. According to the legal principle of
vicarious liability, any conspirator was also guilty of the crimes committed
by his coconspirators. In other words, if the prosecution could prove that
Manson had ordered the killings, he would be guilty of murder, even having
not laid a finger on any of the victims. Bugliosi had to show that Manson had
a unique ability to control his followers’ thoughts and actions—that they
would do whatever he asked, even kill complete strangers.
It would have been a complicated case even had things proceeded
smoothly. But the Family did all they could to throw sand in the gears. On the
very first day of the trial, Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X
carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next
day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs.
The women skipped down the courtroom hallways, three abreast, holding
hands, singing nursery rhymes that Manson had written. They laughed at the
photographers who jostled to get their pictures. During the trial, if Manson
took umbrage at something, they took umbrage, too, mimicking his profanity,
his expressions, his outbursts.
The judge, Charles Older, would often threaten to remove Manson. On
one occasion, Manson returned the reproach: “I will have you removed if you
don’t stop. I have a little system of my own… Do you think I’m kidding?”
Grabbing a sharp pencil, he sprang over the defense table, flinging himself
toward Older. A bailiff intervened and tackled him, and the girls jumped to
their feet, too, chanting unintelligible verses in Latin. As he was dragged
from the courtroom, Manson remained defiant, shouting, “In the name of
Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” It was a glimpse of the
raw pugilism that ran beneath Manson’s philosopher-guru facade. The judge
began to carry a .38 revolver under his robes.
Things were no more orderly outside the courtroom, where, at the corner
of Temple and Grand, members of the Family gathered each morning to hold
sidewalk vigils. Barefoot and belligerent, they sat in wide circles, singing
songs in praise of their leader. The women suckled newborns. The men
laughed and ran their fingers through their long, unwashed hair. All had
followed Manson’s lead and cut Xs into their foreheads, distributing
typewritten statements explaining that the self-mutilation symbolized their
“X-ing” themselves “out of society.”
Bugliosi called the defendants “bloodthirsty robots”—a grandiloquent
phrase, but an apt one. It captured the unsettling duality of the killers: at once
animal and artificial, divorced from emotion and yet capable of executing the
most intimate, visceral form of murder imaginable. Tex Watson would later
hymn the detached, automated ecstasy of stabbing: “Over and over, again and
again, my arm like a machine, at one with the blade.” Susan Atkins told a
cellmate that plunging the knife into Tate’s pregnant belly was “like a sexual
release. Especially when you see the blood spurting out. It’s better than a
climax.” And behind them was Manson, who lived for sex even as he
described himself as “the mechanical boy.”

“A Stage of Nothing”
After seven grueling months, the first phase of the trial drew to a close, and
the jury, after ten days of deliberation, arrived at unanimous guilty verdicts.
Now, in the second phase, the prosecution had to present an argument for
putting the defendants to death. Their case, and the defense’s
counterarguments, led to some of the most unnerving testimony yet,
including a kind of symposium on LSD—not as a recreational drug, but as an
agent of mind control. This death-penalty phase of the trial entertained some
of the same questions that engrossed and vexed me for the next two decades.
Had Manson really “brainwashed” people? If so, how? And if one person was
truly under the psychological control of another, then who was responsible
for that person’s actions?
For the first time, the three convicted women—Atkins, Krenwinkel, and
Van Houten—took the witness stand. One by one, they explained their roles
in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their
utter lack of remorse. The families of the victims looked on in stunned
silence as the women described their loved ones’ final moments in clinical
detail. To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love—it freed
that person from the confines of their physical being.
Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her
to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I
just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many
times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She
shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion
without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she
added, “because it felt good.”
Patricia Krenwinkel said she’d felt nothing when she stabbed Abigail
Folger twenty-eight times. “What is there to describe? It was just there, and
it’s like it was right.” Why would she kill a woman she didn’t even know?
“Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought and the thought came to be.”
“‘Sorry’ is only a five-letter word,” Leslie Van Houten told the
courtroom. “It can’t bring back anything.” She’d helped stab Rosemary
LaBianca forty-one times. “What can I feel?” Van Houten said. “It has
happened. She is gone.”
As unrepentant as the women were, Bugliosi had his work cut out for him
when it came to securing the death penalty. His reasoning relied on a seeming
contradiction. He’d argued during the first phase of the trial that the women
were “brainwashed zombies,” totally in Manson’s thrall. Now he had to
prove the opposite: that they were as complicit as Manson was. Although
they were “automatons,” Bugliosi said, “slavishly obedient to Manson’s
every command,” the women still had, “deep down inside themselves,” such
“bloodlust” that they deserved the death penalty.
The defense argued that the women were merely pawns. Manson had used
an almost technologically precise combination of drugs, hypnotism, and
coercion to transform these formerly nonviolent people into frenzied,
psychopathic killers. At that point, scientists in the United States had been
studying LSD for only a little more than a decade—it was far from a known
quantity. Manson, the defense said, had used the drug to ply his
impressionable followers, accessing the innermost chambers of their minds
and molding them to his designs.
Former members of the Family have often recounted Manson’s systematic
“brainwashing” methods, beginning with the seduction of new recruits by
“bombarding” them with love, sex, and drugs. On the witness stand, Paul
Watkins outlined the near weekly orgies that Manson orchestrated at the
Spahn Ranch. The leader would hand out drugs, personally deciding
everyone’s dosages. And then, as Bugliosi writes in Helter Skelter,

Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As

he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes…
Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations,
positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a
masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was
using warm bodies.”

If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would

eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted
doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her
being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote.
“Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid
himself of all inhibitions.”
Tex Watson, in his 1978 memoir Will You Die for Me?, tells a similar
story. “There was a room in the back of the ranch house totally lined with
mattresses,” he wrote, essentially set aside for sex. “As we had any
inhibitions we still weren’t dead, we were still playing back what our parents
had programmed into us.”
Having made them feel freed and wanted, Manson would isolate his
followers from the world beyond the ranch, giving them daily tasks to
support the commune and forbidding them from communicating with their
families or friends. His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars.
Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely
free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins
testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”
Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD
sessions—often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks—during
which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose.
Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and
sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from
prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was
all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality
until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the
same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from
Satan.
Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his
philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and
agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance
in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you
have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her
way out the door when Charlie said, ‘Never mind.’” Manson excelled,
Watkins said, at “locating deep-seated hang-ups.” He “took up residence in
people’s heads,” leaving them with “no point of reference, nothing to relate
back to, no right, no wrong—no roots.” They lived in a “new reality”
summoned by LSD, which left them “melt-twisted and free of pretension in
timeless spirals of movement.”
Ironically, as his followers became more and more robotic, Manson taught
them that people in the straight world “were like computers,” the Family’s
Brooks Poston wrote. Their worldviews were simply a matter of society’s
programming, and any program could be expunged. On the stand, Susan
Atkins described Sharon Tate as an “IBM machine—words came out of her
mouth but they didn’t make any sense to me.”
For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much
LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity
and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called
going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective,
sharing “one common brain.”
 Bugliosi had to use a little prosecutorial hocus-pocus to tell stories like
these. He argued that the Manson women had been psychologically
compromised, but he didn’t assert that Manson had actually created his
killers. Despite Manson’s talk about “reprogramming,” there was no template
for one person’s ever having done such a thing to another. Instead, Bugliosi
purported that Manson’s followers must have had some preexisting homicidal
impulse buried in their subconsciouses. Manson had learned to recognize and
exploit that impulse, but even so, each woman was responsible for her
actions. Then as now, this position fascinated and perplexed me: it posited a
form of brainwashing in which the brainwashed were still, to some degree,
“themselves.”
When it came time to decide on the death penalty, though, the defense
called a series of psychiatric experts who disagreed. Manson had
brainwashed his followers, they said, and those followers couldn’t be
culpable for the murders. LSD had given him a portal to the most labile parts
of the subconscious. The scientists explained how acid could break down and
reconstruct someone’s personality—how a sober “guide,” intended to lead
someone peacefully through the many hours of an acid trip, could abuse the
role, inserting violent ideals and beliefs into their minds. With repetition and
reinforcement, these beliefs took root and flourished even when the followers
were sober. Throw in other coercive techniques like sensory deprivation and
hypnosis—both of which Manson embraced—and it was possible to rewrite
someone’s moral code such that she acknowledged no such thing as right or
wrong.
Dr. Joel Fort, a research psychiatrist who’d opened the nation’s first LSD
treatment center, was one of the defense witnesses. He believed that Manson
had used LSD to produce “a new pattern of behavior for the girls,” resulting
in “a totally neutral system which saw death or killing in a completely
different way than a normal person sees it,” free of “social concern,
compassion, [and] moral values.”
In one of the most remarkable exchanges in the trial, Manson’s attorney,
Irving Kanarek, asked Dr. Fort if “a school for crime” could exist, peopled
with social rejects and fueled by LSD: “Let us say with your knowledge of
LSD, you have a school for crime, and then you take them here and you
program them to go out and commit a murder here, there, everywhere… Are
you telling us that this can be done, that you can capture the human mind by
such a school for crime?”
“I am indeed telling you that,” Fort said. And he’d never seen anything
like it. He compared it to a government’s ability, through the nebulous
powers of patriotism, to condition soldiers to kill on its behalf.
What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal
education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to
control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or
merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had.
This remains the most enduring mystery of the case. It’s the one that still
keeps me up at night. And while all this back-and-forth about LSD is
provocative, it feels like an insufficient explanation.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi grapples with this unfathomable riddle: How
did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his
life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—
among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a
homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?
Bugliosi conceded that he still didn’t have the answer. “All these factors
contributed to Manson’s control over others,” he writes,

but when you add them all up, do they equal murder without remorse?
Maybe, but I tend to think there is something more, some missing link
that enabled him to so rape and bastardize the minds of his killers that
they would go against the most ingrained of all commandments, Thou
shalt not kill, and willingly, even eagerly, murder at his command.
It may be something in his charismatic, enigmatic personality,
some intangible quality that no one else has yet been able to isolate
and identify. It may be something that he learned from others.
Whatever it is, I believe Manson has full knowledge of the formula he
used. And it worries me that we do not.

In the end, Manson and his followers got the death penalty anyway. Bugliosi
said that they had, “coursing through their veins,” the willingness to kill
others. For the jury, as for the public, that was a much more comfortable
truth: these people were an aberration. Brainwashing, complete loss of
agency—these were difficult to contemplate, let alone to accept.
 “When you take LSD enough times you reach a stage of nothing,”
Manson had said in court. “You reach a stage of no thought.” No one wanted
to dwell on that. Ingrained evil, teased out of young women by a mastermind
—that was something. And something was better than “a stage of nothing.”
When the jury delivered death sentences to the four defendants—Manson,
Krenwinkel, Atkins, and Van Houten; Kasabian had become a witness for the
prosecution and was granted immunity—the three women sprang to their
feet. Their heads were freshly shaved, as Manson’s was. They’d enlarged the
Xs on their foreheads, as Manson had. And they were livid.
“You have judged yourselves,” Patricia Krenwinkel screamed at the jury.
“Better lock your doors and watch your own kids,” Susan Atkins warned.
“Your whole system is a game,” Leslie Van Houten shouted. “You blind,
stupid people. Your children will turn against you.”
Out on the street, Sandy Good, one of Manson’s fiercest loyalists, looked
into a TV camera and said, “Death? That’s what you’re all going to get.”
With that, the Family was swept off the national stage, and the public
could relegate these grisly crimes to the past. Seven people had been brutally
murdered. But the nation was confident that we knew how and why, and that
the evil people were behind bars.
 2

An Aura of Danger

“Live Freaky, Die Freaky”

When I started interviews for my Premiere piece, in April 1999, much of
what you’ve just read was unknown to me. I’d gotten through Helter Skelter,
and I knew the murders had left a mark on Hollywood, but that was about all.
In a few years I’d develop a deep obsession with the case; I’d have the trial
transcript at my fingertips and binders full of press clippings at my disposal.
But in the beginning, I was flummoxed.
Helter Skelter had captured the story definitively. Its author had ensured
that Manson was locked away. How could a magazine feature top that?
Leslie, my editor, had given me leeway in finding an angle. But her first
suggestion—how did the crimes change Hollywood?—wasn’t enough for me,
and I suspected it wouldn’t be enough for her, either.
My earliest weeks of interviews pulled me in wildly different directions.
At first, I was compelled by the way the murders had sundered friendships in
Hollywood, revealing strong opinions about the era’s morality, or lack
thereof. As I cycled through Hollywood cliques, I found that I was reigniting
thirty-year-old rumors and rivalries. Everyone, over time, assigned the blame
for the crimes a little differently. I was dealing in memories that had survived
decades of erosion. Even my most reliable sources were shaky on the details.
As for the unreliable sources, I kept reminding myself that many of them
were washed-up Hollywood personalities, often in their dotage. Their
memories had warped to accommodate their bruised egos, their ulterior
motives, and, above all, their sense that they were at the center of any story
worth telling.
A lot of the contradictions I heard centered on the house at Cielo Drive,
and the decadent scene there in the months before the murders. That house
still signified a lot in Hollywood. For some, the death of Sharon Tate and her
friends aroused as much fear as it did grief.
After the murders, the media had blamed Hollywood’s “unreality and
hedonism,” as the New York Times’s Stephen Roberts put it, for having
fostered an atmosphere where mass homicide was all but guaranteed.
Roberts, then Los Angeles bureau chief of the Times, talked to a lot of
Hollywood people in those first weeks. Bugliosi quoted him in Helter
Skelter: “All the stories had a common thread: That somehow the victims had
brought the murders on themselves… The attitude was summed up in the
epigram: ‘Live freaky, die freaky.’”
The problem was, thirty years later, no one could agree on who had
brought the “freakiness” into the home, and why. I had to wonder if there was
a conspiracy of silence in Hollywood. It had taken months for the LAPD to
crack the case. In that time, Manson and the Family had almost certainly
killed others. If Hollywood hadn’t circled the wagons, it seemed there was a
good chance the investigation could have ended sooner. So many of the
people I spoke to had strong ideas about why these murders had happened—
and yet none of them had spoken to the police, and many remained unwilling
to go on the record with me.
The one thing everyone seemed to agree on—everyone outside of the
DA’s office, that is—is that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter motive didn’t add up. It
had worn thin with police and Hollywood insiders, and it was wearing thin
with me, too. I tried to unpack this idea that Manson chose the Cielo house to
“instill fear” in Terry Melcher, the record producer whose rejection had
apparently so enraged Manson that he activated a race war.
One problem was that Melcher, by all accounts, had no idea that this was
why the Family attacked his former home. They never told him that they
wanted him to be afraid—they didn’t follow the murders with any kind of
communication to him. According to Bugliosi, Melcher never realized the
crimes had anything to do with him until months later, when the police got in
touch with him. How was this motive supposed to work if Melcher was never
apprised of it?
The grander scheme underlying Helter Skelter—to start a massive race
war by making it look as if Black Panthers were behind the murders—didn’t
land, either. Although Manson was clearly a racist, and while he had a wild,
eschatological philosophy, no one believed even for a second that black
militants were behind these killings, as he’d hoped it would seem.
So was the Family just too dumb, or too drugged, to pull it off? Or was
there another reason for the murders that had nothing to do with race wars
and scaring Melcher? It seemed to me that the Manson murders had garnered
much of their infamy—and Bugliosi much of his fame—from the Helter
Skelter motive. A hippie race war spawned by an acid-drenched,
brainwashing ex-con: it was such a fantastical conceit that the murders lived
on in pop culture. With a more commonplace explanation—a drug burn, say,
or Hollywood infighting—they would’ve faded into history after a few years,
and Bugliosi would never have written the most popular true-crime book of
all time.
With an eye on other possible motives, I focused on three questions in my
first weeks of reporting. First: Did the victims at the Tate house have
something to do with the killers?
Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after
the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities?
Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in
the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the
Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny?
Here, as neatly as I can tell it, is what I learned in the early, frantic weeks
of my reporting. Just as important is what I didn’t learn—which goes a long
way toward explaining how a simple three-month magazine assignment
turned into a twenty-year obsession.

“The Dancing Was Different”

Julian Wasser, a photographer for Life magazine, was my first interview.
Almost right away, I felt the kind of cognitive dissonance that followed me
through my reporting. I’d meet my sources at a fancy restaurant of their
choice—in this case, Le Petit Four, a sunny sidewalk café in West
Hollywood—and, within minutes, as the conversation turned toward
violence, the plush setting would feel totally incongruous. Such was the case
with Wasser, who told me over a tuna niçoise salad about one of the saddest
days of his life.
Days after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had
accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo
Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in
a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home,
his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s
blood on the front door.
“It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved
through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence.
“There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones,
and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so
much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell
it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.
Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him
there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at
least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited
along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a
minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to
Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.
Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and
decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and
just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be
here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was
just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen
anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The
enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom
and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing
what happened there.”
Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week
before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared
on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had
sold his copies, vibrations and all.
Wasser described the “great fear” that descended on Los Angeles after the
murders. “I lived in Beverly Hills. If you went to someone’s house they
wouldn’t let you in. The normal selfishness and paranoia was magnified a
hundredfold. It was another reason for not answering your door.”

I heard a lot of that in my first interviews. Sales of burglar alarms and

security systems had apparently soared after the murders, and people were
quick to ditch their drug stashes. There’s a famous, anonymous line from
Life, from the very article featuring Wasser’s pictures, actually: “Toilets are
flushing all over Beverly Hills; the entire Los Angeles sewer system is
stoned.”
Others took more drastic precautions. At the funerals of his friends Tate
and Sebring, Steve McQueen carried a pistol in his belt, his publicist Warren
Cowan told me. The actor was in the throes of an anxiety that pervaded
Hollywood, where everyone suspected that the killer might be among them.
Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair journalist known for his reporting on the
entertainment industry, told me, “Hollywood did change… The dancing was
different. The drugs were different. The fucking was different.” He and his
wife were so frightened that they sent their kids to stay with their
grandmother in northern California.
Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, said that her father had hired a security
guard. “He was there from sundown to sunrise for months,” she explained.
“Mom fed him to death, I think. He was uniformed with a gun and he sat in
the kitchen all night. I can remember the whole tone of this city afterward…
it defined fear.”
In 1999, apparently, that fear was still alive and well, at least among
Hollywood’s A-list, many of whom declined to speak to me, even though
thirty years had passed. I was rebuffed by the intimates of Tate, Polanski, and
Sebring—sometimes with vehemence, sometimes with tersely worded emails
or phone calls. “No interest.” “Doesn’t want to be involved.” Or just the one
word: “No.” Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda said no. Jack Nicholson and
Dennis Hopper, both reputedly close to Tate and Polanski: no, no. Candice
Bergen, Terry Melcher’s girlfriend at the time of the murders, said no, too—
as did David Geffen, Mia Farrow, and Anjelica Huston, among others.
As the rejections piled up, I had my own bout of paranoia. Had some
memo gone out? My request had asked simply if they’d like to discuss the
aftereffects of the murders on their community; it didn’t feel like I was
prying. And Premiere, since it was dedicated entirely to the movie business,
usually garnered some enthusiasm from this crowd. Bruce Dern: no. Kirk
Douglas: no. Paul Newman: no. Elliott Gould, Ann-Margret, Hugh Hefner:
no, no, no. All told, more than three dozen people turned me down. Some
were household names, but plenty of the decidedly nonfamous found reasons
to decline, too. It was looking like I’d have a story about Hollywood with no
one from Hollywood in it.
Hoping for something more revelatory, I went to less well-known names.
Peter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski,
and what he told me gave me some semblance of a lead.
“I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to
Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there
was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were
getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody
who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”
This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that
Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had
brought about their own murders. I thought there might be something here.
After all, the murders had been solved and the victims had done seemingly
nothing to instigate them—but Bart, and others I’d soon speak to, still
claimed that their lifestyles were to blame.
I had to get closer to those who’d known Sharon and Roman, anyone
who’d attended these supposedly lurid parties. But the rejections kept
coming. I’d been in touch with Diane Ladd’s manager, having heard that
Ladd, who’d been married to Bruce Dern at the time of the murders, ran in
some of the same circles as Tate and Polanski. Her manager promised to set
up an interview. The next day she called back, saying that Ladd had had an
“emotional, visceral reaction.” The manager said, “I don’t know what
happened with Diane back in the sixties, but she adamantly refused to have
anything to do with the piece. She even told me that if her name was in it, she
was going to contact her attorney.”
Peter Fonda gave me yet another no. Not long afterward, I came across
him at a gas station in the middle of the Mojave Desert, of all places, some
five hours outside L.A. True to form, he was in leathers and on a Harley. I
approached him with my business card and tried to explain the story as
succinctly as possible. He seemed receptive. But later, when I followed up
again, the answer was still: no.
 I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed
with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson
might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit.
“Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

Bugliosi’s First Slip

There was one major player who agreed to talk to me: Vincent Bugliosi. Not
only did he sign on for an interview, he invited me to his new home in
Pasadena, the same one where, years later, he would threaten to “hurt [me]
like [I’d] never been hurt before” if I published my findings.
There was no sign of that animosity during our first meeting. On a sunny
spring day, Bugliosi gave me six hours of his time, driving me around to
show me various landmarks related to the crime and enjoying a long lunch
with me in one of his favorite restaurants. I was flattered to have captured his
attention—here was the man who’d put away one of the monsters of the
twentieth century. Later I would question the motive behind all his
generosity.
A prosecutor makes a lot of enemies over the course of his career, and
Bugliosi, I’d learn, made more than most, both in and out of the DA’s office.
But considering that he’d once fielded death threats from Manson himself, he
lived in a surprisingly unprotected home, quintessentially suburban. He and
Gail, his wife of forty-three years, were still moving in when I visited that
April of 1999; Bugliosi, white haired, lean, and blue eyed, greeted me with a
firm handshake and a litany of apologies for the unpacked boxes. In the
living room, flowers of all kinds, dried, artificial, and real, burst from pots
and vases.
Their kitchen, adorned with Gail’s chicken and rooster tchotchkes,
could’ve been right out of a fifties sitcom. Bugliosi picked up a hairless cat
that brushed against his leg—a rare Siamese breed, he told me. The cat’s
name was Sherlock, “because he snoops everywhere.” Gail put out a plate of
cookies and a pair of iced teas for us.
Bugliosi was a fast talker. He sent a tsunami of words in my direction,
sometimes jumping out of his chair for no apparent reason. Gail, an island of
repose by comparison, busied herself at the kitchen counter. I caught her
rolling her eyes as her husband told me that the movie version of Helter
Skelter, from 1976, “was number one that year” and “had the biggest ratings
in TV history, prior to Roots.” He’d essentially been on a thirty-year victory
lap, and he had his talking points down cold. It was hard to get him off script.
As he drove me around that day, he was still reliving his encounters with
Manson in the courtroom. Sometimes it seemed he was quoting almost
verbatim from Helter Skelter. On the surface, he seemed chatty and
forthcoming, but everything he said—for hours—was canned.
Still hoping for a good angle, I tried to probe, however gently, at the holes
I’d noticed in Helter Skelter. For one, how had the cops missed so many
clues in the case—why hadn’t they solved it much sooner? As he did in his
book, Bugliosi blamed sloppy police work. They never would’ve cracked the
case without him, he told me.
I wanted his take on the Cielo house’s caretaker, William Garretson,
who’d been the only one on the property to survive that night. Garretson
lived in the modest guesthouse separated from the main home. His story was
so unlikely that, at first, he’d been the LAPD’s number one suspect. He
swore that his stereo had been playing loud enough to drown out the murders.
He’d heard no part of the brutal slaughter, even though the screaming and the
gunshots had occurred only sixty feet from his bedroom window. And
Bugliosi concurred, albeit reluctantly. The police, he reminded me, had
conducted sound tests that supported Garretson.
I moved on to Terry Melcher. If Manson had wanted to teach him a
lesson, why did he order the killings of people who had no real connection to
him, other than that they’d lived at the same address at different times?
Melcher didn’t know any of the victims at the Tate house. I couldn’t even
find evidence that he’d met any of them. Plus, by Bugliosi’s own account,
Manson sent his followers to the Cielo house knowing full well that Melcher
didn’t live there anymore.
Bugliosi dodged those questions, instead reiterating the terror that
Melcher felt during the trial and for years afterward—fearing that Manson or
someone from the Family still wanted him dead. Could he put me in touch
with Melcher? The mere fact that I’d asked seemed to unnerve him a bit. He
said I’d have a hard time getting him to talk. Later, when I did manage to
track down Melcher, I’d find out why.
As the sun was setting after many hours of talk, I asked Bugliosi if he
could share anything with me about the case that had never been reported
before—the journalist’s Hail Mary. I could see by the furrow of his brow that
he was really thinking about it. I pulled a book from my bag: Barney
Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’s music industry. I’d been
reading it for research—what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little
more free time on my hands than I’d expected—and I wanted Bugliosi to
look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies
had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied
up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed
Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi
had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.
Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After
what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can
never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable
source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-
record response.)
When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered
some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to
detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate
being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he
told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered
enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and
hurt him. They’re both victims.”
It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most
of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered
a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly
returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit
with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,”
Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into
his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”
The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was
so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And
soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping
with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,”
Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was
telling the truth—and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged—the tape
seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect,
and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.
I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new
information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that
the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more
than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the
tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until
November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the
house.
In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to
authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives
back in August—if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return
to the house—then something in the police investigation had necessitated his
involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was
something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to
protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know,
because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t
caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally
found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.

Ugliness and Purity

Helter Skelter opens with a famous sentence: “It was so quiet, one of the
killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in
cocktail shakers in the homes down the canyon.” The first half of the book,
concerning the police investigation, traffics in the dread of that sentence.
Given Bugliosi’s revelation to me, it was the first place I started looking for a
break. If he had changed one detail about the case, could he have changed
others? That question would recur throughout my entire investigation.
The LAPD had assigned two separate teams of detectives to the cases, one
for the Tate murders and one for the LaBiancas. Despite the similarities in the
crimes, the LAPD had concluded, as mentioned earlier, that the LaBiancas
were the victims of a copycat crime. After all, there was seemingly little
common ground between the luxe Beverly Hills set at Cielo and the suburban
couple in Los Feliz.
 The police fanned out in what would become the largest murder
investigation in Los Angeles history. The LaBianca team operated in relative
anonymity; the press couldn’t muster much interest in their case, at least not
when Sharon Tate’s killer was on the lam. On the other side of town, by
contrast, the Cielo crime scene was like a carnival. The LAPD had assigned
twenty-one men to the case. Helicopters hovered over the hilltop property.
Guards stood watch around the clock at the entry gate.
Detectives moved to lock down their initial suspect right away. William
Garretson, the lone survivor of the night’s massacre, was dragged out of the
guesthouse sleepy-eyed, shirtless, and barefoot, shoved into a patrol car, and
driven straight to headquarters, where he was read his rights and charged with
five murders. Garretson, only nineteen, couldn’t explain why he hadn’t heard
anything that night, except to say it might have been because he had the
stereo on. For three days, he was on front pages around the world as he
languished behind bars. Finally, police concluded he was just a slow kid in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
In those same first twenty-four hours, the Tate detectives got a tip. A
friend of the victims had been telling people that he knew who the murderers
were; convinced that his knowledge would get him killed, the friend had gone
into hiding. He was Witold Kaczanowski, an artist and Polish émigré who’d
known the Tate crowd through his countryman Voytek Frykowski. Police
tracked him down through Roman Polanski’s manager. Lured by the promise
of twenty-four-hour police protection, Kaczanowksi finally consented to be
interviewed.
He believed that Frykowski had been involved in the drug trade with a
host of career criminals and other unsavory characters. One of these was a
man named Harris “Pic” Dawson, who had, at a recent party, threatened to
kill Frykowski. Remember how Susan Atkins wrote the word “Pig” on the
front door of Cielo Drive, in Sharon Tate’s blood? Kaczanowski thought that
word was “Pic,” as in Pic Dawson.
The police found him credible, especially because they’d learned about
another altercation at the Cielo house that past spring, when Tate and
Polanski had thrown a going-away party. (Although the couple had moved in
only on February 15, by the end of March they had to leave for separate film
jobs in Europe, where they’d remain for most of the summer.) At their
farewell party, attended by more than a hundred guests, three gate-crashers
had behaved so aggressively that Polanski had them kicked out. They were
Billy Doyle, Tom Harrigan, and Pic Dawson.
Hoping to ask Polanski about these three, police anxiously awaited his
return from London, scheduled for the evening of August 10, the day after the
bodies had been discovered. Polanski flew back to L.A. under heavy
sedation, with his longtime producer Gene Gutowski and two friends, Warren
Beatty and Victor Lownes. At the airport, he was spirited through a side exit
to a waiting car while Gutowski read a statement to the throngs of press.
The chairman of Paramount Pictures had arranged a suite for Polanski on
the studio lot—a place where he could avoid the prying eyes of the press, and
the killers, too, if they were out to get him. But before he arrived at
Paramount, Polanski had his car stop at a Denny’s parking lot for a hushed
conversation with Kaczanowski. Bugliosi never reported this in Helter
Skelter. The media never knew about it. To me, it was something to explore.
After they chatted at Denny’s, Kaczanowski got in the car and headed to
Paramount with the director; they talked all the way to the lot. When the
LAPD arrived at the studio that evening, they were barred from entering
Polanski’s suite until he’d finished the debriefing. Bugliosi didn’t find that
worth mentioning; he only wrote that “Polanski was taken to an apartment
inside the Paramount lot, where he remained in seclusion under a doctor’s
care. The police talked to him briefly that night, but he was, at that time,
unable to suggest anyone with a motive for the murders.”
Polanski’s friends Lownes and Gutowski confirmed the secret Denny’s
meeting in interviews with me. Both defended it as a simple exchange of
information between two longtime friends. And yet Polanski, in a polygraph
exam with the LAPD, had denied knowing Kaczanowski at all.
Sensing there was more to the story, I sought out Kaczanowski, who, like
so many others connected to the victims, had never spoken to reporters about
the murders. Over the phone, somewhat to my surprise, he promptly agreed
to discuss the case with me. Yes, he said, the Denny’s meeting had happened,
but, despite its seeming urgency, there was nothing so furtive about it. He’d
only answered some of Polanski’s questions about Frykowski’s possible drug
dealing. Kaczanowski emphasized that his suspicion—that Pic Dawson had
targeted Frykowski—sent the police on a months-long chase that amounted
to nothing.
And yet it was easy to see how Frykowski may have gotten in over his
head in those months before the murders. It was a turbulent time at the Cielo
house, I learned—much more fraught than Bugliosi had reported. When Tate
and Polanski left, they gave Frykowski and Abigail Folger the run of the
place, and things got weird. The couple threw parties all the time. The door
was open to anyone and everyone. The crowds grew rowdier, the drugs
harder—not just pot and hash, but an abundance of cocaine, mescaline, LSD,
and MDA, which was then a new and fairly unheard-of synthetic. Frykowski
was especially enamored of it.
Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan, the same trio who’d been booted from the
party in mid-March, were now regular guests at the house, sometimes staying
for days at a time. They also supplied most of the drugs. By July, the three
men, all international smugglers, had cornered the market on MDA, which
was manufactured in Doyle and Harrigan’s hometown, Toronto. Frykowski
wanted in. Although he didn’t have much cash—Folger, his heiress
girlfriend, kept him on a tight leash financially—he negotiated a deal with his
new friends, making himself a middleman between them and Hollywood.
Soon after we spoke on the phone, Kaczanowski visited Los Angeles. I
met him in the backyard of his friend’s home in West Hollywood. A
handsome man with a craggy face, thick black hair, and robust blue eyes, he
spoke with a heavy accent and a reserved, contemplative air. Though it was
maybe three in the afternoon, he opened a bottle of red wine and poured us
each a generous glass.
He’d been the last of Frykowski’s friends to see him alive. The two had
gotten together at his gallery just hours before the murders; he’d intended to
visit the Tate house that night, but he was too tired. Frykowski had called him
around midnight, likely just minutes before the killers arrived, to try to talk
him into coming over.
Now he showed me a large manila envelope full of old ephemera,
including Frykowski’s airline ticket to the United States, dated May 16, 1967,
and a reference letter Polanski had written for him on Paramount stationery.
These artifacts seemed to transport Kaczanowski. The sixties, he said, were
often on his mind.
“I can close my eyes and I feel that it’s still 1969. I hear people’s voices, I
see their faces,” Kaczanowski said. He was amazed at how the usual
indicators of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood at the time,
where “the most extreme ugliness with total purity was mixed up.” This
blurriness was the inevitable outcome of the open-door policy they’d all
subscribed to at the end of the decade. “Totally primitive, uneducated people”
could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely
who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and
it was impossible to make a distinction.”
Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people”
coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes
stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the
guests. “They walked so freely through the place.” He would ask Frykowski
who these people were, and the answer always came with degrees of removal
—they were friends of this guy, or friends of friends of so-and-so. That was
why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the
same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.
“I remember Voytek telling me that they threw Pic Dawson out of a
party,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “They told Pic Dawson to take his
backpack and fuck off.” Kaczanowski remembered another party, a few
weeks before the murders, where he’d had to kick out two very drunk guys.
At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me,
and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”
All the months of partying with Frykowski had a cumulative effect. He
met so many threatening characters that, when his friend turned up dead, he
was convinced one or more of them was to blame. He’d wondered if
Frykowski, or even Polanski or Sebring, had ever encountered Manson or his
followers. His concern and uncertainty still felt raw. Here was someone
who’d been so close to the victims that he’d held on to their possessions for
all these years—and he still couldn’t rule out the possibility of a revenge
motive. As I sat across from him, the elaborate puffery of the Helter Skelter
motive, and all the panicked headlines that came with it, seemed to recede
into the afternoon smog.
If Frykowski were alive, I ventured, and Kaczanowski could ask him one
question, what would it be? Looking down into his wine, he said quietly,
“Did you ever meet anybody from the group of people who came to kill
you?”

“He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins”

Having finished what would be her final film, The Thirteen Chairs (also
known as 12 + 1), Sharon Tate came back to the Cielo house in July 1969,
more than seven months pregnant. She wanted to have her baby in the house
she loved. But Polanski, who was supposed to have returned by then,
deferred his homecoming. He needed to continue scouting locations for his
next film. Assuring her that he’d be back in time for the baby’s arrival, he
asked his old friend Frykowski to stick around with Folger and keep Tate
company.
That, at least, is the version Bugliosi provides. Once I’d heard from him
about Polanski’s tape and the seedier side of Cielo, I started pushing harder in
my interviews, and diverging stories developed. Polanski’s intimates said that
Tate was grateful for the company. She didn’t want to be alone in the
secluded estate, especially at the end of her pregnancy. As for Polanski
himself, his friends described him as careful, conservative, even square, and
deeply in love with his wife. If he said he had to stay on in London for work,
then that’s what he was doing.
Others remembered it differently. Tate had been horrified at the scene that
greeted her upon her return to Los Angeles. She was leery of Folger and
especially of Frykowski, whom she suspected of drug dealing—she wanted
the couple, and the crowd attached to them, out of her house. As I won the
confidence of some of her closest friends, they came out with intensely
disturbing stories. Her marriage was in shambles, they said, and many of
them didn’t want her to fix it—they wanted her to leave it.
Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The
Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence.
“The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German
actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t
herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an
awesome charisma.”
That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called
him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s
face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording
of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he
made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in
which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his
other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw
her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted
orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.
Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring,
was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they
existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James
Toback—who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more
than two hundred allegations of sexual assault—was even more certain. One
night, Warren Beatty had invited him to a party at the Tate house. Toback
brought Jim Brown, a football all-star who’d become an action-film hero. At
the party, people began to whisper about an orgy. “I was going to be included
because I was with Jim,” Toback told me, “and I was certainly up for it, but
Jim declined.”
And yet: “James Toback is full of shit and always has been,” Paul Sylbert,
a production designer and a friend of Polanski, told me. “Nothing crazy went
on up there. There were no orgies, not that I ever have been to, and I was up
there frequently.” He conceded that Polanski was “peculiar,” but “whatever
his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale and quite private. He might’ve been
hinting at orgies, but there were never any.”
Orgies or no, at a certain point Tate felt that she’d suffered enough. As the
humiliations accumulated, she approached Elke Sommer for her advice.
Sommer remembered telling her, “I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s
an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him.”
Tate wasn’t about to do that, but she did, on a few occasions, warm to the
idea of leaving Polanski. Sommer thought she was always too much in her
husband’s thrall to follow through. “There was a tremendous sickness when I
worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her
relationship. She was quite lost.”
A number of Tate’s friends were quick to mention the undesirable
company she kept—with Frykowski and Folger at the top of the list.
Tate “couldn’t stand them,” said Joanna Pettet, another actress who’d
become close to her. The two had had lunch together at the house on the day
of the murders. Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom
she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked,
who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me
to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it.
On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she
complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too
much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly
when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover,
she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her—he didn’t
want her there.
I’d gone to great lengths to track down Pettet, who had quit the movie
business in the nineties. She lived in the high desert beyond Palm Springs,
where she was something of a recluse, with no phone. It had dawned on me
that I might be able to reach her through the Screen Actors Guild—they
would have her address on file, since they were responsible for mailing her
residual checks. Through them, I sent her a long letter, and she agreed to
meet me for lunch at a strip mall near her house. She was slightly
apprehensive when she first arrived. Then fifty-seven, she cut a striking
figure, dressed head to toe in denim, with dark glasses that obscured her
piercing eyes, until she felt comfortable enough to remove them.
“I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she said. “I had to be hospitalized and
missed the funeral.” She made no attempt to conceal her contempt for
Polanski. “I hated him,” she said flatly. As others had, Pettet described a
marriage in which he exuded an almost casual cruelty toward his wife. For
four months in the summer of ’67, Pettet had stayed with the couple at a
rented beach house, and she began to notice how often Polanski bossed Tate
around. He had a malicious streak; sometimes it reached Pettet herself. “He
would throw a brick in the pool and watch my dog dive for it and try to
retrieve it. He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up.”
After Sharon’s funeral, Polanski called Pettet. “On the phone he was
strange with me, cold as ice. There was no despair. And I was sobbing.” He
wanted to know what she’d told the police. It made her wonder what was
behind her friend’s murder. “At the time I suspected it was maybe friends of
his who did it. All I know is, he never came [when she asked him to come
back], and she was here.”

Figuring that Polanski’s confidants would want to tell a different story, I

coaxed Bill Tennant, his manager, into talking to me. Tennant had never
given an interview about the murders, in part because the events of 1969 had
sent his life into a tailspin. He’d had the somber task of identifying the bodies
at the Tate house. A 1993 piece in Variety (by Peter Bart, as coincidence
would have it) described Tennant’s fall from grace. Through the sixties and
seventies, he’d found great success in Hollywood, discovering the script for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agenting Peter Fonda’s deal for
Easy Rider. But Bart had found him, “a gaunt, battered figure,” “sleeping in a
doorway on Ventura Boulevard.” A cocaine addiction had done away with
his marriage and his money, leading him to trade “even the gold inlays in his
teeth for a fix.” In Bart’s assessment, “the shock of the Manson murders
began unraveling him.”
I tracked down Tennant in London, where he was sober, remarried, and
managing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance. He’d become a born-again
Christian, but he displayed little compassion or forgiveness for Polanski, his
onetime client and friend. “Roman is a shit,” he said. Echoing what I’d heard
from other friends of the couple, Tennant said there were two versions of
their story. “Which one do you want to tell?”
On one hand, Polanski had fallen into dissolution in London, where he
was working on a movie and sleeping around while, back in California, his
pregnant wife was putting together a home. Tate “wound up getting murdered
because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one
side of it.
“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air Hotel with Roman after the
funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very
good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I
wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given
more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick
who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Voytek,
these wankers, these four tragic losers, or do you want to talk about a poor
kid, Roman Polanski?”
Tennant resisted the idea that the murders represented a loss of innocence
for Hollywood. “There was nothing innocent about it,” he said. “It was
retribution.” The big value in Los Angeles when he was there, Tennant said,
was this: “He who dies with the most toys wins. I think it’s pretty self-serving
to call that period, and what was going on, innocent… What’s innocent about
drugs? What’s innocent about promiscuous sex?… You tell me where the
innocence was.” Within a week of the murders, Polanski was “partying it up”
with Warren Beatty, he added. The brutal reality was that “nobody cared or
gave a shit about Sharon Tate. Not because they weren’t nice but because she
was expendable. As expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets
dropped.”
After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as
much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the
killers or the media—from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance
units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about
everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of
the Los Angeles Police Department, and that they knew everything there was
to know.”
Although he had no way of knowing it in 1969, Tennant wasn’t being
paranoid when he wondered how the LAPD knew so much about his friends.
Many law enforcement agencies, including the LAPD, the Los Angeles
County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI, had maintained units to surveil and
even infiltrate groups that they considered subversive or threatening. At this
stage, I wasn’t inclined to view law enforcement with anything approaching
suspicion. Even so, I was beginning to see the official version of the case
with a jaundiced eye.

“In California, Everybody Has a Tan”

I found it difficult to sort through the stories coming out of the house on
Cielo Drive. Picture a spiderweb so dense with connections and tendrils that
it looks like a solid sheet of fabric. That’s what I felt I was working with. The
Hollywood cliques that had seemed, at the start, so discrete and isolated were
all mixed up with one another, much more than Bugliosi had made it appear.
Plus, then and now, people weren’t always willing to be up-front about who
they hung out with.
Tate was right to be wary of Frykowski, assuming she had been. He’d
fallen in with a dangerous crowd. Many of the “primitive” people that
Kaczanowski met had extensive rap sheets, and their names kept coming up
when people mentioned the gravest excesses of Cielo Drive. Pic Dawson,
who’d threatened Frykowski’s life and been thrown out of Polanski’s party,
had been the subject of Interpol surveillance for drug smuggling as early as
1965. The young son of a diplomat, he’d gained entrée in the Polanski crowd
through his friendship with Cass Elliot, one of the singers in the popular
sixties group the Mamas and the Papas. Like most of the men in the troubled
singer’s life, he’d used her for her money and connections. Elliot’s
biographers would later write that her infamous 1966 London arrest—she’d
been caught stealing hotel towels and keys—was actually a ruse to force her
to share information about Dawson’s drug-smuggling operations. Dawson’s
colleagues in the drug business, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, also wormed
their way into Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass.
According to police reports, Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan—all twenty-
seven, and all romantically involved with Elliot—were joined by a fourth
partner, “Uncle” Charles Tacot, a New Yorker who was more than a decade
older. A former marine, the six-foot-six strongman was renowned for his
prowess with knives; he was rumored to have maintained ties to military
intelligence, and he’d been selling drugs in Los Angeles since his arrival in
the mid-1950s. Curiously, despite their many years of drug peddling and
several drug arrests among them, only Doyle had ever been convicted of any
crime—and his conviction was later overturned and changed to an acquittal
on his record. Like Charles Manson, the four men seemed to have little fear
of law enforcement.
Helter Skelter paid only passing attention to these guys. They were among
the few figures in the book who were given pseudonyms. Although Bugliosi
noted Pic Dawson’s death threat against Frykowski, he omitted an even more
disturbing incident, one that makes a revenge motive much more plausible—
and that reveals the extent to which the victims were mixed up in the seamier
side of the counterculture.
As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the
residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and
Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the
times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski
and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with
Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd
of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.
This has become the kind of apocrypha that Manson conspiracy theorists
can’t get enough of. It’s the same incident referenced in Barney Hoskyns’s
Waiting for the Sun, the book I showed Bugliosi that day after our lunch. The
story feels almost mythological, in its ugliness and in the extent to which its
most basic details—who, what, when, where, why—are in flux. Candice
Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said
that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John
Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas); Dennis Hopper told the Los
Angeles Free Press that it was at the Cielo house. He described it as “a mass
whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.” Ed
Sanders, in The Family, reports that Doyle was “whipped and video-
buggered,” and the location varies depending on which edition of the book
you’re looking at.
So what really happened? I hesitated to report on this in 1999; it felt like
another lurid departure from Manson, and it’s not as if my deadline afforded
me time to explore every strange byway. But it bothered me that Bugliosi had
left this out, and that so many people close to the victims regarded it as a
flashpoint in the case. It was another instance of the resilience of the “live
freaky, die freaky” mind-set. Plus, even if Pic Dawson, Billy Doyle, and the
other dealers hadn’t murdered anyone, they could still be behind the crimes,
or adjacent to them. If I could connect them to Manson, for instance—
couldn’t they have contracted him for the murders? And if they were selling a
lot of drugs to anyone who’d died at the Tate household, might there have
been some kind of cover-up at work?
So, down I went.

Thanks to Kaczanowski and a few others who spoke with the LAPD,
detectives were quickly suspicious of Doyle and his companions after the
murders. And Doyle himself was getting around quite a bit at the time. He
was back and forth between Los Angeles, Jamaica, and his native Toronto. It
was in this last city that police caught up to him in late August. I wouldn’t get
a transcript of the LAPD’s interview until many years into my investigation,
but it’s worth including here because it gives his side of the story. And Doyle
is quotable—there’s something almost farcically hard-boiled about him.
In short, he told the LAPD’s Lieutenant Earl Deemer that he didn’t
remember being raped, but he couldn’t be sure; it might’ve happened
anyway. He recalled going over to see Frykowski at the Cielo house on the
night in question, sometime in early July. Frykowski, thinking it would be a
funny prank, slipped some mescaline in his champagne. Folger and
Kaczanowski were there, too. “It was out at the swimming pool,” Doyle told
Deemer, “and there was two cases of champagne by the pool… And
apparently [Frykowski] put some in my drink, and I said, Jesus… I am
high… I am really out of my bird.”
He wanted something to bring him down, and Frykowski was happy to
oblige, producing some pills that he said belonged to Sharon Tate. Doyle
swallowed “about eight of them,” and soon enough, as Frykowski started to
laugh at him, he realized that the pills were something else entirely, and that
he was dealing with some wild people:

They were crazier than hell. I didn’t realize they were so crazy. I am
using the word ‘crazy,’ I mean drug-induced crazy… in California,
everybody has a tan. Now, if people don’t have a tan, they look a little
different. You can see things in their face[s] that a tan covers up…
They were all tan and looked healthy. They looked very straight to me
when I first got there. And, uh… I don’t remember much more than
that.

His observation about California, where “everybody has a tan,” reminded me

of Kaczanowski’s remark: it was impossible, back then, to separate geniuses
from charlatans. Everyone blended in.
Of course, by most reckonings, Doyle himself would count as one of the
charlatans. He admitted that he was a naturally paranoid person. In recent
months he’d developed a coke habit, which only exacerbated the paranoia.
Convinced that someone, somewhere, was out to get him, he started carrying
a gun. It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had,
especially when there were women around. “They all wanted to get laid,” he
said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I
learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell
everyone he had “pounds of it.” His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘For
Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’ And I said,
‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”
That day, higher and higher on drugs that he couldn’t even name, Doyle
became convinced that Frykowski meant to harm him. So he pulled out his
gun and pointed it at the Pole, threatening to kill him. Frykowski, the bigger
man—and the more sober, too, if only by a hair—wrested the gun from him.
Here Doyle’s memory got hazy; he apparently lapsed into
unconsciousness, and Voytek called up Charlie Tacot, asking him to come
collect his deranged friend. It was possible, Doyle conceded, that Frykowski
or Kaczanowski had raped him after that. He admitted that he might’ve told
his friend Mama Cass something to that effect. “I was unconscious,” he told
Deemer. “I wasn’t sore the next day… not there. But I was sore everywhere
else.”
In another LAPD officer’s account of that interview, Doyle puts it even
more frankly: “I was so freaked out on drugs I wouldn’t know if they’d
fucked me or not!”

It took a lot of asking around, but eventually I tracked down both Billy Doyle
and Charles Tacot. (As for the other two: I’d learned Dawson had died of a
drug overdose in 1986, and Harrigan was nowhere to be found.) Neither had
given an interview before, and though they could be cagey, they were also
eager to relive their underworld glories. Both were old men now, but they
were still operators who acted as if they were at the height of their criminal
powers. Impressively foulmouthed, both of them threatened to have me killed
at various points in our interviews, although I didn’t take either seriously.
In our first phone call, Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s
story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out
somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently
with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek
fucked him.”
They took Doyle, still unconscious, to Mama Cass’s place in the
Hollywood Hills. Tacot remembered thinking, “If we don’t take care of him,
he’s going to go back there and have a beef. I carried him out, laid him by a
tree, went back to my car and got about twenty feet of welded link chain,
which I had in there for somebody else, originally. I put it around his ankle
and a tree with a good padlock and snapped it all together—so I know he’s
not going anywhere. Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the
Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”
Doyle came to a few hours later, still very high, and simmering with rage.
“‘I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’” Tacot remembered him saying.
“And I said, ‘No, no, we’re leaving town. We’re going to Jamaica… but first
you’re going to get sober and you’re going to be on this fucking tree until you
are.’”
I asked Tacot: “Do you think Voytek did fuck Billy?”
“Yeah, that’s why Billy was so pissed at him,” Tacot said. “Voytek would
have been killed if I hadn’t intervened.”
“Would Billy have hired killers?” I asked, thinking of Manson.
“No. He would’ve taken all the pleasure himself.”
In his interview with the police, Doyle had allowed that he was furious at
Frykowski and his set. “When I was chained to the tree,” he said, “they were
the object of my rage. Which was an unreasonable and unnatural rage.” To
calm him down, Doyle said, Tacot had “chained a sign to the tree that said
‘You are loved.’” Doyle was stuck there for more than a day.
After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently
they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has
ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics
deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those
people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said. He and Doyle were
suspects within days. “I picked up the phone one day and the Toronto Star
informed me that me and Billy were in the headlines: two wanted for
murder.” A couple of days later, back in the United States, “I took a lie-
detector test,” Tacot told me. “They knew I had nothing to do with it. Billy,
too. He was in Jamaica with me. We were cleared, out of the country. You
can’t kill somebody long-distance.”
True enough, but you could arrange for someone else to do the killing.
Tacot adamantly denied that he and Billy Doyle knew Manson—they’d never
even met the guy. Nor, he said, had they sold drugs to anyone staying at the
Tate house.
“We were consultants,” he said. “We’d tell them if it was okay or not.”
“If the drugs were okay?”
“Yeah.” He added, “Billy was fucking a whole bunch of broads up there.”
“Did you ever hear about any orgies?” I asked.
“If you want to consider Billy fucking the broads an orgy.”

Charlie Tacot wasn’t exactly the picture of virtue. I wanted to find other
people who’d known him, who could say if he’d known Manson. It wasn’t
hard. Seemingly everyone in town had partied with Tacot at some point.
Corrine Calvet, a French actress who’d worked in Hollywood since the
forties, had one of the most alarming stories of them all. Calvet was as
famous for her turbulent life as her film roles. She’d starred opposite James
Cagney in What Price Glory? In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a
mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey
Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime
lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.
I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and
unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the
point.
“The only thing that I can tell you about this Manson,” she said, her
accent inflecting the words with glamour and gravity, “is that Charlie Tacot
brought him and the girls to a party at our house. Two hours after they were
there, I caught Charlie Manson taking a piss in my pool. I told Charlie Tacot
to get them out of here and they left. After the tragedy happened, the FBI
came by and told me I was next on their list to be killed.”
When I expressed shock at this, her eyes narrowed. With genuine malice,
she said, “Maybe you are new at this. When I tell you something, don’t
question it! I don’t say it unless it is true.”
I explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in
the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her
words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”
I pressed her again. Was she sure that Tacot brought Manson and the girls
to her party?
“Well, I would not put my hand in the fire, saying that Charlie brought
them over, but Charlie knew them.”
I tried to get more out of Calvet, but the rest of the interview was frosty.
When I asked her for specific dates, or even years, she grew exasperated,
throwing her hands up in disgust. “I do not know years, do not ask me.”
Before long, she’d had it with me altogether. “I want you to leave now,” she
said. And I did.

Thinking I could eventually get Tacot to let his guard down, I began to visit
him at the Santa Anita Convalescent Center in Temple City. His health was
failing, and he had trouble walking. I found him lying in bed naked, a sheet
pulled just above his groin; he was bald, with a silver mustache, bony arms,
and a gravelly voice. I noticed a fading tattoo on his forearm. On the wall
he’d hung a photo of his granddaughter at her senior prom. Later, when he
rose to get exercise using a walker, I saw how tall he was: six foot six and rail
thin. Although his faculties were waning, he was sharp. He still commanded
enough authority to boss around the short orderly who assisted him.
Tacot shared his room with another patient, and he seemed to resent the
enfeebling atmosphere of the place—“too much groaning around here,” he
said—so I offered to drive him to his favorite restaurant, Coco’s, a California
chain known for its pies. Taking him out to lunch was an elaborate procedure.
People from the rest home wheeled him out to my car, lifted him in, and put
the wheelchair in the trunk. Once we were at Coco’s, however, I had to lift
Tacot into the wheelchair myself—an intimate maneuver for two near
strangers. Humiliated, he began to threaten me, albeit ineffectually. “Do you
realize who you’re dealing with?” he rasped as I attempted to hoist him out of
my passenger seat. “I could have you hurt, or killed!”
In Coco’s, with food in front of him, he calmed down a bit, and soon we
were having a freewheeling if combative conversation about the murders and
Hollywood in the sixties. Tacot had lived in Los Angeles since the mid-
1950s, when he moved there from Mexico with his wife. He had two
daughters, one of whom, Margot, would later confirm a lot of her father’s
story: he was a drug dealer, she said, who operated on the fringes of the
music and acting world. Although he would often get arrested, she said,
“nothing ever stuck. Someone always took care of it for him.”
Tacot continued to deny ever having known Manson, and he bridled at the
insinuation that he had anything to do with the crimes. The Tate murders, he
went on, led to “the most fucked-up investigation I’ve ever seen in my life.”
He had sued the Los Angeles Times for announcing him as a suspect. Any
effort to implicate him, he said, was probably just the LAPD covering up for
their bad police work.
As he grew more comfortable, Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at
the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency—he wouldn’t
say which—and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military
Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so
secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until
1972. Fine, a Polish émigré whose true name was Hersh Matias Warzechahe,
was “an assassin who shot people for the government,” Tacot claimed.
Thinking the old guy was fantasizing, I barely followed up on the
revelation. But he, and later Billy Doyle, would often reference Fine, only to
refuse to answer any questions about him. When I looked into him, I learned
neither man had been lying. Tacot also described his friend Doyle—they
were still close—as “a dangerous man. He’d kill you in a fucking minute.
Both of us are second-generation intelligence.
“Don’t write this stuff,” he implored me. “You’ll get killed. These are
very dangerous men, they’ll find you and kill you.” (That was a warning I’d
hear a lot from various parties over the years.) Tacot reminded me that
Bugliosi, when he wrote Helter Skelter, had given pseudonyms to him and
his friends, and not just for the sake of politeness. “He was afraid American
intelligence would kill him if he exposed us,” Tacot claimed. He added that
Bugliosi was “an asshole” who’d never interviewed him or Billy. “Vincent
Bugliosi knows to keep his mouth shut. I’d’ve got him killed. I didn’t tell him
that—didn’t have to.”
I tried to get Tacot on the subject of Frykowski, who was, to my mind, the
victim with the shadiest cast of characters around him. Frykowski was on
drugs all the time, Tacot said. Contradicting what he’d told me on the phone,
he said that Frykowski had sold MDA, but only to close friends.
I didn’t take Tacot out again, but I kept calling and visiting him. I found
him evasive, or senile, or a little of both. And the more I asked around about
him, the more he seemed to vanish into the mist of the sixties. Some people
told me, with certainty, that Tacot had been an assassin for the CIA, that he
was a “gun freak” and an incredible marksman. (In his 2006 autobiography,
Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it, the
musician David Crosby identified Tacot as a “soldier of fortune” who taught
him how to shoot a gun.) Others said that he was an ex-marine who’d served
in Korea and used to show off his impressive knife-throwing skills. I heard
that he grew pot in Arizona; that he was a child molester; that he was a coke
smuggler; that he was an uncredited screenwriter; and that his intelligence
ties were all fictitious. And the strange thing was, none of this was entirely
implausible. About the only thing everyone could agree on was that Tacot
had been involved in a lot of schemes—that he’d been a drug dealer and,
even more, a drug user. But then, as one source put it, “Hey, man, aren’t
you?”
When I looked into Hank Fine, the MIS guy Tacot had said he’d reported
to, I learned that, like everything Tacot said, there was at least a kernel of
truth to it. Fine, who’d been a movie PR man from the 1940s until his death
in 1975, had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
counterintelligence agency that oversaw the MIS and evolved into the CIA
after World War II. His work often seemed to combine Hollywood and
spycraft. Eddie Albert, the star of the sixties sitcom Green Acres, told me that
Fine had sent him on undercover missions to Mexico during the war; from his
sailboat, the actor had photographed German landing sites and military
training grounds. Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s
associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through
the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a
cover—and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of
work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified.
Whenever I saw Tacot, I returned to the subject of Fine. “Don’t mention
that name anywhere!” he barked, seeming genuinely disturbed. When I asked
why not, he said, “None of your fucking business! You’re fucking with the
wrong people!”
Or was I fucking with lowlifes who only wanted to present an illusion of
importance? I really couldn’t say. And when I finally was able to talk to Billy
Doyle, things didn’t get any clearer.

Tacot gave me Doyle’s number. “He’s a retired old man just like me,” he
said, “and he may not want to talk too much. Don’t push him if he doesn’t.”
But Doyle liked an audience, just as he had in 1969. I called him often at
his home in Toronto, and he talked for hours, sometimes rambling at such
length that I would turn off my recorder to save tape. Just when he was trying
my patience, he’d say something provocative and I’d have to switch the
recorder back on and try to get him to repeat it. He had a short temper, and
when he exploded, usually out of nowhere, it could be hard to calm him
down. One time, when he didn’t like my line of questioning, he told me, “I
was shooting targets at a thousand yards yesterday,” implying that I could
soon be one of them. Another time, when I’d tried to get some specifics about
Hank Fine, Doyle yelled, “Go in the bathroom, swallow the gun, and pull the
trigger!” When he wasn’t angry, he sometimes got a kick out of teasing me:
he would make a major revelation and then retract it the next time we spoke. I
got the sense that he sometimes trusted me enough to tell the truth, only to
realize later that he shouldn’t have done that.
Doyle believed that Polanski and Frykowski were Polish spies, the former
subverting American democracy with his decadent films. He was sure that
Polanski had something to do with the killings. (It went both ways: I’d heard
that Polanski thought Doyle had something to do with the killings.) He
denied that he’d ever been a drug dealer. I read him passages from the police
report, in which he’d confessed to, even bragged about, having vast amounts
of cocaine. But even after that, he denied it to me. He wouldn’t be stupid
enough to carry two pounds of coke on a plane, he said. When I asked him
about MDA, the drug that he and Voytek had allegedly bought in large
quantities, he said he’d never even heard of it. He relented when I read him
some quotes from the transcript—okay, fine, he’d taken it.
I brought up his and Tacot’s alibi for the night of the murders: they’d been
in Jamaica, you’ll recall, filming “a pot movie.” Doyle admitted that the
movie was a ruse. He and Tacot had really been doing intelligence work
there, he said, as part of some effort to keep Cuba out of Jamaica.
“Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this shit,” he said.
“You have to understand that the government doesn’t want to have any
exposure on the Jamaican thing—there never was a Jamaican thing. They
don’t want to know about it.” When I asked why, he said, “How the fuck do I
know? I’m a Canadian citizen. I went with Charles on an adventure. I thought
we were going to do a movie.”
“But that’s not what you were really there for, and you knew it.”
“That’s right.”
It’s an exchange that illustrates how cryptic Doyle could be—and how he
reveled in it. I had to ask about the story behind his alleged rape. He said that
never happened, either.
“Charles was spreading the rape story to have fun at my expense,” he
explained. “Even my mom and dad asked if I was raped.” And yet he
betrayed the same uncertainty he’d shown to the cops so many decades ago,
telling me that he’d had a friend take photos of him naked so he could
examine his rear end.
 Similarly, he told me that Corrine Calvet was dead wrong when she said
that Tacot had brought Manson to her house. “That’s a lie,” he said, noting
that Tacot and Calvet had once dated. “She will say anything to grasp at
stardom. Men with badges and guns have raised these questions before,” he
added, “not police, FBI, sitting in D.C.” That in itself was astonishing to me;
I hadn’t heard that the FBI had investigated the murders, but I would find out
later that it was true.
I suggested that I didn’t believe him about Calvet. “You are going to
come to a horrible truth,” he said. “Be nervous that you may have discovered
the truth and you won’t like it.”
As spurious and slimy as he could be, I found him believable when he
repeated that there was more to the murders than had been reported. Later,
when I’d interviewed so many people that some of them had started to
compare notes, he said something really impenetrable. “The community has
looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us.”
“What community?” I asked. “Who?”
“The ties that bind.”
Eventually, Doyle became convinced that I was Roman Polanski’s private
investigator. It was never clear to me how much he actually believed this, but
it was enough to make me back away from him. I sunk a lot of hours into
cultivating sources like Tacot, Doyle, and the crowd surrounding them.
They’d been so close to the Tate murders that they were suspects, and yet
they’d assumed no role in the mythology surrounding the events of August 9.
Bugliosi, like the LAPD, had summarily acquitted them of any involvement
in the killings—they were his book’s classic red herring. But I still wasn’t
convinced. In their sleazy, run-of-the-mill criminality, their motivations
seemed much more viable than a lofty idea like Helter Skelter. The more I
talked to them, the more I recognized certain inadequacies in Bugliosi’s
story, which had curtailed so many explanations in favor of the most
outlandish one.

A Haircut from Little Joe

I wanted to keep one eye open to the possibility that Tacot, Doyle, and their
associates had some link to the Manson group. After all, in The Family, Ed
Sanders had written that it was likely that Mama Cass Elliot knew Manson
through her drug connections—it seemed probable that Doyle and Tacot were
pivotal there. Plus, Elliot had been friends with Frykowski and Folger; and
Elliot’s bandmates were close to Polanski and Tate. In other words, everyone
knew everyone else, and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.
Maybe I could suss out the connections there, but I was less enthusiastic
about these supposed ties with intelligence agencies—except that I was about
to get another push in that direction. Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair
journalist who’d been friends with Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, had given
me a tip: get a haircut from a man named Joe Torrenueva.
Nicknamed Little Joe, Torrenueva had been eighteen, fresh out of barber
school, when Jay Sebring took him under his wing as an apprentice
hairstylist. That was in 1961. Sebring, not yet thirty, was already one of the
biggest names in fashion, having revolutionized men’s grooming. He was the
first to “style” men’s hair rather than simply cut it. He patented a “Sebring
method,” through which “your hair is shaped and conditioned to stay natural
between visits,” as promotional materials explained, and he introduced a line
of hair-care products. (Sebring wasn’t his given name; he was born Thomas
Kummer and renamed himself after a racetrack in Florida he liked.)
Sebring saw his clients in a private room with only one chair. When
Torrenueva began working for him, he was charging an unheard-of twenty-
five dollars for a haircut—the going rate was a buck fifty. But his customers
were happy to pay a premium, and in turn, he catered to their whims. Sebring
traveled every few weeks to Las Vegas, where his clients included Frank
Sinatra and several casino owners. Torrenueva always went with him, and in
those quiet rooms, as the scissors snipped and tufts of hair gathered on the
floor, he saw the casual intimacy between Sebring and his clients, who
confided in him even when Little Joe was within earshot.
Now, like his mentor, to whom he referred in hushed, almost reverential
tones, Little Joe was a “barber to the stars.” He saw his clients in a private,
oak-paneled room in Beverly Hills. His price was a hundred bucks. Dunne
had told me that if I bided my time and didn’t press him too hard, Joe might
open up about the murders. When I showed up, he seemed aware of my
ulterior motive. Slight and soft-spoken, he sighed and paused before nearly
every sentence.
Joe was convinced that Sebring’s murder had to do with something more
than hippies trying to ignite a race war. Sebring, he told me, had been
involved with mob guys from Chicago and Las Vegas. He cut their hair,
partied with them in Vegas. Then, after the murders, Little Joe got a call from
General Charlie Baron, a casino executive and mobster, who told him, “Don’t
worry, Little Joe, you’re going to be all right.” He presumed that the murders
had been a drug deal gone wrong, and that Jay and Frykowski had been
targeted.
That was all I got. I needed more information. I’d have to get another
haircut.
I let a month go by, so I really needed one, and soon enough I settled into
Little Joe’s leather chair again.
Charlie Baron’s call haunted him to this day. It came “right after” the
murders, Torrenueva said, before anyone had any notion of who’d committed
them. “You didn’t do anything to anybody,” he said Baron told him.
“Nobody’s going to do anything to you.” The implication was that Baron and
his associates were well aware of who committed the crimes, and why.
But then Joe was done snipping. So I went back for a third haircut.
“Charlie Baron was very close to Jay,” Joe told me in our third
conversation. He added: “Charlie killed people.” When Baron was a young
man during Prohibition in Chicago, he “shot two guys who were going to kill
him for fixing a fight.” He later went to Havana to run casinos for Meyer
Lansky, another mob figure. When he returned to the United States, he was
Lansky’s eyes and ears at the new Sands Casino in Vegas.
Baron was hardly an outlier in Sebring’s shop, which was a “nest of
mobsters and criminals,” Torrenueva said. But it was Baron who scared Little
Joe the most, even before his phone call. Despite Baron’s known mob ties, he
had some type of security-intelligence clearance with the federal government.
He always packed a gun, and he was close with a cabal of right-wing military
intelligence and Hollywood figures, many of whom had been Sebring’s
clients. Little Joe alleged that they “did terrible things to black people,” and
that “it was Charlie who did the worst things.”
I couldn’t get him to elaborate on that. But I did ask him why, if he was
following the Tate murder investigation and knew that the police had no
leads, he didn’t tell the cops about his call from Baron. Because he was too
close to higher-ups in law enforcement and intelligence, Joe said.
He added yet another intriguing name to the list of Baron’s associates:
General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the
carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had
served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a
coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the
military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases
they’d found in Cuba.
It was a lot of names to process, and the implications were dizzying. I had
one question that Torrenueva was especially reluctant to answer. Why would
Sebring—at the time, arguably the best-known men’s hairstylist in the world
—involve himself in crime? He had so much to lose, and clearly he was
thriving.
But he hadn’t been, Torrenueva was pained to say. “The deals kept falling
through. He was a bad businessman.”
“Do you think he sold drugs?” I asked, aware that Frykowski had possibly
been doing the same.
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Sebring’s problems had multiplied throughout the sixties. He’d clash with
other barbers who wanted to unionize. In 1963, a group of his stylists had
defected, en masse, to start their own business. At other times, he’d had to
hire bodyguards because some guys had come into the shop and “roughed
up” several employees, Torrenueva said, for reasons that were never shared
with him. Sebring carried a gun, and “he shot someone once who came to his
house and was giving his father a rough time at the door.”
The bottom line: Sebring, like Frykowski, had a lot more going on at the
time of his murder than had ever been revealed. Whatever it was, Little Joe
thought it had more to do with his death than any hippie/race-war motive did.
Which meant that, in addition to drug dealers and Hollywood’s seedier
hangers-on, I had to account for mobsters, ex-military figures, and
intelligence agents in my reporting. I was already worried about wandering
into the weeds—now I risked veering off the map entirely.

Coda: Down the Rabbit Hole

I was writing a story about Charles Manson that had, so far, very little of
Manson in it. It was more about the way that events, in all their messy reality,
boiled down to canonical fact; the way that a narrative becomes the narrative.
I had to decide if stories like Little Joe’s, Charlie Tacot’s, and Billy
Doyle’s were worth looking into, and, as a responsible journalist, if I was
justified in dragging my magazine into it. It definitely meant asking for an
extension from Premiere and risking, in the final publication, looking like a
fool. No matter how you viewed them, these were conspiracy theories. But I
was riveted by the stuff I’d turned up that contravened the Manson story as
we knew it. For better or worse, it felt like there was something covered up
all these years, ripe for exposure. Maybe with the passage of time, people
who knew about these things might divulge them at last.
I was starting to figure out that Bugliosi had sifted so many stories out of
Helter Skelter—to make his narrative about the conviction of the mad hippie
guru and his zombielike followers easier and cleaner. If that were merely an
editorial choice, so be it. But if he’d changed things to protect people, or to
shore up holes in the investigation, then I felt justified in digging deeper. It
seemed impossible that a story like Little Joe’s, heavy with intelligence
agencies and organized crime, could coexist alongside the Helter Skelter
motive. I knew that, in the late sixties, intelligence agencies regarded
dissident youth movements as the greatest threat to the nation’s security, and
they’d marshaled their efforts accordingly. Insofar as hippies, musicians, and
movie stars played a role in those movements, I could see how the broadest
outline of Little Joe’s story could have some truth to it. But even a hardened
national-security reporter would have trouble verifying his claims, and that I
was not.
These were the concerns I faced by the summer of 1999. The obvious
answer would be: keep pushing. The only problem was, my deadline was fast
approaching. I owed Premiere five thousand words, and I’d written zero.
 3

The Golden Penetrators

Instilling Fear
Maybe I was naive to think I could discover what was going on at the Tate
house in the months before the murders. People had been trying to untangle
that rats’ nest of rumors for thirty years, and not with a magazine deadline
looming in front of them. Now I’d determined to my satisfaction that
Frykowski and Polanski had a lot to hide, and that their connections to the
drug trade could’ve put them plausibly in Manson’s orbit. Beyond that, my
sense of Manson’s link to Hollywood was still too tenuous for my liking.
And if I felt that Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter motive was only a high-profile
contrivance, I needed to find the bald truth it concealed. Hoping for a better
angle, I focused on one figure who was among the most perplexing in the
case: Terry Melcher.
Without Melcher, there would have been no murders at 10050 Cielo
Drive. He was the clearest link between Manson and the Hollywood elite. A
music-industry bigwig, he’d promised Manson a record deal only to renege
on it. The official story was that Manson, reeling from the rejection, wanted
to “instill fear” in Melcher—so he chose Melcher’s old house on Cielo Drive
as the site for the first night of murders. He knew that Melcher didn’t live
there anymore. He just wanted to give the guy a good scare.
This was a vital point in the case. According to Bugliosi, Manson never
went to the house the night of the murders—he just sent his followers there
and told them to kill anyone they found. To convict Manson of criminal
conspiracy, then, and get him a death sentence, Bugliosi had to establish a
compelling, premeditated reason that Manson had picked the Cielo Drive
home. Terry Melcher was that reason.
Melcher testified that he’d met Manson exactly three times, the last of
which was around May 20, 1969, more than two months before the murders.
After Manson’s arrest, Melcher became so frightened of the Family that
Bugliosi had to give him a tranquilizer to relax him before he testified. “Ten,
fifteen years after the murders I’d speak to him and he was still convinced
that the Manson Family was after him that night,” Bugliosi had told me.
If Manson had wanted to kill Melcher, he could have. He had Melcher’s
new address in Malibu. Gregg Jakobson, a musician and a friend of the Beach
Boys, had testified at the trial that Manson called him before the murders,
asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass.”
“Yes, why?” Jakobson answered.
“Well, he doesn’t anymore,” Manson said. The Family had “creepy-
crawled” Melcher’s Malibu home—that’s what they called it when they
dressed up in black and sneaked around rich people’s places—and stolen the
spyglass. When Melcher himself testified, he confirmed that he’d noticed it
missing around “late July or early August.” Candice Bergen, his girlfriend,
had noted the disappearance, too.
Over the years, Manson researchers have generally agreed that Melcher
was stretching the truth. Karina Longworth, whose podcast You Must
Remember This devoted a whole season to Manson, said in one episode that
Melcher “was vague about the details of his meetings with Manson, and
probably shaved a couple of visits to the ranch off the official record.”
It would be one thing to fudge the numbers a bit—it’s easy to see why
someone would want to understate their relationship with Charles Manson.
But I became convinced that this was graver than that. I found proof that
Melcher was much closer to Manson, Tex Watson, and the girls than he’d
suggested. A year before the murders, he’d even lived with a member of the
Family at the house on Cielo Drive.
There was a strong likelihood that Melcher knew, immediately after the
crimes, that Manson was involved—but he never told the police. I found
evidence that Melcher lied on the stand, under oath. And Bugliosi definitely
knew about it. Maybe he’d even put him up to it, suborning witness perjury.
Just like the omissions about Polanski’s sex tape and Frykowski’s episode
with Billy Doyle, this raised questions about Bugliosi’s motives. Did he
change the story to protect Melcher, a powerful record producer and the only
child of one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars? Had he streamlined certain
elements for the jury’s sake, in the interest of getting an easy conviction? Or
was this part of a broader pattern of deception, of bending the facts to support
a narrative that was otherwise too shaky to stand? Helter Skelter (the motive)
and Helter Skelter (the book) seemed more illusory by the day.
Chasing the Melcher angle further imperiled any chance of hitting my
deadline. It soured my relationship with Bugliosi; it brought on the first of
many lawsuit threats; and it turned my fascination with the case into a full-
blown obsession. But it convinced me more than anything that I was onto
something—that the full story behind the Manson murders had never been
properly told.

“I Live with 17 Girls”

The story of Manson and Melcher starts with Dennis Wilson. By the summer
of 1968, Wilson, then twenty-three, had reached an impasse. He’d become
world famous as the drummer for the Beach Boys, helmed by his brother
Brian; now the band was in decline, edged out by more subversive acts. He
and his wife, Carole, had recently divorced for the second time. She wrote in
court filings that he had a violent temper, inflicting “severe bodily injury” on
her during his “rampages.”
The couple had two young children, but Dennis decided to rusticate as a
bachelor. He moved into a lavish, Spanish-style mansion in Pacific Palisades,
once a hunting lodge owned by the humorist Will Rogers. The home boasted
thirty-one rooms and a swimming pool in the shape of California. He
redecorated in the spirit of the times—zebra-print carpet, abundant bunk beds
—and hosted decadent parties, hoping to have as much sex as possible.
One day, Wilson was driving his custom red Ferrari down the Pacific
Coast Highway when two hitchhikers, the Family’s Ella Jo Bailey and
Patricia Krenwinkel, caught his eye. He gave them a quick lift. When he saw
them again soon afterward, he picked them up a second time, taking them
back to his place for “milk and cookies.” History hasn’t recorded what kind
of cookies they enjoyed, or whether those cookies were in fact sex, but
whatever the case, the girls told Manson about the encounter. They weren’t
aware of Wilson’s clout in the music industry—but Manson was, and he
insisted on going back to the house with them.
After a late recording session, Wilson returned to his estate to find the
Family’s big black bus parked outside. His living room was populated with
topless girls. Whatever alarm he felt was eased when their short, intense,
unwashed leader, Manson, sunk to his knees and kissed Wilson’s feet.
This night ushered in a summer of ceaseless partying for Wilson. Manson
and the Family set up shop in his home, and soon Manson recruited one of
the group’s deadliest members, Tex Watson, who picked him up hitchhiking.
The Family spent their days smoking dope and listening to Charlie strum the
guitar. The girls made the meals, did the laundry, and slept with the men on
command. Manson prescribed sex seven times a day: before and after all
three meals and once in the middle of the night. “It was as if we were kings,
just because we were men,” Watson later wrote. Soon Wilson was bragging
so much that he landed a headline in Record Mirror: “I Live with 17 Girls.”
Talking to Britain’s Rave magazine, Wilson offered disjointed remarks
about his new friend, whom he called “the Wizard.” “I was only frightened as
a child because I didn’t understand the fear,” he said. “Sometimes ‘the
Wizard’ frightens me. The Wizard is Charles Manson, who is a friend of
mine who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry
and may be another artist for Brother Records,” the Beach Boys’ label.
This last bit excited Manson, who was desperate to leverage his
connection with Wilson into a music career. The two cowrote a song, “Cease
to Exist,” whose lyrics claimed that “submission is a gift.” (Later that year,
the Beach Boys recorded it as a B side, changing the title, finessing the lyrics,
and dropping Manson’s songwriting credit—a snub that fueled his anger
toward the establishment.) Manson fraternized with some of the biggest
names in music. Neil Young remembered meeting him and the girls at
Wilson’s place. “A lot of pretty well-known musicians around L.A. knew
Manson,” Young later said, “though they’d probably deny it now.”
Among these was Terry Melcher. He and Wilson had pledged allegiance
to the “Golden Penetrators,” a horny triumvirate they’d formed with their
friend Gregg Jakobson. The Penetrators, who’d painted a car gold to
celebrate themselves, aimed to sleep with as many women as they could.
Wilson’s ex-wife referred to them as “roving cocksmen.” Obviously, then,
Melcher would want to rove over to Wilson’s house—it was full of
promiscuous young women. Sometime in that summer of ’68, at one of
Wilson’s marathon parties, he crossed paths with Manson for the first time.
After another such party, Melcher rode back to Cielo Drive with Wilson, and
Manson came along in the back seat. As Melcher later testified, Manson got a
good look at the house from the driveway.
When the end of summer came, things went south with Wilson, who’d
finally grown tired of footing the bill for the endless party: upward of
$100,000 in food, clothes, and car repairs, plus gonorrhea treatments.
According to Bugliosi, Wilson was too frightened of Manson to throw him
out. Instead, he simply up and left in the middle of the night, leaving the
messy business of eviction to his landlord.
But it must’ve been more complicated than that. Wilson gave three
interviews in which he raved about Manson and the girls—and all of those
interviews date to the winter and summer of 1969, nearly a year after he and
the Family had supposedly parted ways. Why would Wilson brag about his
connections to a man he’d just schemed to escape?
The only sure fact is that Manson and his group decamped to the Spahn
Ranch in late August 1968. Wilson moved into a Malibu beach house with
Gregg Jakobson, who’d also recently split from his marriage.

Having drifted from Wilson—his best shot at a record deal—Manson knew

he had to hitch his wagon to Terry Melcher’s star. As his chances at fame
dwindled, his mood darkened. He became obsessed with the Beatles’ White
Album, released in late November 1968, and started to preach about the
prophecies of a race war embedded in its lyrics. Things only got worse in the
winter of ’69, when he arranged for Melcher to come out and hear his music.
Manson prepared meticulously for the prospective meeting, but Melcher
stood him up.
On March 23, a desperate Manson went searching for Melcher, thinking
he’d goad the producer into a record deal. He found his way back to the
house at Cielo Drive, having remembered that Melcher lived there. Instead,
Sharon Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami, intercepted him.
Hatami had never heard of a Terry Melcher. He told Manson to go to the
guesthouse and ask the owner of the property, Rudolph Altobelli, who
explained curtly that Melcher no longer lived there and hadn’t left a
forwarding address.
Manson prevailed on Gregg Jakobson—still a friend, and still a fan of the
girls—to book another session with Melcher. This time, it worked. That May,
Melcher made the winding drive to the Spahn Ranch and auditioned Manson
in person, visiting twice over four days.
Manson had rounded out a dozen or so of his best songs with backup
singing from the girls. Performing in a gully in the woods, the girls sprawled
on the ground and gazed up at their leader, who sat astride a rock with his
guitar. “I wasn’t too impressed by the songs,” Melcher would later testify. “I
was impressed by the whole scene… by Charlie’s strength, and his obvious
leadership.” As a courtesy, the producer complimented Manson, saying that
one or two of his songs were “nice.” He had no intention of offering a
recording contract, but he saw how the Family’s rustic, cultish lifestyle would
lend itself to a TV documentary. Melcher suggested that his friend Mike
Deasy, whose van was outfitted to make field recordings, could come out to
the ranch and capture another performance.
Before Melcher could get out of there, a foreman at the ranch came
stumbling out of a pickup truck. Drunk and belligerent, he was dressed like a
cowboy, fingering a holstered gun—the same one that would later be used at
the Tate murders. Manson stepped up to him and shouted, “Don’t draw on
me, motherfucker!” socking him in the gut, taking his gun, and continuing to
pummel him.
It spooked Melcher. Here was a peace-and-love cult with naked girls
roaming the old Western sets, and yet the constant threat of violence loomed
over the place. It needed to be documented in all its oddity. A few days later,
Melcher returned with Deasy and Jakobson, and the Family repeated their
audition. But what had seemed spontaneous now felt rehearsed. Deasy
returned a few more times, until he had a frightening LSD trip with Manson
and vowed never to go back.
It was all getting too toxic. Melcher conveyed his rejection through
Jakobson, and that was the end of that. Manson’s last brush with greatness
was gone, and he became full-on apocalyptic. Melcher never went back to the
ranch or saw anyone from the Family again. Or so he said under oath,
anyway.
After the murders, as Hollywood panicked and the LAPD chased down leads,
the Golden Penetrators realized that they hadn’t quite washed their hands of
Manson. This is where their story began to feel unbelievable to me. Manson
wasn’t charged with murder until late November. But Wilson, Jakobson, and
Melcher had good cause to suspect him back in August, right after the
killings. By then, they were frightened of Manson, though Helter Skelter does
little to indicate their terror. When I saw how much they knew—and how
quiet they’d kept, when their information would’ve helped police solve the
case—I realized just how flimsy the Helter Skelter motive was. Its
unforgettable grandiosity may have hidden a more prosaic truth: that a few
rich guys had gotten in over their heads with an unstable ex-con.
First, Wilson and Jakobson knew that Manson had shot a black man
named Bernard Crowe about five weeks before the Tate murders. And
Jakobson, who testified that he’d talked to Manson “upward of a hundred
times,” was well acquainted with his friend’s bizarre race-war predictions.
Manson warned him that “whiteys” in the affluent homes of Bel Air would be
“cut up and dismembered,” and that the murderers would smear the victims’
blood on the walls, “scatter [their] limbs, and hang them from the ceiling.”
And yet, when a group of affluent whites really was cut up, and Sharon Tate
was hanged from the ceiling of her home in Bel Air, Jakobson apparently
didn’t make the connection.
Nor did it occur to him in mid-August, when he witnessed Manson’s
violence firsthand. Manson broke into Jakobson’s home in the middle of the
night, shook him awake, and produced a bullet. “Tell Dennis there are more
where this came from,” he said. On the witness stand, Jakobson compared
Manson that night to a caged bobcat: “The electricity was almost pouring out
of him. His hair was on end. His eyes were wild.”
A few days earlier, Manson had shown up at Wilson’s house, too,
demanding fifteen hundred dollars. When Wilson refused to give him the
money, Manson threatened him: “Don’t be surprised if you never see your
kid again.”
After Manson’s arrest, Wilson fell into a deep depression, spurring his
problems with drugs and alcohol. Later, he told the Beach Boys’ authorized
biographer, David Leaf, “I know why Charles Manson did what he did.
Someday I’ll tell the world. I’ll write a book and explain why he did it.” He
never got the chance. In 1983, three weeks after his thirty-ninth birthday, an
acutely drunk Wilson dove from the deck of his boat into the chilly waters of
Marina del Rey and accidentally drowned. Within days, a rock journalist
wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about a jarring exchange he’d had with
Wilson. “Me and Charlie, we founded the Family,” Dennis had said, apropos
of nothing.
The Golden Penetrators, then, had an abundance of reasons to accuse
Manson of the Tate–LaBianca murders—immediately. They believed he’d
shot someone dead. He’d threatened two of them with violence. They knew
he stockpiled guns and knives at the ranch. And the slaughter at Melcher’s
old house was exactly the kind he’d predicted, down to the most chilling
detail. Shouldn’t they have connected the dots? Was it possible that there was
a conspiracy of silence among them?

“Asshole Buddies”
Rudi Altobelli, the owner of the house on Cielo Drive—Tate and Polanski’s
landlord, and Terry Melcher’s before that—became one of my best sources. It
was thanks to him that I started looking into Melcher’s story in the first place.
When I met up with Altobelli in the spring of 1999, he’d never publicly
spoken about the murders that had occurred at his house, except in trial
testimony. I wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to talk now, and to me, of all
people; I’d heard it would be a waste of time even to bother asking. But
Altobelli had always been unpredictable. One of the first openly gay men in
Hollywood, he’d made a living as a manager, his clients including Henry
Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. In November 1969—three months after the
murders, before the killers had been found—he shocked the community by
filing a lawsuit against Polanski and Sharon Tate’s father to recover the
damages his property had sustained during the murders. It was an appallingly
callous response: to seek money from a victim’s family because she’d bled
on Altobelli’s carpet as she lay dying.
I knew, then, that I’d have to tread carefully with Altobelli. True to old
Hollywood form, he suggested we meet at Musso and Frank Grill, a
legendary outpost that looked right out of a film noir. Many of its red-
jacketed waiters seemed so old that they could’ve been working there when it
opened in 1919. One of them led me through the wood-paneled room past red
banquettes to Altobelli, at a corner table, already treating himself to the first
in a succession of Gibsons (with extra onions). Compact and nattily dressed,
he was a few weeks shy of his seventieth birthday, but he had no lines on his
face and no gray in his hair. Admittedly vain, he’d begin all our meetings by
asking “How do I look?”—it came before hello. His glasses were always
tinted: on some days blue, on others pink, orange, or light purple.
After dinner that night, he kept calling to chat, and I took him out for
years to come. The restaurants were always fancy; the bills were always
mine. And I always felt, through hundreds of hours of conversation, that I
wasn’t getting the whole story. His go-to defense was unchanging: “I may not
tell you everything, but I have never lied to you.” (Robert Towne, who wrote
the screenplay for Chinatown, called Altobelli “the most honest man in
Hollywood”—a low bar to clear, maybe, but I’d take what I could get.) If I
printed anything without his permission, he said, “I’ll find ya and cut your
balls off and feed ’em to you.” Fortunately, he later decided it was all on the
record.
Altobelli had bought the Cielo house in 1963. In May 1966, he rented to
Terry Melcher, who was known at the time for having produced the Byrds’
“Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Altobelli liked to befriend
his tenants—he’d live in the guesthouse and rent out the main property—and
soon the two became what he called “asshole buddies.” (An affectionate
term, he assured me.)
Not only was Altobelli one of the few people who’d befriended both
Melcher and Tate—he was one of the few who’d seen Manson on the
property before the murders. He provided critical testimony for the state,
identifying Manson as the man who’d barged into his guesthouse looking for
Terry Melcher on March 23, 1969. His ID was reliable; he’d already met
Manson at Dennis Wilson’s house the summer before. He’d sat on Dennis’s
bed atop a “dirty satin sheet with cum spots on it,” Rudi told me, “while
Manson sat on the floor” playing music. “I didn’t like the vibe from him,”
Rudi added. “I even told Terry to keep those people off the property.”
It sounded like Altobelli, and others in his circle, had suspected Manson
from the start. And that was true, Altobelli said. When he heard about the
murders, he thought of Manson right away. Altobelli was in Rome at the
time, and his memories troubled him enough that within hours of the
murders, before he’d even boarded a flight home, he called his lawyer, Barry
Hirsch, who told him he should mind his own business.
Altobelli returned to Los Angeles hoping to move back into his house
right away. The LAPD forbade him. Instead, he crashed with Melcher and
Candice Bergen at their place in Malibu. That house belonged to Doris Day,
Melcher’s mother, but she seldom used it. During Altobelli’s stay, Gregg
Jakobson stopped by and invited him for a walk on the beach. As they
strolled along the surf, past beautiful oceanfront homes fortified in recent
weeks with fences, guard dogs, and security systems, Jakobson told him
“about the musician that Manson was supposed to have killed.”
Altobelli didn’t remember the musician’s name. I wondered if he was
thinking of Gary Hinman, a musician who’d been killed by the Family
thirteen days before the Tate–LaBianca murders. If Jakobson knew about that
murder, he would’ve almost certainly connected the Tate–LaBianca deaths to
Manson, too.
That day on the beach, Jakobson reached into his pocket and pulled out a
bullet. “He said, ‘This one’s for Terry.’ It was from Manson.”
This strained credulity. As mentioned above, during the trial, Jakobson
had said that after the murders, Manson broke into his house, gave him a
bullet, and told him to show it to Dennis Wilson. The message: “There are
more where this came from.” Maybe Altobelli was getting all of it mixed up?
But he was insistent. “No, he said it was for Terry!”
Then why didn’t he tell Terry about it?
“Because when I’m told to mind my own business by my attorney, I mind
my own business. In fact, I should be minding my own business now and
shut up.”
How could Altobelli have spent so much time with Melcher, doing
nothing but discussing the tragedy and speculating on possible culprits,
without sharing this crucial information—without telling his friend that there
was a bullet with his name on it? He knew it would’ve helped solve the case.
Altobelli did say that he called his attorney one more time to fill him in. He
was told, again, to mind his own business. (Hirsch declined to comment.)
If Altobelli was telling the truth, then all four of these men—him,
Melcher, Wilson, and Jakobson, the main links between Manson, Hollywood,
and the house on Cielo Drive—had to know that Manson was behind the
murders. And yet all they wanted to do was forget about it. Three weeks after
the crimes, Altobelli moved back into the house on Cielo Drive, with
Melcher as his new roommate—an arrangement that’s never been reported
before.
Altobelli returned out of a desire to reclaim his home from the evil that
had infested it. He hoped to restore some order to the place. By then it had
become a morbid mecca for Hollywood’s elite, who came by wanting a
glimpse at the scene of the crimes. Even Elvis Presley came to pay his
respects. Altobelli turned most of these visitors away—but he welcomed
Melcher, who’d expressed a bizarre yearning to stay in his old place again.
With Altobelli’s blessing, Melcher lived there for a month, maybe longer. He
hardly left the property.
“He probably figured it was safe there,” Altobelli said. “That lightning
wouldn’t strike twice.” Melcher came alone—he seemed to have split up with
Bergen. Settling back into the house, he became morose, as Altobelli
remembered, wandering around in a daze and drinking heavily. Another
friend, the screenwriter Charles Eastman, who lived several doors down on
Cielo Drive, said that Melcher showed up at his place wearing Voytek
Frykowski’s clothing. “I said, This is too gruesome, this is ugly, I don’t like
this.”
Melcher was living out his attachment to the place in macabre ways. “He
felt, as everybody did, that the house was sacred,” Eastman said. He loved it
so much that he’d even tried to talk Altobelli into selling it to him. Which
made me wonder: Why had he and Bergen ever moved out? Bugliosi hinted
in Helter Skelter that their departure was abrupt, but he never said why.
They left in the middle of the night, with no warning and four months left
on the lease, Altobelli told me. “Terry blamed it on Ruth [Simmons], their
housekeeper… He said they were frightened of her. That she was
domineering and a drunk. That it was the only way they knew to get rid of
her.”
Melcher and Bergen, both privileged children of Hollywood royalty, were
so frightened of a housekeeper that they’d sooner move out of a house they
loved than fire her? A power couple, scared of the maid.
Eastman was convinced that something else was to blame: Melcher “knew
that Manson was after him.” Altobelli and Melcher were always being
pestered by strange visitors, girls with funny names, he said. “My feeling was
that Rudi and Terry both had reason to be uncomfortable about Manson and
his people.” Eastman had even written about it in his journal in March 1969.
He read the entry to me:

Rudi criticizes Terry for leaving behind so many cats when he moved.
When I ask him why Terry moved, he tells me it was money, that
Terry became peeved at the rent… remembering Terry’s love of the
house and how many times, according to Rudi, that Terry offered to
buy the house from him, it seems odd to me that he moved away so
suddenly, so abruptly.

None of this had ever come out before. Other friends of Melcher agreed that
he and Bergen had “snuck out in the middle of the night” because of threats
from the Family. “Melcher was afraid of them,” one source told me. “They
said, ‘If you don’t produce our album, we’ll kill you.’” After the murders,
Melcher seemed “really guilty.” He “probably felt he should have said to [the
new tenants, Tate and Polanski]: Don’t rent the house, there are these people
who have been harassing me there.”

Altobelli gave me the number for Carole Wilson, Dennis Wilson’s ex-wife. It
was after their second separation that Dennis had taken up with Manson and
the girls, much to Carole’s chagrin. The two shared custody of their two kids.
Later, I would hear from a reliable source that Carole had had photos taken at
Dennis’s house, capturing him cavorting naked around the pool with women
from the Family. She used them to pressure Dennis, getting him to agree to
her terms in the divorce.
Carole kept careful tabs on her ex’s goings-on. “She kept a diary from the
day Dennis first met Tex Watson,” Altobelli told me. “It has everything in it,
everything on Terry—she hates him.” Meanwhile, she pursued a romance
with Jay Sebring, which I’d never seen reported before. It felt significant, in
light of the fact that her ex-husband had been intertwined with Sebring’s
killers.
It was just before the weekend when I reached Wilson. I told her that I
was exploring the possibility that her former husband and his friends had
been more involved with the Manson Family than previously reported, and I
wondered if Manson’s reach in Hollywood was further than had been known.
“Yes, it sure was,” she replied. She asked that I call her back on Monday—
we could meet for coffee.
When Monday came, though, she’d changed her mind. “I thought long
and hard over the weekend,” she said, “and I can’t talk to you.” There were a
lot of people involved, she explained—too many. “It’s a scary thing,” she
said, “and anyone who knows anything will never talk.”
I couldn’t draw her out on that. She suggested that I talk to Melcher and
Jakobson, but she wouldn’t put me in touch.
Meanwhile, I’d started to hear more sordid stuff about Melcher’s
affiliation with the Family. Bob April, a retired carpenter who’d been a fringe
member of the Family, told me with confidence that Manson “would supply
girls” for “executive parties” that Melcher threw, giving well-heeled business
types unfettered access to Manson’s girls. But what would Manson get in
return?
“That’s why everyone got killed,” April said. “He didn’t get what he
wanted.” Melcher had promised Manson a record deal “on Day Labels,” his
mother’s imprint. But Doris Day took one look at Manson “and laughed at
him and said, ‘You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to produce a
fucking record for you.’ Said it to Charlie’s face.” Melcher and Manson
“knew each other very well,” April said. “I’ve tried to get this out for years.”

The Paper Trail Begins

I was doing shoe-leather reporting on a thirty-year-old story. The memories I
heard were rife with the omissions, contradictions, and embroidery that come
with the passage of time. I would interview people and then rush to the
library to fact-check, as best I could, what they’d told me—in books about
the case, histories of Los Angeles, biographies of organized crime figures,
old news clippings, and more. But if I wanted to report this story with
veracity, I needed contemporaneous, documentary evidence: the paperwork.
When sources like Charles Eastman would mention having journals, I would
beg them to find them, often calling back repeatedly until they did. But first
and foremost, I wanted police reports and trial transcripts. The case had been
the longest and costliest in California history, and Bugliosi said that the
transcript numbered more than a million pages. Where was that? Could I
have access to it?
 The LAPD told me they’d destroyed all their investigative reports; they’d
retained some files, but they weren’t about to release them to me. How could
they have trashed their records of the most infamous case in the history of the
city? I didn’t believe it. I asked them to put it in writing, and they did, stating
in an official letter that “a thorough and proper search” produced “no
records”; all the evidence had been “destroyed.”
I turned to unofficial channels. I’d heard about a “researcher” named Bill
Nelson, an older man who was obsessed with the murders. He’d self-
published several books about the case and had a lot of original police
reports. Nelson was purportedly a pretty strange guy: he stalked former
members of the Family and relatives of the victims, trying to befriend them
so he could interview them. He’d become close to Sharon Tate’s mother,
Doris, even traveling with her to Paris to visit Roman Polanski, but they’d
had some falling-out before her death in 1992.
I looked at Nelson’s website, Mansonmurders.com. The fact that he had
one at all was still something of a novelty in 1999. Regularly updated with
accounts of his crusades, his page included an index of crime-scene photos,
police documents, and interviews, most of which were for sale.
There was also plenty to suggest his instability. A retired evangelical
minister, Nelson boasted of “a close and personal relationship” with Jesus
Christ. He bragged about having attended the “United States Secret Service
Academy,” where his design for the annual class ring was still in use. His
exposés of former Family members were vitriolic and often ad hominem.
He’d published photographs of some of their children, having stalked them at
their homes and schools.
But I had to admit that he was a thorough researcher—and I was at a loss
as to how I could come by these documents otherwise. I swallowed my pride
and sent him an email.
We met for coffee at a Denny’s in Costa Mesa one afternoon. Across the
table, Nelson looked like a retired accountant: midsixties, balding, his silver
hair neatly combed on the sides. He dressed conservatively, in a button-down
shirt and khakis. I paid him forty bucks for copies of the homicide
investigation reports, unredacted and numbering almost a hundred pages.
He’d gotten these from Earl Deemer, the cop whose interview with Billy
Doyle I discussed earlier. Deemer conducted most of the polygraphs for the
Tate investigation, and had copied all the police reports, photos, and
audiotapes related to the case. How Nelson persuaded him to part with this
stuff was a mystery: some said he bought the files, others that he stole them.
He didn’t want to tell me, that much was clear.
Deemer had since died, and what was left of his records went to Mike
McGann, a retired homicide detective who’d been the lead investigator on the
Tate team. McGann lived in Idaho now. Nelson gave me his number.
Like Ed Sanders and others, Nelson believed that certain elements of law
enforcement knew that the Tate–LaBianca murders were planned, or they
knew who was behind them. They’d been unable to act because it would’ve
exposed their secret intelligence-gathering operations. Nelson had watched
nearly every televised interview Manson had ever given; he felt that Manson
“never lies,” he just “withholds information.” But Manson would never tell
the truth about the murders—it would involve snitching, and there was no
greater transgression in a criminal’s mind.
Hearing all this at Denny’s made my head hurt, but I felt I had to indulge
Nelson. In spite of how far-fetched his theories sounded, some of them
resonated with me long after I pulled away from the restaurant that day.

