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

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

  What about Reeve Whitson, the mysterious figure who’d helped gain the testimony of Sharon Tate’s photographer friend, Shahrokh Hatami? Did Bugliosi remember Whitson?

  “Oh, possibly,” he said.

  The hours ticked by, and whatever I threw at him, he deflected. The replacement of Susan Atkins’s attorney? I showed him the memos. “I don’t remember any of this stuff.”

  Manson’s mysterious move to San Francisco, which violated his parole even though Bugliosi had wrongly written that he “requested and received permission” for it? “I can’t even remember that.”

  How about the warrant for the massive August 16 raid at the Spahn Ranch? Bugliosi had asserted, incorrectly, that it was “misdated.” “I don’t know where I got that,” he said.

  “I wanted to ask you about Roger and David Smith,” I said. (I wasn’t about to get into the matter of Jolly West; I knew it’d be met with a blank stare.)

  “Who are they?” I gave him my spiel on the paramount significance of Manson’s year in San Francisco. “That’s good stuff that you’ve come up with,” he said. “Are they mentioned in my book?” Barely, I said. He was unfazed. “Must’ve gotten past me.”

  To present our back-and-forth in granular detail would be excruciating—reading through the transcript never fails to give me a headache. Suffice it to say that the subject of Terry Melcher always riled him up. Anything and everything else, he hardly cared about; if it didn’t involve him directly, he had no use for it. He reiterated that he was “the fairest prosecutor in the land,” and that a hefty hundred-million-dollar lawsuit awaited me if I suggested otherwise. This is when he fell into his refrain about “the Man in the Mirror.” Because he was ethical “to an unprecedented degree,” he could live with the sight of his own reflection. He didn’t understand how I could live with mine. Manson himself had a fondness for the same phrase: “I am the man in the mirror,” he said. “Anything you see in me is in you, I am you, and when you can admit that you will be free.”

  When Bugliosi and I finished, at last, he confessed that he was sometimes obsessive and overreactive—Gail had told him he might have a psychiatric disorder. But he’d done nothing wrong, and he didn’t want his admittedly frenetic behavior to color my impressions of his conduct as a prosecutor.

  It was a rare moment of self-awareness, probably the last I ever saw in him. The aftermath of our meeting was a series of alternately coaxing and acrimonious phone calls at all hours of the day and night, conveying a thinly veiled ultimatum: I could drop anything negative about him from my book or fear his wrath. If I published such “outrageous,” “preposterous,” and “unbelievable” lies, the lawsuit was a foregone conclusion.

  Before the litigation, though, would come the letter: a cri de coeur to my editor at Penguin, with the publisher and president of the company in cc. It would be “very, very, very long,” Bugliosi warned. He’d take “six, seven, eight hours” to write the first of “many drafts.” He didn’t want to do it—he’d gladly tear it up if I called to apologize.

  “There is nothing to decide, here, Tom,” he continued, sounding like a used-car salesman. “It’s so damn easy.”

  When I declined for the last time, he said, “We should view ourselves as adversaries,” and told me to expect the letter.

  Now that Bugliosi was my sworn adversary, his next move hardly came as a surprise: the smear campaign. First thing next morning, I got a panicked message from Rudi Altobelli, the flamboyant talent manager who’d owned the house on Cielo Drive. We hadn’t spoken in four years.

  “Please give me a call so I can understand what I’m talking about,” the elderly Altobelli said. “I still love you.”

  Altobelli had gotten a disturbing call from Bugliosi. “The first thing he wanted to know about was your relationships with young boys,” he told me when I called back. As Bugliosi remembered it, Altobelli had told him years ago that I “dated ten, twelve, and fourteen-year-olds,” Altobelli said, adding that he knew it was a lie. I’m gay, and when Altobelli and I became friends, I was dating someone younger—but he was twenty-nine, not twelve. At that time, Bugliosi was in regular communication with Altobelli, who felt he must’ve told him I was dating a younger guy. But then and now, Bugliosi knew he meant a young man, not a kid. “You’re creating something that isn’t so,” Altobelli told him.

