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

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

  Next he was cross-examined by the defense’s Paul Fitzgerald: “Do you recall the last time you saw Charles Manson?”

  “Yeah, just a few days after May 18… at the ranch.”

  Three different times on the stand, always as a witness for Bugliosi, Melcher lied about not seeing Manson after May 1969. Next, I pulled out Danny DeCarlo’s testimony to see if Bugliosi had ever asked him about Melcher. It never happened.

  This was a stunner, never before revealed. Without DeCarlo’s testimony, Bugliosi said he might never have gotten his convictions. Only Linda Kasabian, the member of the Family who testified in exchange for immunity, spent more time on the stand.

  Clearly, this was information Bugliosi didn’t want before the jury. But why? Was it simply because any postmurder visits by Melcher undermined the Helter Skelter motive? Bugliosi argued that Manson chose the Cielo house to “instill fear” in Melcher, as Susan Atkins said. But if Melcher were with Manson after the murders, where was the fear? And, most important: What were these additional meetings about? Maybe Melcher knew that the Family was behind the murders but, for some reason, believed he was safe. Was this the secret Bugliosi was hiding, and, if so, to whose benefit?

  As I read the DA’s file more carefully, I found that every single thing DeCarlo and Bugliosi had discussed that day was later repeated by DeCarlo on the witness stand—except the descriptions of Melcher’s visits after the murders. In his notes, Bugliosi had crossed out all of these references.

  The defense should have received a copy of the DeCarlo interview. Bugliosi was legally required to turn over all his evidence to the other side.

  As soon as I could, I scheduled a lunch with the defense’s Paul Fitzgerald, to see if he knew anything about this. We met at his favorite dim sum restaurant downtown, near the courthouse. Fitzgerald, an ex-boxer who was legendary in L.A. legal circles, was his usual animated self: loud, vulgar, slapping the table to make his points, already into his second martini before the first course arrived.

  Wasting no time, I showed him the documents I’d copied at the DA’s, trying not to sway his reaction. His mouth dropped open. “This is Vince Bugliosi’s handwriting,” he said. “I never saw this before! Obviously [they] didn’t want to put on this evidence.” Fitzgerald and the defense team had paid a lot of attention to DeCarlo, thinking he might be an asset to them. “He was not a member of the Family, had a good relationship with truth, lived at the ranch, was an outsider—pretty straightforward guy in most ways, credible. I liked him. He didn’t embellish anything, told it the way it was.”

  That made this document all the more legitimate, in Fitzgerald’s eyes, and more sensational. “I’m very shocked.” He argued that Bugliosi, who was “extremely deceitful” and “the robot he claimed his defendants were,” had written “a script for the entire trial,” getting witnesses to agree to his narrative in advance.

  I was relieved by Fitzgerald’s astonishment—it convinced me that I wasn’t overreacting here. Wanting to eliminate any possible doubt, I tried for months to find Danny DeCarlo himself, but he seemed to have vanished. I did eventually track down a girlfriend of his, who told me that she’d gotten my interview request to him—he lived mainly in Mexico these days, she said. I never heard back from him.

  I felt it was becoming nearly impossible to deny that Bugliosi had manipulated some of his witnesses—or that he’d conspired with at least two of his principals to conceal the facts of the case and shore up his motive. If Melcher and DeCarlo were tainted—and if Melcher had committed outright perjury, suborned by Bugliosi—then the veracity of the prosecutor’s entire case, including the extraordinary hippie/race-war motive that made him a bestselling author, was called into question.

  “The Guy Is Psychotic”

  As one of the biggest bands in the world, the Beach Boys employed a retinue of managers, roadies, engineers, and gofers—I wondered if any of them had any thoughts on Wilson and Melcher, or if they could fill in some blanks for me. (The band’s surviving members had all declined to speak to me.) I got in touch with John Parks, who’d been the band’s tour manager when Manson and the Family lived at Wilson’s place. He recalled that Melcher had not only met Manson but recorded him, too.

