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

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

  The fortieth anniversary of the Tate–LaBianca murders came and went. It had now been ten years since my report for Premiere was supposed to appear. The magazine didn’t even exist anymore. On cable news, my fellow reporters and dozens of my interview subjects showed up as talking heads, discussing the continuing significance of the murders. There was Bugliosi, still hawking Helter Skelter, calling the crimes “revolutionary, political.”

  I fumbled and fiddled, trying to find a workable structure for the book. Should it begin with MKULTRA? The night of the Tate murders? No matter where I dropped in, I tripped myself up with parentheticals and long digressions; there was no starting point that didn’t entail a herculean amount of exposition. I sent in outlines, synopses, addenda, half-starts, revised proposals. None of them hit the mark, and I knew that. I’d come to feel like a prisoner of my own story. Everyone agreed that it would make for an outstanding book; no one, least of all me, could describe what that book might look like, or how it would accommodate a plot that had no end. By 2011, I’d taken so long to deliver that my original editor had come back to Penguin. He proposed bringing on a collaborator, someone who could metabolize my reporting into a cogent narrative.

  I was all for it. Penguin helped me find an ideal candidate: a journalist with decades of political reporting and many books under his belt, someone with experience and sangfroid. When he signed on, I felt like I could see a lifeboat on the horizon. He wrote yet another synopsis, one that yielded the first unabashedly positive note from Penguin I’d gotten in years. “We find this very encouraging: full speed ahead.”

  That was in October 2011. By December, he’d quit. Our deadline—the last one—was only six months away, and now I was flying solo.

  After he walked, Penguin offered to buy me out. If I let someone else write the book—completely—I’d receive no more money, no credit, no input, nothing. All I’d get was the portion of the advance I’d already received—and spent, years before, on nothing but reporting the book. I told my agent to tell them to go to hell.

  I decided to use those remaining six months to write the book myself. Before he’d even seen my manuscript, my editor warned that there was only a one in a million chance they wouldn’t reject it. I typed out pages in furious haste. I tried to be thorough, to be linear. I wrote in the first person, hoping to give readers a sense of what I’d been thinking. And in June 2012, I turned in what I had: 129 pages, single-spaced, amounting to 117,228 words. It covered barely the first three months of my reporting.

  If you’ve inspected the spine of this book, you’ve already noticed that the Penguin Press colophon isn’t on it. They canceled the book. I like to believe my editor was sorry it came to this, and that he believed in the project. I don’t believe Penguin’s lawyers shared his sorrow—they wanted their money back. If I didn’t pay up by the start of 2013, they would have no choice but to sue me.

  I didn’t have that money, of course. I’d been living on it, as the publisher had intended me to, for years. A few months earlier, I’d been hoping to repay my parents for their loan. Now I was in the hole with them and one of the biggest publishers in the world. In 2012, I became one of a dozen authors Penguin sued for failing to deliver manuscripts. Most were far more established than I was. The lawsuits sent waves of panic through the industry. Even though mine was for the most money, it came half a year later than the others, and so, mercifully, it didn’t make the papers. That was one humiliation I was spared.

  But I was still devastated. I felt like I’d failed everyone. I had one job to do, and I hadn’t done it. Paul Krassner, the journalist who’d warned me that the story would “take over my life,” was more than right: it had chewed me up and spit me out. I didn’t know how I could ever report on anything else now. My agent shopped the book around to other publishers, and while a few were interested in buying the rights, the offers never materialized. Some documentary filmmakers had courted me, too, and one, an Oscar winner, went so far as to make some test footage, which he sold as a series to a premium cable station. But there, too, things fell apart. In all honesty, though, I was the one who backed out of these projects. Inevitably, the conversations ran aground on questions of ownership—some legal, others more figurative. Whose story was this? How far did you have to step back before you could fit a frame around it? And, of course: Where did it all go?

  I remember a day soon after the deal fell apart. My neighbor, a good friend, was walking his dogs and saw me sitting outside, looking miserable. He invited me to join him. After trying to distract me with pleasantries for a while, he turned the conversation to the lawsuit.

