I called Guenther, and I could hear him wilt on the other end of the line. “Is that how he wants it? Then let’s just drop it.” I was deflated, too. Just as easily as he’d given me the scoop, Guenther was prepared to take it back. “You’re just not going to be able to use it,” he said. “That’s all.”
As if to prove how thoroughly he’d given up, Guenther began to change his story. When I talked to him again two weeks later, he said that he’d neither seen nor heard the tape—he only knew of its existence. Exactly Stovitz’s position.
This was going to be a lot more difficult than I thought.
I drove all the way to Vegas to speak to Guenther’s former partner, Paul Whiteley, whose demeanor was the polar opposite. Where Guenther would bound about the room, pacing and shaking and pleading, Whiteley barely moved. We sat among graceful Chinese porcelain pieces—his wife was a collector—and he was as serene and contemplative as the figures depicted in the china.
He remembered the Beausoleil tape clearly. “I heard it, yes,” he told me. “Something about leaving a sign.” And he corroborated the story of Captain Walsh’s infuriated response. “Walsh was a by-the-book captain. He hit the roof!”
Like Guenther, his investigation had made him overwhelmingly confident of one thing: “Helter Skelter didn’t happen.” So many veterans of this case, I noticed, were willing to say that the prosecutor had basically fabricated a motive, using Manson’s ramblings to button up his case. Helter Skelter was “not a motive,” Whiteley said, “but a philosophy.” Bugliosi was well aware of this; he just didn’t care. And that meant he didn’t care about the subtleties of the Hinman case, either, or about how LASO might go about prosecuting it.
The Beausoleil wiretap was maybe the single biggest break I’d gotten at that point, but the stories around it had begun to multiply. Guenther would eventually allow me to use him as an on-the-record source, but his account muddied the waters more than it cleared them. Despite their bombshell evidence of a copycat motive, both he and Whiteley insisted that they simply gave up after the LAPD told them to. Although they knew Beausoleil had an accomplice, and that he’d called someone at the Spahn Ranch, they never even drove out there to question anybody. That didn’t track. Not with these guys.
“The Biggest Circus”
Around the time I reached an impasse with Guenther, I began to research another figure from the county sheriff’s office, one whose scintillating claims about LASO and Manson had circulated for decades among counterculture enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists. Preston Guillory, once a LASO detective, had left the police force under a cloud of suspicion in December 1969, immediately after the LAPD had announced Manson’s apprehension.
A couple of years later, in 1971, Guillory gave an interview to Mae Brussell, a cult-favorite radio host whose show trafficked in conspiracies—some plausible, others outright loony. Reading through the transcript, I found myself more intrigued by Guillory than I wanted to be, especially in light of what I’d gone through with Guenther and Whiteley.
Guillory’s thesis was this: Manson had gotten away with far too much at the Spahn Ranch in the months before the murders. Even though he was a federal parolee, Manson had no job; he had ready access to drugs, alcohol, and underage girls; he had a cache of firearms. And LASO officers knew all about it. At LASO’s Malibu station—Spahn was in its jurisdiction—Manson’s lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said. Firemen patrolling the ranch’s fire trails had even encountered Manson and the Family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The cops always looked the other way. According to Guillory, that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”
And so, despite the raft of crimes that Manson and the Family were committing, they were never apprehended, and Manson never had his parole revoked. There was even an occasion where Manson was picked up by LASO police for statutory rape, but they ended up cutting him loose.
Even as the station instituted this hands-off policy, they kept a close watch over Manson. Guillory was sure that LASO’s intelligence unit, or some other intelligence unit, was running surveillance on the Spahn Ranch. He alluded to memos about Manson—with cover sheets to protect against prying eyes—that went straight to the station captain, and who knows where after that. Guillory didn’t think the surveillance “was just a local thing.”
Then came the murder of Gary Hinman, and soon after it the Tate–LaBianca murders. How had LASO failed to see this coming? They’d been monitoring Manson constantly. Guillory theorized that the massive August 16 raid on the Spahn Ranch was LASO’s effort to cover its tracks after the murders. Calling it “the biggest circus I’ve ever been involved in,” he marveled at the fact that all the charges had been dropped seventy-two hours later. Something didn’t add up about the raid—all that force, all those arrests, for nothing? It was “like we were doing something perhaps a week late to show that we had really been watching,” he said on the radio.
But that raised a bunch of problems. If the sheriff’s office was surveilling Manson before the raid, it would’ve known enough to bring him in for the murders. If it wasn’t watching him, then how had it amassed enough evidence to get the search warrant authorizing the raid?
When the LAPD held a self-congratulatory press conference to announce that Manson and his group were suspects in the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory decided to become a whistle-blower. He went to a news station, KCAL, and told them everything he knew, thinking the press would be all over this story. They hardly touched it. Worse, the leak cost him his job: LASO’s internal affairs department got wind of his remarks and sent him packing.
After his departure, LASO did all it could to discredit him. An internal memo said that no one should discuss his previous employment there. It implied that he was a drug addict and an unrepentant leftist bent on smearing the office’s reputation.
