This is kind of a two for one; it’s an investigation into the Manson Family case as well as a memoir of the 20 years of work, the ups and downs, of the writer Tom O’Neill (co-author Dan Piepenbring is never mentioned) put into this project.
It does have a happy ending. It started as a featured article for Premiere magazine. After delays and extensions, since O’Neill needed more time, the magazine ended up folding and the project was orphaned for a while with the investigator living on savings and family loans. About a year later it was picked up by a book publisher, eventually dropped and then adopted by another producing the published book.That’s the happy ending of the personal memoir part of the book, not that he solved the case.
The investigation and what it revealed is of course more complicated and still muddy, smeared with intentional official cover-up by various parties for each their own reasons that range from cops just covering their own tracks to the secrecy of CIA MK-ULTRA mind control experimentation connected to it all.
It’s the CIA MK-ULTRA stuff that I find most interesting. I’m kind of a buff for mind control info as well as The Red Scare, strange and troubling mid-20th Century USA big world happenings and reactions that I think we are still feeling the ripples from. This was their search for truth serums, mind control assassins, and a lot of just dosing people with LSD and other brain altering chemicals just to see what happened or how suggestable the subject would then become. I assume I am saying “kind of a buff” to distinguish from a full-on “conspiracy theorist”. I’m not entirely sure that there is some ultimate truth that can be acquired with a lot of this murky stuff and it might not lead to a very productive life. There are probably countless Tom O’Neill’s out there without official paper publication, guys, and probably mostly guys, who have thrown a lot of their energy and time into finding out the truth of this or that in a long or meandering trail that eventually takes us to Qannon and “Stop the Steal!”. One can picture “The Truth” as a shining city in the distance, but the long dirt road leading there is littered with bones and corpses of varying decay, some still being picked over by the buzzards. With certain ones I just decide what I want to believe. Like; I want to believe that the CIA murdered JFK because the story is very dramatic and makes sense, fits, with some things that have gone on since.
All this is part of the Manson story because he spent some time while on parole in LA, in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury, maybe acquiring the mind control abilities and forming the family. The MK-ULTRA connection here might be David Smith who ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. In the book it comes off as an interesting place. First, it did provide a real service, a needed one free health care in a non-judgemental hip atmosphere. But it was free like FaceBook is free. We give them data for the service. We get the benefit and then sometimes wonder if we are giving up too much of ourselves in the bargain. The man who created and ran the free clinic was funded by MK-ULTRA to study group dynamics with drugs involved, speed. According to the book, The Family was more into speed than LSD at the time of the murders. Speed, we can assume, is a much better substance to do ones murdering with.
The implication is that Manson was kind of sent there, being on parole in LA it was odd that his parole officer also named Smith (Roger Smith) would let him move like that. Could Manson have been a mind control subject that went berserk or even one that did exactly as planned to make the communal hippies look like potentially a homicidal gang instead of their day-glow flower power free love image?
There is also murky stuff going on with Terry Melcher and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosii. Did Melcher lie on the witness stand and did he visit Manson and the family three times AFTER the Tate murders out at Spahn and Baker ranches?
There is this crazy story about Vincent Bugliosi harassing the family of a milkman because he thought the guy was the father of Bugliosii’s own child. This was even before the famous trial.
Chaos is multi-layered, well written, with the data not as confusing as it could be, a true crime, memoir, and conspiracy book.
It is rather satisfying if one is looking for that sort of thing. Not that I’m anything other than an occasional reader of the genre.
I liked it.
Do I have conclusions on the Manson case? Not really, other than not believing the official story and feeling that something was definitely going on there beyond what we were told. Glad that they were not murdering acidheads, but speed users instead, because I like to think that psychedelics are more helpful than harmful because I think they have been for me.
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