What We Still Don’t Know About the Manson Murders

In the late summer of 1969, panic spread throughout Los Angeles. Over two consecutive nights in early August, a strange group of college-aged hippies who were living at an abandoned movie ranch under the magnetic leadership of Charles Manson, brutally murdered seven people. Among the five victims killed on the first night was the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, who was married to the director Roman Polanski. The second night, the Manson acolytes killed Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary in similar fashion, leaving bloody ominous messages on walls and over doorways.

The killers, along with Manson, were arrested four months later and eventually found guilty of first-degree murder thanks to lead prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, who crafted a convincing motive that he later fleshed out in his best-selling 1974 book Helter Skelter. He argued that Manson had been overcome by delusional messianic visions—spurred on by the Bible and the titular Beatles song—and commanded his drug-fueled disciples to slice up upper-class Angelinos to provoke a race war that he and his adopted family would survive by living in a bottomless pit in the desert.

Bugliosi’s argument was the prevailing reasoning behind the murders, until author Tom O’Neill began a Premiere magazine writing assignment in 1999 that turned into a 20-year book project. Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties, which O’Neill wrote in 2019 with Dan Piepenbring, pokes holes in the “Helter Skelter” motive. Through sourcing governmental documents and conducting interviews with former intelligence operatives and cult members, O’Neill’s book examined the contradictory information and conspiracies surrounding the case, raising (and occasionally answering) a variety of intriguing questions: Were the murders part of a drug operation? Were the police involved in covering up details? Was Manson a drugged Machurian Candidate?

Six years later, filmmaker Errol Morris further interrogates these theories and discrepancies in a new Netflix documentary. Chaos: The Manson Murders brings the book to life with a mix of archived footage, audio files, and new interviews, soundtracked with recordings of Manson’s songs. The Oscar-winning director uses some of his classic techniques, incorporating white-hot lights on his interview subjects and talking to O’Neill in various locations while attempting to place his many ideas on a spectrum of probable to ridiculous.

O’Neill has admitted in previous interviews that despite finding numerous holes in the argument that Manson wanted to start a “race war” and discovering the Manson family’s intersection with drug traffickers, law enforcement, and government officials, he doesn’t have direct evidence to explicitly counteract Bugliosi, who died in 2015. However, prior to his death, Bugliosi met with O’Neill for an interview, though he stopped communication with him the more the author poked holes in his theory. “I still don’t know what happened,” O’Neill says in the documentary. “But I know that what we were told isn’t what happened.”

Let’s unpack the main theories and doubts that O’Neill and Morris highlight in Chaos: The Manson Murders. 

Mind Control and Operation MKUltra

Manson spent his early years in foster homes and reform schools before being arrested for the first time in 1956, and was released from prison in 1967. He then moved to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, known for being a hippie hotspot during the summer of love. While there, he spent a lot of time inside the same medical clinic where the C.I.A.—with the help of psychiatrist Jolly West—was recruiting subjects for LSD studies that tested the drug’s capabilities and influence on human behavior. 

The tests were believed to be part of a super-secret experimentation program, Project MKUltra, which ran from 1953 to 1973 (when the program’s records were destroyed) to identify drugs that could weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The idea was to create a Manchurian Candidate, or puppet, though Morris doesn’t think the government came close to actually concocting one. While the LSD studies did not lead to conclusive findings about the drug, many people, including intelligence officials, believed it presented mind-control opportunities, with West even writing on record that he learned how to replace true memories with false ones.

To O’Neill, Manson and West circling the Haight-Ashbury location at the same time seems too suspicious to be a coincidence. He notes in the documentary that West was inducing insanity on his study participants for a decade without them knowing it. While he believes Manson was likely connected to West’s work on LSD, O’Neill was never able to place West and Manson in the same room despite the two briefly overlapping in San Francisco. Still, many believe that Manson was only able to so quickly build such a devoted following because of the use of LSD. 

