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

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

  Guenther died in 2014. I was heartbroken by the frailty I heard in his voice that day. And I was confused. In the throes of my obsession with the case, I couldn’t understand how such a celebrated detective would want to shut the door on it, to lose his drive to get to the bottom of it. But that was when I assumed I’d soon shut the door myself. Now many more years have passed, and that door is still open, and I understand Guenther perfectly.

  6

  Who Was Reeve Whitson?

  Fairly early in my reporting, I knew I could have wrapped up my Premiere story if I really wanted to. I had the guts of a great piece, even if it was too late for the milestone thirtieth anniversary of the murders. I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence. The thrust of my story was still mired in ambiguity. I worried that my reporting could be too easily dismissed, Lee Baca–style, as “Hollywood fluff.”

  So I kept going, although in many ways I’ve come to regret it. A few of my interviews were especially tormenting—the ones that convinced me I couldn’t call it quits yet. I thought of Little Joe, Jay Sebring’s barber, who’d received an elliptical phone call from a mobster after the murders. And of the first suspects, Charles Tacot and Billy Doyle, who claimed to have intelligence connections. And of Preston Guillory, who alleged that police allowed Manson to remain free because they knew he planned to attack the Black Panthers. I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement or was even an informant. It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was. But this is where the reporting took me.

  I started reading up on the use of informants. Perusing old editions of the two major Los Angeles papers of the era, the Times and the Herald Examiner, I learned that in the midsixties both the LAPD and LASO had infiltrated groups they considered a threat to the status quo: antiwar leftists, the Black Panther party, and other black militant groups like the US Organization, a fierce rival of the Panthers in Los Angeles. Posing as leftists, agents provocateurs would gain the trust of these groups from the inside, provoking them to commit crimes or do violence against rivals.

  Even from a distance, this line of inquiry gave me pause. I’d never been interested in conspiracies. I wasn’t one to speculate about a second shooter in JFK’s assassination or faking the moon landing. For the first time, though, I saw the appeal of trafficking in murky secrets—it was an attractive option, as long as people believed you. If I found the plot, I could change the way people understood one of the seminal crimes, and criminals, of the twentieth century. If I got it wrong, or took too much on faith, I’d become someone who made people glaze over at parties, politely excusing themselves as I droned on about “the big picture.”

  Even if it made me look crazy, I wanted to see whether the informant theory held water: if Manson had any credible connections to the government or law enforcement, and if I could link him to the police infiltrations of leftist groups I’d read about. Then, as if I’d conjured him from thin air, someone emerged who fit into the puzzle. He seemed to have wandered into Southern California from the pages of a spy novel, and not a very well written one, at that. His name was Reeve Whitson, and his intersections with the Manson investigation suggested a dimension to the Tate–LaBianca murders that had been wiped from the official record.

  “I Had to Save My Ass”

  It started with Shahrokh Hatami, Sharon Tate’s friend and personal photographer. When I spoke with Hatami over the phone in 1999, he’d never given an interview about the murders. Sorting through his memories, he recalled something he’d never been able to explain.

  At seven in the morning on August 9, 1969, Hatami got a frantic phone call from a friend. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he listened as the caller delivered the terrible news: Sharon Tate and four others had been murdered in her home on Cielo Drive. Afterward, in numb terror, he and his girlfriend switched on the radio and listened all morning for further reports. They had to wait a while. As Hatami later learned, that call came ninety minutes before the Polanskis’ maid had arrived at the house, discovered the bodies, and ran screaming to the neighbors, who called the police. Unwittingly, Hatami had become one of the first people in the world to hear about the murders—all because of his friend.

  That “friend” was Reeve Whitson, whom Hatami characterized as “a mystery man”—a phrase I’d hear a lot as I researched him in earnest. A close friend of Tate and Polanski, Whitson had a talent for discretion. When people remembered him at all, he was usually on the periphery, coming and going, his purpose unknown, his motives inscrutable.

