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

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

  And yet, when I revisited the matter with Smith a few years later, he said, “I don’t know if Al went to Spahn Ranch.” When I reminded him that he’d said otherwise, he made a grudging concession: “He was with them four weeks, max!”

  So I tracked down Rose himself, who told me in a phone call that he was at the ranch for “probably three or four months.” Rose was shocked that I wanted to talk to him—only one other journalist had been in touch—and I found him nonchalant about his time with the Family. More than either of the Smiths, he came across as mild, somewhat naive, and unassuming. His memories of the late sixties had their edges smoothed like stones in the sea. Of course he remembered the girls: “They had a level of self-confidence and dynamism that was pretty amazing,” he said. “They could walk into stores and get checks cashed without ID, okay?” And he remembered the power that Manson exuded, recalling a man whose raw charisma was by then tainted with egotism and racism. Still, he obeyed Manson, sincerely feeling that his “destiny was going with Charlie and the girls.” He added, “We were all pretty impressionable, very idealistic… Charlie convinced me I didn’t need glasses. I stopped wearing them. He’d have me drive the bus up and down the L.A. freeway. I really had to strain.”

  What had finally made him leave the Spahn Ranch was an incident in which Manson picked up a prostitute from the freeway and “paraded” her in front of his followers, saying that he “wouldn’t have sex with her because she wouldn’t give him head. And I just saw that as such an abuse of the power that he had.”

  It was late autumn 1968 when Rose returned to the Haight. He moved in with Roger and his wife, Carol, in Tiburon, and assisted in writing up two studies. The first was Roger’s ARP dissertation. The second was called “The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,” coauthored with David Smith: the first-ever scholarly study of the Manson Family.

  David and Rose believed they had a major research paper on their hands, bolstered by Rose’s firsthand observations of the Family. The first published remarks about their “study” appeared six weeks after the Family was charged with the murders, in a January 1970 interview Smith gave to the Berkeley Barb, an alt-weekly. The front-page story was headlined, “M.D. on Manson’s Sex Life: Psychologist Who Lived with Manson Family Tells About Commune.”

  Smith discussed Rose’s “four months” on the ranch, but he never indicated that his coresearcher had been a follower of Manson. Intentionally or not, Smith gave the impression that Rose’s time with the Family was part of a planned study; in fact, they’d decided to write about the Family only after Rose left the commune, a point they’d finesse later. And even though Rose was the “psychologist” referred to in the headline, he wasn’t, of course, a real psychologist. Smith didn’t let him do any of the talking. Instead, the reporter quoted portions of their “scholarly paper,” noting that Smith had pulled that article from the presses as soon as he learned that its subjects had been accused of mass murder.

  Their paper was eventually published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in September 1970. It distanced the HAFMC from Rose’s involvement with the Family, and it never identified Manson by his last name, leaving the reader to make the connection. “Participation in the commune at the time of [Rose’s] involvement,” read the introduction, “was not associated with academic observation and only after leaving the communal setting was thought given to description.” To exculpate the authors of any responsibility for the murders, it fudged the facts about “Charlie,” claiming that during “our observation” he “expressed a philosophy of nonviolence… LSD-induced psychedelic philosophy was not a major motivational force.”

  Smith further downplayed the Family’s connection to the HAFMC by claiming that they only spent “three months” living in the Haight, during which their “primary” residence was a bus. In fact, the Family lived in the Haight for more than a year, two blocks from the HAFMC, and after Manson took some followers to Los Angeles, the others moved into Rose’s home.

  The paper asked why “these young girls” were “so attracted and captivated by a disturbed mystic such as Charlie.” That was a great question. Past a certain point, it seemed Rose and Smith had no intention of answering it. Their paper detailed Manson’s abusive, controlling methods, especially his sexual tactics, but it steered clear of their true area of expertise: LSD. Most egregiously, the paper was never updated to mention the Tate–LaBianca murders, even though it was published a full year later. The defining event of the “commune” that Rose had infiltrated was nowhere to be found.

