Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

Now, most of the people who had the full story, including Manson himself, have died, and the questions I had then have continued to consume me for almost twenty years. But I’m certain of one thing: much of what we accept as fact is fiction.

That’s not to say the work was without its twists and turns. I’d gotten in a shouting match with Tom Cruise about Scientology; Gary Shandling had somehow found a way to abandon me during an interview in his own home; and I’d pissed off Alec Baldwin, but who hasn’t?

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.

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?

Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.

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 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions—often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks—during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan.

When it came time to decide on the death penalty, though, the defense called a series of psychiatric experts who disagreed. Manson had brainwashed his followers, they said, and those followers couldn’t be culpable for the murders. LSD had given him a portal to the most labile parts of the subconscious. The scientists explained how acid could break down and reconstruct someone’s personality—how a sober “guide,” intended to lead someone peacefully through the many hours of an acid trip, could abuse the role, inserting violent ideals and beliefs into their minds. With repetition and reinforcement, these beliefs took root and flourished even when the followers were sober. Throw in other coercive techniques like sensory deprivation and hypnosis—both of which Manson embraced—and it was possible to rewrite someone’s moral code such that she acknowledged no such thing as right or wrong. Dr. Joel Fort, a research psychiatrist who’d opened the nation’s first LSD treatment center, was one of the defense witnesses. He believed that Manson had used LSD to produce “a new pattern of behavior for the girls,” resulting in “a totally neutral system which saw death or killing in a completely different way than a normal person sees it,” free of “social concern, compassion, [and] moral values.”

What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case. It’s the one that still keeps me up at night. And while all this back-and-forth about LSD is provocative, it feels like an insufficient explanation.

How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year? Bugliosi conceded that he still didn’t have the answer.

I had to wonder if there was a conspiracy of silence in Hollywood. It had taken months for the LAPD to crack the case. In that time, Manson and the Family had almost certainly killed others. If Hollywood hadn’t circled the wagons, it seemed there was a good chance the investigation could have ended sooner. So many of the people I spoke to had strong ideas about why these murders had happened—and yet none of them had spoken to the police, and many remained unwilling to go on the record with me.

With an eye on other possible motives, I focused on three questions in my first weeks of reporting. First: Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers? Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities? Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny?

In 1999, apparently, that fear was still alive and well, at least among Hollywood’s A-list, many of whom declined to speak to me, even though thirty years had passed. I was rebuffed by the intimates of Tate, Polanski, and Sebring—sometimes with vehemence, sometimes with tersely worded emails or phone calls. “No interest.” “Doesn’t want to be involved.” Or just the one word: “No.” Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda said no. Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, both reputedly close to Tate and Polanski: no, no. Candice Bergen, Terry Melcher’s girlfriend at the time of the murders, said no, too—as did David Geffen, Mia Farrow, and Anjelica Huston, among others.

Some were household names, but plenty of the decidedly nonfamous found reasons to decline, too. It was looking like I’d have a story about Hollywood with no one from Hollywood in it.

“Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”

There was one major player who agreed to talk to me: Vincent Bugliosi.

There was no sign of that animosity during our first meeting. On a sunny spring day, Bugliosi gave me six hours of his time, driving me around to show me various landmarks related to the crime and enjoying a long lunch with me in one of his favorite restaurants. I was flattered to have captured his attention—here was the man who’d put away one of the monsters of the twentieth century. Later I would question the motive behind all his generosity.

Still hoping for a good angle, I tried to probe, however gently, at the holes I’d noticed in Helter Skelter. For one, how had the cops missed so many clues in the case—why hadn’t they solved it much sooner? As he did in his book, Bugliosi blamed sloppy police work. They never would’ve cracked the case without him, he told me.

When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.” It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”

if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth—and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged—the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.

In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.

Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.

Given Bugliosi’s revelation to me, it was the first place I started looking for a break. If he had changed one detail about the case, could he have changed others? That question would recur throughout my entire investigation.

Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence. “The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an awesome charisma.” That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.

Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James Toback—who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more than two hundred allegations of sexual assault—was even more certain. One

Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked, who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it. On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover, she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her—he didn’t want her there.

After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the killers or the media—from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department,

and that they knew everything there was to know.”

Although he had no way of knowing it in 1969, Tennant wasn’t being paranoid when he wondered how the LAPD knew so much about his friends. Many law enforcement agencies, including the LAPD, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, and the FBI, had maintained units to surveil and even infiltrate groups that they considered subversive or threatening. At this stage, I wasn’t inclined to view law enforcement with anything ...

“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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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?

The story of Manson and Melcher starts with Dennis Wilson. By the summer of 1968, Wilson, then twenty-three, had reached an impasse. He’d become world famous as the drummer for the Beach Boys, helmed by his brother Brian; now the band was in decline, edged out by more subversive acts. He and his wife, Carole, had recently divorced for the second time. She wrote in court filings that he had a violent temper, inflicting “severe bodily injury” on her during his “rampages.”

Dennis decided to rusticate as a bachelor. He moved into a lavish, Spanish-style mansion in Pacific Palisades, once a hunting lodge owned by the humorist Will Rogers. The home boasted thirty-one rooms and a swimming pool in the shape of California. He redecorated in the spirit of the times—zebra-print carpet, abundant bunk beds—and hosted decadent parties, hoping to have as much sex as possible.

The girls made the meals, did the laundry, and slept with the men on command. Manson prescribed sex seven times a day: before and after all three meals and once in the middle of the night. “It was as if we were kings, just because we were men,” Watson later wrote. Soon Wilson was bragging so much that he landed a headline in Record Mirror: “I Live with 17 Girls.”

The Wizard is Charles Manson, who is a friend of mine who thinks he is God and the devil. He sings, plays and writes poetry and may be another artist for Brother Records,” the Beach Boys’ label.

This last bit excited Manson, who was desperate to leverage his connection with Wilson into a music career. The two cowrote a song, “Cease to Exist,” whose lyrics claimed that “submission is a gift.” (Later that year, the Beach Boys recorded it as a B side, changing the title, finessing the lyrics, and dropping Manson’s songwriting credit—a snub that fueled his anger toward the establishment.)

Manson fraternized with some of the biggest names in music. Neil Young remembered meeting him and the girls at Wilson’s place. “A lot of pretty well-known musicians around L.A. knew Manson,” Young later said, “though t...

It spooked Melcher. Here was a peace-and-love cult with naked girls roaming the old Western sets, and yet the constant threat of violence loomed over the place. It needed to be documented in all its oddity. A few days later, Melcher returned with Deasy and Jakobson, and the Family repeated their audition. But what had seemed spontaneous now felt rehearsed. Deasy returned a few more times, until he had a frightening LSD trip with Manson and vowed never to go back.

It was all getting too toxic. Melcher conveyed his rejection through Jakobson, and that was the end of that. Manson’s last brush with greatness was gone, and he became full-on apocalyptic. Melcher never went back to the ranch or saw anyone from the Family again. Or so he said under oath, anyway.