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

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

  He erupted. “If you want to be conspiratorial,” he said, “yes, I was doing research on Mexican drug trafficking at the same time I was trying to send him there. So, yes, you could make it look like that, but that wasn’t what it was. I wasn’t a career PO. I only did it for a couple of years because I needed the money while I did my dissertation. My wife was a teacher, but we had no money. Was I a career, committed parole officer? No!”

  Committed or not, Smith had official responsibilities—and the paper trail, in its sparseness, suggests that these didn’t much weigh on him. After those two Mexico requests, Smith generated only two more documents regarding Manson for another five months. Both were simple form letters authorizing Manson to travel to Florida to meet with “recording agents.”

  Those interested me for several reasons. First, they violated Smith’s orders from Washington—he was to forbid Manson from leaving the Northern District of California under any circumstances. Second, Smith had postdated them, suggesting that he wrote them after Manson had already left town, safeguarding him from another potential violation. And third, there’s no sign that Manson and the Family ever actually went to Florida. If they went anywhere, the only available evidence suggests, it was to Mexico.

  Smith’s letters are from November 1967. On the very day that Susan Atkins’s probation officers were frantically trying to prevent her from traveling, she, Manson, and the others were pulling out of San Francisco in their big yellow bus with permission from Roger Smith.

  Manson was required to send postcards to Smith; there’s no record that he did. Later, probation reports noted that Atkins and Mary Brunner had said they spent quite a bit of time in Mexico with Manson that winter. Otherwise, their whereabouts for November and December 1967 are entirely unaccounted for.

  Fourteen Naked Hippies in a Ditch

  After the Florida letters, the record of Manson’s supervision stops for another five months—a period during which Manson reported to Smith on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, as he turned his soul-searching followers into programmed killers and planned for a race war.

  There should be an avalanche of paperwork on Manson from this time. While certainly Smith wrote reports, the Parole Commission released only twelve documents from his fourteen-month supervision. The Los Angeles portion of Manson’s file—covering approximately May 1968 to October 1969—is nearly as incomplete, with sixteen letters from agency officials and Samuel Barrett, who succeeded Smith as Manson’s parole officer.

  As few as they are, those letters depict an unmanageable parolee at odds with the “excellent progress” described by Smith a year earlier. Barrett once wrote to Manson, “Considering the nature of your last two arrests, and the suspicion you have aroused with law enforcement in this district, the reflection of your status leaves much to be desired.”

  Despite this admonishment, Barrett was the parole officer Bugliosi singled out for blame at the trial and in Helter Skelter. Not Smith, the foster parent to Manson’s baby; not Smith, the proud possessor of an affectionate nickname from Manson; not Smith, the parole officer who praised Manson’s “progress” three days after he was criminally convicted. By smearing Barrett, Bugliosi diverted attention from Smith’s far graver sins. After all, where Smith’s caseload had dwindled from forty to just one, Barrett had between two hundred fifty and three hundred parole cases between 1967 and 1969. But in Helter Skelter’s more than seven hundred pages, Bugliosi could spare only twenty-one words for Roger Smith, whom he never called to testify at trial. Smith told me that he was never questioned about Manson by Bugliosi, the police, or any federal agency—ever.

  I knew there had to be more papers from Smith’s time as Manson’s parole officer. Remember, under oath at the trial, Barrett had described Manson’s parole file as “about four inches thick.” I asked the Parole Commission spokesperson, Pamela A. Posch, how it could have been reduced to what I’d been told was only 138 pages, and why I could see only 69 of these, extensively redacted. The Bureau of Prisons “apparently did not retain all of the parole documents pertaining to Mr. Manson,” Posch wrote, conceding that this was unusual. The bureau had a policy to preserve the files of “notorious felons” for history’s sake. Manson was about as notorious as a felon could be.

  I thought I’d exhausted my options, but then I remembered that Smith and Manson were part of the San Francisco Project. Since it was a federal study funded by NIMH, it would have required even closer scrutiny of Manson’s activities; according to Smith, its clients were to be tracked, analyzed, and recorded in a separate file. But it practically goes without saying: that file was missing, too.

  If Smith maintained a close record of Manson, he kept a lot of people in the dark, including his own colleagues. He provided so few details that the parole offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco didn’t even know where Manson was living.

