After years of obsessing over Charles Manson and the Manson Family, journalist Tom Brolley finally decided to take matters into his own hands. He s written a book about the Manson murders, and now he s working on a second book about it. But first, he s got to the bottom of one of the biggest mysteries in American history: what actually happened behind the scenes in the Manson compound in the late 60s and early 70s. And he s doing it with the help of a man who s been obsessed with the Manson family for decades: his good friend and former colleague, Joe Pesci. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and edited by Alex Blumberg. The opinions expressed in this episode are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this podcast. It was produced and produced by our patrons. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, which you can get a free copy of the album on Amazon here. If you like what you hear here, please leave us a review and tell us what you think about it in the comments section below. Thanks to our sponsorships, we'll be giving away a copy of our new book, Chaos: The Secret History of the Manson: The Manson Family and Manson: A Secret History on November 1st, 2019. Thank you so much love and appreciation to all the listeners who helped make this podcast possible! and we'll see you in the next episode of Chaos, Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, The CIA, the Manson, The Manson Murders, and The Mansonans, the cult, and the rest of the Beatles, the Beatles and The Beatles, and so much more! Thanks again for listening to Chaos, Charlie Manson. - Tom Brodmore, Joe Brodell, and his book, and all the rest, and thanks to everyone else who helped get this out there in the world out there. . Tom, Joe, Joe and Joe, and a very special thanks you, Tom, too. and the gang at the Manson House, too! -- Thank you for all the work done by Tom, and we appreciate you, Joe. Tom and Joe at The Manson Project, and I hope you enjoy this podcast, and much more.
00:00:04.000I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks, and we'll tell everybody what it's called right off the bat.
00:00:11.000It's called Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the 60s.
00:00:18.000I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is a tiny fraction of what was going on behind the scenes.
00:00:31.000You've essentially been obsessed with this.
00:00:34.000How many years did it take you to do this?
00:02:07.000I mean, that's also a little bit of a complicated story, too.
00:02:09.000I got an assignment to do a normal feature, which is about three months, three and a half months.
00:02:15.000So I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any person's life where you're kind of reevaluating things anyway.
00:02:25.000So I thought I needed the money, and I needed a job, and I knew that I could get into Premiere magazine as a contributor on the masthead, which meant a yearly contract, I think?
00:02:52.000A month or two, when the story kind of started breaking open and I started finding holes in the official narrative and pursuing them, I had met with the editor-in-chief, Jim Miggs, and he agreed, once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence,
00:03:09.000which was just a small portion of what I ended up having in the end, he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue of August 99, and And he started contracting me by the month.
00:03:23.000And that continued for a year and a half.
00:03:26.000All I did was report the story on Premier's dime.
00:05:07.000I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense team to sabotage the defense.
00:05:14.000I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses, including Terry Melcher, who played a big part in this and we'll probably talk about that at some point, lied on the stand, you know, suborned themselves in a murder trial.
00:05:28.000And if you commit perjury in a murder trial, You could be convicted of murder.
00:05:33.000I mean, you could be sentenced to a murder.
00:05:36.000You could get a murder sentence, too, because of that.
00:05:39.000So there was about a dozen of those, and none of them happened all at once.
00:05:44.000So if you committed perjury during a murder trial, you could be sentenced for murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentenced if they murdered somebody?
00:05:57.000And the five people who were convicted of murder in the first trial, once, had I been around and able to prove this in the early 70s, Vincent Bugliosi and the three people who lied on the stand...
00:06:14.000In a material way, you know, in a very important way, they all could have been tried for that perjury and sentenced to the same—or given the same sentence that the people who had gotten the death sentence.
00:06:26.000Now, I told you that I just got to the 11th chapter of your book.
00:06:31.000And essentially what I'm getting so far—I haven't finished the book—but what I'm getting so far is there was some sort of a CIA program— Where they were...
00:07:05.000One of the other things I found out that was very significant was that Manson had a parole officer, his first parole officer, who kind of had given him a get-out-of-jail-free card for the first year after Manson was released from prison.
00:07:51.000They originally were going to violate him, sent him right back to prison, and someone stepped in and took care of that and let Manson stay in San Francisco, and he was assigned to Roger Smith.
00:08:04.000It took about a year and a half, but through a Freedom of Information Act process, I got his federal parole file.
00:08:10.000And those were the kind of seeds of how I found out that Manson had this immunity from prosecution for the two years he was out of prison from 67 until the murders occurred in the summer of 69. I'm sorry to interrupt, but who was Smith doing this for?
00:08:25.000Who was giving him the instructions to continue to let Manson out and to continue to monitor him?
00:08:32.000I didn't get the whole file, and the file I got had redactions.
00:08:36.000He would report to the head office, and they would give him instructions, and then he would violate those instructions, and there'd be no repercussions for him or for Manson.
00:08:47.000For instance, Manson was arrested in...
00:09:19.000The parole officer, Roger Smith, a week later wrote to the head office that Manson was doing fine, and he actually recommended that Manson be allowed to go to Mexico and work in Mexico.
00:09:31.000And the head parole office in the United States, since it's federal, wrote back and they said, that's insane.
00:09:37.000The job that he was going to do in Mexico was surveying soil for insecticides.
00:09:43.000I mean, it had nothing to do with, and I have all these documents showing this.
00:09:47.000Who was hiring Charles Manson to survey soil?
00:09:50.000It was a company in Nevada, which disappeared a couple years later.
00:10:02.000I don't like to speculate because I can't prove it.
00:10:04.000All I know is just the fact that his parole officer asked to send him not only to Mexico, but to the country that Manson had been deported from in 1959. The last time he was a free man, he had violated his parole then.
00:10:51.000And that through this program, they were using him and using with LSD and all the members of the family, they were turning them violent.
00:11:04.000And why do you think they were doing this?
00:11:07.000Again, this is where I got to reel it in a little bit.
00:11:09.000I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to prove.
00:11:14.000What I've proven is that he was getting leniency from the federal government and The law enforcement, first in San Francisco that year, the person who represented the federal government there was his parole officer,
00:11:29.000Roger Smith, the federal parole officer who was giving him leniency.
00:11:34.000Roger was also doing drug research at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which opened in June of 67. Manson, during that period, turned into the Manson that we're familiar with today, you know, the monster, the embodiment of evil,
00:11:50.000as Vince Bugliosi called him, the guru who could control the minds of these followers.
00:11:56.000So he would come into the clinic to see Roger.
00:12:11.000They wouldn't speak unless he spoke to them.
00:12:14.000Any command he issued towards them, they would follow.
00:12:18.000And they became very well known around the clinic.
00:12:21.000And they were there principally for Manson to see Roger for his weekly parole appointments and then the girls were going in for STDs and there were some pregnancies and stuff and they were getting free treatment.
00:12:34.000That was the summer that the Manson family formed and then they left in late 67, early 68 and migrated down to Los Angeles.
00:13:05.000MKUltra was a government program run by the Central Intelligence Agency.
00:13:11.000Originally started as something called Bluebird in 1948-49, morphed into Artichoke, and then in 1952 became MKUltra.
00:13:20.000It was a mind control program, a brainwashing program.
00:13:23.000The CIA was trying to learn how to control people's behavior Without their knowledge.
00:13:30.000Now, this all came out in Senate and congressional hearings in the 70s.
00:13:36.000It was exposed, but nobody knew about it until 1974 when Seymour Hersh, the New York Times reporter, reported it on the front page of the paper.
00:13:45.000So their main objective was to create what they called hypnoprogrammed assassins, people who would kill, on command, Popularly known as Manchurian Candidates after a book that was written in 1962 and later became a movie and then a movie again.
00:14:04.000The people would be, through drugs and hypnotism, the objective was to get people to go and commit an act of murder against their moral code and have no...
00:14:17.000Memory of their programming and be amnesic even of the act after the fact often.
00:14:23.000That was just one of, that was their main goal, but they were also trying to create couriers, people, you know, military people that they could implant messages, send them, you know, across dangerous areas where there were, at that time it was the Vietnam War, and deliver messages and then have them wiped from their memory in case they were captured.
00:15:02.000When it was all exposed in the 70s, and there were these hearings, first the Rockefeller Commission hearings and the church hearings, and then finally Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye held hearings.
00:15:16.000The CIA admitted that they had done this, but no one would say exactly what they did.
00:15:22.000All the records had been destroyed when the two people who ran it, Richard Helms, who had become the director of the CIA in the 60s, And Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was kind of the mad scientist who had supervised all the safe houses in San Francisco,
00:15:38.000New York, Los Angeles, where they would experiment on people that were lured into these apartments and houses that either looked like brothels or hippie communes or whatever.
00:15:52.000The people who are working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic that was run by another Smith, which makes it a little confusing, but Dr. David Smith, who founded it, he had given an office to a scientist named Jolly West, Louis J. West,
00:16:10.000Was, when the hearings occurred in the 70s, identified as a top MKUltra researcher.
00:16:16.000He was an academic, come out of the military, had been at the University of Oklahoma, and then UCLA, running the psychiatric divisions.
00:16:28.000He denied ever being involved in MKUltra.
00:16:31.000And this was one of the moments, I think it was 2001, when things really kind of Shook the course of my reporting was I learned that West had been at the same place that Manson was in the hate in the summer that Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create and I knew actually I'd interviewed West About seven years before for a story I did about celebrity stalkers and people who were obsessed with stars and then only to kill them or
00:17:02.000And he was an expert in violence, hypnotism, brainwashing, and he was the chair of the psychiatry department at UCLA at that point.
00:17:10.000He was dead when his name came up in the Manson story.
00:17:16.000I guess there was a lot of Google then or a little bit, but when I did a little research, I found out that there had been these allegations that he'd been involved in MKUltra.
00:17:55.000I just thought there might be something there.
00:17:57.000And sure enough, I eventually found it.
00:17:59.000It was correspondence between Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, the doctor that ran MKUltra, beginning in 1953, about conducting experiments on people without their knowledge to get them to have amnesia of the acts after they were programmed.
00:18:18.000And everything that he had been accused of And denied.
00:18:24.000Not only did he do it, he created the blueprint for the whole program with Gottlieb.
00:18:30.000The fact that all these kind of interesting research programs merged at the Haight, at the clinic, and then Manson came out of it, With the power to do exactly what the MKUltra had been trying to create up to that point,
00:18:47.000I thought was worth investigating further.
00:18:50.000And that's why I kept going and going and going.
00:18:52.000They did a lot of crazy shit back then.
