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

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

  I’d shrugged it off at the time. Now it felt like a prophecy. But if I wanted my book, or even just my proposal for the book, to be more complete than my Premiere piece would’ve been, I had to let the story consume me.

  Scot-Free in Mendocino

  To understand my fascination with Manson’s parole officer, you might pick up where we left off: with Susan Atkins. She was plainly pushed around by the DA’s office. Her story was cut and polished until it glimmered for the prosecutors, bringing indictments, convictions, and a raft of publicity.

  The more I learned about Atkins’s past, though, the stranger her manipulation became to me. In the years before the Family’s rise to notoriety, the justice system afforded her a shocking amount of latitude. If anything, she’d gotten away with far too much in those years. When she was on probation, she broke the law regularly, but her arrests never put her in any further legal jeopardy. Instead, there was a pattern of catch-and-release. Whenever the police brought her in, she’d find herself cut loose within a few days. Why was law enforcement so lenient with her?

  The events of June 4, 1969—about two months before the Tate–LaBianca murders—are as good a starting point as any. At 3:30 that morning, an LAPD patrolman pulled over a ’68 Plymouth for speeding in the San Fernando Valley, ordering the driver to step out of the car. A small, long-haired man emerged, staggering toward him, his arms flailing in “wild gyrations.” “He appeared under the influence of some unknown intoxicant,” the officer later reported.

  It was Charles Manson. He was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, being on drugs, and operating a vehicle without a license. He had four passengers in the car, all arrested for being under the influence: Thomas J. Walleman, Nancy Pitman, Leslie Van Houten, and Susan Atkins.

  Within twenty-four hours, all of them—including Manson, who’d informed the booking officers that he was on federal parole—were released with no charges. All except Atkins. She was held for more than two weeks.

  The police had discovered a warrant for Atkins, not even a week old. On May 29, hundreds of miles away in Mendocino, a judge had ordered her arrest for violating five conditions of her probation. (Atkins had gotten a three-year probation sentence in 1968, after an arrest near Ukiah, California.) Now, notified of her arrest in Los Angeles, two Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies drove 1050 miles round-trip to scoop her up and bring her back up north. On June 7, she was booked into the Mendocino County jail.

  The state had a strong case against Atkins. She had probation officers in both L.A. and Mendocino, and neither was happy with her. According to their reports, she’d brazenly defied all attempts at supervision since her sentence was imposed. Since she’d received a courtesy transfer of her probation from Mendocino to Los Angeles County, she’d changed her address more than six times without permission. She hadn’t sought employment. She’d failed to check in for almost every monthly appointment. And most recently, she’d told the probation office that, although she knew it was forbidden, she was moving to the Mojave Desert with her friends, with no plan to return to L.A.

  Describing Atkins’s whereabouts as “totally unknown,” the probation office’s report advised, “The best thing is to revoke the defendant’s probation as it appears she has no intentions of abiding by it.”

  Despite that recommendation, at a hearing that month, Judge Wayne Burke of Mendocino County Superior Court decided that “the defendant has not violated probation. She has complied with the terms. Probation is reinstated and modified to terminate forewith. She is released.” Not only did the ruling defy the probation office—it seemed to reward Atkins’s bad behavior, “terminating” her probation more than two years before it was scheduled to conclude. And off she went, soon to participate in the murders of at least eight people. The fact that she was nearly sent to prison so soon before the killings has never been reported.

  Hoping to shed some light on the deceased Judge Burke’s decision, I found the head of the Mendocino County Probation Office in 1969, Thomas Martin, who’d appeared at the hearing. I also spoke to Atkins’s L.A. probation officer, Margo Tompkins, who’d written the recommendation for her revocation. Both recalled their shock at the ruling. Calling it “very strange,” Tompkins said, “Judges almost always went along with a probation officer’s recommendation. Clearly she had not had any employment, no fixed addresses… I have no idea why [he] would have done that.”

