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

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

  I looked at Nelson’s website, Mansonmurders.com. The fact that he had one at all was still something of a novelty in 1999. Regularly updated with accounts of his crusades, his page included an index of crime-scene photos, police documents, and interviews, most of which were for sale.

  There was also plenty to suggest his instability. A retired evangelical minister, Nelson boasted of “a close and personal relationship” with Jesus Christ. He bragged about having attended the “United States Secret Service Academy,” where his design for the annual class ring was still in use. His exposés of former Family members were vitriolic and often ad hominem. He’d published photographs of some of their children, having stalked them at their homes and schools.

  But I had to admit that he was a thorough researcher—and I was at a loss as to how I could come by these documents otherwise. I swallowed my pride and sent him an email.

  We met for coffee at a Denny’s in Costa Mesa one afternoon. Across the table, Nelson looked like a retired accountant: midsixties, balding, his silver hair neatly combed on the sides. He dressed conservatively, in a button-down shirt and khakis. I paid him forty bucks for copies of the homicide investigation reports, unredacted and numbering almost a hundred pages.

  He’d gotten these from Earl Deemer, the cop whose interview with Billy Doyle I discussed earlier. Deemer conducted most of the polygraphs for the Tate investigation, and had copied all the police reports, photos, and audiotapes related to the case. How Nelson persuaded him to part with this stuff was a mystery: some said he bought the files, others that he stole them. He didn’t want to tell me, that much was clear.

  Deemer had since died, and what was left of his records went to Mike McGann, a retired homicide detective who’d been the lead investigator on the Tate team. McGann lived in Idaho now. Nelson gave me his number.

  Like Ed Sanders and others, Nelson believed that certain elements of law enforcement knew that the Tate–LaBianca murders were planned, or they knew who was behind them. They’d been unable to act because it would’ve exposed their secret intelligence-gathering operations. Nelson had watched nearly every televised interview Manson had ever given; he felt that Manson “never lies,” he just “withholds information.” But Manson would never tell the truth about the murders—it would involve snitching, and there was no greater transgression in a criminal’s mind.

  Hearing all this at Denny’s made my head hurt, but I felt I had to indulge Nelson. In spite of how far-fetched his theories sounded, some of them resonated with me long after I pulled away from the restaurant that day.

  Back home, I put on some coffee and pulled out the sheaf of papers I’d just bought, feeling somewhere between eager and anxious. As explained in Helter Skelter, the Homicide Investigation Progress Reports were essentially internal summaries. They outlined the detectives’ various leads and efforts to break the case, presenting the investigation in all its disarray, without Bugliosi’s streamlining.

  The thirty-three pages on the Tate murders—“First Homicide Investigation Progress Report”—dated to the end of August 1969. Much of them was workmanlike, describing the activities of the victims in the days leading to their deaths, the chronology of the discovery of the bodies, the recovery of evidence, and so on. When the investigators speculated on the hows and whys, I sat up a bit. They focused on the possibility that Billy Doyle, Charles Tacot, and others had initiated a vengeful massacre after Frykowski welshed on a drug deal. The “Second Homicide Investigation Progress Report” came six weeks later, describing the battery of polygraphs and interrogations through which investigators concluded they hadn’t found the killers yet.

  I’d expected to see names like Altobelli’s and Melcher’s everywhere in the two Tate reports, but I was wrong. Melcher wasn’t mentioned once, and Altobelli was only referenced in passing. If investigators had looked into the possibility that the man who owned the house, or its most recent previous occupant, had anything to do with the murders, there was no sign of their efforts here.

  As intriguing as these reports were, they were kind of a letdown—and other reporters had already gotten them. If I wanted something new, really new, I’d have to keep pressing. I decided to call Mike McGann, the retired cop who lived in Idaho. If Nelson was right, he’d have a stockpile of documents that dwarfed the collection in my hands.

  “Everything in Vince Bugliosi’s book is wrong,” McGann told me on the phone. “I was the lead investigator on the case. Bugliosi didn’t solve it. Nobody trusted him.” McGann spoke in gruff sentences, sometimes no more than a word or two—always a breath away from hanging up on me.