Back home, I put on some coffee and pulled out the sheaf of papers I’d just
bought, feeling somewhere between eager and anxious. As explained in
Helter Skelter, the Homicide Investigation Progress Reports were essentially
internal summaries. They outlined the detectives’ various leads and efforts to
break the case, presenting the investigation in all its disarray, without
Bugliosi’s streamlining.
The thirty-three pages on the Tate murders—“First Homicide
Investigation Progress Report”—dated to the end of August 1969. Much of
them was workmanlike, describing the activities of the victims in the days
leading to their deaths, the chronology of the discovery of the bodies, the
recovery of evidence, and so on. When the investigators speculated on the
hows and whys, I sat up a bit. They focused on the possibility that Billy
Doyle, Charles Tacot, and others had initiated a vengeful massacre after
Frykowski welshed on a drug deal. The “Second Homicide Investigation
Progress Report” came six weeks later, describing the battery of polygraphs
and interrogations through which investigators concluded they hadn’t found
the killers yet.
 I’d expected to see names like Altobelli’s and Melcher’s everywhere in
the two Tate reports, but I was wrong. Melcher wasn’t mentioned once, and
Altobelli was only referenced in passing. If investigators had looked into the
possibility that the man who owned the house, or its most recent previous
occupant, had anything to do with the murders, there was no sign of their
efforts here.
As intriguing as these reports were, they were kind of a letdown—and
other reporters had already gotten them. If I wanted something new, really
new, I’d have to keep pressing. I decided to call Mike McGann, the retired
cop who lived in Idaho. If Nelson was right, he’d have a stockpile of
documents that dwarfed the collection in my hands.

“Everything in Vince Bugliosi’s book is wrong,” McGann told me on the

phone. “I was the lead investigator on the case. Bugliosi didn’t solve it.
Nobody trusted him.” McGann spoke in gruff sentences, sometimes no more
than a word or two—always a breath away from hanging up on me.
I wanted to know more, but McGann, like others close to the case,
expected to be compensated for his time. And even more so for his papers—
he had the records, he told me, but they were available only for a price. That
effectively shut down the conversation.
I kept calling McGann, who was willing to tolerate my curiosity, to a
point. I wanted to know about Melcher, Wilson, Jakobson, and Altobelli—
what had they told the cops, and when? What about Carole Wilson, and
Carole Jakobson, Gregg’s wife? McGann said he hadn’t gone through the
files in years, but he’d look, if he had a chance.
Two months later, during our sixth conversation—he still hadn’t agreed to
show me anything for free—McGann said that he had 190 written summaries
of the interviews by the Tate detectives—some were only half a page long;
most were a page or two; a few were longer. There were no interviews of
Melcher, Jakobson, Wilson, or Altobelli, but there were interviews with
Carole Jakobson and Carole Wilson. He pulled out the latter, dated August
15, 1969, and started to read a portion over the phone, but soon he stopped
and raised his voice. “Are you taping this? I’m not gonna go for that.” I
turned off the tape, but he refused to read any more. Before he totally lost
patience, I asked if he could tell me one last thing: the date of the Carole
Jakobson interview.
He leafed through the pages. “August 10,” he said. The day after the
bodies were discovered. That meant that both wives, Jakobson’s and
Wilson’s—“the two Caroles,” as Altobelli called them—had spoken to police
within a week of the murders. Why not their husbands? And why not
Melcher or Altobelli, given their close ties to the Cielo home? Where were
those interviews?

Revisiting Cielo Drive

One night, after taking Altobelli out to dinner, I drove him home, as I always
did. He’d totaled his car after our first meeting—he was certain someone had
run him off the road as a warning to stop speaking to me—and since then I’d
become his de facto chauffeur. (“What, the good car in the shop?” he’d
always say.) Our evenings together usually ran to six or eight hours, with
Altobelli requesting impromptu stops at the supermarket or at a bar for a
nightcap. We were close to Benedict Canyon that night, so I took us back to
the Valley that way.
“I used to drive this way back to Cielo,” he said, beginning to reminisce
about “the happiest period of my life.” When I asked if he’d mind if we drove
up to the house, he said, “Sure, why not?” I sensed some reluctance in his
answer. Cresting the final hill, we proceeded in silence down the narrow
road, stopping at the gated entrance to what had once been 10050 Cielo
Drive. The house had been razed in 1994; erected in its place was “Villa
Bella,” an Italianate mansion of concrete and marble behind a tall,
ostentatious gate that concealed most of it from the street.
“I want to see what number they put on my mailbox,” Rudi said, suddenly
irritated. “Where is my mailbox?” I maneuvered the car beside it. “10066,”
Altobelli said, reading the numbers. “They had it changed.” His voice
cracked. “We had such a great view,” he said, gazing from my passenger seat
at the sliver of space beyond the gate. “It’s all so cold looking now. My house
was so warm and cozy.” His voice broke again and his breathing was
shallow, like he was gasping for air.
“Let’s go,” he said after a long pause. “Back up, back up—now!” he said.
When we were already halfway down Cielo, he shouted again, “Just go!” We
drove back to his apartment in silence.
At home, with about a half dozen stray cats greeting him outside,
Altobelli perked up, kneeling down to pet each one and calling them all by
name. Inviting me in, he apologized for what had happened back at Cielo. It
was the first time he’d returned since he left ten years before. “I lived in that
house twenty-five years, four months, and thirty-eight hours,” he said. Now
he lived in a converted garage in a neighborhood known for its gang activity.
Hanging over his desk was a framed photo of the house from the
midsixties and a watercolor painting of the front gate. Also framed was a
letter from Bugliosi, commending him for his testimony at the trial. Riffling
through old snapshots on his desk, he handed me fading photographs of
celebrities, all taken at 10050 Cielo Drive. The last one was of Terry Melcher
passed out on top of the same desk Altobelli was presently seated at.
Melcher’s hand gripped an empty bottle of liquor. “Booze and pills,”
Altobelli said. The photo was taken when Melcher was staying with him at
the house after the murders.
In November of that year, when the police told Altobelli that Manson was
responsible for the murders, the first thing he did was call “the two Caroles.”
“I said because of their husbands I was stuck with all of this. I was left in the
lurch. They knew what was happening at the house. Terry was the instigator
of the whole thing.”
Altobelli seemed to be toying with the idea of letting me in on something
bigger. He did this a lot—a seemingly offhand remark would complicate his
entire portrait of the period. “Terry talked about Manson all the time,” he
said. “He thought he was wonderful. He asked me to manage him.” But
hadn’t Terry said he wanted nothing to do with him? “Terry stalked Manson.
They thought they had Jesus Christ.”
Later, when I got transcripts of the trials, I’d see that Altobelli wasn’t just
embroidering. On the stand, he’d said that Melcher, along with Wilson and
Jakobson, had “talked to me on many occasions about Mr. Manson and his
philosophy… his way of living and how groovy it was.” Tellingly, in his own
testimony, Melcher acted as if he hardly knew the man behind this groovy
philosophy. Presented with a photo of Manson, he told a grand jury, “I don’t
know him but I think I have seen him at Dennis Wilson’s house.” Later, he
revised this story, still stressing that he’d met Manson no more than three
times. In other words, even at the time, Melcher’s and Altobelli’s stories
weren’t straight.
Thinking of my talk with Mike McGann, I asked Altobelli if detectives
had interviewed him after the murders. Of course they had, he said. He even
remembered when: it had been on the day of the Tate and Sebring funerals, at
his lawyer’s office. (At the trial, he’d testified to the same thing.) Following
his lawyer’s instructions, he reminded me, he hadn’t said anything to the
police about Manson. I told Altobelli that McGann had said there was no
record of his interview. He was as baffled as I was.

“It Might Surprise You”

With McGann stonewalling me, I paid a visit to Stephen Kay, of the Los
Angeles DA’s office, thinking he might be able to point me toward more
documents. Kay had helped Bugliosi prosecute the case in 1970, joining the
trial midway through—a career-making turn for the young lawyer. In the
ensuing decades, Kay had served as the government’s most prominent voice
against Manson and the Family, appearing at their parole hearings to argue
against their release. He was, after Bugliosi, the legal world’s leading expert
on the Family.
I met Kay at his office in Long Beach. When I turned the subject to
Melcher, he volunteered something else I’d never heard.
“Manson and Watson attended a party at the Cielo house when Terry and
Candy Bergen lived there,” he said. He was confident about this: the
information first came out during the trial for Tex Watson, who’d been tried
separately from the other Family members. Kay had confirmed it with Gregg
Jakobson. He thought it was another reason that Manson had chosen the
Cielo house for the murders; when he sent Watson and the girls there, he
noted that “Tex knows the layout of the place.” And yet Melcher, in his
testimony, had said that he never once saw Watson inside his house.
“Melcher doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. You’ll never get to
talk to Melcher or Candice Bergen,” Kay told me.
Kay didn’t believe that the LAPD had really destroyed their files on the
case. For one thing, he said Bugliosi had borrowed what he needed to write
Helter Skelter and then, conveniently, never returned anything. Bugliosi had
seen earlier than anyone that the Manson trial “was going to be his meal
ticket,” Kay said. He took the ethically dubious step of installing his writing
partner, Curt Gentry, in the courtroom every day to watch the proceedings in
real time. Gentry was working on the book that would become Helter Skelter
before anyone was even convicted. The sensationalism only inflamed
Bugliosi’s hubris. At one point, he grabbed Kay’s arm in the courtroom and
said to him, “Steve, aren’t I great? Do you know anyone as great as me?”
And Bugliosi was still dining out, literally, on his Manson stories. The
case continued to earn him a handsome income in royalties and public-
speaking appearances. I was curious about those who hadn’t made out so well
—people still living in the shadow of these crimes, who’d been broken by the
tumult of the late sixties. They’d have no vested interest in preserving the
official narrative.
Through a series of Los Angeles attorneys, I tracked down Irving A.
Kanarek, Manson’s defense attorney. I’d been warned that his was a sad
story, but I wasn’t prepared for the dire straits I’d find him in.
Kanarek comes across as a ridiculous figure in Helter Skelter. Bugliosi
portrays him as an erratic, bombastic blowhard whose “obstructionist tactics”
earned him opprobrium from every corner of the legal world. The book
devotes many pages to his history of indiscretions in the courtroom. By the
available evidence, Bugliosi wasn’t exaggerating here. Kanarek really was a
reviled, difficult lawyer, and his conduct in the Manson case bore this out.
(According to legend, Manson wanted the worst trial lawyer in Los Angeles;
someone told him that Kanarek was his man.) He objected nine times during
Bugliosi’s opening statement alone. By day three he’d racked up an
impressive two hundred objections. The judge jailed him twice for contempt.
Bugliosi conceded that Kanarek could be effective, even eloquent at
moments, but this didn’t stop him from calling Kanarek, in court and in
Helter Skelter, “the Toscanini of Tedium.”
I met this Toscanini standing on the sidewalk in tony Newport Beach. It
was eighty degrees out, but he shuffled up in an oversized winter coat and
threadbare sneakers, lugging a battered briefcase held together with twine.
Newspapers and plastic bags were poking out. Short and stooped, Kanarek
had an unkempt, patchy gray beard; his hands and face were streaked with
dirt, as if he hadn’t bathed for weeks. There were sores on his body. He was
missing most of his teeth.
Once Kanarek learned I had a car, he asked me to drive him to a Barnes &
Noble, where the cashier handed him a copy of the Los Angeles Times and
sent him on his way. It was the previous day’s paper, he told me—that’s why
he didn’t have to pay for it.
Then we got lunch outside at Santa Monica Seafood, a relatively upscale
chain. Kanarek struck me as sharp, but eccentric. His explosive volume led
diners at two other tables to relocate indoors. He’d shout things like “Manson
didn’t kill anyone! He’s the one who should’ve gotten immunity!” or “All
Charlie wanted to do was screw girls! He didn’t know they were going to
murder those people!” Most of his diatribes took on Bugliosi, for whom he
had endless epithets: Liar! Cheat! Crook! Con man! Adulterer! Stalker!
Woman beater! Son of a bitch! “And worse,” he shouted, causing another
table to flee, “an indicted perjurer who used his influence to be acquitted
during his trial!”
When I asked if Kanarek was paid to defend Manson, he smiled wryly
and said that he was, but that confidentiality prevented him from revealing by
whom.
“It would be big news,” he said. “It might surprise you.” (If Kanarek had a
benefactor, another lawyer later told me, that white knight wasn’t generous—
Kanarek apparently spent most of the trial living out of his car and sleeping
in the press room at the courthouse.)
Over the ten years prior to our meeting, Kanarek had discovered his wife
was cheating on him; he’d wandered into traffic and been struck by a car;
he’d suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in a mental institution.
He’d lost his law firm, his license to practice, and his life’s savings. Now he
was living on social security at a motel in Costa Mesa, the next town over.
After lunch, I offered to drive him back. He took me up on it. But could I
take him on “a few more stops” before we parted ways?
“A few more stops” turned into two harrowing hours in my 1988 Acura.
Kanarek screamed at me for missing turns that he’d told me to take just as we
were passing them. We drove in circles around Orange County until, to my
horror, he announced that he’d decided to accompany me back to L.A.—
which meant two more hours in the car with him, during rush-hour traffic.
Almost as soon as we pulled onto the freeway, he was ranting again. When
he said again that Bugliosi was an “indicted perjurer,” I asked him to explain.
Belittling me for not having done my homework, Kanarek said that during
the Manson trial someone had leaked the rumor about Manson’s celebrity
“hit list” to a journalist named Bill Farr, who’d published it in violation of the
court’s gag order. The hit-list scoop must’ve come from one of the lawyers
on the case—they were the only ones with access to it. With the jury out of
the courtroom, the judge made the attorneys swear under oath that they
hadn’t slipped the information to Farr, who’d refused to reveal his source. All
six attorneys denied having done it. After the trial, the judge, still suspicious,
empaneled a grand jury to investigate the incident. They indicted two of the
attorneys for lying. One was Daye Shinn, Susan Atkins’s defense attorney.
The other was Bugliosi.
“Read the grand jury transcript!” Kanarek shouted. The state decided to
prosecute the case. But if Bugliosi was convicted of perjury, it would
jeopardize the verdicts in the Manson trial, and the DA’s office couldn’t
stand for that. They got the judge to dismiss the charges on a technicality—
they colluded, that is, to protect the convictions from the longest, most
expensive criminal trial in U.S. history. “It was a sweetheart deal, don’t you
see?” Kanarek shouted, his spittle spraying my face.
It wasn’t mentioned in Helter Skelter, I said. Of course it wasn’t, Kanarek
scoffed. Neither was the fact that Bugliosi “stalked his milkman” and “beat
up his mistress.” I should look up those cases, too, both of which, he said,
had been “taken care of” because of Bugliosi’s political clout. “He’s a
criminal,” he shouted, “and dangerous, too!”
I thought Kanarek was unstable, so I didn’t put much stock in his stories. I
was relieved when we got to Hollywood; I wouldn’t have to endure any more
of his delusions. As he gathered his things and got out, I started to worry
about him. It’d occurred to me that he might’ve been homeless. I offered him
some cash, but he waved it away, asking me instead to promise that I’d look
into his claims about Bugliosi. I watched him disappear into the crowd on the
low-rent end of Hollywood Boulevard. Later that year, when my relationship
with Bugliosi began to sour, I’d find that everything he said was true.

Coda: I’m Not the Oracle

I’d been sending progress reports to Premiere. The magazine’s editor in
chief, Jim Meigs, was hooked on the story—he was as invested as I was. In
the middle of May 1999, the editors agreed to extend my deadline a second
time. That meant the piece would be too late for the anniversary of the
murders, but it didn’t matter, they told me, as long as I could deliver
something big. I was relieved, at least in the short term. In the long term, I
was starting to feel the pressure of having to produce something mind-
blowing. I had to get it right—and to do that, I had to push harder on my
sources, find new ones, and, most critically, find more of the documents
generated during the investigation.
Having heard so often that Terry Melcher would never talk to me, I knew
one thing I could do to set my story apart: get Terry Melcher to talk to me.
I’d gotten his number, but I didn’t want to use it until I was sure I had some
good questions to ask him. I figured I’d only get one shot. I finally called him
in early June. He was articulate and, from the start, irritable and distrustful.
“I get so many goddamned calls about this crap from all over the world,”
he said. “I don’t know anything about this shit. Rudi [Altobelli] called me for
the first time in ten or fifteen years a few days ago and told me the story of
the bullets. I don’t know if that’s real but, you know, so what? What are you
gonna do?”
“At the time of the murders,” I asked, “did you suspect Manson?”
“I had no idea. No idea whatsoever. I used to audition three or four bands
a week. They all looked the same. They all looked like the cast of Hair.”
“How many times did you meet Manson?”
“Once, very briefly, at Dennis Wilson’s house, and the second time at the
ranch.”
“But I’ve spoken to people who claim that you knew them a lot better.”
“I really didn’t,” Melcher said.
Why had he moved out of the Cielo house so suddenly? It was “totally
ridiculous” to pin that on his fear of Manson, he said. He still blamed his
housekeeper, Ruth Simmons.
“It’s just hard to believe that someone as powerful as you would move out
of his house rather than fire the maid,” I said.
“It’s really true. I just couldn’t figure out what else to do.” Plus, his mom
had vacated their Malibu beach house, and he thought it was a good idea to
live there to prevent it from falling into disrepair.
Next I probed his friendship with Dennis Wilson. How could he dodge the
fact that both of them, plus Gregg Jakobson, should’ve suspected Manson as
soon as they learned of the murders?
 Melcher said his friendship with Wilson had dissolved around that time,
as Wilson became increasingly reticent. The rumor was that Wilson “knew
that they were killing people,” Melcher said. “He was so freaked out he just
didn’t want to live anymore. He was afraid, and he thought he should have
gone to the authorities, but he didn’t, and then the rest of it happened. So he
was in some way just tremendously guilty—now I don’t know that that’s
true…”
“And that guilt doesn’t apply to you, too?” I asked.
“I don’t think so! Christ, if they wanted to get me, all my doors were wide
open that whole summer.” After the murders, he’d heard that Wilson met
with Bugliosi and “all the DAs in the state of California in one great big
room,” and that Wilson had managed to eke out only one sentence about the
Family: “‘Well, we hung around and smoked a little pot and sang some
songs.’ Period. That was it. That was his entire statement.”
“Why would Vince settle for that?” I asked.
“I dunno, he thought he’d just put him on the stand.”
“But he didn’t put him on the stand,” I said. This was something I’d been
thinking about a lot. Dennis Wilson would’ve been a star witness, since he’d
known Manson so well and had seen his violent tendencies. If he didn’t want
to testify, Bugliosi could have subpoenaed him; he did it to force testimony
from plenty of others. Why not Wilson?
“Well, they thought he was nuts, and by that time he was,” Melcher said.
“He had a hard time separating reality from fantasy, seriously. He had
inventions. He tried to sell me once a new invention that was the size of a
cigarette box, an antigravity device. You kept it in your glove compartment,
but when you get into a traffic jam, you just turn it on and fly right over the
other cars. He really thought it worked.”
I had more questions, but I could feel him growing impatient. “I’m not the
oracle about this thing,” Melcher said. “I just know that it was an incredible
pain in the ass.”
That pain would continue. Listening back to my tape of the call, I’d
realize that I’d caught Melcher in a lie, one that implicated Bugliosi—and
gave me my best shot yet at proving that both of them were involved in a
cover-up.
 4

The Holes in Helter Skelter

Moorehouse Moves In
As my trust in Bugliosi faltered, I kept revisiting Helter Skelter, turning its
pages in search of some detail that felt forced or wrong—especially where
Terry Melcher was concerned. One day, a few sentences jumped out at me:

After Terry Melcher had moved out of the [Cielo Drive] residence, but
before the Polanskis had moved in, Gregg Jakobson had arranged for a
Dean Moorehouse to stay there for a brief period. During this time Tex
Watson had visited Moorehouse at least three, and possibly as many as
six, times.

Emphasis mine. Something about that offhand phrasing—“a Dean

Moorehouse”—raised a red flag for me.
This was the only time Moorehouse was mentioned in the book. He had
been a peripheral member of the Family. A wavering Protestant minister,
insurance salesman, and married father of three, he was living in San Jose
when he first encountered Manson, in 1967, when the ex-con was fresh out of
federal prison and hitchhiking. Moorehouse pulled over to give him a lift,
which turned into an invitation to dinner, which blossomed into a friendship
of sorts. Moorehouse, who’d strayed from his ministry and was himself on
probation for a forgery charge, was searching for something new and was
eager to discuss spirituality; Manson was eager to ogle Moorehouse’s fifteen-
year-old daughter, Ruth Ann.
Before long, Manson absconded with Ruth Ann on a trip up the California
coast, prompting her mother to report her to the police as a runaway. Dean
Moorehouse had left the marriage by then—he’d fallen under the spell of the
sixties and grown a long white beard. By March 1968, he was in trouble with
the law again, facing an arrest for contributing to the delinquency of a minor;
police had found him when they raided a home in search of marijuana. Soon
afterward, he was arrested again, this time for selling LSD. The legend is that
Manson persuaded him to try it for the first time, after which he renounced
his earthly possessions.
Moorehouse kept chasing his daughter, who’d remained with the Family;
Manson had rechristened her “Ouisch.” When Moorehouse followed them to
Dennis Wilson’s house in Pacific Palisades, Manson kneeled and kissed his
feet, launching a charm offensive that effectively ended the conflict.
Increasingly sympathetic to the Family’s philosophies, Moorehouse moved
into the back cabin and lived there rent-free in exchange for maintaining the
landscaping. Manson had converted a onetime Christian minister.
But when had Moorehouse taken up residence in the Cielo home?
Melcher had told me he had no memory of it. Bugliosi wrote that it was after
Melcher moved out, meaning in January 1969.
I found Moorehouse in the phone book and gave him a call. He was
friendly, though spacey. Now seventy-nine, he was living in northern
California under the name “Baba,” which Manson had given him. He’d had
more than four hundred LSD trips between 1967 and 1972. “When I talk to
you, I’m talking to myself,” he explained. “When you talk to me, you’re
talking to yourself.”
Be that as it may, he had a sharp recall for his time with Manson, and
what he told me didn’t vindicate Melcher or Bugliosi in the slightest. It was
impossible that he’d moved into the Cielo house in January 1969, for one
simple reason: he’d gone to prison then.
Moorehouse had been arrested on a drug charge in Ukiah, California. In
the midst of his time with the Family, he had to head back north for his trial.
“They convicted me in December of ’68,” he said. “I was due back there at
the end of December for sentencing, and then on January 3 they hauled me
off to Vacaville,” a correctional facility.
Moorehouse said he’d really lived at Cielo “off and on” throughout the
summer of ’68, when Melcher lived there. “Terry was a good friend,” he
explained, “and when I first met him at Dennis’s, he said, ‘If it’s okay with
you I’ll send my chauffeur down one of these days and have you come up to
my house.’” Melcher “took me in and showed me a bedroom and said, ‘This
is your bedroom, you can stay here anytime that you want.’ So I was staying
there off and on, whenever I felt like it.” He also confirmed a detail from Ed
Sanders’s The Family: that Melcher had let him borrow his Jaguar for the
long drive to Ukiah. “I drove the Jaguar up there with Tex Watson,” he said.
Melcher “gave it to me to use on this trip and he gave me his credit card to
use for gas and anything that happened to the car.”
I asked Moorehouse for written proof of his time in prison. With his
permission, I got a copy of his parole record from the state of California. It
showed that he entered the prison system on January 2, 1969.
So Bugliosi’s timeline was wrong, and Melcher had lied to me. I felt I had
to talk to Melcher about this, though I knew it’d anger him—he might cut me
off afterward. Still, I called him up and laid out the evidence as gingerly as I
could. Melcher wasn’t having it. He stuck to the story as Bugliosi had told it
in Helter Skelter and promptly got rid of me.
Not long after, I got a disturbing call from Rudi Altobelli, sounding more
upset and angry than I’d ever heard him. He’d been in touch with Melcher for
the first time in many years. Their conversations had left him feeling out of
the loop. In Altobelli’s eyes, the Golden Penetrators—Jakobson, Wilson,
Melcher—had always known that Manson had spent time up at the house.
But they were too scared to say it on the stand. That task fell to Altobelli,
who now felt he’d been pressured into talking about it under oath without
understanding the full story.
Once they’d started talking again, Altobelli asked Melcher about Dean
Moorehouse, with my reporting in mind. Melcher had snapped, saying he
was going to call Bugliosi. “Vince was supposed to take care of all that,” he
said, “and now it’s all resurfacing.”

Melcher’s Lies
Stephen Kay of the Los Angeles DA’s office told me to call another longtime
employee there, Sandi Gibbons. She might be sympathetic to my aims.
Before she worked for the DA, Gibbons had been a journalist, and her
coverage of the Manson trial left her deeply skeptical of Bugliosi and his
motives. She became one of several reporters who believed that Bugliosi was
corrupt, arrogant, vain, even crazy; later, when he pursued elected office, she
wrote a number of stories detailing his misconduct as a prosecutor.
I took Gibbons out to lunch and found her impressively forthright. Soft-
spoken and direct, she was certain that Bugliosi had covered up for Terry
Melcher during the trial. The two must have made some kind of deal: you
testify to this and I’ll keep you out of that. She also confirmed that Bugliosi
had stolen a bunch of the DA’s files for his book, knowing full well that it
was illegal to remove them. It bothered her that he was always portrayed as
upstanding and aboveboard—he was a snake. She could still recall the sight
of a vein throbbing in his temple—if I ever saw that vein, she warned me, it
meant that Bugliosi was about to blow his stack.
Once I’d earned her trust, she agreed to show me the DA’s Manson file. I
could make photocopies of anything I wanted, though she would have to
supervise me as I went through everything. She was under no obligation to
show me any of these documents—and, though she never said it, I was under
the impression that my visits weren’t exactly authorized.
Gibbons led me through the labyrinth of the DA’s office and unlocked a
storage room. Long, narrow, and windowless, the room accommodated a row
of cabinets with barely enough space for the two chairs that Gibbons and I
carried in. I leafed through endless folders containing police reports,
interview notes, investigation summaries, chronologies, photographs, rap
sheets, mug shots, suspect lists—and, best of all, a half dozen or more faded
legal pads of Bugliosi’s interviews with his most prized witnesses. I made
notes and set aside any documents I wanted to copy—Gibbons had to clear
them, but she approved everything at a glance. Several times she called my
attention to folders that had nothing in them, telling me that Bugliosi or Bill
Nelson had removed their contents. I spent hours in that room, returning four
times in the next few weeks and several more times in the ensuing years.
On my third visit I struck gold: a long yellow legal pad with pages of
notes scrawled in black ink, much of it crossed through but still legible. It
was an interview of one of Bugliosi’s key witnesses, Danny DeCarlo, who
testified for eight consecutive days, often under blistering cross-examination.
A biker from Venice in a gang called the Straight Satans, DeCarlo began
staying at the Spahn Ranch in the spring of ’69. He and his associates
provided a degree of security that endeared him to Manson, who’d grown
paranoid and embattled. DeCarlo’s father was in the firearms business and,
although Danny was never a full-fledged member of the Family, he soon ran
their arsenal, a cache of weapons that grew to include a submachine gun. In
exchange, he and the other bikers got access to drugs and the Family’s girls.
His testimony did a lot of heavy lifting for Bugliosi. He detailed Manson’s
plan to ignite the Helter Skelter race war; he outlined the ways Manson
dominated his followers; and he identified the weapons used in the murders.
In the crossed-out sections of Bugliosi’s notes, to my astonishment,
DeCarlo described three visits by Terry Melcher to the Manson Family
—after the murders.
I read them, reread them, and reread them again. I couldn’t quite believe
what I was seeing. I took scrupulous, word-for-word notes, in case Gibbons
looked too closely at the flagged pages and realized that they completely
upended one of the most important cases in her office’s history. Luckily, she
let me photocopy them without a second glance.
At home, I looked again. I hadn’t imagined it. In an interview on February
11, 1970, DeCarlo described Melcher’s two visits to the Spahn Ranch in late
August and early September, 1969, and his third visit to the Barker Ranch—
more than two hundred miles away—in mid-September.
According to Bugliosi’s notes, DeCarlo didn’t approach Melcher on any
of these occasions, so he didn’t know what Melcher and Manson discussed—
but he was certain, each time, that it was Melcher he saw. Bugliosi’s notes on
the two visits to the Spahn Ranch read:

[DeCarlo] released 72 hours after the bust on 8-16-69. Went back to

Venice for a few days & then went back to [Spahn] ranch. Week or
week & a half later, went up to Barker with Tex & Bruce Davis in a
flatbed truck. Manson & 4 or 5 girls left at same time in a car. Rest of
family stayed at Spahn. Between time that Danny returned to the
Ranch & time he left for Barker, definitely saw Melcher out at [Spahn]
ranch. Heard girls say, “Terry’s coming, Terry’s coming.” Melcher
drove up in a Metro truck… by himself. Melcher stayed for 3 or 4
hours.
 3 or 4 days later, saw Melcher in his same truck.

Then he writes of the third visit, which occurred in the canyon passageway to
the Family’s hideouts in Death Valley:

1½ weeks later saw Melcher with Gypsy & Brenda at bottom of Golar
Wash near Ballarat, sitting in a car with the girls. DeCarlo was with
Sadie, Tex, Manson, Bruce & Dennis (w[itness]’s child) on foot. All of
them got in Melcher’s car, everyone in the car. (Brenda had been the
driver. Melcher only a passenger. Everyone called Melcher “Terry[.]”)
Charlie took over the driver’s seat & drove to Ridgecrest & picked up
a 1959 Buick. DeCarlo & rest then drove off leaving Melcher, Manson
& Brenda in the car they had. That’s the last time W[itness] saw
Melcher.

I cross-referenced this with the trial transcripts, which I’d photocopied at the
California Court of Appeals. Pulling Melcher’s testimony from my filing
cabinet, I saw that at the grand jury hearing in December 1969, Bugliosi had
asked him whether he ever saw Manson after his May 1969 visit to the Spahn
Ranch. “No, I didn’t,” Melcher replied under oath.
During the trial, Bugliosi asked him again: “After this second occasion
that you went to the Spahn Ranch, which was a couple of days after May 18,
1969, did you ever see Mr. Manson thereafter?”
“No,” Melcher said—again under oath.
Next he was cross-examined by the defense’s Paul Fitzgerald: “Do you
recall the last time you saw Charles Manson?”
“Yeah, just a few days after May 18… at the ranch.”
Three different times on the stand, always as a witness for Bugliosi,
Melcher lied about not seeing Manson after May 1969. Next, I pulled out
Danny DeCarlo’s testimony to see if Bugliosi had ever asked him about
Melcher. It never happened.
This was a stunner, never before revealed. Without DeCarlo’s testimony,
Bugliosi said he might never have gotten his convictions. Only Linda
Kasabian, the member of the Family who testified in exchange for immunity,
spent more time on the stand.
 Clearly, this was information Bugliosi didn’t want before the jury. But
why? Was it simply because any postmurder visits by Melcher undermined
the Helter Skelter motive? Bugliosi argued that Manson chose the Cielo
house to “instill fear” in Melcher, as Susan Atkins said. But if Melcher were
with Manson after the murders, where was the fear? And, most important:
What were these additional meetings about? Maybe Melcher knew that the
Family was behind the murders but, for some reason, believed he was safe.
Was this the secret Bugliosi was hiding, and, if so, to whose benefit?
As I read the DA’s file more carefully, I found that every single thing
DeCarlo and Bugliosi had discussed that day was later repeated by DeCarlo
on the witness stand—except the descriptions of Melcher’s visits after the
murders. In his notes, Bugliosi had crossed out all of these references.
The defense should have received a copy of the DeCarlo interview.
Bugliosi was legally required to turn over all his evidence to the other side.
As soon as I could, I scheduled a lunch with the defense’s Paul Fitzgerald,
to see if he knew anything about this. We met at his favorite dim sum
restaurant downtown, near the courthouse. Fitzgerald, an ex-boxer who was
legendary in L.A. legal circles, was his usual animated self: loud, vulgar,
slapping the table to make his points, already into his second martini before
the first course arrived.
Wasting no time, I showed him the documents I’d copied at the DA’s,
trying not to sway his reaction. His mouth dropped open. “This is Vince
Bugliosi’s handwriting,” he said. “I never saw this before! Obviously [they]
didn’t want to put on this evidence.” Fitzgerald and the defense team had
paid a lot of attention to DeCarlo, thinking he might be an asset to them. “He
was not a member of the Family, had a good relationship with truth, lived at
the ranch, was an outsider—pretty straightforward guy in most ways,
credible. I liked him. He didn’t embellish anything, told it the way it was.”
That made this document all the more legitimate, in Fitzgerald’s eyes, and
more sensational. “I’m very shocked.” He argued that Bugliosi, who was
“extremely deceitful” and “the robot he claimed his defendants were,” had
written “a script for the entire trial,” getting witnesses to agree to his narrative
in advance.
I was relieved by Fitzgerald’s astonishment—it convinced me that I
wasn’t overreacting here. Wanting to eliminate any possible doubt, I tried for
months to find Danny DeCarlo himself, but he seemed to have vanished. I did
eventually track down a girlfriend of his, who told me that she’d gotten my
interview request to him—he lived mainly in Mexico these days, she said. I
never heard back from him.
I felt it was becoming nearly impossible to deny that Bugliosi had
manipulated some of his witnesses—or that he’d conspired with at least two
of his principals to conceal the facts of the case and shore up his motive. If
Melcher and DeCarlo were tainted—and if Melcher had committed outright
perjury, suborned by Bugliosi—then the veracity of the prosecutor’s entire
case, including the extraordinary hippie/race-war motive that made him a
bestselling author, was called into question.

“The Guy Is Psychotic”

As one of the biggest bands in the world, the Beach Boys employed a retinue
of managers, roadies, engineers, and gofers—I wondered if any of them had
any thoughts on Wilson and Melcher, or if they could fill in some blanks for
me. (The band’s surviving members had all declined to speak to me.) I got in
touch with John Parks, who’d been the band’s tour manager when Manson
and the Family lived at Wilson’s place. He recalled that Melcher had not only
met Manson but recorded him, too.
“Terry recorded him while we were on a fairly long tour,” Parks told me.
That was something else Melcher had expressly denied on the stand,
something hidden for all these decades. Bugliosi repeated it in his closing
statement: “He did not record Manson.”
When Melcher moved to end his professional relationship with Manson,
things took a dark turn. As Parks remembered it, Manson began calling
Melcher and unloading on him, making death threats against him “to
everybody he saw”; he was “yelling about it and stuff.” Parks could certainly
understand, he said, how those threats could’ve influenced Melcher’s
decision to move out of the Cielo house so suddenly.
After the murders, I asked, did Parks or any of his colleagues suspect
Manson? Of course, he said. “I knew that Terry had kind of fired Charlie and
stopped recording him, so my first thought was that Charlie had made a
mistake and actually got Sharon Tate instead of Terry.” One of Manson’s
girls, he explained, had already told him that the Family had murdered one of
the caretakers at the Spahn Ranch—Donald “Shorty” Shea, whose body
wasn’t found until 1977.
“You could look at these folks and see that they were totally drugged
out,” Parks said. “After one of the girls told me that they killed the caretaker,
then it got real serious for me.” Everyone in their scene suspected Manson
right away, he said, even though it took the LAPD nearly four months to
bring him to justice. “I have no idea why they didn’t arrest him right away
because to me it was pretty obvious.” The Hollywood community knew that
the Beach Boys had been wrapped up in Manson’s world, and it turned them
into pariahs, for a time; nightclubs where they’d once been welcomed were
suddenly turning them away. “We couldn’t go out because people didn’t
want us at their place,” Parks said.
“So you’re saying a huge community of people knew before the world did
that Charles Manson committed these murders?”
“Yeah.”
Parks went on to say something even more dizzying: he was positive that
the FBI had sent agents to the Beach Boys’ office soon after the murders.
“They were monitoring our phones, because they thought there was some
connection with those guys,” he said. “They were sitting in my office picking
up my telephone… I’m sure they had the phones tapped, but they weren’t
sharing information with us.” He told the FBI about Manson “early on,” but
they didn’t seem to act on his tip. “I didn’t know why they weren’t doing
anything, and everybody else was just trying to stay out of the situation. For
the Beach Boys, we didn’t want that kind of publicity. And neither did
anybody else.”
Steve Despar, the Beach Boys’ recording engineer, remembered the
ordeal that Manson had put him through during the recording sessions, when
he’d show up with “about twelve girls, many underage, quiet, in a stupor.”
The group smelled so foul that the studio’s management, at the behest of
Brian Wilson’s wife, soon “installed a sanitary bathroom seat.” In the control
room, Manson, reeking, would “pull out a knife and clean his fingernails,
wave it around and gesture.” After three sessions, Despar was fed up. He
called the Beach Boys manager and said, “I refuse to be alone with him. The
guy is psychotic and scares the hell out of me.” Despar emphasized, “He was
after Melcher… Melcher was not out of the picture at this point. He was part
of the project. When I was recording Charles Manson, it was for Dennis and
Terry Melcher.”

“For a Layperson”
Melcher would never admit that, and I didn’t want to talk to him again until
I’d done my due diligence. Fortunately, in the archives of the L.A. County
Sheriff’s Office (LASO), I soon stumbled on further proof that Melcher had
visited Manson after the murders.
LASO had records of an interview with Paul Watkins, another key
member of the Family who’d testified against Manson. He, too, saw Melcher
at the Spahn Ranch, around the same time as Danny DeCarlo had—the first
week of September 1969. What he told the unnamed interviewer was
shocking to me:

Melcher was on acid. Was on his knees. Asked Manson to forgive him.
Terry Melcher failed to keep an appointment. Called him a pig. They
are all little piggies. Helter Skelter meant for everyone to die. Charlie
gave Gregg [Jakobson] a 45 slug and said give Dennis [Wilson] this
and tell him I have another one for him.

This was even more explosive than the files from the DA, I realized. Not only
did it suggest that Melcher had some bizarre debt to Manson—it opened up
Watkins to accusations of perjury. Just like DeCarlo, Watkins had omitted
these details from his testimony. He made no mention of having seen
Melcher at the Spahn Ranch in early September 1969—much less having
seen him on acid, begging for forgiveness.
As much as the Watkins interview buttressed my case for a cover-up, it
brought a host of new questions. Why did Melcher need Manson’s
forgiveness? Did he know that it was he who was supposed to die that night
—had Manson instilled much more fear in him than anyone had ever known?
And what had compelled Bugliosi to believe that he could hide the true extent
of their relationship? I wondered how many other stories like this had been
kept secret. Now I felt I had a stronger shot at grabbing Melcher’s attention,
maybe even at getting him to concede that he’d lied.
First, though, I had to contend with Bugliosi. As the summer faded into
autumn in the first year of my reporting, I had a hunch that Vince was
keeping close tabs on me, even monitoring my progress, in a way. Altobelli
had suggested that Vince was always asking about me, trying to undermine
my credibility; he thought I was only masquerading as a magazine journalist.
When I heard about Melcher’s puzzling remark—“Vince was supposed to
take care of all that”—I’d made a conscious decision to distance myself from
Bugliosi. Although we’d once spoken on an almost weekly basis, I hadn’t
been in touch with him since June. One day in October I came home to find
that he’d left a message on my machine. “I need to talk to you about
something,” he said, sounding unusually serious. This was it, I thought. I set
up my tape recorder and called him back.
“How you doing, buddy?” he answered, sounding manic. “Listen, are you
still working on this thing?” Then he added: “Someone, I don’t remember
who, called me… If there’s something about my handling of the case—
anything at all—that you had a question about, I would appreciate if you
would call me to get my view on it… I think I did a fairly good job, and I
can’t think of things that I would do differently. But for a layperson, they
may look at it and say, He should not have done this, this is improper or what
have you—and I’d like to at least be heard.”
I told him I would absolutely give him a chance to be heard, and that I
did, in fact, have some questions—but I didn’t have them ready yet.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah, call me, because there may be a justification or
reason why I did something that, as a layperson, you would not know.”
Now I was positive that he had some notion of what I’d been researching,
whom I’d been talking to. I mentioned that I’d made halting progress on the
piece, which was still expected for Premiere, even if it was running behind
schedule. The Melcher angle, I said—wondering if he’d take the bait—had
been so impossible to get.
“Were you ever able to get in touch with Terry?” he asked.
I said I was.
“Oh, you have talked to him? You got him on the phone?” Vince’s
surprise was evident, but I couldn’t tell if it was feigned or not. I felt like he
was hoping to keep me talking, to feel out my progress. I got off the phone as
soon as I could.
I didn’t hear from him again until December, just a few days before
Christmas, when he left a phone message asking for my address. He said he
wanted to send me a CD of some songs by Manson that “a guy playing
Manson in a movie” had given him. When I didn’t return the call, he left
another message the next day to make sure I understood that the music was
“very rare and not otherwise available.” I didn’t return that call, either, but
the same night I got a call from Altobelli, who said that Vince had called him
twice that day “wanting to know what you’re doing.” Their second
conversation ended in “a shouting match,” Altobelli said, after he started
asking Bugliosi about some of the information I’d shared over the previous
months.
That was enough for me. I wouldn’t speak to Vince again for seven years.

On Melcher’s Roof
When my piece for Premiere was more than a year late, I knew I had to talk
to Melcher again, and to put my full weight on him. I wanted this
conversation to bring my reporting to a close. Then I could file my piece,
finally.
Months of constant interviewing had honed my strategy. If I could get
someone on the phone in a talkative mood, I’d suggest an in-person meeting
that same day, which would minimize the chance that they’d get cold feet. I’d
be ready to go at a moment’s notice: showered and dressed, with notes,
questions, documents, and tape recorders in my bag by the door. Such was
the case on the day I phoned Melcher—July 3, 2000. Surprisingly, he picked
up; even more surprisingly, I caught him in a lively frame of mind; most
surprising of all, he said he’d meet me on the roof of his apartment building
in fifteen minutes.
I bolted out the door and drove over to his high-rise on Ocean Avenue, in
Santa Monica, dwelling all the while on his choice of venue: his rooftop? I
imagined some kind of bleak, desolate place, the sun beating down on us as
ventilation fans whirred. Instead, I bounded into his lobby and took the
elevator up to find a rooftop lounge with a bar, a pool, and a kingly view of
the Santa Monica Bay.
Melcher lived in one of the penthouse suites, and there he was, sitting on a
couch with a drink in his hand. Though it was a gorgeous day and anyone in
these luxury suites could access the roof lounge, we were alone up there. He
was wearing a gold shirt and aviator glasses that he didn’t take off until
midway through our conversation. When I arrived, he disappeared into his
kitchen to leave his drink there. I got the sense it wasn’t the first he’d had.
Considering how much time and energy I’d devoted to Melcher, I
couldn’t believe I’d never laid eyes on him before. He had a pronounced
abdomen but skinny legs. His long, wispy, blond-gray hair fell over his ears
and across his forehead. His face was swollen and wet, with high
cheekbones; his eyes, when the sunglasses came off, were puffy, and he
stared at me unsmilingly. Around the mouth and chin, he resembled his
mother, Doris Day. And he spoke in a kind of high-pitched, halting half-
whisper.
We sat in the shade, where I took my papers out and told him I had reason
to believe he’d visited the Spahn and Barker Ranches after the murders, and
had spent time with Manson.
“The only reason I know the Barker Ranch name is because that’s where
they arrested them and caught all those people,” he said. “Isn’t that right?
Someplace out in the middle of the Mojave Desert?”
“Dennis and Gregg had been there,” I said.
“Well, I hadn’t. I had no idea where the Barker Ranch was. None.”
I started to read from Bugliosi’s interview with Danny DeCarlo, the one
I’d gotten from the DA’s office. “‘Definitely saw Melcher out at ranch. Heard
girls say, “Terry’s coming, Terry’s coming.” Melcher drove up in a Metro
truck similar to a bread or milk truck…’”
“It was actually a Mercedes Benz convertible.”
“This is after the murders,” I emphasized. “Between August 16 and the
second week of September. Do you recall that?” I watched the frustration
come over him as I explained.
“Look,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Obviously this is
something that continues to haunt me whether I’d like it to or not, and I’m
not exactly like a convicted felon running around doing bad things. But the
only guy to talk to and ask questions about for me is Bugliosi. Vince Bugliosi
knows everything that I had to do with this, everything!”
“I wanted to hear it from you first before I went to him,” I said.
“Well, you know, if you want to fuck with us and get something from him
and something from me, you can do that, too, in which case I’ll put four law
firms on Premiere magazine.”
 I was floored. We’d barely begun, and already he was threatening to sue.
The threats, as I was beginning to understand by then, were almost always a
good thing. They didn’t happen unless you were onto something. “I just want
the truth, Terry,” I said. “Can I just finish reading from this?”
“You certainly may, Tom. I have never misrepresented once what
happened in this situation. I had nothing to do with this situation other than
the fact that I was a great big, famous record producer at the time, period.”
Pressing ahead, I pulled out the LASO files, and soon reached the most
damning lines: “Melcher was on acid, on his knees.”
“Not true!” he shouted. “Not real! Hey, I was a Columbia Records
producer! I was the biggest Columbia Records producer on the West Coast! I
had the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, all right? I was selling tonnage
of product. I was simply looking at acts… I went out there to the Spahn
Ranch, met them, I am awfully goddamned lucky to have gotten out of there
alive.” He adamantly refuted the idea that he’d been to the Spahn Ranch more
than the two times he’d testified to at trial, both in May 1969.
“Rudi [Altobelli] is one of my sources,” I said. “He called you and you
said, ‘Vince was supposed to take care of all that and now it’s all
resurfacing.’”
“No, I never told Rudi that… I like Rudi, we were friends, I hope there’s
no rancor.” He scoffed and crossed his arms. “And Christ, what are you
doing a thing like this for?”
“I’m just trying to get the truth about this story, and when I see this stuff
from the DA’s files and combined with that comment from Rudi, which
implies that Vince protected you—”
“Vince never protected me. Vince never protected anybody. Rudi was the
guy—” But he cut himself off and sighed. “I got to use the men’s room,” he
said, walking back toward his place.
He came back having collected himself. “I’m going to digress for a
while,” he said, removing his sunglasses. “First of all, if you want my record
as it relates to this, it is so squeaky clean—all I did was audition people for
Columbia Records. Some of them I signed. Some of them I didn’t sign. I
never once spent one second with these girls, although at one point, when
they were in jail, like twenty-five of them said that I was the father of all their
children, and that put me in bed for about three weeks. I mean, they were so
ugly. To get the DA’s department off my ass in that one, I took Michelle
Phillips”—his girlfriend at the time, during the trial—“down to headquarters
and I said, ‘This is my girlfriend, do you think I’d want to be with any of
these…’” He gestured, implying Manson’s “ugly” girls. “And they said,
probably not.”
I reminded him of what Altobelli had said: “On the stand, he said that you
wanted him to manage Manson.”
“That is total insanity… This is really my book, okay?… You know what?
If I’m going to do this with you, then we should write this book together.” It
was almost a bargaining chip, an under-the-table deal. I thought Melcher
wanted me to read between the lines—why say all these nasty things about
me in a silly little magazine piece when I can cut you in on the earnings from
my book? He proposed that I coauthor his memoirs. People had been begging
him for years to write a book. He was the “only American to produce the
Beatles!” He seemed to suggest that I’d be a fool not to jump at his offer,
even though I was the same writer who believed he’d been lying about one of
the most transformative events of his life.
“I need to do this story, and I need the truth,” I said. “You were a
powerful guy—”
“Was? Am.” He asked, “Is your interest in this purely journalistic or is it
just to fuck someone over?”
I stressed, again, that I had no desire to smear him; I just wanted to know
why these files told such a strikingly different story from the one Bugliosi
had pursued.
“Dennis Wilson was the only one that really knew what was going on,”
Melcher said. “He’s talked about it in various ways that sounds like he knew
all about it, he was there.” Melcher seemed put upon by the effort of
discussing Manson, as if it were a minor nuisance that he’d long ago put
behind him. “After a while you get used to it, it’s a terrible thing to say, but
you kind of get used to it.” And then, once more, he acted like he was ready
to cut a deal. “So what’s the best thing that you and I can do about it?”
The interview suddenly had the air of a tense negotiation. “There has to be
an explanation for this,” I said, turning the conversation back to the papers
from the DA and LASO. “Why was this in the files? How was it suppressed,
why? If they were lying”—DeCarlo and Watkins, I meant—“how did they
testify to other significant factors?”
“I have no idea where that second ranch is,” Melcher said. “I have no idea
in the world! It could be in Kuwait.” He rose to get a bottle of white wine,
half-full, and poured himself a drink. “You’re welcome to share that, by the
way,” he said. He’d brought only one glass.
“If it is true that you were at the ranch after the murders, it undermines the
entire Helter Skelter motive for the prosecution,” I said.
“I’m curious why you would want to talk to me about this,” he said,
almost muttering: “out to crucify me…”
“Because nobody’s ever had this information that I have, about you at the
ranch afterward.”
At that point, Melcher dropped his lawyer’s name. “Joe Lavely. Do you
know who he is? He can shut down everything. Networks, magazines.
Anything.” He asked me to fax him a draft of my story. I told him I couldn’t
do that.
Melcher leaned forward. “You know I like you,” he said, looking me in
the eye. “If I didn’t like you, I’d take your briefcase and throw it off the
balcony. Okay? I happen to like you, so I hope you’ll be fair.”
“That sounds like a threat,” I said. “But I will be fair with you.”
“That’s not a threat, it’s the truth.”
It was the truth, of course, that Melcher had the means to follow through.
He could try to sue me or Premiere. He could leap up and toss my papers—
all photocopies—off his rooftop. But I wondered what he would really do. As
unnerving as it was to sit across from him, getting no admissions from him
whatsoever, I stayed calm by wondering what form his antagonism could
possibly take, considering I was confident I had solid reporting on him.
“I know you have money, resources, powerful lawyers,” I said, aware that
the interview was next to over. “But that’s not going to stop me from writing
my story, and there is no way you can shut it down with all of that, because it
is the truth, and you can’t shut down the truth, Terry.”
And soon I was in the elevator and on the ground again, looking up at his
building in the sun. I felt the mix of exhilaration and frustration that often
followed my biggest interviews, when I felt I’d made headway in some
unpredictable direction. No, I hadn’t cracked Melcher, but I had his bizarre
behavior to report, his threats, his offer that I coauthor his life story, and,
perhaps most important, the first on-the-record answers about Charles
Manson he’d given since 1974. What I still didn’t know was when, or how,
all of this was going to end.
Coda: “They Used to Call Me an Angel”
I never saw or spoke to Melcher again. He died in 2004, at age sixty-two, of
cancer. To my knowledge, he never gave another interview about Manson or
wrote his memoirs.
His death foreclosed the possibility of learning so much about the Family:
about their true motivations for the murders, their ties to the Hollywood elite,
and their ability to go undiscovered for so many months after their grisly
crimes. I remain convinced that Melcher had more of the answers than he let
on, and that he cast himself as a bit player in Manson’s world when his role
was much larger. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain the discrepancies in
his story to my satisfaction.
After my confrontation with him that day, I turned my attention elsewhere
—though even from a remove, Melcher and his cohort continued to pop up in
my reporting. And because of how tantalizingly close I felt I’d been to
unearthing something, I couldn’t stop from ruminating on some of the
questions I’d had about him. Why had he moved out of 10050 Cielo Drive?
Did he ever record Manson? What was his true relationship with Tex Watson
and Dean Moorehouse? Most of all, was it possible he could have prevented
the murders at the house through some kind of intervention with Manson, or
by warning the victims—or just by calling the police?
With Melcher and Dennis Wilson both deceased, you might be
wondering: Why not get some answers from that third and final Golden
Penetrator, Gregg Jakobson? I did end up finding him. Actually, we spoke
well before I ever got to Melcher, in the first months of my reporting—before
I knew my way around the story well enough to push back on some of his
claims.
In a sense, Jakobson is more mysterious than Melcher or Wilson. Unlike
those two, he didn’t come from privilege. An orphan, he was adopted by the
chief of police in St. Paul, Minnesota; when he was twelve, his adoptive
father died, and he moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he was
soon rubbing elbows with the sons and daughters of celebrities. He parlayed
these connections into a career on the periphery of Hollywood, taking gigs as
a stuntman, an actor, and a talent scout, and racking up a few arrests along
the way. But it was his past that attracted Manson to him. As an orphan,
Jakobson held a special place in the Family’s mythology. Manson loathed the
influence of parents, and Jakobson, despite his adopted family, was held up
as a parentless icon. “They used to call me an angel,” Jakobson told me,
“because I came into the world without parents.”
Dennis Wilson’s biographer John Stebbins believed Jakobson “testified to
protect Wilson from having to do the same.” Wilson gave Jakobson cowriting
credits—and therefore a steady stream of royalties—on many of his songs,
even though Jakobson “had no idea what he was doing” in the studio, where
it seemed he “didn’t know a guitar string from a piano key.”
In 1999, Jakobson wanted one hundred bucks an hour to talk to me. When
I made it clear that I wouldn’t pay him, he claimed that the passage of thirty
years had fogged up his memory. Jakobson contradicted himself with
nonchalance. Consider the theft of the green spyglass, for instance. This was
a huge point in the trial: Jakobson testified that Manson had called him before
the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass” at his new address
in Malibu. When Jakobson said yes, Manson responded, “He doesn’t
anymore.” This proved that Manson knew that Melcher had moved out of the
Cielo house. And yet, speaking to me, Jakobson dismissed the whole episode.
“I don’t know how much of that is legend and how much of it is true,” he
said about something he’d testified to under oath. “I think there was a good
chance that [Manson] didn’t know that Melcher had even moved.” I’ve found
dozens of discrepancies between his statements on the stand and his
statements to me.
Sometimes, sorting through old news items, I’ll chance upon something
that reminds me of how much remains unsaid here. I found a November 1970
bulletin from the Associated Press, headlined, “Defendant in Tate Trial Well
Liked.” It noted the curious affection that Melcher and Jakobson held for the
man who’d brought so much scrutiny on them. “Jakobson frequently smiled
at Manson,” the report noted, “who, upon leaving the courtroom one day,
said to Jakobson, ‘Come see me.’” What are we supposed to make of that
friendliness, and of the insider knowledge it augurs? Why would Manson
have wanted to commune with someone who’d just testified against him in a
case that carried the death penalty? Manson’s lawyer Irving Kanarek chose
not to cross-examine Terry Melcher. He infuriated the judge by saying that
Manson and Melcher were “still good friends,” and that he wanted to “thank
Mr. Melcher for his presence”—comments that earned him admonishment
from the court, and were ordered stricken from the record.
Jakobson told me that he never really took Manson all that seriously.
“There was so much bullshit,” he said. “I never tried to make sense out of it. I
didn’t care.” He left open the possibility that there’d been some scheming to
make the story more presentable at trial. “I wonder if Bugliosi was doing
Melcher a favor,” he said to me, “or there was some reciprocity there…
honest to God, I have no knowledge of it.” He was a little more willing to
talk about Melcher’s attraction to the girls in the Family. “He might have
been carrying on with one of the girls,” he told me, though Melcher had
fiercely denied exactly that. “I had a soft spot for little Ruth Ann
Moorehouse. He might have, too. She was the little gem of the group. Little
sweet fifteen, sixteen.” Likewise, Jeff Guinn’s 2013 book Manson includes
several references to Melcher’s having sex with Ruth Ann Moorehouse, all
sourced to Jakobson.
Melcher always policed his image in regards to Manson, especially when
others implied or wrote outright that he’d slept with the girls. Nothing made
him more litigious. And he often subjected writers to the same kinds of legal
threats he’d made to me. Barney Hoskyns, the author of the aforementioned
Waiting for the Sun, told me that Melcher’s lawyers had ordered his publisher
to pulp all existing copies of the first edition, and to delete “all and any
references to Terry Melcher in connection with ‘Manson’s girls’ from any
future editions.” His publisher complied.
But the most glaring example of Melcher’s interventions came from
Stephen Kay, the attorney in the Los Angeles DA’s office who’d helped
Bugliosi prosecute the case. He told me that Melcher’s lawyer approached
him in the mid-1990s, requesting that he sign an official document certifying
that Melcher’s connections with the Family didn’t extend beyond his three
occasions in Manson’s presence: once at Wilson’s house, twice at the Spahn
Ranch. Kay signed it, though he said he hadn’t retained a copy. At the time,
he hadn’t seen the documents I had detailing Melcher’s relationship with the
Family.

One of the most bewildering parts of reporting on a case like this is figuring
out how much weight to give your findings. I spent years wondering if I was
crazy to think that Terry Melcher was so important, indicative of some
hollowness in Bugliosi’s motive.
Years later, in 2005, it was Kay who gave me a semblance of vindication.
I met with him again and showed him the notes I’d found in Bugliosi’s hand.
By that point, my obsession with the case had become a full-blown mania:
my reporting had taken over my entire life, and I often wondered if there
would be any end to it, any form of closure or consequence. I can still
remember sitting in Kay’s Compton office and watching him shake his head
as he looked over my photocopies.
“I do not believe that Terry Melcher was at the Spahn Ranch after the
murders. I just don’t believe that,” he said. “If he was there at the Spahn
Ranch, Manson would have harmed him, because Manson was very upset.”
But with the sheaf of papers in front of him, and the handwriting
undeniably belonging to Bugliosi, Kay slumped in his chair. “I am shocked,”
he said. “I am just shocked.” He was planning his retirement then, having
boasted that he was leaving office “sixty and zero”: sixty court appearances
opposite Family members, without a single one of them earning parole. With
the evidence of Bugliosi’s corruption in his hands, Kay said, “This throws a
different light on everything… I just don’t know what to believe now.” He
went on: “This is egregious conduct if this happened. All of this should have
been turned over to the defense.”
The fact that Paul Watkins and Danny DeCarlo told similar stories seemed
to indicate that both men were telling the truth, impeaching Melcher’s
testimony and, with it, much of the basis for the Helter Skelter motive.
Looking at the heavy lines that Vince had drawn through the most damning
parts of the interviews, Kay said, “I just don’t understand the cross-outs… it
just doesn’t make any sense.”
His voice trailing off, he asked the question I’d so often asked myself. “If
Vince was covering this stuff up,” he said, “if he changed this, what else did
he change?”
I asked Kay whether this evidence would be enough to overturn the
verdicts against Manson and the Family. Yes, he conceded—it could get
them new trials, and it would mean big trouble for Bugliosi. If he were found
guilty of suborning perjury, he would technically be eligible for the death
penalty, since that was the maximum possible sentence in the Manson case.
I wasn’t on some crusade to prove Manson innocent, or to impugn
Bugliosi’s name. I just wanted to find out what really happened. Kay, sitting
across from me that day, seemed to be struggling with the same thing.
Neither of us could grasp why Bugliosi had covered this up, or how Melcher
and his friends had, for so many years, consigned the truth to the realm of
rumor and hearsay.
I felt a familiar conflict welling up inside me. Part of me was convinced
that if I kept pushing, if I were more tenacious and vigilant and hard-nosed
than ever before, I could crack this case and figure it all out. The other part of
me feared that I was too late. Powerful interests had aligned themselves
against the truth.
 5

Amnesia at the L.A. County Sheriff’s

Office

“Keep Going”
The thirtieth anniversary of the Tate–LaBianca murders passed with no story,
at least not in Premiere. That didn’t worry me—not at first, anyway. I knew
that Jim Meigs, the magazine’s editor in chief, shared my obsession. He
started leaving the due date blank on the contracts I had to sign every month:
a reporter’s dream come true, until it wasn’t.
Within a year, I’d interviewed more than five hundred people: movie-
industry players, friends and relatives of the victims, witnesses, journalists,
cops, attorneys, judges, suspects, and hangers-on. My one-bedroom
apartment in Venice had become a hoarder’s nest of Manson ephemera. I
installed shelves above my desk to house a growing collection of books and
binders—I bought the thickest ones I could find—with labels like “News
Clips—1967–1969,” “Timelines,” “Trial Transcripts,” “Questions—
Witnesses,” and so on. They multiplied as if they were breeding. When my
friends visited, they’d stop in their tracks upon entering my apartment and
cast worried glances my way. Above my computer was a whiteboard with
“MANSON” circled in the center. Springing from his name like a
psychedelic spiderweb were lines in erasable ink, leading to associates of the
Family who’d never been publicly identified before, Hollywood drug dealers,
and other names that had seldom been uttered in three decades.
I tried to interview as many people as I could in a day, so my workdays
became endless. I was always behind, needing to hop in my battered Acura to
drive to the Valley or San Diego or Santa Barbara for an interview at a
moment’s notice. When I wasn’t interviewing, I was researching, arranging
my binders, or working the phones to set up more interviews. I’d basically
adopted my neighbor’s German shepherd, Bully, who spent day and night at
my house; I sometimes worried my files could be stolen, and I felt safer with
the dog by my side.
My magazine assignment was coming to feel like a vocation. Manson and
the theories surrounding him were always on my mind, whether I was alone
or with friends—though, in the hopes of wrapping up the story, I was alone
much of the time. Since Meigs was authorizing my extensions, he would visit
me on trips to L.A. We’d sit on the floor as I spread out documents for him to
examine, kicking around various explanations for the discrepancies in the
case. He was a reassuring presence; the things that seemed suspicious to me
bothered him, too. As long as I had his confidence, I could keep putting in
long hours. At that point, the end—the break, the big scoop—seemed just
around the corner. Looking from a document to a name on my whiteboard,
Jim would nod and say, “Yes, yes—I see. Good. Keep going.” And I did.

“Political Piggy”
The Tate–LaBianca murders are etched into the public imagination. They are,
in casual conversation, what people mean when they say “the Manson
murders”: two nights of unhinged bloodshed that came out of nowhere.
It’s too often forgotten that the Family had taken another life by then.
Gary Hinman, thirty-four, lived in a secluded house in Topanga Canyon, a
hippie community about fifteen miles south of the Spahn Ranch. A soft-
spoken Buddhist and music teacher, Hinman had treated Manson and his
followers with a dignity that few afforded them. He hosted members of the
Family for long stays in his home, and he was generous when they needed
food or money.
In July 1969, the increasingly agitated Manson was convinced that
Hinman had just come into an inheritance of some twenty thousand dollars.
Seeing green, he ordered three of his followers—Bobby Beausoleil, Mary
Brunner, and Susan Atkins, the last of whom would later participate in the
Tate–LaBianca murders—to seize Hinman’s money by any means necessary.
The three showed up at Hinman’s on July 25. Manson was wrong, he said,
there was no inheritance, but they refused to take him at his word. They tied
him up and ransacked the place, but there was no cash to be found. Manson
decided to see for himself, coming over with Bruce Davis, another Family
member. But even Manson couldn’t extract anything from Hinman. Finally,
incensed, Manson drew a saber from a sheath on his belt and cut Hinman’s
ear in half. He and Davis left the house, but he told Beausoleil and the girls to
stay until they found the money.
For two days, they battered and tortured Hinman, who insisted he had no
inheritance. (They also sewed up his severed ear using dental floss.) By day
three, Manson had had enough—he wanted Hinman dead. Over the phone, he
ordered his followers to take care of it. Beausoleil tied Hinman up and
stabbed him at least four times. As Hinman incanted a Buddhist prayer,
Atkins and Brunner took turns holding a pillow over his face until he stopped
breathing. Just as Manson would do in the Tate–LaBianca murders, he told
his followers to leave signs implicating the Black Panthers. They dipped a rag
in Hinman’s blood and smeared the words “political piggy” on the living
room wall, surrounding it with bloody paw prints.
Some of Hinman’s friends grew concerned. On July 31, not having heard
from him in six days, they drove over to check on him. They found his body
and called the cops.
Charles Guenther and Paul Whiteley, homicide detectives from the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, went to investigate. They spent five days
searching the crime scene for evidence and conducting interviews. Although
no one had seen or spoken to Hinman in the days before his body was
discovered, it seemed that a woman had been in his house answering the
phone during his captivity. At one point, when a friend of Hinman stopped
by, she’d even answered his front door, holding a candle and explaining in a
flimsy British accent that Hinman had gone to Colorado to see his parents.
The detectives issued an all-points bulletin for two vehicles missing from
Hinman’s driveway: a Fiat station wagon and a VW microbus. Seven days
after the body was discovered, the Fiat turned up on the side of a highway in
San Luis Obispo, 189 miles north of L.A. Inside was Bobby Beausoleil, fast
asleep. A state trooper took him into custody, and Guenther and Whiteley
hurried to question him.
 Beausoleil had concocted a story that blamed the Black Panthers for the
murder, but he kept muddling the details. First he said that he hadn’t known
Hinman at all; he’d bought the Fiat from a Black Panther a few days earlier.
When the police told him they’d found the murder weapon in the Fiat’s tire
well, he half-confessed: sure, he’d been in Hinman’s home, but he hadn’t
killed the man. He and two women, neither of whom he would identify, had
arrived at the house to find Hinman bloodied and beaten, complaining that a
group of Black Panthers had robbed him. They’d stayed and nursed Hinman
back to health. As a sign of gratitude, Hinman gave them the Fiat. The
murder, Beausoleil speculated, must have occurred after he and the girls left
the house—maybe the Panthers had returned seeking more money. So why
was the knife in his car? He couldn’t explain. Nor could he say why he’d
suddenly changed his story.
Guenther and Whiteley were confident they’d found their man. They
charged Beausoleil with first-degree murder and booked him into the Los
Angeles County jail on August 7. But they knew he had at least one
accomplice: the girl who answered the phone and front door during Hinman’s
captivity.
The next day, according to Bugliosi’s narrative, Manson decided it was
time to kick off Helter Skelter, his all-out race war. He ordered the Tate–
LaBianca murders, making sure, again, that his followers left signs at the
crime scenes implicating the Black Panthers.
Anyone might wonder: How could the police fail to connect Hinman’s
murder to the Tate–LaBianca killings, given their macabre similarities? It’s a
good question—and the official answer, even when I first read it in Helter
Skelter, stretched credulity. Part of the problem was a simple matter of
jurisdiction. The Hinman murder occurred outside the city limits of Los
Angeles, so it was an L.A. County Sheriff’s (LASO) case; the Tate–LaBianca
murders were handled by the LAPD. The two police forces didn’t talk as
much as you might expect. In fact, as Bugliosi tells it, it was their failure to
communicate that led them to overlook Manson in the first place.
By August 10, the day after the LaBiancas had been murdered, Guenther
and Whiteley had connected Hinman’s murder to Manson. They knew Bobby
Beausoleil had spent time at the Spahn Ranch, living with a strange group
under the control of an ex-con named Charlie. And, according to Bugliosi,
the two detectives did the right thing: they rushed to the county morgue,
where autopsies of the Cielo Drive murder victims were under way, and they
reported their suspicions to the LAPD. A sergeant named Jess Buckles heard
them out. Wasn’t it curious, they said, that both the Hinman and Tate
murders involved brutal stabbings, plus some iteration of the word “Pig”
smeared in the victims’ blood near their bodies? They explained that their
suspect, Beausoleil, had been living out at a disused movie ranch with a band
of hippies led by a guy who claimed to be Jesus Christ.
Their theory fell on deaf ears. Sergeant Buckles didn’t see the connection
—especially not if hippies were involved. He told the LASO detectives that
they were barking up the wrong tree; the LAPD was already pretty sure that
the Tate murders were a drug deal gone awry.
And so, Bugliosi argued, the LASO lead withered on the vine, and shoddy
police work kept the Manson Family at large for months longer than they
otherwise would’ve been. They weren’t taken into custody until a pair of
raids nabbed them on October 10 and 12. Even then, their arrest was for
stolen vehicles: the police wouldn’t connect them to Tate–LaBianca for more
than another month. While they were at large, Manson and the Family may
have killed dozens more people, Bugliosi speculated.
In the official narrative, Manson had a lot of sheer dumb luck. Not only
did he evade these early suspicions against him—he also survived, ostensibly
on a technicality, the largest police raid in the history of California.

On August 16, 1969, LASO descended on the Spahn Ranch en masse. Just
past six in the morning, as the sun was creeping up and most everyone was
still asleep, more than one hundred officers swarmed the property, led by the
organization’s elite SWAT team. Armed with handguns, AR-15 rifles, and
tear gas, they were assisted by two helicopters, numerous ATVs, and a fleet
of some thirty-five squad cars. Surrounding the ranch’s two hundred acres,
they descended from five prearranged outposts with a show of force the likes
of which no one in LASO had ever seen before. They arrested everyone in
the Family—twenty-seven adults and seven juveniles. They confiscated
seven stolen cars and a vast cache of weapons, including an automatic pistol
and a submachine gun. One officer praised the raid’s military precision,
telling me, “It was the most flawlessly executed operation I’d ever been
involved in.”
 The raid had nothing to do with the murders. In the preceding weeks,
deputies had been keeping the ranch under close surveillance, perhaps even
sending undercover agents to investigate. They suspected that Manson was
running an auto-theft ring out of Spahn, stealing Volkswagens and converting
them into dune buggies.
It would seem like a coup, wouldn’t it? Even if they had no knowledge of
the murders, sheriffs had just picked up Manson and everyone involved with
him on suspicion of crimes that were damning in their own right. Had the
Family been formally charged, they would’ve been sitting in jail already
when the cops realized they were behind the killings.
But the Family wasn’t charged. Despite the preponderance of evidence—
the cars, the guns, the numerous sightings of Manson and his followers with
stolen vehicles—the entire group was released three days after the raid, no
questions asked. Bugliosi explained it in Helter Skelter: “They had been
arrested on a misdated warrant.”
His book downplayed the size of the raid; you’d never know it was the
biggest in the history of Los Angeles law enforcement at that time. He also
took it as a given that Guenther and Whiteley, seasoned and widely respected
detectives, would back away from a lead to the most prominent unsolved
murder case in California history. It seemed to me that they wouldn’t do that
unless they were told to.
I wanted to get the story straight from Guenther and Whiteley. What they
told me was, at the very least, the story of an agonizing series of coincidences
and near misses, a comedy of errors that had never been given a proper
airing. At most, it was the germ of an extensive cover-up by LASO, which
moved to conceal either its own ineptitude or something more sinister: the
hand of a higher authority, warning that pursuing Manson would come with
steep consequences.

“Leave a Sign”
Paul Fitzgerald, the defense attorney, gave me Charlie Guenther’s number.
Guenther was the most honest cop he knew; when he’d taken the liberty of
telling the retired detective about my research, Guenther had said he might be
able to help me.
 When I got Guenther on the phone, he already knew what he wanted to
tell me—but he refused to say it. I had to come to his house, he said, more
than a hundred miles away in Victorville, California. I tried to wrestle a hint
out of him. Sounding exasperated, he said it had something to do with Bobby
Beausoleil and “maybe a call that had been made.” After a pause, he added,
“and the destruction of evidence.”
The very next day, I made the two-hour drive to Victorville. If you’re
driving from L.A. to Vegas, it’s just about the last place to fill up your tank
before you’re surrounded by the endless vastness of the Mojave Desert. The
town is an oasis of man-made lakes and sprawling golf clubs, all catering to
the community’s many retirees—among them, Charlie Guenther, who
welcomed me into his new condo dressed in a white T-shirt and shorts. I sat
on an overstuffed couch beneath a framed painting of a forlorn Jesus in
prayer at Gethsemane. Guenther sank into a large recliner, though he was
seldom relaxed enough to stay in it for long.
Guenther was famous among true-crime devotees—he’d become
something of a staple in the genre, his skilled investigative work having
solved a number of notable murders. His better-known cases included the
Cotton Club murders and the 1958 killing of the author James Ellroy’s
mother. Guenther never solved that crime, but Ellroy still hailed him, in My
Dark Places, as one of the best homicide detectives ever to work in L.A.
Most everyone who wrote about Guenther noted his penetrating blue eyes,
his unruly mop of hair—now gone white—and his stocky build.
Listening to him talk, I could see why Guenther was so highly regarded—
but that day he was also nervous, jumpy. He wouldn’t let me tape our
conversation, saying that “smart cops” never allow themselves to be
recorded. As the words came spilling out of him, I tried to get his every
utterance on paper while appearing nonchalant, lest he become even more
inhibited.
He remembered going to the Tate autopsies with his partner, Whiteley, to
tell the investigators about the similarities between the Hinman murder and
the Tate murders. The coroner, Thomas Noguchi, had already reached the
same conclusion: they must be connected. “I know Charlie, I know,”
Noguchi told him. “Same knife. Same wound. Same blood on the wall.” But
the LAPD detectives weren’t nearly as receptive. They were “convinced it
had something to do with narcotics,” Guenther said.
 I turned the conversation to Bobby Beausoleil. The mere mention of his
name launched Guenther out of his recliner: “He lies, and I can’t tell you how
I know that.”
Of course he lies, I said. Didn’t all murderers?
“He called the ranch after he was arrested,” Guenther said, pacing in front
of me. To his mind, it was this phone call that had initiated the Tate–
LaBianca murders. “The sole motive for those murders was to get Bobby out
of jail.”
I’d heard this before—the copycat theory of the murders. Bugliosi had
discredited it, I reminded him. That name didn’t sit well with him, either.
“Arrogant son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Vince didn’t want anything to do
with the Hinman case. Hinman was a nothing case. Vince didn’t want to
prosecute it.”
So Guenther didn’t buy into the Helter Skelter motive? He absolutely
didn’t, he said, sinking back into his recliner. He thought Bugliosi “made up”
the motive to sell books. No one in law enforcement believed it, either, he
added. As soon as the Family’s Linda Kasabian flipped and became a
prosecution witness, the entire motive for the murders changed. Guenther
slouched in his chair, his great paw of a hand rubbing his forehead.
When Beausoleil called the ranch from jail, according to Guenther “he
said, ‘Tell Charlie I’ve been arrested for killing Hinman.’” Guenther was sure
about this, because there was a recording of Beausoleil’s call. Knowing that
he had accomplices in the Hinman murder, police had tapped the phone at the
men’s jail and recorded the calls he made. On August 8, the day after he was
booked, Beausoleil called the Spahn Ranch and told the person on the other
end, allegedly Linda Kasabian, that he’d been arrested for Hinman’s murder.
“I need help,” he was heard telling her. “Leave a sign.”
That night, Sharon Tate and her friends were killed, and Susan Atkins
scrawled the word “Pig” in blood on the front door of the Cielo house, just as
she’d done on the wall at Hinman’s. Guenther believed this was the “sign”
Beausoleil referred to—Atkins hoped to exonerate Beausoleil, since he was
in jail when the Tate–LaBianca murders had taken place. Manson’s followers
were, in effect, imitating themselves on a more devastating scale just to free
one of their own. After that, they could escape to the desert.
Essentially, the wiretap was the best evidence yet for the copycat theory
of the murders, and Guenther had never told anyone about it. He was visibly
anxious to get it off his chest after thirty years, sometimes shaking in his seat.
But he worried that it would overturn the verdicts against the convicted
killers. “I don’t want this reversed after all these years!” he said, pounding his
fist on the arm of his chair.
Guenther’s intensity moved me—he seemed on the verge of tears. But I
couldn’t figure out why he’d decided to reveal the recordings now, after all
these decades. And why to me? Surely other journalists had sniffed around
before. I asked if he had a copy of the tape. No such luck. Because the
wiretap was illegal, his commanding officer, Captain George Walsh, had
ordered him and Whiteley to turn over the recording; Walsh apparently
destroyed it, or made sure that someone else did.
But if any of this was going into my Premiere story, Guenther didn’t want
to go on the record alone about it. He needed someone else to say it with him,
someone who could verify the tape’s authenticity—ideally, someone from the
other side of law enforcement. He named Aaron Stovitz, who’d been
Bugliosi’s coprosecutor for part of the trial. Stovitz had heard the tape.
Guenther was sure of that—the detective had brought it to him before it was
destroyed.
“Get Stovitz to say it,” he urged me, tears welling in his eyes again. “Say,
Charlie Guenther gave me this reluctantly. Say I owned up after a long
conversation and did it reluctantly. Ask him, how can it hurt? Promise me,
promise me! I don’t want them all back out on the street, and I’m worried this
will do it!”
I promised him. But I still didn’t understand why Walsh had destroyed the
tape. Even if it were illegal, it so clearly solved the Tate–LaBianca murders—
the day after they occurred, at that. “He said it would eliminate the narcotics
angle,” Guenther told me.
That startled me. Why would Walsh, who wasn’t involved in the LAPD
investigation, want them to pursue what he now knew was a false lead?

Talking to Guenther reminded me of something in an old issue of Rolling

Stone. Aaron Stovitz had given an interview to the magazine in June 1970,
right before the trial started. He mentioned exactly the phone call that
Guenther had just told me about, though he’d couched it in more uncertain
terms. Using the pseudonym “Porfiry,” and speaking in the present tense,
Stovitz told Rolling Stone that Bobby Beausoleil “puts a phone call in at the
ranch telling them that he was arrested there and telling them he hasn’t said
anything”:

Now—this is only a supposition on my part, I don’t have any proof to

support it—I suppose he, meaning Manson, said to himself, “How am
I going to help my friend Beausoleil out? By showing that the actual
murderer of Hinman is still at large. So I know that Melcher used to
live in this house on Cielo Drive. ‘Go out there, Watson, with these
girls and commit robbery and kill anyone that you see there. Don’t
forget to leave’”—and this is very important because in the Hinman
case they wrote POLITICAL PIGGY in blood. He said “Don’t forget
to leave a sign.”

Given that Guenther had used that exact phrase—“leave a sign”—I was
almost sure that none of this was a mere “supposition” on Stovitz’s part. But
he’d never divulged how he knew about Beausoleil’s phone call. Would he
admit to having heard the tape?
I doubted it. I’d interviewed Stovitz once already, and he was cagey. He’d
said he was always convinced that the Tate–LaBianca murders were copycat
crimes, but he wouldn’t say why. When I’d asked him why the case wasn’t
prosecuted that way, he said it was because Bugliosi called the shots.
And sure enough, when I paid him a second visit, Stovitz was even more
aloof. He denied ever having heard the Beausoleil tape. He’d heard “rumors”
of it, he conceded, but never from Guenther. He dismissed me with a
message: “Tell Charlie Guenther, Mr. Stovitz has a great deal of faith in you
but unless you have some notes [it didn’t happen].”
I called Guenther, and I could hear him wilt on the other end of the line.
“Is that how he wants it? Then let’s just drop it.” I was deflated, too. Just as
easily as he’d given me the scoop, Guenther was prepared to take it back.
“You’re just not going to be able to use it,” he said. “That’s all.”
As if to prove how thoroughly he’d given up, Guenther began to change
his story. When I talked to him again two weeks later, he said that he’d
neither seen nor heard the tape—he only knew of its existence. Exactly
Stovitz’s position.
 This was going to be a lot more difficult than I thought.
I drove all the way to Vegas to speak to Guenther’s former partner, Paul
Whiteley, whose demeanor was the polar opposite. Where Guenther would
bound about the room, pacing and shaking and pleading, Whiteley barely
moved. We sat among graceful Chinese porcelain pieces—his wife was a
collector—and he was as serene and contemplative as the figures depicted in
the china.
He remembered the Beausoleil tape clearly. “I heard it, yes,” he told me.
“Something about leaving a sign.” And he corroborated the story of Captain
Walsh’s infuriated response. “Walsh was a by-the-book captain. He hit the
roof!”
Like Guenther, his investigation had made him overwhelmingly confident
of one thing: “Helter Skelter didn’t happen.” So many veterans of this case, I
noticed, were willing to say that the prosecutor had basically fabricated a
motive, using Manson’s ramblings to button up his case. Helter Skelter was
“not a motive,” Whiteley said, “but a philosophy.” Bugliosi was well aware
of this; he just didn’t care. And that meant he didn’t care about the subtleties
of the Hinman case, either, or about how LASO might go about prosecuting
it.
The Beausoleil wiretap was maybe the single biggest break I’d gotten at
that point, but the stories around it had begun to multiply. Guenther would
eventually allow me to use him as an on-the-record source, but his account
muddied the waters more than it cleared them. Despite their bombshell
evidence of a copycat motive, both he and Whiteley insisted that they simply
gave up after the LAPD told them to. Although they knew Beausoleil had an
accomplice, and that he’d called someone at the Spahn Ranch, they never
even drove out there to question anybody. That didn’t track. Not with these
guys.

“The Biggest Circus”

Around the time I reached an impasse with Guenther, I began to research
another figure from the county sheriff’s office, one whose scintillating claims
about LASO and Manson had circulated for decades among counterculture
enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists. Preston Guillory, once a LASO
detective, had left the police force under a cloud of suspicion in December
1969, immediately after the LAPD had announced Manson’s apprehension.
A couple of years later, in 1971, Guillory gave an interview to Mae
Brussell, a cult-favorite radio host whose show trafficked in conspiracies—
some plausible, others outright loony. Reading through the transcript, I found
myself more intrigued by Guillory than I wanted to be, especially in light of
what I’d gone through with Guenther and Whiteley.
Guillory’s thesis was this: Manson had gotten away with far too much at
the Spahn Ranch in the months before the murders. Even though he was a
federal parolee, Manson had no job; he had ready access to drugs, alcohol,
and underage girls; he had a cache of firearms. And LASO officers knew all
about it. At LASO’s Malibu station—Spahn was in its jurisdiction—
Manson’s lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said.
Firemen patrolling the ranch’s fire trails had even encountered Manson and
the Family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The
cops always looked the other way. According to Guillory, that was because
his station had a policy handed down from on high: “Make no arrests, take no
police action toward Manson or his followers.”
And so, despite the raft of crimes that Manson and the Family were
committing, they were never apprehended, and Manson never had his parole
revoked. There was even an occasion where Manson was picked up by LASO
police for statutory rape, but they ended up cutting him loose.
Even as the station instituted this hands-off policy, they kept a close watch
over Manson. Guillory was sure that LASO’s intelligence unit, or some other
intelligence unit, was running surveillance on the Spahn Ranch. He alluded to
memos about Manson—with cover sheets to protect against prying eyes—
that went straight to the station captain, and who knows where after that.
Guillory didn’t think the surveillance “was just a local thing.”
Then came the murder of Gary Hinman, and soon after it the Tate–
LaBianca murders. How had LASO failed to see this coming? They’d been
monitoring Manson constantly. Guillory theorized that the massive August
16 raid on the Spahn Ranch was LASO’s effort to cover its tracks after the
murders. Calling it “the biggest circus I’ve ever been involved in,” he
marveled at the fact that all the charges had been dropped seventy-two hours
later. Something didn’t add up about the raid—all that force, all those arrests,
for nothing? It was “like we were doing something perhaps a week late to
show that we had really been watching,” he said on the radio.
But that raised a bunch of problems. If the sheriff’s office was surveilling
Manson before the raid, it would’ve known enough to bring him in for the
murders. If it wasn’t watching him, then how had it amassed enough
evidence to get the search warrant authorizing the raid?
When the LAPD held a self-congratulatory press conference to announce
that Manson and his group were suspects in the Tate–LaBianca murders,
Guillory decided to become a whistle-blower. He went to a news station,
KCAL, and told them everything he knew, thinking the press would be all
over this story. They hardly touched it. Worse, the leak cost him his job:
LASO’s internal affairs department got wind of his remarks and sent him
packing.
After his departure, LASO did all it could to discredit him. An internal
memo said that no one should discuss his previous employment there. It
implied that he was a drug addict and an unrepentant leftist bent on smearing
the office’s reputation.
Listening to Guillory’s radio interview, I couldn’t say if he was a crackpot
or not. He was airing a version of events that, a year before, I would’ve
dismissed as sheer lunacy—and he was doing it on a radio show that traded
in unadulterated paranoia. But his message resonated with me, especially
now that I knew how much had been covered up. Guenther had convinced me
that the tape of Beausoleil’s phone call was real, and I never would’ve
believed that, either. It seemed possible, if not entirely plausible, that there
was still more to the story of the sheriff’s office, especially its bungled raid
on the Spahn Ranch.
I added Guillory’s name to my whiteboard: one more in the jumble of
cops and Hollywood has-beens, witnesses reliable and unreliable, with fading
memories and ulterior motives. Then I picked up the phone. He wasn’t hard
to find—he ran a private detective agency, paired, somewhat oddly, with a
traffic school, out of a strip mall off the highway in Riverside.
When I drove out to visit him, I was relieved to find him calm, confident,
even fearless. Portly and white-haired, his mustache still flecked with red, he
had a strong recollection of what he’d told Mae Brussell back in ’71, and he
stood by all of it. As we spoke, I noticed he had a weapon in a pouch on his
desk, along with some model police cars; his diploma and graduation photo
from the sheriff’s academy were hanging on the wall behind him. Despite his
contentious end with LASO, he remained a proud cop.
“We were told not to bother these people,” he told me, referring to the
Family. The order came in a memo from his captain. “Tell him whatever we
saw or heard, that was one of the first things that I was told when I got to
Malibu.” Peter Pitchess, the sheriff of Los Angeles County at the time, was
“memo-minded,” Guillory explained. He exerted immense authority—and
that authority extended to his officers’ conduct with Manson. “We were
asked to generate memos every time we had contact with any member of the
Family,” Guillory said.
Despite this intense period of information gathering, Manson was never
charged when he was arrested. Why was a law-breaking parolee allowed to
go free? “A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, We can’t
keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets.
My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason—I
don’t know.” It was “very unusual” that someone with a record like
Manson’s would be left on the streets.
The shock of the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory thought, forced the
sheriff’s office to hide its own intelligence-gathering efforts. If Manson were
guilty of homicide, “How could anybody possibly say we let him on the
streets?” There would’ve been civil liability issues. Careers would have been
destroyed. And, of course, it would’ve cost Pitchess the next election.
But that didn’t explain why the police allowed Manson to go free for
another three months after the Tate murders, knowing he could have killed
more people. Why not just arrest him right away, and keep their surveillance
program quiet?
Guillory had no idea—he’d been asking himself the same question. All he
knew was “that Manson was under some kind of loose surveillance by our
department or somebody else. We know he’s being watched by somebody,
but we don’t know who. The thing is this—if he was under surveillance,
those people left the ranch on two occasions, committed the seven
homicides… why was there no intervention?” He added that there was no
legal obligation for LASO to intervene; they could’ve chosen to let the
murders pass without action, if Manson were so important that they didn’t
want to risk interrupting their surveillance.
Guillory was fairly confident that someone from LASO knew right away
that the Family had committed those murders. “Probably someone saw them
come and go and there’s a log entry someplace and then, of course, later they
found where they went and all hell would’ve broken loose.”
Plus, he reiterated, LASO never could have launched such an
extraordinary raid without sound intelligence—enough to persuade a judge to
grant a search warrant. “You don’t mount a raid without surveillance like
this!” he said. More infuriating still: none of it stuck. The sheriff’s office
went to all that effort for nothing. And it didn’t have to be that way, Guillory
was sure. “We did find evidence of enough criminal activity—stolen
property, narcotics—to violate [Manson’s] parole in the first place. It was
astounding! I never could figure out why he was released.” Guillory had been
part of the operation that day, and he remembered finding stolen purses,
wallets, and pocketbooks with IDs—all damning evidence, and all seemingly
ignored. After the raid, he said, the surveillance ended, as mysteriously as it
had started.
In another interview, with the writer Paul Krassner, Guillory explained,
“It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought…
There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I
never had the feeling the raid was necessary.” He speculated that Manson
was never arrested “because our department thought he was going to attack
the Black Panthers.” Their intelligence had revealed that Manson had shot
Bernard Crowe, whom he mistakenly believed to be a Black Panther, in July,
and this apparently convinced LASO that Manson “was going to launch an
attack” on the whole organization.
Of Guillory’s many outrageous claims, this one was maybe the hardest to
swallow—but, again, he stuck by it when I asked him. “I believe there was
something bigger Manson was working on,” he said. “Cause a stir, blame it
on the Panthers… I’ve got to believe he was involved, based on all info we
have. Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.”
When Manson was finally brought to justice for the murders, LASO took
dramatic precautions to hide its surveillance of the ranch. “I thought what
they were doing was illegal,” Guillory told me. “All the crime reports
disappeared from the station. Everything was gone, all of our reports were
gone. Normally you had access to your own reports; they were all gone,
disappeared. The whole file was gone, and the memo went up that no one
involved in the Spahn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone outside the
department.” That convinced Guillory to go to a reporter—the move that cost
him his job.
I found Guillory credible, if overheated. I knew I wanted to believe him—
and that put me at risk of falling into the great trap of conspiracy theorists,
who come to believe in grand plots simply because they make the world a
more fascinating place. Certainly I’d have a more interesting magazine story
on my hands if Guillory were correct. But that was a big if.
I was in touch with a number of former LASO deputies at this point, and I
collected their opinions on Guillory. One described him as “kind of an off-
the-wall guy.” Another said he had “a gigantic chip on his shoulder,” and
“hard feelings for the sheriff’s department—always feeling that he was being
beset upon.”
According to the most pejorative story I heard, Guillory had once tried to
kill himself in the most dramatic way possible: “He had barricaded himself in
a motel room in Malibu, I believe, and one of the inspectors was trying to talk
him out of the room. He was threatening suicide and he had an automatic
weapon.” I asked the officer if he’d witnessed this firsthand. “I wasn’t
actually there,” he said, “I just heard about it in the station. John Graham was
the inspector who talked him out of the room.”
Guillory called this allegation “bullshit,” reminding me that LASO had
embarked on a campaign to discredit him after he left. “They tried to put me
out of business, basically… It was goodbye, we’ll see you, never darken our
door again. I was crazy, malcontent, a loose cannon.” If he’d really
barricaded himself in a motel room, he said, “produce a report.” Neither
LASO files nor the media would have any record of it, because it never
happened. “Ask Captain Graham: where was the hotel, what was the date?
Tell him to put up or shut up.”
In so many words, I did. I called Graham, who, like his colleagues, had a
negative opinion of Guillory. But had the man really barricaded himself in a
motel room? “Not that I know of,” Graham said. Once I told him the story, he
changed his mind. “Now that I recall, I did hear that there was probably a
phony attempt at suicide.” But he hadn’t been there.
However reliable Guillory was—and I came to feel he was largely
reliable, in the end—I was in a familiar predicament. I needed documentary
evidence to back up his claims. My best shot was leering at me from the
pages of Helter Skelter: the search warrant for LASO’s massive raid. If
Bugliosi had found it, couldn’t I?
On the Paper Trail (Again)
Charlie Guenther was wary of appearing in my story, but we still talked a lot.
When I told him I wanted LASO’s files on the Hinman case, he made a
phone call. Next thing I knew, I had backdoor access to the office’s closed-
case archives. With some directions and the name of another retired deputy
sheriff scrawled on a piece of paper, I parked at the sheriff’s training
academy in East L.A. and knocked on the door of a windowless, barrackslike
building.
The deputy let me in and walked me through rows of dusty filing cabinets,
stopping in front of two and leaving me alone with them. I pulled up a
folding chair and opened the top drawer. It was crammed with disorganized
documents that appeared not to have been handled for decades. In the silence
of the large, dim shed, broken only by the occasional sound of gunshots from
a nearby firing range, I began my search.
The crux of the reports, to my delight, covered sheriffs’ activities at the
Spahn Ranch over the roughly sixteen months the Manson Family had lived
there. Over the next few months, I made half a dozen visits to the hangar at
the sheriff’s academy. The retired detective was always happy to see me—I
suspected I was the only other person he saw all day. When I had questions
about language or codes in the reports, or even LASO procedure, he’d
patiently explain them to me as I took notes. And he let me photocopy
documents, but only after reviewing them first. After a while he barely
glanced at what I brought him, instead reminding me how he preferred his
coffee—I’d always return with a cup when I ventured out to a Kinko’s
nearby. I wasn’t entirely surprised when I learned, several years later, that
these visits of mine were completely unsanctioned—and unknown to LASO
top brass.
In one of my earliest visits, with great relief, I found a copy of the search
warrant for the August 16 raid. Although other researchers have since
uncovered it, at that time it had never been seen by anyone outside law
enforcement. Once I read it, I could understand why: it revealed that LASO
had a far broader understanding of Manson’s criminal activities—and his
gurulike control over his followers—than had ever been shared with the
public.
Running to sixteen pages, the warrant was rooted in the testimony of
Deputy Sheriff William C. Gleason, who sought permission for LASO to
recover “stolen automobile parts… and rifles, automatic pistols, and
revolvers” from the Spahn Ranch. Charles Manson was the only suspect
identified by name in the document, which stated that he was the
unchallenged “leader” of the crime ring and also “on Federal Parole for
Grand Theft Auto.”
That last bit is crucial: it means that LASO was officially aware of
Manson’s parole status. If the police turned up any stolen vehicles or
weapons—and they did, of course—he would be in violation of the terms of
his release agreement, and would have to go back to federal prison.
If Manson was aware of that fact, he didn’t act like it. And the police had
already shown a willingness to look the other way. The search warrant related
an incident from an Officer Williams of the LAPD. He told Deputy Gleason

that within the last two weeks he and his partner were on duty at the
Spahn Ranch… Mr. Manson was bragging to the officers about the
weapons available to him and his friends at the Ranch. Mr. Manson
told the officers that while he was talking to the officers that his
friends had rifles trained on the officers… this is standard procedure
whenever officers approach the Ranch.

Manson had flouted the law and bragged about it to LAPD officers as he had
his followers train rifles on them—something else, incidentally, not reported
in Helter Skelter.
Manson’s cavalier, taunting behavior continued. Elsewhere in the warrant,
the LAPD’s Ted Leigh said he had found three loaded ammunition clips for a
carbine that “fell from a dune buggy while on the highway” sometime on or
around July 29. Leigh soon heard from Manson himself, who said the
ammunition was his and that he would stop by and pick it up.
So Manson, a paroled ex-con with a known history of violence, had
simply called up the cops and asked them if he could come collect the
ammunition he’d lost? And he’d done this a little more than a week before
the Tate–LaBianca murders. Manson, the warrant noted, had been
“mentioned in prior memos,” which fit with Guillory’s insistence that police
knew how dangerous he was.
Whether that awareness was the result of surveillance was an open
question. The warrant explained that LASO deputies had cultivated an
informant at the ranch, someone who “has seen guns in practically every
building on the property. The informant was also threatened by Charles
Manson.” And there was extensive reconnaissance by the same Officer
Leigh, who “flew over the Spahn Movie Ranch approximately August 1,
1969, and… observed a 1969 Volkswagen laying [sic] in a ditch.” How often
did the LAPD use planes to investigate car theft? Why were they flying over
the ranch, which was out of their jurisdiction?
Manson was prepared to match their vigilance. Per the warrant, someone
in the Family had bragged that “we have a guard at each road in [to the ranch]
with a rifle and a telephone so if anyone comes in, we’ll know they’re
coming.” Another memo quoted Manson telling a fire inspector, “Don’t try to
play the ‘man,’ because the next time you try it, you’ll find yourself hanging
from a tree, upside down, dead.”
And two days before the murders, an informant told an LAPD sergeant
that Manson was on his way back from San Francisco with a young runaway
girl and “a large amount of narcotics.” The memo was partly correct. Manson
had been in northern California then with a young runaway, but he’d been in
Big Sur, not San Francisco. Who knows if Manson had that “large amount of
narcotics,” or if they played a role in the bloodshed to come. In any case, the
document shook me—it suggested that authorities had tracked Manson with
plenty of diligence, and with the help of an informant, in the days before the
murders. They had a reliable sense of his comings and goings from the ranch
mere hours before he dispatched his killers to the Tate house. And yet,
somehow, it took them months to pin the murders on him.
Given the abundance of evidence, it came as no surprise that the raid had
been authorized. Manson was practically begging for the strong arm of
justice to come swooping in. When it did, the police got more than they
bargained for. I found a one-page arrest report for Manson dated August 16,
the day of the raid. In addition to the stolen cars and weapons, the arresting
officer wrote that Manson had four stolen credit cards in his possession that
day: they “fell out of his shirt pocket” when he was taken into custody. This
had never been reported before.
 In summary: Manson, the known federal parolee, walked away from an
arrest that caught him with stolen cars and credit cards, an arsenal of
weapons, and underage runaways. And meanwhile, two of the LASO’s best
homicide detectives failed to realize that the biggest raid in California history
was going down at the very same ranch that their murder suspect had called.

