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

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

  I met Brune at his mortuary in Bishop, where I was ushered into a somber reception area and asked to wait: he was with someone at the moment. That someone turned out to be Mayor Frank Crom, who didn’t offer me his hand when he emerged from Brune’s office. Instead, he followed me back into the room—he intended to sit in on our interview, whether I minded or not. As we took our seats, I got out my tape recorder. Crom said he wouldn’t allow our conversation to be recorded. Things didn’t get much better from there. Crom answered or amended my questions to Brune, constantly interrupting us.

  I tried to ask Brune about the sketch of the murder scene I’d found among the pages he’d faxed. Why weren’t the motel room windows included in the sketch? No mention was made of them in the report. How big were they? When the body was discovered, were they open or closed, locked or unlocked?

  Crom answered for him: “No one could’ve gotten in or out of those windows. They were too small.”

  Barely ten minutes after we started, Brune shot a nervous glance at Crom and ended the meeting. He had business to attend to. I’d asked him only half of my questions. Crom got me out of the building and followed me to my car, repeating that there was no way the death was anything but a suicide. He suggested I was wasting my time. Everything in his behavior said the opposite.

  The Sportsman’s Lodge, where Tenerelli died, was long gone. But Bee Greer, the owner, wasn’t. A spry eighty-one-year-old widow with a razor-sharp memory, she flatly contradicted the mayor’s statement that her motel windows were too small to climb in or out of. Maybe even two people at a time could fit through them, she said. Her son, Kermit, who’d helped push in the barricaded door of Tenerelli’s room, was with us that day. He added that his parents had often punished him by locking him in the same unit. He’d always climb out the windows, he said, and he wasn’t much smaller then than he was now. (And he was a big guy.)

  If I didn’t believe him, why not go see for myself? The motel hadn’t been demolished, he reported. It’d been sold to an alfalfa ranch just outside of town: they picked up the whole structure and moved it out there a few years before.

  I drove out to Zack’s Ranch to have a look. Just as the Greers had said, the windows were big enough for two people to climb through at the same time. Andi Zack, whose late father had bought the motel units, told me that all the windows were original. She showed me unit 3 and let me photograph it.

  Bee Greer remembered when Tenerelli showed up to the motel. He arrived without a car, she said, which was why he had to show her a driver’s license—something the police and the newspapers had explicitly said he didn’t do.

  “I never would’ve checked anyone in who came without a car and a license,” she said—without those, she’d have no collateral if there were damages to the property or the customer tried to bolt without paying. She copied the license information into her register, which she later gave to the police. But the cops, Crom among them, refused to believe that the victim had showed her ID, or even that he had a wallet. “They kept coming back and trying to talk me out of it,” she said, still angry all these years later. “It was a wallet with a driver’s license—but they didn’t want me to say that.”

  Later, I found a registration form from the Sportsman’s Lodge. It had Tenerelli’s name on it—misspelled—and it showed that he paid for a thirty-three-day stay beginning on October 1, 1969. The total was $156, paid in full. Bee Greer told me it was “exactly” the same registration form she would’ve used in 1969, but a couple of things didn’t seem right. The customer always filled out the form. Why would Tenerelli have spelled his own name wrong? There should’ve been a home address and a driver’s license number, but neither was there. Tenerelli’s sister later confirmed that this wasn’t his handwriting. Plus, Tenerelli had a noticeable Italian accent. The man Greer spoke with had no accent at all. Maybe someone had checked in under Tenerelli’s name, paying for a month in advance to ensure that the body wouldn’t be discovered right away.

  The police reports contained no photographs of the crime scene. They made no mention of any forensics tests—no ballistics, blood splatters, fingerprints, rigor mortis. Officials I spoke to said these would have been routine in an unattended shooting death, even in 1969. There was a lab report showing that Tenerelli’s blood-alcohol level at the time of his death was .03%, which doesn’t even qualify as under the influence. But he’d bought those two fifths of whiskey the night before he died. When his body was found, one bottle was sitting empty in the wastebasket; the other was on a shelf, only a third full. If Tenerelli didn’t drink all that whiskey, who did?

