The biggest bombshells from Netflix’s “Chaos: The Manson Murders ”documentary: Mind control, LSD, MKUltra, and the CIA
Errol Morris’ new documentary pulls from Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book, which disputes much of what we know about the Manson Family.
The Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by the Manson Family in the summer of 1969, are among the most famous in the realm of true crime — and just about everything we know about them might be false.
That’s the argument posed by author Tom O’Neill in his 2019 book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. It’s a dizzying but lucidly-written takedown of Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, the 1974 best-seller that’s long been considered the definitive account of the case.
Today, Netflix releases Chaos: The Manson Murders, a new documentary in which famed filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) offers three perspectives on the brutal murders of actress Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent, Jay Sebring, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
One of those perspectives is O’Neill’s, who speaks with Morris about the book’s broader revelations. “Frankly, I still don’t know what happened,” he admits in the documentary. “But I know that what we were told isn’t what happened.”
Representing Helter Skelter‘s narrative is Stephen Kay, an attorney who worked to convict Manson alongside Bugliosi. Morris also speaks with Bobby Beausoleil, a musician and Manson associate currently serving a life sentence for the murder of Gary Hinman. Similar to the Tate-LaBianca murders, the killers left disturbing messages written in blood on the walls.
As with any Morris documentary, Chaos is clear-eyed and fleet-footed, balancing multiple perspectives and challenging its subjects. Though it only touches on a fraction of the revelations in O’Neill’s book, it zooms in on the question that’s followed the case for more than 50 years. As O’Neill puts it: “One of the biggest mysteries about this case is how Manson was able to gain control of his followers to the degree that he could get them to go out and kill on command, without remorse, without hesitation, complete strangers.”
Read on as we discuss the biggest bombshells of Chaos: The Manson Murders, though be aware that some of these stories contradict each other. As O’Neill makes evident in both the documentary and the book, the case is filled with bizarre rabbit holes and dead ends.
Manson may have been involved in the CIA’s MKUltra program
O’Neill is aware that he sounds nuts when talking about Manson’s connection to the CIA and its MKUltra program, which researched techniques for mind control that violated ethical norms and individual rights. MKUltra notably investigated whether it’s possible to program a person to assassinate a target while under hypnosis. (If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate or its 2004 remake.)
“[I know] I sound crazy if I say, well, there were these research scientists who were working secretly for the government who were trying to do exactly what Manson did with the girls — create people who would kill without regret or remorse, on command, and not recalling how or why they did it,” O’Neill says in conversation with Morris. “And those research scientists came into contact with him during this pivotal time that he was turning into Charles Manson, guru/cult leader of these obedient slaves that would do whatever he said.”
But O’Neill has the receipts, and Morris highlights several official documents that support the author’s findings. It goes something like this: When Manson and his followers lived in San Francisco in the summer of 1967, they frequented the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic to treat the consequences of their promiscuous lifestyles, namely venereal diseases. Manson’s parole officer, Roger Smith, also had an office there. Smith told O’Neill that he met Manson at the clinic on a weekly basis.
Another frequent visitor of the clinic was Louis “Jolly” West, a scientist with expertise in hypnosis and brainwashing, whose name appears often in literature about U.S. government conspiracies. According to O’Neill, West called the clinic a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad,” and he used the clinic to recruit subjects for his study of the effects of LSD on youth.
The LSD and other psychoactive drugs were also a key aspect of MKUltra, and, though West denied it until his death in 1999, O’Neill has several official documents proving that the psychiatrist was financed by the CIA to work on MKUltra experiments in mind control. In those documents, West discussed not only how to conduct experiments to implant false memories, instill specific mental disorders, and induce trance states, but also how to hide them.
“West came into the picture more than a year after I’d begun the research when I started suspecting the involvement of MKUltra in this case,” O’Neill tells Morris. “[I] found out he’d been at the Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic working with these people who had contact with Manson during the time Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create — programmed assassins.”
He goes on to discuss how Manson was able to get his followers to “completely abandon their sense of morality and their code of ethics and to believe that there’s no such thing as evil.” LSD, O’Neill says, was a way for Manson “to create personality change and make it fixed, [to] make it last after the LSD trips had ended.” That, he says, was a key research objective for the MKUltra researchers.