Hundreds of Man-hours and Zero Indictments

Bugliosi, you may recall, had chalked up the failure to a simple mistake—the
search warrant was “misdated.” But now that I had it in my hands, I saw no
evidence of any misdating. The warrant was clearly dated August 13, 1969.
According to the California penal code, a warrant is good for ten days after
its date. The raid was completely legal on August 16, a fact I verified with
many police and attorneys.
Was there another potential explanation? Ed Sanders went a bit further in
The Family—in addition to the “misdated” warrant, he wrote that the Family
was let go because of insufficient evidence.
To figure it out, I talked to Bill Gleason, the sergeant who’d written the
search warrant and spent two weeks organizing the raid. We spoke often. I
always found him quick to smile and patient with my questions, even when I
implied that he’d been negligent.
Gleason was still furious at Bugliosi and Sanders for impugning his
reputation with their talk of “misdating.” They’d led millions of readers to
assume that a clerical slipup had invalidated the hundreds of man-hours that
went into the raid.
The “insufficient evidence” excuse, Gleason told me, was closer to the
mark. The problem was that none of the evidence—stolen vehicles, guns—
could be linked to any of the suspects, most especially Manson himself. It
was all scattered around the ranch. What seemed, in the warrant, like an
airtight case turned into more of a fishing expedition.
“It’s pretty hard when you got twenty-seven adults there to prove who
actually stole a car,” Gleason told me. They’d tried to dust one of the vehicles
for fingerprints, but it had been sitting out in the dirt for so long that they got
nothing.
“The warrant specified Manson’s body to be searched for car keys and
small parts, because he was said to be the leader,” Gleason said.
“But do you sleep with your car keys?” I asked, thinking it was ridiculous
to expect to find them on Manson’s person at the crack of dawn.
“No,” Gleason said, laughing. “At six a.m. we didn’t know what they
were going to be doing.”
What about the stolen credit cards? They were found on Manson’s person,
having fallen out of his shirt pocket. Couldn’t they have prosecuted Manson
for those?
“Yeah, we could,” Gleason said. “But we didn’t know he was going to
have credit cards when we were doing the search warrant. It was the DA’s
call, and if he says we’re not going to prosecute him there’s not a whole lot I
can do.”
Robert Schirn, the DA who’d signed the warrant for the raid and then
dismissed the charges a few days later, was still working at the Los Angeles
District Attorney’s office, so I set up an interview with him. Surrounded by
plaques and awards, Schirn greeted me with a warm hello and told me to take
a seat opposite his desk. Like Gleason, he said that it was hard to bring
charges in a case where the thefts couldn’t be linked to anyone. But what
about the credit cards?
“It’s been so many years,” Schirn replied. “I don’t know if I was told
about the credit cards. If they’re in a report, I assume I would have been
shown the report—and I would have been able to determine that there were in
fact some stolen credit cards attributable to him.” Maybe Manson was never
caught attempting to use the cards. He couldn’t recall.
“So you just don’t remember what went into the decision?” I asked.
“I really don’t.”
He looked a little sheepish, and the silence lasted a beat too long. “All I
did was just fill out the card and went on to my next case.”

My inner skeptic had trouble taking Gleason and Schirn at face value. But
let’s say they were right, that the colossal raid of the Spahn Ranch had failed
to yield any arrests worthy of prosecution, and that it was only a freak
coincidence that it brought them so close to the group responsible for so
many murders. Even if you believe that, LASO isn’t free and clear. Because a
week after their botched raid, the sheriff’s deputies arrested Manson again,
on totally different charges. And again, he was allowed to go free.
On August 24, the owner of a property adjacent to the Spahn Ranch
alerted LASO sheriffs that someone was trespassing. Deputies drove out to
find Manson and a seventeen-year-old girl, Stephanie Schram, in an
abandoned cabin, where they’d just had sex. On a bedside table were several
joints. And the LASO brought in Manson once more, this time on a felony
pot possession charge and for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
As with the raid, published accounts of this incident are thin at best.
Bugliosi kept it out of Helter Skelter altogether, and Ed Sanders makes only
passing mention of it in The Family, writing that Manson and Schram were
released because there was no pot in the cigarettes, only tobacco.
However, according to an arrest report I found in the LASO files, the
joints did contain pot—and on August 26 the sheriffs released Manson
anyway, instead charging Schram with felony possession, even though she
was a minor with no criminal record. No reason was given for the decision.
The day after Manson’s release on August 26, a judge signed another
warrant, this time for Manson’s arrest, on the strength of his having been
found with drugs and a juvenile. This time, LASO detectives never even
bothered going to arrest him, something else none of the forty-plus LASO
officers I interviewed could explain to me, and something again left out of
Helter Skelter. Manson stayed at the Spahn Ranch until he moved to Death
Valley around September 10.
The DA’s order rejecting the pot charges against Manson was signed by
Monte Fligsten, the deputy district attorney of Van Nuys. Incredibly enough,
like Schirn, Fligsten was still working in the DA’s office. When I called him,
though, I found him much warier than Schirn had been. I gave him a quick
rundown of the files I’d found: Manson, Schram, marijuana, delinquency of a
minor… ring any bells?
“I have no recollection,” he said.
“Do you recall investigating Manson at the time of August of ’69?”
“I didn’t participate in any of the Manson issues at all,” he said. I offered
to fax him the documents so he could verify his signature. He said he didn’t
want to be involved and hung up.
The LASO deputies who’d arrested Manson were flabbergasted when he
wasn’t charged at any point after the raid—especially given the effort of the
raid itself. It was “a bunch of bullshit.”
The deputies and the DAs had numerous chances to get Manson behind bars,
or to keep him there, and they failed.
Even if none of Manson’s charges were prosecutable, they were egregious
enough to send the parolee back to prison. Bugliosi said as much in Helter
Skelter: “During the first six months of 1969 alone, [Manson] had been
charged, among other things, with grand theft auto, narcotics possession,
rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There was more than ample
reason for a parole revocation.”
If LASO officers did try to get Manson’s parole officer to send him back
to prison, I found no written record of such a request in the files. No one I
spoke to could even agree on whose job it was to report a federal parole
violation. The DAs said it was the detectives’ job. The detectives said it was
the DA’s job. And, at the end of the day, everyone said, Wasn’t it the parole
officer’s job? “It’s always been a problem,” Bill Gleason told me, “that guys
would get arrested and released before the P.O. could place a hold.” Then
again, I had it on good authority that it was precisely Bill Gleason’s duty to
have told the parole office, and he didn’t.
I felt like I was trapped in the swirling eddies of some forgotten
bureaucracy. Maybe Manson was just the beneficiary of a simpler time, when
police had fewer forces at their disposal and cruder methods of
communication.
Samuel Barrett, who was Manson’s parole officer at the time of the
murders, told me he’d never been informed of the August 1969 arrests. If a
parolee was involved in a crime at the local level, he said, it was “paramount”
for the DA to file the charges. Otherwise, it would be hard to send anyone
back to federal prison.
“But sheriffs, the DA,” I said, “they all said it was up to you.”
“They pass the buck,” Barrett said. “It’s all hearsay without filing
charges.”

Chasing Kitty Lutesinger

While Bobby Beausoleil was busy torturing Gary Hinman, he left his
girlfriend behind at the ranch. Kitty Lutesinger, sixteen, was pregnant with
his child, and in his absence, she set off a chain of events that gave the
sheriff’s office another chance to nab Manson.
Lutesinger had moved out to the Spahn Ranch to be with Beausoleil, but
she’d never been a perfect fit for the Family. Now that she was pregnant,
Manson mistrusted her, fearing that she’d compel Beausoleil to leave the
group and raise their child. Lutesinger, in turn, was uneasy around Manson.
He was always speechifying about the end of the world, fooling around with
guns, and heaping abuse on anyone who crossed him. So, with her boyfriend
showing no signs of returning anytime soon, Lutesinger ran away from the
ranch.
LASO sheriffs found her on July 30 and took her in for questioning, since
she was a teen runaway. She told them everything she knew about Manson:
that he was an ex-con who’d threatened her life and her relatives’ if she left
the Family, that there were drugs and guns stockpiled at the ranch, and that
many of the Family were runaway girls. Police sent her home to her parents
in the San Fernando Valley. But she’d proven so informative that Bill
Gleason drove out there to interview her again eleven days later, in
preparation for the big raid. This would’ve been on August 10—just a day
after the bodies had been found at Cielo Drive.
I couldn’t find his full report in the LASO files, but Ed Sanders wrote
about it in The Family, and he included an eye-opening detail: Lutesinger
asked Gleason if the Black Panthers were behind the Tate murders. “I had
been programmed to believe it was the Panthers who did it,” she told him.
That remark should have raised a red flag. The timeline is the key. This
conversation took place when the bodies at Cielo Drive were barely cold. As
Gleason knew, Lutesinger had been away from the Manson Family since
August 1, when she fled the ranch. So if she had, in fact, been “programmed
to believe” that the Panthers killed Tate, the programming must’ve occurred
before the murders, by someone who was responsible for them. Gleason
should’ve suspected that Manson, or at least someone at the Spahn Ranch,
knew more. (He told me he had no memory of discussing the Tate murders
with Lutesinger, and found it unlikely that he had. The murders “had only
occurred a few hours before. There probably wouldn’t have been anything
much on the news at that time.” In fact, the bodies had been discovered more
than twenty-four hours before he interviewed her; they’d dominated the
news.)
 Even though Lutesinger had cooperated with police, she apparently
couldn’t decide where her allegiances were. On August 15, she ran away
again, fleeing her parents’ home and returning to the Spahn Ranch.
That same day, Guenther and Whiteley, still searching for accomplices in
the Hinman murder—though, for some reason, they never checked the Spahn
Ranch—learned that Lutesinger was Beausoleil’s girlfriend and immediately
deemed her a person of interest, issuing an all-points bulletin for her arrest.
On August 17, the day after their colleagues raided the Spahn Ranch,
Guenther and Whiteley visited her parents. I found Whiteley’s interview
notes in the LASO files. Lutesinger’s parents confirmed that she was
pregnant by their main suspect, that she’d been living at the Spahn Ranch
until August 1, and that she’d run away again the night before, though they
didn’t know where. Whiteley did note that Manson had personally phoned
the Lutesinger home the preceding week, and that Kitty had spoken to him.
In fact, at the very moment of that interview, Kitty Lutesinger was in
LASO custody. She’d been picked up with the rest of the Family in the raid.
And here, to my mind, the credibility of the LASO deputies stretches to its
breaking point. Guenther and Whiteley had just posted the bulletin for
Lutesinger’s arrest. They’d just learned that she’d been living at the Spahn
Ranch—along with their primary murder suspect. And yet they didn’t go to
the ranch to look for her. They did nothing.
All they had to do was stop by, and they would have learned that everyone
from the ranch was in jail at the Malibu station; they could’ve gone there,
interviewed Lutesinger, and potentially cracked the Hinman and the Tate–
LaBianca murders four months earlier than those crimes were.
Why didn’t they go? For two reasons, Guenther told me. First, he and
Whiteley never heard about the August 16 raid, even though their colleagues
conducted it, and it was the largest in state history. Bill Gleason backed them
up on this. “We were two independent units,” he told me. “We really had no
reason to contact each other or even knew about the investigations going on.”
Gleason said he “purposely kept everything quiet” about the raid. But
he’d also said that a few stray LAPD squad cars had found out about it
somehow and came along uninvited. Plus, as Bugliosi reported in Helter
Skelter, the raid was on the front page of the local section of the next day’s
Los Angeles Times, beside a story about the still unsolved Tate murders.
Guenther’s second reason was that Kitty Lutesinger’s parents told him
they’d already been to the ranch to look for her, and they’d been told that she
wasn’t there. But did he really expect a runaway’s friends to turn her over to
her parents, especially when everyone knew the cops were sniffing around
for a murder suspect? He didn’t even attempt an answer; we just sat in silence
for a while.
Gleason had organized the raid. It would seem that it was only a matter of
time until he realized that Lutesinger, whom he’d interviewed just six days
earlier, was sitting in one of his jail cells while homicide detectives sought
her out. He’d given me copies of his files on the case—one of them, a
timeline of the investigation, had an entry dated August 17, 1969: “Whitely
[sic] & Guenther tell Gleason that Lutesinger is wanted for questioning in
Hinman murder.”
But Gleason told me that he didn’t even know Lutesinger was arrested
during his own raid. She’d been booked under a fake name, because everyone
in the Family used aliases. I reminded him that he’d already known that. It
was in the search warrant affidavit he wrote before the raid, and Lutesinger
herself had told him. Plus, one of the arrest reports in the LASO files said that
he’d taken it on himself to learn the true identities of each suspect. He was
unmoved. “She was just another face,” he said. “I had a lot of things going on
that day. I doubt if I would have recognized her.” Lutesinger was released
with the rest of the Family on August 18, and remained with them at the
Spahn Ranch until mid-September, when they all moved to Death Valley. No
one ever went to the ranch to look for her, despite the all-points bulletin out
for her arrest.

The last time I saw Guenther was in January 2005, when I visited him to go
through a timeline I’d made of his investigation of the Hinman murder. I told
him that I couldn’t believe he never went to the Spahn Ranch to solve the
case. The police had Bobby Beausoleil in custody, and they knew he’d called
the ranch asking for help. They knew his girlfriend lived there. They knew
he’d stolen two of Hinman’s cars. If nothing else, surely they would’ve
gotten a warrant to search his last known residence—the ranch—for evidence
of the theft.
But Guenther stuck to his story. He looked at the floor and said, “Maybe
we just made a mistake.”
 I wasn’t a seasoned crime reporter. Most of what I knew about the
criminal justice system I’d gleaned from the news, police procedurals, and
legal thrillers. So I went to Kimberly Kupferer, the chairman of the criminal
law section for the California State Bar, and asked her to walk me through the
standard operating procedure in murder investigations.
Kupferer contradicted Guenther on every point. She said it was standard
practice to go to a murder suspect’s last residence—whether “it’s a ranch,
motel room, or rat hole”—to search for evidence, especially in a robbery-
homicide, like the Hinman case was. The fact that the detectives didn’t go
was “highly unusual,” in her estimation.
Though I knew I was really pushing my luck, I made another call to
Guenther in February 2005. “I know you’ve always told me, ‘You’ll never
hear an untrue word from Guenther or Whiteley,’” I said, “but is there
anything you haven’t told me that would make me better understand your
actions in this case?”
“No,” he said faintly.
“Okay,” I said. “One last question: Were you ever told by anyone to back
off the Manson Family or the Spahn Ranch in your investigation of the
Hinman murder?”
“No,” he said again, this time almost inaudibly. “I was not.”
I couldn’t ask Whiteley the same questions. After my first meeting with
him, he refused to speak with me again.

“Chicken Shit”
Sometimes, seemingly ancillary people would completely refocus my
reporting. Such was the case with Lewis Watnick, the former head deputy
DA of Van Nuys. I wanted to talk to Watnick precisely because he had
nothing to do with the Manson case: he worked in the same office as the DAs
who had, so he could offer some valuable perspective without feeling boxed
in.
I went to visit him at his house in Thousand Oaks. I can still picture him
shuffling to the door: a frail, thin man in his sixties, with wispy brown hair, a
nice smile, and sad eyes. Suffering from an illness, he spoke in a labored,
rasping whisper. His home was air-conditioned to frigidity.
 He spent a while reading my documents in silence, and then he sighed.
“Chicken shit!” he croaked. “This is all a bunch of chicken shit.” The size of
the raid; the fact that the DA’s office kept releasing Manson when they had
enough evidence to charge him, or at least violate his parole… “It dovetails
right in,” he said. “Manson was an informant.”
It was only a guess, he conceded, but an educated one, based on his thirty
years in the job. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the theory. One of my
LASO sources had wondered if Manson “had his finger in a bigger pie.”
Having been in the office’s intelligence division, he’d seen stuff like this
before. “What happens in those situations is either he’s giving up somebody
bigger than himself or he’s on somebody else’s list as far as a snitch, or he’s
ratting out other people.” And if he were informing for someone else, the
DEA or the feds, no one in the LASO would know about it, necessarily.
Robert Schirn, the DA who authorized the raid only to dismiss the charges,
had made the same suggestion: “Another possibility, sheer speculation, is that
[Manson] may have been an informant for somebody.” But LASO deputies
had all denied it.
“Of course,” Watnick said when I told him that. “Confidential informant
means they’re confidential.”
Neither of us could say what or who it was that Manson would have any
decent information about. Drug dealers? Watnick wondered if it had a
political dimension, given Manson’s antagonistic relationship to the Black
Panthers. “Maybe,” he continued, muttering more to himself than to me, it
was someone “big… possibly the FBI.”
True, the search warrant was littered with references to Manson’s fear of
the Black Panthers. He thought the group was about to attack the ranch. One
memo I’d found even said that Manson claimed to have seen “carloads” of
“negroes” on the property photographing the Family. A fire patrolman
reported that Family members had told him they’d moved into the canyons
because they’d “killed a member of the Black Panthers.”
“You know there’s an old saying: an enemy of my enemy is my friend,”
Watnick said. “So, if Manson figured out this black-white confrontation, he
may have been giving out information to the FBI,” who had a vendetta
against the Panthers.
Hearing this from Watnick—someone from the DA’s office, but
unaffiliated with the case—boosted my confidence. Looking at the lengthy
search warrant again, he kept grumbling. “Helicopters, agents carrying
automatic weapons, three different departments, four weeks of official
surveillance… They had this massive raid and everybody’s released two days
later!” He shook his head. “The more that he’s released, the more I feel that
he was released because they’d get more out of him by having him released,”
he said. “They’d been watching this guy for something large… The thing that
I wonder about is who was watching.”
Watnick urged me to go back to Gleason—he knew the detective well, he
said, and he trusted him. Why did Gleason just roll over when the DA’s
office undid all his hard work? As for this notion that Manson’s parole officer
couldn’t find him in violation with charges from the DA, “That’s bullshit,
too,” Watnick said.
As promised, I went back to Gleason, who calmly but adamantly denied
that Manson was an informant. He didn’t even see a glimmer of a possibility.
“I’m sure that I would have heard something like that,” he told me. “I never
heard anything. Even if he was an LAPD informant, I’m sure I would have
been contacted by LAPD… I never heard a word.” He added, “The guy was a
jerk… Every cop I talked to wanted to get him buried.”
Then why had all of them failed? I couldn’t stop turning it over in my
mind: the image of Watnick, hunched over my files in his chilly home,
grumbling with such certainty, “Manson was an informant.”

Coda: “A Huge No-no”

I did most of my reporting on LASO in 2000. As with all aspects of my
investigation, I kept thinking that I’d return to the key subjects someday and
try them again, seeing if the passage of time had loosened them up somehow.
I imagined a cascade effect—once I got somebody—say, Vince Bugliosi or
Terry Melcher—to admit to a major cover-up, other areas of the case would
begin to open up, too, or I could brandish an incriminating document that
would change people’s minds.
But you can guess what happened. I kept reporting and reporting, and
time had other plans. In my obsession, I began to think of the story as a
puzzle I could solve, if only I recovered all the pieces. I listened again and
again to my interview tapes; I wrote out intricate timelines listing my
subjects’ every move, day by day and sometimes hour by hour, trying to
discern who knew what, and when they knew it. I kept lists of possible
explanations, about gun laws and parole laws and car-theft laws, and, most
critically, about how those laws were written and enforced in 1969.
By 2005, I’d moved away from the LASO angle of the story, but I found
myself constantly thinking about it. I knew I had to take another look at the
archive to fill in some blanks. I was under the impression that I could go back
anytime. I’d interviewed more than forty deputies over the years, making no
effort to hide my reporting. One of them had told me that the sheriff himself,
Leroy Baca, wanted to learn about what I was doing and “offer the sheriff
department’s cooperation.”
But no one—except, evidently, the pair of retired deputies who got me
into the archive in the first place—had any idea that I’d accessed the LASO
files on the case. When I called the main office and asked to go back in, they
were, to put it mildly, enraged. From the first officer I spoke to, all the way
up to Sheriff Baca, the response to my request was a resounding no.
I argued that they’d set a precedent by letting me in before, unauthorized
or not. For accuracy’s sake, they owed it to me—and to the public, assuming
I ever reached the end of my reporting—to let me in to recheck my notes. But
because I’d never signed in anywhere, there was no record of my visits, they
said, so it was like I’d never been there at all—even though I could show
them the many files I’d photocopied.
When I persisted, they allowed me to make my case in person with the
sheriff’s captain of homicide. I arrived to find not one but three deputies,
who’d invented a new reason to keep me out. I couldn’t go back in, they said,
because there was an “open case” against unnamed Family members
involving “stolen credit cards.”
That couldn’t be, I said. The statute of limitations on any type of theft by
the Family would have long run out. They didn’t care. Sergeant Paul
Delhauer, who had more or less seized control of the meeting, told me there
was “stuff you can never be told, will never know about” regarding the case.
Then he showed me the door.
When I’d been in the LASO archive all those years ago, it had been
Delhauer’s job to decide who got access and who didn’t. For that reason, the
sheriff’s office had decided he was the guy who had to take my calls now. So
I did call him—again and again, and again after that. We got on each other’s
nerves, and our conversations devolved into intense acrimony. “What
happened as far as you getting access to those materials,” he said with the air
of a martinet, “was a huge no-no.”
Delhauer accepted that this no-no wasn’t my fault, and in his more
charitable moments he allowed that it put me in a tricky position. But he
didn’t see what he could do to help.
“I don’t really care, Tom,” he said. “I see absolutely no significance to
those questions. They have nothing to do with the resolution of the case.
They have nothing to do with the scope of the investigation.”
I told him about Watnick’s theory—that Manson might’ve been an
informant. “This is rank speculation,” he said. “I honestly find this
appalling.” Well, of course it was speculation. That was one reason I’d tried
to get back into the files—to see if there was any validity to it.
“I don’t get paid to do your research,” Delhauer said. “Everybody seems
to be jumping to conclusions about some big grandiose thing,” he said.
Worn down by my persistence, Delhauer finally agreed to remind Sheriff
Baca of his long-ago offer of “the sheriff department’s cooperation.” If I
wrote a letter to Baca, Delhauer would make sure he received it.
When Baca didn’t respond to my letter, I was unrelenting, following up
constantly. At last, I was granted an interview with the sheriff himself, who,
it became apparent, had been thoroughly briefed on the angle I was pursuing.
Elected to his post in 1998, Baca had become a major figure in California
law enforcement. Heading the nation’s largest sheriff’s office, he oversaw
eighteen thousand employees with a jurisdiction covering more than four
thousand square miles. Known as a strict enforcer with a no-nonsense style,
he was at the peak of his power in November 2005, when we met at his
headquarters.
I followed the tall, lean lawman as he marched down a hall to his office:
large and comfortably furnished, with ceramic sculptures from Asia and three
dramatically lit, floor-to-ceiling trophy cases. Hanging on a wall was a
framed quote of Baca’s from the Los Angeles Times: “We need to carefully
concern ourselves with the feelings of other individuals and not engage in
rhetoric that just inflames divisiveness.”
We sat at a coffee table; I was on a couch, he in an easy chair, tan and
slightly stooped, wearing his uniform. Making it clear the meeting was going
to be brief, he suggested I get right to my point. I wanted to get back into the
files, I said, to learn why his department had been so lenient on Manson.
Baca fixed me with an unblinking, unnerving stare, and said, “The reality
is that Charlie Manson as an individual was a dopehead, a weirdo, a cultist,
and a control freak… Charlie’s not a guy who is going to get pimped by a
cop.”
“He seemed pretty fearless of them,” I said. “When they went to the
ranch, he told them he had men in the hills with guns on them.”
“It further exemplifies that he doesn’t need anyone to help him… You
know, look at the obvious here, he’s not reliable even in terms of his own
conditions. Now, if he’s not reliable in defining himself, how is he going to
be reliable in defining something useful for the cops?”
Most of what he said followed this line of thinking: Manson was too
unstable to be of use to law enforcement. As for Guenther and Whiteley’s
backing away from the case, he didn’t want to touch it.
“Every sheriff I interviewed,” I told him, “said they couldn’t get around
the fact that Guenther and Whiteley didn’t go to the ranch.”
“I think that only they can account for why they didn’t go,” he said. “It’s
interesting, in the pursuit of criminals, even when you’re on the hot trail, and
something distracts the effort that you’re into, you’ll say I’ll do that
tomorrow, and then tomorrow is going to interfere with some other damn
thing… and then before you know it a whole week has gone by.”
I reminded him that this wasn’t any old murder case. Guenther and
Whiteley believed, truly believed, that their case was tied into the biggest
unsolved murders in Los Angeles history, a crime that had the city living in
fear.
“I can assure you that they aren’t part of a larger deal-making person with
a guy like Charles Manson. You can’t hide something like that.”
“If I present it this way,” I said, implying that he was leaving me no other
option, “they’re going to look like bad cops.”
“Incompetent. Not bad.”
Our meeting ended almost as quickly as it started. Baca, who’d kept me
waiting more than an hour, had to get to a dinner in Pasadena. We walked out
together, trailed by his driver. Out in the dusk, he turned to me before we
parted ways. “If you’d like a little more assistance, I will get you in touch
with someone who does run informants and let you throw that hypothetical at
them,” he said. Thinking of Manson, he added, “He’s a weirdo. What kind of
cop is going to rely on a weirdo for anything?”
I didn’t say anything. I knew it was useless. The sheriff had his mind
made up before he met me. As his driver pulled up in his sedan, Baca gave
me a final once-over, as if still not certain what to make of me. Then he
shook his head and, getting into his car, said, “You got Hollywood fluff, like
Marilyn Monroe was murdered, that’s what you got. But that’s good. That’s
what sells books.”

Baca retired in 2014. In 2017, a jury found him guilty of obstructing an FBI
investigation into inmate abuse in Los Angeles County jails. He was
sentenced to three years in federal prison. Before a packed courtroom, a U.S.
district judge told him: “Your actions embarrass the thousands of men and
women who put their lives on the line every day. They were a gross abuse of
the trust the public placed in you… Blind obedience to a corrupt culture has
serious consequences.”
I found Baca contemptuous and condescending that day in 2005. He did,
however, make good on his offer to me, putting me in touch with the head of
his detective division, Commander Robert Osborne, who was the closest
thing LASO had to an expert on informants. I gave him my song and dance—
well rehearsed, by then—and, while he found it unlikely that Manson had
ever informed for his office, he said it was possible for a federal agency to
call and ask for one of its informants to be released from LASO custody. In
such cases, they’d call the investigator; the captain would be uninvolved.
“It’s possible that a phone call was made, yes. [But] what benefit would
be gained by keeping it a secret forever? The theory that somebody asked
them to do something different than the norm is not implausible,” he
admitted, “though I don’t know why they wouldn’t tell you. I can’t imagine
why they would want to keep it a secret. I don’t see anything to be gained—
if, in fact, there was some other agency involved in 1969 or 2005—to keep
that quiet.”
Unless, I thought, it resulted in the murders of innocent people.
I sensed this was the closest thing to a concession I’d ever get from the
L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. I thanked Osborne for his time and went on my
way.
This is what desperation does to a writer. I knew that Guenther would be
enraged if he learned that Baca had called him and Whiteley “incompetent.” I
wondered if this might be what would finally get him to break the code of
silence—the fact that he, one of the most legendary detectives in LASO
history, had been denigrated by the head of his former office. I didn’t have
the heart to tell him, but I did tell one of his friends, who was understandably
outraged. I had a hunch he’d share it with others, including Guenther. But it
still took me six years to call him.
When I did, he sounded tired and defeated, not like the Charlie Guenther I
remembered. He still had a funny way of calling me by my full name in
conversation.
“I want to close the door on that, Tom O’Neill,” Guenther said. “I want to
end it with you. Lee Baca kind of upset me. Our conversation is over.”
I apologized and explained why I didn’t think he was incompetent, and
why I was sure that anyone who knew his record didn’t, either. But it didn’t
break the wall. “Twenty years I did this,” he said quietly, referring to his time
in homicide, “and Baca said I’m incompetent… I just want it to finish. Hell,
I’m eighty-three years old.”
“I just want to write the truth about why those murders happened,” I said.
“I know what you’re saying, Tom, and I’d ask you to accommodate me.
This is over forty years ago and I’d like to be out of it… please, Tom O’Neill.
I have no squabbles with you… I’m totally done.”
Guenther died in 2014. I was heartbroken by the frailty I heard in his
voice that day. And I was confused. In the throes of my obsession with the
case, I couldn’t understand how such a celebrated detective would want to
shut the door on it, to lose his drive to get to the bottom of it. But that was
when I assumed I’d soon shut the door myself. Now many more years have
passed, and that door is still open, and I understand Guenther perfectly.
 6

Who Was Reeve Whitson?

Fairly early in my reporting, I knew I could have wrapped up my Premiere

story if I really wanted to. I had the guts of a great piece, even if it was too
late for the milestone thirtieth anniversary of the murders. I’d spoken to
duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious
prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation.
But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of
circumstantial evidence. The thrust of my story was still mired in ambiguity.
I worried that my reporting could be too easily dismissed, Lee Baca–style, as
“Hollywood fluff.”
So I kept going, although in many ways I’ve come to regret it. A few of
my interviews were especially tormenting—the ones that convinced me I
couldn’t call it quits yet. I thought of Little Joe, Jay Sebring’s barber, who’d
received an elliptical phone call from a mobster after the murders. And of the
first suspects, Charles Tacot and Billy Doyle, who claimed to have
intelligence connections. And of Preston Guillory, who alleged that police
allowed Manson to remain free because they knew he planned to attack the
Black Panthers. I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all
people, had some type of protection from law enforcement or was even an
informant. It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson
could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he
was. But this is where the reporting took me.
I started reading up on the use of informants. Perusing old editions of the
two major Los Angeles papers of the era, the Times and the Herald
Examiner, I learned that in the midsixties both the LAPD and LASO had
infiltrated groups they considered a threat to the status quo: antiwar leftists,
the Black Panther party, and other black militant groups like the US
Organization, a fierce rival of the Panthers in Los Angeles. Posing as leftists,
agents provocateurs would gain the trust of these groups from the inside,
provoking them to commit crimes or do violence against rivals.
Even from a distance, this line of inquiry gave me pause. I’d never been
interested in conspiracies. I wasn’t one to speculate about a second shooter in
JFK’s assassination or faking the moon landing. For the first time, though, I
saw the appeal of trafficking in murky secrets—it was an attractive option, as
long as people believed you. If I found the plot, I could change the way
people understood one of the seminal crimes, and criminals, of the twentieth
century. If I got it wrong, or took too much on faith, I’d become someone
who made people glaze over at parties, politely excusing themselves as I
droned on about “the big picture.”
Even if it made me look crazy, I wanted to see whether the informant
theory held water: if Manson had any credible connections to the government
or law enforcement, and if I could link him to the police infiltrations of leftist
groups I’d read about. Then, as if I’d conjured him from thin air, someone
emerged who fit into the puzzle. He seemed to have wandered into Southern
California from the pages of a spy novel, and not a very well written one, at
that. His name was Reeve Whitson, and his intersections with the Manson
investigation suggested a dimension to the Tate–LaBianca murders that had
been wiped from the official record.

“I Had to Save My Ass”

It started with Shahrokh Hatami, Sharon Tate’s friend and personal
photographer. When I spoke with Hatami over the phone in 1999, he’d never
given an interview about the murders. Sorting through his memories, he
recalled something he’d never been able to explain.
At seven in the morning on August 9, 1969, Hatami got a frantic phone
call from a friend. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he listened as the caller
delivered the terrible news: Sharon Tate and four others had been murdered
in her home on Cielo Drive. Afterward, in numb terror, he and his girlfriend
switched on the radio and listened all morning for further reports. They had
to wait a while. As Hatami later learned, that call came ninety minutes before
the Polanskis’ maid had arrived at the house, discovered the bodies, and ran
screaming to the neighbors, who called the police. Unwittingly, Hatami had
become one of the first people in the world to hear about the murders—all
because of his friend.
That “friend” was Reeve Whitson, whom Hatami characterized as “a
mystery man”—a phrase I’d hear a lot as I researched him in earnest. A close
friend of Tate and Polanski, Whitson had a talent for discretion. When people
remembered him at all, he was usually on the periphery, coming and going,
his purpose unknown, his motives inscrutable.
If Whitson’s involvement had been limited to that early phone call, I don’t
know whether I’d have given him a second thought. It seemed entirely
possible that Hatami had gotten the time wrong. To get some sense of
Whitson’s role in the case, I looked his name up in the trial transcript. It
appeared four times, all during Hatami’s testimony. It was Whitson, he
confirmed on the stand, who brought him to Bugliosi during the
investigation. And yet Whitson never appeared in Helter Skelter, which gave
an otherwise detailed account of Hatami’s story.
As well it should. Hatami’s testimony was a dramatic high point. Before
the packed courtroom, he explained that five months before the murders, he’d
been visiting Sharon Tate when he noticed someone on the property. Hustling
toward the front door, he found short, scraggly Manson standing there.
Manson asked if Terry Melcher was around. Hatami, wanting to be rid of
him, sent Manson around back. He knew that Rudi Altobelli lived in the
guesthouse and could tell him where to find Melcher.
Hatami’s story proved that Manson knew where the house on Cielo Drive
was, and how to get there. And it added some tragic foreshadowing: since
Tate, Sebring, Folger, and Frykowski were in the room behind Hatami, this
would be the one and only time Manson laid eyes on his future victims.
The problem, Hatami revealed to me, was that he’d never been confident
that it was Manson he saw that day. His uncertainty meant nothing to
Bugliosi and Reeve Whitson, who coerced his testimony anyway. “The
circumstances I was put through to become a witness,” Hatami said, “I didn’t
like at all.” Whitson told him, “‘Hatami, you saw that guy, Altobelli said so,
we need another person to corroborate it.’” (Presumably, Bugliosi felt he
needed two accounts of Manson’s visit to the house that day; it was such an
important part of tying Manson to the murder scene.)
Hatami demurred, and Whitson turned the screws, effectively threatening
him with deportation—he said he’d ensure that Hatami, an Iranian without
U.S. citizenship, wouldn’t be able to get another visa. If he wanted to stay in
America, all he had to do was say he’d seen Manson that day at Tate’s house.
Not long after, Whitson brought Hatami to his car and showed him his gun.
Although Hatami didn’t know Whitson too well, he took the threat seriously
—he believed that Whitson really had the means to deport him.
“I was framed by Mr. Whitson,” Hatami told me. “I was never sure it
happened that way. I had to save my ass.” Bugliosi and I were still speaking
then, so I asked him if he knew Whitson at all. He didn’t recall the name, he
claimed. Hatami thought that was “rubbish.” “Bugliosi knows him very
well,” he said. “I could not have been a witness without Reeve.”
He was right. Because the defense suspected that Bugliosi and Whitson
had, indeed, coerced Hatami’s story, they called on Bugliosi to explain
himself at the trial. Under oath, but out of the presence of the jury, Bugliosi
tried to answer for the fact that he’d interviewed Hatami without a tape
recorder or a stenographer. Who was in the room when Hatami talked? “Just
Reeve Whitson, myself, and Mr. Hatami,” Bugliosi replied. The judge
decided that Hatami couldn’t testify to having seen Manson. The jury heard
only that he was at the house when a man came to the door, and that he sent
the man to the guesthouse.
But of course Bugliosi had forgotten that he’d supplied Whitson’s name
under oath. Whitson wanted it that way. He served his purpose and then
disappeared, Hatami said, like “a piece in a chess game.”

A Photographic Memory
If Whitson was a chess piece, who was moving him around? He’d died in
1994, so I couldn’t ask him. Hatami gave me the names of people who
might’ve known him. Almost invariably they told me the same thing: that
Whitson had been an undercover agent of some kind. Some said he was in the
FBI, others the Secret Service. The rough consensus, though, was that he was
part of the CIA, or an offshoot special-operations group connected to it.
 It seemed absurd, the first time I heard it: an undercover agent wrangling
witnesses for the Manson trial. It seemed absurd the second and third times,
too. But then I kept hearing it, dozens of times—Reeve Whitson belonged to
an intelligence agency. As I talked to his confidants, a portrait emerged.
Whitson had been serious, secretive, compartmentalized. He lived “about
eight lives simultaneously,” as one friend put it. He had eccentric habits and
an eidetic memory. What he did with that memory, and whom he did it for,
remained the subject of feverish speculation.
Bill Sharman, a former NBA player and general manager of the Lakers,
had known Whitson since 1980. He recalled his friend’s “photographic
mind.” Sharman met me with his wife, Joyce. Both believed Whitson was
connected to the Manson case. “He said he worked for the CIA… He told us
he was involved in the investigation, but gave us no details,” Joyce said.
“Reeve would tell us the most preposterous things and eventually we’d find
out that they were true… we learned to start believing him. We loved him
very much, but he was always a mystery to us.”
That word cropped up whenever I asked anyone about Reeve. Even those
who’d known him well described him as a complete enigma, with a penchant
for telling unbelievable stories that turned out to be true. Another friend,
Frank Rosenfelt, the former president and chief executive of MGM, who’d
known Whitson since ’75, called him “the strangest guy in the world.”
“He didn’t lie,” Rosenfelt told me. “He did not put himself in a position
where he told you something and you could disprove it.” He was confident
that Whitson “had some intel connection, no doubt about it.” Rosenfelt was
one of a few people who remarked on Whitson’s odd tendency to call from
pay phones. He “would call me for hours… I always wondered, who the hell
is paying the bills? And always from a phone booth on the street!” And
“Reeve knew a lot about the Manson situation,” Rosenfelt said. “He indicated
that if they had listened to him that a lot of people may have not been killed.
He was heavily involved.”
“If who had listened to him?” I asked.
“I think he meant whoever was looking into it. The federal people, law
enforcement people. He implied he gave a lot of suggestions, he was
involved and they didn’t listen to him… He was bitter about it.”
That implied Whitson had some advance knowledge of the Family’s
plans. I wrote it off as a faulty memory until I heard it again. Richard and
Rita Edlund, who met Whitson through Rosenfelt, described a “very cryptic”
figure who took pains to avoid detection. “I knew he helped in the Manson
investigation,” Richard, a special-effects cinematographer, said. “Reeve was
among those, if not the one, who broke the Tate case.” But, like the others I’d
spoken to, Richard couldn’t offer too many specifics, only beguiling
memories: “He operated in the CIA—I believe he was on their payroll…
Reeve was the kind of guy who, because of his background, he still would
turn the inside light of his car out, so when he opened his door the light
wouldn’t go on. Because he had it that you never know who’s looking.” He
“used his thumbnail to tear the top-right-hand corner of every piece of paper
he handled, to mark it. Can’t shake old ways, he used to say.”
With his “gift of gab,” Whitson had “anything but a military bearing.” A
man who couldn’t be stereotyped, he “was infiltrating the town in his
incredibly charming way. He was friends with Jay Sebring and Polanski was
a buddy of his, and the Beach Boys—and he met Manson through all this.”
“Before the murders?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah!” Their encounter had come through Dennis Wilson, Edlund
recalled, in the period when Manson was trying to break into the music
business through the Beach Boys. “Reeve was the kind of guy who would
meet everybody. He would create the infrastructure of the town in his mind—
there was hardly anybody that he didn’t know.”
The likeliest story, I’d thought, was that Whitson was some kind of con
man, or at least a slick liar—and that Shahrokh Hatami had simply
misremembered or exaggerated the incidents culminating in his testimony.
But Whitson’s friends had me more and more convinced that he’d been
involved with Manson. Maybe the most compelling evidence came from Neil
Cummings, a lawyer who’d known Whitson since ’84. Several people had
told me he was among Reeve’s closest confidants, so I took him to lunch. I
hadn’t told him about Hatami’s claim—that Whitson had called him before
the bodies were even identified—but he corroborated it independently.
According to Cummings, Whitson was in a top-secret arm of the CIA,
even more secretive than most of the agency. He talked a lot about his
training in killing people, implying that he’d done it at least a few times. And
when it came to Manson, he “was closer to it than anybody,” Cummings
avowed:
 He was actively involved with some sort of investigation when it
happened. He worked closely with a law enforcement person and
talked quite a bit about events leading up to the murders, but I don’t
remember what they were. He had regrets for not stopping them, for
doing something about it.
He had a reason to believe something weird was about to happen at
the [Tate] house. He might have been there when it happened, right
before or after—the regret was maybe that he wasn’t there when it
happened. He told me he was there after the murders, but before the
police got there. He said there were screw-ups before and after. I
believe he said he knew who did it, and it took him a long time to lead
police to who did it.

Whitson had the Tate house under surveillance, Cummings added, which is
how he knew something was going to happen. On the night of the murders,
he’d been there and left. As outlandish as it sounded, Cummings was
confident about all of this. “He knew more than anyone else.”
I was flummoxed. For a year, I’d been hearing a rumor from people inside
and outside the case: that Manson had visited the Cielo house after the
murders, that he’d gone back with someone unknown to rearrange the scene.
This would’ve accounted for discrepancies in the positions of the bodies: the
killers left them one way, and the police found them in another. There were
pools of Tate’s and Sebring’s blood on the front porch, splatters on the
walkway and the bushes. But according to the killers, neither Tate nor
Sebring had ever left the living room, where they died. The coroner described
blood smears on Tate’s body, as if she’d been dragged—again, never
mentioned by the killers. Those in the area, including a private security
officer, had heard gunshots and arguing hours after the killers said they’d left.
And Manson himself had claimed on a few occasions that he’d gone back to
the house with an unnamed individual to “see what my children did.”
The mere mention of this claim made Bugliosi apoplectic. I’d seen a video
in which another researcher had raised the possibility. An indignant Bugliosi
asked: Why would Manson put himself at risk like that? He may have been
crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. And when I asked Bugliosi about it at our first
meeting, he refused even to consider the possibility, despite all the
discrepancies.
Now, though, here was Cummings, along with others, saying that Whitson
had been at the Tate house after the murders but before the police. Here was
Hatami, saying Whitson had called him that morning. Cummings said it was
Whitson’s “biggest regret” that he hadn’t been able to prevent the slaughter.
Maybe these were the words of a self-important liar, or maybe Manson was
telling the truth about this return visit, and Whitson had been there, too. That
seemed delusional to me. But Cummings and Hatami weren’t crazy. They
were two independent, credible sources with the same story.
It seemed possible to me that Whitson was the fulcrum, the man who
could connect everything. The strange omissions at the trial and in Helter
Skelter; the blatant failures of LASO to follow up on good leads; the
suspicion that Manson could be an informant; the murmurs about a narcotics
deal gone south: if I wanted to construct a unified field theory, Whitson,
linked to intelligence work by no fewer than a dozen sources, would have to
be at the center. Knowing that a lot of what I had was circumstantial and
speculative, I contained myself—I had a ton of work ahead of me. But,
looking back, when I wonder how I let this case consume me for the better
part of twenty years, I can point to Whitson as a major cause.

“He Did Not Exist”

The vital records on Whitson were thin. Born in Chicago on March 25, 1931,
he’d grown up in Kendallville, Indiana, and even his childhood had a whiff of
the fanciful to it. His mother was a dancer, and his father was a world-
renowned acrobat, part of a traveling family act. An only child, he developed
a flair for the dramatic. At the University of Indiana, he was the lead in
school plays, and he so enjoyed acting that he transferred to the Pasadena
Playhouse, moving to L.A. and hoping, like so many before him, to become
an actor or a singer. As a friend put it: “His great strength was his natural
affinity for people… He could play all these roles. His life really was a series
of theatrical productions.”
It’s not clear when that life swerved into espionage. According to a few
people I spoke with, Whitson said that he’d had a mentor, Pete Lewis, who’d
inducted him into undercover work. Lewis apparently met a tragic and deeply
improbable end, like something out of a James Bond movie: he was killed by
a poison dart hidden in an umbrella. Richard Edlund, one of several to
mention the poison-dart story, saw it as a vital part of Whitson’s origin story;
it was almost like Whitson thought he could avenge his friend’s death by
working as a spy. Who could say how much of it was true? My hope was that
Whitson’s family could separate fact from fiction.
A few of the people I’d met in California told me that he had a Swedish
ex-wife, as well as a daughter. Their very existence was speculative, because
he was so reluctant to disclose anything about them. The family had lived
together in America briefly, until, in 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis
came to a head, he’d sent them back to Sweden, certain that the United States
was on the brink of nuclear war. All of this sounded far-fetched to me, too,
but what didn’t, with Whitson?
Sure enough, I reached his ex-wife, Ellen Josefson (née Nylund), by
phone in Sweden. Josefson didn’t beat around the bush.
“He was working for the CIA,” she said. “That is why I am worried to talk
to you.”
Was she sure about that?
“Yes, I am sure.” She and Reeve had met in Sweden in ’61, she explained.
They fell in love in an instant. Before the end of the year they’d married and
moved to New York. In those days he was undercover as a journalist,
producing pro-Communist pieces as a ploy to meet radicals. This, he seems
to have hoped, would lead to more contacts in Russia. It was a scheme so
elaborate that someone from the Polish embassy was involved, she
remembered, and in due time Whitson was bringing Russians to their place.
“I got furious with him,” she said. “I was very anti-Communist.” How
could she have married a pinko? That’s when Whitson felt he had to pull the
curtain back. He explained that it was just part of his work for the agency—
something he was otherwise ill inclined to discuss.
In October 1962, Josefson said, she gave birth to their daughter, Liza. By
then, she had misgivings about her marriage; the bloom was off the rose.
Reeve’s job jeopardized her life, and now her daughter’s, too. And it made
him hard to love. He would be dispatched to remote areas of the world for
months at a time, returning with no explanation for where he’d been or what
he’d been doing. In 1962, he was always going off to Cuba, and after the
missile crisis he decided it would be best to send his family back to Sweden.
They returned to Ellen’s homeland sometime before JFK died, as she
recalled. And then—radio silence.
“I didn’t hear anything from him,” Ellen said. When he did resurface, it
was to demand a divorce. The legalities dragged on for two or three years. “I
had to be nice,” she said. “He said that things could happen to me if I didn’t
divorce him.”
After the divorce was finalized, neither she nor Liza heard from Whitson
for some fifteen years. He reappeared in the late seventies or early eighties,
saying that he’d retired and that he wanted to atone in some way for his
absence. Although they spoke only a few more times, Ellen did remember his
bringing up Manson and the Family.
“He said that his mother and Sharon Tate’s mother were close,” she said,
“and that’s why he had to go back to it, to help… I never wanted to have any
details. I was scared. He said, ‘It’s best for you to not know.’”
On Ellen’s advice, I got ahold of Liza, her daughter, who’d met Whitson
for the first time since her infancy when she was eighteen. In several long
phone calls, she filled in more biographical blanks about him. Now a married
nurse living in Sweden, she had trouble reconciling her father’s intense
secrecy with his role in her life. She found him inexplicable, opaque.
“I could never understand how he got to know all these important people,”
she told me. “He told me that he worked within the Central Intelligence
Agency. And he was in a part of the agency that was absolutely nonexistent.
He did not exist.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Yes,” she said. “My existence was kept a secret to all his friends.” When
she made a trip to California to see him, he told some friends that she was
coming. They “were absolutely convinced that he was just making a practical
joke, like he always did. When I came through the door, I had two people just
staring at me! They were so stunned.” Whitson told her that he’d kept her at
arm’s length for so long because “he lived his life in complete control over
other people, and I was the only one that he could not control.” If people
wanted to hurt him, “they could get me,” she said. “My mother and my
grandparents in Sweden feared that I was going to be kidnapped because I
was his daughter.” Even after her father retired, they had a difficult
relationship. He still wouldn’t discuss his past, and his politics bothered her
—he was an archconservative with a rabid disdain for leftists.
 When Whitson died, Liza flew to Los Angeles to attend his funeral and
was astonished to see how many powerful friends he had, and how few of
them knew much about him beyond his or her personal experience. “He kept
his friends apart,” she said. Hoping to recover any mementos, she went to his
sparsely furnished apartment, finding nothing of any sentimental value. He
did leave behind a few photos, which surprised her—Whitson had always
refused to be photographed. One of them caught her off guard. It was a black-
and-white picture of her father with long, flowing hair—not a wig, by all
appearances—and bell-bottoms. “He looks like he could’ve been one of the
Manson Family members,” she told me.
She sent me the photograph, which, sure enough, showed a grimacing
Whitson dressed as a hippie, not flamboyantly, but plausibly, in blue jeans
and a wide belt, his shirt open at the neck. Liza was convinced that it was
from one of his undercover operations. My impression was that the photo
dated to about the mid-1960s; the cars in the background were from that
period. I wondered if the disguise could have been related to Manson at all.
She couldn’t say. Although he’d told her that he played some role in the case,
“I never figured out why he was involved,” she said. “He was a master of
telling you things but not really spelling it out.”
Whitson had a large extended family. Many of his “cousins” weren’t even
related by blood, but they’d bonded with him anyway. As Frank Rosenfelt
told me, “He had a strange habit of getting in touch with people named
Whitson and saying they were his cousins.”
Linda Ruby, however, was a real cousin of his—Liza had put me in touch
—and she presented another side of Whitson’s activities during and after the
Tate murders.
In August 1969, Ruby told me, Whitson was living with his parents in
L.A. On the day the bodies were discovered at the Tate house, she said, he
went missing. His father, her uncle Buddy, had told her this story. The
morning after the murders—around the same time Whitson would’ve placed
his call to Hatami—Buddy woke up and discovered that Reeve hadn’t come
home that night. When news of the murders flashed on the radio, Buddy got
nervous. He knew that Reeve had planned to visit the Cielo house the night
before, and early reports said that one of the bodies there had yet to be
identified. (It was Steven Parent, who wasn’t IDed until eight that night.)
Fearing that his son had been murdered, Buddy Whitson called the cops,
who sprang into action. “The police set up a nerve center at their house,”
Ruby said. They remained there, manning the telephones, until Reeve finally
returned home late that night, at which point they eagerly debriefed him.
Ruby couldn’t understand why the police would set up a command center
at the home of an anonymous Los Angeles resident. Why not just check to
see if the unidentified body was his? Making things weirder still, Whitson
himself was present when his father told her the story—he was sitting right
there, she remembered, quietly refusing to clarify or contribute. He never
even said where he was during the hours he was missing.
Another friend summed it up nicely: “He always wanted to go to
restaurants that no one went to. He said, ‘I have to keep a low profile.’ It was
so low that there was no profile.”

“Mr. Anonymous”
As usual, I was anxious to find some way to verify everything I’d heard.
With Whitson, especially, my reporting had crossed the line into
conspiratorial territory, and I would be hard-pressed to convert skeptics on
the merits of my interviews alone. Of course, clandestine intelligence agents
are exactly the sort of people who don’t leave a lot of paper behind, and
Whitson, by all accounts, was so savvy that he didn’t need to take notes. I’d
filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the CIA, asking for
any information on him. Their response said that they could “neither confirm
nor deny” Whitson’s connection to the agency. FOIA specialists told me that
this is the closest one can get to confirmation that someone worked for the
CIA.
I did, eventually, find corroboration in print, but it came in a strange form:
a manuscript for an unpublished book called Five Down on Cielo Drive.
Written around 1974 or ’75—before Helter Skelter, and thus before
Bugliosi’s telling of the Manson story had ossified into the “official”
narrative—the book had a tortured history, not least because it involved at
least three authors. The most prominent was Lieutenant Robert Helder,
who’d headed the LAPD’s investigation into the Tate murders. Another
contributor was Sharon Tate’s father, Colonel Paul Tate. The third author was
Roger “Frenchie” LaJeunesse, an FBI agent who’d “unofficially” assisted the
LAPD.
It’s not hard to see the appeal of the book, especially before Helter
Skelter. Here were three authorities on the case who could give a rich account
of it when no such account existed. They secured a contract with a publisher.
When too much time passed without a viable book, a ghostwriter came on
board, but by the time the manuscript was ready, Bugliosi had beaten them to
the punch, and Helter Skelter had claimed the mantle of “official” Manson
book. The deal fell through. In the ensuing years, the Five Down manuscript
gained a reputation among researchers and obsessives. It was exceptionally
rare—hardly anyone other than its authors had read it—and even though it
was apparently tedious, it was rumored to have the most complete account of
the LAPD’s investigation, false leads and all.
Another journalist passed me a copy. I read the parts about Colonel Tate
especially closely. A retired military intelligence officer, Tate had mounted
his own inquiry into his daughter’s death, separate from but parallel to the
LAPD’s. Many had told me that Whitson was under his wing. You wouldn’t
think that LAPD detectives would have been so keen on two outsiders
helping them, especially given those outsiders’ connections to intelligence—
but a LASO detective told me that Colonel Tate “appeared to be running the
LAPD.”
Then in his midforties, Tate had only recently left the army. To mount his
“independent” investigation, he tried to masquerade as a laid-back
Californian, growing a beard and long hair. But he retained the upright
carriage of a military officer as he wandered into hippie clubs and drug dens
in search of his daughter’s murderer, offering a lavish reward to anyone who
would help.
How did Whitson play into this? The Five Down manuscript refers to a
Walter Kern, “a somewhat shady character who can best be described as a
‘police groupie.’ Apparently he had been a friend of Jay Sebring… and
wanted to help in any way he could.” “Kern” was always one step ahead of
the other investigators. Helder wrote, “In this business, as you might imagine,
a policeman gets to meet many strange people. Kern was among the
strangest. No one knew what he did for a living, yet he always seemed to
have money and knew just about everyone on the wrong side of the tracks. I
didn’t like him but he was useful.”
And he kept popping up. When Helder arrived to interview Roman
Polanski at the Paramount lot where he was sequestered with Witold
Kaczanowski, Kern was there, “lurking in the shadows. He sure did get
around.” Believing that Voytek Frykowski was involved with drug dealers
who may have murdered him, Helder instructed Kern to cozy up to anyone
who might know them, especially those in Mama Cass’s circle.
In another section of the manuscript, a “Hollywood hooker” is said to
have spoken to Kern, “who by now was well-known as an amateur sleuth on
the case.” Kern shared leads and took orders, and yet the man was so
shrouded in mystery that Helder referred to him as “Mr. Anonymous.”
It seemed likely to me that there was more to “Mr. Anonymous” than
Helder had shared. By that point, Helder had died, but I’d already spoken to
Frenchie LaJeunesse, the FBI agent who’d contributed to Five Down. I called
him again to ask whether Walter Kern was really Reeve Whitson.
His answer: “Yes.” In fact, the publishing deal couldn’t have happened
without Whitson, LaJeunesse said. “Reeve Whitson was a part of putting the
book together, the linchpin between all of us.”
It was Lieutenant Helder, the lead investigator for the LAPD, who’d
assigned Whitson the pseudonym of Walter Kern, to protect his undercover
status—hardly a step one would take with an ordinary “amateur sleuth.”
“Reeve didn’t want his name associated with a book,” LaJeunesse said, even
long after the Manson case had been solved. “Not on the jacket, not even in
contracts—he didn’t even want money.”
In effect, I now had written proof from the LAPD’s head investigator, and
from Sharon Tate’s own father, that Reeve Whitson was smack in the middle
of the Manson investigation from the start. LaJeunesse didn’t know who
Whitson worked for, just that he was an “astounding fellow” who’d been an
informant of some kind. He “wanted to project an aura of mystery,”
LaJeunesse said. But the heart of his motivation was an antidrug
conservatism. He was “interested in keeping young people away from the
curse of narcotics.”
Mike McGann, the LAPD detective whom I’d interviewed about the early
days of the investigation, remembered Whitson’s involvement, too.
“He was heavily involved,” McGann said. “And he had no need for
money.” McGann was nearly certain that Whitson was in the CIA, and found
him “very credible.” Still, when I said that Whitson had reportedly believed
he could’ve stopped the murders, McGann laughed. “Bullshit. He’d talk for
three hours and never say anything. Typical government employee—a real
good line of bullshit.”

If I could prove once and for all that Whitson was working for the CIA, even
McGann might admit I had a story on my hands. The CIA wasn’t even
supposed to operate on domestic soil. What could they have been doing
messing around with an acid-soaked cult in Los Angeles? And if Whitson
had been close enough to the murders to stop them, why didn’t he?
Everyone agreed that Paul Tate was the key to understanding Whitson. I
knew that Tate was still alive, but getting him to open up would be a long
shot.
His wife and Sharon’s mother, Doris, had been comfortable discussing the
murder. She’d formed a national victims’ rights advocacy group and
mobilized it whenever anyone from the Family was eligible for parole. Her
friends said she believed there was something deeper than Helter Skelter
behind the murders. Like her husband, she’d conducted her own investigation
through the years, becoming convinced that the Cielo house was under
surveillance by some type of law enforcement at the time of the murders.
(Whether she knew that Reeve Whitson had claimed to be watching the
house, we’ll never know.) She was also sure that her daughter wasn’t
supposed to be home when the killers arrived that night. Whoever was
watching the house, she believed, had noticed that Sharon’s red Ferrari
wasn’t in the driveway—it was in the repair shop—and concluded that she
wasn’t there. She’d planned to write a book about her theories, but she never
got to: she was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1992.
Paul Tate, rumor had it, had never discussed the case with his wife.
Before she died, they’d barely spoken to each other, having taken up in
separate parts of their house. He hadn’t spoken publicly about Sharon’s death
since Manson had been captured, and he’d already declined an interview with
me once. But I phoned him again in May 2000, telling him I’d gotten a copy
of Five Down on Cielo Drive and planned to quote it.
That got him to agree to meet with me. But as the date approached, he
canceled on me; we rescheduled, and he canceled again. When he called to
cancel yet another meeting, I tried to butt in with a question about Reeve
Whitson before he could get off the phone. He was receptive—at first,
anyway.
“Reeve was my main person to help me,” Tate said. “He’s been a friend
of Roman Polanski and Sharon and mine and Jay Sebring… He was very,
very helpful.”
Even so, Tate found it ridiculous that Whitson’s friends were going
around saying that he could have prevented the murders. That simply wasn’t
true, he said. Could he help me clear it up, having contributed so much to the
investigation?
“I contributed, just—put in there I contributed nothing.”
“But you were involved in the investigation,” I said. “You wrote a book
about it!”
“Yeah, well…”
“Did you ask Reeve to do the undercover work or did someone else?”
“I’m not gonna answer those questions,” he said, impatience creeping into
his voice.
Could he at least tell me who Whitson worked for? He refused.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to tell you that!” he nearly shouted.
Out of desperation, I made a foolish mistake. Sometimes, when I sensed
that someone was withholding something sensitive, I’d remind the person
that, in all the speculation about Manson himself, the basic, brutal loss of
human life was too often the first thing people stopped thinking about. So I
said, “Just out of respect to the victims, don’t you think—”
Paul Tate sounded a million miles away to me, and he had a gruff,
emotionally detached tone befitting his military background. But he was, first
and foremost, Sharon Tate’s father: a man who’d lost a child to an
unimaginable horror, who’d seen her death become a kind of shorthand for
tabloid atrocities. I’d forgotten that truth, and my comment understandably
upset him. I regretted it right away.
“Out of respect for the victims!” he shouted. “What kind of fuck do you
think I am?” He laughed bitterly. “You go ahead and do whatever you want
to do, but… if any son of a bitch ever had respect for the victims, it was me.”
“I apologize,” I said. “I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out.”
“Okay,” he said. “Bye, bye.” And that was the end of my relationship with
Paul Tate, the man who knew better than anyone what Reeve Whitson was up
to. He died in 2005.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Helder had written that Whitson “knew just about everyone on the wrong
side of the tracks.” The opposite was true, too—he knew how to pull the
levers of power. Colonel Tate was just one of his friends in high places.
Usually, in the same breath, Whitson’s friends named another military
bigwig: General Curtis LeMay.
As discussed earlier, LeMay was part of the unsettling story I’d heard
from Jay Sebring’s barber, Little Joe. One of Sebring’s clients, the mobster
Charlie Baron, had called Joe after Sebring’s murder, pledging that no harm
would come to the barber. Charlie Baron was a friend of Curtis LeMay, too.
Meetings between the two were noted by the FBI, who surveilled Baron for
decades. LeMay, a former air-force officer nicknamed “Bombs Away
LeMay,” had retired in ’65 and turned to defense contracting, where one
critic feared that he “could be more dangerous than when he was air force
chief of staff.” He moved to L.A. to become the vice president of a missile-
parts manufacturer, but it fizzled, as did LeMay’s brief political career. After
that, Mr. Bombs Away had spent his retirement roaming the city with Mr.
Anonymous.
I added a few more connective arrows to the big whiteboard on my wall,
realizing more than ever that its tangle of lines and circles made sense only to
me. Though I never figured out what LeMay and Whitson got up to together,
it was plausible that they were tied up in Charlie Baron’s cabal of right-wing
Hollywood friends, the ones who, Little Joe told me, had “done terrible
things to black people.” (George Wallace, who’d chosen LeMay as his
running mate in his ’68 presidential bid, was among the nation’s most
notorious racists.)
“I’m sure he knew Baron,” Whitson’s friend John Irvin told me. A British
film director who himself claimed to have ties to MI5, Irvin said that Whitson
got meetings “within minutes” at “the highest levels of the defense industry
—it was amazing.” He was “on the fringes of very far-out research” for the
government, “not discussed openly because it verges on the occult.” He
added that Whitson “had very good connections with the Los Angeles
Sheriff’s Office” and pull with immigration officials, as Shahrokh Hatami
had said. But Irvin couldn’t elaborate on any of this.
Then came Otto and Ilse Skorzeny, the most sinister of Whitson’s friends.
They were Nazis—genuine, German, dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. The United
Nations listed Otto Skorzeny as a war criminal. He’d been one of Hitler’s
most trusted operatives, leading the manhunt of one of the Führer’s would-be
assassins and spearheading a secret mission to rescue Mussolini. After the
Third Reich fell, Skorzeny safeguarded the wealth of countless Nazis and
helped disgraced war criminals settle into new lives around the world.
Brought to trial before a U.S. military court, Skorzeny was alleged to be “the
most dangerous man in Europe”—but he was acquitted, having made himself
an asset to U.S. intelligence. His wife, the Countess Ilse von Finkelstein, was
once a member of the Hitler Youth; a shrewd businesswoman known for her
beauty and charm, she negotiated arms deals and contracts for German
engineering companies. Irvin had met Ilse many times through Whitson.
When she got drunk, he said, “she was always doing Heil Hitler salutes!”
Whitson could look past any ideology, no matter how abhorrent, if
someone proved useful to him. His friends construed him as the purest form
of Cold Warrior, lifted from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He carried
an outmoded fifties-era politics into the future, masquerading as a hippie,
infiltrating an LSD cult, and befriending Nazis to eliminate the scourge of
communism and narcotics—the latter being, to his mind, a direct extension of
the former.
“He believed there was an operation to destabilize American youth,” one
friend told me. “Russians were bringing drugs in to battle the American
system from within.”
Having worked in South America, Whitson believed “we should kill the
drug lords in Bolivia and their whole families… If there’s a baby, you kill the
baby. I don’t think he would say something like that and not be capable of
doing it. He didn’t believe in the individual, but in the larger picture.”
Another acquaintance recalled, “The entire Manson situation, the Black
Panther movement, and probably similar other movements… people like that
were discredited by certain things that, according to Reeve, may have been
staged or done by government authorities in order to make them look bad.”
If I could find out where Whitson’s money came from, I might be closer
to understanding what he actually did. His résumé was scant from the fifties
through the seventies, after which it covered more ground than seemed
possible for a single life. He was the special advisor to the chairman of the
board of Thyssen, among the largest corporations in Germany. He sank years
into a scheme to construct a maglev monorail train stretching from Las Vegas
to Pasadena. He wanted to build a Brigadoon theme park in Scotland. He was
involved in weapons manufacturing, early iterations of the Miss Universe
pageant, and a new variety of childproof medicine bottle. And he had a
passion for race cars—building them, selling them, driving them—which
may explain how he befriended Jay Sebring, another racing enthusiast.
These ventures had one thing in common: they fell through. The easiest
explanation, of course, was that they were covers, and sometimes Whitson
told his friends as much. So where did his money come from? No one knew.
He always paid in cash—he stowed it in his freezer—and when he had it, he
was quick to settle a tab. Whitson dressed in gabardine suits, but for much of
his adult life, an ex-girlfriend recalled, he lived “like a hermit,” sleeping “on
a cot in his parents’ kitchen.” The man who loved fast cars drove an
economical Ford Pinto.
In his final years, Whitson was destitute and disgruntled, telling rueful
stories of the “Quarry”—his term for the section of the CIA he worked for—
and trash-talking the agency. Once you’re in, he told one friend, “You really
are a pawn.” In his dying days, the government had said, “You didn’t even
exist to us.” Even the movies were no reprieve, offering reminders of his
glory days. About a year before he died, seeing the thriller The Pelican Brief,
Whitson leaned over in the dark of the cinema and told a friend, “I wrote the
yellow papers on everything that happened.” With a hint of nostalgia, he
explained that “yellow papers” detailed interrogation techniques, including a
procedure in which a man had a plastic tube inserted in his rectum, peanut
butter smeared on his scrotum, and a rat dropped in the tube.
Whitson died at the relatively young age of sixty-three. With no health
insurance, he left behind an enormous unpaid hospital bill, something to the
tune of half a million dollars. A few of my sources felt there may have been
foul play. He’d given conflicting explanations for his health problems: a heart
attack, or a spider bite, or a brain tumor, or lymphoma. “I think he committed
suicide,” his daughter told me. “His greatest fear was to be a vegetable.”

Coda: Neither Confirm nor Deny

Reeve Whitson “was a walk-in,” as one of my sources put it, “an
extraterrestrial.” Once he consumed me, I found myself fixating on
possibilities that I would’ve dismissed as insane only months before. His life
opened onto a vantage of intrigue, where Manson and the sixties
counterculture were just one element in a political struggle that encompassed
Nazis, Cuba, Vietnam, South America, military intelligence, and byzantine
matters of national security.
But Whitson was too much the mystery man he was said to be. He
brought my reporting to a standstill. At a certain point, I felt I’d learned
everything I could about him without tapping official sources. I’d attempted
to find his tax records and asked reporters with stronger connections at
Langley if they could look him up. They never found anything. FOIAs to the
FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, the ATF, the IRS, and the military all got
responses that said they’d had nothing to do with him. It was only the CIA
that gave me the “neither confirm nor deny” response. Later, responding to
my appeal, it wrote that Whitson had “no open or officially acknowledged
relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
I worry that I’ll never know the truth about Reeve Whitson. There is, of
course, the possibility that he was little more than an effective con artist,
someone who weaseled his way into a minor role in the Manson investigation
by sweet-talking people in power. Someone who’s constantly implying to his
friends that he’s in the CIA might not be very effective as an undercover
agent. If Whitson were truly a high-functioning member of the intelligence
community, would anyone have had any idea?
On the other hand, maybe the stories I heard are fundamentally correct—
Whitson was an intelligence agent who led a storied international career, and
he wasn’t exaggerating when he said that he could’ve stopped the Manson
murders. If that was true—what then? Why would the CIA, or any
intelligence group, have had Whitson infiltrate the Family, and what did
Manson know about it? The bottom line was that I’d learned just enough
about Whitson to dwell on him. It was as his daughter said: “He gives a little
and then he goes away.”
 7

Neutralizing the Left

Dawn of the “Campus Malcontents”

I couldn’t expect to report on the likes of Reeve Whitson, or on outrageous
claims about intelligence connections and military figures, until I learned
more about the politics and pressures of California in the sixties. My research
was pushing me toward broader connections and social implications, and I
didn’t always know what to do with them. If Preston Guillory was correct, for
instance, then LASO knew about Manson’s plan to attack the Black Panthers.
How could the police have known, and why would they have wanted that
attack to happen? I had vague notions of the tension between the Panthers
and the government, but I couldn’t say how it fit in the larger context of
protest in the sixties, when the nation’s unrest had crystallized in California.
The state was the epicenter of the summer of love, but it had also seen the
ascent of Reagan and Nixon. It had seen the Watts riots, the birth of the
antiwar movement, and the Altamont concert disaster, the Free Speech
movement and the Hells Angels. Here, defense contractors, Cold Warriors,
and nascent tech companies lived just down the road from hippie communes,
love-ins, and surf shops.
If there was any truth to Reeve Whitson’s story, I needed a crash course in
the government’s involvement in antileft action in California, and solid
sources to tell me how Manson could have been swept up in it. I focused on
two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in
1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary
objective, according to three congressional committees that investigated them
in the midseventies, was to discredit the left-wing movement by any means
necessary—an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of
the Manson murders.

The sixties youth movement was born on May 13, 1960, when hundreds of
demonstrators, most of them UC Berkeley students, began a two-day protest
at San Francisco’s City Hall. The House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HCUA) had convened a series of hearings there, and students
were chagrined to learn that they were barred from the proceedings. A riot
broke out as police turned firehoses on the protesters, the intense pressure
forcing them down the building’s imposing marble stairway. Police clubbed
protesters and made sixty-one arrests, including more than thirty students.
“Black Friday,” as it came to be known, marked the end of the fifties, the
dawn of a new age of dissent. The following day, the demonstrators returned
undeterred, this time totaling more than five thousand. The HCUA was
cowed—never again did it conduct hearings beyond the Capitol. J. Edgar
Hoover, the director of the FBI, couldn’t believe the left had such strength in
numbers. He was convinced that foreign Communists sponsored the
movement. Thus began a pitched battle between federal law enforcement and
young “subversives.”
In the midsixties, with the war in Vietnam escalating, Berkeley became a
hotbed of antiwar activity. Sit-ins were staged on campus; rallies were held
throughout the Bay Area, each growing in size and fervor. Late in 1964,
some fifteen hundred students crowded into Berkeley’s Sproul Hall to protest
the university’s mistreatment of campus activists. More than seven hundred
of them were arrested that day.
On January 28, 1965, a distraught Hoover met with the director of the
CIA, John McCone, hatching a plan to take “corrective action” at Berkeley.
The CIA’s charter prohibited the agency from domestic operations, but
McCone collaborated with Hoover nonetheless, hoping to quash the protests.
One of their targets was Clark Kerr, the president of UC Berkeley, who was
widely perceived as sympathetic to the protesters. McCone and Hoover
circulated false information claiming that he had Communist ties. They also
targeted faculty supporters of the demonstrators and the student leaders
themselves.
 A few months later, McCone resigned from the CIA, having felt
unappreciated by President Lyndon Johnson. His next job brought him back
to California: he took a post on Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign,
shoring up the candidate’s credibility with right-leaning voters. Reagan
campaigned fervently against “the so-called New Left,” vowing a swift end to
California’s burgeoning antiwar movement. Without citing evidence, he
claimed that Berkeley had suffered reduced enrollment as a result of the
protesters’ “destructive conduct.” If elected, he said, he would appoint
McCone to lead a formal investigation of the university’s “campus
malcontents and filthy speech advocates.” Reagan won by a landslide. As he
cemented his power, antiwar sentiment continued to flower at Berkeley. In
April 1970, soon to win a second term, Reagan famously declared war
against the movement. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” he
announced. “No more appeasement.”
The Oval Office was similarly disturbed by the rise of student activism.
By 1967, Lyndon Johnson believed that the country was on the verge of a
political revolution that could topple him from power. Having mired the
nation even further in the Vietnam War, he faced constant jeers at rallies:
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” As antiwar
demonstrations spilled from campuses into the streets, Johnson ordered the
FBI and the CIA to take action. That August, with the president’s approval,
CIA director Richard Helms authorized an illegal domestic surveillance
program, code-named CHAOS. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover revived the
FBI’s dormant counterinsurgency program, COINTELPRO. Both agencies
opened the first offices of their respective operations in San Francisco—still
considered ground zero for the revolution, especially since the founding of
the Black Panther party in nearby Oakland the previous summer.
Thanks to these two secret programs and their network of well-placed
informants, there was an all-out war raging in California by the summer of
’69. The FBI and CIA had induced the left to feed on itself; among
competing factions, what had been sectarian strife had devolved into outright
violence. The more I read about it, the more I saw how someone like Charles
Manson could fit into a scheme like this. I was only speculating, but I knew
that he’d spent a lot of time in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,
often inveighing against the Black Panthers; and I had reliable sources
suggesting that he was an informant, or at least hanging around with others
who could’ve been.
It struck me that the Tate–LaBianca murders had been so often invoked as
the death knell of the sixties. Arguably, they did more than any other event to
turn the public opinion against hippies, recasting the peace-and-love flower-
power ethos as a thing of latent, drug-addled criminality. As the writer Todd
Gitlin noted, “For the mass media, the acid-head Charles Manson was
readymade as the monster lurking in the heart of every longhair.” Wasn’t this
the goal of CHAOS and COINTELPRO?
It was a sound connection in theory. To report it, to take it out of the
realm of the hypothetical, seemed an impossible task for someone with no
background in national security. But I had to try. And so, feeling the line
between “researcher” and “conspiracy theorist” blurring before me, I
hunkered down in the library to read about the many ways our government
has deceived us.

“Fomenting Violence and Unrest”

The FBI and the CIA launched their counterintelligence programs in the same
month. On August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover issued a memorandum to the
chiefs of each of his FBI field offices in the United States, outlining the
objective of COINTELPRO. (The name was an abridgment of Counter
Intelligence Program.) First launched in 1956 to “increase factionalism”
among Communists in the United States, COINTELPRO had been activated
on and off throughout the early sixties, often to vilify civil rights leaders—
Martin Luther King Jr. most prominent among them. In his ’67 memo,
Hoover formed a new branch of the operation, aiming

to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the

activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations… The activities
of all such groups of intelligence interest to this Bureau must be
followed on a continuous basis… Efforts of various groups to
consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be
frustrated. No opportunity should be missed to exploit… the
organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the
groups… [and] to capitalize upon existing conflicts between
 competing black nationalist organizations.

Hoover specified more than twenty cities where COINTELPRO methods

could be put to effective use, Los Angeles among them. In a later memo, he
ordered the Bureau to “pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them
before they exercised their potential for violence.”
Informants were COINTELPRO’s lifeblood, providing the only effective
way for the FBI to learn about, and exert influence on, the groups it hoped to
discredit. The Bureau went to extreme lengths to cultivate solid informants; if
it found a convict willing to infiltrate a political group, it would commute his
prison sentence. In Quantico, Virginia, at the sprawling marine corps base
where the FBI would soon open its own academy, a less-formal “Hoover
University” trained agents in the delicate art of passing as leftists. They grew
unkempt beards, refrained from bathing for days at a time, parroted radical
talking points, got stoned, and tripped on acid.
In the Black Panther party and, in Los Angeles, the US Organization,
informants were instrumental in fomenting violence. They would spread
disinformation to catalyze an intergroup rivalry, or they’d simply arrange for
the bloodshed themselves.
Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the Black
Panther Party for Self Defense (commonly known as the Black Panther party)
had become the bête noire of federal law enforcement. From Hoover on
down, the FBI’s ranks saw the group as a threat to the national order rivaled
only by communism and nuclear holocaust. Originally, the Panthers served to
safeguard Oakland’s black residents from overzealous policing. They
promoted lawful, armed self-defense in inner-city neighborhoods, and their
social outreach programs brought meals and health care to those who
couldn’t afford them. Their Ten-Point Program demanded “power to
determine the destiny of our Black Community.”
But as the party grew in size and prominence, opening chapters in nearly
every major city in the United States and abroad, it embraced more militant
action against the long arm of law enforcement, starting in Oakland. In 1967,
Newton shot and killed a cop during a traffic stop. In ’68, Eldridge Cleaver,
who headed the Panthers’ Ministry of Information, was in a firefight during
which he and two cops suffered gunshot wounds and a seventeen-year-old
Panther was killed. That same year, the violence found its way to Los
Angeles, as gunfights led to four Panther deaths.
By 1969, the Panthers had been involved in more than a dozen shoot-outs
with police, some the result of ambushes. Fearing infiltration by informants,
the party began to implode, purging members and, in one notorious case,
torturing and killing a nineteen-year-old member suspected of being a snitch.
Their paranoia was far from unfounded. Hoover’s FBI chalked up the internal
strife, not to mention the rash of deaths, as a victory.
COINTELPRO promised the violent repudiation of what Hoover had
dubbed a “hate-type organization.” The Bureau’s strategy was merciless, its
results disastrous but effective. In Chicago, famously, the FBI recruited
William O’Neal, recently charged with impersonating a federal officer and
driving a stolen car across state lines, to infiltrate the Panthers’ Illinois
chapter, forgiving those charges in exchange for his services. Soon O’Neal
became the personal bodyguard for Fred Hampton, the chapter’s chairman.
O’Neal’s post allowed him to provide the Bureau with a steady stream of
intelligence, including detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment.
Although he found no evidence that Hampton or the group posed a threat to
anyone’s safety, O’Neal continued to inform. In December 1969—days,
coincidentally, after Manson was charged in the Tate–LaBianca murders—
O’Neal slipped a barbiturate into Hampton’s drink over dinner. By the end of
the night, the police had raided Hampton’s apartment and shot him twice in
the head at point-blank range.
O’Neal was one of many such informants around the country, and
Hampton’s death one of many such deaths. The FBI’s role may never have
come to light if not for the Citizens’ Committee to Investigate the FBI, an
audacious crew of activist-burglars who took it upon themselves to break into
a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia.
One night in March 1971, the group took a crowbar to that office’s dead-
bolted door, stuffing suitcases with papers revealing the FBI’s domestic
spying, which they soon parceled out to the press.
Hoover was in high dudgeon: the group’s methods were straight out of the
FBI playbook. They’d cased the office for months, sending in a woman
disguised as a college student to get a sense of the building’s security. In his
fury, Hoover allocated some two hundred agents to track down the burglars,
but they were never found; only in 2014 did they reveal themselves. They
were motivated, they said, by a sense that the government had lied to them
about Vietnam, and that conventional protests had proven useless.
The existence of COINTELPRO was the single most earthshaking
revelation in the stolen documents, among which was Hoover’s incendiary
’67 COINTELPRO memo, the one in which he pledged to “discredit” and
“neutralize” leftist organizations. With his pet project exposed, Hoover took
steps to end COINTELPRO. But the burglary inaugurated a spate of whistle-
blowing that undermined the FBI’s credibility over the next few years.
Congressman Hale Boggs, the House Majority Leader, compared the FBI to
the “secret police,” conceding that even Congress lived in fear of them, and
that they’d “hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny.” Lawsuits brought
under the Freedom of Information Act forced the attorney general to reveal
more incriminating FBI files. By 1975, anti-intelligence sentiment was so
high that Congress formed a committee to scrutinize the Bureau.
Led by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, the committee’s investigation
exposed FBI duplicity on a scale that had been unthinkable even after the
Pennsylvania burglary. The Church Committee’s findings, published in ’76,
gave the nation its first glimpse of the astonishing success that Hoover’s
counterintelligence operation had seen. As reported in the New York Times
that May, the committee’s final report determined that “FBI headquarters
approved more than 2,300 actions in a campaign to disrupt and discredit
American organizations ranging from the Black Panthers to Antioch
College,” and that the Bureau “may have violated specific criminal statutes”
in pursuing actions that “involved risk of serious bodily injury or death to
targets.”
The Church Committee noted that COINTELPRO encompassed “a
staggering range of targets,” and that the FBI’s deployment of “dangerous,
degrading, or blatantly unconstitutional techniques appears to have become
less restrained with each subsequent program.” Hoover had specifically
requested that these techniques be “imaginative and hard-hitting,” and they
were—the FBI tried seemingly everything, from gossip to gunfights. The
Bureau mailed pejorative articles and newspaper clippings to college
administrators. Its agents tried to destroy marriages by writing unsigned,
malicious, rumor-mongering letters. They smeared leftists as informants
when they weren’t, and they stoked the flames of internecine conflicts until
they grew into feuds.
 The committee detailed several of the FBI’s exploits in Los Angeles, and
by now I wasn’t surprised by the scope of the mayhem. The operations
described, especially the deadly ones, were equal parts sophisticated and
reckless, with the Bureau taking great pains to install informants and incite
violence with no care for the consequences. I looked for any signs of
Manson, no matter how tangential—any pattern among law enforcement, any
familiar name.
The most conspiratorial possibility, of course, would be that the FBI had
carefully groomed Manson and pressed him into service as a COINTELPRO
informant—but I knew that was the longest of long shots, and if the facts
didn’t lead me there, I had no desire to force the connection. Given the FBI’s
sloppiness, I wondered if Manson could have been implicated in other, more
indirect ways, willingly or not. Maybe he wasn’t an informant but had been
close to someone who was; maybe someone like Reeve Whitson had
influenced his actions from two or three degrees of removal; maybe someone
at the sheriff’s office had assisted the FBI.
I was encouraged by one simple fact: the FBI had behaved
conspiratorially with COINTELPRO, early and often. One of its greatest
coups came in January 1969, when G-men had incited the murders of two
Black Panthers on the UCLA campus. FBI infiltrators had lied to the
Panthers’ rivals, the US Organization, telling them that the Panthers were
meeting on the campus to plan their assassinations. US responded by
ambushing two Panthers at a Black Student Union meeting and shooting
them dead.
LASO knew that the Panthers were murdered because of the FBI’s
meddling. They didn’t care. In fact, they hid the FBI’s role in the violence. In
their eyes, the most desirable outcome had been achieved: two Panthers were
dead, three US gang members were in jail, and the American public was
more fearful of black militants. The FBI used the incident to spur more
violence between US and the Panthers, according to a 1970 memo from the
Los Angeles Field Office:

The Los Angeles Division is aware of mutually hostile feelings

harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to
capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that the US
 Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and
location of BPP [Black Panther party] activities in order that the two
organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the
opportunity to take her due course.

That emphasis comes from the Church Committee, who noted that “due
course,” in this case, meant nothing less than first-degree murder. The
committee’s final report blasted the FBI for its complicity in the deaths of the
Panthers. “The chief investigative branch of the Federal Government engaged
in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting
violence and unrest,” it wrote. “Equally disturbing is the pride which those
officials took in claiming credit for the bloodshed that occurred.”
Indeed, it seemed that whenever the FBI made headway with its tactics, it
doubled down. Rather than halt its provocations as the Panthers and the US
Organization claimed each other’s lives, the FBI escalated the campaign,
spreading propaganda, including political cartoons, designed to inflame the
violence. “The FBI viewed this carnage as a positive development,” the
Church Committee wrote.
Maybe the most lacerating testimony came from William Sullivan, a high-
ranking FBI official who’d helped implement COINTELPRO before Hoover
fired him in 1971. Sullivan had masterminded an episode in which Coretta
Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife, received a recording in which her
husband could be heard flirting with other women. Sullivan had deemed King
“a fraud, demagogue, and scoundrel.” Now, before the Church Committee, he
allowed that the FBI’s ruthless pragmatism had obscured any sense of
morality he and his colleagues might’ve had. “Never once,” he said, “did I
hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action
which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’… The
one thing we were concerned about was this: ‘Will this course of action
work? Will it get us what we want?’”
COINTELPRO’s excesses were well documented, but the FBI’s director
—Clarence M. Kelley, who’d succeeded Hoover—refused to admit
wrongdoing, defending the operations as a necessary precaution against
violent extremists who hoped to “bring America to its knees.” He added, “For
the FBI to have done less under the circumstances would have been an
abdication of its responsibilities to the American people.”

“Lined Up Against the Wall with the Rest of the Whites”

When Hoover reconstituted COINTELPRO, he was already worried that
America’s black militants would be embraced by liberal whites, especially in
a left-leaning place like Hollywood. In the August 1967 memo reanimating
the counterintelligence program, he’d noted the importance of “prevent[ing]
militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability”:
“they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible
community and to the ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant
black nationalists simply because they are Negroes.”
Two years later, the Panthers had become almost synonymous with
Hollywood’s liberal elite. Actresses such as Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg
appeared at their rallies. Hoover felt he had to widen the chasm between
blacks and whites in Los Angeles. In a November 1968 memo, an L.A. field
agent discussed new efforts to spread disinformation to Hollywood’s liberal
whites.
In the context of the Tate–LaBianca murders, the memo is chilling.
Remember, the Tate house by then had become a high-profile gathering place
for liberal Hollywood—among others, for Fonda, Cass Elliot, and Warren
Beatty, all three of whom were under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, who
would die at the hands of the Family, was an outspoken civil rights activist.
That year she campaigned for Tom Bradley, the first African American
candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Many in the Polanski–Tate crowd
belonged to the White Panther party, explicit allies of the Black Panthers, or
to the Peace and Freedom Party of California, which also voiced its support.
The FBI, according to the memo, planned to generate distrust through
disinformation:

The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) has been furnishing the BPP with
financial assistance. An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau
approval to be sent to a leader of PFP in which it is set forth that the
BPP has made statements in closed meetings that when the armed
rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall
 with the rest of the whites.

Emphasis mine. The FBI would make it seem as if even sympathetic leftists
were in the Panthers’ crosshairs. Less than a year after this memo was
written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in
Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to
implicate the Black Panthers.

Of course, the FBI couldn’t have done this work alone. They needed local
law enforcement on their side, and, according to the Church Committee, they
got it.
The committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO
actions in L.A., the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and
a decorated Vietnam vet. Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years
for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time
of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the
Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther
headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau
agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s
involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill
Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived
only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more
comfortable to sleep on the floor.
Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its
landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the
LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee
quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover
himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is
furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department
Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of
black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead
to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this
meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and
hindering prosecution.
Manson the Race Warrior
If there was a bridge between the Family and COINTELPRO, I thought it
probably stemmed from this basic fact: Charles Manson was a racist.
According to Gregg Jakobson, Manson sincerely believed that “the black
man’s sole purpose on earth was to serve the white man.” Another member of
the Family recalled that Manson looked forward to the day when, having
survived the apocalyptic race war, he could “scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and
kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton.”
And at the start of ’69, as COINTELPRO provoked black militants in
L.A., Manson’s bigotry reached a delusional fever pitch. He became
convinced, seemingly without a shred of evidence, that the Black Panthers
were spying on the Family at the Spahn Ranch, planning an attack on him.
His paranoia mounting, Manson placed armed guards at every entrance to the
ranch, sending lookouts to the mountains with powerful telescopes.
His fear was self-fulfilling, in a way. On July 1, 1969, during a dispute
over drug money in a Hollywood apartment, Manson shot Bernard
“Lotsapoppa” Crowe, a black drug dealer. According to Helter Skelter, the
dealer had told Manson that he was a Panther, and that his “brothers” would
“come and get” Manson at the ranch if he didn’t pay up. Manson shot Crowe
in the chest and fled the scene, believing he’d killed the dealer. Back at the
ranch, Manson was sure that Crowe’s friends were readying their attack. In
Bugliosi’s account, this contributed to Manson’s decision a month later to
“speed along the race war” by inciting “Helter Skelter”: the Tate–LaBianca
murders would sow racial discord.
But Bernard Crowe wasn’t a Black Panther. And he survived after
Manson shot him—Bugliosi even called him to the stand during the trial.
Bugliosi chalked it up to a misunderstanding on Manson’s part, but the more
I thought about it, especially in light of what I’d learned about
COINTELPRO, the more I wondered if there was more to the story. The
prosecutor reported that Manson was already frightened of the Black
Panthers before the Crowe shooting. If Manson were truly scared of the
Panthers, the last thing he would have done is shoot a man whom he believed
to be a Panther—a man who’d already told his “brothers” where Manson
lived, and made a threat to kill him. True, Manson hoped to launch a race
war, but he didn’t want to be caught in its crossfire. That was a fate he
wished on other whites, but never on himself.
Furthermore, Tex Watson’s girlfriend and three of Crowe’s friends had
witnessed the shooting; they called an ambulance after Manson made his
getaway. At the hospital, Crowe refused to tell the police who’d shot him.
Wouldn’t the police have questioned the four witnesses? Did Crowe even say
who they were? Why didn’t the police pursue a near fatal shooting with
plenty of witnesses, especially when the alleged shooter was a paroled ex-
con? We might never know—Bugliosi doesn’t clarify any of it in Helter
Skelter.
I’d always considered the Crowe shooting an inexplicable sideshow in the
Manson circus. It took on grander proportions after I’d learned about the
FBI’s disinformation campaign against the Panthers—at this same time, this
same place. Less than a week after the Tate murders, further COINTELPRO
provocations led to the shootings of three more Panthers, one of them fatal.

The CIA on Domestic Soil

In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA
director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s aforementioned illegal
domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also employed agents and
informants to infiltrate “subversive” groups and then “neutralize” them.
CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67,
the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led
couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and
presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove
that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their
origins abroad.
Richard Helms complied without hesitation. In the six years that followed,
the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering
so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division
were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three
hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American
citizens. The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and
the Justice Department. At its peak, CHAOS had fifty-two dedicated agents,
most of whom served to infiltrate antiwar groups, like their counterparts in
the FBI. Undercover, they hoped to identify Russian instigators, although
they never found any. With the Interdivision Intelligence Unit (IDIU), a new
branch of the Justice Department outfitted with sophisticated computerized
databases, they collaborated on a list of more than ten thousand names, all
thought to be dangerous activists; the IDIU produced regular reports on these
people, hoping to predict their activities.
The journalist Seymour Hersh got wind of CHAOS late in 1974. He told
James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence, and William
Colby, the director of the CIA, that he had a story “bigger than My Lai”
about CIA domestic activities. Colby was forced to admit that Hersh’s
findings were accurate, and Angleton resigned from the agency. The story
broke on December 22, on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge CIA
Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in
Nixon Years.”
The Church Committee probed the CIA’s illegal activities, as did a
separate government investigation, the Rockefeller Commission—but neither
was able to penetrate the agency’s veil of secrecy. Since the CIA has no right
to operate on American soil, the program should have brought even more
censure than COINTELPRO; instead, it drew only a muted response. CIA
leadership stonewalled at every opportunity. Even if they hadn’t,
investigators were crippled by the dearth of information. When Richard
Helms had disbanded CHAOS before leaving office in 1973, he ordered the
destruction of every file pertaining to it, and since the seventies, almost
nothing has come out. The operation hardly left a footprint.
Even if reams of paperwork had survived, the Rockefeller Commission
was hardly willing to press the agency. While the commission made some
shocking findings—evidence of wiretaps, bugging, and hidden burglaries, in
addition to the extensive record keeping mentioned above—by the end of the
seventies, well after it had disbanded, allegations arose that it had suppressed
information. (Its chairman, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, had worked
with the CIA in the late fifties.) In a memoir, former CIA director Colby later
claimed that President Gerald Ford fired him for refusing to help Rockefeller
sabotage his own investigation. According to Colby, CHAOS was so highly
classified that even he, the director of the CIA, didn’t have access to it. “I
found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS],”
he wrote. “Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very
much on its periphery.”
In the spring of ’78, the New York Times revealed that the investigations
into CHAOS had been woefully inadequate. When one agent was asked why
he hadn’t been more forthcoming, he said simply, “They didn’t ask.” The true
extent of the agency’s domestic activities against dissidents would probably
never be known, the Times declared—but the paper had been able to uncover
CHAOS activities from the late sixties that had targeted the Black Panther
party. Rockefeller’s commission failed to reveal that “between 150 and 200
CIA domestic files on Black dissidents had been destroyed,” the Times
reported. “The CIA conducted at least two major programs involving the use
of American blacks, when the Panthers, organized by young blacks in the
mid-60s, were publicly advocating revolutionary change… Just how
successful the CIA was in those alleged activities could not be determined.”

Winning Hearts and Minds

Knowing more about CHAOS and COINTELPRO, I felt that men like Reeve
Whitson were potentially much more common than I’d anticipated, always in
peripheral, undefined roles. Part of the reason that Whitson seemed like such
a wild card to me was that he appeared to have walked on the scene from
nowhere: an outré, worldly man suddenly hobnobbing with the LAPD’s top
brass. I wanted others who fit that profile. To cover up an operation like
CHAOS, the agency needed friends in law enforcement—insiders who could
make arrests or, just as important, not make arrests.
The most promising but frustrating of my inquiries concerned an LAPD
officer named William W. Herrmann. I could never connect him to Whitson
or Manson, but he certainly fit the profile of someone who’d helped with
counterintelligence actions. When I was deep in the weeds of my CHAOS
research, split between feeling that I was onto something or that I was risking
my credibility, Herrmann’s was a name that came up several times—usually
from sources I didn’t quite trust, or in arcane articles from the alternative
press. What I heard about him was just plausible enough to get me to look
closer. I’m glad I did. Herrmann’s story hints at how intelligence agencies
may have collaborated with police in Los Angeles.
A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD, Herrmann had an unusual
background for law enforcement. He had a doctorate in psychology; he
specialized in quelling insurgencies; he’d developed one of the first computer
systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities. Daryl
Gates, the head of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, hailed him as a “genius,”
praising his technical aptitude in particular.
But Herrmann’s work wasn’t limited to Los Angeles, or even to the
United States. My FOIA request to the FBI yielded a collection of redacted
documents detailing his extensive employment history. Concurrent with his
time in the LAPD, he’d worked under contract for a dizzying list of American
intelligence and military agencies: the air force, the Secret Service, the
Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the
Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance
Office, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Most of his work for these groups remains classified.
You’d think these projects wouldn’t have left much free time, but
Herrmann piled on even more work, taking leaves of absence from the LAPD
to pursue side gigs with defense firms. These had opaque, generic names like
Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corp., and Control Data
Corp. This last, a weapons manufacturer in Minneapolis, relied on
Herrmann’s services for ten years, from 1961 to ’71—or so Herrmann told
the FBI. When the Bureau went to Control Data Corp. for a background
check, the company claimed that Herrmann never worked for them.
You might have guessed: given Herrmann’s long list of government
employers, I wondered if his work for these defense contractors could have
been a front for the CIA, one of the few agencies that didn’t appear on his
résumé. As usual, official channels were useless. My FOIA request to the
CIA for Herrmann’s records yielded the same “neither confirm or deny”
response that Reeve Whitson’s had.
I did find, however, a record of Herrmann’s overseas work, much of
which he conducted while still employed with the LAPD. Having spent four
months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann
returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam.
Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him
as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South
Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong
insurgents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but
the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together.
The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his
professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he
was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial
elements in the agency’s history.
Richard Nixon had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was
discontinued in early ’71. The agency described it as “a set of programs that
sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.”
Inside Vietnam, Phoenix operatives waged a campaign of terror against the
Viet Cong guerrillas, with tactics including the assassination and torture of
noncombatant civilians. According to a 1971 congressional investigation, the
program violated the codes of the Geneva Conventions and rivaled the Viet
Cong’s own terrorism in its mercilessness.
During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to
massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of
the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral
Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in
revulsion. A Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, the single most
decorated combat veteran of Vietnam, published a bestselling book, Soldier,
that detailed typical orders from his Phoenix superiors: “They wanted me to
take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to
make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale
was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own
and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”
Their attempts were sometimes even more unhinged. In 1968, CIA
scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls
of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers,
and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing
one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies
burned.
According to Seymour Hersh’s 1972 book, Cover-Up, Phoenix had
“committees” set up across all forty-four provinces in South Vietnam. They
kept blacklists of Viet Cong fighters and had strict orders to meet weekly or
monthly quotas of “neutralizations.” The whole operation relied on
computerized indexes. The identity of its CIA leader never came to light—
but whoever he was, he was there ostensibly as part of the Agency for
International Development (AID), later revealed as a CIA front.
Herrmann, of course, was known for his aptitude with computers, and his
time in Vietnam coincided almost exactly with Phoenix’s operations. The
papers I found at the National Archives confirmed that he was a part of AID.
I had no way to press him about any of this; he’d died in 1993. As I had
with Whitson, I wondered whether his family could tell me more about him. I
found one of his daughters, Cindy, a dog breeder in Spokane, Washington;
she invited me to see her. Only a teenager in the sixties, she didn’t have many
memories of her father’s work, but she was confident that much of it had
been top-secret, and that he’d worked for the CIA. He never discussed his
work with the family, not even her mother; she was instructed never to talk
about her father with anyone, including extended family. She knew he did
undercover work, both while he was with the LAPD and afterward. She
showed me his passport. Visa stamps chronicled at least four trips to Vietnam
between 1968 and ’70. Among his ID cards was one for “The Xuat Nhap
Vietnam Cong HOA.”
She also shared several documents confirming Herrmann’s participation
in Phoenix. A framed memo from the U.S. Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam, dated September 9, 1968, advised all personnel that Herrmann was
a “member of the Pacification Task Force working for Ambassador Komer.”
Komer, first name Robert, was nicknamed “Blowtorch Bob” for his take-no-
prisoners approach to warfare. He served fifteen years in the CIA before
arriving in Vietnam to work on Phoenix; according to Senate testimony, he
was behind the program’s notorious kill quotas. Even Herrmann’s ephemera
captivated me. Cindy had held on to a photo of dozens of men on an airplane,
captioned, “‘Bad guys’ leaving a bad spot after having been bad.”

Once he returned from Vietnam, Herrmann retired from the LAPD after more
than twenty years on the force, embarking on a series of “research” gigs for
various federal agencies—again, all top-secret. With information from Cindy,
a growing pile of press clippings, and the government documents I’d
amassed, I tried to piece together Herrmann’s postretirement projects.
Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.—his
work in California bore disturbing resemblances to the techniques he’d honed
as part of the Phoenix project. In 1968, Governor Reagan appointed him to
head a new Riots and Disorders Task Force, dedicated to studying urban
unrest and devising ways to prevent future outbreaks of violence. But in a
1970 interview, Herrmann revealed, maybe by accident, that the task force
was hardly the research-based enterprise it claimed to be.
Herrmann didn’t give many interviews, but when he spoke to the London
Observer’s Charles Foley in May 1970, he was apparently in a voluble mood.
Discussing his work for the task force, he described a program of spying and
infiltration far exceeding the “studies” that the group was committed to—his
words sounded as if they’d been lifted from COINTELPRO and CHAOS
manuals. (Both of those operations, of course, were well under way in Los
Angeles.)
Like Governor Reagan and President Johnson, Herrmann believed that
California’s student dissidents were funded by foreign Communists. He told
the Observer that he had a “secret plan” for “forestalling revolution in
America.” The key was “to split off those bent on destroying the system from
the mass of dissenters; then following classic guerilla warfare ‘theory’ to find
means which will win their hearts and minds.” He called this plan, simply,
“Saving America,” and it included strategies for “deeper penetration by
undercover agents into dissenting groups,” such as “army agents pos[ing] as
students and news reporters.” In a turn worthy of Minority Report, he wanted
to use mathematical probability models to predict when and where violence
would erupt. He also called for the use of long-range electronic surveillance
devices; if informants had already penetrated any “dissenting groups,” they
would “secretly record speeches and conversations.”
What that information would be used for, and how, Herrmann didn’t say.
He spoke of the task force in the future tense, making it hard to discern how
operational its “Saving America” tactics were. Whatever the case, his brazen
claims generated backlash from the left. His daughter showed me a flyer from
the Students for a Democratic Society depicting him as a pig. Maybe he felt
he’d said too much—or maybe his superiors told him so—but a few months
later, he gave another, more circumspect interview. Talking this time to the
Sacramento Bee, he walked back some of his more chilling claims about
“Saving America.” “Herrmann bridles at an article in the London Observer,”
the reporter wrote, quoting Herrmann: “The council could not set up a plan
like that… We have a nonoperational role. All we can do is review and fund
projects suggested by local authorities.”
 “Saving America” sounded a lot like COINTELPRO, which sounded a lot
like CHAOS—they all ran together, in part, it seemed, because they’d all
shared notes. In June 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle published an
investigative series detailing Governor Reagan’s secret dealings with the CIA
and the FBI, all part of his effort to halt what he construed as a Communist-
sponsored antiwar movement in California. The Chronicle revealed an
internal FBI memo from July 1969, when Herbert Ellinwood, one of the
governor’s top advisors, visited FBI headquarters to discuss Reagan’s plans
for the “destruction of disruptive elements on California campuses.” As the
Chronicle reported, “Ellinwood asked the FBI for ‘intelligence’ information
against protest groups… the FBI had secretly given the Reagan
administration such assistance in the past.”
J. Edgar Hoover himself approved the request. The FBI suggested that the
California state government might attack dissidents through “a psychological
warfare campaign.” If that’s what Reagan wanted, he didn’t have to look far.
In his own circle of advisors was Herrmann, the chairman of the Riots and
Disorders Task Force, a veteran of Phoenix, and a man whose antileftist ideas
jibed perfectly with the Reagan’s administration in Sacramento, to say
nothing of the FBI’s and the CIA’s.

