Charles Manson #2 - The Trial, And A Missing Videotape
Live Freaky, Die Freaky
It’s Friday! I’d originally planned Fridays to be a more free-form post. But I saw that Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS - Charles Manson, The CIA, And The Secret History Of The Sixties had a Netflix documentary based on it. I decided to deep-dive into this book as well. Hopefully, this should be only a few weeks.
Whether you're reading this book along with me, or you’re just curious, these posts keep you in the loop without the homework.
Tom O’Neill’s Thesis
Charles Manson and his followers, called the “Manson Family”, killed actress Sharon Tate, the wife of filmmaker Roman Polanski and her friends in her house in 1969. Their arrest and the trial that followed was a major media spectacle, with Americans following it closely to understand why peace-and-love hippies would commit violent, senseless murders. As the trial ended, people came away feeling more negatively about hippies and drugs.
The prosecution said:
Charles Manson was a criminal type who had brainwashed his followers with drugs and ordered them to commit senseless murders.
He did so because he was angry with Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day and a record producer, who had cheated him out of a music career. Melcher was a former tenant of the house Sharon Tate lived in.
Charles Manson also wanted to make these death look like they had been done by the Black Panthers, which would then trigger a race war, which he called ‘Helter Skelter’ based on his misinterpretation of the Beatles song of the same name.
Everyone involved is in prison, we can all go back to our lives.
There have been a lot of documentaries and movies about how it all happened. But everyone assumes it was Manson’s charisma that led to this.
On The Other Hand, Tom O’Neill, at the end of this book says:
The US Government, through the MK-ULTRA project, was experimenting on its own citizens, giving them drugs to turn them into people who can kill on command, and then figuring out how to brainwash them so they have no memory of committing the assassination.
They experimented on Charles Manson, and he learned how to turn people into obedient killers.
He and his gang were killing a lot, but the cops kept covering it up and setting them free.
This whole thing could have been orchestrated to turn the tide on hippies and the counterculture, as part of CHAOS - a CIA op to identify foreign influences on antiwar and countercultural protest movements.
These are my interpretations, Mr. O’Neill in all his interviews and in the book is too careful with his words.
With this series, I want to follow his reporting, and how he ended up with the answers that he did.
The CHAOS documentary
Errol Morris of Thin Blue Line fame made a documentary based on this book for Netflix. And it featured Tom O’Neill as well, so I thought this book was getting the series it deserved. This is why I decided to revisit the book.
But… it turned out to be a 90-minute documentary. And while it goes into saying Manson learned the mind-control techniques from the CIA, that’s all it does. Nothing about the lies, nothing about the coverup, nothing about dirty cops and how they were controlled. Nothing about how the main motive made zero sense.
Well, that’s more for us to do, then. Let’s dive in and read more!
The Crime Scene
August 8, 1969 was a day like any other, except in London, the Beatles clicked their famous Abbey Road picture. Three weeks earlier, Neil Armstrong had stepped on the moon.
Late that night, though, shit happened.
Susan Atkins, 21, Patricia Krenwinkel, 21, Linda Kasabian, 20, and Tex Watson, 23, were in a beat-up yellow Ford, heading to Beverly Hills. They had all got into drugs at some point in their young lives, and dropped out of society. They were living in a hippie commune on the Spahn Movie Ranch, that was on the Santa Susanna Pass Road, by Simi Valley. The commune called itself The Family, and was led by 35-year-old jailbird, Charles Manson.
They were headed to a very specific location - 10050 Cielo Drive, the home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. At this point, Roman Polanski was in London, scouting locations for the movie The Day Of The Dolphin.
I looked up this movie. It was released in 1973, and this is one of the posters for it:
The New Yorker’s review of it said that if the best subject that Nichols and Henry could think of was talking dolphins, then they should quit making movies altogether. So it wasn’t exactly winning Oscars.
Anyway, back to the murder scene.
I don’t want to type out the murders in graphic detail. It’s draining, and you can read it here if you want to know who stabbed who and in what order and how many times.
But it was just after midnight and they were armed with a gun, and buck knives - a hunting knife usually used to skin large game.