00:18:54.000Are you aware of Operation Midnight Climax?
00:18:58.000Those were the safe houses in San Francisco.
00:19:00.000Well, that was the brothel version of it.
00:19:02.000Where they lured these Johns into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them.
00:19:08.000Yeah, George Hunter White was the head CIA guy.
00:19:12.000And he would sit behind a two-way or one-way mirror and watch the Johns would be dosed with LSD. They tried aerosols or just drinks, different things.
00:19:22.000And then they would study their behaviors.
00:19:27.000But that would get the prostitutes too then, no?
00:19:29.000No, the prostitutes would get them in there and then they'd go to the bathroom or something or to be in the bathroom.
00:19:34.000And again, the problem is the records are so scant because Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all the records in 1973 when the two men left the agency.
00:19:45.000And the only reason anybody ever discovered that it existed was a whistleblower, somebody who used to work for the State Department who remembered that there were records in a warehouse and they were just financial records from the beginning of the program in 1952 until the end in...
00:20:01.000The possible end in 73. And it was just financial records of where research took place, how much was spent, what kind of equipment was bought, but nothing about the content.
00:20:13.000The guy that found that ended up testifying to Congress and working with Seymour Hearst to expose it was named John Marks.
00:20:19.000He wrote the first book about MK Alter that came out in the mid to late 70s called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate.
00:20:26.000And after he wrote his book, He spoke, did a little bit of a tour, and then retreated into obscurity and never would do an interview again until I approached him in the early 2000s.
00:20:41.000And when I told him what I had, what I had found in West Files, these documents, he agreed to meet with me at his townhouse in Washington, D.C., And he told me, he said, the reason I stopped talking or writing about this was people were camping out on my front lawn, you know,
00:20:56.000telling me that they'd been victims of MKUltra.
00:21:19.000So he had never given an interview till he met with me.
00:21:22.000And when he looked at my documents at that point, I think I had about 10 or 12 or 15 pages that grew eventually because I kept going back to the files and getting more.
00:21:31.000He said it was the most unredacted, uncensored account of what the real objectives were and what was really being done.
00:21:40.000He said if I had had that, my whole book would have been different.
00:21:46.000That's one of the problems about saying, well, how much did they do or how far did they go?
00:21:51.000There's barely any record, and that's another reason it took me 20 years, because I was trying to find out whether or not Wes had actually interacted with Manson and or the girls.
00:23:10.000So they ran that for the summer of 67, and Wes was getting people from that Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic on Clayton Street and sending them around the corner to Frederick Street to participate in that.
00:23:26.000I got the diaries of some of the graduate students who were there, and they all in these diaries said, we have no idea what we're really supposed to be doing here.
00:23:35.000We feel like this whole thing is a cover for something else.
00:23:50.000Because they were also encouraged to use LSD. Yeah, I'm sure.
00:23:55.000But I mean, imagine being a graduate student, and this is your project on people.
00:24:00.000I mean, that sets up, even if you leave that program and go on to do legitimate work, The ethical foundations of your career are set up in such a strange way.
00:24:10.000You're manipulating people against their knowledge.
00:24:13.000Well, they didn't know who they were doing it for.
00:24:16.000That's why they were always questioning it.
00:24:20.000I found one or two of them after, and they were very careful talking to me.
00:24:26.000I'm sure they probably felt like they were going to go to jail.
00:24:46.000And it was really frustrating for me because, again, his name was on the front page of the New York Times in 1977 when they had the major hearings about MKUltra.
00:24:56.000And it identified him as the head of the psychiatry department at UCLA, a very prominent doctor, a researcher.
00:25:03.000And he said he had nothing to do with that.
00:25:05.000He'd never used LSD on humans and he wouldn't.
00:25:09.000He said they had asked him and he said no.
00:25:13.000I have all these letters between him and the guy who was running the program describing how they're going to do it, hide it from his colleagues.
00:25:20.000When he started it, he started at Lackland Air Force Base.
00:25:23.000He was running the psychiatry department at the hospital there in 1952. When he was there running that hospital, that's when he started his experiments on prisoners, human subjects, and one letter to Gottlieb.
00:25:37.000He says, eventually we have to take these experiments out into the field.
00:26:35.000Itinerant guys had called the local sheriff and said, there's a guy here that wandered out of the brush with scratches and blood, no shirt, and he doesn't know how he got here or who he is.
00:26:52.000They did a search and they found the little girl's body not too far away and she had been raped and murdered by this guy who had no memory of doing it.
00:27:20.000Who inserted himself into the case and then extracted his memory from him using sodium pentothal where he admitted to the murder.
00:27:29.000Now in the context of what we found out West was doing and what his objectives were, At that same time, it raises huge questions about this was an experiment gone wrong, you know, that he was part of one of these experiments at Lackland Air Force Base where he was signed up.
00:27:47.000During the trial, it came out that he had had treatment for severe migraines, experimental treatment at Lackland.
00:27:55.000That's another, you know, a smaller subchapter in the book.
00:27:58.000Does it describe what kind of experimental treatment he received?
00:28:06.000There was actually a trial, a retrial, and sentencing.
00:28:11.000And every time it came up, it was really frustrating because he never testified.
00:28:16.000So it was either his wife or his mother who would talk about it.
00:28:19.000It was mostly his mother saying, well, all I knew was they wanted him to be involved in this two-year study to try to relieve his migraines.
00:28:28.000He would have such horrible migraines, he would put his head in buckets of ice water.
00:28:33.000The people who described encountering him that night when he was arrested and immediately taken out of the sheriff's custody by the military police and brought to Lackland and then back to the sheriff's.
00:28:46.000The doctors tested him for alcohol because they thought, well, maybe he's drunk.
00:28:51.000He had just a little bit of alcohol in his system, but he wasn't drunk.
00:28:55.000And after the fact, they found out that he had I mean, I don't want to get into this because it's really getting into the weeds, but he had hallucinated that this little girl was a cousin who sexually abused him as a child,
00:29:19.000Jolly West, in 1955, A report to Sidney Gottlieb, which nobody had seen, and it was another document I found in his files, announcing that he had learned how to develop the technology to remove true memories and replace them with false memories in a human subject without their knowledge.
00:30:02.000Not just me, but most experts think that that was a cover, that they didn't want to admit that they had developed these technologies that were effective.
00:30:09.000They also claimed that they had released everything they had.
00:30:13.000I found the same report where Wes said that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones without a person's awareness, but they had removed that from the report and then released it to Congress.
00:30:29.000So there's a lot of that stuff in the book.
00:30:32.000So the speculation is that this guy, through these experimental treatments, that they had dosed him up with LSD and experimented using these MKUltra techniques and did that to him and induced some sort of...
00:30:51.000The guy had no history of violence, never been arrested, was a stellar, upstanding citizen.
00:30:59.000His only problem was he had these horrible headaches.
00:31:02.000All of a sudden, he shows up by a small girl's body who'd been brutally murdered with no memory of doing it.
00:31:10.000A year earlier, Dr. West, who became a psychiatrist within a week or two, Possibly had experiences with them before, but there was no record.
00:31:21.000Oh, when I tried to get the record from the medical center at Lachlan, his name was Shaver.
00:31:29.000I think it was S-A to S-I was missing.
00:31:35.000So where Shaver would have been in the medical records, it was gone.
00:31:39.000So I couldn't find out whether he had actually participated in any kind of experimental program there.
00:31:45.000So is the speculation, again, this is speculation, that he did commit the crime, that he was somehow or another induced into committing this crime?
00:31:57.000The objective was to get people who would go out and do things, not even necessarily kill, that was the ultimate goal, but to do things against their will, against their moral code.
00:32:37.000He first gained national attention for being one of four or five doctors who treated Korean prisoners of war who returned to the United States after they had made confessions of spraying the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons.
00:32:53.000The United States said that we don't use that.
00:32:58.000And these guys were brainwashed by the North Korean Chinese Soviets.
00:33:05.000So when they were brought back after the war, West and four other psychiatrists were assigned to deprogram them.
00:33:12.000What a lot of researchers believe is that they actually brainwashed them into thinking they've been brainwashed by the Koreans where they actually were telling the truth.
00:33:23.000Because there's a lot of evidence that's come out as recently as five, six years ago that we did use these weapons in Korea.
00:33:33.000So, is the speculation that Charlie Manson was basically just sort of a two-bit criminal who had spent most of his life inside the system and had been incarcerated for, what, half of his life?
00:36:44.000I actually have not only his federal parole file, which was the hardest thing to get because it had never been released from 67 to 69, but I also have the one prior to that from the 50s to the 60s and all the correspondence.
00:36:58.000And he would talk about these doctors coming in to examine him.
00:37:03.000And he didn't trust them and he didn't know what they were doing.
00:37:32.000He could have come out of the program or the experimentation that began there.
00:37:40.000And again, it's hard to kind of synopsize all this without showing all the documentation and stuff of what was going on and where he was and how everything matches up.
00:37:49.000But you'll see that when you get through Chapter 11. Okay, so I wish I got to it, but it's a rush to get that far.
00:37:58.000So 1967, he gets out of jail, and how long before he hooks up with this clinic?
00:38:08.000So he got out in March of 67. The clinic opened in June of 67. So just a few months.
00:38:15.000Yeah, well, Roger Smith, he was actually living in Berkeley, Manson was, and he got his first follower, Mary Bruner, and then two or three or four more.
00:38:24.000And then Roger was the one who suggested that he go to the hate to absorb the vibes.
00:38:29.000He thought Manson might benefit from the love and peace vibes that were happening in the summer of love.
00:38:35.000Roger Smith was his parole officer in 67, but also was his parole officer before that.
00:38:43.000Well, no, Roger Smith, well, his assistant, that's good, you remember that, Gail Sedalia, told me, she was his assistant at the clinic, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic when he was running his amphetamine study in 68. She said that Roger had told her he met Manson when he was doing probation work in Illinois in the early 60s.
00:39:11.000I eventually interviewed Roger several times, and Roger denied that.
00:39:15.000And when I went back to Gail, she was shocked.
00:39:17.000She's like, I can't believe he's denying that.
00:39:29.000To document that Manson had been in Illinois except for three days in 61, or excuse me, in 61, he was brought from Mexico to Texas, and then they brought him to Los Angeles to be violated in front of the judge there.
00:39:46.000And he did spend three days at Joliet Prison where Roger Smith worked, but he was there a year or two later.
00:39:53.000So that was one of the many frustrating moments where everything made sense, except for one, but one very important hole, which was, well, they weren't there at the same time, at least as far as the official record shows.