In 1978, a congressional committee uncovered evidence that the CIA had

“operatives” in at least one city’s district attorney’s office in the late sixties. I
wondered if a similar situation existed in Los Angeles and, if so, who those
operatives might have been.
It wouldn’t have been too difficult an agency to penetrate. At the time of
the Manson murders, in 1969, the district attorney of Los Angeles was Evelle
Younger, whose résumé linked him to tons of intelligence work. Decades
earlier, he’d been “one of the top agents” of Hoover’s FBI. In 1942, he left
the Bureau to join the Office of Strategic Services. Trained in espionage and
counterintelligence techniques, he opted to enroll in law school after the war.
In the fifties, Younger was elected to the bench before becoming Los
Angeles district attorney in 1964. A staunch Republican and a friend of
Governor Reagan, he was appointed head of a federal law-and-order task
force in January 1969, organized by incoming president Richard Nixon to
crack down on crime and internal threats to the nation’s security. According
to the 1974 book Big Brother and the Holding Company: The World Behind
Watergate, the “politically ambitious” Younger advised Nixon to “appoint
tougher judges, use more wiretaps, encourage ‘space age techniques and
hardware,’ and support local police with better training and equipment.”
Younger’s subordinates in the DA’s office referred to him as “the
General.” In his obituary, the Los Angeles Times in 1989 noted that he was
“the first prosecutor in America to undertake mass felony prosecutions of
college campus demonstrators in the 1960s”; he’d prosecuted students who’d
protested the absence of a black studies program at San Fernando Valley
State College. The November 1969 trial resulted in twenty convictions, a
coup for the up-and-coming deputy DA who tried the case: Vincent Bugliosi.
If the CIA wanted a presence in the Los Angeles DA’s office, Younger
didn’t strike me as someone who’d put his foot down. Nor did his second in
command, Lynn “Buck” Compton, who’d been an LAPD detective before
getting his law degree and joining the DA’s office. Compton was the lead
prosecutor in the trial of Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of Senator
Robert F. Kennedy. And he’d been a World War II hero—his exploits with
the parachute infantry regiment, the Easy Company, were chronicled in the
HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.
I found a letter that Compton wrote to Herrmann on March 14, 1969, five
months before the Tate–LaBianca murders, thanking him for “obtaining good
advance intelligence… on subversives and militants.” The two had served
together on the LAPD in the fifties, so I wasn’t surprised that they knew each
other. I was surprised that Compton had written a note that all but proved that
he and Herrmann were operating beyond their remit for the State of
California. Neither man had any business gathering “advance intelligence” on
“subversives and militants”—or on anyone else, for that matter. The DA’s
office was supposed to prosecute crimes, not prevent them. And Herrmann,
in his strenuous correction to the London Observer article, had stressed that
his role was “nonoperational.”

Coda: Front-Page News

I read about CHAOS and COINTELPRO until I must’ve sounded, to all my
friends, like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, someone who might go
off on a long-winded tangent about the threats of the deep state. But the fact
that the CIA has become an all-purpose scapegoat—the preeminent symbol
of global power run amok—doesn’t change the fact that its abuses of power
in the 1960s were legitimate and myriad. If anything, these abuses were so
gross that they’ve lent authority to any and every claim against federal
intelligence agencies: if the CIA and the FBI are capable of killing American
citizens in cold blood, often in elaborate schemes, what aren’t they capable
of?
There had been a day in the summer of ’69 when the major elements from
my reporting collided on a single page of the Los Angeles Times. An August
12 article about the DA’s argument in the UCLA Panther murder trial
(“Panther Killings Result of Power Play, Jury Told”) ran next to a piece on
the LAPD’s theory that the LaBianca killers were imitating the people who’d
murdered the Tate victims the night before (“Police See ‘Copycat Killer’ in
Slaying of Los Feliz Couple”). The irony was that both of these stories were
wrong. The LaBianca murders weren’t the work of a “copycat killer,” and the
police should’ve known by then; the real “power play” at UCLA was
perpetrated by the FBI. I was tantalized by the juxtaposition of the two items:
by how much of the “news” in them was flawed when it was first reported,
and by how much of it might be flawed still.
Manson’s race-war motive dovetailed almost too perfectly with the goals
of these federal agencies and the DA’s office. In programs like CHAOS and
COINTELPRO—and in people like Reeve Whitson, William Herrmann, and
Buck Compton—I saw the potential for a major turn in my reporting, even as
I tried to accept that so much of what they did would always be untraceable.
Still, if nefarious plots from the CIA and FBI had eventually exploded
into public view, I thought I should at least try to see where my hunches led
me. What I wanted to answer was this: How did a body like the Los Angeles
DA’s office exert its political force? If it wanted to be of service to a higher
agency, like the FBI or the CIA, would that be easily accomplished, or was I
veering too much into the realm of the paranoiac?
I didn’t have to look very far to see how the DA’s office wielded its
power. One glaring example came at the start of the Manson trial, when,
without anyone being the wiser, the DA’s office conspired to make sure that
its narrative for the Tate–LaBianca murders was the only one that anyone
ever heard.
 8

The Lawyer Swap

“My Hands Were Tied”

When it came to prosecuting the Manson Family, the Los Angeles DA’s
office left nothing to chance. I’d already seen that Vincent Bugliosi had no
problem getting his witnesses to lie on the stand, and that Deputy DA Buck
Compton gathered intelligence on “subversives and militants.” What I found
next was evidence of more pervasive, top-down interference by the DA’s
office, which took extraordinary measures to control, and likely in part to
fabricate, the story of the Manson murders.
The first signs of misconduct came during the trial of Bobby Beausoleil.
He was accused of murdering Gary Hinman, the musician who’d been found
stabbed to death just days before the Tate–LaBianca murders.
For reasons never disclosed by Bugliosi, the DA’s office tried Beausoleil
separately from the rest of the Family. As I suggested earlier, it made sense to
try all three of the murder cases together—Hinman, Tate, and LaBianca. Law
enforcement had connected the crimes. Uniting them under a single trial
would’ve made it easier to convict Manson of conspiracy, since he’d helped
torture Hinman and had ordered all three sets of slaughters.
And yet they kept the cases separate. I thought I knew why. If they’d
thrown Hinman in with Tate–LaBianca, the resulting testimony would have
revealed that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office (LASO) knew as early
as August 10 that the Manson Family was responsible for all the murders.
Remember, LASO detectives Charlie Guenther and Paul Whiteley broke the
Tate case when a recorded phone call from one of Hinman’s murderers,
Beausoleil, clued them in to a link with the Tate murders. The only way to
hide this early break was to try the Hinman murder case separately.
Beausoleil went to trial on November 12, 1969. The prosecutor was
Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, who confirmed to me that the
case had been tried separately under very suspicious circumstances. He had
orders, he said, to keep Charles Manson and the Family out of the trial. That
meant that scoring a conviction against Beausoleil would be an uphill battle
—since, after all, without Manson’s instructions, he may never have
murdered Hinman.
Still, Ross felt he had no choice but to obey. “My hands were tied,” he
told me. When we first spoke, in 2000, he’d recently retired after thirty years
in the DA’s office, and the case sounded fresh in his mind. He remembered
“the orders from on high: don’t mention the name of Manson or these other
people.”
Ross later learned that his superiors at the DA’s office, and his own
investigating detectives, Guenther and Whiteley, had withheld all evidence
related to the Manson Family from him to keep their secret. “I was pissed
when I learned later that they had other evidence,” Ross said. “I [was] closed
out of the thing. I really don’t know why they did that.”
He could still recall the day the case first landed on his desk, in early
September 1969. He was just back from a vacation. The horrors of the Tate–
LaBianca murders, then only a month old, still dominated the news. The
killers remained at large, and no one even knew who they were. Ross was
struck by reports that they’d left the bloody word “Pig” in conspicuous areas
of both the Tate and LaBianca homes. His Hinman murder scene featured
such writing, too. He took one look at the case and immediately connected it
to the unsolved Tate–LaBianca murders. “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and
blind not to,” he said.
He called in Guenther and Whiteley to ask them about it. “And they said,
‘Oh, no, no, it’s not related. No, [we] can’t find any connection between the
two.’” He still sounded bruised when he added, “Now I think they were lying
through their teeth.”
Guenther denied the allegation to me, but I found it believable, given what
he’d told me about his investigation. And if it’s true, it shows that by
September 1969, he and Whiteley were conspiring to hide what they’d
learned about the Manson Family’s role in the murders.
 Since Ross wasn’t allowed to link Beausoleil to the Family, his case was
mostly circumstantial and, by his own admission, weak. After just two days
of testimony, the trial was more or less wrapped up. Beausoleil’s defense
attorney, Leon Salter, didn’t call a single witness. When the defense rested,
Ross’s superiors feared they might lose the trial; they needed more evidence.
At the last minute, they decided to take a gamble.
Just before the attorneys delivered their closing arguments, David Fitts—
the head deputy DA of Santa Monica, and Ross’s supervisor—went into a
closed meeting with the judge, who emerged ten minutes later to announce
that the trial would be delayed for five days to accommodate a new witness
for the prosecution: Danny DeCarlo, the Straight Satans bike-gang member
who’d moved to the Spahn Ranch that spring of 1969.
The judge’s action here was unprecedented, or close to it. For one thing,
the two lawyers who’d just rested their cases, Ross and Salter, had no say in
it. Plus, as a matter of course, trials are almost never reopened after the
defense has rested; it risks prejudicing the jury.
When I reached Salter on the phone, he was still incensed by the choice.
“For the judge to discuss the case without the opposing attorney being
present is just unheard of,” he told me. “There was just something rotten
about it… I never reported it to [the] state bar, which I’ll always regret.” In
the trial transcript, Salter made his objections plain. “It is shocking,” he told
the judge, “that when you are in the middle of a trial, where this young man
can end up with a life imprisonment, that the District Attorney… has the
audacity to talk about this case without my being present.”
You might think that Ross wouldn’t have minded the intervention so
much—Fitts was his boss, after all, and they were both angling for
Beausoleil’s conviction. But Ross bristled at having been excluded, too. In
his thirty years as a DA, he told me, he’d never been left out of a meeting
about his own witness lineup.
Ross felt he had no choice but to put DeCarlo on the stand. “That was the
first time in my whole career where I was actually ordered to use a witness,”
Ross said. The decision came from the highest levels of the DA’s office. Fitts
was taking orders from someone. “My best estimate,” Ross said, “would be
Buck Compton.”
Ross thought DeCarlo lacked credibility. The biker, already a convicted
felon, had decided to testify only because he was facing new charges for
marijuana possession and having stolen a motorcycle engine. He was, to use
Ross’s word, a snitch, and it was impossible to say if he was telling the truth
or not. “DeCarlo was simply amoral,” Ross said. “He could have said
whatever he wanted to say.” And getting something useful out of DeCarlo on
the stand would be no mean feat, because Ross still wasn’t allowed to
introduce anything about Manson or the Family, even though his new witness
was a known associate of theirs.
Once he was sworn in, DeCarlo relayed the story of the Hinman stabbing.
He claimed he was telling it exactly as he’d heard it from Beausoleil himself.
He even included the parts where a man named Charlie, who lived at the
Spahn Ranch, cut Hinman’s ear off with “a long sword,” and later ordered
Beausoleil to kill Hinman, telling him, “You know what to do.” But he never
gave Charlie’s full name.
Then came Salter’s cross-examination.
“This person Charlie that you referred to in your testimony,” he said to
DeCarlo. “Were you aware of this person Charlie’s full name?”
“Charles Manson,” DeCarlo said. It was the first time the name had been
uttered in the whole trial—on the last day of testimony.
That was November 24. Outside the courtroom, police and district
attorneys were finally making headway on the Tate–LaBianca crimes. Like
Ross, Salter knew enough to suspect a link. The prosecution’s sudden
addition of DeCarlo only encouraged those suspicions. Salter knew that
police had questioned DeCarlo about the Tate murders, and he intended to let
the jury know it, too.
Manuel Gutierrez, an LAPD officer who’d been the first to hear
DeCarlo’s story, took the stand to lend the biker some credibility. Salter tried
to get the information out of him. “Sir,” he asked, “you were investigating the
Tate murder case at that time, were you not?”
Ross objected; the court sustained.
“Your Honor, may I be heard on this?” Salter said. At the bench, out of
earshot from the jury, Salter argued that the jurors should know that DeCarlo
was connected to the unsolved Tate murders. “I think we can prove
[Gutierrez] was interviewing [DeCarlo] with regard to the Tate murder case,”
he said. “If it was a small case, fine, but he is investigating a case in which
there has been so much publicity, and they are rather anxious, I imagine, to
find out who did it.”
 But the judge allowed no further questions on the topic, and that was the
last anyone heard of a potential connection to the Tate murders.
Ironically, the addition of DeCarlo did nothing to help the prosecution.
The jurors didn’t trust him any more than Ross did. The trial ended in a hung
jury. Thanks to Ross’s candor, it is clear that the lack of evidence could be
blamed squarely on the higher-ups in the DA’s office: they needed to cover
up Guenther and Whiteley’s early knowledge of the Manson Family as the
Tate–LaBianca murderers.

“Warm and Sticky and Nice”

As they tailored the Hinman trial to suit the needs of the state, Buck Compton
and Vincent Bugliosi were also behind the scenes of the Tate–LaBianca case.
The DA’s office knew it needed a momentous conviction, a sense of justice
befitting the crime of the century. And Bugliosi, who aspired to power and
celebrity, saw how much he could gain from some good publicity here. His
office needed to control the narrative from the start, whether they had the
evidence to back it up or not.
Even in clear-cut circumstances, a criminal trial is a messy, protracted
affair—and once the verdict comes in, all the particularities fade from the
public mind. In the fifty years since Manson and his followers were
convicted, the details have become largely irrelevant. If people recall any
aspect of the trial, it’s usually the testimony of Linda Kasabian, the state’s
star witness. She’d served as a lookout and a driver for the Family during
both nights of murders. Granted immunity, Kasabian was able to describe the
crimes and the inner workings of the Family in nauseating detail, clinching
the case against Manson. And while many observers weren’t pleased that an
accomplice to the murders would walk free, Kasabian took pains to appear
more honorable than the others. She showed remorse; she emphasized that
she hadn’t participated in any of the violence.
What hardly anyone remembers is that Kasabian wasn’t the first one in
the Family to get a deal from the prosecutors. Before her was Susan Atkins,
the woman who’d led the police to break the case—and who was eventually
convicted along with the other killers, spending the rest of her life in prison
before her death in 2009. Before Kasabian flipped, Atkins, an unrepentant
killer, was the foundation for the LAPD’s case, and for the prosecution that
followed.
To pursue the conviction of Manson, the prosecution first had to bring
their charges before a grand jury. They relied strongly on Atkins’s testimony
there—it was instrumental in securing the first-degree murder indictments
against Manson and five others, including herself. In short, it was her story
that made Bugliosi’s famous trial possible.
But I found two memos indicating that Atkins was improperly obtained as
a witness. Before she or any other Manson followers had been charged,
prosecutors colluded with a Superior Court judge to have her legally
appointed defense attorney replaced by a former deputy DA who would do
their bidding. Her story, sanctioned and tweaked by the DA’s office and her
planted defense attorney, was based on lies. The entire narrative put before
that grand jury should be reconsidered.

It started with the end of the Family. About a month after the Tate–LaBianca
murders that would bring them to infamy, they fled the Spahn Ranch;
Manson believed the police were closing in on them. (He also feared
retaliation from the Black Panthers, having mistakenly believed, as discussed
in the last chapter, that he’d murdered one—Bernard Crowe, who was neither
a Panther nor dead.) He resettled his clan deep in Death Valley, at an
adjoining pair of remote, barren ranches called Myers and Barker. There they
sustained themselves through petty crimes and an auto-theft ring. It was this
last that brought them to the attention of Inyo County law enforcement, who
tracked them to their compound and captured them in raids over two nights in
mid-October 1969.
In Independence, California, the group of twenty-some bedraggled hippies
sat in the cramped county jail. LASO detectives Guenther and Whiteley
drove 225 miles to the dusty desert town to seek out a possible witness in the
Hinman murder. You may remember her name: Kitty Lutesinger, Bobby
Beausoleil’s girlfriend, the same witness the detectives had seemingly
deliberately failed to track down months earlier.
Lutesinger’s parents had called the detectives to say that their daughter
was in custody in Independence. When Guenther and Whiteley found her, she
told them that Susan Atkins had boasted of torturing and finally killing
Hinman with Beausoleil over two nights. The story aligned with what they’d
already heard. They asked the Inyo County sheriff to take them to Atkins
herself.
Atkins agreed to speak to the detectives without an attorney present. They
told her that her fingerprints had been found at the Hinman crime scene and
that Beausoleil had already ratted on her—both lies, but they got her talking
about the crime. Atkins admitted to having held Hinman while Beausoleil
stabbed him, but she claimed she never hurt him. She was booked on a first-
degree-murder charge and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for
Women, in downtown Los Angeles.
Atkins’s cellmate was a longtime con artist and call girl who went by
Ronnie Howard. The two became fast friends. Almost immediately, Atkins
was telling Howard and another inmate, Virginia Graham, all about her role
in the Tate–LaBianca murders. She had personally stabbed Sharon Tate to
death, she bragged, as Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby. After Tate
died, Atkins said she’d tasted the dead actress’s blood; it was “warm and
sticky and nice.”
Howard was shocked. Here was a woman casually crowing about the
biggest unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. On November 17, she made
a hushed call from a pay phone to the Hollywood station of the LAPD, telling
a detective that she knew who was responsible for the Tate–LaBianca
murders.
That night, the LAPD sent two detectives to interview Howard at Sybil
Brand. She convinced them easily of the veracity of her claims. Fearing for
her safety, detectives had her moved to an isolated unit. The next morning,
more detectives interviewed her, and that same day they brought their
information to the district attorney, Evelle Younger. He assigned Aaron
Stovitz and Vincent Bugliosi to prosecute the case. The Tate–LaBianca
murders had been solved.

“Strong Client Control”

On the evening of November 19, Bugliosi attended a hastily convened
meeting at the district attorney’s office. In attendance were his immediate
superior, Assistant District Attorney Joseph Busch; Aaron Stovitz, also from
the DA’s office; and, from the LAPD, Lieutenant Paul LePage and Sergeant
Mike McGann, of the LaBianca and Tate investigative teams, respectively.
With the consent of the DA’s office, the LAPD wanted to cut a deal with
Susan Atkins: she’d share what she knew about the murders in exchange for
immunity. Bugliosi thought this was a grave error. Atkins, he reminded his
colleagues, had described personally stabbing Sharon Tate to death and
tasting her blood. She’d admitted stabbing other victims at the Tate house.
She’d participated in the murder of Gary Hinman. And that was only what
they’d heard so far—who knows what else she’d done? “We don’t give that
gal anything!” he claimed to have said.
But the LAPD was adamant. For months, they’d been under enormous
pressure to solve the case. The press had derided them constantly for their
failure. Now they could announce their success with a splashy press
conference and rush the case to a grand jury. Bugliosi countered that they
were getting ahead of themselves. They didn’t have a case yet, only a solid
lead.
The group reached a compromise: instead of total immunity, Atkins
would be offered a second-degree-murder plea, sparing her the death penalty
while ensuring she wouldn’t walk free. But, as Bugliosi acknowledged in
Helter Skelter, they didn’t work out “the precise terms” of this offer. One of
the most pressing concerns went unaddressed: Would Atkins have to testify
at the trial—before the public, and Manson himself—or only for the grand
jury?
However Bugliosi claimed to have felt about Atkins, the district attorney’s
office was desperate to secure her cooperation; without it, they weren’t sure
they could indict Manson and the other killers. A lot depended on her
reliability and consistency. What if she changed her story, which, so far,
they’d only heard from her cellmate? And even more was riding on her
defense attorney—if he didn’t like the deal, he could prove to be a major
obstacle. Rather than risk that, the DA’s office decided they’d do better to
replace him with someone guaranteed to play by their rules—and someone
who could make sure Atkins said the right thing at the right time.
Atkins’s attorney was Gerald Condon, a lawyer in private practice who’d
been legally appointed by a judge to represent her in the Hinman murder.
Normally, the court would’ve assigned her someone from the public
defender’s office, but they couldn’t do that here—Beausoleil, her accomplice
in the Hinman killing, was already represented by a public defender, and in
such cases the court had to avoid a potential conflict of interest. So Condon it
was.
Condon was appointed on November 12. Two weeks later, on November
26, he was out.
What happened? In the LASO archives, I found a seven-page memo that
gave me a good lead. In an entry for November 20—the day after the DA’s
office and the LAPD had agreed to attempt a deal with Atkins—the
document notes a never-before-reported meeting between LASO officers, the
LAPD, and “Mr. Compton and Mr. Stovitz of the DA’s office.” The men
discussed the fact that “the Atkins woman would be in court on 11-26-69 for
the Superior Court arraignment, at which time it was stated that there would
be a change of her counsel and Mr. Caballero would be designated as her
counsel” (emphasis added). There’s no mention of Condon’s or Atkins’s
consent to this change. And it was presented as a fait accompli. This meeting
came six days before the hearing in question—and yet all parties involved
were already certain of the outcome. How?
A second, less ambiguous document turned up in the files of LAPD
lieutenant Paul LePage. It was a three-page summary of his investigative
work on the LaBianca murders. A section on Susan Atkins’s court
appearances described the same November 20 meeting in more detail: “It was
decided that because of the gravity of the case and the importance of Atkins’s
information and cooperation, that her attorney be the type who had ‘strong
client control.’ Deputy District Attorney Fitts made several inquiries and it
was decided that Condon might not have the necessary control.”
So, behind Atkins’s and Condon’s backs, Fitts “recommended Dick
Caballero as an attorney who had good client control and would properly
represent his client.” Fitts got in touch with Judge Mario Clinco, who was
overseeing the case, “and arrangements were made for Caballero to be
appointed as Atkins’s attorney of record at her felony arraignment. This was
accomplished.”
“This was accomplished”—yes, it was, with no small contribution from
Fitts, the same DA who’d inserted himself in the Beausoleil trial.
According to the minutes of Atkins’s November 26 arraignment, the judge
assigned Caballero to the case right then and there. No mention was made of
Condon’s removal—or how or why it occurred. The full transcript of the
hearing has vanished from the archives of the Los Angeles Superior Court.
The court’s spokesperson told me that a thorough search of the archive
produced no results.
I called Condon to ask him about his removal from the case. He
confirmed that he’d been replaced against his wishes—and his client’s—and
that Judge Clinco had never given him a reason.
“Whatever was going through Clinco’s mind, I don’t know,” Condon told
me. “Atkins did ask that I stay on.” He remembered being “temporarily
distressed” by Clinco’s action, but he never complained to the court about it.
Once the news came that Atkins was involved in the Tate–LaBianca murders,
his wife told him she’d leave him if he tried to represent her again.
That was that. The LAPD and the district attorney’s office had quietly
decided that their star witness needed a certain lawyer. Whether she or her
attorney wanted it or not, they “accomplished” it.

“Improper and Unethical”

In addition to his much vaunted “client control,” the replacement lawyer,
Richard Caballero, had another quality that endeared him to the DA’s office:
he’d worked there himself for eight years. As a prosecutor, Caballero had
won five death-penalty convictions, and he was still close with his former
colleagues. Bugliosi, Compton, and the others could trust him. Now all he
had to do was get Atkins to take the deal. She didn’t have to stay under his
thumb forever, just long enough to make it through the grand jury and bring
on the indictments they needed.
We’ll never know exactly what Caballero promised Atkins, or how he laid
out the terms of the deal: unlike most agreements of this nature, hers was
never formalized in writing, never marked by her signature. Whatever he
said, it was enough to satisfy the higher-ups at the LAPD and the DA’s
office. On December 1, they were finally ready to tell the public: they’d
solved the case of the century.
That was the day Police Chief Edward Davis got his big press conference:
sturdy podium, cameras rolling, hundreds of stunned and eager reporters
jostling for space. Reading from prepared remarks, Davis doled out the
details sparingly. He didn’t even provide Manson’s name, announcing that
“legal restrictions prohibit the revelation of further information at this time.”
Pressed for more information about the suspects, he said only that they were
part of a “roving band of hippies” that called itself “The Family” and were
led by a man they called “Jesus.”
Davis had to be judicious, or at least appear to be. A thorough account of
the murders could taint the jury pool. The next day, however, an endless
trough of specifics came flooding out, provided by two unassailable, on-the-
record sources: Atkins’s new attorney, Richard Caballero, and his law
partner, Paul Caruso.
Acting as no less than a bullhorn for the DA’s office, Caballero and
Caruso—the latter a well-known mob lawyer and a longtime friend of Los
Angeles DA Evelle Younger—outlined what would become, in essence, the
prosecution’s case for murder against the Manson Family.
Standing on the steps of the Santa Monica Courthouse, Caballero told
gathered reporters that Atkins was a follower of Charles Manson, and that
she’d been “at the scene of the Tate slayings, the Hinman murder, and the
killings of the LaBiancas.” Atkins was under Manson’s “hypnotic spell,” but
she had “nothing to do with the murders”—seemingly his only effort at
exonerating her amid the onslaught of grim particulars. He added that
Manson called himself “both God and the Devil,” and that the police had told
him “that Atkins and the others were directed by Manson to go to both the
Hinman house and the Tate house.” Atkins would “tell her complete story” to
the grand jury later that week.
In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi claimed that he’d come across Caballero’s
comments in the evening paper, and that was the only way his office learned
that Atkins had accepted their deal. He never even tried to explain why it
wasn’t in writing or why Caballero wouldn’t have alerted him more formally.
Over the next few days, Caballero and Caruso kept talking to the press—
and talking, and talking. In case there was lingering ambiguity, they
described Manson’s dictatorial methods. They offered a timeline of events for
the nights of the murders, including the order of the deaths. They tossed in
sordid details, describing the killers’ dress code and noting that, after killing
the LaBiancas, they’d helped themselves “to a snack from the icebox.”
It was a four-day fusillade of specificity. Finally, on December 4, the
president of the Los Angeles County Bar had had enough. “Bar Chief Scores
Atkins Attorney over Tate Comments,” read the Santa Monica Evening
Outlook’s front page, quoting him as he accused Caballero and Caruso of
“entirely improper and unethical” conduct by “revealing vital facts about the
Sharon Tate murder case from the viewpoint of Miss Atkins.”
But the scrutiny didn’t last. Amid the swell of coverage on the murders,
no one seemed to mind the lawyers’ leaking. In a passing remark to the Los
Angeles Times on the day before Atkins’s grand jury testimony, Caballero
more or less admitted that he wasn’t acting in his client’s best interest, saying
he was “gambling that her voluntary testimony might save her from the gas
chamber”—“gambling” and “might” being the operative words.
Bugliosi and his team had essentially arranged for the defense lawyers to
taint the jury on the prosecution’s behalf: everyone in Los Angeles was
suddenly an expert on the Manson Family. Meanwhile, on December 4, as
they continued their press tour, Caballero and Caruso met with the DAs to
finalize their “deal.” Bugliosi described it as “excellent”; it was, in fact,
nonexistent. As all the parties present would later admit during the death-
penalty phase of the trial, nothing was ever formalized or signed.
The next day, Atkins testified before the grand jury, as promised. The
papers reported that Manson, Atkins, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel,
Leslie Van Houten, and Tex Watson had been indicted on seven counts of
murder after only twenty minutes of deliberation.
Soon after, Caballero and Caruso walked away from the case, richer and
more famous, with no apparent regrets. A reporter asked Bugliosi if he would
have gotten the indictments without Atkins’s cooperation. He answered, “Do
the French drink wine?”

The Shape-Shifting Deal

When Bugliosi made his “deal” with Caballero, he knew full well that Atkins
was an unstable witness and a murderer. He needed her to get indictments for
the other members of the Family, but he also needed a pretext to back away
from her after she’d served her purpose. It wouldn’t look good if he could
only score convictions by easing up on one of the killers. His reversal would
be a lot easier since the deal wasn’t on paper, but even so, he’d have to
provide some explanation if and when the prosecution parted ways with her.
Before Bugliosi put Atkins in front of the grand jury, he approved an odd
request from her lawyers: to have her removed from jail and brought to their
offices in Beverly Hills for a taped interview. In Helter Skelter, calling the
arrangement “unusual” but “not unprecedented,” Bugliosi claimed that his
team went along with it because they thought Atkins would speak more
freely away from her fellow inmates. But it also set up a chain of events that
allowed the prosecutor to rid himself of her.
In the comfort of Caballero’s office, Atkins spoke on tape for two and a
half hours about her role in the murders. Listening the next day, Bugliosi
noticed that she’d changed her story. At first, she’d told her cellmates that
she’d stabbed Sharon Tate. Now she claimed that she couldn’t bring herself
to do it, and instead held Tate by the arms while Watson stabbed her. That’s
what she told the grand jury, too: that she didn’t kill Sharon Tate. But the
discrepancy wasn’t a problem for Bugliosi as long as he got his indictments.
Throughout Helter Skelter, Bugliosi inadvertently proved how malleable
the Atkins deal was, describing it in different terms at different times. Early
in the narrative, he said that all she had to do was testify truthfully to the
grand jury and cooperate with authorities; she’d never have to testify against
her codefendants at the actual trial. In exchange, the prosecution would
consider not asking for the death penalty.
But after the grand jury, the deal changed. Suddenly, she did have to
testify against the others. Without her, “we still didn’t have a case,” Bugliosi
wrote. Later still, he said that the prosecution was “stuck” with Atkins on the
stand because of the deal, bemoaning the fact that he’d made an agreement
with a killer.
I tend to think this is all rhetorical hand-wringing—a way of upping the
stakes in his book when really he knew that Atkins was never going to take
the stand.
Caballero, in fact, was doing everything in his power to lead his client
away from testifying. He allowed Atkins to take visits from her former
friends in the Family, who came bearing messages from Manson. The lawyer
knew full well that, given enough exposure to her former lifestyle, Atkins
was likely to return to Manson’s fold and refute her grand jury testimony. It
worked. One day, she called Caballero and told him that she refused to testify
at the trial. It was her first step toward formally undoing everything—except
the indictments, which couldn’t be undone. Bugliosi fretted that he’d lost his
“star witness.”
 But inwardly, he must have been pleased. Although he omitted it from his
book, he was already in negotiations with the attorney of Linda Kasabian, a
far more sympathetic witness, to cut a deal and take Atkins’s place at the
trial. Of course, had Atkins’s attorneys been independently appointed, they
would’ve reminded the prosecution of the terms of her deal, which precluded
her testimony at the trial. Now Bugliosi could claim that she’d violated the
deal and would lose her security against the death penalty.
Atkins kept unraveling. On March 5, 1970, in the attorney’s room at the
Central County Jail, Caballero presided over an hour-long reunion between
his client and Manson. He described it as “joyous,” adding that Atkins and
Manson “both burst into laughter when their eyes met for the first time in five
months.” The meeting was only possible because Judge William Keene had
granted Manson the right to represent himself—an allowance that shocked
the courtroom. As his own attorney, Manson was entitled to meet with his
jailed codefendants on the pretext of interviewing them as possible witnesses
in the case against him. Among his first requested interviews was the woman
responsible for his indictment: Susan Atkins.
After their meeting, a reporter asked Atkins if Manson had ordered her to
“change the story she related to the grand jury.” Atkins responded just as
Caballero and the prosecution always knew she would: “Charlie doesn’t give
orders. Charlie doesn’t command”—contradicting the thrust of her grand jury
testimony, of course.
The day after the meeting, Atkins fired Caballero and Caruso. She
announced that she was recanting her grand jury testimony and formally
declined to testify for the state. That same day, Judge Keene revoked
Manson’s right to represent himself, arguing that he had filed too many
“outlandish” and “nonsensical” motions.
Caballero later testified that, after he was fired, he didn’t check in with the
prosecution about the status of Atkins’s deal. But in an interview with the
Hollywood Citizen News several weeks after his firing, he made the status of
the deal crystal clear: it didn’t exist. “Susan Atkins’ former attorney, Richard
Caballero, said that no deal had been made which caused her to testify before
the grand jury,” the paper reported.
The “excellent deal” that Bugliosi had written of was no deal at all. Its
nonexistence has gone unnoticed all these years. Who cares about the legal
vagaries of a confessed killer like Susan Atkins? But without this hoax of a
deal—and the lawyer swap that enabled it—Manson and his followers may
never have been indicted, and the reigning narrative of Manson as an all-
controlling cult leader may never have come out.
Gary Fleischman, Linda Kasabian’s attorney—he now goes by Gary
Fields—told me that he was convinced the DA was “instrumental in getting
Dick Caballero appointed,” and that Bugliosi never had any intention of
keeping his deal with Atkins. “They used [her] to get an indictment,” he said,
“and then they dumped her because they couldn’t use her at trial because she
was dirty.” The whole thing “smelled to high heaven,” he continued.
“Caballero and Caruso got away with fucking murder. They sold her down
the river.” It was a stunning assessment from Fields. No one had benefited
more from Caballero and Caruso’s dirty dealings than his client.

Ice Cream for Atkins

Caballero had another coup during his tenure as Atkins’s lawyer: he made
sure that her story was heard around the world, in all its gory, self-
incriminating detail.
A few days before Atkins’s grand jury testimony, her attorneys met with a
self-described “Hollywood journalist and communicator” named Lawrence
Schiller to negotiate the publication of her firsthand account of the murders.
Essentially, the text would be an edited transcription of the recording she’d
made in Caballero’s office, with her byline slapped on it. Caballero and
Caruso later claimed that they intended for the story to appear only overseas,
far from the eyes of any potential jurors in Los Angeles. But such was not the
case. On Sunday, December 14, Atkins’s byline landed on the front page of
the Los Angeles Times. “Her” piece ran to 6,500 words, spilling across three
full pages.
The piece was an immediate sensation, far and away the most robust
account of the Manson murders available to the public. Readers in Los
Angeles—and within twenty-four hours, in nearly every place on the planet
with a printing press—now had all the lurid details, including those that had
been kept from the public by both the prosecution and the other killers’
defense attorneys. The piece spiked a vulgar account of the bloodshed with
hints of Atkins’s naive girlishness. “My lawyer is coming soon,” it ended,
“and he’s bringing me a dish of vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream really
blows my mind.” As Rolling Stone put it later, “Any doubts about Manson’s
power to cloud men’s minds were buried that morning between Dick Tracy
and one of the world’s great real estate sections.”
And that, it seemed, was the real purpose of the piece—to eliminate any
doubts about Manson the public might’ve had. In just the first column of the
article, Atkins used the word “instructed” five times in reference to Manson’s
role in the killings. Everything she and the Family did was on Manson’s
orders, she said. He was a criminal mastermind, a cult leader, a conspiring
lunatic.
The task of assembling an unbiased jury was suddenly a lot harder. A
spokesperson for the Southern California branch of the American Civil
Liberties Union told Newsweek, “The interview makes it all but impossible
for [the defendants] to get a fair trial in Los Angeles.” Bugliosi, craving
convictions and the deluge of publicity from a high-profile trial, was
presumably unbothered by this.
But Caballero should’ve been bothered. Even though this piece was in
effect a continuation of the many detailed press conferences he’d given, he
went through the motions of outrage. Claiming to be “shocked and
surprised,” he told the press that Schiller had double-crossed him, breaking a
promise that the story wouldn’t appear in the United States. Although
Caballero threatened lawsuits, they never materialized.
Nor did Caballero make any effort to halt the dissemination of the story,
which continued apace. One week later, Schiller released an expanded
version in a “quickie” paperback called The Killing of Sharon Tate: Exclusive
Story by Susan Atkins, Confessed Participant in the Murder. In the
acknowledgments, he thanked “several attorneys involved in this case” and
“two journalists,” writing, “Without their help this book could not have been
produced.”

Bugliosi maintained that his office had no idea the story was coming until
that fateful issue of the Times landed on his doorstep. He hadn’t learned a
thing about the sale of Atkins’s story, he claimed in Helter Skelter, until the
death-penalty phase of the trial. At that point, since Atkins was eligible for
the death penalty, her (third) new attorney, Daye Shinn, made an attempt to
save her life by arguing that Caballero had misrepresented her. He called on
everyone involved in the publication of her story to explain themselves.
Reading the transcript, I learned that the DA’s office not only was aware of
the planned publication, but may have facilitated it. And, of course, Helter
Skelter left all of this out.
The key to the scheme was Lawrence Schiller, the so-called
communicator who’d brokered the publication deal. This wasn’t Schiller’s
first high-profile article. Among other pieces, he’d arranged to publish the
“deathbed confession” of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby; nude
photos of Marilyn Monroe; and photos of the comedian Lenny Bruce lying
dead on his bathroom floor. He finished the Atkins deal on December 8,
when the contract was signed—just in the nick of time. Two days later, Judge
Keene issued a gag order, making it illegal for anyone involved to talk to the
press.
That should’ve brought a decisive end to the publication. But in violation
of the gag order, Caballero drove Jerry Cohen, a Los Angeles Times reporter
and a friend of Schiller, to interview his client in jail. Cohen had been tapped
to ghostwrite the piece. His main source was the taped account that Atkins
had made in Caballero’s office. But apparently he needed more material, and
the lawyer was happy to accommodate him.
In the car that evening, besides Caballero and Cohen, were Schiller and a
stenographer, Carmella Ambrosini. At the jail, Cohen and Ambrosini went
inside to interview Atkins. The purpose of the visit, as recorded in the
visitors’ log at Sybil Brand, was to discuss a “future psychiatric evaluation.”
Remember, Caballero had earlier claimed that Atkins could speak safely
only at his Beverly Hills offices. Now a journalist and a stenographer were
talking with her right there in jail. They spoke for about an hour. When they
got back in the car, Caballero made an unusual demand of Ambrosini: he told
the stenographer to pull out a small section of the tape from her machine,
maybe about three minutes’ worth, and give it to him. Caballero “ripped the
tape into tiny pieces,” Ambrosini later testified, “and then threw them on the
floor of the car. Then he picked them up from the floor and put them into his
pocket.”
On the stand, Caballero finally admitted that the taped section contained
comments from Atkins suggesting that she’d lied to the grand jury at his
direction. She’d said something to the effect of “Okay, I played your game. I
testified. I said what you wanted me to say, I don’t want to do it anymore”—
at which point he told her to stop talking. Under more persistent questioning,
Caballero conceded that Atkins “used the word ‘lie’” and “appeared” to be
“repudiating” her grand jury testimony.
It was the closest thing to an admission that Caballero had manipulated
Atkins—that her testimony, and all the indictments that stemmed from it,
were unreliable. But again, because Atkins was a confessed murderer, this
hardly seemed remarkable to the media. And, of course, the story of how
Caballero and Caruso became Atkins’s attorneys was locked in police vaults
until I found it.

“Something Very Smelly”

Jerry Cohen was a ghostwriter in the purest sense of the word. No one was
supposed to know that he’d finessed Atkins’s words, let alone that he’d
interviewed her in jail. To that end, Lawrence Schiller had presented himself
unambiguously as Atkins’s interlocutor. “I will be the first and the last
newsman with whom Susan Atkins can speak freely until her fate is decided,”
he wrote in the paperback version of the Atkins story.
In fact, Schiller had been sitting outside in the car while Cohen talked to
Atkins in jail. After that interview, Cohen ripped through his ghostwriting in
two days at Schiller’s house. Schiller made three carbon copies of the
finished piece: one for Caballero; one for a German editor who’d bought the
translation rights; and one to be flown overseas to the London News of the
World, which had paid $40,000 for exclusive English rights. Or so said
Bugliosi, who wrote in Helter Skelter, “How the Los Angeles Times obtained
the story remains unknown.”
Bugliosi did not write that Cohen, a reporter for the Times, was also a
friend and collaborator of his. That relationship came out only when Bugliosi
himself appeared as a witness during the trial’s penalty phase. Under cross-
examination, he admitted that he’d known Cohen for the “last two or three
years.” As he later confirmed to me, he was collaborating with Cohen on a
book of his own: not Helter Skelter, but Till Death Do Us Part, another true-
crime chronicle (it eventually appeared in 1978 with another coauthor). The
two men had begun work on the book before Sharon Tate was even
murdered; Bugliosi set it aside when he realized that the Manson murders
would be the more sensational story.
The defense alleged that Bugliosi had helped broker the publication of
Atkins’s story. They never proved it, in part because Jerry Cohen had dodged
subpoena servers and never testified. But certainly it was a point in their
favor that Bugliosi had omitted his working relationship with the reporter
who ghostwrote the story—and that said reporter worked for the same
newspaper where the story eventually appeared.
As for Schiller: in his turn on the stand, he did finally admit that he never
met Susan Atkins. But afterward he claimed in interviews with Vanity Fair,
Playboy, and the New York Times, and even in his Pulitzer Prize–winning
collaboration with Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song, that he’d
interviewed Atkins in her cell.

Cohen’s ghostwriting would’ve remained a secret if not for Pete Miller, an

investigative reporter for Los Angeles’s KTTV. In January 1970, as
preliminary hearings continued in the Manson case, he decided to look into
the Atkins sale. He wanted to see if Lawrence Schiller had actually
interviewed Atkins in her jail cell, as he’d claimed he had.
Miller checked the jail’s visitors’ log and saw that Schiller had never been
in to see Atkins. But he did notice a name he recognized: Jerry Cohen’s,
appearing alongside Caballero’s. On the phone, Caballero admitted that he’d
brought Cohen “in case he wanted to prepare a psychiatric defense” for
Atkins. Miller pointed out that Cohen was a reporter, not a psychiatrist, and
Caballero abruptly ended the conversation.
Miller tried to bring this to light, but he couldn’t get very far. After his
initial reports aired in January 1970, Bugliosi requested a meeting with him.
The two sat down at KTTV’s headquarters, along with Caballero, a second
DA, Miller’s bosses, and attorneys for the station.
This meeting came up during the penalty phase of the trial, when the
defense called Miller to testify. He tried to say what they’d discussed and
why no more stories aired after his first one, but Bugliosi objected every step
of the way. All he could get out was that they’d talked about “some of the
reports I had been doing… concerning Susan Atkins.”
“As a result of this meeting, was something done regarding your further
broadcasts of this case?” asked Daye Shinn, Atkins’s attorney.
“Objection!” cried Bugliosi. “Irrelevant.”
“Sustained,” responded the court.
Shinn tried again later. “As a result of this meeting did you further
terminate—”
“Objection!” Bugliosi said again. “Irrelevant.”
“Will you complete the question?” the judge asked Shinn.
“As a result of this meeting did you further terminate the broadcasts
concerning this case?”
“Objection! Irrelevant.”
“Sustained.”
Out of earshot of the jury, Bugliosi told the judge, “Miller’s testimony has
nothing to do with death as opposed to life. It is my contention that [the
defense attorneys] are going to use this death-penalty hearing as a forum to
sling dirt at various people.” Including, of course, him. The judge said he
wouldn’t allow any mention of what happened at the meeting. It constituted
hearsay.
Thus the prosecutor kept much of Miller’s investigation under wraps.
Most of the media covering the trial never even mentioned the Miller
appearance. The Los Angeles Times omitted him entirely, focusing instead, as
they always had, on the litany of bizarre behavior from the defendants and
their supporters outside the courthouse.

Under oath, both Bugliosi and his coprosecutor, Aaron Stovitz, denied that
they knew about the sale of Atkins’s story before it was published. Maybe
inadvertently, Richard Caballero impeached their testimony.
Under questioning by the defense’s Irving Kanarek, Caballero said, “I did
state to someone at the district attorney’s office—I believe it was Mr. Stovitz,
I may be wrong—that I had entered into the arrangement for the sale of the
story… And they were upset.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Kanarek asked.
“I believe Mr. Stovitz was there, and I am almost positive someone else
was there… but I cannot recall who.”
Kanarek did his best to bring out the implication that this “someone else”
was Bugliosi. Caballero, in a response worthy of the CIA, neither confirmed
nor denied it.
After the Atkins story came out, Lawrence Schiller spoke to Newsweek,
which asked how he’d been able to penetrate the security surrounding the
state’s “star” witness, risking a mistrial by publishing her story. He answered
“with a grin”: “Let’s say this, the prosecution didn’t put up any obstacles.”
I was more than ready to believe him on that count. But what about the
judge, William Keene—why didn’t he put up any obstacles? The worldwide
publication of Atkins’s story was about as blatant a violation of his gag order
as one can imagine, but he never held Caballero and Caruso in contempt. In a
story for the Los Angeles Free Press, Ed Sanders, who would go on to write
The Family, argued that Judge Keene must’ve known in advance about the
publication, letting it slide because he, like Bugliosi, wanted the publicity
from the case. Keene was considering a run for district attorney.
After Atkins’s story was published, Linda Kasabian’s attorney, Gary
Fields, filed a motion to dismiss the case because of unfair pretrial publicity.
Judge Keene denied the motion, despite abundant evidence of publicity.
“That’s where the story is,” Fields told me thirty years later. “Something very
smelly there.”

“A Strange Little Guy”

Richard Caballero refused to discuss the case with me. “The answer is no
thank you,” he said on the phone. I asked him why not. “The answer is no
thank you,” he said. I tried one more time, saying I wanted to discuss the sale
of the Atkins story. “The answer is no thank you!” he shouted, hanging up
the phone.
Lawrence Schiller wouldn’t talk to me, either, and Jerry Cohen had died
by his own hand, in 1993. Looking into those two men, I found that
throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in
furtive arrangements. In ’67, Schiller had published the first book to attack
the conspiracy theorists around John F. Kennedy’s assassination, staunchly
supporting the official explanation for JFK’s death. That same year,
foreshadowing his feat at Sybil Brand, Schiller wormed his way into the
Dallas hospital room of Jack Ruby, who’d killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee
Harvey Oswald. The reporter emerged with the only recording ever made of
Ruby’s confessing to the murder. Schiller released it on vinyl that year.
Notably, he’d taped Ruby saying that he hadn’t killed Oswald as part of a
conspiracy, thus shoring up the government’s official line.
During a congressional investigation of the CIA’s illegal domestic
operations, the agency admitted that it had more than 250 “assets” in the
American media in the 1960s. Their identities were never revealed. Mark
Lane, who’d written the first book questioning the findings of the Warren
Commission—the investigative committee appointed by President Lyndon
Johnson, which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin—
believed Schiller was one of those assets, and Jerry Cohen, too. Lane
believed they’d been tasked with disrupting investigations of the Kennedy
assassination. In testimony before Congress, Lane charged that the CIA had
paid Cohen to “smear” him in the press.
I could never prove that, but I did find a trove of documents in the
National Archives showing that Schiller had been acting as an informant for
the FBI in 1967 and 1968, sharing confidential information with the Bureau
about Mark Lane’s sources. His work as an informant continued under the
cloak of his “reporting” for Life magazine, which was later named in a 1977
Rolling Stone story as one of the publications that provided CIA employees
with cover. Schiller tracked down authorities who were investigating
potential malfeasance in the Kennedy assassination, using his press
credentials to obtain interviews and then sharing his findings with the FBI.
He’d written to J. Edgar Hoover to say that he was “in possession of the
names and whereabouts of [the] confidential informant whom Mr. [Mark]
Lane refused to identify” in his testimony to the Warren Commission.
Schiller dug up information about officials looking into the CIA’s
involvement in the Kennedy assassination. According to memos, the FBI
eagerly awaited Schiller’s information.
Others had made similar claims about Cohen and Schiller. Pete Noyes, a
TV investigative reporter who’d written a book on the assassinations of
President Kennedy and his brother Robert, said that Cohen, a friend, had
pressured him to abandon the project. If Noyes dropped the publication of the
book, Cohen promised him a plum job at the Los Angeles Times. Noyes
declined the offer, but he was disturbed by how much Cohen knew about his
unpublished work. A few weeks later, he was fired from his job at CBS
News. Cohen was “a strange little guy,” Noyes told me. He wondered why
his onetime friend tried to quash his book, and he suspected that Cohen had
played a role in his firing, too. Although he could never prove it, Noyes was
fairly certain that Cohen was a CIA asset.

Coda: What Did Atkins Really Say?

Susan Atkins’s testimony was the blueprint for the official narrative of the
murders. But if it was shaped to serve the prosecution, how much of it should
we believe?
If there’s an unvarnished account—a sense of what Atkins said about the
crimes before she came under the “control” of her attorneys and the DA’s
office—it’s the one she shared with her cellmate Ronnie Howard. We’ll
never get to hear that account verbatim, but there’s something that comes
close. In the files of LAPD lieutenant Paul LePage, I found notes from
detectives’ November 18, 1969, interview with Howard; they contained
several inconsistencies with what would become Atkins’s official story. And
by the time Howard was reinterviewed seven days later—after Caballero’s
insertion in the case—she changed what she said, and all of these
discrepancies were gone. To my knowledge, they’ve never been reported.
First: Atkins told Howard that Sharon Tate died in her bedroom, on the
bed. (Later, she was said to have died in the living room.)
Second: she said the killers were tripping on LSD the night of the Tate
murders. If that were true, the defense could’ve argued that they had
“diminished capacity,” thus sparing them the gas chamber. Bugliosi, wanting
to eliminate that possibility, made Linda Kasabian testify on multiple
occasions that no one took any drugs on the nights of the murders. (In a 2009
documentary, Kasabian contradicted her testimony, saying that all the killers
had taken speed on the night of the Tate murders.)
Third: Atkins said that they killed the LaBianca couple because of
something to do with “blackmail,” although she couldn’t elaborate. She said
she’d participated in those murders, too—she was the one who left the
kitchen fork protruding from Leno LaBianca’s belly. (In the official narrative,
Atkins was in the car that brought the killers to the LaBiancas’, but she never
went inside the house.)
What’s just as remarkable is everything that Howard didn’t mention in
that first interview. She said nothing about Helter Skelter, Manson’s race
war, except to note that those words were left in blood on the LaBianca
refrigerator. She made no mention, in other words, of a racist motive, black
people, holes in the desert, Armageddon, or the Beatles, all of which became
central to Bugliosi’s prosecution.
And, as you might expect by now, she made no mention of Manson’s
“instructing” anyone to go anywhere or kill anyone—all of which would be
repeated incessantly in Atkins’s later accounts.
As for Atkins’s most heinous act—the stabbing of Sharon Tate as she
begged for the life of her baby—Howard was much more equivocal about it
than we’ve been led to believe. She said that Atkins “didn’t admit she did the
stabbing on the Tate deal.” And yet, the next time Howard talked, after
Caballero had arrived, she said without reservation that Atkins had boasted
about stabbing Tate in nauseating detail.

Think of all the unanswered questions that have swirled around the Manson
case for fifty years now. Just a few: Why did the killers target strangers for
murder? Why would previously nonviolent kids—except for Atkins, none of
them had a criminal record—kill for Manson, on command, and with such
abandon and lack of remorse? And if Manson hoped to ignite a world-ending
race war, why didn’t he order more killings, since the two nights of murder
didn’t trigger that war?
Bugliosi made a fortune and achieved worldwide fame from his
prosecution of the Manson Family and Helter Skelter. Over the years, many
people in law enforcement have told me that they never believed the Helter
Skelter motive. Their theories were always more mundane—they would’ve
made thinner gruel for Bugliosi’s book.
Eventually, all the killers settled on a story similar to the one that Atkins
told after her attorney swap. And all of them have sought parole releases
based on that story’s thesis: that they were not responsible for their actions
because they were under Manson’s control. Many of the psychiatrists who
testified said that the defendants’ minds had been so decimated by LSD that
they likely had no way of discerning real memories from false ones. They
may not even have known if they were at either house on the nights of the
killings, let alone whether they participated in the murders.
 The only person who never endorsed Atkins’s final story, and the Helter
Skelter motive along with it, was Manson. After his conviction, he said little
about the crimes, except that he didn’t know what his “children” were going
to do before they did it, and that he had no explanation for why they’d done
it. Curiously, Bugliosi admitted in one of his last interviews that he was
pretty certain Manson never believed in Helter Skelter. “I think everyone who
participated in the murders bought the Helter Skelter theory hook, line, and
sinker,” he told Rolling Stone. “But did Manson himself believe in all this
ridiculous, preposterous stuff about all of them living in a bottomless pit in
the desert while a worldwide war went on outside? I think, without knowing,
that he did not.” Unfortunately, the reporter didn’t follow up with the obvious
rejoinder: If the murders weren’t committed to incite a race war, what was the
reason?
As I’ve mentioned before, there was a persistent rumor among followers
of the case, including the detectives who’d investigated it, that Manson had
visited the Tate house after the murders, arriving with some unknown
companion to restage the crime scene. If it’s true that Susan Atkins’s story
was the product of careful sculpting by the DA’s office, the prospect of
Manson’s visitation isn’t nearly as far-fetched as it would be otherwise.
One of the more perplexing clues to that end is a pair of eyeglasses
recovered from Tate’s living room after the murders. They didn’t belong to
any of the victims; they didn’t belong to any of the murderers; they didn’t
seem to belong to anyone, period. Detectives never explained them to
anyone’s satisfaction. In a 1986 book called Manson in His Own Words,
ostensibly cowritten by Manson and an ex-con named Nuel Emmons,
Manson mentioned these glasses, saying he went to the Cielo house with an
unnamed conspirator and took elaborate measures to rearrange the crime
scene. “My partner had an old pair of eyeglasses which we often used as a
magnifying glass or a device to start a fire when matches weren’t available,”
he wrote. “We carefully wiped the glasses free of prints and dropped them on
the floor, so that, when discovered, they would be a misleading clue for the
police.”
To be clear, Manson in His Own Words is a far from unimpeachable
source. Emmons wrote the book years after a series of prison interviews with
Manson, but he wasn’t allowed to record these or take notes at the time.
Manson himself vaguely disavowed the book, although not before appearing
with Emmons in several televised interviews to promote it.
I was inclined to take a kinder view toward it when I found, in the LASO
files, a “kite,” or prison note, from Manson to Linda Kasabian. His coded
language is hard to decipher, but he may have been admitting that he left the
glasses at the Cielo house after the murders. The note seems to have been
delivered in an effort to persuade Kasabian not to make a deal with the
prosecution:

So what if I did make you do it I don’t care if you’re a snitch… you

been a lien bitch… I did what I did because I felt it was to be done & I
even put the eye glasses to where I could show you all are blind & give
them Shorty… each time you skiw down you think of Sharon Tate &
know that’s you if I can’t get to my Nancy’s love…

The next lines had been underlined by police: “tell Gold to hold the bone
yard and no bones outside the yard.”
While it’s always difficult to decode anything Manson said or wrote, this
note isn’t as impenetrable as others. “Gold” was Manson’s nickname for one
of his Family favorites, Nancy Pitman, whom he had referred to as “Nancy” a
few lines earlier. In early 1970, Pitman paid frequent visits to all the
defendants in jail, doing Manson’s bidding. She told Linda Kasabian not to
turn state’s evidence; she told Atkins to stop cooperating with the
prosecution. “Shorty” refers to Shorty Shea, the Spahn Ranch caretaker
whom the Family had killed and buried in a remote part of the property; as
mentioned earlier, his remains weren’t recovered until 1977.
To hazard a guess: Manson was warning Kasabian not to flip, and
instructing her to tell “Gold,” when next she visited, that Shorty Shea’s
“bones” were not to be removed from “the bone yard” at the Spahn Ranch
where he was buried. Manson even may have been referring to other victims’
buried remains at the ranch; it’s long been suspected that more victims of the
Family are buried somewhere. While the implications of the note are
sensational, what’s more important to me is Manson’s apparent admission
that he returned to the Tate house after the murders and planted the glasses.
I expected investigators to dismiss the possibility of Manson’s meddling
at the scene, but some were open to it. Late in my reporting, I spoke with
Danny Bowser, a retired lieutenant from the LAPD homicide squad who’d
never given an interview about Manson. In 1965 Bowser had been appointed
the first commander of the LAPD’s new Special Investigations Section (SIS),
an elite, high-tech unit that served as “professional witnesses” by running
covert surveillance on known criminals. Its goal was to gather such a
preponderance of evidence that convictions were all but guaranteed, and plea
bargains all but impossible. And the SIS was a furtive bunch: for a decade,
the LAPD never even publicly acknowledged its existence. “We weren’t even
connected to a division,” Bowser told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “They
carried us [on the roster] at different places, different times.”
That was the only time Bowser ever commented about the SIS. A second
piece reported that SIS was called the “Death Squad” within the LAPD
because its members had killed thirty-four suspects since 1965. The
“secretive” twenty-man unit had a controversial policy: it refused to intervene
to stop crimes, even those in which people’s lives were at stake. The Times
investigation “documented numerous instances in which well-armed teams of
SIS detectives stood by watching as victims were threatened with death and,
sometimes, physically harmed by criminals who could have been arrested
beforehand.” The later piece in the Times reported that “Even within the
LAPD, SIS officers are known as a fearsome and mysterious bunch. Some of
their colleagues repeat unsubstantiated—and vigorously denied—rumors of
SIS officers conspiring to shoot suspects and celebrating gunfights with ‘kill
parties.’”
I’d heard from other detectives that, after Sharon Tate’s murder, the
LAPD assigned Bowser to serve as Roman Polanski’s “bodyguard.” Why
would such an elite officer get such a low-level task? Polanski confirmed the
assignment in his 1984 autobiography, Roman by Polanski, writing that
Bowser had been the first detective to interview him and had shadowed his
every move. He added somewhat cryptically that “Bowser wasn’t, strictly
speaking, on the investigative side of the case… One of his responsibilities
was to keep in touch with me.” Why, then, was his name never mentioned in
Helter Skelter or at the trial?
I had trouble finding a way to talk to Bowser. Finally, in 2008, I settled on
a time-honored reportorial tactic: I showed up at his doorstep unannounced.
He lived way out in Inyo County, five hours from L.A., at the end of a quiet
suburban street.
 Bowser refused to let me in, saying he wouldn’t talk to me. Despite his
advanced age, he cut an imposing figure—he had a glass eye, and I later
learned that his real eye had been shot out—but I kept him standing in his
doorway by blurting out questions about the Tate crime scene, hoping to
convince him that I’d done my homework. It worked—kind of. Bowser
would shut the door on me, only to open it again to say more. Whenever he
seemed to have said his piece, he’d find something else to add. For the next
thirty minutes, as the sprinklers chirped next door and a TV blared from
inside his house, he told me things that he insisted he’d never shared outside
the SIS.
Most of our stilted conversation was about the homicide investigation
report for the Tate case, a document that was pretty much the basis of the
prosecution’s physical evidence. Bowser said it was littered with
inaccuracies. The detectives in the homicide unit, he claimed, “left things
behind, things they missed… an awful lot of evidence didn’t get processed.”
At least two key pieces of physical evidence weren’t, in fact, discovered at
the crime scene the morning of the murders, although more than a dozen
police officers and forensic investigators had testified that they had been. One
was that mysterious pair of eyeglasses. Bowser told me he’d found those
himself, five entire days after the murders. That contradicted the homicide
report, which said the glasses had been located and taken into custody on
August 9, 1969. Gently, I suggested he might be mistaken—that the homicide
report suggested otherwise.
“What, you think that’s the Bible?” He snorted. “You believe the stuff
you read in there?” He made sure I didn’t jump to the conclusion that he or
any of the SIS agents working under him had done anything improper. He
said that his guys didn’t write reports, nor did they report to anyone.
Nevertheless, if what he said was true, then critical elements of the
prosecution’s presentation of the crime scene were inaccurate. Included, just
for starters, would be the means of entry into the house, the way the victims
were bound and by whom. “Everything evil over there kind of connects,” he
added.
If he was accurate, then all those cops—his colleagues at the LAPD—had
lied under oath, I reminded him.
“Did you see any of my guys on the stand?” he asked. And he added that I
wouldn’t find any of his “guys” named in the police reports, either. He was
right.
Toward the end, Bowser toyed with giving me a proper interview. “I was
going to give you my number,” he said before shutting the door again, “to
protect you from stumbling over your dick. But I changed my mind.” I waited
a good ten minutes, but the door remained closed this time, and I finally left.
Two years later, in 2010, he died.
As I drove away, my mind was awash with possibilities. I’d always
wondered about the crime-scene discrepancies. I wondered if Bowser, just by
alleging that the crime scene had been presented incorrectly or possibly even
staged, was pointing to other reasons for the murders, or other people,
perhaps, involved in covering up what had really happened. I had to think of
Reeve Whitson, and his claim of having gone to the crime scene after the
murders but before the police had arrived.
All of this is compelling evidence of a different scenario for the crimes,
but I’ll be the first to admit that it proves nothing for certain. I do believe it’s
possible that there was another reason for the Tate–LaBianca murders. And I
do believe the crime scene suggests that the sequence of events as we know it
is wrong. But our best chance to learn the truth vanished in November 1969,
when the DA’s office put Susan Atkins’s testimony on lockdown. The
question remaining was: Why?
 9

Manson’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

No More Extensions
Good reporting takes time—vast and often unreasonable amounts of time.
Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put
in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends. My Freedom of
Information Act requests alone would stretch on for months, as I quibbled
with bureaucrats over redactions and minutiae. Since my three-month
assignment from Premiere had long since evolved into a years-long project,
I’d accepted that the Manson case was something akin to a calling, like it or
not. Even in the longueurs between my major breakthroughs, I worked
diligently with the confidence—and, sometimes, the hubris—that comes with
the hunch that you’re onto something big.
That confidence would’ve been nothing if my editors at Premiere didn’t
share it. The camaraderie and support they offered was critical, but more
basically than that, they were keeping me alive. For almost a year and a half,
through one deadline extension after another, they paid me a generous
monthly stipend to keep reporting, on top of the standard fee from my
original contract. Even then, I knew that these paychecks were a tremendous
act of faith, and I didn’t take them lightly. I wanted to deliver a news-making
piece, unlike the usual stuff printed in entertainment magazines, and I thought
I could do it. I just needed time.
But there were limits to Premiere’s largesse. In November 2000, Jim
Meigs—the editor in chief, who’d sat on the floor of my apartment,
examining documents with me—was fired. I heard a rumor, which I could
never confirm, that the handsome monthly payments he’d authorized for me
were part of the problem. Whatever the case, Premiere’s new regime got
down to brass tacks right away. In total, including expenses, they’d paid me a
king’s ransom at that point, and now they demanded the goods. Immediately.
Looking back, maybe I was too full of pride. I still can’t decide if what I
did next was best for me in the long run. But I did it: I walked away from
Premiere. I thought I had a historic story, and to publish it in that condition,
with loose ends and so much research left to be done, would’ve been giving
too much away. The minute I let it go, I thought, the Los Angeles Times or
the Washington Post would put six reporters on the story to finish what I
couldn’t. If they got the big scoop that had eluded me—the story of what
really happened, as opposed to the millions of tiny holes in what was
supposed to have happened—all the glory would be theirs, and I would be
only a footnote.
A writer friend had referred me to her literary agent, who took me on,
convinced that I had an important book on my hands. If I could write up a
proposal and sell it to a publisher, he said, I’d get the time and the money I
needed to put my reporting to bed. He disentangled me from my obligation to
Premiere and I started right away.
It took more than a year to write the first draft of the proposal. My friends,
many of whom were writers, could never understand why it was taking so
long. Why not just sit down and crank the thing out? I was constantly on the
defensive with them, looking for justifications. The problem, of course, was
that I was still reporting. Because that’s what I always did. I never stopped.
Without the backing of an institution like Premiere, my mind-set started
to change—it was expanding. I found myself looking into Manson’s year in
San Francisco. He was there for the summer of love, in 1967. It was where
he’d formed the Family. I was flummoxed by the authority figures who’d
surrounded Manson at this time: his parole officer and the locally renowned
physician who ran the clinic where he and his followers received free health
care. Neither of them had spoken much to the press, and neither had testified
at the trial, despite the fact that each man had seen Manson almost daily in
the critical period when he’d started his cult.
These weren’t fringe figures like Reeve Whitson or William Herrmann:
they were well-known and respected in the Bay Area, and, even better for me,
they were still alive. So when I plunged into their stories with Manson and
found evidence of serial dishonesty—again, often connected to federal law
enforcement and intelligence agencies—I had to ask myself if I was crazy to
be doing all of this.
The question wasn’t whether it was “worth it”; I thought it was, assuming
the truth could be wrested out of aging scientists, reformed hippies, and dusty
government files. The question was how much of myself I was willing to
give, irrespective of any consequences to my reputation or well-being. I was
haunted by something Paul Krassner, a journalist who’d covered the trial for
the legendary counterculture magazine The Realist, had told me after a lunch
in the first months of my investigation. At a Venice Beach sushi bar, we’d
been discussing our belief that the reasons behind the murders had been
misrepresented. “Be careful, Tom,” he said as we parted ways. “This will
take over your life if you let it.”
I’d shrugged it off at the time. Now it felt like a prophecy. But if I wanted
my book, or even just my proposal for the book, to be more complete than
my Premiere piece would’ve been, I had to let the story consume me.

Scot-Free in Mendocino
To understand my fascination with Manson’s parole officer, you might pick
up where we left off: with Susan Atkins. She was plainly pushed around by
the DA’s office. Her story was cut and polished until it glimmered for the
prosecutors, bringing indictments, convictions, and a raft of publicity.
The more I learned about Atkins’s past, though, the stranger her
manipulation became to me. In the years before the Family’s rise to notoriety,
the justice system afforded her a shocking amount of latitude. If anything,
she’d gotten away with far too much in those years. When she was on
probation, she broke the law regularly, but her arrests never put her in any
further legal jeopardy. Instead, there was a pattern of catch-and-release.
Whenever the police brought her in, she’d find herself cut loose within a few
days. Why was law enforcement so lenient with her?
The events of June 4, 1969—about two months before the Tate–LaBianca
murders—are as good a starting point as any. At 3:30 that morning, an LAPD
patrolman pulled over a ’68 Plymouth for speeding in the San Fernando
Valley, ordering the driver to step out of the car. A small, long-haired man
emerged, staggering toward him, his arms flailing in “wild gyrations.” “He
appeared under the influence of some unknown intoxicant,” the officer later
reported.
It was Charles Manson. He was arrested and charged with driving under
the influence, being on drugs, and operating a vehicle without a license. He
had four passengers in the car, all arrested for being under the influence:
Thomas J. Walleman, Nancy Pitman, Leslie Van Houten, and Susan Atkins.
Within twenty-four hours, all of them—including Manson, who’d
informed the booking officers that he was on federal parole—were released
with no charges. All except Atkins. She was held for more than two weeks.
The police had discovered a warrant for Atkins, not even a week old. On
May 29, hundreds of miles away in Mendocino, a judge had ordered her
arrest for violating five conditions of her probation. (Atkins had gotten a
three-year probation sentence in 1968, after an arrest near Ukiah, California.)
Now, notified of her arrest in Los Angeles, two Mendocino County sheriff’s
deputies drove 1050 miles round-trip to scoop her up and bring her back up
north. On June 7, she was booked into the Mendocino County jail.
The state had a strong case against Atkins. She had probation officers in
both L.A. and Mendocino, and neither was happy with her. According to
their reports, she’d brazenly defied all attempts at supervision since her
sentence was imposed. Since she’d received a courtesy transfer of her
probation from Mendocino to Los Angeles County, she’d changed her
address more than six times without permission. She hadn’t sought
employment. She’d failed to check in for almost every monthly appointment.
And most recently, she’d told the probation office that, although she knew it
was forbidden, she was moving to the Mojave Desert with her friends, with
no plan to return to L.A.
Describing Atkins’s whereabouts as “totally unknown,” the probation
office’s report advised, “The best thing is to revoke the defendant’s probation
as it appears she has no intentions of abiding by it.”
Despite that recommendation, at a hearing that month, Judge Wayne
Burke of Mendocino County Superior Court decided that “the defendant has
not violated probation. She has complied with the terms. Probation is
reinstated and modified to terminate forewith. She is released.” Not only did
the ruling defy the probation office—it seemed to reward Atkins’s bad
behavior, “terminating” her probation more than two years before it was
scheduled to conclude. And off she went, soon to participate in the murders
of at least eight people. The fact that she was nearly sent to prison so soon
before the killings has never been reported.
Hoping to shed some light on the deceased Judge Burke’s decision, I
found the head of the Mendocino County Probation Office in 1969, Thomas
Martin, who’d appeared at the hearing. I also spoke to Atkins’s L.A.
probation officer, Margo Tompkins, who’d written the recommendation for
her revocation. Both recalled their shock at the ruling. Calling it “very
strange,” Tompkins said, “Judges almost always went along with a probation
officer’s recommendation. Clearly she had not had any employment, no fixed
addresses… I have no idea why [he] would have done that.”
Martin said he’d never experienced anything like it in thirty-two years on
the job. He was especially galled because they’d gone to the trouble of
sending two police officers on the thousand-mile journey to retrieve Atkins.
“That seldom, if ever, happened,” he said. Martin remembered Burke well; he
felt the ruling must have had some ulterior motive. “Judge Burke was not just
somebody in the woods,” he said. “There was something in his mind.
Something that he knew that he never shared with us.”

Whatever that something was, it had worked to Atkins’s benefit before. A

year and a half earlier, an entirely different set of probation officers—in
another state—had tried to have her probation revoked, and they met with an
almost identical response from a different judge.
Atkins was living in San Francisco then. She’d fallen in with a strange
man who promised to change her life, and her probation officers weren’t
thrilled about it. Her sudden infatuation with this “Charlie” meant she might
backslide into the recklessness that had gotten her arrested in the first place,
when she’d been found in a stolen car in Oregon with two ex-cons, one of
whom she’d met while working as a stripper. It was the end of a crime spree
for the trio. They’d stolen the car in California, driven it across the state line
into Oregon, and held up a string of gas stations and convenience stores, with
Atkins at the wheel.
When they were apprehended outside Salem, she told the officer she
would’ve shot and killed him if he hadn’t caught them by surprise. Then only
eighteen, Atkins was convicted of being in possession of stolen goods and a
concealed weapon. Her three-year probation sentence was transferred to San
Francisco, where she promised to clean up her act. And so she had, until the
summer of ’67, when she’d fallen under Manson’s spell.
According to probation records, Atkins phoned her San Francisco
probation officer, Mary Yates, that November 10, saying that she’d joined a
communal marriage with seven other women. They were all hitched to a
“traveling minister” by the name of Charlie, fresh out of federal prison.
Atkins and Charlie’s other “wives,” many of them pregnant by him, would
soon be leaving San Francisco in a “big yellow bus” bound for Southern
California, Florida, and ultimately Mexico.
Yates had been supervising Atkins for a year, and she was surprised by
her charge’s sudden change in character. True, Atkins had always been
“flighty,” but she’d also been respectful and polite, and she’d never failed to
follow the rules. Now she sounded defiant, if also lackadaisical. She didn’t
seem to understand, or care, that her behavior would land her in prison.
After that disturbing phone call, Yates wrote to the head office in
Sacramento to fill them in. “Charlie,” she wrote, not knowing his last name,
“is in love with all of them and they all love each other.” Yates had told
Atkins not to leave, but she was “certain she will do as she pleases.” She
recommended getting Atkins in court to decide whether her probation should
be revoked. She closed her letter with chillingly prophetic words: “Hopefully,
she won’t get into further difficulties with Charlie and the other seven girls.”
The phone call had so worried Yates that she got in touch with another
probation officer, M. E. Madison, of Oregon, where Atkins had originally
been sentenced. Madison, who also kept tabs on Atkins, raised an alarm of
his own. He’d spoken to Atkins, too, and he didn’t like what he heard. “Her
speech was quite disorganized,” he wrote to his superiors, “and she repeated
several times… that ‘Love is everything; everything is nothing.’” He told her
she couldn’t go; she said she was leaving anyway.
The officers tried to track her down, to no avail. November faded into
December. Feeling they’d exhausted their options, they wrote to the original
sentencing judge, George Jones, of Marion County, Oregon, advising that the
court take action. That was on December 12. Afterward, the paper record
abruptly stopped. For twenty-three days, there were no more documents,
memos, or court filings regarding the truant probationer.
Then, on January 4, 1968, Judge Jones signed an order terminating Susan
Atkins’s probation. Probation officials in two states had gone so far as to
warn Atkins that her return to prison was inevitable. Instead, the judge
rewarded her by releasing her from all obligations to law enforcement.
As in the later case, there was no record explaining the judge’s decision.
He knew the nature of her crimes; he knew how serious a threat she could
become. Why would he have reversed himself? Why would another judge
have followed suit? Atkins hardly seemed the type to win over two separate
judges. Only one thing had changed when these reversals occurred: she was
with Manson. As long as she stayed on his side, it seemed the rules didn’t
apply.

Roger Smith, “the Friendly Fed”

The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbit. Once I
was absorbed in the Family’s origin story, I found evidence everywhere of a
curious leniency, always helped along by a hand from the outside. Of special
note was an incident in June 1968 that earned Atkins her second probation
sentence, the one that almost—almost—had her off the streets for good
before the Tate–LaBianca murders.
It began in the small outpost of Ukiah. As the seat for Mendocino County
—one of the Family’s favorite getaways—Ukiah by 1968 had become a
haven for hippies fleeing San Francisco, which was no longer the
untrammeled paradise it had been a few years before. In Haight-Ashbury,
speed was now the drug of choice, and with it came violence, con men,
bikers, dope peddlers, and runaways. Worst were the tourists, who’d started
to congregate in the Haight to admire the psychedelic memorabilia for sale:
tie-dyed shirts, MAKE LOVE NOT WAR buttons, beads, baubles, and bell-
bottoms.
Mendocino County, 150 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge, was
an oasis by comparison. Rolling acres of land and dense forests of centuries-
old redwoods stretched all the way to the sea. Small towns speckled the
landscape with a patchwork quilt of groves and orchards. Communes had
sprouted up as early as 1965, but they increased tenfold after the implosion of
the Haight. In early June 1968, Manson sent his girls there to win some
recruits for their own commune.
 The delegation of five women—Susan Atkins, Ella Jo Bailey, Patricia
Krenwinkel, Stephanie Rowe, and Mary Brunner—used a technique that
they’d refined into an art form. They sought out impressionable young men,
invited them to an all-girl orgy, and offered them a plethora of narcotics,
including marijuana quietly spiked with LSD. Unfortunately, that day in
Ukiah, they snared three underage boys. More unfortunately, one of them
happened to be the son of a Mendocino County deputy sheriff.
The seventeen-year-old awoke in a tangle of limbs, extricated himself, and
darted home, telling his parents that his “legs looked like snakes” and that he
“saw flashes when he closed his eyes.” Soon all five women had been
charged with felony drug possession and contributing to the delinquency of
minors. They were locked up in the Mendocino County jail.
The outlook was grim for the Manson girls. Two of them were already in
the probation office’s sights—Atkins had just been released from her
sentence, and Brunner’s had just begun. But all they had to do was make one
phone call and they were as good as gone.

The man they called was Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer in San
Francisco. Or rather, his former parole officer. At the time of these arrests,
Smith had recently left his job, and you’d think he would have severed ties
with his one remaining parolee: Manson. But the two had grown close.
Smith, who called Manson “Charlie,” ended up becoming one of the most
vital figures in my investigation—more than anyone else, he knew how and
why Manson had formed the Family, because he’d watched it happen. And
legally, he wielded immense power over Manson. He could’ve sent him back
to prison at any time.
Instead, he acted more as Manson’s guardian. Their bond was such that,
when Manson’s disciples called him from Ukiah that day in June, Smith and
his wife decided to drive up to Mendocino County to check on them. They
had no professional obligation to do this.
Brunner had recently given birth to a son, Michael Valentine, and with the
girls in jail, the baby had no one to take care of him. (Manson was the father,
of course; Michael Valentine, sometimes known as “Pooh Bear,” was the
Family’s first child.) Smith and his wife took an extraordinary step: they got
the court to appoint them as Pooh Bear’s temporary foster parents, and they
returned to the Bay Area with the baby, looking after him for eight weeks.
In the meantime, a friend of Smith named Alan Rose repaired to
Mendocino County to get the girls out of jail. Rose, a college dropout who
met the Family through Smith, made a valiant effort. He’d become enamored
of the girls. He visited them almost daily, hired lawyers for them, and
testified as a character witness at their preliminary hearings. And finally he
raised their bail money, winning their freedom until the trial at the end of the
summer.
All the while, Manson remained in L.A., ensconced in the comfort of
Dennis Wilson’s home. He received periodic updates about the girls, but he
never seemed terribly concerned. Why should he have been? By that time,
he’d been through enough to know that he was golden: with Roger Smith
watching over him, crimes had no consequences.
In the end, charges were dropped against three of the women for lack of
evidence. Atkins and Brunner pleaded guilty to possessing narcotics. In
exchange, the charges that they’d furnished drugs to minors were dismissed.
Then the court shocked the community by granting Atkins probation
instead of sending her to prison. Brunner was already on probation in L.A., or
one assumes she would’ve gotten it, too. The sixty days they’d already spent
in the county jail was apparently punishment enough—they were free.
As we now know, Atkins would violate her probation in June 1969,
forcing her to be spirited away from the Family and carted back to
Mendocino County by police. And her violation wouldn’t matter—the
beneficent Judge Burke would return her to the fold, no questions asked.
Once again the pattern held: when it came to women in the orbit of
Charles Manson, the court was unusually forgiving, ruling against the wishes
of police and prosecutors.
I wanted to find the reasons behind the court’s clemency. I called the
Superior Court in Ukiah and bought the entire file for the Mendocino case,
including the record of the probation investigations for Atkins and Brunner.
It turned out that both women had received glowing appraisals and
impassioned pleas for leniency from none other than Roger Smith. In his
petitions, Smith identified himself as a “former federal parole officer,” but he
neglected to mention that his most recent and final parole client was Charles
Manson—the very man who’d sent Atkins and Brunner to Mendocino in the
first place.
 If the court knew about Smith’s relationship to Manson, there’s no record
of it. And the judges weren’t the only ones from whom Smith withheld this
information. David Mandel, a Mendocino County probation officer who filed
the sentencing report for Atkins and Brunner, wrote extensively about
Manson and his “guru”-like hold over the women, and he spoke to Roger
Smith—without realizing the two were connected. Neither Smith nor his
wife, who’d also advocated for the girls’ release, ever saw fit to mention their
relationship with Manson. (Smith’s wife, Carol, who divorced him in 1981,
denied any involvement in the recommendations, suggesting that Smith had
used her name without her knowledge.)
Mandel put a lot of stock in Smith’s word. He was impressed that a
former federal parole officer would put his weight behind a slouch like
Atkins, whom he described as “hostile and possibly vengeful.” Smith and his
wife swore that Atkins would “comply willingly with any probationary
conditions.” And while Mandel saw Brunner as “much influenced and often
manipulated by her present group,” the Smiths praised her as an emblem of
“traditional Christian values.”
Of course, Smith had spent a long time with the Family by then. He knew
that Brunner and Atkins had every intention of returning to the man who
dictated their lives, often inciting them to criminality. And sure enough, when
the court let them go, they fled Mendocino immediately for the Spahn Ranch,
where Manson was now situated.

In 2008, I met with David Mandel in Marin County. I was the first to tell him
that Roger Smith had been Manson’s parole officer.
“Of course it should have been disclosed,” said Mandel, poring over the
documents I’d brought. “It’s a huge conflict of interest!”
Mandel remembered visiting the Smiths at their home in Tiburon, outside
San Francisco. He noticed that the couple cared enough for Mary Brunner to
have petitioned for temporary custody of her child. The couple was a major
factor in his decision to recommend probation, he said, shaking his head. “I
should’ve put two and two together.”
One other strange fact bears mentioning, even though I’ve never known
what to make of it. Six months after the Ukiah trial, one of the judges, Robert
Winslow, lost his reelection bid to the bench—in no small part, according to
one insider, because of his leniency with the Manson girls. Winslow
resurfaced in Los Angeles. Remarkably, he’d become the attorney for Doris
Day and her son, Terry Melcher. It was Winslow who prepped Melcher for
his appearances at the Tate–LaBianca trial, and Winslow who accompanied
him in the courtroom as he testified, incorrectly, about the number of times
he’d met Manson. Ironically, Winslow was helping Melcher speak out
against the same group he’d helped the year before. Neither he nor Melcher
ever made a public comment about the sheer unlikeliness of it all.

“A Totally Irresponsible Individual”

Even before I got the probation records, I was convinced that something was
off about Roger Smith’s relationship with the Family. My interest in the
federal officer coincided with my deep dive into COINTELPRO and
CHAOS, both of which were active in the Bay Area in 1967.
I wanted to know everything about Smith and Manson. How had Smith
become Manson’s parole officer? Why were they so close? And what made
Smith so inclined to treat Manson like a harmless hippie rather than a
dangerous ex-con?
The answers came mainly from a pivotal chapter of Manson’s life, one
that Bugliosi glossed over in Helter Skelter: the summer of love. From the
late spring of 1967 to June 1968, Manson lived in Haight-Ashbury, the
hotbed of the counterculture. Given how often Manson is characterized as a
curdled hippie—a perversion of the principles of free love—you’d think his
year in the Haight would attract more attention. It was the crucible in which
his identity was forged. He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-
haired cult leader. It was in the Haight that he began to use LSD. He learned
how to attract weak, susceptible people, and how to use drugs to keep them
under his thumb. And he internalized the psychological methods that would
make his followers do anything for him.
This would’ve been all but impossible without Roger Smith.

The two came together in a roundabout way. Manson had been released from
Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles County on March 21, 1967. He’d
served seven and a half years for forging a government check. When he
stepped out that day, he was thirty-two, and he’d spent nearly half his life in
prisons and juvenile detention centers. As Bugliosi would marvel in Helter
Skelter, prison supervisors had largely assessed Manson as nonviolent.
Though he’d faced juvenile convictions of armed robbery and homosexual
rape, and had beaten his wife, these didn’t add up, in the eyes of the state, to a
“sustained history of violence.” Nor, as Bugliosi noted, did they fit the profile
of a mass murderer in 1969.
Another peculiarity: all of Manson’s prison time was at the federal level.
Bugliosi found this startling. “Probably ninety-nine out of one-hundred
criminals never see the inside of a federal court,” he noted. Manson had been
described as “criminally sophisticated,” but had he been convicted at the state
level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars—maybe less than
five years, versus seventeen.
Within days of his release, Manson violated his parole. Unless he had
explicit permission, he was supposed to stay put; he was forbidden from
leaving Los Angeles under penalty of automatic repatriation to prison. But
practically immediately, he headed to Berkeley, California.
Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked just for failing to report
to his supervisor. Now, for some reason, the police bureaucracy of an entirely
different city welcomed him with open arms. When he called up the San
Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some
routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith, an
officer and a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology.
Helter Skelter is deeply misleading on this point. Bugliosi writes simply
that Manson “requested and received permission to go to San Francisco.” The
prosecutor had a copy of Manson’s parole file, so he knew this wasn’t true.
I wanted that file, too. After a FOIA request and months of negotiations
and appeals, I received a portion of it in 2000. It contained a letter from the
San Francisco parole office to the Los Angeles office, dated April 11, 1967—
three weeks after Manson’s release. “This man called our San Francisco
Federal Parole Office to announce that he had been paroled and was now
within the city of Berkeley, California,” the letter begins.

He had no parole documents (he impresses as a totally irresponsible

individual)… the institution at Terminal Island tells us that this man
 was paroled on March 21, 1967, to the Central District of California
(Los Angeles). Since this man indicates his intention to stay within the
San Francisco Metropolitan area for the indefinite future we now
indicate our willingness to accept transfer of supervision to this
Northern District of California.

And so began Manson’s assignment to Roger Smith, whom the ex-con came
to revere.

As the months passed, Manson granted Smith a special role as “protector” in

the abstruse mythology he’d begun to construct around himself. The Haight
had introduced him to Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein’s
provocative 1961 sci-fi novel. Manson was obsessed with the book. He
carried a worn copy with him at all times, and though he was barely literate,
he seemed to grasp the nuances of its dense narrative and its invented
language.
There’s no saying who might have read the book to him or told him about
it, but in its hero, Valentine Michael, Manson recognized himself, so much so
that he named his first child after him. Roger Smith got a nickname from
Manson, too: “Jubal Harshaw,” the most important character in the hero’s
life, his lawyer, teacher, protector, and spiritual guide on Earth.
The plot of Stranger in a Strange Land has eerie parallels to Manson’s
rise, so much so that, after the murders, fans of the novel went out of their
way to disavow Manson’s connection to it. Valentine Michael, a human
raised on Mars, is endowed with hypnotic powers. He descends to Earth to
foster a new and perfect race. Guarded by Jubal, he assembles a “nest” with
about twenty others, almost all women, whom he initiates through sex. He
demands that his followers surrender their egos to him in a spirit of total
submission. They worship the innocence of children and yearn to exist in a
state of such pure consciousness that they can communicate telepathically.
The group sleeps and eats together; one of their most sacred rituals is the act
of “sharing water,” which takes on vaguely druggy undertones. In Valentine
Michael’s philosophy, there is no death, only “discorporation”; killing people
saves their souls, giving them a second chance through reincarnation. The
group begins to discorporate their enemies with impunity. In time, Valentine
Michael draws strength from the “nest” and, like Christ, saves the world.
After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre
parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In
January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson
had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.”
But Roger Smith approved of Manson’s fascination with the novel. He
thought it was good that Manson saw his own fantasies in it; there was no
harm in his desire to become a savior. If that meant that Smith himself took
on the role of Jubal, so be it.
When we spoke, Smith was hazy on the details of how he became
Manson’s parole officer. Manson had been assigned to him as a part of the
so-called San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by
the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative
progress of newly released felons. When Manson arrived in the Bay Area in
March 1967, he was attached to the program—and to Roger Smith.
Manson’s participation in the San Francisco Project has never been
reported. In part, it explains why the two men had developed such a powerful
bond—because Smith spent much more time with Manson than the average
parole officer would. The project studied the relationship between federal
parolees and their supervisors; researchers wanted to know how varying
degrees of oversight affected recidivism rates. The six participating parole
officers, all of whom had advanced degrees in criminology, were assigned
one of three caseloads: “normal,” averaging about one hundred clients;
“ideal,” numbering forty clients; or “intensive,” twenty clients.
Roger Smith fell into the middle group. He met with his clients once a
week, per project guidelines. But at some point, his “ideal” caseload became
even more intense than his colleagues’ “intensives.” By the end of ’67, he’d
winnowed his set of parolees from forty down to just one: Manson.
I was shocked that Manson had become Smith’s one and only client, but I
could never figure out why. Hoping to learn more, I interviewed Smith’s
research assistant from that time, Gail Sadalla. Although Smith had assured
me that he’d never met Manson before becoming his parole officer, Sadalla
had a different recollection. Smith told her in 1968 that Manson became his
charge because he’d already been his probation officer years earlier—in the
early sixties, at the Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois. Admittedly, this seemed
all but impossible. Manson had never been in the Illinois parole system, and
he’d only been incarcerated in the state for a few days in 1956. But Sadalla
was convinced that the two had met previously. When I told her that her
former boss had no memory of meeting Manson before March 1967, she was
stunned.
“He didn’t remember that?” she asked. “I’m surprised… It was always my
understanding. That’s why there was this connection.”
I didn’t know what to believe, but if Sadalla was correct, it might explain
how Manson was able to move to San Francisco without being sent back to
prison for violating the terms of his parole: he may have been sent there.

“Wipe Your Eyes and See”

As a doctoral student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, Roger Smith
studied the link between drug use and violent behavior in Oakland gang
members. In April 1967, the study had seen enough success to merit a press
conference. As the New York Times reported, Smith and his colleagues had
found that a gang’s drug use, rather than “mellowing them out,” more often
triggered violent behavior. The students wanted to distinguish between gang
members who fell into violence because of inherent sociopathic tendencies
and those who became sociopathic because of drugs.
Smith conducted research through his own “immersion.” He and the other
researchers created “outposts” in the Oakland slums, hanging around at
community centers and churches, befriending gang members under less-than-
transparent circumstances. They embraced a “participant-observer” approach
to social research, which Smith would further incorporate into his methods in
the years to come.
By 1967, Smith was regarded as an expert on gangs, collective behavior,
violence, and drugs. Manson, his one and only parole supervisee, would go
on to control the collective behavior of a gang through violence and drugs.
Smith described himself to me as a “rock-ribbed Republican”—he never
struck me as someone with much tolerance for the counterculture. And yet it
was his idea, he admitted, to send Manson to live in the Haight. He hoped
that Manson could “soak up” some of the “vibes” of the peace and love
movement exploding in the district that summer. Maybe it would allay some
of Manson’s hostility.
 So Manson moved from Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury, crashing wherever
he could and never paying rent. The hippie movement was nearing its high
point. Bohemians were dispensing with boundaries, giving away clothes,
drugs, sex, music, and hours of talk about tolerance. Anarchists called for the
end of racism, capitalism, and imperialism; the mere act of picking up a
guitar had a new ideological voltage. The length of your hair said everything
about you. Drawn by the psychedelic aesthetic, teens flocked from around the
country to get laid, to try to bring enduring peace to the world, or to try pot
and LSD, the latter of which had only recently been made illegal in
California.
It was a concerted, grassroots effort to reject middle-class morality. But
where some saw earthshaking radicalism, others saw only Dionysian excess.
George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the
Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was
just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. A press release for the Human
Be-In, a sprawling gathering a few months before Manson came to town,
gives a sense of the era’s transformative rhetoric: “A new nation has grown
inside the robot flesh of the old… Hang your fear at the door and join the
future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”
When Manson went to wipe his eyes and see, he wasted no time adopting
the folkways and postures of the flower children. Once he landed in the
Haight, he dropped acid on a daily basis. It took just one trip to foment the
most abrupt change that Roger Smith had ever witnessed in one of his
charges. Manson “seemed to accept the world” after LSD, Smith wrote.
Seemingly overnight, he transformed himself into an archetypal hippie, his
worldview suddenly inflected with spiritualism. He grew out his hair and
played guitar in the street, panhandling and scrounging for food. Although
only in his early thirties, he presented himself as a father figure, attracting
young, down-and-out men and women as they embarked on the spiritual
quest that had led them to the Haight.
If Manson was eager to portray himself as Jesus, then Roger Smith
would’ve been John. According to one of my sources, no one knew Manson
better than his parole officer did. It would be surprising if Smith didn’t know
that his ward was breaking the law—a lot. But he had only praise for his sole
client. “Mr. Manson has made excellent progress,” he wrote in one of several
reports he made to the head parole office in Washington, D.C. “He appears to
be in better shape personally than he has been in a long time.”
Smith wrote those words on July 31, 1967. At the time, Manson was
sitting in a jail cell. A few days earlier, in Ukiah, he’d been convicted of
interfering with a police officer in the line of duty—a felony. He’d been
trying to prevent the arrest of Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch, one of his
newly recruited underage girls. Though the charge was reduced to a
misdemeanor, Manson was given a thirty-day suspended sentence and three
years’ probation. (The arrest merited only a footnote in Helter Skelter—and
Bugliosi didn’t say that it resulted in a conviction.) Instead of being sent back
to prison, Manson, who’d been out for only four months then, was back on
the streets again in a few days.

That incident continued the distressing pattern of amnesty that Roger Smith
could never explain. In part, Smith benefited, and continues to benefit, from a
veil of secrecy. Manson’s complete parole file has never been released. It
wasn’t even permitted into evidence during the trial. During the death-penalty
phase, the defense’s Irving Kanarek had subpoenaed the file, hoping he could
use some part of it to argue for his client’s life. Not only did the United States
Attorney General, John Mitchell, refuse to release it, he dispatched David
Anderson, an official from the Justice Department, to aid Bugliosi in his
effort to quash the subpoena. It was an almost unprecedented action. During
death-penalty arguments, when a defendant’s life hangs in the balance,
anything that could be introduced to save that life is routinely allowed into
evidence. In the courtroom, stunned that the government wouldn’t allow
Manson access to his own file, Kanarek asked Anderson if it contained
information that would “incriminate the Attorney General.” Bugliosi
objected; the judge sustained, and Anderson didn’t have to answer.
Ultimately, the judge upheld the prosecution’s motion to quash the subpoena.
The file was never allowed into evidence, and the whole episode was
excluded from Helter Skelter.
The fifty-five parole documents turned over to me (later sixty-nine, after
exhaustive FOIA appeals) by the federal Parole Commission represent only a
sliver of Manson’s total file, which was described as “four inches thick” at
his trial. Still, those pages have enough raw data to show that during
Manson’s first fourteen months of freedom in San Francisco—months during
which he attracted the followers that became the Family—he was given
virtual immunity from parole revocation by Roger Smith. Under Smith’s
supervision, Manson was repeatedly arrested and even convicted without
ever being sent back to prison. It was up to Smith to revoke Manson’s parole
—it was ultimately his decision. But he never even reported any of his
client’s violations to his supervisors.
In interviews with me, Smith claimed not to have known about Manson’s
conviction in Ukiah, even though it had occurred under his watch. In fact, in
the same July 1967 letter that should have mentioned Manson’s conviction—
the letter that lauded his “excellent progress”—Smith requested permission
for Manson to travel to Mexico, where he would’ve been totally
unsupervised, for a gig with a hotel band. (Smith failed to note the fact that
Manson had been arrested in Mexico in 1959, resulting in his deportation to
the United States and the revocation of his federal probation.)
“Manson is not to leave the Northern District of California,” the parole
board responded, noting that Manson’s “history does not mention any
employment as musician,” and that his record was “lengthy and serious.”
And yet, two weeks later, Smith tried again—he really wanted to send
Manson to Mexico. He told the parole board that Manson had been offered a
second job there by “a general distributor for the Perma-Guard Corporation
of Phoenix Arizona named Mr. Dean Moorehouse,” who wanted Manson to
survey “the market for insecticides, soil additives and mineral food
supplements.” Smith neglected to mention that Moorehouse was on probation
—regulations barred associations between parolees and probationers—and
one of Manson’s newest recruits, the father of the fifteen-year-old whose
arrest Manson had tried to prevent three weeks earlier.
The parole board rejected this second request, too. Interestingly, at the
same time Smith made these requests, he’d launched a criminological study
of Mexican drug trafficking for the federal government. He’d attempted to
send Manson to Mazatlán, which was the main port city of Sinaloa, the drug
trafficking capital of Central America in the 1960s.
“In hindsight,” Smith told me when I presented him with the documents,
“it was not a good decision.” Then he reversed course a bit, saying that he
probably made the requests “just to show Manson they wouldn’t let him go.”
“But, twice?” I asked. “And at the expense of your own credibility?”
He erupted. “If you want to be conspiratorial,” he said, “yes, I was doing
research on Mexican drug trafficking at the same time I was trying to send
him there. So, yes, you could make it look like that, but that wasn’t what it
was. I wasn’t a career PO. I only did it for a couple of years because I needed
the money while I did my dissertation. My wife was a teacher, but we had no
money. Was I a career, committed parole officer? No!”

Committed or not, Smith had official responsibilities—and the paper trail, in

its sparseness, suggests that these didn’t much weigh on him. After those two
Mexico requests, Smith generated only two more documents regarding
Manson for another five months. Both were simple form letters authorizing
Manson to travel to Florida to meet with “recording agents.”
Those interested me for several reasons. First, they violated Smith’s
orders from Washington—he was to forbid Manson from leaving the
Northern District of California under any circumstances. Second, Smith had
postdated them, suggesting that he wrote them after Manson had already left
town, safeguarding him from another potential violation. And third, there’s
no sign that Manson and the Family ever actually went to Florida. If they
went anywhere, the only available evidence suggests, it was to Mexico.
Smith’s letters are from November 1967. On the very day that Susan
Atkins’s probation officers were frantically trying to prevent her from
traveling, she, Manson, and the others were pulling out of San Francisco in
their big yellow bus with permission from Roger Smith.
Manson was required to send postcards to Smith; there’s no record that he
did. Later, probation reports noted that Atkins and Mary Brunner had said
they spent quite a bit of time in Mexico with Manson that winter. Otherwise,
their whereabouts for November and December 1967 are entirely
unaccounted for.