Listening to Guillory’s radio interview, I couldn’t say if he was a crackpot or not. He was airing a version of events that, a year before, I would’ve dismissed as sheer lunacy—and he was doing it on a radio show that traded in unadulterated paranoia. But his message resonated with me, especially now that I knew how much had been covered up. Guenther had convinced me that the tape of Beausoleil’s phone call was real, and I never would’ve believed that, either. It seemed possible, if not entirely plausible, that there was still more to the story of the sheriff’s office, especially its bungled raid on the Spahn Ranch.
I added Guillory’s name to my whiteboard: one more in the jumble of cops and Hollywood has-beens, witnesses reliable and unreliable, with fading memories and ulterior motives. Then I picked up the phone. He wasn’t hard to find—he ran a private detective agency, paired, somewhat oddly, with a traffic school, out of a strip mall off the highway in Riverside.
When I drove out to visit him, I was relieved to find him calm, confident, even fearless. Portly and white-haired, his mustache still flecked with red, he had a strong recollection of what he’d told Mae Brussell back in ’71, and he stood by all of it. As we spoke, I noticed he had a weapon in a pouch on his desk, along with some model police cars; his diploma and graduation photo from the sheriff’s academy were hanging on the wall behind him. Despite his contentious end with LASO, he remained a proud cop.
“We were told not to bother these people,” he told me, referring to the Family. The order came in a memo from his captain. “Tell him whatever we saw or heard, that was one of the first things that I was told when I got to Malibu.” Peter Pitchess, the sheriff of Los Angeles County at the time, was “memo-minded,” Guillory explained. He exerted immense authority—and that authority extended to his officers’ conduct with Manson. “We were asked to generate memos every time we had contact with any member of the Family,” Guillory said.
Despite this intense period of information gathering, Manson was never charged when he was arrested. Why was a law-breaking parolee allow
ed to go free? “A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets. My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason—I don’t know.” It was “very unusual” that someone with a record like Manson’s would be left on the streets.
The shock of the Tate–LaBianca murders, Guillory thought, forced the sheriff’s office to hide its own intelligence-gathering efforts. If Manson were guilty of homicide, “How could anybody possibly say we let him on the streets?” There would’ve been civil liability issues. Careers would have been destroyed. And, of course, it would’ve cost Pitchess the next election.
But that didn’t explain why the police allowed Manson to go free for another three months after the Tate murders, knowing he could have killed more people. Why not just arrest him right away, and keep their surveillance program quiet?
Guillory had no idea—he’d been asking himself the same question. All he knew was “that Manson was under some kind of loose surveillance by our department or somebody else. We know he’s being watched by somebody, but we don’t know who. The thing is this—if he was under surveillance, those people left the ranch on two occasions, committed the seven homicides… why was there no intervention?” He added that there was no legal obligation for LASO to intervene; they could’ve chosen to let the murders pass without action, if Manson were so important that they didn’t want to risk interrupting their surveillance.
Guillory was fairly confident that someone from LASO knew right away that the Family had committed those murders. “Probably someone saw them come and go and there’s a log entry someplace and then, of course, later they found where they went and all hell would’ve broken loose.”
Plus, he reiterated, LASO never could have launched such an extraordinary raid without sound intelligence—enough to persuade a judge to grant a search warrant. “You don’t mount a raid without surveillance like this!” he said. More infuriating still: none of it stuck. The sheriff’s office went to all that effort for nothing. And it didn’t have to be that way, Guillory was sure. “We did find evidence of enough criminal activity—stolen property, narcotics—to violate [Manson’s] parole in the first place. It was astounding! I never could figure out why he was released.” Guillory had been part of the operation that day, and he remembered finding stolen purses, wallets, and pocketbooks with IDs—all damning evidence, and all seemingly ignored. After the raid, he said, the surveillance ended, as mysteriously as it had started.
In another interview, with the writer Paul Krassner, Guillory explained, “It appeared to me that the raid was more or less staged as an afterthought… There was some kind of a grand plan that we were participating in, but I never had the feeling the raid was necessary.” He speculated that Manson was never arrested “because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers.” Their intelligence had revealed that Manson had shot Bernard Crowe, whom he mistakenly believed to be a Black Panther, in July, and this apparently convinced LASO that Manson “was going to launch an attack” on the whole organization.
Of Guillory’s many outrageous claims, this one was maybe the hardest to swallow—but, again, he stuck by it when I asked him. “I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on,” he said. “Cause a stir, blame it on the Panthers… I’ve got to believe he was involved, based on all info we have. Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.”
When Manson was finally brought to justice for the murders, LASO took dramatic precautions to hide its surveillance of the ranch. “I thought what they were doing was illegal,” Guillory told me. “All the crime reports disappeared from the station. Everything was gone, all of our reports were gone. Normally you had access to your own reports; they were all gone, disappeared. The whole file was gone, and the memo went up that no one involved in the Spahn Ranch raid was to talk to anyone outside the department.” That convinced Guillory to go to a reporter—the move that cost him his job.
