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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom O'Neill
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July 16 - July 25, 2025
Manson was never charged when he was arrested. Why was a law-breaking parolee allowed to go free? “A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets. My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason—I don’t know.” It was “very unusual” that someone with a record like Manson’s would be left on the streets.
We know he’s being watched by somebody, but we don’t know who. The thing is this—if he was under surveillance, those people left the ranch on two occasions, committed the seven homicides… why was there no intervention?” He added that there was no legal obligation for LASO to intervene; they could’ve chosen to let the murders pass without action, if Manson were so important that they didn’t want to risk interrupting their surveillance.
Guillory was fairly confident that someone from LASO knew right away that the Family had committed those murders. “Probably someone saw them come and go and there’s a log entry someplace and then, of course, later they found where they went and all hell would’ve broken loose.”
Guillory had been part of the operation that day, and he remembered finding stolen purses, wallets, and pocketbooks with IDs—all damning evidence, and all seemingly ignored. After the raid, he said, the surveillance ended, as mysteriously as it had started.
When Manson was finally brought to justice for the murders, LASO took dramatic precautions to hide its surveillance of the ranch. “I thought what they were doing was illegal,” Guillory told me. “All the crime reports disappeared from the station. Everything was gone, all of our reports were gone. Normally you had access to your own reports; they were all gone, disappeared. The whole file was gone, and the memo went up that no one involved in the Spahn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone outside the department.” That convinced Guillory to go to a reporter—the move that cost him his job.
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.
While Bobby Beausoleil was busy torturing Gary Hinman, he left his girlfriend behind at the ranch. Kitty Lutesinger, sixteen, was pregnant with his child, and in his absence, she set off a chain of events that gave the sheriff’s office another chance to nab Manson.
Manson mistrusted her, fearing that she’d compel Beausoleil to leave the group and raise their child. Lutesinger, in turn, was uneasy around Manson. He was always speechifying about the end of the world, fooling around with guns, and heaping abuse on anyone who crossed him. So, with her boyfriend showing no signs of returning anytime soon, Lutesinger ran away from the ranch.
Lutesinger asked Gleason if the Black Panthers were behind the Tate murders. “I had been programmed to believe it was the Panthers who did it,” she told him.
And here, to my mind, the credibility of the LASO deputies stretches to its breaking point. Guenther and Whiteley had just posted the bulletin for Lutesinger’s arrest. They’d just learned that she’d been living at the Spahn Ranch—along with their primary murder suspect. And yet they didn’t go to the ranch to look for her. They did nothing.
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
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“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.
“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.”
“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.
When I persisted, they allowed me to make my case in person with the sheriff’s captain of homicide. I arrived to find not one but three deputies, who’d invented a new reason to keep me out. I couldn’t go back in, they said, because there was an “open case” against unnamed Family members involving “stolen credit cards.” That couldn’t be, I said. The statute of limitations on any type of theft by the Family would have long run out. They didn’t care. Sergeant Paul Delhauer, who had more or less seized control of the meeting, told me there was “stuff you can never be told, will never know about”
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“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
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Preston Guillory, who alleged that police allowed Manson to remain free because they knew he planned to attack the Black Panthers. I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement or was even an informant. It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was. But this is where the reporting took me.
I learned that in the midsixties both the LAPD and LASO had infiltrated groups they considered a threat to the status quo: antiwar leftists, the Black Panther party, and other black militant groups like the US Organization, a fierce rival of the Panthers in Los Angeles. Posing as leftists, agents provocateurs would gain the trust of these groups from the inside, provoking them to commit crimes or do violence against rivals.
Even from a distance, this line of inquiry gave me pause. I’d never been interested in conspiracies. I wasn’t one to speculate about a second shooter in JFK’s assassination or faking the moon landing. For the first time, though, I saw the appeal of trafficking in murky secrets—it was an attractive option, as long as people believed you.