  If Whitson’s involvement had been limited to that early phone call, I don’t know whether I’d have given him a second thought. It seemed entirely possible that Hatami had gotten the time wrong. To get some sense of Whitson’s role in the case, I looked his name up in the trial transcript. It appeared four times, all during Hatami’s testimony. It was Whitson, he confirmed on the stand, who brought him to Bugliosi during the investigation. And yet Whitson never appeared in Helter Skelter, which gave an otherwise detailed account of Hatami’s story.

  As well it should. Hatami’s testimony was a dramatic high point. Before the packed courtroom, he explained that five months before the murders, he’d been visiting Sharon Tate when he noticed someone on the property. Hustling toward the front door, he found short, scraggly Manson standing there. Manson asked if Terry Melcher was around. Hatami, wanting to be rid of him, sent Manson around back. He knew that Rudi Altobelli lived in the guesthouse and could tell him where to find Melcher.

  Hatami’s story proved that Manson knew where the house on Cielo Drive was, and how to get there. And it added some tragic foreshadowing: since Tate, Sebring, Folger, and Frykowski were in the room behind Hatami, this would be the one and only time Manson laid eyes on his future victims.

  The problem, Hatami revealed to me, was that he’d never been confident that it was Manson he saw that day. His uncertainty meant nothing to Bugliosi and Reeve Whitson, who coerced his testimony anyway. “The circumstances I was put through to become a witness,” Hatami said, “I didn’t like at all.” Whitson told him, “‘Hatami, you saw that guy, Altobelli said so, we need another person to corroborate it.’” (Presumably, Bugliosi felt he needed two accounts of Manson’s visit to the house that day; it was such an important part of tying Manson to the murder scene.)

  Hatami demurred, and Whitson turned the screws, effectively threatening him with deportation—he said he’d ensure that Hatami, an Iranian without U.S. citizenship, wouldn’t be able to get another visa. If he wanted to stay in America, all he had to do was say he’d seen Manson that day at Tate’s house. Not long after, Whitson brought Hatami to his car and showed him his gun. Although Hatami didn’t know Whitson too well, he took the threat seriously—he believed that Whitson really had the means to deport him.

  “I was framed by Mr. Whitson,” Hatami told me. “I was never sure it happened that way. I had to save my ass.” Bugliosi and I were still speaking then, so I asked him if he knew Whitson at all. He didn’t recall the name, he claimed. Hatami thought that was “rubbish.” “Bugliosi knows him very well,” he said. “I could not have been a witness without Reeve.”

  He was right. Because the defense suspected that Bugliosi and Whitson had, indeed, coerced Hatami’s story, they called on Bugliosi to explain himself at the trial. Under oath, but out of the presence of the jury, Bugliosi tried to answer for the fact that he’d interviewed Hatami without a tape recorder or a stenographer. Who was in the room when Hatami talked? “Just Reeve Whitson, myself, and Mr. Hatami,” Bugliosi replied. The judge decided that Hatami couldn’t testify to having seen Manson. The jury heard only that he was at the house when a man came to the door, and
that he sent the man to the guesthouse.

  But of course Bugliosi had forgotten that he’d supplied Whitson’s name under oath. Whitson wanted it that way. He served his purpose and then disappeared, Hatami said, like “a piece in a chess game.”

  A Photographic Memory

  If Whitson was a chess piece, who was moving him around? He’d died in 1994, so I couldn’t ask him. Hatami gave me the names of people who might’ve known him. Almost invariably they told me the same thing: that Whitson had been an undercover agent of some kind. Some said he was in the FBI, others the Secret Service. The rough consensus, though, was that he was part of the CIA, or an offshoot special-operations group connected to it.

