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

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

  He came back having collected himself. “I’m going to digress for a while,” he said, removing his sunglasses. “First of all, if you want my record as it relates to this, it is so squeaky clean—all I did was audition people for Columbia Records. Some of them I signed. Some of them I didn’t sign. I never once spent one second with these girls, although at one point, when they were in jail, like twenty-five of them said that I was the father of all their children, and that put me in bed for about three weeks. I mean, they were so ugly. To get the DA’s department off my ass in that one, I took Michelle Phillips”—his girlfriend at the time, during the trial—“down to headquarters and I said, ‘This is my girlfriend, do you think I’d want to be with any of these…’” He gestured, implying Manson’s “ugly” girls. “And they said, probably not.”

  I reminded him of what Altobelli had said: “On the stand, he said that you wanted him to manage Manson.”

  “That is total insanity… This is really my book, okay?… You know what? If I’m going to do this with you, then we should write this book together.” It was almost a bargaining chip, an under-the-table deal. I thought Melcher wanted me to read between the lines—why say all these nasty things about me in a silly little magazine piece when I can cut you in on the earnings from my book? He proposed that I coauthor his memoirs. People had been begging him for years to write a book. He was the “only American to produce the Beatles!” He seemed to suggest that I’d be a fool not to jump at his offer, even though I was the same writer who believed he’d been lying about one of the most transformative events of his life.

  “I need to do this story, and I need the truth,” I said. “You were a powerful guy—”

  “Was? Am.” He asked, “Is your interest in this purely journalistic or is it just to fuck someone over?”

  I stressed, again, that I had no desire to smear him; I just wanted to know why these files told such a strikingly different story from the one Bugliosi had pursued.

  “Dennis Wilson was the only one that really knew what was going on,” Melcher said. “He’s talked about it in various ways that sounds like he knew all about it, he was there.” Melcher seemed put upon by the effort of discussing Manson, as if it were a minor nuisance that he’d long ago put behind him. “After a while you get used to it, it’s a terrible thing to say, but you kind of get used to it.” And then, once more, he acted like he was ready to cut a deal. “So what’s the best thing that you and I can do about it?”

  The interview suddenly had the air of a tense negotiation. “There has to be an explanation for this,” I said, turning the conversation back to the papers from the DA and LASO. “Why was this in the files? How was it suppressed, why? If they were lying”—DeCarlo and Watkins, I meant—“how did they testify to other significant factors?”

  “I have no idea where that second ranch is,” Melcher said. “I have no idea in the world! It could be in Kuwait.” He rose to get a bottle of white wine, half-full, and poured himself a drink. “You’re welcome to share that, by the way,” he said. He’d brought only one glass.

  “If it is true that you were at the ranch after the murders, it undermines the entire Helter Skelter motive for the prosecution,” I said.

  “I’m curious why you would want to talk to me about this,” he said, almost muttering: “out to crucify me…”

  “Because nobody’s ever had this information that I have, about you at the ranch afterward.”

  At that point, Melcher dropped his lawyer’s name. “Joe Lavely. Do you know who he is? He can shut down everything. Networks, magazines. Anything.” He asked me to fax him a draft of my story. I told him I couldn’t do that.

  Melcher leaned forward. “You know I like you,” he said, looking me in the eye. “If I didn’t like you, I’d take your briefcase and throw it off the balcony. Okay? I happen to like you, so I hope you’ll be fair.”

  “That sounds like a threat,” I said. “But I will be fair with you.”

  “That’s not a threat, it’s the truth.”

  It was the truth, of course, that Melcher had the means to follow through. He could try to sue me or Premiere. He could leap up and toss my papers—all photocopies—off his rooftop. But I wondered what he would really do. As unnerving as it was to sit across from him, getting no admissions from him whatsoever, I stayed calm by wondering what form his antagonism could possibly take, considering I was confident I had solid reporting on him.

  “I know you have money, resources, powerful lawyers,” I said, aware that the interview was next to over. “But that’s not going to stop me from writing my story, and there is no way you can shut it down with all of that, because it is the truth, and you can’t shut down the truth, Terry.”