  Martin said he’d never experienced anything like it in thirty-two years on the job. He was especially galled because they’d gone to the trouble of sending two police officers on the thousand-mile journey to retrieve Atkins. “That seldom, if ever, happened,” he said. Martin remembered Burke well; he felt the ruling must have had some ulterior motive. “Judge Burke was not just somebody in the woods,” he said. “There was something in his mind. Something that he knew that he never shared with us.”

  Whatever that something was, it had worked to Atkins’s benefit before. A year and a half earlier, an entirely different set of probation officers—in another state—had tried to have her probation revoked, and they met with an almost identical response from a different judge.

  Atkins was living in San Francisco then. She’d fallen in with a strange man who promised to change her life, and her probation officers weren’t thrilled about it. Her sudden infatuation with this “Charlie” meant she might backslide into the recklessness that had gotten her arrested in the first place, when she’d been found in a stolen car in Oregon with two ex-cons, one of whom she’d met while working as a stripper. It was the end of a crime spree for the trio. They’d stolen the car in California, driven it across the state line into Oregon, and held up a string of gas stations and convenience stores, with Atkins at the wheel.

  When they were apprehended outside Salem, she told the officer she would’ve shot and killed him if he hadn’t caught them by surprise. Then only eighteen, Atkins was convicted of being in possession of stolen goods and a concealed weapon. Her three-year probation sentence was transferred to San Francisco, where she promised to clean up her act. And so she had, until the summer of ’67, when she’d fallen under Manson’s spell.

  According to probation records, Atkins phoned her San Francisco probation officer, Mary Yates, that November 10, saying that she’d joined a communal marriage with seven other women. They were all hitched to a “traveling minister” by the name of Charlie, fresh out of federal prison. Atkins and Charlie’s other “wives,” many of them pregnant by him, would soon be leaving San Francisco in a “big yellow bus” bound for Southern California, Florida, and ultimately Mexico.

  Yates had been supervising Atkins for a year, and she was surprised by her charge’s sudden change in character. True, Atkins had always been “flighty,” but she’d also been respectful and polite, and she’d never failed to follow the rules. Now she sounded defiant, if also lackadaisical. She didn’t seem to understand, or care, that her behavior would land her in prison.

  After that disturbing phone call, Yates wrote to the head office in Sacramento to fill them in. “Charlie,” she wrote, not knowing his last name, “is in love with all of them and they all love each other.” Yates had told Atkins not to leave, but she was “certain she will do as she pleases.” She recommended getting Atkins in court to decide whether her probation should be revoked. She closed her letter with chillingly prophetic words: “Hopefully, she won’t get into further difficulties with Charlie and the other seven girls.”

  The phone call had so worried Yates that she got in touch with another probation officer, M. E. Madison, of Oregon, where Atkins had originally been sentenced. Madison, who also kept tabs on Atkins, raised an alarm of his own. He’d spoken to Atkins, too, and he didn’t like what he heard. “Her speech was quite disorganized,” he wrote to his superiors, “and she repeated several times… that ‘Love is everything; everything is nothing.’” He told her she couldn’t go; she said she was leaving anyway.

  The officers tried to track her down, to
no avail. November faded into December. Feeling they’d exhausted their options, they wrote to the original sentencing judge, George Jones, of Marion County, Oregon, advising that the court take action. That was on December 12. Afterward, the paper record abruptly stopped. For twenty-three days, there were no more documents, memos, or court filings regarding the truant probationer.

  Then, on January 4, 1968, Judge Jones signed an order terminating Susan Atkins’s probation. Probation officials in two states had gone so far as to warn Atkins that her return to prison was inevitable. Instead, the judge rewarded her by releasing her from all obligations to law enforcement.

  As in the later case, there was no record explaining the judge’s decision. He knew the nature of her crimes; he knew how serious a threat she could become. Why would he have reversed himself? Why would another judge have followed suit? Atkins hardly seemed the type to win over two separate judges. Only one thing had changed when these reversals occurred: she was with Manson. As long as she stayed on his side, it seemed the rules didn’t apply.