  It seemed absurd, the first time I heard it: an undercover agent wrangling witnesses for the Manson trial. It seemed absurd the second and third times, too. But then I kept hearing it, dozens of times—Reeve Whitson belonged to an intelligence agency. As I talked to his confidants, a portrait emerged. Whitson had been serious, secretive, compartmentalized. He lived “about eight lives simultaneously,” as one friend put it. He had eccentric habits and an eidetic memory. What he did with that memory, and whom he did it for, remained the subject of feverish speculation.

  Bill Sharman, a former NBA player and general manager of the Lakers, had known Whitson since 1980. He recalled his friend’s “photographic mind.” Sharman met me with his wife, Joyce. Both believed Whitson was connected to the Manson case. “He said he worked for the CIA… He told us he was involved in the investigation, but gave us no details,” Joyce said. “Reeve would tell us the most preposterous things and eventually we’d find out that they were true… we learned to start believing him. We loved him very much, but he was always a mystery to us.”

  That word cropped up whenever I asked anyone about Reeve. Even those who’d known him well described him as a complete enigma, with a penchant for telling unbelievable stories that turned out to be true. Another friend, Frank Rosenfelt, the former president and chief executive of MGM, who’d known Whitson since ’75, called him “the strangest guy in the world.”

  “He didn’t lie,” Rosenfelt told me. “He did not put himself in a position where he told you something and you could disprove it.” He was confident that Whitson “had some intel connection, no doubt about it.” Rosenfelt was one of a few people who remarked on Whitson’s odd tendency to call from pay phones. He “would call me for hours… I always wondered, who the hell is paying the bills? And always from a phone booth on the street!” And “Reeve knew a lot about the Manson situation,” Rosenfelt said. “He indicated that if they had listened to him that a lot of people may have not been killed. He was heavily involved.”

  “If who had listened to him?” I asked.

  “I think he meant whoever was looking into it. The federal people, law enforcement people. He implied he gave a lot of suggestions, he was involved and they didn’t listen to him… He was bitter about it.”

  That implied Whitson had some advance knowledge of the Family’s plans. I wrote it off as a faulty memory until I heard it again. Richard and Rita Edlund, who met Whitson through Rosenfelt, described a “very cryptic” figure who took pains to avoid detection. “I knew he helped in the Manson investigation,” Richard, a special-effects cinematographer, said. “Reeve was among those, if not the one, who broke the Tate case.” But, like the others I’d spoken to, Richard couldn’t offer too many specifics, only beguiling memories: “He operated in the CIA—I believe he was on their payroll… Reeve was the kind of guy who, because of his background, he still would turn the inside light of his car out, so when he opened his door the light wouldn’t go on. Because he had it that you never know who’s looking.” He “used his thumbnail to tear the top-right-hand corner of every piece of paper he handled, to mark it. Can’t shake old ways, he used to say.”

  With his “gift of gab,” Whitson had “anything but a military bearing.” A man who couldn’t be stereotyped, he “was infiltrating the town in his incredibly charming way. He was friends with Jay Sebring and Polanski was a buddy of his, and the Beach Boys—and he met Manson through all this.”

  “Before the murders?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah!” Their encounter had come through Dennis Wilson, Edlund recalled, in the period when Manson was trying to break into the music business through the Beach Boys. “Reeve was the kind of guy who would meet everybody. He would create the infrastructure of the town in his mind—there was hardly anybody that he didn’t know.”

  The likeliest story, I’d thought, was that Whitson was some kind of con man, or at least a slick liar—and that Shahrokh Hatami had simply misremembered or exaggerated the incidents culminating in his testimony. But Whitson’s friends had me more and more convinced that he’d been involved with Manson. Maybe the most compelling evidence came from Neil Cummings, a lawyer who’d known Whitson since ’84. Several people had told me he was among Reeve’s closest confidants, so I took him to lunch. I hadn’t told him about Hatami’s claim—that Whitson had called him before the bodies were even identified—but he corroborated it independently.