  “Terry recorded him while we were on a fairly long tour,” Parks told me. That was something else Melcher had expressly denied on the stand, something hidden for all these decades. Bugliosi repeated it in his closing statement: “He did not record Manson.”

  When Melcher moved to end his professional relationship with Manson, things took a dark turn. As Parks remembered it, Manson began calling Melcher and unloading on him, making death threats against him “to everybody he saw”; he was “yelling about it and stuff.” Parks could certainly understand, he said, how those threats could’ve influenced Melcher’s decision to move out of the Cielo house so suddenly.

  After the murders, I asked, did Parks or any of his colleagues suspect Manson? Of course, he said. “I knew that Terry had kind of fired Charlie and stopped recording him, so my first thought was that Charlie had made a mistake and actually got Sharon Tate instead of Terry.” One of Manson’s girls, he explained, had already told him that the Family had murdered one of the caretakers at the Spahn Ranch—Donald “Shorty” Shea, whose body wasn’t found until 1977.

  “You could look at these folks and see that they were totally drugged out,” Parks said. “After one of the girls told me that they killed the caretaker, then it got real serious for me.” Everyone in their scene suspected Manson right away, he said, even though it took the LAPD nearly four months to bring him to justice. “I have no idea why they didn’t arrest him right away because to me it was pretty obvious.” The Hollywood community knew that the Beach Boys had been wrapped up in Manson’s world, and it turned them into pariahs, for a time; nightclubs where they’d once been welcomed were suddenly turning them away. “We couldn’t go out because people didn’t want us at their place,” Parks said.

  “So you’re saying a huge community of people knew before the world did that Charles Manson committed these murders?”

  “Yeah.”

  Parks went on to say something even more dizzying: he was positive that the FBI had sent agents to the Beach Boys’ office soon after the murders. “They were monitoring our phones, because they thought there was some connection with those guys,” he said. “They were sitting in my office picking up my telephone… I’m sure they had the phones tapped, but they weren’t sharing information with us.” He told the FBI about Manson “early on,” but they didn’t seem to act on his tip. “I didn’t know why they weren’t doing anything, and everybody else was just trying to stay out of the situation. For the Beach Boys, we didn’t want that kind of publicity. And neither did anybody else.”

  Steve Despar, the Beach Boys’ recording engineer, remembered the ordeal that Manson had put him through during the recording sessions, when he’d show up with “about twelve girls, many underage, quiet, in a stupor.” The group smelled so foul that the studio’s management, at the behest of Brian Wilson’s wife, soon “installed a sanitary bathroom seat.” In the control room, Manson, reeking, would “pull out a knife and clean his fingernails, wave it around and gesture.” After three sessions, Despar was fed up. He called the Beach Boys manager and said, “I refuse to be alone with him. The guy is psychotic and scares the hell out of me.” Despar emphasized, “He was after Melcher… Melcher was not out of the picture at this point. He was part of the project. When I was recording Charles Manson, it was for Dennis and Terry Melcher.”

  “For a Layperson”

  Melcher would never admit that, and I didn’t want to talk to him again until I’d done my due diligence. Fortunately, in the archives of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office (LASO), I soon stumbled on further proof that Melcher had visited Manson after the murders.

  LASO had records of an interview with Paul Watkins, another key member of the Family who’d testified against Manson. He, too, saw Melcher at the Spahn Ranc
h, around the same time as Danny DeCarlo had—the first week of September 1969. What he told the unnamed interviewer was shocking to me:

  Melcher was on acid. Was on his knees. Asked Manson to forgive him. Terry Melcher failed to keep an appointment. Called him a pig. They are all little piggies. Helter Skelter meant for everyone to die. Charlie gave Gregg [Jakobson] a 45 slug and said give Dennis [Wilson] this and tell him I have another one for him.

  This was even more explosive than the files from the DA, I realized. Not only did it suggest that Melcher had some bizarre debt to Manson—it opened up Watkins to accusations of perjury. Just like DeCarlo, Watkins had omitted these details from his testimony. He made no mention of having seen Melcher at the Spahn Ranch in early September 1969—much less having seen him on acid, begging for forgiveness.