  Roger Smith, “the Friendly Fed”

  The law afforded special privileges to everyone in Manson’s orbit. Once I was absorbed in the Family’s origin story, I found evidence everywhere of a curious leniency, always helped along by a hand from the outside. Of special note was an incident in June 1968 that earned Atkins her second probation sentence, the one that almost—almost—had her off the streets for good before the Tate–LaBianca murders.

  It began in the small outpost of Ukiah. As the seat for Mendocino County—one of the Family’s favorite getaways—Ukiah by 1968 had become a haven for hippies fleeing San Francisco, which was no longer the untrammeled paradise it had been a few years before. In Haight-Ashbury, speed was now the drug of choice, and with it came violence, con men, bikers, dope peddlers, and runaways. Worst were the tourists, who’d started to congregate in the Haight to admire the psychedelic memorabilia for sale: tie-dyed shirts, MAKE LOVE NOT WAR buttons, beads, baubles, and bell-bottoms.

  Mendocino County, 150 miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge, was an oasis by comparison. Rolling acres of land and dense forests of centuries-old redwoods stretched all the way to the sea. Small towns speckled the landscape with a patchwork quilt of groves and orchards. Communes had sprouted up as early as 1965, but they increased tenfold after the implosion of the Haight. In early June 1968, Manson sent his girls there to win some recruits for their own commune.

  The delegation of five women—Susan Atkins, Ella Jo Bailey, Patricia Krenwinkel, Stephanie Rowe, and Mary Brunner—used a technique that they’d refined into an art form. They sought out impressionable young men, invited them to an all-girl orgy, and offered them a plethora of narcotics, including marijuana quietly spiked with LSD. Unfortunately, that day in Ukiah, they snared three underage boys. More unfortunately, one of them happened to be the son of a Mendocino County deputy sheriff.

  The seventeen-year-old awoke in a tangle of limbs, extricated himself, and darted home, telling his parents that his “legs looked like snakes” and that he “saw flashes when he closed his eyes.” Soon all five women had been charged with felony drug possession and contributing to the delinquency of minors. They were locked up in the Mendocino County jail.

  The outlook was grim for the Manson girls. Two of them were already in the probation office’s sights—Atkins had just been released from her sentence, and Brunner’s had just begun. But all they had to do was make one phone call and they were as good as gone.

  The man they called was Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer in San Francisco. Or rather, his former parole officer. At the time of these arrests, Smith had recently left his job, and you’d think he would have severed ties with his one remaining parolee: Manson. But the two had grown close. Smith, who called Manson “Charlie,” ended up becoming one of the most vital figures in my investigation—more than anyone else, he knew how and why Manson had formed the Family, because he’d watched it happen. And legally, he wielded immense power over Manson. He could’ve sent him back to prison at any time.

  Instead, he acted more as Manson’s guardian. Their bond was such that, when Manson’s disciples called him from Ukiah that day in June, Smith and his wife decided to drive up to Mendocino County to check on them. They had no professional obligation to do this.

  Brunner had recently given birth to a son, Michael Valentine, and with the girls in jail, the baby had no one to take care of him. (Manson was the father, of course; Michael Valentine, sometimes known as “Pooh Bear,” was the Family’s first child.) Smith and his wife took an extraordinary step: they got the court to appoint them as Pooh Bear’s temporary foster parents, and they returned to the Bay Area with the baby, looking after him for eight weeks.

  In the meantime, a friend of Smith named Alan Rose repaired to Mendocino County to get the girls out of jail. Rose, a college dropout who met the Family through Smith, made a valiant effort. He’d become enamored of the girls. He visited them almost daily, hired lawyers for them, and testified as a character witness at their preliminary hearings. And finally he raised their bail money, winning their freedom until the trial at the end of the summer.