Tex Watson broke into the house through cutting a window screen, and opened the door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. Linda Kasabian stayed outside as a lookout.
They found Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, his girlfriend Abigail Folger, heavily pregnant Sharon Tate, and her ex-boyfriend and hairstylist to the stars, Jay Sebring.
They tied up, beat, stabbed and shot these four. The amount of force and brutality is just insane. Frykowski, for instance, had fifty-one stab wounds, thirteen blows to the head, and two bullet wounds.
Then, Tex Watson told Susan Atkins to “write something that would shock the world”. She wrote “PIG” on the wall with Sharon Tate’s blood.
It wasn’t over, though.
The next day, these four at the ranch were joined by three more - Clem Grogan, Leslie Van Houten, and, their leader, Charles Manson.
They cruised around in the car searching for more victims for three hours that night, when they came across a house in Los Feliz. They had no idea who lived there.
Manson broke into the house, saw Leno LaBianca, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch with a newspaper on his face, and his wife Rosemary in the bedroom. He apparently tied both of them up by himself, and then went back to the car, and asked his followers to go inside and kill everyone.
Which they did, just as brutally.
And they scrawled “Healter Skelter” in blood on the fridge, and “Death To Pigs” on the wall.
The Trial
I’ll go into the cultural fallout of this trial in more detail next week, because I find this whole aspect of how this trial changed the American perspective on hippies very interesting, especially from an Indian lens.
But let’s go into the broad strokes of how it shaped up.
The murders happened in August, but it took them until December to arrest the perps. Susan Atkins had been arrested in connection with another murder, and she talked about being part of the Tate murders, which is what solved the case for the LAPD. They already had Charles Manson in prison for stealing cars a month ago. They arrested the rest after this lead.
The trial was a 9-month-long circus. The perps and their Family were not hardened criminals, they were young, stereotypical hippies! They had long hair, they wore beads and buckskin jackets, and jeans and tie-dye.
Everyone tuned in because they wanted to know how people who spoke of free love and vegetarianism ended up committing cold-blooded murder. Was it the drugs? Could it happen to them? Their kids?
Manson gave everyone the show they had come for. He represented himself and put on an act of insanity. The judge often threatened to remove Manson from the courtroom. Manson replied with “I will have you removed if you don’t stop” and flung himself at the judge with a sharp pencil. The bailiff tackled him and he was dragged away from the courtroom. His “girls” jumped to their feet chanting unintelligible verses in Latin. Manson yelled “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off”.
I think even our reality TV addled brains would be riveted with a trial like this.
On the other side was the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi. He was the same age as Manson, but he wore suits and had a receding hairline, so he seemed like he could be Manson’s dad.
Bugliosi even called The Beatles “the English musical recording group” in the trial. Imagine how square that makes you.
Why were the Beatles coming up here? Because Bugliosi said that Manson had committed the murders because he thought the Beatles were speaking to him via their songs. Okay this is just insane, I’ll just quote him here:
Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter”, the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.
What a heady mix - race war, the Beatles, and.. the Bible and the Armageddon.
So Manson thought a race war was coming, so he decided to ignite it with these murders, and then stay safe during it.
Then why did they choose the Tate and LaBianca houses?
Bugliosi asserted that the previous tenant of the house, Terry Melcher, a record producer and the son of Doris Day, had rejected Manson’s music. While Melcher had moved away from that house, it came to symbolize “the establishment” for Manson, and he decided to kill everyone in it, and also instill fear in Terry Melcher.
But even with this explanation, this case was difficult - Charles Manson hadn’t actually murdered anyone or even been around the crime scenes. How could he be convicted of first-degree murder?
So they had to bring a case of Conspiracy To Murder so he would be guilty as a conspirator, and they had to prove that he had ordered the killings.
To get the Death Penalty for all these conspirators, Bugliosi did some legal sleight-of-hand - he said that Manson had brainwashed these young people to such an extent that they were robots mindlessly doing what Manson had told them to. This was to ensure Manson was found guilty. BUT ALSO, they were bloodthirsty on their own, and Manson had simply awakened their inherent evil, so they, too, needed to get the death penalty.