  The documents made me wonder when exactly Bishop police and the coroner’s office had figured out the identity of the John Doe in their morgue. On October 17, a radiologist at Washington Hospital in Culver City examined X-rays of the John Doe sent to her by the Inyo County coroner. They were “similar or identical,” she wrote, to those of a patient who’d been operated on at the hospital after a motorcycle accident in ’64: Tenerelli. The Inyo coroner had been notified of the match “within twenty-four hours,” so they’d identified their John Doe as Tenerelli no later than October 18. And yet the chief of police had told the Inyo Register that the identification came ten days later, on October 28.

  The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office was investigating the case from the other side: they’d found Tenerelli’s totaled Beetle in the desert, and they wanted to know where he’d gone. Documents from their investigation suggested that the coroner’s office withheld information from them. When an Inyo detective asked about Bishop’s John Doe on October 28, Brune didn’t tell him they’d identified the victim nearly two weeks earlier.

  Had Brune deliberately kept this from the sheriff? Why wasn’t Tenerelli’s identification shared with the other agencies—or his own family—sooner? I could never ask Brune. Neither he nor Crom spoke to me again.

  Robert Denton, the surgeon who’d conducted Tenerelli’s autopsy, told me he’d never believed the case was a suicide; he only called it that under pressure from the coroner’s office. Looking over his own report, Denton said, “See where I wrote, ‘This man seems to be a suicide’? I wasn’t happy with this. That’s why I wrote seems.” He shook his head. “There were bum things going on here.” It appeared to him now, as it probably did then, that Tenerelli had been “in a fight or dragged” before he was shot. In those days, he said, a lot of “questionable deaths” were “signed off as suicides”: “It was too expensive to investigate… People didn’t want to be involved.”

  On the other side, the sheriffs and the California Highway Patrol were looking into the abandoned Volkswagen with blood on its interior.

  A report filed by one of the sheriff’s deputies on October 5 said, “From indications at the scene… the vehicle has not been at the location for more than two days.” If that was true, Tenerelli couldn’t have dumped the car. His body had been found three days earlier, on October 2, and the estimated time of death was between 9:30 and 10:30 p.m., October 1.

  And yet all the newspapers, working on information from the police, reported that Tenerelli had ditched his car there after a failed suicide attempt. Why did police concoct this story when they knew it couldn’t be true?

  There were clues among the evidence recovered from the scene near the car. Cops found a pickax and a shovel with a broken handle, as well as beer and soda bottles—all covered in what was thought to be Tenerelli’s blood. Then there was a cache of unused shotgun shells, a loaf of French bread and a package of lunch meat, maps, “miscellaneous papers,” and several documents indicating that Tenerelli might not have been alone in the car: a “meal” and “laundry” sheet from Brentwood Hospital, where he had neither worked nor been a patient; and a Santa Monica bus schedule, which he wouldn’t have needed because he owned a car and a motorcycle.

  The two hunters who’d chanced upon Tenerelli’s car had observed someone “coming up from the wreck” as they climbed down to it, sheriffs’ reports said. There was far more bloo
d in and around the vehicle than the papers had reported: blood on the fender and bumper, inside the driver’s-side door and under the dash, palm prints in dried blood, scratch marks going through the dried blood… a lot of blood from just one man who had no noticeable wounds when he arrived in Bishop. Bee Greer had told police that when she talked to Tenerelli he “seemed quite natural and told her that he was here to look the area over and possibly find a job.” If the coroner’s time of death was correct, Tenerelli had shaved his pubes, downed a bottle and a half of whiskey, and shot himself within two hours of that conversation.