00:40:08.000So if Smith was a part of these experiments, and if Smith was also his parole officer and did know him before he did the seven years before he got out, which is when it's speculated that Manson was possibly experimented on,
00:40:24.000and Smith might have been aware of the entire process of it and was supervising him upon his release.
00:40:30.000So that's why every time Manson got arrested, which should have just locked him up, they would just let him go.
00:40:37.000And Smith, I mean, to give you a little background on Smith, as he told me, he called himself, he goes, I was a rock-ribbed Republican from the Midwest, and I came out.
00:40:47.000He went to Berkeley, to the School of Criminology, to become a criminologist, I think in 65 or 66. He was getting his master's and his PhD, and his special area...
00:41:01.000The point of study was in the beginning, gangs, collective behavior and violence, and then how drugs would make some of these gangs that he had, people he was working with infiltrate, students infiltrate, to get information.
00:41:17.000Yeah, this was in Oakland in the ghettos in like 65, 66 when the Panthers were forming.
00:41:22.000Then in late 66, He decided to become a federal parole officer while he was still writing his dissertation and he got assigned to something called the San Francisco Project which was an experimental program run by the federal government to see how different numbers of parole clients Case loads per parole officer were,
00:41:56.000So if you had the lowest load was 20 clients, the largest was like 50 or 60, were you able to super...
00:42:03.000I mean, you wouldn't think that 50 or 60 is going to be a lot more difficult, but it always wasn't.
00:42:08.000So Smith joined that program where he's supposed to be paying much more attention and care to his clients because it's part of a special...
00:42:56.000One of them, Mary Bruner, had the first baby with Manson in the group.
00:43:00.000And Roger Smith and his wife, Carol, So they were the foster parents of Manson's son.
00:43:16.000I mean, everything was irregular about this.
00:43:19.000Actually, that case is pretty interesting.
00:43:22.000So Mary Bruner and Susan Atkins, two women who actually killed for Manson in 1969, were...
00:43:29.000Given they were convicted of contributing to the delinquency of minors, illegal drug possession, and without a trial, they pled out.
00:43:39.000And then there was what they call the sentencing phase, where a probation officer is assigned to decide whether or not they should be sent to prison or given probation, supervised probation.
00:43:51.000So I got access to their files, Brunner's and Atkins, and in the file were recommendations to the court by Roger Smith and his wife saying, these are good women, they shouldn't go to prison.
00:45:11.000And he never disclosed to That he was Manson's parole officer, and Manson's identified in these same files as the person who lured these women into crime, that they were his communal wives, that they would steal for him, prostitute themselves for him,
00:45:27.000and the other people that they interviewed.
00:45:29.000The probation officer argued against it, saying they're going to go right back to this guy who's down in Los Angeles and continue their life of crime, but the judge released them.
00:45:38.000Now, they were doing Charlie's bidding, according to the record.
00:45:44.000What they were trying to do was recruit people into the family.
00:45:48.000And so they would offer them drugs and sex and a lot of women and bring them to these parties.
00:45:56.000And where they screwed up is they got an underage boy who was...
00:46:16.000There's so many of these instances where Charlie or members of the family were arrested and then It seemed like the police officers who were holding them were being told, hey, you've got to let these guys go.
00:46:34.000Well, a real turning point in my reporting was after I got access to Manson's parole file, And saw that, I mean, and Helder Skelter-Bugliosi, I think, describes two arrests that Manson got released on technicalities, you know,
00:46:49.000shoddy police work or something, when he should have been violated.
00:46:52.000But what he didn't do was talk about three or four more.
00:46:55.000And if you've gotten up to Chapter 10, you've seen all that stuff laid out.
00:46:59.000So when I got this record, a pretty substantial record, I took it to someone named Louis Wachnick, who was a retired judge and a retired district attorney from the valley out around here, Van Nuys, because I needed somebody with the expertise and the knowledge of how things worked.
00:47:18.000Because you have to look at everything in context.
00:47:20.000Things work out differently today than they did today.
00:47:23.000In 2009 or 2000 when I interviewed him but he was there in 69 in the DA's office.
00:47:28.000I brought the documents to him and we laid them all out on his kitchen table and he's looking at them and the poor guy was very sick with cancer and he talked like this but I had the recorder going and he's looking at all the documents and he's seeing this pattern of catch-release,
00:47:46.000catch-release and he's going, chicken shit, chicken shit, this is all chicken shit.
00:47:51.000He goes, he should have gone back the first time.
00:48:10.000He goes, well, he was working either for local law enforcement, The federal government, the FBI, but somebody wanted him out there doing whatever he was doing.
00:48:22.000Another turning point was a bunch of years later was when I brought similar materials to Stephen Kay, who was Bugliosi's co-prosecutor in the case.
00:49:43.000In 1967, the FBI started a program called COINTELPRO. In San Francisco, they opened their first office the same time Manson arrived there.
00:49:56.000The CIA started a program, like MKUltra, illegal.
00:50:00.000I mean, MKUltra was illegal because they were violating people's human rights by giving them drugs without their knowledge or consent.
00:50:07.000But they were also operating on American soil, domestic soil, which is against the law in the United States.
00:50:14.000The CIA is not allowed to operate here.
00:50:17.000They started a new program called CHAOS. Same thing.
00:50:22.000They began in San Francisco in the summer of 67, authorized by Richard Helms, who was by then the director of the CIA. He had come up since 52, working under Alan Dulles and then John McComb.
00:50:34.000And he was the one who supervised Gottlieb and N.K. Ultra.
00:50:37.000So Chaos and COINTELPRO each had the same objectives, which were to neutralize What they believe was revolutionaries that were going to create a civil war in America, the left wing, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers,
00:50:53.000and the hippie movement who kind of embraced it all.
00:50:57.000And this all began in the early 60s with Ronald Reagan had become the governor of California.
00:51:04.000And J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the free speech movement, which began in the early 60s in Berkeley, had been infiltrated by communists from Russia and China, and they were trying to create divisiveness.
00:51:20.000Within the United States to start a revolution.
00:51:24.000So Hoover started COINTELPRO and Reagan was involved with that as the governor and then Helms started chaos and both of them had informants who were trained.
00:51:36.000They had something called the Hoover Academy where they had training programs to turn agents into hippies, just like Johnnie West with his graduate students.
00:51:45.000They grew their hair long, they learned the lingo, And then they went and tried to insinuate themselves with left-wing groups, African Americans with the Panthers.
00:51:56.000COINTELPRO would pit rival groups against each other, and the ultimate goal was to get them to kill each other.
00:52:06.000And COINTELPRO was exposed in 1972, one or two, after a bunch of kind of radical people raided a warehouse in Pennsylvania, in Media Pennsylvania, not far from where I was raised, where they knew that the FBI stored records.
00:52:23.000And then they released it to the public, and it was the record of this operation.
00:52:28.000And the documents were astonishing because they weren't redacted, because they were stolen and then released.
00:52:35.000There are documents celebrating the murder of one...
00:52:40.000The Panthers became really paranoid by 67, 68. There were all kinds of inner power struggles, and they correctly thought that they had been infiltrated, and some of them killed other Panthers because they thought they were informants.
00:53:15.000And when Cohen Troll was exposed in the 70s and resulted in more hearings, investigations, they admitted to being responsible for instigating, I think, 20 or 30 killings.
00:53:31.000Chaos, on the other hand, there's minimal records of chaos.
00:53:35.000All we knew was it existed from 67, probably till Helms left the CIA in 73, and that their objective was, we knew that they were doing surveillance, and we knew that they were doing wiretapping and infiltrating groups, but as far as beyond that,
00:53:56.000Nobody's ever been exposed because everything was destroyed when Helms left the record.
00:54:01.000So these groups were trying to incite violence.
00:54:08.000Now we get to the motive of the official narrative of the Manson murder, or the Tela Bianca murders, which is what the prosecutor Vince Bugliosi presented at trial, which was the famous Helter Skelter motive.
00:54:23.000In a nutshell, Manson believed that...
00:54:29.000There was going to be a race war, and he wanted to incite this race war because he had convinced his followers that through messages he received from the Beatles' White Album, from their lyrics, from biblical Old Testament prophecies,
00:54:45.000that he had been told that he was going to be the savior of the world.
00:54:50.000And once the race war started, he would hide his family in a bottomless pit in the desert And when the race war ended, with the blacks winning, the blacks would be framed for murders.
00:55:05.000The Manson family would emerge and repopulate the planet with their perfect offspring and dominate the blacks.
00:55:18.000There was a philosophy of Helter Skelter at the Spahn Ranch, where they lived in 68 and 69, that Manson would discuss.
00:55:26.000But whether or not it was the motive for the murders, I raise serious questions about that in the book.
00:55:32.000And Manson would discuss it in that way, that there was going to be a race war and that they would emerge and then their offspring...
00:55:40.000Yeah, yeah, except for the fact that what's questioned—so the way Bugliosi was able to convict Manson, Manson wasn't at the Tate house when the murders happened.
00:55:51.000He had, in the official story, dispatched Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Kasabian, and Tex Watson to the house, the former house of Terry Melcher.
00:56:05.000But just to kill everybody— And as Manson allegedly said, leave something witchy.
00:56:10.000He wanted it to look like blacks had killed these, all he knew was they were wealthy, beautiful whites.
00:56:19.000And he wanted to ignite the race war because if the Panthers got blamed for these murders, then the police would crack down on them, they'd revolt, the revolution would happen.
00:56:32.000It would spread across the whole world, and then when it was over and the blacks had prevailed, they were too dumb, Manson believed, to be able to run the world.
00:56:42.000That's when he would come out with his followers of their hole in the desert and take over the planet.
00:56:48.000Bugliosi said in interviews that I didn't have until after he and I stopped speaking, which is when he started threatening me with lawsuits and other things in about 2006, 2007, I discovered two or three interviews he gave in the early 70s where he was asked...
00:57:07.000If he believed that Manson really believed this craziness, and Bugliosi said, I don't think Charlie believed in it.
00:57:14.000He got his followers, too, but he never believed in that.
00:57:19.000What the interviewers didn't ask him in the follow-up was, well, if he didn't believe it, why did he send his followers to kill these people the first night at the Tate House, the second night in Los Villas, this upper-middle-class couple of the La Biancas, Then, you know,
00:58:17.000He was the first, not the first, but one of the first interviews I did when it was a magazine assignment.
00:58:21.000He invited me to his house in Pasadena.