  According to Cummings, Whitson was in a top-secret arm of the CIA, even more secretive than most of the agency. He talked a lot about his training in killing people, implying that he’d done it at least a few times. And when it came to Manson, he “was closer to it than anybody,” Cummings avowed:

  He was actively involved with some sort of investigation when it happened. He worked closely with a law enforcement person and talked quite a bit about events leading up to the murders, but I don’t remember what they were. He had regrets for not stopping them, for doing something about it.

  He had a reason to believe something weird was about to happen at the [Tate] house. He might have been there when it happened, right before or after—the regret was maybe that he wasn’t there when it happened. He told me he was there after the murders, but before the police got there. He said there were screw-ups before and after. I believe he said he knew who did it, and it took him a long time to lead police to who did it.

  Whitson had the Tate house under surveillance, Cummings added, which is how he knew something was going to happen. On the night of the murders, he’d been there and left. As outlandish as it sounded, Cummings was confident about all of this. “He knew more than anyone else.”

  I was flummoxed. For a year, I’d been hearing a rumor from people inside and outside the case: that 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 Tate’s and Sebring’s blood on the front porch, splatters on the walkway and the bushes. But according to the killers, neither Tate nor Sebring had ever left the living room, where they died. The coroner described blood smears on Tate’s body, as if she’d been dragged—again, never mentioned by the killers. Those in the area, including a private security officer, had heard gunshots and arguing hours after the killers said they’d left. 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.”

  The mere mention of this claim made Bugliosi apoplectic. I’d seen a video in which another researcher had raised the possibility. An indignant Bugliosi asked: Why would Manson put himself at risk like that? He may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. And when I asked Bugliosi about it at our first meeting, he refused even to consider the possibility, despite all the discrepancies.

  Now, though, here was Cummings, along with others, saying that Whitson had been at the Tate house after the murders but before the police. Here was Hatami, saying Whitson had called him that morning. Cummings said it was Whitson’s “biggest regret” that he hadn’t been able to prevent the slaughter. Maybe these were the words of a self-important liar, or maybe Manson was telling the truth about this return visit, and Whitson had been there, too. Tha
t seemed delusional to me. But Cummings and Hatami weren’t crazy. They were two independent, credible sources with the same story.

  It seemed possible to me that Whitson was the fulcrum, the man who could connect everything. The strange omissions at the trial and in Helter Skelter; the blatant failures of LASO to follow up on good leads; the suspicion that Manson could be an informant; the murmurs about a narcotics deal gone south: if I wanted to construct a unified field theory, Whitson, linked to intelligence work by no fewer than a dozen sources, would have to be at the center. Knowing that a lot of what I had was circumstantial and speculative, I contained myself—I had a ton of work ahead of me. But, looking back, when I wonder how I let this case consume me for the better part of twenty years, I can point to Whitson as a major cause.

  “He Did Not Exist”

  The vital records on Whitson were thin. Born in Chicago on March 25, 1931, he’d grown up in Kendallville, Indiana, and even his childhood had a whiff of the fanciful to it. His mother was a dancer, and his father was a world-renowned acrobat, part of a traveling family act. An only child, he developed a flair for the dramatic. At the University of Indiana, he was the lead in school plays, and he so enjoyed acting that he transferred to the Pasadena Playhouse, moving to L.A. and hoping, like so many before him, to become an actor or a singer. As a friend put it: “His great strength was his natural affinity for people… He could play all these roles. His life really was a series of theatrical productions.”

  It’s not clear when that life swerved into espionage. According to a few people I spoke with, Whitson said that he’d had a mentor, Pete Lewis, who’d inducted him into undercover work. Lewis apparently met a tragic and deeply improbable end, like something out of a James Bond movie: he was killed by a poison dart hidden in an umbrella. Richard Edlund, one of several to mention the poison-dart story, saw it as a vital part of Whitson’s origin story; it was almost like Whitson thought he could avenge his friend’s death by working as a spy. Who could say how much of it was true? My hope was that Whitson’s family could separate fact from fiction.