So, they were mindless bloodthirsty robots.
The defense argued that Manson had systematically brainwashed everyone in the Family. He’d bombard newcomers with love, sex, drugs. He’d get them all to take drugs, especially LSD, and make them do things they had hang-ups about, and were most resistant to. These often involved sexual things. He’d not take the drugs or only take a low dose but pretend to be as high as them. These drug-fueled sessions could last days on end.
He also isolated them from the world on the Spahn ranch, keeping them occupied with busy work and not allowing them to communicate with friends or family. There were no clocks or calendars or newspapers on the ranch. He even gave them all new names, so they could be “completely free” by forgetting their past.
LSD was keyed as a big factor here. The defense got in Dr. Joel Fort, who had opened America’s first LSD treatment center. He said that Manson used LSD to produce a “new pattern of behavior” in his followers, which created a “totally neutral system which saw death or killing in a completely different way than a normal person sees it”, free of “social concern, compassion, moral values”.
Manson’s lawyer asked Dr. Fort:
Let us say, with your knowledge of LSD, you have a school for crime, and then you take them here and you program them to go out and commit a murder here, there everywhere… Are you telling us that this can be done, that you can capture the human mind by such a school for crime?
Dr. Fort replied with “I am indeed telling you that”.
Wow.
How had Manson, a man with little to no formal education and who had spent more than half his life in prison, learned how to control people this way? There were many crime bosses in this era. Many gangs. Many highly educated organizations. None of them had managed to control people to this extent. How had Manson, with nothing but a ranch, some drugs, and young people from middle-class families, managed this?
This was never brought up in the trial, apparently. But what Bugliosi says in his bestselling book, Helter Skelter, is this is exactly what helped Manson do this - the long jail time, no other skills, no resources.
The trial ended with Manson and his merry band getting the Death Penalty.
And thus, the Sixties ended for real. People grew fearful about hippies, drugs, and alternative lifestyles. Idealism was dead.
Joan Didion said in her book, The White Album:
The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.
The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
Nosey Journalist Finds Things Don’t Add Up
Now let’s go back to 1999 when Tom O’Neill is nosing around for his story.
He wanted to write about how friendships in Hollywood had been torn apart by the murders. But in digging into that angle, people were throwing about blame for the murders in wild directions, pulling out 30-year-old grudges and rumors, combined with memories warped by time.
The common thread he found was that everyone felt that the Tate house had brought those murders upon itself, somehow. Everyone, right from back when the murders happened, said “Live Freaky, Die Freaky”.
When he tried to unpack the freakiness, he found no one was willing to go on the record even now, 30 years later, about it. Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson (friends of Tate and Polanski), Candice Bergen (then Terry Melcher’s girlfriend), Mia Farrow, and Anjelica Huston all refused interviews.
Hollywood still seemed to carry fear about those murders. I wonder if Mr. O’Neill wondered then, if that was because the real murderers were still out there.
But amid all the contradictions and rumors, everyone seemed to agree that the official Helter Skelter narrative — i.e. Terry Melcher got Manson so mad that he decided to ignite a race war with the murders — didn’t add up.
The main problem was, Terry Melcher had NO IDEA, until the cops told him months later, that the murders were intended to scare him. How exactly was Manson achieving his goal of scaring Terry Melcher, if Melcher didn’t know he was supposed to be scared?
Plus, if Manson had tried to ignite a race war by making the murders look like they’d been done by Black Panthers, with the ‘Death To Pigs’ written in blood - no one thought that for a second. That wasn’t the angle the cops pursued at all.
You could explain this away saying they were incompetent and too drug-addled to carry out their motives successfully, But… this was just too complicated. And too convenient as a way for Bugliosi to get a big media trial and a bestselling book. If it was some other motive, like a drug deal gone bad, or jealousy, no one would have cared beyond a point.
So. Mr. O’Neill comes up with three questions he wanted the answers to:
Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the Manson family?
Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the killings, but kept quiet out of fear?