Fourteen Naked Hippies in a Ditch

After the Florida letters, the record of Manson’s supervision stops for another
five months—a period during which Manson reported to Smith on a weekly
and sometimes daily basis, as he turned his soul-searching followers into
programmed killers and planned for a race war.
There should be an avalanche of paperwork on Manson from this time.
While certainly Smith wrote reports, the Parole Commission released only
twelve documents from his fourteen-month supervision. The Los Angeles
portion of Manson’s file—covering approximately May 1968 to October
1969—is nearly as incomplete, with sixteen letters from agency officials and
Samuel Barrett, who succeeded Smith as Manson’s parole officer.
As few as they are, those letters depict an unmanageable parolee at odds
with the “excellent progress” described by Smith a year earlier. Barrett once
wrote to Manson, “Considering the nature of your last two arrests, and the
suspicion you have aroused with law enforcement in this district, the
reflection of your status leaves much to be desired.”
Despite this admonishment, Barrett was the parole officer Bugliosi
singled out for blame at the trial and in Helter Skelter. Not Smith, the foster
parent to Manson’s baby; not Smith, the proud possessor of an affectionate
nickname from Manson; not Smith, the parole officer who praised Manson’s
“progress” three days after he was criminally convicted. By smearing Barrett,
Bugliosi diverted attention from Smith’s far graver sins. After all, where
Smith’s caseload had dwindled from forty to just one, Barrett had between
two hundred fifty and three hundred parole cases between 1967 and 1969.
But in Helter Skelter’s more than seven hundred pages, Bugliosi could spare
only twenty-one words for Roger Smith, whom he never called to testify at
trial. Smith told me that he was never questioned about Manson by Bugliosi,
the police, or any federal agency—ever.
I knew there had to be more papers from Smith’s time as Manson’s parole
officer. Remember, under oath at the trial, Barrett had described Manson’s
parole file as “about four inches thick.” I asked the Parole Commission
spokesperson, Pamela A. Posch, how it could have been reduced to what I’d
been told was only 138 pages, and why I could see only 69 of these,
extensively redacted. The Bureau of Prisons “apparently did not retain all of
the parole documents pertaining to Mr. Manson,” Posch wrote, conceding
that this was unusual. The bureau had a policy to preserve the files of
“notorious felons” for history’s sake. Manson was about as notorious as a
felon could be.
I thought I’d exhausted my options, but then I remembered that Smith and
Manson were part of the San Francisco Project. Since it was a federal study
funded by NIMH, it would have required even closer scrutiny of Manson’s
activities; according to Smith, its clients were to be tracked, analyzed, and
recorded in a separate file. But it practically goes without saying: that file was
missing, too.

If Smith maintained a close record of Manson, he kept a lot of people in the

dark, including his own colleagues. He provided so few details that the parole
offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco didn’t even know where Manson
was living.
In April 1968, Smith’s carelessness blew up in his face when, yet again,
Manson was arrested. And there was no covering it up this time—too many
papers had gotten the story. When Smith’s colleagues at the parole office
read about it, they flipped out and tried to do what Smith hadn’t: send
Manson back to prison.
The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Wayward Bus Stuck in
Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds.” Other papers picked
up the news, too. Their articles were the first to describe what the world
would soon know as the Manson Family.
The Times staff writer Charles Hillinger described an Oxnard deputy on a
late-night patrol who stumbled on a broken-down bus in a ditch by the Pacific
Coast Highway. When he saw the bodies scattered in the weeds—nine
women, five men—he thought they were dead. Then he realized they were
only sleeping. After running a check on the bus’s tags, he learned it had been
reported stolen from Haight-Ashbury. Waking the group, he told them to get
dressed and wait for the county bus he’d ordered, which would take them all
to jail. Before they left, one of the women (later identified as Mary Brunner)
said, “Wait, my baby’s on the bus.” She went back to pick up her child, then
only a week old. He was sick, with grime and open sores all over his body.
The article identified the “self-proclaimed leader of the band of
wanderers” as Charles Manson, adding that he was booked on suspicion of
grand theft. Brunner was charged with endangering the life of a child. She
was later convicted and received two years’ probation.
Within several days, the chief of the San Francisco probation office,
Albert Wahl, was alerted to an article about the arrest in the Oakland
Tribune: “14 Nude Hippies Found Beside Wayward Bus.” Of course, one of
those hippies was a parolee under his office’s supervision.
Wahl flew into a rage, writing to his counterpart in Los Angeles, Angus
McEachen, for assistance in finding Manson and sending him back to San
Francisco. Wahl had to admit, embarrassingly, that his office’s file on
Manson was “incomplete,” but “apparently” he had been traveling “freely
between San Francisco and Los Angeles” for months. Wahl didn’t know if
Manson had permission to travel, but one thing was clear, he added in a
moment of supreme understatement: “regulations weren’t followed.” Smith’s
name didn’t come up in the letter, but surely Wahl had him in mind when he
wrote, “The officer who was handling the case is no longer attached to this
office.”
Wahl also wrote of two more arrests in McEachen’s district, noting that
Manson had failed to report them, as required. For good measure, he sent a
copy of his letter to the head of the national office in Washington, adding a
copy of the Tribune story and a handwritten note: “Be sure to read the
clipping—there are people like this.”

“You Have Nothing More Important to Do”

So far, the “people like this” had yet to suffer any consequences for their
actions. Having been found the legal owner of the bus, Manson spent one day
in jail. Then he was released, along with the rest of the group.
McEachen, the chief of the Los Angeles probation office, was not happy
about this. He had something of a personal stake in Manson’s fate. All the
way back in May 1960, he’d been the one to violate Manson’s probation for
failing to report to his supervisor, sending Manson back to federal prison. He
had every intention of following a similar course this time—but he soon
learned that, while Manson’s probation had been easy to violate in 1960,
things were different now.
In a letter to Wahl, McEachen said that Manson had “personally appeared
in our office to bring us up-to-date on his adventuresome nature.” Claiming
to have no interest in money or work—“he has over 3,000 friends who are
willing to give him any needed assistance”—Manson said that he owned the
school bus and that he and his “girls” had been traveling between San
Francisco and Los Angeles in it for months. If anyone from the probation
office needed to contact him, he could be reached through a “friend named
Gary Hinman of Topanga Canyon”—the same Hinman whom the Family
would murder about a year later.
Manson had gall, but McEachen thought he’d gained the upper hand—
because Manson had since been arrested again, this time on a drug charge.
Apparently he was at that moment sitting in the Los Angeles County jail
awaiting arraignment.
Sadly, McEachen was wrong: Manson had been released the previous
day. For unknown reasons, the DA had declined to file charges. Not to be
deterred, McEachen and Wahl tried to rein in their wandering, lawbreaking
parolee. As the highest-ranking figures in their offices, they had a lot of clout
—but not enough to catch Manson.
Wahl’s most vigorous attempt came on June 3, 1968, when he sent a stern
ultimatum to Manson’s last two known addresses in San Francisco and Los
Angeles. (The latter belonged to Dennis Wilson.) Because Wahl didn’t know
Manson’s exact whereabouts, he was forced to give him two options: report
to the U.S. probation office in either city immediately. “Failure to follow this
direction,” he wrote, “will result in my recommending that a warrant for
mandatory release violation be issued”:

From this point on, you are not to leave your current residence without
written permission from a U.S. Probation Officer. Any permission
given you by Mr. Smith, who is no longer connected with this Service,
is hereby canceled. Give this matter your immediate attention. You
have nothing more important to do.

Manson defied the orders. Rather than showing up in person, he made a

phone call to Wahl, who was out of the office—and furious to learn, in a
message taken by a subordinate, that Manson had said he was living at
Dennis Wilson’s place and had been offered a $20,000 annual recording
contract by the Beach Boys’ label. As Wahl later wrote to McEachen, “It
would appear that Mr. Manson is on another LSD trip.”
Still, at least they knew where Manson was living now. That was a step in
the right direction, wasn’t it? On June 6, they sent Samuel Barrett, his new
parole officer, to make an unannounced visit. As Barrett reported back,
“Manson and some of his hippie followers, mostly female,” had “found a
haven” at Wilson’s home; “apparently [Wilson] has succumbed to Manson’s
obsequious manner.”
Just how deeply had Wilson “succumbed,” though? Could it really be true
that their delinquent parolee had sweet-talked a Beach Boy into giving him a
record deal? McEachen must’ve been relieved to hear from Nick Grillo, the
Beach Boys’ manager. Requesting anonymity, Grillo complained that
“Manson and his followers are proving to be a threatening factor to the music
company.” The record label “would have to be idiotic” to have signed him.
The parole office decided they had to order Manson back to San
Francisco, making it clear that he’d return to prison if he failed to comply. On
June 12, Barrett sent a letter giving him twelve days to return.
Someone must have intervened. There’s no record of what happened
between June 12 and the June 24 deadline, but apparently that deadline
evaporated. The next letters came in late July and early August. Making no
mention of the skipped deadline, McEachen reported to Washington, D.C.,
that he’d received a phone call from Manson, who had moved on to the
Spahn Ranch, where he was “receiving free room and board in exchange for
his work as a ranch hand.” By then, someone above Wahl, McEachen, and
Barrett must’ve decided that it was best to just let Manson be.
Manson built the Family right under his federal supervisors’ noses. From
then on, the federal government, as well as local and state law enforcement,
only backed further away from the group as they more brazenly broke the
law.
The only one who didn’t was Roger Smith. Well after his supervision of
Manson ended, he was still writing letters to the Mendocino County court
about Atkins’s and Brunner’s sterling characters, and he was caring for
Manson’s son. Smith and his wife even hosted Manson at their home. With
all I’d learned, I still couldn’t grasp how a “rock-ribbed Republican” would
fall in with an aspirant hippie like Manson—and why their friendship
persisted beyond the dissolution of their official relationship.

Coda: The Speed Scene

Smith may have had ulterior motives when he told Manson to move to
Haight-Ashbury. As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to
lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of
Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this
study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced
NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a
funding front in the sixties.
Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became
psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be
controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he
dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the
Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and
the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.”
Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines,
and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when
he was appointed to lead the study, “[I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my
wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were
calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”
There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s
not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published
his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the
Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing
to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to
Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains
no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand
anecdotes and statistical analysis.
But the paper, “The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and Compulsive
Methamphetamine Abuse,” does describe the nature of participant-
observation, which, Smith wrote, forced a social scientist to break the law.
Hiding in a “deviant group,” he had to convince drug users

that they can trust him with information which, in other hands, would
place them in jeopardy, and perhaps most important, he must resolve
the moral dilemma of being part of something which he may find
morally objectionable (at best), probably by association he could
himself be arrested… in a very real sense, he becomes a co-
conspirator… with information and insight which under normal
conditions the average citizen would be obliged to share with law
 enforcement… he must try to understand what individuals within the
group feel, how they view the “straight” world, how they avoid arrest
or detection…

To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects

from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and
granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something
resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.
Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic
(HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was
spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole
client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where
Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient
for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had
started to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those
for free.
Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith
and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the
clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors
there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to
research drug use among hippies.
Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising
Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the
record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later
expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his
retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the
time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific
Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for
steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long
flowing dresses. I was convinced that Roger Smith had played some part in
this transformation; now I began to wonder whether the HAFMC, with its
emphasis on hippies, drugs, and research, had some role, too.
 10

The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical

Clinic

Too Many Smiths

To tell the story of Manson properly, as I’d argue Bugliosi never did, you’ve
got to familiarize yourself with a dauntingly large cast, as is clear by now.
When I was preparing to turn my aborted Premiere story into a book, I
realized just how frustrating it was to keep everyone straight, to tell the
narrative in a way that gave its major players their due without getting mired
in details. Because, in a sense, the details were everything. The lacunae and
silences and seemingly irrelevant detours in Manson’s life made it clear that
he was far more a product of his times, and his surroundings, than something
as outrageous as the Helter Skelter motive would have you believe. That
motive makes it seem like Manson and the Family lived in a vacuum. But
during their formative year in San Francisco, by most accounts, they were
part of the zeitgeist. To understand that zeitgeist, I had to deal with the sheer
proliferation of names: hundreds and hundreds of names.
It’s a confusing story to tell because it involves two Smiths, and they ran
in the same circles—both were drug researchers with a sociological interest
in the Haight-Ashbury youth scene. On top of Roger Smith, Manson’s parole
officer, there was David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the
Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.
You wouldn’t think that Manson, a chary ex-con who disdained
conventional power structures, would spend a lot of time at a government-
funded clinic, no matter how groovy its trappings. But Manson and the girls
were at the HAFMC a lot. When they moved from the disused school bus
into a proper apartment, he chose one right around the corner from the clinic.
His involvement with the place, and the extent to which it dovetails with both
of the Smiths, has been serially unexplored in popular writing on him.
Because Bugliosi seemed to have no use for the Smiths, no one else did,
either. But having seen how crucial Roger was to Manson’s development, I
knew I had to dive into David’s history, too.

Dr. Dave
David Elvin Smith grew up in the dusty farm community of Bakersfield,
California, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. When he moved to
the Bay Area in 1960 to study at UC Berkeley, Smith was, by his own
admission, a hick. He’d never traveled much beyond his backwoods town,
and he lacked the political and intellectual curiosity that animated Berkeley’s
sophisticated, international student body. Had it not been for his pushy peers,
always scolding him for missing their sit-ins and marches, Smith probably
wouldn’t have noticed the dawn of the Free Speech movement on his own
campus. Later, he liked to remember a teaching assistant who canceled class
so he and the other students could head to a protest downtown. Smith refused
to join. He wanted to study for an upcoming test. The TA told him he’d never
get an A if he didn’t go.
Smith has been open about his louche behavior in this period: an
inveterate womanizer and a binge drinker, he disappeared for days at a time
on benders, nevertheless graduating at the top of his class. At the end of
1965, a debilitating blackout and a messy breakup led him to give up alcohol.
By then, Smith, a raffish, good-looking man of twenty-six, was a postdoctoral
student at UC San Francisco and the chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Later he remembered his
curiosity flaring as his research collided with the city’s cultural upheaval. “I
was injecting white rats with LSD in the lab,” he said, “and then I’d walk
home past the Haight, where I’d see kids who were high on the same
substance.”
He began to experiment with psychedelics himself, and he liked them.
The lifestyle brought new friends and new politics. He and his friends tracked
the burgeoning counterculture in the Haight, where some were predicting an
influx of 100,000 young people in the coming year. Smith, who felt that
health care was a right, wondered where the newcomers would receive
medical attention, and how they would afford it. He moved to Haight-
Ashbury himself with plans to found a free clinic.
When it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Haight-Ashbury
Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was an immediate sensation. Staffed entirely
by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department, it treated
hundreds of patients a day, offering nonjudgmental care for those suffering
from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and
malnourishment, or for those who just needed a kind ear. Lines at the
HAFMC sometimes stretched around the block with hippies waiting to
ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering
was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could to advertise its
psychedelic affinities. Exam rooms were painted in aqua and Day-Glo
orange; one of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs,
naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent
and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly
encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love.
As faces filed in and out of the clinic that summer, Smith and his
colleagues befriended the repeat visitors, and the HAFMC became a scene
within a scene. It could be hard to tell the hippies apart, with their long,
beflowered hair, their upstart communes, their shifting legions of followers
and leaders. But decades later, no one at the clinic had any trouble
remembering Charlie Manson and his girls.

Negate Your Ego

In 1971, David Smith published Love Needs Care, a memoir of the
HAFMC’s germinal years. I found it rife with details about Manson and the
Family, and about the very period that Bugliosi had omitted from Helter
Skelter: the summer of love, when Manson, apparently at his most
charismatic, began to attract followers and ensure their unconditional
devotion. Better still, Love Needs Care had a few contributions from Roger
Smith, offering his own appraisal of Manson.
As invaluable as these portraits are, though, I called them into question
when my reporting led me to doubt both of the Smiths. The more I reread
certain passages, the more they seemed like gingerly public-relations efforts.
The Smiths had to make it clear that they knew Manson well, and that they’d
felt some sympathy toward him—there could be no denying that, given how
often they’d been seen together. But the book came two years after the
murders, when both men had an interest in distancing themselves from that
Manson, the murderous one, the metaphor for evil. Love Needs Care attempts
the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while
making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would
someday erupt into unconscionable violence.
David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where
“Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for
sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to
Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him
as Christ, or “J.C.”
When the Family moved to an apartment on Cole Street, Manson began in
earnest to “reprogram” his followers. David had an elaborate sense of
Manson’s tactics, although he never explained where he got it. Using a
combination of LSD and mind games, Manson forced his followers to submit
to “unconventional sexual practices,” Smith wrote; he would invoke
mysticism and pop psychology as the acid took hold, saying, “You have to
negate your ego.” Treating the girls “like objects,” he eroded their
independence, turning them “into self-acknowledged ‘computers,’ empty
vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in.” Before long, they
obeyed him unquestioningly.
Acid was unmistakably essential to the process. Manson’s insistence on it
sometimes put him at odds with trends in the Haight, David thought.
Typically, hippies who dropped a lot of acid eventually moved on to speed. A
schism grew in the scene. The “acid heads” (a phrase David claims to have
coined) favored nonviolence, whereas the “speed freaks” (ditto) caused the
rash of violence that destroyed the Haight’s live-and-let-live ethos. But
Manson had an aversion to needles; he wouldn’t use amphetamines. The
Family’s drug pattern was effectively reversed, with Manson urging his
disciples to relinquish speed and embrace acid. Weaning his recruits from
amphetamines reduced the chance of interference with his induction process.
Speed became a part of the Family’s lifestyle only later, David told me,
when it came time to kill in Los Angeles. He’d heard this from Susan Atkins
herself, when she asked him to assess her mental health for a parole hearing
in 1978. “When they went to the south, they got very deeply involved in
speed,” he said. They got it from the Hells Angels. “They were trading sex
for speed, and [Atkins] thinks that Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a
paranoid speed delusion.”
Bugliosi kept any mention of the Family’s speed use out of the trial.
David thought he understood why—it risked presenting “mitigating
circumstances” for the prosecution. And the defense wouldn’t want it coming
up, either; no one wants his or her clients to look like addicts.
Both the Smiths have said that Manson’s fear of needles made speed a
nonissue, but obviously speed can be taken orally or snorted. Over the years,
a smattering of evidence and firsthand recollections has suggested that the
Family used amphetamines more often than was suggested at the time. In a
2009 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions
each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the
night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken
any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings,
Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex
Watson wrote that he frequently snorted it with the group, and that he, too,
took it on both nights of the murders. Others added that the Family kept an
abundance of speed at the Spahn Ranch toward the end of their time there,
and that Manson himself wasn’t above taking it, especially as he grew more
paranoid. He would use it to stay up for days at a time, brooding on his
delusions.

Remember, Manson lived in the Haight because Roger Smith sent him there,
thinking its “vibes” would assuage the ex-con’s hostility. And make no
mistake: Roger did believe that Manson was hostile. In a short essay for Life
magazine published months after the murders, Roger offered his first-ever
insights about Manson. (“He speaks of Manson here out of his extensive
unofficial contact with him,” the magazine noted, without describing the
nature of that contact or any potential conflict with Smith’s parole duties.)
“Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across,” Roger wrote.
“He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole.
He was headed back to the joint and there was no way out of it.”
Roger would seldom write or speak about Manson again, wanting to
distance himself from his most infamous client; when I first spoke to him, in
2001, I was only the third reporter to do so. But his remark about Manson’s
hostility always stayed with me. I’d already seen, after all, how he’d
characterized Manson in official parole documents as a well-behaved guy
making “excellent progress.” The disparity suggested that Roger had been
willing to sweep Manson’s “hostility” under the rug.
In a passage he contributed to Love Needs Care, Roger did his best to
support the idea that the bizarreries of the Haight suited an ex-con like
Manson. Daily LSD trips made him mellower, more thoughtful. He still had
the slick duplicitousness of a con man, and he was still a master manipulator,
but he was suddenly fond of vacuous self-help bromides like “If you love
everything, you don’t need to think about what bothers you.”
Roger Smith couldn’t seem too credulous, so he made sure to note the
“messianic” tilt of Manson’s acid days—an oblique acknowledgment of
Charlie’s growing megalomania. David Smith mirrored the sentiment,
writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a
manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies. David admitted
that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions as his involvement
with LSD progressed.” He fantasized about the Beatles ordaining him their
musical equal; he imagined a Judgment Day when blacks would slaughter
whites.
Some of Roger’s familiars, including his wife, couldn’t understand his
affinity for Manson. Roger was “pretty much in awe of Charlie’s ability to
draw these women to him,” one said. Another thought that he “was always
kind of fascinated” with “the charming charismatic sociopath.”
After Manson’s role in the Tate–LaBianca murders came out, Roger
allowed that “he had made an error” in bringing him to the Haight. But at the
time, the Family enjoyed a remarkable kinship with Roger. They “swarmed
over [Roger] Smith and often filled the [clinic] reception room,” David Smith
wrote, “bringing operations to a standstill.” Roger didn’t mind the adulation,
in part, David claimed, because “Charlie frequently offered him the services
of his harem.” (Roger declined this offer.)
 Among the HAFMC alumni I spoke to, the understanding was Manson
had visited the clinic on many occasions to see Roger for their mandatory
parole meetings. Roger himself would later claim that the Family simply
came by out of the blue, for no particular reason, and that they didn’t begin
seeing him there until after his duties as Manson’s parole officer had ended.
In either case, something about the arrangement didn’t sit well with me. One
reason the HAFMC was free, after all, was that David, Roger, and their
colleagues had received private and federal grants to conduct drug research
there. The Smiths were both studying amphetamines and LSD, the latter
being the crucial component in Manson’s “reprogramming” process. How
had an uneducated ex-con—someone who, months ago, had never taken acid
and maybe never even heard of it—come to use the drug to such
sophisticated ends? And wasn’t it suspicious, at least, that he was coming to
the HAFMC to see two people who were studying that very phenomenon, the
use of drugs to control and change behavior?
At least one friend of Roger’s had foreseen that it would be “a conflict of
interest”: “I always thought there would be problems.” Another noted,
“Roger had really made a career at that point in trying to help Manson… He
was going to soothe the savage beast.” Instead, the beast grew more savage
than ever.

“Frenzied Attacks of Unrelenting Rage”

When he launched the HAFMC, David Smith left a loose end dangling in his
past: he’d never actually received his PhD in pharmacology. He’d completed
a two-year research project on amphetamines and their effects on groups of
confined mice, but he never finished his dissertation. Although he shrugged
off the lapse—he’d already completed medical school, after all, and he’d
taken quickly to his new life in the Haight—it surprised many of his closest
friends, and in our interviews, he was reluctant to admit it. It wasn’t like him
to leave something undone.
Even in its unpublished form, Smith’s research on mice defined him,
creating the larger-than-life personality who would eventually be known as
“Dr. Dave.” In my obsessive way, I found as much of this research as I could.
I saw that Smith had published a brief article based on his study in the
HAFMC’s own house organ, the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, in 1969. It
wasn’t nearly as robust as his full thesis would’ve been, but it gave me
something to go on.
Before long, I was noticing parallels between Smith’s mice and the
Family. At first I was inclined to disregard these as the product of my more
speculative side—I saw no purpose in linking the behavior of mice in a
controlled experiment to the behavior of people in the world at large. But I
took another look when I saw that Smith himself had made such a
connection. He spoke of his mice as proxies for human beings.
His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other
researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate”
settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate
crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next
twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic
combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-
inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was
unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.”
Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered,
dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters,
he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times.
In another attempt, some of the mice were dosed with other chemicals—
mescaline, chlorpromazine, or reserpine—before they received amphetamine
injections. The extra drugs sometimes had a sorting effect, segregating the
mice that would kill from the mice that wouldn’t. Or they had a soothing
effect, all but eliminating the violent tendencies.
Smith told me he’d started his research having foreseen an influx of
amphetamine abusers in San Francisco. He didn’t say how he’d predicted that
influx, but he was right. In the summer of ’67, as he opened his clinic,
amphetamines exploded in popularity in the Haight.
“When the speed scene hit, it was a total shock to everybody,” he told me.
“Suddenly, what I’d learned in pharmacology relative to amphetamines was
applicable [to people].”
Throughout Love Needs Care, Smith draws parallels between the rodents
he’d studied and the speed-addled hippies in the Haight. The mice on speed,
he wrote, “become inordinately aggressive and assaultive… [turning] upon
one another with unexpected savagery. Their violent behavior is probably
intensified by confinement for it is strikingly similar to that observed in
amphetamine abusers who consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres.”
In the Haight, Smith watched as people living cheek by jowl took huge
doses of speed, inspiring paranoia and hallucinations. Once peaceful and
well-adjusted, the “speed freaks” of San Francisco now “lashed out with
murderous rage at any real or imagined intrusion,” assaulting, raping, or
torturing to relieve the paranoid tension. “Cut off from the straight world,
crammed together in inhuman conditions, and controlled by chemicals,”
Smith concluded, “they behaved, quite naturally, like rats in a cage.”
But when I spoke to Smith, he was quick to discount these parallels. “I
happened to study amphetamines before they hit the Haight,” he said. “The
Haight didn’t give me the idea. It’s kind of like a historical accident… I was
studying LSD before LSD hit the Haight [too].”
In fact, according to Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who participated in a portion
of Smith’s rat research in 1965, LSD was an integral component of the
project. Smith and his colleagues would inject the rats with acid in hopes of
making them more suggestible before he gave them amphetamines.
Suggestibility was among the most prized effects of LSD from a clinical
perspective. And yet Smith kept LSD out of the official documentation of his
research. The article he published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs never
mentioned acid.
I asked Smith if LSD was part of his protocol. He denied it—then, a
moment later, without provocation, he reversed himself.
“Yeah, I stuck LSD in them,” he said.
But he couldn’t explain why. “I was sticking all different kinds of drugs in
them,” he added. In his recollection, LSD “produced disorganized behavior,
but not violent behavior.” The rats would just wander around in a daze.
If you’ve noticed that I’ve used “rats” and “mice” interchangeably, there’s
a reason for that—Smith used them interchangeably, too, even though the
two species have vastly different behavioral patterns, especially in groups. In
his Journal of Psychedelic Drugs article, he calls them mice; in Love Needs
Care and another book he published, they’re rats. Schoenfeld insisted that
he’d worked with rats during his part of the research. But Smith was adamant
that they were mice, and he couldn’t explain his confusion on the subject.
Like the San Francisco Project and Roger Smith’s Amphetamine Research
Project (ARP), some of David Smith’s research, according to his academic
papers, was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),
which, as mentioned earlier, later acknowledged that the CIA used it as a
front for LSD research. And though David never mentioned it in his writing,
his work owed a clear debt to the landmark research of another NIMH
psychologist, John B. Calhoun, who’d studied rat populations since 1946.
Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—
became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder,
cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral
sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other
males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female
rats into a “harem” of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was “the
probers”: “hypersexualized” male rats that stalked and raped both males and
females, and often cannibalized their young. The probers would commit
“frenzied” and “berserk” attacks against rat families sleeping in their
burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were
involved here; the probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement.
They deferred only to the dominant male rat, fleeing if he caught sight of
them.
Calhoun’s study was a watershed. In the midsixties, amid growing
concerns about population density, social scientists, politicians, and
journalists cited him to explain the riots in America’s overcrowded ghettos.
His term “behavioral sink”—defined as “the outcome of any behavioral
process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers…
aggravating all forms of pathology that can be found within [the] group”—
entered the scientific lexicon almost right away. David Smith used it
extensively in his writing and in interviews with me.
Though Smith never mentioned Calhoun by name, his research was
essentially a continuation. He sought to control the pathologies of rats (or was
it mice?) in crowded environments by aggravating them with amphetamines.
He concluded that amphetamines were more toxic to rats in groups than rats
alone. Their crowding essentially exacerbated the effects of the stimulant.
And this conclusion, like so much in Smith’s research, confused me. I
didn’t see how it could be objective and unbiased. According to Calhoun, the
rats’ violence wasn’t intensified by confinement, but created by it. So what
difference did it make if Smith shot them up with amphetamines? It seemed
like the equivalent of studying drunk, inexperienced ice skaters to learn about
alcohol intoxication. The novice skaters were going to fall down on the ice
anyway, regardless of whether they’d been drinking or not. Plus, the more
interesting subtleties of Calhoun’s research—the emergence of a dominant
male, a harem of subservient females, and an underclass of “probers,” all of
which, it had to be said, sounded a lot like the Family—had gone entirely
unnoted in Smith’s project. I wondered if amphetamines, with or without
LSD, had increased the dominant male’s grip on his followers.
Given how eerily Smith’s research prefigured the creation of the Family—
under David’s nose, in the Haight, during the summer of ’67—I wondered if
he had deliberately underreported it. I’ve never come close to proving that he
did, but I haven’t been able to explain the holes in it, either. Why would he
use LSD to induce suggestibility in rats before injecting them with
amphetamines and making them berserk?
Past a certain point, Smith had little interest in helping me sort it out.
“I was just talking about the parallels to what happened with the Manson
Family,” I said, “and when I try to describe your research, I just kept getting
hung up on—”
“Well, then why don’t you just forget about the research, then. Just delete
the whole thing from your book.”
“It was important,” I said.
“You’re spending way too much of your and my time on it. Take what
you want and reject the rest.”

The Psychedelic Syndrome

When Roger Smith joined forces with the HAFMC to begin the ARP, he was
picking up where David left off—but this time, the research involved people.
This meant that both Smiths, and Manson, were often in the same place, at
the same time, with both Smiths having received funding from a federal
institute later revealed to be a CIA front.
“It was in a certain sense coincidental,” David said of the arrangement.
“Roger was the head of the speed project and Charlie came to the Haight and
visited Roger. He didn’t come to be part of the speed research project. It was
just that Roger happened to be his [parole] officer.”
Details on the ARP, and on the pharmacological goings-on at the HAFMC
more generally, were hard to come by. The reams of record keeping you’d
expect from clinical experimentation simply weren’t there. Stephen Pittel, a
forensic psychologist who’d worked with both Smiths at the HAFMC,
volunteered a stunning bit of information that Roger and David had neglected
to share with me.
“The only thing I remember about ARP was that it got burglarized one
night and Roger lost all of his files,” Pittel told me. Their disappearance had
been jarring, in part because Roger was “an unusually paranoid guy to begin
with.” He was especially skittish about Manson. After the murders, Roger
refused to discuss him with anyone. Pittel assumed that Smith didn’t want to
be blamed for “directing” Manson to the Haight. “He felt people were saying
that he was the one who put the toxins into the environment.”
The HAFMC’s original chief psychiatrist, Dr. Ernest Dernburg,
remembered the theft of the ARP files, too. As he recalled, they’d gone
missing right after the announcement of Manson’s arrest for the Tate–
LaBianca murders and that “Roger, understandably, was pretty upset.”
Nothing else was taken from the HAFMC, which led the staff to believe that
the police or some federal agency might’ve removed the files. These were
research papers, he reminded me: “It didn’t make sense for someone to steal
these things when they didn’t inherently have any value to the average
individual. It seemed to have a more nefarious purpose.”
The Smiths both denied that the theft had ever happened. “You’re dealing
with aging memories,” David said. But Dernburg and Pittel—full-time
doctors, and credible sources, I thought—stood by their stories. “They were
absolutely stolen,” Pittel said. Dernburg, perturbed by David’s insinuation
about his faculties, told me more that he remembered. “It was a considerable
amount of research—the premier amphetamine research conducted at a street
level. It would have been very important to the clinic… and it disappeared.
Call David. Ask Roger if he has the files or knows where they are.”
Both men said they had no idea.

What have survived are the many issues of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs,
the HAFMC’s in-house research organ, still active to this day. David Smith
founded it in ’67, and at various points both he and Roger served on its
editorial board. In the late sixties and early seventies, the journal printed a
raft of articles by David and other clinicians about the long-term effects of
LSD and amphetamines.
One of these articles hoped to find out “whether a dramatic drug-induced
experience” would have “a lasting impact on the individual’s personality.”
Another observed that feelings of “frustrated anger” led people to want to try
LSD: “The soil from which the ‘flower children’ arise,” the author wrote, “is
filled more with anger and aggression, thorns and thistles, rather than passion
and petunias.” Under “emotional pressure,” acid could induce “images and
sensations of anger or hate magnified into nightmarish proportions.”
David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that
he called “the psychedelic syndrome,” first articulated in 1967 or early ’68.
The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a
“chronic LSD state” that reinforced “the interpretation of psychedelic
reality.” The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more
they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered
together on LSD, thus producing “dramatic psychological changes.”
Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use
could cause “the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.” And in
people with “prepsychotic personalities,” Smith wrote, LSD precipitated “a
long-term psychological disorder, usually a depressive reaction or a
schizophrenic process.”
Had Smith seen this “syndrome” in the Family? After Manson had been
arrested for the murders, David wrote, “Charlie could probably be diagnosed
as ambulatory schizophrenic.” He said the same thing when I asked about
Manson: “I felt that he was schizo.” It was Roger Smith who’d had the better
diagnosis, and the earlier one, David maintained: “Roger said that he knew
from day one that Charlie was a psychopath.”
But Roger apparently never thought it was necessary to intervene—to
send his parolee back to prison or to get him proper psychiatric care. Instead,
he sent him to the Haight and watched him drop acid every day, accruing
suggestible young followers as he went. Meanwhile, David was studying the
exact psychological conditions that gave rise to the Manson Family while he
treated them at his clinic. Bugliosi had erased all of these facts from his
history of the group.
Roger Smith knew that the stereotype of the addict had a lot of potency in the
popular imagination. Casual drug users were regarded as inherently criminal,
a tear in the fabric of society. The public’s fear of such people was easily
manipulated.
In 1966, the year before Manson was released from prison, Smith
published a criminology paper called “Status Politics and the Image of the
Addict,” examining the propaganda that had stigmatized Chinese (or
“Oriental,” as he put it) opium smokers in San Francisco in the early
twentieth century. Citing police files and strategy manuals, Smith described
an organized effort to cast opium addicts—who were by and large peaceful—
as “insidious” “deviants” who “posed a threat to society.”
To this end, some agents “were assigned to pose as drug addicts” and
infiltrate the opium scene. Their objective was to “characterize the addict as a
dangerous individual likely to rob, rape, or plunder in his crazed state.” And
it worked: the once invisible opium users of San Francisco’s Chinese ghettos
were, by 1925, depicted in the media as crazed “dope fiends.” The shift in
public perception allowed the police to crack down on the Chinese
population, deporting or institutionalizing the undesirables. Smith neither
valorized nor condemned these efforts, but he noted that they were effective.
“The Orientals,” he wrote, “were viewed as a threat to the existing structure
of life in this country.” Tainting their image meant that they could be
“differentiated and degraded to the satisfaction of society.”
It’s not hard to see how such research could be applied to Haight-Ashbury
hippies in the late sixties. Most Americans frowned on acid, as they frowned
on all drugs, but it took Charles Manson to give LSD new and fearsome
dimensions. Suddenly it caused violence, and the hippies who used it were
perceived as wild-eyed and dangerous where once they’d been harmless, if
vacuous, pleasure seekers.
The HAFMC’s goal—free health care for everyone—was an
unimpeachable part of the hippie ethic, and there could be no doubting that
David Smith and his volunteer doctors had improved the community. But just
because the clinic had “Free” in its name didn’t mean that it had no cost. The
place served as a gateway between the hippie world and the straight world,
affording doctors a closer look at the hierarchies and nuances of the
counterculture. In exchange for their “free” health care, patients were held up
to the light and scrutinized by eager researchers, David Smith chief among
them.
Emmett Grogan, the founder of the Diggers, was one of a few observers
who saw something amiss behind Smith’s idealism. The Diggers were an
anarchist group known for providing food, housing, and medical aid to
runaways in the Bay Area. Smith liked them, and he worked with them at a
free infirmary based out of their Happening House; it inspired his own clinic.
But as Grogan wrote in his 1972 memoir Ringolevio, the admiration
wasn’t mutual, at least not for long. Smith soon “began his own self-
aggrandizement.” He appeared “more concerned with the pharmacology of
the situation than with treating the ailing people who came to him for help.”
Grogan noticed that he kept detailed records “about drugs and their abuse.”
These he used to secure funding for the HAFMC, which he opened only six
weeks after he’d joined the Diggers’ operation. Grogan saw through the
HAFMC’s mission statement right away: “Just because no one was made to
pay a fee when they went there, didn’t make it a ‘free clinic,’” he wrote. “On
the contrary, the patients were treated as ‘research subjects’ and the facility
was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate
to the agency.”
Of course, one of these patients was Manson, who became one of David
Smith’s “research subjects” as well. He was such a special case that Smith
tracked him far beyond the walls of the HAFMC, sending his top researcher
all the way down to Los Angeles, where Manson and his ranks of followers
had set up shop on the timeworn Western sets of the Spahn Ranch.

The Group-Marriage Commune

You might remember the name Alan Rose. It was Rose who dropped
everything and went to Mendocino County in ’68 when several of Manson’s
followers wound up in jail there. That trip was only a prelude to his deeper
involvement with the Family, which saw him embed with the group to study
their sexual dynamics—or just to get laid, depending on whom you ask.
Rose was a friend of Roger Smith—he’d helped set up the ARP—but he
was even closer to David Smith, who told me, “Al was like my disciple and I
was like his father.” A former rabbinical student, Rose had dropped out of
college in Ohio to move to the Haight in ’66, when he was twenty-one. He
became the HAFMC’s head administrator and a research assistant, at various
times, to both Smiths. Rose and David went on to coauthor three studies of
the Haight’s drug culture in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. Like the
Smiths, Rose had an intuitive grasp of the population and a clinician’s
knowledge of the drugs they were taking, even though he had no formal
medical training.
While reserved and socially awkward by many accounts, Rose enjoyed
the Haight, especially its sexual openness. He felt inexperienced in that
regard, and he hoped he could change that when Roger introduced him to
Manson and the girls, who were coming by the clinic with increasing
frequency. Rose was enamored. He decided, along with David, that they’d
make for good research subjects. But already there was the question of his
impartiality. The legend around the HAFMC was that the girls had “seduced”
Rose, probably on Manson’s orders.
When, in June 1968, Manson hand-selected a number of his group to
accompany him to Los Angeles, Rose may have feared that the yearlong
party was drawing to a close. He invited the remaining women to move into
his Haight-Ashbury home, where he could tend to their needs until Manson
summoned them.
It was then that some of the girls headed to Ukiah for their ill-fated
recruitment effort. When they landed in jail, Rose jumped at the chance to
rescue them. As David Smith described the episode in Love Needs Care,
Rose outdid himself, visiting the girls daily and fetching candy and cigarettes
for them. Mary Brunner, the mother of Manson’s newborn son, was still
lactating. The other girls made a habit of going naked and sucking the milk
from her breasts. This rattled the jail staff, but Rose vouched for the girls.
Outside the jail, he kept busy by consulting with lawyers on courtroom
strategy and preparing his testimony as a character witness. All the while, he
was living on money funneled to him by David.
When the case was resolved, the girls made tracks for the Spahn Ranch,
not wanting to keep Manson waiting. By now, it seemed, Rose couldn’t bear
to part with them; he elected to go, too. And then he stayed with them. For
four months.
Was this a business trip or a vacation? It’s up for debate just how totally
Rose succumbed to the Family’s power. Judging from the published accounts
of his time with them, he was more an enabler than a blind devotee.
Somewhat opaquely, David wrote that Rose was “both a sympathetic cousin
and… a sociologically oriented participant-observer in the strange communal
phenomenon.” Roger Smith had used that term “participant-observer,” too,
for his ARP—he endorsed looking the other way when one’s subjects broke
the law. Did that same laxness apply to Rose at the Spahn Ranch?
David provided varying and sometimes contradictory accounts of Rose’s
role in the Family, and he lost his temper when I tried to set the record
straight. The first time we spoke, he admitted that “Al became enraptured
with their philosophy and he traveled with them.” Rose dropped acid with the
Family, Smith said, “and then six of the girls just fucked his brains out and he
saw God… He borrowed some money from me and he didn’t pay it back and
it turned out he gave it to Charlie… So it was, like, very weird.” Other
sources also remembered Rose having some kind of ecstatic sexual encounter
with the Family.
But at some point, the appeal of the group faded for him, and he left. “He
came back,” Smith said. “I can’t really say he got kicked out. He just said he
was no longer part of it.”
And yet, when I revisited the matter with Smith a few years later, he said,
“I don’t know if Al went to Spahn Ranch.” When I reminded him that he’d
said otherwise, he made a grudging concession: “He was with them four
weeks, max!”
So I tracked down Rose himself, who told me in a phone call that he was
at the ranch for “probably three or four months.” Rose was shocked that I
wanted to talk to him—only one other journalist had been in touch—and I
found him nonchalant about his time with the Family. More than either of the
Smiths, he came across as mild, somewhat naive, and unassuming. His
memories of the late sixties had their edges smoothed like stones in the sea.
Of course he remembered the girls: “They had a level of self-confidence and
dynamism that was pretty amazing,” he said. “They could walk into stores
and get checks cashed without ID, okay?” And he remembered the power that
Manson exuded, recalling a man whose raw charisma was by then tainted
with egotism and racism. Still, he obeyed Manson, sincerely feeling that his
“destiny was going with Charlie and the girls.” He added, “We were all pretty
impressionable, very idealistic… Charlie convinced me I didn’t need glasses.
I stopped wearing them. He’d have me drive the bus up and down the L.A.
freeway. I really had to strain.”
 What had finally made him leave the Spahn Ranch was an incident in
which Manson picked up a prostitute from the freeway and “paraded” her in
front of his followers, saying that he “wouldn’t have sex with her because she
wouldn’t give him head. And I just saw that as such an abuse of the power
that he had.”
It was late autumn 1968 when Rose returned to the Haight. He moved in
with Roger and his wife, Carol, in Tiburon, and assisted in writing up two
studies. The first was Roger’s ARP dissertation. The second was called “The
Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,” coauthored with David Smith:
the first-ever scholarly study of the Manson Family.

David and Rose believed they had a major research paper on their hands,
bolstered by Rose’s firsthand observations of the Family. The first published
remarks about their “study” appeared six weeks after the Family was charged
with the murders, in a January 1970 interview Smith gave to the Berkeley
Barb, an alt-weekly. The front-page story was headlined, “M.D. on Manson’s
Sex Life: Psychologist Who Lived with Manson Family Tells About
Commune.”
Smith discussed Rose’s “four months” on the ranch, but he never
indicated that his coresearcher had been a follower of Manson. Intentionally
or not, Smith gave the impression that Rose’s time with the Family was part
of a planned study; in fact, they’d decided to write about the Family only
after Rose left the commune, a point they’d finesse later. And even though
Rose was the “psychologist” referred to in the headline, he wasn’t, of course,
a real psychologist. Smith didn’t let him do any of the talking. Instead, the
reporter quoted portions of their “scholarly paper,” noting that Smith had
pulled that article from the presses as soon as he learned that its subjects had
been accused of mass murder.
Their paper was eventually published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs
in September 1970. It distanced the HAFMC from Rose’s involvement with
the Family, and it never identified Manson by his last name, leaving the
reader to make the connection. “Participation in the commune at the time of
[Rose’s] involvement,” read the introduction, “was not associated with
academic observation and only after leaving the communal setting was
thought given to description.” To exculpate the authors of any responsibility
for the murders, it fudged the facts about “Charlie,” claiming that during “our
observation” he “expressed a philosophy of nonviolence… LSD-induced
psychedelic philosophy was not a major motivational force.”
Smith further downplayed the Family’s connection to the HAFMC by
claiming that they only spent “three months” living in the Haight, during
which their “primary” residence was a bus. In fact, the Family lived in the
Haight for more than a year, two blocks from the HAFMC, and after Manson
took some followers to Los Angeles, the others moved into Rose’s home.
The paper asked why “these young girls” were “so attracted and
captivated by a disturbed mystic such as Charlie.” That was a great question.
Past a certain point, it seemed Rose and Smith had no intention of answering
it. Their paper detailed Manson’s abusive, controlling methods, especially his
sexual tactics, but it steered clear of their true area of expertise: LSD. Most
egregiously, the paper was never updated to mention the Tate–LaBianca
murders, even though it was published a full year later. The defining event of
the “commune” that Rose had infiltrated was nowhere to be found.

“Extricated”
Vincent Bugliosi didn’t have much use for David and Roger Smith, and he
had no use at all for Alan Rose. He didn’t interview any of them for Helter
Skelter. The book’s one quote from Roger—“There are a lot of Charlies
running around, believe me”—was lifted from his short piece in Life
magazine and framed to make it look as if Bugliosi had actually spoken to
him. The same was true of David. Bugliosi used him to shrug off the
implication that drugs enabled the Family, quoting his assertion that “sex, not
drugs, was the common denominator.” That quote is also pulled misleadingly
from Life—David had written about Manson in the same issue. (Given the
realm of David Smith’s research, I can’t see how he really believed it.) Other
than that, the Smiths are absent from a story that might never have unfolded
without them.
A book is one thing—Bugliosi had dramatic license. Maybe he just didn’t
think he could do justice to Manson’s messy year in Haight-Ashbury. The
trial was different. There, Bugliosi had to convince the jury beyond a
reasonable doubt that Manson had enough control over his followers to get
them to kill for him. He got former Family members to testify in exchange
for lighter sentences or dropped charges; they provided vivid illustrations of
Manson’s domination. But he never called Roger or David Smith, two
authorities who’d had almost daily exposure to Manson as he formed the
group.
Bugliosi’s obsession with convicting Manson of conspiracy is the drama
that drives Helter Skelter forward. To get Manson’s guilty verdict, he had to
demonstrate that Manson had ordered the murders and had enough control
over the killers that they would do his bidding without question. And he was
desperate to do this. He wanted witnesses who could say that “Manson
ordered or instructed anyone to do anything,” he told his subordinates. He
had to prove “domination.”
Roger Smith’s and David Smith’s Life essays, the same ones Bugliosi
quoted in Helter Skelter, came out a month before Bugliosi issued those
marching orders to LAPD detectives. Within weeks, the Berkeley Barb and
Los Angeles Free Press ran their front-page stories featuring David Smith’s
discussion of Manson’s “indoctrination” techniques, his “process of
reorienting” new recruits, and his “methods of disciplining family members.”
Bugliosi told the jury he’d prove that Manson was “the dictatorial leader
of the Family.” He was still calling witnesses to the stand when David Smith
and Alan Rose’s research paper came out, featuring such lines as “[Manson]
served as absolute ruler.”
Yet the Smiths and Alan Rose told me that Bugliosi never got in touch
with them. Nor did anyone else from the Los Angeles DA’s office or the
LAPD. Despite their extensive knowledge of the Family, the researchers
never felt it was their duty to tell the authorities what they knew. If anything,
David Smith feared testifying. “I remember not wanting to be involved in that
trial,” he said. “I felt that it would compromise our clinic.”
Dr. Dernburg, the psychiatric director of the HAFMC when the Family
went there, followed the trial with mounting gloom as he realized that the
whole San Francisco chapter of Manson’s life was never going to come out.
He told me it was “as if Manson’s stay up here had been extricated from the
whole mass of data.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around this. Why did Bugliosi ignore the most
powerful prosecution evidence available: eyewitness testimony of Manson’s
control from his parole officer, a laureled medical researcher, and his
assistant, who’d lived with the group? Each could’ve taken the witness stand
independently, untainted by the suggestion of a plea arrangement or some
type of deal.
I knew I’d have to ask Bugliosi about this eventually, but by that point I
didn’t trust him, and I wanted to box him in as much as I could. So I called
on Stephen Kay, his coprosecutor, to show him all the evidence of the
Smiths’ relationships with the Family. I was on good terms with Kay, and I
felt I could rely on him to be straight with me. At his office, I laid out the two
Life essays, which I knew Bugliosi had seen, plus press accounts of the
Smiths and the HAFMC research papers.
Kay read through them diligently. “I have never seen these before,” he
said, his mouth open. I asked him if there was any way that Bugliosi had
missed this stuff. Absolutely not, Kay said. “Vince read all the newspapers,
every paper that came out. He subscribed to every paper.
“I know everything we had in the files,” Kay went on, “because we had a
big file cabinet. I’d been through all that.” He was positive they didn’t have
the Smiths’ papers and articles there. If Bugliosi knew about them, “he
wasn’t keeping them in the regular file.”
As far as Kay could recall, Bugliosi had never discussed the Smiths and
Alan Rose, never entertained the idea of putting them on the stand. But Kay
couldn’t understand why. “If we had an independent person like that,” he told
me, “that’s much better than calling a member of the Manson Family… They
would have been dynamite witnesses for us.”
Although the Smiths never appeared in the courtroom, there’s a link
between their research and Bugliosi’s reasoning that continues to perplex me.
In the first phase of the trial, the prosecutor persuaded the jury that Manson
had controlled his followers’ every thought and action, full stop. In the trial’s
death-penalty phase, he had to refine that argument somewhat. Because the
defendants could be sentenced to death only if they were acting under their
own free will, Bugliosi claimed that, regardless of their brainwashing, each of
them had the independent capacity to murder. As Bugliosi explained it to me
in our first meeting in 1999, Manson had somehow learned that a select few
of his followers were willing and able to kill. “Something in the deepest
resources of their soul enabled them to do something that you and I cannot
do,” he said to me that day. “There was something independent of Charles
Manson that was coursing through them… These people not only killed for
him, but they did it with gusto, with relish. One hundred and sixty-nine stab
wounds! Some of them postmortem! What does that show? I think it’s
circumstantial evidence that some people have much more homicidal
tendencies than others.”
It’s those “tendencies” that recall David Smith’s research. In a 1969 issue
of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Smith wrote that the main purpose of
his experiments with mice was to “isolate” the “behavioral” traits of the
rodents that would kill after they’d been aggregated and injected with
amphetamines—and then to “modify” their behavior using other drugs. Two
years later, writing of the study and its parallels to hippies in the Haight in
Love Needs Care, Smith admitted that “it has yet to be determined whether
amphetamines modify the personality primarily by biochemically altering the
central nervous system or by reinforcing or precipitating long-term
psychological tendencies.” Strikingly, as Bugliosi had it, those
“psychological tendencies” were exactly what Manson had learned to exploit.
In the two years before the Manson murders, several papers in the Journal
of Psychedelic Drugs and other periodicals looked at the increase of
psychotic violence in the Haight and its link to amphetamines, LSD, and
population density. Some made reference to a forthcoming paper by David
Smith, Roger Smith, and Alan Rose on the role that personality factors
played in users’ reactions to drugs. Why was it that, after just one experience
with amphetamines or LSD, certain people experienced hallucinations that
lasted for days or even weeks? Were the drugs to blame, or some aspect of
the users’ psychology? Their paper promised to look into the phenomenon.
But when the article, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity,” finally appeared in
the spring 1969 Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, both Roger Smith and Alan
Rose had been removed as authors. Contradicting his later claim in Love
Needs Care, David Smith wrote that he “disagreed” with the consensus that
“personality was the prime factor in differentiating between psychotic and
nonpsychotic reactions,” arguing instead that “in the drug subculture of the
Haight-Ashbury, the prime determinates of psychotic vs. nonpsychotic
reactions were immediate drug environment and experience of the user.”
More significant than the contradiction, I felt, was the article’s obscurity:
when the HAFMC republished bound editions of all the Journals five years
later, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity” wasn’t included in the collection. All
the annotations referring to it in other Journal articles had been removed, too.
Just as Manson’s time in the Haight was “extricated” from the record at trial,
the study by the two Smiths and Alan Rose—a study into the origins of the
same psychological tendencies found in members of the Manson Family—
had disappeared.

Coda: Six Hours with Roger Smith

Even now, more than a decade later, I get excited when I look at the host of
documents I showed Kay that day. Flipping through them, I remember how I
felt when I was first reporting on Manson’s lost year in San Francisco. I
thought I’d found the angle that would set my story apart from the reams of
others—the beginnings of a working theory about what really motivated the
Tate–LaBianca murders. True, it had come too late to work for Premiere, but
it could be the linchpin for my book.
I pinned a lot of my hopes on one last interview: a sit-down with Roger
Smith. It was set for late December 2001. My deal with Premiere had been
off for a year and I was living off savings, but they were dwindling. If I
wanted to earn more money, I’d have to finish my book proposal and sell it to
a publisher.
When I spoke to Smith, I knew I had to come away with something so
solid that I could finish my reporting. And I sincerely believed that I could.
To me, it was obvious that Smith had covered something up, and the
evidence was so abundant on this point that I’d have no trouble confronting
him about it, even if our exchange got contentious. I would show him
documents he hadn’t seen in more than three decades. I would press him on
his connections to the HAFMC, to Manson, to David Smith, and more; I
would ask him why he’d never sent Manson back to prison and why he’d
gone along with the bizarre plot to send him to Mexico.
Needless to say, it didn’t work out like that.

After the Manson murders, Smith had spent his career behind the well-
fortified walls of numerous federal penitentiaries, where he ran specialized
units studying or treating sex offenders and drug addicts. It was a path that
afforded him plenty of privacy. Over the years, he’d lived on a yacht off the
coast of Hawaii; in rural Bend, Oregon; and in a farmhouse more than a
century old, surrounded by cornfields, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside Ann
Arbor.
Smith had agreed to the interview without a moment’s hesitation, though
I’d called him out of the blue. He was preparing to retire after a decade as
director of the Bureau of Mental Forensics for the Michigan State
Penitentiary System, and he claimed that none of the many people from his
circle I’d interviewed by then had said anything to him about me. On the
phone, he told me that he’d been reticent about Manson over the years for
fear that the affiliation would tarnish his career. “I’m close to retirement
now,” he said, “so maybe it’s okay to talk.”
Our interview began in his office at the prison. It ended at his beautifully
restored farmhouse, nearly six hours, a pizza, and several bottles of wine
later. It was late December, and snow was falling—outside, the fields were
blanketed in white and the houses, his included, twinkled with Christmas
lights. Smith lived with his second wife, Carmen, who sat with us in the
living room for almost the entirety of the interview. A fire roared in the
hearth. Soft rock emanated from a station he’d found on satellite TV. The
couple was unfailingly courteous, and I found Smith a patient listener; only a
few times did he betray any frustration with my lines of questioning, even as
I forced him to examine papers he hadn’t seen in thirty-five years.
But the fact was this: he gave me nothing. On the most important
questions about his relationship to Manson, he pleaded ignorance, or claimed
he had no memory at all.
“I’ve never been able to understand how he ended up under [your]
supervision in San Francisco if he was paroled in L.A.,” I said.
“I really don’t know, either,” Smith said. He posited that parole protocols
were more relaxed back in the sixties, and that officials just didn’t care if
Manson took himself to another city. “Different time, then, I think.”
Smith had a memory of interviewing Manson as part of his “prerelease”
from prison—a routine process that couldn’t have involved him, at least not
officially, if Manson was released in Los Angeles.
“Well, I guess I didn’t,” he replied when I told him that. “I don’t even
remember that he was released out of L.A.”
But I thought I’d have him dead to rights on the question of Manson’s
arrests during his parole supervision. I had him look over the letter he’d sent
to Washington, D.C., asking for permission for Manson to travel to Mexico.
 “He was actually in jail then, in Ukiah,” I told Smith.
“Really!… I was never notified. This is a mystery to me… I should’ve
been notified.”
“By Manson or by the people who arrested him?” I asked.
“By the people who arrested him,” Smith said. “There would be some
federal record of his arrests, convictions, incarcerations, his criminal justice
status.”
“Would his parole have been violated for that arrest?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but Smith was right, in a way. There were two
federal documents—Manson’s FBI rap sheet and his Bureau of Criminal
Identification and Investigation Record—listing his July 31, 1967,
conviction, proving that the government had been notified. The first of those
documents dated to the time of Smith’s supervision, so he would’ve been
notified, too—the probation office receives such papers as a matter of course
—but he was saying he wasn’t. For good measure, I checked with another
federal parole officer who’d worked in the Bay Area in that era. He
confirmed that the Justice Department would’ve automatically notified Smith
of Manson’s conviction. “Even back then,” he said, “the federal guys didn’t
mess up.”
Whenever I reread my interview transcripts, I wince at moments like this.
I prepared diligently for these conversations, especially in cases where I
thought the right questions could bring major new revelations. Reliving
marathon interviews like this, I sometimes kick myself even for having had to
stop the conversation to go to the bathroom—maybe if I hadn’t taken a break,
things would’ve gone differently.
Even now, I wonder what could’ve happened if I’d held off on
confronting Smith until I’d marshaled every possible resource. In 2001, for
example, I hadn’t yet found the glowing recommendation he’d provided for
Susan Atkins, effectively winning her probation a year before the murders. If
I’d had that, I could’ve challenged a bunch of the assertions he made about
Atkins that night—he called her a “hard, hard lady,” and he hoped that she
never got out of prison. “She was scary. She was aggressive. I thought she
was sort of Charlie’s operative.” Quite an about-face from the man who’d
claimed in 1968 that Atkins would “comply willingly with any probationary
conditions aimed at her rehabilitation.”
 I pointed out that Manson had apparently continued to invoke Smith’s
name after their parole relationship dissolved. Manson and the girls continued
visiting him at his office at the HAFMC, and even at his home. I told Smith,
“I think he was still trying to pass you off as his PO.”
But all he had to say on the subject was: “Oh, really!”
When Smith said he’d never been asked to testify at the trial, despite
having served as “an expert witness in lots and lots of trials,” I told him and
his wife how much that baffled me. They seemed perplexed, too. I asked,
“Was there something going on behind the scenes that your testifying would
have exposed, a Big Picture, that they didn’t want exposed? Maybe like in
L.A., where they kept releasing him for offenses without charging him when
they had evidence against him?”
For the first time, Smith lost his temper. “Okay, you’re operating from the
theory that he was tied in—something else was going on. Tom, I can’t help
you. I don’t know.” His face reddened, and he shouted, “I really don’t
know!”
“Because you were part of his gestating phase in San Francisco, I thought
maybe you might have an indication.”
“Yeah, I saw his talent. I saw his bullshit. He was very glib,” Smith said.
“I had known for a long time how powerful his effect was on people… his
particular brand of psychobabble was as persuasive as anybody on the street.”
He reminded me that San Francisco in the late sixties may as well have
been another country, so different were its customs and mores. I was
sympathetic, to a point. By then I’d spoken to so many people about this
period that it felt at once totally near and completely alien. So many of my
sources, even the most reliable, had trouble explaining their feelings and
motivations, not just because so much time had passed but because some
schism stood between them and the past. It was irreparable—wherever the
sixties had come from, they were gone, even in memory.
As we refilled our wineglasses, Smith conjured the scene: “It was a time
when birth control pills first became widely available… You will find this
absolutely stupid—women used to walk around and pull up their sweaters to
show that they didn’t have bras and they would actually seek you out to have
sex. Unheard-of.” He continued, “Then comes the whole drug thing. Then
comes the Haight-Ashbury. The whole Bay Area was one of the most electric
places you could possibly be… It was like a magnet.”
 Manson, he said, had arrived at the tail end of this innocence. When Smith
traded his parole job for the ARP, he remembered the Haight already yielding
to speed, “the beginning of one of the most incredibly destructive patterns of
drug use I’d ever seen… The first six months I was there, there were thirty
murders within, like, a six-block radius of the office we had. It was middle-
class, totally naive kids… it was the worst maudlin, stupid theater that you’ve
ever seen.”
In a scene like that, the Charlie Mansons of the world were a dime a
dozen. The Haight was so flooded with weirdos, seekers, addicts, and guru
figures that no one batted an eye at him. If anything, Smith said, Manson was
a little more respectable than many of them, insofar as he eschewed speed
and asked his followers to do the same.
“He was very odd. He was a hippie, it was clear. He was very
manipulative—but was he highly dangerous? Didn’t see it… I did let him
travel, and there were some checks and balances. Basically, when he was in
the Bay Area, he was in my office every week. I saw him a lot. Not only in
the office… he came in with his girls after a while and I think that became
kind of an annoyance to the office.”
I made a mental note of that comment. It seemed to confirm that Manson
was visiting Smith for official parole meetings at the HAFMC. Later, he
backed away from it.
“My association with the clinic really was pretty intermittent,” he said. “It
wasn’t until after I left federal probation that I came down there.”
“The chronology confuses me,” I said. “The people at the clinic all
thought he was coming in for probation.”
“No, no, no, I had left probation.”
“So he was just coming in to say hello?”
“First of all, he didn’t come in that often,” Smith said. “I never saw him in
any official way and I also never invited him.” There could be nothing
untoward about Manson’s appearances at the HAFMC, he implied, because a
conspiracy takes careful planning, and no one there had the capacity to plan
anything. “Nothing happened according to schedule in the Haight-Ashbury.
You had people walking around jacked up on two grams of speed tempered
out with heroin and people carrying guns and tweaking on acid and it was
absolutely crazy. Actually, Charlie and his girls were the sanest people
around in some ways.”
 That claim shouldn’t have surprised me. Manson had endeared himself to
Smith; they were close enough that Smith felt comfortable taking care of
Manson’s baby. He’d looked after the child for “a couple of months, I think. I
know it was long enough to have the baby circumcised, which I think really
pissed him off.”
When we’d finished our pizza and made our way through most of the final
bottle of wine, I steered Smith back toward the subject of Manson’s
psychology. I still felt that he was trying to have it both ways: to
acknowledge Manson’s anger and instability and, sometimes in the same
breath, to downplay the eccentricities of a man who’d started a cult as Smith
watched on.
“There was this unquestioned loyalty to Charlie while they were in San
Francisco, [but] there was almost a good-natured quality to it,” Smith told
me. “There was still the ability to joke with him, and push him.” In his mind,
the move to the Spahn Ranch was fatal, in that it took the Family out of
society. “They were isolated. They were doing acid every day and they were
essentially without any reality checks at all… There’s a time when everything
flips. And I don’t know when that was, but it sure as hell wasn’t when he was
in San Francisco.”
Explaining why he refused to talk about Manson for more than twenty-
five years, he said, “There were a lot of people who became overnight experts
on Manson… particularly back then. Even now. I’m prepared to tell you to
get the fuck out of here at some point. You understand what I’m doing here
and what’s important, which is me. The thing is, Tom, as I look back on that
time I don’t know what else I could have done… I felt real sadness about it—
I don’t feel any culpability.”
That about summed it up. Soon I thanked Smith and his wife for their
generosity and got to my feet. We’d all had some wine, and there was a
warmth, if not a trust, in their rustic old farmhouse. I remembered suddenly
that it was almost Christmas. They led me to the back door, both of them
waving as they saw me out, flakes of snow still falling from the night sky. In
my rental car, I took the old highway back past the prison that Smith worked
at; apparently he’d personally planned their new, ten-million-dollar mental
health care facility. The thought of it made me feel small.
He’d been more than accommodating, hadn’t he? And he’d taken a
serious look at the papers I’d found, had given serious consideration to my
questions… On the face of it, I had no reason to be dissatisfied, having just
gotten hours of tape from one of the most reclusive officials connected to
Charles Manson.
And yet, as I dwelled on it, the interview felt strange and inconclusive.
The closer I got to my motel, the sadder I got. I wasn’t finished with the
story, or even close to finished. I’d gone to Michigan expecting to shock
Roger Smith with incontrovertible evidence of everything he’d overlooked.
He had reacted, basically, with six hours of shrugging and some free wine
and pizza.
Soon enough, I’d transcribe the interview and start to work away at the
little inconsistencies and contradictions in Smith’s account, but at the
moment I was crestfallen. Even supposing I could find something to push
back on, was I right about any of it? Or had Smith entertained six hours of
questioning from someone peddling conspiracy theories? His denials felt
wrong to me, but I’d had hours to prove my case to him, to get him to break,
and I hadn’t.
I headed back home to Philadelphia for the holidays. No one knows me
better than my family, and over the Christmas break, they noticed right away
that something was off. I was aloof, skipping meals to work on the book
proposal and figure out my next moves. Stuck in my own head, going
through the paces of my story, I tried to construct a coherent narrative out of
interview transcripts and dozens of discarded drafts of my dead Premiere
piece. With no new revelations from Roger Smith, the ending was a big
blank.
I’d also told my father, sheepishly, that I was running out of money. He
generously offered me a loan, as much as I needed to keep me afloat—and I
accepted. I meant it when I promised I’d pay him back.
My father was a tax attorney and law professor, and I realized that I’d
never given him a full debriefing on my reporting, even as it became
increasingly legalistic. That Christmas I filled him in on everything I’d
learned, walking him through my collection of three-ring binders, their pages
now dog-eared and marked with a rainbow of neon highlights and plastic
reference tabs.
To my relief, I watched as my sober-minded father transitioned to my
thinking. He’d told me that he never trusted Bugliosi—too arrogant, too
flamboyant—and now he was ready to roll up his sleeves, take out his red
pen, and help me in the best way he knew how, by arguing with the U.S.
government for records. With his legal knowledge, he helped me fill out new
FOIA requests and file appeals to old ones. In the coming months, and for
several years, he accomplished what I’d been unable to, forcing unwilling
bureaucrats to fill in redacted documents and release information in dribs and
drabs. It wasn’t enough, of course, to fill in all the gaps, but it got me closer
to the truth—and it would never have been possible if I hadn’t won over my
old buttoned-up dad. He believed in what I’d found. He had the same
questions that I did, especially about the parole board’s reluctance to release
Manson’s file. Why were they hiding all this? Everything about the case
should be publicly available, he thought. His skepticism kept me going.
After the new year, he drove me to the airport so I could fly back to L.A.
I’ll never forget the father-son pep talk he gave me. It doesn’t matter to us, he
said, if you’re never able to prove all of this. The fact that you tried so hard is
all that matters to us. I headed back to the West Coast feeling reinvigorated,
aware of how lucky I was to have my family behind me. At least, I thought, I
could have my book out in time for the fortieth anniversary of the murders, in
2009.
 11

Mind Control

Off the Deep End

I can still remember the email I sent to my agent. I’d made peace with the
fact that I’d never reach a firm conclusion on Manson’s involvement with the
Smiths. I’d accepted that I had to break off my reporting and move ahead on
my book proposal. I’d even taken a full week off—for the first time since I’d
started in ’99—to clear my head. And then Jolly West happened.
“You’re not gonna like this,” I wrote to my agent, pausing before I typed
the next line: “but I think the JFK assassination is involved.” I paused again.
“And the CIA’s mind-control experiments.”
I rewrote it a bunch of different ways, trying to make myself sound less
insane, but when I hit send, I still wished right away that I hadn’t. I might
lose the one publishing professional I had in my corner. And at this point I’d
understand if he cut and ran. He always seemed to hold his breath when I
mentioned a new “finding,” but now I knew I was pressing my luck.
What I’d written was true, though, and I was confident he’d understand.
Through my research on the HAFMC, I’d learned that yet another shadowy
researcher kept an office there—and that his LSD research had clearer, more
nefarious ties to the CIA than any of the others. At least his name wasn’t
Smith this time: he was Dr. Louis Jolyon West. His friends called him
“Jolly,” for his middle name, his impressive girth, and his oversized
personality. Pursuing West felt like the logical thing to do, but it also meant
swimming deeper into the waters of conspiracy, where, as near as I could tell,
only the real nut jobs had wandered before me. I thought of Bill Nelson, the
creepy Manson memorabilia dealer I’d once met at a Denny’s. Was there
something about the isolation and intensity of this work that appealed to me
when it pushed most people away?
I’d dared to tell my agent about any of this only because I’d found firm
documentation for a long whispered rumor about West. He’d used drugs and
hypnosis to conduct behavior-control experiments on Americans without
their knowledge or consent. That allegation had landed on the front page of
the New York Times in 1977, but West had denied it until the day he died, and
no one had ever proven the charge. I could, and I thought it was my biggest
scoop yet. West’s résumé was so chockablock with intrigue and mad-scientist
larks that even someone like Reeve Whitson, who behaved like a spy out of a
GQ spread, paled in comparison.
Born in Brooklyn in 1924, West had enlisted in the army air force during
World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. He came to my interest
when I learned that he’d accepted an office at the Haight-Ashbury clinic from
David Smith himself to recruit subjects for LSD research.
Earlier in his career, West researched methods of controlling human
behavior at Cornell University. During the Korean War, he helped to
“deprogram” returning prisoners of war who’d allegedly been brainwashed.
His success earned him national attention. Around the same time, he achieved
still more fame when he joined civil rights activists like his friend the actor
Charlton Heston, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in marches
demanding equal rights for African Americans. Ironically, while he was
fighting for the rights of some, he was suspected of infringing on those of
others. His detractors alleged that through the fifties and early sixties, at air
force bases in Texas and Oklahoma, he performed experiments on unwitting
subjects using LSD and hypnosis.
After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, West
psychiatrically examined Jack Ruby, who’d murdered Kennedy’s assassin,
Lee Harvey Oswald. Not long before Ruby was due to testify for the Warren
Commission, West examined him alone in his jail cell. He emerged to report
that Ruby had suffered an “acute psychotic break.” Sure enough, Ruby’s
testimony before the commission succeeded only in making him sound
unhinged. He could never fully explain why he’d decided to kill Oswald.
Through the seventies, journalists linked West to the CIA’s mind-control
research program, MKULTRA. He denied all involvement, vigorously
attacking anyone who suggested otherwise. He kept up those attacks until his
death in 1999. Then seventy-four, he’d been diagnosed with metastatic
cancer, and he prevailed on his son to help him commit suicide with a
cocktail of pills.
I had only a fraction of that information at my disposal when I first heard
about West, but you can see why I felt I had to expand the frame of my
reporting—yet again—just when I’d promised myself to narrow it. Nearly
every psychiatrist and researcher I spoke to from Haight-Ashbury had
invoked his name, often unfavorably. When I saw that he’d been accused of
conducting mind-control experiments, I second-guessed myself; this was not
an excursion to be taken lightly.
West had spent the last decades of his career at UCLA, where he’d
become something of an institution, heading the psychiatry department’s
renowned neuroscience center; the university had named an auditorium in his
honor. When I called the school, I learned that he’d donated his papers to
them, but since no one had asked to see them, they’d never been processed.
No one had so much as opened the first box. I would be the first reporter to
look at them.
For weeks I convinced myself to leave well enough alone. There was
more than enough to fill out my book proposal. I didn’t need to involve
something as vast and intractable as secret government-sponsored mind-
control experiments. But I had a gut feeling that something important was in
those files. It gnawed at me.
One day I ran out of willpower. I hopped in my car and drove to the
library. Soon I was showing up every day when the building opened, staying
for hours to read in the basement, and leaving only when they kicked me out
at closing time.

Faking a “Hippie Crash Pad”

Late in the fall of 1966, Jolly West arrived in San Francisco to study hippies
and LSD. The Bay Area had seen an unprecedented migration of middle-
class youth and an explosion of recreational drug use. West felt he had to
witness it firsthand. He secured a government grant and took a yearlong
sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Oklahoma, nominally
to pursue a fellowship at Stanford, although that school had no record of his
participation in a program there.
West was a square—tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look
in keeping with his military past. If he wanted a good glimpse of the hippies,
he’d have to blend in. He started cobbling together a new wardrobe and
skipping haircuts.
At least he had a solid knowledge base. The summer of love had yet to
come, and the Tate–LaBianca murders were still years away, but West would
effectively predict them both. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, he’d contributed
a chapter called “Hallucinogens,” warning students of a “remarkable
substance” percolating through college campuses and into cities across the
United States. It was LSD, known to leave users “unusually susceptible and
emotionally labile” as it caused a “loosening of ego structure.” That language
was reminiscent of the “reprogramming” spiel that Charles Manson would
soon develop, urging his acid-tripping followers to “negate their egos.”
When West cautioned against the “LSD cults” springing up in America’s
“bohemian” quarters, he described exactly the kind of disenchanted
wanderers who’d flock to a personality like Manson’s in the years to come.
West had a hunch that alienated kids “with a pathological desire to withdraw
from reality” would crave “shared forbidden activity in a group setting to
provide a sense of belonging.”
Another paper by West, 1965’s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise
of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into
violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West
asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they’d violate their
moral codes. Scarier still, they’d have no memory of it afterward. Just
because such outcomes were rare, he argued, didn’t mean they were
impossible.
West cited two cases to back up his argument: a double murder in
Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a “military
offense” induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. He
“personally knew” of two other instances, and he’d “heard on excellent
authority” of three more, but he didn’t elaborate. Later, I’d get a sense of
what, or who, he might have had in mind.
When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, then, West was the only scientist in
the world who’d predicted the emergence of potentially violent “LSD cults.”
How had he learned so much about acid? You’d never know from his
published writing that he’d conducted innumerable experiments with it. In
San Francisco, he hoped to conduct more still.

In the Haight, West found a group of kindred spirits at David Smith’s new
clinic, where plenty of shrinks from the “straight world” were basking in
hippiedom. Getting his bearings at the HAFMC, he arranged for the use of a
crumbling Victorian house on nearby Frederick Street, where he opened what
he described as a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad.” This would
serve as a “semi-permanent observation post,” granting him an up-close-and-
personal look at the youth. He installed six graduate students in the “pad,”
telling them to “dress like hippies” and “lure” itinerant kids into the
apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as
they liked, as long as they didn’t mind grad students taking copious notes on
their behavior.
The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. West
took pains to ensure that it felt realistic, decorating it “with posters, flowers
and paint.” Thus was born the Haight-Ashbury Project, as he called it, or
“HAP,” for short. For the next six months, he undertook “an ongoing
program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of the
hippies.”
To drum up hippie business, West stopped by the HAFMC, where David
Smith could furnish willing subjects. Smith even gave him an office. Having
a nationally recognized researcher like West working out of the HAFMC
would attract sorely needed government funding.
“We helped him with research,” Smith told me. He was sympathetic to
West’s project, even though he admitted that he never bothered to find out
what it was, or what its objectives were. He assumed that West, like himself,
was diagnosing “psychedelic patterns in the counterculture,” trends that
others had dismissed as boorish fads.
“They came over and interviewed kids that came into our clinic,” Smith
said of West and his students. “He wanted to know, ‘What is a hippie?’”
Smith reminded me that “this was a very new population… the fact that large
numbers of white middle-class kids would use illicit drugs was a total
mindblower.”
 Who was paying for all this? According to records in West’s files, his
“crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry,
Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades
and institutions. For reasons soon to be clear, I concluded that the
Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.
This wouldn’t have been the agency’s first “disguised laboratory” in San
Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight
Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses
disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky
photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired
prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were
served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing
activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex,
could be used to coax sensitive information from the men—something of a
psychedelic honeypot experiment. White so enjoyed the proceedings that he
had a portable toilet and a mini-fridge installed on his side of the mirror, so
he could watch the action and swill martinis without taking a bathroom break.
He later wrote to his CIA handler, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a
heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun,
fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal,
deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?
Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!”
West knew better than to commit such sentiments to paper, but by 1967
he’d “toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards,” too. Before he moved to the
Haight, he’d supervised a similar study in Oklahoma City, hiring informants
to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender “a fundamental change” in “basic
moral, religious or political matters.” The title of the project was Mass
Conversion. As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the
head of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
In other words, as I said to David Smith, it was all but certain that Jolly
West came to the Haight to answer a more ignoble question than “What is a
hippie?”
“That would be a cover project,” I told Smith.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Is This an Asphalt Sherwood Forest?”
What was Jolly West really up to in San Francisco? Hanging out at his “crash
pad” and roaming the streets of the Haight, he tried to pass as an apostle of
free love, but few were fooled. Bob Conrich, a cofounder of the HAFMC,
saw through the ruse right away. West “walked into the clinic one day and
my first reaction was that he’d read too many Tim Leary interviews,”
Conrich wrote to me. West was a careerist in hippies’ clothing. “What I
remember is his enthusiasm for the whole ‘summer of love’ thing, which
seemed exaggerated and insincere.”
Conrich was right. West’s excitement was a sham, his feelings for hippies
dripping with condescension. He soon concluded that the constellation of sex,
drugs, and communalism shining over the Haight that summer was “doomed
to fail”: “The very chemicals they use will inevitably enervate them as
individuals and bleed the energies of the hippie movement to its death.” He
called this an “ineffable tragedy,” but it’s hard to imagine he saw it that way.
For West, the failure of sixties idealism was the most desirable outcome—
one that he was quite possibly working toward. A copy of his résumé from
this period hints at the thrust of his research. He was at work on a book called
Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. But he
never published it. Nor, on the surface, would “the induction of abnormal
states” dovetail with the stated goals of his HAP. By the early seventies he
removed the title from his résumé and never mentioned it again.
Stephen Pittel, the forensic psychologist, worked briefly with West in
1968 and referred to him as “the only benevolent psychopath I ever met.”
The man could “charm the pants off of anyone, and manipulate people into
doing all sorts of things they didn’t want to do.”
At the HAP, though, West’s motives were so vague that even his charm
didn’t suffice. No one had a firm grasp of the project’s purpose—even those
involved in it. The grad students hired to man West’s “crash pad” laboratory
were assigned to keep diaries of their work. In unguarded moments, nearly all
these students admitted that something didn’t add up. They weren’t sure what
they were supposed to be doing, or why West was there. And often he wasn’t
there. Unlike the grad students, he didn’t live at the pad. But he wasn’t
putting in long hours at the HAFMC, either. Those who knew him at both
places—and elsewhere in his long career—recalled his chronic absenteeism.
 One of the diaries in West’s files belonged to Kathy Collins, a Stanford
psychology grad student who lived at the HAP pad that summer. The
experience was a huge letdown for her, aimless to the point of worthlessness.
She was getting paid to do nothing. When “crashers” showed up, “no one
made much of a point of finding out about [them],” she put down in neat
handwriting. More often, hippies failed to show up at all, since many of them
apparently looked on the pad with suspicion. “What the hell have I gotten
myself into and what the hell is Jolly doing, it is like a zoo. Is he studying us
or them?”
When West made one of his rare appearances, he was “dressed funny,”
like a hippie; sometimes he would have friends in tow, costumed just as
poorly. Collins wrote, “The rest of us tended to look to them in trying to
understand what we were supposed to do or what Jolly wanted. Their general
reply was that this was a good opportunity to have fun. I gather that they did.
They spent a good deal of the time stoned.”
Ennui set in. Hoping to feel useful, Collins and the others made inquiries
about helping out at the HAFMC. They were swiftly rebuffed. Pressed for
specific guidelines, West exuded “phoniness and dishonesty,” suggesting that
the students answer sweeping, high-flown questions about the Haight, such as
“Is this an asphalt Sherwood Forest?” She “got the impression that this
question had already been answered.”
At the height of her frustration, Collins wrote like someone trapped in an
existentialist drama. “I really don’t know whether to laugh at Jolly or take
him seriously,” she fumed. “I feel like no one is being honest and straight and
the whole thing is a gigantic put on… What is he trying to prove? He is
interested in drugs, that is clear. What else?”

Brainwashing with the Love Drug

Collins was right. West was interested in drugs. His professional fascination
with LSD was practically as old as the substance itself, and he was one of an
elite cadre of scientists using it in top-secret research. Lysergic acid
diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerland’s Sandoz
Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the
fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a very
new substance. Be that as it may, the agency was not inclined to exercise
caution.
Almost right away, government scientists saw LSD as a potential Cold
War miracle drug, the key to eradicating communism and seeding global
democracy. Its effects on individual minds were extrapolated onto groups,
voting blocs, and entire populations. Among psychiatrists, artists, and curious
recreational users, LSD augured a different sort of liberty, but they, too,
regarded it with awe. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who’d discovered
its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a “sacred drug” that
gestured toward “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive
reality.” The actor Cary Grant, on the advice of his shrink, took some one
hundred LSD trips during their weekly meetings in the late fifties,
experiencing a “rebirth” and picturing himself “as a giant penis launching off
from Earth like a spaceship.”
Charles Fischer, a drug researcher who worked with David Smith,
described to me the early perceptions of acid, when “trips” were planned like
literal journeys. “Very few people took LSD without having somebody being
a ‘trip leader,’” Fischer said. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to
hypnosis—and Jolly West, of course, had known well enough to study the
two in tandem. “You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it
something else,” Fischer explained. “Hammer the nail into the wood, and the
wood, perhaps, is a human being… [It] could result in some violent activity,
even though LSD was considered a love drug.”
The global superpowers considered it anything but. Full-fledged U.S.
research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American
intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence
human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that
the Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge,
program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill
on command.
The CIA, then in its infancy, saw mind control as a natural extension of
communism, spreading like fire where the forces of unreason prevailed. In
1949 it launched Operation Bluebird, a mind-control program whose chipper
name belied its brutal ambitions and its propensity for trampling on human
rights. In its yen to best the Soviets, the CIA tested drugs on American
citizens—most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases—who didn’t
even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they
underwent.
Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured
American pilots admitted on national radio that they’d sprayed the Korean
countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond
the pale that the CIA blamed Communists: the POWs must have been
“brainwashed.” The word, a literal translation of the Chinese xi nao, didn’t
appear in English before 1950. It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced
in postwar America. Soviets were using guile to force an evil philosophy on
the world. Technology had destabilized every atom of human nature, and a
new class of chemicals with unpronounceable names could reduce people to
machines. The human mind, like any other appliance, could be rewired and
automated.
Once the Korean War was over and the American POWs returned, the
army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those
scientists was a young psychiatrist from Cornell, Dr. Louis J. West. He would
later claim to have studied eighty-three prisoners of war, fifty-six of whom
had been forced to make false confessions. West interviewed them at length,
undoing the treacheries of the “thought reform” they’d undergone in enemy
hands. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into
Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their
claims about having used biological weapons.
West’s success with the POWs gained him entrée to the upper echelons of
the intelligence community. As the Cold War bred paranoia, the CIA
accelerated its mind-control efforts, and West, I learned, carved out a niche
he’d occupy for decades to come. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent
further brainwashing by the Soviets. But the extraordinary power of
psychotropic drugs, particularly LSD, was hard to ignore. Thus a defensive
program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into
Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a poisons expert who headed the chemical division of
the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, had convinced the agency’s director,
Allen Dulles, that mind-control ops were the future. Gottlieb, whose aptitude
and amorality had earned him the nickname the “Black Sorcerer,” developed
gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle
sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste, poisoned
handkerchiefs, poisoned cigars, poisoned anything. Mind control became
Gottlieb’s pet project. Dulles, convinced that the American dream was at
stake, ensured that Gottlieb was well funded. In a speech at Princeton
University, Dulles warned that Communist spies could turn the American
mind into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside
genius over which it has no control.” Just days after those remarks, on April
13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion.
The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its
umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting
participants. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to
replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply
of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could
embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and
remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to
opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of
hypno-programmed assassins.
In their defense, CIA spooks weren’t above experimenting on themselves.
The same substance that held the promise of controlling minds and quashing
communism was used in churlish office pranks, with agents quietly slipping
LSD into their colleagues’ drinks to achieve much needed “firsthand
knowledge.” A plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA Christmas party was
quashed when higher-ups reminded the office that it could cause insanity.
The most sensitive work was conducted far from Langley—farmed out to
scientists at colleges, hospitals, prisons, and military bases all over the United
States and Canada. The CIA gave these scientists aliases, funneled money to
them, and instructed them on how to conceal their research from prying eyes,
including those of their unknowing subjects. Feeling that it was their patriotic
duty, the scientists accepted their secret missions in defiance of the
Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”
In 1949, at the Nuremberg trials that adjudicated the crimes of World War
II, the United States adopted the International Code for Human
Experimentation: “A person must give full and informed consent before
being used as a subject.” MKULTRA scientists flouted this code constantly,
remorselessly—and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work
encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory
deprivation to “induced pain” and “psychosis.” They sought ways to cause
heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t
do the trick, they’d try to master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation
poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields.
Operated on a strict need-to-know basis, MKULTRA was so highly
classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director late in
1961 he was not informed of its existence. Fewer than half a dozen agency
brass were aware of MKULTRA at any period during its twenty-year history.
When Gottlieb retired, in 1972 or ’73, the project retired with him. By then it
had been pared down to almost nothing, as the agency focused on other ways
to halt communism and sway policy making abroad and at home.
Still, when the Watergate scandal, and the CIA’s involvement in it,
consumed the nation in the early seventies, it occurred to agency leadership
that it would be prudent to cover their tracks. Director Richard Helms ordered
Gottlieb to destroy all MKULTRA files. In January 1973, the Technical
Services Staff shredded countless documents describing the use of
hallucinogens, including every known copy of a manual called “LSD: Some
Un-Psychedelic Implications.” MKULTRA evaporated.

Grandiose and Sinister

In their haste to purge their misdeeds, the agents forgot about a cache of some
sixteen thousand additional papers in an off-site warehouse. Even internally,
those files would remain undiscovered for several years, but it was only a
matter of time until the story broke; MKULTRA had become fodder for
rumors around Washington.
In December 1974, the project finally came to light in a terrific flash of
headlines and intrigue. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the
New York Times: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar
Forces.” Three government investigations followed, all hobbled by the CIA’s
destruction of its files. When records were available, they were redacted;
when witnesses were summoned, they were forgetful.
First came the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, each
mentioned earlier regarding CHAOS and COINTELPRO. The Church
Committee’s final report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKULTRA
by the CIA’s inspector general. “Precautions must be taken,” the document
warned, “to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The
knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would
have serious repercussions.” A 1963 review from the inspector general put it
even more gravely: “A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products
places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.”
In fact, as the Church Committee’s report went on, MKULTRA had
caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a doctor who’d
been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank
Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at
a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by
Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which
led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where
agents had brought him for “treatment.” (Continued investigation by Olson’s
son, Eric, strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his
suicide; they threw him out of the window themselves out of fear that he
would blow the whistle on MKULTRA and the military’s use of biological
weapons in the Korean War.)
The news of Olson’s death shocked a nation already reeling from
Watergate, and now less inclined than ever to trust its institutions. The
government tried to quell the controversy by passing new regulations on
human experimentation. But scrutiny and internal pressure on the CIA
continued to mount until the agency was forced to make an admission: It
hadn’t destroyed everything. It had come to their attention that thousands of
pages about MKULTRA were collecting dust in the off-site warehouse.
So came another congressional investigation, more robust than the last,
with sixteen thousand additional pages of documentation at its disposal.
Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye subpoenaed a number of CIA
spooks. Among them was Gottlieb, rousted from his retirement in California
and forced to defend his actions before the Senate. Or rather, before some of
the Senate. Gottlieb claimed that his heart condition precluded the possibility
of his addressing the whole chamber; instead, he was installed in an
anteroom, where he answered questions from a select group while the masses
listened over a public address system.
As the New York Times pointed out, Gottlieb “managed to elude the lights
and microphones and the crush of reporters waiting for him in the Senate
hearing room.” He was spared the sight of the incredulity that spread over
their faces as he admitted that he had destroyed MKULTRA’s files not to
cover up “illegal activity,” but “because this material was sensitive and
capable of being misunderstood.” He resented the harm done to his
reputation, and he was loath to provide specifics about MKULTRA
experiments, saying that he’d never witnessed any himself.
Gottlieb’s destruction of the MKULTRA files was a federal crime. It was
investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times,
“quietly dropped.” His brutal courses of experimentation broke any number
of laws, and his perjury that day did, too. But he was never prosecuted. He’d
testified before the Senate only under the condition that he receive total
criminal immunity.
As for those sixteen thousand new pages, they were mainly financial
records, but a few more tantalizing documents found the CIA explicating its
ambitions. “Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and
mental) of any individual, willing or unwilling… with a guarantee of
amnesia?” they asked. “Can we force an individual to act against his own
moral concepts?” And: “Can an individual… be made to perform an act of
attempted assassination?”
Senate investigators condemned MKULTRA unanimously. Kennedy
branded it “perverse” and “corrupt,” an erosion of the “freedom of
individuals and institutions in the name of national security.” Inouye called it
“grandiose and sinister.” The CIA’s new director, Stansfield Turner, swore
that he’d sent all existing MKULTRA files to the Justice Department, which
would mount a thorough investigation.
Still, between the destruction of records and the subpoenaed agents’
sudden memory lapses, everyone knew that “the full facts,” as the New York
Times editorialized, “may never come out.” The Senate demanded the
formation of a federal program to locate the victims of MKULTRA
experiments, and to pursue criminal charges against the perpetrators. That
program never coalesced. Surviving records named eighty institutions,
including forty-four universities and colleges, and 185 researchers, among
them Louis J. West. The New York Times identified him, in a front-page lead
story, no less, as one of seven suspected scientists who’d secretly participated
in MKULTRA under academic cover. And yet not one researcher was ever
federally investigated, and only two victims were ever notified. The Times
had called MKULTRA “a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar
effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.” It looked like no
one would suffer any consequences for it.
Griffin Bell, the Attorney General at the time of the revelations, told me
the files never arrived at the Justice Department, despite Stansfield Turner’s
sworn claim to the contrary. Bell said they must’ve just “fall[en] through the
cracks.” As for Turner himself, he told me he could no longer remember
having testified that the CIA sent the files. “I’m just drawing a total blank
here,” he said. I read his remarks back to him. “I guess I did testify about
this,” he said. “Somebody fed me the stuff and I played it back.”
The New York Times ran twenty-seven stories on MKULTRA, eight on
the front page. But no one in the press corps, and none of the senators
involved, followed up to see that the promised investigations took place.
Since then, the program’s bewildering significance has been engulfed many
times over by other controversies. Receding in the rearview mirror, it looks
like just another example of the CIA’s megalomania at the zenith of the Cold
War.

Jolly West, CIA Asset

When I started visiting the UCLA library, I had no idea that Jolly West had
created a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad” in the Haight. I’d found
early research papers of his, but not much else. And for a long while, my
days in the library were fruitless. West’s archive comprised two hundred
boxes, most of them full of ephemera. There were tons of press clippings.
West had tracked the media’s coverage of assassinations, the CIA, aggression
in cats, psychosurgery, capital punishment, alcoholism among Native
Americans, behavior modification, and the civil rights movement, among
other subjects. I was intrigued to see many clippings on the Manson murders,
and papers by Roger Smith, David Smith, and Alan Rose.
Part of the reason that West became my white whale was that, improbably
enough, I’d already interviewed him once in 1995, a few years before his
death, when I was still reporting celebrity features for Us and Premiere. I was
doing a piece on the uptick in celebrity stalkers, and West was one of the
scientific “experts” I consulted. When I’d spoken with psychiatrists before, I
was the one who did all the talking—this time it was all West, who droned on
for so long that I cut the interview short.
Now that felt like a lifetime ago. As I settled in for the long haul at the
library, my early certainty began to falter. My first visit had been on June 12,
2001. I’d leave the campus every evening wondering if I was wasting my
time, having found nothing and gotten no closer to wrapping up my
reporting. The basement of the library came to feel like my underground
bunker. More than two months went by. I kept sifting and taking notes. On
August 25, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis, I found them:
letters between West and his CIA handler, “Sherman Grifford.”
I didn’t recognize the name, so as soon as I got home, I began tearing
through every book I had that mentioned MKULTRA, hoping that it would
jump out at me. In the first and most definitive of the bunch, John Marks’s
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, there it was, buried in a footnote:
“CIA operators and agents all had cover names,” it said, “even in classified
documents. Gottlieb was ‘Sherman R. Grifford.’”
So West really had lied all those years. Not only was he a part of
MKULTRA, he’d corresponded with the “Black Sorcerer” of MKULTRA
himself. Preserved in his files, the letters picked up midstream, with no
prologue or preliminaries. The first one was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two
months after MKULTRA started. West was then chief of psychiatric service
at the airbase at Lackland, Texas.
Addressing Gottlieb as “S.G.,” he outlined the experiments he proposed to
perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis.
Enumerating short- and long-term goals, he offered a nine-point list,
beginning with a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be
extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in
combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the
interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information
he formerly knew.” Another item proposed honing “techniques for
implanting false information into particular subjects… or for inducing in
them specific mental disorders.” West wanted to reverse someone’s belief
system without his knowledge, and make it stick. He hoped to create
“couriers” who would carry “a long and complex message” embedded
secretly in their minds, and to study “the induction of trance-states by drugs.”
All of these were the goals of MKULTRA, and they bore a striking
resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a
decade later.
“Needless to say,” West added, the experiments “must eventually be put
to test in practical trials in the field.”
West’s colleagues wouldn’t approve of his activities. He yearned to “cut
down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to
account.” Because he’d be using drugs that were “not on the Air Force list of
standard preparations,” he wanted to secure “some sort of carte blanche.”
(He would go on to suggest a number of security measures in his letters,
including disguised funding, double envelopes, and false names.)
Next West addressed a sensitive matter: who would the guinea pigs be?
He listed four groups—basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and “others,
possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.” Only the volunteers
would be paid. The others could be unwilling, and, though it wasn’t spelled
out, unwitting. It’d be easier to preserve his secrecy if he was “inducing
specific mental disorders” in people who already exhibited them. “Certain
patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative
disorders (trances, fugues, amnesias, etc.) might lend themselves to our
experiments.”
As if to prove his thoroughness, he affixed two addenda to his four-page
letter, begging Gottlieb to get one of his superiors, a Major Robert Williams,
“transferred to another base.” Williams was “an uncomfortably close
scrutinizer of all my activities” who believed that hypnosis was “tampering
with the soul,” West complained.

Gottlieb’s reply came on letterhead from “Chemrophyl Associates,” a front

company he used to correspond with MKULTRA subcontractors. “My Good
Friend,” he wrote, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and
comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real… you have
indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after.
For this I am deeply grateful.” He would arrange top-secret clearances for
anyone who might become ensnared in their work, giving West “a separate
sum” for the purchase of materials.
Gottlieb saluted his new recruit: “We have developed quite an asset in the
relationship we are developing with you.”
West returned the camaraderie. “It makes me very happy to realize that
you consider me ‘an asset,’” he replied. “Surely there is no more vital
undertaking conceivable in these times.”
With that, the record of their correspondence ceased for nearly nine
months. When it resumed, in April 1954, West had begun arrangements to
relocate to the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, which wanted
him to head its psychiatry department. He would be a civilian again. Gottlieb
commended his “new look,” noting, “it appears at the moment to be a move
which would in the long run be beneficial for us.” He signed off intimately,
“Give my regards to your family.”
West had lied to his prospective employer, writing, “My present job is
purely clinical and I have been doing no research, classified or otherwise.”
The university took him at his word. Now performing his duties for Gottlieb
at both the university and the air force base, West asked the judge advocate at
Lackland for permission to accept money from the Geschickter Fund for
Medical Research, which he called “a non-profit private research
foundation.” In fact, as the CIA later acknowledged, Geschickter was another
of Gottlieb’s fictions, enabling him to keep West and other researchers
properly paid.
By April 1955, West had moved permanently to Oklahoma City. But the
air force insisted he return to Lackland weekly to serve out the remainder of
his contract. Gottlieb, who’d evidently attempted to pull some strings, wrote
in September 1954 to relay some frustrating news: “The Air Force will not
release you… Although this rather adequately stops our present effort, it does
not erase the need for research in the field. I’m suggesting therefore that you
give some thought to the period some 20 months hence and the plans which
might be made in the interim.”
Twenty months would’ve put them in April 1956. That year, West
reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last
come to fruition. He was ensconced in a civilian institution, and evidently he
found it a less oppressive setting than Lackland had been. In a paper titled
“The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he
claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true
memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. In
case the CIA didn’t grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman’s terms:
“It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the
life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the
subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took
place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”
The document, marked “classified,” was right there in West’s files; I had
to assume that the CIA had destroyed any copies. They’ve never publicly
acknowledged West’s groundbreaking deed. He’d done it, he claimed, by
administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the induction of the
hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given
subjects.”
As in his initial experiments, West performed most of these psychiatric
feats on mental health patients. “The necessity to obtain most of the subject
material from a population of psychiatry patients made standardized
observations very difficult,” he groused. In the report, which doubled as a
request for continued funding—a successful request; West received
government backing through 1965 at the least—he enthusiastically described
a high-tech laboratory he planned to construct at Oklahoma. It would include
“a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-
environmental variables will be manipulated.”
West had hypnotized mental patients and “normal subjects” and exposed
them to a host of drugs, including chlorpromazine, reserpine, amphetamines,
and LSD—the same ones that David Smith would inject in his confined
rodents about a decade later. Of course, at least two of these, LSD especially,
would prove instrumental in the Manson Family’s group psychology.
But when it came to elaborating on his findings about implanting
memories and controlling thoughts, West skimped on the details. He seemed
to have been in a rudimentary phase of his research. Acid, he wrote, made
people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long
bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation. Using hypnotic suggestion, he
claimed, “a person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course
of this year many changes have taken place… so that it is now acceptable for
him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discuss… An
individual who insists he desires to do one thing will reveal that secretly he
wishes just the opposite.”
Since West’s paper was light on specifics, it’s hard to know if it was only
a ploy for more funding. Whatever it was, the CIA felt it had to keep it under
wraps. When the agency was forced to disclose MKULTRA to the public,
they submitted an expurgated version of West’s paper to Congress, an act of
deception that’s never been exposed. At the National Security Archives in
D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis
and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name
and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the
Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an
unsigned summary. There was no mention of West’s triumphant
accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the
life of an individual” with a “fictional event.”
In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress
was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names.
Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely
misrepresented its contents. The one-page summary of West’s
accomplishments in the lab doesn’t exist in West’s original. The new page
was only a theoretical discussion of LSD—of its possible effects on
“dissociative states.” It concluded, “The effects of these agents [LSD and
other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of
disassociated states has never been studied.”
West, of course, had studied those effects for years and years. I could only
conclude that the CIA misrepresented the original document to mislead the
Senate committee, thus striking West’s research from the official record. As
was my habit whenever I found hard evidence of a cover-up, I started
dwelling on one question after another. Didn’t this counterfeit paper cast
doubt on the entire cache of documents released to the Senate in 1977? If
West’s authentic paper had been so fuzzy about the effects of drugs,
including LSD, on dissociative states, why had the CIA felt the need to
generate a fake version?
Maybe because West had achieved one of MKULTRA’s most coveted
goals. Despite testimony to the contrary, the CIA had, in fact, learned how to
manipulate people’s memories without their knowledge. Agency officials
claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading newspapers to run
mocking headlines like “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight.” It could’ve
been exactly what the agency wanted—for the world to assume MKULTRA
was a bust, and forget the whole thing. One thing was indisputable: The
CIA’s falsified documents invalidated the Senate investigation’s findings.
The agency lied, obstructed justice, and tampered with evidence, and the
West documents prove it.
Given the furtive nature of his research, West could be surprisingly garrulous.
Among the press clippings in his file were two items from Portland, Oregon,
newspapers, both dated October 1963—the murky period between his
Oklahoma hypnosis studies and the Haight-Ashbury Project. West had given
an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he
was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive
developments: they might someday cure mental illness.
“We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for
the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.”
The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD,
along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things
that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal
people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the
Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in
producing model mental illnesses.”
Almost fifteen years later, besieged by reporters after the New York Times
alleged that he’d taken part in MKULTRA’s secret LSD experimentation
program, West insisted that all of his LSD work “had been confined to
animals,” denying any CIA affiliation. When reporters pointed out that he’d
received an awful lot of money from the agency, he retorted that he’d had no
idea that the Geschickter Fund and other sources were CIA fronts. Legally,
the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its
faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily
redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed
through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative
phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical
disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic
obedience.”
None of the allegations harmed West’s reputation. By then he’d left
Oklahoma for UCLA, where he offered a steady stream of denials and
continued to thrive through his retirement in 1988. Irascible and arrogant, he
was quick to threaten lawsuits when anyone brought up the charges.
Sometimes he threw in diversionary tactics: in a 1991 rebuttal, he claimed,
“My secret connection to Washington, D.C. is not as a spook, but rather as a
confidential advisor to Presidents… From Eisenhower to Bush, Democrat
and Republican Presidents alike have freely sought and received my
counsel.” In a 1993 letter to the editor of the UCLA Bruin, he had the
temerity to compare his accusers to Nazi propagandists “in Goebbels’
tradition of the Big Lie.” West added, “I have never taken part in ‘mind-
control’ experiments funded by the CIA or anybody else”: a statement belied
by his own files.

