Chaos by Tom ONeill
Chaos by Tom ONeill
Chaos by Tom ONeill
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of
copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to
produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The
Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not
owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking
events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call
(866) 376-6591.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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,
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
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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:
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.
“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
“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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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:
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
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.”
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.
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.
And so began Manson’s assignment to Roger Smith, whom the ex-con came
to revere.
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!”
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?”
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Discover Your Next Great Read
Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite
authors.
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.