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

by Tom O'Neill

After Manson’s arrest, Wilson fell into a deep depression, spurring his problems with drugs and alcohol. Later, he told the Beach Boys’ authorized biographer, David Leaf, “I know why Charles Manson did what he did. Someday I’ll tell the world. I’ll write a book and explain why he did it.” He never got the chance.

In 1983, three weeks after his thirty-ninth birthday, an acutely drunk Wilson dove from the deck of his boat into the chilly waters of Marina del Rey and accidentally drowned. Within days, a rock journalist wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about a jarring exchange he’d had with Wilson. “Me and Charlie, we founded the Family,” Dennis had said, apropos of nothing.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

“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.’

The LAPD told me they’d destroyed all their investigative reports; they’d retained some files, but they weren’t about to release them to me. How could they have trashed their records of the most infamous case in the history of the city? I didn’t believe it. I asked them to put it in writing, and they did, stating in an official letter that “a thorough and proper search” produced “no records”; all the evidence had been “destroyed.”

“Terry talked about Manson all the time,” he said. “He thought he was wonderful. He asked me to manage him.” But hadn’t Terry said he wanted nothing to do with him? “Terry stalked Manson. They thought they had Jesus Christ.”

And Bugliosi was still dining out, literally, on his Manson stories. The case continued to earn him a handsome income in royalties and public-speaking appearances. I was curious about those who hadn’t made out so well—people still living in the shadow of these crimes, who’d been broken by the tumult of the late sixties. They’d have no vested interest in preserving the official narrative. Through a series of Los Angeles attorneys, I tracked down Irving A. Kanarek, Manson’s defense attorney. I’d been warned that his was a sad story, but I wasn’t prepared for the dire straits I’d find him in.

When I asked if Kanarek was paid to defend Manson, he smiled wryly and said that he was, but that confidentiality prevented him from revealing by whom. “It would be big news,” he said. “It might surprise you.” (If Kanarek had a benefactor, another lawyer later told me, that white knight wasn’t generous—Kanarek apparently spent most of the trial living out of his car and sleeping in the press room at the courthouse.)

I had more questions, but I could feel him growing impatient. “I’m not the oracle about this thing,” Melcher said. “I just know that it was an incredible pain in the ass.” That pain would continue. Listening back to my tape of the call, I’d realize that I’d caught Melcher in a lie, one that implicated Bugliosi—and gave me my best shot yet at proving that both of them were involved in a cover-up.

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.

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.

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.

After the murders, I asked, did Parks or any of his colleagues suspect Manson? Of course, he said. “I knew that Terry had kind of fired Charlie and stopped recording him, so my first thought was that Charlie had made a mistake and actually got Sharon Tate instead of Terry.”

The Hollywood community knew that the Beach Boys had been wrapped up in Manson’s world, and it turned them into pariahs, for a time; nightclubs where they’d once been welcomed were suddenly turning them away. “We couldn’t go out because people didn’t want us at their place,” Parks said.

“So you’re saying a huge community of people knew before the world did that Charles Manson committed these murders?” “Yeah.” Parks went on to say something even more dizzying: he was positive that the FBI had sent agents to the Beach Boys’ office soon after the murders. “They were monitoring our phones, because they thought there was some connection with those guys,”

Steve Despar, the Beach Boys’ recording engineer, remembered the ordeal that Manson had put him through during the recording sessions, when he’d show up with “about twelve girls, many underage, quiet, in a stupor.”

The guy is psychotic and scares the hell out of me.” Despar emphasized, “He was after Melcher… Melcher was not out of the picture at this point. He was part of the project. When I was recording Charles Manson, it was for Dennis and Terry Melcher.”

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?

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Guillory’s thesis was this: Manson had gotten away with far too much at the Spahn Ranch in the months before the murders. Even though he was a federal parolee, Manson had no job; he had ready access to drugs, alcohol, and underage girls; he had a cache of firearms. And LASO officers knew all about it. At LASO’s Malibu station—Spahn was in its jurisdiction—Manson’s lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said. Firemen patrolling the ranch’s fire trails had even encountered Manson and the Family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The cops always looked the other way. According to Guillory, that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”

And so, despite the raft of crimes that Manson and the Family were committing, they were never apprehended, and Manson never had his parole revoked. There was even an occasion where Manson was picked up by LASO police for statutory rape, but they ended up cutting him loose.

Guillory was sure that LASO’s intelligence unit, or some other intelligence unit, was running surveillance on the Spahn Ranch.

Then came the murder of Gary Hinman, and soon after it the Tate–LaBianca murders. How had LASO failed to see this coming? They’d been monitoring Manson constantly. Guillory theorized that the massive August 16 raid on the Spahn Ranch was LASO’s effort to cover its tracks after the murders.

Something didn’t add up about the raid—all that force, all those arrests, for nothing? It was “like we were doing something perhaps a week late to show that we had really been watching,” he said on the radio.

Guillory decided to become a whistle-blower. He went to a news station, KCAL, and told them everything he knew, thinking the press would be all over this story. They hardly touched it. Worse, the leak cost him his job: LASO’s internal affairs department got wind of his remarks and sent him packing.

“We were told not to bother these people,” he told me, referring to the Family.