  I wanted to know more, but McGann, like others close to the case, expected to be compensated for his time. And even more so for his papers—he had the records, he told me, but they were available only for a price. That effectively shut down the conversation.

  I kept calling McGann, who was willing to tolerate my curiosity, to a point. I wanted to know about Melcher, Wilson, Jakobson, and Altobelli—what had they told the cops, and when? What about Carole Wilson, and Carole Jakobson, Gregg’s wife? McGann said he hadn’t gone through the files in years, but he’d look, if he had a chance.

  Two months later, during our sixth conversation—he still hadn’t agreed to show me anything for free—McGann said that he had 190 written summaries of the interviews by the Tate detectives—some were only half a page long; most were a page or two; a few were longer. There were no interviews of Melcher, Jakobson, Wilson, or Altobelli, but there were interviews with Carole Jakobson and Carole Wilson. He pulled out the latter, dated August 15, 1969, and started to read a portion over the phone, but soon he stopped and raised his voice. “Are you taping this? I’m not gonna go for that.” I turned off the tape, but he refused to read any more. Before he totally lost patience, I asked if he could tell me one last thing: the date of the Carole Jakobson interview.

  He leafed through the pages. “August 10,” he said. The day after the bodies were discovered. That meant that both wives, Jakobson’s and Wilson’s—“the two Caroles,” as Altobelli called them—had spoken to police within a week of the murders. Why not their husbands? And why not Melcher or Altobelli, given their close ties to the Cielo home? Where were those interviews?

  Revisiting Cielo Drive

  One night, after taking Altobelli out to dinner, I drove him home, as I always did. He’d totaled his car after our first meeting—he was certain someone had run him off the road as a warning to stop speaking to me—and since then I’d become his de facto chauffeur. (“What, the good car in the shop?” he’d always say.) Our evenings together usually ran to six or eight hours, with Altobelli requesting impromptu stops at the supermarket or at a bar for a nightcap. We were close to Benedict Canyon that night, so I took us back to the Valley that way.

  “I used to drive this way back to Cielo,” he said, beginning to reminisce about “the happiest period of my life.” When I asked if he’d mind if we drove up to the house, he said, “Sure, why not?” I sensed some reluctance in his answer. Cresting the final hill, we proceeded in silence down the narrow road, stopping at the gated entrance to what had once been 10050 Cielo Drive. The house had been razed in 1994; erected in its place was “Villa Bella,” an Italianate mansion of concrete and marble behind a tall, ostentatious gate that concealed most of it from the street.

  “I want to see what number they put on my mailbox,” Rudi said, suddenly irritated. “Where is my mailbox?” I maneuvered the car beside it. “10066,” Altobelli said, reading the numbers. “They had it changed.” His voice cracked. “We had such a great view,” he said, gazing from my passenger seat at the sliver of space beyond the gate. “It’s all so cold looking now. My house was so warm and cozy.” His voice broke again and his breathing was shallow, like he was gasping for air.

  “Let’s go,” he said after a long pause. “Back up, back up—now!” he said. When we were already halfway down Cielo, he shouted again, “Just go!” We drove back to his apartment in silence. />
  At home, with about a half dozen stray cats greeting him outside, Altobelli perked up, kneeling down to pet each one and calling them all by name. Inviting me in, he apologized for what had happened back at Cielo. It was the first time he’d returned since he left ten years before. “I lived in that house twenty-five years, four months, and thirty-eight hours,” he said. Now he lived in a converted garage in a neighborhood known for its gang activity.

  Hanging over his desk was a framed photo of the house from the midsixties and a watercolor painting of the front gate. Also framed was a letter from Bugliosi, commending him for his testimony at the trial. Riffling through old snapshots on his desk, he handed me fading photographs of celebrities, all taken at 10050 Cielo Drive. The last one was of Terry Melcher passed out on top of the same desk Altobelli was presently seated at. Melcher’s hand gripped an empty bottle of liquor. “Booze and pills,” Altobelli said. The photo was taken when Melcher was staying with him at the house after the murders.