While O’Neill suspects Manson was involved in those experiments, he could never place Manson and West in a room together.
“How did he learn how to brainwash those kids, really in under a year?” O’Neill asks. “Yeah, he was a con artist, but everybody who knew him in prison and everyone who knew him prior to becoming Charlie Manson said he was a joke to everybody. Nobody took him seriously. He suddenly got help. Where did that come from?”
“What does it all mean? I’m very honest about not knowing,” he says.
O’Neill and Beausoleil both think Bugliosi’s theory about Manson wanting a race war is bunk
According to Bugliosi, Kay, and Helter Skelter‘s narrative, Manson used popular music and the Book of Revelations to prophesy a war between the Black and white races. As Kay explains in the documentary, Manson saw the Beatles‘ song “Helter Skelter” as symbolic of an imminent race war, which is why his followers wrote the words in blood on the LaBiancas’ fridge after murdering the couple.
Related: The 50 best Beatles songs ever, ranked
In archival footage shown in the documentary, Bugliosi explains that “In Manson’s mind, the term ‘helter skelter’ meant the Black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, with the exception of him and his followers, who escaped ‘helter skelter’ by going to the desert and living in the bottomless pit.”
If that sounds tough to swallow, you’re not alone. O’Neill claims that there’s little to no evidence to support this claim and that Bugliosi knew “that the more sensational a case he presented, the better sales the book would have.”
Beausoleil feels the same. “Bugliosi knew what the truth was but didn’t reveal it,” he tells Morris. “It was not to start a race war… he knew that Manson talked about that kind of s—, stories told around the campfire that really were just that. But it really had nothing to do with the murders. [Bugliosi’s] intention from the get-go was to do exactly what he did — write a book, make a bazillion dollars on that book, live on it for the rest of his life, and sell the movie rights. which is what he did. His [co-writer] was sitting in the courtroom taking notes for the book that they were already writing while he was trying Charlie and those three girls. He had to get a conviction. He wanted to portray himself in this book as the white knight protecting all the people of America.”
Manson himself balked at it, saying on multiple occasions that the phrase simply meant “confusion.”
Bobby Beausoleil insists Manson was “not a mastermind,” nor an effective cult leader
According to Beausoleil, the Hinman and Tate-LaBianca murders weren’t motivated by Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” theory. Rather, he believes that their crimes were inspired by two things: Manson’s fear of the Black Panthers and his desire to wield more power over his followers.
Manson feared retaliation from the Black Panthers, a political organization, after he shot a drug dealer named Bernard Crowe, whom he believed to be a Panther. The thing is, Crowe didn’t die, nor was he a Black Panther.
“I remember that everybody had it in their minds about the Black Panthers,” Beausoleil tells Morris. “We’d been kind of absorbed in that for a couple of weeks since the Bernard Crowe shooting, and what Charlie said, that the Black Panthers were the enemies. There was an idea to make it seem like the Black Panthers were responsible for killing Gary [Hinman].”
This is why Beausoleil, who claims he killed Hinman alongside Manson followers Susan Atkins and Mary Brunner after a drug deal gone bad, says they drew a paw print and wrote the words “political piggy” in blood on the walls.
Similar wording was likely written in blood in the Tate and LaBianca homes to implicate the Panthers, but Beausoleil has little to say about that. In his mind, the other murders, which occurred just days later, were Manson’s way of keeping his followers in line.
“Charlie’s way of protecting himself… was the typical convict way of insurance,” Beausoleil says. “If someone is a potential snitch, then you make that person complicit in illegal activity. You have something on them just as they have something on you.”
He continues, “There’s no doubt in my mind what the motivation was. None. Zero. Charlie had got paranoid of his own people. He wanted to bind them to him through they’re committing bad crimes, that was the true motive.”
Manson, in Beausoleil’s opinion, was not a criminal mastermind or all that effective of a cult leader. “[People] don’t wanna hear how mundane this story really is. How not a mastermind Charlie actually was. In his paranoid delusions, in his miscalculations. It was just blunder after blunder after blunder. If you only knew what I know now in terms of the criminal mindset.”
Despite multiple arrests before the murders, Manson never violated his parole
O’Neill was puzzled by Manson never seeming to suffer any ramifications for the various laws he broke during his two years with the Family.
