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

by Tom O'Neill

believe Manson has full knowledge of the formula he used. And it worries me that we do not.

“When you take LSD enough times you reach a stage of nothing,” Manson had said in court. “You reach a stage of no thought.”

Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers? Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities? Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny? Here, as neatly

The chairman of Paramount Pictures had arranged a suite for Polanski on the studio lot—a place where he could avoid the prying eyes of the press, and the killers, too, if they were out to get him. But before he arrived at Paramount, Polanski had his car stop at a Denny’s parking lot for a hushed conversation with Kaczanowski. Bugliosi never reported this in Helter Skelter. The media never knew about it. To me, it was something to explore.

When the LAPD arrived at the studio that evening, they were barred from entering Polanski’s suite until he’d finished the debriefing. Bugliosi didn’t find that worth mentioning;

Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people” coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the guests. “They walked so freely through the place.”

That was why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.

“There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her relationship.

On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos.

She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip.

she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her—he d...

Tate “wound up getting murdered because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one side of it.

“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air

Hotel with Roman after the funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Vo...

As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.

Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas);

It was another instance of the resilience of the “live freaky, die freaky” mind-set. Plus, even if Pic Dawson, Billy Doyle, and the other dealers hadn’t murdered anyone, they could still be behind the crimes, or adjacent to them. If I could connect them to Manson, for instance—couldn’t they have contracted him for the murders?

And if they were selling a lot of drugs to anyone who’d died at the Tate household, might there have been some kind of cover-up at work? So, down I went.

Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek fucked him.”

Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”

asked Tacot: “Do you think Voytek did fuck Billy?”

“Yeah, that’s why Billy was so pissed at him,” Tacot said. “Voytek would have been killed if I hadn’t intervened.” “Would Billy have hired killers?” I asked, thinking of Manson. “No. He would’ve taken all the pleasure himself.”

After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said.

True enough, but you could arrange for someone else to do the killing. Tacot adamantly denied that he and Billy Doyle knew Manson—they’d never even met the guy. Nor, he said, had they sold drugs to anyone staying at the Tate house.

A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo. I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the point.

When I tell you something, don’t question it! I don’t say it unless it is true.”

explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”