00:58:24.000So it was April of 99. We spent We're good to go.
00:58:43.000During the course of that interview, I arrived at his house, went into his kitchen.
00:58:49.000His wife gave me Italian cookies, coffee and lemonade.
00:58:53.000Then he and I went out to lunch in the valley somewhere.
00:58:56.000He showed me some of the sites connected to the murders.
00:59:00.000Then we went back to the house and talked till sunset.
00:59:03.000And towards the end of the six hours, I did realize...
00:59:07.000That even though he was talking nonstop and I'm recording everything, he hadn't given me anything new or different.
00:59:13.000I mean, I had just finished Helter Skelter.
00:59:15.000I read it for the first time because I'd never been interested in the case until I got the assignment.
00:59:19.000So I did what we call the Hail Mary pass in journalism, which is you ask someone if there's anything they could tell you off the record, not for attribution, that will help them to get something fresh.
00:59:30.000Because I was still searching for an angle.
01:00:13.000It was off the record in 2005 when I interviewed him for the second time and all things went to hell and he started threatening me with lawsuits and writing letters to my publisher trying to get them to stop the book.
01:00:28.000He wrote about what he told me and he claimed that I had dragged it out of him and embellished it and all this.
01:00:36.000But once he put that in a letter, the lawyers at the publisher said, well, it's not on the record anymore because these documents will all be in a civil trial when he sues you, which he said he was about to do.
01:00:48.000Yeah, they said now it's on the record.
01:00:50.000I mean, he's violated his agreement with you.
01:00:53.000So what he told me was that, famously, a videotape was taken from the Tate House by the police, excuse me, the first day after the murders.
01:01:07.000Home videotaping was relatively new at that point.
01:01:10.000Not a lot of people had cameras, but Roman Polanski did.
01:01:13.000And in Helter Skelter, Vince says in the book that the police took the tape, viewed it, and it was just Sharon and Roman making love and returned it to the loft.
01:01:26.000And Roman was in London at the time of the murders.
01:01:30.000He came back immediately, and then about a week later, he went up to the house.
01:01:35.000And one of the first things he did was he went up to the loft, and he never even knew that they took it, allegedly.
01:02:24.000Which we're not going to see anymore because the last one he made, which is supposed to be one of his best, they're not going to release it in the United States.
01:02:31.000But once I had that, that's kind of the first rabbit hole I went down because I'm like, well, if this was different in the official narrative...
01:02:48.000So I'd be interviewing people, and one of the first things after that that I found was the perjuries by Terry Melcher on the stand.
01:02:55.000I got access to two separate files and found that Melcher, Doris Day's son, record producer, young boy wonder, who lived in the house with his girlfriend Candy Bergen on Cielo, Up until January 1st of 69,
01:03:12.000then moved to Malibu, and Roman and Sharon moved into the house in February.
01:03:18.000Melcher was the part of the motive for why the house was picked.
01:03:23.000And again, this is getting into the weeds, but it's hard to talk about any of this without this exposition.
01:03:29.000Manson sent his followers up there To instill fear in Melcher by killing all the occupants of his former house who were strangers to them.
01:03:45.000Melcher testified at the grand jury and then at the trial that he had three fleeting encounters with Manson, one at Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson's, two there I think, and then – oh no, one there and then two when he went to the Spahn Ranch in April and May of 69 to listen to them play music with the – I
01:04:50.000His relationship with Manson ended in May of 69. He said he never saw him again.
01:04:56.000When the murders happened at his former house, it never occurred to him it had anything to do with him or that Manson did it.
01:05:02.000I stopped believing that a month or two in, and then I found these documents showing that Meltzer actually had I've gone to see Manson twice at the Spahn Ranch after the murders, and then once all the way out at Death Valley where they had the Barker Ranch where they were hiding when they were finally captured in the fall of 69. Once I could document that,
01:06:11.000And that's why I think – well, I think you could get away with anything then because the antics of the family at the trial and everybody was so horrified by what was going on.
01:06:20.000Nobody was looking at this critically and questioning stuff.
01:06:24.000Because every day, you know, Manson and the girls were getting thrown out of the courtroom for screaming, for singing, for dancing, for mocking the proceedings.
01:07:01.000He was traveling, actually, in Europe with Sharon, who had come back about three weeks before And Rudy had told me from the very beginning, he was very close to Terry, Dennis Wilson, and the third guy,
01:07:59.000This guy said to me, or one of my friends, or they say, Vince said, someone told me, I heard that you're questioning my tactics and my choices at the trial.
01:08:11.000I go, well, you know, I'm looking at stuff, Vince, and you know where this was going.
01:08:15.000I mean, I know we haven't talked, at that point we hadn't talked for about six weeks, I think.
01:08:18.000He goes, well, I want you to assure me that I'll be given the opportunity to To answer any of these questions, he goes, because what might appear irregular to you as a layperson can be easily explained by me.
01:08:40.000He goes, well, they're also saying it's a book and that you lie, that it's not a magazine.
01:08:44.000So I go, no, no, I'm still getting paid by Premier because I was at that point.
01:08:47.000And I had no idea it was going to be a book because we're still in the first six, seven months.
01:08:51.000So at that point, we stopped talking, Vince and I, and it wasn't until 2005 when I got my book deal that I went back to him with these questions.
01:09:02.000And I thought, hoped naively, that I would get him to break down and say, yes, this was all a CIA operation.
01:09:24.000Well, again, you've read the prologue to the book where we open in that scene in his kitchen where he's screaming and cursing at me and saying he's going to hurt me like I've never been hurt before and he's going to sue me for hundreds of millions of dollars.
01:10:36.000Then when I got home that night, so I walk out of the house, six hours, exactly almost six hours, just like the first time, six years earlier, he's grabbing me by the arm.
01:10:45.000He goes, this isn't quid pro quo, this isn't quid pro quo, but if you don't put this ridiculous nonsense in, he goes, you know, a blurb from Vince Bool, he always referred to himself in the third person.
01:11:10.000And he called me, I think it's a week, week and a half, almost every day.
01:11:13.000The next morning, a few days later, trying to— He would bully me, and then he'd say, no, no, look at what this is going to do to my family, my kids, and all that.
01:11:37.000So a year later, he kept, not a year later, he said, when we finally, he goes, at the very last phone call, which was a week and a half later, he goes, so you're really going to go ahead and do with this?
01:14:40.000I wanted him to be accountable and have to answer to all this.
01:14:44.000The reason I didn't publish it when I was going to publish it was Penguin, my publisher, canceled my deal in 2011 and then sued me for a return of the advance, which crippled...
01:15:11.000No, I mean, they extended it, and then in 2011, they lost their patience.
01:15:16.000And it was a surprise, because I knew that the editor and the publisher of Penguin Press, the imprint, who are very serious publishers, very well-known...
01:15:27.000I knew or I thought that they believed in me and understood why it was still taking long.
01:15:31.000So when I got the call, it was devastating.
01:15:35.000And then even worse is a year later, my agent got served with papers and they took me to court.
01:17:37.000So when my deal got canceled and I was in limbo, I thought, well, I can go to Errol now.
01:17:42.000I'd never met him or spoken to him, but I sent him an email, got his email address, and he called me like the next day and he goes, are you kidding me?
01:17:49.000He goes, I've always, he goes, I was fat because he had got my proposal.
01:17:53.000He said, I was so fascinated by this story and I've always wanted to do something on both Manson and MKUltra.
01:17:59.000So it took about six months of legal stuff because since my book was still, Owned by Penguin, but the suit was happening.
01:19:03.000And I had never signed the final contracts because I said, Errol, you've got to give me a clearer picture of what this is.
01:19:09.000Well, at one point he decided he wanted to do the story of Frank Olson with my story and Frank Olson's son's Eric's pursuit of his father's possible murder by the CIA in 1954 because of what he had found out about the Korean POWs.
01:19:29.000That became Wormwood, which I don't know if you saw.
01:19:31.000It was a Netflix series about two years ago.
01:19:33.000It's the second to last thing Errol did.
01:19:44.000I didn't like the direction it was going, so Errol and I fell out over that.
01:19:49.000We're still friends, and he gave me some pictures for the middle of the book from the shoot.
01:19:54.000And he did just Frank Olson and Eric's pursuit of it.
01:19:58.000So that took up like a year and a half of working with him and his people to develop it, and then it all stopped.
01:20:06.000And I actually walked away from money that would have really helped me, but I... I was willing to give him control, but I didn't like where it was going.
01:20:17.000And I had already invested 16 years of my life at that point.
01:20:24.000I still need this to be my vision, not somebody else's.
01:20:28.000And he was pretty upset and pissed off.
01:20:31.000But he made another good series that evolved out of my project.
01:20:36.000And at that point, it was about 2015-16, I just kept reporting and working to get the lawsuit resolved.
01:20:44.000And then as soon as it did, my agent took it out and he said, before I take out this new proposal, I got a collaborator, Dan Pipenbring, young, had started working with Prince on Prince's memoir,
01:20:59.000and then Prince died in the middle of it.
01:21:35.000Well, we took it out and Sloan, my agent, said we've got to send it to Penguin first because But we still have that resolution that hasn't been resolved.
01:21:45.000I mean, it's all agreed to, but we have to finish what we have to do.
01:22:13.000Let's just say, I said, if they just give me a little bit more than Little Brown's offering, I'll go with them because it was the same people and they knew everything.
01:22:49.000I don't want to be overdramatic, but...
01:22:53.000I kind of spent 20 years of my life doing nothing but investigating this and trying to bring it to fruition.
01:23:02.000And there were so many setbacks and so many times that I was broke and my reporting had hit a wall and I found out I'd wasted three months pursuing one angle that ended up not holding up.
01:23:17.000But at some point I thought, what else can I do now In good faith, knowing that all this stuff I've done up to this point is in the gutter, you know, in the garbage.
01:23:31.000And I knew I had really important discoveries.
01:23:33.000I mean, my problem was putting them all together in a cohesive way with a final answer.
01:23:38.000And my agent had started telling me around the mid-2000s, you know, you don't have to have resolution.
01:23:44.000You don't have to have a perfect beginning, middle, and end.
01:23:48.000You've got so much important stuff that you've uncovered about not just...
01:23:53.000The murders and the trial and the corruption in Los Angeles, but the federal government, the Jolly West, MKU, all of this stuff, he goes, just put all that out there.