The Misadventures of Jolly West

Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in
plenty of trouble. In 1972, he announced plans to build a lab in an abandoned
Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. He would call it “The
Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,” or the Violence Center, for
short. There, in perfect isolation, he could study the origins and control of
human violence by experimenting on prisoners. Governor Ronald Reagan
gave the Violence Center a full-throated endorsement.
But West’s proposal for grant money landed him in hot water. He planned
to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and
“remote monitoring devices” in prisoners’ brains. A federal investigation
concluded that the program involved “coercive methods” that threatened
“privacy and self-determination.”
The committee’s disclosures stymied the Violence Center before it got
past the planning stages. The California legislature vetoed the project;
UCLA’s student body rose up in protest of West. And this, to reiterate, was
before anyone had a clue about his CIA work.
Now I could tie West to the highest, most clandestine echelons of the
Central Intelligence Agency. I could tie him to both of the Smiths, the
authority figures from Manson’s lost year in San Francisco. And through his
efforts to open the Violence Center, I could tie him to bigwigs in the LAPD
and the DA’s office who’d helped to prosecute Manson. But I could never
prove that he’d examined Manson himself—or even that they’d ever met.
Nor had West taken part in Manson’s trial. His absence was conspicuous.
One of the world’s leading experts on brainwashing and cults, he was hardly
averse to publicity. He’d appeared as a witness many times before. Manson
was tried in his own backyard; the proceedings were international news. Yet
West went nowhere near them.
I told David Smith about the CIA’s research and its parallels with
Manson: the agency had wanted to accomplish exactly what Manson
succeeded in doing with the girls. I was wondering whether someone in the
CIA influenced Manson while he was in San Francisco.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but the military experiments are added proof
that my hypothesis is correct—that it can be done.”
“That you can brainwash with LSD?”
He nodded.
“The CIA maintained that they never were able to accomplish it,” I said.
“In part because they were basically taking normal subjects,” he said, “not
susceptible girls in a reinforcing environment.” When he’d evaluated Susan
Atkins for a parole hearing ten years after she’d separated from Manson, she
was still under his control. “I can’t get him out of my head!” she told him.
“He’s still in my brain!”
But was brainwashing really even possible? I’d always believed that Cold
War–era paranoia had overstated the potential for “Manchurian Candidates”
taught to kill by dastardly commies. On the other hand, I accepted that
Charles Manson had altered his followers’ minds, and that LSD did a lot of
the heavy lifting. He’d seemed to have an endless supply of the drug, though
no one said how he got it. Plus, he was so often described as “hypnotic.” Ed
Sanders had written in The Family of a hypnotist, William Deanyer, who
managed a Sunset Strip club and alleged that he’d taught Manson how to
hypnotize. It seemed dubious. But I confirmed that Deanyer had learned
hypnosis in the navy. And his daughter told me she’d seen her father teaching
Manson at the club.
With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d
written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking West
to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an
MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA
experiment gone right.”
In the back of my mind was the most confounding passage in Helter
Skelter—one that I’d underlined, highlighted, and finally torn out and taped
above my computer. “The most puzzling question of all,” Bugliosi wrote,
was how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseful killers.
Even with the LSD, the sex, the isolation, the sleep deprivation, the social
abandonment, there had to be “some intangible quality… It may be
something that he learned from others.” Something that he learned from
others. Those had become the six most pivotal words in the book for me.
I was more compelled than ever to peel back every layer of West’s past,
hoping that some tie to Manson would come out, or that I’d get the name of
someone who knew the name of someone who could confirm that the two
had met. On the way, I discovered some fearsome episodes from West’s past.
As a self-styled brainwashing expert, he’d been present whenever mind
control reared its ugly head in American culture. Murders, assassinations,
kidnappings, cults, prisoners of war—his fingerprints were on all of them.

The Curious Case of Jimmy Shaver

After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton
disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was
stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she
played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her
missing, they formed a search party.
Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with
her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two
construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a
Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in
blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party
walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed”
and “trance-like.”
“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t
say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him.
Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck
was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies
arrested the man.
His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried,
with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at
the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who
told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on
something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable
from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume
custody of him.
Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and
two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that
he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect
him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and
booked for rape and murder.
Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife
came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10:30
a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image
of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned
to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full
responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he
must have done it.
Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned.
The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was
he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks
under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They
returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West
hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth
serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.
While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to
“deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed
to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth
Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking
at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear
to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for
questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession
was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—
they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.
Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric
expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime,
and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained
that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that
Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One
newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a
trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a
known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others
believe his demeanor is real.”

West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the
trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that
he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He
sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-
year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was
never named.
Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was
made of the base hospital, Wilford Hall, where West had conducted his
MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d
never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I
checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their
master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954
had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning
with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.
Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West
had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance
states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And
West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for
projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”
This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of
Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the
entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your
clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed
memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened
before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”
“I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.
The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason,
wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is
crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”
West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”
 “Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.
For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelible
mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose,
was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it.
When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.
“In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview,
“that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his
face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him
that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal.
After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he
seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—
hypnotism was not part of the protocol.
He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right
away.
“We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me
the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh
Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”
West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a
minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an
appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the
retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric
chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.
West claimed he was in the courtroom the day Shaver was sentenced to
death. Around this time, he became vehemently against capital punishment. I
couldn’t help but wonder if it was because he knew his experiments might’ve
led to the execution of an innocent man and the death of a child. What if his
correspondence with Gottlieb, predating the crime by just a year, had been
presented at trial? Would the outcome have been the same?

Tusko Goes Down

If the Shaver incident was the most harrowing chapter of West’s career, the
most surreal belonged to Tusko: an elephant. Of all West’s experiments, this
one netted the most press, much of it scathing. But the public didn’t know
that the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb had funded it.
 On August 2, 1962, West headed to Oklahoma City’s Lincoln Park Zoo,
where he’d invited a crowd of eager onlookers to watch his latest test. To
their delight, he’d secured an Asian elephant named Tusko, an exotic
specimen in Oklahoma. West would attempt, he explained, to induce musth,
“a form of madness” that occurred in male elephants during the rutting
season. Musth caused violent behavioral changes. “Normally cooperative and
tamable, the elephant now runs berserk for a period of about two weeks,
during which time he may attack or destroy anything in his path,” West
explained, claiming that whole villages had been wiped out by a single
musthing animal. In his rage, the elephant secreted “a mysterious fluid,”
brown and sticky, from his temporal gland. Could it prove medically useful?
He intended to find out. His method was simple: he would simulate musth by
injecting the elephant with a lot of LSD.
But West had miscalculated the dosage. Tusko weighed a whopping 7000
pounds. West shot him with 2800 milligrams of acid, about 1400 times the
quantity given to a human to produce “a marked mental disturbance,” by
West’s measurement. “Five minutes after the injection,” West later wrote,
“Tusko trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated and
went into status epilepticus,” a respiratory seizure resulting in death.
The next morning’s paper featured a front-page photo of the portly
psychiatrist bent over the deceased pachyderm. There were no animal-rights
groups then—Tusko’s death was received more as comedy than tragedy. For
a time, West became the laughingstock of the scientific community, and he
was soon making fun of the mishap himself; he liked to inform his lecture
audiences that he was the doctor famous for killing an elephant with LSD.
When I asked Roger Smith about West, he exclaimed, “He’s the guy that
killed the elephant. Great story. Wonderful story. He always told it!”
The mystery behind the joke was why LSD had been used on an elephant
in the first place. What good did it do to simulate musth? West, true to form,
never gave the same explanation twice. Speaking to an interviewer from the
Medical Tribune, and to another from the Daily Oklahoman, West said his
objective was to find an “animal model” for “recurring psychoses in
humans.” Elephant brains were useful analogs for the human mind: they had
excellent memories, “creative judgment,” sophisticated problem-solving
abilities, and even an “individual personality.” Looking at elephant violence
offered an opportunity “to learn what changes are correlated with this gross
behavior,” and to see if those changes happened in people, too.
And yet in a December 1962 article for the journal Science, West and his
coresearcher acted as if their ambitions were purely zoological. If they
surgically removed an elephant’s glands before puberty, “he might grow up
to be a sexually capable but behaviorally tractable animal.”
Their recommendations were so preposterous that they occasioned an
avalanche of letters to Science. Outraged scientists questioned West’s true
objectives, labeling him “capricious” and “irresponsible.” “I fail to see any
scientific merit,” one wrote, “or purpose.”
West left his position at the University of Oklahoma in January 1969. His
successor, Dr. Gordon Deckert, found records in the department’s files about
the Tusko debacle. “When [the elephant] died, the department was worried:
How in the world are we going to pay for that?” Deckert recalled. “All Jolly
would say to anybody was that he would find a way to pay for it. I learned
then, when I became chair, that the source was payment from the CIA.”
Having known about West’s involvement in “the so-called brainwashing
issue in the Korean War,” Deckert conceded that he “wasn’t terribly
surprised.” The financial cover was the Foundations Fund for Research in
Psychiatry, Inc.: the same group that paid for West’s Haight-Ashbury Project.

Jack Ruby’s Psychotic Break

At UCLA, I kept requesting boxes of West’s papers, and they kept leading
me over trapdoors. Next they dropped me into a quagmire I wanted no part
of: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that plausibly qualified as
the most discussed crime of all time. Certainly it had bred more conspiracy
theories, skepticism, and enmity than any other incident in U.S. history,
altering the way Americans digested their news, and breaking the nation’s
belief in its institutions. I flipped through West’s pages cautiously, hoping
that his involvement was peripheral. It wasn’t. Down through the trapdoor I
went.
Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza
on November 22, 1963. Two days later, at the Dallas police headquarters,
officers escorted Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to an armored car
that would drive him to the county jail. A man stepped out from the crowd
and aimed a revolver at Oswald’s chest. It was Jack Ruby, a nightclub
proprietor with connections to Cuban political groups and organized crime.
He fired once at point-blank range, sending a fatal bullet into Oswald’s
stomach.
According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter
—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again
involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out
his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had
no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What
are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s
defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent
amnesia.”
On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered
Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of
testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli,
later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any
explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications
“had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive
memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.”
Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly
West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of
“experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. He took
the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d
impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to
appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial
information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive.
And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his
papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek
the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact
never before made public.
The judge turned him down. For the moment, it seemed, West would be
getting nowhere near Ruby, who was soon convicted of first-degree murder
and sentenced to death. Ruby was reportedly unmoored by the news. He’d
killed the president’s assassin, and the citizens of Dallas had rewarded him
with a trip to the gallows. He fired his attorney and hired Hubert Winston
Smith, a psychiatrist with a law degree who’d assisted in the trial, to
represent him on appeal.
Meanwhile, at Langley, the CIA’s Richard Helms was making the case
that MKULTRA’s human guinea pigs had to be entirely unaware of the
experiments performed on them. This was “the only realistic method,” he
wrote, “to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly
be unwitting.”
Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to
request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in
mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed
acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. Perhaps, Smith
wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an
administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his
memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum
assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.)
And so, on April 26, 1964, West boarded a plane bound for Dallas. He
was scheduled to examine Jack Ruby in the county jail that afternoon.

The Dallas papers reported it in their final editions that evening: West
emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had
undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-
eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only
the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby
“was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and
“fixed.”
In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a
completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly
acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in
America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all
Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack
Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were
so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said
he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned
in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for
this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”
West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the
exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide
attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for
attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little
Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.”
From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar
diagnoses: he was delusional. West, however, was hardly the first to have
evaluated him. By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally
renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially
compos mentis. West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he
wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them
until earlier today on the airplane. Tonight, my own findings make it clear
that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these
earlier studies were carried out.”
The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. In the preceding
five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d
never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described.
Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d
clamored to see Ruby months earlier. After the judge heard West’s report, he
ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested
doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of
it.”
That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two
days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public,
confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and
“asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge
Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. He
considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it
out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have
convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been
tampered with or drugged by an outsider. “The possibility of a toxic
psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely
because of the protected situation.”
The truth, by that point, was sealed up behind West. Beavers couldn’t
have known that one of his fellow caregivers was capable of anything so
diabolical as inducing mental illness in a patient. His report would have
turned out differently, no doubt, if he’d been apprised of West’s unorthodox
fortes, and his long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.
Dozens of West’s colleagues offered me assessments of his character.
There was praise, especially from those who’d worked with him at UCLA,
but there was also condemnation, most of it from his former colleagues at
Oklahoma, where he’d done the bulk of his MKULTRA research. He was a
“devious man,” “egotistical,” an inveterate “narcissist” and “womanizer.”
The few who hadn’t already suspected his involvement with the CIA
accepted it readily. But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley,
his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air
Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shurley was one of the few
colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him
if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to
scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.
“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be
honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.”
Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little
problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced
American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or
not… Jolly had a real streak of—I guess you’d call it patriotism. If the
president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he
would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.”
“Even if it meant distorting American history?”
“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

“A Deliberate Gangland Killing”

West’s “fearless” intervention set the stage for decades of confusion and
conspiracy in Washington. A week after Kennedy’s assassination, the newly
installed president, Lyndon Johnson, hand-selected a group of thirteen men to
investigate the crime. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of
President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its
chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious
members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director.
Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs
invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms,
soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the
longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials
aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except,
presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset”
trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of
Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important
witness.”
In June 1964, Earl Warren and others from the group flew to Dallas to
give Ruby a hearing in the interrogation room of the county jail. The bulk of
his testimony was a morass of paranoid rambling. He begged Warren to get
him out of Dallas. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this
moment,” he warned. “I know I won’t live to see you another time… Do I
sound sort of screwy?” He demanded to speak with a Jew, whispering
frantically, “You have to get me to Washington! They’re cutting off the arms
and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso!”
The commission, unable to extract a cogent account from their main
witness, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating
Kennedy, and that Ruby did not act in a conspiracy to silence Oswald.
Although they saw no evidence of a secret plot, they couldn’t definitively
rule out such a thing. But their integrity was compromised the minute West
set foot in Ruby’s jail cell. The group was required to investigate the CIA as
a routine suspect in the assassination of a sitting president. Neither Dulles nor
Helms ever reported their knowledge of West’s employment by the CIA. And
soon Jack Ruby was no longer around to tell his own story. He died in 1967
of complications from lung cancer.
In the seventies, when Congress looked into abuses by intelligence
agencies, it found evidence that the CIA and FBI had obstructed the Kennedy
investigation. Dulles and Helms had deliberately concealed failed CIA plots
to assassinate Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. Allegedly, the CIA had aligned
with organized crime figures, many sworn enemies of President Kennedy and
his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy; they teamed up with anti-
Castro Cubans in Miami and New Orleans to assassinate the dictator. Helms
had personally overseen those schemes.
The evidence, wrote House officials, “impeaches the process by which the
intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the
assassination.” Feeling it had no choice but to start over again, the House
voted overwhelmingly to impanel the House Select Committee on
Assassinations (HSCA) and reinvestigate.
The HSCA openly aspired to make the Warren Report “persuasive.” Its
final five-volume report—arriving in 1979, after two and a half years and
$5.4 million in taxpayer money—did just the opposite. Based on new ballistic
evidence of a second gunman in Dallas, the HSCA rejected the Warren
Commission’s finding that Oswald had acted alone. There was a “probable
conspiracy,” it announced, to assassinate the president.
The committee had to be measured; it didn’t identify any potential
coconspirators in the president’s murder. A few years later, freed of their
congressional restraints, the committee’s G. Robert Blakey and Richard
Billings published The Plot to Kill the President, an unmuzzled account of
the investigation. “The murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby had all the earmarks
of an organized crime hit, an action to silence the assassin, so he could never
reveal the conspiracy,” they wrote. “Jack Ruby, working for the mob, after
stalking Oswald for two days, silenced him forever. This was a deliberate
gangland killing.”
The coauthors saw no evidence implicating the CIA, but they remained
suspicious. Their suspicions were borne out in the hulking twenty-seven-
volume appendix of the HSCA witnesses’ published testimony, which
described behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Dulles and Helms to obstruct
the Warren Commission. Along with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, Dulles and
Helms were determined to present Oswald as a crazed lone assassin and
Ruby as a distraught citizen. Hoover released the FBI’s initial findings just
two weeks after the killing, concluding that Oswald acted alone.
“Hoover lied his eyes out,” the Warren Commission’s Hale Boggs later
testified in HSCA hearings, “on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the
bullets, the gun, you name it.”
Dulles was no less complicit. He’d urged the Warren Commission to limit
itself to reviewing the FBI’s investigation, rather than mounting its own. In
secret, he met with Helms and other CIA officials to coach them on what
questions the commission planned to ask.
Faced with these revelations, the HSCA could only conclude that
intelligence groups were hiding their links to Oswald and Ruby, if not a CIA
effort to assassinate Castro. Some believed that the plot on Castro may have
been turned on Kennedy, after his Bay of Pigs invasion failed and he
embraced other policy changes that curtailed the agency’s influence, like
reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam, warming diplomatic relations with
the Soviet Union, and decreasing military spending. Even President Johnson
had his doubts. “The President felt that [the] CIA had had something to do
with the plot,” said an Oval Office memo from ’67.

If the CIA wanted to shut Ruby up, what was it that he had on it? Burt
Griffin, an attorney for the Warren Commission, appeared before the HSCA
to say that he and his partner had nearly confirmed Ruby’s ties to gunrunning
schemes by anti-Castro Cubans, who were shipping arms from the United
States to Cuba in hopes of deposing the dictator.
At the time, Griffin had no idea that the CIA sponsored these gunrunning
schemes. In March 1964—when Ruby was weeks away from his
“examination” by Jolly West—Griffin and his partner approached Richard
Helms, requesting all the information the CIA had on Ruby. They believed it
was possible “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban
elements who might have had contact with Oswald.”
Helms offered only a curt reply: “The CIA would be very limited in its
possibility of assisting.” Griffin was baffled—this was someone who was
supposed to be helping him. He appealed again. By the time Helms mustered
a response, months had passed, and West had long since paid his fateful visit
to Ruby. “An examination of Agency files,” Helms wrote, “has produced no
information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”
As for Jolly West, he also did his part to keep Ruby untainted from any
whiff of conspiracy. As the Warren Commission tried to divine Ruby’s
motive, West sent a confidential letter to Earl Warren himself, a copy of
which I discovered in the HSCA’s files. Dated June 23, 1964, and addressed
to “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” West’s note contends that his
“examinations” of Ruby gave him unique insight into the man’s “motivations
for the murder.” (This despite the fact that West had said Ruby was
“positively insane.”) He was confident that Ruby had acted in an “irrational
and unpremeditated” manner when he shot Oswald, “wanting to prove that
the Jews—through himself—loved their President and were not cowards.”
Moreover, West asserted that Ruby “had never seen [Oswald] in his life”
before his involvement in the Kennedy assassination broke. Without consent
from his patient or his patient’s lawyers, West was offering confidential
medical assessments tailored to political ends. “Please let me know if there is
anything else that I can do to be of assistance,” he added. Warren didn’t. In
an internal note, he dismissed the psychiatrist as an “interloper,” writing, “I
see no need to do anything with this material.” Had he known of West’s CIA
connections, he may have reacted differently.
If West couldn’t foist his version of events onto the Warren Commission,
he could at least make sure that no compromising information about Ruby
emerged. At his urging, a psychiatrist named Dr. Werner Tuteur examined
Ruby in July 1965 to prepare for an upcoming hearing on his sanity. Tuteur
submitted a twelve-page report to West—it was there in his files, bundled
with an edited version that West had submitted to the court. He struck just
one passage, the most vital: “There is considerable guilt about the fact that he
sent guns to Cuba,” Tuteur had written. “He feels he ‘helped the enemy’ and
incriminated himself. ‘They got what they wanted on me.’” Erasing those
lines, West expunged the very evidence Griffin had been looking for.
West kept meticulous notes on the Ruby case, all dutifully filed. As
investigators, scholars, and journalists struggled to piece together the puzzle,
he watched from afar, compiling records for his own book about Ruby. He
never ended up writing it, but he paid close attention to an exhaustive 1965
volume, The Trial of Jack Ruby, by John Kaplan and Jon R. Waltz. They
wrote, “The fact is that nobody knows why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey
Oswald—and this includes Jack Ruby.”
Jolly West had jotted down that line with a note to himself: “good quote.”
It was, until now, the closest he ever came to receiving public credit for his
work.

Coda: “The Data-Spew”

Libra, Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, features a
character named Nicholas Branch—a retired CIA analyst tasked with
internally reviewing the agency’s conduct in the JFK assassination, once and
for all. The assignment swallows him for fifteen years. The agency pays for
the construction of a lavish, fireproof home office, which becomes, to
Branch, “the book-filled room, the room of documents, the room of theories
and dreams.” He reposes in “a glove-leather armchair,” surrounded by
shelves and filing cabinets bursting with folders, cassettes, legal pads, and
books. Branch “sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives.” He comes to feel
that “the past is changing as he writes.” And his ultimate subject, he knows,
isn’t crime or politics. It’s “men in small rooms.”
Although I had a sagging sofa instead of a glove-leather armchair, and
while nothing in my apartment was fire-insured, let alone fireproof, I
identified a lot with Nicholas Branch. I was immersed in records, voices from
the past, competing narratives, complexity that sometimes seemed to multiply
for its own sake. No matter which way I moved, the stories shifted beneath
my feet. I was a man in a small room reading about men in small rooms. But
where Nicholas Branch had the full backing of the CIA, I had only myself.
As I worked to fill out my book proposal and, I hoped, draw my reporting
to a close, I had dreams of sharing my findings with the members of the
Warren Commission, brandishing evidence they’d never been able to prize
out of the CIA. But most of the commission’s members were long dead.
Gerald Ford wasn’t, but he wanted nothing to do with me. Burt Griffin,
who’d been responsible for handling the Ruby aspect of the investigation,
said in a phone interview that my findings were “very scary stuff,” and that
West’s relationship with the CIA “should be investigated.” But he was long
retired—if anyone was going to launch an investigation, it wouldn’t be him.
I had better luck with Arlen Specter, then the senior senator from my
home state of Pennsylvania. Late in 2002, visiting my parents in
Philadelphia, I decided to see if he was interested in the papers I’d uncovered.
Specter had joined the Warren Commission as a young investigative
attorney. He’d participated in Ruby’s appearances before the commission.
When Ruby dilated on his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, he thought he
had an ally in Specter, one of the commission’s only Jewish staff members.
Specter was also responsible for the Warren Commission’s controversial
“single bullet theory,” which argued that one bullet had taken a circuitous
route through the bodies of John F. Kennedy and Governor John Connally,
who had been sitting in front of Kennedy when he was shot. This theory ruled
out the possibility of a second gunman, and Specter regarded it as gospel
truth; he referred to it as the Single Bullet Conclusion. Since his role in the
commission had launched his career, Specter had been unusually forthcoming
about it over the years, eager to defend his position and to remind voters of
his role in a seminal chapter of American history.
Getting Specter’s attention took months. Through his aides, I wrangled
what was supposed to be a two-minute phone interview. He called me from
the Senate floor. I laid out my case as quickly as possible, with background
on West, his involvement with the CIA’s MKULTRA experiments, and his
examination of Ruby.
Specter was intrigued. Our call ended up running to twenty minutes.
Though he had no knowledge of the agency’s mind-control program or the
congressional investigation into it, he seemed open to the possibility that
West could have tampered with Ruby and, thus, with the Warren
Commission’s findings.
“Can you fax me these documents?” he asked, offering to approach the
CIA about them.
I wanted him to see them in person. Once they were out of my hands,
there was no telling where they might end up, and alerting the CIA to them
right away might not be in the best interest of my reporting. Specter sighed.
Knowing that congressmen usually went home for weekends, I took a
chance: “If you’re going to be in Philadelphia…”
He had a squash match that Saturday at the Wyndham Plaza Hotel. He
suggested I meet him there. His aide would call to set it up.
I was thrilled—a sitting senator, a key investigator for the Warren
Commission, was willing to hear me out in person. I followed up with a fax
sharing some of the New York Times’s reporting on MKULTRA and more
information on West.
And then I got paranoid.
I hadn’t gone through every box of West’s files yet. What if divulging my
findings to Specter jeopardized my access to those? Someone could get there
first and remove anything incriminating.
But that was outlandish, I thought. I was flying back to L.A. at the end of
the weekend. If I went to the UCLA files right away, I’d be fine—even the
CIA couldn’t act so quickly.
And yet the more I thought about it, the more distrustful I got. Why was
Specter so eager to see the documents? He didn’t seem to care a whit about
my credentials, or lack thereof. And could it really be true that a longtime
senator had never heard of MKULTRA? Specter was the chairman of the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the same group that had
investigated MKULTRA back in the day. He had the power to open doors for
me, but if he was bent on upholding the Warren Commission’s findings,
wouldn’t he just as soon close those doors?
I was overthinking everything, and then overthinking my overthinking. At
the end of the day, I decided to err on the side of caution and postpone our
meeting. Maybe in the future I could have an attorney accompany me, or
some impartial observer.
The next morning, I left messages at Specter’s hotel and with his press
office: I was profoundly sorry, but an emergency had come up, and I really
had to leave for L.A. that afternoon. I went to run a few errands, trying to
convince myself I hadn’t made a huge mistake. To this day, I wonder about
that.
While I was out, the phone rang and my mom picked up. It was Arlen
Specter, sounding confused. Having been briefed on my plan, my mom told
Specter I was on my way to the airport. (Her feelings were mixed, she told
me later—her son was important enough to merit a call from a senator on a
weekend, but her son had also made her lie to that senator.)
Specter was gobsmacked. “So he’s not going to meet with me?”
“I’m afraid not,” my mom said.
I tried to reschedule our meeting for years. When I finally got him on the
phone again, I was so shocked to have gotten through that I realized I’d long
since stopped preparing for our talk. It had been months since I’d rehearsed
the particulars of West and Ruby. I was much less convincing. He wasn’t
interested in seeing any of my papers.
“I just don’t see where this all leads,” Specter said. That was a phrase I’d
be hearing a lot in the coming years.
 12

Where Does It All Go?

Writing the Music

Jolly West’s MKULTRA letters were my biggest discovery, I thought. If
there were an answer to that question of questions—how Manson got his
followers to kill—I felt it had to be there. I marshaled my energy in the hopes
of discovering that they’d crossed paths, or that Manson’s enormous success
in creating the Family had some debt to the CIA’s mind-control techniques.
Even if I turned up nothing, I thought considering Manson and West in
parallel was a worthy effort. Theirs was one of the great non sequiturs of the
sixties. Manson, the ex-con, the Hollywood striver, the oversexed, unwashed
guru who’d been discarded from society, had used LSD to collect and
reprogram his followers. In the summer of love, he walked the same streets
and frequented the same clinic as Jolly West, the upright air force officer, the
world-renowned psychiatrist, the eloquent hypnotist who wrote to his CIA
handler that there was “no more vital undertaking conceivable” than to dose
unwitting research subjects with LSD and replace their memories.
Both men were moralizers, hypocrites, and narcissists. And both were
determined to make their presence felt in an America they felt had gone
rotten. On the stand at his own trial, Manson said, “Is it a conspiracy that the
music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment?… It is not my
conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says rise, it says kill.
Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.” On some level, he was right.
I resumed work on my proposal feeling that I had enough to make even
hardened skeptics doubt themselves a little bit. Though it took me years to
get all my words in fighting condition, I finally finished in 2005. It came in at
a whopping eighty thousand words, as long as many actual books. On the
merits of the proposal, Penguin Press agreed to publish the book. I was
elated, and more than a little relieved. I hadn’t known whether any
respectable publisher would vouch for a project that mentioned Manson, Jack
Ruby, and CIA mind control in the same breath. Penguin’s support was
vindicating, and the advance payment it offered was more than enough to let
me tie up my reporting.
The complete manuscript was due in early 2008, a little less than three
years away. Now all I had to do was finish my reporting and write the thing.
The following year would be the thirtieth anniversary of the murders—I’d
only missed my Premiere deadline by a decade. But that had been a
magazine story. This would be a book.

I had big plans for the money from my advance, which was more lucrative
than I’d allowed myself to imagine it could be. I upgraded my computer,
junked my old Acura, and bought… a used ’85 Volvo, for four hundred
bucks. Everything else would go back into the book. Although my friends
advised me to buy property and take an exotic vacation, I didn’t even
consider it. I had at least three years of rigorous reporting and writing ahead
of me. The money could help me accomplish what had been too costly or
labor-intensive before. I hired two research assistants to help me get
organized. They transcribed the endless hours of taped interviews I’d
amassed—more than two hundred cassettes by then, most of their ninety
minutes completely filled. They helped type out the handwritten notes on my
sixty legal pads and thirty notebooks, and some of the passages I’d
highlighted in some three hundred books. Most of my papers were in one of
the 190 binders I had, and yet I’d allowed a half dozen stacks of unfiled
documents to grow to about four feet high apiece. (At least they were
separated by subject.) Reviewing the massive material record of my work
was unsettling. I was rediscovering the fragments, micro-obsessions, and
niggling questions that had tugged me onward when I began my reporting.
Many I’d simply forgotten about; others were unresolved and probably
always would be. But a few started to tempt me again. Now that I was
finalizing everything, I had to be sure I hadn’t missed a lead. If a doubt sat in
the back of my mind long enough, I added it to my to-do list. Soon it was
dangerously long for someone with a book to write.
One of the most basic problems I’d had over the years was tracking
people down. Many former members of the Family had gone to great lengths
to make themselves unreachable: they’d changed their names and severed ties
with anyone who might’ve known about their pasts. At least the celebrities
who’d said no to me once upon a time could be reached through publicists.
Now I was looking for people who’d gone off the grid. I didn’t necessarily
want to force anyone to speak to me. But what if someone in the Family
remembered Jolly West, or Reeve Whitson, or any of the shadowy figures I’d
investigated? What if, like the detective Charlie Guenther, they had
something they’d wanted to get off their chest for thirty years? Some of my
hostile interviewees had thawed when they saw that I didn’t have the
sensational, tabloid-style agenda that fueled most reporting on Manson.
So I also hired a private detective, a retired LASO deputy nicknamed
Moon, who worked out of an office in Arizona. To this day, I’ve never met
him, though we’ve shared thousands of emails and calls. Moon found people
and police records I never could’ve turned up on my own. He’d participated
in the LASO raid of the Spahn Ranch, and he reached out to other retired
cops, urging them to speak to me. He also schooled me in skip tracing, the art
of finding people who don’t want to be found. Before long I was paying to
access digitized cross-directories and databases, including one called Merlin
that required a PI license to use. (Moon took care of that for me.) Between
the two of us, Moon and I located just about everyone who’d hung around
with Manson, most of them scattered up and down the West Coast. I added
them to my interview list, along with the usual mix of cops, lawyers, drug
dealers, researchers, Hollywood has-beens, and congressmen.
The extra help freed me up to do what I did best: dive into the archives. I
had about a dozen places I needed to visit to fill in holes in my paper trail.
There were old LAPD and LASO homicide detectives; district attorneys
who’d offered to show me their stuff; files on the Family from courts, police
departments, parks departments, and highway patrols that I’d persuaded the
state of California to let me see for the first time; and personal files from
reporters who’d long ago tried to investigate the same stuff I was after, most
of them hitting the same dead ends.
My to-do list was now as long as it’d been in the heaviest days of my
reporting. And sometimes, behind my excitement and anxiety, I could feel a
lower, deeper dread. Even if I could strengthen the bridge between Manson
and West, I didn’t have a smoking gun—some fabled needle at the Spahn
Ranch with Jolly West’s fingerprints on it, or a classified memo from the Los
Angeles DA’s office to the FBI. I worried I never would. The evidence I’d
amassed against the official version of the Manson murders was so
voluminous, from so many angles, that it was overdetermined. I could poke a
thousand holes in the story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact,
the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another.
It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies
with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the
Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and
judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers,
an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD
mind-control experiments tested in the field… could it? There was no way.
To imagine state, local, and federal law enforcement cooperating in perfect
harmony, with the courts backing them up—it made no sense. What I’d
uncovered was something closer to an improvised, shambolic effort to
contain the fallout from the murders. I couldn’t walk myself through the
sequence of events without tripping on something. I was a lousy conspiracy
theorist, at the end of the day, because I wanted nothing left to the realm of
the theoretical.
I was sure that at least one person had a better idea of the truth than I did.
Before I went delving into any more archives or darting up the coast to
confront former Family members, I had to return a phone call I’d been
putting off for years. I had to talk to Bugliosi.

My Adversary
Back in 1999, Bugliosi had told me, “If there’s something about my handling
of the case—anything at all—that you had a question about, I would
appreciate if you would call me to get my view on it.” I’d promised to hear
him out, imagining I’d circle back in another few months. Now seven years
had passed, and I had so many questions that it took me weeks of preparation
just to remember all of them.
 If I was reluctant to pick up the phone, it was because I was about to
engage with a man who went to criminal lengths to protect his reputation.
I’ve already mentioned Mary Neiswender, the reporter who told me that
Bugliosi was “terribly dangerous”: he’d sent an emissary warning that he
knew where her kids went to school and implied that “it would be very easy
to plant narcotics in their lockers.” And I knew that Bugliosi had been
indicted for perjury as a result of his prosecuting the murders—as mentioned
earlier, he’d leaked information about Manson’s “hit list” to a reporter and
had threatened professional consequences for his coprosecutors if they told
anyone.
Those turned out to be two of the milder incidents in his quest for self-
preservation. In 1968, Bugliosi fell into a scandal kept under wraps by the
DA’s office until ’72, when he was running for district attorney of Los
Angeles. (He lost the election.) He’d stalked and terrorized someone he was
convinced had carried on an affair with his wife and fathered his first-born
child, Vincent Jr. As clichéd as it sounds, Bugliosi suspected his milkman,
Herbert Weisel, who was married with two children.
Weisel had left his job in 1965, eight months before Vincent Jr. was born.
Bugliosi was sure that Weisel had quit because of his transgression—the
evidence must’ve been in Weisel’s personnel file at the dairy. He made
anonymous phone calls to Weisel’s wife and then to Weisel himself,
demanding him to release his files. The couple began to notice “strange cars”
circling their block after dark. They changed their phone number, which was
already unlisted. Two days later, they got a typed letter postmarked from
L.A. “You shouldn’t have changed your phone number,” it said. “That wasn’t
nice.”
Eventually, Bugliosi’s wife, Gail, approached the Weisels, revealing her
identity in the hopes that she could arrange a détente. The Weisels told her
that her husband should be getting psychiatric help. “She told us that she’d
tried many times, but that he wouldn’t do it,” they later testified in a civil
deposition. She’d taken paternity and lie-detector tests to prove the child was
his, but he still harbored doubts. “I know he’s sick,” she said. “He’s got a
mental problem.”
The couple became so frightened that they stopped allowing their children
to take the bus to school. They hired a lawyer and, after a mediation, Bugliosi
agreed to stop harassing them and to pay them $100 for their silence. They
refused the money. In ’72, with Bugliosi on the ballot, they decided it was
their civic duty to go public—their tormentor aspired to the most powerful
law enforcement job in the city. They told the papers of his yearlong
harassment and intimidation campaign.
Enlisting his well-documented talent for fabrication, Bugliosi retaliated,
telling the press that Weisel had stolen money from his kitchen table seven
years earlier. Weisel sued him for slander and defamation. It wasn’t a tough
case to win. In depositions, Bugliosi and his wife swore they’d only been
worried about the alleged robbery of their home. The Weisels proved
otherwise, bringing in witnesses who exposed the Bugliosis as perjurers.
Soon it came out that Bugliosi had twice used an investigator in the DA’s
office—his office—to get confidential information about Weisel, claiming he
was a material witness in a murder case. Fearing the disclosure would cost
him his job, Bugliosi settled out of court, paying the Weisels $12,500. He
paid in cash, on the condition that they sign a confidentiality agreement and
turn over the deposition tapes.
No sooner was the milkman imbroglio resolved than Bugliosi fell into
another fiasco, again abusing his connection to the criminal justice system to
straighten it out. His mistress, Virginia Cardwell, the single mother of a five-
year-old, told him she was pregnant. It was his. With visions of public office
still dancing in his mind, and Helter Skelter on the eve of publication, he
ordered Cardwell, a Catholic, to get an abortion. She refused, but after
Bugliosi threatened her and gave her money for the procedure, she lied and
said she’d done it. He wasn’t about to take her word for it. He got her
doctor’s name, called him, and learned that she’d never been to see him, after
which he headed to her apartment and beat her so savagely that she suffered a
miscarriage. He choked her, struck her in the face several times with his fists,
threw her onto the floor, pulled her up by her hair, and threatened to kill her
if she had the baby, saying she wouldn’t leave the apartment alive if she lied
to him: “I will break every bone in your body—this will ruin my career.”
Bruised and battered, Cardwell gathered herself and went to the Santa
Monica Police Department, where she filed a criminal complaint. The cops
photographed her bruises and then, evidently, did nothing.
That evening, an eagle-eyed reporter spotted the incident on the police
blotter and wrote about it in the next day’s paper. Bugliosi returned to
Cardwell’s apartment that morning, this time with his secretary. The pair held
her hostage for four hours until she agreed to tell the police she’d filed a false
complaint the previous day. Bugliosi assured her he’d use his contacts in the
DA’s office to make sure she was never brought to trial for the false report.
He and his secretary used Cardwell’s typewriter to forge a backdated bill for
legal services, telling her to show it to the police. He listened in on an
extension as she called to turn herself in. The dispatcher said they’d send a
patrol car to get her. He vigorously shook his head, and Cardwell told the
dispatcher she’d be fine getting in on her own.
The dispatcher sent a car anyway. One of the detectives who’d seen
Cardwell that day, Michael Landis, told me Bugliosi and “a couple of his
associates” answered the door “and tried to discourage us from talking to her.
We were persistent and we did see her—and she was pretty well banged up.”
Cardwell claimed that the bruises were from an accident: her son had hit her
in the face with a baseball bat. She’d only blamed Bugliosi because she was
angry that he’d overcharged her for legal advice concerning her divorce.
“This outrageous charge, even though false, can be extremely harmful,”
Bugliosi told police.
Cardwell’s brother persuaded her to file a lawsuit against Bugliosi.
Bugliosi’s story fell apart before the suit was even filed, and he settled with
Cardwell in exchange for her confidentiality—ensuring, he hoped, that his
lies to the police, fabrication of evidence, and obstruction of justice would
never see the light of day. He was wrong. The Virginia Cardwell story hit the
papers in 1974, when his opponent in the California state attorney general’s
race, Joseph Busch, caught wind of it. (Bugliosi lost that election, too.)
Because of his clout in the DA’s office, he was never prosecuted for
assaulting Cardwell. Landis, the detective, called him “a whiney, sniveley
little bastard,” saying, “I wanted to prosecute the son of a bitch.”
All of which is to say that I approached Bugliosi with extreme caution.
And at first, he refused to grant me another interview. In the intervening
years, he explained, he’d heard from two unnamed “sources” that I’d done
“terrible things” in my “private life.” He refused to say what these things
were. I knew I’d done nothing wrong. I told him to go ahead and expose
whatever it was he had on me—it would never hold up to scrutiny. I added
that I’d amassed a lot of documents, including some in his own hand, that
raised questions about the integrity of the prosecution. But he was adamant:
no interview. Furthermore, if my book defamed or libeled him, he would hold
me liable to the greatest degree of the law. “You don’t want to be working for
me the rest of your life,” he said. “I think you know what I mean.” He hung
up.
And then, ten minutes later, he called back. He wanted to repeat the same
conversation we’d just had, to pretend like we were having it for the first
time. His wife, Gail, would be listening in on another extension as a
“witness,” so I wouldn’t misrepresent what he’d said.
“You want us to repeat the conversation word for word, like it hadn’t
already happened?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Or, you know, the essence of the conversation.”
It was a ridiculous exercise. I agreed anyway; I wanted to keep our lines
of communication open, and I had a morbid desire to see how it played out. I
told him I’d only do it if I could tape the call, so I’d have a “witness,” too. He
agreed.
Listening back to it now, I’m amazed: we really did it. We had the same
talk again, with occasional corrections. (“No, Vince, you said you’d sue me
for 100 million dollars, not millions of dollars.”) Every few minutes, Bugliosi
would make sure that Gail was still listening. “Yes,” she’d sigh. “I’m here.”
As for the papers I had, he told me, “Documents may be accurate… but it
doesn’t make the document itself truthful.” And even if he wanted to sit
down with me—which he didn’t, because of the “terrible things” I’d done—
he couldn’t, because he was “absolutely swamped.” He didn’t even have time
to go to a Super Bowl party that “some prominent people” had invited him to.
“I kind of doubt that under any circumstances I’d be willing to give you
an interview,” he said. “But if you send me a letter specifying everything you
want to talk about, or the essence of what you want to talk about, there’s an
outside possibility that I may find the time, or make the time.”
I never sent that letter. Experience had taught me that the longer I stayed
silent, the more agitated Bugliosi would become. Despite his protestations, he
really wanted to know what I’d write about him. A week later, he called and
said that his wife had persuaded him to sit down with me. The interview was
on.

Bugliosi Redux
And so we return to that sunny day in February 2006, when Bugliosi gave me
a stern dressing-down at his home in Pasadena, his wife looking on
phlegmatically. That was the day he announced himself as my “adversary”
and issued a forty-five-minute “opening statement,” his kitchen now his
courtroom as he mounted the case that he was a “decent guy” who’d “never
hurt anyone in the first instance.” He would retaliate “in the second instance,”
in self-defense or “to get even, or to get justice.”
As if to prove that point, he kept threatening to sue me, making it clear
that he wouldn’t tolerate any allegation of misconduct. He spoke so quickly,
and with such a flurry of hyperbole and legalism, that I could hardly rebut
one of his points without three more rising up to take its place. Just as my
encounter with Roger Smith had, my interview with Bugliosi lasted for some
six hours, and I came out of it with little more than a list of denials and
evasions. But at least Smith had given me wine and pizza. Bugliosi gave me
only vitriol.
Before we met, I rehearsed my questions with an actor friend who stepped
into Bugliosi’s shoes. We developed a plan on how best to deploy my
findings and parry his denials. I brought binders full of documents and
carefully highlighted passages from Helter Skelter so that I could refresh his
memory if he claimed not to recall certain particulars from the case.
But right away, Bugliosi threw me off. “Ask me your hardest question,”
he said at the outset. And so I started with everything I had on Terry Melcher,
suggesting that Bugliosi had covered up for him and that he’d been much
friendlier with Manson than had been revealed. It was the wrong move—I’d
intended to build to this moment, and now I was leading with it, giving him
every reason to take a contentious tone. Pulling out a passage from Helter
Skelter, I showed Bugliosi what he’d written about Dean Moorehouse, the
member of the Family who, according to the prosecutor, stayed at the house
on Cielo Drive “for a brief period” after Melcher moved out.
“That’s not true,” I said. “He never lived there after Melcher moved out.
He lived there the summer before, off and on with Melcher.” I showed him
that Dean Moorehouse was actually in prison when Bugliosi had said he lived
at the Cielo house.
“I forget what you’re telling me,” Bugliosi said. “The matter of where and
how, I forget that kind of stuff. Thirty-five years ago, I’ve gone after a
million things since then… There’s a lot of errors in the book.” He’d
authored it with a cowriter, and he’d been too busy running for district
attorney to fact-check every last word.
“This may have gotten past me,” he said. “I’m [more] interested in
anything you would have that would indicate that I may have misled the jury,
because I don’t believe that happened intentionally.”
I took out the pages in Bugliosi’s own handwriting: notes from his
interview with Danny DeCarlo, one of his main witnesses, who’d said that
Terry Melcher had visited Manson three times after the murders,
contravening what Melcher had said on the stand.
“This was after the murders?” Bugliosi clarified, reading through his own
notes. “Are you sure about that?”
“You wrote it,” I said. He confirmed they were his notes and read them
again.
“You have to know, Tom, that when people are talking to you they garble
things up… My god. They tell a story—”
“But this is not ambiguous. You write, ‘Definitely saw Melcher out at
Spahn Ranch. Heard girls say, Terry’s coming! Terry’s coming!’ And you
make a point of writing down that it was after the August 16th bust. There’s
nothing ambiguous about when it was.”
“I’m being a hundred percent candid with you,” Bugliosi said, “this is
new to me. I’m not saying I didn’t know it at the time, don’t get me wrong,
but I absolutely have no impression, no recollection of this at all.” He sighed.
“What’s the point?… How does it help me with the jury?”
I thought it impeached Melcher’s testimony, which had been essential to
the case. It made him a dirtier witness, I said, because he had a relationship
with the murderers after the murders. I showed him the sheriff’s interview
with the Family’s Paul Watkins, who remembered seeing Melcher on his
knees, on acid, begging for Manson’s forgiveness at the Spahn Ranch—
again, after the murders. Didn’t it suggest some kind of complicity?
Bugliosi leveled an intense stare at me. “I was not trying to protect Terry
Melcher,” he said. “Why would I try to deceive the jury on something that
the opposition had? I turned over everything to them.”
But Paul Fitzgerald, the defense attorney, “said he never saw any of that.
He said he was shocked,” I explained.
“He may have forgotten about them himself!” Bugliosi shouted. “Look, if
I’m going to try to hide them, I throw them away! Why wouldn’t I throw
them away? Everything that I had was turned over to the defense.
Everything.”
“He didn’t say he didn’t remember, he said he never saw it.”
Bugliosi scoffed. “Terry would never have associated with these people if
he thought they committed these murders,” he said. “If he did go out there
afterward, it wasn’t because he was complicit… I’m investigating this case,
I’m handling all the witnesses, things could have gotten past me. But you’ve
got to ask yourself this question, what could I possibly gain?”
I told him how Stephen Kay, his own coprosecutor, had reacted to these
documents: “If Vince was covering this stuff up… what else did he change?”
Bugliosi gave a brittle laugh. “Oh, Jesus, that is so laughable it’s just
unbelievable. Just absolutely unbelievable. That I’d cover up that Terry
Melcher had gone out to Spahn Ranch after the murders. It’s just so
extremely insignificant, it wouldn’t help me at all.” But it wasn’t
insignificant, and from his reaction I could tell he knew it. These pages
rewrote the narrative of the case. That’s why Melcher had threatened to throw
them from his rooftop; that’s why Bugliosi would sue me if I printed them.
Around and around we went. Bugliosi said, “When Terry was on the
witness stand, did he testify that he never saw Manson after May?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So, that’s perjury.”
“So you’re saying that Terry lied on the witness stand.” Still, he didn’t see
the point, or pretended not to. Until I read him his own closing argument, he
refused to recognize that he’d even used Melcher as part of the motive for the
murders. He’d said in his summation, “indirectly [Manson] was striking back
at Terry Melcher personally. By ordering a mass murder at Melcher’s former
residence, Manson obviously knew that Melcher’s realization that these
murders took place at a residence in which he lived just a couple of months
earlier would literally paralyze Melcher with fear.” If that were so, why did
Melcher go out to visit Manson at least three times afterward? All Bugliosi
could say about the matter was that it “must have slipped past me.” To accuse
him of conspiring with Melcher was “mind-boggling craziness.”
What about Reeve Whitson, the mysterious figure who’d helped gain the
testimony of Sharon Tate’s photographer friend, Shahrokh Hatami? Did
Bugliosi remember Whitson?
“Oh, possibly,” he said.
The hours ticked by, and whatever I threw at him, he deflected. The
replacement of Susan Atkins’s attorney? I showed him the memos. “I don’t
remember any of this stuff.”
Manson’s mysterious move to San Francisco, which violated his parole
even though Bugliosi had wrongly written that he “requested and received
permission” for it? “I can’t even remember that.”
How about the warrant for the massive August 16 raid at the Spahn
Ranch? Bugliosi had asserted, incorrectly, that it was “misdated.” “I don’t
know where I got that,” he said.
“I wanted to ask you about Roger and David Smith,” I said. (I wasn’t
about to get into the matter of Jolly West; I knew it’d be met with a blank
stare.)
“Who are they?” I gave him my spiel on the paramount significance of
Manson’s year in San Francisco. “That’s good stuff that you’ve come up
with,” he said. “Are they mentioned in my book?” Barely, I said. He was
unfazed. “Must’ve gotten past me.”
To present our back-and-forth in granular detail would be excruciating—
reading through the transcript never fails to give me a headache. Suffice it to
say that the subject of Terry Melcher always riled him up. Anything and
everything else, he hardly cared about; if it didn’t involve him directly, he
had no use for it. He reiterated that he was “the fairest prosecutor in the
land,” and that a hefty hundred-million-dollar lawsuit awaited me if I
suggested otherwise. This is when he fell into his refrain about “the Man in
the Mirror.” Because he was ethical “to an unprecedented degree,” he could
live with the sight of his own reflection. He didn’t understand how I could
live with mine. Manson himself had a fondness for the same phrase: “I am
the man in the mirror,” he said. “Anything you see in me is in you, I am you,
and when you can admit that you will be free.”
When Bugliosi and I finished, at last, he confessed that he was sometimes
obsessive and overreactive—Gail had told him he might have a psychiatric
disorder. But he’d done nothing wrong, and he didn’t want his admittedly
frenetic behavior to color my impressions of his conduct as a prosecutor.
It was a rare moment of self-awareness, probably the last I ever saw in
him. The aftermath of our meeting was a series of alternately coaxing and
acrimonious phone calls at all hours of the day and night, conveying a thinly
veiled ultimatum: I could drop anything negative about him from my book or
fear his wrath. If I published such “outrageous,” “preposterous,” and
“unbelievable” lies, the lawsuit was a foregone conclusion.
Before the litigation, though, would come the letter: a cri de coeur to my
editor at Penguin, with the publisher and president of the company in cc. It
would be “very, very, very long,” Bugliosi warned. He’d take “six, seven,
eight hours” to write the first of “many drafts.” He didn’t want to do it—he’d
gladly tear it up if I called to apologize.
“There is nothing to decide, here, Tom,” he continued, sounding like a
used-car salesman. “It’s so damn easy.”
When I declined for the last time, he said, “We should view ourselves as
adversaries,” and told me to expect the letter.

Now that Bugliosi was my sworn adversary, his next move hardly came as a
surprise: the smear campaign. First thing next morning, I got a panicked
message from Rudi Altobelli, the flamboyant talent manager who’d owned
the house on Cielo Drive. We hadn’t spoken in four years.
“Please give me a call so I can understand what I’m talking about,” the
elderly Altobelli said. “I still love you.”
Altobelli had gotten a disturbing call from Bugliosi. “The first thing he
wanted to know about was your relationships with young boys,” he told me
when I called back. As Bugliosi remembered it, Altobelli had told him years
ago that I “dated ten, twelve, and fourteen-year-olds,” Altobelli said, adding
that he knew it was a lie. I’m gay, and when Altobelli and I became friends, I
was dating someone younger—but he was twenty-nine, not twelve. At that
time, Bugliosi was in regular communication with Altobelli, who felt he
must’ve told him I was dating a younger guy. But then and now, Bugliosi
knew he meant a young man, not a kid. “You’re creating something that isn’t
so,” Altobelli told him.
“I’m not going to talk to him anymore,” Altobelli said. “Ever.” Bugliosi
kept calling for weeks; in just one morning, he left seven messages on
Altobelli’s machine. He wanted Altobelli to sign a letter saying I’d lied about
Melcher. Altobelli refused.
At least now I knew the “terrible things” about me that Bugliosi had
referred to; they were as transparently false as I’d suspected. I could see why
he’d twice been sued for defamation. In his long career, Bugliosi had lied
under oath; he’d lied to newspapers; he’d lied to police and investigators
from his own office. Now that I’d called him a liar, he was plenty willing to
lie about me, too.
His letter arrived at Penguin on July 3, 2006. It had taken five months to
write. It was thirty-four pages, single-spaced. And, as it turned out, it was the
first of many such letters. As Bugliosi had promised, copies were delivered to
my editor and my publisher, so we could take in its distortions, ad hominem
attacks, and vigorous self-aggrandizement as a team. Often referring to me as
“super-sleuth O’Neal”—the misspelling was intentional, I believe; he’d done
the same to his nemesis Stephen Kay in Helter Skelter—Bugliosi claimed
that I’d first approached him for the sole purpose of discovering titillating
factoids about Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s “private sex and drug
lives.” (Easy to disprove—I’d taped the whole interview.) He hinted at his
allegations of pedophilia and claimed that I’d accused him of framing
Manson. Most of all, he attacked the significance—or lack thereof—of my
findings on Terry Melcher.
“Can you see why there is a part of me that actually wants O’Neal’s
dream to come true,” he wrote, “so that I can have the opportunity to get even
with him and destroy his life more than he’s trying to destroy mine?” If
Penguin moved forward with my book, the publisher “would almost
assuredly be perceived by the national media as taking a position in defense
of Charles Manson, one of history’s most notorious murderers.” He followed
up with letters to all of the Family’s imprisoned murderers except Manson
himself, asking if they’d refute my claims about Melcher’s involvement with
the group. No one replied.
When it became clear that Penguin would stand behind me, Bugliosi sent
another letter in 2007. And another in 2008, inveighing against my project
and the irreparable harm it would do to his children, especially if, as I’d told
him I would, I detailed the lawsuits he’d faced over the years.
I’d promised my editor that I’d finish my reporting by August 1, 2006.
Though I may never have hit that deadline anyway, Bugliosi’s letter derailed
me. Everyone I knew urged me not to respond on a point-by-point basis. But
how could I not? I had no intention of replying to him directly, but he’d
gotten the best of my inner obsessive, and I spent a while collating all the
evidence that refuted his claims. If he did plan on suing me, I’d be ready. In
light of his threats, I told him I was now treating everything he’d said to me
as on the record. Back in 1999, he’d given me my first shred of new
information on the case, telling me off the record that Roman Polanski had
forced Sharon Tate to have sex with two other men on tape. Since Bugliosi
had detailed this allegation in one of his letters to Penguin, I saw no need to
keep it off the record.
My fastidiousness distracted me from that looming dread, perhaps best
articulated by Bugliosi himself: “Where does it all go, Tom? Where does it
all go?” I thought his apoplexy confirmed that I was on the right track, but
I’d have to find the answers without any help from him. And now there was
another unanswerable question: Was it all worth it? All the lonely hours in
my car, the endless days poring over transcripts at archives from the edge of
Death Valley to small towns in Washington and Nevada; begging and
battling for police records; studying obscure medical journals and academic
papers; filing hundreds of FOIA requests; fielding death threats and promises
of litigation… could I really say it was worth it? Honestly, I didn’t know
anymore. And this was before I fell into a debt of more than half a million
dollars.

Digging for Bodies in the Desert

Bugliosi had rattled me, but I tried to shake him off. I had a book to finish—
or, more realistically, a book to start. Whenever I sat down, opened up
Microsoft Word, and confronted a blinking cursor over a snowy expanse of
white, I found it easy to make other plans. Sometimes I’d eke out ten or
fifteen pages only to recoil at the holes in my story. My theory that Manson
and West were linked was tenuous, circumstantial, lying solely in the fact
that they’d walked the corridors of the same clinic. Wouldn’t it be more
effective to argue that the entire prosecution of Manson was a sham, with
Helter Skelter as a cover-up? Bugliosi had said he “must have missed”
Manson’s San Francisco chapter—but everyone who knew him said he’d
never miss it. I had to show that he concealed more, that witnesses besides
Melcher lied, that there was an elaborate scheme to misrepresent the facts.
Sure, I told myself: that would be better. I’d go back to the trial transcripts—
maybe a few weeks here, a spare weekend there, while I wrote. Maybe Jolly
West didn’t even belong in the book. Maybe Reeve Whitson was just
padding. Maybe, maybe…
 I put more effort into begging for deadline extensions than I did into
writing the book. And the world kept concocting reasons for me to keep
reporting. Toward the end of 2007, a homicide cop named Paul Dostie
claimed to have found forensic evidence of at least five bodies buried at the
Barker Ranch in Death Valley, where Manson was captured in 1969. Dostie’s
trained cadaver dog had sniffed out unidentified remains in the area. As part
of a big PR push, Dostie asked me for information supporting the possibility
that these could be Manson’s long rumored additional victims. His comrade-
in-arms was Debra Tate, Sharon’s sister, who had become a good friend of
mine. Their effort garnered national media coverage. Soon the Inyo County
Sheriff’s Office authorized a dig in the desert.
Skeptics liked to ask: What did it matter if the police had taken so many
months to bring the Family to justice after the murders? Even if they fudged
the investigation, they still found him eventually. My answer was always that
the Family may have used those extra months to continue their murder spree.
At the trial, a ranch hand told police that Manson had bragged about killing
thirty-five people; Bugliosi thought the number “may even exceed Manson’s
estimate.” The bodies had been buried or staged to look like suicides. Just
because the Family had never been prosecuted for these killings didn’t mean
they hadn’t happened. If I could put a human face on the death toll, I could
say with certainty that we were right to question the official narrative—that
the failures of the police, deliberate or not, had a steep cost.
Dostie’s dig could help me with that, but I already had a lead on a
promising unsolved murder from the Family’s time in Death Valley. In
January 2008—motivated by the surge of support for Dostie’s work, petitions
from Debra Tate, and my own preliminary reporting—police announced that
they were reopening an investigation into this death. This was great news,
except when it came to my book. I worried that the renewed attention would
compromise my final reporting. Former Family members might go back
underground after I’d taken months to find out where they lived. The police
might flush out information about the unsolved murder that I’d been on the
brink of finding myself. I had to hit the road right away. The writing was on
hold yet again.
A good part of my trip was a bust. I spent six months living out of cheap
motels and crashing on friends’ couches, racing across the Pacific Northwest
to confront Family members at their doorsteps, along with a slew of other
boldfaced names from Helter Skelter, most of whom had never been found.
They were not happy to see me. Very few of them agreed to speak to me at
all. Several chased me off their property—two with gardening shears.
Just when I was starting to think that the trip was a total wash, I made my
last big break. I had proof—beyond a reasonable doubt, I thought—that the
Manson Family had killed a young man in the desert, and that investigators
had covered it up.

What Happened to Filippo Tenerelli?

On September 29, 1969, a twenty-three-year-old named Filippo Tenerelli left
his parents’ home in a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle. Tenerelli, a native
Italian, had immigrated to Los Angeles with his family in 1959. He had no
history of mental illness and no arrests.
Tenerelli made the long drive from Culver City to Father Crowley Point,
an overlook at Death Valley National Park offering majestic desert vistas. He
was there to drive his car over the cliff.
But at the precipice, the Beetle got caught on boulders, thwarting his
suicide. Frustrated, Tenerelli took a pickax and a shovel from his trunk and
dislodged the car. Then, his fury overpowering his suicidal impulses, he
pushed it over the edge. The car fell some four hundred feet, coming to rest
wheels up at the bottom of the canyon. He clambered down the steep, rocky
terrain, reached into the car to retrieve his belongings, and cut his hands on
something inside, leaving blood splatters on the ceiling.
No one knew how Tenerelli spent the rest of the day, or the day following.
On the evening of the thirtieth, he wound up in Bishop, California, one
hundred miles away. He checked into unit 3 of the Sportsman’s Lodge motel,
where he again tried and failed to kill himself, slashing his right wrist. The
cut was superficial, and he covered it with a bandage.
The next day, October 1, Tenerelli went to the town’s sporting-goods
store and bought a twenty-gauge shotgun, some ammo, a case, and a cleaning
kit. Elsewhere, he picked up two fifths of whiskey, two pairs of underwear, a
safety razor, and an issue of Playboy.
That night Tenerelli emerged from his motel room when he heard fire
engines. The fire department was doing a controlled demolition of a building
across the street. The motel owner, Bee Greer, was watching, and she told
Tenerelli what was going on. He observed the fire for a while and returned to
his room. No one saw him alive again.
A maid tried to get into Tenerelli’s room the next morning. The door was
barricaded from the inside. Around noon, Greer’s husband and son pushed it
in. There was Tenerelli, dead of a gunshot to the face.
Police reports concluded that Tenerelli had blocked the door with a chair,
put the loaded shotgun into his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. He
was lying on his back on the floor, dressed only in jeans, with “two Turkish
bath towels under his head, possibly to soak up blood,” and “a bed pillow
over his head, apparently to muffle the sound.” He’d shaved all of his pubic
hair—some of it was between the pages of the Playboy he’d bought. But
when he’d checked in to the motel, he’d given someone else’s name. With no
ID to be found, he was listed as a John Doe.

Tenerelli’s family filed a missing persons report on October 3. The next day,
two hunters spotted his overturned Beetle at the bottom of Father Crowley
Point and notified the California Highway Patrol. An officer went to look
and, noticing the blood on the ceiling, suspected foul play. The Tenerelli
family learned that their son’s abandoned car had been discovered in Death
Valley.
For three weeks, the Bishop Police Department tried to ID their John Doe
while the county sheriff’s office looked for the missing Tenerelli. They never
connected their parallel investigations, though they had stations next door to
each other in Bishop, and the same coroner’s office served them both.
On October 30, the Inyo Register reported that the “suicide victim” had
been positively identified as Filippo Tenerelli of Culver City. Tenerelli had
been IDed by X-rays that matched his patient records at an L.A. hospital. But
the case was soon pushed from the local papers by an even wilder story: in a
remote area of Death Valley, a band of nomadic hippies had been arrested for
destroying government property and operating an auto-theft ring. In the
coming weeks, they’d be charged with the grisly murders of Sharon Tate and
seven others in Los Angeles.
Although it wasn’t reported at the time, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office
and the California Highway Patrol did briefly consider the possibility that the
Family was responsible for Tenerelli’s death. According to documents I
found, investigators doubted that Tenerelli had died by his own hand; they
had evidence linking Family members to his death. Their suspicions were
obliquely referenced in a Los Angeles Times story two weeks after the Family
was charged in the Tate–LaBianca murders. The paper reported that law
enforcement was looking into other potential Family murders, including a
“motorcyclist killed in Bishop.” Six months later, a Rolling Stone story
quoted an “insider” in the Los Angeles DA’s office—later identified as
Aaron Stovitz—who suggested that the death of “a Philip Tenerelli” might’ve
been the Family’s doing. But no one had reported what, if anything, led
investigators to their suspicions. In 2007, when I began looking into
Tenerelli’s death, no one outside of law enforcement had seen documents
linking Tenerelli to the Family.
I started with three people: the mayor of Bishop, Frank Crom, who’d been
on the police force in 1969; Lieutenant Chris Carter, currently of the Bishop
Police Department; and Leon Brune, the chief deputy coroner in ’69, and still
coroner of Inyo County.
Carter said the records of Tenerelli’s suicide had been “purged.” Only
unsolved homicide records were kept indefinitely. (Another cop who’d
worked the case said he’d seen the records as recently as 1993.) Brune,
meanwhile, faxed me the autopsy report and his investigation of the death.
His record gave me a much clearer picture of Tenerelli’s death, but I found
some glaring inconsistencies. The story got even murkier when I tracked
down the original Bishop Police Department investigative report, which
suggested a far more sinister ending to Tenerelli’s life—and, perhaps more
disturbing, a cover-up of that ending by investigators that continued into the
present. Something was wrong.
I met Brune at his mortuary in Bishop, where I was ushered into a somber
reception area and asked to wait: he was with someone at the moment. That
someone turned out to be Mayor Frank Crom, who didn’t offer me his hand
when he emerged from Brune’s office. Instead, he followed me back into the
room—he intended to sit in on our interview, whether I minded or not. As we
took our seats, I got out my tape recorder. Crom said he wouldn’t allow our
conversation to be recorded. Things didn’t get much better from there. Crom
answered or amended my questions to Brune, constantly interrupting us.
I tried to ask Brune about the sketch of the murder scene I’d found among
the pages he’d faxed. Why weren’t the motel room windows included in the
sketch? No mention was made of them in the report. How big were they?
When the body was discovered, were they open or closed, locked or
unlocked?
Crom answered for him: “No one could’ve gotten in or out of those
windows. They were too small.”
Barely ten minutes after we started, Brune shot a nervous glance at Crom
and ended the meeting. He had business to attend to. I’d asked him only half
of my questions. Crom got me out of the building and followed me to my car,
repeating that there was no way the death was anything but a suicide. He
suggested I was wasting my time. Everything in his behavior said the
opposite.
The Sportsman’s Lodge, where Tenerelli died, was long gone. But Bee
Greer, the owner, wasn’t. A spry eighty-one-year-old widow with a razor-
sharp memory, she flatly contradicted the mayor’s statement that her motel
windows were too small to climb in or out of. Maybe even two people at a
time could fit through them, she said. Her son, Kermit, who’d helped push in
the barricaded door of Tenerelli’s room, was with us that day. He added that
his parents had often punished him by locking him in the same unit. He’d
always climb out the windows, he said, and he wasn’t much smaller then than
he was now. (And he was a big guy.)
If I didn’t believe him, why not go see for myself? The motel hadn’t been
demolished, he reported. It’d been sold to an alfalfa ranch just outside of
town: they picked up the whole structure and moved it out there a few years
before.
I drove out to Zack’s Ranch to have a look. Just as the Greers had said,
the windows were big enough for two people to climb through at the same
time. Andi Zack, whose late father had bought the motel units, told me that
all the windows were original. She showed me unit 3 and let me photograph
it.
Bee Greer remembered when Tenerelli showed up to the motel. He
arrived without a car, she said, which was why he had to show her a driver’s
license—something the police and the newspapers had explicitly said he
didn’t do.
“I never would’ve checked anyone in who came without a car and a
license,” she said—without those, she’d have no collateral if there were
damages to the property or the customer tried to bolt without paying. She
copied the license information into her register, which she later gave to the
police. But the cops, Crom among them, refused to believe that the victim
had showed her ID, or even that he had a wallet. “They kept coming back and
trying to talk me out of it,” she said, still angry all these years later. “It was a
wallet with a driver’s license—but they didn’t want me to say that.”
Later, I found a registration form from the Sportsman’s Lodge. It had
Tenerelli’s name on it—misspelled—and it showed that he paid for a thirty-
three-day stay beginning on October 1, 1969. The total was $156, paid in full.
Bee Greer told me it was “exactly” the same registration form she would’ve
used in 1969, but a couple of things didn’t seem right. The customer always
filled out the form. Why would Tenerelli have spelled his own name wrong?
There should’ve been a home address and a driver’s license number, but
neither was there. Tenerelli’s sister later confirmed that this wasn’t his
handwriting. Plus, Tenerelli had a noticeable Italian accent. The man Greer
spoke with had no accent at all. Maybe someone had checked in under
Tenerelli’s name, paying for a month in advance to ensure that the body
wouldn’t be discovered right away.
The police reports contained no photographs of the crime scene. They
made no mention of any forensics tests—no ballistics, blood splatters,
fingerprints, rigor mortis. Officials I spoke to said these would have been
routine in an unattended shooting death, even in 1969. There was a lab report
showing that Tenerelli’s blood-alcohol level at the time of his death was
.03%, which doesn’t even qualify as under the influence. But he’d bought
those two fifths of whiskey the night before he died. When his body was
found, one bottle was sitting empty in the wastebasket; the other was on a
shelf, only a third full. If Tenerelli didn’t drink all that whiskey, who did?
The documents made me wonder when exactly Bishop police and the
coroner’s office had figured out the identity of the John Doe in their morgue.
On October 17, a radiologist at Washington Hospital in Culver City
examined X-rays of the John Doe sent to her by the Inyo County coroner.
They were “similar or identical,” she wrote, to those of a patient who’d been
operated on at the hospital after a motorcycle accident in ’64: Tenerelli. The
Inyo coroner had been notified of the match “within twenty-four hours,” so
they’d identified their John Doe as Tenerelli no later than October 18. And
yet the chief of police had told the Inyo Register that the identification came
ten days later, on October 28.
The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office was investigating the case from the
other side: they’d found Tenerelli’s totaled Beetle in the desert, and they
wanted to know where he’d gone. Documents from their investigation
suggested that the coroner’s office withheld information from them. When an
Inyo detective asked about Bishop’s John Doe on October 28, Brune didn’t
tell him they’d identified the victim nearly two weeks earlier.
Had Brune deliberately kept this from the sheriff? Why wasn’t Tenerelli’s
identification shared with the other agencies—or his own family—sooner? I
could never ask Brune. Neither he nor Crom spoke to me again.
Robert Denton, the surgeon who’d conducted Tenerelli’s autopsy, told me
he’d never believed the case was a suicide; he only called it that under
pressure from the coroner’s office. Looking over his own report, Denton said,
“See where I wrote, ‘This man seems to be a suicide’? I wasn’t happy with
this. That’s why I wrote seems.” He shook his head. “There were bum things
going on here.” It appeared to him now, as it probably did then, that Tenerelli
had been “in a fight or dragged” before he was shot. In those days, he said, a
lot of “questionable deaths” were “signed off as suicides”: “It was too
expensive to investigate… People didn’t want to be involved.”

On the other side, the sheriffs and the California Highway Patrol were
looking into the abandoned Volkswagen with blood on its interior.
A report filed by one of the sheriff’s deputies on October 5 said, “From
indications at the scene… the vehicle has not been at the location for more
than two days.” If that was true, Tenerelli couldn’t have dumped the car. His
body had been found three days earlier, on October 2, and the estimated time
of death was between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., October 1.
And yet all the newspapers, working on information from the police,
reported that Tenerelli had ditched his car there after a failed suicide attempt.
Why did police concoct this story when they knew it couldn’t be true?
There were clues among the evidence recovered from the scene near the
car. Cops found a pickax and a shovel with a broken handle, as well as beer
and soda bottles—all covered in what was thought to be Tenerelli’s blood.
Then there was a cache of unused shotgun shells, a loaf of French bread and a
package of lunch meat, maps, “miscellaneous papers,” and several documents
indicating that Tenerelli might not have been alone in the car: a “meal” and
“laundry” sheet from Brentwood Hospital, where he had neither worked nor
been a patient; and a Santa Monica bus schedule, which he wouldn’t have
needed because he owned a car and a motorcycle.
The two hunters who’d chanced upon Tenerelli’s car had observed
someone “coming up from the wreck” as they climbed down to it, sheriffs’
reports said. There was far more blood in and around the vehicle than the
papers had reported: blood on the fender and bumper, inside the driver’s-side
door and under the dash, palm prints in dried blood, scratch marks going
through the dried blood… a lot of blood from just one man who had no
noticeable wounds when he arrived in Bishop. Bee Greer had told police that
when she talked to Tenerelli he “seemed quite natural and told her that he
was here to look the area over and possibly find a job.” If the coroner’s time
of death was correct, Tenerelli had shaved his pubes, downed a bottle and a
half of whiskey, and shot himself within two hours of that conversation.
Meanwhile, memos from the California Highway Patrol suggested
suspects for the murder: the group of hippie car thieves they’d recently taken
into custody. In Bishop, “around the 1st of October,” a highway patrolman
had stopped a “late model” blue Volkswagen; Tenerelli drove a ’69 blue
Volkswagen, and October 1 was the day before his body was found. The
patrolman questioned the driver, who, like his two male passengers, was a
“hippie” type. Later, investigators showed the patrolman a photograph of the
Family, including Manson, Steven Grogan, and Danny DeCarlo. He “was
sure” that DeCarlo was the driver of the car.
The report continued: “Even though Tenerelli was supposed to be a
definite suicide, perhaps Bishop PD would be interested, especially if we can
place DiCarlo [sic] in Bishop after 9-29-69 and prior to or on 10-1-69.” I
checked, and DeCarlo was in Death Valley on exactly the dates in question.
But there was no indication that the Highway Patrol had shared their findings
with the Bishop Police Department.
Records from the Inyo District Attorney contained a morgue photograph
of Tenerelli’s face, with a note attached. DAs wanted to find another photo of
Tenerelli to show to “Kitty”: the Family’s Kitty Lutesinger, who’d run away
from Death Valley before her friends were caught, and who’d briefly
cooperated with investigators. If she told detectives anything about Tenerelli,
we’ll probably never know—there were no other documents linking the two,
and she refused to speak to me when I knocked on her door in 2008.

Neither of the officers who investigated Tenerelli’s abandoned Volkswagen

believed he committed suicide. One of them, the California Highway Patrol’s
Doug Manning, called the official story “a bunch of malarkey.” The other,
Inyo sheriff’s deputy Dennis Cox, called it “bullshit.”
Cox was sure the car was “dumped” in Death Valley after Tenerelli’s
death in Bishop. He’d been to Father Crowley Point the day before the
hunters discovered the Beetle, and “it wasn’t there.” After the Manson
Family was arrested for their auto-theft ring, one of the girls told
investigators that she was “involved” with Tenerelli, and that he’d been with
the Family in Death Valley before his death. But Cox couldn’t remember
who’d said that.
When police in Death Valley finally captured the Family, they’d been
tracking the group’s car thefts and burglaries since September 29 at the latest.
They might not have known yet that their suspects were killers, but they did
know that they’d been stealing vehicles all over Inyo County, with a special
predilection for Volkswagen Beetles, which they liked to convert into dune
buggies for use in the rugged desert terrain.
One last thing bothered me: the pubic hair. If, as police reports stated,
Tenerelli had shaved his pubes just before killing himself, and a “few
strands” had been found “between the pages” of a Playboy magazine—what
happened to the rest? The Family’s Bill Vance had a “magic vest” he liked to
wear that was “made of pubic hair,” per a report from the Los Angeles
County Sheriff’s Office. The LASO report never said where the pubic hair
came from—and how could it, really?—but I found it relevant that Vance, an
associate of Manson from prison, was arrested for stealing a gun from a car in
Death Valley on October 5, 1969, the day Tenerelli’s car was pulled from the
nearby ravine.

Coda: “Out of the Loop”

In January 2008, Bishop’s new chief of police, Kathleen Sheehan, called to
say she’d heard about my investigation from Debra Tate. In light of my
findings she was reopening the investigation into Tenerelli’s death. She
assigned a homicide detective, David Jepson, to the case, asking me to share
my findings with him. “Murder doesn’t happen every day around here,” she
said.
I was happy to help. For once, I thought my reporting might yield positive
results, rather than dead ends and obfuscation. Jepson and I spoke on the
phone more than a dozen times before he decided to visit me in L.A. That
July, he and his superior, Chris Carter, drove 275 miles to meet with me in
the dining room of the Embassy Suites Hotel in El Segundo.
During our four-hour meeting, which Jepson recorded, I showed them
everything. Both officers agreed that the death was a “probable” murder and
vowed to continue their investigation in Bishop. Carter said he didn’t
“believe in coincidences,” and there were “too many” here. But toward the
end of the meeting they turned off the recorder and made an odd request.
Carter asked me to copy the documents I’d shared that day and mail the
file to a “personal” P.O. box in Bishop. The detectives were concerned that
their chief, Sheehan, would use this case to get publicity. They wanted to
keep her “out of the loop on this one” until the investigation was over.
I didn’t like the sound of that, and I told them so. Sheehan had been the
one who reopened the case. We wouldn’t be meeting if not for her.
Making sure the recorder was still off, Carter said he believed Sheehan
would “kill the investigation” if she found out that “it involved a cover-up or
even incompetence.” And the mayor, Frank Crom—who’d already tried to
persuade me to leave well enough alone—would “pull the plug if [we]
discover cover-up aspects.” The detectives assured me they’d prevent any
derailment of the investigation, and they promised to share anything new they
uncovered. Against my better instincts, I agreed to continue cooperating with
them.
That was a big mistake. I never heard from either officer again. Through
intermediaries, I learned they were telling people in Bishop that their
investigation had turned up no pursuable evidence and the case had been
closed.
The three of us had discussed people they’d want to interview when they
returned to Bishop. I called a lot of those people—they’d never heard from
the detectives. In fact, in the six months between the reopening of the case
and their visit to me in L.A., they had interviewed only three people. That
number never went up. According to the scant record Jepson finally shared
with me in 2011, he never conducted another interview after our meeting.
When I finally got Jepson on the phone, I reminded him that he’d
promised to share his findings with me. He said his files were in a storage
shed in his backyard. It took him weeks to dig through this shed. Because I
kept leaving him messages, he eventually called me back and, sounding
triumphant, told me that he’d found one of his notebooks. He faxed me the
pages from it: they covered the same period I already knew about, during
which he’d spoken to all of three people. Jepson was sure there were later
interviews, but he kept searching in his shed, and nothing turned up.
I had to ask if the investigation had been quashed, as he and Carter had
warned it would be if it disclosed a “cover-up” or “incompetence” in the old
department.
After a lot of prodding, Jepson recalled “conversations” at the police
department before their meeting with me—something to the effect that they
weren’t going to have “people come up here and smear a retired lieutenant’s
[Frank Crom’s] name and smear the department.”
I knew I had to go to Jepson’s superiors, beginning with Sheehan. By then
she’d left Bishop to become chief of police in Port Hueneme, another small
town in California. Although she sounded happy to hear from me again on
the phone, by the time I drove out to see her the next day, her mood had
darkened. Like Jepson, she said the investigation was over, and that was all
there was to it. When I explained that Carter and Jepson had said that she
craved publicity and should be kept “out of the loop,” she didn’t believe it. I
showed her my notes from that meeting, and she accused me of fabricating
them. I’d seen these reversals many times before, almost exclusively from
law enforcement officials. But Sheehan’s was so abrupt, so hard, that I left
her office shaken—whatever had happened in Bishop, I believed she was a
part of it.
Chris Carter, who’d succeeded Sheehan as chief of the Bishop Police
Department, was clearly prepared for my call. He denied everything he’d said
to me in L.A. while his recorder was off. I asked for a copy of the tape—he’d
be happy to provide it. I knew he’d made his incriminating remarks when the
recorder wasn’t running, I said, but I still expected to hear the click of the
machine going off and on again. I should’ve kept that to myself. Two weeks
later, when I called again, he claimed the tape had been lost or destroyed.
Nevertheless, I filed an Open Records Act Request with the Bishop Police
Department for all files on their reinvestigation of the Tenerelli death. I
received a response saying no records had been found.
Through all this, I never stopped thinking of Tenerelli’s mother, Caterina,
whom I’d met in 2008, when she was ninety-four. With one of her daughters
translating her Italian, she told me she never accepted that her son killed
himself. She believed God had kept her alive to learn the truth about him. But
she’d died at ninety-nine, never knowing the answers.

Paul Dostie, the detective with the cadaver dog, had no better luck than I did.
The sheriff halted his dig in Death Valley after less than two feet of earth had
been removed.
And now my book was even more overdue than my article to Premiere
had ever been. Penguin had granted me extension after extension, approving
another advance payment to me to keep me afloat. In the meantime, my
editor had left the house, and the 2008 recession had editorial departments
tightening their belts. Author contracts had once come with implicit latitude.
Now, with lots of money on the line, editors wanted something to show for
their investments, especially when an untested writer had received a
significant advance.
The fortieth anniversary of the Tate–LaBianca murders came and went. It
had now been ten years since my report for Premiere was supposed to
appear. The magazine didn’t even exist anymore. On cable news, my fellow
reporters and dozens of my interview subjects showed up as talking heads,
discussing the continuing significance of the murders. There was Bugliosi,
still hawking Helter Skelter, calling the crimes “revolutionary, political.”
I fumbled and fiddled, trying to find a workable structure for the book.
Should it begin with MKULTRA? The night of the Tate murders? No matter
where I dropped in, I tripped myself up with parentheticals and long
digressions; there was no starting point that didn’t entail a herculean amount
of exposition. I sent in outlines, synopses, addenda, half-starts, revised
proposals. None of them hit the mark, and I knew that. I’d come to feel like a
prisoner of my own story. Everyone agreed that it would make for an
outstanding book; no one, least of all me, could describe what that book
might look like, or how it would accommodate a plot that had no end. By
2011, I’d taken so long to deliver that my original editor had come back to
Penguin. He proposed bringing on a collaborator, someone who could
metabolize my reporting into a cogent narrative.
I was all for it. Penguin helped me find an ideal candidate: a journalist
with decades of political reporting and many books under his belt, someone
with experience and sangfroid. When he signed on, I felt like I could see a
lifeboat on the horizon. He wrote yet another synopsis, one that yielded the
first unabashedly positive note from Penguin I’d gotten in years. “We find
this very encouraging: full speed ahead.”
That was in October 2011. By December, he’d quit. Our deadline—the
last one—was only six months away, and now I was flying solo.
After he walked, Penguin offered to buy me out. If I let someone else
write the book—completely—I’d receive no more money, no credit, no input,
nothing. All I’d get was the portion of the advance I’d already received—and
spent, years before, on nothing but reporting the book. I told my agent to tell
them to go to hell.
I decided to use those remaining six months to write the book myself.
Before he’d even seen my manuscript, my editor warned that there was only
a one in a million chance they wouldn’t reject it. I typed out pages in furious
haste. I tried to be thorough, to be linear. I wrote in the first person, hoping to
give readers a sense of what I’d been thinking. And in June 2012, I turned in
what I had: 129 pages, single-spaced, amounting to 117,228 words. It
covered barely the first three months of my reporting.
If you’ve inspected the spine of this book, you’ve already noticed that the
Penguin Press colophon isn’t on it. They canceled the book. I like to believe
my editor was sorry it came to this, and that he believed in the project. I don’t
believe Penguin’s lawyers shared his sorrow—they wanted their money back.
If I didn’t pay up by the start of 2013, they would have no choice but to sue
me.
I didn’t have that money, of course. I’d been living on it, as the publisher
had intended me to, for years. A few months earlier, I’d been hoping to repay
my parents for their loan. Now I was in the hole with them and one of the
biggest publishers in the world. In 2012, I became one of a dozen authors
Penguin sued for failing to deliver manuscripts. Most were far more
established than I was. The lawsuits sent waves of panic through the industry.
Even though mine was for the most money, it came half a year later than the
others, and so, mercifully, it didn’t make the papers. That was one
humiliation I was spared.
But I was still devastated. I felt like I’d failed everyone. I had one job to
do, and I hadn’t done it. Paul Krassner, the journalist who’d warned me that
the story would “take over my life,” was more than right: it had chewed me
up and spit me out. I didn’t know how I could ever report on anything else
now. My agent shopped the book around to other publishers, and while a few
were interested in buying the rights, the offers never materialized. Some
documentary filmmakers had courted me, too, and one, an Oscar winner,
went so far as to make some test footage, which he sold as a series to a
premium cable station. But there, too, things fell apart. In all honesty, though,
I was the one who backed out of these projects. Inevitably, the conversations
ran aground on questions of ownership—some legal, others more figurative.
Whose story was this? How far did you have to step back before you could fit
a frame around it? And, of course: Where did it all go?
I remember a day soon after the deal fell apart. My neighbor, a good
friend, was walking his dogs and saw me sitting outside, looking miserable.
He invited me to join him. After trying to distract me with pleasantries for a
while, he turned the conversation to the lawsuit.
“Do you regret all this?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said. I shocked myself with my answer, but I really believed
it. “This has been the most exciting thirteen years of my life. There’s nothing
like the adrenaline rush of catching these people in lies, and documenting it—
knowing that you’ve found something no one else has found.”
I kept little pieces of cardboard around my office. Sometimes I folded
them up and carried them in my pocket. Whenever I started doubting myself,
which was a lot, I had a list of bullet points I’d write down on them and read
to myself for encouragement—a reminder of what I’d discovered that no one
else had, what I knew I had to share with the world. Like: Stephen Kay
telling me that my findings were important enough to overturn the verdicts.
Lewis Watnick, the retired DA, saying that Manson had to be an informant.
Jolly West writing to his CIA handlers to announce that he’d implanted a
false memory in someone; the CIA removing that information from the report
they shared with Congress. The DA’s office conspiring with a judge to
replace a defense attorney. Charlie Guenther, fighting back tears to tell me
about the wiretap he’d heard. People had confided in me. I’d wrested
documents from places other reporters had never penetrated. What did it
mean, and what would I do with it?
When I got back from the walk with my neighbor that day, I fished out
one of the cardboard squares and read the bullet points again. Each one set
off a chain of reminders to myself: People I needed to call. FOIA requests I
had to follow up on. A new book on the CIA I hadn’t read yet. A retired
detective whose files were probably, at this very second, quietly turning to
dust in his garage…
What else could I do?
I kept reporting.
 EPILOGUE

The Manson murders have an aura of finality. In 2016, The Guardian

marveled at how they compel us despite “the lack of any meaty mystery”:
“There are no questions about what happened… We know pretty much
exactly who did what to whom, when and why.” In a sense, that’s true: the
material evidence is sickeningly conclusive, and it still shocks today. But it
doesn’t make sense. The mystery is there.
In my nearly twenty years of reporting on this case, people have asked me
all the time: What do I think really happened? I hate that question more than
anything. The plain answer is, I don’t know. I worry that as soon as I
speculate, I undermine the work I’ve done. In a sense, had I been more
willing to fill in the blanks, I might’ve finished this book a lot sooner.
That’s not to say I haven’t entertained a lot of pet theories over the years.
They’ve fallen in and out of favor as I learned more or shifted my focus. For
a while, I was convinced the victims at the Tate and LaBianca houses knew
their killers in the Family, that they’d been targeted—maybe not by the girls,
but by Manson and Tex Watson. It may have had something to do with a
drug burn, or an unknown middleman with connections to Hollywood. Or
there’s the possibility that the Family was caught up in a CHAOS or
COINTELPRO operation, goaded into violence as sheriff’s deputies and the
LAPD looked the other way, necessitating a cover-up. And there’s the most
“far out” theory: that Manson was tied to an MKULTRA effort to create
assassins who would kill on command.
It’s when someone claims that I’ve “found the truth” that I get anxious. I
haven’t found the truth, much as I wish I could say I have. My goal isn’t to
say what did happen—it’s to prove that the official story didn’t. I’ve learned
to accept the ambiguity. I had to, I realized, if I ever wanted to finish this
book. For every chapter here, there are a dozen I’ve left out. There’s more,
there’s always more.
But I haven’t stopped trying. If there’s hope anywhere, it’s in the
documents. I remain shocked by the state’s lack of transparency. For reasons
I can’t understand, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, federal
bureaus, and other outposts of officialdom continue to suppress their files,
even as they claim they have nothing to hide.
This position assumes a certain amount of complacency in the public. If
the truth turns out to exist on a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, on
the 3,005th page of a transcript so dry that no one has read it from start to
finish, they’re counting on our not caring. To get to that kernel of truth, you
have to generate a paper trail of your own: of FOIA requests, public hearings,
and concerned letters to your congressperson, all eventually housed in their
own sleepy archives.
As of this writing, the LAPD and the DA’s office are still in legal battles
about their unfathomable refusal to release information—a refusal that
extends to the victims’ families and to the defendants themselves.
The latest front is a battle over the Tex Watson tapes. Less than two
weeks before the Family’s capture in the desert. Watson absconded to his
parents’ place in Copeville, Texas. On November 30, 1969, he turned himself
in for questioning after learning that two LAPD detectives were on a plane
heading his way. He got a lawyer, Bill Boyd, of Dallas, who sat him down to
make a taped confession. This is, as far as anyone knows, the first known
recorded account of the crimes—before Bugliosi or anyone else could impose
narrative order on it. It’s all the more valuable because Watson hadn’t even
been identified as a suspect yet. He was speaking of his own accord to his
lawyer, not as a man defending himself to the police.
According to Boyd, Watson described the duration of his time with the
Family and, in chilling detail, the killing of Tate and the other victims. He
was “very straightforward” and “candid” about his involvement in the crimes,
Boyd told me. He also described other murders that the group committed—
murders that hadn’t been discovered.
In 2009, Boyd agreed to let me listen to the tapes, but only with Watson’s
permission, which I knew he’d never get. He wouldn’t go into granular detail
about them, perhaps realizing that he’d already violated Watson’s
confidentiality. Boyd died a year after we spoke. By 2011, his law firm had
gone bankrupt, and its holdings were in receivership—including the cassettes,
which he’d kept in a safe in his office.
A Dallas bankruptcy trustee had come into possession of the tapes, and
she seemed on the verge of releasing them to me. Instead, she offered them to
Patrick Sequeira, the deputy district attorney in L.A. who handled Watson’s
parole hearings. Sequeira supported my effort to get them, and he assured me
he’d let me hear them—“We wouldn’t even know they existed if it weren’t
for you,” he said. Watson tried to halt their release, filing an injunction in
Texas and setting off a yearlong battle. The DA’s office won. But since
gaining custody of the recordings, they have been played for no one outside
the justice system, not even the victims’ families, who asked to hear them.
The DA’s office and the LAPD have released only minimal and at times
contradictory statements about their content.
Sequeira told me there were no unknown homicides mentioned on them—
there was nothing new at all. But if the DA’s office released them to me,
they’d have to release them to everyone, and they didn’t want the information
to be distorted by the public. Soon after, he cut off communications with me.
Richard Pfeiffer, the attorney for Leslie Van Houten, wanted to hear the
tapes, too—what if they contained exculpatory information that could be used
at parole hearings? Pfeiffer tried to get them but to no avail. Soon the DA’s
office trotted out a different reason for not releasing them: “There are
unsolved crimes Manson Family members are suspected of committing. The
information in the tape(s) are part of the investigation of those crimes and
could be used to solve them.”
The case reached the California Supreme Court. Pfeiffer suggested that
the judge could review the tapes and make his own decision. But the DA’s
office did not “believe it necessary for the court to arduously labor through
the 326 pages of [Watson’s] rambling musings.” The court decided in the
DA’s favor. Since then, Leslie Van Houten has been approved for parole for
the first time ever. California’s governor at the time, Jerry Brown, vetoed her
release on the recommendation of the DA’s office. Although Pfeiffer made it
clear that it was his idea to go after the tapes, the DAs had lambasted Van
Houten for trying to get them, saying it was clear evidence that she still
hadn’t accepted full responsibility for her crimes.
Pfeiffer vowed to go back to court and get the tapes, and he’s pursued a
number of legal avenues, all unsuccessful, thus far. To this day, the DA’s
office is guarding them with more fervor than ever. I keep the parole hearings
in my calendar, making sure to get transcripts of them as soon as they’re
available. At these hearings, the state tries to turn the mind-bending events of
August 9, 1969, into inert history—and they’re one of the only places left to
hope for the truth.