  “Do you regret all this?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. I shocked myself with my answer, but I really believed it. “This has been the most exciting thirteen years of my life. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of catching these people in lies, and documenting it—knowing that you’ve found something no one else has found.”

  I kept little pieces of cardboard around my office. Sometimes I folded them up and carried them in my pocket. Whenever I started doubting myself, which was a lot, I had a list of bullet points I’d write down on them and read to myself for encouragement—a reminder of what I’d discovered that no one else had, what I knew I had to share with the world. Like: Stephen Kay telling me that my findings were important enough to overturn the verdicts. Lewis Watnick, the retired DA, saying that Manson had to be an informant. Jolly West writing to his CIA handlers to announce that he’d implanted a false memory in someone; the CIA removing that information from the report they shared with Congress. The DA’s office conspiring with a judge to replace a defense attorney. Charlie Guenther, fighting back tears to tell me about the wiretap he’d heard. People had confided in me. I’d wrested documents from places other reporters had never penetrated. What did it mean, and what would I do with it?

  When I got back from the walk with my neighbor that day, I fished out one of the cardboard squares and read the bullet points again. Each one set off a chain of reminders to myself: People I needed to call. FOIA requests I had to follow up on. A new book on the CIA I hadn’t read yet. A retired detective whose files were probably, at this very second, quietly turning to dust in his garage…

  What else could I do?

  I kept reporting.

  EPILOGUE

  The Manson murders have an aura of finality. In 2016, The Guardian marveled at how they compel us despite “the lack of any meaty mystery”: “There are no questions about what happened… We know pretty much exactly who did what to whom, when and why.” In a sense, that’s true: the material evidence is sickeningly conclusive, and it still shocks today. But it doesn’t make sense. The mystery is there.

  In my nearly twenty years of reporting on this case, people have asked me all the time: What do I think really happened? I hate that question more than anything. The plain answer is, I don’t know. I worry that as soon as I speculate, I undermine the work I’ve done. In a sense, had I been more willing to fill in the blanks, I might’ve finished this book a lot sooner.

  That’s not to say I haven’t entertained a lot of pet theories over the years. They’ve fallen in and out of favor as I learned more or shifted my focus. For a while, I was convinced the victims at the Tate and LaBianca houses knew their killers in the Family, that they’d been targeted—maybe not by the girls, but by Manson and Tex Watson. It may have had something to do with a drug burn, or an unknown middleman with connections to Hollywood. Or there’s the possibility that the Family was caught up in a CHAOS or COINTELPRO operation, goaded into violence as sheriff’s deputies and the LAPD looked the other way, necessitating a cover-up. And there’s the most “far out” theory: that Manson was tied to an MKULTRA effort to create assassins who would kill on command.

  It’s when someone claims that I’ve “found the truth” that I get anxious. I haven’t found the truth, much as I wish I could say I have. My goal isn’t to say what did happen—it’s to prove that the official story
didn’t. I’ve learned to accept the ambiguity. I had to, I realized, if I ever wanted to finish this book. For every chapter here, there are a dozen I’ve left out. There’s more, there’s always more.

  But I haven’t stopped trying. If there’s hope anywhere, it’s in the documents. I remain shocked by the state’s lack of transparency. For reasons I can’t understand, district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, federal bureaus, and other outposts of officialdom continue to suppress their files, even as they claim they have nothing to hide.

  This position assumes a certain amount of complacency in the public. If the truth turns out to exist on a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, on the 3,005th page of a transcript so dry that no one has read it from start to finish, they’re counting on our not caring. To get to that kernel of truth, you have to generate a paper trail of your own: of FOIA requests, public hearings, and concerned letters to your congressperson, all eventually housed in their own sleepy archives.

  As of this writing, the LAPD and the DA’s office are still in legal battles about their unfathomable refusal to release information—a refusal that extends to the victims’ families and to the defendants themselves.