01:24:06.000And when I finally said, well, I'll do this the rest of my life and have nothing, when I made that kind of decision and then took on this Dan, my collaborator, and we literally turned it around in a year, It was like a dream,
01:24:23.000And then when the book was – when I first got the galleys at my house and then the hardcover, you know, a few months later at my shitty apartment in Mid-City, I just – I couldn't believe it.
01:24:34.000And I thought, all right, now I can get run over by a bus.
01:24:38.000I don't care because there's a document.
01:25:06.000It's a lot longer than they originally gave us.
01:25:08.000And then I was telling you a few days ago, they were only going to give me 10 pages of endnotes, you know, where you show all your sources at the back of the book.
01:25:16.000And I fought for more and I got 60. And, you know, that's the most important part of the book because it shows every single document where to get it, where I found it.
01:25:26.000I, you know, add a little bit more of information about why, you know, why it's important.
01:25:31.000With all that out there now, It's like, I feel like I don't really need to do anything ever again.
01:26:26.000That we had submitted to a couple of the publishers with nondisclosures.
01:26:31.000They somehow got it, Amazon, and made us an offer.
01:26:35.000And this was when I was really, really broke in 2017. I mean, I got a little advance from Little Brown, but let's just say a lot of that had to go to some other people that I owed money to.
01:26:45.000So my agent basically said, you know, bottom line is Amazon is going to do a great job, whatever they do with it.
01:27:19.000The guy who's doing it, so he came to spend a week with me about...
01:27:22.000In October, before he began writing, and he's an established guy, smart, good, done a lot of films, and he's like, oh my god, now I know why it took you 20 years.
01:27:33.000How am I going to fit this into two hours?
01:27:55.000It's crazy and I think it's also a really important part of human history.
01:28:00.000Imagine if the whistleblower had not come forward and we didn't know about MKUltra and all those documents didn't get, they didn't find the warehouse where the documents were.
01:28:42.000Also, these people are agents for the federal government.
01:28:46.000I mean, what kind of precedent does this establish?
01:28:48.000Well, most of the people doing the research were subcontracted researchers at...
01:28:53.000You know, medical personnel at prisons.
01:28:56.000And in the case of Jolly West, he was first in the Air Force and then he was in university settings.
01:29:01.000And Jolly was, you know, once he got to the University of Oklahoma, he was experimenting on patients.
01:29:07.000And in one of his letters to Gottlieb asking for more funding, he's saying working with psychiatric patients actually benefits us because people can't...
01:29:21.000I'm not quoting directly here, but he was making the argument that their weird behavior wouldn't be noticed by anybody at the hospital because they're psychiatric patients.
01:29:31.000So these people are getting LSD, which is a pretty powerful drug, and other drugs he was using.
01:29:37.000And he was hypnotizing them in many of his experiments without their knowledge and their psychiatric patients.
01:29:45.000Your mind is, you know, the next most important thing besides your soul, and they're tampering with it.
01:29:51.000You know, one of Jolly's colleagues, a guy who actually took over the department when Jolly, in 69, came out to UCLA from Oklahoma— He said to me, because I, again, I would do this with people.
01:30:39.000You're going to get to about 30 or 40 pages on Jack Ruby and Jolly West.
01:30:44.000I don't want to spoil it for you or for the listeners if they haven't read the book yet, but Jolly West inserted himself into the Ruby case after Ruby was convicted of shooting and killing Oswald in the spring of 64. Before he was going to testify to the Warren Commission,
01:31:47.000But anyway, He goes to the Dallas County Jail in, I think it was April of 64, to examine Ruby in preparation for not the Warren Commission testimony, which he was giving in a couple months, but for his next trial, because he had gotten an appeal for a psychiatric review.
01:32:07.000And West, who had told Sidney Gottlieb in these early letters from the 50s, that part of his experiments were inducing insanity in a person without their awareness.
01:32:18.000West goes to examine Ruby, emerges from the county jail, and there's press waiting for him, and he announces that within the preceding 48 hours, Ruby had had a psychotic break That was irrevocable.
01:32:39.000He had audio and visual hallucinations.
01:32:42.000During the exam, he said Ruby hid under a table because he thought there were people in the room trying to kill him, told Wes that he could hear children's screams outside his jail cell, Jewish children, as they were boiled alive, and Wes said he's completely insane.
01:33:00.000That was I mean, there was no evidence of Ruby being mentally ill prior to Wes's exam.
01:33:10.000Wes was alone with him in the cell and then treated him for about six months.
01:33:16.000When Ruby finally gave his testimony to the Warren Commission, so Earl Warren, Chief Justice Warren, who was head of the commission, flew down to Dallas with Gerald Ford, who was in Congress and on the commission, and Arlen Spector, the young Arlen Spector,
01:33:32.000who was an investigator for the Warren Commission, who eventually came up with the magic bullet He called it the magic bullet conclusion.
01:33:42.000Anyway, the three of them put Ruby under oath, and Ruby babbled, was incoherent, grabbed Arlen Specter, who was like him, Jewish, and he said, don't you know they're killing Jews?
01:33:56.000And they've killed my brother and cut off his legs.
01:34:41.000Which later emerged, the anti-Castro-Cuban effort to overthrow Fidel Castro, which was run, it was Operation Mongoose, by the CIA. It was an illegal assassination program.
01:34:53.000Ruby denied being in it, and that's in the book.
01:34:55.000I found out that, again, through West's papers that I got access to, Ruby admitted never that he stalked and killed Oswald on the order's Of anyone, but that he was working with these people who were suspected of being involved in the assassination if there was a conspiracy.
01:35:15.000And he had never admitted that to anyone.
01:35:48.000Alan Dulles, the former head of the CIA who was fired by John F. Kennedy, was second in command to Judge Warren in the commission.
01:35:59.000Richard Helms, who was actually Jolly West's employer for MKUltra, Was the liaison between the CIA and the commission.
01:36:07.000So Helms knew that Ruby, who they call their most important witness in their investigation, the Warren Commission investigation, because he was the one who silenced the killer.
01:36:17.000There could be no trial for Oswald because he was dead.
01:36:20.000So they tried to learn everything they could about Ruby to see if he had had any meetings with Oswald prior or if he had connections beyond the superficial ones to organize crime.
01:36:36.000The commission, which I believe was a joke from the beginning, it was set to determine...
01:36:43.000I mean, they said in the beginning their objective was to prove that Oswald acted alone.
01:36:48.000They came up with that conclusion, but after the first Senate intelligence hearings in the early 70s that exposed MKUltra, Chaos, COINTELPRO... Primarily the Frank Church hearings,
01:37:03.000they found out that Dulles and Helms and others had lied about the CIA's involvement with Oswald and with their own agents who had had these peripheral issues.
01:37:17.000We don't know if they were peripheral or not, but definitely encounters with Oswald.
01:37:21.000They withheld all that, so the House voted to have what they call the House Select Committee on Assassinations that began in 77. In 78, they released their report, which they concluded there was a probable conspiracy to kill Oswald.
01:38:53.000Well, the first report, which was fabricated by his first lawyer, who admitted this years and years later, he told Ruby to say he did it to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to come to Dallas for a trial of Oswald.
01:39:36.000My argument in my book is it's important.
01:39:39.000My most important finding is that a CIA contracted agent or researcher for mind control Became the most important witness to the Warren Commission.
01:39:52.000He became that witness's doctor right before he testified and told his story.
01:39:58.000I go, that should have been disclosed, obviously, to the commission, but they're not going to say it because it's a secret program.
01:40:18.000Arlen Specter, I think I mentioned that to you before.
01:40:21.000There's an interesting – I approached Alan Spector, who was running for re-election, this was 2002, and told him I had new information.
01:40:33.000He made a lot of money off of his books about justice and defending his magic bullet theory.
01:40:45.000He always said, if anybody comes to me with new evidence, I'll look at it with an open mind.
01:40:50.000So I had sent him a persuasive letter, well, his people.
01:40:54.000They finally said, alright, if you have these documents showing that this doctor...
01:40:59.000Who treated Ruby, you know, and within the 24 hours he lost his mind, Spectre will look at them and then decide if he'll talk to you, fax him to us.
01:41:10.000And at that point, that was 2002, I had lost the magazine story and I didn't have a book deal, so I was operating entirely on my own.
01:41:17.000I said, I can't send this stuff to you because it's my smoking gun, the letters between Gottlieb and Wes describing all the experiments.
01:41:27.000So finally, Spector agreed to talk to me on the phone for a few minutes, and it was amazing.
01:41:32.000He called me from the Senate floor while they were waiting to vote on whether or not they were going to invade Iraq.
01:41:37.000This was 2002. So we were only supposed to talk for a few minutes, and when I explained what I had and what it showed West had been involved with at the time he treated Ruby...
01:41:49.000He said, well, if you're not going to send the stuff to me, I don't know, you know, I need to see it.
01:41:54.000And I go, well, I can't send it to you.
01:41:56.000And he said, well, you want to meet me?
01:41:58.000Because I told him I was in Philadelphia visiting my folks, and he was from Philadelphia, too.
01:42:24.000I don't think I got too—I don't think I ever really got paranoid during this, but— Spector had been a long-term senator.
01:42:31.000He was running for re-election, and it was the first time in his career that the polls were against him, that his opponent, they were predicting that Spector was going to lose.
01:42:42.000He had also defended this magic bullet theory forever.
01:42:46.000I mean, more people knew him for the Kennedy assassination than anything else.
01:42:49.000I thought, so if I do meet with him and I show him these documents, maybe it was grandiose in me, too.
01:42:55.000I thought, he's going to go, oh, my God.
01:42:56.000I need to be part of their exposure, because if he didn't and walked away from it, I thought they were important enough that he would know that once they were publicized and he had the opportunity to say, hey, we need to look into this,
01:43:16.000He's either going to use it to get publicity, have a press conference and help him in his re-election, or...
01:43:24.000He's gonna use it to be the hero of it and run with it before I've published a book and then I'll just be a footnote, you know, to all this because he took it.
01:43:33.000So I canceled the meeting the morning of.
01:43:36.000I called up his press secretary And his cell phone, like the three phones I had for him, I said, you have to tell Senator Spector, I am so sorry, but there's an emergency.
01:43:55.000I just left the message and I said, I'm so sorry, but obviously I've worked so hard to get this meeting.
01:44:01.000It's embarrassing, but I have to go back.
01:44:03.000So I left my parents' place to go to the post office because I had been there for three months.
01:44:10.000I was actually writing the first version of the proposal at their place to get away from my friends and all the distractions in LA. And I was only going for like 15 minutes.
01:44:19.000I go, Mom, if that press secretary calls...
