What Did the CIA Know About Charles Manson? Netflix’s ‘Chaos’ Dives Into Conspiracy Theory

"It's a strange, surreal excursion into some no man's land of investigation," director Errol Morris says of the new documentary, which is based on Tom O'Neill's 2019 book

By Jon Blistein

February 21, 2025 

When Errol Morris was a graduate student in philosophy at University of California Berkeley, he made a "pilgrimage" to the California Medical Facility prison in Vacaville. Interested in insanity pleas and murder, the future Oscar-winning documentarian was there to interview the serial killer Ed Kemper. But while at the CMF, he was given another unexpected opportunity. 

"I was asked by the guard following my interview, 'You interested in meeting Charles Manson?'" Morris recalls in a recent interview. "And I said, 'Sure! Of course I am.'" 

The meeting didn't amount to much, Morris says: "Manson wanted to complain to me about his lack of masturbation privileges," he quips. Still, this was the mid-Seventies, and Manson remained a phenomenon. In 1971, the wild-eyed Svengali had been convicted on murder charges related to the Tate-LaBianca killings, carried out two years earlier by members of his so-called Family. In 1974, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi published his best-selling book Helter Skelter, in which he recounted the case — centered around Manson's apparent desire to ignite an apocalyptic race-war —  that had secured his conviction. "Everybody was aware of this case," Morris says. "It's one of the most famous cases in American history, if not world history. And a lot of people, including myself, had read more than one book about it." He cites Helter Skelter, as well as Ed Sanders' The Family, though it was the former that forward the narrative that would define the Manson murders for years — one centered on LSD, brainwashing, out of control hippies, race wars, and the Beatles. 

Decades later, a new book would complicate that narrative. Tom O'Neill's Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-written with journalist Dan Piepenbring and published in 2019, punctured Bugliosi's case, arguing the prosecutor hid evidence, coerced witnesses into lying, and pushed falsehoods that may have provided cover for other dark forces swirling around Manson — chief among them, the Central Intelligence Agency and its top-secret MKULTRA mind-control program. O'Neill's reporting suggested the Manson killings weren't a product of poisoned free-love, but a kind of blowback from the CIA's own experiments with LSD and brainwashing. And a cover-up may have furthered the aims of domestic espionage operations like the CIA's CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO, which targeted and discredited radical movements whether hippies, Black Panthers, or anti-war activists.

O'Neill's book serves as the basis for Morris' new documentary, Chaos: The Manson Murders, which hits Netflix March 7. (The film's trailer is also premiering today, exclusively via Rolling Stone.) O'Neill's book is thrilling but dense, filled with countless threads to pull and dark corridors to explore. It could've easily been turned into a multi-part series, but Morris instead distilled the book's essence and most significant arguments into a 90-minute documentary that elucidates the potential links between Manson and the CIA, while using the case's myriad unanswered questions as a jumping off point to "reflect on the nature of investigations and truth."

But O'Neill also acknowledges that his reporting encroaches upon a truth that remains elusive. He still cannot, for instance, place West and Manson in the same room together. This ambiguity leads Morris to describe Chaos as "a strange, surreal excursion into some no man's land of investigation." For his new film, Morris embraced the uncertainties and instead tried to "deal with various accounts of why Manson committed these murders." 

Morris was first introduced to O'Neill, and his investigation, while the journalist was still struggling to finish his book. In fact, Morris says he was brought in to help O'Neil with this "labyrinthine enterprise." Morris spent three days interviewing O'Neill in his apartment, bursting with Manson research — "Folder after folder, box after box after box, cassette tape after cassette tape after cassette tape" — but O'Neill ultimately decided against the film. He went on to finish the book with Piepenbring, and after it became a hit, he reconnected with Morris to see if he wanted to finish the movie. 

Morris was eager to do just that. "I've probably read [Chaos] more times than I would like to admit," Morris says, adding: "Reading Tom's book, knowing Tom, and interviewing Tom has been an experience in and of itself. It's a very odd thing to say but true: Tom's book has caused me to reflect on the nature of investigations and the nature of truth." 

Tom O'Neill's 2019 book 'Chaos' introduced the theory that the CIA may have been studying the Manson Family long before the murders

Morris knows what it's like to obsess over a confounding case or fall down a CIA-sized rabbit hole. He did both in his 2017 miniseries Wormwood, about the mysterious MKULTRA-linked death of scientist Frank Olson. And his 2012 book, Wilderness of Error, probed the case of former Green Beret surgeon, Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters; while Morris believes he showed the prosecution of MacDonald was "a violation of what we take to be due process," he acknowledges he was not successful in proving MacDonald's guilt or innocence. Morris is drawn to the "strange gray area of hunches, suppositions, [and] strange beliefs," but remains committed to the truth, even though he knows attaining it, in full, is rarely possible. (Through "sheer, obsession, diligence, and luck," he says, he came closest in 1988's The Thin Blue Line, which helped exonerate convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams.)

With Manson, the case is replete with — to paraphrase another Morris subject, Donald Rumsfeld — known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. "There will be so many questions about this murder that will never be answered," Morris says. "Or let's just put it this way: I don't have answers to them, and I'm not sure when those answers will be forthcoming. I guess never say never."

What Morris feels he can say definitively is that Chaos dismantles the Helter Skelter theory. "I find Bugliosi's version far-fetched," Morris says. "Do I believe the Beatles and 'Helter Skelter' and the whole dream of a race war motivated this story? I think it's unlikely."

More far-fetched than a version involving MKULTRA and CIA experiments?

"I think it is," Morris says with a smile. "Was that stuff going on? Yes. Was it going on with Manson? Maybe." 

In lieu of concrete answers, Morris latched onto other people and elements of the mystery, like Manson's music. The film is partly soundtracked by Manson demo recordings, and features an interview with Gregg Jakobson, a talent scout and close friends of the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, who famously wound up in Manson's orbit. (Wilson earned Manson's ire when he remade Manson's song "Cease to Exist" as the Beach Boys' "Never Learn Not to Love," without giving Manson credit.) 

"I like Manson's music!" Morris exclaims. "Call me a fool. But I think there's something really interesting [about it], and a lot of other people were interested in his music." 

Morris pushes back against what he calls the "default position that Manson was deeply untalented" and suggests his songs reveal "the desperation of the man." He's also partial to the theory that Manson's rejection by the record producer Terry Melcher played a role in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Melcher famously lived at the house at 10050 Cielo Drive before Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in. Revenge — not unlike MKULTRA and LSD mind control — feels less far-fetched than "Helter Skelter." 

"We've all heard the argument that we should default to the simplest explanation, but maybe there is no simple explanation," Morris says. "Maybe there's just a stupid explanation. The explanation of confusion, cross purposes, people who don't know what they're doing, and have mixed, confused reasons for doing anything."

Bobby Beausoleil was arrested for murder a day before the Tate massacre took place.