  And soon I was in the elevator and on the ground again, looking up at his building in the sun. I felt the mix of exhilaration and frustration that often followed my biggest interviews, when I felt I’d made headway in some unpredictable direction. No, I hadn’t cracked Melcher, but I had his bizarre behavior to report, his threats, his offer that I coauthor his life story, and, perhaps most important, the first on-the-record answers about Charles Manson he’d given since 1974. What I still didn’t know was when, or how, all of this was going to end.

  Coda: “They Used to Call Me an Angel”

  I never saw or spoke to Melcher again. He died in 2004, at age sixty-two, of cancer. To my knowledge, he never gave another interview about Manson or wrote his memoirs.

  His death foreclosed the possibility of learning so much about the Family: about their true motivations for the murders, their ties to the Hollywood elite, and their ability to go undiscovered for so many months after their grisly crimes. I remain convinced that Melcher had more of the answers than he let on, and that he cast himself as a bit player in Manson’s world when his role was much larger. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain the discrepancies in his story to my satisfaction.

  After my confrontation with him that day, I turned my attention elsewhere—though even from a remove, Melcher and his cohort continued to pop up in my reporting. And because of how tantalizingly close I felt I’d been to unearthing something, I couldn’t stop from ruminating on some of the questions I’d had about him. Why had he moved out of 10050 Cielo Drive? Did he ever record Manson? What was his true relationship with Tex Watson and Dean Moorehouse? Most of all, was it possible he could have prevented the murders at the house through some kind of intervention with Manson, or by warning the victims—or just by calling the police?

  With Melcher and Dennis Wilson both deceased, you might be wondering: Why not get some answers from that third and final Golden Penetrator, Gregg Jakobson? I did end up finding him. Actually, we spoke well before I ever got to Melcher, in the first months of my reporting—before I knew my way around the story well enough to push back on some of his claims.

  In a sense, Jakobson is more mysterious than Melcher or Wilson. Unlike those two, he didn’t come from privilege. An orphan, he was adopted by the chief of police in St. Paul, Minnesota; when he was twelve, his adoptive father died, and he moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he was soon rubbing elbows with the sons and daughters of celebrities. He parlayed these connections into a career on the periphery of Hollywood, taking gigs as a stuntman, an actor, and a talent scout, and racking up a few arrests along the way. But it was his past that attracted Manson to him. As an orphan, Jakobson held a special place in the Family’s mythology. Manson loathed the influence of parents, and Jakobson, despite his adopted family, was held up as a parentless icon. “They used to call me an angel,” Jakobson told me, “because I came into the world without parents.”

  Dennis Wilson’s biographer John Stebbins believed Jakobson “testified to protect Wilson from having to do the same.” Wilson gave Jakobson cowriting credits—and therefore a steady stream of royalties—on many of his songs, even though Jakobson “had no idea what he was doing” in the studio, where it seemed he “didn’t know a guitar string from a piano key.”r />
  In 1999, Jakobson wanted one hundred bucks an hour to talk to me. When I made it clear that I wouldn’t pay him, he claimed that the passage of thirty years had fogged up his memory. Jakobson contradicted himself with nonchalance. Consider the theft of the green spyglass, for instance. This was a huge point in the trial: Jakobson testified that Manson had called him before the murders, asking him if Melcher had a “green spyglass” at his new address in Malibu. When Jakobson said yes, Manson responded, “He doesn’t anymore.” This proved that Manson knew that Melcher had moved out of the Cielo house. And yet, speaking to me, Jakobson dismissed the whole episode. “I don’t know how much of that is legend and how much of it is true,” he said about something he’d testified to under oath. “I think there was a good chance that [Manson] didn’t know that Melcher had even moved.” I’ve found dozens of discrepancies between his statements on the stand and his statements to me.