  “Extricated”

  Vincent Bugliosi didn’t have much use for David and Roger Smith, and he had no use at all for Alan Rose. He didn’t interview any of them for Helter Skelter. The book’s one quote from Roger—“There are a lot of Charlies running around, believe me”—was lifted from his short piece in Life magazine and framed to make it look as if Bugliosi had actually spoken to him. The same was true of David. Bugliosi used him to shrug off the implication that drugs enabled the Family, quoting his assertion that “sex, not drugs, was the common denominator.” That quote is also pulled misleadingly from Life—David had written about Manson in the same issue. (Given the realm of David Smith’s research, I can’t see how he really believed it.) Other than that, the Smiths are absent from a story that might never have unfolded without them.

  A book is one thing—Bugliosi had dramatic license. Maybe he just didn’t think he could do justice to Manson’s messy year in Haight-Ashbury. The trial was different. There, Bugliosi had to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Manson had enough control over his followers to get them to kill for him. He got former Family members to testify in exchange for lighter sentences or dropped charges; they provided vivid illustrations of Manson’s domination. But he never called Roger or David Smith, two authorities who’d had almost daily exposure to Manson as he formed the group.

  Bugliosi’s obsession with convicting Manson of conspiracy is the drama that drives Helter Skelter forward. To get Manson’s guilty verdict, he had to demonstrate that Manson had ordered the murders and had enough control over the killers that they would do his bidding without question. And he was desperate to do this. He wanted witnesses who could say that “Manson ordered or instructed anyone to do anything,” he told his subordinates. He had to prove “domination.”

  Roger Smith’s and David Smith’s Life essays, the same ones Bugliosi quoted in Helter Skelter, came out a month before Bugliosi issued those marching orders to LAPD detectives. Within weeks, the Berkeley Barb and Los Angeles Free Press ran their front-page stories featuring David Smith’s discussion of Manson’s “indoctrination” techniques, his “process of reorienting” new recruits, and his “methods of disciplining family members.”

  Bugliosi told the jury he’d prove that Manson was “the dictatorial leader of the Family.” He was still calling witnesses to the stand when David Smith and Alan Rose’s research paper came out, featuring such lines as “[Manson] served as absolute ruler.”

  Yet the Smiths and Alan Rose told me that Bugliosi never got in touch with them. Nor did anyone else from the Los Angeles DA’s office or the LAPD. Despite their extensive knowledge of the Family, the researchers never felt it was their duty to tell the authorities what they knew. If anything, David Smith feared testifying. “I remember not wanting to be involved in that trial,” he said. “I felt that it would compromise our clinic.”

  Dr. Dernburg, the psychiatric director of the HAFMC when the Family went there, followed the trial with mounting gloom as he realized that the whole San Francisco chapter of Manson’s life was never going to come out. He told me it was “as if Manson’s stay up here had been extricated from the whole mass of data.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around this. Why did Bugliosi ignore the most powerful prosecution evidence available: eyewitness testimony of Manson’s control from his parole officer, a laureled medical researcher, and his assistant, who’d lived with the group? Each could’ve taken the witness stand
independently, untainted by the suggestion of a plea arrangement or some type of deal.

  I knew I’d have to ask Bugliosi about this eventually, but by that point I didn’t trust him, and I wanted to box him in as much as I could. So I called on Stephen Kay, his coprosecutor, to show him all the evidence of the Smiths’ relationships with the Family. I was on good terms with Kay, and I felt I could rely on him to be straight with me. At his office, I laid out the two Life essays, which I knew Bugliosi had seen, plus press accounts of the Smiths and the HAFMC research papers.

  Kay read through them diligently. “I have never seen these before,” he said, his mouth open. I asked him if there was any way that Bugliosi had missed this stuff. Absolutely not, Kay said. “Vince read all the newspapers, every paper that came out. He subscribed to every paper.