Bobby Beausoleil was arrested for murder a day before the Tate massacre took place

Morris found this thread, too, in the story of Bobby Beausoleil, the Family member serving a life sentence for murdering Gary Hinman in July 1969, a few weeks before the Tate-LaBianca killings. As Beausoleil recalls in the doc, he was confronting Hinman over a drug deal gone bad when Manson barged in, slashed Hinman's face, then left Beausoleil to deal with his mess. Worried Hinman would snitch if he took him to an emergency room, Beausoleil says he called Manson and demanded he fix the problem. Manson allegedly told Beausoleil that he "knew what to do as well as" Manson did, then hung up the phone. 

"I've asked Bobby several times, 'You kill Hinman, you take his car, you put the murder weapon in the car, so that when you're ultimately arrested, they have the car, the murder weapon, and you! Who does that kind of thing?' The only explanation that I have, and I've said this many times to Bobby, is it's all incredibly so stupid. But not so stupid that it didn't actually happen."

While Morris says O'Neill "discounts" much of what Beausoleil says, the filmmaker found him "entirely compelling" — not because he believed everything Beausoleil told him, but because, over 50 years later, he was still "trying desperately to come to terms with what he had done and what happened to him."

He adds, "In everything that Bobby says to me, he too is trying to grapple with, if you like, the stupidity of it all. I sometimes look back on my life and I think, 'My god, this was stupid. How could you have ever lived it?' And the fact that Bobby is grappling with it still, I find endlessly interesting and moving."

Morris even gives Beausoleil the penultimate word in Chaos (Manson, obviously, gets the last), as he succinctly meditates on peoples' fondness for fantasy, speculation, and conspiracy when reality is often so much more mundane — even stupid. 

"Could it be that some things are just a result of confusion and ignorance?" Morris wonders. "Rather than some kind of grand conspiracy that's being played out and orchestrated by one person, or a group of few people working in consort." Extrapolating to the chaos engulfing the world now, he adds, "I suppose when the history is written of our current era, and we ask questions about why our democracy fell apart, the feelings that I'm left with — maybe this shows my own inclinations — is that we're looking at the machinations of total incompetence thrashing around in reality."

The CIA's Review of Chaos

Did you think that Tom O'Neill's Chaos would fly under the radar of the CIA notice? Of course not. All in all it's a generous review though one might get the feeling that there were a few eye rolls along the way when writing the review.

Intelligence in Public Media 

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

Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring (Little, Brown and Company, 2019), 521 pages, plates and illustrations, bibliography, index. 

Reviewed by Leslie C.

 Authors, or their agents and publishers, seem unable to resist using the word “secret” to modify that apparently pedestrian word “history.” Its use promises something the finished work invariably fails to deliver, implying as it does access to the eldritch or the gnostic, when the reality is often more mundane. Such a force is at work in Tom O’Neill’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. 

The book has its origins in a magazine article O’Neill was commissioned to write marking the 30th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Charles Manson, a semiliterate drifter and purported cult leader, and members of his “Family” were convicted of the killings. The episode transfixed the American public and suggested the forces unleashed by the social tides of the sixties, not least the anti-war and youth movements, had dark if not violent undertones. O’Neill never finished his article. The threads he uncovered while doing his research led him instead on a 20-year odyssey that crossed the line into obsession, as he switched editors and publishers, borrowed money from relatives, and did anything else required to unearth the truth about Manson. 

Chaos is a monument to O’Neill’s determination to get the story and a narrative of his efforts to track down reluctant witnesses, obtain forgotten or buried documentary evidence, and pull the pieces into a coherent picture. Chaos is not—at least not in the way its title suggests—a “secret history of the sixties.” With its fascinating allusions to a host of Southern California characters from Cass Elliott to the Beach Boys, it is more Once Upon A Time In Hollywood than Manchurian Candidate. This review will not summarize O’Neill’s theories, though it will touch on them insofar as they are germane to the primary question for this audience, which is, of course, what did Charles Manson have to do with the CIA? But first, some housekeeping. 

Over the course of August 8–10, 1969, Manson’s followers, at his urging, murdered eight people during two home invasions: six at the home of actress Sharon Tate and the director Roman Polanski, and two at the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson believed the killings would trigger a race war, and his followers—using the victims’ blood—left behind graffiti meant to suggest the Black Panther Party was responsible. A four-month investigation, spurred by the jailhouse confession of a member of the “Family,” resulted in the arrest of Manson and his accomplices. Vincent Bugliosi, the Los Angeles district attorney who tried the case and secured the convictions, wrote a book about the crimes. Titled Helter Skelter—after a Beatles song Manson used a code word for the race war—it went on to become the best-selling “true crime” book in the history of American publishing. 

All of this is straightforward. However, O’Neill’s research uncovered a litany of problems and unanswered questions about the conduct of the investigation that might, had they been brought to light sooner, have justified a re-trial, according to one of Bugliosi’s associates in the DA’s office. In O’Neill’s telling, Bugliosi emerges as a villain who seized his chance to profit in the wake of a terrible crime and who spent the subsequent decades consciously foiling any effort to question the methods or outcome of the investigation. O’Neill’s scrupulous catalogue of the myriad omissions in Bugliosi’s case certainly paints an unflattering picture of the entire process and of many of those involved. 

Manson’s responsibility for these crimes in not in question. O’Neill’s interest is in the motivations and actions of many secondary players, together with the grip Manson continues to hold on the American imagination. Most people were horrified—yet fascinated—by the brutality of the killings, though others saw them in a different light. The leftist radical Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground infamously elevated Manson to a revolutionary hero. New Left chronicler Todd Gitlin was more reasonable, and closer to the mark, when he observed that “For the mass media, the acidhead Charles Manson was readymade as the monster lurking in the heart of every longhair, the rough beast slouching to Beverly Hills to be born for the new millennium.” O’Neill reaches a similar conclusion, which brings us to the main point, which is the CIA’s alleged role. 

If, as Gitlin suggests, Manson embodied for most Americans the darkness hard wired in the counterculture, then how did the US government benefit? O’Neill delves into the FBI’s COINTELPRO and CIA’s CHAOS, domestic surveillance programs designed to infiltrate, discredit, and neutralize civil rights, student, and anti-war organizations that first Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon regarded as subversive. These programs, which in the case of CIA violated its charter, were ultimately exposed and triggered congressional hearings in the mid-1970s, in which the Intelligence Community was held to account. 

And this is where O’Neill ultimately falls short. Despite what his title implies, he cannot document any compelling link between these programs and Manson. This was not for lack of effort. Extensive research and a slew of FOIA requests did not produce a smoking gun or much beyond the shadowy, ill-explained presence around these events of Reeve Whitson, an alleged “intelligence operative.” O’Neill also examines the CIA program MKULTRA, which may have gotten him closer to his goal—but not much. Conceived by Richard Helms and authorized by Allen Dulles in 1953, MKULTRA studied mind control, one possible path to which was hallucinogenic drugs. 