  In November of that year, when the police told Altobelli that Manson was responsible for the murders, the first thing he did was call “the two Caroles.” “I said because of their husbands I was stuck with all of this. I was left in the lurch. They knew what was happening at the house. Terry was the instigator of the whole thing.”

  Altobelli seemed to be toying with the idea of letting me in on something bigger. He did this a lot—a seemingly offhand remark would complicate his entire portrait of the period. “Terry talked about Manson all the time,” he said. “He thought he was wonderful. He asked me to manage him.” But hadn’t Terry said he wanted nothing to do with him? “Terry stalked Manson. They thought they had Jesus Christ.”

  Later, when I got transcripts of the trials, I’d see that Altobelli wasn’t just embroidering. On the stand, he’d said that Melcher, along with Wilson and Jakobson, had “talked to me on many occasions about Mr. Manson and his philosophy… his way of living and how groovy it was.” Tellingly, in his own testimony, Melcher acted as if he hardly knew the man behind this groovy philosophy. Presented with a photo of Manson, he told a grand jury, “I don’t know him but I think I have seen him at Dennis Wilson’s house.” Later, he revised this story, still stressing that he’d met Manson no more than three times. In other words, even at the time, Melcher’s and Altobelli’s stories weren’t straight.

  Thinking of my talk with Mike McGann, I asked Altobelli if detectives had interviewed him after the murders. Of course they had, he said. He even remembered when: it had been on the day of the Tate and Sebring funerals, at his lawyer’s office. (At the trial, he’d testified to the same thing.) Following his lawyer’s instructions, he reminded me, he hadn’t said anything to the police about Manson. I told Altobelli that McGann had said there was no record of his interview. He was as baffled as I was.

  “It Might Surprise You”

  With McGann stonewalling me, I paid a visit to Stephen Kay, of the Los Angeles DA’s office, thinking he might be able to point me toward more documents. Kay had helped Bugliosi prosecute the case in 1970, joining the trial midway through—a career-making turn for the young lawyer. In the ensuing decades, Kay had served as the government’s most prominent voice against Manson and the Family, appearing at their parole hearings to argue against their release. He was, after Bugliosi, the legal world’s leading expert on the Family.

  I met Kay at his office in Long Beach. When I turned the subject to Melcher, he volunteered something else I’d never heard.

  “Manson and Watson attended a party at the Cielo house when Terry and Candy Bergen lived there,” he said. He was confident about this: the information first came out during the trial for Tex Watson, who’d been tried separately from the other Family members. Kay had confirmed it with Gregg Jakobson. He thought it was another reason that Manson had chosen the Cielo house for the murders; when he sent Watson and the girls there, he noted that “Tex knows the layout of the place.” And yet Melcher, in his testimony, had said that he never once saw Watson inside his house. “Melcher doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. You’ll never get to talk to Melcher or Candice Bergen,” Kay told me.

  Kay didn’t believe that the LAPD had really destroyed their files on the case. For one thing, he said Bugliosi had borrowed what he needed to write Helter Skelter and then, conveniently, never returned anything. Bugliosi had seen earlier than anyone that the Manson trial “was going to be his meal ticket,” Kay said. He took the ethically dubious step of installing his writing partner, Curt Gentry, in the courtroom every day to watch the proceedings in real time. Gentry was working on the book that would become Helter Skelter before anyone was even convicted. The sensationalism only inflamed Bugliosi’s hubris. At one point, he grabbed Kay’s arm in the courtroom and said to him, “Steve, aren’t I great? Do you know anyone as great as me?”

  And Bugliosi was still dining out, literally, on his Manson stories. The case continued to earn him a handsome income in royalties and public-speaking appearances. I was curious about those who hadn’t made out so well—people still living in the shadow of these crimes, who’d been broken by the tumult of the late sixties. They’d have no vested interest in preserving the official narrative.

  Through a series of Los Angeles attorneys, I tracked down Irving A. Kanarek, Manson’s defense attorney. I’d been warned that his was a sad story, but I wasn’t prepared for the dire straits I’d find him in.