Were the cops aware that Manson was the culprit much earlier than their purported breakthrough, but had kept it quiet to protect someone?
Mysterious New Evidence
The one person who was willing to talk - a lot - to Mr. O’Neill was Vince Bugliosi. He gave Mr. O’Neill six hours of his time, which, IDK, I consider super generous. Maybe people didn’t have much to do in the ‘90s, but heck, I don’t think I have six hours to chat with someone (I say as my phone lets me know I spent way more than that on my phone last week).
There is a trait I notice with authors who do a lot of public speaking on the topic of their books - they say nothing while talking a lot. It’s natural - you have only so many ideas at the core of your book, and you get used to bringing them up at every interview or talk. You find a winning formula early on, and just repeat it.
Bugliosi was no different. He’d gotten famous from the trial, and then from his bestselling book on the Manson murders, Helter Skelter. He was happy to keep talking. But when Mr. O’Neill asked questions about things not adding up, all he got was canned responses. They hadn’t caught the murderers earlier because of sloppy police work. Terry Melcher still lived in fear that Manson wanted him dead. And on and on.
Mr. O’Neill then ends the conversation, with nothing more to ask, and asks, “Is there something you can share about the case that has never been reported before?”
This gets Bugliosi thinking.
To jog his memory, Mr. O’Neill brings up a couple of books on the music industry, one of which alleged that a few S&M movies had been shot at the Tate house, and another said once a drug dealer had been flogged at the house.
Bugliosi tells him to turn off the tape. He has something to say off the record.
“This can never be attributed to me,” he says, “Just say it comes from a very reliable source”.
In his book, Bugliosi said while searching the house after the murder, cops came across a videotape. When they played it, it turned out to be Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski “making love”, and it had been discreetly returned to their house to avoid tainting the memory of Sharon Tate. Roman Polanski found the tape when he got back from London, and put it away.
But here, off the record, Bugliosi adds some information that hadn’t been public.
The tape had Roman Polanski forcing Sharon Tate to have sex with two men.
This tape had been brought to Bugliosi’s notice when he had joined the case. He had told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman had suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”
At the time, Mr. O’Neill didn’t think much of it, given it was a small new fact. It added to the ‘Live Freaky, Die Freaky’ narrative.
But the more he thought about it, the weirder it seemed.
First off, if the husband has been abusing the wife, and there was clear evidence of it, why didn’t the cops investigate Roman Polanski for his wife’s murder?
But also, the dates didn’t add up.
Roman Polanski had returned on August 17. Bugliosi hadn’t been assigned the case until November 18.
As District Attorney, he might have known about the tape because he’s the one who signs search warrants. But it wasn’t within his authority to tell the cops to return the tape, was it?
Did something come up in the investigation that got him involved in it much earlier?
Was he protecting someone and hence scuttled this line of investigation against Roman Polanski?
Most importantly, Bugliosi’s bestselling book had long been considered the final word on the topic….. But if he had changed this detail about the case — What else had he changed?
That would be the question that would haunt Tom O’Neill for the next 20 years and keep him going.
Next week…
I was confused about how to structure this saga, and it seems like it’s good to have one part of each post in the past, and another part in the present, like we did today.
For the ‘past’, I want to go into the cultural fallout of the Manson murders and the trial that followed.
What’s interesting to me is how the ‘60s are all about an increasing Eastern, especially Indian influence on the West, which manifests as Hippie culture. Just the weekend after the Manson murders, from August 15-18, was the famous Woodstock music festival, long considered an iconic event of the Summer of Love. Pandit Ravi Shankar famously performed there!
And then these murders happened, and hippies who were beginning to have a strong impact on mainstream culture, get vilified, in the process of Americans trying to understand what would cause someone to go so crazy. I’m going to explore that.
For the ‘present’, let’s follow Tom O’Neill as he finds a Polish immigrant who swears to high heaven that a drug dealer is behind these murders, which leads him to take a few expensive haircuts to gain more information.
Which finally leads him to drug dealers who were CIA agents. Can he get them to talk?
Tune in next week, same time, same channel.