The standard histories of the subject indicate that the CIA, through MKULTRA, spent considerable effort to understand the use and effects of LSD and other substances, and contracted with a number of researchers to that end. One was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who is the closest O’Neill gets to tying Manson to the CIA. West, purportedly at the behest of the agency, opened an office in San Francisco, the purpose of which was “studying the hippies in their native habitat”, Haight Ashbury.  Manson had, at the same time, been a denizen of the Haight before moving the “Family” to Los Angeles, and he liberally dosed his followers with LSD, which was one of his tools for bending them to his will. Indeed, defense attorneys unsuccessfully attempted to use this as a mitigating factor during the trial. 

While O’Neill not unreasonably asks how a barely educated criminal like Manson could use sophisticated methods to control his “Family,” he cannot link Manson to Dr. West. There is no evidence the two ever met, or that Manson was—in what O’Neill admits is the most “far-out” theory—the product of “an MKULTRA effort to create assassins who would kill on command.” (430) His own conclusions about CHAOS—which are less relevant to his theory of the case than MKULTRA—are dubious. He describes a program that kept tabs on 300,000 people, sharing intelligence with FBI, the Department of Justice, and the White House, but he then claims it was so well-hidden within CIA that “even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless.” (233). And yet, when the program was exposed and Director William Colby admitted its existence, James Angleton, the longtime head of counterintelligence and presumably no stranger to such efforts, was the official who resigned. 

O’Neill also makes the occasional odd statement. One example will illustrate the point. In untangling the web of connections surrounding the Manson case, O’Neill links one figure to former Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay, who, he writes, “tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff” during the Cuban Missile Crisis (83). This was news, as the standard Cold War history fails to mention it, as does LeMay’s biographer. LeMay did forcefully advocate for military action against the missile sites—and he was famously satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove— but a coup? Presumably if his advocacy had reached even the level of significant insubordination Kennedy would have removed him. There was, after all, precedent for doing so. 

O’Neill’s narrative is never uninteresting. His research has raised legitimate questions about the investigation and prosecution of these notorious crimes, and the actions of a number of people, from the district attorney’s office to the sheriff’s department; from the associates and relatives of the victims to the perpetrators. However compelling his determination to follow every last thread, O’Neill has not written a “secret history” of the 1960s, unless the secrets are those certain individuals wished to keep for their own reasons. The author cannot definitively tie Manson to MKULTRA or CHAOS; he can only imply it on circumstantial evidence. At least, in the end, he has the grace to acknowledge it.

The reviewer: Leslie C. is a CIA operations officer. 

Studies in Intelligence Vol 65, No. 3 (Extracts, September 2021)

Original Article 

TOM O'NEILL'S DECEITFUL BOOK CHAOS DEBUNKED BY A PRO

After waiting for decades (he says 20 years okay sure) and harassing and stalking old people, Tom O'Neill's book Chaos came out. And it was just a turbo charged version of Maury Terry's ludicrous book ULTIMATE EVIL. The Col reviewed it and mocked it and, aside from some Q anon people on Instagram think he book went almost no where;Vera Dreiser masturbated with it (Tom himself!) and then nada. Since the book was a nothing burger, no one has done serious research to take his shit down. The UnderGround Bunker, a great site fighting against vile Scientology, used first hand research and more to take this shitty book to task. This is a long work. It destroys a HUGE portion of Tom's fictional book. Take the time to read and digest it all ------------------------------ 

  Jon Atack takes issue with new theory about Charles Manson that ignores Scientology Tony Ortega Undergrund Bunker Charles Manson and his ‘Family’ will always stir up fascination, because of the horrifying brutality of the slayings in Los Angeles in 1969, and the mythology that has been so dexterously spun around them. Manson was the pied piper who brainwashed runaway girls in his orgiastic, drug-crazed sex cult and then loosed them on a rampage of murder in the attempt to begin a race war in the US. A war named for The Beatles’ song Helter-Skelter, which would also be the title of the book that made prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi rich. That narrative took a beating when Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties came out in 2019. The prestigious Times Literary Supplement dubbed it a ‘masterpiece’ and the book sold like hot cakes. I eagerly checked the book’s index for ‘Scientology,’ to see what O’Neill had added to the secret internal Scientology files in my collection. I knew Manson had been deeply involved with the famous mind control training. Finding not a single mention of Scientology, I looked then for a reference to Manson’s autobiography, Without Conscience. There were only two paragraphs, and they related to a pair of spectacles left at the Sharon Tate crime scene. O’Neill ignored the autobiography’s numerous references to Scientology. In his 200-page account, Manson himself said that he had been ‘heavily into dianetics and scientology.’ At that point I put O’Neill’s book aside without reading any further. After a recent video chat, YouTuber Eric Hunley, referring to O’Neill’s book, asked if I knew that my late friend Jolly West had programmed the Manson Family. I was aghast. In my experience, Jolly was a friendly, compassionate, and helpful man. Not the sort of person who would systematically create mayhem and murder. When we first met in 1988 Professor Louis Jolyon ‘Jolly’ West, MD, was the head of the department of neuroscience and biobehavior at UCLA Medical School. We were not close, but we met four times over the next few years, and spent hours talking each time. On our second meeting, his assistant told me he kept two books on his desk – the Bible and my Piece of Blue Sky. She said he would read a few paragraphs whenever he took a break. It cheered him to see that the history of this group which had caused him so much trouble had finally been printed.