Even if it made me look crazy, I wanted to see whether the informant theory held water: if Manson had any credible connections to the government or law enforcement, and if I could link him to the police infiltrations of leftist groups I’d read about. Then, as if I’d conjured him from thin air, someone emerged who fit into the puzzle. He seemed to have wandered into Southern California from the pages of a spy novel, and not a very well written one, at that. His name was Reeve Whitson, and his intersections with the Manson investigation suggested a dimension to the Tate–LaBianca murders that had
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Hatami demurred, and Whitson turned the screws, effectively threatening him with deportation—he said he’d ensure that Hatami, an Iranian without U.S. citizenship, wouldn’t be able to get another visa. If he wanted to stay in America, all he had to do was say he’d seen Manson that day at Tate’s house. Not long after, Whitson brought Hatami to his car and showed him his gun. Although Hatami didn’t know Whitson too well, he took the threat seriously—he believed that Whitson really had the means to deport him.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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’s not clear when that life swerved into espionage. According to a few people I spoke with, Whitson said that he’d had a mentor, Pete Lewis, who’d inducted him into undercover work. Lewis apparently met a tragic and deeply improbable end, like something out of a James Bond movie: he was killed by a poison dart hidden in an umbrella. Richard Edlund, one of several to mention the poison-dart story, saw it as a vital part of Whitson’s origin story; it was almost like Whitson thought he could avenge his friend’s death by working as a spy. Who could say how much of it was true? My hope was that
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Sure enough, I reached his ex-wife, Ellen Josefson (née Nylund), by phone in Sweden. Josefson didn’t beat around the bush. “He was working for the CIA,” she said. “That is why I am worried to talk to you.” Was she sure about that? “Yes, I am sure.”
In October 1962, Josefson said, she gave birth to their daughter, Liza. By then, she had misgivings about her marriage; the bloom was off the rose. Reeve’s job jeopardized her life, and now her daughter’s, too. And it made him hard to love. He would be dispatched to remote areas of the world for months at a time, returning with no explanation for where he’d been or what he’d been doing. In 1962, he was always going off to Cuba, and after the missile crisis he decided it would be best to send his family back to Sweden. They returned to Ellen’s homeland sometime before JFK died, as she recalled.
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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
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It was only the CIA that gave me the “neither confirm nor deny” response. Later, responding to my appeal, it wrote that Whitson had “no open or officially acknowledged relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Someone who’s constantly implying to his friends that he’s in the CIA might not be very effective as an undercover agent. If Whitson were truly a high-functioning member of the intelligence community, would anyone have had any idea?
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.
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
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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?
COINTELPRO had been activated on and off throughout the early sixties, often to vilify civil rights leaders—Martin Luther King Jr. most prominent among them. In his ’67 memo, Hoover formed a new branch of the operation, aiming to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations… The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to this Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis… Efforts of various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated. No opportunity
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In the Black Panther party and, in Los Angeles, the US Organization, informants were instrumental in fomenting violence. They would spread disinformation to catalyze an intergroup rivalry, or they’d simply arrange for the bloodshed themselves.
The most conspiratorial possibility, of course, would be that the FBI had carefully groomed Manson and pressed him into service as a COINTELPRO informant—but
LASO knew that the Panthers were murdered because of the FBI’s meddling. They didn’t care. In fact, they hid the FBI’s role in the violence. In their eyes, the most desirable outcome had been achieved: two Panthers were dead, three US gang members were in jail, and the American public was more fearful of black militants. The FBI used the incident to spur more violence between US and the Panthers, according to a 1970 memo from the Los Angeles Field Office:
When Hoover reconstituted COINTELPRO, he was already worried that America’s black militants would be embraced by liberal whites, especially in a left-leaning place like Hollywood. In the August 1967 memo reanimating the counterintelligence program, he’d noted the importance of “prevent[ing] militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability”: “they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to the ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes.”
Two years later, the Panthers had become almost synonymous with Hollywood’s liberal elite. Actresses such as Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg appeared at their rallies. Hoover felt he had to widen the chasm between blacks and whites in Los Angeles. In a November 1968 memo, an L.A. field agent discussed new efforts to spread disinformation to Hollywood’s liberal whites.
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.
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.
CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67, the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad.
In the six years that followed, the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American citizens.
During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in revulsion.
Their attempts were sometimes even more unhinged. In 1968, CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned.
I read about CHAOS and COINTELPRO until I must’ve sounded, to all my friends, like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, someone who might go off on a long-winded tangent about the threats of the deep state.
But the fact that the CIA has become an all-purpose scapegoat—the preeminent symbol of global power run amok—doesn’t change the fact that its abuses of power in the 1960s were legitimate and myriad.
If anything, these abuses were so gross that they’ve lent authority to any and every claim against federal intelligence agencies: if the CIA and the FBI are capable of killing American citizens in cold blood, ...
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