01:44:22.000I told him I was leaving, so tell him that I just went to the airport and I apologize.
01:44:28.000And she goes, well, I can't lie to a press secretary.
01:45:28.000The fact that that actually gets debated, and the fact that it never gets brought up that there were more bullet fragments in Connelly's body than there were missing from that bullet, and the fact that anyone who knows anything about guns, anyone who's ever shot a gun who's seen what a bullet shatters bone,
01:45:45.000what it looks like, would look at that fucking bullet and think that bullet went through two human beings.
01:45:50.000And the fact that the reason why they had to make up this theory in the first place was because a guy was hit by a ricochet on the underpass.
01:46:18.000I had never cared about Kennedy or the John F. Kennedy assassination, but once I found out that West was connected to Ruby, and again, that was a moment that I was like, oh no.
01:46:27.000I mean, first it was West and the CIA, and then I'm like, and Ruby?
01:46:31.000How can I not look at the Kennedy assassination?
01:46:33.000So I kept my focus narrowly just on Ruby, Oswald, West, Spectre.
01:46:39.000I looked a little bit at the magic bullet and agree with you, but I never did a deep dive into a lot of that stuff.
01:46:45.000Well, they had to come up with that theory because there was a guy who was hit under the underpass.
01:47:11.000They had the bullet that was the headshot, they had the bullet that hit the curb, and then all the other injuries had to be attributed to one bullet.
01:47:18.000Not only that, there's a different description of the frontal shot.
01:47:23.000There's a shot when Kennedy, you see Kennedy grabbing his neck.
01:47:26.000Well, in the hospital in Dallas, it's described as a frontal shot.
01:47:31.000When they fly the corpse to Bethesda, Maryland, they describe it as a trach hole.
01:47:42.000And then, on top of that, the Bugliosi writes a book to justify the findings of the Warren Commission.
01:47:49.000There's a great book called Best Evidence by David Lifton, and that book got me down a dark road when I was in my 20s.
01:47:58.000That's what got me really freaked out about conspiracy theories in the first place, because I I would have always thought that conspiracy theories were for dull-minded people that didn't spend much time thinking or reading.
01:48:10.000You know, they just like to think that there was a bunch of people just controlling everything, man.
01:48:26.000Like, there's video footage of, I believe it's, I think it's British soldiers, where they dosed them up with acid and sent them out into this field.
01:48:34.000Have you ever seen that video footage?
01:49:34.000But look at these guys just laughing and giggling, these soldiers lying on the ground, laughing hysterically, covering their eyes, and it's all archived footage.
01:49:57.000They knew what they were doing to these people, and then they filmed them, and this is what they got from Imperial War Museum in London, original footage.
01:50:05.000Well, if we have films like that from our government, you're not going to see them.
01:50:09.000If they weren't destroyed, they're locked up.
01:50:11.000I mean, that was another big eye-opener for what's kept from us.
01:50:16.000At one point in 2011, I had a researcher at the Washington Post, a woman there who has been there for years, I could get myself in trouble for this, too.
01:53:06.000And I had found out about him in my reporting.
01:53:09.000First I got to his attorney and then to some of his close friends.
01:53:13.000He lived in Los Angeles and then he disappeared for months doing undercover work.
01:53:18.000He wouldn't even tell us who he worked for but his wife and daughter who were in Sweden and other people who said it was the CIA. He told, before he died, a couple years before his death,
01:53:35.000three or four of his closest friends, including his attorney, that he had worked on an operation, and he wouldn't tell them who, but he had infiltrated the Manson family prior to the murders, and his dying regret was he could have prevented them but didn't.
01:53:52.000He also said that he was at the crime scene after the killers had left, But before the police had arrived, which was like a four or five hour window, and I was able to confirm not that he was there those five hours,
01:54:09.000but that he was missing and that the police set up a watch at his father's house who he was living with to try to figure out what was going on.
01:54:17.000He ended up helping Colonel Tate, Sharon Tate's father, who left his job in military intelligence to Help the police in the investigation.
01:54:29.000He even dressed up like a hippie, right?
01:54:30.000He dressed up like a hippie and so did Reeve.
01:54:33.000And Reeve was a really hardcore right-wing guy.
01:54:36.000I mean he was racist and his daughter sent me pictures of him and she said once he died, in fact this is how serious this guy was, Reeve divorced his wife who was a Swedish model.
01:54:50.000First he sent her and his infant daughter back to Sweden from the United States in 61 because he thought there was going to be nuclear war.
01:55:01.000And then in the mid-60s, he told his wife he had a divorcer.
01:55:31.000He said, I couldn't have any relationship with you because of my work, but I want to do that now.
01:55:36.000So he flew her to Los Angeles, introduced her to all of his friends, and after he died, she went to his apartment and went through his things and found a picture of him dressed up as a hippie.
01:57:23.000He was the one who ran the clinic and it basically gave Jolly West an office at the clinic to recruit people in the summer of 67. And then Roger, he...
01:57:33.000Gave him office space there to conduct what he called the Amphetamine Research Project in 68 and 69 at the period that he was still...
01:57:42.000They called him the friendly fed in the hate because everybody knew he was a federal government person, but he grew his hair longer and grew a mustache to try to blend in, but everybody thought he was a narc, and I guess he was.
01:57:56.000But David's line of work after his mice research which people can read about in the book and mice and violence was trying to figure out why some people were more susceptible To LSD and having a personality change.
01:59:14.000And it was funded by the government, and David Smith admitted that.
01:59:18.000He took funds, and that's one of the reasons he told me he gave Jolly an office there, was Jolly was well-known in the research community.
01:59:25.000He knew that Jolly would attract government funding, but they were only supposed to be a service to runaway kids and hippies and people who couldn't afford health care.
01:59:35.000They weren't supposed to be doing research.
01:59:37.000They weren't supposed to be doing experiments, but they were the entire time.
01:59:43.000So it was sold as a non-profit health care facility when it was actually a research center for the federal government.
01:59:52.000And this is interesting, and people might think I'm crazy, but it raises questions.
01:59:57.000My book came out in June, last June of 2019. The clinic was open from June of 1967. It closed in September of last year, I think it was.
02:00:11.000It shut its doors for the first time in 50, no, 52 years.
02:00:15.000Three months after your book came out.
02:00:18.000And that's one of the biggest disappointments of the book is, you know, because I couldn't answer the largest questions I could only present.
02:00:26.000You know, a case for why it sure looked like it might have happened this way, that way, the other way.
02:00:32.000I was hoping that it would be kind of a call to action, you know, that other people would pick up the ball and run with it, you know.
02:00:41.000And again, maybe it was my naivety, my grandiosity.
02:00:50.000I wanted some serious journalists, especially in the cities where these things took place.
02:01:09.000They got more coverage than any other trial until O.J., and I can prove that it was fixed from the very beginning when they switched to lawyers and planted evidence and perjury and stuff like that.
02:01:19.000They put a former prosecutor in charge of Susan Atkins.
02:02:23.000We were sure we were going to get lawsuits.
02:02:26.000You know, Little Brown was braced for it.
02:02:28.000I mean, when Bugliosi, he was already dead when I sold it to them, so they weren't so much worried about his family, although his family...
02:02:34.000They did say, you know, we could be sued by his family because they own Helter Skelter, and they could argue that you diminish the value of Helter Skelter, which I hope I did.
02:02:44.000And I'd love to have that argument in court.
02:02:47.000Not a word, but there are, you know, a dozen principal people in that book, many of them not public figures like Roger Smith.
02:02:57.000David Smith, to an extent, is because he became very well known.
02:03:01.000Not one of them has either threatened a lawsuit, contacted me, the publisher.
02:03:10.000And I think, again, thank God I've got the 60 pages of notes because I think they know they can't argue the points that I'm making.
02:03:16.000Everything I've exposed is documented.
02:03:18.000That's why I was so careful about not putting speculation in the book, about not putting stuff in there that I hadn't substantiated or corroborated.
02:03:25.000Well, I don't think the book made a big enough splash for them.
02:05:17.000When the book came out and no one did try to sue you or no one did come after you, were you concerned that maybe it hadn't gotten the push that you felt like the subject deserved?
02:05:50.000You've got to get into it to really piece.
02:05:54.000There's a couple of times where I had to go back over things and try to piece it together, and there's a lot going on and a lot of people to follow.
02:06:21.000And again, I mean, the bottom line for me was, I'm just so happy it's out there in the public realm, because that would have been, I can't imagine dying with this.
02:06:33.000Either being sent into a dumpster somewhere, nobody's seeing this stuff, because I think a lot of it is important.
02:06:59.000I'll start without the speculative part, something I can prove.
02:07:03.000He was compromised when he was given this case in 1969. It's in the book.
02:07:11.000I mean, he has family out there, but they know about this.
02:07:14.000He was involved in a couple cases, the first one before the trial, that are crazy.
02:07:21.000I mean, when you see the stuff that happened between him and I, you know, all those years later, it makes sense when you see what he was like before he became famous.
02:07:30.000So in 1965, he had his first child, Vincent Bugliosi Jr., He decided that he wasn't the father, that the milkman was the father.
02:07:42.000And back in those days, you're too young to know, people used to deliver milk to homes.
02:08:27.000A month after his wife found out she was pregnant, Vince's wife, Vince in his delirium decided that he was fired because he had gotten people he delivered milk to pregnant.
02:08:43.000So he was writing them anonymous letters.
02:08:48.000Following the kids, I actually, this is one thing I did here.
02:08:51.000I heard from the little girl, who's now a grown woman, read about this in my book and she sent me a letter and she goes, you only got half of it.
02:10:03.000So the milkman followed Vince, or his brother-in-law, got the plate number, found out who he was and that he was at the DA's office, called his personal attorney, and the personal attorney called Vince, and they had a meeting between Vince,
02:10:19.000the milkman, the milkman's wife, and Mrs. Bugliosi, and Vince...
02:10:23.000He admitted that he had been stalking them because he thought it was his wife.
02:10:27.000He had used DA's investigators calling this guy a material witness in a murder case to follow him, get private information on him.
02:10:37.000So Vince said he would pay them $100 and never do it again.
02:10:42.000And the milkman said, we don't want your money.
02:12:10.000And the milkman and his wife had never told anyone, I guess outside of their family, what had happened four or five years before.
02:12:18.000But when they saw that Vince was trying to be the most powerful law enforcement person in the city of Los Angeles, they went to his opponent and said, you need to know this.
02:12:28.000So they told the opponent and they had a press conference.
