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

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

  Ice Cream for Atkins

  Caballero had another coup during his tenure as Atkins’s lawyer: he made sure that her story was heard around the world, in all its gory, self-incriminating detail.

  A few days before Atkins’s grand jury testimony, her attorneys met with a self-described “Hollywood journalist and communicator” named Lawrence Schiller to negotiate the publication of her firsthand account of the murders. Essentially, the text would be an edited transcription of the recording she’d made in Caballero’s office, with her byline slapped on it. Caballero and Caruso later claimed that they intended for the story to appear only overseas, far from the eyes of any potential jurors in Los Angeles. But such was not the case. On Sunday, December 14, Atkins’s byline landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. “Her” piece ran to 6,500 words, spilling across three full pages.

  The piece was an immediate sensation, far and away the most robust account of the Manson murders available to the public. Readers in Los Angeles—and within twenty-four hours, in nearly every place on the planet with a printing press—now had all the lurid details, including those that had been kept from the public by both the prosecution and the other killers’ defense attorneys. The piece spiked a vulgar account of the bloodshed with hints of Atkins’s naive girlishness. “My lawyer is coming soon,” it ended, “and he’s bringing me a dish of vanilla ice cream. Vanilla ice cream really blows my mind.” As Rolling Stone put it later, “Any doubts about Manson’s power to cloud men’s minds were buried that morning between Dick Tracy and one of the world’s great real estate sections.”

  And that, it seemed, was the real purpose of the piece—to eliminate any doubts about Manson the public might’ve had. In just the first column of the article, Atkins used the word “instructed” five times in reference to Manson’s role in the killings. Everything she and the Family did was on Manson’s orders, she said. He was a criminal mastermind, a cult leader, a conspiring lunatic.

  The task of assembling an unbiased jury was suddenly a lot harder. A spokesperson for the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union told Newsweek, “The interview makes it all but impossible for [the defendants] to get a fair trial in Los Angeles.” Bugliosi, craving convictions and the deluge of publicity from a high-profile trial, was presumably unbothered by this.

  But Caballero should’ve been bothered. Even though this piece was in effect a continuation of the many detailed press conferences he’d given, he went through the motions of outrage. Claiming to be “shocked and surprised,” he told the press that Schiller had double-crossed him, breaking a promise that the story wouldn’t appear in the United States. Although Caballero threatened lawsuits, they never materialized.

  Nor did Caballero make any effort to halt the dissemination of the story, which continued apace. One week later, Schiller released an expanded version in a “quickie” paperback called The Killing of Sharon Tate: Exclusive Story by Susan Atkins, Confessed Participant in the Murder. In the acknowledgments, he thanked “several attorneys involved in this case” and “two journalists,” writing, “Without their help this book could not have been produced.”

  Bugliosi maintained that his office had no idea the story was coming until that fateful issue of the Times landed on his doorstep. He hadn’t learned a thing about the sale of Atkins’s story, he claimed in Helter Skelter, until the death-penalty phase of the trial. At that point, since Atkins was eligible for the death penalty, her (third) new attorney, Daye Shinn, made an attempt to save her life by arguing that Caballero had misrepresented her. He called on everyone involved in the publication of her story to explain themselves. Reading the transcript, I learned that the DA’s office not only was aware of the planned publication, but may have facilitated it. And, of course, Helter Skelter left all of this out.

  The key to the scheme was Lawrence Schiller, the so-called communicator who’d brokered the publication deal. This wasn’t Schiller’s first high-profile article. Among other pieces, he’d arranged to publish the “deathbed confession” of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby; nude photos of Marilyn Monroe; and photos of the comedian Lenny Bruce lying dead on his bathroom floor. He finished the Atkins deal on December 8, when the contract was signed—just in the nick of time. Two days later, Judge Keene issued a gag order, making it illegal for anyone involved to talk to the press.