  Meanwhile, memos from the California Highway Patrol suggested suspects for the murder: the group of hippie car thieves they’d recently taken into custody. In Bishop, “around the 1st of October,” a highway patrolman had stopped a “late model” blue Volkswagen; Tenerelli drove a ’69 blue Volkswagen, and October 1 was the day before his body was found. The patrolman questioned the driver, who, like his two male passengers, was a “hippie” type. Later, investigators showed the patrolman a photograph of the Family, including Manson, Steven Grogan, and Danny DeCarlo. He “was sure” that DeCarlo was the driver of the car.

  The report continued: “Even though Tenerelli was supposed to be a definite suicide, perhaps Bishop PD would be interested, especially if we can place DiCarlo [sic] in Bishop after 9-29-69 and prior to or on 10-1-69.” I checked, and DeCarlo was in Death Valley on exactly the dates in question. But there was no indication that the Highway Patrol had shared their findings with the Bishop Police Department.

  Records from the Inyo District Attorney contained a morgue photograph of Tenerelli’s face, with a note attached. DAs wanted to find another photo of Tenerelli to show to “Kitty”: the Family’s Kitty Lutesinger, who’d run away from Death Valley before her friends were caught, and who’d briefly cooperated with investigators. If she told detectives anything about Tenerelli, we’ll probably never know—there were no other documents linking the two, and she refused to speak to me when I knocked on her door in 2008.

  Neither of the officers who investigated Tenerelli’s abandoned Volkswagen believed he committed suicide. One of them, the California Highway Patrol’s Doug Manning, called the official story “a bunch of malarkey.” The other, Inyo sheriff’s deputy Dennis Cox, called it “bullshit.”

  Cox was sure the car was “dumped” in Death Valley after Tenerelli’s death in Bishop. He’d been to Father Crowley Point the day before the hunters discovered the Beetle, and “it wasn’t there.” After the Manson Family was arrested for their auto-theft ring, one of the girls told investigators that she was “involved” with Tenerelli, and that he’d been with the Family in Death Valley before his death. But Cox couldn’t remember who’d said that.

  When police in Death Valley finally captured the Family, they’d been tracking the group’s car thefts and burglaries since September 29 at the latest. They might not have known yet that their suspects were killers, but they did know that they’d been stealing vehicles all over Inyo County, with a special predilection for Volkswagen Beetles, which they liked to convert into dune buggies for use in the rugged desert terrain.

  One last thing bothered me: the pubic hair. If, as police reports stated, Tenerelli had shaved his pubes just before killing himself, and a “few strands” had been found “between the pages” of a Playboy magazine—what happened to the rest? The Family’s Bill Vance had a “magic vest” he liked to wear that was “made of pubic hair,” per a report from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. The LASO report never said where the pubic hair came from—and how could it, really?—but I found it relevant that Vance, an associate of Manson from prison, was arrested for stealing a gun from a car in Death Valley on October 5, 1969, the day Tenerelli’s car was pulled from the nearby ravine.

  Coda: “Out of the Loop”

  In January 2008, Bishop’s new chief of police, Kathleen Sheehan, called to say she’d heard about my investigation from Debra Tate. In light of my findings she was reopening the investigation into Tenerelli’s death. She assigned a homicide detective, David Jepson, to the case, asking me to share my findings with him. “Murder doesn’t happen every day around here,” she said.

  I was happy to help. For once, I thought my reporting might yield positive results, rather than dead ends and obfuscation. Jepson and I spoke on the phone more than a dozen times before he decided to visit me in L.A. That July, he and his superior, Chris Carter, drove 275 miles to meet with me in the dining room of the Embassy Suites Hotel in El Segundo.

  During our four-hour meeting, which Jepson recorded, I showed them everything. Both officers agreed that the death was a “probable” murder and vowed to continue their investigation in Bishop. Carter said he didn’t “believe in coincidences,” and there were “too many” here. But toward the end of the meeting they turned off the recorder and made an odd request.

  Carter asked me to copy the documents I’d shared that day and mail the file to a “personal” P.O. box in Bishop. The detectives were concerned that their chief, Sheehan, would use this case to get publicity. They wanted to keep her “out of the loop on this one” until the investigation was over.