  “I know everything we had in the files,” Kay went on, “because we had a big file cabinet. I’d been through all that.” He was positive they didn’t have the Smiths’ papers and articles there. If Bugliosi knew about them, “he wasn’t keeping them in the regular file.”

  As far as Kay could recall, Bugliosi had never discussed the Smiths and Alan Rose, never entertained the idea of putting them on the stand. But Kay couldn’t understand why. “If we had an independent person like that,” he told me, “that’s much better than calling a member of the Manson Family… They would have been dynamite witnesses for us.”

  Although the Smiths never appeared in the courtroom, there’s a link between their research and Bugliosi’s reasoning that continues to perplex me. In the first phase of the trial, the prosecutor persuaded the jury that Manson had controlled his followers’ every thought and action, full stop. In the trial’s death-penalty phase, he had to refine that argument somewhat. Because the defendants could be sentenced to death only if they were acting under their own free will, Bugliosi claimed that, regardless of their brainwashing, each of them had the independent capacity to murder. As Bugliosi explained it to me in our first meeting in 1999, Manson had somehow learned that a select few of his followers were willing and able to kill. “Something in the deepest resources of their soul enabled them to do something that you and I cannot do,” he said to me that day. “There was something independent of Charles Manson that was coursing through them… These people not only killed for him, but they did it with gusto, with relish. One hundred and sixty-nine stab wounds! Some of them postmortem! What does that show? I think it’s circumstantial evidence that some people have much more homicidal tendencies than others.”

  It’s those “tendencies” that recall David Smith’s research. In a 1969 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Smith wrote that the main purpose of his experiments with mice was to “isolate” the “behavioral” traits of the rodents that would kill after they’d been aggregated and injected with amphetamines—and then to “modify” their behavior using other drugs. Two years later, writing of the study and its parallels to hippies in the Haight in Love Needs Care, Smith admitted that “it has yet to be determined whether amphetamines modify the personality primarily by biochemically altering the central nervous system or by reinforcing or precipitating long-term psychological tendencies.” Strikingly, as Bugliosi had it, those “psychological tendencies” were exactly what Manson had learned to exploit.

  In the two years before the Manson murders, several papers in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs and other periodicals looked at the increase of psychotic violence in the Haight and its link to amphetamines, LSD, and population density. Some made reference to a forthcoming paper by David Smith, Roger Smith, and Alan Rose on the role that personality factors played in users’ reactions to drugs. Why was it that, after just one experience with amphetamines or LSD, certain people experienced hallucinations that lasted for days or even weeks? Were the drugs to blame, or some aspect of the users’ psychology? Their paper promised to look into the phenomenon.

  But when the article, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity,” finally appeared in the spring 1969 Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, both Roger Smith and Alan Rose had been removed as authors. Contradicting his later claim in Love Needs Care, David Smith wrote that he “disagreed” with the consensus that “personality was the prime factor in differentiating between psychotic and nonpsychotic reactions,” arguing instead that “in the drug subculture of the Haight-Ashbury, the prime determinates of psychotic vs. nonpsychotic reactions were immediate drug environment and experience of the user.” More significant than the contradiction, I felt, was the article’s obscurity: when the HAFMC republished bound editions of all the Journals five years later, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity” wasn’t included in the collection. All the annotations referring to it in other Journal articles had been removed, too. Just as Manson’s time in the Haight was “extricated” from the record at trial, the study by the two Smiths and Alan Rose—a study into the origins of the same psychological tendencies found in members of the Manson Family—had disappeared.

  Coda: Six Hours with Roger Smith

  Even now, more than a decade later, I get excited when I look at the host of documents I showed Kay that day. Flipping through them, I remember how I felt when I was first reporting on Manson’s lost year in San Francisco. I thought I’d found the angle that would set my story apart from the reams of others—the beginnings of a working theory about what really motivated the Tate–LaBianca murders. True, it had come too late to work for Premiere, but it could be the linchpin for my book.

  I pinned a lot of my hopes on one last interview: a sit-down with Roger Smith. It was set for late December 2001. My deal with Premiere had been off for a year and I was living off savings, but they were dwindling. If I wanted to earn more money, I’d have to finish my book proposal and sell it to a publisher.