To bolster his case about West, O’Neill also cites that the psychiatrist had been court-appointed to examine Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby before the assassin testified. Upon his examination, West claimed Ruby was suffering from “major mental illness precipitated by the stress of (his) trial.” But O’Neill asserts that many felt that was a fishy diagnosis considering how quickly and drastically Ruby would have had to change.

Counterintelligence programs

What was the point of turning Manson (and his family members) into potential zombie assets? 

The end of the 1960s was filled with counterculture and civil rights movements, and the government feared an anti-establishment upheaval. As a countermeasure, the C.I.A put together a program called Chaos, while the F.B.I had one called Cointelpro. The objectives for both were to enact secret operations to destabilize the left-wing movement by making hippies and other alternative groups appear dangerous and violent. What better way to demonize those groups than by turning them into gruesome killers? 

O’Neill is quick to explain that the Manson murders could not have been orchestrated by the government. But, he says, it’s possible that the government gave Manson the leeway to do whatever he wanted, which would include killing upper-class white residents and making the general public afraid of the country’s rebellious subcultures. 

Were there law enforcement cover-ups?

O’Neill admits he doesn’t know if any mind-control experiments specifically happened in the Haight-Ashbury medical clinic, but he was intrigued by the idea when he looked into Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer. According to O’Neill, Smith had an office in the clinic where he held parole meetings once a week. Throughout the course of Manson’s first year there, Manson was arrested six times, but instead of revoking his parole, Smith wrote a letter to the probation office vouching for the ex-con and explaining that he’d been behaving well. 

Every probation officer that O’Neill spoke to scratched their head about Smith’s reasoning and believed key information was missing. 

O’Neill also jumps ahead to the Los Angeles Police Department’s suspicious lack of urgency and connective theorizing when it came to solving the Tate-LaBianca murders. Initially, authorities believed the murders weren’t connected to each other, even with the similar stab wounds and wall markings. Then, a week after the killings, they raided Spahn Ranch on car theft charges and found stolen guns, vehicles, underage runaways, and stolen credit cards that netted 26 arrests. Three days later, everyone was released on a misdated warrant technicality. 

“Somebody wanted this group out there,” O’Neill says. 

The truth is mundane

One of the new interviews that Morris conducts is with Bobby Beausoleil, who remains in prison for killing Gary Hinman just a couple weeks before the Tate-LaBianca murders. In the documentary, Beausoleil explains how he met Manson through the music industry, entered his sphere, and got into trouble thanks to a bad drug deal, which ultimately led him to killing Hinman at Manson’s urging. It wasn’t long before police arrested Beausoleil after finding the murder weapon in his car. 

Was it his own stupidity that led to his arrest? Beausoleil makes that claim, and argues that stupidity and self-preservation is also a sound reason for the Manson murders. Though it made sense that Bugliosi would attach Manson’s bizarre biblical beliefs as the primary motive for the killings (he wanted to sell a book after all), it’s very possible that Manson had simply gotten paranoid of his own followers ratting him out for various crimes and wanted to implicate them with murder so they had no incentive to go to the police. Specifically, Beausoleil says that the Tate murders were likely a complete miscalculation. 

Morris is partial to his belief that Manson’s rejection as a musical artist by record producer Terry Melcher in the late 1960s was a key reason for the murders. As is well known, Melcher had lived at the Cielo Drive house before Polanski and Tate, but Manson didn’t know he had moved. As Occam’s Razor suggests, misguided revenge might be the simplest way to understand it. 

“They want it to be more complicated than it is,” Beauloseil tells Morris over the phone. “It’s so hard to disabuse people from those fantasies.”

Throughout most of the documentary, Morris expresses a similar skepticism toward O’Neill’s ideas, but also seems to acknowledge there is more at play than what we’ve come to believe. O’Neill has spent a quarter of his life getting to that conclusion. 

“What does it all mean?” O’Neill says. “I’m very honest about not knowing.”