02:12:32.000So the milkman and his wife went public and Vince responded by having his own press conference and telling the reporters, here's what happened.
02:12:44.000The milkman, we believe, stole $300 in cash from our kitchen table when he was on the route, so I was just doing a personal investigation.
02:12:54.000And the reporter said, well, did you hire—I mean, did you contact the Pasadena police?
02:12:58.000He goes, no, no, I just wanted to do it on my own.
02:13:00.000And then as other people pointed out later, he was doing this—this was 65—he was doing it through the end of 68, the statute of limitations on— The theft, burglary, robbery is three years.
02:13:14.000Even if he found out that he had stolen the $3, they wouldn't have been able to prosecute it.
02:13:26.000Then he ran again after Skelter came out for Attorney General of California.
02:13:32.000At that point, the milkman and the wife were going to go public again and say, hey, we have even more to tell about this, which I think is what the daughter wants to tell me.
02:13:41.000She actually hasn't gotten in touch with me after the first email.
02:13:44.000I said, I want to hear what you have, and she said she has all these documents.
02:13:48.000But then a woman named Virginia Cardwell said she was going to go public too.
02:13:55.000She came out and said, excuse me, after Vince told the world that the milkman had stolen $300 for him.
02:14:05.000The milkman and his wife filed a civil suit against Vince and Gail, his wife, because Gail also publicly said with Vince in an interview that that's the truth.
02:14:17.000They sued them for defamation, and they settled, and Vince paid them, I think it was $12,000 in cash and $100 bills, and part of the agreement was they weren't allowed to talk about it.
02:14:29.000They couldn't say they'd gotten any money, and he would only give it in cash, so they couldn't trace it to him.
02:14:39.000Then, when they went public again, when he was running for attorney general, they were subject to being in violation of that, but they said, Then we'll tell everything he doesn't want to tell.
02:14:50.000He lied under oath and deposition, so did his wife, about the stalking.
02:14:55.000So in 73, Vince had an affair with a woman named Virginia Cardwell.
02:15:35.000So Vince went to her house and beat the hell out of her.
02:15:39.000And I've got all those depositions too.
02:15:43.000He just, according to her story to the police, because she reported it, he dragged her across the hair, the floor by the hair, sat in her and punched her and punched her again in the face, told her she had to get an abortion.
02:15:59.000After that episode, she went to the Santa Monica police as soon as he left and reported it.
02:16:04.000And nobody would have known about it, but reporters saw it on the police wire service or whatever.
02:16:10.000So the next day, it was on the front page of all the LA papers that Vince Bugliosi had been accused of a battery of a woman who said that he wanted her to have an abortion and she wouldn't.
02:16:21.000So Vince went to the police, told them she was lying.
02:16:25.000She was a client that he had had one phone consultation with, never met her face to face, and she was trying to embarrass him because he wanted her to pay him $200 or $300.
02:16:59.000After the newspapers reported it and Vince said it was a lie and he told the police that, Vince went back to her apartment with his secretary and a typewriter and he held her hostage.
02:17:13.000Held her hostage for I think three or four hours.
02:17:17.000Begging her and then bullying her, and he might have hit her then too, I can't remember, to go to the police and say that she had made the whole story up.
02:17:26.000His secretary was there, because once he got her to agree to do it, she wrote up, backdated the bill for the money, and had Virginia sign it.
02:17:48.000I've got the connections to the DA's office in Santa Monica, which he did, and he did take care of it.
02:17:54.000So she called up the Santa Monica Police Department to say she was coming in to report that she had made the story up because she was angry about this money.
02:19:48.000He lied in the depositions, and then when he got caught with the other people who could show that they'd been together and there was a history, they'd had an affair for like six months, he resolved it and paid her a substantial amount of money to go away.
02:20:02.000So this was the kind of person who When I told Vince I was writing about this in my book, he's like, well, number one, I can't talk about either of those cases because they were resolved and there's nondisclosures.
02:20:15.000And I go, well, Vince, you know that's not true because, I mean, number one, Virginia's dead.
02:20:22.000And she went public and so did the Weisels, the milkman and the mistress, And I wouldn't, you know, I'm not interested in your assorted, you know, personal life, but it's relevant because I'm arguing that you committed crimes in the prosecution of the Manson family,
02:20:39.000suborn perjury, hid evidence, you know, manipulated the defense by planning an attorney.
02:20:45.000So if I'm going to You know, try to make this case and everyone's not going to believe it because you're Vince Bugliosi, you know, this prominent prosecutor author.
02:20:55.000Well, I have to show that there's a pattern in this behavior, not only that you're lying under oath in the depositions in these two cases before you settle, but you also lied to the police in the Cardwell case and you lied to the papers in both.
02:21:09.000If I have that in my book, then people will be more prone to believe that you do the same thing in the Tate LaBianca trial, that you would break rules to win your convictions.
02:21:20.000Did he have a ghostwriter for Helter Skelter?
02:21:23.000No, he had a collaborator, Kurt Gentry, yeah.
02:21:42.000And the milkman's wife, in her deposition, said that when Gail, Vince's wife, came to her house and knocked on her door and said, please do this.
02:22:20.000He said to me, you know, Gail thinks I have some psychiatric issues and she's been trying to get me to go to a doctor forever.
02:22:26.000So, you know, I'm not saying that this is a reason some of this stuff might have happened, but I do, you know, I don't even know why he would tell me that.
02:22:34.000But yeah, so I think that he was able to be manipulated because of these vulnerabilities.
02:23:41.000It involved Billy Doyle and Charles Taco and these guys who were dealing drugs out of the house with Wojciech, Vorkowski, you know, one of the victims, Polanski's friend, and possibly, allegedly, J.C. Ring, the hairdresser.
02:24:43.000I mean, it makes sense if they're laughing and dancing.
02:24:46.000Well, if we're going to speculate again, I believe that One of the other objectives was personality change, using drugs, hypnosis, etc., and making it fix, making it stick.
02:25:01.000These doctors were trying to learn why some people, do they have precipitating personality factors that made them more vulnerable?
02:25:09.000To using LSD once or a few times and all of a sudden just losing all sense of reality.
02:25:15.000Not everyone had that experience, but some did.
02:25:17.000And that research began in 1962 in Los Angeles.
02:25:20.000There's a whole chapter, there's a few chapters, but there's a whole chapter that we left out of the book and if we do do a follow-up, it'll be in there.
02:25:28.000About another guy who's not even named in the book who was one of these LSD researchers.
02:25:34.000You're interested in hyperbolic chambers and all that stuff?
02:25:50.000That's the increased oxygen for recovery from injuries.
02:25:54.000Yeah, well, so there was a group, it's a fascinating, it would have been a fascinating chapter.
02:25:59.000There was a group of people Artists, educators, but they were all kind of like beatniks and stuff, that lived on Topanga Beach in this community of abandoned fisherman shacks that had been there when the PCH went up in like the 30s and 40s.
02:26:21.000There was this whole community of homes, mostly ramshackle homes, that were inaccessible except by one road, I think Topanga Canyon Road.
02:26:30.000So a bunch of people migrated there who wanted to—they were almost like communally living.
02:26:39.000There were, I think, about 30 of them, and they renovated them, and they were beautiful little places.
02:26:44.000They all got destroyed when they turned that into a park in the, I think, early 70s or mid-70s.
02:26:50.000But one of the guys there, Paul Rowan, was an LSD researcher at UCLA doing the same kind of research Wes was doing, but as early as 62. But unofficially, he and, I don't know if you know who Oscar Jenninger was, He was one of the first doctors,
02:27:06.000psychiatrists in Los Angeles who got LSD from Sandoz for his patients.
02:27:12.000But there was a group of these people that lived there, and one of them was named Perry Bivens, and he was a diver.
02:27:20.000And he was a trust fund medical student, a lot of money, and he built a hyperbolic chamber and put gases in it.
02:27:29.000His objective was to try to learn A way to dive.
02:27:35.000Well, a bunch of these guys dived to the depths that people hadn't dove to before by learning how to deprive their brains of oxygen for longer and longer times.
02:27:48.000They got access to LSD. They were the first ones, supposedly, civilians in the United States to have access to LSD, you know, not through military or CIA experiments, as early as 1954 or 55. And then by the early 60s, everybody who knew,
02:28:04.000knew where to get LSD from this community.
02:28:07.000And Tex Watson moved there, who was the main killer in 68, and lived among these guys who were doing this early research.
02:28:18.000Into, mostly, the one guy, Paul Rowan, personality change.
02:28:24.000I mean, it's so complicated about why it's important that Watson was with this community prior to joining Manson and what happened to him as far as his personality change even before he met Manson,
02:28:39.000which was the summer of 68, but I guess I'll save that for the next chapter.
02:29:10.000If you look at the COINTELPRO objectives, which was to...
02:29:18.000To neutralize the left-wing movement, to make them look horrible, evil, bad, and this is what drugs are going to do to your kids.
02:29:28.000The kind of outcome that these murders had was to make the hippies the boogeyman.
02:29:34.000I mean, the biggest boogeyman in the United States history.
02:29:38.000I don't know, forever, but at least until the 70s, became Charlie Manson.
02:29:43.000And when Manson and his family were identified as suspects the first week of December, 69, I mean, it was like earth-shaking because all of a sudden nobody knew who had committed the murders, that the case was open from August till 1st of December.
02:29:59.000You have photos on the front page of every paper in the world of these hippie women, you know, nursing children living communally who are accused of these horrible, brutal slayings.
02:30:12.000And the argument was, and what the reporters were reporting was they had gone crazy on LSD and free love and the hippie ethic.
02:30:24.000And that was the same thing Chaos and Co-Entrelle Powell were trying to do.
02:30:28.000They were trying to damage the youth revolution, the youth movement.
02:30:32.000Why do you think they targeted that house, though?
02:30:38.000So J. Edgar Hoover, when he had the COINTELPRO operation, he wrote a – no, excuse me, an L.A. agent wrote a memo to Hoover saying what we have to do – this is when they were mostly battling the Panther – I mean trying to neutralize the Panthers in L.A.,
02:30:56.000Was go after the whites, the elite whites, the Hollywood whites who were supporting the Panthers.
02:31:02.000There was something called the White Panther Party that began in L.A. in 67 or 68. Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Cass Elliott.
02:31:10.000Those three were actually under surveillance by the FBI. They were part of this group, Donald Sutherland, and they were basically a support...
02:31:20.000So in this one memo, which I think it was...