Whenever I tell people about my work, they want to know if I interviewed

Charles Manson himself. I did, over the phone, in 2000. Our first
conversation, disconcertingly enough, was on Valentine’s Day.
Our exchanges were mediated through two of Manson’s associates, Pin
Cushion and Gray Wolf. The former, nicknamed for the frequency with
which he’d been stabbed, was born Roger Dale Smith. He was Manson’s guy
on the inside, his prison gofer. The latter, born Craig Hammond, had been
anointed Gray Wolf by Manson himself, and brokered all outside access to
Manson. A retiree, he’d moved to Hanford, California, decades earlier just to
be near the prison that housed Manson, whom he believed to possess “deep
insight into environmental issues.” (Many of Manson’s latter-day followers
claimed to be enchanted by his ecological “ATWA” philosophy—“Air,
Trees, Water, Animals,” or “All the Way Alive”—through which he endorsed
the use of a seed gun called “the Savior” to repopulate California’s plant
species.) Later, Hammond was arrested for smuggling a cell phone to
Manson in prison. A few years after that, when Manson had gotten engaged
to a young woman named Star, he discovered that Hammond had been
sleeping with her, and rechristened him “Dead Rat.”
In 2000, when Gray Wolf set up my interview, he urged me to “protect
myself.” “You don’t know what powers are pushing against you,” he said.
He patched me through to Pin Cushion, who put on Manson himself. We
would have five minutes to talk before the prison terminated the call
automatically.
“Hello, Tom,” Manson said.
“Hi, Charlie, how you doing?”
“Aw, hanging loose, man.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.
“Yeah, same to you, man.”
I’d only caught Manson’s interest because his handlers had told him I had
information about potential perjury during the trial—Terry Melcher’s. But
now that I had him on the line, he wanted to talk about anything but Terry
Melcher. I gave him a brief introduction to my angle for Premiere, which he
dismissed as “hype.” He wanted me to speak “to the heart.” I rattled off a list
of names to see if he knew them.
“I don’t know anyone, man,” he said. “I barely know myself.”
Manson spoke in riddles when he spoke at all. He claimed that there was a
lot of money behind the murders, and that the “United States Navy” held the
purse strings. “I’m Vincent Bugliosi’s godfather,” he said. But he wasn’t a
snitch, so he wasn’t going to give me any names. “There’s a lot of people
playing a lot of games, man,” he said. He added: “I pitched horseshoes when
I was seventeen.”
Whenever he didn’t feel like answering, he’d say something like that. “I
got five red wheels on that truck.” Or: “When Reagan went to Greenland we
locked all the weather stations to the heart project.”
Our five minutes vanished before I even got my bearings. Hammond
dialed again. If I wanted to connect with Charlie, he said, I had to show him
my human side, my heart. I took a breath while Manson got back on the line.
“Look it, man,” he said. “See, I have no way of knowing what you’re
biting into.”
I tried again to explain. Even in Manson’s more lucid moments, the only
thing we saw eye to eye on was that the prosecution had played dirty. But he
didn’t think Melcher was the problem—“He didn’t say anything.” He seemed
to have written Melcher off. “The simplicity of the whole thing is that Terry
gave his word for something,” he said, “and he didn’t do it, and we didn’t
realize that the Korean War was lost.” To him, the real villain was Linda
Kasabian, his lapsed follower, who’d flipped for the prosecution.
“She gave the souls of her children up to the devil in a sacrificial trip that
came down in an agreement with the universal mind,” he explained. “You
just tell her that the key to Red Skelton’s house is in the ventilator and it’s
still there. And that crypt is still there with the dogs at attention.”
Our time was nearly up again. Manson passed the phone back to Pin
Cushion, who offered to write down my remaining questions and send me
Manson’s answers, verbatim.
But the next night, Gray Wolf called and said that would never happen.
Manson—who was apparently much less gnomic with his friends than he’d
been with me—was upset with me. He and Pin Cushion wouldn’t talk again
or send answers. Gray Wolf seemed surprised by all of it. He wasn’t used to
Manson taking calls from journalists, and he said that he, too, was still
processing everything he’d heard last night, as if some of it had been news to
him. I wondered if this had more to do with Pin Cushion, who’d made some
bold claims as he’d jotted down my questions. He said Manson personally
knew Mama Cass Elliot. He’d brought his girls to orgies for the Hollywood
elite. He’d left a bunch of “bodies out in that motherfucking desert, man!”
And, most mystifying of all, other members of the Family may have gone to
the Tate house the night she was killed. I wondered if Manson had been
standing next to him while he said all this, and gotten angry afterward.
In 2008, I reached out to Manson again through Gray Wolf. This was after
my many run-ins with Manson’s former followers, many of whom were not
as former as I thought. The people I’d asked about Filippo Tenerelli and other
possible victims must have relayed those communications to Manson. Gray
Wolf told me never to get in touch again.
“People are upset with you and you’re in trouble,” he said. “You don’t
have permission to do what you’re doing.” He wouldn’t say more. I was cut
off. “And I don’t know you,” he added. He hung up.
So concluded my dealings with Charles Manson and his inner circle.
When Manson died, in November 2017, the moment aroused little feeling in
me. My investigation orbited him, but he mattered hardly at all to me. At
some point, as a cottage industry rose up around him and he became a true-
crime icon, he’d been made brittle, toothless. His image had become a
repository for our fears. Everyone preferred the idea of him to the reality, and
in death, he was more ideal than ever: the killer hippie from the sixties, a
decade that feels further removed from the present than many that occurred
before it.
Always willing to play the madman, he slipped too easily into our
understanding of the criminal mastermind. In that rictus of his, those glinting
eyes, the X carved into his forehead, we’re supposed to recognize what
Bugliosi famously called “a metaphor for evil.” But the full extent of that evil
isn’t in what we know about Manson. It’s in what we don’t know. That’s
what kept me going all these years, even when I was broke, even when
people said I was crazy, even when I had death threats lobbed at me.
As Manson said to me with an air of disgust: “The bottom line is that you
want information.”
“Exactly,” I said.
Charles Manson sitting opposite his lawyer, Irving Kanarek, at the 1970 trial for the Tate–
LaBianca murders. (Bettmann Archive)
Vincent Bugliosi, chief prosecutor in the Tate–LaBianca trial, speaking with reporters outside the
courtroom in 1971. (Associated Press)
Four of Manson’s followers (from left: Cathy Gillies, Kitty Lutesinger, Sandy Good, and Brenda
McCann) kneel on the sidewalk outside the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, March 1971.
(Associated Press)
Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate’s husband, at the house on Cielo Drive mere days after the
murders in August 1969. (Courtesy Julian Wasser)
Jay Sebring (far left), Roman Polanski, and Sharon Tate at a
party in London. (Bill Ray / The Life Picture Collection)
Terry Melcher with Candice Bergen at the Whisky a Go Go in the summer of 1967. During
Manson’s trial, Melcher would become one of the prosecution’s most important—and most
suspicious—witnesses. (Phil Roach/ipol/Globe Photos, Inc.)
Rudi Altobelli, standing and speaking to Candice Bergen
during a gathering at the house on Cielo Drive. Altobelli,
who owned the house, suggested that the true story behind
the murders has never been told. (Courtesy Dominic
Pescarino)
Altobelli in 1999, with one of his many adopted cats.
(Courtesy Dominic Pescarino)
One of several memos in Bugliosi’s handwriting suggesting
that Melcher continued to see Manson after the Tate–
LaBianca murders. (Public archive)
 A police drawing of the Spahn Movie Ranch, the Family’s hideout. Deputies from the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Office raided the ranch on August 16, 1969, but they apparently failed
to connect the Family to the rash of murders it had recently committed. (Courtesy John A.
Kolman)
 A mug shot of the Family’s Bobby Beausoleil, who
participated in the murder of Gary Hinman. (Courtesy Lee
Koury)
Reeve Whitson with his wife, Ellen, in the winter of 1961–
62. Whitson claimed to have been at the house on Cielo
Drive in the hours after the Tate murders. (Courtesy Liza
Josefson)
 Whitson disguised as a hippie. His friends and family
believed he was an intelligence agent with ties to the Manson
case. (Courtesy Liza Josefson)
At work in my home office in Venice Beach, around 1999.
(Author collection)
At work in my home office in Venice Beach, in 2014. (Courtesy Errol Morris)
At work in my home office in Venice Beach, in 2014. (Courtesy Errol Morris)
The whiteboard on which, to the concern and amusement of
my friends, I tried to keep track of all the connections I’d
made in the case. (Author collection)
Susan Atkins, right, leaving the grand jury proceedings for
the Tate–LaBianca murders with her defense attorney,
Richard Caballero. Atkins’s testimony was critical to
securing indictments against Manson and others in the
Family, including herself. But Caballero came to represent
her only through an arrangement by prosecutors. (Ralph
Crane / The Life Picture Collection)
 Caballero also sold his client’s story to the press and
arranged to have it published as a quickie paperback,
released the same month as her grand jury appearance—a
move that only bolstered the state’s case against Atkins and
her coconspirators. (Author collection)
Mary Brunner, one of Manson’s earliest followers, with their
child, Michael “Pooh Bear” Valentine. (Life magazine)
Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, with his assistant, Gail Sadalla. Manson formed the
Family during his time under Smith’s supervision in San Francisco. (Elaine Mayes)
A stern letter to Manson from the Federal Probation Office.
Manson often ignored his responsibilities as a federal
parolee, but he never faced any consequences. (Public
archive)
 Dr. David E. Smith (facing the camera), the cofounder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical
Clinic, during the summer of love in 1967. Manson and the Family frequented the clinic. (Wayne
F. Miller / Magnum Photos)
 In clinical experiments, David Smith injected drugs into
groups of rodents in confinement. His research echoed the
work of John B. Calhoun, a scientist who used rats to study
the effects of overpopulation. Illustrations in his landmark
1962 paper, “Population Density and Social Pathology,”
showed the rodents growing violent in increasingly crowded
environments. (Scientific American)
 Through his clinic, Smith launched the Journal of
Psychedelic Drugs, a research periodical that later included a
study of the Manson Family’s “group-marriage commune.”
(Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic)
Dr. Louis Jolyon West, circa 1955. The Central
Intelligence Agency subcontracted West for its
top-secret MKULTRA program, although he
denied it for the rest of his life. (Louis Jolyon
West files, UCLA)
West found notoriety in 1962
when one of his experiments
led him to inject an elephant
with enough LSD to kill it in
an accidental overdose. While
the fact never came out,
funding for this debacle came
from the CIA. (The
Oklahoman digital archive)
In the 1950s, around the time he researched mind-control techniques for the CIA, West inserted
himself into the case of Jimmy Shaver, a Texas airman convicted of raping and murdering a
three-year-old girl. Shaver claimed to have no memory of the crime. (San Antonio News)
Sidney Gottlieb, West’s handler at the CIA, wrote to him
under the pseudonym Sherman Grifford, using letterhead
from “Chemrophyl Associates,” a front company. Their
correspondence, which confirms West’s participation in
MKULTRA, has never before been published. (Author
collection)
 In 1969, at age twenty-three, Filippo Tenerelli was found
dead in a Bishop, California, motel room. Although his death
was ruled a suicide, police covered up an abundance of
evidence suggesting he was another victim of the Manson
Family. (Courtesy Caterina Tenerelli)
 After his death, Tenerelli’s Volkswagen Beetle
was found overturned near the Family’s hideout in
Death Valley. Manson and his followers routinely
stole Beetles to convert them into dune buggies for
use in the rough desert terrain. (Courtesy Dallas
Sumpter)
A coroner’s drawing of the scene of Tenerelli’s death. The autopsy physician later said he was
never confident that the incident was a suicide. (Author collection)
The Family in Death Valley, November 1968, in a never-
before-published photograph. Manson appears in the back
row, fourth from the left. (Special Collections department,
University of Nevada)
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The twenty-year journey culminating in this book began with a phone call
from Leslie Van Buskirk at Premiere magazine. For that I am forever grateful
and, yeah, sometimes resentful. Jim Meigs bet the bank on this—I wish he
could’ve stuck around to the end, but who wants to live with Manson that
long, except for me? Others at Premiere who kept me on my toes for nearly
two years were Kathy Heintzelmen and Anne Thompson.
Without my agent, Sloan Harris of ICM, this book wouldn’t exist. His
tenacity and faith—not to mention his extraordinary ability to think outside
the box when cancelations, lawsuits, and threats became routine—should be
enshrined in the Agentry Hall of Fame. Also life-preserving at ICM were
Sloan’s assistants over the years: Kristyn Keene, Heather Karpas, and Alexa
Brahme. Kudos, too, to the lawyers who kept me out of jail or, at least,
bankruptcy court: John DeLaney and Heather Bushong. And to Rich Green,
Michael McCormick, and Will Watkins, who wrangled much-needed
sustenance from Hollywood.
At Little, Brown, editor-in-chief Judy Clain went where others before her
wouldn’t (or did, then fled). Reagan Arthur bravely put pen to paper, making
it real. Their team—Alex Hoopes, Katharine Myers, Alyssa Persons, Ira
Boudah, Ben Allen, Trent Duffy, and Lauren Harms—pulled off the amazing
feat of producing and publicizing this book. Thanks also to Eric Rayman and
Carol Ross, whose close reading safeguarded (hopefully) my future mobility.
When you work on a book for twenty years—examining crimes that
occurred decades prior—you lose many of your sources along the way.
Among the many who are no longer with us, but who must be acknowledged
for excavating memories of a dark, horrifying time, are: Rudi Altobelli, Bill
Garretson, Elaine Young, Dominick Dunne, Bill Tennant, Shahrokh Hatami,
Richard and Paul Sylbert, Polly Platt, Charles Eastman, Julia Phillips, Denny
Doherty, Christopher Jones, Gene Gutowski, and Victor Lownes.
From the law enforcement and legal worlds, and also gone: Charlie
Guenther, Paul Whiteley, Bill Gleason, Preston Guillory, Mike and Elsa
McGann, Danny Bowser, Paul Caruso, Gerald and Milton Condon, Paul
Fitzgerald, Lewis Watnick, Buck Compton, and George Denny.
To thank everyone I interviewed would require dozens of pages—and
many of my sources never appear in this book. I’ll limit this list to the ones
who endured my inquiries for years, if not decades, and who deserve
accolades for their patience.
From the world of Cielo Drive and slightly beyond: Allan Warnick, Gregg
Jakobson, Sharmagne Leland-St. John, Jim Mitchum, Elke Sommer, Peter
Bart, Tanya and Michael Sarne, Corrine Sydney, Joe Torrenueva, Witold
Kaczanowski, Sheilah Welles, Joanna Pettet, Bob Lipton, and Mark Lindsay.
From the Beach Boys’ arena, including authors, researchers, and
associates of the band: Alan Boyd, Brad Elliot, Karen Lamm, Nick Grillo,
Steve Despar, John Parks, David Anderle, Stanley Shapiro, Ryan Oskenberg,
and especially Eddie Roach and Jon Stebbins. Richard Barton Campbell, the
webmaster of CassElliot.com, was a tremendous help.
Witnesses who testified at the trial or provided information that helped
break the case: Virginia Graham, Jerrold Friedman, Harold True, Joe Dorgan,
Father Robert Byrne, and Christine and Michael Heger.
The Hinman case: Cookie Marsman, Marie Janisse, Jay Hofstadter, Eric
Carlson, John Nicks, Glen David Giardenelli, Glenn Krell, Michael Erwin,
Mark Salerno, Jim and Julie Otterstrom.
Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office: Bill “Moon” Mullin, Louie Danhof, John C.
Graham, Jim White, Harold White, John Kolman, Lee Koury, Tony Palmer,
Frank Merriman, Bill McComas, Michael Devereaux, Garland Austin, Gil
Parra, Jerome Stern, Frank Salerno, Bob Lindbloom, Beto Kienast, George
Grap, Samuel Olmstead, Bob Wachsmuth, Bob Payne, George Smith, Paul
Piet, Robert Osborne, Don Dunlop, Paul George, Carlos DeLaFuente, John
Sheehan, D. C. Richards, Fred Stemrich, and Donald Neureither. Los
Angeles Police Department: Carl Dein, James Vuchsas, Charles Collins,
Mike Nielsen, Bob Calkins, Jerry Joe DeRosa, Robert Burbridge, Dudley
Varney, Wayne Clayton, Walt Burke, Freddy McKnight, Sidney Nuckles,
Danny Galindo, William Lee, Cliff Shepard, Ed Lutes, Ed Meckel, and
Edward Davis.
 Federal law enforcement and the U.S. Attorney’s Office: Roger
“Frenchie” LaJeunesse, Werner Michel, John Marcello, Rich Gorman,
Samuel Barrett, Richard Wood, Bob Lund, Bob Hinerfeld, Timothy
Thornton, Gerald O’Neill, and Ray Sherrard. Los Angeles District Attorney’s
office: Stephen Kay, Burton Katz, Jeff Jonas, Robert Schirn, Ronald Ross,
Anthony Manzella, and John Van de Kamp. Defense attorneys for Manson
Family: Irving Kanarek, Gary Fields, Leon Salter, Jeffrey Engler, Deb Fraser,
and Rich Pfeiffer.
Los Angeles media: Sandi Gibbons, Mary Neiswender, Pete Noyes, Dick
Carlson, and Brent Zackie.
Las Vegas Police Department: Loren Stevens.
San Francisco: David Smith, Roger Smith, Al Rose, Gail Sadalla, Ernest
Dernburg, Eugene Schoenfeld, Steve Pittel, Lyle Grosjean, Charles Fischer,
John Frykman, Bob Conrich, John Luce, and Joel Fort. Mendocino County:
Margo Tomkins, David Mandel, Thomas Martin, and Duncan James.
Inyo County Sheriff’s Department: Jim Bilyeu, Wayne Wolcott, Harry
Homsher, Joe Redmond, Alan George, Dave Walizer, Dennis Cox, Ben
Anderson, Jerry Hildreth, and Randy Geiger. Inyo County District Attorneys:
Art Maillett and Tom Hardy. California Highway Patrol: officers Jim Pursell,
Doug Manning, and George Edgerton. Regarding the investigation and
capture of the Family in Death Valley, thanks also to former Death Valley
National Park superintendent (and author of the indispensable Desert
Shadows) Bob Murphy, and Parks Department rangers Homer Leach, Al
Schneider, Paul Fodor, Don Carney, and Richard Powell. And thanks to
Darlene Ward, the daughter of late Inyo deputy sheriff Don Ward.
The Tenerelli case would’ve remained in the shadows were it not for the
invaluable assistance of Bee and Kermit Greer, Robert Denton, and Billy
Kriens, the original investigating officer at the Sportsman’s Lodge. A special
thank you to Sue Norris, a medical doctor with experience in forensic
pathology who provided a detailed analysis of the Tenerelli coroner’s
findings. Finally, while I wasn’t able to comfort Filippo’s mother, Caterina,
with a final answer about what happened to her son, I hope I have provided
some solace to his sisters, Angela, Lucia, Maria, and Chiara, and his nieces
and nephews, especially Cosimo Giovane, who has worked so tirelessly to
have the cause of death on his uncle’s death certificate changed from
“suicide” to “unknown.”
 Lastly, in Inyo, a heartfelt expression of gratitude to Paul Dostie, who has
committed the last twelve years of his life to searching for the remains of
possible unidentified victims of the Manson Family.
My detour into the murky world of government intelligence and covert
operations would have been impossible without the pioneering work of
previous CHAOS, COINTELPRO, and MKULTRA authors and researchers,
many of whom provided guidance, moral support, and files. Among those
who offered generous help are Eric Olson, John Marks, Alan Scheflin, Doug
Valentine, Dick Russell, Sid Bender, William Turner, Peter Dale Scott, John
Judge, Rex Bradford, Larry Hancock, John Kelly, Phil Melanson, Robert
Blair Keiser, Shane O’Sullivan, Brad Johnson, Jim DiEugenio, and Rose
Lynn Mangan.
Especially helpful in my investigation of Reeve Whitson was his
daughter, Liza, and his former wife, Ellen. Likewise, thanks to Cindy
Hancock and Margot Silverman for welcoming me into their homes and
opening their fathers’ (William Herrmann and Charles Tacot, respectively)
files. A big thanks also to Paul LePage Jr. for allowing access to his late
father’s files, and to Joseph Boskin, who served on the Riots and Disorders
Task Force with William Herrmann and gave me his entire archive on the
committee.
I interviewed dozens of Jolly West’s colleagues and associates. I must
express gratitude to the few who helped me understand him the most:
Elizabeth “Libby” Price, Gilbert Rose, James R. Allen, and Margaret T.
Singer, West’s partner in studying the returned prisoners of the Korean War
who beseeched me not to publish the West-Gottlieb letters because they’d
destroy “all the good research” they’d done “showing how brainwashing and
thought reform works.”
I talked to relatives of the doomed airman Jimmy Shaver and his victim,
Chere Jo Horton. His sister, Brenda Hoff, shared family secrets with me as
well as the absolute conviction that her brother did not wittingly kill Horton.
Thanks to the archivists across the country who endured my unending
requests: at the Los Angeles Court of Appeals, Oscar Gonzalez; Los Angeles
Superior Court, Mark Hoffman and Don Camera; Federal Bureau of Prisons,
Dana Hansen, Ben Kingsley, Traci Billingsly, and Ann Diestel; Federal
Parole Office, Pamela Posch and Debbie Terrell; Inyo County District
Attorney’s office, Janet and C.J.; University of Nevada Reno, Jacque
Sundstrand; National Archives, Greg Badsher, Richard Boylan, Will
Mahoney, John Taylor, Fred Romanski, Marjorie Ciralante, Martha Murphy,
Marty McGann, Carl Wisenbach, Sam Bouchart, Ken Schlesinger, Rod Ross,
Steve Tilley, Ramona Oliver, and Janis Wiggins; National Security Archive,
Kevin Symonds; California State Archives, Linda Johnson; and the Special
Collections Department of the Charles E. Young Library at UCLA, Charlotte
Brown.
Authors who shared information on the Manson case include Ivor Davis,
Simon Wells, Greg King, Marlin Maryneck, Barney Hoskyns, and Paul
Krassner.
Independent researchers who helped me include Jedidiah Laub-Klein,
Tommy Schwab, Jason Majik, Jon Aes-Nihil, John Michael Jones, and Mark
Turner. Also Bo Edlund and Glenna Schultz, the proprietors of the best
websites on the crimes, CieloDrive.com and TruthOnTateLaBianca.com,
respectively. These two case “scholars” often found information I’d long
given up on. Their knowledge on the crimes surpasses anyone I’ve
encountered in my twenty years researching them.
Helpful members and associates of the Family include Dean Moorehouse,
Sherry Cooper, Catherine “Cappie” Gillies, Dianne Lake, Brooks Poston,
Paul Crockett, Vern Plumlee, and Barbara Hoyt. There were also those who
intersected with the group, including Bob Berry, Bob April, Charlie Melton,
Corrine Broskette, Rosina Kroner, and Lee Saunooke.
A host of my friends provided unwavering moral support—not to mention
beds, couches, and floors when I turned up in their towns with a car full of
files and addresses of local criminals I planned to confront. Among them (the
friends, not the criminals) are Jenny Jedeikin, Patricia Harty, Holly Millea,
Gail Gilchrist, Greg and Erin Fitzsimmons, Jay Russell, Lee Cunningham,
Paul Lyons, Nick Smith, Jaceene Margolin, Jane Campbell, Daisy Foote,
Mary Fitzgerald, Bryan Northam, Eileen O’Conner, Elaine DeBuhr, Daina
Mileris, Beena Kamlani, Anne McDermott, Sean Jamison, Val Reitman, Kim
Stevens, Karla Stevens, Fernando Arreola, Brad Verter, and Liz Heskin.
Thanks also to Mike Gibbons (who gave me a car), Jesse Despard (who held
forty boxes of my files in her basement for two years), Tim and Kyle
Dilworth (basement storage for even more boxes), and Tim Guinee (an actor
who roleplayed an antagonist with me in preparation for an interview).
I’ve had the best researchers and tape transcribers, including Jim and Desi
Jedeikin, Tanya McClure, Chris Kinker, Tucker Capps, Phil Brier, and Julie
Tate. The one who hung in the longest and found out the most is Bob Perkins,
a true investigator and an excellent writer.
A few lawyers who provided invaluable support are Joe Weiner, David
Feige, Richard Marks, Jessica Friedman, Paul McGuire, and Tim O’Conner.
And some filmmakers who briefly journeyed with me as we pursued possible
collaborations: Errol Morris, John Marks, and Ken Druckerman.
In 2016, my collaborator, Dan Piepenbring, became the final component
to finishing this odyssey, breathing life into my moribund pages, making
sense of nonsense, and allowing me to see my findings again, with fresh eyes.
For that, I will be forever indebted to the best collaborator an overwhelmed
author could have. (Also thanks to Dan’s equally talented agent, Dan
Kirschen of ICM.)
But my deepest gratitude is reserved for two people without whose
support I never would’ve survived these past twenty years: my father,
William, who believed in the project from day one, even when others stopped
believing; and my mother, Jean, who outlived him, making our joy at the
conclusion bittersweet. My siblings, Bill, Tim, and Ellen, and their spouses
and kids, were an enormous source of spiritual, sometimes financial, and
(with Tim, particularly) legal sustenance. (Thank God there are three lawyers
in my family, and thank God they were determined enough to keep me from
moving into their basements to make sure all my contracts were ironclad and
my lawsuits settled.)
These acknowledgments would mean nothing without a word of thanks to
the people who sacrificed, and continue to sacrifice, the most in this story.
The survivors of the victims of the crimes described in these pages have to be
reminded, yet again, of pain and trauma that needs no reminding. Their
generosity and bravery never fail to humble me. Their grace in the face of
such tragedy is a far greater testament to the lives of the loved ones they lost
than any book could be.
Thank you to the sister of John Philip Haught, Paula Scott Lowe, and to
the mother of Marina Habe, Eloise Hardt, who died in 2017 at age ninety-
nine, never knowing who killed her only child, and to Marina’s stepbrother
and best friend, Mark McNamara.
And my sincerest gratitude to the survivors of the known victims of the
Manson group, who shared their stories with me: Frank Struthers, Suzanne
LaBerge, Eva Morel, Janet Parent, and, especially, Anthony DiMaria and
Debra Tate.
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 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

TOM O’NEILL is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work

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DAN PIEPENBRING is an advisory editor for The Paris Review and a

contributor to The New Yorker’s website.
NOTES
Prologue
1 Vince’s own handwriting: Vincent Bugliosi interview with Terry Melcher, Los Angeles District
Attorney’s office.
2 I believed he’d framed Manson: Author interview with Rudolph Altobelli.

1. The Crime of the Century

Helter Skelter was published in 1974. An updated edition was published in 1994 to commemorate the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders. All citations are from that 1994 edition. The accounts of the
crimes and investigation in this chapter are taken from the trial transcripts and Helter Skelter. Where
information is used from the trial transcript that was either not used or abridged by Bugliosi in Helter
Skelter, that information will be cited.
1 “a metaphor for evil”: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton,
1994), 640.
2 “the dark and malignant side of humanity”: Bugliosi quoted in Richard C. Paddock, “The Long,
Chilling Shadow of Charles Manson,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 8, 1994.
3 “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 442.
4 would often molest her: Susan Atkins testimony, Subsequent Parole Consideration Hearing, State
of California Board of Prison Terms, in the Matter of the Life Term Parole Consideration Hearing
of Susan Atkins, CDC Inmate W-08340, Dec. 16, 1988.
5 “‘You’re going downhill’”: This and all quotations from the Manson trial in this chapter are from
the court transcripts, California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia
Krenwinkel, case 22239.
6 At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent: I uncovered ample evidence suggesting that
Parent’s relationship with William Garretson was significantly different than the one depicted at
trial and in Helter Skelter, including the purpose of his visit to the guesthouse on August 8, 1969.
7 put on “a crooked orbit.”: Steven V. Roberts, “Polanskis Were at Center of a Rootless Way of
Life,” New York Times, Aug. 31, 1969.
8 she’d apparently stopped traffic: Author interview with Martin Ransohoff.
9 the home she called the “Love House”: Author interview with Rudolph Altobelli, who added that
Tate got the name from the house’s prior occupant, Candice Bergen.
10 her child would strengthen her marriage: Author interview with Elaine Young.
11 “It was like I was dead”: Susan Atkins testimony, California v. Manson et al.
12 called the murders a “blood orgy”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 45.
13 others reported “ritualistic slayings”: Dial Torgerson, “Ritualistic Slayings,” Los Angeles Times,
Aug. 10, 1969.
14 “overtones of a weird religious rite”: Kay Gardella, “Actress and 4 Slain in Ritual,” New York
Daily News, Aug. 10, 1969.
15 “It’s like a battlefield”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 37.
16 “Eeny meeny miney mo”: Associated Press, “Two More Killings Spur Coast Manhunt,” Aug. 11,
1969.
17 breaking in and moving their furniture: LAPD Second Homicide Investigation Progress Report, DR
69-586-381, 4.
18 “breaking off a minute piece”: Tex Watson and Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? (Old Tappan,
N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 79.
19 as many as thirty-three people: Bugliosi reported in Helter Skelter (615–16) that ranch hand Juan
Flynn told him that Manson bragged that he had killed thirty-five people; Bugliosi believed the
actual number might’ve been higher.
20 “invitation to freedom”: “Hippies and Violence,” Time, Dec. 12, 1969.
21 “I am a mechanical boy”: Watson and Ray, Will You Die for Me?, 80.
22 antisocial behavior and psychic trauma: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 193.
23 “If there ever was a man”: Ibid., 200.
24 “an evil Pied Piper”: United Press International, “Leader Played Part of Evil Pied Piper,” Dec. 8,
1969.
25 “a nomadic band of hippies”: Associated Press, untitled article, Dec. 2, 1969.
26 “pseudo-religious cult”; United Press International, “Pseudo-Religious Cult Members Suspects in
Bloody Slayings,” Dec. 2, 1969.
27 “power to control their minds and bodies”: Steven V. Roberts, “3 Suspects in Tate Case Tied to
Guru and ‘Family,’” New York Times, Dec. 3, 1969.
28 “man of the year” and “Offing those rich pigs”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 297.
29 “hippie drug-and-murder cult”: “The Demon of Death Valley,” Time, Dec. 12, 1969.
30 “bushy-haired, wild-bearded”: Associated Press, “Charles Manson, Hippie Leader Key Figure in
Tate Murder Case,” Dec. 4, 1969.
31 “a psyche torn asunder”: “The Demon of Death Valley.”
32 “even-toned arguments”: Associated Press, “Beatles Song Inspired Tate Murders, Says D.A.,” July
24, 1970.
33 That house was no longer occupied: I was able to document that the house was, in fact, occupied at
the time, by the owner’s son, Leonard Posella. (His mother, the owner, lived in the guesthouse in
the back.)
34 a .38 revolver under his robes: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 487.
35 “Over and over”: Watson and Ray, Will You Die for Me?, 180.
36 “It’s better than a climax”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 139.
37 “agreements from his followers” and “got right up”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 318.
38 “locating deep-seated hang-ups” through “melt-twisted”: Paul Watkins with Guillermo Soledad,
My Life with Charles Manson (New York: Bantam, 1979), 80–81.
39 “were like computers”: Brooks Poston testimony in California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins,
Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, case 22239.
40 “to a purity and nothingness”: Watson and Ray, Will You Die for Me?, 78–79.
41 “coursing through their veins”: Steve Oney, “Manson: An Oral History,” Los Angeles Magazine,
Jul. 1, 2009.
42 “Death? That’s what you’re all going to get”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 594.

2. An Aura of Danger
1 “unreality and hedonism”: Stephen V. Roberts, “Polanskis Were at Center of Rootless Way of
Life,” New York Times, Aug. 31, 1969.
2 “Los Angeles sewer system is stoned”: Thomas Thompson, “A Tragic Trip to the House on the
Hill,” Life, Aug. 29, 1969.
3 sound tests that supported Garretson: The police, nonetheless, were hardly convinced, as noted in
the LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, DR 69-059-593 (p. 29): “It is highly
unlikely that Garretson was not aware of the screams, gunshots and other turmoil that would result
from a multiple homicide such as took place in his near proximity.” Stephen Kay told me he
believed Garretson had fled the guesthouse during the murders and hid in the hills above the house.
In interviews with me and other reporters before his death in 2017, Garretson claimed that he’d
recovered memories of the night of the murders after seeing a reenactment on television in the
1990s. He believed he’d been picked up by associates of the killers who were casing the house
earlier that evening. He added that Barry Tarlow, the attorney who represented him at the time of
his arrest, had said he’d been sent “by a friend,” refusing to identify who that “friend” was.
(Tarlow’s office confirmed that he had been sent by a “friend,” but insisted he wasn’t paid and
never learned the friend’s identity.)
4 that a drug dealer had once been tied up: Among the books reporting this story are Steven Gaines,
Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys (Boston: Da Capo, 1995), Barney Hoskyns,
Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1996), and Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002).
5 a tape of Roman and Sharon: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York:
Norton, 1994), 47.
 6 “climbed the ladder to the loft”: Ibid., 88.
7 assigned the Tate murder case until November: Ibid., 166–67.
8 Kaczanowski finally consented to be interviewed: The account of Kaczanowski’s interactions with
the police, victims, Polanski, and original suspects comes from my interviews with Kaczanowski
and the LAPD files on the case (provided by retired LAPD Sgt. Mike McGann).
9 Billy Doyle, Tom Harrigan, and Pic Dawson: First Homicide Investigation Progress Report;
individual subject interviews by LAPD; author interviews with William Tennant, Kaczanowski,
Billy Doyle, Thomas Harrigan, and Charles Tacot.
10 Gene Gutowski and two friends: Author interviews with Gutowski, Victor Lownes, and Richard
Sylbert.
11 Denny’s parking lot: Author interviews with Kaczanowski, Gutowski, and Lownes.
12 barred from entering Polanski’s suite: Robert Helder and Paul Tate, Five Down on Cielo Drive
(unpublished manuscript; Talmy Enterprises, Inc., 1993), 27.
13 “Polanski was taken to an apartment”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 79.
14 denied knowing Kaczanowski at all: Roman Polanski, LAPD Polygraph Examination, Aug. 11,
1969.
15 a turbulent time at the Cielo house: The information in this chapter about the activities at Cielo
Drive in the months leading up to the murders—including the details about the drug dealing by
Doyle, Harrigan, Dawson, and Tacot—is from First Homicide Investigation Progress Report;
LAPD Second Homicide Investigation Progress Report, DR 69-059-593; witness interviews by
LAPD (from McGann files); numerous author interviews; and Helder and Tate, Five Down.
16 “one of the most evil people”: Author interview with Judy Pierson.
17 smashed Tate’s face into a mirror: Author interview with James Mitchum; author interview with
Tom Grubbs.
18 having sex with another woman: James Mitchum, LAPD Interview, #85, by Celmer, Burke, and
Stanley, Aug. 13, 1969; author interview with Mitchum; author interview with Pierson; author
interview with Grubbs.
19 he threw her into the pool: Author interview with Elke Sommer.
20 without his wife’s knowledge or consent: Author interview with Joanna Pettet.
21 Tennant’s fall from grace: Peter Bart, “Exec Comes Full Circle After Descent into Despair,”
Variety, Feb. 8, 1993.
22 subject of Interpol surveillance: Eddi Fiegel, Dream a Little Dream of Me: The Life of “Mama”
Cass Elliot (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2005), 244–45; Author FOIPA Request, 1122260-000,
Dawson, Harris Pickens, III, Nov. 24, 2008.
23 The young son of a diplomat: “Evelyn Parks Dawson” (obituary), Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1987;
LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, DR 69-059-593, 9–10.
24 1966 London arrest: Fiegel, Dream a Little Dream, 244–45.
25 Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass: LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress Report.
26 According to police reports: Ibid.
27 selling drugs in Los Angeles: Author interview with Margot Tacot Silverman.
28 conviction was later overturned: LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, 30.
29 anally raped him: Accounts of this incident come from individual LAPD interview subject reports;
the LAPD Homicide Progress Reports; author interviews with Doyle and Tacot; Gaines, Heroes
and Villains; Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun; and Sanders, The Family.
30 Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD: LAPD Interview with Bergen, #145, by Warren
and Gilmore, Aug. 21, 1969.
31 Dennis Hopper told the Los Angeles Free Press: Sanders, The Family, 195. Sanders says Hopper
also told the Press that Doyle’s rape was filmed, quoting Hopper: “They had fallen into sadism and
masochism and bestiality—and they recorded it all on videotape too. The L.A. police told me this. I
know that three days before they were killed, twenty-five people were invited to that house to a
mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.”
32 In short, he told: All quotations and summaries in this section are from Billy Doyle, LAPD
Interrogation (transcript), by Earl Deemer, Aug. 28, 1969.
33 “if they’d fucked me or not!”: Helder and Tate, Five Down, 63.
34 Dawson had died: Fiegel, Dream a Little Dream, 143; “Harris Pickens Dawson, III” (obituary),
Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1986.
35 Harrigan was nowhere to be found: I did find and interview Harrigan, but not until 2014.
36 “chained a sign to the tree”: Doyle, LAPD Interrogation transcript.
37 No footage from this film has ever surfaced: Doyle admitted to me that the movie was a ruse, but
gave differing reasons for the trip’s true purpose. Reed B. Mitchell, a Los Angeles disc jockey, told
the LAPD that he’d been approached by Tacot before the murders “regarding a boat to bring back
some drugs possibly [from] Jamaica” (Mitchell, LAPD Interview, #106, by Celmer, Burke, and
Stanley, Aug. 19, 1969).
38 “I took a lie-detector test,” Tacot told me: I have never been able to find this lie detector test, or any
reference to a polygraph being administered to Tacot in the LAPD files.
39 “You can’t kill somebody long-distance”: The LAPD was never able to corroborate that the two
men were in Jamaica when the murders occurred. Several interview subjects told police they saw
Doyle in Los Angeles around the time of the murders. According to the Homicide Investigation
Report, Harrigan visited the Tate house the day before the murders (Aug. 7) to discuss “a delivery
of MDA in the near future” with Frykowski (First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, 11);
Harrigan’s attorney, when he was a suspect in the Tate murders and questioned by police, was Paul
Caruso, who would later represent Susan Atkins with his law partner, Richard Caballero. Caruso
 told me that Harrigan sold drugs to Frykowski but was never paid for them.
40 pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral: Author interview with Jim Dickson.
41 “controlling” him with voodoo: United Press International, “Corrine Calvet Denies Threatening
with Hex,” Dec. 12, 1967.
42 “The only thing that I can tell you”: Author interview with Corrine Calvet. As for Calvet’s
assertion that the FBI told her she was in danger, even though the FBI wasn’t supposed to have
been involved in the investigation, several dozen people told me they were certain they were
interviewed by investigators who identified themselves as FBI agents. Roger “Frenchie”
LaJeunesse, an FBI field agent in Los Angeles, confirmed to me that he participated in the
investigation in an “unofficial” capacity.
43 sued the Los Angeles Times: Case 963676, Los Angeles Superior Court, Oct. 23, 1969. The case
was dismissed after Tacot missed several hearings.
44 acknowledged by the federal government: Carina A. Del Rosario, A Different Battle: Stories of
Asian Pacific American Veterans (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 95.
45 Hersh Matias Warzechahe: Los Angeles Superior Court Archives, Case C36566, Henry Martin
Fine v. Bloch, Robert D., Aug. 15, 1972.
46 an assassin for the CIA: Author interview with Peter Knecht. Knecht, a Hollywood defense
attorney, had been Jay Sebring’s lawyer and accompanied Roman Polanski and the psychic Peter
Hurkos to the Cielo house after the murders. He represented Tacot on a charge of carrying an
army-issued firearm. Knecht said one of Tacot’s assignments from the CIA included a failed
assassination attempt against Fidel Castro.
47 “soldier of fortune”: David Crosby and Carl Gottlieb, Since Then: How I Survived Everything and
Lived to Tell About It (New York: Putnam, 2006), 209.
48 ex-marine who’d served in Korea: Author interview with Mitchum; William Rinehart, LAPD
Polygraph and Interview transcript, by Earl Deemer, Sept. 30, 1969.
49 grew pot in Arizona: Author interview with Mitchum; author interview with Silverman.
50 a child molester: Author interview with a person who wishes to remain anonymous.
51 coke smuggler: Author interview with Silverman; author interview with David Berk.
52 “Hey, man, aren’t you?”: Author interview with Mitchum.
53 a movie PR man from the 1940s: Margot Tacot Silverman shared Fine’s personal papers, which her
father inherited, with me. They included countless press clippings and promotional photographs of
Fine with stars like John Wayne and Kim Novak.
54 Office of Strategic Services: Author interviews with colleagues and friends of Fine, including
Eddie Kafafian, Vernon Scott, Bob Thomas, Joe Hyams, and Eddie Albert; author interview with
Shalya Provost Spencer, Fine’s daughter (she has changed her first name from the one she was
given at birth, Sheila).
 55 German landing sites: Author interview with Albert; author interview with Spencer.
56 espionage operations through the sixties: Author interviews with Kafafian, Scott, Thomas, Hyams,
Albert, and Spencer.
57 vast amounts of cocaine: Doyle, LAPD Interrogation transcript.
58 Cass Elliot knew Manson: Sanders, The Family, 147. I have never been able to corroborate Manson
and Elliot meeting, but it has also been reported by Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun, 183; and Fiegel,
Dream a Little Dream, 305. Michael Caine, in his memoir, What’s It All About? (New York:
Random House, 1992), 318, claimed to have met Manson at a party at Elliot’s house that was also
attended by Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring.
59 Elliot had been friends with Frykowski and Folger: There are multiple references to this in both the
First and Second Homicide Investigation Progress Reports.
60 Elliot’s bandmates were close: LAPD Homicide Investigation Progress Report I, 10; John and
Michelle Phillips, LAPD Interview, #22, by Celmer, Stanley, and Burke, Aug. 12, 1969 (1–2).
61 renamed himself after a racetrack: Author interview with Larry Geller.
62 Frank Sinatra and several casino owners: Author interview with Joe Torrenueva.
63 “shot two guys who were going”: United Press, “Pistols Roar as Fans Scrap: Quarrel on Griffith
Fight Ends with Gun Duel,” Dec. 1, 1929; Ovid DeMaris, Captive City (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle
Stuart, 1969), 230; William F. Roemer Jr., Roemer: Man Against the Mob: The Inside Story About
How the FBI Cracked the Chicago Mob by the Agent Who Led the Attack (New York: Ivy Books,
1989), 100.
64 He later went to Havana: Baron FOIPA, 0926058-00, released Oct. 3, 2001; DeMaris, Captive City,
230; Roemer, Roemer, 100.
65 Lansky’s eyes and ears: Roemer, Roemer, 100. Baron was “the closest associate” of Johnny Rosselli
at the time that Rosselli was part of the top-secret CIA effort to assassinate Fidel Castro known as
“Mongoose” (Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993], 199, 178).
66 some type of security-intelligence clearance: Baron FBI FOIPA 92-251 LV (sec. 1, pt. 1); DeMaris,
Captive City, 225; untitled article, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 14, 1961.
67 a cabal of right-wing military intelligence: The others named by Torrenueva were Virgil Crabtree,
the head of intelligence for the IRS in Los Angeles in the fifties and an undercover investigator for
the L.A. District Attorney’s office in the sixties; Jack Entratter, who ran the Sands Casino until his
death in the early seventies; Sy Bartlett, a retired army intelligence officer who moved to
Hollywood and had a successful career as a screenwriter; and Tony Owen, the ex-husband of
wholesome actress Donna Reed.
68 General Curtis E. LeMay: See Curtis LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965); Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis
 LeMay (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2009); and I. F. Stone, “LeMay: Cave Man in a Jet Bomber,”
in In a Time of Torment, 1961–1967 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 92–104.
69 “He was a bad businessman”: Sebring’s nephew, Anthony DiMaria, who is making a documentary
film about his uncle, adamantly refutes the notion that his uncle was anything but flush at the time
of his death, but I found ample evidence in police interviews and elsewhere suggesting the opposite
was true. A few samples: In Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the
Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice (New York: It Books/HarperCollins, 2012), Alisa
Statman and Brie Tate say that Sebring was “over a quarter million dollars in debt” (p. 85). Art
Blum, a business partner, told me that Sebring “always had financial problems, spent it as fast as
he could… [and] was losing his shirt at the salon.”
70 a group of his stylists had defected: Author interview with Felice Ingrassia.
71 “roughed up” several employees: Ibid.; author interview with Phillips.

3. The Golden Penetrators

1 Bugliosi had to give him a tranquilizer: Author interview with Vincent Bugliosi.
2 “shaved a couple of visits to the ranch”: Karina Longworth, “Charles Manson’s Hollywood, Part 5:
Doris Day and Terry Melcher,” You Must Remember This (podcast), June 23, 2015.
3 divorced for the second time: According to State of California Marriage Records, Carole married
Dennis Wilson on July 29, 1965, divorced him in December 1966, remarried him at an unrecorded
date (and location), and divorced him again in June 1967.
4 during his “rampages”: Case 711515, Superior Court of Los Angeles, Los Angeles.
5 two young children: Scott, born in 1962, to Carole and her first husband (Scott Vanerstrom), was
adopted by Dennis; the couple’s daughter, Jennifer, was born in 1967.
6 Ella Jo Bailey and Patricia Krenwinkel: The story of Wilson’s introduction to the Manson Family is
from the Tate-LaBianca trial transcripts and Helter Skelter, unless otherwise indicated.
7 “just because we were men”: Tex Watson and Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? (Old Tappan,
N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 57.
8 “I Live with 17 Girls”: David Griffiths, “Dennis Wilson: I Live with 17 Girls,” Record Mirror,
Dec. 21, 1968.
9 “another artist for Brother Records”: Keith Altman, “Dennis Wilson: This Is Where It’s At,” Rave,
May 1969.
10 “Cease to Exist”: Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 64. The
key word “exist” was changed to “resist” and the song title was changed to “Never Learn Not to
Love.” It was released as the B side of the first single from the Beach Boys album 20/20 on
December 8, 1968. The band performed the song, with Dennis singing the lead vocal, on The Mike
 Douglas Show on August 22, 1969, less than two weeks after the Tate–LaBianca murders (see
IMDB.com, The Mike Douglas Show, episode 8.240). Bugliosi didn’t report that Wilson had stolen
a song from Manson until the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Helter Skelter—and then, only in
a footnote (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter [New York: Norton, 1994], 667).
11 “though they’d probably deny it now”: Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock
Music (Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002), 310.
12 the “Golden Penetrators”: Steven Gaines, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys
(Boston: Da Capo, 1995), 190; Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes,
and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 156.
13 “roving cocksmen”: Gaines, Heroes and Villains, 190.
14 he crossed paths with Manson: Melcher testimony, California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins,
Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, case 22239, 15083.
15 Manson came along in the back seat: Ibid., 15097–98.
16 upward of $100,000: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 335–36.
17 Wilson gave three interviews: Griffiths, “I Live with 17 Girls”; Altman, “Dennis Wilson”; Lon
Goddard, “The Continuing Story of Beach Boy Dennis and His House of Seventeen Women,”
Record Mirror, July 5, 1969. Bugliosi omitted from Helter Skelter the fact that these three
interviews were published before the murders.
18 a Malibu beach house: Author interview with Gregg Jakobson.
19 Melcher stood him up: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 323.
20 ask the owner of the property: Ibid., 308, 306.
21 visiting twice over four days: There are multiple references to this in Melcher testimony, California
v. Manson et al.
22 his friend Mike Deasy: Ibid.
23 “Don’t draw on me, motherfucker!”: David Felton and David Dalton, “Charles Manson: The
Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive,” Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970, 39.
24 the Family repeated their audition: Melcher testimony, California v. Manson et al., 15124.
25 a frightening LSD trip: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 250.
26 Melcher conveyed his rejection through Jakobson: Melcher testimony, Grand Jury, A253156, The
People of the State of California vs. Charles Manson, Charles Watson, aka Charles Montgomery;
Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz; Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Sankston,
Dec. 5, 1969, 127.
27 Wilson and Jakobson knew that Manson had shot: I located more than a half dozen documents in
the Los Angeles District Attorney files and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office files
indicating that Manson had discussed the Bernard Crowe shooting with Wilson within a week of
the Tate murders, although it’s unclear if the name Crowe was ever mentioned.
28 “upward of a hundred times”: Jakobson testimony, California v. Charles Watson, 2 Crim 22241,
2851.
29 “scatter [their] limbs”: Ibid., 2836.
30 Tate was hanged from the ceiling: Coroner Thomas Noguchi testified, “Based on the wound
findings on the left side of her cheek and the way the rope was tied at the scene… I would form the
opinion that Miss Tate had been suspended”—see California v. Manson et al., 8907.
31 Jakobson apparently didn’t make the connection: Jakobson testimony, ibid., 14235.
32 “Tell Dennis there are more,” “The electricity,” and “Don’t be surprised”: Bugliosi and Gentry,
Helter Skelter, 336–7.
33 “I know why Charles Manson”: David Leaf, The Beach Boys and the California Myth (New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 136.
34 “Me and Charlie”: Joel Selvin, untitled article, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 8, 1984.
35 including Henry Fonda: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 305.
36 filing a lawsuit: Rudolph Altobelli v. Polanski et al., Superior Court of the State of California, Nov.
16, 1969.
37 “about the musician that Manson”: Stephen Kay has said at various parole hearings (and in
interviews with me) that Hinman met Manson through Wilson, Jakobson, and Melcher, something
else left out of Helter Skelter.
38 Altobelli moved back into the house: Melcher eventually admitted to me that he’d lived in the
house with Altobelli after the murders. He’d said the opposite in his mother’s biography: “I hadn’t
been in the house since the day I moved out,” Melcher wrote of the day in late November 1969
when he learned of Manson’s involvement in the murders (Melcher, quoted in A. E. Hotchner,
Doris Day [New York: Bantam, 1976], 242).
39 both privileged children of Hollywood royalty: Bergen’s father was the famous ventriloquist Edgar
Bergen.
40 “snuck out in the middle of the night”: Author interview with Allen Warnick.
41 “‘we’ll kill you’”: Author interview with Genevieve Waite.
42 “these people who have been harassing me there”: Ibid.
43 Carole had had photos taken: Author interview with Dean Moorehouse.
44 she pursued a romance with Jay Sebring: Carole Wilson, LAPD Interview, #66, by Gilmore, Aug.
15, 1969, which includes: “Miss Wilson states she slept with Sebring at his home off and on for the
past two years.”
45 longest and costliest in California history: “The Manson Murders at 40: ‘Helter Skelter’ Author
Vincent Bugliosi Looks Back,” Newsweek, Aug. 1, 2009.
46 stating in an official letter: Lorenzo Quezada, LAPD Discovery Unit, to author, June 4, 1999.
47 stalked former members of the Family: Author interviews with multiple former Family members,
 including Dianne Lake, Sherry Cooper, and Catherine Gillies; author interviews with the children
of Rosemary LaBianca, Suzan LaBerge, and Frank Struthers.
48 falling-out before her death in 1992: Author interview with Bill Nelson; author interview with
Debra Tate.
49 Like Ed Sanders: Author interview with Ed Sanders.
50 Carole Wilson, and Carole Jakobson: The wives of Dennis Wilson and Gregg Jakobson were both
close to Sebring, Tate, and Altobelli, and they were frequent visitors to the Tate house. Both
women also had harrowing encounters with Manson before and after the murders.
51 “August 10”: I later learned that Carole Jakobson was the third person interviewed by the LAPD
(Carole Jakobson, LAPD Interview, #63, by Varney, Aug. 10, 1969). According to Gregg
Jakobson’s testimony at the Tate–LaBianca trial, he was also present for the interview, although his
name doesn’t appear in the LAPD summary. Jakobson told the jury the detectives “really did not
come to speak to me. They spoke to my wife more than me. I was there so they spoke to me, too”
(Jakobson testimony, California v. Manson et al.). During his closing argument to the jury, Irving
Kanarek noted the impossible “coincidence” that the man who knew most about Manson, outside
of the Family, was among the first to be interviewed by police, and somehow never mentioned his
friend as a possible suspect in the murders (Kanarek, final statement, ibid., 20274).
52 spoken to police within a week: Carole Wilson’s interview was on August 15, 1969.
53 “his way of living and how groovy it was”: Altobelli testimony, California v. Manson et al., 14769.
54 “I think I have seen him at Dennis Wilson’s house”: Melcher testimony, Los Angeles Grand Jury,
128.
55 he’d met Manson no more than three times: Multiple references in Melcher testimony, California v.
Manson et al.
56 “Manson and Watson attended a party”: Author interview with Stephen Kay.
57 never once saw Watson inside his house: Melcher’s recollections about Watson changed
dramatically according to the needs of the prosecution. Before the grand jury, when shown a photo
of Watson, Melcher testified that he didn’t “know him” (Melcher testimony, Los Angeles Grand
Jury, 128). When pressed, he said he may have seen him at Dennis Wilson’s house, but wasn’t
certain (ibid.). He was never asked about Watson at the Tate–LaBianca trial (Watson wasn’t a
defendant), but when Watson was tried by Bugliosi after the Tate–LaBianca verdicts and the
prosecution needed to place the Texan inside the Cielo Drive house prior to the Polanskis’
residency, Melcher delivered. Asked by Bugliosi if he’d ever seen Watson in his house, Melcher
replied that he had “approximately six times” (Melcher testimony, California v. Watson, 2207).
These discrepancies were never reported in Helter Skelter.
58 Gentry was working on the book: Gentry, Stephen Kay, and more than six other people who were
present during the trial confirmed this in interviews with me.
59 “obstructionist tactics”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 371.
60 opprobrium from every corner: Kanarek first gained fame as the attorney for one of two defendants
who killed a LAPD officer in a case that would later be immortalized as a book and movie called
The Onion Field.
61 Manson wanted the worst: Author interview with Burton Katz; Burton Katz, Justice Overruled:
Unmasking the Criminal Justice System (New York: Grand Central, 1997), 163; author interview
with Peter Knecht; author interview with Gary Fields.
62 He objected nine times: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 417, 424.
63 The judge jailed him twice for contempt: Ibid., 466.
64 “the Toscanini of Tedium”: Ibid., 530.
65 confidentiality prevented him: Several sources told me they believed Kanarek was paid by
Melcher, accounting for, they said, Kanarek’s highly uncharacteristic decision to forgo cross-
examining Melcher on the stand.
66 living out of his car: Author interview with Fields; author interview with Kay.
67 Over the ten years previous to our meeting: Unless otherwise indicated, all the information about
Kanarek came from interviews with him and with George Denny, an attorney and longtime friend.
Kanarek also shared the story of his nervous breakdown and the loss of his law license with a Los
Angeles Times reporter; see Dana Parsons, “Barred from World He Loved, Just Getting by Is a
Trial,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 25, 1998.
68 they colluded, that is, to protect the convictions: After the judge ruled that Farr had immunity as a
newsman and didn’t have to testify about who gave him the sealed documents, the state withdrew
its charges.

4. The Holes in Helter Skelter

1 “After Terry Melcher”: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton,
1994), 496.
2 the ex-con was fresh out of federal prison: The information in this chapter about Dennis
Moorehouse is from my interviews with him and from his parole file, which I received from the
State of California after obtaining his consent. Details about the arrest of Manson in Leggett in July
1967 are from police reports and news articles.
3 prompting her mother to report her: G. Campbell, Bureau of Criminal Identification and
Investigation, Crime Report, Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, File 25544, Suspect: Charles
Willis [sic] Manson, July 28, 1967; “Deputies End Leggett Tryst,” Ukiah [Calif.] Daily Journal,
July 31, 1967, 8.
4 The legend is that Manson persuaded: Author interview with Dean Moorehouse.
 5 “They convicted me in December of ’68”: Moorehouse’s first trial had ended in a hung jury the
previous August (see ibid. and “LSD Trial Ends in Hung Jury; New Trial Date Set,” Ukiah Daily
Journal, Aug. 28, 1968).
6 for the long drive to Ukiah: Melcher testimony, California v. Charles Watson, 2 Crim 22241, 2208;
Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 83; Tex Watson and
Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 62; author
interview with Moorehouse.
7 “he gave me his credit card”: Author interview with Moorehouse. See also Sanders, The Family,
83; Watson and Ray, Will You Die for Me?, 62. In August 1968, Watson was ticketed for speeding
while driving Melcher’s car in San Luis Obispo County with Moorehouse. When Watson failed to
pay the fine or appear for the court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest, identifying Melcher as
the registered owner of the vehicle (case T-3504, citation F221471, California v. Charles Denton
Watson, Order to Appear, County of San Luis Obispo Justice Court, Sept. 5, 1968—from the files
of Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office).
8 entered the prison system on January 2, 1969: Moorehouse, Dean Allen, Cumulative Case History,
State of California, Department of Corrections, case 4482-C, Jan. 3, 1969.
9 left her deeply skeptical of Bugliosi… for Terry Melcher: Author interview with Sandi Gibbons.
10 my visits weren’t exactly authorized: Since my last visit to the files in 2006, to the best of my
knowledge all other requests from researchers wanting similar access have been denied.
11 the Straight Satans: DeCarlo helped found the bike club in 1966, according to testimony from his
trial for drug smuggling. See United States v. DeCarlo et al., no. 37502-SD-Criminal, U.S. District
Court, Southern District, March 28–June 30, 1967.
12 in the spring of ’69: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 146.
13 DeCarlo’s father was in the firearms business: Ibid., 144.
14 got access to drugs: Ibid., 132; Bill Nelson, audio interview with Vincent Bugliosi, 1999,
Mansonmurders.com.
15 His testimony did a lot of heavy lifting for Bugliosi: The prosecutor wrote in Helter Skelter that he
“succeed[ed] in getting a tremendous amount of evidence in through DeCarlo” (468).
16 he identified the weapons used in the murders: Ibid., 464–69.
17 In the crossed-out sections of Bugliosi’s notes: Vincent Bugliosi interview with Danny DeCarlo,
Feb. 11, 1970, 2.
18 Melcher replied under oath: Grand Jury, A253156, The People of the State of California vs.
Charles Manson, Charles Watson, aka Charles Montgomery; Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz;
Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Sankston, Dec. 5, 1969, 128.
19 “After this second occasion”: Melcher testimony, California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins,
Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, case 22239, 15127.
20 “Yeah, just a few days after May 18”: Ibid., 15144–45.
21 might never have gotten his convictions: Bugliosi interview, “Charlie’s Friends,” The Fifth Estate
(Canadian TV series), 1975.
22 to “instill fear” in Melcher: Richard Caballero and Paul Caruso interview with Susan Atkins,
transcript, Dec. 1, 1969, 3.
23 Bugliosi had crossed out: Bugliosi interview with DeCarlo.
24 legendary in L.A. legal circles: Fitzgerald was the model for the title character of John Gregory
Dunne’s crime novel Dutch Shea, Jr., about a scrappy, hard-drinking Los Angeles defense
attorney.
25 a girlfriend of his: Author interview with Cupertina Vega.
26 Melcher had expressly denied: Melcher testimony, California v. Manson et al., 15124.
27 “He did not record Manson”: Bugliosi, closing argument, ibid., 21370. When Bugliosi executive-
produced a remake of the TV movie of Helter Skelter in 2004, he included a scene depicting
Melcher and Wilson recording Manson in a studio (John Gray, Helter Skelter script, page 9).
28 Donald “Shorty” Shea: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 661.
29 “After one of the girls told me that they killed the caretaker”: Parks probably believed, erroneously,
that Shea was the “caretaker” of the ranch.
30 “Melcher was on acid”: Unsigned handwritten notes, Paul Watkins interview, LASO, Dec. 19,
1969, 7.
31 “Dennis and Greg had been there”: In police interviews and interviews with me, Jakobson
described several visits he made with Wilson to the Family’s outpost in Death Valley. This
suggested that Wilson wasn’t done with the Family after he allegedly threw them out of his home
in August 1968. The Family didn’t start going to the desert until mid-November 1968, according to
police reports, trial testimony, and Helter Skelter.
32 “And they said, probably not”: Melcher was less kind in his mother’s biography, writing: “The
cops said that five or six of the Manson girls claimed that Manson had set me up with them and
that I was the father of their babies. I finally got so fed up with the cops over these sex inquiries
that I got out the pictures of the most recent ladies in my life, real beauties, all of them, and I said,
‘Listen, when I’ve got beauties like these to get in bed with, why would I want to screw any of
Manson’s clap-ridden, unwashed dogs?’” (A. E. Hotchner, Doris Day [New York: Bantam, 1976],
247).
33 soon rubbing elbows with the sons: All the Jakobson information comes from my interviews with
him, unless otherwise noted.
34 racking up a few arrests along the way: According to testimony at Tex Watson’s trial, Jakobson had
been arrested on a drug charge in November 1968; Watson said that Manson sent him to Melcher’s
house to get money to bail Jakobson out of jail. Melcher refused, and had his chauffeur drive
 Watson down to Sunset Boulevard so he could hitchhike back to the Spahn Ranch (Watson
testimony, California v. Watson, 3251, 3310). The second arrest, according to Melcher’s first
police interview (LAPD Interview, #231, by Patchett, Nov. 31 [sic], 1969), occurred on his and
Jakobson’s third visit to the Spahn Ranch. LAPD detective Frank Patchett wrote, “It was on that
visit that the three were stopped by LA County sheriffs and Jakobson was arrested for a ticket.
Melcher bailed him out.” It seemed curious to me that there was actually a sheriff’s officer at the
Spahn Ranch who arrested Jakobson during his and Melcher’s “final” visit to Manson in May
1969.
35 “He doesn’t anymore”: Jakobson testimony, California v. Manson et al., 14182.
36 “how much of that is legend and how much of it is true”: Though both Melcher and Jakobson’s
testimony about the spyglass was brought out by Bugliosi—and the prosecutor also included it in
his summation—for some reason Bugliosi never mentions this vital bit of information in Helter
Skelter. Melcher wrote about it in his mother’s biography: Manson had “stolen a telescope from the
deck of the Malibu house, presumably to let me know he knew my whereabouts” (Hotchner, Doris
Day, 249).
37 “Jakobson frequently smiled at Manson”: Associated Press, “Defendant in Tate Trial Well Liked,”
Nov. 16, 1970.
38 “thank Mr. Melcher for his presence”: California v. Manson et al., 15152. Although Bugliosi
omitted the cordial remarks from Kanarek to Melcher in Helter Skelter, he did note (without
editorial comment) that Kanarek chose not to examine Melcher, “probably at Manson’s request”
(495).
39 all sourced to Jakobson: Jeff Guinn, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2013), 157, 182, 198.
40 “all and any references”: I counted five changes between the original hardcover edition (1996) and
the paperback reissue (1999). References to Melcher’s involvement with the Manson women were
removed and the number of times he visited the Spahn Ranch was changed from “several” to
“twice.” Any suggestions that he was aware of Manson’s propensity for murder were excised
entirely. All the changes to Waiting for the Sun can be seen by comparing the following pages (the
1996 hardcover versus the 1999 paperback): 176/181, 176/181 (a second set of changes here),
179/183, 179/184, 179/184 (a second set of changes here), and 181/186.

5. Amnesia at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office

1 A soft-spoken Buddhist: All the information about Hinman in this chapter comes from the Hinman
murder trial transcripts (A-057452, The People of the State of California v. Robert Kenneth
Beausoleil) or Helter Skelter, unless otherwise noted.
2 Atkins and Brunner took turns: Atkins and Brunner both admitted smothering Hinman with a
pillow. But at Atkins’s 1978 parole hearing, she said it was Beausoleil who smothered Hinman
(Atkins testimony, Subsequent Parole Consideration Hearing, State of California Board of Prison
Terms, in the Matter of the Life Term Parole Consideration Hearing of Susan Atkins, CDC Inmate
W-08340, July 20, 1978, 24–25).
3 They spent five days: Paul Whiteley testimony, California v. Robert Beausoleil (I), A-057452, 9;
Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 188.
4 a woman had been in his house: Bill Gleason (retired LASO), timeline of Hinman murder (provided
by Gleason to author); author interview with Jay Hofstadter; Hofstadter testimony, California v.
Charles Manson (for Hinman and Shea murders), A-267861, 4124; Richard Siegel testimony, ibid.,
4345. Gleason’s timeline contains these entries:
7-26-69 and 7-27-69: Jay Hofstadter calls Hinman home, phone answered by Atkins; second call
by Mary Brunner.
7-26-69 and 7-27-69: Richard Siegal calls Hinman, Atkins answers, speaks with English accent.
5 he had at least one accomplice: Gleason timeline; the applicable entry reads: 7-26-69: Dave Ewing
knocks on front door of Gary Hinman’s home, Susan Atkins answers door carrying candle, said
Hinman in Colorado. (He was being tortured at the time.)
In addition, according to documents in the LASO files, Ewing was a biker known as
“preacher” who lived with Hinman in 1968 and knew the Family well. Ewing could have provided
a physical identification of Atkins at the Hinman house during the period he was being tortured
and murdered, but for reasons unknown he never testified in any of the Hinman murder trials. He
refused to be interviewed for this book.
6 that led them to overlook Manson: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York:
Norton, 1994), 113.
7 the two detectives did the right thing: Ibid., 62.
8 kept the Manson Family at large: Ibid.
9 arrest was for stolen vehicles: They were also charged with possession of stolen property,
possession of illegal firearms (a sawed-off shotgun), and arson (they’d set fire to a federally owned
earth-moving vehicle, a “Michigan Loader”). See “28 ‘Hips’ Nabbed in Death Valley, Goler Wash
Raids,” Inyo [Calif.] Independent, Oct. 16, 1969, 1.
10 On August 16, 1969: Unless otherwise noted, all the information on the Spahn Ranch Raid is from
the reports I obtained from the LASO files and from interviews with officers who participated in
the raid, some of whom shared additional records from the raid, including its “operational plan.”
11 “It was the most flawlessly”: Author interview with John Kolman.
12 perhaps even sending undercover agents to investigate: Frank Salerno, a retired LASO narcotics
detective, told me that LASO intelligence sent undercover agents wired with recording devices into
 the Spahn Ranch to purchase narcotics from Family members but were unsuccessful. Another
retired detective, Gil Parra, who worked LASO intelligence and homicide, told me that when he
started working intelligence in May 1969, the sheriffs already had “informants” planted at the
ranch.
13 “on a misdated warrant”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 90.
14 Ellroy still hailed him: James Ellroy, My Dark Places (New York: Knopf, 1996), 217; the author
also praised Guenther as the cop “who really broke the Charles Manson case” (ibid.).
15 “Same knife. Same wound”: In a phone conversation, Noguchi told me he “thinks” he remembers
telling Guenther this but isn’t certain. He also said he was “surprised” when the LAPD announced
two days after the LaBianca killings that the couple’s murders were committed by different
perpetrators than the ones who killed the Tate victims.
16 Bugliosi had discredited it: Bugliosi, in his words, “demolished” the false scenario by exposing its
many holes. Among those he listed: If Tate and LaBianca were to be a “carbon copy” of Hinman,
why weren’t the words “Political Piggy” written at the Tate house, rather than just “Pig,” and why
were there no paw prints like the ones left at Hinman’s? How did the words “Helter Skelter” on the
LaBiancas’ refrigerator mimic the Tate or Hinman murder scene? (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter
Skelter, 586–87; author interview with Vincent Bugliosi).
17 No one in law enforcement: More than two dozen investigators, from both LASO and the LAPD,
didn’t believe the Helter Skelter motive. Many of Bugliosi’s own colleagues at the DA’s office
didn’t, either. Among those who said this on the record were: Aaron Stovitz, Bugliosi’s original
coprosecutor, who told me he never believed the murders were committed for any other reason
than to free Bobby Beausoleil; Burton Katz, who prosecuted two Family members (Beausoleil in
his retrial for Hinman, and Grogan for the Shea murder), was certain it was a copycat, too, saying
Bugliosi used Helter Skelter because he wanted “something sexy”; and Jeff Jonas, who appeared
for the state against Beausoleil and Bruce Davis at parole hearings.
18 allegedly Linda Kasabian: In my interview with him, Beausoleil denied making any such phone
call; Kasabian, through her family, turned down repeated requests for an interview.
19 “Pig” in blood: Atkins Testimony, Grand Jury, A253156, The People of the State of California v.
Charles Manson, Charles Watson, aka Charles Montgomery; Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz;
Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Sankston, Dec. 5, 1969.
20 on the wall at Hinman’s: Both Atkins and Beausoleil have taken credit for writing “Political Piggy”
in Hinman’s blood at his house. It’s difficult to know which one actually did it (author interview
with Bobby Beausoleil; Atkins testimony, Grand Jury, 69).
21 other journalists had sniffed around: Both Guenther and his partner Whiteley worked closely with
Ed Sanders on his book The Family (their names appear in the acknowledgments). However, when
I asked Sanders whether they’d ever told him about the tape and, if so, why he hadn’t written about
 it, Sanders said he’d heard only about the phone call, not that there had been a recording of it.
22 made sure that someone else did: It’s difficult to determine whether it was illegal in 1969 to tape an
inmate’s call in the Los Angeles County jail without his or her knowledge. Some experts told me it
was legal as long as the inmates were informed of the possibility, either verbally or by posted
notice. Others told me calls could be recorded only by court order.
23 magazine in June 1970: David Felton and David Dalton, “Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of
the Most Dangerous Man Alive,” Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970, 28.
24 Tate–LaBianca murders were copycat crimes: Author interview with Aaron Stovitz.
25 “I heard it, yes,”: Author interview with Paul Whiteley.
26 they never even drove out there: Author interview with Guenther.
27 Reading through the transcript: Mae Brussell interview with Preston Guillory, “Assassination
Dialogue,” KLRB News, tape 21, side 2, Nov. 17, 1971.
28 cache of firearms: Preston Guillory testimony, California v. Manson (Hinman/Shea), 9557; author
interview with Guillory.
29 Manson’s lawlessness: Guillory testimony, California v. Manson (Hinman/Shea), 9585–86, 9598–
99; author interview with Guillory.
30 Family toting machine guns: Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut:
Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 203; author
interview with Guillory.
31 “Make no arrests”: Brussell interview with Guillory, side 1.
32 statutory rape: George Smith, County of Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, Complaint 469-0084-
1071-724, S: Charles Milles Manson, April 2, 1969; William C. Gleason, Affidavit in Support of
and Petition for Search Warrant, State of California, County of Los Angeles, no. 2029, Aug. 13,
1969, 4.
33 running surveillance on the Spahn Ranch: Guillory testimony, California v. Manson
(Hinman/Shea), 9584; Brussell interview with Guillory; author interview with Guillory.
34 cover sheets to protect: Ibid. (all).
35 “was just a local thing”: Brussell interview with Guillory.
36 cover its tracks after the murders: Ibid.
37 thinking the press: Ibid.; author interview with Guillory.
38 sent him packing: Given the option to “quit or be fired,” Guillory chose to resign (Guillory
testimony, California v. Manson (Hinman/Shea), 9570; author interview with Guillory).
39 discuss his previous employment there: Brussell interview with Guillory.
40 it would’ve cost Pitchess the next election: Pitchess, a former FBI agent, was sheriff of Los
Angeles County for twenty-three years (1953–1982).
41 “the raid was more or less staged”: Krassner, Confessions, 203.
42 “kind of an off-the-wall guy”: Author interview with Gleason.
43 “a gigantic chip on his shoulder”: Author interview with Robert Wachsmuth.
44 “a motel room in Malibu”: Author interview with Bill McComas.
45 “Not that I know of”: Author interview with John Graham.
46 Running to sixteen pages: William C. Gleason, Affidavit in Support of and Petition for Search
Warrant, State of California, County of Los Angeles, no. 2029, Aug. 13, 1969.
47 “automatic pistols, and revolvers”: Ibid., 1.
48 the only suspect identified by name: Manson is named nineteen times in the document, beginning
on the first page.
49 “from a tree, upside down, dead.”: Richard W. Pearson, Captain/Commander, Malibu Station, to
John P. Knox, Chief, Patrol Division West, LASO, “Spahn Ranch Summary,” Aug. 11, 1969, 5.
50 “a large amount of narcotics”: Gleason, Sergeant, Motorcycle File, to James C. White, Captain,
Records and Data Bureau, LASO, “Additional Information Regarding Narcotics Activity at Spahn
Movie Ranch in Chatsworth,” Aug. 7, 1969, 1.
51 one-page arrest report: P. R. George, Supplementary Report, File 469-02614-1071-029, S: Charles
Milles Manson, Aug. 16, 1969.
52 a warrant is good for ten days: Section 1534(a) of the California Penal Code reads: “A search
warrant shall be executed and returned within 10 days after date of issuance.”
53 because of insufficient evidence: Sanders, The Family, 268.
54 never caught attempting to use the cards: According to Manson’s arrest report (P. R. George,
Supplementary Report), the four cards—each for a different gasoline company—belonged to Irvin
H. Weiland, M.D., of Encino, whom I located and spoke to. Dr. Weiland told me the cards had
been in his wallet, which was stolen from the glove compartment of his car. He didn’t remember
whether they had ever been used, but, as several retired LASO officials told me, the possession of
stolen goods itself is a crime.
55 On a bedside table were several joints: Unless otherwise noted, the information about this arrest is
from the Manson and Schram arrest reports (R. Wachsmuth, Complaint Report, Charles Milles
Manson, Carol Matthews [Schram], File 469-02723-1071-181, Aug. 24, 1969); a transcript of a
sheriff’s interview with Schram and her parents (“Statement of Stephanie Schram,” and parents,
File 069-02378-1076-036, by Dep. George A. Palmer and Sgt. William Gleason, LASO, Dec. 4,
1969); and an interview with Robert Wachsmuth, the sheriff’s deputy who made the arrests.
56 no pot in the cigarettes: Sanders, The Family, 269.
57 on August 26: Charles Milles Manson, Supplementary Report, LASO, File 469-07223-1071-181,
by V. W. Jones, Aug. 27, 1969.
58 No reason was given for the decision: Statement of Stephanie Schram, 29. In the statement,
Schram’s mother rebukes Gleason and Palmer, saying that her daughter is now on probation for
 “possession of marijuana… and it’s on her record, but he [Manson] was just set free!” Mrs. Schram
adds, “He was violating federal parole [and] they let him loose!”
59 found with drugs and a juvenile: Manson, Supplementary Report.
60 never even bothered going to arrest him: This is my assumption based on the fact that I was unable
to find any documentary evidence indicating that it had been done.
61 he moved to Death Valley: The September 10 date is an estimate based on police interviews of
Family members, trial testimonies, and witness reports.
62 The DA’s order rejecting the pot charges: Manson, Supplementary Report.
63 The LASO deputies who’d arrested Manson: Author interview with Paul George.
64 “ample reason for a parole revocation”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 546.
65 Gleason’s duty to have told the parole office: Author interview with Guenther.
66 Kitty Lutesinger, sixteen, was pregnant: Kathern [sic] Rene Lutesinger, AKA Kitty, LASO
“Wanted for Questioning—Murder,” by Guenther and Whiteley, Aug. 17, 1969.
67 to be with Beausoleil: Lutesinger testimony, California v. Beausoleil (I), 26.
68 leave the group and raise their child: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 115.
69 heaping abuse on anyone: Lutesinger, Arrest Report, LASO, DR-156-774, by Officer Peterson, Sgt.
Bell, July 30, 1969, 2.
70 ran away from the ranch: Ibid.
71 LASO sheriffs found her on July 30: Ibid., 2–3; “Additional Information Regarding Spahn Movie
Ranch, and the Stolen Vehicle Activity at That Location,” LASO Correspondence, Gleason to
James C. White, Capt., Aug. 11, 1969, 3–5.
72 interview her again eleven days later: Ibid., 3.
73 “I had been programmed to believe”: Sanders, The Family, 259.
74 On August 15: [Unsigned] Lutesinger, “Sheriff’s interview at San Dimas Station on 10/12/69,” 1–
2.
75 they never checked the Spahn Ranch: Author interview with Guenther.
76 all-points bulletin: [Unsigned memo], “Hinman, Tate, et. al [sic], LaBianca Murder Cases,” 2. The
teletype that went out after the radio broadcast was dated August 17 (Lutesinger “Wanted for
Questioning”).
77 Whiteley’s interview notes in the LASO files: Paul Whiteley, Case 069-02378-1076-06, July 31,
1969.
78 though they didn’t know where: Whiteley notebook in ibid.
79 She’d been picked up: Katherine Lynn Drake, LASO Booking and Property Report, File 469-
02614-1071-029, Booking 892 975, Aug. 19, 1969.
80 posted the bulletin for Lutesinger’s arrest: Lutesinger “Wanted for Questioning.”
81 living at the Spahn Ranch: Whiteley notebook. The “Wanted for Questioning” bulletin lists “Spawn
 [sic] Ranch, Malibu,” as one of Lutesinger’s “possible addresses.”
82 They did nothing: Author interview with Guenther.
83 at the Malibu station: They were released without charges on Monday, August 18, 1969.
84 a few stray LAPD squad cars: I confirmed this in other reports in the LASO file as well as in
interviews with LASO deputies who participated in the raid, but I was never able to identify the
LAPD officers.
85 beside a story about the still unsolved Tate murders: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 89–90.
86 “Whitely [sic] & Guenther tell Gleason”: Gleason timeline, Oct. 29, 1969.
87 Lutesinger herself had told him: “Additional Information Regarding Spahn Movie Ranch,” 4.
88 true identities of each suspect: Teletype to Malibu Station, SBI and IRC, “Make Following
Corrections as to AKA’s”, refer: Gleason, Aug. 18, 1969.
89 when they all moved to Death Valley: Vincent Bugliosi interview with Kitty Lutesinger, undated,
Los Angeles District Attorney files, 1.
90 “had his finger in a bigger pie”: Author interview with Gil Parra.
91 “ratting out other people”: Ibid.
92 Manson’s fear of the Black Panthers: Gleason, Search Warrant, 6.
93 “carloads” of “negroes”: Pearson to Knox, “Spahn Ranch Summary,” 13.
94 A fire patrolman reported: Ibid., 2.
95 “offer the sheriff department’s cooperation”: Author interview with James C. White.
96 I arrived to find not one but three deputies: Author interview with Captain Raymond Peavy, Lt. Joe
Hartshorne, and Det. Paul Delhauer.
97 “Your actions embarrass”: Matt Stevens, “Ex-Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca Is Sentenced to 3
Years in Prison,” New York Times, May 12, 2017.

6. Who Was Reeve Whitson?

1 before the Polanskis’ maid had arrived: Police estimated she arrived at the front gate at
approximately 8:30 a.m. (LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, DR 69-059-593,
15).
2 It appeared four times: Hatami testimony, California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van
Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, case #22239, 14483, 14508, 14542, 14554.
3 “Just Reeve Whitson, myself, and Mr. Hatami”: California v. Manson et al., 14554.
4 The judge decided that Hatami: Judge Older refused to allow Hatami to make a physical
identification of Manson in court because of his uncertainty over who he saw that day. He
permitted him only to testify that the person resembled the defendant (ibid., 14566–67).
5 “about eight lives simultaneously”: Author interview with William Whitson (who is unrelated to
 Reeve Whitson).
6 The coroner described blood smears: First Homicide Investigation Progress Report (4–5) reads:
“There was dried blood smeared over the entire body. It appeared to investigating officers that
someone had handled the victim, as in moving her from one location to another and the blood from
the wounds had been smeared over the body in the process.”
7 heard gunshots and arguing: First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, 19–21. Bugliosi
described two incidents of sounds heard after the killers were supposed to have left the property in
his book but omitted two more reports of shouting and gunfire that occurred hours after the
murders—one from a second private security officer on patrol in the vicinity; see Vincent Bugliosi
with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton, 1994), 20–21.
8 “see what my children did”: Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002),
220.
9 another researcher had raised the possibility: Bill Nelson videotaped interview with Vincent
Bugliosi, in author’s possession.
10 a traveling family act: Author interview with Hope Hirschman.
11 “His great strength”: Author interview with William Whitson.
12 According to a few people I spoke with: Author interview with the Edlunds; author interview with
Rosenfelt; author interview with Julie Newmar.
13 how many powerful friends he had: Among other Whitson friends I spoke to were Leon Uris
(author of Exodus), John Raitt (actor-singer), and Art Linkletter (the television entertainer, who
told me Whitson was “a spook”).
14 “He always wanted to go”: Author interview with Baron Oswald von Richthofen.
15 “neither confirm nor deny”: Whitson, CIA FOIA response, no. 2000-01269, June 23, 2000.
16 unpublished book: Robert Helder and Paul Tate, Five Down on Cielo Drive (unpublished
manuscript; Talmy Enterprises, Inc., 1993).
17 They secured a contract: Author interview with Roger LaJeunesse; author interview with Shel
Talmy.
18 a ghostwriter came on board: Author interview with LaJeunesse; author interview with Stanley
Ralph Ross.
19 “appeared to be running the LAPD”: Author interview with Charles Guenther.
20 growing a beard and long hair: Helder and Tate, Five Down, 72.
21 “a somewhat shady character”: Ibid., 22.
22 “He sure did get around”: Ibid., 27.
23 especially those in Mama Cass’s circle: Ibid., 28.
24 “an amateur sleuth on the case”: Ibid., 138.
25 “Mr. Anonymous”: Ibid., 60.
26 was eligible for parole: Associated Press, “Doris Tate, Victims’ Rights Activist, 68,” New York
Times, July 1, 1992.
27 something deeper than Helter Skelter: Author interview with Ed Sanders; Sanders, The Family,
512; author interview with Judy Hanson.
28 Cielo house was under surveillance: Author interview with Sanders; author interview with Hanson.
29 her daughter wasn’t supposed: Ibid. Hanson, a private investigator and close friend of Doris and
Paul Tate, also told me that Doris “confirmed” to her that a call had been made from the Spahn
Ranch to Cielo Drive a few hours before the murders. In Helter Skelter, however, Bugliosi
maintained that records for the Spahn Ranch pay phone from April to October 1969 didn’t show
any calls to the Tate house (the months of April and July were “lost or destroyed,” he added). See
Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 333.
30 Sharon’s red Ferrari: Author interview with Sanders; Sanders, The Family, 512; author interview
with Hanson.
31 book about her theories: Author interview with Debra Tate; author interview with Greg King.
32 separate parts of their house: Author interviews with sources who requested anonymity.
33 “knew just about everyone”: Helder and Tate, Five Down, 23.
34 who surveilled Baron for decades: Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 199.
35 “could be more dangerous”: I. F. Stone, “LeMay: Cave Man in a Jet Bomber,” in In a Time of
Torment, 1961–1967 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 104.
36 vice president of a missile-parts manufacturer: LeMay was hired by Networks Electronic in 1965.
The high-security facility, which had a contract with the Defense Department, was located in
Chatsworth, California, less than five miles from the Spahn Ranch. The company’s founder and
president, Mihai Patrichi, was a former Romanian army general who was a member of the Iron
Guard, a far-right political group in Romania (“General Radescu’s Relations with the Iron
Guardists in Argentina,” Nov. 24, 1948, declassified document in National Archives, College Park,
Md.; Alan Goldstein, “Patrichi Is the Main Power at Explosives-Maker Networks Electronic,” Los
Angeles Times, May 29, 1986).
37 United Nations listed Otto Skorzeny: Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1981), 160.
38 one of Hitler’s most trusted operatives: Charles Higham, American Swastika: The Shocking Story
of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst from 1933 to the Present Day (New York: Doubleday, 1985),
244; Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 4–18.
39 new lives around the world: Infield, Skorzeny, 235.
40 “the most dangerous man in Europe”: Ibid. See also Lee, The Beast Awakens, 6.
41 once a member of the Hitler Youth: Skorzeny, Intelligence Report, Museum of Intolerance, Los
 Angeles, Calif., 1951.
42 contracts for German engineering companies: Skorzeny, Defense Intelligence Agency Report, Sept.
12, 1962. Ilse was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s finance minister (he was tried at
Nuremberg, and acquitted); see Infield, Skorzeny, 171.
43 “American system from within”: Author interview with von Richthofen.
44 “we should kill the drug lords”: Ibid.
45 “The entire Manson situation”: Author interview with Andreas Gross.
46 His résumé… racing enthusiast: The projects described in this paragraph come from author
interviews with the Edlunds; Neil Cummings; Gross; von Richthofen; McGann; Clyde Whitson;
Art Linkletter; William Whitson; Robert Whitson; James Paul; Shelly Wile; Alastair Buchan;
Louise Batchelor; Gloria Krachmalnick; Hope Hirschman; Will Layman; Carroll Shelby; Dan
Gurney; and Maurice Phillips.
47 he stowed it in his freezer: Author interview with William Whitson; author interview with Clyde
Whitson; author interview with the Edlunds.
48 “on a cot in his parents’ kitchen”: Author interview with Simone Zorn Hunt.
49 drove an economical Ford Pinto: Author interview with von Richthofen.
50 destitute and disgruntled: Author interview with the Edlunds; author interview with Robert
Whitson.
51 “You really are a pawn”: Author interview with Robert Whitson.
52 “You didn’t even exist to us”: Ibid.
53 a rat dropped in the tube: Ibid.
54 half a million dollars: Author interview with Rosenfelt.
55 may have been foul play: Author interview with Clyde Whitson; author interview with the Edlunds.
56 “an extraterrestrial”: Author interview with William Whitson.
57 “no open or officially acknowledged relationship”: Whitson, CIA FOIA 2000-01269, reply, May
21, 2003.