  “I’m not going to talk to him anymore,” Altobelli said. “Ever.” Bugliosi kept calling for weeks; in just one morning, he left seven messages on Altobelli’s machine. He wanted Altobelli to sign a letter saying I’d lied about Melcher. Altobelli refused.

  At least now I knew the “terrible things” about me that Bugliosi had referred to; they were as transparently false as I’d suspected. I could see why he’d twice been sued for defamation. In his long career, Bugliosi had lied under oath; he’d lied to newspapers; he’d lied to police and investigators from his own office. Now that I’d called him a liar, he was plenty willing to lie about me, too.

  His letter arrived at Penguin on July 3, 2006. It had taken five months to write. It was thirty-four pages, single-spaced. And, as it turned out, it was the first of many such letters. As Bugliosi had promised, copies were delivered to my editor and my publisher, so we could take in its distortions, ad hominem attacks, and vigorous self-aggrandizement as a team. Often referring to me as “super-sleuth O’Neal”—the misspelling was intentional, I believe; he’d done the same to his nemesis Stephen Kay in Helter Skelter—Bugliosi claimed that I’d first approached him for the sole purpose of discovering titillating factoids about Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s “private sex and drug lives.” (Easy to disprove—I’d taped the whole interview.) He hinted at his allegations of pedophilia and claimed that I’d accused him of framing Manson. Most of all, he attacked the significance—or lack thereof—of my findings on Terry Melcher.

  “Can you see why there is a part of me that actually wants O’Neal’s dream to come true,” he wrote, “so that I can have the opportunity to get even with him and destroy his life more than he’s trying to destroy mine?” If Penguin moved forward with my book, the publisher “would almost assuredly be perceived by the national media as taking a position in defense of Charles Manson, one of history’s most notorious murderers.” He followed up with letters to all of the Family’s imprisoned murderers except Manson himself, asking if they’d refute my claims about Melcher’s involvement with the group. No one replied.

  When it became clear that Penguin would stand behind me, Bugliosi sent another letter in 2007. And another in 2008, inveighing against my project and the irreparable harm it would do to his children, especially if, as I’d told him I would, I detailed the lawsuits he’d faced over the years.

  I’d promised my editor that I’d finish my reporting by August 1, 2006. Though I may never have hit that deadline anyway, Bugliosi’s letter derailed me. Everyone I knew urged me not to respond on a point-by-point basis. But how could I not? I had no intention of replying to him directly, but he’d gotten the best of my inner obsessive, and I spent a while collating all the evidence that refuted his claims. If he did plan on suing me, I’d be ready. In light of his threats, I told him I was now treating everything he’d said to me as on the record. Back in 1999, he’d given me my first shred of new information on the case, telling me off the record that Roman Polanski had forced Sharon Tate to have sex with two other men on tape. Since Bugliosi had detailed this allegation in one of his letters to Penguin, I saw no need to keep it off the record.

  My fastidiousness distracted me from that looming dread, perhaps best articulated by Bugliosi himself: “Where does it all go, Tom? Where does it all go?” I thought his apoplexy confirmed that I was on the right track, but I’d have to find the answers without any help from him. And now there was another unanswerable question: Was it all worth it? All the lonely hours in my car, the endless days poring over transcripts at archives from the edge of Death Valley to small towns in Washington and Nevada; begging and battling for police record
s; studying obscure medical journals and academic papers; filing hundreds of FOIA requests; fielding death threats and promises of litigation… could I really say it was worth it? Honestly, I didn’t know anymore. And this was before I fell into a debt of more than half a million dollars.

