Tom O’Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

V incent Bugliosi was on another tirade.

Nothing could be worse than accusing a prosecutor of doing what youre implying that I did in this case, he barked at me. Its extremely, extremely defamatory.

It was a sunny day in February 2006, and we were in the kitchen of his Pasadena home. The place was cozy, with floral patterns, overstuffed furniture, andliterallya white picket fence out front, all belying the hostility erupting within its walls. Bugliosi wanted to sue me. It would be, he soon warned, a hundred-million-dollar libel lawsuit, and one of the biggest lawsuits ever in the true-crime genre. If I refused to soft-pedal my reporting on him, Id be powerless to stop it.

I think we should view ourselves as adversaries, hed tell me later.

VinceI was on a first-name basis with him, as I guess adversaries must bewas a master orator, and this was one of his trademark perorations. Our interview that day dragged on for more than six hours, and he did most of the talking, holding forth as expertly as he had when he prosecuted the Charles Manson trial more than thirty-five years before. Seventy-one and in shirtsleeves, Vince still cut an imposing figure, hectoring me over a Formica table strewn with legal pads, notes, tape recorders, pens, and a stack of booksall written by him. Wiry and spry, his eyes a steely blue, he would sit down only to leap up again and point his finger in my face.

Riffling through the pages of one of his yellow legal pads, he read from some remarks hed prepared. Im a decent guy, Tom, and Im going to educate you a little about just how decent Vince Bugliosi is.

And so he didreciting a prewritten opening statement that lasted for forty-five minutes. He insisted on beginning this way. Hed dragooned his wife, Gail, into serving as a witness for the proceedings, just in case Id try to misrepresent him. Essentially, hed turned his kitchen into a courtroom. And in a courtroom, he was in his element.

Bugliosi had made his name with the Manson trial, captivating the nation with stories of murderous hippies, brainwashing, race wars, and acid trips gone awry. Vince was sure to remind me, early and often, that hed written three bestselling books, including Helter Skelter, his account of the Manson murders and their aftermath, which became the most popular true-crime book ever. If he seemed a little keyed up that day, well, so was I. My task was to press him on some of his conduct in the Manson trial. There are big holes in Helter Skelter: contradictions, omissions, discrepancies with police reports. The book amounts to an official narrative that few have ever thought to question. But Id found troves of documentsmany of them unexamined for decades, and never before reported onthat entangled Vince and a host of other major players, like Mansons parole officer, his friends in Hollywood, the cops and lawyers and researchers and medical professionals surrounding him. Among many other things, I had evidence in Vinces own handwriting that one of his lead witnesses had lied under oath.

I sometimes wonder if Vince could see what a bundle of nerves I was that day. Im not a churchgoing person, but Id gone to church that morning and said a little prayer. My mom always told me I should pray when I need help, and that day I needed all the help I could get. I hoped that my interview with Vince would mark a turning point in my seven years of intensive reporting on the Manson murders. Id interviewed more than a thousand people by then. My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of those people: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist, a lunatic. Id let friendships fall away. My family had worried about my sanity. Manson himself had harangued me from prison. Id faced multiple threats on my life. I dont consider myself credulous, but Id discovered things I thought impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixtiesthings that reek of duplicity and cover-up, implicating police departments up and down the state. Plus, the courts. Plusthough I have to take a deep breath before I let myself say itthe CIA.

If I could get Bugliosi to admit any wrongdoing, or even to let a stray detail slip, I could finally start to unravel dozens of the other strands of my reporting. Maybe soon I could get my life back, whatever that might look like. At the very least, I could know that Id done all I could to get to the bottom of this seemingly endless hole.

Sitting in his kitchen, though, and watching the hours wear on as Vince defended and fortified every point he made, my heart sank. He was stonewalling me. I could hardly get a word in edgewise.

Its a tribute to your research, he told me. You found something that I did not find. In the closest thing I got to a concession, he said, Some things may have gotten past me. But, he added, I would never in a trillion years do what youre suggesting. Okay? Never. My whole history would be opposed to that. And number two, Tom, even if I had the thought that youre suggestingof suborning perjuryit goes nowhere. Its preposterous. Its, its silly Who cares? It means nothing!

Who cares? Ive asked myself that a lot over the years. Was it worth investing so much of my time and energy in these, some of the most well-known, worn-out crimes in American history? How did I end up falling into this, anyway? I remember glancing over at Gail, Vinces wife, during his long, stentorian opening statement. She was leaning against the counter looking exhausted, her eyelids drooping. Eventually, she excused herself to go upstairs and lie down. She mustve heard it all a thousand times before, his scripted lines, his self-aggrandizement. When Im down on myself, I imagine everyone feels like Gail did that day. Oh, no, not the Manson murders, again. Weve been through this. Weve processed this. We know everything there is to know. Dont drag us back into this story.

I was almost heartened, then, to see that Vince was so anxious. Thats what kept me going, knowing that Id gotten under his skin. Why would he be so committed to stopping this? And if what Id discovered was really nothing, why had so many of his former colleagues told me otherwise?

Another one of my sources had tipped off Vince about my reporting, giving him the ludicrous idea that I believed hed framed Manson. That was dead wrong. Ive never been a Manson apologist. I think he was every bit as evil as the media made him out to be. But it