  The latest front is a battle over the Tex Watson tapes. Less than two weeks before the Family’s capture in the desert. Watson absconded to his parents’ place in Copeville, Texas. On November 30, 1969, he turned himself in for questioning after learning that two LAPD detectives were on a plane heading his way. He got a lawyer, Bill Boyd, of Dallas, who sat him down to make a taped confession. This is, as far as anyone knows, the first known recorded account of the crimes—before Bugliosi or anyone else could impose narrative order on it. It’s all the more valuable because Watson hadn’t even been identified as a suspect yet. He was speaking of his own accord to his lawyer, not as a man defending himself to the police.

  According to Boyd, Watson described the duration of his time with the Family and, in chilling detail, the killing of Tate and the other victims. He was “very straightforward” and “candid” about his involvement in the crimes, Boyd told me. He also described other murders that the group committed—murders that hadn’t been discovered.

  In 2009, Boyd agreed to let me listen to the tapes, but only with Watson’s permission, which I knew he’d never get. He wouldn’t go into granular detail about them, perhaps realizing that he’d already violated Watson’s confidentiality. Boyd died a year after we spoke. By 2011, his law firm had gone bankrupt, and its holdings were in receivership—including the cassettes, which he’d kept in a safe in his office.

  A Dallas bankruptcy trustee had come into possession of the tapes, and she seemed on the verge of releasing them to me. Instead, she offered them to Patrick Sequeira, the deputy district attorney in L.A. who handled Watson’s parole hearings. Sequeira supported my effort to get them, and he assured me he’d let me hear them—“We wouldn’t even know they existed if it weren’t for you,” he said. Watson tried to halt their release, filing an injunction in Texas and setting off a yearlong battle. The DA’s office won. But since gaining custody of the recordings, they have been played for no one outside the justice system, not even the victims’ families, who asked to hear them. The DA’s office and the LAPD have released only minimal and at times contradictory statements about their content.

  Sequeira told me there were no unknown homicides mentioned on them—there was nothing new at all. But if the DA’s office released them to me, they’d have to release them to everyone, and they didn’t want the information to be distorted by the public. Soon after, he cut off communications with me.

  Richard Pfeiffer, the attorney for Leslie Van Houten, wanted to hear the tapes, too—what if they contained exculpatory information that could be used at parole hearings? Pfeiffer tried to get them but to no avail. Soon the DA’s office trotted out a different reason for not releasing them: “There are unsolved crimes Manson Family members are suspected of committing. The information in the tape(s) are part of the investigation of those crimes and could be used to solve them.”

  The case reached the California Supreme Court. Pfeiffer suggested that the judge could review the tapes and make his own decision. But the DA’s office did not “believe it necessary for the court to arduously labor through the 326 pages of [Watson’s] rambling musings.” The court decided in the DA’s favor. Since then, Leslie Van Houten has been approved for parole for the first time ever. California’s governor at the time, Jerry Brown, vetoed her release on the recommendation of the DA’s office. Although Pfeiffer made it clear that it was his idea to go after the tapes, the DAs had lambasted Van Houten for trying to get them, saying it was clear evidence that she still hadn’t accepted full responsibility for her crimes.

  Pfeiffer vowed to go back to court and get the tapes, and he’s pursued a number of legal avenues, all unsuccessful, thus far. To this day, the DA’s office is guarding them with more fervor than ever. I keep the parole hearings in my calendar, making sure to get transcripts of them as soon as they’re available. At these hearings, the state tries to turn the mind-bending events of August 9, 1969, into inert history—and they’re one of the only places left to hope for the truth.

  Whenever I tell people about my work, they want to know if I interviewed Charles Manson himself. I did, over the phone, in 2000. Our first conversation, disconcertingly enough, was on Valentine’s Day.