  As much as the Watkins interview buttressed my case for a cover-up, it brought a host of new questions. Why did Melcher need Manson’s forgiveness? Did he know that it was he who was supposed to die that night—had Manson instilled much more fear in him than anyone had ever known? And what had compelled Bugliosi to believe that he could hide the true extent of their relationship? I wondered how many other stories like this had been kept secret. Now I felt I had a stronger shot at grabbing Melcher’s attention, maybe even at getting him to concede that he’d lied.

  First, though, I had to contend with Bugliosi. As the summer faded into autumn in the first year of my reporting, I had a hunch that Vince was keeping close tabs on me, even monitoring my progress, in a way. Altobelli had suggested that Vince was always asking about me, trying to undermine my credibility; he thought I was only masquerading as a magazine journalist. When I heard about Melcher’s puzzling remark—“Vince was supposed to take care of all that”—I’d made a conscious decision to distance myself from Bugliosi. Although we’d once spoken on an almost weekly basis, I hadn’t been in touch with him since June. One day in October I came home to find that he’d left a message on my machine. “I need to talk to you about something,” he said, sounding unusually serious. This was it, I thought. I set up my tape recorder and called him back.

  “How you doing, buddy?” he answered, sounding manic. “Listen, are you still working on this thing?” Then he added: “Someone, I don’t remember who, called me… If there’s something about my handling of the case—anything at all—that you had a question about, I would appreciate if you would call me to get my view on it… I think I did a fairly good job, and I can’t think of things that I would do differently. But for a layperson, they may look at it and say, He should not have done this, this is improper or what have you—and I’d like to at least be heard.”

  I told him I would absolutely give him a chance to be heard, and that I did, in fact, have some questions—but I didn’t have them ready yet.

  “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, call me, because there may be a justification or reason why I did something that, as a layperson, you would not know.”

  Now I was positive that he had some notion of what I’d been researching, whom I’d been talking to. I mentioned that I’d made halting progress on the piece, which was still expected for Premiere, even if it was running behind schedule. The Melcher angle, I said—wondering if he’d take the bait—had been so impossible to get.

  “Were you ever able to get in touch with Terry?” he asked.

  I said I was.

  “Oh, you have talked to him? You got him on the phone?” Vince’s surprise was evident, but I couldn’t tell if it was feigned or not. I felt like he was hoping to keep me talking, to feel out my progress. I got off the phone as soon as I could.

  I didn’t hear from him again until December, just a few days before Christmas, when he left a phone message asking for my address. He said he wanted to send me a CD of some songs by Manson that “a guy playing Manson in a movie” had given him. When I didn’t return the call, he left another message the next day to make sure I understood that the music was “very rare and not otherwise available.” I didn’t return that call, either, but the same night I got a call from Altobelli, who said that Vince had called him twice that day “wanting to know what you’re doing.” Their second conversation ended in “a shouting match,” Altobelli said, after he started asking Bugliosi about some of the information I’d shared over the previous months.

  That was enough for me. I wouldn’t speak to Vince again for seven years.

  On Melcher’s Roof

  When my piece for Premiere was more than a year late, I knew I had to talk to Melcher again, and to put my full weight on him. I wanted this conversation to bring my reporting to a close. Then I could file my piece, finally.

  Months of constant interviewing had honed my strategy. If I could get someone on the phone in a talkative mood, I’d suggest an in-person meeting that same day, which would minimize the chance that they’d get cold feet. I’d be ready to go at a moment’s notice: showered and dressed, with notes, questions, documents, and tape recorders in my bag by the door. Such was the case on the day I phoned Melcher—July 3, 2000. Surprisingly, he picked up; even more surprisingly, I caught him in a lively frame of mind; most surprising of all, he said he’d meet me on the roof of his apartment building in fifteen minutes.

  I bolted out the door and drove over to his high-rise on Ocean Avenue, in Santa Monica, dwelling all the while on his choice of venue: his rooftop? I imagined some kind of bleak, desolate place, the sun beating down on us as ventilation fans whirred. Instead, I bounded into his lobby and took the elevator up to find a rooftop lounge with a bar, a pool, and a kingly view of the Santa Monica Bay.

