Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211)

by O'Neill, Tom; Piepenbring, Dan (CON)

  The last time I saw Guenther was in January 2005, when I visited him to go through a timeline I’d made of his investigation of the Hinman murder. I told him that I couldn’t believe he never went to the Spahn Ranch to solve the case. The police had Bobby Beausoleil in custody, and they knew he’d called the ranch asking for help. They knew his girlfriend lived there. They knew he’d stolen two of Hinman’s cars. If nothing else, surely they would’ve gotten a warrant to search his last known residence—the ranch—for evidence of the theft.

  But Guenther stuck to his story. He looked at the floor and said, “Maybe we just made a mistake.”

  I wasn’t a seasoned crime reporter. Most of what I knew about the criminal justice system I’d gleaned from the news, police procedurals, and legal thrillers. So I went to Kimberly Kupferer, the chairman of the criminal law section for the California State Bar, and asked her to walk me through the standard operating procedure in murder investigations.

  Kupferer contradicted Guenther on every point. She said it was 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.

  Though I knew I was really pushing my luck, I made another call to Guenther in February 2005. “I know you’ve always told me, ‘You’ll never hear an untrue word from Guenther or Whiteley,’” I said, “but is there anything you haven’t told me that would make me better understand your actions in this case?”

  “No,” he said faintly.

  “Okay,” I said. “One last question: Were you ever told by anyone to back off the Manson Family or the Spahn Ranch in your investigation of the Hinman murder?”

  “No,” he said again, this time almost inaudibly. “I was not.”

  I couldn’t ask Whiteley the same questions. After my first meeting with him, he refused to speak with me again.

  “Chicken Shit”

  Sometimes, seemingly ancillary people would completely refocus my reporting. Such was the case with Lewis Watnick, the former head deputy DA of Van Nuys. I wanted to talk to Watnick precisely because he had nothing to do with the Manson case: he worked in the same office as the DAs who had, so he could offer some valuable perspective without feeling boxed in.

  I went to visit him at his house in Thousand Oaks. I can still picture him shuffling to the door: a frail, thin man in his sixties, with wispy brown hair, a nice smile, and sad eyes. Suffering from an illness, he spoke in a labored, rasping whisper. His home was air-conditioned to frigidity.

  He spent a while reading my documents in silence, and then he sighed. “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.”

  It was only a guess, he conceded, but an educated one, based on his thirty years in the job. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the theory. One of my LASO sources had wondered if Manson “had his finger in a bigger pie.” Having been in the office’s intelligence division, he’d seen stuff like this before. “What happens in those situations is either he’s giving up somebody bigger than himself or he’s on somebody else’s list as far as a snitch, or he’s ratting out other people.” And if he were informing for someone else, the DEA or the feds, no one in the LASO would know about it, necessarily. Robert Schirn, the DA who authorized the raid only to dismiss the charges, had made the same suggestion: “Another possibility, sheer speculation, is that [Manson] may have been an informant for somebody.” But LASO deputies had all denied it.

  “Of course,” Watnick said when I told him that. “Confidential informant means they’re confidential.”

  Neither of us could say what or who it was that Manson would have any decent information about. Drug dealers? Watnick wondered if it had a political dimension, given Manson’s antagonistic relationship to the Black Panthers. “Maybe,” he continued, muttering more to himself than to me, it was someone “big… possibly the FBI.”

  True, the search warrant was littered with references to Manson’s fear of the Black Panthers. He thought the group was about to attack the ranch. One memo I’d found even said that Manson claimed to have seen “carloads” of “negroes” on the property photographing the Family. A fire patrolman reported that Family members had told him they’d moved into the canyons because they’d “killed a member of the Black Panthers.”

  “You know there’s an old saying: an enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Watnick said. “So, if Manson figured out this black-white confrontation, he may have been giving out information to the FBI,” who had a vendetta against the Panthers.

  Hearing this from Watnick—someone from the DA’s office, but unaffiliated with the case—boosted my confidence. Looking at the lengthy search warrant again, he kept grumbling. “Helicopters, agents carrying automatic weapons, three different departments, four weeks of official surveillance… They had this massive raid and everybody’s released two days later!” He shook his head. “The more that he’s released, the more I feel that he was released because they’d get more out of him by having him released,” he said. “They’d been watching this guy for something large… The thing that I wonder about is who was watching.”

  Watnick urged me to go back to Gleason—he knew the detective well, he said, and he trusted him. Why did Gleason just roll over when the DA’s office undid all his hard work? As for this notion that Manson’s parole officer couldn’t find him in violation with charges from the DA, “That’s bullshit, too,” Watnick said.

  As promised, I went back to Gleason, who calmly but adamantly denied that Manson was an informant. He didn’t even see a glimmer of a possibility. “I’m sure that I would have heard something like that,” he told me. “I never heard anything. Even if he was an LAPD informant, I’m sure I would have been contacted by LAPD… I never heard a word.” He added, “The guy was a jerk… Every cop I talked to wanted to get him buried.”

