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

by Tom O'Neill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“There are no questions about what happened… We know pretty much exactly who did what to whom, when and why.” In a sense, that’s true: the material evidence is sickeningly conclusive, and it still shocks today. But it doesn’t make sense. The mystery is there.

And there’s the most “far out” theory: that Manson was tied to an MKULTRA effort to create assassins who would kill on command.

I haven’t found the truth, much as I wish I could say I have. My goal isn’t to say what did happen—it’s to prove that the official story didn’t.

shocked by the state’s lack of transparency. For reasons I can’t understand, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, federal bureaus, and other outposts of officialdom continue to suppress their files, even as they claim they have nothing to hide.

As of this writing, the LAPD and the DA’s office are still in legal battles about their unfathomable refusal to release information—a refusal that extends to the victims’ families and to the defendants themselves.