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.
