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

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

  Second: she said the 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. (In a 2009 documentary, Kasabian contradicted her testimony, saying that all the killers had taken speed on the night of the Tate murders.)

  Third: Atkins said that they killed the LaBianca couple because of something to do with “blackmail,” although she couldn’t elaborate. She said she’d participated in those murders, too—she was the one who left the kitchen fork protruding from Leno LaBianca’s belly. (In the official narrative, Atkins was in the car that brought the killers to the LaBiancas’, but she never went inside the house.)

  What’s just as remarkable is everything that Howard didn’t mention in that first interview. She said nothing about Helter Skelter, Manson’s race war, except to note that those words were left in blood on the LaBianca refrigerator. She made no mention, in other words, of a racist motive, black people, holes in the desert, Armageddon, or the Beatles, all of which became central to Bugliosi’s prosecution.

  And, as you might expect by now, she made no mention of Manson’s “instructing” anyone to go anywhere or kill anyone—all of which would be repeated incessantly in Atkins’s later accounts.

  As for Atkins’s most heinous act—the stabbing of Sharon Tate as she begged for the life of her baby—Howard was much more equivocal about it than we’ve been led to believe. She said that Atkins “didn’t admit she did the stabbing on the Tate deal.” And yet, the next time Howard talked, after Caballero had arrived, she said without reservation that Atkins had boasted about stabbing Tate in nauseating detail.

  Think of all the unanswered questions that have swirled around the Manson case for fifty years now. Just a few: Why did the killers target strangers for murder? Why would previously nonviolent kids—except for Atkins, none of them had a criminal record—kill for Manson, on command, and with such abandon and lack of remorse? And if Manson hoped to ignite a world-ending race war, why didn’t he order more killings, since the two nights of murder didn’t trigger that war?

  Bugliosi made a fortune and achieved worldwide fame from his prosecution of the Manson Family and Helter Skelter. Over the years, many people in law enforcement have told me that they never believed the Helter Skelter motive. Their theories were always more mundane—they would’ve made thinner gruel for Bugliosi’s book.

  Eventually, all the killers settled on a story similar to the one that Atkins told after her attorney swap. And all of them have sought parole releases based on that story’s thesis: that they were not responsible for their actions because they were under Manson’s control. Many of the psychiatrists who testified said that the defendants’ minds had been so decimated by LSD that they likely had no way of discerning real memories from false ones. They may not even have known if they were at either house on the nights of the killings, let alone whether they participated in the murders.

  The only person who never endorsed Atkins’s final story, and the Helter Skelter motive along with it, was Manson. After his conviction, he said little about the crimes, except that he didn’t know what his “children” were going to do before they did it, and that he had no explanation for why they’d done it. Curiously, Bugliosi admitted in one of his last interviews that he was pretty certain Manson never believed in Helter Skelter. “I think everyone who participated in the murders bought the Helter Skelter theory hook, line, and sinker,” he told Rolling Stone. “But did Manson himself believe in all this ridiculous, preposterous stuff about all of them living in a bottomless pit in the desert while a worldwide war went on outside? I think, without knowing, that he did not.” Unfortunately, the reporter didn’t follow up with the obvious rejoinder: If the murders weren’t committed to incite a race war, what was the reason?

  As I’ve mentioned before, there was a persistent rumor among followers of the case, including the detectives who’d investigated it, that Manson had visited the Tate house after the murders, arriving with some unknown companion to restage the crime scene. If it’s true that Susan Atkins’s story was the product of careful sculpting by the DA’s office, the prospect of Manson’s visitation isn’t nearly as far-fetched as it would be otherwise.