  That should’ve brought a decisive end to the publication. But in violation of the gag order, Caballero drove Jerry Cohen, a Los Angeles Times reporter and a friend of Schiller, to interview his client in jail. Cohen had been tapped to ghostwrite the piece. His main source was the taped account that Atkins had made in Caballero’s office. But apparently he needed more material, and the lawyer was happy to accommodate him.

  In the car that evening, besides Caballero and Cohen, were Schiller and a stenographer, Carmella Ambrosini. At the jail, Cohen and Ambrosini went inside to interview Atkins. The purpose of the visit, as recorded in the visitors’ log at Sybil Brand, was to discuss a “future psychiatric evaluation.”

  Remember, Caballero had earlier claimed that Atkins could speak safely only at his Beverly Hills offices. Now a journalist and a stenographer were talking with her right there in jail. They spoke for about an hour. When they got back in the car, Caballero made an unusual demand of Ambrosini: he told the stenographer to pull out a small section of the tape from her machine, maybe about three minutes’ worth, and give it to him. Caballero “ripped the tape into tiny pieces,” Ambrosini later testified, “and then threw them on the floor of the car. Then he picked them up from the floor and put them into his pocket.”

  On the stand, Caballero finally admitted that the taped section contained comments from Atkins suggesting that she’d lied to the grand jury at his direction. She’d said something to the effect of “Okay, I played your game. I testified. I said what you wanted me to say, I don’t want to do it anymore”—at which point he told her to stop talking. Under more persistent questioning, Caballero conceded that Atkins “used the word ‘lie’” and “appeared” to be “repudiating” her grand jury testimony.

  It was the closest thing to an admission that Caballero had manipulated Atkins—that her testimony, and all the indictments that stemmed from it, were unreliable. But again, because Atkins was a confessed murderer, this hardly seemed remarkable to the media. And, of course, the story of how Caballero and Caruso became Atkins’s attorneys was locked in police vaults until I found it.

  “Something Very Smelly”

  Jerry Cohen was a ghostwriter in the purest sense of the word. No one was supposed to know that he’d finessed Atkins’s words, let alone that he’d interviewed her in jail. To that end, Lawrence Schiller had presented himself unambiguously as Atkins’s interlocutor. “I will be the first and the last newsman with whom Susan Atkins can speak freely until her fate is decided,” he wrote in the paperback version of the Atkins story.

  In fact, Schiller had been sitting outside in the car while Cohen talked to Atkins in jail. After that interview, Cohen ripped through his ghostwriting in two days at Schiller’s house. Schiller made three carbon copies of the finished piece: one for Caballero; one for a German editor who’d bought the translation rights; and one to be flown overseas to the London News of the World, which had paid $40,000 for exclusive English rights. Or so said Bugliosi, who wrote in Helter Skelter, “How the Los Angeles Times obtained the story remains unknown.”

  Bugliosi did not write that Cohen, a reporter for the Times, was also a friend and collaborator of his. That relationship came out only when Bugliosi himself appeared as a witness during the trial’s penalty phase. Under cross-examination, he admitted that he’d known Cohen for the “last two or three years.” As he later confirmed to me, he was collaborating with Cohen on a book of his own: not Helter Skelter, but Till Death Do Us Part, another true-crime chronicle (it eventually appeared in 1978 with another coauthor). The two men had begun work on the book before Sharon Tate was even murdered; Bugliosi
set it aside when he realized that the Manson murders would be the more sensational story.

  The defense alleged that Bugliosi had helped broker the publication of Atkins’s story. They never proved it, in part because Jerry Cohen had dodged subpoena servers and never testified. But certainly it was a point in their favor that Bugliosi had omitted his working relationship with the reporter who ghostwrote the story—and that said reporter worked for the same newspaper where the story eventually appeared.

  As for Schiller: in his turn on the stand, he did finally admit that he never met Susan Atkins. But afterward he claimed in interviews with Vanity Fair, Playboy, and the New York Times, and even in his Pulitzer Prize–winning collaboration with Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song, that he’d interviewed Atkins in her cell.