Jolly had been an out-spoken critic of Scientology for almost forty years by this time. He had fought off several suits filed against him by Scientology. In a speech to the American Psychiatric Association, he once said, ‘I would like to advise my colleagues that I consider Scientology a cult and L. Ron Hubbard a quack and a fake. I wasn’t about to let them intimidate me.’ He threw down the gauntlet. After sixteen unrelenting years of my own harassment by Scientologists, I can assure you that this was a brave stance. Jolly was an important speaker at Cult Awareness Network and American Family Foundation conferences. I have a recording of an excellent history of hypnotism from one CAN conference. Unlike most in his profession, Jolly recognised the value of hypnotism, a practice that has seen a resurgence in the decades since his death in 1999. Jolly determinedly shared sound information about hypnotism and the potential dangers of hypnotic states at a time when academia smirked at the subject (by the 1970s, only six out of ninety US university courses on psychology included any mention of it). By demonstrating hypnotism, he helped many, many people to avoid control through exploitative persuasion or ‘mind control.’ Hardly the psychopath portrayed by O’Neill, because by definition, psychopaths have no desire to help others. Jolly was a polymath and one of the most intelligent and well-informed people I’ve ever met. Our last meeting was in London. He was en route to a celebration of the work of Patrick O’Brian, author of the Master and Commander novels. Jolly was invited to speak about the accuracy of O’Brian’s descriptions of surgery during the Napoleonic Wars. One of many subjects on which he was expert. Jolly’s research into drugs was well known, especially through the death of the elephant Tusko during the crazy period when LSD was used in experiments on both human and animal subjects by hundreds of researchers around the world (I long ago interviewed an English psychiatrist who had given LSD to an eight-year-old child. It was a time of innocence and stupidity, when hallucinogens were handed out like candy). When I was invited to apply for a doctoral degree for A Piece of Blue Sky by Aarhus University, Jolly was quick to write a fulsome letter of support. He not only stood up to Scientology and other authoritarian sects, but was also active with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement. Another potentially dangerous pursuit. I was surprised when Tom O’Neill said a former colleague had labelled Jolly ‘the only benevolent psychopath I ever met.’ Psychopaths are not likely to take up good causes. Jolly had put himself in the firing line with both cults and the at times murderous enemies of civil rights. O’Neill also tells us that for forty years Jolly was ‘vehemently against capital punishment,’ an unlikely position for a true psychopath. In CHAOS, O’Neill argues that for twenty years Jolly West was a principal investigator for the CIA’s deplorable MKULTRA mind control programs. As O’Neill says, there were 149 separate ‘experiments’ carried out under the aegis of MKULTRA during that period. He goes on to say that ‘Surviving records name eighty institutions, including forty-four universities and colleges, and 185 researchers…’ O’Neill cites a 1977 New York Times article, which tells us that MKULTRA was ‘a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.’ Most accounts agree that the program flopped (Naomi Klein takes an interesting contrary position that is highly relevant; but not to our discussion). In an interview with Eric Hunley, Tom O’Neill says that Jolly West was ‘the MKULTRA psychiatrist who I’ve uncovered documents showing that he was a pivotal part of the MKULTRA program for twenty years, and he practically wrote the blueprint for it with Sydney Gottlieb…’ This is a monumental claim based upon a handful of circumstantial evidence. O’Neill does admit his personal disdain for Jolly during their only conversation, where he says Jolly ‘droned on for so long I cut the interview short.’ I never knew Jolly to ‘drone on.’ He was one of the most fascinating conversationalists I’ve ever met. O’Neill tells us that ‘West became my white whale.’ It’s a telling remark, because this makes O’Neill the fervently obsessed Captain Ahab of Melville’s great novel (‘a grand, ungodly, god-like man’). Ahab goes to his death to destroy the white whale in revenge for it taking his leg off. Of course, in the novel – spoiler alert – Captain Ahab goes down lassoed to the whale. I hope the same will not be true for Tom O’Neill. He has done remarkable research, so a follow-up book on the Scientology connection might well save him. O’Neill’s obsession with Jolly is compounded by several statements, peppered throughout his 400-page book. He wants us to believe that Jolly West programmed Manson, but says, ‘I could never prove that he’d [West] examined Manson himself – or that they’d ever met.’ He makes this overblown statement: ‘As a self-styled brainwashing expert, he’d [West] been present whenever mind control reared its ugly head in American culture. Murders, assassinations, kidnappings, cults, prisoners of war – his fingerprints were on all of them.’ All of them? Thousands of people were subjected to Bluebird, MKULTRA, MKNAOMI. West could not possibly have ‘been present’ in every case, and O’Neill gives us no shred of evidence of involvement in any vicious act on Jolly’s part, let alone ‘murders’ or ‘assassination’. Further, O’Neill tells us, ‘I didn’t have a smoking gun … I worried I never would … I could poke a thousand holes in the story [of the killings], but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another. … to imagine state, local and federal law enforcement cooperating in perfect harmony, with the courts backing them up – it made no sense. What I’d uncovered was something closer to an improvised, shambolic effort to contain the sequence of events without tripping on something. I was a lousy conspiracy theorist … because I wanted nothing left to the realm of the theoretical.’ In the end, however, almost everything is left in ‘the realm of the theoretical.’ And ‘an improvised, shambolic effort to contain the sequence of events without tripping on something’ comes very close to Manson’s own account. O’Neill continues in the same vein, ‘My theory that Manson and West were linked was tenuous, circumstantial, lying solely in the fact that they’d walked the same 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? … Maybe Jolly West didn’t even belong in the book.’ O’Neill then goes with what he himself calls the ‘most “far out” theory,’ which is ‘that Manson was tied to an MKULTRA effort to create assassins who would kill on command.’ I’m dissatisfied that sufficient evidence is provided to draw this conclusion. Or indeed, any evidence. It doesn’t reach the ‘realm of the theoretical’ because it is actually hypothetical rather than theoretical. It remains an untested, unproven hypothesis, a ‘theory’ requires evidence. O’Neill believes that Jolly had ‘claimed to have achieved the impossible’ that ‘he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge.’ Yet, bringing people to manufacture false memories is an everyday experience. Most people who have undergone ‘past life regression’ (a favourite technique in Scientology) have readily created memories that they will believe to be real, although they can provide no evidence (such memories would include the language spoken by them at the time. No medieval French has been recovered from supposed reincarnated survivors of Agincourt nor any other instance, despite myriad hours of Scientology ‘processing’). One formerly very high-ranking, long-term Scientologist told me she’d seen about two hundred believers reporting that they had been Jesus. At least 199 were mistaken. UK mentalist Derren Brown has induced false memories (and beliefs) during his TV shows within minutes. Elizabeth Loftus spent a career studying the induction of false memories. It is far from ‘impossible.’ In his 1961 study of returnees from Chinese Thought Reform Camps, Robert Jay Lifton calls the change of memory ‘ideology over experience’ or ‘doctrine over person’ where the individual replaces a memory with the group’s description of events.