  One of the more perplexing clues to that end is a pair of eyeglasses recovered from Tate’s living room after the murders. 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. Detectives never explained them to anyone’s satisfaction. In a 1986 book called Manson in His Own Words, ostensibly cowritten by Manson and an ex-con named Nuel Emmons, Manson mentioned these glasses, saying he went to the Cielo house with an unnamed conspirator and took elaborate measures to rearrange the crime scene. “My partner had an old pair of eyeglasses which we often used as a magnifying glass or a device to start a fire when matches weren’t available,” he wrote. “We carefully wiped the glasses free of prints and dropped them on the floor, so that, when discovered, they would be a misleading clue for the police.”

  To be clear, Manson in His Own Words is a far from unimpeachable source. Emmons wrote the book years after a series of prison interviews with Manson, but he wasn’t allowed to record these or take notes at the time. Manson himself vaguely disavowed the book, although not before appearing with Emmons in several televised interviews to promote it.

  I was inclined to take a kinder view toward it when I found, in the LASO files, a “kite,” or prison note, from Manson to Linda Kasabian. His coded language is hard to decipher, but he may have been admitting that he left the glasses at the Cielo house after the murders. The note seems to have been delivered in an effort to persuade Kasabian not to make a deal with the prosecution:

  So what if I did make you do it I don’t care if you’re a snitch… you been a lien bitch… I did what I did because I felt it was to be done & I even put the eye glasses to where I could show you all are blind & give them Shorty… each time you skiw down you think of Sharon Tate & know that’s you if I can’t get to my Nancy’s love…

  The next lines had been underlined by police: “tell Gold to hold the bone yard and no bones outside the yard.”

  While it’s always difficult to decode anything Manson said or wrote, this note isn’t as impenetrable as others. “Gold” was Manson’s nickname for one of his Family favorites, Nancy Pitman, whom he had referred to as “Nancy” a few lines earlier. In early 1970, Pitman paid frequent visits to all the defendants in jail, doing Manson’s bidding. She told Linda Kasabian not to turn state’s evidence; she told Atkins to stop cooperating with the prosecution. “Shorty” refers to Shorty Shea, the Spahn Ranch caretaker whom the Family had killed and buried in a remote part of the property; as mentioned earlier, his remains weren’t recovered until 1977.

  To hazard a guess: Manson was warning Kasabian not to flip, and instructing her to tell “Gold,” when next she visited, that Shorty Shea’s “bones” were not to be removed from “the bone yard” at the Spahn Ranch where he was buried. Manson even may have been referring to other victims’ buried remains at the ranch; it’s long been suspected that more victims of the Family are buried somewhere. While the implications of the note are sensational, what’s more important to me is Manson’s apparent admission that he returned to the Tate house after the murders and planted the glasses.

  I expected investigators to dismiss the possibility of Manson’s meddling at the scene, but some were open to it. Late in my reporting, I spoke with Danny Bowser, a retired lieutenant from the LAPD homicide squad who’d never given an interview about Manson. In 1965 Bowser had been appointed the first commander of the LAPD’s new Special Investigations Section (SIS), an elite, high-tech unit that served as “professional witnesses” by running covert surveillance on known criminals. Its goal was to gather such a pre
ponderance of evidence that convictions were all but guaranteed, and plea bargains all but impossible. And the SIS was a furtive bunch: for a decade, the LAPD never even publicly acknowledged its existence. “We weren’t even connected to a division,” Bowser told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “They carried us [on the roster] at different places, different times.”

  That was the only time Bowser ever commented about the SIS. A second piece reported that SIS was called the “Death Squad” within the LAPD because its members had killed thirty-four suspects since 1965. The “secretive” twenty-man unit had a controversial policy: it refused to intervene to stop crimes, even those in which people’s lives were at stake. The Times investigation “documented numerous instances in which well-armed teams of SIS detectives stood by watching as victims were threatened with death and, sometimes, physically harmed by criminals who could have been arrested beforehand.” The later piece in the Times reported that “Even within the LAPD, SIS officers are known as a fearsome and mysterious bunch. Some of their colleagues repeat unsubstantiated—and vigorously denied—rumors of SIS officers conspiring to shoot suspects and celebrating gunfights with ‘kill parties.’”

