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

by Tom O'Neill

“My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”

And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.

None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch—whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows—the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality.

Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.

Nestled against a hillside on a bluff, it afforded views of Los Angeles glittering to the east and Bel Air’s fulsome estates unfurling to the west. On a clear day, you could see straight to the Pacific, ten miles out.

Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.

Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”

“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.

Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.

She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist.

He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.

On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d

Tate was optimistic about the future. She believed her child would strengthen her marriage to Polanski, who sometimes demeaned her.

Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights. Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?” “You’re all going to die,” Watson said.

Atkins had remained in the house with Tate, who was whimpering, sitting on the floor—still in only lingerie, and still bound by the neck to the dead body of her former lover, Sebring.

“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.”

She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.” Their work was done.

When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly. “I was gone,” Atkins later recalled. “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.”

Maybe drugs were involved, maybe they weren’t; maybe Sebring had been wearing the black hood of a Satanist, maybe he hadn’t. The big picture was one of supernatural ruin.

before he learned of the murders, Polanski, at a party in London, had been discussing a friend’s death. “Eeny meeny miney mo,” he said, “who will be the next to go?” With that, the phone rang, and he was summoned to hear that his wife and friends had been brutally murdered.

Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in.

Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately—and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in through an unlocked side door, and he tied up the couple by himself.

This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night.

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.

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. For a while, the police maintained that the two sets of murders were unrelated; the LaBiancas were victims of a copycat attack. Even Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood was only a few years old, fell into the speculative fervor, appearing on The Tonight Show to provide a “fantasy” explanation of the murders. He blamed them on one person, with the motive a fit of rage and a heaping portion of paranoia.

Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day.

In mid-October, Manson, with a welter of his followers, had been apprehended on auto-theft charges at the Barker Ranch, a hideaway in forbidding Death Valley; its seclusion surpassed even that of the Spahn Ranch.

These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth:

They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation.

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

Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. 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 s...

Where had these beliefs come from? The murderers had been raised and educated in solid, conventional American communities...

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.

And so much about the crimes was mired in uncertainty, from the motive to the body count. 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.

piece in Time magazine drew specious parallels between hippies and violence.

the magazine warned, “criminals and psychotics” blossomed as easily as innoc...

Even when they act as if they love, they can be totally devoid of true compassion. That is the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly… Many hippies are socially almost dead inside.

A thirty-five-year-old ex-con, roughly half his life whiled away in federal institutions, had ensnared the lives and minds of his followers, mainly young women.

Watson, who later wrote that 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.’”

Beneath this spectacle, I could glimpse the public’s truer, more profound interest in the case, the same puzzle that would consume me: How and why had these people devolved into criminals? And, more pointedly, could it happen to any average American child—could anyone go “too far”?

The jury was sequestered at the Ambassador Hotel, where, two years earlier, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.

For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”

Manson had learned to recognize and exploit that impulse, but even so, each woman was responsible for her actions. Then as now, this position fascinated and perplexed me: it posited a form of brainwashing in which the brainwashed were still, to some degree, “themselves.”

With repetition and reinforcement, these beliefs took root and flourished even when the followers were sober. Throw in other coercive techniques like sensory deprivation and hypnosis—both of which Manson embraced—and it was possible to rewrite someone’s moral code such that she acknowledged no such thing as right or wrong.

“Let us say with your knowledge of LSD, you have a school for crime, and then you take them here and you program them to go out and commit a murder here, there, everywhere… Are you telling us that this can be done, that you can capture the human mind by such a school for crime?”

He compared it to a government’s ability, through the nebulous

powers of patriotism, to condition soldiers to kill on its behalf.

What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered t...

may be something that he learned from others. Whatever