  When I spoke to Smith, I knew I had to come away with something so solid that I could finish my reporting. And I sincerely believed that I could. To me, it was obvious that Smith had covered something up, and the evidence was so abundant on this point that I’d have no trouble confronting him about it, even if our exchange got contentious. I would show him documents he hadn’t seen in more than three decades. I would press him on his connections to the HAFMC, to Manson, to David Smith, and more; I would ask him why he’d never sent Manson back to prison and why he’d gone along with the bizarre plot to send him to Mexico.

  Needless to say, it didn’t work out like that.

  After the Manson murders, Smith had spent his career behind the well-fortified walls of numerous federal penitentiaries, where he ran specialized units studying or treating sex offenders and drug addicts. It was a path that afforded him plenty of privacy. Over the years, he’d lived on a yacht off the coast of Hawaii; in rural Bend, Oregon; and in a farmhouse more than a century old, surrounded by cornfields, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside Ann Arbor.

  Smith had agreed to the interview without a moment’s hesitation, though I’d called him out of the blue. He was preparing to retire after a decade as director of the Bureau of Mental Forensics for the Michigan State Penitentiary System, and he claimed that none of the many people from his circle I’d interviewed by then had said anything to him about me. On the phone, he told me that he’d been reticent about Manson over the years for fear that the affiliation would tarnish his career. “I’m close to retirement now,” he said, “so maybe it’s okay to talk.”

  Our interview began in his office at the prison. It ended at his beautifully restored farmhouse, nearly six hours, a pizza, and several bottles of wine later. It was late December, and snow was falling—outside, the fields were blanketed in white and the houses, his included, twinkled with Christmas lights. Smith lived with his second wife, Carmen, who sat with us in the living room for almost the entirety of the interview. A fire roared in the hearth. Soft rock emanated from a station he’d found on satellite TV. The couple was unfailingly courteous, and I found Smith a patient listener; only a few times did he betray any frustration with my lines of questioning, even as I forced him to examine papers he hadn’t se
en in thirty-five years.

  But the fact was this: he gave me nothing. On the most important questions about his relationship to Manson, he pleaded ignorance, or claimed he had no memory at all.

  “I’ve never been able to understand how he ended up under [your] supervision in San Francisco if he was paroled in L.A.,” I said.

  “I really don’t know, either,” Smith said. He posited that parole protocols were more relaxed back in the sixties, and that officials just didn’t care if Manson took himself to another city. “Different time, then, I think.”

  Smith had a memory of interviewing Manson as part of his “prerelease” from prison—a routine process that couldn’t have involved him, at least not officially, if Manson was released in Los Angeles.

  “Well, I guess I didn’t,” he replied when I told him that. “I don’t even remember that he was released out of L.A.”

  But I thought I’d have him dead to rights on the question of Manson’s arrests during his parole supervision. I had him look over the letter he’d sent to Washington, D.C., asking for permission for Manson to travel to Mexico.

  “He was actually in jail then, in Ukiah,” I told Smith.

  “Really!… I was never notified. This is a mystery to me… I should’ve been notified.”

  “By Manson or by the people who arrested him?” I asked.

  “By the people who arrested him,” Smith said. “There would be some federal record of his arrests, convictions, incarcerations, his criminal justice status.”

  “Would his parole have been violated for that arrest?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Smith was right, in a way. There were two federal documents—Manson’s FBI rap sheet and his Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation Record—listing his July 31, 1967, conviction, proving that the government had been notified. The first of those documents dated to the time of Smith’s supervision, so he would’ve been notified, too—the probation office receives such papers as a matter of course—but he was saying he wasn’t. For good measure, I checked with another federal parole officer who’d worked in the Bay Area in that era. He confirmed that the Justice Department would’ve automatically notified Smith of Manson’s conviction. “Even back then,” he said, “the federal guys didn’t mess up.”