  Digging for Bodies in the Desert

  Bugliosi had rattled me, but I tried to shake him off. I had a book to finish—or, more realistically, a book to start. Whenever I sat down, opened up Microsoft Word, and confronted a blinking cursor over a snowy expanse of white, I found it easy to make other plans. Sometimes I’d eke out ten or fifteen pages only to recoil at the holes in my story. My theory that Manson and West were linked was tenuous, circumstantial, lying solely in the fact that they’d walked the corridors of the same clinic. Wouldn’t it be more effective to argue that the entire prosecution of Manson was a sham, with Helter Skelter as a cover-up? Bugliosi had said he “must have missed” Manson’s San Francisco chapter—but everyone who knew him said he’d never miss it. I had to show that he concealed more, that witnesses besides Melcher lied, that there was an elaborate scheme to misrepresent the facts. Sure, I told myself: that would be better. I’d go back to the trial transcripts—maybe a few weeks here, a spare weekend there, while I wrote. Maybe Jolly West didn’t even belong in the book. Maybe Reeve Whitson was just padding. Maybe, maybe…

  I put more effort into begging for deadline extensions than I did into writing the book. And the world kept concocting reasons for me to keep reporting. Toward the end of 2007, a homicide cop named Paul Dostie claimed to have found forensic evidence of at least five bodies buried at the Barker Ranch in Death Valley, where Manson was captured in 1969. Dostie’s trained cadaver dog had sniffed out unidentified remains in the area. As part of a big PR push, Dostie asked me for information supporting the possibility that these could be Manson’s long rumored additional victims. His comrade-in-arms was Debra Tate, Sharon’s sister, who had become a good friend of mine. Their effort garnered national media coverage. Soon the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office authorized a dig in the desert.

  Skeptics liked to ask: What did it matter if the police had taken so many months to bring the Family to justice after the murders? Even if they fudged the investigation, they still found him eventually. My answer was always that the Family may have used those extra months to continue their murder spree. At the trial, a ranch hand told police that Manson had bragged about killing thirty-five people; Bugliosi thought the number “may even exceed Manson’s estimate.” The bodies had been buried or staged to look like suicides. Just because the Family had never been prosecuted for these killings didn’t mean they hadn’t happened. If I could put a human face on the death toll, I could say with certainty that we were right to question the official narrative—that the failures of the police, deliberate or not, had a steep cost.

  Dostie’s dig could help me with that, but I already had a lead on a promising unsolved murder from the Family’s time in Death Valley. In January 2008—motivated by the surge of support for Dostie’s work, petitions from Debra Tate, and my own preliminary reporting—police announced that they were reopening an investigation into this death. This was great news, except when it came to my book. I worried that the renewed attention would compromise my final reporting. Former Family members might go back underground after I’d taken months to find out where they lived. The police might flush out information about the unsolved murder that I’d been on the brink of finding myself. I had to hit the road right away. The writing was on hold yet again.

  A good part of my trip was a bust. I spent six months living out of cheap motels and crashing on friends’ couches, racing across the Pacific Northwest to confront Family members at their doorsteps, along with a slew of other boldfaced names from Helter Skelter, most of whom had never been found. They were not happy to see me. Very few of them agreed to speak to me at all. Several chased me off their property—two with gardening shears.

  Just when I was starting to think that the trip was a total wash, I made my last big break. I had proof—beyond a reasonable doubt, I thought—that the Manson Family had killed a young man in the desert, and that investigators had covered it up.

  What Happened to Filippo Tenerelli?

  On September 29, 1969, a twenty-three-year-old named Filippo Tenerelli left his parents’ home in a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle. Tenerelli, a native Italian, had immigrated to Los Angeles with his family in 1959. He had no history of mental illness and no arrests.

  Tenerelli made the long drive from Culver City to Father Crowley Point, an overlook at Death Valley National Park offering majestic desert vistas. He was there to drive his car over the cliff.

  But at the precipice, the Beetle got caught on boulders, thwarting his suicide. Frustrated, Tenerelli took a pickax and a shovel from his trunk and dislodged the car. Then, his fury overpowering his suicidal impulses, he pushed it over the edge. The car fell some four hundred feet, coming to rest wheels up at the bottom of the canyon. He clambered down the steep, rocky terrain, reached into the car to retrieve his belongings, and cut his hands on something inside, leaving blood splatters on the ceiling.

  No one knew how Tenerelli spent the rest of the day, or the day following. On the evening of the thirtieth, he wound up in Bishop, California, one hundred miles away. He checked into unit 3 of the Sportsman’s Lodge motel, where he again tried and failed to kill himself, slashing his right wrist. The cut was superficial, and he covered it with a bandage.