  Sometimes, sorting through old news items, I’ll chance upon something that reminds me of how much remains unsaid here. I found a November 1970 bulletin from the Associated Press, headlined, “Defendant in Tate Trial Well Liked.” It noted the curious affection that Melcher and Jakobson held for the man who’d brought so much scrutiny on them. “Jakobson frequently smiled at Manson,” the report noted, “who, upon leaving the courtroom one day, said to Jakobson, ‘Come see me.’” What are we supposed to make of that friendliness, and of the insider knowledge it augurs? Why would Manson have wanted to commune with someone who’d just testified against him in a case that carried the death penalty? Manson’s lawyer Irving Kanarek chose not to cross-examine Terry Melcher. He infuriated the judge by saying that Manson and Melcher were “still good friends,” and that he wanted to “thank Mr. Melcher for his presence”—comments that earned him admonishment from the court, and were ordered stricken from the record.

  Jakobson told me that he never really took Manson all that seriously. “There was so much bullshit,” he said. “I never tried to make sense out of it. I didn’t care.” He left open the possibility that there’d been some scheming to make the story more presentable at trial. “I wonder if Bugliosi was doing Melcher a favor,” he said to me, “or there was some reciprocity there… honest to God, I have no knowledge of it.” He was a little more willing to talk about Melcher’s attraction to the girls in the Family. “He might have been carrying on with one of the girls,” he told me, though Melcher had fiercely denied exactly that. “I had a soft spot for little Ruth Ann Moorehouse. He might have, too. She was the little gem of the group. Little sweet fifteen, sixteen.” Likewise, Jeff Guinn’s 2013 book Manson includes several references to Melcher’s having sex with Ruth Ann Moorehouse, all sourced to Jakobson.

  Melcher always policed his image in regards to Manson, especially when others implied or wrote outright that he’d slept with the girls. Nothing made him more litigious. And he often subjected writers to the same kinds of legal threats he’d made to me. Barney Hoskyns, the author of the aforementioned Waiting for the Sun, told me that Melcher’s lawyers had ordered his publisher to pulp all existing copies of the first edition, and to delete “all and any references to Terry Melcher in connection with ‘Manson’s girls’ from any future editions.” His publisher complied.

  But the most glaring example of Melcher’s interventions came from Stephen Kay, the attorney in the Los Angeles DA’s office who’d helped Bugliosi prosecute the case. He told me that Melcher’s lawyer approached him in the mid-1990s, requesting that he sign an official document certifying that Melcher’s connections with the Family didn’t extend beyond his three occasions in Manson’s presence: once at Wilson’s house, twice at the Spahn Ranch. Kay signed it, though he said he hadn’t retained a copy. At the time, he hadn’t seen the documents I had detailing Melcher’s relationship with the Family.

  One of the most bewildering parts of reporting on a case like this is figuring out how much weight to give your findings. I spent years wondering if I was crazy to think that Terry Melcher was so important, indicative of some hollowness in Bugliosi’s motive.

  Years later, in 2005, it was Kay who gave me a semblance of vindication. I met with him again and showed him the notes I’d found in Bugliosi’s hand. By that point, my obsession with the case had become a full-blown mania: my reporting had taken over my entire life, and I often wondered if there would be any end to it, any form of closure or consequence. I can still remember sitting in Kay’s Compton office and watching him shake his head as he looked over my photocopies.

  “I do not believe that Terry Melcher was at the Spahn Ranch after the murders. I just don’t believe that,” he said. “If he was there at the Spahn Ranch, Manson would have harmed him, because Manson was very upset.”

  But with the sheaf of papers in front of him, and the handwriting undeniably belonging to Bugliosi, Kay slumped in his chair. “I am shocked,” he said. “I am just shocked.” He was planning his retirement then, having boasted that he was leaving office “sixty and zero”: sixty court appearances opposite Family members, without a single one of them earning parole. With the evidence of Bugliosi’s corruption in his hands, Kay said, “This throws a different light on everything… I just don’t know what to believe now.” He went on: “This is egregious conduct if this happened. All of this should have been turned over to the defense.”