O’Neill does show that Jolly West had contact with the head of the dreadful MKULTRA program, Sydney Gottlieb. The two corresponded in the 1950s, but Gottlieb used an assumed name (Sherman Grifford). O’Neill does not prove that West was aware that the correspondent was Gottlieb. As O’Neill says, CHAOS, another CIA program, was so secret that when William Colby was appointed director of the CIA, he wasn’t told of its existence. This secrecy extended to the funding of the 149 projects in MKULTRA. A host of front groups were created through which monies could be channelled. These included ‘Chemrophyl Associates’ – the letterhead for ‘Sherman Grifford’ in his correspondence to Jolly West. It is possible and indeed highly likely that Jolly West did indeed receive funding indirectly from the CIA, however, we need to put the CIA’s research projects into context. The CIA represented the US government. While its activities were deplorable, immoral, and illegal — and its members deserved to be incarcerated in mental asylums or prisons — it nonetheless represented a legitimate government and was considered to be ‘making the world safe for democracy’ until the early 1970s, when Victor Marchetti pierced the veil of silence. In his study, Science of Coercion, Communication Research & Psychological Warfare 1945-1960, Professor Christopher Simpson found that over 90 percent of psychological research in the US in the two decades after the war was sponsored by the military: “Military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies such as the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency helped to bankroll substantially all of the post-World War II generation’s research into techniques of persuasion, opinion measurement, interrogation, political and military mobilization, propagation of ideology, and related questions. The persuasion studies, in particular, provided much of the scientific underpinning for modern advertising and motivational techniques. This government-financed communication research went well beyond what would have been possible with private sector money alone and often exploited military recruits, who comprised a unique pool of test subjects.” Which is not to say that the research was morally proper. The various foundations created as fronts were to prevent researchers from knowing the source of their funds. The only possible connection that O’Neill can make is that Jolly West used a ‘crash pad’ in Haight Ashbury in 1967 to monitor the effects of LSD on hippies who were invited to trip there. Some of those hippies were referred by the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic which Manson attended. End of connection. That’s everything O’Neill has about the relationship between Jolly West and Charles Manson. O’Neill would have us believe that Jolly West manipulated Manson for two years. He cannot show that they communicated in any way. He does not track any coincidence in their movements during that two years either. The methods of manipulation are also given scant attention. O’Neill tells us that ‘Manson … had used LSD to collect and reprogram his followers.’ But he also reports Jolly West’s conclusion that ‘Acid … made people more difficult to hypnotize: it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation.’ He adds to this Dr Eugene Schofield’s assertion that ‘LSD produced disorganized behavior, not violent behavior.’ This is supported by the literature. LSD would not be useful in creating programmed murderers – Manchurian candidates – because it has unpredictable effects. The CIA’s attempt to program students and soldiers with LSD failed. It disorientated rather than increasing obedience. They could find no effective way to distribute it to enemy soldiers and, after thousands of tests, LSD was abandoned as a chemical weapon. If O’Neill had paid attention to Manson’s Without Conscience, he would have found references to the drug most likely to have caused the psychotic behaviour of the Manson gang. O’Neill makes no mention of that drug. Tex Watson participated in both the Tate and the LaBianca murders. He and Manson both refer to a drug they call ‘talatche tea.’ By strange happenstance, at a meeting between us and Jolly West, my friend and colleague Steven Hassan asked Jolly what drug he thought had influenced the Manson Family. Extremely knowledgeable about drugs, without hesitation, Jolly said, ‘jimson weed.’ In Without Conscience, Manson says one ‘Indian Joe’ brought Family member Brenda ‘belladonna’ plants. The roots were boiled to make ‘talatche tea’ by her. Tex ‘picked up a large root and started scarfing it like he was eating an apple. Before the full effect hit him, Tex caught a ride into town. I wasn’t in the kitchen, nor did I know what was going on … I think it was the last time before the trials I saw Tex in what might be called his right mind.’ Manson says that Tex Watson took both ‘talatche’ and LSD before setting off on the Tate murders. After reviewing O’Neill’s and Manson’s books, I contacted an ethnobotanist, who very kindly explained that Manson and Watson had misspelled toloache, which is indeed jimson weed or datura. Here is his report:

‘Datura is common wild to the southwestern US and the Sonoran desert. It is sometimes called thorn apple, which refers to the thorny seed pods. It is also known as devil’s weed or hell’s bells. Once you know what to look for you can spot them all over. Manson and crew would have had ready access to datura around Spahn Ranch and the Simi Hills. It’s pretty easy to get into mischief with datura. It’s free and broadly distributed and will get you loaded, though at a potentially horrific cost. Datura has alluring trumpet-shaped blossoms. In the US West you will find abundant datura, also known as jimson weed or locoweed. All parts of the plant contain the highly toxic tropane alkaloids atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine. The plant is easily located along roads, and is a source of poisoning for both people and animals. The tropane alkaloids are potent medicines in broad pharmaceutical use today. The effects of toloache’ vary greatly according to how you take it. If you make a tea, then it is a very risky business. ‘A mild datura tea may produce somewhat pleasant and dreamy effects, but a stronger tea will be a whole other bad thing. Visions on datura tend to be dark, crazy, evil, gravely disturbing. Most people become distraught and will not take a strong dose twice. It’s the definition of a bad trip. And if the tea is too strong, then you ride a gurney into that big hotel for dead souls. Thousands have died consuming datura in various forms. The seeds of datura may be ground finely and used as a poison or to intoxicate others such that they become open to suggestion. This is currently a known practice among robbers in Colombia. Finely ground seeds are blown into people’s faces, they inhale the powder, and become malleable and empty their ATM’s to robbers. The powdered seeds are also put into drinks, rendering the unsuspecting incapacitated and easy to rob. The Thuggee cult of India, from which we derive the word thug, used datura preparations regularly to kill and rob. It’s a very powerful poison, fast acting, associated with the goddess Kali.’ Datura belongs in a stronger class of drugs than LSD. It is a ‘deleriant’: due to its primary effect of causing delirium, as opposed to the more lucid and less disturbed states produced by other hallucinogens. Manson said, ‘I still don’t believe any of the violence would have erupted if we had controlled the drugs instead of letting them control us.’ It isn’t possible to control datura. It turns the whole world into a hallucination, a living nightmare. We come – at last – to Manson’s involvement with Scientology. In his interview with Eric Hunley – but nowhere in his book – is O’Neill’s single statement about the influence Scientology might have had on Manson: ‘The official narrative is that he audited or was audited for about a hundred hours and absorbed a lot of the techniques, a lot of the language of this ‘religion’ and then walked away from it, but a lot of it stayed, you know, stuff about ego and … all this word play. The question is, was there more to that? … Scientology had been infiltrated by federal agents too, who were using it to accomplish things. And there’s an interesting character who was the one who taught Manson Scientology, who later represented Squeaky Fromm after the assassination attempt of Gerald Ford … in ’75 … Lanier Ramer … Bruce Davis … was suspected in a couple of other murders, including two Scientology teenagers in LA in November of ’69’. I’d love to see information about this use by federal agents of Scientology. The only time I’ve heard it before was back in 1983 from Hubbard’s ‘Second Deputy Commodore’ Captain Bill Robertson, who assured me that Scientology had been taken over by the FBI as part of the alien invasion of Earth which was already underway with two hundred thousand Marcabians in Switzerland under the cover of Transcendental Meditation and the Freemasons. The occasional infiltrator from the intelligence community perhaps, but agents working to ‘accomplish’ something using Scientology? That’s new to me. While I was working on this piece, Steven Hassan, PhD, wrote a column for Psychology Today about the parole request for Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten. To our surprise, Psychology Today pulled the reference to Manson’s Scientology experience. You can see Steve’s response and my email to the timorous magazine here. The expurgated Psychology Today article is here. Scientology relied on a 1971 Guardian newspaper article where the allegation of Manson’s involvement was withdrawn after litigation. This disingenuous tactic conceals Scientology’s certain knowledge that Manson received about 150 hours of dianetic and scientology ‘processing’ from his cell mate Lanier Ramer over a fourteen-month period at McNeil Island penitentiary beginning in 1962. Files seized by the FBI show that Scientology tried to suppress any mention of this involvement. I brought it up in the original edition of Let’s Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky back in 1990. Scientology made no attempt to sue me over the claim, despite launching suits against the book in both New York and London. One of the seized internal Scientology Guardian’s Office documents is headed ‘Re: Our disinformation action on the Process re Manson.’ The Process was a Scientology splinter group that caused Scientology a headache when it was alleged that Manson had been involved with it. Deliberate ‘disinformation’ has been a usual tactic for Scientology for decades, to ‘find or manufacture enough threat … to cause them to sue for peace … Don’t ever defend. Always attack,’ in Ron Hubbard’s words. The key word is ‘manufacture.’ In 1979, Mary Sue Hubbard, Hubbard’s wife and Controller of the Guardian’s Office, was sentenced to five years imprisonment for a long list of crimes including kidnapping, false imprisonment, theft, bugging and burglary. She oversaw the Manson cover-up, which was part of ‘Operation Rawhide.’ Manson was apprehended for the Tate-LaBianca killings in October 1969. On 22 June 1970, a full month before his trial began, a ‘compliance report’ concerning Manson and Family member Bruce Davis was sent to Mary Sue Hubbard. It detailed Manson’s ‘approximately 150 hours of auditing’ and his practice of Training Routine 0 (TR-0) with cell mate Lanier Ramer (a drill that is done for ‘some hours’ according to Hubbard’s instructional bulletin). The report adds that ‘for a time,’ Manson would ‘talk about nothing but Scientology to the extent that people avoided his company.’ Later, he was ‘screaming to get away from his auditor.’ (In the opinion of the report’s author, Manson had been run for too long – or ‘over-run’ – on a ‘process’). This report also says that Leslie Van Houten was ‘interested’ in Scientology. Elsewhere, there is mention of Sandra Good, another Family member, also having an interest in Scientology. Four of the key players in the Manson story had an involvement in a sophisticated system of thought reform. As part of Mary Sue Hubbard’s ‘disinformation’ campaign, the Guardian’s Office had Lanier Ramer sign an affidavit to the effect that he was not a Scientology ‘minister,’ saying ‘I have at no time held nor claimed any licensed, certified, official, or employee position within any Church of Scientology.’ He seems to have been a very dedicated Scientologist, however. A Scientology timeline of Ramer says that he ‘supposedly told Riverside PD that he robbed the bank in order to get money for Scn. courses.’ (‘Scn’ here means ‘Scientology.’) There is no secret that Scientology is an indoctrination in control techniques. Hubbard called this ‘infinite control’ or ‘8C’ (Hubbard often used the number 8 in place of the infinity symbol: ∞). There are many Scientology drills and processes that are supposed to lead to ‘8C’ or ‘Tone 40’ control. The manipulation of others’ emotions is part of the basic drilling of all Scientologists. Manson describes his time in the Gibault Catholic Boys Home from the age of twelve, saying ‘being under five feet tall and weighing less than sixty-five pounds … I was easy pickings for the bullies.’ He spent most of the next fifteen years in institutions being picked on by the bullies. Then he was initiated into the control methods of Scientology – including the famous thousand-mile ‘TR-0’ stare that he and other Scientologists are commonly associated with. We do not know the extent to which Scientology training was a part of Manson’s authority over the Family, but it should surely find a place in any analysis of his behaviour. It is likely that he passed on other elements of Scientology belief to his followers – as may the other three Scientologists in the Family. He certainly shared Scientology’s core belief in reincarnation. Perhaps he taught Training Routines to members of the gang too. As these constitute the first step of Scientology indoctrination, it is likely that Bruce Davis, Leslie Van Houten and Sandra Good were already acquainted with what cult expert Steven Hassan has called ‘the most overt use of hypnosis by any cult group.’ Manson himself said that in 1962 in prison, where he had just learned to read: ‘I studied hypnotism and psychiatry. I found whatever books I could find (and understand) that dealt with mind development. A cell partner turned me on to scientology. With him and another guy I got pretty heavily into dianetics and scientology. Through this and my other studies, I came out of my state of depression. I was understanding myself better, had a positive outlook on life, and knew how to direct my energies to each day and each task. I had more confidence in myself and went the way I chose to go, whereas previously, I had always been content to listen and follow.’ If only Scientology hadn’t bolstered Manson’s confidence. Scientology is the most elaborate and perhaps the most successful system of behaviour modification ever devised. Fervent Scientologists have included NASA scientists, theoretical physicists, high-power trial attorneys, politicians, sociologists, medical doctors – even one psychiatrist – and, of course, many famous actors, composers and musicians. Hubbard rarely told the truth, but when he said of Scientology, ‘We have ways of making slaves here’ and ‘We can brainwash faster than the Russians,’ he was offering his honest opinion. If Manson made slaves, if Manson brainwashed his followers, we must look to his time in Scientology and carefully consider its significance. O’Neill spent twenty years researching CHAOS. He added a great deal of information to the record but as he tells us about one potential interview, ‘I was overthinking everything, and then overthinking my overthinking.’ The book is drenched in speculation. While O’Neill does put to rest the corrupt prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s myth of ‘Helter Skelter,’ he replaces it with a far more elaborate and fanciful idea: that the Manson gang’s murders were the consequence of ‘programming’ by Jolly West. He tells us nothing about this programming process. I’ve spent a lifetime investigating the methods of brainwashing, mind control, thought reform, coercive control – call it what you will – and it is vital to have details of any such program; the often incremental steps. The frightening documentary Manson: The Lost Tapes was not available to O’Neill. It shows remaining ‘Family’ members only days after Manson’s arrest and the later testimony of the girls then filmed is a keen insight into the madness of the Family. None of them mention Jolly West. Jolly is indeed O’Neill’s white whale. Chaos is not the only place where he heaps blame upon Jolly. In an interview with Eric Hunley, O’Neill says West ‘snapped’ Ruby into insanity in a single session. No corroborating evidence is offered and no explanation of the method used. In an article in The Intercept, O’Neill asserts ‘Louis Jolyon West seems to have used chemicals and hypnosis liberally in his medical practice, possibly leading to the death of a child and the execution of an innocent man.’ If West could do this in 1954 – when these dreadful events took place – the whole MKULTRA program would have been redundant: if O’Neill’s speculation is accepted, a programmed killer had been made and the CIA’s quest was complete. The program continued for another twenty years without, as far as we know, achieving this objective. While I’ve met many people who were exploited into allowing others to interpret their reality, I’ve yet to find any case among the thousands I’ve looked into where anyone was turned into a compliant robot (my own Opening Our Minds explores the many ways in which obedience, groupthink and deliberate thought reform work). Yes, it is possible to make people act against their own best interests and even their own morality, even to sacrifice their lives for the good of a bogus cause, but to maintain murderous conviction requires rather more than a few positive suggestions and a few tabs of LSD. In fact, the first stage of mind control is the creation of feelings of knowing, a spurious ‘certainty.’ This ‘certainty’ is based upon belief rather than evidence. Mind control is undone when the individual discards the feelings of knowing, the sense of certainty, by accepting hard evidence that they are just feelings. O’Neill has successfully convinced many people of his own certainty. As yet, as he admits, he has only circumstantial evidence to support that certainty. It remains an unproven hypothesis; a speculation, worth further investigation, but not yet worth believing. In O’Neill’s account, West has become a magician with supernatural abilities beyond description or explanation. But O’Neill is not Captain Ahab. He worked not for revenge but in the hope of understanding an awful series of events. That is a noble endeavour. He amassed a mountain of research, and his work was meticulous. I do not question his integrity, just his conclusions. — Jon Atack

Take the Back Alley to Langley - Part Three

Hippie Reeve via Chaos

Part One Introduction

Part Two Backstory

Houston, we have a problem. 

Our friend inside the government, these days known online as Montana Sun, ran an earnings report on Reeve Whitson. They found:

- No government earnings were ever posted for Whitson

- No government pension existed for Whitson

- No government retirement insurance existed from that nonexistent pension 

- No record of Whitson paying taxes after 1962

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People who work for Uncle Sam have insurance. Former service members have VA records. Everyone pays taxes. 

As Montana Sun pointed out, even Lee Harvey Oswald left a paper trail, and he helped kill a President of the United States. 

Is it possible Whitson was nothing more than a well-connected PI? His life is straight out of James Bond. We'll wrap this up in Part Four. +ggw

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Edit: You can catch me on The Paulcast tonight at 10 pm EST talking all things Whitson! 

Edit #2: Whitson's gal Joan Weldon. 

Take the Back Alley to Langley - Part Two

Reeve Whitson - Junior Year of High School 

Part One Introduction 

This is a quick section. Just a little fact check on O'Neill's version of Whitson's early years and we'll be out the door.

Whenever I decide I've discovered the most interesting person in this study, a new rabbit hole opens in front of my fingertips, and down I go. Without fail, I search every time for a starting point long before the subject enters our realm. I need to see them as people. 

I look for the usual stuff. Hopes. Dreams. Were they loved? 

Truth be told, love isn't something I always find on these dark roads. Imagine if some connection existed between unloved children and bad outcomes. Talk about possibilities. 

I'll stop there. Bootstraps arguments are pointless. We've already had them and it's not like monsters and heroes appear fully formed the first time they emerge from the shadows anyway. That stuff only happens in movies. In real life, monsters and heroes walk beside us every step of the way. 

Online, I followed Tom O'Neill's research team to Reeve Whitson's relatives. Figuring out who's who isn't super hard. Crime dogs always stop when they discover someone they can call. Paper trails only need to stretch that far. 

Here are the things I found while attempting to confirm O'Neill's backstory on Whitson. Thankfully, my ride through history was easy this time. None of the snow was unplowed. 

Reeve's father was a circus performer in a successful family business. He had representation in the Big Apple. 

Reeve's mother took him to London while she worked. I thought she was an actress but O'Neill says she's a dancer. He's probably correct. 

Whitson took part in school activities you might expect from the son of performers. Drama. Singing. Instruments. He also stayed fit. All in all, Reeve was a handsome overachiever. I found an honest smile in almost every photo. 

Basketball team manager.

This one will make Tobias happy. Whitson ran Track! 

O'Neill tells us in Chaos that Whitson went to Indiana University after high school but I couldn't find anything. Someone has locked down several Whitson photos online. That cruelty knows no bounds.  

Buntline, where for art thou? An ROTC type photo would be fantastic right about now. 

My research into Whitson's backstory made me feel like O'Neill didn't fudge anything. I didn't expect any funny business but found myself pleasantly surprised nevertheless. I'll be back with more screen caps from Whitson's public life in subsequent sections. For now, let's leave Whitson in the stands of an early 1950's Hoosier basketball game and jump to 1969. 

At least this time, the person actually exists. See you in Part Three. 

Take the Back Alley to Langley - Part One

Reeve Whitson - Freshman Year of High School 

Did photographer Shahrokh Hatami doom Sharon Tate and her friends one March morning in 1969 after a confrontation with Charles Manson at the Cielo front door? Were Rudi Altobelli's tenants cursed that evening when the Rudi told Charlie he'd be in Italy for a year after Charlie stood in front of the guesthouse and said he'd like to talk more in the future? 

Was Manson even there that day? Hatami wasn't sure. Mighty Max Frost, I am reaching out with my mind. Beep boop tell me what Rudi said. 

Today, we're exploring Tom O'Neill's claim that a possible CIA agent named Reeve Whitson has been left out of the Manson study history. According to O'Neill, after hearing Hatami's story, Whitson delivered his friend Hatomi (and his Ides of March tale) to Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, and then sat in on the unrecorded interview.  

-  Here is Hatami's backstory in case you think he's some hanger-on with a fancy camera who took a two year degree at Santa Monica College after UCLA laughed at his high school GPA and asked him to jump through hoops before achieving main campus status. Hatami was no state school guy. 

 - Here is Bugliosi's closing argument in the Manson, et al, trial. Photographer Hatami is mentioned fourteen times. 

During the trial, Bugliosi argued that Hatami's high-handed dismissal at the Cielo  to the guesthouse sent Charlie over the edge. Bugs asked about Hatami's aggressive posture, tone, and had him describe how he jabbed an index finger toward the guesthouse when dismissing Manson. 

- Here's a newspaper article from a courtroom reporter (via the almighty) if you are new to our study or desire a quick refresh on Hatami's testimony.  

Others weren't so sure about the encounters. Filmmaker and author Robert Hendrickson smelled a rat and believed Bugliosi needed those March 1969 confrontations to convince the jury Charlie visited Cielo before the murders took place and had an axe to grind after the Hatami and Altobelli brush offs. Hendrickson was so passionate about about Bugliosi's duplicity that he continued his argument across two Hatami posts in our blog library. 

- This video in Matt's post from 2014 shows Sharon and Hatami in better days. Hatami is the shirtless hunk. Sharon is as pretty as pretty gets. Hatami's girlfriend is hanging around because she's no fool. 

That fateful day in March, Hatami takes the chivalry route when an uninvited man reaches the Cielo front door. Not shocking. Manly man exhibitions in front of attractive women have always been a thing, even if sometimes it's only pretend. 

According to author Tom O'Neill, Hatami first shared his Charlie encounter story with possible CIA agent Reeve Whitson. The son of an actress and a circus acrobat, Whitson enters our story when Tom O'Neill has Whitson phone Hatami early that Saturday morning we all know so well before anyone else discovered the bodies up on Cielo. 

In O'Neill's Chaos, Whitson claims to friends he was the CIA surveillance team watching the Cielo house. He was supposedly on the scene early that fateful Friday but didn't stick around. According to his friends, Whitson forever lamented his inability to prevent the killings.  

We need to back up a bit because things are already not making sense. How does Reeve Whitson, a rumored CIA super spook, find his way to the Cielo crowd? 

Bugliosi never mentions Whitson in his book, but Chaos provides insight. According to O'Neill, Whitson might've bonded with Sebring over race cars. And Whitson's mom was good buds with Doris Tate. Third, O'Neill writes, Paul Tate told him Whitson was a friend to himself, Sharon, and Roman.   

So there's three hows. Whitson maybe became a family friend after meeting Sebring at the track. Unfortunately, answering my first question created a second. Why was Whitson surveilling his good friends? 

Reeve Whitson was an archconservative on an anti-drug mission. By some accounts, an ounce of blow was found in Jay Sebring's Porsche the morning following the murders. That's more than a personal stash, Idgaf who you are. An ounce was enough to get half the houses on the block trembling while searching for the man through their bedroom blinds the night of August 8th. Was Sebring doing deals out of the Cielo parking lot? 

English Major Math time: 

* In 1969, one gram of cocaine cost $100-$150 dollars in Los Angeles

* We know Jay sold little baggies out of his briefcase

* Sebring would be a fool to give rich people his lowest price - let's err on the bigger side this time 

* Twenty-eight grams come out of an ounce - more if Sebring stepped on his dope 

* $150 x 28 = $4200

* $4200 in 1969 money is more than $32000 today 

** Let's pause for reader corrections on the amount of cocaine found in Sebring's car, and also to give others a chance to describe how much blow they snorted some random Friday night in the 80's at a Huey Lewis concert. 

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Discussion Materials: 

In addition to what is linked above, we're using newspapers articles, Helter Skelter, and Tom O'Neill's Chaos. Feel free to add links to any supporting or counterarguments in the comments below the posts. 

Most of O'Neill's research we're discussing in this piece is found in Chapter Six of Chaos, titled Who Was Reeve Whitson? I'm using the Kindle version. You should explore digital searching if you don't already. Yes, chopped down trees feel great in my hands, but they are garbage when I wonder how many times Whitson is printed in the text (150). 

Or Hatami (43). Btw, O'Neill doesn't care which version you buy. Both cost about the same. 

Continues in Part 2...

The Col Presents: THE LAST WORD on Tom O'Neill's CHAOS

In 1992 a hoax was published, THE DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER, in which the forever unknown killer was alleged to have been the husband of  a 1880s woman poisoner.  It was nonsense, attempting to link two separate but famous murders of the time, akin to alleging that Richard Speck was the Zodiac.

Longtime Manson Researchers no doubt have seen Maury Terry's THE ULTIMATE EVIL on the fifty cent rack during a library sale.  Written in 1987 it is one long series of conspiracies that essentially allege satanists all over the United States getting together and killing randos because reasons.  The Son of Sam?  Charles Manson?  CIA?  Mind Control?  Sure why not.

It is a supremely silly book.


In 2003 a sad, deranged individual named Steven Hodel published a book called BLACK DAHLIA AVENGER where he tries to work his Daddy issues out by blaming his deceased father (of course) for a string on unsolved woman murders in LA in the 1940s.  Since idiots listened to him he has published multiple subsequent books in which he alleges Daddy was The Lipstick Killer and The Zodiac and who knows who else, maybe he killed Hoffa too.

The above trend shows you that the True Crime arena is sloppy, lazy and filled with people alleging absolute bullshit without any proof- oh, as long as the people being talked about are dead.

On February 4, 2019 I reviewed on this illustrious blog the first section of CHAOS by Tom O'Neill.  In that review I noted my history with Mr. Tom and provided evidence that he was a dick  I also pointed out that the book was, as far as that section was concerned, filled with lies and incorrect statements.  I offered to help review the rest of the manuscript and took the liberty of offering the assistance of you all (blog readers) to try to get things right.  Tom of course refused.

The book came out, sold a few copies and has vanished.  No serious researcher will ever consult it.

Tom as a "journalist" (his jacket blurb lists only magazine writing credits for mags that have been shut for over a decade) is of the slimy type who works like this- "Answer my question".  "No comment." " Well if you don't answer my question (which you have every right not to do) I have to conclude you have something bad to hide"  He states several times that he tried to get a hold of celebrities and others who did not want to speak with him, then implies that they are guilty of some unexplained shit.

But once the finished volume came out the whole thing turned into the ramblings of a deranged fan.  In fact much of it reads as bad fan fiction, if you were a fan of shitty sixties spy novels.

A good portion of the book is all about how hard it was for Tom to write the book.  They advertised that it was 20 YEARS!! in the making as if that was a good thing.  It took 20 years because he waited for people to die so he could accuse them of things.

For example- BUG was a punk.  My hatred for BUG was public on the ONLY Official TLB Blog while Bug was alive.  I had clear reasons- he made up the motive that has confused this case for 50 years.  He lied under oath,.  He stalked his milkman.  He beat his mistress.  You do not usually get an actual crazy person in charge of a major prosecution but then we haven't had an actual crazy President before now.

But you have to remember Tom is an angry, credulous child.  He befriends BUG to get background for his book.  BUG wants to control the narrative (shocking!).  He and BUG fight.  He gets a hold of some documents (not reprinted in any format) and alleges BUG committed perjury.  BUG threatens him.  O'Neill is freaked out.

What the hell did he think was going to happen?

I focused on this section (the rest gets worse) because back when I liked the guy (pre his TV interviews about Charlie's Karate School Inc) I knew he had met with Terry Melcher and gotten some hot information from him.  It was a secret rendezvous on a rooftop.  This was over 15 years ago and conveniently Melcher is dead now.

The big reveal is that Melcher probably hung out at the Ranch again at least once after the murders. OO-EE-OO.  BUG hid that from the defense. If it had ever come out....what?  I mean Crazy Tom basically says that this BOMBSHELL would lead to the killers being released.  Uh huh.

So this is not useful, is not interesting and could only matter to Terry and BUG.  But you read the book and you conclude that this is better than DNA- to Tom O'Neill.

The second half of the book goes the full Conspiracy Tinfoil Gamut.  Manson's parole officer was CIA.  Another dead guy was the linchpin for a mind control operation.  Jet fuel cannot burn steel girders.  Kubrick shot the fake moon landing. HAIL Q!

Tom contacted me in June after the book was published to ask if I had any questions.  I held off on this review because it seemed pointless.  The book was not mattering because it was the life's work of an angry wannabe journalist who was going to publish the book no matter what, even if there was no story.

Tom hopes his readers will fall for shit people fall for on the internet all the time. Life is not a narrative.  It doesn't always make sense one hundred percent. There are things I cannot explain about Amanda Knox's behavior, but there is plenty of evidence that she killed her roommate.  I am uncertain if Charlie did go back to Cielo; I do not know whose glasses they were; I think Kasabian was more involved.  But Tex Watson and the girls still stabbed all those people.  Not being able to explain EVERYTHING does not make a case weak.

I am sad this book is out, because that means I cannot mock Tom about it any more.

I hope he found the journey worth it.  The end product was a waste.


UP NEXT: The Col Presents THE LAST WORD on ONCE UPON A TIME ...IN HOLLYWOOD