  I’d heard from other detectives that, after Sharon Tate’s murder, the LAPD assigned Bowser to serve as Roman Polanski’s “bodyguard.” Why would such an elite officer get such a low-level task? Polanski confirmed the assignment in his 1984 autobiography, Roman by Polanski, writing that Bowser had been the first detective to interview him and had shadowed his every move. He added somewhat cryptically that “Bowser wasn’t, strictly speaking, on the investigative side of the case… One of his responsibilities was to keep in touch with me.” Why, then, was his name never mentioned in Helter Skelter or at the trial?

  I had trouble finding a way to talk to Bowser. Finally, in 2008, I settled on a time-honored reportorial tactic: I showed up at his doorstep unannounced. He lived way out in Inyo County, five hours from L.A., at the end of a quiet suburban street.

  Bowser refused to let me in, saying he wouldn’t talk to me. Despite his advanced age, he cut an imposing figure—he had a glass eye, and I later learned that his real eye had been shot out—but I kept him standing in his doorway by blurting out questions about the Tate crime scene, hoping to convince him that I’d done my homework. It worked—kind of. Bowser would shut the door on me, only to open it again to say more. Whenever he seemed to have said his piece, he’d find something else to add. For the next thirty minutes, as the sprinklers chirped next door and a TV blared from inside his house, he told me things that he insisted he’d never shared outside the SIS.

  Most of our stilted conversation was about the homicide investigation report for the Tate case, a document that was pretty much the basis of the prosecution’s physical evidence. Bowser said it was littered with inaccuracies. The detectives in the homicide unit, he claimed, “left things behind, things they missed… an awful lot of evidence didn’t get processed.”

  At least two key pieces of physical evidence weren’t, in fact, discovered at the crime scene the morning of the murders, although more than a dozen police officers and forensic investigators had testified that they had been. One was that mysterious pair of eyeglasses. Bowser told me he’d found those himself, five entire days after the murders. That contradicted the homicide report, which said the glasses had been located and taken into custody on August 9, 1969. Gently, I suggested he might be mistaken—that the homicide report suggested otherwise.

  “What, you think that’s the Bible?” He snorted. “You believe the stuff you read in there?” He made sure I didn’t jump to the conclusion that he or any of the SIS agents working under him had done anything improper. He said that his guys didn’t write reports, nor did they report to anyone. Nevertheless, if what he said was true, then critical elements of the prosecution’s presentation of the crime scene were inaccurate. Included, just for starters, would be the means of entry into the house, the way the victims were bound and by whom. “Everything evil over there kind of connects,” he added.

  If he was accurate, then all those cops—his colleagues at the LAPD—had lied under oath, I reminded him.

  “Did you see any of my guys on the stand?” he asked. And he added that I wouldn’t find any of his “guys” named in the police reports, either. He was right.

  Toward the end, Bowser toyed with giving me a proper interview. “I was going to give you my number,” he said before shutting the door again, “to protect you from stumbling over your dick. But I changed my mind.” I waited a good ten minutes, but the door remained closed this time, and I finally left. Two years later, in 2010, he died.

  As I drove away, my mind was awash with possibilities. I’d always wondered about the crime-scene discrepancies. I wondered if Bowser, just by alleging that the crime scene had been presented incorrectly or possibly even staged, was pointing to other reasons for the murders, or other people, perhaps, involved in covering up what had really happened. I had to think of Reeve Whitson, and his claim of having gone to the crime scene after the murders but before the police had arrived.

  All of this is compelling evidence of a different scenario for the crimes, but I’ll be the first to admit that it proves nothing for certain. I do believe it’s possible that there was another reason for the Tate–LaBianca murders. And I do believe the crime scene suggests that the sequence of events as we know it is wrong. But our best chance to learn the truth vanished in November 1969, when the DA’s office put Susan Atkins’s testimony on lockdown. The question remaining was: Why?