  The fact that Paul Watkins and Danny DeCarlo told similar stories seemed to indicate that both men were telling the truth, impeaching Melcher’s testimony and, with it, much of the basis for the Helter Skelter motive. Looking at the heavy lines that Vince had drawn through the most damning parts of the interviews, Kay said, “I just don’t understand the cross-outs… it just doesn’t make any sense.”

  His voice trailing off, he asked the question I’d so often asked myself. “If Vince was covering this stuff up,” he said, “if he changed this, what else did he change?”

  I asked Kay whether this evidence would be enough to overturn the verdicts against Manson and the Family. Yes, he conceded—it could get them new trials, and it would mean big trouble for Bugliosi. If he were found guilty of suborning perjury, he would technically be eligible for the death penalty, since that was the maximum possible sentence in the Manson case.

  I wasn’t on some crusade to prove Manson innocent, or to impugn Bugliosi’s name. I just wanted to find out what really happened. Kay, sitting across from me that day, seemed to be struggling with the same thing. Neither of us could grasp why Bugliosi had covered this up, or how Melcher and his friends had, for so many years, consigned the truth to the realm of rumor and hearsay.

  I felt a familiar conflict welling up inside me. Part of me was convinced that if I kept pushing, if I were more tenacious and vigilant and hard-nosed than ever before, I could crack this case and figure it all out. The other part of me feared that I was too late. Powerful interests had aligned themselves against the truth.

  5

  Amnesia at the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office

  “Keep Going”

  The thirtieth anniversary of the Tate–LaBianca murders passed with no story, at least not in Premiere. That didn’t worry me—not at first, anyway. I knew that Jim Meigs, the magazine’s editor in chief, shared my obsession. He started leaving the due date blank on the contracts I had to sign every month: a reporter’s dream come true, until it wasn’t.

  Within a year, I’d interviewed more than five hundred people: movie-industry players, friends and relatives of the victims, witnesses, journalists, cops, attorneys, judges, suspects, and hangers-on. My one-bedroom apartment in Venice had become a hoarder’s nest of Manson ephemera. I installed shelves above my desk to house a growing collection of books and binders—I bought the thickest ones I could find—with labels like “News Clips—1967–1969,” “Timelines,” “Trial Transcripts,” “Questions—Witnesses,” and so on. They multiplied as if they were breeding. When my friends visited, they’d stop in their tracks upon entering my apartment and cast worried glances my way. Above my computer w
as a whiteboard with “MANSON” circled in the center. Springing from his name like a psychedelic spiderweb were lines in erasable ink, leading to associates of the Family who’d never been publicly identified before, Hollywood drug dealers, and other names that had seldom been uttered in three decades.

  I tried to interview as many people as I could in a day, so my workdays became endless. I was always behind, needing to hop in my battered Acura to drive to the Valley or San Diego or Santa Barbara for an interview at a moment’s notice. When I wasn’t interviewing, I was researching, arranging my binders, or working the phones to set up more interviews. I’d basically adopted my neighbor’s German shepherd, Bully, who spent day and night at my house; I sometimes worried my files could be stolen, and I felt safer with the dog by my side.

  My magazine assignment was coming to feel like a vocation. Manson and the theories surrounding him were always on my mind, whether I was alone or with friends—though, in the hopes of wrapping up the story, I was alone much of the time. Since Meigs was authorizing my extensions, he would visit me on trips to L.A. We’d sit on the floor as I spread out documents for him to examine, kicking around various explanations for the discrepancies in the case. He was a reassuring presence; the things that seemed suspicious to me bothered him, too. As long as I had his confidence, I could keep putting in long hours. At that point, the end—the break, the big scoop—seemed just around the corner. Looking from a document to a name on my whiteboard, Jim would nod and say, “Yes, yes—I see. Good. Keep going.” And I did.

  “Political Piggy”

  The Tate–LaBianca murders are etched into the public imagination. They are, in casual conversation, what people mean when they say “the Manson murders”: two nights of unhinged bloodshed that came out of nowhere.