More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tom O'Neill
Read between
September 12 - October 11, 2021
mom racking up another arrest for grand larceny.
What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt,
mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing
Manson, said in one episode that Melcher “was vague about the details of his meetings with Manson, and probably shaved a couple of visits to the ranch off the official record.”2 It would be one thing to fudge the numbers a bit—it’s easy to see why someone would want to understate their relationship with Charles Manson. But I became convinced that this was graver than that. I found proof that Melcher was much closer to Manson, Tex Watson, and the girls than he’d suggested. A year before the murders, he’d even lived with a member of the Family at the house on Cielo Drive.
The story of Manson and Melcher starts with Dennis Wilson. By the summer of 1968, Wilson, then twenty-three, had reached an impasse. He’d become world famous as the drummer for the Beach Boys, helmed
two hitchhikers, the Family’s Ella Jo Bailey and Patricia Krenwinkel, caught his eye.6 He gave them a quick lift. When he saw them again soon afterward, he picked them up a second time, taking them back to his place for “milk and cookies.” History hasn’t recorded what kind of cookies they enjoyed, or whether those cookies were in fact sex, but whatever the case, the girls told Manson about the encounter. They weren’t aware of Wilson’s clout in the music industry—but Manson was, and he insisted on going back to the house with them.
He even remembered when: it had been on the day of the Tate and Sebring funerals, at his lawyer’s office. (At the trial, he’d testified to the same thing.) Following his lawyer’s instructions, he reminded me, he hadn’t said anything to the police about Manson. I told Altobelli that McGann had said there was no record of his interview. He was as baffled as I was.
In the crossed-out sections of Bugliosi’s notes, to my astonishment, DeCarlo described three visits by Terry Melcher to the Manson Family—after the murders.17 I read them, reread them, and reread them again. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I took scrupulous, word-for-word notes, in case Gibbons looked too closely at the flagged pages and realized that they completely upended one of the most important cases in her office’s history. Luckily, she let me photocopy them without a second
Guenther said. I turned the conversation to Bobby Beausoleil. The mere mention of his name launched Guenther out of his recliner: “He lies, and I can’t tell you how I know that.” Of course he lies, I said. Didn’t all murderers? “He called the ranch after he was arrested,” Guenther said, pacing in front of me. To his mind, it was this phone call that had initiated the Tate–LaBianca murders. “The sole motive for those murders was to get Bobby out of jail.”
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 case was. The fact that the detectives didn’t go was “highly unusual,” in her estimation.
“Chicken shit!” he croaked. “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.”
Manson had visited the Cielo house after the murders, that he’d gone back with someone unknown to rearrange the scene. This would’ve accounted for discrepancies in the positions of the bodies: the killers left them one way, and the police found them in another. There were pools of
The coroner described blood smears on Tate’s body, as if she’d been dragged—again, never mentioned by the killers.6 Those in the area, including a private security officer, had heard gunshots and arguing hours after the killers said they’d left.7 And Manson himself had claimed on a few occasions that he’d gone back to the house with an unnamed individual to “see what my children did.”8
It is intended that the US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP [Black Panther party] activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.
Lynn “Buck” Compton, who’d been an LAPD detective before getting his law degree and joining the DA’s office.91 Compton was the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And he’d been a World War II hero—his exploits with the parachute infantry regiment, the Easy Company, were chronicled in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.
So, behind Atkins’s and Condon’s backs, Fitts “recommended Dick Caballero as an attorney who had good client control and would properly represent his client.” Fitts got in touch with Judge Mario Clinco, who was overseeing the case, “and arrangements were made for Caballero to be appointed as Atkins’s attorney of record at her felony arraignment. This was accomplished.”
The full transcript of the hearing has vanished from the archives of the Los Angeles Superior Court. The court’s spokesperson told me that a thorough search of the archive produced no results.17
the replacement lawyer, Richard Caballero, had another quality that endeared him to the DA’s office: he’d worked there himself for eight years.18
“revealing vital facts about the Sharon Tate murder case from the viewpoint of Miss Atkins.” But the scrutiny didn’t last. Amid the swell of coverage on the murders, no one seemed to mind the lawyers’ leaking. In a passing remark to the Los Angeles Times on the day before Atkins’s grand jury testimony, Caballero more or less admitted that he wasn’t acting in his client’s best interest, saying he was “gambling that her voluntary testimony might save her from the gas chamber”—“gambling” and “might” being the operative words.28
Bugliosi and his team had essentially arranged for the defense lawyers to taint the jury on the prosecution’s behalf: everyone in Los Angeles was suddenly an expert on the Manson Family.
killers were tripping on LSD the night of the Tate murders. If that were true, the defense could’ve argued that they had “diminished capacity,” thus sparing them the gas chamber. Bugliosi, wanting to eliminate that possibility, made Linda Kasabian testify on multiple occasions that no one took any drugs on the nights of the murders.82 (In a 2009 documentary, Kasabian contradicted her testimony, saying that all the killers had taken speed on the night of the Tate murders.)83
pair of eyeglasses recovered from Tate’s living room after the murders.87 They didn’t belong to any of the victims; they didn’t belong to any of the murderers; they didn’t seem to belong to anyone, period.
Almost right away, government scientists saw LSD as a potential Cold War miracle drug, the key to eradicating communism and seeding global democracy. Its effects on individual minds were extrapolated onto
fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that the Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge, program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill on command. The CIA, then in its infancy, saw mind control as a natural extension of communism, spreading like fire where the forces of unreason prevailed. In 1949 it launched Operation Bluebird, a mind-control
...more
West, I learned, carved out a niche he’d occupy for decades to come. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further brainwashing by the Soviets. But the extraordinary power of psychotropic drugs, particularly LSD, was hard to ignore. Thus a defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation
April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion. The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.”34 Under its umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting participants. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug.
The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.35 In their defense, CIA spooks weren’t above experimenting on themselves.
MKULTRA was so highly classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director late in 1961 he was not informed of its existence. Fewer than half a dozen agency brass were aware of MKULTRA at any period during its twenty-year history.
MKULTRA had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens.39 One was a doctor who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD
he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge.67, 68 In
he enthusiastically described a high-tech laboratory he planned to construct at Oklahoma. It would include “a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.”
CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents. The one-page summary of West’s accomplishments
“The CIA maintained that they never were able to accomplish it,” I said. “In part because they were basically taking normal subjects,” he said, “not susceptible girls in a reinforcing environment.
I’d always believed that Cold War–era paranoia had overstated the potential for “Manchurian Candidates” taught to kill by dastardly commies. On the other hand, I accepted that Charles Manson had altered his followers’ minds, and that LSD did a lot of the heavy lifting. He’d seemed to have an endless supply of the drug, though no one said how he got it.
Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an
MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.” In
“All Jolly would say to anybody was that he would find a way to pay for it. I learned then, when I became chair, that the source was payment from the CIA.”