  I didn’t like the sound of that, and I told them so. Sheehan had been the one who reopened the case. We wouldn’t be meeting if not for her.

  Making sure the recorder was still off, Carter said he believed Sheehan would “kill the investigation” if she found out that “it involved a cover-up or even incompetence.” And the mayor, Frank Crom—who’d already tried to persuade me to leave well enough alone—would “pull the plug if [we] discover cover-up aspects.” The detectives assured me they’d prevent any derailment of the investigation, and they promised to share anything new they uncovered. Against my better instincts, I agreed to continue cooperating with them.

  That was a big mistake. I never heard from either officer again. Through intermediaries, I learned they were telling people in Bishop that their investigation had turned up no pursuable evidence and the case had been closed.

  The three of us had discussed people they’d want to interview when they returned to Bishop. I called a lot of those people—they’d never heard from the detectives. In fact, in the six months between the reopening of the case and their visit to me in L.A., they had interviewed only three people. That number never went up. According to the scant record Jepson finally shared with me in 2011, he never conducted another interview after our meeting.

  When I finally got Jepson on the phone, I reminded him that he’d promised to share his findings with me. He said his files were in a storage shed in his backyard. It took him weeks to dig through this shed. Because I kept leaving him messages, he eventually called me back and, sounding triumphant, told me that he’d found one of his notebooks. He faxed me the pages from it: they covered the same period I already knew about, during which he’d spoken to all of three people. Jepson was sure there were later interviews, but he kept searching in his shed, and nothing turned up.

  I had to ask if the investigation had been quashed, as he and Carter had warned it would be if it disclosed a “cover-up” or “incompetence” in the old department.

  After a lot of prodding, Jepson recalled “conversations” at the police department before their meeting with me—something to the effect that they weren’t going to have “people come up here and smear a retired lieutenant’s [Frank Crom’s] name and smear the department.”

  I knew I had to go to Jepson’s superiors, beginning with Sheehan. By then she’d left Bishop to become chief of police in Port Hueneme, another small town in California. Although she sounded happy to hear from me again on the phone, by the time I drove out to see her the next day, her mood had darkened. Like Jepson, she said the investigation was over, and that was all there was to it. When I explained that Carter and Jepson had said that she craved publicity and should be kept “out of the loop,” she didn’t believe it. I showed her my notes from that meeting, and she accused me of fabricating them. I’d seen these re
versals many times before, almost exclusively from law enforcement officials. But Sheehan’s was so abrupt, so hard, that I left her office shaken—whatever had happened in Bishop, I believed she was a part of it.

  Chris Carter, who’d succeeded Sheehan as chief of the Bishop Police Department, was clearly prepared for my call. He denied everything he’d said to me in L.A. while his recorder was off. I asked for a copy of the tape—he’d be happy to provide it. I knew he’d made his incriminating remarks when the recorder wasn’t running, I said, but I still expected to hear the click of the machine going off and on again. I should’ve kept that to myself. Two weeks later, when I called again, he claimed the tape had been lost or destroyed.

  Nevertheless, I filed an Open Records Act Request with the Bishop Police Department for all files on their reinvestigation of the Tenerelli death. I received a response saying no records had been found.

  Through all this, I never stopped thinking of Tenerelli’s mother, Caterina, whom I’d met in 2008, when she was ninety-four. With one of her daughters translating her Italian, she told me she never accepted that her son killed himself. She believed God had kept her alive to learn the truth about him. But she’d died at ninety-nine, never knowing the answers.

  Paul Dostie, the detective with the cadaver dog, had no better luck than I did. The sheriff halted his dig in Death Valley after less than two feet of earth had been removed.

  And now my book was even more overdue than my article to Premiere had ever been. Penguin had granted me extension after extension, approving another advance payment to me to keep me afloat. In the meantime, my editor had left the house, and the 2008 recession had editorial departments tightening their belts. Author contracts had once come with implicit latitude. Now, with lots of money on the line, editors wanted something to show for their investments, especially when an untested writer had received a significant advance.