I found Guillory credible, if overheated. I knew I wanted to believe him—and that put me at risk of falling into the great trap of conspiracy theorists, who come to believe in grand plots simply because they make the world a more fascinating place. Certainly I’d have a more interesting magazine story on my hands if Guillory were correct. But that was a big if.
I was in touch with a number of former LASO deputies at this point, and I collected their opinions on Guillory. One described him as “kind of an off-the-wall guy.” Another said he had “a gigantic chip on his shoulder,” and “hard feelings for the sheriff’s department—always feeling that he was being beset upon.”
According to the most pejorative story I heard, Guillory had once tried to kill himself in the most dramatic way possible: “He had barricaded himself in a motel room in Malibu, I believe, and one of the inspectors was trying to talk him out of the room. He was threatening suicide and he had an automatic weapon.” I asked the officer if he’d witnessed this firsthand. “I wasn’t actually there,” he said, “I just heard about it in the station. John Graham was the inspector who talked him out of the room.”
Guillory called this allegation “bullshit,” reminding me that LASO had embarked on a campaign to discredit him after he left. “They tried to put me out of business, basically… It was goodbye, we’ll see you, never darken our door again. I was crazy, malcontent, a loose cannon.” If he’d really barricaded himself in a motel room, he said, “produce a report.” Neither LASO files nor the media would have any record of it, because it never happened. “Ask Captain Graham: where was the hotel, what was the date? Tell him to put up or shut up.”
In so many words, I did. I called Graham, who, like his colleagues, had a negative opinion of Guillory. But had the man really barricaded himself in a motel room? “Not that I know of,” Graham said. Once I told him the story, he changed his mind. “Now that I recall, I did hear that there was probably a phony attempt at suicide.” But he hadn’t been there.
However reliable Guillory was—and I came to feel he was largely reliable, in the end—I was in a familiar predicament. I needed documentary evidence to back up his claims. My best shot was leering at me from the pages of Helter Skelter: the search warrant for LASO’s massive raid. If Bugliosi had found it, couldn’t I?
On the Paper Trail (Again)
Charlie Guenther was wary of appearing in my story, but we still talked a lot. When I told him I wanted LASO’s files on the Hinman case, he made a phone call. Next thing I knew, I had backdoor access to the office’s closed-case archives. With some directions and the name of another retired deputy sheriff scrawled on a piece of paper, I parked at the sheriff’s training academy in East L.A. and knocked on the door of a windowless, barrackslike building.
The deputy let me in and walked me through rows of dusty filing cabinets, stopping in front of two and leaving me alone with them. I pulled up a folding chair and opened the top drawer. It was crammed with disorganized documents that appeared not to have been handled for decades. In the silence of the large, dim shed, broken only by the occasional sound of gunshots from a nearby firing range, I began my search.
The crux of the reports, to my delight, covered sheriffs’ activities at the Spahn Ranch over the roughly sixteen months the Manson Family had lived there. Over the next few months, I made half a dozen visits to the hangar at the sheriff’s academy. The retired detective was always happy to see me—I suspected I was the only other person he saw all day. When I had questions about language or codes in the reports, or even LASO procedure, he’d patiently explain them to me as I took notes. And he let me photocopy documents, but only after reviewing them first. After a while he barely glanced at what I brought him, instead reminding me how he preferred his coffee—I’d always return with a cup when I ventured out to a Kinko’s nearby. I wasn’t entirely surprised when I learned, several years later, that these visits of mine were completely unsanctioned—and unknown to LASO top brass.
In one of my
earliest visits, with great relief, I found a copy of the search warrant for the August 16 raid. Although other researchers have since uncovered it, at that time it had never been seen by anyone outside law enforcement. Once I read it, I could understand why: it revealed that LASO had a far broader understanding of Manson’s criminal activities—and his gurulike control over his followers—than had ever been shared with the public.
Running to sixteen pages, the warrant was rooted in the testimony of Deputy Sheriff William C. Gleason, who sought permission for LASO to recover “stolen automobile parts… and rifles, automatic pistols, and revolvers” from the Spahn Ranch. Charles Manson was the only suspect identified by name in the document, which stated that he was the unchallenged “leader” of the crime ring and also “on Federal Parole for Grand Theft Auto.”
That last bit is crucial: it means that LASO was officially aware of Manson’s parole status. If the police turned up any stolen vehicles or weapons—and they did, of course—he would be in violation of the terms of his release agreement, and would have to go back to federal prison.
If Manson was aware of that fact, he didn’t act like it. And the police had already shown a willingness to look the other way. The search warrant related an incident from an Officer Williams of the LAPD. He told Deputy Gleason
that within the last two weeks he and his partner were on duty at the Spahn Ranch… Mr. Manson was bragging to the officers about the weapons available to him and his friends at the Ranch. Mr. Manson told the officers that while he was talking to the officers that his friends had rifles trained on the officers… this is standard procedure whenever officers approach the Ranch.
Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211) Page 16