  Cohen’s ghostwriting would’ve remained a secret if not for Pete Miller, an investigative reporter for Los Angeles’s KTTV. In January 1970, as preliminary hearings continued in the Manson case, he decided to look into the Atkins sale. He wanted to see if Lawrence Schiller had actually interviewed Atkins in her jail cell, as he’d claimed he had.

  Miller checked the jail’s visitors’ log and saw that Schiller had never been in to see Atkins. But he did notice a name he recognized: Jerry Cohen’s, appearing alongside Caballero’s. On the phone, Caballero admitted that he’d brought Cohen “in case he wanted to prepare a psychiatric defense” for Atkins. Miller pointed out that Cohen was a reporter, not a psychiatrist, and Caballero abruptly ended the conversation.

  Miller tried to bring this to light, but he couldn’t get very far. After his initial reports aired in January 1970, Bugliosi requested a meeting with him. The two sat down at KTTV’s headquarters, along with Caballero, a second DA, Miller’s bosses, and attorneys for the station.

  This meeting came up during the penalty phase of the trial, when the defense called Miller to testify. He tried to say what they’d discussed and why no more stories aired after his first one, but Bugliosi objected every step of the way. All he could get out was that they’d talked about “some of the reports I had been doing… concerning Susan Atkins.”

  “As a result of this meeting, was something done regarding your further broadcasts of this case?” asked Daye Shinn, Atkins’s attorney.

  “Objection!” cried Bugliosi. “Irrelevant.”

  “Sustained,” responded the court.

  Shinn tried again later. “As a result of this meeting did you further terminate—”

  “Objection!” Bugliosi said again. “Irrelevant.”

  “Will you complete the question?” the judge asked Shinn.

  “As a result of this meeting did you further terminate the broadcasts concerning this case?”

  “Objection! Irrelevant.”

  “Sustained.”

  Out of earshot of the jury, Bugliosi told the judge, “Miller’s testimony has nothing to do with death as opposed to life. It is my contention that [the defense attorneys] are going to use this death-penalty hearing as a forum to sling dirt at various people.” Including, of course, him. The judge said he wouldn’t allow any mention of what happened at the meeting. It constituted hearsay.

  Thus the prosecutor kept much of Miller’s investigation under wraps. Most of the media covering the trial never even mentioned the Miller appearance. The Los Angeles Times omitted him entirely, focusing instead, as they always had, on the litany of bizarre behavior from the defendants and their supporters outside the courthouse.

  Under oath, both Bugliosi and his coprosecutor, Aaron Stovitz, denied that they knew about the sale of Atkins’s story before it was published. Maybe inadvertently, Richard Caballero impeached their testimony.

  Under questioning by the defense’s Irving Kanarek, Caballero said, “I did state to someone at the district attorney’s office—I believe it was Mr. Stovitz, I may be wrong—that I had entered into the arrangement for the sale of the story… And they were upset.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” Kanarek asked.

  “I believe Mr. Stovitz was there, and I am almost positive someone else was there… but I cannot recall who.”

  Kanarek did his best to bring out the implication that this “someone else” was Bugliosi. Caballero, in a response worthy of the CIA, neither confirmed nor denied it.

  After the Atkins story came out, Lawrence Schiller spoke to Newsweek, which asked how he’d been able to penetrate the security surrounding the state’s “star” witness, risking a mistrial by publishing her story. He answered “with a grin”: “Let’s say this, the prosecution didn’t put up any obstacles.”

  I was more than ready to believe him on that count. But what about the judge, William Keene—why didn’t he put up any obstacles? The worldwide publication of Atkins’s story was about as blatant a violation of his gag order as one can imagine, but he never held Caballero and Caruso in contempt. In a story for the Los Angeles Free Press, Ed Sanders, who would go on to write The Family, argued that Judge Keene must’ve known in advance about the publication, letting it slide because he, like Bugliosi, wanted the publicity from the case. Keene was considering a run for district attorney.

  After Atkins’s story was published, Linda Kasabian’s attorney, Gary Fields, filed a motion to dismiss the case because of unfair pretrial publicity. Judge Keene denied the motion, despite abundant evidence of publicity. “That’s where the story is,” Fields told me thirty years later. “Something very smelly there.”

