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

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

  I was sure that at least one person had a better idea of the truth than I did. Before I went delving into any more archives or darting up the coast to confront former Family members, I had to return a phone call I’d been putting off for years. I had to talk to Bugliosi.

  My Adversary

  Back in 1999, Bugliosi had told me, “If there’s something about my handling of the case—anything at all—that you had a question about, I would appreciate if you would call me to get my view on it.” I’d promised to hear him out, imagining I’d circle back in another few months. Now seven years had passed, and I had so many questions that it took me weeks of preparation just to remember all of them.

  If I was reluctant to pick up the phone, it was because I was about to engage with a man who went to criminal lengths to protect his reputation. I’ve already mentioned Mary Neiswender, the reporter who told me that Bugliosi was “terribly dangerous”: he’d sent an emissary warning that he knew where her kids went to school and implied that “it would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers.” And I knew that Bugliosi had been indicted for perjury as a result of his prosecuting the murders—as mentioned earlier, he’d leaked information about Manson’s “hit list” to a reporter and had threatened professional consequences for his coprosecutors if they told anyone.

  Those turned out to be two of the milder incidents in his quest for self-preservation. In 1968, Bugliosi fell into a scandal kept under wraps by the DA’s office until ’72, when he was running for district attorney of Los Angeles. (He lost the election.) He’d stalked and terrorized someone he was convinced had carried on an affair with his wife and fathered his first-born child, Vincent Jr. As clichéd as it sounds, Bugliosi suspected his milkman, Herbert Weisel, who was married with two children.

  Weisel had left his job in 1965, eight months before Vincent Jr. was born. Bugliosi was sure that Weisel had quit because of his transgression—the evidence must’ve been in Weisel’s personnel file at the dairy. He made anonymous phone calls to Weisel’s wife and then to Weisel himself, demanding him to release his files. The couple began to notice “strange cars” circling their block after dark. They changed their phone number, which was already unlisted. Two days later, they got a typed letter postmarked from L.A. “You shouldn’t have changed your phone number,” it said. “That wasn’t nice.”

  Eventually, Bugliosi’s wife, Gail, approached the Weisels, revealing her identity in the hopes that she could arrange a détente. The Weisels told her that her husband should be getting psychiatric help. “She told us that she’d tried many times, but that he wouldn’t do it,” they later testified in a civil deposition. She’d taken paternity and lie-detector tests to prove the child was his, but he still harbored doubts. “I know he’s sick,” she said. “He’s got a mental problem.”

  The couple became so frightened that they stopped allowing their children to take the bus to school. They hired a lawyer and, after a mediation, Bugliosi agreed to stop harassing them and to pay them $100 for their silence. They refused the money. In ’72, with Bugliosi on the ballot, they decided it was their civic duty to go public—their tormentor aspired to the most powerful law enforcement job in the city. They told the papers of his yearlong harassment and intimidation campaign.

  Enlisting his well-documented talent for fabrication, Bugliosi retaliated, telling the press that Weisel had stolen money from his kitchen table seven years earlier. Weisel sued him for slander and defamation. It wasn’t a tough case to win. In depositions, Bugliosi and his wife swore they’d only been worried about the alleged robbery of their home. The Weisels proved otherwise, bringing in witnesses who exposed the Bugliosis as perjurers. Soon it came out that Bugliosi had twice used an investigator in the DA’s office—his office—to get confidential information about Weisel, claiming he was a material witness in a murder case. Fearing the disclosure would cost him his job, Bugliosi settled out of court, paying the Weisels $12,500. He paid in cash, on the condition that they sign a confidentiality agreement and turn over the deposition tapes.

  No sooner was the milkman imbroglio resolved than Bugliosi fell into another fiasco, again abusing his connection to the criminal justice system to straighten it out. His mistress, Virginia Cardwell, the single mother of a five-year-old, told him she was pregnant. It was his. With visions of public office still dancing in his mind, and Helter Skelter on the eve of publication, he ordered Cardwell, a Catholic, to get an abortion. She refused, but after Bugliosi threatened her and gave her money for the procedure, she lied and said she’d done it. He wasn’t about to take her word for it. He got her doctor’s name, called him, and learned that she’d never been to see him, after which he headed to her apartment and beat her so savagely that she suffered a miscarriage. He choked her, struck her in the face several times with his fists, threw her onto the floor, pulled her up by her hair, and threatened to kill her if she had the baby, saying she wouldn’t leave the apartment alive if she lied to him: “I will break every bone in your body—this will ruin my career.” Bruised and battered, Cardwell gathered herself and went to the Santa Monica Police Department, where she filed a criminal complaint. The cops photographed her bruises and then, evidently, did nothing.