  In April 1968, Smith’s carelessness blew up in his face when, yet again, Manson was arrested. And there was no covering it up this time—too many papers had gotten the story. When Smith’s colleagues at the parole office read about it, they flipped out and tried to do what Smith hadn’t: send Manson back to prison.

  The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds.” Other papers picked up the news, too. Their articles were the first to describe what the world would soon know as the Manson Family.

  The Times staff writer Charles Hillinger described an Oxnard deputy on a late-night patrol who stumbled on a broken-down bus in a ditch by the Pacific Coast Highway. When he saw the bodies scattered in the weeds—nine women, five men—he thought they were dead. Then he realized they were only sleeping. After running a check on the bus’s tags, he learned it had been reported stolen from Haight-Ashbury. Waking the group, he told them to get dressed and wait for the county bus he’d ordered, which would take them all to jail. Before they left, one of the women (later identified as Mary Brunner) said, “Wait, my baby’s on the bus.” She went back to pick up her child, then only a week old. He was sick, with grime and open sores all over his body.

  The article identified the “self-proclaimed leader of the band of wanderers” as Charles Manson, adding that he was booked on suspicion of grand theft. Brunner was charged with endangering the life of a child. She was later convicted and received two years’ probation.

  Within several days, the chief of the San Francisco probation office, Albert Wahl, was alerted to an article about the arrest in the Oakland Tribune: “14 Nude Hippies Found Beside Wayward Bus.” Of course, one of those hippies was a parolee under his office’s supervision.

  Wahl flew into a rage, writing to his counterpart in Los Angeles, Angus McEachen, for assistance in finding Manson and sending him back to San Francisco. Wahl had to admit, embarrassingly, that his office’s file on Manson was “incomplete,” but “apparently” he had been traveling “freely between San Francisco and Los Angeles” for months. Wahl didn’t know if Manson had permission to travel, but one thing was clear, he added in a moment of supreme understatement: “regulations weren’t followed.” Smith’s name didn’t come up in the letter, but surely Wahl had him in mind when he wrote, “The officer who was handling the case is no longer attached to this office.”

  Wahl also wrote of two more arrests in McEachen’s district, noting that Manson had failed to report them, as required. For good measure, he sent a copy of his letter to the head of the national office in Washington, adding a copy of the Tribune story and a handwritten note: “Be sure to read the clipping—there are people like this.”

  “You Have Nothing More Important to Do”

  So far, the “people like this” had yet to suffer any consequences for their actions. Having been found the legal owner of the bus, Manson spent one day in jail. Then he was released, along with the rest of the group.

  McEachen, the chief of the Los Angeles probation office, was not happy about this. He had something of a personal stake in Manson’s fate. All the way back
in May 1960, he’d been the one to violate Manson’s probation for failing to report to his supervisor, sending Manson back to federal prison. He had every intention of following a similar course this time—but he soon learned that, while Manson’s probation had been easy to violate in 1960, things were different now.

  In a letter to Wahl, McEachen said that Manson had “personally appeared in our office to bring us up-to-date on his adventuresome nature.” Claiming to have no interest in money or work—“he has over 3,000 friends who are willing to give him any needed assistance”—Manson said that he owned the school bus and that he and his “girls” had been traveling between San Francisco and Los Angeles in it for months. If anyone from the probation office needed to contact him, he could be reached through a “friend named Gary Hinman of Topanga Canyon”—the same Hinman whom the Family would murder about a year later.

  Manson had gall, but McEachen thought he’d gained the upper hand—because Manson had since been arrested again, this time on a drug charge. Apparently he was at that moment sitting in the Los Angeles County jail awaiting arraignment.

  Sadly, McEachen was wrong: Manson had been released the previous day. For unknown reasons, the DA had declined to file charges. Not to be deterred, McEachen and Wahl tried to rein in their wandering, lawbreaking parolee. As the highest-ranking figures in their offices, they had a lot of clout—but not enough to catch Manson.

  Wahl’s most vigorous attempt came on June 3, 1968, when he sent a stern ultimatum to Manson’s last two known addresses in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (The latter belonged to Dennis Wilson.) Because Wahl didn’t know Manson’s exact whereabouts, he was forced to give him two options: report to the U.S. probation office in either city immediately. “Failure to follow this direction,” he wrote, “will result in my recommending that a warrant for mandatory release violation be issued”:

  From this point on, you are not to leave your current residence without written permission from a U.S. Probation Officer. Any permission given you by Mr. Smith, who is no longer connected with this Service, is hereby canceled. Give this matter your immediate attention. You have nothing more important to do.

  Manson defied the orders. Rather than showing up in person, he made a phone call to Wahl, who was out of the office—and furious to learn, in a message taken by a subordinate, that Manson had said he was living at Dennis Wilson’s place and had been offered a $20,000 annual recording contract by the Beach Boys’ label. As Wahl later wrote to McEachen, “It would appear that Mr. Manson is on another LSD trip.”

  Still, at least they knew where Manson was living now. That was a step in the right direction, wasn’t it? On June 6, they sent Samuel Barrett, his new parole officer, to make an unannounced visit. As Barrett reported back, “Manson and some of his hippie followers, mostly female,” had “found a haven” at Wilson’s home; “apparently [Wilson] has succumbed to Manson’s obsequious manner.”

  Just how deeply had Wilson “succumbed,” though? Could it really be true that their delinquent parolee had sweet-talked a Beach Boy into giving him a record deal? McEachen must’ve been relieved to hear from Nick Grillo, the Beach Boys’ manager. Requesting anonymity, Grillo complained that “Manson and his followers are proving to be a threatening factor to the music company.” The record label “would have to be idiotic” to have signed him.

  The parole office decided they had to order Manson back to San Francisco, making it clear that he’d return to prison if he failed to comply. On June 12, Barrett sent a letter giving him twelve days to return.

  Someone must have intervened. There’s no record of what happened between June 12 and the June 24 deadline, but apparently that deadline evaporated. The next letters came in late July and early August. Making no mention of the skipped deadline, McEachen reported to Washington, D.C., that he’d received a phone call from Manson, who had moved on to the Spahn Ranch, where he was “receiving free room and board in exchange for his work as a ranch hand.” By then, someone above Wahl, McEachen, and Barrett must’ve decided that it was best to just let Manson be.

  Manson built the Family right under his federal supervisors’ noses. From then on, the federal government, as well as local and state law enforcement, only backed further away from the group as they more brazenly broke the law.

  The only one who didn’t was Roger Smith. Well after his supervision of Manson ended, he was still writing letters to the Mendocino County court about Atkins’s and Brunner’s sterling characters, and he was caring for Manson’s son. Smith and his wife even hosted Manson at their home. With all I’d learned, I still couldn’t grasp how a “rock-ribbed Republican” would fall in with an aspirant hippie like Manson—and why their friendship persisted beyond the dissolution of their official relationship.

  Coda: The Speed Scene

  Smith may have had ulterior motives when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury. As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.

  Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”

  There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand anecdotes and statistical analysis.

  But the paper, “The Marketplace of Speed: Violence and Compulsive Methamphetamine Abuse,” does describe the nature of participant-observation, which, Smith wrote, forced a social scientist to break the law. Hiding in a “deviant group,” he had to convince drug users

  that they can trust him with information which, in other hands, would place them in jeopardy, and perhaps most important, he must resolve the moral dilemma of being part of something which he may find morally objectionable (at best), probably by association he could himself be arrested… in a very real sense, he becomes a co-conspirator… with information and insight which under normal conditions the average citizen would be obliged to share with law enforcement… he must try to understand what individuals within the group feel, how they view the “straight” world, how they avoid arrest or detection…

  To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.

  Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had star
ted to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those for free.

  Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to research drug use among hippies.

  Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long flowing dresses. I was convinced that Roger Smith had played some part in this transformation; now I began to wonder whether the HAFMC, with its emphasis on hippies, drugs, and research, had some role, too.

  10

  The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic

  Too Many Smiths

  To tell the story of Manson properly, as I’d argue Bugliosi never did, you’ve got to familiarize yourself with a dauntingly large cast, as is clear by now. When I was preparing to turn my aborted Premiere story into a book, I realized just how frustrating it was to keep everyone straight, to tell the narrative in a way that gave its major players their due without getting mired in details. Because, in a sense, the details were everything. The lacunae and silences and seemingly irrelevant detours in Manson’s life made it clear that he was far more a product of his times, and his surroundings, than something as outrageous as the Helter Skelter motive would have you believe. That motive makes it seem like Manson and the Family lived in a vacuum. But during their formative year in San Francisco, by most accounts, they were part of the zeitgeist. To understand that zeitgeist, I had to deal with the sheer proliferation of names: hundreds and hundreds of names.