  All the while, Manson remained in L.A., ensconced in the comfort of Dennis Wilson’s home. He received periodic updates about the girls, but he never seemed terribly concerned. Why should he have been? By that time, he’d been through enough to know that he was golden: with Roger Smith watching over him, crimes had no consequences.

  In the end, charges were dropped against three of the women for lack of evidence. Atkins and Brunner pleaded guilty to possessing narcotics. In exchange, the charges that they’d furnished drugs to minors were dismissed.

  Then the court shocked the community by granting Atkins probation instead of sending her to prison. Brunner was already on probation in L.A., or one assumes she would’ve gotten it, too. The sixty days they’d already spent in the county jail was apparently punishment enough—they were free.

  As we now know, Atkins would violate her probation in June 1969, forcing her to be spirited away from the Family and carted back to Mendocino County by police. And her violation wouldn’t matter—the beneficent Judge Burke would return her to the fold, no questions asked.

  Once again the pattern held: when it came to women in the orbit of Charles Manson, the court was unusually forgiving, ruling against the wishes of police and prosecutors.

  I wanted to find the reasons behind the court’s clemency. I called the Superior Court in Ukiah and bought the entire file for the Mendocino case, including the record of the probation investigations for Atkins and Brunner.

  It turned out that both women had received glowing appraisals and impassioned pleas for leniency from none other than Roger Smith. In his petitions, Smith identified himself as a “former federal parole officer,” but he neglected to mention that his most recent and final parole client was Charles Manson—the very man who’d sent Atkins and Brunner to Mendocino in the first place.

  If the court knew about Smith’s relationship to Manson, there’s no record of it. And the judges weren’t the only ones from whom Smith withheld this information. David Mandel, a Mendocino County probation officer who filed the sentencing report for Atkins and Brunner, wrote extensively about Manson and his “guru”-like hold over the women, and he spoke to Roger Smith—without realizing the two were connected. Neither Smith nor his wife, who’d also advocated for the girls’ release, ever saw fit to mention their relationship with Manson. (Smith’s wife, Carol, who divorced him in 1981, denied any involvement in the recommendations, suggesting that Smith had used her name without her knowledge.)

  Mandel put a lot of stock in Smith’s word. He was impressed that a former federal parole officer would put his weight behind a slouch like Atkins, whom he described as “hostile and possibly vengeful.” Smith and his wife swore that Atkins would “comply willingly with any probationary conditions.” And while Mandel saw Brunner as “much influenced and often manipulated by her present
group,” the Smiths praised her as an emblem of “traditional Christian values.”

  Of course, Smith had spent a long time with the Family by then. He knew that Brunner and Atkins had every intention of returning to the man who dictated their lives, often inciting them to criminality. And sure enough, when the court let them go, they fled Mendocino immediately for the Spahn Ranch, where Manson was now situated.

  In 2008, I met with David Mandel in Marin County. I was the first to tell him that Roger Smith had been Manson’s parole officer.

  “Of course it should have been disclosed,” said Mandel, poring over the documents I’d brought. “It’s a huge conflict of interest!”

  Mandel remembered visiting the Smiths at their home in Tiburon, outside San Francisco. He noticed that the couple cared enough for Mary Brunner to have petitioned for temporary custody of her child. The couple was a major factor in his decision to recommend probation, he said, shaking his head. “I should’ve put two and two together.”

  One other strange fact bears mentioning, even though I’ve never known what to make of it. Six months after the Ukiah trial, one of the judges, Robert Winslow, lost his reelection bid to the bench—in no small part, according to one insider, because of his leniency with the Manson girls. Winslow resurfaced in Los Angeles. Remarkably, he’d become the attorney for Doris Day and her son, Terry Melcher. It was Winslow who prepped Melcher for his appearances at the Tate–LaBianca trial, and Winslow who accompanied him in the courtroom as he testified, incorrectly, about the number of times he’d met Manson. Ironically, Winslow was helping Melcher speak out against the same group he’d helped the year before. Neither he nor Melcher ever made a public comment about the sheer unlikeliness of it all.