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

by Tom O'Neill

six hours,

obsessive, a conspiracy theorist, a lunatic.

sixties—things

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sixties.

six foot three,

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“write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.” Their work was done.

“It was like I was dead. I could not think about anything. It was almost as if I passed out, blacked out… My head was blank. There was nothing in me. It was like I had given it all.”

“ritualistic

slayings” and “overtones of a weird religious rite.” The facts were unavailable or misreported.

Sebring had been wearing the black hood ...

“Eeny meeny miney mo,” he said, “who will be the next to go?”

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they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat.

Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator—misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.

nine-and-a-half-month-long trial. But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months. With the suspects unknown and at large, rumors proliferated and the tension reached a fever pitch.

but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.

hundred reporters that the case was solved. Warrants were out for Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian. More people would be named pending grand jury indictments. Davis added,

Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson—and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.

They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.

In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals—even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared—it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently

valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.

The Family, with its starry-eyed communalism, sexual frankness, and veneration of LSD, offered a screen onto which anyone could project his insecurities about the era’s politics and pressures. The promise of the hippie movement had been in its willingness to forgo cherished institutions in favor of the new and untested. After the Tate murders, it seemed that hippies and freaks were more than a risible sideshow: they could really undermine the status quo.

By some estimates, over that four-month period in 1969, as many as thirty-three people may have been killed simply because one man ordered it. This was something altogether different.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a father he never met, he’d known little but privation and suffering. Few would be naturally inclined to look up to him, and in the most literal sense, not many could: he was only five foot six.

Manson, not yet nine, was already a truant, known to steal from local shops. His mother looked for a foster home for him. Instead,

he was made a ward of the state and sent to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic-run school for delinquents in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Manson had “a special hatred for women as mothers… This probably had something to do with his feelings about his own mother, though he never talked about her… The closest he came to breaking his silence was in some of his song lyrics: ‘I am a mechanical boy, I am my mother’s boy.’”

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defendants—Charles

Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.

Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.

Manson’s followers subscribed to his prophecy of Armageddon as if it’d been delivered from the Holy Mount. They were willing to kill for him to make it a reality.

The trial was the longest and most expensive in U.S. history at the time.

Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs.

After seven grueling months, the first phase of the trial drew to a close, and the jury, after ten days of deliberation, arrived at unanimous guilty verdicts. Now, in the second phase, the prosecution had to present an argument for putting the defendants to death. 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 ...

an agent of mind ...

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?

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At that point, scientists in the United States had been studying LSD for only a little more than a decade—it was far from a known quantity. Manson, the defense said, had used the drug to ply his impressionable followers, accessing the innermost chambers of their minds and molding them to his designs.

“One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while

the others watched,”

“Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himse...

His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars.