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

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

  It wasn’t over. The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened, with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from Orange County who’d played the sousaphone in junior high.

  And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.

  The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife. Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately—and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in the front door, and he tied up the couple by himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway, where they were waiting in the car.

  Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill everyone. They had only buck knives.

  They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator—misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.

  “Almost Dead Inside”

  The bloodshed, in its primitive defiance—a pregnant star slaughtered, a man perforated with kitchen utensils—confirmed a sense of rupture in America. The decade’s subversive spirit had come on with too much fervor. Some reckoning was bound to come, or so it seemed in retrospect; the latent violence couldn’t contain itself forever.

  The nation was immured in these events: in the motive, the manhunt, and then, in 1970, the sensational nine-and-a-half-month-long trial. But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months. With the suspects unknown and at large, rumors proliferated and the tension reached a fever pitch. For a while, the police maintained that the two sets of murders were unrelated; the LaBiancas were victims of a copycat attack. Even Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood was only a few years old, fell into the speculative fervor, appearing on The Tonight Show to provide a “fantasy” explanation of the murders. He blamed them on one person, with the motive a fit of rage and a heaping portion of paranoia.

  As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of LAPD detectives—one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca—failed to share information, believing the crimes unconnected. As they lost valuable time pursuing false leads, doubt and ridicule followed them in the press. For almost four months, the police would say that they had no real idea who had committed some of the most appalling murders in the history of the country.

  Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.

  At LAPD headquarters, the chief of police, Edward M. Davis, stepped up to an array of fifteen microphones and announced to a stunned crowd of two hundred reporters that the case was solved. Warrants were out for Charles Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian. More people would be named pending grand jury indictments. Davis added, to everyone’s astonishment, that the Tate and LaBianca murders were connected. The suspects may have been responsible for a series of other unsolved homicides, too.

  He didn’t name Manson or Susan Atkins that day because they were already in custody. In mid-October, Manson, with a welter of his followers, had been apprehended on auto-theft charges at the Barker Ranch, a hideaway in forbidding Death Valley; its seclusion surpassed even that of the Spahn Ranch. Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder—that of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson—and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.

  Journalists dug into the story. Images and mug shots of Manson and the Family were emblazoned on front pages and TV screens around the world. The cognitive dissonance was intense. These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.

  They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor-bright buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts. They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.

  In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals—even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared—it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.

  Where had these beliefs come from? The murderers had been raised and educated in solid, conventional American communities, but no one wanted to claim them. The Family, with its starry-eyed communalism, sexual frankness, and veneration of LSD, offered a screen onto which anyone could project his insecurities about the era’s politics and pressures. The promise of the hippie movement had been in its willingness to forgo cherished institutions in favor of the new and untested. After the Tate murders, it seemed that hippies and freaks were more than a risible sideshow: they could really undermine the status quo. Their promiscuity had always earned a lot of finger wagging from concerned moralists, while others had looked on with thinly veiled envy. Parents were worried that their kids would drop out, become hippies, and never get decent jobs. Everywhere, kids were hitchhiking. The consensus from the straight world was that hippies were mostly harmless—but you didn’t want to be one. While there had been isolated incidents of violence attributed to hippies, none of it was as horrific, premeditated, and systematic as the murders committed by Manson’s Family. And so much about the crimes was mired in uncertainty, from the motive to the body count. By some estimates, over that four-month period in 1969, as many as thirty-three people may have been killed simply because one man ordered it. This was something altogether differ
ent.

  On December 12, with the nation still reeling from the indictments, a piece in Time magazine drew specious parallels between hippies and violence. In the movement’s “invitation to freedom,” the magazine warned, “criminals and psychotics” blossomed as easily as innocents and pacifists did. But how, Time asked, could “children who had dropped out for the sake of kindness and caring, love and beauty, be enjoined to kill”? Dr. Lewis Yablonsky, a sociologist who’d written a book called The Hippie Trip, argued that many hippies were “lonely, alienated people”:

  Even when they act as if they love, they can be totally devoid of true compassion. That is the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly… Many hippies are socially almost dead inside. Some require massive emotions to feel anything at all. They need bizarre, intensive acts to feel alive—sexual acts, acts of violence, nudity, every kind of Dionysian thrill.

  “The Mechanical Boy”

  And this Charles Milles Manson, whose face was suddenly everywhere—was he not the epitome of the Dionysian thrill seeker? A thirty-five-year-old ex-con, roughly half his life whiled away in federal institutions, had ensnared the lives and minds of his followers, mainly young women. Numbering variously between two to three dozen, the majority of the Family members had been under Manson’s influence for less than two years, some not even close to that. Yet all of them would do anything Manson asked, without question, including slaughtering complete strangers. He had cultivated extreme compliance.

  Manson was an unlikely candidate for a charismatic leader. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a father he never met, he’d known little but privation and suffering. Few would be naturally inclined to look up to him, and in the most literal sense, not many could: he was only five foot six.

  Manson spent his earliest years in neglect. When he was still an infant, his mother would leave him to go on benders with her brother, during one of which the pair decided to rob a guy who looked wealthy. Within hours, they’d been arrested, and Manson’s mother was imprisoned for several years. He was eight when she was released, and they spent the next months with a succession of unreliable men in seamy locales, his mom racking up another arrest for grand larceny. Eventually, she pursued a traveling salesman in Indianapolis, marrying him in 1943 and trying to cut back on her drinking. Manson, not yet nine, was already a truant, known to steal from local shops. His mother looked for a foster home for him. Instead, he was made a ward of the state and sent to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic-run school for delinquents in Terre Haute, Indiana. He ran away. His mother took him back. The separation must have weighed on him, at least to go by his acolyte Watson, who later wrote that Manson had “a special hatred for women as mothers… This probably had something to do with his feelings about his own mother, though he never talked about her… The closest he came to breaking his silence was in some of his song lyrics: ‘I am a mechanical boy, I am my mother’s boy.’”

  The “mechanical boy” made short work of the Gibault School. Ten months in, he ran away again, turning to burglary to keep himself afloat. His crimes soon landed him in a correctional facility in Omaha, Nebraska. He ran away from there, too, and started breaking into grocery stores. At age thirteen, Manson was sent to the Indiana Boys School, a tougher institution, where he claimed the other boys raped him. He learned to feign lunacy to keep them at bay. And he kept running away: eighteen times in three years.

  In February 1951, when he was sixteen, Manson broke out again, this time with a pair of other boys. They drove a stolen car across state lines—a federal offense. When a roadblock in Utah brought their escapade to an end, Manson was sent to the National Training School for Boys, in Washington, D.C. Thus began a long stint in the federal reformatory system. From there, Manson went to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where he was caught raping a boy at knifepoint; to a federal reformatory in Virginia, where he racked up similar offenses; and to a reformatory in Ohio, where a run of good behavior earned him an early release in 1954, though caseworkers had taken frequent note of his antisocial behavior and psychic trauma.

  In less than a year’s time he had a wife, and a baby on the way. He took on various service jobs, but he couldn’t give up stealing cars, several of which he drove, again, across state lines. Those crimes, plus his failure to attend a hearing related to one of them, netted him a three-year sentence to Terminal Island, a federal prison in San Pedro, California. By the time he got out, in 1958, his wife had filed for divorce, and he turned to pimping to make a living. The following May, he was arrested yet again, this time for forging a government check for $37.50. This got him another ten-year sentence, but the judge, moved by the plea of a woman who said she was in love with him and wanted to marry him, suspended the sentence right away, letting him go free.

  Manson kept pimping, stealing cars, and scheming people out of their money. The FBI was surveilling him, hoping to bust him for violating the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of prostitutes across state lines. They were never able to bring the charge, but when Manson disappeared to Mexico with another prostitute, he was found in violation of his probation, and the ten-year sentence he’d received earlier was brought into effect. The same judge who’d granted him probation now decreed: “If there ever was a man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for probation, he is it.”