  Our exchanges were mediated through two of Manson’s associates, Pin Cushion and Gray Wolf. The former, nicknamed for the frequency with which he’d been stabbed, was born Roger Dale Smith. He was Manson’s guy on the inside, his prison gofer. The latter, born Craig Hammond, had been anointed Gray Wolf by Manson himself, and brokered all outside access to Manson. A retiree, he’d moved to Hanford, California, decades earlier just to be near the prison that housed Manson, whom he believed to possess “deep insight into environmental issues.” (Many of Manson’s latter-day followers claimed to be enchanted by his ecological “ATWA” philosophy—“Air, Trees, Water, Animals,” or “All the Way Alive”—through which he endorsed the use of a seed gun called “the Savior” to repopulate California’s plant species.) Later, Hammond was arrested for smuggling a cell phone to Manson in prison. A few years after that, when Manson had gotten engaged to a young woman named Star, he discovered that Hammond had been sleeping with her, and rechristened him “Dead Rat.”

  In 2000, when Gray Wolf set up my interview, he urged me to “protect myself.” “You don’t know what powers are pushing against you,” he said.

  He patched me through to Pin Cushion, who put on Manson himself. We would have five minutes to talk before the prison terminated the call automatically.

  “Hello, Tom,” Manson said.

  “Hi, Charlie, how you doing?”

  “Aw, hanging loose, man.”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  “Yeah, same to you, man.”

  I’d only caught Manson’s interest because his handlers had told him I had information about potential perjury during the trial—Terry Melcher’s. But now that I had him on the line, he wanted to talk about anything but Terry Melcher. I gave him a brief introduction to my angle for Premiere, which he dismissed as “hype.” He wanted me to speak “to the heart.” I rattled off a list of names to see if he knew them.

  “I don’t know anyone, man,” he said. “I barely know myself.”

  Manson spoke in riddles when he spoke at all. He claimed that there was a lot of money behind the murders, and that the “United States Navy” held the purse strings. “I’m Vincent Bugliosi’s godfather,” he said. But he wasn’t a snitch, so he wasn’t going to give me any names. “There’s a lot of people playing a lot of games, man,” he said. He added: “I pitched horseshoes when I was seventeen.”

  Whenever he didn’t feel like answering, he’d say something like that. “I got five red wheels on that truck.” Or: “When Reagan went to Greenland we locked all the weather stations to the heart project.”

  Our five minute
s vanished before I even got my bearings. Hammond dialed again. If I wanted to connect with Charlie, he said, I had to show him my human side, my heart. I took a breath while Manson got back on the line.

  “Look it, man,” he said. “See, I have no way of knowing what you’re biting into.”

  I tried again to explain. Even in Manson’s more lucid moments, the only thing we saw eye to eye on was that the prosecution had played dirty. But he didn’t think Melcher was the problem—“He didn’t say anything.” He seemed to have written Melcher off. “The simplicity of the whole thing is that Terry gave his word for something,” he said, “and he didn’t do it, and we didn’t realize that the Korean War was lost.” To him, the real villain was Linda Kasabian, his lapsed follower, who’d flipped for the prosecution.

  “She gave the souls of her children up to the devil in a sacrificial trip that came down in an agreement with the universal mind,” he explained. “You just tell her that the key to Red Skelton’s house is in the ventilator and it’s still there. And that crypt is still there with the dogs at attention.”

  Our time was nearly up again. Manson passed the phone back to Pin Cushion, who offered to write down my remaining questions and send me Manson’s answers, verbatim.

  But the next night, Gray Wolf called and said that would never happen. Manson—who was apparently much less gnomic with his friends than he’d been with me—was upset with me. He and Pin Cushion wouldn’t talk again or send answers. Gray Wolf seemed surprised by all of it. He wasn’t used to Manson taking calls from journalists, and he said that he, too, was still processing everything he’d heard last night, as if some of it had been news to him. I wondered if this had more to do with Pin Cushion, who’d made some bold claims as he’d jotted down my questions. He said Manson personally knew Mama Cass Elliot. He’d brought his girls to orgies for the Hollywood elite. He’d left a bunch of “bodies out in that motherfucking desert, man!” And, most mystifying of all, other members of the Family may have gone to the Tate house the night she was killed. I wondered if Manson had been standing next to him while he said all this, and gotten angry afterward.