  9

  Manson’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

  No More Extensions

  Good reporting takes time—vast and often unreasonable amounts of time. Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends. My Freedom of Information Act requests alone would stretch on for months, as I quibbled with bureaucrats over redactions and minutiae. Since my three-month assignment from Premiere had long since evolved into a years-long project, I’d accepted that the Manson case was something akin to a calling, like it or not. Even in the longueurs between my major breakthroughs, I worked diligently with the confidence—and, sometimes, the hubris—that comes with the hunch that you’re onto something big.

  That confidence would’ve been nothing if my editors at Premiere didn’t share it. The camaraderie and support they offered was critical, but more basically than that, they were keeping me alive. For almost a year and a half, through one deadline extension after another, they paid me a generous monthly stipend to keep reporting, on top of the standard fee from my original contract. Even then, I knew that these paychecks were a tremendous act of faith, and I didn’t take them lightly. I wanted to deliver a news-making piece, unlike the usual stuff printed in entertainment magazines, and I thought I could do it. I just needed time.

  But there were limits to Premiere’s largesse. In November 2000, Jim Meigs—the editor in chief, who’d sat on the floor of my apartment, examining documents with me—was fired. I heard a rumor, which I could never confirm, that the handsome monthly payments he’d authorized for me were part of the problem. Whatever the case, Premiere’s new regime got down to brass tacks right away. In total, including expenses, they’d paid me a king’s ransom at that point, and now they demanded the goods. Immediately.

  Looking back, maybe I was too full of pride. I still can’t decide if what I did next was best for me in the long run. But I did it: I walked away from Premiere. I thought I had a historic story, and to publish it in that condition, with loose ends and so much research left to be done, would’ve been giving too much away. The minute I let it go, I thought, the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post would put six reporters on the story to finish what I couldn’t. If they got the big scoop that had eluded me—the story of what really happened, as opposed to the millions of tiny holes in what was supposed to have happened—all the glory would be theirs, and I would be only a footnote.

&
nbsp; A writer friend had referred me to her literary agent, who took me on, convinced that I had an important book on my hands. If I could write up a proposal and sell it to a publisher, he said, I’d get the time and the money I needed to put my reporting to bed. He disentangled me from my obligation to Premiere and I started right away.

  It took more than a year to write the first draft of the proposal. My friends, many of whom were writers, could never understand why it was taking so long. Why not just sit down and crank the thing out? I was constantly on the defensive with them, looking for justifications. The problem, of course, was that I was still reporting. Because that’s what I always did. I never stopped.

  Without the backing of an institution like Premiere, my mind-set started to change—it was expanding. I found myself looking into Manson’s year in San Francisco. He was there for the summer of love, in 1967. It was where he’d formed the Family. I was flummoxed by the authority figures who’d surrounded Manson at this time: his parole officer and the locally renowned physician who ran the clinic where he and his followers received free health care. Neither of them had spoken much to the press, and neither had testified at the trial, despite the fact that each man had seen Manson almost daily in the critical period when he’d started his cult.

  These weren’t fringe figures like Reeve Whitson or William Herrmann: they were well-known and respected in the Bay Area, and, even better for me, they were still alive. So when I plunged into their stories with Manson and found evidence of serial dishonesty—again, often connected to federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies—I had to ask myself if I was crazy to be doing all of this.

  The question wasn’t whether it was “worth it”; I thought it was, assuming the truth could be wrested out of aging scientists, reformed hippies, and dusty government files. The question was how much of myself I was willing to give, irrespective of any consequences to my reputation or well-being. I was haunted by something Paul Krassner, a journalist who’d covered the trial for the legendary counterculture magazine The Realist, had told me after a lunch in the first months of my investigation. At a Venice Beach sushi bar, we’d been discussing our belief that the reasons behind the murders had been misrepresented. “Be careful, Tom,” he said as we parted ways. “This will take over your life if you let it.”