02:31:23.000The winter of 68, I got the date in the book, said that what we have to make the whites think is that when the revolution finally happens, when the blacks rise up, they'll be lined up with everybody else and slaughtered.
02:31:37.000So, if you look at that memo that was part of their operation, which was to...
02:31:43.000They did it by sending letters, making the whites scared.
02:31:49.000I hate to speculate, but I think people will draw that conclusion if you read the book, that this could have been a chaos or COINTELPRO operation to turn the world, the nation, the culture against...
02:32:06.000Hippies, the left wing, the Black Panthers.
02:32:09.000And they picked that house because it was high profile?
02:32:56.000Yeah, it's like Joan Didion wrote in her book, The White Album, that the morning she learned about the murders and she knew most of the victims, she goes, I knew that the 60s had ended, they were over.
02:33:08.000I mean, there was also Altamont and, I mean, not a whole lot else, but that was like a cultural watershed moment.
02:33:16.000But the LaBianca killings were fairly random.
02:34:06.000It's a big, beautiful home that had been turned into a convent, like a retirement home for nuns.
02:34:13.000And when the church really hit hard times financially, they told the nuns they were going to have to leave there because they were selling it.
02:34:20.000So the church, I think, sold it to Katy Perry.
02:34:25.000And then some of the nuns hired a lawyer because they didn't want to leave.
02:34:30.000I mean, I didn't look too closely at it, but I just know that the whole thing is in dispute.
02:36:20.000The reason the book's so hard to write is one theory would conflict with another.
02:36:24.000So if the Tates were killed for chaos, co-intel, pro, high profile, neutralize the left, or a drug deal gone wrong, what about the LaBiancas?
02:36:36.000Well, the LaBiancas were an upper middle class couple that lived in Las Villas and Vince wrote in the book that they were randomly targeted because Manson had been to the house next door quite a bit when someone named Harold True lived there and knew the layout and supposedly went to kill Harold True first,
02:36:57.000got to Harold True's house, which was empty, and then went next door, tied up the LaBianca couple, left the house, and sent Tex Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Halten in to kill them.
02:37:11.000What Vince wrote about what the investigators found out was that Lino, the father, had gambling debts.
02:37:19.000He also had embezzled $200,000 from his family company.
02:37:24.000And the original investigation, the two teams were separate.
02:37:28.000The LAPD assigned two different units, one to the Tate murders, which was much larger, and one to the LaBianca.
02:37:36.000And they announced within a couple days that even though We're good to go.
02:37:56.000I make an argument in the book that I think the police knew exactly who did both murders right away.
02:38:04.000It'll be too long to get into here, but all the evidence that I accumulated is in there, and I'm not the first one to say that.
02:38:11.000So then why were the LaBiancas killed?
02:38:16.000What Vince kept out of the book was not only was Lino in debt to his family, but he had a meeting on August 9th with his family that they had told him he had to come in, his two brothers-in-law and his mother, who operated the Gateway shop.
02:38:49.000He went with his wife and their boat to a lake where their daughter was visiting a friend so the daughter and her friend could water ski, didn't even call the family to say he wasn't showing up, came back that night and was killed with his wife.
02:39:07.000Vince kept that important meeting out.
02:39:10.000He also kept the depth and the degree of...
02:39:20.000I mentioned them because it's an important part, but I don't talk about what I found out and why it was important.
02:39:28.000There's a much better case that Lino was targeted The argument would be, well, who would ever hire Manson to kill someone?
02:39:41.000Well, Manson wasn't as dumb as he seemed, and they needed money.
02:39:45.000This is where I don't want to speculate, and again, it's not even a chapter in the book, so I can't really show you what I've got except to tell you.
02:39:53.000One other argument that Vince made for why he thought the LaBiancas were killed by the Manson family I mean, they were actually right with their first theory.
02:40:04.000It was a copy of the night before to throw off investigators, but it was the same killers.
02:40:08.000The police were wrong when they thought it was two separate killers, which I don't think they did.
02:40:12.000He said we could never establish a connection between the two groups of victims.
02:40:17.000So there was the Hollywood set at Benedict Canyon, Cielo Drive.
02:40:23.000And then there was Lino and his wife across town in Los Villas.
02:40:27.000And we worked so hard to try to determine if they knew each other or had any encounter thus tying them together and we couldn't.
02:40:36.000Lino got his haircut from Jay Sebring, the victim.
02:40:39.000He was in Jay Sebring's appointment book.
02:40:41.000That's in the police reports that I got access to like my first or second year when I begged, persuaded a cop to let me come go through his files in Palm Springs.
02:40:50.000So he very well might have been to that house, too, the Cielo Drive house.
02:42:45.000They were going to watch the movie, and then all of a sudden there was a power surge, and the lights went really, really bright and dimmed, and they lost the cable.
02:43:50.000What I found out from a police interview of Paul Greenwald, the kid who was called to ask, he told this to the police and then he confirmed it to me 30, 40 years later when I found him and interviewed him.
02:44:00.000He said, I went to the house either Sunday or Monday after the murders because my father sent me there to get a suit for Jay to be buried in.
02:44:11.000He goes, I got to the house and I wanted to see what had happened to the wires since I had put all the wires in.
02:44:17.000And I did a circle of the house and I found the wires cut.
02:44:21.000He goes, I picked them up and I looked at them and there were like four cables and three work.
02:44:33.000He said, so the night before they were killed, somebody cut the wires.
02:44:38.000And it couldn't have been a gardener because it was 9 o'clock at night.
02:44:42.000And he said, from what Jay had told him about the power surge, all the floodlights got really bright and then dimmed.
02:44:47.000He goes, that's what happens when you do...
02:44:49.000I don't know anything about electricity.
02:44:52.000The police didn't follow up on it, or if they did, I couldn't find a record.
02:44:56.000And I found Elvin Greenwald, and I said, you know, you're...
02:45:00.000This police report, which I have, completely upends The prosecution's argument that these people were random because Tex Watson, the next night, cut the wires at the Tate house, the phone wires, and then they went into the house and killed everybody.
02:45:17.000So unless it's a coincidence that 24 hours before, the same four people at a different location had the house wires cut by somebody who might have gotten spooked by the surge or something, they weren't random.
02:46:02.000I mean, it has to feel like an amazing accomplishment after all those years to finally have this book.
02:46:09.000Yeah, and again, I mean, more than anything in the world, You've even gotten to the end of the book.
02:46:14.000There's a murder in there that I think the Manson family committed that was covered up by the law enforcement because it would have screwed up the prosecution.
02:46:25.000Also, at the end of the book, there are these Tex Watson audio tapes that I found out about in 2008. When Watson turned himself in, he was alerted in Texas.
02:46:37.000The police called the local sheriff, who was Tex's cousin, and his parents, and said he's wanted for questioning in these unsolved tape murders.
02:47:00.000Watson was brought into the station, questioned by the LAPD, put under arrest.
02:47:06.000They had to extradite him, so the sheriff there, Tex's cousin, put him in a cell.
02:47:11.000The family called up a lawyer, Bill Boyd, who had actually represented Tex on a college case when he stole a typewriter from a college in a prank.
02:47:20.000He told me in an interview in 2008 that that day he had text tell him the whole story, or Charles as he called him, about how he met Manson, why the murders were committed, how they happened.
02:47:34.000He said he spoke to me for 20 hours and he goes, I've got all those audio tapes in a safe in my office.
02:47:41.000He told me this in 2008. He said he also described other murders that the family had committed that hadn't been connected to them.
02:47:50.000So right away, in 2008, I'm working on it that long, I thought, other murders, that's important to me.
02:47:56.000But more important, did he tell his attorney why the murders really happened?
02:48:14.000About a week later, after she had gotten her new attorney that the prosecution planted, they audiotaped her telling her version, which became the official version.
02:48:25.000So Watson's would predate that by a week.
02:48:29.000And when I found out that they were in that safe, and he's telling me this on the phone, I thought, wait, he can't play that to me because that would violate Watson's attorney-client privilege.
02:49:10.000And then finally, after four months, I called up and his secretary said, oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Boy's in China on business today.
02:49:19.000And I said, well, you have to tell him I'm not going to wait anymore.
02:49:22.000I'm going to write to Charles and tell him what he told me.
02:49:24.000I go, if there's other bodies – I mean, I didn't let them know that I was more interested in the motive story.
02:49:30.000But I said if there's – and I was interested in this too.
02:49:32.000I go, if there's other bodies or victims out there who have never been connected or even – we don't even know if the remains were uncovered because there's a lot of – Evidence that there might have been people killed out in the desert and buried there.
02:50:37.000He died six months later on the treadmill.
02:50:39.000Oh my God, probably thinking about you.
02:50:42.000And his firm went bankrupt, and then it wasn't until two or three years later, and it's all in there, the backstory, but I finally went to try to get the tapes again and found out he had died, found out that the tapes were in the possession of the trustee who was waiting for the bankruptcy to be resolved.
02:51:02.000And it took me three or four months of back and forth And to try to get them to release the tapes to me, and I made an argument for why they weren't protected anymore.
02:51:12.000Again, long story short, I was sharing information with the deputy DA in Los Angeles, who I thought was friendly.
02:51:22.000And he was handling all the parole hearings of the Manson family, a guy named Pat Secura.
02:51:28.000The woman who was in charge of the tapes, the trustees said, If Secura calls me and tells me that it's okay for me to release them to you and explains how it's not a violation, I'll do it.
02:52:15.000For about a year, it went from the local court to the state Supreme Court, where the judge finally ruled that the LAPD should have the tapes.
02:52:23.000They sent two officers down to get the tapes in 2013. They came back, and then nobody at the DA's office would talk to me anymore.
02:52:32.000The promise that had been made that I would be the first one to listen to them reneged.
02:52:36.000Those tapes, a million journalists have made Freedom of Information Act requests for them.
02:52:43.000Leslie Van Houten's attorney wants them.
02:52:45.000He thinks it'll help her at her parole hearings because he thinks there's information on there to show that she's been telling the truth all these years.
02:52:52.000He's gone to the state Supreme Court through other courts.
02:53:15.000I would just be happy if some paper like the L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post assigned some reporters just to go through my reporting and see if I've made shit up or if it all plays out and then does a little bit of additional reporting.
02:53:56.000Excerpts of my interviews with Bugliosi, Manson, some of the really important stuff where I put the audio tapes up.
02:54:03.000So what you can't get in the book or even in the footnotes you can see online, if you just Google my name, Manson, and Instagram or Facebook, There it is, right there.