  That evening, an eagle-eyed reporter spotted the incident on the police blotter and wrote about it in the next day’s paper. Bugliosi returned to Cardwell’s apartment that morning, this time with his secretary. The pair held her hostage for four hours until she agreed to tell the police she’d filed a false complaint the previous day. Bugliosi assured her he’d use his contacts in the DA’s office to make sure she was never brought to trial for the false report. He and his secretary used Cardwell’s typewriter to forge a backdated bill for legal services, telling her to show it to the police. He listened in on an extension as she called to turn herself in. The dispatcher said they’d send a patrol car to get her. He vigorously shook his head, and Cardwell told the dispatcher she’d be fine getting in on her own.

  The dispatcher sent a car anyway. One of the detectives who’d seen Cardwell that day, Michael Landis, told me Bugliosi and “a couple of his associates” answered the door “and tried to discourage us from talking to her. We were persistent and we did see her—and she was pretty well banged up.” Cardwell claimed that the bruises were from an accident: her son had hit her in the face with a baseball bat. She’d only blamed Bugliosi because she was angry that he’d overcharged her for legal advice concerning her divorce. “This outrageous charge, even though false, can be extremely harmful,” Bugliosi told police.

  Cardwell’s brother persuaded her to file a lawsuit against Bugliosi. Bugliosi’s story fell apart before the suit was even filed, and he settled with Cardwell in exchange for her confidentiality—ensuring, he hoped, that his lies to the police, fabrication of evidence, and obstruction of justice would never see the light of day. He was wrong. The Virginia Cardwell story hit the papers in 1974, when his opponent in the California state attorney general’s race, Joseph Busch, caught wind of it. (Bugliosi lost that election, too.) Because of his clout in the DA’s office, he was never prosecuted for assaulting Cardwell. Landis, the detective, called him “a whiney, sniveley little bastard,” saying, “I wanted to prosecute the son of a bitch.”

  All of which is to say that I approached Bugliosi with extreme caution.

  And at first, he refused to grant me another interview. In the intervening years, he explained, he’d heard from two unnamed “sources” that I’d done “terrible things” in my “private life.” He refused to say what these things were. I knew I’d done nothing wrong. I told him to go ahead and expose whatever it was he had on me—it would never hold up to scrutiny. I added that I’d amassed a lot of documents, including some in his own hand, that raised questions about the integrity of the prosecution. But he was adamant: no interview. Furthermore, if my book defamed or libeled him, he would hold me liable to the greatest degree of the law. “You don’t want to be working for me the rest of your life,” he said. “I
think you know what I mean.” He hung up.

  And then, ten minutes later, he called back. He wanted to repeat the same conversation we’d just had, to pretend like we were having it for the first time. His wife, Gail, would be listening in on another extension as a “witness,” so I wouldn’t misrepresent what he’d said.

  “You want us to repeat the conversation word for word, like it hadn’t already happened?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Or, you know, the essence of the conversation.”

  It was a ridiculous exercise. I agreed anyway; I wanted to keep our lines of communication open, and I had a morbid desire to see how it played out. I told him I’d only do it if I could tape the call, so I’d have a “witness,” too. He agreed.

  Listening back to it now, I’m amazed: we really did it. We had the same talk again, with occasional corrections. (“No, Vince, you said you’d sue me for 100 million dollars, not millions of dollars.”) Every few minutes, Bugliosi would make sure that Gail was still listening. “Yes,” she’d sigh. “I’m here.” As for the papers I had, he told me, “Documents may be accurate… but it doesn’t make the document itself truthful.” And even if he wanted to sit down with me—which he didn’t, because of the “terrible things” I’d done—he couldn’t, because he was “absolutely swamped.” He didn’t even have time to go to a Super Bowl party that “some prominent people” had invited him to.

  “I kind of doubt that under any circumstances I’d be willing to give you an interview,” he said. “But if you send me a letter specifying everything you want to talk about, or the essence of what you want to talk about, there’s an outside possibility that I may find the time, or make the time.”

  I never sent that letter. Experience had taught me that the longer I stayed silent, the more agitated Bugliosi would become. Despite his protestations, he really wanted to know what I’d write about him. A week later, he called and said that his wife had persuaded him to sit down with me. The interview was on.

  Bugliosi Redux

  And so we return to that sunny day in February 2006, when Bugliosi gave me a stern dressing-down at his home in Pasadena, his wife looking on phlegmatically. That was the day he announced himself as my “adversary” and issued a forty-five-minute “opening statement,” his kitchen now his courtroom as he mounted the case that he was a “decent guy” who’d “never hurt anyone in the first instance.” He would retaliate “in the second instance,” in self-defense or “to get even, or to get justice.”

  As if to prove that point, he kept threatening to sue me, making it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate any allegation of misconduct. He spoke so quickly, and with such a flurry of hyperbole and legalism, that I could hardly rebut one of his points without three more rising up to take its place. Just as my encounter with Roger Smith had, my interview with Bugliosi lasted for some six hours, and I came out of it with little more than a list of denials and evasions. But at least Smith had given me wine and pizza. Bugliosi gave me only vitriol.

  Before we met, I rehearsed my questions with an actor friend who stepped into Bugliosi’s shoes. We developed a plan on how best to deploy my findings and parry his denials. I brought binders full of documents and carefully highlighted passages from Helter Skelter so that I could refresh his memory if he claimed not to recall certain particulars from the case.