  Then why had all of them failed? I couldn’t stop turning it over in my mind: the image of Watnick, hunched over my files in his chilly home, grumbling with such certainty, “Manson was an informant.”

  Coda: “A Huge No-no”

  I did most of my reporting on LASO in 2000. As with all aspects of my investigation, I kept thinking that I’d return to the key subjects someday and try them again, seeing if the passage of time had loosened them up somehow. I imagined a cascade effect—once I got somebody—say, Vince Bugliosi or Terry Melcher—to admit to a major cover-up, other areas of the case would begin to open up, too, or I could brandish an incriminating document that would change people’s minds.

  But you can guess what happened. I kept reporting and reporting, and time had other plans. In my obsession, I began to think of the story as a puzzle I could solve, if only I recovered all the pieces. I listened again and again to my interview tapes; I wrote out intricate timelines listing my subjects’ every move, day by day and sometimes hour by hour, trying to discern who knew what, and when they knew it. I kept lists of possible explanations, about gun laws and parole laws and car-theft laws, and, most critically, about how those laws were written and enforced in 1969.

  By 2005, I’d moved away from the LASO angle of the story, but I found myself constantly thinking about it. I knew I had to take another look at the archive to fill in some blanks. I was under the impression that I could go back anytime. I’d interviewed more than forty deputies over the years, making no effort to hide my reporting. One of them had told me that the sheriff himself, Leroy Baca, wanted to learn about what I was doing and “offer the sheriff department’s cooperation.”

  But no one—except, evidently, the pair of retired deputies who got me into the archive in the first place—had any idea that I’d accessed the LASO files on the c
ase. When I called the main office and asked to go back in, they were, to put it mildly, enraged. From the first officer I spoke to, all the way up to Sheriff Baca, the response to my request was a resounding no.

  I argued that they’d set a precedent by letting me in before, unauthorized or not. For accuracy’s sake, they owed it to me—and to the public, assuming I ever reached the end of my reporting—to let me in to recheck my notes. But because I’d never signed in anywhere, there was no record of my visits, they said, so it was like I’d never been there at all—even though I could show them the many files I’d photocopied.

  When I persisted, they allowed me to make my case in person with the sheriff’s captain of homicide. I arrived to find not one but three deputies, who’d invented a new reason to keep me out. I couldn’t go back in, they said, because there was an “open case” against unnamed Family members involving “stolen credit cards.”

  That couldn’t be, I said. The statute of limitations on any type of theft by the Family would have long run out. They didn’t care. Sergeant Paul Delhauer, who had more or less seized control of the meeting, told me there was “stuff you can never be told, will never know about” regarding the case. Then he showed me the door.

  When I’d been in the LASO archive all those years ago, it had been Delhauer’s job to decide who got access and who didn’t. For that reason, the sheriff’s office had decided he was the guy who had to take my calls now. So I did call him—again and again, and again after that. We got on each other’s nerves, and our conversations devolved into intense acrimony. “What happened as far as you getting access to those materials,” he said with the air of a martinet, “was a huge no-no.”

  Delhauer accepted that this no-no wasn’t my fault, and in his more charitable moments he allowed that it put me in a tricky position. But he didn’t see what he could do to help.

  “I don’t really care, Tom,” he said. “I see absolutely no significance to those questions. They have nothing to do with the resolution of the case. They have nothing to do with the scope of the investigation.”

  I told him about Watnick’s theory—that Manson might’ve been an informant. “This is rank speculation,” he said. “I honestly find this appalling.” Well, of course it was speculation. That was one reason I’d tried to get back into the files—to see if there was any validity to it.

  “I don’t get paid to do your research,” Delhauer said. “Everybody seems to be jumping to conclusions about some big grandiose thing,” he said.

  Worn down by my persistence, Delhauer finally agreed to remind Sheriff Baca of his long-ago offer of “the sheriff department’s cooperation.” If I wrote a letter to Baca, Delhauer would make sure he received it.

  When Baca didn’t respond to my letter, I was unrelenting, following up constantly. At last, I was granted an interview with the sheriff himself, who, it became apparent, had been thoroughly briefed on the angle I was pursuing.

  Elected to his post in 1998, Baca had become a major figure in California law enforcement. Heading the nation’s largest sheriff’s office, he oversaw eighteen thousand employees with a jurisdiction covering more than four thousand square miles. Known as a strict enforcer with a no-nonsense style, he was at the peak of his power in November 2005, when we met at his headquarters.

  I followed the tall, lean lawman as he marched down a hall to his office: large and comfortably furnished, with ceramic sculptures from Asia and three dramatically lit, floor-to-ceiling trophy cases. Hanging on a wall was a framed quote of Baca’s from the Los Angeles Times: “We need to carefully concern ourselves with the feelings of other individuals and not engage in rhetoric that just inflames divisiveness.”

  We sat at a coffee table; I was on a couch, he in an easy chair, tan and slightly stooped, wearing his uniform. Making it clear the meeting was going to be brief, he suggested I get right to my point. I wanted to get back into the files, I said, to learn why his department had been so lenient on Manson.