  “A Strange Little Guy”

  Richard Caballero refused to discuss the case with me. “The answer is no thank you,” he said on the phone. I asked him why not. “The answer is no thank you,” he said. I tried one more time, saying I wanted to discuss the sale of the Atkins story. “The answer is no thank you!” he shouted, hanging up the phone.

  Lawrence Schiller wouldn’t talk to me, either, and Jerry Cohen had died by his own hand, in 1993. Looking into those two men, I found that throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in furtive arrangements. In ’67, Schiller had published the first book to attack the conspiracy theorists around John F. Kennedy’s assassination, staunchly supporting the official explanation for JFK’s death. That same year, foreshadowing his feat at Sybil Brand, Schiller wormed his way into the Dallas hospital room of Jack Ruby, who’d killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The reporter emerged with the only recording ever made of Ruby’s confessing to the murder. Schiller released it on vinyl that year. Notably, he’d taped Ruby saying that he hadn’t killed Oswald as part of a conspiracy, thus shoring up the government’s official line.

  During a congressional investigation of the CIA’s illegal domestic operations, the agency admitted that it had more than 250 “assets” in the American media in the 1960s. Their identities were never revealed. Mark Lane, who’d written the first book questioning the findings of the Warren Commission—the investigative committee appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin—believed Schiller was one of those assets, and Jerry Cohen, too. Lane believed they’d been tasked with disrupting investigations of the Kennedy assassination. In testimony before Congress, Lane charged that the CIA had paid Cohen to “smear” him in the press.

  I could never prove that, but I did find a trove of documents in the National Archives showing that Schiller had been acting as an informant for the FBI in 1967 and 1968, sharing confidential information with the Bureau about Mark Lane’s sources. His work as an informant continued under the cloak of his “reporting” for Life magazine, which was later named in a 1977 Rolling Stone story as one of the publications that provided CIA employees with cover. Schiller tracked down authorities who were investigating potential malfeasance in the Kennedy assassination, using his press credentials to obtain interviews and then sharing his findings with the FBI. He’d written to J. Edgar Hoover to say that he was “in possession of the names and whereabouts of [the] confidential informant whom Mr. [Mark] Lane refused to identify” in his testimony to th
e Warren Commission. Schiller dug up information about officials looking into the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. According to memos, the FBI eagerly awaited Schiller’s information.

  Others had made similar claims about Cohen and Schiller. Pete Noyes, a TV investigative reporter who’d written a book on the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, said that Cohen, a friend, had pressured him to abandon the project. If Noyes dropped the publication of the book, Cohen promised him a plum job at the Los Angeles Times. Noyes declined the offer, but he was disturbed by how much Cohen knew about his unpublished work. A few weeks later, he was fired from his job at CBS News. Cohen was “a strange little guy,” Noyes told me. He wondered why his onetime friend tried to quash his book, and he suspected that Cohen had played a role in his firing, too. Although he could never prove it, Noyes was fairly certain that Cohen was a CIA asset.

  Coda: What Did Atkins Really Say?

  Susan Atkins’s testimony was the blueprint for the official narrative of the murders. But if it was shaped to serve the prosecution, how much of it should we believe?

  If there’s an unvarnished account—a sense of what Atkins said about the crimes before she came under the “control” of her attorneys and the DA’s office—it’s the one she shared with her cellmate Ronnie Howard. We’ll never get to hear that account verbatim, but there’s something that comes close. In the files of LAPD lieutenant Paul LePage, I found notes from detectives’ November 18, 1969, interview with Howard; they contained several inconsistencies with what would become Atkins’s official story. And by the time Howard was reinterviewed seven days later—after Caballero’s insertion in the case—she changed what she said, and all of these discrepancies were gone. To my knowledge, they’ve never been reported.

  First: Atkins told Howard that Sharon Tate died in her bedroom, on the bed. (Later, she was said to have died in the living room.)