7. Neutralizing the Left

In June 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle published an award-winning series of investigative articles
about the rise of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley and the attendant crackdown by Governor
Ronald Reagan, the CIA, and the FBI. Using information from files won in three Freedom of
Information lawsuits against the FBI, the reporter Seth Rosenfeld’s six-story series exposed the
previously unreported lengths that Reagan, the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the CIA Director
John McCone went to in order to dismantle and smear the leaders of the left-wing movement in
California. Much of the information in this chapter is from Rosenfeld’s series, later expanded into a
book, The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 2012). I also relied heavily on the published reports of the Rockefeller Commission and
Church Committee (The President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States
[Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975]; hereinafter, the Rockefeller Commission); and The United States
Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
[Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976]; hereinafter, the Church Committee), as well as the reporting of
Seymour Hersh in the New York Times and Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s indispensable The
COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent (Boston:
South End Press, 1990).
1 three congressional committees: These were the aforementioned Rockefeller Commission and
Church Committee, as well as The United States House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence (referred to as the Pike Committee, and active in 1975–1976).
2 “No more appeasement”: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York:
Random House, 1987), 415.
3 respective operations in San Francisco: Seymour Hersh, “Hunt Tells of Early Work for a C.I.A.
Domestic Unit,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 1974, A-1, 4.
4 “in the heart of every longhair”: Gitlin, The Sixties, 404.
5 First launched in 1956 to “increase factionalism”: Carl J. Jensen III, David H. McElreath, and
Melissa Graves, Introduction to Intelligence Studies (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2012), 34.
6 “to expose, disrupt, misdirect”: Quoted in Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 92–
93.
7 “their potential for violence”: Quoted in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The
CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1999), 69.
8 tripped on acid: Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties
Rebellion (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), 223.
9 arrange for the bloodshed themselves: Jack Olson, Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph
of Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 45.
10 “power to determine the destiny”: Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The
World of the Black Panthers (New York: Abrams, 2016), 12.
11 Newton shot and killed: Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1968 and sentenced to
two to fifteen years in prison. An appellate court decision later reversed the conviction.
12 a seventeen-year-old Panther was killed: While awaiting trial on attempted murder charges, Cleaver
fled to Cuba. He returned from foreign exile in 1978 and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in
exchange for a sentence of 1,200 hours of community service.
13 gunfights led to four Panther deaths: Three were killed by the LAPD on August 5, 1968, and one
on October 5, 1968. See Edward Jay Epstein, “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of
 Genocide?,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 1971.
14 suspected of being a snitch: Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, Murder in the Model City: The Black
Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 20–34.
15 a “hate-type organization”: James E. McKeown and Frederick Inglebrit Tietze, The Changing
Metropolis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 86.
16 the personal bodyguard for Fred Hampton: Much has been written about the murder of Fred
Hampton, but nothing as thorough as Jeffrey Haas’s The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the
FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011),
from which most of the information about Hampton has been taken.
17 a small FBI field office in Media: Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar
Hoover’s Secret F.B.I. (New York: Knopf, 2014).
18 only in 2014 did they reveal themselves: Ibid.
19 “hastened the growth of a vine”: James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom,
Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015), 187.
20 “injury or death to targets”: Associated Press, “Black Panthers Affected,” New York Times, May 6,
1976.
21 “a staggering range of targets”: Church Committee, book 3, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert
Action Programs Against American Citizens, April 23, 1976, 19, 11, 15.
22 exploits in Los Angeles: Ibid., 35, 58, 64, 67.
23 Black Student Union meeting: Olson, Last Man Standing, 223–24.
24 “The Los Angeles Division”: Church Committee, 3:189.
25 “the bloodshed that occurred”: Ibid.
26 “carnage as a positive development”: Ibid., 3:192.
27 flirting with other women: Ibid., 3:158; Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and
Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 246.
28 “a fraud, demagogue, and scoundrel”: William C. Sullivan to Alan H. Belmont, Jan. 8, 1964, FOIA
no. 77-56944-19; Church Committee, 3:136.
29 “Will it get us what we want?”: Church Committee, 3:135.
30 “responsibilities to the American people”: Statement of Clarence M. Kelley, Director, Federal
Bureau of Investigation, Cong. Rec., House of Representatives, Feb. 4, 1975, 2247.
31 “simply because they are Negroes”: Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr., and Waldo E. Martin,
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2015), 202.
32 Hollywood’s liberal whites: [Redacted name], Field Agent, SAC, Los Angeles, to, Director, FBI,
Nov. 29, 1968, quoted in Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 132.
33 under FBI surveillance: For Jane Fonda, see ibid., 159, 212, 214; Church Committee, 3:209. For
 Cass Elliot, see FBI File 62-5-38112, cited in Jon Johnson, Make Your Own Kind of Music: A
Career Retrospective of Cass Elliot (Detroit: Music Archives Press, 1987), 99–124. For Warren
Beatty, see Paul Young, L.A. Exposed: Strange Myths and Curious Legends in the City of Angels
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002), 34.
34 outspoken civil rights activist: LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, DR 69-059-
593, 27. It reads, “In the past year, Abigail had been an active participant in Negro social work. She
sponsored and attended rallies in the Watts area and is reported to have been an active participant
in civil rights activities in the San Francisco bay area. This contention is borne out by several civil
rights placards found at the Cielo address.”
35 “The Peace and Freedom Party”: Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 132.
36 the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt: The information in this section is from Jack Olson’s Last
Man Standing, unless otherwise noted.
37 “the arrest of the militants”: Ibid., 231.
38 “to serve the white man”: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton,
1994), 303.
39 “go pick the cotton”: Ibid., 330.
40 planning an attack on him: William C. Gleason, Affidavit in Support of and Petition for Search
Warrant, State of California, County of Los Angeles, no. 2029, Aug. 13, 1969, 6.
41 with powerful telescopes: Ibid.; Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 344.
42 Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 372–73 (all Crowe information
is taken from Helter Skelter, unless otherwise indicated).
43 “speed along the race war”: Author interview with Vincent Bugliosi.
44 Manson was already frightened: Bugliosi maintained that Manson began warning of an impending
race war in February 1969 (Helter Skelter, 329).
45 three more Panthers, one of them fatal: Olson, Last Man Standing, 225.
46 infiltrate “subversive” groups and then “neutralize” them: Seymour Hersh, “Huge C.I.A. Operation
Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years, New York Times, Dec.
22, 1974, 1, 26; Charles J. V. Murphy, “Assassination Plot That Failed,” Time, v. 105, Jun. 30,
1975, 28.
47 born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis: Unless otherwise indicated, all the information in this section
is taken from the Seth Rosenfeld 2002 investigative series, mentioned in the headnote to this
chapter’s notes, or directly from the Rockefeller Commission.
48 “bigger than My Lai”: William Egan Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 15.
49 Angleton resigned from the agency: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New
York: Anchor, 2007), 389.
50 he ordered the destruction: Ibid., 375.
51 Rockefeller, had worked with the CIA: Tad Szulc, “Why Rockefeller Tried to Cover Up the CIA
Probe,” New York, Sept. 5, 1977. Szulc called the commission’s investigation “the most blatant
cover-up since Watergate,” reporting that Vice President Rockefeller argued that “for national
security reasons, it was not necessary for his commission to be told ‘everything.’”
52 Gerald Ford fired him: Seymour Hersh, “Colby Says His Dismissal as CIA Chief Arose from His
Cooperation in Domestic Spying Activities,” New York Times, Mar. 14, 1978, 12.
53 “very much on its periphery”: Colby and Forbath, Honorable Men, 317.
54 the New York Times revealed: Seymour Hersh, “CIA Reportedly Recruited Blacks for Surveillance
of Panther Party,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 1978, A-1, 16.
55 A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD: Herrmann retired on August 29, 1968, with the rank of
lieutenant, according to my interview with a Public Information Officer in the LAPD Pensions and
Retirement Office.
56 he specialized in quelling insurgencies: William Drummond, “State Intelligence System: Stigma of
a ‘Big Brother,’” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 18, 1970.
57 predict violent outbreaks in cities: Charles Foley, “Reagan’s Plan to ‘Beat Revolution,’” The
Observer (London), May 17, 1970, 2.
58 “genius,” praising his technical aptitude: Daryl F. Gates with Diane K. Shah, Chief: My Life in the
LAPD (New York: Bantam, 1992), 163.
59 yielded a collection of redacted documents: Eighty-three pages were released by the Washington,
D.C., office of the FBI (FOIPA no. 0966502); a second request to the Los Angeles Field Office
produced an additional thirty-eight pages (FOIPA no. 190-231795). Many of the redactions are
preceded or followed by phrases like “project which was very sensitive in nature” or “Top Secret
(The D.O.D. [Department of Defense] Clearances are still active).” One report revealed that
Herrmann’s work for the White House Office of Science and Technology (at unspecified dates in
the 1960s) was “so sensitive in nature” that the White House “was unable to provide any further
information”—and the information that was provided to the FBI was then redacted by the agency.
Other records revealed that Herrmann received his first “secret clearance” from the federal
government on February 7, 1957. That was elevated to a “top secret security clearance” on April
16, 1965, by the Office of Security, Treasury Department (FOIPA no. 0966502).
60 the company claimed that Herrmann never: FOIPA no. 0966502, July 21, 1972, 10.
61 “neither confirm or deny”: CIA F-2002, 02097, March 7, 2003. I also received the same response
from the CIA for records of the Systems Development Corporation (Systems Development
Corporation, CIA FOIA F-2002-01413, Feb. 10, 2003: “Neither confirm nor deny any confidential
or covert relationship…”), where, according to an article in the Honolulu Advertiser (“University
Post Seen for Herrmann,” Mar. 26, 1971), Herrmann was “responsible for research, development
 and related activities connected with public order, counterinsurgency and security systems”
between 1967 and 1971.
62 training Thai police: FBI FOIPA no. 0966502; “University Post Seen for Herrmann”; CORDS
Historical Working Group Files, NARA (National Archives), 1967–73, box 25, Folder—
Pacification Task Force/General Correspondence, ARPA, DAHC04-69-C-0010.
63 a scientific “advisor” to the army: CORDS Historical Working Group Files.
64 CIA project called Phoenix: Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this section is from
Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
65 “a set of programs”: Colonel Andrew R. Finlayson, USMC (Ret.), “A Retrospective on
Counterinsurgency Operations: The Tay Ninh Provincial Reconnaissance Unit and Its Role in the
Phoenix Program, 1969–70,” Central Intelligence Agency, Library (accessed via CIA website).
66 a 1971 congressional investigation: Cong. Rec., Proceedings and Debates; Congress, vol. 117, pt. 4
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1971), 4240–49.
67 the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong: Ibid.
68 “They wanted me to take charge”: Anthony B. Herbert, Herbert: The Making of a Soldier (New
York: Hippocrene, 1982).
69 “The good guys”: John Pilger, Heroes (Boston: South End Press, 2001), 258.
70 prisoners were shot and their bodies burned: Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, 210.
71 later revealed as a CIA front: Seymour Hersh, Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the
Massacre at My Lai 4 (New York: Random House, 1972). Wrote Hersh, “By 1968, Phoenix
Committees were set up in each of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces and directed by an agent from the
CIA, who sometimes operated under cover as an employee of the Agency for International
Development (AID).”
72 he was a part of AID: CORDS Historical Working Group Files. In addition, Herrmann told two
interviewers that he went to Thailand for AID in 1967: see James Wrightson, “Computer Replaces
Spy-in-Street for Antiriot Sleuthing,” Sacramento Bee, Aug. 2, 1970, and “University Post Seen for
Herrmann.”
73 nicknamed “Blowtorch Bob”: Tim Weiner, “Robert Komer, 78, Figure in Vietnam, Dies,” New
York Times, April 12, 2000.
74 behind the program’s notorious kill quotas: Valentine, Phoenix Program, 98.
75 series of “research” gigs: FOIPA no. 0966502; FOIPA no. 190-231795.
76 to prevent future outbreaks of violence: Ibid. (both); “University Post Seen for Herrmann.”
77 the task force was hardly: Foley, “Reagan’s Plan to ‘Beat Revolution.’” (All the information in this
section is taken from this article, unless otherwise indicated.)
78 depicting him as a pig: “Big Pig on Campus” (SDS document), collection of Cindy Hancock.
79 more circumspect interview: “Computer Replaces Spy-in-Street for Antiriot Sleuthing.”
80 the CIA had “operatives”: Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth,
1993), 239. Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which in
1978 examined the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F.
Kennedy), reported that the committee discovered a CIA operative had also infiltrated New
Orleans DA Jim Garrison’s 1966 investigation and prosecution of Clay Shay, an alleged CIA
operative, for the John F. Kennedy assassination. In her Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s
Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books,
2007), Joan Mellen alleges that two Garrison investigators, William Martin and William C. Wood,
were secretly contracted by the CIA to “sabotage” his prosecution.
81 “one of the top agents”: R. Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central
Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 18.
82 the Office of Strategic Services: Ibid., 18; Office of Strategic Services, Declassified Files, Record
Group no. 226, National Archives, College Park, Md.
83 Trained in espionage and counterintelligence techniques: Office of Strategic Services, Declassified
Files (multiple files); Steven Edington interview with Evelle Younger, “Evelle J. Younger: A
Lifetime in Law Enforcement,” Oral History Program, Powell Library, University of California,
Los Angeles, 1982, 6–7.
84 becoming Los Angeles district attorney in 1964: John Balzar, “FBI: Ex-Atty. Gen. Evelle Younger
Is Dead at 70,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1989.
85 a friend of Governor Reagan: Ibid.; “Evelle J. Younger: A Lifetime,” 7–10.
86 internal threats to the nation’s security: “Evelle J. Younger: A Lifetime,” 15–16, 17.
87 “better training and equipment”: Steve Weissman, ed., Big Brother and the Holding Company: The
World Behind Watergate (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts, 1974), 29.
88 “the General”: Balzar, “FBI: Ex-Atty. Gen.”
89 absence of a black studies program: Ron Einstoss, “20 Found Guilty in Disturbances at Valley
State,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 19, 1969.
90 deputy DA who tried the case: Ibid.
91 Nor did his second in command: All the Compton information is from Lynn “Buck” Compton with
Marcus Brotherton, Call of Duty: My Life Before During, and After the Band of Brothers (New
York: Berkley Caliber, 2008) or from author interview with Lynn Compton. Compton also was an
advisor to Herrmann’s Riots and Disorders Task Force, according to “California Council on
Criminal Justice Records, 1968–74,” F3869, California State Archives, Sacramento, Feb. 7, 1969.
92 role was “nonoperational”: “Computer Replaces Spy-in-Street for Antiriot Sleuthing.”
93 next to a piece on the LAPD’s theory: Ron Einstoss, “Panther Killings Result of Power Play, Jury
Told,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 1969; Lee Dye, “Police See ‘Copycat Killer’ in Slaying of Los
Feliz Couple,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 1969.
8. The Lawyer Swap
1 ordered all three sets of slaughters: Stephen Kay, who joined the prosecution after the trial began,
said as far as he knew there was never any thought to try the cases together, but he would’ve done
it. “When you’re trying a conspiracy, you want as many cases as possible,” he explained. Hinman’s
murder was also further “proof” of the Helter Skelter motive, Kay added; Manson wanted
Hinman’s money to get the Family to the desert during “the race war.”
2 a closed meeting with the judge: Bugliosi omits this episode from his book, mentioning only that
the first Beausoleil trial ended in a hung jury because DeCarlo, “brought in at the last minute…
hadn’t been a convincing witness” (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter [New York:
Norton, 1994], 206–7). My account of the Beausoleil prosecution relies on interviews with Leon
Salter and Ron Ross, the opposing attorneys, the trial transcript, and Jerry LeBlanc and Ivor
Davis’s 5 to Die, which has the best rendering of the first Beausoleil trial (Los Angeles: Holloway
House, 1970).
3 already a convicted felon: United States v. DeCarlo et al., no. 37502-SD-Criminal, U.S. District
Court, Southern District, March 28–June 30, 1967.
4 facing new charges: DeCarlo, Case A058069, Los Angeles Superior Court Archives.
5 “a long sword”: DeCarlo testimony, California v. Robert Beausoleil (I), A-057452.
6 their daughter was in custody… Atkins agreed to speak: Guenther and Whiteley, LASO
Supplementary Report, File 069-02378-1076-016, Arrested: Lutesinger, Atkins, Oct. 13, 1969.
7 her role in the Tate–LaBianca murders: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 117–30.
8 “warm and sticky and nice”: Ibid., 126.
9 On the evening of November 19: The information in this passage comes from ibid., 172–73.
10 Atkins’s attorney was Gerald Condon: The account that follows is based on documents discovered
in the files of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office; the Los Angeles Superior Court Archives; the Los
Angeles District Attorney’s office; the personal files of Paul LePage, the LAPD detective who
supervised the LaBianca murder investigation (shared by his son, Paul LePage Jr.); the files of
Mike McGann, the LAPD detective who worked the Tate investigation; as well as from interviews
with Gerald Condon, F. Milton Condon (his brother, who assisted Gerald), and others, as noted.
11 Beausoleil… was already represented: This public defender was Leon Salter.
12 Condon was appointed on November 12: Susan Atkins, County of Los Angeles Sheriff’s
Department, Supplementary Report, Nov. 12, 1969.
13 seven-page memo: “Hinman, Tate, et. [sic] al., LaBianca murder cases,” LASO Files. This
document is undated and unsigned.
14 entry for November 20: Ibid., 4.
15 a three-page summary: Paul LePage, “Chronology of Information on the LaBianca/Tate Murder
Investigation,” Oct. 15–Nov. 31, 1969.
16 minutes of Atkins’s November 26 arraignment: California v. Atkins, Case no. A058031, Los
Angeles Superior Court Archives, Nov. 26, 1969.
17 produced no results: Mary Hearn, Director of Public Information, Los Angeles Superior Court, told
me this.
18 worked there himself for eight years: Dial Torgerson and Ron Einstoss, “Jury Hears Tate Case Girl
Today, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 1969.
19 close with his former colleagues: California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten
and Patricia Krenwinkel, case 22239, 25063. Caballero acknowledged that—like his law partner
who assisted him in the case, Paul Caruso—he was a member of the “EJY Club,” a steering
committee of citizens dedicated to electing DA Evelle J. Younger as attorney general of California
in 1970. The club was disbanded after Younger’s opponent charged that its members received
favors from Younger in exchange for donations.
20 Police Chief Edward Davis: “3 from Bay Commune Named in Tate Slaying,” Santa Monica
[Calif.] Evening Outlook, Dec. 1, 1969, 1.
21 well-known mob lawyer: Jeanie Kasindorf, “The Case Against Evelle Younger,” New West
Magazine, Oct. 23, 1978. This eight-page cover story alleged that DA Younger protected organized
crime figures through the help of friends like Caruso. The story focused on a notorious 1967 case
involving Caruso’s representation of Maurice Friedman, a mobster, who, with Johnny Rosselli—
Charles Baron’s associate—was tried for fixing card games at the Hollywood Friars Club.
22 she’d been “at the scene”: All the quotes in this paragraph from an unbylined front-page story, “8
Women, 2 Men Held in Tate Killings,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, Dec. 2, 1969, 1.
23 Atkins had accepted their deal: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 223.
24 Manson’s dictatorial methods: Charles Hillinger and Dial Torgerson, “Revenge Claimed: Grudge
Against Doris Day Son Linked to Slaying in Tate Case; Deaths Were Ordered, Suspect Says,” Los
Angeles Times, Dec. 3, 1969, 1.
25 “to a snack from the icebox”: “Attorney for Girl Member of Cult Tells Her Version,” Santa Monica
Evening Outlook, Dec. 3, 1969, 1.
26 a four-day fusillade of specificity: Associated Press, “Attorneys Accuse Hippies in Sharon Tate’s
Murder,” Dec. 4, 1969.
27 the president of the Los Angeles County Bar: Marilyn Elias, “Bar Chief Scores Atkins Attorney
over Tate Comments,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, Dec. 5, 1969, 1.
28 “might save her from the gas chamber”: Torgerson and Einstoss, “Jury Hears Tate Case Girl
Today.”
29 Bugliosi described it as “excellent”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 232.
30 nothing was ever formalized or signed: When pressed by Kanarek about not having a signed
agreement, Caballero said, the “common practice is such that these agreements aren’t written
down. It is just normally not done. These people are lawyers, professional people. You make an
agreement and you keep it” (Caballero testimony, California v. Manson et al., 25803). Kanarek
made sure to point out that Linda Kasabian’s attorneys had received a fully executed contract for
her deal with the prosecution.
31 “Do the French drink wine?”: Lawrence Schiller, The Killing of Sharon Tate (New York: Signet,
1969), 63.
32 unstable witness and a murderer: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 234.
33 “unusual” but “not unprecedented”: Ibid., 221.
34 Atkins spoke on tape: Ibid., 229–30.
35 that she didn’t kill Sharon Tate: Atkins testimony, Los Angeles Grand Jury, Dec. 5, 1969, 66.
36 consider not asking for the death penalty: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 218.
37 But after the grand jury, the deal changed: In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi wrote that once he learned
Atkins wouldn’t testify against the others the deal was all but over, despite their promise to Atkins
about not having to testify at trial (ibid., 338).
38 “we still didn’t have a case”: Ibid., 285, 295.
39 who came bearing messages from Manson: Ibid., 295, 338.
40 in negotiations with the attorney of Linda Kasabian: In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi made it appear that
they didn’t begin negotiations with Kasabian’s attorney until after they’d been notified on February
26, 1970, that Atkins wouldn’t testify at trial (which, again, she didn’t have to do anyway). But
according to documents I found, they’d already started discussing a Kasabian deal on or before
January 22. One such document from the LePage files, dated January 22, 1970 and titled “Minutes
of Meeting at Robbery Homicide, LAPD,” contained the following: “Present [at meeting], LePage
[eight other LAPD detectives], Stovitz and Bugliosi… On Kasabian, for us to agree to a plea of
manslaughter she would have to give full testimony in each trial. Her attorneys strike me (Stovitz)
as being sincere…”
41 “joyous”… “both burst into laughter”: Associated Press, “Happy Jail Reunion: Miss Atkins,
Manson Rejoined,” Mar. 6, 1970.
42 “Charlie doesn’t give orders”: William Farr, “Manson, Atkins in ‘Joyful’ Meeting,” Los Angeles
Herald Examiner, Mar. 5, 1970.
43 Atkins fired Caballero and Caruso: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 353.
44 declined to testify for the state: William Farr and Charles Sterling, “Susan Atkins to Deny Her
Story,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Mar. 10, 1970.
45 “outlandish” and “nonsensical” motions: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 353.
46 “to testify before the grand jury”: “2 New Tate Suspects?,” Hollywood Citizen News, Mar. 24,
 1970.
47 “instrumental in getting Dick Caballero”: Author interview with Gary Fleischman (now Gary
Fields).
48 “Hollywood journalist and communicator” named Lawrence Schiller: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter
Skelter, 261; Schiller testimony, California v. Manson et al., 24875.
49 far from the eyes of any potential jurors in Los Angeles: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 262.
50 Atkins’s byline landed: “Susan Atkins’ Story of 2 Nights of Murder,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 14,
1969, A1.
51 “world’s great real estate sections”: David Felton and David Dalton, “Charles Manson: The
Incredible Story of the Most Dangerous Man Alive,” Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970, 25.
52 “a fair trial in Los Angeles”: “Checkbook Journalism,” Newsweek, Dec. 29, 1969, 46.
53 Claiming to be “shocked and surprised”: City News Service, “Atkins Lawyer Raps Story,
Threatens Suit,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, Dec. 17, 1969.
54 “could not have been produced”: Schiller, Killing of Sharon Tate, 5.
55 landed on his doorstep: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 260–62.
56 Helter Skelter left all of this out: All the information—including direct quotes—in this section is
taken from the transcripts of the death-penalty phase testimony of Susan Atkins, Richard Caballero,
Paul Caruso, Carmella Ambrosini, Lawrence Schiller, Vincent Bugliosi, and Aaron Stovitz, unless
otherwise indicated. Ed Sanders also wrote a series of articles in the Los Angeles Free Press in
1970 (under his own name and various pseudonyms) detailing his suspicion that Caballero and
Caruso had been planted by the prosecution and sabotaged the Family’s defense: “Manson Can Go
Free: Distinguished Attorney Maps Out Manson’s Defense,” Jan. 16, 1970, 1, 6, 7; Dunbar J. Van
Ness, “Changing Focus on Manson,” Jan. 23, 1970, 2, 12, 13; A. J. Stapleton, “Manson Case: A
Fair Trial?,” Feb. 13, 1970, 21, 22; Ed Sanders, “Talk to Charles Manson—$1000 a Crack,” June
5, 1970, 3; and Ed Sanders, “The Case of the Susan Atkins Rip-Off,” July 24, 1970, 3, 20, 24.
57 the comedian Lenny Bruce: Grace Lichtenstein, “Gilmore’s Agent an Entrepreneur Who
Specializes in the Sensational,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 1977; author interview with Richard
Shackleton.
58 “until her fate is decided”: Schiller, The Killing of Sharon Tate, 66.
59 $40,000 for exclusive English rights: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 262. The New York
Times reported Schiller’s gross at $175,000—see Lichtenstein, “Gilmore’s Agent an Entrepreneur.”
60 collaborating with Cohen on a book of his own: Author interview with Vincent Bugliosi.
61 said reporter worked for the same newspaper: Schiller testified that Cohen had taken a three-day
leave of absence from the Times to write the story (Schiller testimony, California v. Manson et al.,
24911).
62 afterward he claimed in interviews: See David Margolick, “Letter from Los Angeles: O.J.’s Ghost,”
 Vanity Fair, Nov. 1996, 116; David Scheff, “Playboy Interview: Lawrence Schiller,” Playboy, Feb.
1997, 23; Lichtenstein, “Gilmore’s Agent an Entrepreneur”; Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s
Song (New York: Warner, 1980), 599.
63 if not for Pete Miller: All the information in this section is taken from the transcripts of the death-
penalty phase testimony of Pete Miller, Caballero, and Bugliosi, unless otherwise indicated.
64 “the prosecution didn’t put up any obstacles”: “Checkbook Journalism.”
65 wanted the publicity from the case: Ed Sanders, “‘Gas Chamber’ Prosecution Girds Its Loins for
Battle,” Los Angeles Free Press, June 12, 1970, 12.
66 Lawrence Schiller wouldn’t talk: His assistant in 2005, Kathleen, told me the Manson case was
“the one subject he doesn’t discuss” (of course, from his interviews with Playboy, Vanity Fair, and
more, that hardly appears to be true).
67 supporting the official explanation: Richard Warren Lewis, The Scavengers and Critics of the
Warren Report: Based on an Investigation by Lawrence Schiller (New York: Delacorte Press,
1967).
68 Ruby’s confessing to the murder: Released by Capitol Records in 1967 as an LP, it’s titled The
Controversy.
69 hadn’t killed Oswald: According to documents I found at the National Archives, Schiller sent a
prerelease transcript of the Ruby interview to, among others, J. Edgar Hoover, offering it as proof
that Ruby shot Oswald “on an impulse and there was no conspiracy” (House Select Committee on
Assassinations, Rec. 180-10019-10176, File 62-109060-4429, Jan. 20, 1967, 2). In an effort to
refute Warren Commission critic Mark Lane, who claimed that a famous photograph of Kennedy’s
alleged assassin Oswald holding the rifle used in the crime was doctored, Schiller appeared in a
1967 TV documentary to present the findings of his “independent study” of the picture, showing it
was authentic (The Warren Report, CBS, June 25, 1967). A decade later, in Carl Bernstein’s
groundbreaking exposé, “The CIA and the Media” (Rolling Stone, Oct. 20, 1977), Bernstein
reported that “CBS was unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable asset,” adding, “over the years the
network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign
correspondent and several stringers” (61).
70 Their identities were never revealed: Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” 55–67.
71 believed Schiller was one of those assets: Author interview with Mark Lane.
72 “smear” him in the press: HSCA, Rec. 180-10019-100034, File 008976, June 6, 1978.
73 Schiller had been acting as an informant: Most of the information in this section is taken from the
records of the National Archive’s Kennedy Assassination Collection. However, I also relied
heavily on a book by Joan Mellen, a Temple University professor, about New Orleans District
Attorney Jim Garrison’s unsuccessful prosecution of alleged CIA “asset” Clay Shaw, for the
murder of President Kennedy. A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and The
 Case That Should Have Changed History (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005) used many of the
same documents I found to make a compelling case that Schiller and Cohen were among many
CIA and FBI media assets tasked to obstruct and derail the controversial DA’s investigation.
74 publications that provided CIA employees with cover: Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” 63.
Bernstein reported that Henry Luce, the founding publisher of Time and Life magazines, “readily
allowed certain members of his staff—at Time and Life—to work for the Agency and agreed to
provide jobs and credentials to other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience” (ibid.).
75 and then sharing his findings with the FBI: HSCA, Rec. 180-10046-10153, File 105-82555-
unrecorded, Mar. 16, 1967, 1–6; FBI, Rec. 124-100048-10455, File 62-109060-4876, Mar. 15.
1967, 1; FBI, Rec. 124-10050-10025, File 62-109060-4907, Mar. 22, 1967, 1–4; FBI, Rec. 124-
10050-10018, File 62-109060-4903, Mar. 29, 1967, 1–4.
76 “in possession of the names”: FBI, Rec. 124-100048-10455, File 62-109060-4876, Mar. 15. 1967,
1. A week later, according to two follow-up memos, Schiller met with agent A. Rosen of the FBI’s
Los Angeles Field Office and provided the name, aliases, and likely addresses of Lane’s informant
—see FBI, Rec. 124-10050-10025, File 62-109060-4907, Mar. 22, 1967, 1–4; FBI, Rec. 124-
10050-10018, File 62-109060-4903, Mar. 29, 1967, 1–4.
77 According to memos, the FBI eagerly awaited: FBI, Rec. 124-10050-10006, File 62-109060-4897,
Mar. 28, 1967, 1. In addition, Schiller informed the FBI of articles “under consideration” at Life
that “attacked the conclusions of the Warren Commission” (FBI, Rec. 124-10043-10283, File 62-
109060-4846, Mar. 21, 1967) and of articles in preparation at other publications—in this case The
New Yorker—with information about Garrison’s investigation that hadn’t been made public yet
(FBI, Rec. 124-10050-10006, File 62-109060-4897, Mar. 28, 1967, 3).
78 President Kennedy and his brother Robert: Noyes’s book, Legacy of Doubt (New York: Pinnacle,
1973), blamed right-wing intelligence operatives and organized crime for the assassinations of both
Kennedys.
79 pressured him to abandon the project: Author interview with Pete Noyes.
80 Noyes was fairly certain that Cohen: The CIA never responded to my 2002 FOIA for information
on Cohen. His widow, Dorothy, a former journalist and two-term mayor of South Pasadena,
declined my request for an interview. His daughter, Cassy, also a journalist, spoke to me briefly but
said she couldn’t continue without consulting an attorney.
81 interview with Howard: “Interview of Rena Howard—Sybil Brand Institute,” Nov. 18, 1969, 1–4,
LePage personal files.
82 drugs on the nights of the murders: Kasabian testified more than a dozen times that she didn’t take
drugs anytime around the murders. “I just know,” she said under cross-examination by Kanarek
(California v. Manson et al., 6302). “Do I have to give a further explanation? I just know.”
83 all the killers had taken speed: Kasabian voice-over, Manson, Cineplex Productions, 2009: “Before
 we left the ranch, I remember that we all took some speed. A white capsule was handed to me and I
took it.”
84 repeated incessantly in Atkins’s later accounts: In the Dec. 14, 1969, Los Angeles Times story,
Schiller quoted Atkins saying Manson “instructed” her to do things five times in just the opening
column of the multipage article.
85 They may not even have known: Keith Ditman testimony, California v. Manson et al., 25347.
86 he had no explanation for why: By the end of Manson’s life, this had evolved to his saying he
might’ve had an idea what they were going to do, but he had nothing to do with it. “I didn’t direct
anyone to do a motherfucking thing,” Manson told Rolling Stone in 2013 (Erik Hedegaard,
“Charles Manson Today: The Final Confessions of a Psychopath,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 21, 2013).
87 eyeglasses recovered from Tate’s living room: LAPD First Homicide Investigation Progress
Report, DR 69-059-593, 16.
88 “a misleading clue for the police”: Nuel Emmons, Manson in His Own Words (New York: Grove
Press, 1986), 207.
89 Manson himself vaguely disavowed: Author interview with Craig Hammond.
90 several televised interviews to promote it: Manson, with Emmons, was interviewed in prison by
Tom Snyder for Snyder’s eponymous show on June 12, 1981, and again, for Today on Jan. 27,
1987.
91 “So what if I did make you”: Charles Manson to Linda Kasabian, Mar. 21, 1970, LASO files.
92 she told Atkins to stop cooperating: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 294.
93 never given an interview about Manson: Author interview with Danny Bowser.
94 covert surveillance on known criminals: All the information about SIS in this section is from a
series of investigative pieces the Los Angeles Times ran about the secretive unit, beginning with
David Freed, “Special Investigations Section: Watching Crime Happen—LAPD’s Secret SIS Unit,
Citizens Terrorized as Police Look On,” Sept. 25, 1988; and including Matt Lait, “SIS: Stormy
Past, Shaky Future; LAPD’s Special Investigation Section,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 29, 1998.
95 “We weren’t even connected”: Ibid.
96 SIS was called the “Death Squad”: Lait, “SIS: Stormy Past.”
97 “documented numerous instances”: Freed, “Special Investigations Section.”
98 “Even within the LAPD”: Lait, “SIS: Stormy Past.”
99 The later piece in the Times reported: Ibid.
100 “One of his responsibilities”: Roman Polanski, Roman by Polanski (New York: William Morrow,
1984), 310.
101 his real eye had been shot out: Ibid.
102 taken into custody on August 9, 1969: First Homicide Investigation Progress Report, 16.
9. Manson’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card
1 The events of June 4, 1969: All information about the June 4, 1969, arrest is from the two-page
police report (Officer G. M. Heidrich, LAPD, Arrest Report, DR 69-469997).
2 The police had discovered a warrant: The information about the arrests and prosecution of Atkins,
Brunner, and other female Family members in Mendocino, as well as the probation violations of
Atkins after her sentence, and Mendocino County’s effort to revoke her probation, comes from
arrest reports, court minutes, probation reports, news clippings, and interviews with principal
subjects. Sources are cited below whenever a document, news report, or interview is quoted. If
information is presented without quotation marks, it comes from the more than two dozen
documents, clips, and interviews compiled for this section. The same goes for the almost identical
events in Oregon a year earlier.
3 “no intentions of abiding by it”: “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation for Revocation
in Absentia,” Sadie Mae Glutz, Case no. 4503-C, Dept. 2, Filed in the Superior Court of the State
of California, Mendocino County, Statement of Fact, Margo S. Tompkins, May 29, 1969, 3.
4 “the defendant has not violated”: “Minute Order on Probation Hearing,” Glutz, Case no. 4503-C,
Dept. 2, Filed in the Superior Court of the State of California, Mendocino County, June 18, 1969,
1.
5 murders of at least eight people: Atkins was convicted in the seven Tate–LaBianca killings and
pleaded guilty to the murder of Gary Hinman.
6 a “traveling minister”: Mary Yates, Senior Probation Officer, City and County of San Francisco,
letter to C. H. McFarlan, Deputy Administrator, Interstate Probation and Parole, Sacramento, Re:
Susan Denise Atkins, Case CJ 4771-Oregon, Nov. 10, 1967, 1–2.
7 “is in love with all of them”: Ibid., 1.
8 “certain she will do as she pleases”: Ibid., 2.
9 “Her speech was quite disorganized”: M. E. Madison, Memo to File, Re: Atkins, CJ Prob. 4771,
Nov. 14, 1967.
10 they wrote to the original sentencing judge: M. E. Madison, Supervisor, Interstate Unit, letter to
Honorable Judge George A. Jones, Marion County Court House, Re: Atkins, CJ Prob. 4771, Dec.
12, 1967, 1–2.
11 terminating Susan Atkins’s probation: George A. Jones, Circuit Judge, State of Oregon, County of
Marion, no. 61487, Oregon v. Atkins, “Order Terminating Probation,” Jan. 4, 1968.
12 Manson sent his girls there: The information in this section is from the same records, clippings, and
interviews, with additional arrest, court, and probation files of the others arrested in Mendocino on
May 22, 1968: Mary Brunner, Ella Jo Bailey, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Stephanie Rowe.
Additional information comes from such books as David E. Smith and John Luce, Love Needs
 Care (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s
Mouth, 2002), and Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton, 1994).
13 “saw flashes when he closed his eyes”: David Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and
Recommendation, Sadie Mae Glutz aka Susan Denise Atkins,” Superior Court of the State of
California, in and for the County of Mendocino, Case no. 4503-C, Dept. 2, Aug. 30, 1968, 3.
14 Brunner’s had just begun: Brunner was arrested in April 1968 with Manson and about a dozen
other Family members while sleeping beside their parked bus on the Pacific Coast Highway in
Ventura County. The officers found her week-old baby, Michael Valentine, sleeping alone in the
bus and charged her with endangering the welfare of a child. She pleaded guilty to a reduced
charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and was sentenced to two years’ probation,
though there’s no record she ever met with a probation officer (“‘Hippie’ Mom on Probation,
Returned Baby,” Oxnard [Calif.] Press Courier, May 14, 1968, 9).
15 Smith and his wife decided: This was first reported by Sanders in The Family. It was also
confirmed by Roger Smith, and his ex-wife, Carol, in interviews with me.
16 Pooh Bear’s temporary foster parents: Ibid.
17 Alan Rose repaired to Mendocino County: Alan Rose’s involvement with the Family was first
reported in “M.D. on Manson’s Sex Life: Psychologist Who Lived with Manson Family Tells
About Commune,” The Berkeley Barb, Jan. 16–22, 1970, 1, 13, and later by Sanders in The Family
and Smith and Luce in Love Needs Care. It was also confirmed by Rose, David Smith, Roger
Smith, and others in interviews with me.
18 “former federal parole officer”: Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation, Sadie
Mae Glutz,” 4.
19 Manson and his “guru”-like hold: David Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and
Recommendation, Mary Theresa Brunner,” Superior Court of the State of California, in and for the
County of Mendocino, Case no. 4503-C, Dept. No. 2, Sept. 6, 1968, 6.
20 used her name without her knowledge: Author interview with Carol Smith (who asked to be
identified by her former last name).
21 “hostile and possibly vengeful”: Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation, Sadie
Mae Glutz,” 10.
22 “comply willingly”: Ibid., 4. According to the report, the couple said they knew Atkins for
“approximately three years.” If true, that meant they’d known Atkins since about August 1965, two
years before she even met Manson.
23 “manipulated by her present group”: Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation,
Mary Theresa Brunner,” 8.
24 his leniency with the Manson girls: Author interview with Duncan James (one of the deputy district
attorneys who prosecuted Atkins, Brunner, and the others).
25 Winslow resurfaced in Los Angeles: The judge’s last day on the bench was January 6, 1969,
according to the Mendocino County Office of Human Resources.
26 the attorney for Doris Day and her son, Terry Melcher: Winslow represented the pair in their
lawsuit against the business partner of Day’s late husband for breach of contract and fraud.
27 Winslow who accompanied him: Author interview with Tom Johnson; also confirmed by
Winslow’s widow, Betty, via Johnson (Mrs. Winslow declined to speak to me).
28 began to use LSD: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 257–58.
29 Manson had been released from Terminal Island: The information in this section comes from a
variety of sources, most prominently, Manson’s federal parole file, which I petitioned the U.S.
Parole Commission for in a nearly two-year-long FOIA process. Other sources were police reports
and case files I was able to obtain from various county, state, and federal offices, newspaper
clippings, books (including Love Needs Care and The Family), and interviews, chief among them,
Roger Smith, David Smith, and Alan Rose.
30 “sustained history of violence”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 203.
31 “criminally sophisticated”: Ibid.
32 Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked: Angus D. McEachen, Chief U.S. Probation
Officer, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, “Petition for Action… Praying
that court will order issuance of bench warrant…,” United States v. Charles Milles Manson,
Central Division, Docket no. C-27806-CD (“Probationer has failed to submit written monthly
report since Feb. 5, 1960 [and] to keep the Probation Office notified as to his whereabouts and
current address”), filed May 25, 1960. Manson’s probation was also revoked in 1956 by the federal
probation office in Los Angeles for missing a hearing (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 196). I
was unable to determine if McEachen was in the office at that time.
33 “requested and received permission”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 203.
34 The prosecutor had a copy of Manson’s parole file: Ibid., 190–203.
35 “now within the city of Berkeley, California”: John A. Sprague, Supervising U.S. Probation
Officer, Northern District of California, letter to Angus D. McEachen, Chief U.S. Probation
Officer, U.S. Court House, Los Angeles, Apr. 11, 1967.
36 Robert Heinlein’s: Robert Gillette, “Manson’s Blueprint?: Claim Tate Suspect Used Space-Fiction
Plot,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Jan. 8, 1970, A1–2; “A Martian Model?,” Time, Jan. 19,
1970, 44–45; Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 258.
37 Roger Smith got a nickname: Gillette, “Manson’s Blueprint?,” A2.; Smith and Luce, Love Needs
Care, 260.
38 “no powers of invention”: “A Martian Model?,” 44.
39 But Roger Smith approved: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 258.
40 hazy on the details of how he became: I interviewed Smith on the phone several times and in
 person twice, first at his home in Michigan in 2001, and then at his home in Oregon in 2008.
41 funded by the National Institute of Mental Health: James Robison, Leslie T. Wilkins, Robert M.
Carter, and Albert Wahl, “Final Report,” The San Francisco Project: A Study of Federal Probation
and Parole, April 1969, 1 (“This study was supported by a $275,000 Mental Health Project Grant
from the National Institute of Mental Health”).
42 The project studied the relationship between: I reviewed the study’s papers at the Special
Collections Department of the University of California Bancroft Library, Berkeley. This archive—
catalogued officially as The San Francisco Project, University of California, School of
Criminology, 1965–1969, Call no. NRLF (UCB) HV9303. C2 no. 14—consists mostly of academic
papers, with no individual case files or specifics about clients (“No substantive estimate of the
number and characteristics of these cases appears to be available”—William P. Adams, Paul M.
Chandler, and M. G. Neithercutt, “The San Francisco Project: A Critique,” Federal Probation,
Dec. 1971, 46). Neither Smith’s nor Manson’s names appear in the collection. The information in
this section comes from these UC Berkeley files, as well as news articles and interviews with Smith
and several other parole and probation officers who worked on the four-year-long study.
43 The six participating parole officers: Ibid.; author interviews with William P. Adams, M. G.
Neithercutt, and Roger Smith.
44 winnowed his set of parolees: Roger Smith was vague about when and if Manson ever became his
only client, but Gail Sadalla and Alan Rose, both of whom assisted Smith at the Amphetamine
Research Project, said Manson was the only parolee they were aware of who came to the HAFMC
for meetings with Smith (author interview with Gail Sadalla; author interviews with Rose).
45 a few days in 1956: According to Manson’s FBI “rap” sheet, he was held in the Chicago County
Jail from March 9 through 12, 1956, while awaiting transfer to Los Angeles on a federal probation
violation (“Charles Milles Manson,” U.S. Department of Justice, FBI Rec, no. 643 369 A, April 15,
1959).
46 violent behavior in Oakland gang members: Wallace Turner, “Addiction Linked to Violent Youth:
‘Rowdies’ Likely to Become Heroin Users, Study Finds,” New York Times, April 30, 1967.
47 through his own “immersion”: Author interview with R. Smith.
48 He and the other researchers created “outposts”: Ibid. One of the “projects” initiated by Blumer and
Smith in 1965—with Smith serving as director—was the Juvenile Add-Center Project, an “action
research program” for at-risk youth in the flatland district. In an academic paper, Smith described
the center as a way “to penetrate the drug world… its primary goal is to obtain a clear view of the
ways into and the ways out of the drug world” (Roger Smith, “Status Politics and the Image of the
Addict,” Issues in Criminology, Fall 1966, 157, 307–8).
49 They embraced a “participant-observer” approach: As Smith explained to me, the best way to
“understand how young people got involved with gangs, how they rationalized what they did, how
 they were able to justify it to recruit other people” was to “suspend judgment” and observe them.
This included, he acknowledged, not reporting criminal activity he or his researchers might
witness.
50 expert on gangs, collective behavior: “Seminar to Explore Use, Abuse of Drugs,” Oakland Tribune,
Apr. 18, 1967.
51 to send Manson to live in the Haight: Author interview with R. Smith; Smith and Luce, Love Needs
Care, 257 (Smith and Luce maintain that Roger originally turned down Manson’s request to
relocate to the Haight, but later changed his mind and approved it).
52 “The summer of love was just”: George Varga, “The Summer of Love, an Epic Tipping Point for
Music and Youth Culture, Turns 50,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 27, 2017.
53 “A new nation has grown”: Peter Conners, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of
Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), 199.
54 dropped acid on a daily basis: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 258.
55 “seemed to accept the world”: Ibid., 257.
56 “He appears to be in better shape”: Roger Smith to Joseph Shore, Parole Executive, U.S. Board of
Parole, July 31, 1967.
57 At the time, Manson was sitting in a jail cell: All the information about Manson’s arrest and
conviction in July 1967 is from police reports, news clippings, and interviews with the officers
involved in the arrest, as well as with Dean Moorehouse (the father of Ruth Ann Moorehouse),
who witnessed it.
58 merited only a footnote: Bugliosi did mention that Manson received a three-year probation sentence
(Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 315), but he never said what happened to Manson’s probation
supervision for his 1967 conviction. And I’ve never found any evidence that it was enforced, let
alone enacted.
59 permitted into evidence during the trial: The information in this section is from the testimony of
Samuel Barrett (Manson’s final parole officer), who was called during the death-penalty phase of
the trial by Kanarek, in an effort to gain access to Manson’s parole records (California v. Charles
Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, case 22239, 22132–203).
60 he dispatched David Anderson: Ibid., 22161–74.
61 “incriminate the Attorney General”: Ibid., 22193.
62 “four inches thick”: Ibid., 22177.
63 occurred under his watch: Author interview with R. Smith.
64 to travel to Mexico: Smith to Shore, July 31, 1967.
65 Manson had been arrested in Mexico: Manson v. United States, “Forma Pauperis Affidavit,” no.
64-585-WM, filed Apr. 8, 1964 (Manson filed a motion arguing that his 1959 arrest in Mexico and
reparation to the United States were unfair because he was unable to understand the proceedings in
 the Mexican court).
66 “Manson is not to leave”: There were two overlapping notes, one typed and one handwritten; the
first, cited here, is Joseph Shore to Albert Wahl, Chief U.S. Probation Officer, San Francisco, Aug.
25, 1967.
67 record was “lengthy and serious”: Handwritten note with illegible signature to illegible recipient,
on “U.S. Board of Parole” letterhead, Sept. 5, 1967.
68 “additives and mineral food supplements”: Roger Smith to Joseph Shore, Aug. 15, 1967.
69 The parole board rejected: Shore to Wahl, Aug. 25, 1967.
70 study of Mexican drug trafficking: Author interview with R. Smith.
71 Mazatlán, which was the main port city: Elijah Wald, Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of
Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas (New York: Rayo, 2001), 39.
72 “Was I a career, committed parole officer? No!”: Author interview with R. Smith.
73 to meet with “recording agents”: Roger Smith [to Manson], “Permission to Travel” (“Ft.
Lauderdale, Fla., via Los Angeles… leaving Nov. 10, 1967 and returning within 20 days… to
contact recording agents in Los Angeles and Florida regarding sale and recording of your music”),
Nov. 16, 1967; Roger Smith [to Manson], “Permission to Travel” (“Miami, Fla… leaving 11-30-67
and returning within 20 days… to further the possibility of obtaining a record contract”), Dec. 4,
1967.
74 If they went anywhere: Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation, Mary Theresa
Brunner,” 5 (“They have also visited Southern California and Mexico lately”).
75 Susan Atkins’s probation officers: Yates to McFarlan, Nov. 10, 1967, 1–2. Yates wrote: “Today
they leave for Los Angeles and then on to Florida. I told her she was not to leave without the
permission of the Oregon Probation Department, but I am just as certain she will do as she
pleases.” See also Madison, Memo to File, Nov. 14, 1967. Madison wrote: “At 3:15 pm Atkins
called and advised she was going on trip with or without permission.”
76 quite a bit of time in Mexico: Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report and Recommendation, Mary
Theresa Brunner.”
77 “your status leaves much to be desired”: Samuel Barrett to Charles Manson, June 12, 1968, in
Manson’s federal parole file.
78 Barrett was the parole officer: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 546–47.
79 three hundred parole cases between 1967 and 1969: Author interview with Samuel Barrett.
80 only twenty-one words for Roger Smith: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 225.
81 “apparently did not retain”: Pamela A. Posch, General Counsel, United States Parole Commission,
letter to author, June 4, 2001, 1. Posch conceded that this was unusual in a follow-up phone
conversation.
82 the files of “notorious felons”: Author interview with Ann Diestel, Archivist, Federal Bureau of
 Prisons; Posch to O’Neill, June 4, 2001, 1.
83 that file was missing, too: Author interview with Victoria Hardin, Director, Office of History,
National Institute of Health. Using the information I gave her, Hardin was unable to find any
record of the San Francisco Project in her archive, which inherited the NIMH files after several
reorganizations of the program.
84 The headline: Charles Hillinger, “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies
Asleep in Weeds,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 23, 1968, 3, 23. See also: “Nine Nude Hippies
Arrested; Found Huddled Around a Bonfire,” Oxnard Press Courier, Apr. 23, 1968, 9; Associated
Press, “No Disaster: Just Hippies Sleeping Nude,” Ontario Daily Report, Apr. 23, 1968, A-4;
United Press International, “14 Nude Hippies Found Beside a Wayward Bus,” Oakland Tribune,
Apr. 23, 1969, 14.
85 “Wait, my baby’s on the bus”: Hillinger, “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch,” 3.
86 She was later convicted: “‘Hippie’ Mom on Probation,” 9.
87 traveling freely “between San Francisco”: Albert Wahl, Chief Probation Officer, U.S. District
Court, Northern District of California, letter to Angus D. McEachen, Apr. 26, 1968, 1.
88 “Be sure to read the clipping”: Ibid., 2.
89 legal owner of the bus: Angus D. McEachen, letter to Albert Wahl, May 7, 1968, 1–2.
90 sending Manson back to federal prison: McEachen, “Petition for Action.”
91 “his adventuresome nature”: McEachen to Wahl, May 7, 1968, 2.
92 sitting in the Los Angeles County jail: Ibid.
93 DA had declined to file: Angus D. McEachen, letter to Albert Wahl, May 29, 1968.
94 “Failure to follow”: Albert Wahl, letter to Charles Manson, June 3, 1968.
95 “It would appear that Mr. Manson”: Albert Wahl, letter to Angus D. McEachen, June 11, 1968.
96 “succumbed to Manson’s obsequious manner”: Angus D. McEachen, letter to Albert Wahl, June
12, 1968.
97 The record label “would have to be idiotic”: Ibid.
98 On June 12, Barrett: Samuel Barrett, letter to Charles Manson, June 12, 1969.
99 The next letters came: Angus D. McEachen, letter to Joseph Shore (Attn.: James Jones), Aug. 7,
1968.
100 hosted Manson at their home: Author interview with C. Smith; author interview with R. Smith.
101 The National Institute of Mental Health funded: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36.
102 used by the CIA as a funding front: Edwin M. Long Jr., Deputy Director, Scientific and Public
Information, NIMH, letter to Joseph J. Petrillo and Timothy Sullivan, Sept. 30, 1976, National
Security Archives, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
103 “way in which violence”: Roger Smith, “The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and Compulsive
Methamphetamine Abuse” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1969), 5.
104 “asking me to help them with the law”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36.
105 Hiding in a “deviant group”: Smith, “The Marketplace of Speed.”
106 anonymity in all reports: Ibid., 136.
107 opened the previous summer: When it finally received funding in May 1968, ARP was moved to
the clinic’s “annex,” one block away (Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36).
108 why not just meet: Smith was vague in his interviews with me (as were David Smith and Luce in
their book) about when his professional relationship with Manson ended and the personal one
began. Smith told Ed Sanders, for instance, that he stopped being a parole officer in January 1968,
when he began work at the clinic (Sanders, The Family, 460–61), but in a résumé Smith shared
with me, he lists the date of his departure from the probation office as May 1968. David Smith and
Luce put the start of Roger’s work at the HAFMC as January 1968 (36) but other sources told me it
was the fall of 1967 (author interviews with Rose, Sadalla, and Ernest Dernburg). Whatever the
case, Manson was visiting Roger Smith at the clinic in some capacity in the spring of ’68, as Smith
and Luce report Roger saying in their book: “I ceased being his parole officer in 1968, when I
started working at the Medical Section, so [Manson] had no real reason to spend so much time with
me. But he came anyway, preaching about love” (257).
109 Soon Manson became a mainstay: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 36, 255–62.

10. The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic

1 David Elvin Smith grew up: This section relies primarily on Smith’s writing in Love Needs Care
(cowritten by John Luce; Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) and in his self-published Journal of
Psychedelic Drugs. A biography of Smith by Clark S. Sturges, Dr. Dave: A Profile of David E.
Smith, M.D., Founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Devil Mountain
Books, 1993), was also heavily resourced.
2 “high on the same substance”: Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, “Volunteer Doctor, The Free Clinic at 33: How
a Radical Idea Became a Model Institution,” Diversion, April 2000.
3 “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known: Author interview with Robert Conrich.
4 They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New
York: Norton, 1994), 315.
5 “reprogram” his followers: The information about Manson’s methods of “reprogramming” his
followers during the Haight period is from Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 259–63, unless
otherwise noted.
6 a phrase David claims to have coined: Author interview with David Smith.
7 But Manson had an aversion: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 258–59.
8 “mitigating circumstances”: Ibid.
 9 a “capsule” of speed: Manson, Cineplex Productions, 2009.
10 In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins: Susan Atkins with Bob Slosser, Child of Satan,
Child of God (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1977), 135; Susan Atkins, Subsequent Parole
Consideration Hearing, State of California Board of Prison Terms, in the Matter of the Life Term
Parole Consideration Hearing of Susan Atkins, CDC Inmate W-08340, June 1, 2005, multiple
references.
11 both nights of the murders: Tex Watson and Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? (Old Tappan,
N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 131, 141.
12 brooding on his delusions: Susan Atkins-Whitehouse, The Myth of Helter Skelter, (San Juan
Capistrano, Calif.: Menelorelin Dorenay, 2012), 63.
13 a short essay for Life magazine: Roger Smith and David Smith, “A Doctor and a Parole Officer
Remember Manson,” Life, Dec. 1, 1969, 26.
14 only the third reporter: Not counting his December 1969 Life essay and his interview for 1971’s
Love Needs Care, Roger Smith spoke to Ed Sanders for The Family in 1971 (but his quotes weren’t
attributed to him until Sanders’s 2002 update, 460–61) and the cable channel A&E for its
documentary Charles Manson: Journey into Evil (1995).
15 “If you love everything, you don’t”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 257–58.
16 “Charlie’s ability to draw”: Author interview with Alan Rose.
17 “was always kind of fascinated”: Author interview with Carol Smith.
18 “he had made an error”: Author interview with Ernest Dernburg.
19 “bringing operations to a standstill”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 260.
20 One reason the HAFMC was free: Much of Love Needs Care recounts David Smith’s never-ending
battle to keep the clinic open in the first few years. Although he told me in interviews that it never
received federal grants, he clearly states in the book (36) that Roger Smith’s ARP was funded by a
$37,000 grant from the NIMH in May 1968, and several papers published by Smith and his
colleagues at the HAFMC acknowledge the NIMH for funding.
21 “I always thought there would be problems”: Author interview with Lyle Grosjean.
22 “He was going to soothe the savage beast”: Author interview with Dernburg.
23 never actually received his PhD: Author interview with D. Smith.
24 published a brief article: The story is an almost word-for-word copy of the thesis of Charles M.
Fischer, one of the four researchers, who received his master’s in pharmacology at the University
of California, San Francisco, in 1968. I obtained a copy of the thesis from the university. Smith told
me that it was originally his PhD dissertation; he “gave” it to Fischer when he realized he wasn’t
going to finish his doctorate. Fischer denied Smith’s assertion. Fischer’s name—along with those
of Smith, Eugene Schoenfeld, and Charles H. Hine—appeared on the paper when it was published
the following year in the HAFMC’s Journal of Psychedelic Drugs under the same title,
 “Behavioral Mediators in the Polyphasic Mortality Curve of Aggregate Amphetamine Toxicity”
(vol. 2 [Spring 1969]: 55–72). A revised version of the article was published in a bound collection
of Journal articles in 1973.
25 sixteen albino mice: The information in this section comes from interviews with David Smith and
Schoenfeld and Fischer, Smith’s coresearchers in the mice study. (Hine died in 1991.) The
scientific data is taken directly from version of the paper published in 1969 in Journal of
Psychedelic Drugs, except where specified. The similarities of Smith’s animal research to the
formation of the Manson Family were first reported by Carol Greene (a pseudonym) in a German
book published by the right-wing Lyndon LaRouche Organization, Der Fall Charles Manson:
Mörder aus der Retorte (n.p.: E.I.R., 1992). I was able to obtain an English translation (The Test
Tube Murders; no publication data available) and speak to “Greene” in 2003. Some of her findings
were substantiated during my independent investigation and expanded on (others were impossible
to corroborate). “Greene” told me she’d severed ties with the LaRouche organization and no longer
had her research files. She didn’t interview anyone for her book and relied mostly on Smith’s
articles and Love Needs Care, from which she drew her theories.
26 “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 16. See also author
interview with D. Smith.
27 dismembered body parts: Fischer, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the time, had to check
on the mice in eight-hour intervals, often in the middle of the night. “It was brutal,” he told me of
the carnage he’d encounter. “There was no rhyme or reason—it was just helter skelter.”
28 “consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 16.
29 “lashed out with murderous rage”: Ibid., 19.
30 “like rats in a cage”: Ibid., 222.
31 Suggestibility was among: According to the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs article, the objective of
research was twofold: to discover which drugs would “modify” the violence of the animals caused
by amphetamine and aggregation and, more important, what existing “behavioral” factors made
some animals violent enough to kill, and to isolate those factors. See Fischer et al., “Behavioral
Mediators,” 56.
32 they’re rats: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, multiple references; David Smith and Donald R.
Wesson, eds., Uppers and Downers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974), 47.
33 Schoenfeld insisted that he’d worked with rats: Author interview with Eugene Schoenfeld. Fischer
asked me whether David Smith was on “drugs” when he told me the research was on rats. “I’m
surprised that David wouldn’t remember that,” he said during our interview, “they were Balt-C. I
was the one who ordered those damn mice and I was the one who shot them up.”
34 David Smith’s research was funded: D. E. Smith, C. M. Fischer, and C. H. Hine, “Effects of
Chlorpromazine, Phenobarbital, and Iproniazid on the Polyphasic Mortality Curve of Aggregate
 Amphetamine,” from “Abstracts of Papers for the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Society of
Toxicology, Atlanta, Georgia, March 23–25, 1967,” Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology 10
(1967): 378–411. The abstract contains this notation on p. 403: “Supported in part by U.S. Public
Service Toxicology Training Grant No. 5 TO1 GM01304-02.”
35 rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide: The information in this section is from Calhoun’s paper,
unless otherwise noted: John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific
American 206, no. 2 (Feb. 1962): 139–49.
36 “that can be found within [the] group”: Ibid., 144.
37 “a lasting impact on the individual’s personality”: William McGlothlin, Sidney Cohen, and
Marcella McGlothlin, “Long Lasting Effects of LSD on Normals,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 3,
no. 1 (Sept. 1970): 20–31 (reprinted from Archives of General Psychiatry 17, no. 5 [Nov. 1967]:
521–32).
38 feelings of “frustrated anger” led people: Kay Blacker, “Chronic Users of LSD: The ‘Acidheads,’”
Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1970): 32.
39 “the psychedelic syndrome”: According to a paper he later wrote, Smith first presented this theory
in a lecture at the University of California, San Francisco, between the fall of 1967 and spring of
1968. See David E. Smith, “Changing Patterns of Drug Abuse in Haight-Ashbury,” California
Medicine, Feb. 1969.
40 “the emergence of a dramatic orientation”: David E. Smith, “LSD and the Psychedelic Syndrome,”
Clinical Toxicology 2, no. 1 (Mar. 1969): 69–73.
41 “Charlie could probably be diagnosed”: R. Smith and D. Smith, “A Doctor and a Parole Officer
Remember Manson,” 26.
42 a criminology paper: Roger Smith, “Status Politics and the Image of the Addict,” Issues in
Criminology, Fall 1966. All of the information in this section is taken directly from Smith’s article.
43 But as Grogan wrote: Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (Boston: Little, Brown,
1972), 290.
44 Rose was a friend of Roger: Author interview with Rose.
45 A former rabbinical student: The information about Rose comes primarily from Smith and Luce,
Love Needs Care, and from interviews with Rose, David Smith, Roger Smith, Gail Sadalla, and
others who worked alongside him at the clinic.
46 Rose and David went on to coauthor three studies of the Haight’s drug culture in the Journal of
Psychedelic Drugs: “LSD: Its Use, Abuse, and Suggested Treatment,” vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1967–
68): 117–28; “Incidents Involving the Haight-Ashbury Population and Some Uncommonly Used
Drugs,” vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1967–68), cowritten with Frederick Meyers; and “The Group
Marriage Commune: A Case Study,” vol. 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1970): 115–19.
47 probably on Manson’s orders: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263; author interview with Rose;
 author interview with D. Smith; author interview with Sadalla.
48 until Manson summoned them: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263; author interview with
Rose.
49 he was living on money funneled: Author interview with Rose; author interview with D. Smith.
50 he stayed with them: Ibid. (both); Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263.
51 “in the strange communal phenomenon”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 263.
52 one’s subjects broke the law: Roger Smith, “The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and Compulsive
Methamphetamine Abuse” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1969), 3, 136.
53 The first was Roger’s ARP dissertation: author interview with Rose.
54 the first-ever scholarly study: Smith and Rose, “The Group Marriage Commune,” 115–19.
55 a January 1970 interview: “M.D. on Manson’s Sex Life: Psychologist Who Lived with Manson
Family Tells About Commune,” The Berkeley Barb, Jan. 16–22, 1970.
56 a point they’d finesse later: Smith and Rose, “The Group Marriage Commune,” 115–16.
57 the others moved into Rose’s home: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 256–64.
58 He didn’t interview any: author interviews with D. Smith, R. Smith, Rose, and Vincent Bugliosi.
Rose isn’t mentioned in Helter Skelter.
59 as if Bugliosi had actually spoken to him: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 225.
60 “sex, not drugs, was the common denominator”: Ibid., 226.
61 to prove “domination”: Ibid., 287.
62 ran their front-page stories: The Los Angeles Free Press, sister publication to the Barb, ran the
identical story a week later (Jan. 23–29, 1970).
63 “the dictatorial leader of the Family”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 413.
64 “served as absolute ruler”: Smith and Rose, “The Group Marriage Commune,” 116.
65 if they were acting under their own free will: Bugliosi addressed the quandary in Helter Skelter,
writing: “I was giving the attorneys for the three girls a ready-made defense. In the penalty phase
of the trial they could argue that since Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten were totally under
Manson’s domination, they were not nearly as culpable as he” (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter,
415).
66 to “modify” their behavior: Fischer et al., “Behavioral Mediators,” 28.
67 “long-term psychological tendencies”: Smith and Luce, Love Needs Care, 16.
68 Some made reference to a forthcoming paper: In Charles Fischer’s own master’s thesis, a footnote
refers to D. E. Smith, C. M. Fischer, A. J. Rose, and F. M. Meyers, “Patterns of Amphetamine
Toxicity in the Haight-Ashbury,” which is forthcoming from the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs;
and a footnote in Smith, “Changing Drug Patterns in the Haight-Ashbury,” refers to D. E. Smith, C.
M. Fischer, and R. Smith, “Toxicity of High Dose Methamphetamine Abuse,” which is then “in
press” at the same journal.
69 both Roger Smith and Alan Rose: David E. Smith and Charles M. Fischer, “Acute Amphetamine
Toxicity,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 2, no. 2 (Spring 1969).
70 the government had been notified: The two documents are: Manson, Charles Willis [sic], Bureau of
Criminal Identification and Investigation, Sacramento, “Crime Report,” Case no. 25544, “Date and
Time Reported to Department: 7-28-1967, 01:00 PM”; and Manson, Charles Milles, U.S.
Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Rap Sheet), Record no. 643 369 A, Apr.
30, 1968, 5.
71 “the federal guys didn’t mess up”: Author interview with Richard Wood.
72 “comply willingly with any probationary conditions”: David Mandel, “Probation Officer’s Report
and Recommendation, Sadie Mae Glutz aka Susan Denise Atkins,” Superior Court of the State of
California, in and for the County of Mendocino, Case no. 4503-C, Dept. 2, Aug. 30, 1968, 4. I was
able to finally show Roger Smith his probation recommendations for Atkins and Brunner at our last
meeting in 2008. He said he had no recollection of making the statements attributed to him and
added they didn’t “sound” like him, anyway. “I would never say ‘unconventional lifestyle,’” he
told me.

11. Mind Control

1 Born in Brooklyn in 1924: Two invaluable books I relied on for West’s biographical information are
Anthony Kales, Chester M. Pierce, and Milton Greenblatt, eds. The Mosaic of Contemporary
Psychiatry in Perspective (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992) and John West, The Last
Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2009). The
latter is a memoir by one of West’s three children, recalling life with his father and the decision he
made to assist both his parents when they chose to end their lives after being diagnosed with
terminal illnesses. No one in West’s family would talk to me, but I interviewed dozens of his
colleagues and friends, dating all the way back to his time as the head of the psychiatric unit at the
Lackland Air Force Base. His archive at the Department of Special Collections at the Charles
Young Library at UCLA—hereinafter cited as West Archive—provided me with the clearest
picture of the true nature of his research.
2 equal rights for African Americans: Robert S. Pynoos, “Violence, Personality, and Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder: Development and Political Perspectives,” in Mosaic of Contemporary Psychiatry,
71–72.
3 suffered an “acute psychotic break”: Hubert Winston Smith, letter to Joe Tonahill, May 11, 1964,
West Archive.
4 making him sound unhinged: “Testimony of Jack Ruby,” Warren Commission volumes, 5H208-211,
June 7, 1964, 181–213.
5 he prevailed on his son: West, The Last Goodnights.
6 no record of his participation: Douglas McAdam (former director of the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Science at Stanford, after West’s time there), email to author; Julie Schumaker
(Center for Advanced Study, researcher), email to author. McAdam and Schumaker said that West
never provided a “Statement of Purpose” or “Year End Report,” both required of all participants.
7 and skipping haircuts: West, letter to Fred Pumpian-Mindlin (one of the researchers), June 20, 1967,
West Archive.
8 a “remarkable substance”: West and A. Mandell, “Hallucinogens,” Comprehensive Textbook of
Psychiatry, ed. Alfred M. Freedman and Harold I. Kaplan (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins,
1967), 247–53. According to the book’s editors, West’s chapter was completed in 1966.
9 “negate their egos”: David E. Smith and John Luce, Love Needs Care (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971),
259.
10 in America’s “bohemian” quarters: West and Mandell, “Hallucinogens,” 252.
11 “crackpots” who hypnotized: West and Gordon H. Deckert, “Dangers of Hypnosis,” Journal of the
American Medical Association 192, no. 1 (Apr. 1965): 9–12.
12 You’d never know from his published writing: In the many papers written by West, he never once
mentioned his own drug experiments with human subjects, just those conducted by other
researchers.
13 a crumbling Victorian house: West published several academic papers about the Haight-Ashbury
Project, all of which will be cited in this section, but the most relevant information was obtained
from his archive at UCLA, which contains the diaries of many of the researchers who participated
in the program. I interviewed several of the researchers as well as others who knew of the project
through their work with West at the HAFMC that summer.
14 a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad”: West and James R. Allen, “Flight from Violence:
Hippies and the Green Rebellion,” American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 3 (Sept. 1968): 365;
West, James R. Allen, and Joshua Kaufman, “Runaways, Hippies and Marijuana,” American
Journal of Psychiatry 126, no. 5 (Nov. 1969): 163.
15 “semi-permanent observation post”: West and James R. Allen, “The Green Rebellion,” Sooner,
Nov. 1967, 6.
16 “with posters, flowers and paint”: Ibid.
17 could furnish willing subjects: Author interview with David Smith; author interview with James
Allen.
18 records in West’s files: See, for instance, West, Allen, and Kaufman, “Runaways, Hippies and
Marijuana,” which contains this acknowledgment: “This study was supported in part by a grant
from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, by a fellowship award from the Center for
Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Calif., awarded to Dr. West, and by Public
 Health Service Grant MH-35063 from National Institute of Mental Health.”
19 the agency’s first “disguised laboratory”: The first and still definitive book on the MKULTRA
program is by the former State Department official who compelled the agency to release its
financial records: John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind
Control (New York: Norton, 1979). I also reviewed Marks’s files (CIA Behavior Experiments
Collection—John Marks Donation, National Security Archive, Gehlman Library, George
Washington University, Washington, D.C.); for records of “Operation Midnight Climax,” the “safe
house” projects run by George Hunter White in New York City and San Francisco in the 1960s, I
reviewed White’s papers (George White Papers, 1932–1970, collection no. M1111), at Stanford
University, in the library’s department of special collections. Other invaluable books on
MKULTRA include Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties
Rebellion (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985); Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair,
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1998); and Alan W. Scheflin and
Edward M. Opton, The Mind Manipulators (New York: Paddington Press, 1978). An additional
resource was the published transcripts of Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in
Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the
Subcommittee on Human Resources, U.S. Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Sess., Aug. 3, 1977
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977); and Human Drug Testing by the CIA, 1977, Hearings before the
Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, U.S.
Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Sess., Sept. 20–21, 1977 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977); hereafter
referred to as the Kennedy-Inouye Hearings. The information that follows comes primarily from
these sources.
20 “I was a very minor missionary”: Troy Hooper, “Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed
S.F. Citizens with LSD,” S.F. Weekly, Mar. 14, 2012.
21 Mass Conversion: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 170. A sanitized description of
the project was released to the university by the CIA in 1977 (CIA MORI DocID: 17358); see
Mick Hinton, “1950s OU Study Funded by CIA,” Oklahoman, Sept. 21, 1977, 4.
22 funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 170; Hinton,
“1950s OU Study,” 4. As both Marks and Hinton reported—and I documented in West’s files—the
research was paid for by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (also called the
Human Ecology Fund), run by an air force colonel named James Monroe, and by the Geschickter
Fund for Medical Research, both exposed during the 1970s congressional investigations as “cut-
outs” for the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
23 “bleed the energies of the hippie movement”: West and Allen, “The Green Rebellion,” 32.
24 He was at work on a book: Memorandum of Agreement: Louis Jolyon West and the McGraw-Hill
Book Company, for a work entitled Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal
 States, Aug. 27, 1968, West Archive.
25 By the early seventies he removed the title: I found the book listed as “in preparation” in a
curriculum vitae dated Apr. 10, 1967 and another dated with just the year 1968, but in no version of
West’s CVs after that (West Archive).
26 Kathy Collins: All the information regarding Collins’s experience is taken directly from her diary,
which is in the West Archive. I searched for Collins for years, only to learn in 2012 that she died
around 2007.
27 When West made one of his rare appearances: Ibid., entry of July 11, 1969.
28 the CIA began to experiment on humans: Much of the information in this section comes from the
books cited above: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate; Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams;
Scheflin and Opton, The Mind Manipulators; and Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout. Also
indispensable were the files of John Marks at the National Security Archive; the Rockefeller
Commission report: The President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975); the Church Committee report: The United States Senate Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1976); and the transcripts of the Kennedy-Inouye Hearings from 1977.
29 “deeper, comprehensive reality”: Albert Hofmann, LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred
Drugs, Mysticism and Science (MAPS.org., 2009), 209.
30 “from Earth like a spaceship”: Xan Brooks, “Cary Grant: How 100 Acid Trips in Tinseltown
‘Changed My Life,’” The Guardian, May 12, 2017.
31 forced to make false confessions: West, I. E. Farber, and Harry F. Harlow, “Brainwashing,
Conditioning and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread),” Sociometry 20 (1957): 271–83. The
information in this section about West’s work with POWs is from this paper.
32 the “Black Sorcerer”: Kris Hollington, Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed
History (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015), 34.
33 “a phonograph playing a disc”: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 27.
34 “to influence human behavior”: Kennedy-Inouye Hearings, Aug. 3, 1977, Appendix A, 82.
35 hypno-programmed assassins: Nicholas M. Horrock, “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to
Create Involuntary Assassins,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1978, A17.
36 In December 1974: Seymour Hersh, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar
Forces,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 1974.
37 “Precautions must be taken”: Church Committee, Book 1, XVII, 391.
38 “rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy”: Ibid., 390.
39 deaths of at least two American citizens: Ibid., 386.
40 The other was Frank Olson: Ibid. (“The Death of Dr. Frank Olson”), 394–403.
41 strongly suggests that the CIA: Eric Olson, personal communications with author; Wormwood,
 Netflix (Errol Morris, dir.), 2017.
42 “waiting for him in the Senate hearing room”: Jo Thomas, “Key Witness Testifies in Private on
C.I.A. Drug Tests,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1977, 1.
43 “quietly dropped”: Anthony Marro, “C.I.A. Head Offers Drug-Test Files If Justice Department Has
Inquiry,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1977, 1.
44 receive total criminal immunity: Thomas, “Key Witness Testifies,” 1.
45 “Can we obtain control”: “Objectives and Agencies” (CIA document), May 23, 1951, 1, 7, CIA
Behavior Experiments Collection—John Marks Donation, National Security Archive, Gehlman
Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
46 “Can we force an individual to act”: Untitled CIA document, 1952, ibid.
47 “an act of attempted assassination?”: Untitled CIA document, Jan. 1954, ibid.
48 “perverse” and “corrupt”: Kennedy-Inouye Hearings, 1st Sess., Aug. 3, 1977, 16.
49 “freedom of individual and institutions”: Ibid., Sept. 20, 1977, 1.
50 Inouye called it “grandiose and sinister”: Ibid., Aug. 3, 1977, 13.
51 Stansfield Turner, swore: Ibid., Sept. 20, 1977, 145.
52 “may never come out”: “Control C.I.A., Not Behavior,” editorial, New York Times, Aug. 5, 1977,
16.
53 That program never coalesced: The closest thing was an in-house investigation by the CIA, called
the Victims Task Force. Unsurprisingly, the three-man team of agents (two from the CIA, one from
the DEA) turned up only two victims of MKULTRA, both women. Each had been unwittingly
dosed with LSD at a party in Greenwich Village on January 11, 1953 (one of the women received a
$15,000 settlement from the federal government, the other was deceased).
54 The New York Times identified him: Nicholas M. Horrock, “Private Institutions Used in C.I.A.
Effort to Control Behavior: $25 Million Program,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1977, A-1.
55 not one researcher: Further, I spoke to Robert H. Wiltse and Frank Laubinger, the two CIA agents
on the task force, and they told me they never even contacted a university or other facility where
MKULTRA research had occurred. Their seven-month investigation consisted of contacting less
than half a dozen people who were named in the diary of George H. White, the CIA agent who
conducted experiments in safe houses in New York and San Francisco between 1953 and 1965.
When I asked Wiltse why the academic institutions and federal facilities where most of the
MKULTRA research occurred had been ignored, he replied that he “didn’t know.” When pressed,
he said it “didn’t seem necessary,” adding that he never even left the CIA headquarters in Langley,
during the investigation. Laubinger told me that he was the one who investigated the safe houses
operated by White, and that he believed Wiltse was responsible for investigating the academic
institutions. Laubinger called Gottlieb “an honorable man who was dealt a blow” by the
congressional investigations. He said if the communists had mind control technology in their
 arsenal, “Well, maybe we ought to have it too.”
56 “a secret twenty-five year”: Horrock, “Private Institutions.”
57 “I’m just drawing a total blank here”: Author interview with Stansfield Turner.
58 “CIA operators and agents”: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 97.
59 The first one was dated June 11, 1953: All the information that follows is taken directly from this
document in the West Archive.
60 “My Good Friend”: “Sherman R. Grifford,” letter to West, July 2, 1953, West Archive.
61 “you consider me ‘an asset’”: West, letter to “Sherman R. Grifford,” July 7, 1953, ibid.
62 his “new look”: “Sherman R. Grifford,” letter to West, Apr. 21, 1954, ibid.
63 “I have been doing no research”: West, letter to Dr. Mark R. Everett, Dean, University of
Oklahoma, School of Medicine, June 8, 1954, ibid.
64 “a non-profit private research foundation”: West to Staff Judge Advocate, Lackland Air Force
Base, Dec. 13, 1954, ibid.
65 keep West and other researchers properly paid: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 63.
66 “The Air Force will not release you”: “Sherman R. Grifford,” letter to West, Sept. 16, 1954, West
Archive.
67 he claimed to have achieved: West, “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and
Suggestibility,” n.d., 1–5, ibid. I found this five-page document in the West Archive attached to a
nine-page paper called “Report on Research in Hypnosis.”
68 “true memories” with “false ones”: West, “Report on Research in Hypnosis,” 6–7, ibid.
69 “a different (fictional) event actually did occur”: Ibid., 7.
70 “deepening the trance that can be produced”: West, “Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and
Suggestibility,” 2.
71 “made standardized observations very difficult”: West, “Report on Research in Hypnosis,” 8.
72 “sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated”: West, “Psychophysiological Studies of
Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” 5.
73 chlorpromazine, reserpine: West, “Report on Research in Hypnosis,” 2–4.
74 “he wishes just the opposite”: Ibid., 7.
75 that the CIA had turned over to the Senate: CIA MORI DocID: 17441.
76 “The effects of these agents”: CIA Document 43-18.
77 mocking headlines like the “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight”: Bill Richards, “The Gang
That Couldn’t Spray Straight,” Washington Post, Sept. 21, 1977, A-1. Richards described the
previous day’s testimony as “more a portrayal of a group of bumbling amateurs than of American
James Bonds.”
78 inducing insanity in the lab: Ross Corduff, “Driving of Patient to Insanity to Perfect Treatment
Explained,” Corvallis Gazette-Times, Oct. 5, 1963.
79 “mental derangement in the laboratory”: Marge Davenport, “Sleep Linked to Sanity of Humans,”
Oregon Journal, Oct. 4, 1963, 2.
80 “had been confined to animals”: United Press International, “C.I.A. Tells Oklahoma U. of Mind-
Research Role,” New York Times, Sept. 3, 1977; see also John Greiner, “Ex-OU Psychiatrist
Reports Contact with CIA Mind Control Research,” Sunday Oklahoman, Aug. 21, 1977, 1; Mick
Hinton, “O.U. Mind Control Experiments Bared: School Told CIA Funded Secret Tests,” Saturday
Oklahoman and Times, Sept. 3, 1977.
81 were CIA fronts: “C.I.A. Tells Oklahoma U.”; Hinton, “O.U. Mind Control Experiments Bared”;
Andy Rieger, “Sharp Informed of CIA Projects,” Oklahoma Daily, Sept. 30, 1977, 1.
82 Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo: Rieger, “Sharp Informed of CIA Projects,” 1; Steve
Walden, “CIA Grants Shown: Report ‘Heavily Censored,’” Oklahoma Daily, Oct. 1, 1977, 1–2.
83 through his retirement in 1988: West, letter to the editor, San Francisco Examiner, Mar. 31, 1988,
1–3, West Archive. “The statement that I was a paid consultant to the CIA and one of its ‘top
hypnotists’ is false,” wrote West. A few months later, West wrote to another magazine: “I have
never worked for the CIA” (West, letter to Michael Sigman, editor of LA Weekly, June 2, 1988,
West Archive).
84 “sought and received my counsel”: West, letter to Marvin Karno, M.D., Robert O. Pasnau, M.D.,
and Joel Yager, M.D., Jan. 15, 1991, ibid.
85 “in Goebbels’ tradition of the Big Lie”: West, letter to the editor, Summer Bruin, June 27, 1993, 2,
ibid.
86 “The Center for the Story and Reduction of Violence”: The information about West’s Violence
Center is from news articles; congressional and state assembly testimony; interviews with
colleagues of West (both involved in the proposed project and opposed to it); and, most
prominently, several drafts of the project in West’s hand from his files in the West Archive—these
documents reveal his efforts to tamp down the project’s more radical objectives in response to the
growing public outcry.
87 Governor Ronald Reagan: Reagan unveiled West’s plan in his State of the State address to the
legislature on January 11, 1973. See William Endicott, “$850 Million Surplus in Taxes Told;
Reagan Calls for Refunds,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 12, 1973, A-1.
88 “remote monitoring devices”: West, “Center for Prevention of Violence, Neuropsychiatric Institute,
UCLA,” Sept. 1, 1972 (first draft of project proposal), 5, West Archive; Staff of the Subcommittee
on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 93rd Congress, 2nd Sess.,
Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification (Washington, D.C.: GPO,
November 1974), 13, 35–37.
89 threatened “privacy and self-determination”: Individual Rights and the Federal Role, 34.
90 helped to prosecute Manson: Among the agencies contacted by West for help in “developing plans”
 for the Violence Center were the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles District Attorney’s
office, and the office of California Attorney General Evelle Younger (ibid., 348).
91 He’d appeared as a witness many times: West’s highest profile appearance as an expert witness in a
brainwashing case came later, however, at the trial of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst in 1976. Two
of West’s staff at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, Keith Ditman and Joel Hochman, testified
for the defense during the death-penalty phase of the Tate–LaBianca trial (Vincent Bugliosi with
Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter [New York: Norton, 1994], 572–79).
92 “that it can be done”: Author interview with D. Smith. In the same interview, Smith expressed
surprise when I mentioned MKULTRA, saying he’d never heard of it—or that the CIA gave LSD
to citizens, even in San Francisco, without their knowledge.
93 so often described as “hypnotic”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 615.
94 taught Manson how to hypnotize: Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth,
2002), 43.
95 Deanyer had learned hypnosis in the navy: A FOIA to the FBI resulted in the release of forty-seven
heavily redacted pages of a forty-nine-page file (FOIPA no. 0961945-000). The file confirmed that
Deanyer, born Burnie William Smith Jr., on June 3, 1934, in Wheeling, West Virginia, learned
hypnotism while stationed in Pearl Harbor with the U.S. Navy, between 1942 and 1946. After
changing his name and opening the Deanyer School of Hypnotism in Honolulu, he was indicted in
1956 on charges of sex trafficking underage girls. At his trial, prosecutors presented evidence that
he’d used hypnotism to induce female students at his school to become prostitutes. Several police
officers testified that when they interviewed the victims they still “appeared to be in a trance and
would say nothing [redacted] and refused to testify against him.”
96 her father teaching Manson: Author interview with Robin Border. In addition, I reviewed the
transcript of a taped interview Martin Lee conducted with Deanyer in the seventies. Deanyer told
Lee that he “talked to Manson frequently,” adding, “the things, believe it or not, that he was asking
me about were not on control… [but] expanded capabilities under hypnosis” (Lee interview with
Deanyer, July 31, 1978; transcript courtesy of Philip Melanson).
97 “The most puzzling question of all”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 626.
98 After midnight on July 4, 1954: The information in this section is from trial transcripts, newspaper
clippings, West’s personal file in the West Archive, and interviews with over fifty people who were
connected to the case.
99 “dazed” and “trance-like”: Charles L. Theall testimony, Texas v. Jimmy N. Shaver, case no. 2552,
409.
100 “What’s going on here?”: Ibid., 394.
101 “not expect him to be under these circumstances”: J. A. Griswold testimony, ibid., 138.
102 “deepen the trance”: Gilbert Rose testimony, ibid., 102.
103 “kill the evil girl Beth”: United Press, “State Argues Shaver Insanity,” Sept. 22, 1954, clipping in
West Archive; West, “Transcript of Shaver ‘Amytal Interview,’” Sept. 14, 1952, 16–18, ibid.
104 “quite sane now”: Howard Hunt, “Shaver Confessed the Slaying After Hours of Questioning,” San
Antonio Express, Sept. 22, 1954, 1.
105 “sat through the strenuous sessions”: United Press, “Shaver Won’t Take Stand,” Sept. 30, 1954, 1.
106 ice water: Mrs. Everett McGhee (Shaver’s mother) testimony, Texas v. Shaver, 596–98; West,
“‘Amytal Interview,’” 10.
107 a two-year experimental program: West, “‘Amytal Interview,’” 10.
108 whether Shaver had been treated: West testimony, Texas v. Shaver, 693.
109 “Sa” through “St” had vanished: Author interview with A1C Airman Trehearne, archivist at
Lackland Air Force Base.
110 “practical trials in the field”: West, letter to “Sherman R. Grifford,” June 11, 1953, West Archive.
111 “took your clothes off, Jimmy”: West, “‘Amytal Interview,’” 6–14.
112 a play about it: Gilbert Rose, The Eve of the Fourth: A Docudrama in Four Acts (Madison, Conn.:
International Universities Press, 1996). Rose also wrote an academic paper on the case: “Screen
Memories in Homicidal Acting Out,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 29 (1960): 328–43.
113 maintained his innocence the whole time: Don Reid and John Gurwell, Have a Seat, Please
(Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2001), 37–40.
114 the day Shaver was sentenced to death: West, transcript of lecture about Shaver case, June 15,
1956, 8, West Archive.
115 against capital punishment: Milton Greenblatt, “LJ West’s Place in Social and Community
Psychiatry,” in Mosaic of Contemporary Psychiatry, 9.
116 most surreal belonged to Tusko: Information in this section is primarily from news coverage,
papers by West and other academics, and interviews with West’s colleagues at the University of
Oklahoma, including Chester M. Pierce, who assisted West in the experiment and coauthored their
paper about it.
117 Sidney Gottlieb had funded it: Author interview with Gordon Deckert; Richard Green, “The Early
Years: Jolly West and the University of Oklahoma Department of Psychiatry,” Journal of the
Oklahoma State Medical Association 93, no. 9 (Sept. 2000): 451.
118 during the rutting season: West and Chester M. Pierce, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: Its Effects on
a Male Asiatic Elephant,” Science 138, no. 3545 (Dec. 7, 1962): 1100.
119 “went into status epilepticus”: Ibid., 1101.
120 The next morning’s paper: Claire Conley, “Shot of Drug Kills Tusko,” Daily Oklahoman, Aug. 4,
1962, 1.
121 he liked to inform his lecture audiences: Author interview with Roger Smith.
122 the Medical Tribune: Staff Report, “Oklahoma University Medical Center to Study Bull Elephant’s
 Rampages,” Medical Tribune, 1962, 8.
123 “recurring psychoses in humans”: Conley, “Shot of Drug Kills Tusko,” 1–2.
124 “individual personality”: Staff Report, “Oklahoma University Medical Center.”
125 “sexually capable but behaviorally tractable animal”: West and Pierce, “Lysergic Acid
Diethylamide,” 1103.
126 “capricious”… “or purpose”: Charles Savage, M.D., letter to the editor, Science, Dec. 18, 1962;
Kenneth Kiedman, letter to the editor, Science, Dec. 20, 1962. The originals of both letters are in
the West Archive.
127 “the department was worried”: Author interview with Deckert.
128 “source was payment from the CIA”: Ibid. Deckert also told me it was his understanding that
West’s objective was to create an “artificial musth.”
129 Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc.: West and Pierce, “Lysergic Acid
Diethylamide,” 1103.
130 and again involving Lawrence Schiller: Jack Ruby and William Read Woodfield, “My Story,”
Long Beach Press Telegram, Jan. 28, 1964, 1, 8. According to multiple accounts, including the
testimony of Ruby’s brother, Earl Ruby, to the Warren Commission (14: 402–3) and a memoir by
Ruby’s first attorney, Melvin Belli (Belli with Robert Blair Kaiser, My Life on Trial [New York:
William Morrow, 1976], 255–56), within seventy-two hours of Oswald’s murder, Schiller had
made a deal with the Ruby family to allow his associate, William Read Woodfield, to secretly
obtain access to Ruby in jail and then publish a first-person account of the Oswald shooting.
131 Ruby “lost [his] senses”: Ruby and Woodfield, “My Story,” Jan. 29, 1969, 3, 8.
132 “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia”: Melvin Belli and Maurice C. Carroll, Dallas Justice:
The Real Story of Jack Ruby and His Trial (New York; David McKay, 1964), 71.
133 On the advice of his attorney: Final Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, U.S. House
of Representatives, 95th Congress, 2nd Sess. (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1979), 158. Ruby had
written a note to one of his attorneys, Joe Tonahill, stating “Joe, you should know this. My first
lawyer Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy
wouldn’t have to come to Dallas to testify. OK?”
134 “a blank spot in his memory”: Belli and Carroll, Dallas Justice, 41.
135 Jolly West tried to insinuate himself: Gene L. Usdin, letter to Jack R. Ewalt, President, American
Psychiatric Association, Jan. 6, 1964, West Archive (“A few days after the assassination, Jolly
phoned me to ask if I would be willing to have my name submitted to the court in Texas as a
possible psychiatric expert”).
136 approaching Judge Joe B. Brown: Libby Price, dictated notes from West, outline for West’s
proposed book, A Police Man at His Elbow: Psychiatric Reflections on Jack Ruby Case, Feb. 16,
1967, ibid. Price was West’s assistant; the relevant passage reads, “Chapter 2—How West was
 asked to set up panel of experts—psychiatrists—later that winter [1963] before Ruby trial started—
turned down by Brown Court.”
137 Three documents among his papers: Ibid. (third document is a second draft of chapter outline by
West).
138 “targets will certainly be unwitting”: “Memorandum from DDP Helms to DDCI Carter, 12/17/63,”
Kennedy-Inouye Hearings, Appendix A, 82.
139 “highly qualified” skills: Hubert Winston Smith, “Motion by Defense Counsel, for an Order by the
Court…,” Texas v. Jack Ruby, no. E-4010-J, Apr. 22, 1964, 5.
140 helping him land a teaching position: Smith was fired from his professorship at the University of
Texas School of Law in 1965 for “disruptive” behavior and a “completely inadequate
performance.” “There is no question that the individual is ill,” wrote a member of the school’s
Budget and Personnel Committee in a letter to the dean (Jerre Williams, letter to W. Page Keeton,
June 15, 1965, West Archive), yet that didn’t stop West from seeing that Smith was hired at
Oklahoma that autumn.
141 the preceding “forty-eight hours”: Libby Price, summary of West’s testimony to the court, June 6,
1967, 13, ibid.
142 there were no witnesses: West, “Report of Psychiatric Examination of Jack Ruby,” Affidavit
submitted to Court, Texas v. Ruby, Apr. 27, 1964, 2.
143 “was now positively insane”: United Press International, “Refuse Ruby Mental Test,” San Mateo
[Calif.] Times and Daily News Leader, Apr. 27, 1964, 1.
144 “unshakable” and “fixed”: West, “LJW Talk on Jack Ruby,” UCLA lecture, Oct. 30, 1978, 6, West
Archive.
145 “He rubbed his head on the wall”: Ronnie Dugger, “The Last Madness of Jack Ruby,” The New
Republic, Feb. 11, 1967.
146 every doctor who examined Ruby: The physicians were Robert Stubblefield (the only doctor who’d
examined him both before and after West), Jan. 28, (approximately) Mar. 10, Apr. 30, May 1, May
11, 1964; William R. Beavers, Apr. 28, 30, May 1, 2, 31, 1964; Werner Tuteur, July 12–15, 1965;
Emanuel Tanay, date unavailable; Gene Usdin, Sept. 29, 1965; and Andrew Watson, Sept. 17,
1965.
147 finding him essentially compos mentis: The psychiatrists were John T. Holbrook, Nov. 25, 1963;
Manfred Guttmacher, Dec. 21–22, 1963 and Mar. 2–3, 1964; Roy Schafer, Dec. 28–30, 1963;
Martin L. Towler, dates unavailable; Robert Stubblefield; and Walter Bromberg, Jan. 11, 20, 1964.
148 “earlier studies were carried out”: West, “Report of Psychiatric Examination of Jack Ruby,” 1.
149 “some real disinterested doctors”: “Texas: Trying for the Truth of It,” Time, May 8, 1964.
150 from Dr. William Beavers: W. R. Beavers, M.D., “Evaluation Report on Jack Ruby,” Apr. 28,
1964, 2, Criminal Court District Court No. 3, Records Annex Building, Dallas.
151 a “devious man”: Author interview with Libby Price.
152 “egotistical”: Author interview with Bud Addis.
153 inveterate “narcissist”: Bob Conrich, email with Dernburg.
154 “womanizer”: Author interview with Addis.
155 Bay of Pigs invasion: Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1994), 533–54.
156 “most important witness”: Jeffrey H. Caufield, General Walker and the Murder of President
Kennedy: The Extensive New Evidence of a Radical-Right Conspiracy (n.p.: Hillcrest, 2015), 539.
157 “The Jewish people are being exterminated”: “Testimony of Jack Ruby,” Warren Commission
volumes, 5H208–211, June 7, 1964, 210.
158 “You have to get me”: Arlen Specter with Charles Robbins, Passion for Truth: From Finding
JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton (New York: William Morrow,
2000), 113.
159 CIA and FBI had obstructed: Associated Press, “Senator Says Agencies Lied to Warren Panel,”
New York Times, May 15, 1976, 12; David Binder, “F.B.I.–C.I.A. Laxity on Kennedy Found,” New
York Times, June 24, 1976, 1, 8.
160 failed CIA plots to assassinate: Binder, “F.B.I–C.I.A. Laxity,” 8.
161 teamed up with anti-Castro Cubans: Church Committee, multiple references.
162 overseen those schemes: Richard Helms with Richard Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in
the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 203–4.
163 “their own conclusions about the assassination”: Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence, The Investigation of the Assassination of President John
F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies (book 5, final report; Senate Report 94-
755), 94th Congress, 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976).
164 make the Warren Report “persuasive”: Jerry D. Rose, The Fourth Decade: A Journal of Research
on the John F. Kennedy Assassination, Volumes 1–2, State University College, 1993, 27; see also
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), 69.
165 There was a “probable conspiracy”: Final Report of the Assassinations Records Review, 1, Sept.
1998 [https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/review-board/report/arrb-final-report.pdf Board];
see also Final Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, 1.
166 didn’t identify any potential coconspirators: HSCA Final Assassinations Report, 1.
167 “The murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby”: G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot to Kill
the President: Organized Crime Assassinated J.F.K., The Definitive Story (New York: Times
Books, 1981), 339.
168 obstruct the Warren Commission: HSCA Final Assassinations Report, multiple references.
169 “Hoover lied his eyes out”: Pamela Colloff and Michael Hall, “Hoover’s Endgame, Conspiracy
Theories: The FBI Theory,” Texas Monthly, Nov. 1998.
170 rather than mounting its own: Grose, Gentleman Spy, 544.
171 “The President felt that [the] CIA”: Associated Press, “Johnson Felt CIA Connected with JFK
Slaying Files Show,” Dec. 13, 1977.
172 in hopes of deposing the dictator: Blakey and Billings, Plot to Kill the President, 82–84.
173 Griffin and his partner approached: Investigation of the Assassination of President John F.
Kennedy, Vol. Xia, 287.
174 “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings”: Blakey and Billings, Plot to Kill the President, 82.
175 “The CIA would be very limited”: HSCA Appendix, Vol. XI, 62.
176 “An examination of Agency files”: Ibid., 289.
177 “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice”: West, letter to Earl Warren, June 23, 1964, JFK Collection, HSCA,
National Archives (College Park, Md.): (RG 233), 005633.
178 “no need to do anything”: Earl Warren to Burt Griffin, July 13, 1964, 004150, ibid.
179 Tuteur submitted: Werner Tuteur, “Psychiatric Report on Jack Ruby,” July 22, 1965, 1–13, West
Archive.
180 an edited version West had submitted: Werner Tuteur, “Report of Examination of Jack Ruby”
(notarized), Sept. 3, 1965, 1–10, ibid.
181 “‘They got what they wanted on me’”: Tuteur, “Psychiatric Report,” 7 (the passage had parenthesis
drawn at either end of it and a black line drawn through the text); Tuteur, “Report of Examination,”
7 (passage no longer on page).
182 his own book about Ruby: West, A Police Man at His Elbow. Libby Price, a graduate student at
Oklahoma in the mid-1960s, shared a portion of the unpublished manuscript with me.
183 “The fact is that nobody knows”: John Kaplan and Jon R. Waltz, The Trial of Jack Ruby (New
York: Macmillan, 1965), 365.
184 “good quote”: Note card, West Archive.
185 “the book-filled room”: Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988), 14–15.
186 Gerald Ford wasn’t: Author correspondence with Ford staff.
187 Specter had joined the Warren Commission: Most of the information in this section is from
Specter’s memoir, Passion for Truth.
188 as the Single Bullet Conclusion: Ibid., 1.

12. Where Does It All Go?

1 “I didn’t write the music”: Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter (New York: Norton,
1994), 512.
 2 In 1968, Bugliosi fell into a scandal: The information in this section is from news articles, court
documents, and interviews with the principals involved in the cases. Especially helpful was a 140-
page manuscript called “The Vince Bugliosi Story,” written by George Denny, the attorney who
represented both the “milkman” (Herbert Weisel) and the “mistress” (Virginia Cardwell) in their
civil lawsuits against Bugliosi. In a 1999 letter accompanying the manuscript, Denny explained that
copies of it were “disseminated at the Beverly Hills Bar Association luncheon in May 1976 in
connection with the DA’s race that year… the matters set down in this document are factually
accurate in every respect.” Bugliosi refused to discuss both cases with me, claiming he was still
bound by the nondisclosure agreements he’d signed as part of the settlements. That wasn’t true, as
Denny had explained to me in 1999. He, the Weisels, and Cardwell had all deliberately violated
their NDAs in 1976 when Bugliosi made his last run for public office, in order to prevent him from
getting elected. They knew he’d never sue them, Denny said, because he’d never go under oath
again about his involvement in either case.
3 Bugliosi suspected his milkman: Bill Boyarsky and Robert A. Jones, “Former Milkman’s
Complaint Adds to DA Race Confusion,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 24, 1972, II-1.
4 Weisel had left his job in 1965: Arden Farms—Personnel Record, Herbert Weisel, Employment
Record, “Date Terminated: 6/16/65” (copy courtesy of Denny).
5 eight months before Vincent Jr. was born: Ancestry.com, California birth record for Vincent
Bugliosi Jr.
6 the evidence must’ve been in Weisel’s personnel file: Anonymous letter to Weisel, postmarked
Mar. 28, 1969 (“Dear Mr. Weisel, When I first spoke to you, you volunteered the statement that I
could look at your records at Arden to verify that your leaving work there was unrelated to my
wife’s pregnancy. Now that I’ve accepted your offer, you refuse to grant me permission and won’t
even talk to me….”).
7 demanding him to release his files: Rose Weisel, Declaration, Nov. 3, 1972, 1; Herbert Weisel,
Declaration, Nov. 3, 1972, 1.
8 “changed your phone number” it said. “That wasn’t nice”: R. Weisel Declaration, 2; H. Weisel
Declaration, 1.
9 the hopes that she could arrange: R. Weisel Declaration, 2; H. Weisel Declaration, 3.
10 “but that he wouldn’t do it”: R. Weisel Declaration, 2; Herbert Weisel, (Second) Declaration, Nov.
4, 1972, 2.
11 paternity and lie-detector tests: R. Weisel, (Second) Declaration, Nov. 4, 1972, 3.
12 “He’s got a mental problem”: Ibid., 2.
13 to take the bus to school: R. Weisel Declaration, 1; H. Weisel Declaration, 1.
14 They hired a lawyer: R. Weisel Declaration, 3; H. Weisel Declaration, 4.
15 civic duty to go public: H. Weisel Declaration, 4.
16 stolen money from his kitchen: Boyarsky and Jones, “Former Milkman’s Complaint,” 10.
17 Weisel sued him for slander: “Couple Sue Bugliosi for $7 Million,” Los Angeles Times, A-25.
18 In depositions, Bugliosi and his wife: Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 49–50.
19 The Weisels proved otherwise: Ibid., 49–52.
20 Bugliosi had twice used an investigator: Ibid., 49. David Correa, an investigator for the District
Attorney’s office, identified two requests in evidence, both by Bugliosi and both identifying Weisel
as a material witness in a murder case; Denny’s manuscript contained photocopies of the requests.
21 Bugliosi settled out of court: “Release Agreement,” signed by Herbert and Rose Weisel, Vincent
and Gail Bugliosi, George Denny (for Weisels), and Stephen W. Solomon (for Bugliosis),
notarized March 21, 1973; Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 53.
22 He paid in cash: Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 53, 65–68; Denny included photocopies of his
bank deposits for Bugliosi’s two cash payments as well as copies of the personal checks he wrote
to the Weisels.
23 a confidentiality agreement: “Liquidated Damages Agreement,” signed by Weisels, Bugliosis,
Denny, and Solomon, notarized March 22, 1973; Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 53.
24 turn over the deposition tapes: Affidavit of Barbara Crooker, Court Reporter, May 6, 1973; Denny,
“Vince Bugliosi Story,” 53.
25 she was pregnant: Most of the information about what occurred is from Cardwell’s police report,
her declaration in the civil case, and Denny’s manuscript.
26 he ordered Cardwell: Sgt. F. M. Sullivan, Santa Monica Police Department, Crime Report, Case 73
11072, Assault and Battery, Victim: Virginia Cardwell, June 25, 1973, 1–3; Cardwell Declaration,
July 6, 1973; Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 70–79.
27 photographed her bruises: Photos provided by George Denny.
28 in the next day’s paper: “Bugliosi Accused of Assault,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June 26,
1973, 1.
29 Bugliosi returned to Cardwell’s apartment: Cardwell Declaration; Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,”
79–89.
30 to forge a backdated bill for legal services: “Received from Virginia Cardwell one hundred dollars
($100.00) for consultation fee regarding child support for son Christopher. Barbara Silver—
personal secretary to Vincent T. Bugliosi, Stanley, Steinberg & Bugliosi”—photocopy in Denny
“Vince Bugliosi Story,” 81; Cardwell Declaration.
31 He listened in on an extension: Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 82.
32 Cardwell claimed that the bruises: Lt. M. Landis, Santa Monica Police Department, Crime Report,
Case 73 11072, Assault and Battery, Supplementary report, June 26, 1973, 1.
33 “This outrageous charge”: “Bugliosi Charge a Fake, Says Woman,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
June 26, 1973, 1–2.
34 in exchange for her confidentiality: Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 86–93, 99–107; “Bugliosi
Assault Said Settled Out of Court: Lawyer’s Account,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, May 9,
1974, 7.
35 Cardwell story hit the papers in 1974: Mary Neiswender, “Charge Bugliosi Paid Hush Money,”
Long Beach Press Telegram, May 7, 1974.
36 Because of his clout in the DA’s office: Denny, “Vince Bugliosi Story,” 84; “SM Woman Escapes
Prosecution,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, June 29, 1973.
37 “paralyze Melcher with fear”: Bugliosi summation, California v. Charles Manson, Susan Atkins,
Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel, case #22239, 21370.
38 “you will be free”: David Felton and David Dalton, “Charles Manson: The Incredible Story of the
Most Dangerous Man Alive,” Rolling Stone, June 25, 1970, 60.
39 His letter arrived at Penguin: Vincent Bugliosi, letter to Scott Moyers, Penguin Press, July 3, 2006
(the letter had fifty-one pages of attachments).
40 Bugliosi sent another letter: Vincent Bugliosi, letter to Scott Moyers, Feb. 15, 2007.
41 And another: Vincent Bugliosi, letter to Editorial Section, Penguin Press, Nov. 18, 2008.
42 Bugliosi had detailed this allegation: Bugliosi to Moyers, July 3, 2006, 2.
43 forensic evidence of at least five bodies: Author interview with Paul Dostie.
44 authorized a dig in the desert: Louis Sahagun, “New Twist in Manson Tale,” Los Angeles Times,
May 20, 2008.
45 a ranch hand told police that Manson: Juan Flynn, LAPD Interview by Philip Sartuche, Aug. 18,
1970, Mike McGann files, 3; Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 440.
46 “may even exceed Manson’s estimate”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 615.
47 buried or staged to look like suicides: Most infamously, a Family member named John Philip
Haught (also known as “Christopher Jesus” and “Zero”) was found dead of a bullet wound to the
face in a house in Venice in the presence of four Family members in November 1969. One of the
group, Bruce Davis (later convicted in both the Hinman and Shea murders), told police Haught was
playing a game of Russian roulette. When police checked the gun, however, all six chambers had
been loaded and the barrel had been wiped clean of fingerprints. Nevertheless, the police declared
the death a suicide (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 619–20). In 1972, the body of nineteen-
year-old Lauren Willett was found buried in the basement of a house occupied by Family members
Nancy Pitman, Squeaky Fromme, and several others, in Stockton, California (the body of Willett’s
husband, James, twenty-six, had been discovered decapitated and partially buried in nearby
Guerneville two days earlier; both had been shot in the head). One of the women’s associates,
Priscilla Cooper, told police that Lauren Willett had killed herself “playing Russian roulette.” This
time the ploy didn’t work: two men (one later married to Pitman) and Pitman and Cooper went to
prison for the murders (Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 622–23).
48 reopening an investigation: Author interview with Kathleen Sheehan (Chief of Police, Bishop,
Calif.); author interview with Debra Tate; Garance Burke, “New Evidence Points to Manson
Victims,” USA Today, Mar. 20, 2008.
49 two with gardening shears: They were Nancy Pitman’s son and “Country” Sue Bartell.
50 September 29, 1969: The information in this section is taken from original reports from police
departments in Bishop and Culver City, California; sheriff’s departments in Inyo and Los Angeles
Counties; Parks Department; California Highway Patrol; and the Inyo DA’s office; as well as news
coverage; and interviews with investigators, witnesses to Tenerelli’s time in Bishop, and friends
and family members of Tenerelli from the Los Angeles area.
51 He was there to drive his car: The theory espoused by investigators after Tenerelli had been
identified by medical records in late October was attributed in the Inyo Register (the paper serving
Bishop, where the body was found) to John Preku, the chief of Bishop police, and in the Inyo
Independent (the paper serving the county, where the car was found) to the county sheriff, Merrill
Curtis. Both articles appeared on October 30, 1969. The Independent’s had about twice as much
information, although, a week later, on November 6, the Register ran a second story with the
information that had been left out of its first story, and this time, all the information was attributed
to Sheriff Curtis, with no mention of Preku. The three articles are: “Suicide Victim Is Identified,
Chief Reports,” Inyo Register¸ Oct. 30, 1969, 1; “Suicide Victim Is Identified, Says Sheriff,” Inyo
Independent¸ Oct. 30, 1969, 1; “Suicide Victim Is Identified, Says Sheriff,” Inyo Register, Nov. 6,
1969, 1.
52 “two Turkish bath towels”: George Gordon, Coroner’s Investigation, Brune Mortuary, Case 69-94,
Oct. 3, 1969, 1.
53 a “motorcyclist killed in Bishop”: Dial Torgerson and Ron Einstoss, “Possible Manson Victim:
Search for Missing Stunt Man Pressed,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 11, 1969, 28.
54 might’ve been the Family’s doing: Felton and Dalton, “Charles Manson,” 30.
55 Tenerelli’s suicide had been “purged”: Author interview with Chris Carter.
56 the original Bishop Police Department investigative report: Files of Frank Fowles (former district
attorney of Inyo County), Special Collections, Library, University of Nevada, Reno.
57 Tenerelli’s name on it—misspelled: as “Tennerelli, Fillippo” on the generic 1969 registration form.
58 had no accent at all: Author interview with Bee Greer. In addition, no mention was made in the
police reports of the people who had spoken with the person believed to be Tenerelli in Bishop
saying he had an accent of any kind.
59 There was a lab report: A. L. Coffey, Chief, Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation,
Department of Justice, letter to Donald H. Talmadge, Coroner of Inyo County, Oct. 9, 1969.
60 “similar or identical”: Mary Hirsh, M.D., X Ray Report, Washington Hospital, Dept. of Radiology,
to Talmadge, Inyo Coroner, Oct. 17, 1969.
61 identified the victim nearly two weeks earlier: Sgt. David Walizer, Supplementary Investigation
Report, no. CR 69-472, Office of Sheriff, Inyo County, Oct. 28, 1969.
62 “not been at the location for more than two days”: Walizer, Office of Sheriff, Inyo County,
Supplementary Investigation Report, no. CR-69-472, Oct. 10, 1969.
63 “coming up from the wreck”: Cox, Supplementary Investigation Report, Oct. 6, 1969.
64 “find a job”: Kriens Complaint, 1. See also author interview with B. Greer.
65 “late model” blue Volkswagen: Hailey, Memo to Area Commander, Nov. 1, 1969, 1–2; Steuber,
Supplemental Arrest—Investigation Report, 1.
66 a “hippie” type: Ibid. (both).
67 “was sure” that DeCarlo: Ibid. (both).
68 “prior to or on 10-1-69”: Hailey Memo, 1.
69 DeCarlo was in Death Valley: According to trial testimony, investigation reports, and Helter
Skelter and other books, Juan Flynn left Barker Ranch for the last time on September 29 or 30. The
night before his departure, a “last supper” was held at which DeCarlo was present and, according to
the testimony, made self-incriminating remarks concerning the murder of Donald “Shorty” Shea—
but, more important, it put DeCarlo in the desert on the same day of Tenerelli’s arrival to the area
(Juan Flynn testimony, California v. Manson et al., 11849, 11907, 12261, 12281; Jerry LeBlanc
and Ivor Davis, 5 to Die [Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1970], 161–69. In addition, in a 1999
taped interview with Bill Nelson, Barbara Hoyt recounted her first attempt to escape from Barker
Ranch with Sherry Cooper on or around October 1, 1969: “Sherry made arrangements with Danny
to meet us at bottom of Golar Wash… but we couldn’t get down there that day. Danny told us later
that he did make it and that they were kind of sneaking up a little bit, trying to meet us and we
couldn’t get down that time…” (Nelson interview with Hoyt, audiotape). Cooper confirmed this to
me, explaining that they were seven hours late, so DeCarlo left without them (author interview with
Sherry Cooper).
70 to show to “Kitty”: Fowles files, Folder 10.
71 she was “involved” with Tenerelli: Ibid.
72 predilection for Volkswagen Beetles: “28 ‘Hips’ Nabbed in Death Valley, Goler Wash Raids,” Inyo
Independent, Oct. 16, 1969, 1.
73 “between the pages” of a Playboy magazine: Gordon, Coroner’s Investigation, 1; Brune letter, Oct.
6, 1969.
74 “made of pubic hair”: Bill Vance Notes (unsigned four-page document), LASO Files, 2.
75 arrested for stealing a gun: Redondo Beach Police Department, Courtesy Report to Inyo County
Sheriff’s Office, Oct. 6, 1969, Fowles Files. According to this report, two Redondo Beach residents
filed a criminal report upon returning from a hunting trip to Death Valley, claiming that their
parked auto had been robbed of a shotgun in the desert on October 4. After discovering the theft,
 they encountered five “hippies,” one of whom—later identified at William Rex Cole (aka Bill
Vance)—had the gun.
76 they’d never heard from the detectives: Among the most important witnesses who were willing to
provide information but were never contacted: Bee Greer, Robert Denton, Dennis Cox, Frank
Crom, and Leon Brune. They also could’ve interviewed Manson Family members, both
incarcerated and not. One of them, Susan Atkins (who died a year after their “investigation” in
September 2009), had told Ronnie Howard (the inmate who helped break the case) that the Family
had killed more people then they’d been held accountable for, including “a guy in the desert—they
can’t identify him.” According to LAPD detective Paul LePage’s notes of the jailhouse interview
with Howard (discussed in chapter 8: “Interview of Rena Howard—Sybil Brand Institute,” Nov.
18, 1969, 1–4, LePage personal files), the conversation between Howard and Atkins took place on
November 2, 1969, a few days after Tenerelli’s body had been identified in Bishop. Evidently the
news hadn’t reached Atkins yet.
77 the six months between the reopening: The three people Jepson told me he interviewed were Billy
Kriens (the Bishop police officer who conducted the two-day investigation of Tenerelli’s death),
Doug Manning (the CHP officer who told me the idea that Tenerelli committed suicide was a
“bunch of malarkey”), and Ray Seguine (whose only connection to the case was he briefly owned
the Sportsman’s Lodge).
78 the scant record: David Jepson, fax to author, July 9, 2011.
79 Open Records Act Request: O’Neill Request, July 19, 2011.
80 no records had been found: Toni Fansler, Records Clerk, Bishop Police Department, July 29, 2011.
81 The sheriff halted his dig in Death Valley: Associated Press, “Manson Site Keeps Its Secrets,” Los
Angeles Daily News, May 24, 2008; author interview with Dostie.
Epilogue
1 “exactly who did what to whom”: Hadley Freeman, “The Second Summer of Charles Manson:
Why the Cult Murders Still Grip Us,” The Guardian, Aug. 16, 2016.
2 Watson absconded to his parents’ place: Tex Watson and Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? (Old
Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 148. According to trial transcripts and police reports,
Watson left the Barker ranch between September 30 and October 2, the period during which
Tenerelli arrived, then died, in Bishop.
3 he turned himself in for questioning: The information in this section is taken from two of my
articles, both in the online journal Medium: “The Tale of the Manson Tapes,” Sept. 16, 2014; and
“Charles Manson’s Right-Hand Man Is Up for Parole. Here’s What to Watch For,” Oct. 25, 1016.
4 “deep insight into environmental issues”: Ted Rowland, “At 75, Charles Manson Still Has Power to
Influence Others,” CNN.com, Nov. 12, 2009.
5 a seed gun called “the Savior”: Jon Michael Jones (longtime friend of Manson), correspondence
with author.
6 cell phone to Manson: Gregory Blevins, “Local Lawyer Recalls Speaking with Manson,” Visalia
[Calif.] Times-Delta, Nov. 20, 2017.
7 rechristened him “Dead Rat”: Lis Wiehl with Caitlin Rother, “How Many Uncounted Victims Did
the Manson Gang Kill?,” The Daily Beast, May 25, 2018.
8 as if some of it: Author interview with Hammond.