  Baca fixed me with an unblinking, unnerving stare, and said, “The reality is that Charlie Manson as an individual was a dopehead, a weirdo, a cultist, and a control freak… Charlie’s not a guy who is going to get pimped by a cop.”

  “He seemed pretty fearless of them,” I said. “When they went to the ranch, he told them he had men in the hills with guns on them.”

  “It further exemplifies that he doesn’t need anyone to help him… You know, look at the obvious here, he’s not reliable even in terms of his own conditions. Now, if he’s not reliable in defining himself, how is he going to be reliable in defining something useful for the cops?”

  Most of what he said followed this line of thinking: Manson was too unstable to be of use to law enforcement. As for Guenther and Whiteley’s backing away from the case, he didn’t want to touch it.

  “Every sheriff I interviewed,” I told him, “said they couldn’t get around the fact that Guenther and Whiteley didn’t go to the ranch.”

  “I think that only they can account for why they didn’t go,” he said. “It’s interesting, in the pursuit of criminals, even when you’re on the hot trail, and something distracts the effort that you’re into, you’ll say I’ll do that tomorrow, and then tomorrow is going to interfere with some other damn thing… and then before you know it a whole week has gone by.”

  I reminded him that this wasn’t any old murder case. Guenther and Whiteley believed, truly believed, that their case was tied into the biggest unsolved murders in Los Angeles history, a crime that had the city living in fear.

  “I can assure you that they aren’t part of a larger deal-making person with a guy like Charles Manson. You can’t hide something like that.”

  “If I present it this way,” I said, implying that he was leaving me no other option, “they’re going to look like bad cops.”

  “Incompetent. Not bad.”

  Our meeting ended almost as quickly as it started. Baca, who’d kept me waiting more than an hour, had to get to a dinner in Pasadena. We walked out together, trailed by his driver. Out in the dusk, he turned to me before we parted ways. “If you’d like a little more assistance, I will get you in touch with someone who does run informants and let you throw that hypothetical at them,” he said. Thinking of Manson, he added, “He’s a weirdo. What kind of cop is going to rely on a weirdo for anything?”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew it was useless. The sheriff had his mind made up before he met me. As his driver pulled up in his sedan, Baca gave me a final once-over, as if still not certain what to make of me. Then he shook his head and, getting into his car, said, “You got Hollywood fluff, like Marilyn Monroe was murdered, that’s what you got. But that’s good. That’s what sells books.”

  Baca retired in 2014. In 2017, a jury found him guilty of obstructing an FBI investigation into inmate abuse in Los Angeles County jails. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison. Before a packed courtroom, a U.S. district judge told him: “Your actions embarrass the thousands of men and women who put their lives on the line every day. They were a gross abuse of the trust the public placed in you… Blind obedience to a corrupt culture has serious consequences.”

  I found Baca contemptuous and condescending that day in 2005. He did, however, make good on his offer to me, putting me in touch with the head of his detective division, Commander Robert Osborne, who was the closest thing LASO had to an expert on informants. I gave him my song and dance—well rehearsed, by then—and, while he found it unlikely that Manson had ever informed for his office, he said it was possible for a federal agency to call and ask for one of its informants to be released from LASO custody. In such cases, they’d call the investigator; the captain would be uninvolved.

  “It’s possible that a phone call was made, yes. [But] what benefit would be gained by keeping it a secret forever? The theory that somebody asked them to do something different than the norm is not implausible,” he admitted, “though I don’t know why they wouldn’t tell you. I can’t imagine why they wo
uld want to keep it a secret. I don’t see anything to be gained—if, in fact, there was some other agency involved in 1969 or 2005—to keep that quiet.”

  Unless, I thought, it resulted in the murders of innocent people.

  I sensed this was the closest thing to a concession I’d ever get from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. I thanked Osborne for his time and went on my way.

  This is what desperation does to a writer. I knew that Guenther would be enraged if he learned that Baca had called him and Whiteley “incompetent.” I wondered if this might be what would finally get him to break the code of silence—the fact that he, one of the most legendary detectives in LASO history, had been denigrated by the head of his former office. I didn’t have the heart to tell him, but I did tell one of his friends, who was understandably outraged. I had a hunch he’d share it with others, including Guenther. But it still took me six years to call him.

  When I did, he sounded tired and defeated, not like the Charlie Guenther I remembered. He still had a funny way of calling me by my full name in conversation.

  “I want to close the door on that, Tom O’Neill,” Guenther said. “I want to end it with you. Lee Baca kind of upset me. Our conversation is over.”

  I apologized and explained why I didn’t think he was incompetent, and why I was sure that anyone who knew his record didn’t, either. But it didn’t break the wall. “Twenty years I did this,” he said quietly, referring to his time in homicide, “and Baca said I’m incompetent… I just want it to finish. Hell, I’m eighty-three years old.”

  “I just want to write the truth about why those murders happened,” I said.

  “I know what you’re saying, Tom, and I’d ask you to accommodate me. This is over forty years ago and I’d like to be out of it… please, Tom O’Neill. I have no squabbles with you… I’m totally done.”