As he tells it, Manson was arrested a “half-dozen” times in 1967 and 1968, but his parole was never revoked. In fact, Roger Smith, his parole officer with the office at the medical clinic, routinely wrote letters insisting that Manson was doing just fine.
What’s more, it took the LAPD months to pin down the Manson family for the Tate-LaBianca murders. As archival evidence shows, law enforcement insisted that the crimes weren’t connected, despite, as O’Neill puts it, both having the “same mode of murder” and variations on the word “pig” written on the walls in blood. He also claims that sheriffs alerted the LAPD to the Hinman case, in which the killers wrote “political piggy” on the wall, but that detectives told them they were instead pursuing a lead about narcotics traffickers.
“How did they know [the Family wasn’t] part of the narcotics traffickers?” O’Neill asks.
Curiously, a raid was conducted on Spahn Ranch, where the Family was living, more than a week after the murders, but it had nothing to do with the Tate-LaBianca case. According to O’Neill, cops found stolen guns, stolen vehicles, and stolen credit cards, not to mention underaged runaways, but everyone who was arrested was released three days later. Manson, meanwhile, didn’t see his parole violated.
“Somebody wanted that group out there,” O’Neill says, implying that some members of the family may have been informants.
Susan Atkins was allegedly “manipulated” by her defense attorney
After the raid on Spahn Ranch, Manson and his followers fled to Barker Ranch in Death Valley National Park. They were raided again, and this time, Manson Family member Susan Atkins was charged with Hinman’s murder. In prison, Atkins told her two cellmates that she was a part of the Tate-LaBianca murders, leading to Manson, Leslie Van Houten, Linda Kasabian, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Charles “Tex” Watson being charged in the case.
O’Neill finds this chain of events suspicious and expresses his theory that the two women in the cell with her, a pair of career criminals with a prior relationship, were planted there by authorities to elicit Atkins’ confession. (They later received a portion of the $25,000 reward offered by Tate’s husband, filmmaker Roman Polanski.)
Even more suspicious, according to O’Neill, is that Atkins’ court-appointed attorney was replaced with a different lawyer. Memos obtained by O’Neill said that an attorney with “strong client control” was needed to handle her case.
“They needed Atkins to testify to indict Manson, Watson, Van Houten, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian, so they got Atkins away from her lawyer, who had been court-appointed and would’ve defended her properly, and got her a new attorney,” O’Neill says. “I have the memos — they held a meeting and they said, ‘Who do we have that would have more control over her and get from her what we need?'”
He adds, “They were basically all working for the prosecution.”
“When a story did start to emerge it was managed very carefully,” Morris says in response. “It was managed and manipulated,” O’Neill says.
O’Neill alleges that the Tate-LaBianca murders were used to tarnish the 1960s counterculture movement
So, what story did the prosecution want to tell?
“Exactly what we think of now when we think of the Manson murders,” says O’Neill. “That these kids went out and became corrupted by the freedoms of the ’60s movement and turned into monsters. So, in other words, don’t let your kids do drugs, don’t let them join communes, don’t let them march against the war, because they’re all going to be turned into these crazed killers who have no respect for life.”
O’Neill goes on to detail two projects the U.S. government was operating during Manson’s arrival in San Francisco: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. These efforts sought to disrupt and undermine anti-war and New Left movements.
“Those programs were designed to infiltrate left-wing groups, especially the [Black] Panthers, and neutralize them,” says O’Neill. “That’s what their own documents say — do whatever it took to basically make them ineffective, wipe them out.”
While O’Neill doesn’t go so far as to say the Manson murders were “orchestrated” by the U.S. government, he does say the murders served the purposes of COINTELPRO and CHAOS, “to have the world finally turn against this left-wing, anti-war movement which a lot of people conflated with hippies.”
He adds, “‘Orchestrated’ sounds like it was planned in advance, executed, and then covered up. It could’ve just been that Manson had leeway to do whatever he wanted for two years. Maybe that’s all it was. It’s kind of ironic, if nothing else, that before we knew about COINTELPRO and the FBI setting up the Panthers, Manson’s plan was to pin these murders on the Panthers.”
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