  But right away, Bugliosi threw me off. “Ask me your hardest question,” he said at the outset. And so I started with everything I had on Terry Melcher, suggesting that Bugliosi had covered up for him and that he’d been much friendlier with Manson than had been revealed. It was the wrong move—I’d intended to build to this moment, and now I was leading with it, giving him every reason to take a contentious tone. Pulling out a passage from Helter Skelter, I showed Bugliosi what he’d written about Dean Moorehouse, the member of the Family who, according to the prosecutor, stayed at the house on Cielo Drive “for a brief period” after Melcher moved out.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “He never lived there after Melcher moved out. He lived there the summer before, off and on with Melcher.” I showed him that Dean Moorehouse was actually in prison when Bugliosi had said he lived at the Cielo house.

  “I forget what you’re telling me,” Bugliosi said. “The matter of where and how, I forget that kind of stuff. Thirty-five years ago, I’ve gone after a million things since then… There’s a lot of errors in the book.” He’d authored it with a cowriter, and he’d been too busy running for district attorney to fact-check every last word.

  “This may have gotten past me,” he said. “I’m [more] interested in anything you would have that would indicate that I may have misled the jury, because I don’t believe that happened intentionally.”

  I took out the pages in Bugliosi’s own handwriting: notes from his interview with Danny DeCarlo, one of his main witnesses, who’d said that Terry Melcher had visited Manson three times after the murders, contravening what Melcher had said on the stand.

  “This was after the murders?” Bugliosi clarified, reading through his own notes. “Are you sure about that?”

  “You wrote it,” I said. He confirmed they were his notes and read them again.

  “You have to know, Tom, that when people are talking to you they garble things up… My god. They tell a story—”

  “But this is not ambiguous. You write, ‘Definitely saw Melcher out at Spahn Ranch. Heard girls say, Terry’s coming! Terry’s coming!’ And you make a point of writing down that it was after the August 16th bust. There’s nothing ambiguous about when it was.”

  “I’m being a hundred percent candid with you,” Bugliosi said, “this is new to me. I’m not saying I didn’t know it at the time, don’t get me wrong, but I absolutely have no impression, no recollection of this at all.” He sighed. “What’s the point?… How does it help me with the jury?”

  I thought it impeached Melcher’s testimony, which had been essential to the case. It made him a dirtier witness, I said, because he had a relationship with the murderers after the murders. I showed him the sheriff’s interview with the Family’s Paul Watkins, who remembered seeing Melcher on his knees, on acid, begging for Manson’s forgiveness at the Spahn Ranch—again, after the murders. Didn’t it suggest some kind of complicity?

  Bugliosi leveled an intense stare at me. “I was not trying to protect Terry Melcher,” he said. “Why would I try to deceive the jury on something that the opposition had? I turned over everything to them.”

  But Paul Fitzgerald, the defense attorney, “said he never saw any of that. He said he was shocked,” I explained.

  “He may have forgotten about them himself!” Bugliosi shouted. “Look, if I’m going to try to hide them, I throw them away! Why wouldn’t I throw them away? Everything that I had was turned over to the defense. Everything.”

  “He didn’t say he didn’t remember, he said he never saw it.”

  Bugliosi scoffed. “Terry would never have associated with these people if he thought they committed these murders,” he said. “If he did go out there afterward, it wasn’t because he was complicit… I’m investigating this case, I’m handling all the witnesses, things could have gotten past me. But you’ve got to ask yourself this question, what could I possibly gain?”

  I told him how Stephen Kay, his own coprosecutor, had reacted to these documents: “If Vince was covering this stuff up… what else did he change?”

  Bugliosi gave a brittle laugh. “Oh, Jesus, that is so laughable it’s just unbelievable. Just absolutely unbelievable. That I’d cover up that Terry Melcher had gone out to Spahn Ranch after the murders. It’s just so extremely insignificant, it wouldn’t help me at all.” But it wasn’t insignificant, and from his reaction I could tell he knew it. These pages rewrote the narrative of the case. That’s why Melcher had threatened to throw them from his rooftop; that’s why Bugliosi would sue me if I printed them.

  Around and around we went. Bugliosi said, “When Terry was on the witness stand, did he testify that he
never saw Manson after May?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So, that’s perjury.”

  “So you’re saying that Terry lied on the witness stand.” Still, he didn’t see the point, or pretended not to. Until I read him his own closing argument, he refused to recognize that he’d even used Melcher as part of the motive for the murders. He’d said in his summation, “indirectly [Manson] was striking back at Terry Melcher personally. By ordering a mass murder at Melcher’s former residence, Manson obviously knew that Melcher’s realization that these murders took place at a residence in which he lived just a couple of months earlier would literally paralyze Melcher with fear.” If that were so, why did Melcher go out to visit Manson at least three times afterward? All Bugliosi could say about the matter was that it “must have slipped past me.” To accuse him of conspiring with Melcher was “mind-boggling craziness.”