  Kanarek comes across as a ridiculous figure in Helter Skelter. Bugliosi portrays him as an erratic, bombastic blowhard whose “obstructionist tactics” earned him opprobrium from every corner of the legal world. The book devotes many pages to his history of indiscretions in the courtroom. By the available evidence, Bugliosi wasn’t exaggerating here. Kanarek really was a reviled, difficult lawyer, and his conduct in the Manson case bore this out. (According to legend, Manson wanted the worst trial lawyer in Los Angeles; someone told him that Kanarek was his man.) He objected nine times during Bugliosi’s opening statement alone. By day three he’d racked up an impressive two hundred objections. The judge jailed him twice for contempt. Bugliosi conceded that Kanarek could be effective, even eloquent at moments, but this didn’t stop him from calling Kanarek, in court and in Helter Skelter, “the Toscanini of Tedium.”

  I met this Toscanini standing on the sidewalk in tony Newport Beach. It was eighty degrees out, but he shuffled up in an oversized winter coat and threadbare sneakers, lugging a battered briefcase held together with twine. Newspapers and plastic bags were poking out. Short and stooped, Kanarek had an unkempt, patchy gray beard; his hands and face were streaked with dirt, as if he hadn’t bathed for weeks. There were sores on his body. He was missing most of his teeth.

  Once Kanarek learned I had a car, he asked me to drive him to a Barnes & Noble, where the cashier handed him a copy of the Los Angeles Times and sent him on his way. It was the previous day’s paper, he told me—that’s why he didn’t have to pay for it.

  Then we got lunch outside at Santa Monica Seafood, a relatively upscale chain. Kanarek struck me as sharp, but eccentric. His explosive volume led diners at two other tables to relocate indoors. He’d shout things like “Manson didn’t kill anyone! He’s the one who should’ve gotten immunity!” or “All Charlie wanted to do was screw girls! He didn’t know they were going to murder those people!” Most of his diatribes took on Bugliosi, for whom he had endless epithets: Liar! Cheat! Crook! Con man! Adulterer! Stalker! Woman beater! Son of a bitch! “And worse,” he shouted, causing another table to flee, “an indicted perjurer who used his influence to be acquitted during his trial!”

  When I asked if Kanarek was paid to defend Manson, he smiled wryly and said that he was, but that confidentiality prevented him from revealing by whom.

  “It would be big news,” he said. “It might surprise you.” (If Kanarek had a benefactor, another lawyer later told me, that white knight wasn’t generous—Kanarek apparently spent most of the trial living out of his car and sleeping in the press room at t
he courthouse.)

  Over the ten years prior to our meeting, Kanarek had discovered his wife was cheating on him; he’d wandered into traffic and been struck by a car; he’d suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in a mental institution. He’d lost his law firm, his license to practice, and his life’s savings. Now he was living on social security at a motel in Costa Mesa, the next town over. After lunch, I offered to drive him back. He took me up on it. But could I take him on “a few more stops” before we parted ways?

  “A few more stops” turned into two harrowing hours in my 1988 Acura. Kanarek screamed at me for missing turns that he’d told me to take just as we were passing them. We drove in circles around Orange County until, to my horror, he announced that he’d decided to accompany me back to L.A.—which meant two more hours in the car with him, during rush-hour traffic. Almost as soon as we pulled onto the freeway, he was ranting again. When he said again that Bugliosi was an “indicted perjurer,” I asked him to explain.

  Belittling me for not having done my homework, Kanarek said that during the Manson trial someone had leaked the rumor about Manson’s celebrity “hit list” to a journalist named Bill Farr, who’d published it in violation of the court’s gag order. The hit-list scoop must’ve come from one of the lawyers on the case—they were the only ones with access to it. With the jury out of the courtroom, the judge made the attorneys swear under oath that they hadn’t slipped the information to Farr, who’d refused to reveal his source. All six attorneys denied having done it. After the trial, the judge, still suspicious, empaneled a grand jury to investigate the incident. They indicted two of the attorneys for lying. One was Daye Shinn, Susan Atkins’s defense attorney. The other was Bugliosi.