  The next day, October 1, Tenerelli went to the town’s sporting-goods store and bought a twenty-gauge shotgun, some ammo, a case, and a cleaning kit. Elsewhere, he picked up two fifths of whiskey, two pairs of underwear, a safety razor, and an issue of Playboy.

  That night Tenerelli emerged from his motel room when he heard fire engines. The fire department was doing a controlled demolition of a building across the street. The motel owner, Bee Greer, was watching, and she told Tenerelli what was going on. He observed the fire for a while and returned to his room. No one saw him alive again.

  A maid tried to get into Tenerelli’s room the next morning. The door was barricaded from the inside. Around noon, Greer’s husband and son pushed it in. There was Tenerelli, dead of a gunshot to the face.

  Police reports concluded that Tenerelli had blocked the door with a chair, put the loaded shotgun into his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. He was lying on his back on the floor, dressed only in jeans, with “two Turkish bath towels under his head, possibly to soak up blood,” and “a bed pillow over his head, apparently to muffle the sound.” He’d shaved all of his pubic hair—some of it was between the pages of the Playboy he’d bought. But when he’d checked in to the motel, he’d given someone else’s name. With no ID to be found, he was listed as a John Doe.

  Tenerelli’s family filed a missing persons report on October 3. The next day, two hunters spotted his overturned Beetle at the bottom of Father Crowley Point and notified the California Highway Patrol. An officer went to look and, noticing the blood on the ceiling, suspected foul play. The Tenerelli family learned that their son’s abandoned car had been discovered in Death Valley.

  For three weeks, the Bishop Police Department tried to ID their John Doe while the county sheriff’s office looked for the missing Tenerelli. They never connected their parallel investigations, though they had stations next door to each other in Bishop, and the same coroner’s office served them both.

  On October 30, the Inyo Register reported that the “suicide victim” had been positively identified as Filippo Tenerelli of Culver City. Tenerelli had been IDed by X-rays that matched his patient records at an L.A. hospital. But the case was soon pushed from the local papers by an even wilder story: in a remote area of Death Valley, a band of nomadic hippies had been arrested for destroying government property and operating an auto-theft ring. In the coming weeks, they’d be charged with the grisly murders of Sharon Tate and seven others in Los Angeles.

  Although it wasn’t reported at the t
ime, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office and the California Highway Patrol did briefly consider the possibility that the Family was responsible for Tenerelli’s death. According to documents I found, investigators doubted that Tenerelli had died by his own hand; they had evidence linking Family members to his death. Their suspicions were obliquely referenced in a Los Angeles Times story two weeks after the Family was charged in the Tate–LaBianca murders. The paper reported that law enforcement was looking into other potential Family murders, including a “motorcyclist killed in Bishop.” Six months later, a Rolling Stone story quoted an “insider” in the Los Angeles DA’s office—later identified as Aaron Stovitz—who suggested that the death of “a Philip Tenerelli” might’ve been the Family’s doing. But no one had reported what, if anything, led investigators to their suspicions. In 2007, when I began looking into Tenerelli’s death, no one outside of law enforcement had seen documents linking Tenerelli to the Family.

  I started with three people: the mayor of Bishop, Frank Crom, who’d been on the police force in 1969; Lieutenant Chris Carter, currently of the Bishop Police Department; and Leon Brune, the chief deputy coroner in ’69, and still coroner of Inyo County.

  Carter said the records of Tenerelli’s suicide had been “purged.” Only unsolved homicide records were kept indefinitely. (Another cop who’d worked the case said he’d seen the records as recently as 1993.) Brune, meanwhile, faxed me the autopsy report and his investigation of the death. His record gave me a much clearer picture of Tenerelli’s death, but I found some glaring inconsistencies. The story got even murkier when I tracked down the original Bishop Police Department investigative report, which suggested a far more sinister ending to Tenerelli’s life—and, perhaps more disturbing, a cover-up of that ending by investigators that continued into the present. Something was wrong.