  Stuck in prison for the long haul, Manson took up the guitar and dabbled in Scientology. The staff noted his gift for charismatic storytelling and his enduring “personality problems.” He made no secret of his musical aspirations. From behind bars, he observed, with great interest and envy, the meteoric rise of the Beatles.

  When he was released at age thirty-two, he’d spent more than half his life in the care of the state. He preferred life in prison, he said, so much so that he asked if he could simply remain inside. “He has no plans for release,” one report said, “as he says he has nowhere to go.”

  “Bloodthirsty Robots”

  Reading early press accounts of Manson and the Family, I found it hard to separate hyperbole from veracity. Manson was often made out as an artful seeker—“an evil Pied Piper,” as one paper put it, with reserves of obscure power. About a week after the Family’s arrests, a photograph of a wild-eyed Charles Manson, looking for all the world like a modern-day Rasputin, appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Inside the issue, the “Manson women,” many of them barely teenagers, posed with babies slung over their slender shoulders. They spoke of their love and undying support for “Charlie,” whom they deemed the second coming of Christ and Satan in one.

  The media had already started to label the Family “a nomadic band of hippies” and a “pseudo-religious cult”; the New York Times, striking a dramatic note, claimed that they “lived a life of indolence, free sex, midnight motorcycle races and blind obedience to a mysterious guru inflamed with his power to control their minds and bodies.”

  The underground press, though, had a swell of sympathy for Manson. People thought he was innocent, that his status as a left-leaning communard had been overblown. Tuesday’s Child, an L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists, named Manson their “man of the year.” Some didn’t even care if he was behind the murders. Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”

  I watched the first television footage of Manson. Cameras followed as bailiffs led him to a pretrial hearing, shackled, stooped, and glaring. I saw few traces of his fabled charisma, but I understood how his unsocialized air of pseudomysticism and jailhouse aggression seemed authentic. Manson brought a rollicking exhibition of controlled insanity whenever he appeared before the bench. He quarreled with the judge, arguing that he should be allowed to represent himself. The “girls,” for their part, mimicked their leader’s behavior, publicly battling the judge and their court-appointed defense attorneys at every opportunity and refusing
to obey even the most fundamental rules of courtroom decorum.

  That Manson had been apprehended in Death Valley—as abyssal a place as any in the United States—made him all the more transfixing. Reporters played up the Rasputin comparison, emphasizing his desert-wanderer sorcery. He was a “bearded, demonic Mahdi,” wrote one journalist, who led “a mystical, semi-religious hippie drug-and-murder cult.” Another described him as a “bushy-haired, wild-bearded little man with piercing brown eyes,” with the Family “a hippie-type roving band.” Manson’s malevolence was seemingly inexplicable. Even in the doodles that he left behind on a courtroom legal pad, psychiatrists saw “a psyche torn asunder by powerful thrusts of aggression, guilt, and hostility.”

  Beneath this spectacle, I could glimpse the public’s truer, more profound interest in the case, the same puzzle that would consume me: How and why had these people devolved into criminals? And, more pointedly, could it happen to any average American child—could anyone go “too far”?

  The trial started in July 1970. The jury was sequestered at the Ambassador Hotel, where, two years earlier, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. The Superior Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles became the center of a media circus unlike any the nation had ever seen. The six defendants—Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Steve Grogan, and Linda Kasabian—received the kind of scrutiny known only to the most famous celebrities in the world. (Tex Watson was tried separately from the other Family members; he’d fled to Texas and had to be extradited to California.)

  Vincent Bugliosi became the public face of the state, and Manson’s de facto foil. Though you’d never know it to look at them, the two were the same age—Manson was actually Bugliosi’s senior by three months. Both were thirty-five when the trial began. But Bugliosi, with his three-piece suits and his receding hairline, was the very picture of the straight world, with its authority and moral gravity; sometimes he looked old enough to be Manson’s dad.