  Melcher lived in one of the penthouse suites, and there he was, sitting on a couch with a drink in his hand. Though it was a gorgeous day and anyone in these luxury suites could access the roof lounge, we were alone up there. He was wearing a gold shirt and aviator glasses that he didn’t take off until midway through our conversation. When I arrived, he disappeared into his kitchen to leave his drink there. I got the sense it wasn’t the first he’d had.

  Considering how much time and energy I’d devoted to Melcher, I couldn’t believe I’d never laid eyes on him before. He had a pronounced abdomen but skinny legs. His long, wispy, blond-gray hair fell over his ears and across his forehead. His face was swollen and wet, with high cheekbones; his eyes, when the sunglasses came off, were puffy, and he stared at me unsmilingly. Around the mouth and chin, he resembled his mother, Doris Day. And he spoke in a kind of high-pitched, halting half-whisper.

  We sat in the shade, where I took my papers out and told him I had reason to believe he’d visited the Spahn and Barker Ranches after the murders, and had spent time with Manson.

  “The only reason I know the Barker Ranch name is because that’s where they arrested them and caught all those people,” he said. “Isn’t that right? Someplace out in the middle of the Mojave Desert?”

  “Dennis and Gregg had been there,” I said.

  “Well, I hadn’t. I had no idea where the Barker Ranch was. None.”

  I started to read from Bugliosi’s interview with Danny DeCarlo, the one I’d gotten from the DA’s office. “‘Definitely saw Melcher out at ranch. Heard girls say, “Terry’s coming, Terry’s coming.” Melcher drove up in a Metro truck similar to a bread or milk truck…’”

  “It was actually a Mercedes Benz convertible.”

  “This is after the murders,” I emphasized. “Between August 16 and the second week of September. Do you recall that?” I watched the frustration come over him as I explained.

  “Look,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Obviously this is something that continues to haunt me whether I’d like it to or not, and I’m not exactly like a convicted felon running around doing bad things. But the only guy to talk to and ask questions about for me is Bugliosi. Vince Bugliosi knows everything that I had to do with this, everything!”

  “I wanted to hear it from you first before I went to him,” I said.

  “Well, you know, if you want to fuck with us an
d get something from him and something from me, you can do that, too, in which case I’ll put four law firms on Premiere magazine.”

  I was floored. We’d barely begun, and already he was threatening to sue. The threats, as I was beginning to understand by then, were almost always a good thing. They didn’t happen unless you were onto something. “I just want the truth, Terry,” I said. “Can I just finish reading from this?”

  “You certainly may, Tom. I have never misrepresented once what happened in this situation. I had nothing to do with this situation other than the fact that I was a great big, famous record producer at the time, period.”

  Pressing ahead, I pulled out the LASO files, and soon reached the most damning lines: “Melcher was on acid, on his knees.”

  “Not true!” he shouted. “Not real! Hey, I was a Columbia Records producer! I was the biggest Columbia Records producer on the West Coast! I had the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, all right? I was selling tonnage of product. I was simply looking at acts… I went out there to the Spahn Ranch, met them, I am awfully goddamned lucky to have gotten out of there alive.” He adamantly refuted the idea that he’d been to the Spahn Ranch more than the two times he’d testified to at trial, both in May 1969.

  “Rudi [Altobelli] is one of my sources,” I said. “He called you and you said, ‘Vince was supposed to take care of all that and now it’s all resurfacing.’”

  “No, I never told Rudi that… I like Rudi, we were friends, I hope there’s no rancor.” He scoffed and crossed his arms. “And Christ, what are you doing a thing like this for?”

  “I’m just trying to get the truth about this story, and when I see this stuff from the DA’s files and combined with that comment from Rudi, which implies that Vince protected you—”

  “Vince never protected me. Vince never protected anybody. Rudi was the guy—” But he cut himself off and sighed. “I got to use the men’s room,” he said, walking back toward his place.